God's War (30 page)

Her eyes widened. She looked over
her shoulder at the door.

“We have to move,” he said.

“He said he wanted you to tell him
where Nyx was. He said… he said….”

Taite grabbed his pack, threw in
some bursts, his wallet, and his bank book. He grabbed a couple of transceivers
from the com and threw in Kine’s dictation sessions.

He took Inaya’s hand. “There’s a
back stair. Please, please hurry.”

Inaya was still sobbing. “I can’t. I
can’t get up. I’m so tired.”

“You can. Come here. Get up.”

Taite lifted her. He didn’t know how
he did it, picking up his older sister, this towering figure he had so admired
before his exile. The strong one. The shifter. He dragged Inaya toward the
hidden door at the back, opened it. He heard someone else on the stairs behind
them. A lot of someones.

He was fucked.

He looked into Inaya’s tear-stained
face and took it into his hands. “Go to Nyx,” he said. “She’s in a garret in
Dadfar, in the Rihaada district on Lower Maida and Seventh. Are you listening
to me? You need to cross the border. Do you understand? You need to cross the
border.”

“I can’t go to Chenja! They’ll kill
me on sight, the bursts—”

“You
can
,”
Taite said. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her eyelids. He had a memory of
his mother doing the same to him, the last he ever saw of her. He could not
remember her face. “You can… A bird can fly across a border.”

“Don’t ask me to do that. Never ask
me to do that!”

He shook her. “Then you’ll die here
with me, do you understand?” He shouted at her, and his gut churned as he
shouted. He sounded like their father. He threw his pack at her. “Take that.
There’s water in Husayn’s bakkie, and a couple bucks in change in my pack. Get
the fuck out of here! Right now. Right now!”

“Taite!”

He prodded her into the dark
stairwell and shut the door behind her.

He pulled out his pistol and crept
behind the com. In the sudden silence, the quiet dim, he looked up at his
little saint, at Baldomerus, and he prayed.

When they walked in, Taite started
shooting.

Nyx faded in and out of awareness.
For a time, she thought she heard voices outside the door. The sound of moist
clicking, the shuffle of insectile legs, roused her.

When she looked down, she saw a
giant centipede gnawing at her left leg with its finger-long pincers. She
yelled and jerked in the chair, scaring it back into its hole in the masonry.
Her body was instantly covered in a sheen of cold sweat. She fought to stay
conscious.

When she next came to, Luce was
standing over her.

“Doesn’t look like so much now, does
she?” Luce said. She took Nyx by the hair and searched her face.

Nyx faded again.

She dreamed of water. Cool,
suffocating water. She swam in a great lake so clear and blue she could see the
ruins of old cities below. And then she was drowning in it, drowning in cold,
pulled down toward the dead cities, cities full of sand. So cold.

Someone dumped a bucket of water
over her. She came to with a start.

“You stink,” Luce said, and set the
bucket next to her.

Fatima was closing the door.

They had left the chair from their
last visit, and Fatima sat in it again.

“Good morning, Nyxnissa,” Fatima
said.

Nyx licked at the moisture on her
lips. Her hands had gone numb. She tried to flex them—the fingers she had and
the fingers she thought she had. Her whole body was stiff and growing
increasingly unresponsive. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She peered at the
bel dames and wondered where Rasheeda was.

“I believe I was asking you
yesterday where Kine’s papers were,” Fatima said. “I think it’s an easy
question. One answer and we give you some water. What do you think of that?”

What Nyx thought was that her throat
was so dry she couldn’t speak. But she was no good to them dead.

She moved her mouth but didn’t let
any sound out.

“What’s that?” Fatima said, leaning
toward her. She gestured irritably at Luce.

Luce walked out and came back with a
water bulb. She held it to Nyx’s lips and let her drink.

Nyx gulped it all down, licked her
lips again. She tried to grin, but it hurt to move her face.

“Kine’s papers,” Fatima said.

“I didn’t kill her,” Nyx rasped.

A sound came from outside the door,
muffled.

“What was that?” Fatima said.

“Sounds like a dog,” Luce said.
“I’ll check it out, but the filters are up. No shifter is getting through that
filter.”

