God's War (10 page)

“I’ve got a poor piece for today,
then.”

“File number?”

Nyx told her.

Shajin grimaced. “You’re in the
dregs again, my woman.”

Shajin passed the file number on to
one of the little desk clerks—a betel-nut-colored, boyish girl named Juon who
had a sassy walk.

Nyx leaned over the desk so her nose
nearly touched the latticework. “When are you coming home with me, Juon?”

Juon marched into the back.

Shajin grinned. “She’ll have none of
you, my woman. She just got a letter from that boy of hers at the front.”

Nyx snorted. “Probably six months
dead. The flies have him.”

Amid the low murmur of exchange and
the occasional outburst from an irate hunter or wheedling bounty came a deep,
familiar voice.

“So the huntress returns,” Raine
said.

Nyx took half a moment to loosen up
her suddenly rigid body. She turned and showed her crimson teeth.

Raine stood near the main door with
three of his crew. On a good day, he had a dozen veterans and half as many
irregulars.

She saw Raine around the Cage a lot
and more around the local pubs, but—not being half a fool—he avoided her
personally. He usually sent out his veterans to harass her. She had sent the
last one back without an ear.

“I see you’ve gotten better at
eavesdropping on our com,” Nyx said.

“Taite’s security is terrible,”
Raine said. “I taught him everything I know.”

“Which must not have been much,” Nyx
said.

“There is much more I could teach
you, Nyxnissa, if you could set aside your arrogance.”

“You’re the one who thinks he’s some
fucking prophet ’cause he had a shitty time at the front. I heard you got
arrested during a protest in Sahlah. I’m surprised nobody’s put you in prison
yet for blasphemy. Why hasn’t your mother gutted you, the way she did the
council?”

“I know faith and belief are
concepts you have a difficult time understanding, Nyxnissa, but some of us have
an interest in righting wrongs, not perpetuating them.”

“I believe in myself. That’s
enough.”

“For you? And your crew?”

“Why don’t you go off and get
married and settle down like a good little war vet, huh? I’m sure you could
find some dumb bitch to put you up.”

“We’re a sorry pair of veterans,
aren’t we? I think you have as much interest in becoming a kept thing as I do.”

“Hey, hunters!” Shajin said. “You
take your personal business outside.”

“I’ve got a file,” Nyx said.

“I have mine,” Raine said. He
clapped his hands. His three regulars headed for the door.

“Watch yourself,” Raine said. He put
his back to her and walked out.

“Watch your regulars,” Nyx said. “I
may find a use for them.”

She wasn’t the only one Raine was
stirring the pot with these days. It wasn’t just the protests in small cities
like Sahlah. Rhys had word of Raine at rallies in Mushtallah and boys’ rights
gatherings in Amtullah. Those were bad places to be seen protesting anything
that had to do with God or the queen or the bel dames. It was like he was
presenting himself to a butcher and asking them to chop something else off. But
he had taught her how to drive, how to use a sword, and how to patch a
bakkie—this old man with the dead eyes and bizarre family history who couldn’t
leave the war alone.

She supposed there must be something
redeemable about him.

Khos spit on the floor next to Nyx.

“Those three were ours,” Anneke
said. “Honest, boss, I had them.”

“Well, you don’t have them now, do
you?” Nyx said, too sharply. She turned back to the desk.

Juon handed Shajin the file.

“Says here you get thirty for a live
catch,” Shajin said, “and twenty fora dead. Too bad.” She filled out the pay
receipt. “You know the routine.”

Nyx handed the receipt to Anneke,
who followed Khos through the throng to the body drop-off and cashier.

Juon leaned over and whispered into
Shajin’s ear.

“What’s that? Ah, yes. You have a
note,” Shajin said.

Juon went to the sorting cabinet
behind Shajin and plucked out a red letter.

Nyx’s heart skipped. The old bullet
wound in her hip throbbed.

