God's War (16 page)

“Anyhow, Tirhan split from Chenja
two hundred years ago,” Nyx said. “The split isn’t exactly new. Don’t they
speak some southern dialect?”

“They know Chenjan,” Solome said.
“Chenja allows them passes to visit their martyr’s grave each year.”

Nyx had heard something about that
at some bug party back in bel dame training. Rhys was still playing with his
hands.

“Tell me,” Solome said, leaning in
slightly now, suddenly a bit more animated. “This sixth prayer of yours, what
is its purpose? No other followers of your book have a midnight prayer.”

“The midnight prayer—” Rhys began,
but Nyx had had enough talk of religion.

“Tell me more about Nikodem and her
love of violence,” Nyx said.

Solome settled back into her chair
again.

“I wouldn’t call it a love,” Danika
said, picking up for Solome. “Perhaps a peculiar obsession. In our country, on
New Kinaan, we are born into our classes. Nikodem was born to a scholarly class,
organic sciences. She wished she had been born one of God’s soldiers.”

“It’s overrated,” Nyx said.

Danika knit her brows.

“Never mind,” Nyx said. “You say she
wanted to see the boxers?”

“Nikodem asked the court’s lead
magician, Yah Hadeel, to arrange for her to see a fight before we departed. The
only one that fit into our schedule was the fight in Faleen. It was a dull
thing.”

“I was at that fight,” Nyx said. “I
heard she talked to the boxers.”

Solome made a noise of distress.

Danika shushed her. “I let her speak
to them.”

Solome snapped something in their
language, and Nyx rearranged the women’s hierarchy in her mind.

“She spoke to both boxers before the
fight,” Danika said. “She was very interested in why they would choose to get
hit in the face.”

“There’s good money in boxing,” Nyx
said.

“In our country,” Keran piped up,
tugging at the fingers of her gloves, cutting off all the ends of her words
with rolling “shhhh” sounds, “the State ensures that all are employed and cared
for. One need not resort to violence.”

“Uh-huh,” Nyx said. The sand was
always cleaner just over the next dune. These women were reminding her more and
more of First Family matrons. “So if your world’s so sweet, what are the lot of
you doing out here collecting bug tech?”

All three women stilled. There was
an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then Danika looked at Solome, and Keran
reached for her cold tea with her gloved hands.

“We have an interest in all of God’s
worlds,” Solome said. “Nikodem more than most. Surely you trust the judgment of
your queen—God’s appointed leader of your world?”

“I wouldn’t take her purported
divine right to the title that far,” Rhys said.

“What about the magicians you met up
with here at the palace?” Nyx said, before Rhys started derailing them again.
“You sure Nikodem ran and wasn’t kidnapped? Not every magician on the Queen’s
payroll is clean.”

Altruism. Shared resources. Catshit.
It wasn’t only their intentions they were lying about. Some of the fact-by-fact
reporting may have been because Danika had told the story so often, but Nyx
wasn’t betting on it, not with some of the other answers they’d given her.
Nikodem just “disappeared”? Went rogue? What kind of society trained and
employed people based on genetics, had their own interstellar diplomacy school,
and then “accidentally” lost one of their diplomats? Umayma was a long way to
come for a couple of bugs and a boxing match.

But that’s none of your concern, she
thought, and grimaced. She only needed the note. She needed Nikodem. It wasn’t
her job to figure the intentions. That was for the queen and her security
techs.

I hate this note already, Nyx
thought.

“It’s true that the magicians
understand the importance of our work,” Danika said. “It’s possible that one of
them could have approached her once she left Mushtallah, but I don’t believe a
magician would take such a risk. Those who were aware of her talents would
understand her importance to your country and the disastrous consequences if
she was acquired by your rivals.”

“So she disappeared from here, not
from Faleen?”

“Oh yes,” Danika said. “Queen
Zaynab’s security bugs recorded her departure.”

“Footage can be doctored,” Nyx said,
turning to Rhys. “Right?”

“It can,” Rhys said. He looked back
at Kasbah. “Can we view it?”