Luce opened the door. She didn’t
close it, and Nyx heard her heading upstairs. From the open door came the
unmistakable sound of a barking dog.

“Why bother holding out now, sister-mine?”
Fatima said, and her voice softened. “There’s no one in this world who will
know or care if you live or die. I am your sister. This time next year, I’ll be
on the bel dame council. You understand that? Why not tell me what I need and
we’ll welcome you back, sister. Isn’t that what you wanted? Kine’s papers, and
all’s forgiven. Do you hear me, Nyxnissa? I have the power to make you a bel
dame again. No one else would give you that.”

Nyx was drooling on herself again.
She blinked a few times and raised her head. “You think I’m fucking stupid?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,”
Fatima said, and her tone flattened again.

“Teams are replaceable,” Nyx said.
“I’ll get another team. You want your seat on the council, you’ll have to
torture something useful out of some other woman.”

“Your sisters were all you had,
Nyxnissa, and in your greed you lost us. I’ve never met a woman so despised.”

“Yes, you have.”

“Is that so? I have three daughters
and a son at the front,” Fatima said. “My lover is descended from the First
Families. You? You have nothing. No one.”

Nyx heard a soft clicking from
outside the door. She raised her head an inch, just an inch, and saw a
fist-size black roach skitter into the room.

Nyx shut her eyes.

There was a pop and a flash that Nyx
could see even from behind her eyelids. Flash bug.

Fatima cried out.

A gun went off. Fatima screeched
again. Noise and movement.

Nyx opened her eyes.

Khos stood next to her, naked, and
covered in mucus, still shaking off the last of his dog hair. Anneke was in the
doorway. She threw him a pair of cutters.

He bent and worked at Nyx’s bonds.

Fatima was crawling toward one
corner of the room, clutching at her bleeding face.

Nyx looked down dumbly at her own
ruined, swollen hand as Khos worked.

“Go, go! Hurry up!” Anneke said.

A swarm of locusts burst through the
door, throwing it wide, and circled the room.

Nyx heard Rhys’s voice then, from
outside. “The other rooms are clear, but Rasheeda’s heading back this way.”

“Do we have another exit?” Anneke
asked.

Khos cut the last of the wire from
Nyx’s elbows and started on her legs. Nyx tried flexing her fingers. Everything
was numb. Even her legs now. She leaned over and coughed up blood.

Khos finished with her legs.

She tried to push herself up, tried
to stand. Her whole body shook. Pain blazed up her legs as circulation
returned. She looked down and saw blood leaking from the wide, wriggling
wounds. If she let go of the armrest, her legs would buckle.

Khos scooped her into his arms. She
had forgotten how big he was. She looped her bad arm around his neck and
tangled the fingers of her other hand into his dreads.

He carried her outside the little
room and up the stairs. They were in some kind of busted-out tenement building.
It stank of piss and dogs and human shit. Anneke yelled something at Khos. Rhys
was at the top of the stairs. A halo of dragonflies circled his head. He was
very beautiful.

“Out,” Rhys said. “Right now. She’s
coming in the back.”

They barreled out the front of the
building. Khos set Nyx in the back of the bakkie as if she were made of glass.
Blood smeared the seat. Khos started the bakkie, and Anneke slung into the
front. Rhys climbed in next to Nyx and held her.

It was strange, being held.

Anneke had her rifle pointed out the
window. “Go! Go!” she yelled. She fired.

Nyx heard something scream.

Anneke fired again.

“What the fuck was that?” Khos said.

Anneke spit out the window. “It
ain’t illegal to kill bel dames in Chenja.”

“Is anything broken?” Rhys asked Nyx
as he ran his hands over her. “You know what day it is?”

She named a date, two days after her
market trip with Anneke.

“That’s about right,” he said. He
pushed her cropped hair out of her bruised face. “Did they break anything?”

“Been coughing up blood,” she
murmured.

“All right,” he said. He touched her
bandaged hand. “They put anything on this?”

“No.”

“All right. I can put something on
it. You’ll lose the whole hand if it goes gangrenous.” He passed his hand over
her legs, and she felt a nasty prickling. The worms writhed.

