God's War (28 page)

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 smelled 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.

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.

But what information? About Nikodem
and the boxing? They’d know about that. Rasheeda didn’t want Nikodem anyway.
Their goal was to keep her away from Nikodem, wasn’t it? Or were they using her
to find Nikodem? What was this, another intimidation game?

She waited. Her body stiffened. She
tried flexing her arms, her back, her shoulders, her legs. She was going to
start losing feeling in her limbs if she didn’t find a way to move.

Nyx finally managed to get a look at
her legs. Bloody wounds crisscrossed her flesh. The lines moved and wriggled.
Alive.

They’d stuffed her wounds with
bloodworms.

Her gut roiled. She looked up again.
Something moved in the far dark corner of the room in the broken masonry. She
briefly saw the shiny head of a giant centipede peek through. The pain would
kick in soon—maybe another couple hours—when the bloodworms had excreted enough
poison into her skin to start the slow burn. Her lower limbs already tingled.

She avoided thinking about her team.
She didn’t think about the interrogation, about what she’d seen Rasheeda do to
people. Instead, she thought about the black sand of Tirhan, the kind she’d
spun stories about back in Mushirah. She thought about sitting on a deck under
a couple of broad-leafed palm trees surrounded in dark green foliage, sipping
cool coconut drinks spiked with vodka.

She thought about counting stars
with Tej, and she remembered the good nights with that girl, what was her name?
Radeyah, yes. Radeyah, with the kind eyes and quick tongue who’d told her
they’d spend a lifetime growing old together in the same bed in a little beach
house in Tirhan, though all that water in one place scared the shit out of Nyx.
But Radeyah’s boy lover had come back from the front—most of him—and dreams of
Tirhan and vodka and a lifetime of Radeyah’s sweet tongue and soft hands had
ended.

She had told that story again,
though, wrapped in bed with another sort of woman, a desperate outrider. Told
her all about Tirhani beaches she had never been to and never wanted to see—
“Don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you…”
—but Nyx
had lied and whispered to her Radeyah’s dream, not her own, because Jaks loved
the sea, dreamed of the sea. Nyx had learned that from one of Jaks’s house
sisters, the one who told her about Arran.

Arran. The note that killed Tej.

Nyx used them all to get to somebody
else, to pick up some other note. It was her job. It’s what she did.

The door opened.

Nyx raised her head.

Rasheeda walked in, wearing loose
trousers and a short coat. Her black hair was pulled back from her cool,
flawless face, and she was grinning. Her eyes were flat and black and, paired
with the grin, she looked like some kind of demon, something come up straight
from hell to inhabit a soulless body. She carried a bag and a stool.

Behind her was Fatima.

Nyx wasn’t surprised. This was the
sort of job Fatima would pull. Fatima was skinny—skinnier than Nyx had ever
seen her—and her dark hair was shot through with white; very becoming on a
Nasheenian woman. Fatima fixed a hard look on Nyx, then shut the door. Nyx
hadn’t seen Fatima since she sent Nyx to prison.

Rasheeda snickered and set the stool
in front of Nyx, just far enough away so Nyx couldn’t bite her nose off.

Fatima sat as Rasheeda unpacked her
instruments from her bag.