God's War Part 12

"Money isn't an issue," the queen said. "Bring me the woman I want-alive- and we can negotiate the rest. I have half a dozen estates and twice as many servants, if you wish it. Women, of course." She looked at Rhys. "Unless you'd prefer half-breeds. We have no end of male half-breeds."

"Until we start sending half-breeds to the front," Nyx said. "You want to know why women risk illegal pregnancy and keep pirates elbow deep in organs? Half-breeds who aren't inoculated-who aren't rich Firsts-don't get drafted. They'd fall like rotten wasp nests at the front."

"Perhaps we can eliminate the need for the draft altogether."

"What do you mean?" This was the dangerous part. No legitimate note was ever pointedly removed from the bel dame queue.

"The woman I'd like you to retrieve can help us end the war."

Nyx gave a soft grunt. And who would be more interested in ending the war than a former bel dame and war veteran who'd lost everything to it? Somebody just as good as a bel dame but with publicly severed ties to the council? Somebody the queen could put in her pocket?

Pocket, my a.s.s, Nyx thought.

"We could put something together," Nyx said. "Who is she?"

"A foreigner. An off-worlder called Nikodem Jordan."

f.u.c.k, Nyx thought. The carrier in Faleen. The boxers. Jaks. Prison. Her sisters. Aliens. A boy's head in a bag. No coincidences.

Cause and effect.

The queen pulled the globe off the table and called up a still. She handed the globe to Nyx. "This gives her likeness and background. You'll need to change the pa.s.sword."

Nyx took the globe. It fit neatly in the palm of her hand. Nikodem's images had date and time stamps. Nyx saw that several of the stills were dated eight years before. Just as she'd suspected. The same carrier. The same aliens.

Nikodem was a small woman, Chenjan in coloring, with a broad nose, wide cheekbones, and gray eyes. It was an arresting face, not so much alien as exotic. She had the smooth, unblemished skin of someone who'd never stood under the suns of Umayma. She was too little and big-eyed for real beauty, but there was some strength in that face-and cunning. It was the sort of face that kept others out, kept secrets.

"I'll need to know everything about her," Nyx said. She looked up from the projections, reluctantly. "How long has she been gone? Does she have friends? Other travelers with her? Who did she meet with when she was last here? Looks like that was eight years ago."

Rhys tilted his head slightly and peered at the images projected from the globe. She saw his eyes widen, and he sat back. The woman wasn't that that pretty. Nyx frowned and peered at the stills again. Then Nyx remembered where Rhys had been eight years ago. She looked at him again. Their gazes met. One long, tense moment. pretty. Nyx frowned and peered at the stills again. Then Nyx remembered where Rhys had been eight years ago. She looked at him again. Their gazes met. One long, tense moment.

Then the queen was talking, and Rhys looked away, and Nyx tried to listen. Nikodem had been missing for a month, the queen said. She came to Nasheen with three others. The off-worlders had come to Faleen for the first time sixteen years before, and they had come speaking the language Chenjans and Nasheenians used for prayer. Only mullahs spoke that language with any competence anymore, and most people would debate just how competent it was.

"What did they come here looking for?" Nyx asked.

"Some of that is confidential," the Queen said. "What I can say is that they were very interested in finding other followers of the Kitab and its sister books. They have offered an exchange of technologies in the spirit of our shared faith. We've been in negotiations for nearly two decades."

"They from New Kinaan?" Nyx asked.

"Yes. You know it?"

"Heard it secondhand. My sister works with foreigners on the coast," Nyx said. Kine might be able to fill her in on what they were up to, though she hadn't spoken to Kine since she got out of prison. Kine had wanted even less to do with her after the black mark. "I know that when we get in off-worlders, we're always real interested in hauling them down to the breeding compounds and getting new tech from them."

"You say they are followers of the Kitab. A sister book. But have you read it?" Rhys asked.

Nyx looked at him sharply. She didn't know what that had to do with anything.

"As with any people, they believe they are the only true believers of the one G.o.d, the only people who know and understand Him through the words of His many prophets," the queen said.

"G.o.d is unknowable," Rhys said. "That is His nature. For them to claim to know G.o.d is arrogance at best. For them to claim more than one prophet isn't heresy, but to claim there was another after ours... I couldn't imagine doing business with such a people."

That dagger was a little too sharp for Nyx's taste. She opened her mouth to tell him to shut up.

