God's War (27 page)

“I don’t like that idea.”

“It would end the war.”

“In your favor. And what then, when
all your Nasheenian men come home to a blasted wasteland? I’m not convinced
they’ll share power with you that easily,” Rhys said.

“You don’t have much faith in
Nasheenian men,” she said. “Are you asking how long it’ll be until Nasheenian
women all become slaves like the Ras Tiegan women and your Chenjan mothers?”

“It isn’t like that.” He hated it
when she made her sweeping generalizations about foreign men. This, from a
woman who had never known a father. That was the problem with Nasheenian women.
They had all been raised without men.

“Why did you leave, again?” she
said.

“That’s not fair.” And not, of
course, true. If you wanted amnesty in Nasheen, you told them you were
blacklisted for protecting a woman. You didn’t tell them the truth.

Anneke walked in from the hall.
“Hungry?” she asked. “I got real tired of sitting around here watching Khos lick
his ass all day.”

“Food sounds fine,” Nyx said. “The
old man got anything?”

Rhys heard a low whine start up from
outside, too high for the muezzin. He cocked his head. He knew the sound but
couldn’t place it.

Anneke turned to look out the
window, and Khos pushed himself away from the wall.

“Fucking incoming!” Nyx yelled, and
before Rhys had time to realize what she was yelling about, he was on a pallet
on the floor with Nyx on top of him.

A heavy thud and whump shook the
whole house, and something rained against the unfiltered glass.

Anneke scrambled across the floor in
front of him toward a gear bag stowed against the far wall. Nyx pulled herself
off Rhys. His face was damp with her sweat. His whole body tingled. There was
some bug in the air, something… He looked toward the window and saw centipedes
crawling along the outside.

“Anneke!” Nyx said. She pulled off
her burnous and grabbed adual-barreled acid rifle from one of the gear bags.

Anneke threw Rhys his pistols.

Rhys shook his head. “I don’t—”

“They’re coming over land!” Nyx
said, her shoulder pressed against the gauzy window frame, one eye on the world
outside.

“Overland?” Rhys said.

“Means Nasheenians are in the city,”
Anneke said, scrambling past him, shotgun slung over her shoulder, sniper rifle
in hand.

Khos said, “You see them?”

“I’ve got a scout in the alley,” Nyx
said. “Cancel that. He’s waving his fucking squad through. Fuck.”

Khos pulled both pistols.

Rhys’s hands were shaking. He raised
one arm, closed his eyes, and looked for a swarm. There were several, but his
nerves made it hard to pinpoint them. Four wild, two locked and specialized.
Whatever squad was coming down the alley, they had at least one magician with
them carrying specialized swarms.

“Don’t fire unless I call it,” Nyx
said.

“Boss?” Anneke said.

“They’re Nasheenians. Don’t fire
without my call.”

“Nyx—” Khos said.

“Nyxnissa,” Rhys said, opening his
eyes. He saw the sweat beading her forehead, her glistening bare arms. The gun
was heavy, and as she stood against the window frame in her breast binding and
knee-high trousers, baldric too tight, he saw the power in her arms, the muscle
under her flesh. He had felt it when she pushed him to the floor, the weight of
her.

She turned to them, outlined in the
blue haze of the coming night, and in her face—the hard jaw and suddenly flat,
fathomless eyes—he saw the woman who had burned at the front. He was
breathless.

“I said you don’t fire without my
call. Those are my boys,” Nyx said.

Anneke set up her sniper rifle at
the window. She would have a clear view of the alley.

Rhys stayed on the floor. He could
track the progress of the squad by the position of their wasp swarms. The
swarms were sniffing out bursts and traps in the alley.

“Nyx?” Rhys said.

All her attention was at the window.

“Nyx?” he repeated.

He heard a banging on the door below
them. Heard raised voices in the house.

Nyx turned to him. “I know,” she
said.

The other magician had sniffed him
out.

Another high whine sounded, close.
“Down!” Nyx yelled, and pushed herself away from the window.

Khos dove flat next to Rhys. Rhys
covered his head with his hands.

The world trembled; the windows
shuddered, and cracks appeared. When Rhys raised his head, he saw that full
night had spread over the city. The room was dark.

“Got another squad,” Anneke said.

