God's War (6 page)

Jaks grinned. It wasn’t an
improvement on her face. “I suppose I owe you money,” she said. “I saw that you
bet on me.”

Nyx shrugged. “Seemed like a fine
idea at the time. What kept you so long?”

“Those off-world women chewed my ear
clean off with all their talk,” Jaks said.

“What, the ones from New Kinaan?”
Yah Tayyib hadn’t been shitting, then. What kind of alien came all the way out
to this blasted rock to talk to boxers?

Jaks sat next to her. “Yeah. What
about you, what the hell you doing in Faleen?” Jaks asked.

“Looking for you,” Nyx said. She had
never been a good liar, so whenever the truth worked, she used it. “What are
you drinking?”

“Whatever you are,” Jaks said. She
was still beaming, and Nyx had a twinge of something like guilt. She let the
feeling slide away, like oil on the surface of a cistern.

The barmaid brought their drinks.
Nyx moved closer to Jaks, so their knees touched. “You have family in Faleen?”
Nyx asked.

Jaks chattered about her kin. They
lived just outside Faleen, she said. She’d been trying to build up to a
magician’s fight since she was fourteen. She had two sisters and a handful of
house brothers. Her mother was on the dole, the
waqf
,
and not well off.

“Boxing keeps me in bread,” Jaks
said, polishing off her third whiskey. Like Nyx, she drank it straight. “And
it’s good for picking up girls,” Jaks added.

“I don’t have a place,” Nyx said.
“You empty tonight?”

“Mostly,” Jaks said. She was
grinning like a fool now, like a kid. She was probably sixteen. She’d never
been to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the
grin, in the eyes.

Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced
around. She paid the tab and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Nyx hunched and shifted her weight
to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and
Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to
Jaks’s neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures
hanging around outside but couldn’t catch their faces in the dim night. Her
sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong
boxer and wouldn’t be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.

Jaks was only a little drunk; the
liquor made her happy.

“Listen,” Jaks said as they stumbled
down the alley, groping at each other. “We need to be quiet. I’ve got company.”

“I’m a spider,” Nyx said.

Jaks took her down a dead-end alley
near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx
reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx’s
knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them
again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head,
crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.

Jaks laughed. “I should have warned
you. They don’t spray around here. Lots of mutants.”

They climbed a rickety ladder to the
second floor. Nyx felt like she’d been running forever, since the dawn of the
world. Time stretched.

A boy’s sandal hung from the top
rung of the ladder. In that moment, Nyx saw the pile of Tej’s things again, the
detritus the Chenjan border filter had left of him. A sword, a baldric, his
sandals.

Nyx caught her breath as she peered
into the little mud-brick room. A couple of worms in glass lit the place. There
were two raised sleeping platforms on either side of the room. A boy looked
down at her from the one at her right. He looked nothing like Jaks. He was
large and soft where she was small and hard. His hair was curly black and too
long for a boy his age.

“My house brother,” Jaks said.
“Arran. Sorry, he doesn’t do tea.”

He didn’t look like he’d spent a day
at the front, but he was the right age. Nyx had expected to feel something when
she saw this one. Rage, maybe; bloodlust. But he was just another boy. Another
body. Another bel dame’s bounty.

Along the far wall was the kitchen
space: a mud-brick oven, all-purpose pot, two knives, and a sack of what must
have been rice or maybe millet, knowing a boxer’s take.

Arran rolled back into the loft.

“Come up,” Jaks said.

Nyx came.

She kissed and licked Jaks in a
detached sort of way. It was like watching two people she didn’t know having
sex.

Nyx lay awake after, until Jaks
slept. She was aware, vaguely, of being hungry. She moved like a dream,
smelling of Jaks, and slunk down the ladder and into the darkness near the
oven. She reached for the biggest of the kitchen knives and put it between her
teeth.

She climbed up the ladder to Arran’s
loft.

He came awake before she reached
him. She heard the straw stir. She took the knife from her mouth, cut her palm,
and as she met the top of the ladder, said, “Arran.”

Following Jaks to find this boy had
cost Nyx a kidney, her womb, and a year’s worth of
zakat
from Yah Tayyib.

