God's War (3 page)

So Bashir had turned her in for
bread.

“How much am I going for?” Nyx
asked. Her hands itched for a blade that she no longer carried. She was good
with a sword. The guns? Not so much.

“About fifty,” Bashir said.

Well, that was something.

The boy beside Nyx took his hand
away from his drink.

The woman behind the bar moved
toward the kitchen.

All right, then.

Nyx kicked up onto the tabletop
before the boy could steady the pistol in his other hand. The gun went off with
a pop and burst of yellow smoke.

She threw a low roundhouse kick to
the other boy’s face and leapt off the table before Bashir could get her
scattergun free.

Reflex sent her running for the back
door, kicking up sand behind her. She shouldered into the kitchen, knocked past
a startled Mhorian cook, and ran headlong out the open back door and into the
alley.

A strong arm shot out and slammed
into her throat. The blow took her off her feet.

Nyx hit the sand and rolled.

Still choking, Nyx tried to get up,
but Raine already had hold of her.

He twisted her arm behind her and
forced her face back into the sand. She spit and turned her head, gulping air.
She saw two pairs of dirty sandaled feet in front of her. She tried to look up
at who owned them.

Little ropy-muscled Anneke hadn’t
broken a sweat. She stood chewing a wad of sen, one arm supporting the weight
of the rifle she kept lodged just under her shoulder. She was as dark as a
Chenjan, and about the size of a twelve-year-old. The other feet belonged to
the skinny half-breed Taite, who wasn’t a whole hell of a lot older than
thirteen or fourteen.

“You must be desperate,” Nyx said,
spitting more sand, “to use Taite and Anneke as muscle.”

“That’s all the greeting I get?”
Raine asked. He pulled her up, kept a grip on her arm, and tugged off her
burnous.

“Where did you lose your gear, girl?
I taught you better than that.” He shook the burnous out, probably thinking
she’d hidden something in it.

Raine was a large man, a head taller
than Nyx, just as dark and twice as massive. His face was broad and flat and
stamped with two black, expressionless eyes, like deep water from a community
well. The hilt of a good blade cut through a slit in the back of his brown
burnous. He was pushing Bashir’s age—one of the few who’d survived the front.

She grunted.

He took off her baldric and passed
it to Anneke for inspection.

“Nothing here,” Anneke said, and
tossed the baldric at Nyx’s feet.

“You’re clean,” Raine said, half a
question. “You know how much you’re going for?”

“More than fifty,” Nyx said.

He took Nyx by her braids and
brought her close to his bearded face. The beard was new, a Chenjan affectation
that would get him noticed on the street and pegged as a political radical. “Do
you know what the queen does to bel dames who turn black?” he asked. “When they
start selling zygotes to gene pirates? Those pirates will breed monsters in
jars and sell them to Chenjans. But you don’t care about that, do you? You need
pocket money.”

Raine had recruited her from the
magicians’ gym after she was reconstituted. They’d spent long nights and longer
days talking about the war and his hatred for those whose work he saw as
perpetuating it. Gene pirates—selling genetic material to both sides—were no
better to him than Tirhani arms dealers.

Raine released her.

“I didn’t train you to be a bel
dame,” he said. “I taught you to be a bounty hunter, to fight real threats to
Nasheen like young bel dames who sell out their organs to gene pirates.”

“I got issued a bel dame note for a
contaminated boy. I know he’s in Faleen. I needed the cash from the womb to
bring him in.”

“You should have given the note to a
real bel dame.”

Nyx looked him in the eye. “I don’t give
up notes.”

“Taite,” Raine said, holding Nyx
with one strong arm while reaching toward the boy. Taite had the half-starved
look of a kid who had grown up outside the breeding compounds. He reached into
his gear bag.

They were going to truss her up and sell
her.

Nyx stood in the back alley of
Bashir’s cantina. At the end of the alley she could clearly see the back
entrance to the magicians’ gym. Anneke was leaning against the wall now, rifle
still in hand. Getting shot would hurt.

Getting trussed up and hauled into
the Chenjan district, though… that would be the end of the job. And probably a
lot more.

Nyx tensed. Taite pulled out the
sticky bands from his gear bag and threw them to Raine.

