God's War (41 page)

“That’s not your problem, kid,” the
woman said. He knew her voice. Was she one of the bel dames? He squinted. There
was something about her, something about her hands…

Rasheeda dragged Nyx out of the
cell.

“Where are you taking her?” he
persisted.

“Don’t you worry,” the woman said,
and when she turned into the light, he knew her. “We’ll come back for you soon
enough.”

Khos’s father had been afraid of
three things: dancing, women, and wine. He had told Khos that what made men
from boys was a man’s ability to drive well, shoot straight, and tell the
truth.

For thirty-four years, Khos had
heeded that advice with a fervor he would call religious. He followed that
creed long after he had violated every law in his country and some others
besides and found himself pining after women with the sort of blind affection
Mhorians were supposed to reserve for those of their own sex. Women were not
the same people, his father and uncles said. They did not feel the same, did
not love the same. They bled and gave birth and died according to their own rules.
Their hearts were great deserts of secrets, and those deserts were not a place
a man could ever hope to cross, let alone conquer.

When he shifted to human form in
front of the bakkie, he paused only to kick out the rocks from behind the tires
and pull on an extra burnous from the back.

Inaya was nursing her son, and she
said nothing to him until the bakkie was belching and grinding down the barely
passable road, toward the shrine.

“What happened?” she asked.

“They’re dead,” he lied, and the lie
tasted bad, like blood.

“Where are we going?”

“Tirhan.”

“Tirhan? Are you mad? How will you
get there?”

“I know some women who can get us
there.” She would kill him if he asked her to shift. In any case, her son
wouldn’t be able to shift at all, even if he’d been born with the talent. Most
shifters didn’t get the knack of shifting until puberty, though there were
exceptions.

“Where’s Nyx?”

“I told you.” He did not look at
her. In her face, he saw too much of Taite. How would he tell Mahdesh? “We go
on until dark. I have some money stowed in the back, some side work I’ve been
doing. We’ll be safe in Tirhan. Your son will be safe in Tirhan.”

And mine, he thought. My son is safe
in Tirhan.

The dust blew in from the road. He
once heard that when the men at the front marched in formation, those at the
center got dust in their nostrils, and their lungs started to seize. They
started getting nosebleeds. It got so bad sometimes that the men just dropped
out of formation and died there along the road, casualties not of the war but
of the desert.

“Khos,” Inaya said.

“We’ll be all right if we can get in
and out of Dadfar fast. We’ll need to pick up a few things, some supplies—”

“Khos?”

He hooked a right past the shrine
and back onto the main road. Another bakkie screamed past him, spewing red
beetles from its back end. There were armed women inside. He was glad they
drove too fast for him to make out their faces. He kept his gaze on the road.
The long, too-bright road.

“Once we’re packed, we can—”

“Khos, where’s Nyx?”

He chanced a look at her.

Inaya had pulled the baby from her
breast. The boy whined in her lap. Her pale breast hung out the front of her
robe. He had a sudden impulse to take the nipple into his own mouth, to close
his eyes and ask for comfort.

He gazed back out at the road,
shifted pedals.

“We were ambushed. She died.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Khos.”

“This was the only way,” he said.
“They’re letting us go. They only wanted Nyx. I can get us out.” He spared a
look at her again. Her face… there was something hard in her face, something
unexpected. “Inaya, I can save you and your son. He can grow up in Tirhan.
There’s no war in Tirhan. No mercenaries. No bel dames. No bounty hunters. You
can wear a veil and live properly. You can live safe. You can—”

“Do you know where they’re taking
her?”

“Who?”

“Nyx.”

“What?” This wasn’t the way it was
supposed to go.

“Where are they taking Nyx? Are they
killing her or capturing her?”

“I—”

“You can’t just leave her back
there.”

“What are you talking about? She let
Taite die. She’d sacrifice me, you, your son, all of us. So long as we’re with
Nyx, we’re dead. It took me a long time to figure that out.”

“I heard what that alien said. Nyx
isn’t doing this for herself.”

“What?”