“Khos, check the other window,” Nyx
said.

Khos got up and went to the gauzy
window, looked out. “There’s another patrol over here too,” he said.

The voices downstairs rose in pitch.
Rhys heard the sound of a rifle shot. Screaming. A woman’s scream.

He tried to see Nyx, but in the
darkness she was only a dim outline. Outside, he saw the pale green and red
streamers of bursts trailing out over the city. God help me, he thought, and
began to recite the ninety-nine names of God. He drew his pistols.

“Khos, check the stairs,” Nyx said.

Khos picked his way toward the door
and opened it. He crept into the hall.

“They’re coming up,” Khos said.

Nyx moved across the room, walked
right past Rhys. “Get back in,” she said.

Rhys heard a pounding on the stairs.

“Get back in!” she hissed.

Khos stepped back inside. He stood a
breath away from her in the dark and said, low, “Goddammit, Nyx, they’re
fucking coming up. I’m not going to sit here like some martyr.”

“You fucking hold,” she said. “Move
the fuck away from the door and listen the fuck up.”

“I’m not going to—”

She shoved her gun against his
chest.

Rhys opened his mouth to protest,
then clamped it shut. Anneke said, “They’ve got backup in the alley!”

Rhys watched Nyx and Khos.

They were both shadows. He was
taller, broader, outweighed her, and the outline of him—his wild mass of
dreads, beefy legs, the breadth of his shoulders, the pistols in both his
hands—was terrifying in the dark.

“I said hold,” Nyx said, softly.

More shouts came from downstairs.
Rhys heard another shot, then the familiar bat-bat of a pistol.

Khos turned his big body away from
Nyx and moved to the window. “You’re going to kill us all,” he said.

“Not today,” she said.

Rhys stood. He raised a hand, found
a local swarm but couldn’t call it. He could hear them singing in his mind,
heard them acknowledge his call, but they did not change course. Useless
magician, he thought. My God, why give me any talent at all if I can’t use it
now?

Something downstairs exploded. The
house trembled again. Footsteps on the stairs. The smell of smoke, yeast, and
the faint whiff of geranium.

Men in the hall, shouting. The squad
was on the floor. Doors banged open. More screams.

Rhys kept hold of his pistols. He
would not kill for her. He would never kill for her. But wounding… Sweat rolled
down his back, between his shoulder blades.

Nyx had her gun pointed at the
floor.

The ninety-nine names of God….

Lights. Movement. Shadows appeared
in the doorway, green lights.

Nyx crouched low, raised her gun,
yelled at them in Nasheenian. “Bel dame! Hold! I’m a bel dame on the queen’s
business!”

Wild cries, from the boys. They had
green lights on the ends of their guns, and the flares swept the room. For a
moment, Rhys was blinded. He turned his head away.

“Drop the guns!” the man at the head
of the group yelled, in Nasheenian, then Chenjan. “Drop the guns!”

“We’re yours! We’re Nasheens!”

“Drop your fucking guns!”

“Drop the guns!” more yelling from
the hall.

“I’m a bel dame, you drop your
fucking gear or I’ll cut off your fucking head!”

Rhys started to
shake. A green light tracked along his breast. Why didn’t she shoot them? She’d
killed Chenjans and Nasheenians in droves. What were three or ten more? 

And the boy said, “Who do you serve,
woman?”

Nyx straightened and pointed her gun
at the floor. She stepped in front of the squad, blocked Rhys and Anneke. “My
life for a thousand,” she said.

Outside, a huge purple burst lit up
the sky, and for one long moment Rhys saw the whole room in violet light: Nyx
and the squad, Anneke with her shotgun at her shoulder, Khos crouched at the
window with his pistols, burnous discarded, as if he was getting ready to
shift. The whole dilapidated room—the peeling paint, the dirty pallets, the
bug-smeared windows—all thrown into sharp relief.

The man at the head of the squad
raised a fist. The men behind him pointed their guns at the floor. He wore
organic field gear gone black for night fighting, and there were black
thumbprints beneath his eyes.

Then the room went dim again, lit
only by the residual glow from the windows and the green lights of the guns.

More screaming sounded below. More
pounding feet.

“This room is clear!” the squad
leader shouted.