"At one time, Nasheen and Chenja did business," the queen said, "and it wasn't called heresy then. It is no business of mine to tell my women how to worship. I do not require a call to prayer in any city. That is up to the mullahs and the people who elect them. Your Chenjan mullahs may be elected, but I am not. When our mullahs overstep, I intervene." She smiled thinly. "Our balance of power has kept the soldiers at the front, the bel dames at work, and the mullahs sticking to matters of G.o.d. We have done this successfully for nearly three hundred years, while doing business with people of the Book. "

"You say you give your people freedom to submit to G.o.d," Rhys said, and Nyx wondered if he'd hoped to have this conversation with the Queen of Nasheen his whole life, "yet you have barred men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. I see some contradiction in that. How can you deny a man the right to submit to G.o.d as he believes G.o.d has directed him?"

Nyx sucked her teeth.

"We have different views of G.o.d, you and I," the queen said.

Which explains that whole war business, Nyx thought.

"So, when can I see these Kinaanites?" Nyx asked.

The queen turned from Rhys and regarded her a long moment, as if she'd forgotten Nyx was even there. "Kasbah will take you to them," she said.

10.

The off-worlders were having supper, which Nyx found somehow rea.s.suring. As she and Rhys stepped into the room behind Kasbah, the call to prayer rolled out over Mushtallah. The keening cry sounded close, and Nyx figured it was pumped into the palace grounds through some kind of local radio.

Rhys found an ablution bowl near the door and began to wash in preparation for prayer. Nyx continued on into the airy little room. There were plush divans and tall succulents in striped pots. Some kind of gauzy curtain draped down from the ceiling in soft folds, which cut some of the filtered light from the open shaft above them.

The off-worlders were gathered around a faux wood table set near four gla.s.s doors that led out onto a balcony overlooking the spread of Mushtallah. Nyx could see the blue light of the second sun begin to push dusky evening across the city. Glow worm lamps had been unshuttered, and the minarets were lit up with red beacons, an old but useless tradition. The beacons just made the minarets better targets.

The aliens at the table were small, bony women. Two were black as pitch, and one was whiter than a Mhorian, which Nyx figured wasn't healthy. The white one wore a visible silver X-shaped pendant, like a Ras Tiegan, and they all wore dark hijabs that covered their hair and wrapped around their necks like overgenerous turbans. They were covered from wrist to ankle in a variety of housecoats and loose trousers. Though she ate with her fingers, the white woman wore gloves. Nyx wondered if the white pigment was some sort of skin condition.

Rhys had pulled the prayer rug from his back and took up his kneeling position, facing north. As he professed his intention to offer salaat and began to go through the gestures of the niyat, she could still follow along with him, the words and movement so familiar to her body. She wished he would carry a sword instead of a rug. When bullets ran out, rugs weren't much good for beating people off.

Kasbah introduced Nyx to the off-worlders.

"You don't pray?" Nyx asked the women.

"We pray," the more delicate of the black women said in heavily accented Nasheenian. "Just not so publicly, not in ordinary s.p.a.ces, and not so frequently. We are people of the Good Book, but our book is... different from yours. I must admit, even among followers of your book... what is it you call it here, the Kitab? Even among followers of your Kitab on other worlds, your interpretation is... exceedingly unique. Yours is the first post-Haj world to-"

"I sometimes wonder what he has left to say to G.o.d," Nyx interrupted, nodding toward Rhys.

"There is always something left to say to G.o.d," the woman said. She gestured to the table. "Join us. I am Danika Chaba."

The other two introduced themselves. The other black woman was Solome Hadar, and the white one was Keran Yarkona. The white one's Nasheenian was so bad that Nyx could barely understand her.

"You're the tenth mercenary to talk to us," Danika said.

"I'm a bounty hunter," Nyx said.

"Oh? Is there a difference?"

"Yeah," Nyx said. She could hear Rhys reciting, not in Chenjan or Nasheenian but the ancient language of prayer: "In the name of G.o.d, the infinitely Compa.s.sionate and Merciful. Praise be to G.o.d, Lord of all the worlds."

"Were you all with Nikodem the last time she was in Nasheen?" Nyx asked. She was hungry, and they had a lot to go over.

Keran and Solome exchanged looks, but Danika did not blink as she replied, "I was. Solome stayed aship, as she had not yet been inoculated against your contagions. Keran had not yet graduated."

"Graduated?"

"Off-world studies, diplomacy. She has done some work for us in-system."

"In-system?"

Danika clucked her tongue. In Nasheen, that was a reproach, but Nyx suspected she meant it differently.

"We have two viable worlds in our star's system, and a colonized moon. We have some experience in negotiating with others who are not as we are."

"It was smart to send women to Nasheen, then."

Danika gave a tight smile. "It was not all politics. We have sent skilled technicians before us, but most were unable to adapt to the peculiar contagions of your world, and perished. Nikodem and I are now the top technicians in our field."

"And what field is that?" Nyx asked.