Inaya sighed heavily. She shifted
her son in her arms, covered her breast. “You want to run away? Nyx believes
that killing this Nikodem woman will stop something much worse. The sort of
tech Nikodem has could exploit people like…”And Khos realized she was about to
say “us.” Instead, Inaya pushed on. “What she’s doing won’t end with Chenja and
Nasheen. Umayma is scarcely habitable. To stir up more bugs, more bursts, more
hybrids, more… monsters, will upset everything. How long until it burns through
Chenja and Nasheen and moves on? How long before Ras Tieg enslaves shifters and
sends them to fight in Nasheen’s war? And Tirhan? Mhoria? How long do you
intend to shield me? And how long do you think I’ll go on, after you’re dead?”

“Inaya, Taite—”

“Taite is dead,” she said, and he
heard a finality in her voice. “I do not love Nyx, but Nikodem and her people
are gene pirates, going planet to planet collecting pieces of what they want
and need while dropping off reckless alien technology. Things that will destroy
us.”

The words of his father and uncles
came back to him. Unknowable. Irrational. And he remembered Taite’s story
again, about Inaya driving a stolen bakkie from town, pulling a dying shifter
from the backseat.

This Inaya.

“Inaya, Nyx isn’t going to save the
world—”

“No, perhaps not, but neither are
we, by running away from her and the rest. If she cannot succeed in killing the
bearer of this knowledge, then one of us needs to. As far as I’m concerned,
Nikodem is a gene pirate, and if that’s so, someone should stop her.”

“Inaya—”

“Do you know where they’re taking
her?”

Khos tightened his grip on the
wheel. “Yes,” he said.

“Take me there.”

“Inaya—”

“Take me there. Or is this a
kidnapping? Don’t confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be
rescued.”

He felt suddenly ridiculous, angry.
“I’m doing this for Taite! And
you
!”

“Taite is dead. And I don’t want it.
So who’s being served?”

“Fuck!” Khos yelled.

“Indeed,” Inaya said, and pulled her
breast back out of her robe, drew her son to her chest.

Dust blew in from the road.

Khos drove.

Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her
own life. Things hadn’t turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she
could just be the hero of someone else’s life, but there was no one who cared
enough about her to keep her that close. Hell, there was nobody she’d let that
close. No one wanted a hero who couldn’t even save herself.

Nyx opened her eyes, but everything
was still dark. She heard people talking really close.

“With the information we’ve gotten
from Nasheen and what you can get me from Chenja, all I need is to meld my work
with what they’re doing in Tirhan, and we’ll have hacked this planet like a
blood bank.”

“Don’t know why you had to do it all
on the sly.”

“It wouldn’t be sporting to offer
two sides of a holy war the same technology. I had to disappear. You and the
magicians gave us that. How were we supposed to deal with Chenja when the only
docking bays on the planet are in Nasheen? You know how long this has taken us?
Decades.”

“Well, you take whatever you want. I
give you your pieces of Chenja, and you give me Nyx. I’ve done work with
pirates before. Just take your shit off the planet.”

“Our worlds have no shifters, no
magicians. The sort of codes you offer us will transform our world. I’ve been
fascinated by some of the mutations I’ve seen in Mhoria and Ras Tieg. I can’t
imagine the wonders they’re keeping from us in Tirhan.”

“Well, you’re on your own with
Tirhan and the red desert. Tomorrow you’ll get your access to the Chenjan
compounds. The magicians will arrange it the same way they arranged your
disappearance.”

Nyx knew one of the voices, the
strange accent. She tried to squint. She wished for sight. A gray wash bled
across her senses. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“I am endlessly fascinated with
Nasheenian magicians.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

Nikodem laughed. It was a big laugh,
far bigger than should have come from the body of such a little woman. “We are
even, you and I.”

Nyx opened her eyes.

Light flooded her vision. She
squinted again. For a moment, everything was blurry light, too intense. Then
she started to make out shapes and figures. The world smelled of damp concrete
and ammonia.

Nyx struggled to sit up, but someone
had bound her to a cold slab at the wrists and ankles.

“Here she is,” Nikodem said. She
wore a black scarf over her hair, but instead of a robe, she wore loose
trousers and a long tunic. She had two pistols belted at her hips.

