God's War Part 30

"Of course, yeah. What, you thought this was going to be a party?"

"What about Taite?"

"I don't think he's coming."

Khos grimaced. "I mean, what will you do about him?"

"We don't have anything to trade for him." There was a lot going on with this note, and she was far enough behind to know that she was the player working with the least amount of information. It was a dangerous place to be. It got you mutilated. And dead.

"We know where to find Nikodem, or at least where to start," Khos said.

"Yeah, but we don't have her yet. I want you and Rhys to go to the waterworks tomorrow and ask around."

"You want to get her first?"

"I think trading Nikodem for Taite is a safer deal." And it would give her time to decipher the dictations and interrogate Nikodem when they found her. Trading Nikodem away without getting any information left her with exactly nothing...

Inaya let out a long, low sound of distress. It was worse than the shrieking.

"She sounds like she's going to die," Khos said.

"Well, it happens."

"How can that be natural?"

"What, death?"

"Birth."

"No more natural than death." She won the hand.

Khos threw in his cards. "You're making fun of me."

"You make it so easy."

Inaya's noises were m.u.f.fled now. She'd worn herself out. Then there was a long silence.

Khos looked over at Nyx with his big, blue Mhorian eyes. "She's dead," he said. They were pretty eyes, if only because she didn't see the color that often, but right now, with a woman bleeding and shrieking in the next room, he wasn't terribly appealing.

"Would you get off the death thing?"

Nyx heard a baby cry.

It was a strange sound, like a cat crying.

And then there was another sound of crying-Inaya's crying. Not shrieking, just crying.

Nyx shuffled to her feet and opened the door into the little room with her good hand.

Anneke was rubbing down the purple-red mewling kid with a clean towel. Was it supposed to be that color? Rhys was trying to soothe Inaya, but she was still sobbing, great heaving sobs.

"What's wrong?" Nyx asked.

Anneke said, "It's a boy."

26.

The waterworks was on the south side of Dadfar, which used to be an industrial quarter before Nasheen blew the h.e.l.l out of it sixty years before. It had never been rebuilt. The south side was a mora.s.s of hulking, burned-out sh.e.l.ls where squatters and draft dodgers made do. There were rude opium dens tucked into corners. The pervasive smell of marijuana filled the rubble-strewn streets. It wasn't the sort of place Khos would have picked for a proper fight, but then, fighting wasn't legal in Chenja.

And, in that case, Khos supposed the south side was perfect.

Rhys, as usual, was wearing too many clothes for the occasion. He had picked up a green turban sometime after they arrived in Dadfar, and that-paired with his long trousers, long tunic, and green burnous-made him look like some local man of importance. He kept everything too clean. And he was too pretty. If Khos drew attention for being a pale giant, Rhys drew it by being too well presented. If Khos had still been a thief, he'd have pegged Rhys as a perfect target, magician or not. Holier-than-thou men were smooth marks.

The night was dark; the moons were in far recession. Khos kept his high beams on and parked about four blocks away from the waterworks.

As Khos stepped out, he asked Rhys, "You ever fought a real fight, boxing?" Khos had learned all of his fighting from street brawls in Mhoria. The desert obsession with boxing interested him; he liked going to fights. "No. Boxing leads to gambling, and I don't gamble."

"It's not gambling if you don't bet on anyone."

"Yes it is. Others gamble."

"If you bet on yourself, you could call it being self-employed."

Rhys sighed. He spent a few minutes calling up his bugs to guard the bakkie. When the wasps were settled, Khos made his way toward the waterworks and Rhys followed. Dark shapes skittered along the edges of his vision. He heard the hiss and chitter of giant scavenging bugs.

There were two men sitting around outside a set of double doors leading into the waterworks. Khos smelled bug-repelling unguent around the doors. f.u.c.k, he hated contaminated cities. Behind the men, a globe full of glow worms gave off a faint light.

Khos still found it strange to see so many men around, even though they were old. He had lived in Nasheen for most of his adult life, and he had gotten used to the presence of women and the sound of Nasheenian. Mhoria was still a strictly s.e.x-segregated society, which he'd hated enough to compel him to cross the border into Nasheen. He did miss some things, though. The food was better in Mhoria, and n.o.body was as suspiciously frightened... of everything. Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear. It got to you. He wasn't sure why Taite had brought his sister out to the desert. She wasn't built for it, and she hated it. Taite had invited him over to her place a couple of times, and he and Inaya had gotten along all right until she realized he was a shifter.

"Take care of her," Taite had said that night in the Mhorian cafe. Taite had said that night in the Mhorian cafe.

And now Raine had Taite, and Inaya was Khos's responsibility.

d.a.m.n this note, Khos thought.

The old men at the doors of the waterworks asked for nearly a buck to admit Rhys and Khos.

Rhys made to argue, but Khos paid it. The less fuss they made, the less likely they'd be remembered. A giant white Mhorian and a draft-age Chenjan would get plenty of attention without making a scene over money.

They entered a narrow corridor that stank of p.i.s.s. Khos followed some glow worms to his left. He heard men talking in loud voices, old men, men who'd been to the front. You could tell. They talked differently from the ones who stayed home-rasping, bitter.

Khos turned in to the room. There was a raised ring at the center with plain organic ropes and unpainted corner posts. Lights hung over the ring, but the rest of the place was dark, except for a few globes at the end of the room where the bar was.

"You want a drink?" Khos asked Rhys.

Rhys just looked at him.

