God's War (9 page)

They came over the top of a low
rise, and Punjai spread before them like a jagged wound, a seething black
groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. Three years before, the front had
been closer, and all of the minarets outside the Chenjan quarter of the city
had been bombed. Truckloads of dead and dying men were still carted into the
city during the worst of the skirmishes, but for the most part, magicians liked
to patch up their charges at the front. The more men that got away from the
front, the more likely it was that somebody would figure a way to smuggle them
out—and the greater the danger they posed to the city if they were
contaminated. Bel dame business was brisk in Punjai. Not that Nyx was licensed
to do that type of thing.

But it didn’t keep her from thinking
about it.

At the edges of the city, the desert
stirred, set free by centuries of bug storms and heavy warfare. Bursts had
seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock
the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped
spirals of the remaining minarets, long since converted to more practical
watchtowers equipped with long-range anti-burst weapons and scatterguns. The
only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer in Punjai was a crumbling
black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.

“Taite briefed you on the file?”
Rhys asked as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black
burnous.

Nyx watched him fiddle with the
frogged tie at his collar.

“Yeah,” she said, “I looked over the
file. Some Chenjan terrorists. Expected to be armed. Good boxers. I sparred
with one of them in Aludra a couple of years ago.”

“I expected they’d be friends of
yours,” Rhys said.

“I run with a lot of questionable
characters,” Nyx said, giving him a sidelong look. “We’re stopping at the
storefront. I need to off-load your body.”

“It’s Khos’s body. Is Anneke in?”

“She’s already posted. Less picky
about where she spends morning prayer.” Anneke had been one of the easier
additions to her crew, once Nyx made up her mind to cannibalize Raine’s team.
All Anneke had wanted was a bigger gun.

“I hate this city,” Rhys said.

Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting
out of the dash. “Find something useful on. You have some sen?”

He obediently switched on the tube.
It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at them.
Local politics. Queen Ayyad had abdicated to her daughter Zaynab four months
before, and the talking heads were still preoccupied with what that meant for
relations between Nasheen and Ras Tieg. Nyx was more interested in what Zaynab’s
policies would be regarding the capture of terrorists. Queens and bel dames did
not, traditionally, get along, and the livelihood of mercenaries and bounty
hunters didn’t even show up as a line item during the low council meetings. The
queen got on best with her decadent group of high-council
nobles—representatives from the richest houses in Nasheen, descendants of the
First Families. It was a hazy kind of history, and Nyx didn’t remember half of
it. Most of her schooling consisted of adding and subtracting bullets and
calculating the trajectory of burst guns, interspersed with some theology from
the Kitab and exaltations about the power of submission to God—dead words from
some other dead world. Actual Umayman history was usually just a nod to how everything
that ever went wrong on Umayma was the fault of the Chenjans.

Nyx changed the station. The air
tingled, and the voices were briefly garbled, but then cleared up. More news:
local gossip. Talk about the upcoming vote on whether or not half-breeds should
be drafted. A couple of serious-sounding women discussed the arrival of a ship
that had put down in Faleen. Where were all these antiquated wrecks coming
from? Nyx thought. When was the last time I saw one?

When you went to prison, she
remembered. She grimaced and turned the radio off. It was a night she didn’t
like to dwell on. The mist receded. Sound faded to silence.

“You know I don’t poison myself with
narcotics and pollutants,” Rhys said, and she realized he was talking about the
sen.

Nyx hoped he’d start ranting about
submission and God and pollutants.

She could use the diversion.

He rarely disappointed her these
days.

“I only drink the blood of my
enemies,” Nyx said, “and may be some whiskey and water. Beer with a little
lime.”

Rhys snorted.

She considered selling him to a
mardana, a brothel populated entirely by men. It was one of her more frequent
fantasies.

The hunched black smudge of the city
grew closer. Umber-clad women moved along the side of the road, balancing
baskets on their heads. Girls herded giant spiders and a couple of dogs along
the drainage ditches flanking the road. Some creepers in blue and gold carried
baskets of beetles and grasshoppers in tiny wooden cages. Giant drooping nets
hung over their lean shoulders.

