God's War

Listen to me, you islands;

hear this, you distant nations:

Before I was born God called me;

from my birth he has made mention of my name.

He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,

in the shadow of his hand he hid me;

he made me into a polished arrow

and concealed me in his quiver.

He said to me, “You are my servant,

Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.”

But I said, “I have labored to no purpose;

I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.

Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,

and my reward is with my God.”

(Bible, Isaiah 49:1-4)

“Say: My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death are
surely for Allah, the Lord of the worlds…”

(Quran, 6.162)

BEL DAME

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between
Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.

Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she
pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and
a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it
two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium,
and the wine she’d gotten from the butchers as a bonus for her womb. But she
did get Jaks into bed, and—loser or not—in the desert after dark, that was
something.

“What are you after?” Jaks murmured
in her good ear.

They lay tangled in the sheets like
old lovers: a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her
left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food, and most of her
clothing.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Nyx
said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for something else too,
something worth a lot more, and Jaks was going to help her get it.

The midnight call to prayer rolled
out over the desert. It started somewhere out in Faleen and moved in a slow
wave from mosque muezzin to village mullah to town crier, certain as a swarm of
locusts, ubiquitous as the name of God.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Nyx said, “what
I’m about to tell you…”

Nyx woke sometime after dawn prayer
with a hangover and what felt like a wad of cotton in her belly. Dropping the
womb had bought her some time—a day, maybe more if the butchers were smart
enough to sell it before her bloody sisters sniffed her out. She’d shaken them
in Punjai when she dumped the womb, along with the rest of her coin.

Jaks was long gone, off to catch a
ride to Faleen with the agricultural traffic. Nyx was headed that way too, but
she hadn’t said a word of that to Jaks. She wanted her next meeting with Jaks
to be a pleasant surprise. Mysterious women were attractive—stalkers and
groupies were not. Nyx had tracked this woman too long to lose it all by being
overly familiar.

Some days, Nyx was a bel dame—an
honored, respected, and deadly government-funded assassin. Other days, she was
just a butcher, a hunter—a woman with nothing to lose. And the butcher had a
bounty to bring in.

The sun bled across the big angry
sky. The call box at the cantina was busted, so Nyx walked. The way was unpaved,
mostly sand and gravel. Her feet were bruised, bleeding, and bare, but she
hadn’t felt much of anything down there in a good long while. Back at the
butchers’, she had traded her good sandals for directions out of the fleshpots,
too dopey to figure the way out on her own. Under the burnous, she wore little
more than a dhoti and breast binding. She had an old baldric, too—her dead
partner’s. All the sheaths were empty, and had been for some time. She
remembered some proverb about meeting God empty-handed, but her knees weren’t
calloused anymore—not from praying, anyway. She had already been to hell. One
prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference.

She hitched a ride on the back of a
cat-pulled cart that afternoon. The cats were as tall as her shoulder. Their
long, coarse fur was matted and tangled, and they stank. The cats turned
leaking, bloodshot eyes to her. One of them was blind.

The woman driving the cart was a
cancerous old crone with a bubbling gash that clove the left half of her face
in two. She offered Nyx a ride in exchange for a finger’s length of blood to
feed the enormous silk beetle she kept in a covered cage next to her left hip,
pressed against her battered pistol.

Nyx had the hood of her burnous up
to keep off the sun; traveling this time of day was dangerous. The crone’s skin
was rough and pitted with old scars from cancer digs. Fresh, virulent melanomas
spotted her forearms and the back of her neck. Most of her nose was gone.

“You coming from the front, my
woman?” the crone asked. Nyx shook her head, but the old woman was nearly blind
and did not see.

“I fought at the front,” the crone
said. “It brought me much honor. You, too, could find honor.”

Nyx had left her partner, and a lot
more at the front—a long time ago.

“I’d rather find a call box,” Nyx
said.

“God does not answer the phone.”

Nyx couldn’t argue with that.

She jumped off the cart an hour
later as they approached a bodega with a call box and a sign telling her she
was fifty kilometers from Faleen. The old woman nattered on about the wisdom of
making phone calls to God.

Nyx made a call.

Two hours later, at fourteen in the
afternoon on a day that clocked in at twenty-seven hours, her sister Kine
pulled up in a bakkie belching red roaches from its back end.

Kine leaned over and pushed out the
door. “You’re lucky the office picked up,” she said. “I had to get some samples
at the war front for the breeding compounds. You headed to the coast? I need to
get these back there.”

“You’ve got a leak in your exhaust,”
Nyx said. “Unlock the hood.”

“It’s been leaking since the front,”
Kine said. She popped the hood.

The bakkie’s front end hissed open.
Waves of yeasty steam rolled off the innards. Nyx wiped the moisture from her
face and peered into the guts of the bakkie. The bug cistern was covered in a
thin film of organic tissue, healthy and functioning, best Nyx could tell by
the color. The hoses were in worse shape—semi-organic, just like the cistern,
but patched and replaced in at least a half-dozen places she could see without
bringing in a speculum. In places, the healthy amber tissue had blistered and
turned black.

