She shoved her gun against his chest.
Rhys opened his mouth to protest, then clamped it shut. Anneke said, “They’ve got backup in the alley!”
Rhys watched Nyx and Khos.
They were both shadows. He was taller, broader, outweighed her, and the outline of him—his wild mass of dreads, beefy legs, the breadth of his shoulders, the pistols in both his hands—was terrifying in the dark.
“I said hold,” Nyx said, softly.
More shouts came from downstairs. Rhys heard another shot, then the familiar bat-bat of a pistol.
Khos turned his big body away from Nyx and moved to the window. “You’re going to kill us all,” he said.
“Not today,” she said.
Rhys stood. He raised a hand, found a local swarm but couldn’t call it. He could hear them singing in his mind, heard them acknowledge his call, but they did not change course. Useless magician, he thought. My God, why give me any talent at all if I can’t use it now?
Something downstairs exploded. The house trembled again. Footsteps on the stairs. The smell of smoke, yeast, and the faint whiff of geranium.
Men in the hall, shouting. The squad was on the floor. Doors banged open. More screams.
Rhys kept hold of his pistols. He would not kill for her. He would never kill for her. But wounding… Sweat rolled down his back, between his shoulder blades.
Nyx had her gun pointed at the floor.
The ninety-nine names of God….
Lights. Movement. Shadows appeared in the doorway, green lights.
Nyx crouched low, raised her gun, yelled at them in Nasheenian. “Bel dame! Hold! I’m a bel dame on the queen’s business!”
Wild cries, from the boys. They had green lights on the ends of their guns, and the flares swept the room. For a moment, Rhys was blinded. He turned his head away.
“Drop the guns!” the man at the head of the group yelled, in Nasheenian, then Chenjan. “Drop the guns!”
“We’re yours! We’re Nasheens!”
“Drop your fucking guns!”
“Drop the guns!” more yelling from the hall.
“I’m a bel dame, you drop your fucking gear or I’ll cut off your fucking head!”
Rhys started to shake. A green light tracked along his breast. Why didn’t she shoot them? She’d killed Chenjans and Nasheenians in droves. What were three or ten more?
And the boy said, “Who do you serve, woman?”
Nyx straightened and pointed her gun at the floor. She stepped in front of the squad, blocked Rhys and Anneke. “My life for a thousand,” she said.
Outside, a huge purple burst lit up the sky, and for one long moment Rhys saw the whole room in violet light: Nyx and the squad, Anneke with her shotgun at her shoulder, Khos crouched at the window with his pistols, burnous discarded, as if he was getting ready to shift. The whole dilapidated room—the peeling paint, the dirty pallets, the bug-smeared windows—all thrown into sharp relief.
The man at the head of the squad raised a fist. The men behind him pointed their guns at the floor. He wore organic field gear gone black for night fighting, and there were black thumbprints beneath his eyes.
Then the room went dim again, lit only by the residual glow from the windows and the green lights of the guns.
More screaming sounded below. More pounding feet.
“This room is clear!” the squad leader shouted.
The men behind him fell back.
For a long moment more, Nyx and the squad leader stood eye to eye, the way she had with Khos.
“You’re on the wrong side of the border, bel dame,” the man said softly.
“We all are,” Nyx said.
And then the man turned back into the hall. He kicked the door closed.
Rhys let out his breath.
“Fuck,” Khos muttered.
The sounds of the men and the shouting receded, headed further downstairs.
“The second squad’s holding,” Anneke said, from the window.
Nyx turned back into the room. Rhys watched her. She looked at him. Khos walked across the room to keep watch at the window with Anneke.
“They’re clearing out,” Khos said.
“Yes,” Nyx said.
Rhys sat back down on the pallet on the floor, suddenly sick. “What were you going to do if they didn’t stand down?” he asked.
“Kill them,” Nyx said.
Rhys shook his head.
Nyx crouched next to him and leaned in so their faces were a hand’s breadth apart. “What were you going to do?” she said. “Where was my wasp swarm, magician? Where were the bugs I pay you for?”