They passed under the burst-scarred
main gate and into Punjai.

Nyx parked outside their storefront,
badly, and pushed into the reception area they called the keg. Before Nyx sold
bounty services out of the storefront, she had sold kegs of beer to wedding
parties and war veterans. Taite started calling it the keg the fourth time a
drunken government clerk came looking for cheap booze in the middle of the
night.

Taite, another crew member scalped
from Raine, was working her com now. Upon her arrival, the skinny pock-faced kid
ducked his head out of the gear room in the back and widened his eyes. He was a
crackerjack with the com, but he still cringed in the face of her moods, and
there were days she wished he had a straighter spine. He must have been in his
early twenties now, but in her head he was still just the fourteen-year-old
refugee of Raine’s with the Ras Tiegan accent.

“Khos?” he said hopefully.

“Khos,” she said.

“He’s already posted at the
location.”

“Fucker,” Nyx said. “Let Rhys know
if that fucker calls off. If he gets tangled up with his whores before this
job, I’m going to tear up his contract.”

She went back out to get Rhys to
help her with the body. The two of them hauled it down into the freezer under
the gear room.

When they came back up, Taite was
looking jittery. He usually only looked that way after he’d talked to his
sister, another refugee half-breed. Nyx had seen her once, looking down at the
bakkie from a dirty window when Nyx dropped Taite off. She was prettier than
Taite, though just as fine-boned and frail. Neither of them had been
inoculated, and they were allergic to everything.

“There’s a problem, Nyx,” Taite
said.

“I hate problems.”

“Anneke says Raine’s there trying to
pick up our bounty. Khos moved without your leave. She thinks Khos lost the bounty.”

“Shit,” Nyx growled. “Get in the
fucking bakkie, Rhys.”

She and Raine had been netting each
other’s prime catches for years, ever since she stole Taite and, later, Anneke
from him. Taite was the only com tech she knew who could keep a line secure without
resorting to venom addiction, but whoever Raine was using now consistently
hacked Taite’s com. She had lost her last two bounties to Raine, and now the
cockless fuck was pushing for another one.

“Keep your ear to the com. I’m
headed there now,” Nyx said.

Nyx hit the juice on the bakkie and
plowed through the narrow streets of Punjai. Rhys had the sense to strap
himself in and hang on tight. She figured he knew better than to push her when
she was pissed off, because he was quiet the whole time.

She drove out to the bounty’s
residence, a brick one-level squeezed between three-storied apartment buildings
with more modern tiled facades.

The door was already bashed open.
Nyx saw scattered parrot feathers all over the street.

She jumped out of the bakkie and ran
across the busy street, dodging cat-pulled carts and sinewy rickshaw drivers.
She half-reached for her sword but pulled her pistol instead. In close
quarters, sword fighting got tricky. She pushed inside.

Lithe little Anneke crouched next to
the crumpled body of a blue-eyed boy still covered in feathers and mucus.
Anneke jerked her head and rifle up when Nyx came in but relaxed when she saw
who it was.

Nyx saw a dead dog with two naked
human legs sprawled near the broken lattice of the window.

“Where’s Khos?” she asked.

She heard a stir outside the window,
and a big blond dog leapt inside. In dog form, Khos was only about as tall as
her hip. The dog shook off the dust and started to shed dog hair all over the
floor. Watching shifters change generally put Nyx off lunch, so she looked away
as Khos shifted. When she looked again, he was wiping mucus off his immense
naked body. Khos was a head and shoulders taller than she was, broad in the
face and chest, and when he shook his head, the last of the dog hair purled out
around him in a cloud, leaving him with a head of thick blond dreadlocks.

“What the fuck happened?” Nyx asked.

“Raine’s team moved for the—” Anneke
began.

“I don’t give a fuck what Raine did.
Which of you moved off point first?”

