God's War (8 page)

“Fuck, you’re kidding me!” the tall
one said.

They started to crowd him. Like all
Nasheenian women, they seemed suddenly larger there together, in the dark along
the empty street. And they spoke in loud voices. Always too loud. Overwhelming.

“That’s a fucking Chenjan!”

“Smells like a pisser, though. You a
cabbage-eater, Chenjan man?”

“Look at that face! Not a day at the
fucking front.”

He made to push through them, but
their hands were on him now, and their liquored breaths were in his face. He
raised one arm to call a swarm of wasps. One of the girls grabbed his arm,
twisted it behind him. The pain blinded him.

“Where you going, black man?”

“You know what Chenjans do in the
street after dark?”

“Fucking terrorist.”

He didn’t know which of them threw
the first punch. Despite their belligerence, he hadn’t expected it. He never
expected violence from women, even after all this time in Nasheen.

She caught him on the side of the
head, and a burst of blackness jarred his vision. He stumbled. Someone else hit
him and he was on the ground, curled up like a child while they kicked him.

“Turn him over!”

“Get that off!”

One of them had a knife, and they
cut his clothes from him. They cut a good deal more of him.

The midnight call to prayer sounded
across Amtullah.

Rhys recited the ninety-nine names
of God.

Rhys took what was left of his money
and his ravaged body and shared a bakkie with eight other hard-luck passengers
to Rioja, a northern city, closer to the sea. Towering above Rioja was the
Alhambra, a fortress of steel, stone, and ancient organic matting built at the
top of a jagged thrust of rock of the same name. Rhys painted portraits in the cobbled
square that lay in the shadow of the Alhambra. He sold them for ten cents
apiece. At night, he slept in the steep, narrow streets among creepers, black
market grocers, and junk dealers. When he was cold, he called swarms of roaches
and scarab beetles to cover him. When he ran out of money for canvas and paint,
he sold bugs to creepers and the local magicians’ gym. And when he was too poor
to eat—or the creepers were no longer buying—he ate the bugs that made his
blood sing, the bugs that tied him to the world.

He dreamed of his father. Of his
house in Chenja. The smell of oranges.

A woman threw a coin at him one
morning while he sat huddled in a doorway in his stained, tattered burnous.

“Find yourself a woman,” she said.
She wore sandals and loose trousers, and her face had the smooth, well-fed look
of the rich.

“I used to dance for Chenjan
mullahs,” Rhys said.

The woman paused. The morning was
cool and misty; winter in Rioja. Damp wet her face, beaded her dark hair. He
suddenly wanted this strong, capable woman to hold him, Nasheenian or not. He
wanted her strength, her certainty.

“But you don’t dance for them
anymore,” the woman said. “Let me tell you, boy: Whatever you were in your past
life, you aren’t that any longer.”

She continued up the narrow street.

In the end, it was not so hard to
return to Yah Reza.

Rhys walked to the magicians’ gym in
Rioja and asked for her at the door. He waited on the street in front of the
dark doorway for some time while they found her there, somewhere within the
bowels of the twisted magicians’ quarters, the world with so many doors.

When she entered the doorway, she
was wearing her yellow trousers and chewing sen, unchanged though it had been
well over a year since he last saw her.

“Hello, baby doll,” Yah Reza said.

“Sanctuary,” Rhys said.

Yah Reza smiled and spit. “I put on
some tea for you.”

She gave him some tea and sent him
to Yah Tayyib.

Yah Tayyib dewormed him and cut out
the old scars from his assault in Amtullah. He did not ask about what had
happened.

“I have seen far worse,” Yah Tayyib
told him. “You were lucky they just cut flesh and not entire body parts—though
I have plenty of those to spare as well.”

Rhys ate his grubs and gravy. After
a time, he no longer urinated blood, and his persistent cough eased. One
morning he found himself in the locker room the outriders used, and he stood
there in the doorway thinking about the little dog-faced girl and her
beautiful, imperfect hands. The old stale smell of sweat and leather filled the
room.