Red letters were straight from the
desk of the queen. The queen only sent red letters to nobles, ambassadors… and
bel dames.

Juon handed the letter to Shajin.

Shajin handed it to Nyx.

Nyx’s fingers trembled. She took the
letter and tucked it carefully into the top of her dhoti. A pardon from the
Queen? Back to bel dame work? Back to prison? Had she fucked anything up
recently?

“Thanks,” she said. “They’ve been
giving them out to the top hunters,” Shajin said. “Must be somebody pretty
important.”

“Oh,” Nyx said. Not a pardon, then.
“If it’s that important, they’d give it to the bel dames, not the hunters.”

Shajin shrugged. “I don’t make
policy. Come now, you’re holding up the line, my woman.”

Nyx pushed away from the counter.
She waited for Anneke and Khos, and when they returned with the bounty money,
she tucked that, too, into her dhoti and told Khos to drive.

Nyx rode shotgun. She pulled out the
red letter. Khos looked at her as he started the bakkie.

It took a long time to read the
letter. If she went too fast she got the characters backward. By the time they
reached the keg, she’d read it twice.

The letter read:

 

We, God’s Imam, Queen Zaynab sa Boliard so Amtullah, on the
forty-eighth day of the Sahfar in the year nine hundred eighty-nine, hereby
summon God’s servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem to the Al-Ahnsalus Palace at
Mushtallah on behalf of Almighty God and the people of the Holy Empire of
Nasheen.

 

In view of the authority conferred to us by God, and to further
the glory of God and His servant Nasheen, we seek the covert recovery of a
fugitive, to be apprehended by God’s servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem and whose
recovery will be rewarded most graciously.

 

God’s servant may exchange this imperial summons at the nearest
train repository for complementary roundtrip tickets to God’s seat, Mushtallah.

Someone had written in, at the
bottom, using the same pen stroke as the queen’s signature:

 

Recompense for the apprehension of the agent is negotiable.
Details forthcoming when you arrive. Discretion advised.

The second part was a lot easier to
read, and much more Nyx’s style. It made her wonder how much of her file they’d
read before sending the summons.

Back at the keg, Nyx handed Rhys the
red letter.

“This for real?” she asked.

He ran his hands over it. “It
appears genuine,” he said.

“Best you can tell, right?” she
said.

He grimaced. “You pay me for an
acceptable level of talent. You get what you pay for.”

“I want you to go with me,” she
said.

His dark eyes widened—pretty eyes
with long lashes. There were days when she couldn’t get enough of them, and
days she wanted to cut them out for the same reason.

“The Nasheenian court? Palace Hill?
You must be joking,” he said.

“Listen. I take Anneke or Khos with
me, they don’t speak very good, all right? I take Taite, and you know he gets
sick when he’s nervous. I want you there.”

“Nyx, I—”

“Thanks,” she said. “Just don’t
worry about it.” She turned away from him before he said any more. She needed
Rhys, her mediocre magician. There were other things he was good at: well-read,
well-spoken, well-mannered. He was Chenjan, sure, but she didn’t know anybody
else around with his manners. He never missed a prayer; he talked about God all
the time and drank tea instead of whiskey. He made her look good. He made the whole
team look good.

Nyx walked into her office and
dumped her gear onto her desk. As she saw Khos walk in to the keg she hollered
that she wanted to talk to him. Rhys was still standing near the door, at the
ablution bowl she had set out for those who wanted to wash themselves before
and after they spoke to her. Her business had that effect on people. Rhys had
his hands in the water, sleeves up.

She turned back in to her spare
office, kicking her chair away. It wasn’t even noon, so the light coming
through the latticed windows was low. She climbed up on to her battered desk
and propped open the old entrance in the ceiling.

Better.

Khos knocked on the open door.

“Get in here,” Nyx said.

She climbed down from the desk as
Khos came through the doorway. He needed a wash.

“Funniest thing,” Nyx said. “I had a
body in my trunk this morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Sit.”