Rhys didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and joined the others at the window.
19
Nyx stumbled into a call booth after the others were asleep in the garret room she’d secured at the low end of Dadfar. The streets of Dadfar were dark, too dark, and they stank like Chenja. She hated the way their cities smelled, and she hated the sounds of their stupid language. It was enough like Nasheenian that when they started talking she expected she could understand them. Then she really heard them, and realized they were speaking something entirely different. The streets were wet; they had gotten into town the day before at the end of some local celebration, probably a mass wedding or a mass funeral involving decadent displays of water wealth.
She made a call. She was very drunk. The liquor wasn’t local. Chenja was dry, as a rule, and she’d had Anneke smuggle in several bottles of whiskey. She was going to need all of them to get through this job.
She heard the faint whir of a burst siren, somewhere to the east. Burst sirens sounded the same everywhere. They were all manufactured in Tirhan.
The line opened up, crackled, spit, then:
“Yes?”
“I’m looking to speak to Yah Tayyib,” Nyx slurred.
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem.” She nearly added, “Tell that fucker I’m coming for him, and I’ve got the queen’s leave to do it if he’s bloodied his hands with this.” But she bit her tongue. A teenage boy ran down the street. Someone shouted from the rooftop. Fuck it all if it wasn’t nearly midnight prayer. The street was going to be singing a dead language in about five minutes.
A long pause.
“One moment.”
Nyx waited. There was some noise coming from the other end of the line—the low hum of bugs, the sound of somebody practicing on a speed bag.
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib is indisposed.”
“You told him who this is?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him again. Tell him I have a question for him.”
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib isn’t taking calls.”
“Tell him I know what he’s doing with Nikodem.”
The muezzin cried. The speakers along the street took up the call. The world was full of prayer, social submission to God.
Nyx hung up.
Nyx woke just before dawn, as the call of the muezzin to dawn prayer sounded across Dadfar. The city pooled at the edge of the desert sea just northwest of the mining town of Zikiri in the Chenjan interior. When the wind blew the wrong way, Dadfar got misted over in a fine haze of toxic grit. The city used to sit along a broad river, maybe a thousand years before, but the river was gone now, and the sand had swallowed any record of it.
Nyx pushed off her sweat-soaked sheet and swung her legs to the floor, rubbing at her eyes. From her garret room, with the shutters open, she saw a sliver of bloody red light spread across the city’s skyline and swallow the blue haze of the first sun. She felt stiff and sore. She stretched out as dawn broke.
In the main room, she heard Anneke and Khos stir. Rhys was already praying. She was tired.
She poured herself a shot from the bottle by the bed and sank it.
Something was pulling at her, something she was unhappy with. She couldn’t name it. She had taken a risk with the call to Yah Tayyib, but i
f he thought she knew more than she did, he might try playing all his cards too soon—if he was the magician who ran off with Nikodem. Nyx would have bet her left kidney he was. Yah Tayyib was in the breeding compound records, and he’d been with Nikodem the night she disappeared.
She took another shot of whiskey and got dressed.
Nyx pushed back the curtain into the common room.
“Anneke, I need you to bind me up.”
Anneke trudged in, tossed her scattergun on the bed, and re-bound Nyx’s breasts. She yanked at the fabric and grunted as she fastened it.
“I’d like to breathe,” Nyx said. “Ease up.”
“Your tits are too big.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints.”
“I’m complaining.”
“Huh,” Nyx said. She pulled on a long tunic and burnous and tucked her botched hair up under a gutra and fastened it with an aghal. She needed to cut her hair again properly. She hated short hair.
“You ready, Anneke?”
Anneke slung her scattergun over her shoulder and went back out into the main room for her rifle. “Ready, boss.”
“You don’t think that’s a little much?”
“Not where we’re going,” Anneke said.
“Khos, you’re doing recon today,” Nyx said.
“Yeah,” he said.