Soon he would go back to teaching
magic to Nasheenian children. He would lose himself again to the dark bowels of
this prison. Hell on Umayma. But was it any worse than the hell outside these
walls?

“Rhys?” Yah Tayyib asked.

Rhys turned and saw the old man
approaching from the direction of the gym.

“I need you to wrap a woman for me.”

“You don’t wish to do it?”

Yah Tayyib pinched his mouth in
distaste. “I have no time for her.”

Rhys walked out into the boxing gym.
He saw Husayn in the ring, surely on her last legs as a magician-sponsored
fighter. The last year had not been kind to her either. She was well past
thirty, too old to make much more money for the magicians. She was gloved and
warming up.

It was the other woman who caught
his attention. She stood in the near corner of the ring, and she turned as he
entered. She was as tall as he was, broad in the shoulders, and heavy in the
chest and hips. She wore a breast binding, loose trousers, and sandals. Her
hair was jet black, braided, and belled. It hung down her back in one long,
knotted tail. She put both hands on the ropes and leaned forward, looking him
straight in the face. The boldness of the look stopped him in his tracks. He
didn’t know if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.

“I know you,” she said.

“You’re a bel dame,” he said. He
knew it the same way he’d known the dog-faced girl had a bad hand, the way he
knew a magician or a shifter by sight on the street.

“Was,” she said. “Not anymore. I’m
Nyx.”

Husayn bounced over to the former
bel dame’s side and punched her on one of her substantial shoulders. “Let’s go,
huh?” Husayn said.

“You’re a dancer,” Nyx said.

“Was,” he said.

Nyx let go of the ropes. She looked
out behind him, toward the entrance to the magicians’ quarters. Rhys followed
her gaze and saw Yah Tayyib in the doorway, watching her with black eyes.

A broad smile lit up Nyx’s face. It
made her almost handsome. “You need a job?” she asked Rhys.

“Doing what?” he asked.

“Bugs,” Nyx said. “It’s what you can
do, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. He’d discovered that
he could do little else. “I’m not the most skilled, but… I’ve been told it’s
enough for petty employment.”

“I’m a hunter. I need a team.
Magicians get ten percent.”

“On a two-person team? No less than
twenty-five.”

“There’s three of us for now, but
it’ll be five, eventually. Fifteen.”

“Five ways is twenty.”

“That assumes we’re all equal.
Nasheen’s not a democracy, and neither’s my team.”

“Fifteen. I won’t kill anyone for
you.”

“Fifteen, you don’t kill anybody,
and you sign a contract today.”

Rhys turned again to look at Yah
Tayyib. The old magician moved out of the doorway, back into the darkness.

“Yes,” Rhys said.

She squatted and reached through the
ropes for him. He started, expecting violence. Instead, she clasped his elbow.
He recovered quickly and clasped hers in turn. And in that one moment, that
brief embrace, he felt safe for the first time in more than a year.

“You’ll do all right with me,” Nyx
said, straightening.

“You think so?”

She grinned again. Her whole face
lit up. It was dynamic. “If you don’t, I’ll cut your fucking head off. It’s
what I’m good at.”

“Not so good as all that, if you
aren’t a bel dame anymore.”

She caught hold of the ropes and
leaned back, still grinning. “A shitty magician and a shitty bel dame. We’re
two of a kind, then, aren’t we?”

He wasn’t sure what scared him most:
that she was right, or that she was now his employer.

IN THE DESERT

Nyx came out of her year in prison
with all of her limbs and organs intact, though she had a new appreciation for
open sky and food that hadn’t been grown in a jar. After that, time licked by
in a blur of boys and blood. Seven years of putting together a crackerjack
bounty hunting team, starting with Taite, her com tech, then her Chenjan
magician. Seven years of boys and blood—girls too. Bounty hunters took up notes
on girls and women, and that’s all she had a license to be anymore, just
another body hacker. Another organ stealer. In Nasheen you hacked out a living
or spent your last days hacking out your lungs.