Khos lumbered over to one of the
backless chairs in front of her desk. They were mismatched chairs, trash she
and Taite had picked up years before when they moved out of their firebombed
storefront in the Chenjan district and onto the east side. He’d been allergic
to the original upholstery, and she’d had to redo most of it herself.

Nyx took off her burnous and draped
it over her chair. She removed the most extraneous of her weapons and piled
them up next to her for cleaning.

“You want to step away from the
crew?” Nyx asked.

If Taite was a good but fragile kid,
Khos was like the kid’s lumbering, towheaded older brother. Nyx had picked up
Khos Khadija at a brothel outside Aludra three years before. They were both
there to see the same girl and had bumped into each other on the stairs. When
she found out he was Raine’s new shifter, she hired him at twice the cut Raine
was giving him. She’d been very drunk. She’d also been very drunk later, when
she slept with him. She didn’t like big men all that much, but it had been a
hot fuck for all that. She knew it had been a while since she’d been to bed
with anybody at all, because right about now he was starting to look half good
again.

Khos shrugged. If the seat had a
back, he would have slumped.

“It was side work. I forgot about
it.”

She climbed into her chair and
perched up on the back, her feet on the seat. She leaned forward.

“You were supposed to wait on me and
Rhys. Instead, you panicked and moved too soon, and we lost our take.”

“I told you, Raine showed up and they
were heading out. We would have lost all of them if I hadn’t gone in when I
did.”

“So instead, all three of them lit
out the back window, right into Raine’s ambush, and we ended up with some dumb
kid who was worth more alive than dead.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Is this your crew? Did I sign a
contract of yours, or did you sign one of mine?”

He grimaced.

“Answer me.”

“No, it’s not my crew.”

“You know how many hunts me and
Anneke have been on? A hell of a lot. There’s nothing we haven’t seen.”

“Nyx—”

“I don’t want to hear about Mhorian
chivalry. You don’t like working with women, you shouldn’t be in Nasheen. As I
heard it, it’s your love of women that got you here in the first place. Women
can fight as well as fuck, you know it?”

He shifted in his seat, looking
toward the window. She knew he hated it when she swore. Mhorians were a strange
bunch of refugees, a late addition to Umayma. They’d been given some of the
shittiest, least developed land in the world, and the vast majority of them had
died within the first year of landing. A thousand years worth of hard living
had made them a prickly, stubborn sort of people. Most of them were religious
zealots, worse than any Chenjan, obsessed with laws and prescriptions about
marital relations and the segregation of men and women. A full three-quarters
of their Book dealt with rules about marriage, sex, and birth. Nyx had been
with Khos the first time he saw a topless woman on the streets of Nasheen,
burning an effigy of the Queen in protest of some new regulation about births completed
off-compound. The look on his face had been worth a thousand notes.

Mhorian women also cost money, like
bugs. Nyx supposed that in a society where most of you were dying and you
didn’t have much initial bug tech, women’s wombs would go for more. Khos had
lit out of Mhoria looking for a good wife he didn’t have to pay for, and he
hadn’t had much luck in Nasheen. Who wanted to shack up with some Mhorian
shifter and push out useless half-breed babies? Half-breeds didn’t get free
government inoculations. The vast majority died within the first three years as
a result. Nyx figured it was why Khos spent most of his time in brothels. Maybe
he thought those women were hard up? What he didn’t seem to get was that women
in Nasheen who made a living as prostitutes were usually doing so for political
reasons, not because they were desperate for money or anxious about having
husbands. Women in Nasheen didn’t grow up looking for husbands. They grew up
looking for honor and glory.

“I need to know you’ll follow the
plan,” Nyx said. “If I can’t count on that, I cancel your contract. I can get
another shifter, you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Go sit with the others in the
keg. We’ve got to prep for another pickup.”

He heaved himself out of his seat, and
shut the door softly behind him. For a man his size, he moved with surprising
quiet.