God's War (32 page)

Nyx unfolded the gauze to reveal a
perfectly formed ear, too pale to be  Nasheenian or Chenjan. Underneath
the ear was a note. Organic paper. It had eaten most of the blood. She held it
up in her good hand.

“What does it say?” Rhys asked.

Nyx grunted. “Raine wants to swap
Taite for Kine’s papers. But if he has Taite, he knows we burned all of those.”

“The dictation sessions,” Rhys said.
“Taite told me he was keeping them to see if he could get any names you
wanted.” Taite wouldn’t have known what Rhys had kept.

Nyx grimaced. “And I bet I have a
real good idea where they ended up.”

Rhys pressed his hands to his face.
There was only one person Taite would have given the dictation sessions to. Why
else would he have sent her here?

“God be merciful,” Rhys muttered.

“Inaya better hope so,” Nyx said,
“cause if He’s not, Raine is headed right for us.”

Nyx had Khos carry her into the
bombed-out building he and Rhys had found on the south side of the city. She
didn’t like being carried, but she didn’t like the idea of walking any better.
She had him put her down on a tattered divan, and when Anneke was done bringing
up the gear, they started playing cards while Rhys and Khos went to go pick up
Inaya.

Nyx didn’t want to make any
decisions until she could recognize her own face in a mirror. She needed to run
a swap for Taite, she just didn’t know what kind. Raine wouldn’t have asked
about transmissions unless Taite had told him they existed, and there was only
one person Taite would give those to without ratting her out by name.

She heard them on the stairs before
she saw them but didn’t look up when Inaya arrived.

Inaya came in yelling, quite a thing
considering she had just come up four flights of stairs.

“You bring my brother back, you
black bitch,” Inaya said. She was still pretty. Fat and dirty, yes, but pretty.

“Black?” Nyx said. “I’m not black.”

“—or I swear to every saint—”

“Cockroach brown,” Anneke said. She
crowned her king, and swapped Nyx for an ace.

“—I’ll tear out your heart—”

“Cheap whiskey brown,” Anneke said.
“We always end up with three extra aces. Who does that, huh?”

“—and strip out your bones—”

“I like being cheap,” Nyx said.
“Anneke’s the black one. What’s this? Did you just steal my king?”

“—from your skin and grind them—”

“That’s an illegal move. What are
you talking about?” Anneke said.

“I’m just saying you’re pretty
dark.”

“—and grind them. You hear me? Grind
them—”

“What’s this? I told you, look at
it, that’s another ace. That’s five aces in this deck.”

“—into flour and pound you into
bread!”

“Are you done making dinner?” Nyx
asked Inaya. Bread sounded real good about now. Food of any kind sounded good.
What sounded less good was getting yelled at by some dumb pregnant Ras Tiegan.
She took back her king and swapped out another ace. “I win,” she said.

Anneke pounded the table.

Inaya’s face was flushed. It wasn’t
often Nyx saw anybody that color. Inaya kept her fists clenched. “I swear—”

“I heard that already. Sit down
before you bust something.”

“Nyx,” Rhys said. He moved
protectively toward Inaya, which just pissed off Nyx more. He called Nyx
godless, but Taite’s sister with her Ras Tiegan bastard of a kid was virtuous?
Bastard
was a bad word in Ras Tieg. She wondered if Rhys
knew that. “I think that maybe—”

“It’s fine,” Nyx said.

Inaya didn’t sit, but started
clutching at her belly. She clenched her teeth and started huffing through her
nose.

“Yeah, hey, sit, would you?” Nyx
said. A sudden sense of alarm sped through her. Pregnancy. Babies. Oh, fuck.

Rhys went over to Inaya and helped
her sit. Her whole body went taut, and she cried out.

“Oh, shit,” Nyx said.

Rhys put a palm to Inaya’s belly.
“How long?” he asked.

She thrashed on the couch, then went
still, came back. “I don’t know.”

“That’s all right.” He looked at
Nyx. “We’ll need a midwife.”

“With what money?” Nyx held up her
right hand. “I’m still missing fingers and you think we can afford a midwife?”

“We won’t find a respectable Chenjan
woman who would do it,” Khos said. “I could take her back to the brothel. It’ll
be tricky, but they know about babies.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Anneke said,
rolling up her sleeves. “I’ll do it.”

