God's War Part 6

"Look at that face! Not a day at the f.u.c.king front."

He made to push through them, but their hands were on him now, and their liquored breaths were in his face. He raised one arm to call a swarm of wasps. One of the girls grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him. The pain blinded him.

"Where you going, black man?"

"You know what Chenjans do in the street after dark?"

"f.u.c.king terrorist."

He didn't know which of them threw the first punch. Despite their belligerence, he hadn't expected it. He never expected violence from women, even after all this time in Nasheen.

She caught him on the side of the head, and a burst of blackness jarred his vision. He stumbled. Someone else hit him and he was on the ground, curled up like a child while they kicked him.

"Turn him over!"

"Get that off!"

One of them had a knife, and they cut his clothes from him. They cut a good deal more of him.

The midnight call to prayer sounded across Amtullah.

Rhys recited the ninety-nine names of G.o.d.

Rhys took what was left of his money and his ravaged body and shared a bakkie with eight other hard-luck pa.s.sengers to Rioja, a northern city, closer to the sea. Towering above Rioja was the Alhambra, a fortress of steel, stone, and ancient organic matting built at the top of a jagged thrust of rock of the same name. Rhys painted portraits in the cobbled square that lay in the shadow of the Alhambra. He sold them for ten cents apiece. At night, he slept in the steep, narrow streets among creepers, black market grocers, and junk dealers. When he was cold, he called swarms of roaches and scarab beetles to cover him. When he ran out of money for canvas and paint, he sold bugs to creepers and the local magicians' gym. And when he was too poor to eat-or the creepers were no longer buying-he ate the bugs that made his blood sing, the bugs that tied him to the world.

He dreamed of his father. Of his house in Chenja. The smell of oranges.

A woman threw a coin at him one morning while he sat huddled in a doorway in his stained, tattered burnous.

"Find yourself a woman," she said. She wore sandals and loose trousers, and her face had the smooth, well-fed look of the rich.

"I used to dance for Chenjan mullahs," Rhys said.

The woman paused. The morning was cool and misty; winter in Rioja. Damp wet her face, beaded her dark hair. He suddenly wanted this strong, capable woman to hold him, Nasheenian or not. He wanted her strength, her certainty.

"But you don't dance for them anymore," the woman said. "Let me tell you, boy: Whatever you were in your past life, you aren't that any longer."

She continued up the narrow street.

In the end, it was not so hard to return to Yah Reza.

Rhys walked to the magicians' gym in Rioja and asked for her at the door. He waited on the street in front of the dark doorway for some time while they found her there, somewhere within the bowels of the twisted magicians' quarters, the world with so many doors.

When she entered the doorway, she was wearing her yellow trousers and chewing sen, unchanged though it had been well over a year since he last saw her.

"h.e.l.lo, baby doll," Yah Reza said.

"Sanctuary," Rhys said.

Yah Reza smiled and spit. "I put on some tea for you."

She gave him some tea and sent him to Yah Tayyib.

Yah Tayyib dewormed him and cut out the old scars from his a.s.sault in Amtullah. He did not ask about what had happened.

"I have seen far worse," Yah Tayyib told him. "You were lucky they just cut flesh and not entire body parts-though I have plenty of those to spare as well."

Rhys ate his grubs and gravy. After a time, he no longer urinated blood, and his persistent cough eased. One morning he found himself in the locker room the outriders used, and he stood there in the doorway thinking about the little dog-faced girl and her beautiful, imperfect hands. The old stale smell of sweat and leather filled the room.

Soon he would go back to teaching magic to Nasheenian children. He would lose himself again to the dark bowels of this prison. h.e.l.l on Umayma. But was it any worse than the h.e.l.l outside these walls?

"Rhys?" Yah Tayyib asked.

Rhys turned and saw the old man approaching from the direction of the gym.

"I need you to wrap a woman for me."

"You don't wish to do it?"

Yah Tayyib pinched his mouth in distaste. "I have no time for her."

Rhys walked out into the boxing gym. He saw Husayn in the ring, surely on her last legs as a magician-sponsored fighter. The last year had not been kind to her either. She was well past thirty, too old to make much more money for the magicians. She was gloved and warming up.

It was the other woman who caught his attention. She stood in the near corner of the ring, and she turned as he entered. She was as tall as he was, broad in the shoulders, and heavy in the chest and hips. She wore a breast binding, loose trousers, and sandals. Her hair was jet black, braided, and belled. It hung down her back in one long, knotted tail. She put both hands on the ropes and leaned forward, looking him straight in the face. The boldness of the look stopped him in his tracks. He didn't know if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.

"I know you," she said.

"You're a bel dame," he said. He knew it the same way he'd known the dog-faced girl had a bad hand, the way he knew a magician or a shifter by sight on the street.

"Was," she said. "Not anymore. I'm Nyx."

Husayn bounced over to the former bel dame's side and punched her on one of her substantial shoulders. "Let's go, huh?" Husayn said.

"You're a dancer," Nyx said.

"Was," he said.

Nyx let go of the ropes. She looked out behind him, toward the entrance to the magicians' quarters. Rhys followed her gaze and saw Yah Tayyib in the doorway, watching her with black eyes.

A broad smile lit up Nyx's face. It made her almost handsome. "You need a job?" she asked Rhys.

