She had been good at what she did.
Until that day.
“I had a good magician work on me. The best in the business,” Nyx said. And then he fucked me over and sent me to prison, Nyx thought. But that was in the file too. No need to repeat it.
“I went against the advice of my best counselors in asking you here,” the queen said, and now she wasn’t looking at the globe anymore. She smiled, but it was a too-sweet grandmotherly smile, like she was doing Nyx a favor. A favor she’d want repaid real soon.
It all started to click together in Nyx’s head now. The aliens from Faleen, the queen’s recent abdication, the fact that the queen was calling in Nyx—a hunter, not a bel dame.
This might get tricky.
“Sorry I’m not more popular,” Nyx said. She was better at killing her own people than getting rid of foreigners. Nobody liked to hear that, but it was true.
“They told me that you served some time in prison for black work. You were delivering zygotes to gene pirates.”
Yeah, that one had definitely gone into the file.
“I did,” Nyx said. She was being tested. But for what? Her loyalty to Nasheen? To the queen? The queen’s laws? To what end?
“You have some sympathy for illegal breeding? We have no need for rogue mixers or illegal half-breeds, like Ras Tieg or Druce. Our compounds perform those functions. It’s disappointing to see a woman waste her womb on a single birth.”
“Your mother was a half-breed, wasn’t she?” Nyx asked.
Rhys made a strange little choking sound that might have been a laugh.
“Excuse me,” he said, “may I have some water, Honorable?”
The queen cocked her head at him. She raised a fleshy hand, and Kasbah called in a retainer. They gave him a plain glass of water. Nyx and the queen were silent through the whole performance.
Nyx’s mother and all the rest who were authorized for child rearing had to go through the filtration and inoculation process on the coast. Just as Umayma had been tailored to suit the people on it, the people on Umayma had been tailored to suit the world. Half-breed illegals like Taite had a tougher time getting around. They burned more easily, died sooner, and suffered from more cancers and diseases. Most of Taite’s childhood stories were about things experienced while bedridden. The former queen and her children wouldn’t have had that problem, of course. The high council would have approved their pairing and gotten them the inoculations they needed. It strengthened Nasheenian ties with Ras Tieg.
“I was into black work because it paid all right,” Nyx said, getting back into safer territory.
“More than being a bel dame? Collecting blood debt is rewarding.”
“Only if you’re good at it,” Nyx said. “I wasn’t.”
Rhys shifted in his seat and gave her a pointed look.
“Nyxnissa is being modest,” Rhys said. “She brought in every note she was assigned. Her final note as a bel dame prevented an outbreak of what we now know was blister fever. I believe a similar contaminated soldier was responsible for the deaths of more than four hundred people in Sahlah last year.”
“Indeed,” the queen said. “And who is this Chenjan man in your company, Nyxnissa?”
Nyx said, “He’s my magician.”
“I read that your other partners did not last long while you were a bel dame.”
“It’s a good thing I changed professions, then,” Nyx said.
“Nyxnissa is many things,” Rhys cut in, “including stubborn. Determined. If you’re looking for a woman to stick to a note until the bitter end, you’ve summoned the proper woman. She has a black mark—the black work—yes, but she was also young and foolish then. She’s tempered a good deal since.”
Rhys was a much better liar than she was.
“Stubborn, yeah,” Nyx agreed. “But maybe just stupid.”
“Neither of us has gotten where we are by being stupid,” the queen said.
“Oh, I’ve done some pretty stupid things,” Nyx said. Going to the front had been one of them. This conversation with the queen might be another. “I heard you’ve called in a lot of hunters for this note. Not just me.”
“Hunters, yes. A few mercenaries. Most have already given up the hunt, however.”
“You haven’t called in any bel dames to pursue the note?” Might as well ask, Nyx thought.
“I have my reasons for keeping bel dames out of this particular affair. I need someone….”
“Desperate?” Nyx suggested.
Rhys pressed his lips together and looked at the table. He discreetly covered his mouth with his hand. Being blunt shocked him.
Maybe selling herself as desperate wasn’t a great idea either. Nyx closed her eyes, and behind her eyelids she saw the mine explode again, felt something wet against her skin, a hard slap. Then the whole world was full of filth, offal; she watched half a dozen boys blow apart.
She had been good, once.
Nyx opened her eyes.
Recompense for the apprehension of the terrorist is negotiable.
How negotiable? Getting back her bel dame title negotiable?
Duty. Honor. Sacrifice. My life for a thousand.
“These days, I only risk my life for cash,” Nyx said, opening her eyes.
Duty. Honor. Cash.
“Tell me, why did you volunteer for the front?” the queen asked.
“My older brothers died at the front. When they called up my youngest brother, I joined so I could watch his back.”
“A family woman, then,” the queen said.
“Not really,” Nyx said. “He died of dysentery during basic training.”
When she’d gotten back from the front after being reconstituted, the government had plowed over her mother’s homestead in Mushirah and put up a munitions factory. The locals later burned the factory down and reclaimed the farmland, but her mother had died of Azam fever when she relocated to a breeding farm on the coast. She was dead and buried long before Nyx was reconstituted.