“What do you know about babies?” Nyx
asked.

“My mom was a breeder, remember?
Multiples are hard. Singles are easy.” She eyed Inaya over. “I gotta have help,
and Nyx ain’t doing it.”

Inaya’s eyes widened, and Nyx
remembered she was Ras Tiegan. Modesty and all that. Worse than Chenjans.

But the white girl grabbed Rhys’s
hand, looked him in the face. “Taite trusts you,” she said. “Help me.”

“Sure then,” Anneke said, and
started waving around her hands. “You and Khos wait outside, Nyx. Rhys?”

“I’ll heat some water,” Rhys said.

Oh, hell, Nyx thought.

Nyx and Khos sat in the main room
and played cards and smoked a cheap cigar. They listened to Inaya shrieking.
The room was stifling. The two of them swapped a sweat rag to wipe the damp
from their faces. A swarm of flies circled at the center of the room.

At dusk, Khos went out and brought
back food for everyone. Inaya was still shrieking when he got back.

Khos leaned toward Nyx over the
remains of dinner, and whispered, “You think she’ll die?”

“No more likely than with any other
woman who gives birth.” She traded one of her cards. “Kid might die, though. No
inoculations.” She had promised Taite inoculations, she realized, back when she
believed they’d all live to bring in this note. She looked at her mangled right
hand. She already knew they wouldn’t make it out whole.

“But women still die doing it,
right, even in Nasheen and Chenja?”

“Of course, yeah. What, you thought
this was going to be a party?”

“What about Taite?”

“I don’t think he’s coming.”

Khos grimaced. “I mean, what will
you do about him?”

“We don’t have anything to trade for
him.” There was a lot going on with this note, and she was far enough behind to
know that she was the player working with the least amount of information. It
was a dangerous place to be. It got you mutilated. And dead.

“We know where to find Nikodem, or
at least where to start,” Khos said.

“Yeah, but we don’t have her yet. I
want you and Rhys to go to the waterworks tomorrow and ask around.”

“You want to get her first?”

“I think trading Nikodem for Taite
is a safer deal.” And it would give her time to decipher the dictations and
interrogate Nikodem when they found her. Trading Nikodem away without getting
any information left her with exactly nothing…

Inaya let out a long, low sound of
distress. It was worse than the shrieking.

“She sounds like she’s going to
die,” Khos said.

“Well, it happens.”

“How can that be natural?”

“What, death?”

“Birth.”

“No more natural than death.” She
won the hand.

Khos threw in his cards. “You’re
making fun of me.”

“You make it so easy.”

Inaya’s noises were muffled now.
She’d worn herself out. Then there was a long silence.

Khos looked over at Nyx with his
big, blue Mhorian eyes. “She’s dead,” he said. They were pretty eyes, if only
because she didn’t see the color that often, but right now, with a woman
bleeding and shrieking in the next room, he wasn’t terribly appealing.

“Would you get off the death thing?”

Nyx heard a baby cry.

It was a strange sound, like a cat
crying.

And then there was another sound of crying—Inaya’s
crying. Not shrieking, just crying.

Nyx shuffled to her feet and opened
the door into the little room with her good hand.

Anneke was rubbing down the
purple-red mewling kid with a clean towel. Was it supposed to be that color?
Rhys was trying to soothe Inaya, but she was still sobbing, great heaving sobs.

“What’s wrong?” Nyx asked.

Anneke said, “It’s a boy.”

The waterworks was on the south side
of Dadfar, which used to be an industrial quarter before Nasheen blew the hell
out of it sixty years before. It had never been rebuilt. The south side was a
morass of hulking, burned-out shells where squatters and draft dodgers made do.
There were rude opium dens tucked into corners. The pervasive smell of
marijuana filled the rubble-strewn streets. It wasn’t the sort of place Khos
would have picked for a proper fight, but then, fighting wasn’t legal in
Chenja.

And, in that case, Khos supposed the
south side was perfect.