Anneke spit on the floor and looked
over at Khos.

Nyx regarded him. A fine webbing of
spidery blue tattoos—the same color as his eyes—wound around Khos’s pale limbs
and torso. Some kind of Mhorian thing. He was still wiping mucus from his face.
In a quarter hour, he was going to be starving for protein. Shifters were
fucking
expensive
.

“They were going to sweep that
bounty right out from under us,” he said. “I moved because—”

“And did you get a transmission from
Rhys or Taite telling you I wanted you off point?” she said.

She heard somebody come in behind
her and turned, pistol in hand. But it was only Rhys, the hood of his burnous
drawn up, a cloud of red beetles circling his head.

“Taite says Raine and his crew are
already headed toward the Cage. With the bounty,” Rhys said.

Nyx grimaced and looked at the body
on the floor. “Can we get anything for this one?”

“Yeah, boss,” Anneke said, “but he
isn’t worth so much as the others.”

“He’ll have to do. Somebody’s gotta
feed Taite’s sister this month. Bundle him up.”

“Boss?” Anneke said.

“We’re taking him to the Cage,” Nyx
said. “Any more questions or suggestions? I don’t run a democracy here. This
isn’t some Mhorian brothel, you get that, Khos?”

He made a face and looked down at
the body. She had another body to talk to him about, later.

Nyx holstered the pistol.

Khos sighed over the body and
muttered, “God be merciful.”

“You’ll find I’m bloodier than He
is,” Nyx said.

“I don’t doubt that,” Khos said.

“Prove it,” she said, and walked
outside to get the trunk ready for the next body.

Nyx dropped Rhys off at the keg and
then followed the old elevated train tracks uptown to the Cage. Khos rode
shotgun, but it was Anneke who rode armed. She sat up in the bowl of the roof,
her feet dangling over the trunk, a shotgun over one of her lean shoulders.

Punjai’s border security office and
bounty reclamation center—aptly known as “the Cage” by those in the
business—was in the heart of upper Punjai, on the other side of the city from
the Chenjan district.

They pulled up outside the Cage.
Raine’s bakkie was already there, along with half a dozen others belonging to
rival hunters.

As she waited for Khos and Anneke to
unload the body, Nyx looked across the parking lot to the
other
reclamation office. The bel dame collection center was a tall
four-storied building with a façade of painted mud-brick and amber. The motto
above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the old
prayer language:
My life for a thousand
.

She remembered swearing an oath with
that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen.
My life for a thousand.

“Boss?” Anneke said.

Nyx looked back at them. Khos had
the bundled body in his arms—the body of some dumb half-breed kid who’d run
with the wrong crowd—but he’d keep them in bread for another day.

My
life for a thousand.

She didn’t risk her life for all
that much, these days.

Nyx reached into the bakkie and
palmed some sen from her stash, then squared herself in front of the low
building. Hunters were slipping in and out, gutter feed in tow. Little operations
like those had to take in half a dozen terrorists a week to make a profit.
She’d gotten out of the small time years ago. She wanted to stay out of it.

Nyx spit red, and led her team in.

Shajin was working behind the
lattice of the front desk. She was a squat, serious woman with flinty eyes and
a bad complexion. She sat gazing stonily at a new hunter who sounded like she
was having trouble understanding the monetary restrictions on her catch.

Shajin, unimpressed, replied in her
booming monotone, “Read the fine print. Says here you only get sixty if this
particular catch is live. They preferred him dead and would have paid you a
hundred for it. I’m not killing him for you, so you take him out back and shoot
him or take your sixty. If there’s something you don’t understand about that,
you need to go back to state school. Get your skinny ass away from my desk.
Move.”

The hunter pulled out her pistol and
then dragged her catch out the door.

Nyx stepped up. Shajin relaxed in
her seat.

“And what do you want, my wandering
woman?” Shajin asked.

“How’s business?” Nyx said.

“Poor. Full of men and
self-righteous mercenary runts. They upset my digestion.” She patted the great
swell of her stomach.