Rhys knit his brows, splayed his
fingers, and as the minutes slid by, the worms began to drop off, one by one.

My magician, she thought.

“Where are we going?” Nyx asked.

“I have a place,” Khos said. “Don’t
worry about it. They’ll give us harbor as long as we need it. We cleared out
after you went missing. Before they searched the safehouse.”

“Yes,” Nyx said.

“They told you about that?” Rhys
asked.

“They said you were all dead.”

“We don’t go down that easy,” Anneke
said.

“No,” Nyx said as the lights outside
blurred past, as Rhys sat with one arm holding her to him as Anneke kept watch
at the windows, her rifle out, and as Khos drove to someplace she’d never been,
in a foreign country that hated her and her people almost as much as she hated
them. Her head felt like someone else’s. Someone else’s broken body. She had
been here before.

“That’s all right,” she said.

“You need anything?” Khos asked.
“You need some water? I’ve got some up front.”

“No, no,” Nyx said, “but I could use
a whiskey.”

She rolled her head against Rhys’s
shoulder and passed out.

Khos had spent his teenage years on
the streets of Mhoria. He had spent one too many nights on the other side of
the great divide that separated men’s and women’s worlds, and the priests—the
rhabbams—had cast him out of polite society for it. So Khos had made his way as
a petty thief and errand runner for a while, and had gotten into his fair share
of fistfights. He had seen a lot of maggoty wounds, of bodies devoured by bugs
and dogs. On Nyx’s crew, he had seen and done worse. But he had never seen it
or done it to anyone on his team.

Nyx looked horrible. He sat at her
bedside and tried to tell himself it was her own fucking fault. She was the
most Nasheenian woman he knew, and that made her headstrong and arrogant and
skilled enough to cut his head off if it caught her fancy.

“How did you find me?” Nyx asked. He
and Rhys had gotten her to take in some water, a little food. Rhys had done
some bug work on her face and cleaned up her legs, but they had to hire a local
hedge witch to do the rest, which Rhys seemed to find embarrassing. Useless
fucking magician, Khos thought. He never understood why Nyx kept him on the
team. He wished she’d fuck the little prick and get it over with.

She lay behind a gauzy curtain in a
discrete room. He’d shown her the lock on the door, and told her she was at the
top of the house. There was a narrow grill far up on the wall. He could hear
the splash of the fountain in the courtyard.

“I tracked your scent,” Khos said.
There were no chairs in the room. The mattress sagged under his weight. “From
where Anneke said she lost you. I could only keep up until the edge of the
city. After that, Rhys sent out some bugs.”

“So what’s this place? You just on
good terms with every brothel mistress in three countries?”

“No,” he said, and hesitated. Then,
“All right, it’s a brothel, yes, but it’s also a safe house we use for the
underground.”

“We?”

It was stupid to keep her in the
dark about it now, but it had become habit over the years. Nyx was a dangerous
woman. The people on her team knew that better than anyone, and everyone else
she met had a pretty good idea. If she took issue with who he helped, who he
betrayed, and the laws he broke, she would murder him for it. He had seen her
kill people. It was never pretty.

“I’ve been helping the local whores
in Nasheen smuggle their boys out for the last three years,” he said, all in a
rush, as if he’d opened a vein.

“Oh, you fuckers,” Nyx said. She put
a hand over her eyes. “I used to cut off the heads of men like you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Who else is here?”

“We’re all here. They agreed to take
all of us.”

“And of course it’s a brothel.” Nyx
crinkled her mouth. It looked like it hurt. “You must have gotten a lot of
grateful women into bed.”

“Only the ones who were interested.”
But none of them was you, Khos thought. He’d had his one night with her in
Punjai, early on, before either of them knew who or what the other really was.

She grunted. “Can the underground do
anything to help us?”

“You mean besides giving us a safe
house where we can help you recover your ass?”

“You know what I mean. I have a
great ass.”

“You do have a great ass,” Khos
said. He’d spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, and one night with
his hands on it. “Yeah, they’ll put us up, and, yeah, they can point us to the
waterworks where we can check out fighters. The whores go with patrons to the
matches.”