God's War Part 4

Not the kind she was related to by blood.

Nyx hunkered on the bench. Her insides shifted. She winced.

"How much longer until it starts?" Nyx asked.

"A moment. The visitors wished to speak with the boxers."

"The visitors?"

"There's a ship in from New Kinaan. Had you not heard?"

"What do they care about boxing?"

"Not only the boxing," Yah Tayyib said. "The magicians. Ah, there she is."

At the far end of the room Yah Reza stood in a door that opened into blackness. Husayn strode in from the darkness, followed by a wave of purple dragonflies that coasted out over the heads of the spectators and swarmed the ring lights. Nyx had known Yah Tayyib's blind-eyed boxer for years. They'd trained together back when Nyx came in from the front. Husayn was a decade older than Nyx, big in the hips and thighs, with the beefy legs of a woman who spent most of her days running-from what or to where, only Husayn knew. She had a mashed-in pulp of a nose and a misty right eye that wasn't commonly talked about. Husayn kept a long list of dead men and women in her locker-the ones she'd served with at the front.

The spectators were finding their seats. Nyx watched her sisters take up a position along the far wall. They did not sit. They would look for a lone woman congratulating the winner at the end of the bout-Nyx knew enough about the game not to bet on losers.

Unless she wanted to.

Jaks appeared from the more traditional entrance, the one from Bashir's cantina. She was a tough, skinny little fighter with a face like death-long and hard and forgettable. She was so sun sore she looked Chenjan. She had her chin tucked and her shoulders rolled, and she walked with her hands up. She had no patron, no cut woman, no manager. She walked alone and looked just the way she should: like a scared kid pulling her first fight in a magicians' gym.

Another of the magicians, Yah Batool, stepped up into the ring and announced the fighters.

Jaks and Husayn touched fists. The stir of dragonflies circled the lights, casting wide, weird shadows over the faces of the crowd.

When the buzzer sounded among the caged insects kept just below the gym's water clock, Jaks leapt forward and opened with a neat right double-jab-crosshook combination. She was young, and overeager. She could probably outlast Husayn if she wanted to, but when the bugs signaled the end of the round, Jaks was already breathing hard, and her face was b.l.o.o.d.y. Husayn had clipped her open. Yah Batool sealed the cut and sent her back out.

Rounds were three minutes long, and in a magicians' ring, the boxers fought it out until somebody was knocked down for the duration of a nine-second count or tapped out in their corner. Nyx had seen outriders go down three seconds into the first round. She'd also stayed up all night watching two magicians pummel each other until one of them had an eye dangling from its socket and the other was spraying blood every time she exhaled.

Jaks's bleeding made Husayn arrogant. Jaks knocked Husayn down in the third round. The knockdown sent Yah Tayyib and the rest of the crowd to their feet. The air filled with a collective roar of dismay.

Nyx took the opportunity to slip past Yah Tayyib's elbow and make her way toward the back of the room.

Yah Batool started the count.

Nyx circled around to the front of the cantina, keeping to the darkness at the rear of the ring and avoiding her sisters. Behind her, Nyx heard the crowd give a yell at the count of seven, and she turned to see Husayn back on her feet.

Husayn wouldn't lose this fight. It was why Nyx hadn't hadn't bet on her. Jaks would visit the betting booth to collect her money for the night, and like every new boxer at a magicians' gym fight, Jaks would want to know who had bet on her. Jaks would check the books and see Nyx's name. There was no faster way to get a losing boxer to take you home than to bet on her when n.o.body else did. And if Nyx had done her job the night before, Jaks would be giddily looking for Nyx in the bar later. bet on her. Jaks would visit the betting booth to collect her money for the night, and like every new boxer at a magicians' gym fight, Jaks would want to know who had bet on her. Jaks would check the books and see Nyx's name. There was no faster way to get a losing boxer to take you home than to bet on her when n.o.body else did. And if Nyx had done her job the night before, Jaks would be giddily looking for Nyx in the bar later.