She glanced at the curtain Rhys had hidden himself behind. Didn’t bother. Sometimes he just exhausted her. He wasn’t happy about Chenja. Or the liquor. He was never happy about anything.
“Let’s go,” she said.
She and Anneke walked out to the bakkie. Nyx did a quick check for explosives, then they both got in and drove to a local teahouse.
Chenjans dressed far more conservatively than Nasheenians, and it was probably the reason they suffered from fewer cancers. The people they drove past and shared the road with wore brightly colored vests and long coats and trousers and aghals and burnouses, and even some of the men veiled their faces. She expected to see more men in Chenja than she did in Nasheen, but unless there was a political rally or she stood outside a mosque around prayer time, the people on the street were still mostly women. All of the women wore veils and covered their hair, and most wore chadors. The few men she saw were swaggering old men or boys young enough to be the grandsons or great-grandsons of the old men. In Chenja, all of the street signs were in the prayer language, not local Chenjan, which was a similar script but not identical. Nyx’s Chenjan wasn’t the best, but she was better with the prayer script.
Luckily, Anneke knew the streets of Dadfar pretty well. She and Raine had worked in Chenja for a couple of years, and she had family in the city, so when Nyx said they needed to find out about a boxing gym—violent sports and gambling were outlawed in Chenja—Anneke knew the right teahouse.
The tea house sold tea and marijuana, and business looked slow. A couple of prayer wheels hung in the window. Most of the patrons were men either too young to be at the front or too old to get sent back. The old men played board games and smoked marijuana. The boys talked about weapons and girls. A gaggle of chador-clad women sat at the back, laughing in high, loud voices. Like all Chenjans, they wore clothing in gaudy, mismatched colors, as if making up for the fact that they had to live without liquor.
Nyx found a table close enough to the rear door to comfort her and sat with her back to the wall. Behind her there was a massive flaking gilt frame with a picture of some Chenjan martyr on it. Maybe the owner’s son. Nyx wondered why it was that the prescription against images of living things didn’t apply to martyrs, just the Prophet and everything else.
“You sure this is the right place?” she asked Anneke in her broken Chenjan.
Anneke waved over the older woman standing behind the counter and started chatting to her in Chenjan. The woman, unveiled and pushing fifty, brought them tea and sat down and drank it with them. Nyx could follow most of what she said. The bar matron knew one of Anneke’s sisters. She’d been widowed. Owning the teahouse paid the bills. She and her daughters kept it running. The man on the wall was her husband. He had been one of the suicide soldiers who bombed the Nasheenian breeding compounds three decades before.
Nyx looked up at the image on the wall again, examined the eyes. She wondered if she’d ever looked like that: the absolute faith, the grim purpose.
They exchanged a few more words about abandoned buildings and boxing, and then the bar matron lowered her voice and nodded.
Anneke said to Nyx, in Nasheenian, low, “Yeah, she’s heard rumors of fights. Doesn’t much like the idea of fighting in this town, but her husband used to do some of it.”
They finished their tea, and the matron left to tend to the others. Anneke stood.
“We’re good?” Nyx said.
“Yeah. There’s supposed to be a fight in a few days about three or four kilometers from here at an abandoned waterworks. They hold a lot of illegal fights there.”
“Good,” Nyx said.
Anneke shrugged as they stepped back out into the heat of the day. “Well, that was easy. Let’s get lunch. She owns the bakery next door.”
“I’m not in the mood for sweets,” Nyx said.
They picked up a couple of stuffed rotis at a food cart in the town square. It was market day, and the square was choked with merchants selling prayer rugs, scarves, hijabs, burnouses, baskets, dried meat, protein cakes, rotis, braided bread… just about anything Nyx could think of, and more besides. There were butchers and pseudo-magicians and what Nyx figured were probably gene pirates selling their services—real magicians didn’t advertise in markets—and one of the fakes was hawking what he said were human organs in jars laced with ice flies.