“I’ve had that footage uploaded to
your globe,” Kasbah said from her place near the door, but she looked at Rhys
as she said it, which was odd for a Nasheenian security tech. When you wanted
to put black boys in their place, you talked to their owners—or employers—not
to them.

“I would need to see the originals,”
Rhys said.

“Can we do that?” Nyx asked.

“I can authorize that,” Kasbah said.

“Great,” Nyx said. She stood and
nodded to the aliens. “Thanks. I can contact you here if I have any other
questions?”

“Certainly,” Danika said. “A contact
pattern has been designated for us and uploaded to your globe. Kasbah says the
call is routed through palace security.”

All three women stood, and pressed
their hands together and bowed.

Nyx made a quick, sloppy mirror of
the gesture and watched Rhys make a far more elegant bow alongside her. Nyx had
never bowed to anybody in her life. It was the sort of thing people only did in
cheap historical dramas. Who ran all these other worlds? Where did all the
people come from? Motes of stardust, just like Nasheenians and Chenjans?
Refugees from dying worlds like the Ras Tiegans or asylum seekers from planets
that hated the people of the Book, like the Mhorians? But then, where did the
people who hated the people of the Book come from?

Theology looked a lot better the
more questions you started to pile up. Saying it was all just God’s plan gave
you neat answers for everything.

Give it a fucking rest, she thought,
and turned to Kasbah. “Let’s go,” she said.

Kasbah took Nyx and Rhys into the
belly of the palace. The way grew darker as they descended. The floors were
still brightly colored tile, but the doors were no longer made of intricately
carved wood. These were solid, made of twisted metal and bug secretions. Nyx
wondered what kind of fallout shelter they had down here. She knew the main bug
bank for Mushtallah’s filter was on Palace Hill, which required a lot of
security.

“Who else was on this job?” Nyx
asked Kasbah. “I’ll need to know how they fucked up, when they gave up, what
they found out. If you don’t have that information, I need to go to them
directly. I don’t want to reinvent their work.”

“We’ve hired only one bounty hunter
who’s still on the note, but the list of mercenaries is somewhat classified,”
Kasbah said. “We already find it politically distasteful to work with bounty
hunters. Admitting publicly that we’ve hired foreign mercenaries as well may be
disastrous.”

“Then at least give me the list of
bel dames you’ve hired,” Nyx said. She was still having trouble with the idea
that they’d cut out the bel dames.

“We cannot involve the bel dame
council in a note such as this. You, of all people, should know this.”

“I know what the line is, Kasbah. I
also know this is Palace Hill.”

“You do perhaps overestimate the
power of the queen or, perhaps, overestimate her interest in agitating the bel
dame council over a matter even such as this.”

“Seems a little funny. This note is
so important, but she won’t piss off a couple old ladies on the council to get
them to put some women on it?”

“Perhaps it is best the old ladies
don’t
understand the importance of this note.”

Nyx gave Kasbah a good sidelong
look. “Don’t tell me the queen’s after somebody the bel dames want dead.”

“Let us say it is best for Nasheen
if we acquire this woman without exciting the bel dame council.”

Nyx let that settle in her head.
This could be bad.

Kasbah led them through several sets
of security doors, past two guards, and through another filter. Then they
stepped into a small viewing room. The room itself was no different than any other
security viewing room Nyx had seen, only colder. She wondered how far
underground they were.

Kasbah stepped into the next room to
find the security techs.

Rhys’s expression was grim. “I don’t
like the sound of this note, Nyx.”

“That’s why it pays so well, Rhys,”
she said, but her chest was tight.

The last time she pissed off the bel
dames, they’d sent her to prison. What the fuck was the queen doing running a
high-risk note under the noses of the bel dames? Why not hire them to do it? If
she was going to bleed, Nyx wanted to know who and what she was bleeding for.

Kasbah returned with a couple of
security techs. One of them held a transparent thumb-size case filled with
amber fluid. She shook it and put it into the viewing tube.

The tube vomited a misty rain of
particles that coalesced into four round moving images.

“I thought your filter kept out
transmission bugs,” Rhys said.

One of the techs, an older woman
with a wash of white-peppered hair, said, “It does. These are native to
Mushtallah, something we put together with the palace magicians.”