The bodies inside the cantina were packed so tight that Nyx had to shoulder her way through to a free patch of counter s.p.a.ce. She edged a smaller woman out of a seat and ordered a whiskey from a slim half-breed barmaid.

Nyx perused the bar. She saw Anneke standing outside the door to the street. Raine and his team were likely worried the magicians had filtered the place against them. Bashir should have been looking for Nyx too, but Bashir spent fight nights watching the fight, and business dictated that she attend the postfight parties with the local tax and gaming merchants. She wouldn't be running the bar.

Nyx looked for a good way to blend in with the chattering locals and decided to flirt with the sour-faced woman at her left, who turned out to be a gunrunner from Qahhar.

Nyx heard the fight end in round five. A wave of celebratory dragonflies cascaded from the arena and into the cantina through the open door. They brought with them a wave of scent-lime and cinnamon-that drowned out the musky stink of sweat-slathered women and warm beer. Dragonflies meant the magician-sponsored fighter had won.

The bar got louder. The winning betters bought rounds of drinks, and the gunrunner started weeping into her beer, grieving for her wayward girlfriend. She bid Nyx good night.

Nyx watched Anneke leave the doorway. Anneke would take up a position on higher ground, where she could get a better view as the cantina began to clear out en ma.s.se.

Jaks came through the door half an hour later, both eyes going purple, lip swollen. Blood oozed through a heavy wad of salve smeared above her brow. She walked like she had the last time she lost a fight-like a woman who believed she'd never see another break.

When Jaks got close, Nyx tugged her hood back so Jaks could see her face.

"Buy you a drink?" Nyx asked.

Jaks grinned. It wasn't an improvement on her face. "I suppose I owe you money," she said. "I saw that you bet on me."

Nyx shrugged. "Seemed like a fine idea at the time. What kept you so long?"

"Those off-world women chewed my ear clean off with all their talk," Jaks said.

"What, the ones from New Kinaan?" Yah Tayyib hadn't been s.h.i.tting, then. What kind of alien came all the way out to this blasted rock to talk to boxers?

Jaks sat next to her. "Yeah. What about you, what the h.e.l.l you doing in Faleen?" Jaks asked.

"Looking for you," Nyx said. She had never been a good liar, so whenever the truth worked, she used it. "What are you drinking?"

"Whatever you are," Jaks said. She was still beaming, and Nyx had a twinge of something like guilt. She let the feeling slide away, like oil on the surface of a cistern.

The barmaid brought their drinks. Nyx moved closer to Jaks, so their knees touched. "You have family in Faleen?" Nyx asked.

Jaks chattered about her kin. They lived just outside Faleen, she said. She'd been trying to build up to a magician's fight since she was fourteen. She had two sisters and a handful of house brothers. Her mother was on the dole, the waqf waqf, and not well off.

"Boxing keeps me in bread," Jaks said, polishing off her third whiskey. Like Nyx, she drank it straight. "And it's good for picking up girls," Jaks added.

"I don't have a place," Nyx said. "You empty tonight?"

"Mostly," Jaks said. She was grinning like a fool now, like a kid. She was probably sixteen. She'd never been to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the grin, in the eyes.

Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced around. She paid the tab and said, "Let's get out of here."

Nyx hunched and shifted her weight to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to Jaks's neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures hanging around outside but couldn't catch their faces in the dim night. Her sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong boxer and wouldn't be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.

Jaks was only a little drunk; the liquor made her happy.

"Listen," Jaks said as they stumbled down the alley, groping at each other. "We need to be quiet. I've got company."

"I'm a spider," Nyx said.

Jaks took her down a dead-end alley near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx's knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head, crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.

Jaks laughed. "I should have warned you. They don't spray around here. Lots of mutants."

They climbed a rickety ladder to the second floor. Nyx felt like she'd been running forever, since the dawn of the world. Time stretched.

A boy's sandal hung from the top rung of the ladder. In that moment, Nyx saw the pile of Tej's things again, the detritus the Chenjan border filter had left of him. A sword, a baldric, his sandals.