"Doing what?" he asked.

"Bugs," Nyx said. "It's what you can do, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. He'd discovered that he could do little else. "I'm not the most skilled, but... I've been told it's enough for petty employment."

"I'm a hunter. I need a team. Magicians get ten percent."

"On a two-person team? No less than twenty-five."

"There's three of us for now, but it'll be five, eventually. Fifteen."

"Five ways is twenty."

"That a.s.sumes we're all equal. Nasheen's not a democracy, and neither's my team."

"Fifteen. I won't kill anyone for you."

"Fifteen, you don't kill anybody, and you sign a contract today."

Rhys turned again to look at Yah Tayyib. The old magician moved out of the doorway, back into the darkness.

"Yes," Rhys said.

She squatted and reached through the ropes for him. He started, expecting violence. Instead, she clasped his elbow. He recovered quickly and clasped hers in turn. And in that one moment, that brief embrace, he felt safe for the first time in more than a year.

"You'll do all right with me," Nyx said, straightening.

"You think so?"

She grinned again. Her whole face lit up. It was dynamic. "If you don't, I'll cut your f.u.c.king head off. It's what I'm good at."

"Not so good as all that, if you aren't a bel dame anymore."

She caught hold of the ropes and leaned back, still grinning. "A s.h.i.tty magician and a s.h.i.tty bel dame. We're two of a kind, then, aren't we?"

He wasn't sure what scared him most: that she was right, or that she was now his employer.

PART TWO.

IN THE DESERT.

5.

Nyx came out of her year in prison with all of her limbs and organs intact, though she had a new appreciation for open sky and food that hadn't been grown in a jar. After that, time licked by in a blur of boys and blood. Seven years of putting together a crackerjack bounty hunting team, starting with Taite, her com tech, then her Chenjan magician. Seven years of boys and blood-girls too. Bounty hunters took up notes on girls and women, and that's all she had a license to be anymore, just another body hacker. Another organ stealer. In Nasheen you hacked out a living or spent your last days hacking out your lungs.

She knew which she preferred.

The war still raged along the ever-changing border with Chenja. Nyx started up her storefront with the dancer and com tech in Punjai, a border city at the heart of the bounty-hunting business. While she was in prison, Punjai had been swallowed by Chenja for six months, then "liberated" by a couple of brilliant Nasheenian magicians and an elite terrorist-removal unit. Chenjan corpses burned for days. All of the city's prayer wheels were burned and the old street signs were put back up. There had been air raids and rationing and a couple more poisoned waterworks, but, as ever, the war was just life, just how things clicked along-one exhausting burst and bloated body at a time.

It was a fitting way to look at time, Nyx figured, as she opened up her trunk one hazy morning while the yeasty stink of bursts blew in on the wind. She and her team were still three bounties short of rent.

She found a headless body inside the trunk.

"You should have put some towels down," Rhys said. It had been worth the look on Yah Tayyib's face the day she signed Rhys, though his cut was still substantially more than anybody else's on the team.

And she liked his hands.

There had been dog carca.s.ses in the alley behind her storefront this morning, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old women netting roaches for stews. The acc.u.mulated filth of rotting tissue, blood, sand, and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out to pick him up. She made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because watching Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as the idea of catching him masturbating-if he even did that sort of thing.

In any case, she hadn't thought to check the trunk.

"Whose is it?" Nyx asked. She was due to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour. She needed the trunk s.p.a.ce.

The body was draped in the white burnous of a clerk, gold ta.s.sels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.

Nice touch, that.

"Khos's," Rhys said.

She should have recognized his work.

Nyx glanced over at Rhys, trying to read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn.

She watched him gather his gear. "I'll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body," he said.

"Khos won't get anything without the head."

"He says the body's got a birthmark."

"Khos is an idiot." Khos, her big Mhorian shifter. Substantial in so so many ways. She teased that thought back out of her mind. s.h.i.t, it had been a while. many ways. She teased that thought back out of her mind. s.h.i.t, it had been a while.

Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited for a word of affirmation, but he said only, "Khos said this one was on the boards for black work. He had me open a file."

Nyx shut the trunk.

"Somebody's going to revoke my hunter's license 'cause Khos can't burn his bodies," she said. It wouldn't be the first time. She'd had her bounty hunter's license revoked twice in her seven years as a hunter-once for accidentally shooting a diplomat's a.s.sistant, who'd been within range of her actual target, and again for employing Khos without a shifter's license. Shifters were expensive.

Nyx moved around to the cab of the little bakkie, kicked the latch loose, and propped open the door. She took the driver's seat, adjusted the sword strapped to her back to make it easier to sit, and pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood. She'd gotten the bakkie off a hedge witch working in the fleshpots on the Tirhani border. Nyx knew all about what it was like to be hard up for bugs and bread.

"Hit the grille," Nyx said. Sometimes you had to get the beetles riled up before they'd feed.

Rhys banged the flat of his hand on the grille. Not much weight behind it. f.u.c.king dancers dancers.

While she waited, Nyx watched a burst from the front ignite across the sky over Punjai. One of the anti-burst guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy whump-whump whump-whump of the guns made her ears pop. The burst burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance. of the guns made her ears pop. The burst burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance.

"Would you put some s.h.i.t behind it?" Nyx yelled. "You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?"