Rhys, as usual, was wearing too many
clothes for the occasion. He had picked up a green turban sometime after they
arrived in Dadfar, and that—paired with his long trousers, long tunic, and
green burnous—made him look like some local man of importance. He kept
everything too clean. And he was too pretty. If Khos drew attention for being a
pale giant, Rhys drew it by being too well presented. If Khos had still been a
thief, he’d have pegged Rhys as a perfect target, magician or not.
Holier-than-thou men were smooth marks.

The night was dark; the moons were
in far recession. Khos kept his high beams on and parked about four blocks away
from the waterworks.

As Khos stepped out, he asked Rhys,
“You ever fought a real fight, boxing?” Khos had learned all of his fighting
from street brawls in Mhoria. The desert obsession with boxing interested him;
he liked going to fights. “No. Boxing leads to gambling, and I don’t gamble.”

“It’s not gambling if you don’t bet
on anyone.”

“Yes it is. Others gamble.”

“If you bet on yourself, you could
call it being self-employed.”

Rhys sighed. He spent a few minutes
calling up his bugs to guard the bakkie. When the wasps were settled, Khos made
his way toward the waterworks and Rhys followed. Dark shapes skittered along
the edges of his vision. He heard the hiss and chitter of giant scavenging
bugs.

There were two men sitting around
outside a set of double doors leading into the waterworks. Khos smelled
bug-repelling unguent around the doors. Fuck, he hated contaminated cities.
Behind the men, a globe full of glow worms gave off a faint light.

Khos still found it strange to see
so many men around, even though they were old. He had lived in Nasheen for most
of his adult life, and he had gotten used to the presence of women and the
sound of Nasheenian. Mhoria was still a strictly sex-segregated society, which
he’d hated enough to compel him to cross the border into Nasheen. He did miss
some things, though. The food was better in Mhoria, and nobody was as
suspiciously frightened… of everything. Countries at war lived in a state of
perpetual fear. It got to you. He wasn’t sure why Taite had brought his sister
out to the desert. She wasn’t built for it, and she hated it. Taite had invited
him over to her place a couple of times, and he and Inaya had gotten along all
right until she realized he was a shifter.

“Take care of
her,”
Taite had said that night in the Mhorian café.

And now Raine had Taite, and Inaya
was Khos’s responsibility.

Damn this note, Khos thought.

The old men at the doors of the
waterworks asked for nearly a buck to admit Rhys and Khos.

Rhys made to argue, but Khos paid
it. The less fuss they made, the less likely they’d be remembered. A giant
white Mhorian and a draft-age Chenjan would get plenty of attention without
making a scene over money.

They entered a narrow corridor that
stank of piss. Khos followed some glow worms to his left. He heard men talking
in loud voices, old men, men who’d been to the front. You could tell. They
talked differently from the ones who stayed home—rasping, bitter.

Khos turned in to the room. There
was a raised ring at the center with plain organic ropes and unpainted corner
posts. Lights hung over the ring, but the rest of the place was dark, except
for a few globes at the end of the room where the bar was.

“You want a drink?” Khos asked Rhys.

Rhys just looked at him.

Khos shrugged. He had never much
cared for Rhys and his buttoned-down coats and upturned nose. It was like he
thought he had some kind of special relationship with God, like he was one of
the First Families. Why didn’t Raine take
you
? he
thought, but that just led to thinking about Taite again, cut up and tortured
in some Chenjan offal house.

Khos remembered the first time he
figured out Taite was looking a little too long at him, that his eyes spent a
lot longer on the few young men they passed than the fleshy, friendly women. It
had amused Khos to find somebody who thought bedding a man was some kind of
sin, something you’d get beaten up or killed for. It was illegal in Ras Tieg,
Chenja, and Nasheen, for no good reason except that it scared the shit out of
people, and Khos had laughed and laughed about it, until he saw a young boy
stoned in the street for kissing another boy in Ras Tieg.

Bloody fucking barbarians, he
thought. In Mhoria, men were brothers and lovers and friends. Denying that was
like cutting out a piece of yourself. What Mhoria didn’t get was that cutting
women out was like cutting out a piece of yourself too. A society needed
balance, Khos thought, but a society at balance was harder to control, and
Umayma had been founded and built on the principles of control. You controlled
the breeding, the sex, the death, the fucking blood that ran in your veins. The
government thought they could control the world through will alone.

Like Ras Tieg and its war against
the shifters.