Nyx caught her breath as she peered into the little mud-brick room. A couple of worms in gla.s.s lit the place. There were two raised sleeping platforms on either side of the room. A boy looked down at her from the one at her right. He looked nothing like Jaks. He was large and soft where she was small and hard. His hair was curly black and too long for a boy his age.

"My house brother," Jaks said. "Arran. Sorry, he doesn't do tea."

He didn't look like he'd spent a day at the front, but he was the right age. Nyx had expected to feel something when she saw this one. Rage, maybe; bloodl.u.s.t. But he was just another boy. Another body. Another bel dame's bounty.

Along the far wall was the kitchen s.p.a.ce: a mud-brick oven, all-purpose pot, two knives, and a sack of what must have been rice or maybe millet, knowing a boxer's take.

Arran rolled back into the loft.

"Come up," Jaks said.

Nyx came.

She kissed and licked Jaks in a detached sort of way. It was like watching two people she didn't know having s.e.x.

Nyx lay awake after, until Jaks slept. She was aware, vaguely, of being hungry. She moved like a dream, smelling of Jaks, and slunk down the ladder and into the darkness near the oven. She reached for the biggest of the kitchen knives and put it between her teeth.

She climbed up the ladder to Arran's loft.

He came awake before she reached him. She heard the straw stir. She took the knife from her mouth, cut her palm, and as she met the top of the ladder, said, "Arran."

Following Jaks to find this boy had cost Nyx a kidney, her womb, and a year's worth of zakat zakat from Yah Tayyib. from Yah Tayyib.

It had cost Tej his life.

Nyx shoved her b.l.o.o.d.y hand against the boy's mouth and brought up the other hand with the knife.

When infected boys came home, they jeopardized the lives of women like Jaks and Kine and little Maj. It's what she told herself every time. It's what she told herself now as she shoved her knife fast and deep into Arran's naked armpit three times.

Arran flailed in the straw. Nyx listened for Jaks. s.e.x and liquor and a hard fight would send even the worst of sleepers into a dead quiet, but anybody who lived like Jaks might be able to shake off worse.

Arran tried to catch her wrist with his other hand. Nyx rolled the rest of the way up onto the platform and pinned him still. She waited until the strength bled out of him, then began to saw at the neck with her stolen knife. For a stretch of time while she cut off Arran's head, she wasn't a bel dame at all-just another body hacker, another organ stealer, another black trader of red goods. The only difference was, when she brought this boy in, her sisters would forgive her. Her sisters would redeem her.

She had collected the blood debt this boy owed Nasheen.

Nyx tugged off her burnous with sticky fingers and bundled up the head. She was an hour's walk from the local collector's. Her feet were numb, and her legs ached.

This was all she knew how to do.

She got lost somewhere outside Jaks's place and turned around in circles, listening to the scuffle of feet and bugs. She remembered what Jaks had said about the mutants. Dark shapes hissed and skittered through the alley, some of them big as dogs-only without the cozy fur. She stumbled over a head-size ravager gnawing on a human hand. It caught hold of the end of her bloodied bag and tried to jerk it out of her hands. She bludgeoned the enormous bug to death with Arran's head.

Light and noise from the apartments hanging above her seeped into the street. Her bundle grew heavier as she walked. She kept losing her grip, and the head thudded onto the dusty street, picking up more sand. The organic burnous would eat most of the blood, but not for much longer. Even bugs got full.

She'd just turned off onto a lane she recognized when she caught the sound of footsteps behind her. She didn't turn, only picked up her pace. Her insides were hurting again. She needed a second wind, but she'd already spent her fourth getting into Faleen.

The footsteps behind her broke into a run.

Nyx ran too.

The way was mostly dark, cut through with rectangles and lattices of light. She ducked in and out of darkness. Bugs hissed and scattered around her.

She was twenty-four years old, a bottom-feeder among the bel dames, and she was about to be far less than that.

"Nyx! Nyx!"

She kept running. Just keep going. Just keep going.