Nyx twisted and swiveled in Raine’s
grip while he tried to catch the bands. She palmed him in the solar plexus. He
grunted. His grip loosened. She pulled free and bolted.

Anneke jumped to attention. Nyx
pushed past her.

The rifle popped.

Nyx felt a sharp, stabbing thump on
her right hip, as if someone had set a sledge hammer on fire and hit her with
it.

She staggered down the alley and
clutched her hip. A burst of mud-brick exploded behind her. She heard two more
rounds go off.

The red door of the magicians’ gym
appeared at her right. She stumbled and pounded on the door.

“Sanctuary!” she yelled. “Bel dame!
My life for a thousand! Sanctuary!”

She heard Anneke yell, “Fuck!”

The pack of them ran toward her.
Raine’s face was dark. Nyx screamed, “My life for a thousand!” and pounded on
the door again. There was nothing easier to shoot than a stationary target.

Anneke was a hand breadth away. She
reached for Nyx’s hair.

The magicians’ door opened. A waft
of cold air billowed into the alley, bringing with it the stink of sweat and
leather. Nyx fell inside, into darkness. She tucked her feet underneath her,
pulling them across the threshold.

“Fuck!” Anneke said again.

Nyx lay at a pair of bare feet
cloaked by yellow trousers. She heard a low buzzing sound, and a soapy organic
filter popped up over the doorway. Through the filmy gauze of the filter, Nyx
saw Raine standing behind his crew, her burnous still in his hand.

She looked up the length of
billowing yellow trousers and into the sapphire-eyed face of Yah Reza.

“You’re bleeding all over my floor,
baby doll,” Yah Reza said, and shut the door.

Rhys had never fought at the front.
He’d been through it, yes. But he had never picked up a blade or a burst or
dismembered a body. He had gone to great lengths to avoid doing so.

He had once walked across a
rubbish-strewn street with his father, anxious to keep up with the long-legged
man, and some piece of glass or serrated tin had lodged in his shoe. He had
kicked free of it and limped on despite the pain. When he arrived home after
morning prayer, he had pulled off his shoe and found it full of blood. It had
taken his mother and sisters nearly a quarter of an hour to stir him from a
dead faint, and by then they had cleaned and bandaged the wound. He did not
look at it again until the skin had healed clean. He threw out the shoes.

When Rhys crossed the great churning
waste of the desert, he’d been running not toward his father but away, across
the disputed border between Chenja and Nasheen. The sky had lit up every night
with deadly green and violet bursts. The world had smelled of yeast and mustard
and geranium. He had stayed as far from the contagion clouds as possible, but
when he stumbled through Chenja and into the nearest Nasheenian border town, he
was hacking up his lungs in bloody clumps, and his skin burned and bubbled like
tar.

What woman took him in then, he did
not know, but he knew it was a woman. Everyone alive in Nasheen was a woman.
They sent all their men out to die at the front. They had no family heads, no
clans. They were godless women who murdered men and bred like flies. The
Nasheenians took him for a deserter, but because they called in their magicians
before they called in their order keepers, they had saved him from a cold,
bloody death in an interrogation room somewhere in the Nasheenian interior.

The magicians had arrived with
sleeves full of spotted fungus beetles and cicadas in their hair, and when Rhys
next opened his eyes, he was in a bed at the center of a circular room deep in
the magicians’ quarters. A lightning bug lamp beside him brightened and dimmed,
brightened and dimmed, until he thought his vision must have been lost
somewhere in the desert along with his name. He moved his hands over the lamp,
and the bugs ceased their intermittent dance and glowed steadily.

“Is it better or worse, in the
light?” one of the magicians had asked, emerging from the darkness of the
doorway. From the raised bed, he could see that the doorway opened into more
blackness.

The woman magician spoke to Rhys in
accented Chenjan, and she had brought him a strange still-wriggling stew of
grubs and gravy. She was a tall, bony woman with eyes the color of sapphire
flies; not their real color, she assured him.