She saw a long line of people—men and women—dressed from head to toe in white, making their way across the square. The white marked them as Tirhani pilgrims, and they bore their temporary visas around their necks. Dadfar was the death place of the Tirhani martyr, Manijeh Nassu, one of the daughters of the Chenjan caliph, back when they had one. She had led southern Chenja in revolt against the north and died trying to get water for her group of fighters after they were cut off from the only well for miles. Nyx remembered the water on the streets the night before, and wondered now if it had been some kind of Tirhani pilgrim thing.
“Bloody fucking dung beetles,” Anneke muttered, following her look. “You watch them. Someday they’re going to show up here, guns hot, telling us they’re our bloody liberators come to save us from ourselves.”
“After selling guns to both sides,” Nyx said. “It’s real easy to sit out there on the coast playing holier than thou and getting fat off someone else’s war.” It was Chenja’s reliance on Tirhani weapons that kept Tirhani pilgrims getting visas, and Nasheenian reliance on the same that kept them ferrying bug tech and magicians by the boatload to Tirhan. Fucking dung beetles.
Across the square was a mosque, and the muezzin called out mid-morning prayer, bringing most of the activity in the market to a halt. Anneke dusted off the sidewalk in front of her and pulled the prayer rug from her back. Going into the mosque would have been risky. Always better to pray outside official spaces when you were cross-dressing in Chenja.
Nyx wandered through the market as it cleared out. She bought a couple of mangoes—Rhys liked mangoes—and another roti. Most Chenjan food was shit, but there was nothing better than a good roti.
She looked over the stalls nearest her and saw Anneke still prone on the sidewalk. She walked a little more until she came to the other side of the square, where a veiled woman sold prayer rugs. On the street behind the woman, a bakkie sat idling, its windows opaqued. Nyx started eating a mango as she watched the bakkie. Strange to leave your bakkie idling while you hopped into the mosque for mid-morning prayer. Chenjans weren’t any more honest than Nasheenians, no matter what Rhys said. Somebody was liable to steal their transport. If not Nyx, then somebody like her.
The veiled woman who owned the stall was praying. The day was going to be hot. Nyx smelle
d curry over protein cakes and grimaced. Chenja.
She turned again to look for Anneke. As she did, she saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye. She ducked and thrust her elbow behind her. She caught somebody in the gut.
A bag went over her head, and the light bled away.
Nyx kicked out, but she was already off her feet. Something hard hit her in the head. She let out a long scream, hoping somebody around her would note that she wasn’t being kidnapped willingly.
Somebody shouted something. Nyx got hit in the head again.
A bakkie door opened, and she was shoved inside. Her captor took the bag off her head. Nyx had one dizzying moment to look into Rasheeda’s grinning face before her sister thrust a toxic scarab beetle into her mouth and gagged her with a rag.
Nyx choked on the beetle as its poison trickled down her throat, turning the world gray and hazy, making her too drugged to move.
20
Nyx forced herself to focus. The poison was wearing off. She’d eaten most of the beetle while trying to breathe. Her head felt too heavy to hold up. She was strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. She was naked. She hadn’t recognized the other women who stripped her and searched her, but she knew Rasheeda was working this with another sister. If Rasheeda had been working alone, she would have just killed Nyx.
Nyx tried raising her head again and looked around. The room was dim. The floor was gritty and oddly damp. The whole room felt too damp. It was probably a basement room dug just above the old riverbed.
She tugged at her bonds—organic rope that fed off her sweat and blood. The more she moved, the tougher it got. Over that, barbed wire twisted into some bizarre shapes on the arm rests. Rasheeda liked to twist restraining wire into grim parodies of faces. They’d trussed her feet as well and pinned her at her elbows and wrists so she had to sit a certain way or risk losing circulation in her arms. She wished they’d tied something around her head to keep it up. She let it sink again.
Time stretched. Her head cleared. She was cold and thirsty. There was something wrong with her legs. She held her urine as long as she could before finally pissing herself. That was part of the game, of course, leaving her in a pool of her own urine, so thirsty she’d drink it if she could reach it. The light globe above her was never shuttered. How long they waited until they came to her depended on how desperate they were for information.
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