God's War

by Kameron Hurley

  “What’s wrong?” Rhys asked.

  Nyx sighed. “I really wanted to get into a fight.”

  Outside, the heady whine of the burst sirens started up again. The building shook.

  “Bloody fucking Chenjans,” Nyx muttered, but she didn’t look at Rhys when she said it.

  12

  “You’re telling me that one of the mercenaries on this list is the Chenjan under ice in our fridge?” Nyx asked.

  “I think so,” Khos said. He shuffled his feet.

  Nyx had sent him and Anneke out to the Cage to butter up Shajin. Shajin had all the records of which mercenaries were given the queen’s note. There was more than one way to dig a hole.

  When Nyx got back from Mushtallah, Khos had handed her a list and told her what they’d found out about all twelve people on it. None of the information was worth much, but from the look of the packages Anneke had hauled in from the bakkie, the bad news hadn’t stopped them from picking up enough weapons from a local dealer to fight a small war. Anneke had a habit of overspending on gear.

  “You think so, or you know so?” Nyx stood in her office packing fist-sized bursts into airtight containers. She had just enough time to repack her gear and head out to Kine’s.

  “I think I know,” Khos said. “The one I wanted was a Chenjan doing black work. I thought this was him. It’s not. This is a mercenary. He’s got a similar birthmark. I had Juon look up his vitals in the directory of resident Chenjans. The one I wanted was worth about seventy. The one in the fridge is just some petty mercenary.”

  “The price for black work has gone up,” Nyx said, and snorted. “Where did you find him?”

  “At a bar in the Chenjan district. Working on some kind of deal. I took him when he came out the back.”

  “He have anything on him?”

  “I didn’t have time to check. I was being followed. That’s why I dumped the head and stowed him in the trunk.”

  She hadn’t checked the body either, when they dumped it at the keg before driving out to the botched bounty job. “Let’s look, then.”

  There was a trapdoor in the hub—the gear and com room—in the back that led down to the freezer in the basement. They passed Taite, who was still working at hacking into Raine’s com. Sweat beaded his brow. He was looking a bit shaky, and Nyx figured she’d tell Khos to get the kid some food. When he didn’t eat on time, he passed out, and the last thing she needed right now was a comatose com tech.

  She and Khos went down into the basement, and Nyx unlocked the fridge. The body was pushed up against the wall, alongside the head of a local magistrate whose sister had never paid them for the bounty she’d put on her. That particular bounty hadn’t exactly been legal. Nyx wasn’t so surprised the sister hadn’t come to collect.

  Nyx crouched by the body and pulled open the burnous. She checked the obvious pockets and seams first, finding three in notes and another buck in change. She opened up a bug box and found a lethargic locust. She handed that to Khos.

  “Make sure Rhys gets that,” she said.

  Then she checked the waistband, found some garroting wire and some black papers. Looked like at least one of the contracts the mercenary was pursuing was a contract that ran boys out of Nasheen, probably to Tirhan or Heidia. Ras Tieg was under contract to send back draft dodgers. Nasheen’s other neighbors weren’t.

  Hell of a thing to die for.

  She handed the papers to Khos.

  “You think he was part of the underground?” Khos asked, and Nyx heard something odd in his voice, something nervous. She wondered how many of his whores knew something about the underground. Most of the women who permitted themselves illegal pregnancies were whores. Pay a hard-up hedge witch and you could get your viability hex turned back on—everybody had it shut off at the breeding compounds when they were kids. It came with the inoculations.

  “Looks like it,” she said.

  Nyx tugged out a purse from the front of the man’s dhoti and opened it. Another ten in notes and loose change. They might be able to afford to feed Taite’s sister this month after all.

  Inside was another bug box. Nyx shook this one before she opened it, and heard a satisfying sloshing sound. He had a recording.

  “Tell Rhys to warm that up and translate it.”

  She wiped over the obvious places on the body where he might have kept organics, hidden documents, or internal transmission bulbs, but came up with nothing.