The men behind him fell back.

For a long moment more, Nyx and the
squad leader stood eye to eye, the way she had with Khos.

“You’re on the wrong side of the
border, bel dame,” the man said softly.

“We all are,” Nyx said.

And then the man turned back into
the hall. He kicked the door closed.

Rhys let out his breath.

“Fuck,” Khos muttered.

The sounds of the men and the
shouting receded, headed further downstairs.

“The second squad’s holding,” Anneke
said, from the window.

Nyx turned back into the room. Rhys
watched her. She looked at him. Khos walked across the room to keep watch at
the window with Anneke.

“They’re clearing out,” Khos said.

“Yes,” Nyx said.

Rhys sat back down on the pallet on
the floor, suddenly sick. “What were you going to do if they didn’t stand
down?” he asked.

“Kill them,” Nyx said.

Rhys shook his head.

Nyx crouched next to him and leaned
in so their faces were a hand’s breadth apart. “What were
you
going to do?” she said. “Where was my wasp swarm, magician? Where were
the bugs I pay you for?”

Rhys didn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought,” she said,
and joined the others at the window.

Nyx stumbled into a call booth after
the others were asleep in the garret room she’d secured at the low end of
Dadfar. The streets of Dadfar were dark, too dark, and they stank like Chenja.
She hated the way their cities smelled, and she hated the sounds of their
stupid language. It was enough like Nasheenian that when they started talking
she expected she could understand them. Then she really heard them, and
realized they were speaking something entirely different. The streets were wet;
they had gotten into town the day before at the end of some local celebration,
probably a mass wedding or a mass funeral involving decadent displays of water
wealth.

She made a call. She was very drunk.
The liquor wasn’t local. Chenja was dry, as a rule, and she’d had Anneke
smuggle in several bottles of whiskey. She was going to need all of them to get
through this job.

She heard the faint whir of a burst
siren, somewhere to the east. Burst sirens sounded the same everywhere. They
were all manufactured in Tirhan.

The line opened up, crackled, spit,
then:

“Yes?”

“I’m looking to speak to Yah
Tayyib,” Nyx slurred.

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Nyxnissa so Dasheem.” She nearly
added, “Tell that fucker I’m coming for him, and I’ve got the queen’s leave to
do it if he’s bloodied his hands with this.” But she bit her tongue. A teenage
boy ran down the street. Someone shouted from the rooftop. Fuck it all if it
wasn’t nearly midnight prayer. The street was going to be singing a dead
language in about five minutes.

A long pause.

“One moment.”

Nyx waited. There was some noise
coming from the other end of the line—the low hum of bugs, the sound of
somebody practicing on a speed bag.

“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib is
indisposed.”

“You told him who this is?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him again. Tell him I have a
question for him.”

“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib isn’t taking
calls.”

“Tell him I know what he’s doing
with Nikodem.”

The muezzin cried. The speakers
along the street took up the call. The world was full of prayer, social
submission to God.

Nyx hung up.

Nyx woke just before dawn, as the
call of the muezzin to dawn prayer sounded across Dadfar. The city pooled at
the edge of the desert sea just northwest of the mining town of Zikiri in the
Chenjan interior. When the wind blew the wrong way, Dadfar got misted over in a
fine haze of toxic grit. The city used to sit along a broad river, maybe a
thousand years before, but the river was gone now, and the sand had swallowed
any record of it.

Nyx pushed off her sweat-soaked
sheet and swung her legs to the floor, rubbing at her eyes. From her garret
room, with the shutters open, she saw a sliver of bloody red light spread
across the city’s skyline and swallow the blue haze of the first sun. She felt
stiff and sore. She stretched out as dawn broke.

In the main room, she heard Anneke
and Khos stir. Rhys was already praying. She was tired.

She poured herself a shot from the
bottle by the bed and sank it.

Something was pulling at her,
something she was unhappy with. She couldn’t name it. She had taken a risk with
the call to Yah Tayyib, but if he thought she knew more than she did, he might
try playing all his cards too soon—if he was the magician who ran off with
Nikodem. Nyx would have bet her left kidney he was. Yah Tayyib was in the
breeding compound records, and he’d been with Nikodem the night she
disappeared.