“We know a thing or two about
illusion in Nasheen,” she had told him. He remembered how strange it was to see
her eyes at all. He had heard that Nasheenian women did not wear veils, but he
still found her vanity surprising, decadent. Chenjan women could submit to God
and wield a rifle with equal ease, but Nasheenian women had allowed their
propensity for violence to pollute their beliefs. Wielding a rifle, they
believed, made them men in the eyes of God, and men did not have to practice
modesty or submission to anyone but God. Nasheenian women had forgotten their
place in the order of things.

The woman’s mouth had worked
constantly at the wad of sen she kept in it. Her teeth were stained a bloody
crimson. She turned to the lightning bug lamp and laughed.

“You’ve figured it all out, haven’t
you, baby doll?” she had said, gesturing at the bugs. “We may find some use for
you yet.”

It was then that he realized he had
asked the bugs to light the room, something only a magician could do. They knew
what he was, then.

Her name, she said, was Yah Reza.
She said she would help him work on his Nasheenian and that hiding his ability
with bugs from another magician would have been like trying to pretend he
wasn’t Chenjan. She could see the difference. Now, she had said, he was hers,
unless he wanted some other life—wanted to get sold off to gene pirates or the
breeding compounds, or become a venom dealer or some mercenary’s translator.

“There are worse fates,” she had
said, and something on the stuccoed wall behind her had shifted, and Rhys
realized it was an enormous butterfly, big as his hand. “But I can make you a
magician.”

A magician.

A
Nasheenian
magician.

“One that can practice in Nasheen?”
he had asked, because he could not go back to Chenja. Something in his chest
ached at the thought of it.

He remembered rubbing at the backs
of his hands where his father had beaten him with a metal rod when he had
refused him. But the magicians had healed those wounds as well, and the skin
and bones were mended now, erasing the physical history of that night, those
words. But not the memory. His or God’s.

“I can even get you a proper
sponsor, once you’re trained. Better, I won’t ask what brought you across the
border in the dead of night or how you did it. You get on with the magicians,
you get immunity from the draft and the inquisition. What do you think of
that?”

Rhys did not fear the Nasheenian
draft—Nasheenians didn’t draft foreign men—or the inquisition; he was too smart
for them. But Yah Reza offered him magic. In Chenja, to reveal his skill would
have meant immediate training for the front, no matter that he was his father’s
only son. As a standard, his father’s lack of sons had given Rhys a place at
home. Men still headed families in Chenja. They still owned companies, acted as
mullahs, ran the government. But as a magician, he would have been forced to
the front.

“I’ll stay,” he had told her.

He spent some months among the
magicians, learning the intricacies of bug manipulation and organic tech. His
Nasheenian improved. He learned to look away from the women in the hall as he
passed. They stared at him openly, like harlots. It was up to him to allow them
to maintain some shred of honor. When he asked to leave the cavernous labyrinth
of the magicians’ quarters and boxing gym to go sightseeing in Faleen, Yah Reza
told him he was not yet ready. She encouraged patience. But her words did
nothing to distill the growing sense that he was a prisoner there, kept at the
discretion of Nasheen’s magicians until he proved worthless or useful. He did
not know what they would do with him when they decided which he best embodied.

Yah Reza caught him by the elbow one
afternoon as he hurried back to his rooms after another embarrassing encounter
with a magician teaching him transmission science. He was not used to a world
where women put their hands on him without reservation and regarded him as if
he were a young but dangerous insect. Chenja was full of women, of course, but
no Chenjan woman had ever grabbed him in the street, not even the lowliest of
prostitutes. And no Chenjan woman had ever done the things to him that the
women in the border towns had done before their magicians showed up. They would
not have dreamed of it. They would have been killed for it.

He was still trembling when Yah Reza
grabbed him.

“Come with me, baby doll,” she said.
She wore a billowing saffron robe and smelled of death and saffron. A furry spider
the size of Rhys’s thumb crawled along her sleeve, and a whirl of tiny blue
moths circled her head.

He tried to quiet his trembling.

Yah Reza beckoned him. Rhys followed
her through the long, twisting halls of the magicians’ quarters—cool,
windowless corridors that suddenly opened into niches and vaulted chambers
filled with locusts and cocooned creatures, lit sporadically by glow worms and
fire beetles and the ever-present lightning bugs flaring and dying in the dark.