“Let’s go ahead and talk money,” Nyx said.
“Money isn’t an issue,” the queen said. “Bring me the woman I want—alive— and we can negotiate the rest. I have half a dozen estates and twice as many servants, if you wish it. Women, of course.” She looked at Rhys. “Unless you’d prefer half-breeds. We have no end of male half-breeds.”
“Until we start sending half-breeds to the front,” Nyx said. “You want to know why women risk illegal pregnancy and keep pirates elbow deep in organs? Half-breeds who aren’t inoculated—who aren’t rich Firsts—don’t get drafted. They’d fall like rotten wasp nests at the front.”
“Perhaps we can eliminate the need for the draft altogether.”
“What do you mean?” This was the dangerous part. No legitimate note was ever pointedly removed from the bel dame queue.
“The woman I’d like you to retrieve can help us end the war.”
Nyx gave a soft grunt. And who would be more interested in ending the war than a former bel dame and war veteran who’d lost everything to it? Somebody just as good as a bel dame but with publicly severed ties to the council? Somebody the queen could put in her pocket?
Pocket, my ass, Nyx thought.
“We could put something together,” Nyx said. “Who is she?”
“A foreigner. An off-worlder called Nikodem Jordan.”
Fuck, Nyx thought. The carrier in Faleen. The boxers. Jaks. Prison. Her sisters. Aliens. A boy’s head in a bag. No coincidences.
Cause and effect.
The queen pulled the globe off the table and called up a still. She handed the globe to Nyx. “This gives her likeness and background. You’ll need to change the password.”
Nyx took the globe. It fit neatly in the palm of her hand. Nikodem’s images had date and time stamps. Nyx saw that several of the stills were dated eight years before. Just as she’d suspected. The same carrier. The same aliens.
Nikodem was a small woman, Chenjan in coloring, with a broad nose, wid
e cheekbones, and gray eyes. It was an arresting face, not so much alien as exotic. She had the smooth, unblemished skin of someone who’d never stood under the suns of Umayma. She was too little and big-eyed for real beauty, but there was some strength in that face—and cunning. It was the sort of face that kept others out, kept secrets.
“I’ll need to know everything about her,” Nyx said. She looked up from the projections, reluctantly. “How long has she been gone? Does she have friends? Other travelers with her? Who did she meet with when she was last here? Looks like that was eight years ago.”
Rhys tilted his head slightly and peered at the images projected from the globe. She saw his eyes widen, and he sat back. The woman wasn’t that pretty. Nyx frowned and peered at the stills again. Then Nyx remembered where Rhys had been eight years ago. She looked at him again. Their gazes met. One long, tense moment.
Then the queen was talking, and Rhys looked away, and Nyx tried to listen. Nikodem had been missing for a month, the queen said. She came to Nasheen with three others. The off-worlders had come to Faleen for the first time sixteen years before, and they had come speaking the language Chenjans and Nasheenians used for prayer. Only mullahs spoke that language with any competence anymore, and most people would debate just how competent it was.
“What did they come here looking for?” Nyx asked.
“Some of that is confidential,” the Queen said. “What I can say is that they were very interested in finding other followers of the Kitab and its sister books. They have offered an exchange of technologies in the spirit of our shared faith. We’ve been in negotiations for nearly two decades.”
“They from New Kinaan?” Nyx asked.
“Yes. You know it?”
“Heard it secondhand. My sister works with foreigners on the coast,” Nyx said. Kine might be able to fill her in on what they were up to, though she hadn’t spoken to Kine since she got out of prison. Kine had wanted even less to do with her after the black mark. “I know that when we get in off-worlders, we’re always real interested in hauling them down to the breeding compounds and getting new tech from them.”
“You say they are followers of the Kitab. A sister book. But have you read it?” Rhys asked.
Nyx looked at him sharply. She didn’t know what that had to do with anything.
“As with any people, they believe they are the only true believers of the one God, the only people who know and understand Him through the words of His many prophets,” the queen said.
“God is unknowable,” Rhys said. “That is His nature. For them to claim to know God is arrogance at best. For them to claim more than one prophet isn’t heresy, but to claim there was another after ours… I couldn’t imagine doing business with such a people.”
That dagger was a little too sharp for Nyx’s taste. She opened her mouth to tell him to shut up.
“At one time, Nasheen and Chenja did business,” the queen said, “and it wasn’t called heresy then. It is no business of mine to tell my women how to worship. I do not require a call to prayer in any city. That is up to the mullahs and the people who elect them. Your Chenjan mullahs may be elected, but I am not. When our mullahs overstep, I intervene.” She smiled thinly. “Our balance of power has kept the soldiers at the front, the bel dames at work, and the mullahs sticking to matters of God. We have done this successfully for nearly three hundred years, while doing business with people of the Book. ”
“You say you give your people freedom to submit to God,” Rhys said, and Nyx wondered if he’d hoped to have this conversation with the Queen of Nasheen his whole life, “yet you have barred men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. I see some contradiction in that. How can you deny a man the right to submit to God as he believes God has directed him?”
