Infidel (24 page)

The woman she’d tackled lay still. Nyx pulled back the hood of the woman’s burnous. Another kid. Not much older than Eshe. Nyx hit her in the face again with the gun, for good measure, then hauled herself upstairs.
 

“Eshe!” she called. Her knees trembled. Too much, too soon. Her skin felt like burnt paper.
 

She crawled up the last couple of steps and dragged herself next to Eshe. She knelt in a pool of his blood and pressed her hands to his wound to stop the rising tide.
 

“Eshe, c’mon,” she said. His face was alarmingly pale. He was conscious, though—glassy-eyed and squirming.
 

“Fuck,” he murmured. “Fuck, fuck…”
 

“Suha!” Nyx yelled. “Suha!”

Suha stumbled into the hall. She was clutching at her hip. Nyx saw more blood.
 

“They down?” Nyx said.
 

Suha nodded.
 

“Help me get him up,” Nyx said. “There’s a hedge witch across the way.”
 

Suha tore off the end of her own burnous and knotted it around her waist.
   

“Don’t let me die,” Eshe whispered. His voice broke.
 

Nyx felt his warm blood pumping up through her fingers. She clenched her jaw, and refused to look at his twisted face. She stared at her bloody hands instead, trying to keep all that life inside such a little body.

“Please don’t let me die.” He clawed at her burnous, left streaks of blood. “Please, please.”
 

How many boys had she watched die like this? Please, please… Clawing at her, begging for life.
 

“Get him up,” Nyx said. “Get moving.”
 

Eshe started crying. “Don’t let me die…”
 

“You’re fine,” Nyx said. “Everything’s fine.”
 

+

“We need to get out of Nasheen,” Suha said.

They stood outside the hedge witch’s tin-roofed hovel three streets over, smoking clove cigarettes. Nyx had pulled out one of their organic carbine rifles. Suha kept her pistol out. They stayed in the shadows under the tin roof. The street smelled of dog shit and human piss and some rotting thing at least three days dead left among the heaps of refuse in the alley behind them.
 

“You think your sister will take us into Shirhazi?”
 

“You still want to run after those bel dames?”

“Those weren’t bel dames back there. I searched them after you got Eshe inside. Forty notes each in their pockets, and one of them had an unlocked slide with her bel dame class schedule on it. They were apprentices. Not the real thing.”
 

“Young and fast is what they were,” Suha said. “I put a trap on that door. That one Eshe killed took it out without a hitch. We’re lucky we got out alive.”
 

Nyx heard the battered door behind her scrape open, and turned. The witch joined them outside. She was an impossibly tiny, stooped, scraggly-haired woman—not old, just filthy. Her pale arms bore the flowery scars of long years of venom use—one of the reasons she was out here and not treating wealthy patrons at some high-end hotel. Unlicensed hedge witches were a lot cheaper than magicians. Less skilled, sure, but easier to get to and easier to shut up. They couldn’t bring you back from the dead, but they could patch up most complaints.
 

“He gonna live?” Nyx asked. Her voice was gruff. She cleared her throat and spit.
 

“Looks like,” the witch said. She looked at Nyx’s scabby arms. “You need to wet that down.”
 

“It’s fine,” Nyx said.
 

“That’s a new skein,” the witch said. Her eyes were better than they looked, then, Nyx thought.
 

“Yeah?”

“Good chance of infection, you scrape up a new skein like this. Your friend got cleaned up,” she said, nodding at Suha. She’d taken a bullet to the hip that the witch had dug out. “Your turn now.”
 

“Yeah, all right. You got something for that doesn’t cost a cat’s ass?”

“When can we move him?” Suha asked.
 

“Not tonight,” the witch said, and mumbled something in… Drucian? Nyx didn’t hear that language a lot, and couldn’t be sure. “Foolish question. Come inside. There are more women in the street.”

Nyx looked into the street again, but didn’t see anything.
 

The hedge witch nodded. “There will be,” she said. “Come inside.”

“We’ve gotta keep watch,” Suha said.
 

“Only need one for that,” the witch said. “Come,” she said, motioning for Nyx. “Someone the boy knows must sit with him. Come.”
 

Nyx grit her teeth. “I should—”
 

“I got it,” Suha said. “Go sit with him.”

Nyx sighed.
 

The hedge witch ushered her into the cramped hovel. A stir of fire beetles chattered in an open brick stove at the center of the room. Jars of beetles and moths and cicadas were stacked all along one wall, so many that they’d collapsed under their own weight. Broken jars littered the hearth. The air carried the tangy stink of fire beetle offal, preservation alcohol, and unwashed hedge witch.
 

The witch had hung a curtain between the main room and her sleeping area, where Eshe was. She pulled the curtain back and motioned Nyx inside.
 

Nyx looked down at him. Pale, skinny little kid. He was naked save for his dhoti, and covered in a thin film of sweat. The witch had packed his wound full of flesh beetles, sewed it closed, and put layers of filmy gauze over the top to absorb the blood and bug excrement. Something in Nyx hurt so bad at the sight of him that she wanted to run back into the street.
 

Your fault, she thought. Just like all the others.
 

She knelt next to him, not sure what to do next. Just sit, the hedge witch had said.
 

So she sat.
 

The hedge witch brought some kind of foul-smelling tea and slathered Nyx’s bloody arms in a stinking unguent even ranker than the tea.
 

“Sit, that’s good,” the hedge witch said, and left her again—plastered in sticky unguent and reeking of the dead. She poured the tea out on the bare dirt floor and wiped dust over it.
 