Like com techs and hedge witches,
most security techs had some paltry talent that made them more adept at working
with bugs. Nyx figured about the only advantage of having an affinity for bugs
was that it increased your job prospects.

Nyx focused on the round views,
broadcasts from the lenses of tailored bugs plotted around the city.

The first showed an image of the
main courtyard they’d entered earlier where all the women had been training.

“She starts here,” the tech said,
pointing to the staircase. It was a bad wide shot. Everything that came in via
bugs was in shades of gray, so the woman moving down the stairs could have been
any dark woman. She walked with two other figures.

“Who are they?” Nyx asked.

“Magicians,” Kasbah said. “Yah Inan
and Yah Tayyib.”

“Yah Tayyib of Faleen?” Nyx asked.

“Yes. You know him?”

“Here,” the tech said, as the
figures disappeared from the eye’s view. She pointed to the next eye, a view of
the deserted main street outside the palace. Nyx saw that the time stamp had
them moving during the darkest part of the night, the thirteenth hour. With the
moons in recession, it was even darker than usual, and hazy by the look of the
gas lamps left running on the windowsill inside the main window of each of the
apartments above the storefronts.

“Did she have a lot of midnight
sorties with magicians?” Nyx asked.

“It wasn’t unusual,” Kasbah said.
“Nikodem got on well with them.”

The younger tech nodded. “We saw
nothing odd about this night, not until here, when we picked her up going
through the filter, alone. But of course we didn’t see that until later. The
bug jumps here, changes position.”

She pointed to the eye that showed
the dark figure moving through the filter. The bug indeed shifted position, a
back-and-forth motion that made the picture wobble. The woman stepped into a
bakkie waiting on the other side of the filter. The picture was bad, and Nyx
couldn’t make out any distinguishing features—no tags, no strange markings. She
couldn’t even gauge the bakkie’s state of health. It was a newer model, not yet
sand-gutted or sun-sick. It might have had tinted windows.

“So she had help,” Nyx said.

“Or she called a bakkie before she
left,” Kasbah said. “The Kinaanites aren’t wholly ignorant of how to get around
in Nasheen.”

“We’re talking about a woman who had
confidential information of great interest to magicians,” Nyx said. “I don’t
think she headed out alone to watch a little boxing in the border towns.”

“The magicians have been extensively
interrogated,” Kasbah said, but it wasn’t the voice of a woman of absolute
faith. Nyx had heard those voices enough to know what they sounded like. “They
understand the nature of this project. They know what would happen to Nasheen
if we lost this woman to the Chenjans.”

“Tell me what would happen to
Nasheen,” Nyx said.

Kasbah looked at her. Her mouth was
a thin line. “If she could end the war in our favor, she could also end it… not
so much in our favor, couldn’t she?” Kasbah said.

The images began looping on all four
lenses: the courtyard, the street, a bookshop where Nikodem seemed to have gone
off on her own, the filter, the bakkie.

Nyx glanced over at Rhys. He was
examining the image of the bakkie. When he caught her looking at him, he
nodded. One of the images was doctored, then. Mercenaries generally didn’t work
with magicians, so any of the ones who’d viewed this before Nyx may not have
caught that, but if Kasbah had a lot of her own security techs and magicians
working on this,
she
should have known it.

Nyx looked over at Kasbah. Kasbah
had her arms crossed as she stared at the security screens. She did not meet
Nyx’s look.

Nyx asked Rhys, “You need to see
anything else?”

He shook his head.

“I think that’s it, then,” Nyx said.
“Unless I can speak to Yah Inan.”

“She is away at the magicians’
quarters,” Kasbah said. “She was scheduled for a sabbatical many months ago.”

“You’ve already talked to Yah
Tayyib?”

“He says he left Nikodem at the
bookshop. He and Yah Inan went out for a late supper with her and paused to
look at some organics books. She said she was going to visit an acquaintance
living above the bookshop. She asked them to escort her home at mid-morning
prayer. When they returned the next day, they found that no one lived above the
shop. That’s when I had my technicians go through the security lenses.”

“She’s been gone a month now?” Nyx
asked.