Nyx sucked her teeth.
“We have different views of God, you and I,” the queen said.
Which explains that whole war business, Nyx thought.
“So, when can I see these Kinaanites?” Nyx asked.
The queen turned from Rhys and regarded her a long moment, as if she’d forgotten Nyx was even there. “Kasbah will take you to them,” she said.
10
The off-worlders were having supper, which Nyx found somehow reassuring. As she and Rhys stepped into the room behind Kasbah, the call to prayer rolled out over Mushtallah. The keening cry sounded close, and Nyx figured it was pumped into the palace grounds through some kind of local radio.
Rhys found an ablution bowl near the door and began to wash in preparation for prayer. Nyx continued on into the airy little room. There were plush divans and tall succulents in striped pots. Some kind of gauzy curtain draped down from the ceiling in soft folds, which cut some of the filtered light from the open shaft above them.
The off-worlders were gathered around a faux wood table set near four glass doors that led out onto a balcony overlooking the spread of Mushtallah. Nyx could see the blue light of the second sun begin to push dusky evening across the city. Glow worm lamps had been unshuttered, and the minarets were lit up with red beacons, an old but useless tradition. The beacons just made the minarets better targets.
The aliens at the table were small, bony women. Two were black as pitch, and one was whiter than a Mhorian, which Nyx figured wasn’t healthy. The white one wore a visible silver X-shaped pendant, like a Ras Tiegan, and they all wore dark hijabs that covered their hair and wrapped around their necks like overgenerous turbans. They were covered from wrist to ankle in a variety of housecoats and loose trousers. Though she ate with her fingers, the white woman wore gloves. Nyx wondered if the white pigment was some sort of skin condition.
Rhys had pulled the prayer rug from his back and took up his kneeling position, facing north. As he professed his intention to offer salaat and began to go through the gestures of the niyat, she could still follow along with him, the words and movement so familiar to her body. She wished he would carry a sword instead of a rug. When bullets ran out, rugs weren’t much good for beating people off.
Kasbah introduced Nyx to the off-worlders.
“You don’t pray?” Nyx asked the women.
“We pray,” the more delicate of the black women said in heavily accented Nasheenian. “Just not so publicly, not in ordinary spaces, and not so frequently. We are people of the Good Book, but our book is… different from yours. I must admit, even among followers of your book… what is it you call it here, the Kitab? Even among followers of your Kitab on other worlds, your interpretation is… exceedingly unique. Yours is the first post-Haj world to—”
“I sometimes wonder what he has left to say to God,” Nyx interrupted, nodding toward Rhys.
“There is always something left to say to God,” the woman said. She gestured to the table. “Join us. I am Danika Chaba.”
The other two introduced themselves. The other black woman was Solome Hadar, and the white one was Keran Yarkona. The white one’s Nasheenian was so bad that Nyx could barely understand her.
“You’re the tenth mercenary to talk to us,” Danika said.
“I’m a bounty hunter,” Nyx said.
“Oh? Is there a difference?”
“Yeah,” Nyx said. She could hear Rhys reciting, not in Chenjan or Nasheenian but the ancient language of prayer:
“In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds.”
“Were you all with Nikodem the last time she was in Nasheen?” Nyx asked. She was hungry, and they had a lot to go over.
Keran and Solome exchanged looks, but Danika did not blink as she replied, “I was. Solome stayed aship, as she had not yet been inoculated against your contagions. Keran had not yet graduated.”
“Graduated?”
“Off-world studies, diplomacy. She has done some work for us in-system.”
“In-system?”
Danika clucked her tongue. In Nasheen, that was a reproach, but Nyx suspected she meant it differently.
“We have two viable worlds in our star’s system, and a colonized moon. We have some experience in negotiating with others who are not as we are.”
“It was smart to send women to Nasheen, then.”
Danika gave a tight smile. “It was not all politics. We have sent skilled technicians before us, but most were unable to adapt to the peculiar contagions of your world, and perished. Nikodem and I are now the top technicians in our field.”
“And what field is that?” Nyx asked.
“Organic sciences.”
Rhys finished the prayer with his feet tucked under his thighs, his palms splayed on either knee.
“Peace and blessings of God be upon you,” he murmured, turning to look over his right shoulder, where one of God’s angels was supposed to be recording all your good deeds. He then looked over his left shoulder, to the angel making note of all his wrongs.
What wrongs had Rhys ever committed, Nyx wondered? Again, he murmured, “Peace and blessings of God be upon you.” He began to roll up his prayer rug.
She noted that he had added no personal prayers to the beginning or end of his salaat.
Angels and demons and a great man in the sky who took the time to listen to a whole world abase itself. There had been no angels at the front. Chenjans were the only demons, and sacrificing herself to God had proved nothing, saved no one.
What bugged her was that Rhys hadn’t figured that out yet.
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