God's War (37 page)

“This is a disgrace! A disgrace!
Whores! You offend my—” Anneke yelled.

“I’m sorry. There’s some
misunderstanding—” the clerk said.

“No misunderstanding,” Khos said.
“My women were asked up to a gathering on the fourth floor. This is a highly
important client—”

“If you could just tell me the
client’s name—”

“That’s confidential. He has a state
stamp. I cannot—”

Nyx angled toward the faceplate door
and called to the clerk, “I have the pastries. I can’t reach the plate. Could
you—”

“If you simply buzz our client—”
Khos said.

“I need a name before—”

“Can you just open this door?” Nyx
said.

“First you lose my reservation, and
then you intend to put me on the same floor with these dirty—”

“I can’t reach the plate,” Nyx said.
“If you could just buzz me in—”

Sweat beaded the clerk’s face. She
reached under the counter.

The door slid open.

Nyx stepped in.

The door closed and cut off the
sound.

Nyx did not allow herself a grin.
The clerk would call for help soon, and Anneke needed to get in before that
happened.

The stairs were adjacent to the main
door. Most residences kept bugs in the lifts. Nyx ditched the cake boxes in the
stairwell and headed up.

She pushed into the short hall. The
floor of the corridor was hard wood, and moaned under her sandaled feet. Nyx
pulled her burnous up and followed the dimly lit signs to room tres-bleu-chose.
The whole place had a Ras Tiegan theme. She passed the door and walked to the
window at the end of the hall to wait for Anneke. She dared not go in on her
own to face a magician.

Nyx waited a couple of minutes, then
heard a door open behind her. She turned and saw a woman walking out of the
room. The woman spoke Nasheenian to someone still inside, asked if they wanted
something from a vendor.

The woman spared an incurious glance
at Nyx, then started off toward the lift. The door shut behind her.

Nyx looked back out the window.

If the magician was gone, that
should leave Nikodem alone in the room.

Nyx clasped her hands behind her
back. The window gave her an inspiring view of the cracked parking lot and
rusted roofs of a sprawling shantytown, broken only by the occasional serrated
palm. Beyond that, low desert hills shimmered in the rising heat.

The call sounded for mid-morning
prayer.

Nyx looked behind her again. No sign
of Anneke. A soda run wouldn’t take the magician long. Without Rhys next to
her, Nyx would be shit in a fight with a magician.

She pulled the crowbar from the loop
at her belt and wedged it into the doorjamb of room tres-bleu-chose.

Tej once told her that sometimes the
old tricks were the best ones.

Nyx popped the door lock, and
front-kicked the door.

The door swung open.

Nyx dropped the crowbar and released
her whip. She needed Nikodem undamaged, for now.

A small dark woman stood at the
center of the room, wearing calf-length trousers and a thigh-length green
tunic. She turned her face to the door, and Nyx knew her in an instant. Gray
eyes met hers—too big-eyed for beauty.

Nyx strode right toward her without
clearing the room. A mistake. She knew better.

“Nikodem? I’m here to get you out,”
Nyx said. “Your sisters have a bounty on you. We need to move.”

Nikodem smiled, and, watching that
smile split the broad-cheeked face, Nyx knew that everything she’d worried
about was true.

“Oh, I know,” Nikodem said, “and
you’re terribly hard to get rid of.”

Nyx heard the unmistakable whir of
an organics gun being powered up.

She looked toward the bathroom.

Dahab pointed a double-barreled
organics gun at Nyx with her good arm.

“Good morning,” Dahab said.

Nyx stepped left, crouched low, and
snapped out her whip at the gun. The whip caught. Nyx pulled. The gun went off
and sprayed the chair behind Nyx. Smoke rose from the upholstery.

Nikodem sprinted for the door.

Nyx jerked the gun from Dahab’s
grasp, freed the whip. The gun clattered across the floor. Nyx lashed her whip
out at Nikodem’s ankle.

The whip caught again. Nyx pulled
again. She took Nikodem off her feet and yanked her forward.

Nikodem reached beneath her tunic
and came out with a throwing dart.

Dahab ran for the gun on the floor.

Nyx heard the floorboards in the
hall groan. If the magician was back with the soda, she was fucked.