Two shadows leaked out of the alley ahead of her. She knew their shapes before they leapt-a fox and a raven. Shifters tracked better in animal form. The third would come from behind. She put one arm over her head to deflect some of the blow.

Her sisters cloaked her from all sides.

I'm a fool, Nyx thought as she hit the dirt, suffocated by the weight of her sisters' bodies. It took three of them to pry the burnous from her clenched fingers.

Nyx howled. She twisted, found an opening through fur and feathers and long, black burnouses.

They shot her. Twice.

Nyx heard her sisters' voices in hazy s.n.a.t.c.hes, little clips of song and breathy whispers. Rasheeda, the raven, had once been an opera singer. A soprano. Nyx had never much cared for opera. It was all about virgin suicides and widowed martyrs. She got enough of that in real life.

The air was sultry and smelled of death and lemon. Nyx saw tall women wearing the white caps of Plague Sisters moving through the hall. She could hear the click and scuttle of insectile legs. The Plague Sisters were a guild of magicians specializing in the decontamination of bel dames and the refurbishment of discharged soldiers. Nyx had been among them before, back when her carca.s.s was hauled in from the front, charred and twisted. But she'd been too ruined even for the Plague Sisters, and they'd sent her to Yah Reza and Yah Tayyib, two of the country's most skilled magicians. Nyx's first memories of reconst.i.tuted life were of Faleen. The sound of cicadas. Yah Reza's eyes, the color of sapphire flies.

Fatima minced into the room with a white raven on her shoulder... Rasheeda the raven. Fatima spent a moment fussing with the gas lamp near the bed. Fatima was picky about things, and had gone so far as to pose her bodies for pick up. She also dabbled her fingers in bel dame politics. She had the patience for it, and the bloodline. Bel dames ran through every generation of her family.

Gas lamps meant they were in Mushtallah or Amtullah, one of the major cities in the heart of Nasheen. If that was true, it meant Nyx had been out a long time-and she was in a lot of trouble. Behind Fatima was a long, thin window that looked down onto a street the color of foam. Extravagant figures cloaked in peach and crimson milled past the smoky gla.s.s like burned jewel bugs. Nyx no longer wondered if she was still half asleep. Her dreams were never so colorful.

"She's coming around again," Fatima said to the raven.

The raven shivered once, hopped from Fatima's shoulder, and began to morph into her sister Rasheeda. A few minutes later, Rasheeda was mostly human again, naked, covered in mucus, tossing her head of dark hair and snickering. Feathers rolled out across the floor.

Rasheeda came alongside the bed and wiped the worst of the mucus from her face and neck with one of Nyx's bedsheets. She had a peculiar way of c.o.c.king her head that put Nyx in mind of the raven.

"You look terrible," Rasheeda said.

"You helped," Nyx said.

Nyx tried to sit up. Rasheeda snickered again. Unlike Fatima's ill.u.s.trious line, Rasheeda's was nothing special-she'd been just another grubby kid from the coast whose mother was into career breeding. Nyx heard that Rasheeda had gone mad at the front, ripping out entrails and eating Chenjan hearts. There was only one suitable occupation for a madwoman from the front after she was discharged.

Nyx gazed down the length of her own body. She swam in the black nightdress of the Plague Sisters. She pushed up the sleeves and saw her own tawny wrists and arms, like sticks. She dared not look at her belly or legs. The bullets her sisters shot her with had been tipped with bugs. They'd whittled her down to almost nothing.

"Get me something to eat," Nyx croaked, and Rasheeda laughed.

One of the Plague Sisters strode into the room, white skirt trailing behind her. A cloud of spiders clung to her hem, darkening the fabric.

The Plague Sister fussed with Nyx's bedding and probed at her arm with the puckered snout of a semi-organic needle, which blinked at Nyx with half-dumb eyes. Nyx flinched. The sister gave her a disapproving frown and pulled away from her arm, taking the blood sample with her.

"I'll mark her for final a.n.a.lysis," the sister said, "but the venom should be out of her system." She walked back out, her entourage of insects pooling behind her.