Nikodem placed a hand on Nyx’s arm.
Behind the alien, Nyx saw someone else, a tall, brown Nasheenian. White hair,
lined face, and his hands… his magician’s hands.

Yah Tayyib.

So this was where everything met up.
Yah Tayyib turned back into the shadows and left them before she could speak.

There were big lights overhead.
Flies circled them.

Nyx was in some kind of converted
storage room. Jars of organs lined the walls—jars covered in cooling bugs—and
there were two giant, silvery vats against one wall whose sleek sides pulsed. A
long table next to Nyx was covered in instruments. Some tendon worms writhed in
a white bowl, trying to escape. She saw a com unit next to the shelving and a
dozen bugs chattered in a cold glass case just above it.

Nikodem would keep a laboratory
someplace safe. Somewhere magicians and bel dames wouldn’t look. Nyx amended
that: where
some
magicians and
some
bel dames wouldn’t look.

Another woman walked into view from
the shadows along the edges of the room. She wore loose trousers and a
thigh-length tie-up tunic that she had failed to knot up top. Her small breasts
were bound in purple silk. She was a lean, long-faced woman, with the dark
circles under her eyes of a bleeder and the confident bouncing walk of a boxer.

Nyx thought the woman reminded her
of someone but couldn’t place her.

The woman cocked her head at Nyx and
grinned. “I can see you trying to figure it out,” the woman said.

The grin. Nyx knew that grin, the
way it didn’t improve the face. There was less joy in it now.

“I know you,” Nyx said.

“You do,” the woman said.

But the first name Nyx said aloud
was “Arran.”

The boy Tej had died for.

“You’re Jaks,” Nyx said. And some
old wound throbbed. The old bullet wound in her hip. “Jaksdijah. The boxer. I
killed your brother.”

“You remember.” She placed a rough
hand on Nyx’s forehead, tenderly, though her eyes and teeth were predatory. She
smoothed back Nyx’s hair.

“Nikodem had Yah Tayyib patch you
all up, one last time,” Jaks said.

“For what?” Nyx said.

“For me,” Jaks said. “Then for your
sisters. I’m told they’ll do far worse, but I wanted you first. It turns out
someone on the bel dame council has wanted you for some time.”

Nyx grunted. “Who?”

“I’m just a businesswoman. Your
sisters say someone on your council wants you. They said they’ll take you dead
if they have to. I needed you alive, but I don’t need to deliver you that way.”

“You can’t do worse to me.” Nyx
tried to think, tried to get her muddled brain to push back the gauze of sleep
and drugs. She had the queen’s protection. Somebody on the council was going
over the queen.

The council was split.

Jaks pulled her hand away, kept
grinning. “I have your team,” Jaks said.

“Why should I care?” Nyx tried
moving again. Flexed her remaining fingers. She ran through the inventory of
her team. Rhys had been in the cell. She figured Khos took off with Inaya,
Anneke had been in some firefight with the bel dames. Taite was dead. The only
one she was certain they had was Rhys.

“Because I’m going to let you fight
me for them.”

“What?”

Nikodem broke in. “You and that
other hunter were the last I had to concern myself with. Your little magician
had some transmission transcripts on him, I heard, and I needed those in order
for my work to continue. Your queen is not as forthright with her information
as she should be. I’d have preferred to get them myself. Rasheeda was assisting
me.”

“Kine’s records,” Nyx said.

“On my world, you two would never
have been called sisters. Impossible, with your differences in class. She
wanted to make life. You want to destroy it.”

“You don’t know shit about either of
us,” Nyx said.

“I know enough. You have an
interesting past, Nyxnissa. It was fortunate that your past served me so well.”

“I’m half dead. You expect me to
fight?” Nyx said.

“No,” Jaks said. “I want you dead.
At my hand.”

“I have a good team,” Nyx said.

“For a woman who prides herself on
her independence, you sure do rely a lot on a bunch of gutter trash,” Jaks
said. “Let’s see how well you do without anyone to hide behind.”

“I did well enough with your
brother.”

Jaks didn’t punch her; she smacked
her, hard, across the face. Blood tickled Nyx’s nose. She sniffed.