She knew which she preferred.

The war still raged along the
ever-changing border with Chenja. Nyx started up her storefront with the dancer
and com tech in Punjai, a border city at the heart of the bounty-hunting
business. While she was in prison, Punjai had been swallowed by Chenja for six
months, then “liberated” by a couple of brilliant Nasheenian magicians and an
elite terrorist-removal unit. Chenjan corpses burned for days. All of the
city’s prayer wheels were burned and the old street signs were put back up.
There had been air raids and rationing and a couple more poisoned waterworks,
but, as ever, the war was just life, just how things clicked along—one
exhausting burst and bloated body at a time.

It was a fitting way to look at
time, Nyx figured, as she opened up her trunk one hazy morning while the yeasty
stink of bursts blew in on the wind. She and her team were still three bounties
short of rent.

She found a headless body inside the
trunk.

“You should have put some towels
down,” Rhys said. It had been worth the look on Yah Tayyib’s face the day she
signed Rhys, though his cut was still substantially more than anybody else’s on
the team.

And she liked his hands.

There had been dog carcasses in the
alley behind her storefront this morning, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old
women netting roaches for stews. The accumulated filth of rotting tissue,
blood, sand, and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt
for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out to pick
him up. She made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because watching
Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as the idea of catching him
masturbating—if he even did that sort of thing.

In any case, she hadn’t thought to
check the trunk.

“Whose is it?” Nyx asked. She was due
to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour. She needed the trunk space.

The body was draped in the white
burnous of a clerk, gold tassels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no
head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.

Nice touch, that.

“Khos’s,” Rhys said.

She should have recognized his work.

Nyx glanced over at Rhys, trying to
read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn.

She watched him gather his gear.
“I’ll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body,” he said.

“Khos won’t get anything without the
head.”

“He says the body’s got a
birthmark.”

“Khos is an idiot.” Khos, her big
Mhorian shifter. Substantial in
so
many ways. She
teased that thought back out of her mind. Shit, it had been a while.

Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited
for a word of affirmation, but he said only, “Khos said this one was on the
boards for black work. He had me open a file.”

Nyx shut the trunk.

“Somebody’s going to revoke my
hunter’s license ’cause Khos can’t burn his bodies,” she said. It wouldn’t be
the first time. She’d had her bounty hunter’s license revoked twice in her
seven years as a hunter—once for accidentally shooting a diplomat’s assistant,
who’d been within range of her actual target, and again for employing Khos
without a shifter’s license. Shifters were expensive.

Nyx moved around to the cab of the
little bakkie, kicked the latch loose, and propped open the door. She took the
driver’s seat, adjusted the sword strapped to her back to make it easier to
sit, and pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood. She’d
gotten the bakkie off a hedge witch working in the fleshpots on the Tirhani
border. Nyx knew all about what it was like to be hard up for bugs and bread.

“Hit the grille,” Nyx said.
Sometimes you had to get the beetles riled up before they’d feed.

Rhys banged the flat of his hand on
the grille. Not much weight behind it. Fucking
dancers
.

While she waited, Nyx watched a
burst from the front ignite across the sky over Punjai. One of the anti-burst
guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy
whump-whump
of the guns made her ears pop. The burst
burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance.

“Would you put some shit behind it?”
Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?”

Rhys kicked the grille. Better.

The bugs hissed, and something
inside the semi-organic cistern belched.

“In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.

Rhys leapt in as the bakkie began
rolling down the dusty hill toward Punjai.

There was a hot desert wind blowing
in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and
settling a misty cloud of red silt over the cityscape. The double dawn had
risen; the orange sun overpowered the wan light of the blue sun, and the
silt-filtered light caught the world on fire.

Nyx shifted pedals as the road
straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple of roach nymphs wiggled free
from the leak in the hose by her feet and flitted through the open windows.