Khos shrugged. He had never much cared for Rhys and his b.u.t.toned-down coats and upturned nose. It was like he thought he had some kind of special relationship with G.o.d, like he was one of the First Families. Why didn't Raine take you you? he thought, but that just led to thinking about Taite again, cut up and tortured in some Chenjan offal house.

Khos remembered the first time he figured out Taite was looking a little too long at him, that his eyes spent a lot longer on the few young men they pa.s.sed than the fleshy, friendly women. It had amused Khos to find somebody who thought bedding a man was some kind of sin, something you'd get beaten up or killed for. It was illegal in Ras Tieg, Chenja, and Nasheen, for no good reason except that it scared the s.h.i.t out of people, and Khos had laughed and laughed about it, until he saw a young boy stoned in the street for kissing another boy in Ras Tieg.

b.l.o.o.d.y f.u.c.king barbarians, he thought. In Mhoria, men were brothers and lovers and friends. Denying that was like cutting out a piece of yourself. What Mhoria didn't get was that cutting women out was like cutting out a piece of yourself too. A society needed balance, Khos thought, but a society at balance was harder to control, and Umayma had been founded and built on the principles of control. You controlled the breeding, the s.e.x, the death, the f.u.c.king blood that ran in your veins. The government thought they could control the world through will alone.

Like Ras Tieg and its war against the shifters.

You'll never bother to understand how any of it works, he thought, pushing his way after Rhys through the crowd. You'll never control a world you don't understand. They'd been bleeding and dying for three thousand years on this planet, and n.o.body'd taken the time to understand it. They just wanted to control it.

Rhys found them a pair of rickety seats. An old man came around asking if they wanted to bet on any of the fighters.

Khos could follow most Chenjan and asked who was fighting.

"Good fight tonight," the old man said, and grinned. He was missing most of his teeth. "We've got an outrider named Afshin Ahben fighting our own Khavar Puniz. Good fighters, both. You seen them? After, we have the really good stuff. We have Barsine Shifteh and Tarsa Zoya."

Khos wondered if he'd heard right. "These are men boxing?"

The old man laughed. "Men? No, no. Barsine, you think that's a boy's name? Your Chenjan needs work, boy."

"How did you find women to box in Chenja?" Rhys asked.

"You haven't seen much boxing," the old man said. "We've been getting in some Nasheenian girls this last year. Why do you think our entrance fee's so high? We don't risk our boys in the ring anymore. Too dangerous. Makes them unfit for the front. Gets people suspicious."

"Husayn said she was losing fighters to this ring," Rhys said, in Mhorian. Khos had only heard him speak Mhorian a handful of times. There were days when he wondered just how important Rhys's family was. Chenjans and Nasheenians didn't bother learning Heidian, Drucian, Ras Tiegan, or Mhorian, as a rule. Those were the lesser people, the latecomers who they fed the planet's sc.r.a.ps. "But I didn't realize they made up the entire card."

"So you want to bet on anybody?" the old man asked. His eyes were eager. Khos wondered what his cut was.

"Yeah, sure," Khos said. "I'll put a buck on that second one, Tarsa."

Rhys said, "A buck? Are you-"

"It's my personal take," Khos said. He counted out a buck in change and handed it over to the man. The man punched out a receipt with a dumb stylo on organic paper. If you wanted to make some contacts, you had to start by pa.s.sing out money.

When he'd gone, Khos said, "You see any magicians in here yet?"

"No. We're early, I think."

"I'm going to the bar. Want anything?"

"Only if they have clean water."

"Doubtful."

Khos moved through the crowd to the bar. The advantage of being big and foreign was that most people got out of your way.

Khos ordered a b.l.o.o.d.y rum. The bartender was a stooped old man with half a face and a crusted black hole where one of his eyes should have been.

"You Mhorian?" the man asked.

"Yeah," Khos said.

The man contorted his face in what Khos took to be an attempt at a smirk. Maybe a grimace.

"What's it like, never seeing women?" the man asked.

"It's why I left," Khos said, and found himself thinking of Inaya. Why had she left Ras Tieg in the first place? Taite always said she was happily married back home.

The man coughed out a laugh and handed over Khos's drink. "I like my women in private s.p.a.ces. Can't get away with it much anymore. Not like old times."

"But foreign women are different?" Khos asked, nodding at the ring.

"Foreign women are dogs," the man said.

"I'm a shifter," Khos said. "I take some offense at that." He didn't, really, but it was worth the fearful look on the man's face. Khos was a head taller and thirty kilos heavier than he was.

"They're just bad women," the barman sputtered.

Khos turned away from the bar and b.u.mped into a tall man wearing a long blue burnous cut like Rhys's. He was old and too pale to be Chenjan. Khos saw a locust clinging to his cuff. When the man opened a hand and ordered a drink, roaches scuttled back up his sleeve.

Khos stepped away and looked over the press of people around the magician. He saw no one familiar, so he widened the sweep of his gaze around the tables to see if anyone was looking at the man. A veiled woman and a tall unveiled woman glanced at the bar from their places near the ring.

"Khos Khadija?"

Khos started. He reached for the short pistol at his hip with his free hand.

A lean, ropy-looking Nasheenian woman with a long, mean face stepped in front of him. She had a boxer's face, one whose nose had been mashed in one too many times. She squinted at him.

"I thought that was you," she said.

"I know you?" he asked. In his line of work, he knew a lot of women.

"No, but some of my women do. You helped some of my wh.o.r.es in Nasheen get their boys out."

"You run a brothel?"

"It's among the many things I do," she said. "Have a drink with me."

"I'm with someone."

"He can wait. I have a private room."