"Organic sciences."

Rhys finished the prayer with his feet tucked under his thighs, his palms splayed on either knee.

"Peace and blessings of G.o.d be upon you," he murmured, turning to look over his right shoulder, where one of G.o.d's angels was supposed to be recording all your good deeds. He then looked over his left shoulder, to the angel making note of all his wrongs.

What wrongs had Rhys ever committed, Nyx wondered? Again, he murmured, "Peace and blessings of G.o.d be upon you." He began to roll up his prayer rug.

She noted that he had added no personal prayers to the beginning or end of his salaat.

Angels and demons and a great man in the sky who took the time to listen to a whole world abase itself. There had been no angels at the front. Chenjans were the only demons, and sacrificing herself to G.o.d had proved nothing, saved no one.

What bugged her was that Rhys hadn't figured that out yet.

She heard him get up and turned to watch him walk over. Kasbah brought another chair from the back of the room, and Rhys joined them at the now crowded table. The white woman, Keran, flinched away from him as he sat next to her. What did she have to be afraid of from another believer? Maybe they all had something against aliens. Nyx wondered how often these people had dealt with other worlds. If they had whole schools for "off-world diplomacy," they must do it a lot. Nyx had a long moment of vertigo. How many worlds were out there?

Lord of all the worlds...

"Compet.i.tive field on your world?" Nyx asked. "Organic sciences?"

"In our country, yes. But you did not come here to talk of science," Danika said.

Nyx leaned back in the chair and thought: You did though, didn't you? You did though, didn't you? But that wasn't the note Nyx had accepted. But that wasn't the note Nyx had accepted.

"Can you think of anyone Nikodem met last time who would give her harbor?" Nyx asked. "Any place she'd want to go?"

A black woman in Nasheen might stick out even if she holed herself up in the Chenjan quarters with the refugees. Though her color would match, her foreign look and accent would give her away as something other than Chenjan, especially if she went out unveiled or looked too many men in the face. These women had no problem looking Rhys in the face-only Keran seemed to actively dislike him-but that may have been them bowing to Nasheenian custom. In any case, the other hunters this group had spoken to would have started in the Chenjan district. If so many had already given up the hunt, it was likely Nikodem wasn't there.

"We have a more detailed itinerary on the globe the queen issued you," Danika said. "We spent a good deal of time here in the palace meeting with bel dames and dignitaries."

"Which bel dames did you meet?"

"Do you remember their names?" Danika asked Solome.

Solome's voice was deep, sultry. Nyx was impressed to hear that voice come out of such a small woman.

"I believe we spent time with Dahab so Batir and Fatima Kosan. Who were the others? Inan so Khada, and someone called Blake, a half-breed from Ras Tieg."

"Blake's not a bel dame, she's a bounty hunter like me," Nyx said. "Half-breeds can't be bel dames." Ah, Blake. So the young upstart was still around. Nyx knew Inan too. They had gone through bel dame training together.

"There were magicians, also," Danika said. "We met with a great deal of magicians over the course of our stay. The nature of our work demanded it. That list is in your file also."

"I heard you saw a boxing match in Faleen," Nyx said, casually. She suspected that little detail wasn't on the queen's globe.

Danika grimaced. "Boxing, yes. A bit of parting vulgarity for Nikodem during her last visit. She has a peculiar obsession with violence."

"Does she?" Nyx said, interested.

"Why is it you are not taking notes?" Solome asked.

"I was trained as a bel dame," Nyx said. "We don't take notes." What she didn't say was that she learned everything by rote because she was dead dumb with books. It was why she could still recite the Kitab by heart nearly two decades after she'd last picked one up.

"Then this man is not your a.s.sistant? Is he a magician?" Solome asked, and Nyx watched her eyes. It was a hungry look, but not one of physical desire. She hadn't looked at him much until now.

"I have some training with bugs," Rhys said, "My practicing license is provisional."

"On what?" Solome asked.

"On my being employed with a local hunter or bel dame," Rhys said.

"I find this ability to manipulate organisms through will alone fascinating," Solome said. "We have tried to replicate it in our system, but... The ability to alter pheromones, to... effectively reprogram insects at the cellular level, seems to be something innate, peculiar to this world."

"It's inherited," Nyx said, "like shape shifting."

"It was not something we carried with us from the moons," Rhys said.

Nyx, startled, looked at him. "Where'd you hear that?"

He shrugged. "My father was a hobby historian."

Solome said something in a bizarre syrupy language to Danika. Danika nodded and replied in the same language.

Solome said, "Perhaps you could tell us of your father. We're much interested in those with knowledge of this world. Most Nasheenian libraries and records were burned or culled during one of your many wars."