Nyx yanked out her pistol, and fired
off a few rounds at Dahab with her bad hand, but—as was typical—didn’t hit
anything. She felt a sharp pain in her shoulder and saw Nikodem’s dart jutting
out of her flesh. She yanked it out and threw it back at her. She hit Nikodem
in the face, with the flat ass-end of the dart.

Nikodem yelled at her in some alien
language, and then Dahab was on her feet and pumping the organics gun to reload
it. The gun whirred.

Nyx shot at her again.

Dahab ducked.

Nikodem started pulling at the whip
around her ankle.

Somebody stepped into the doorway.

Nyx prepared to be assaulted by a
swarm of wasps.

Instead, Anneke shot Dahab in the
head with her shotgun. Dahab’s brains splattered the wall behind her.

The woman crumpled.

Anneke pointed the gun at Nikodem.
“We get paid even if you ain’t breathing,”  Anneke said.

“And how will you get a dead body
out of this hotel?” Nikodem said coolly.

“Want to find out?” Nyx said.

Anneke slung her gun over her
shoulder and put her knee into Nikodem’s back. She bound her with sticky bands
and then gagged her.

“Move, move,” Nyx said. “Everybody
heard that goddamn shotgun.”

They fled into the hall. A few doors
stood half-open, and when the residents saw them, all the doors swung shut. Nyx
supposed that if she had seen herself running down the hall dragging a gagged
woman ahead of somebody carrying a shotgun, she would have shut her door too.

Nyx pushed Nikodem down the stairs.
If they wanted her dead or alive, they wouldn’t mind getting her with bruises.

On the second floor, Nikodem stopped
walking and sagged. Nyx threw the woman over her shoulder, and her whole body
screamed at her. She stumbled. Nikodem tried to bite her ear.

Anneke punched Nikodem.

They ran down the stairs, and pushed
out onto the first floor. Order keepers generally took anywhere from eight to
forty-five minutes to show up after a call was placed, depending on the
neighborhood. The on-premises security would be heading up.

Anneke sprinted down the corridor
and pushed open the back door. The alarm went off.

Nyx stumbled into the hot, dusty
parking lot.

Khos waited in the buzzing bakkie.
“Inaya says the keepers are two minutes away.”

Nyx wrapped Nikodem in a cooling
tarp, and stuffed her into the trunk. Nyx squeezed in up front next to Anneke.

Khos hit the speed but slowed once
they cleared the parking lot, to avoid suspicion on the street.

“She alive?” Khos asked.

“Does it matter?” Nyx said.

Anneke clenched her jaw and squinted
at Nyx.

“You should be happy,” Nyx said.

“You about bit it that time, boss.”

“Not for the first time.”

“No,” Anneke said, “but it was the
first time you almost bit it for doing something real stupid.”

“You all want Taite back? This is
how we do it.” Her leg throbbed. She had fucked up her ankle on the stairs, and
Nikodem was a lot tougher to carry with only three fingers on her right hand.

“Khos, you have your whores tell
Raine’s messenger we’re ready to make a deal for Taite.”

“I’ll drop you off and drive over
there. You both all right?”

“Swimming,” Nyx said.

She had her bounty. She should be
full of grim optimism, but Taite was in pieces and Rhys was missing—and she had
no fucking idea how she was going to pull a slick switch for Taite and get
Nikodem back across the border alive.

Good thing she didn’t intend on
delivering her that way.

Khos unloaded Nikodem from the back.
Her legs were bruised from trying to kick out the trunk. Once she had a clear
view of him, she kicked out at him too.

Her nose was already bloodied from a
hit she had taken from Nyx or Anneke. Khos hit her again, hard this time. She
went limp.

Khos put her over his shoulder, shut
the trunk, and walked up the long flight of stairs to their room. Nyx was just
pushing in the door. Khos heard a shriek.

Nyx swore, and Anneke darted inside.

Khos pounded up the stairs.

Inside, Nyx was on the floor with
Inaya on top of her. Inaya screamed and pulled at Nyx’s butchered hair. Nyx
caught both of Inaya’s wrists and told her to calm down.

“You godless whore!” Inaya cried.
“You dirty godless whore!”

Anneke walked over to a soggy box
sitting on the tea table. The unmistakable reek of death clung to it. Anneke
used the end of her shotgun to open the lid of the box. She grimaced, and slid
the lid back on.

Khos deposited Nikodem on the divan
and pushed Anneke aside. She grunted.

“You bloody bitch! You bloody
bitch!”