Eshe stirred. “Nyx?” he murmured.

“Things got dicey back there,” Nyx said.
 

He gingerly touched his dressing and winced.
 

“You panicked a little,” she said.
 

“I thought I was going to die.”
 

“It’s a scary thing, sometimes,” Nyx said.
 

“Only sometimes?”

Nyx patted his thigh. “Someday you might not be so scared.” Someday you might even be happy about it, Nyx thought. Then everything would stop—pain, guilt, sorrow.
 

“I’ve never seen so much blood come out of me.”

“It was a lot,” Nyx agreed. She touched his face, then, hesitant. He’d come back in one piece.
 

And in two years you’ll feed him to the front, she thought, bitterly. You’ve saved a piece of meat for the grinder. She squeezed her eyes shut.
 

“What is it?” he asked. “You all right?” He took her fingers in his hand.
 

She pulled her hand away. “I’ll be outside. You sleep this off, you hear? I need you strong for what’s coming.”
 

She stood.
 

“I will,” he said.
 

She turned.
 

“Nyx?”
 

Looked back. He was still a little feverish. His face looked terribly plain, and terribly earnest. “I won’t panic like that again,” he said. “I promise.”

“I know,” she said, and ducked under the curtain into the main room. Her vision swam, and she wiped away the wet gathering in her eyes. Nothing to cry over, she thought. He’s just another body. Just another boy. Something caught in her throat.

She stood in the warm room as the hedge witch stirred her fire beetle stove. The witch clucked at her.
 

“It is difficult to have boys,” the witch said.
 

Nyx let herself sag onto the dirt floor across from the witch. Her eyes were still leaking. Wasn’t a good idea to go out and talk to Suha like that. She wiped her face with her burnous. Her skin throbbed.
 

“You ever raised any kids?” Nyx asked.

“Everyone in Nasheen has babies. Didn’t you?” The witch peered up at her. “Ah, but no, you did not, of course. You became a bel dame instead, yes?”

Nyx felt a moment of unease. Did she just look like a bel dame to everybody? “You can choose how you give yours up. I chose chopping off heads. Sounded a lot better than being a breeder.”
 

“I have seen how bel dames must twist themselves, to be with people. In a bel dame’s world, people are things. Meat.” She pointed at the stove. “It is not the perils that kill bel dames before their time. It is the despair.”
 

“Despair over what?”
 

“They have no one to live for,” the hedge witch said, and shrugged. “When they have nothing to live for, they let others kill them. I have seen it many times.”
   

Nyx frowned. “Some career breeder popped out kids from my stuff, probably. They’re around. Getting ground up somewhere. Like everybody else’s. Why get attached to somebody who’ll be dead tomorrow? That’s weakness.”
 

“Perhaps those babies are among the women you kill, yes?”
 

Nyx chewed on that for a while. She’d turned over her genetic stuff when she was seventeen or eighteen, when she went to the front. Those kids would be Mercia’s age by now, maybe older. Like the bel dame apprentices.
 

The witch looked on her with something like pity. It made her angry.
 

“What?” Nyx said.
 

“I patch up boys like yours all the time,” the hedge witch said. “We save moments. Not decades.”

“No use getting worked up over somebody that’s already dead.”

The witch shook her head. “No, no. When you dare to love, you dare to be free.”
 

“You really are Drucian, aren’t you? Syrupy loving-kindness, God-loves-everybody stuff. Catshit.”

The hedge witch smiled. It was like watching old leather wrinkle. “I am human. As are you. Though you may not like it.”
 

Nyx stood. “Thanks for looking after him,” she said.
 

She met Suha out front. Suha was tossing stones at a mutant carrion beetle—tall as Nyx’s knee—scavenging in the alley behind them.
 

“He all right?” Suha asked.
 

“You think there’s a hell?” Nyx asked.
 

“Yeah,” Suha said. “Why make up something so bad if life is already like this?”
 

Nyx grunted.
 

“Why?” Suha said.
 

“Because if there is, I’m going there,” Nyx said.
 

One of Suha’s stones connected with the carrion beetle. It screeched and skittered off into a nearby pile of refuse. Suha straightened and dusted her hands on her trousers. “Good thing,” she said. “They’ll be a lot of interesting folks there.”

17.

R
hys waited for the Tirhani Minister for over an hour. Some of that he spent washing up in the floor washroom, trying to sort out his muddled thoughts.

“Well,” the Tirhani Minister said, when he was finally summoned into her office. “Can I offer you some tea?”

“Certainly, yes,” Rhys said. She seemed a bit taken aback at his acceptance, but acquiesced.
 

“Are you well?” the Minister asked as he took his seat.
 

“Yes. The weather in Beh Ayin does not agree with me.”

“It is a cool… complex, place,” the Minister said.
 

“It is,” Rhys said.
 

Her assistant brought them tea. When she was gone again, the Minister said, “Your services were well thought of in Beh Ayin. I do thank you for your willingness to travel on such short notice, and for your discretion.”

Rhys sipped his tea. “May I ask, Minister, what happened to the other translator you chose for this job?”

The Minister’s face softened. “Is that all? It was thought his presence would be offensive to our proposed business partners. There was some concern over you, as well, though we hoped they would mistake you for a Tirhani.”

“Pardon, Minister, but just because they are coarse does not mean that they are fools.”

“I understand that. But it was also my understanding that these female assassins of Nasheen’s spend most of their time cutting off the heads of their own people, not the heads of Chenjans.”