It had cost Tej his life.

Nyx shoved her bloody hand against
the boy’s mouth and brought up the other hand with the knife.

When infected boys came home, they
jeopardized the lives of women like Jaks and Kine and little Maj. It’s what she
told herself every time. It’s what she told herself now as she shoved her knife
fast and deep into Arran’s naked armpit three times.

Arran flailed in the straw. Nyx
listened for Jaks. Sex and liquor and a hard fight would send even the worst of
sleepers into a dead quiet, but anybody who lived like Jaks might be able to
shake off worse.

Arran tried to catch her wrist with
his other hand. Nyx rolled the rest of the way up onto the platform and pinned
him still. She waited until the strength bled out of him, then began to saw at
the neck with her stolen knife. For a stretch of time while she cut off Arran’s
head, she wasn’t a bel dame at all—just another body hacker, another organ
stealer, another black trader of red goods. The only difference was, when she
brought this boy in, her sisters would forgive her. Her sisters would redeem
her.

She had collected the blood debt
this boy owed Nasheen.

Nyx tugged off her burnous with
sticky fingers and bundled up the head. She was an hour’s walk from the local
collector’s. Her feet were numb, and her legs ached.

This was all she knew how to do.

She got lost somewhere outside
Jaks’s place and turned around in circles, listening to the scuffle of feet and
bugs. She remembered what Jaks had said about the mutants. Dark shapes hissed
and skittered through the alley, some of them big as dogs—only without the cozy
fur. She stumbled over a head-size ravager gnawing on a human hand. It caught
hold of the end of her bloodied bag and tried to jerk it out of her hands. She
bludgeoned the enormous bug to death with Arran’s head.

Light and noise from the apartments
hanging above her seeped into the street. Her bundle grew heavier as she
walked. She kept losing her grip, and the head thudded onto the dusty street,
picking up more sand. The organic burnous would eat most of the blood, but not
for much longer. Even bugs got full.

She’d just turned off onto a lane
she recognized when she caught the sound of footsteps behind her. She didn’t
turn, only picked up her pace. Her insides were hurting again. She needed a
second wind, but she’d already spent her fourth getting into Faleen.

The footsteps behind her broke into
a run.

Nyx ran too.

The way was mostly dark, cut through
with rectangles and lattices of light. She ducked in and out of darkness. Bugs
hissed and scattered around her.

She was twenty-four years old, a
bottom-feeder among the bel dames, and she was about to be far less than that.

“Nyx! Nyx!”

She kept running.
Just keep going.

Two shadows leaked out of the alley
ahead of her. She knew their shapes before they leapt—a fox and a raven.
Shifters tracked better in animal form. The third would come from behind. She
put one arm over her head to deflect some of the blow.

Her sisters cloaked her from all
sides.

I’m a fool, Nyx thought as she hit
the dirt, suffocated by the weight of her sisters’ bodies. It took three of
them to pry the burnous from her clenched fingers.

Nyx howled. She twisted, found an
opening through fur and feathers and long, black burnouses.

They shot her. Twice.

Nyx heard her sisters’ voices in
hazy snatches, little clips of song and breathy whispers. Rasheeda, the raven,
had once been an opera singer. A soprano. Nyx had never much cared for opera.
It was all about virgin suicides and widowed martyrs. She got enough of that in
real life.

The air was sultry and smelled of
death and lemon. Nyx saw tall women wearing the white caps of Plague Sisters
moving through the hall. She could hear the click and scuttle of insectile
legs. The Plague Sisters were a guild of magicians specializing in the
decontamination of bel dames and the refurbishment of discharged soldiers. Nyx
had been among them before, back when her carcass was hauled in from the front,
charred and twisted. But she’d been too ruined even for the Plague Sisters, and
they’d sent her to Yah Reza and Yah Tayyib, two of the country’s most skilled
magicians. Nyx’s first memories of reconstituted life were of Faleen. The sound
of cicadas. Yah Reza’s eyes, the color of sapphire flies.