  “Burn his clothes, cut him up, and feed him to the bugs,” Nyx said. They had a composting bin on the other side of the basement. “The last thing we need is a dead mercenary in our fridge.”

  Khos went out to get the butchering equipment.

  Nyx climbed upstairs.

  Taite was still in the hub working at the com. His dark hair was held clipped back with converted bug clips—the jawed ends from a couple of mud beetles. A stack of books sat at his elbow, half of them written in Ras Tiegan, and he kept an idol of one of the Ras Tiegan demigods—he called them saints—named Balarus or Baldomus or something unpronounceably Ras Tiegan like that. Old Baldo was the demigod of locksmiths, apparently.

  “You hack Raine’s system yet?” she asked.

  “I need another half day,” Taite said. He looked up from his work. “Are you voting this week?”

  “What?” she said, letting the door drop. She wiped her hands on her trousers.

  “The vote. Queen Zaynab’s asking for a public vote about whether or not to draft half-breeds. She’s bypassing the low council and going directly to the people. You remember?”

  “Queen does what she wants no matter what we vote. This isn’t a democracy.”

  Nyx walked toward her office. Taite followed her.

  “It matters,” he said. “If she thinks there’s overwhelming disagreement with the policy, she’ll back down. Things are hot right now between her, the bel dames, and the high council. The vote might actually sway her this time. Only you and Anneke are eligible, so I thought—”

  “Why not have your boyfriend get his sister to do it?” Technically, Taite’s boy-boy love affairs were illegal, but Nyx had seen enough boyish affection at the front that she didn’t have much of a problem with it.

  Taite flushed. “She already is. But I need—”

  “Taite,” Nyx said, getting back to her desk. She tried to find something to do with her hands. “You get drafted and die and your sister gets a pension. What’s the difference if you die on the road with me or at the front?”

  “My sister can barely make it on the eight I give her every month. And the baby’s not here yet. You know how much a pension is?”

  Him and his fucking pregnant sister. What was that fool woman doing, getting pregnant outside a breeding compound? And what fool man had she been cavorting with? Ras Tiegans had absolutely no control over the fecundity of their citizens. Nobody—male or female—ever got bugged or permanently severed, and just like the Mhorians, none of them was legally compelled to give birth at a compound that would properly inoculate their children. It was like some kind of human dice game.

  They’re fucking refugees, she reminded herself, but some of that old anger stirred, her school-taught aversion for wasted reproduction. There were a lot better things Taite’s sister could be doing with her womb. Single births thrown away on a kid who likely wouldn’t live past five were a waste. Hell, Nyx could justify selling her own womb to gene pirates who’d take the zygotes out and build better zygotes for some compound somewhere, but spread her legs with the intent of getting pregnant? What the hell for?

  “Didn’t it go up to seven?” Nyx said. She honestly had no idea what pensions were running these days.

  “Four. Four a month for a half-breed woman and her illegal kid. Come on, Nyx. It’s two minutes of your day.”

  “Anneke will vote. Tell her you’ll buy her a big gun.”

  “Think about how much of your team you’d lose. You work with more men than any other hunter.”

  She packed the la
st of the bursts, and tied her bag closed. “I’ve gotta go,” she said.

  “If they draft half-breed men today, they’ll take resident foreigners next,” Taite said, and his tone got wheedling. She hated it when he did that. “They’ll take Rhys.”

  “I’ll be in Jameela for a few days,” she said. “Transit’s about a week turnaround. Rhys is in charge of the keg, but you’ll need to back him up if there’s security trouble. Khos has a transmission for Rhys to sort out. You’ll need to help him. And finish hacking into Raine’s com.”

  “You driving all the way to the coast?”

  “Yeah. You’ll need to take a local caravan if you have to get out.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out three of the notes she’d pawned off the body. “You get that to your sister. Tell her if we make a bag on this note I’ll get her kid inoculated.” Nasheen didn’t inoculate foreign kids for free.

  “You’ll vote?”

  “Don’t push me.”