She was no bug-blessed magician—not
even a standard tissue mechanic—but she knew how to find a leak and patch it up
with organic salve. Every woman worth her weight in blood knew how to do that.

“Where’s your tissue kit?” Nyx said.

Kine got out of the bakkie and
walked over. She was shorter than Nyx by a head—average height, for a
Nasheenian woman—but they shared the same wide hips. She wore an embroidered
housecoat and a hijab over her dark hair. Nyx remembered seeing her with her
hair unbound and her skirt hiked up, knee deep in mud back in Mushirah. In her
memory, Kine was twelve and laughing at some joke about conservative women who
worked for the government. Rigid crones, she’d call them, half dead or dying in
a world God made for pleasure. A farmer’s daughter, just like Nyx. A blood
sister in a country where blood and bugs and currency were synonymous.

“I don’t have a tissue kit,” Kine
said. “I gave it to one of the boys at the front. They’re low on supplies.”

Nyx snorted. They were low on a lot
more than tissue kits at the front these days.

“You’re the only organic technician
I know who’d ever be short a tissue kit,” Nyx said.

Kine looked her over. “Are you as
desperately poor as you look? I know a good magician who can scrape you for
cancers.”

“I’ve been worse,” Nyx said, and
shut the hood. “Your bug cistern is in good shape. It’ll breed you enough bugs
to power this thing back to the coast, even with the leak.”

But the leak meant she’d get to
Faleen just a little bit slower. If there was one thing Nyx felt short on these
days, it was time.

Nyx slid into the bakkie. Kine got
behind the steering wheel. For a moment they sat in stuffy, uncomfortable
silence. Then Kine turned down the window and stepped on the juice.

“What’s her name?” Kine asked,
shifting pedals as they rolled back onto the road.

“Who?”

“I can smell her,” Kine said,
tightening her hands on the steering wheel. Her hands had the brown, worn,
sinewy look of old leather. Her lip curled in disdain.

“I’m working a note,” Nyx said.
“What I do to bring it in isn’t your business.”

“A note for a deserter, or one of
those dirty bounties you deal in? If you’re bringing in a deserter, where’s
Tej?”

Tej, Nyx thought, and the shock of
it, of hearing his name out loud, of thinking
Tej, my dead
partner
, was a punch in the gut.

“I couldn’t get him back over the
Chenjan border,” Nyx said. Another boy buried in the desert.

A clerk the color of honey had given
Nyx a bel dame’s note for a boy named Arran nearly three months before, after
he’d deserted his place at the front and sought refuge in Chenja. His officer
had called in the bel dames because she believed he’d been exposed to a new
Chenjan burst, a delayed viral vapor that hid out in the host for up to four
months before triggering an airborne contagion. The contagion was capable of
taking out half a city before the magicians could contain it. Nyx had gone into
the bel dame office and been inoculated against the latest burst, so all she
had to do was bleed on the boy to neutralize the contagion, then cut off his
head and take him home. Even clean, the penalty for desertion was death. Boys
either came home at forty or came home in a bag. No exceptions.

This was Nyx’s job.

Some days, it paid well.

So Nyx and Tej had tracked Arran.
Arran had gone over the border into Chenja. That part was easy to figure out.
Where in Chenja, though, that was harder. It took tracking down Jaksdijah so
Hajjij first. Arran had been a house boy of Jaks’s mother, a coastal boy raised
in the interior. Jaks was the last of his known, living kin. Nyx and Tej found
Jaks boxing for bread at an underground fighting club thirty kilometers inside
the Chenjan border. The mullahs didn’t like Chenjans fighting foreigners—which
made Jaks’s fights illegal—but it paid well.

Tej and Nyx bided their time for a
month, waiting for Arran to show up while their money ran out. Arran didn’t
disappoint. Tej was on watch the night a hooded figure knocked on Jaks’s door.
Just before dawn, Jaks and Arran were headed back to Nasheen.

Tej and Nyx followed.

But Tej hadn’t made it back.

“He was the only one of your
partners I liked,” Kine said, and pursed her lips, probably to hold back words
God wouldn’t permit her to say. Then, “You should partner with men more often.”

Nyx snorted.

They blew back out onto the road.
The shocks in the bakkie were going out too, Nyx realized, leaking vital fluid
all over the desert. She hoped Kine knew a good tissue mechanic at the coast.

“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked.
Sand rolled across the pavement.

“Faleen.”

“A bit out of my way.”

Nyx let that one go and looked out
the window, watching flat white desert turn to dunes. Kine didn’t like silence.
Give her a long stretch of stillness and eventually she’d change the subject.

Kine was government now, one of the
breeding techs who worked at the compounds on the coast. She had some kind of
slick security clearance that went well with her hijab and lonely bed. Nyx saw
her only when she was ferrying samples to and from the front—just another blood
dealer, another organ stealer.

“A ship came into Faleen this week,”
Kine said as she rolled up the window. Nyx saw the wide sleeve of her burnous
come down, flashing a length of paler skin from wrist to elbow—dusty sand
instead of sun dark. “If you’re looking for magicians to help you bring in this
deserter, there are a whole mess of them gathering in Faleen. I hear even the
lower sort are there, the sort who might—”