Fatima minced into the room with a
white raven on her shoulder… Rasheeda the raven. Fatima spent a moment fussing
with the gas lamp near the bed. Fatima was picky about things, and had gone so
far as to pose her bodies for pick up. She also dabbled her fingers in bel dame
politics. She had the patience for it, and the bloodline. Bel dames ran through
every generation of her family.

Gas lamps meant they were in
Mushtallah or Amtullah, one of the major cities in the heart of Nasheen. If
that was true, it meant Nyx had been out a long time—and she was in a lot of
trouble. Behind Fatima was a long, thin window that looked down onto a street
the color of foam. Extravagant figures cloaked in peach and crimson milled past
the smoky glass like burned jewel bugs. Nyx no longer wondered if she was still
half asleep. Her dreams were never so colorful.

“She’s coming around again,” Fatima
said to the raven.

The raven shivered once, hopped from
Fatima’s shoulder, and began to morph into her sister Rasheeda. A few minutes
later, Rasheeda was mostly human again, naked, covered in mucus, tossing her
head of dark hair and snickering. Feathers rolled out across the floor.

Rasheeda came alongside the bed and
wiped the worst of the mucus from her face and neck with one of Nyx’s
bedsheets. She had a peculiar way of cocking her head that put Nyx in mind of
the raven.

“You look terrible,” Rasheeda said.

“You helped,” Nyx said.

Nyx tried to sit up. Rasheeda
snickered again. Unlike Fatima’s illustrious line, Rasheeda’s was nothing
special—she’d been just another grubby kid from the coast whose mother was into
career breeding. Nyx heard that Rasheeda had gone mad at the front, ripping out
entrails and eating Chenjan hearts. There was only one suitable occupation for
a madwoman from the front after she was discharged.

Nyx gazed down the length of her own
body. She swam in the black nightdress of the Plague Sisters. She pushed up the
sleeves and saw her own tawny wrists and arms, like sticks. She dared not look
at her belly or legs. The bullets her sisters shot her with had been tipped
with bugs. They’d whittled her down to almost nothing.

“Get me something to eat,” Nyx
croaked, and Rasheeda laughed.

One of the Plague Sisters strode
into the room, white skirt trailing behind her. A cloud of spiders clung to her
hem, darkening the fabric.

The Plague Sister fussed with Nyx’s
bedding and probed at her arm with the puckered snout of a semi-organic needle,
which blinked at Nyx with half-dumb eyes. Nyx flinched. The sister gave her a
disapproving frown and pulled away from her arm, taking the blood sample with
her.

“I’ll mark her for final analysis,”
the sister said, “but the venom should be out of her system.” She walked back
out, her entourage of insects pooling behind her.

“Are you all they sent?” Nyx asked.

Rasheeda snickered again, still
sticky and naked.

“They couldn’t spare any more of us
to go running after a rogue sister,” Fatima said. She was tall, skinnier and
darker than Rasheeda, almost Chenjan in color, and stronger in the face and
shoulders. She bore a perpetual frown on her long countenance.

“Dahab’s here,” Rasheeda said
absently. “Luce went for sodas.”

Dahab and Luce. If they’d sent
Dahab, it was a wonder Nyx was still alive. Four mad, skilled bel dames had
tracked her across the desert. Why the fuck was she still breathing?

“What am I doing in the interior?”

“A suit’s been filed,” Fatima said.

“Catshit. You don’t have anything on
me.”

“I know a number of butchers outside
Punjai,” Fatima said. “One of them even bought a womb that matches your tissue
samples. She sold it back to us.”

“That doesn’t prove—”

“We have Yah Tayyib,” Rasheeda said.

“Yah Tayyib’s taken an oath. He
wouldn’t testify. About black work or anything else.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Fatima said. “He
knows the place of a bel dame. He knows we’re just as happy to haul in rogue
magicians as black sisters. We used to hunt magicians when they went rogue too.
Black bel dames ruin our reputation.”

Nyx lay back on the bed. Yah Tayyib,
who had mended her when she was barely human, who recalled her body and mind
from the front when she thought she had lost both there. The man who taught her
to box.

“He wouldn’t make a charge,” she
said.