As Khos reached for the lid, Inaya’s
voice began to fade. The baby was crying. Crying and crying.

He pushed the lid back and let it
fall to the table.

Khos half-hoped, right up to that
moment, that it would be Rhys’s head.

But, no, the head inside the box had
been severed from its body recently enough that it was still recognizable as
Taite’s. Bloody, covered in sand, discolored, yes… but still the head of his
friend.

Khos felt unsteady. He pushed
Nikodem’s bruised legs out of the way and sat down on the divan.

Sound started to come back—the
screaming baby, Inaya’s sobbing. Nyx was speaking in low tones, and when he
swung his head to look at her, he saw her kneeling next to Inaya.

“I’m not perfect,” Nyx said.

“You bloody bitch,” Inaya murmured.

Khos wanted to take Inaya into his
arms and say something profound and comforting, but a part of him still wanted
this all to be some kind of mistake. Some part of him still wanted Nyx to be
right. He wanted them to win.

But Nyx was just a woman—no more, no
less. He turned to Inaya, to hold her, but her body language warned him off. He
feared that if he touched her, she would claw him.

“Who brought it here?” Khos asked.

“Some magician,” Inaya said.

Khos felt the hair on the back of
his neck rise. “A what?”

Nyx stood. “A magician? You’re
sure?”

“Yes, they all look alike,” Inaya
said, wiping at her wet face. “What does it matter who brought it?”

“What did she say?” Nyx said.

Inaya’s expression got dark, mean.
“She said that if you want your own magician back, you’re to meet him in
Bahreha. She left a map.”

Anneke pushed the box aside and
found a bloodied newsroll beside it. “Got it, boss.”

Nyx took it from her, and unrolled
it.

A misty image took shape in front of
her. Raine’s familiar face formed and spoke.

“You’ve taken up a better note,” he
said, and Khos felt his skin crawl at the sound of Raine’s voice. It brought
back memories of a service he liked even less than his current one.

“But you’re still only a
bloodletter,” Raine continued. “If Taite didn’t get your attention, maybe your
dancer will. You don’t know what you’re doing with this woman, just as you
never knew what you were doing as a bel dame. You were more of a terrorist than
the boys you brought home. I’m waiting for you in Bahreha. Meet us here—”
Raine’s face dissipated, and a map of the terrain surrounding Bahreha
materialized. The image eclipsed, and Khos saw a familiar landform: a low
valley set between two rocky hills just west of them, in Bahreha. “Trade her
for him, and what’s left of your team goes home alive. If you aren’t there by
dusk tonight, I kill your black dancer. And then I kill the rest of you. I
offer you this because of our former partnership.

“Your sins don’t make you cleaner
than I, Nyxnissa. I kill for the good of Nasheen, but you kill
indiscriminately, with malice. That is the difference between us. Now I ask you
to think of our country, our boys. Think of ending the war.”

The particles making up the image
began to come apart and diffused through the room until nothing was left of
Raine’s message but the smell of burned lemon.

“How the fuck did he know we had
her?” Khos said.

Nyx threw the empty newsroll across
the room. “Because our fucking transceivers are hackable,” she spat. “Anneke,
pack up. Now.”

“But, boss—”

“Now.”

“Boss, we ain’t going to trade, are
we? Taite’s dead. Rhys’s dead too, wager. I worked for Raine. That old man—”

“You think he hurt—” Khos began.

“Don’t think about Rhys,” Nyx said,
and something came into her voice, something that twisted Khos’s gut, because
it sounded like fear. “Pack. Both of you. We’re going to Bahreha. Anneke, did
you pack my sword?”

“I
wasn’t
thinking
about Rhys,” Khos said. “I was thinking about Mahrokh and her house.”

“Don’t worry about the whores.”

“I got it wrapped up in the back,
boss. You want it?”

“Yeah. You got the baldric too?”

Khos gritted his teeth. He walked
past Taite’s rotting head to get his rifle. Anneke shot past him, stuffing
extra transceivers into a gunnysack.

“If he knows where we are, he’ll
have the place staked out,” Khos said. “Why didn’t he take Inaya?”

Nyx didn’t look at Inaya. She took
the bundle Anneke handed her and unwrapped her sword and baldric. “Because she
isn’t worth anything. Anneke, pack the bakkie. Go. Now. We don’t need those.”