  Nyx went out into the keg. Rhys was sitting at the front desk doing paperwork, bleeding bugs onto greasy pages.

  “You have the keg,” she said. “I’ll be back in about a week.”

  He glanced up. Looked at her with his dark eyes. She remembered listening to him pray, back at the palace. Had she ever heard him give a salaat that included personal prayers? They’d worked together for six years, and for six years she’d managed to be in some other room or smoking out on the street or patching together a bakkie every time he prayed. What did he pray for, all those times she wasn’t listening?

  “Nyx?” he said.

  God, she wouldn’t mind standing there a while longer while he looked.

  She hated that.

  Nyx dropped her bag, and splashed her face with water from the ablution bowl near the door.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Never better.”

  Her whole body ached. She hadn’t slept well on the train, and she’d had dreams about that old boxing match in Faleen—Jaks the outrider and stocky-legged Husayn bashing each other’s head in, blood soaking into the organic matting of the ring, the whole first row of spectators covered in blood and saliva, their faces animated, jubilant. She had dreamed of her womb, a perfect heart, cut up on a butcher’s block somewhere between Punjai and Faleen.

  “Make a couple of calls to some people you know in the Chenjan districts. Just make sure Nikodem’s not there.”

  “I will.”

  “And keep everybody on high security. The bel dames might move on you here. Not likely, but it’s possible. Council can’t find its own ass some days, and it’ll take them a long time to agree on whether or not we’re worth killing. Hopefully we’ll be in Chenja by then and they won’t touch us. Not even bel dames like running the border. Where’s Anneke?”

  “Getting lunch.”

  “Keep her on point this afternoon. And you double-lock the doors and set up an organics net. Taite and I were burned out of our first office before you came on board. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Nyx picked up her bag and pushed out the door and onto the hot, reeking street. She rolled under the bakkie and checked it for bugs, bursts, and regular explosives. The organic guts surrounding the hoses and wires were clear, and the pulse was good. She opened up the trunk to make sure Khos hadn’t left any more bodies in there. She saw nothing but some bloody blankets and toolkits, but she knew Anneke better than that. She reached into the trunk and pushed back the blankets. Anneke had two long rectangular boxes shoved in the back, tied with brown paper. Regular, not organic. Nyx shook her head and threw the blanket back over them. She might end up needing the guns anyway, and if Anneke had forgotten about them, it might make her sweat a little knowing they weren’t in her hot little hands.

  She tried to open the passenger side door. Jammed. She tossed her bag in through the window. She needed to get Anneke to fix that.

  Nyx hopped in, kicked up the engine, and headed east, to Jameela. To the sea.

  To the bloody fucking sea.

  13

  Nyx blew out of Punjai and hit the radio a couple times with her palm, but all she got was misty blue static.

  It was going to be a long ride.

  She spent the night in the bakkie after making good time; she got about halfway to Mushtallah. She passed the sand-swallowed ruins of old cities, now no more than irregular bulges in the desert, marked only by the tall rusted poles of the cities’ contagion sensors. Rogue swarms and viral bugs leaking in from the north had blighted whole cities back in the old days. There were still wild places in the Khairian wasteland, and the border cities still had working contagion sensors that warned the unfiltered inside when the mutant monsters of the red desert wandered too far south or some sand-crazed magician who had gone out there searching for her soul came back with half her head missing, muttering in tongues. Most magicians stayed concentrated in the big cities to keep them clean of virulent swarms. The borderlands just limped along, mostly on their own. There was homesteading to be done for the poor and desperate, still, in the north and south and throughout Ras Tieg and Heidia and Druce. Three thousand years old, and Umayma was still an untamed place.

  Nyx had kept as far off the road as she could without getting stuck in the sand and sat out a benign locust swarm just before dawn. Once it passed she was back on the road, out past Mushtallah and the central cities, where the gas lamps lit up every window. She landed another night on the road, then climbed over the low mountains that divided the coast from the interior.

  As she came up over the other side, the terrain began to change. Sand gave way to choked crabgrass. The desert bled to scrubland, then long-needled pine trees, then tall oak hybrids with leaves the size of Nyx’s head, low ferns with thorns, tangles of wild roses, snake maples, amber ticklers, patches of low-spring wildflowers. The kinds of bugs changed, too. Fewer beetles and roaches; more ladybugs and spider mites and mayflies. There were less hospitable bugs too, the farther she got from the interior: giant plate-size cicadas and acid-spraying chiggers as long as her arm.

  Nyx found it all pretty claustrophobic. The trees were so enormous they blocked the sky, the suns. She couldn’t see beyond the turns of the road. She checked her mirrors more often.

  She came out of the mountains and into rolling fields of red-tipped wheat, saw the broad dirt runs for the kept dogs. Farmsteads dotted the landscape. Swarms of locusts, red flies, and ladybugs mobbed the fields, tailored to devour the less friendly bugs and fungi that ruined the staples.

  Nyx found a motel that night at the Amber Stalk crossroads, named after some dead magician who’d saved the valley from mutant cicadas. There was a living plaque up under the road marker. Nyx figured she’d saved a lot more lives than he had, but nobody had ever named anything after her. She wondered how spectacular your death had to be to come out the other side with a plaque.

  She parked her bakkie out front alongside flatbeds and rickshaws and a cart hitched to the front end of a converted bakkie. The bakkie had smoky black patches on its semi-organic exterior; the first signs of sun-sickness. Along the edges of the parking lot, she saw a head-size mutant flower chafer scuttling back into the brush. If she had to deal with giant bugs out here, she preferred benign ones like the chafers.

  Inside the motel, she splurged on good food and a bath. The only upside to coming out to the coast was all the cheap food and water.

  Nyx didn’t linger long in the bath. She just scrubbed herself off and rubbed at old wounds that had started biting and aching as the weather cooled. It was colder on the coast.

  She missed the desert.

  When she crawled into bed, her sheets weren’t full of sand.

  She couldn’t sleep.

  Nyx grabbed her pillow and moved to the floor. She lay there for a couple of hours staring at the shiny green roaches scuttling along the ceiling, half the size of the ones in the desert and the wrong color. A couple took flight, landing on her arms and her face. She flicked them away.

 
There was a call box downstairs, but she had no one to call. If she called Kine, it was likely her sister would tell her not to come. If she called the keg, she could make small talk with Taite or Anneke about how they were handling security, but she’d be repeating herself, and they’d see through it. They’d see some kind of weakness. Maybe fear.

  Nyx got up and went to the bar.

  The motel had an “honor” bar, the kind with liquor bottles affixed to the wall upside down and a little book to record how many shots you’d pulled so they could bill you for them later. Nyx didn’t intend on taking shots.

  Nyx pulled out her dagger, pried a bottle of whiskey from the wall, and went out and sat on the front porch. The sky was big, and the stars were the clearest she’d seen since she was a kid in Mushirah. She drank, leaned back in the chair, and tried reading the constellations. Tej had been good at that.

  Tej. A lifetime ago. Been a long time since she’d thought of him too. She touched her baldric absently. Blood and death and aliens—it all went back to that night in Faleen.

  A noise from the parking lot drew her attention. She went still. The night was clear, but the big bloody moons were at the far end of their orbit, meaning they looked about the size of her thumbnail in the night sky. Ten years from now, they would look about three times the size of the sun.

  But that didn’t help her out much tonight.

  The figure was dawdling next to Nyx’s bakkie. Nyx had parked close to the motel so she could keep an eye on it. The figure crouched for a long while, then rose and moved off. She thought it might be some kind of giant leaf insect, but as Nyx watched, the figure shrank, dwindled. She heard a sneeze, and then a white bird was flapping off toward the road.

  Nyx swore.

  She clutched the bottle and went back to her room and bolted herself in. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands shook.

  Bloody sisters. Bloody Rasheeda.

  Nyx took a deep breath, drank more. Find your nerves, woman, she thought. Find your damn nerves. It took four of them to take you out last time.