God's War (33 page)

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 nobody’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 scraps. “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 passing 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 bloody 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 spaces. 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
bumped 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 whores 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.”

Khos hesitated. She wasn’t an
attractive woman, certainly not the type he’d want to have a drink with under
any other circumstances, but he was here to scout out news and make contacts,
and she was offering. He’d also be interested to know how she was going around
unveiled without an escort in Chenja.

And how she knew his name.

“All right, then. One drink,” he
said. “You have a name?”

“In Chenja, I go by Haj.”

“Seriously?”

She grinned. He saw dark circles
under her eyes. Nyx would say she was a bleeder. “Seriously.”

Haj led him up a winding set of
stairs to the balcony overlooking the ring. She opened a battered metal door
and revealed a lushly appointed viewing box with windows overlooking the ring.

Two young women slumped on the
raised benches set against the windows. The benches were covered in an
assortment of pillows that matched the gauzy veils the women wore. Both were
Chenjan dark. They looked up at Haj and Khos with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Get this man a drink,” Haj told one
of the women.

The woman got to her feet with the
practiced ease of a dancer. She went to the private bar at the other side of the
room and poured out two glasses of dark liquor.

“Sit,” Haj told Khos.

He pushed some cushions out of the
way and sat next to the other woman on the bench. She smelled good, some kind
of heady, flowery scent peppered with cinnamon. Haj was well off, but not well
off enough to have boys.

Haj sat in an armchair across from
him and took the liquor the woman offered her.

“I’d heard you were in town,” Haj
said.

Khos felt the hair on the back of
his neck rise. Who else was tagging them?

“Is that so?”

“I run the brothel on East Babuk,”
she said. “Oversee it, actually, for my employer. I found out they’re giving
you sanctuary.”

“Is that so?” Khos repeated, still
too startled to come up with anything else. He couldn’t imagine Mahrokh selling
him out, but he’d been wrong before. Who the hell
was
this woman? “Who’s your employer?” he asked.

“Local magistrate,” Haj said, waving
a hand. “No one important. I hoped to thank you for services rendered. You
helped some good men dodge the Nasheenian draft. I’m grateful for that.”

“Kin of yours?”

A knock came at the door.

“Enter,” Haj said.

A bulky Nasheenian woman pushed into
the room. She wore a set of dueling pistols, and one arm was paler than the
other.

Khos tensed. He knew that woman.

A stocky kid came in behind her.

“You entertaining again?” Dahab said
to Haj. She spared only a glance at Khos. Something else was on her mind,
praise be. “I need to talk to you about Nikodem.”

Khos forced himself to drink more.

“Over here,” Haj said.

“You’re such a voyeur,” Dahab said.
“I don’t have time for this shit.”

“So long as I pay you, you’ll make
time. Come on.”

Haj moved to the far end of the room
with Dahab. The girl who’d come in with Dahab hung around pretending not to
look at Khos and the women.

“You’re a good man,” one of the
women next to Khos murmured, in Chenjan. She put a soft hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t feel so great at the moment.

He took another drink and kept his
head tilted toward Dahab and Haj. He’d seen Dahab two or three times around the
Cage, but it looked like she hadn’t recognized him.

“I can’t protect a woman who goes
out to fights,” Dahab said.

“You could have protected her just
fine if you brought me that bitch you said you had in Jameela.”

“I ain’t God.”

“Neither is she.”

Dahab and Haj said something else,
and then Dahab was marching past him and out the door. Her squirt followed
after her, sparing one last look back.

Haj sat across from him as the
Chenjan woman next to him kissed his neck. Memories of his night with Nyx,
years before—the smell of her skin, the strength in her legs, her perfect naked
ass—showed up in the strangest places.

When the woman pulled away from him,
he saw a smile touch Haj’s plain face.

“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about
what I can offer you for Nyxnissa’s head—and the safety of your little white
bitch.”

Khos took another drink.

“You sure about that?” Nyx asked
from her seat on the tattered divan. Her fingers throbbed—the ones that weren’t
there. She had lost an arm in a tangle with a sand cat once, but she was under
the magicians’ protection then, and after passing out from blood loss, she’d
gone only half a day without an arm before getting fitted with a new one. Ghost
pains were new to her.

Rhys shifted his weight from one
foot to the other. Khos leaned against the card table in front of her, chewing
on his thumb. Anneke was wandering around the room, holding the brat in her
ropy arms and muttering in low tones. She was probably telling the kid prison
stories.

“We tailed Nikodem and the magicians
after the fight,” Khos said. “They’re living in an upscale hotel on the east
side. Rhys got a list of the tenants, and there’s a party of three under Yah
Tayyib’s name.”

Once again—Yah Tayyib. Nyx supposed
she should have been gleeful. Instead, she was exhausted. Being right didn’t
make it any easier.

“But you didn’t see Yah Tayyib at
the fight?”

“No,” Rhys said. “I called Yah Reza,
and she has Yah Tayyib written in as being under residence at the gym in
Faleen.”

“That just means his name’s on a
docket. Doesn’t mean he’s there,” Nyx said. “When’s the next fight?”

“A week from now. You don’t want to
nab her at the house?” Khos asked. He started fussing with his dreads. Always a
bad sign. Something had gotten him worked up at the fight.

“It’ll be easier to take her at the
next fight. I’ll be in better shape then. If we move now, we’re one person
short.”

“Two,” Khos said. “There’s Taite.”

“I haven’t forgotten about Taite.”
Nyx nodded at Anneke, who had settled the kid on the floor in a spill of
blankets. Anneke pulled out her shotgun and started polishing it, still
nattering. She was telling the kid how to take apart an X1080 assault rifle.
“Kinda hard to forget, isn’t he?”

“Sure,” Khos said, and grimaced at
the floor.

“Anneke, I want you scouting out
this building of hers. Get me as much information as possible,” Nyx said. “How
about
that
woman? She ready for visitors?” She
nodded toward Inaya’s room.

“Not really,” Anneke said.

“Too bad,” Nyx said. She hobbled to
her feet and waved away Rhys’s help. It was time to move. In every sense.

She knocked on the door with her
good hand and entered before Inaya said anything. The room was too hot,
airless, and dark. She needed to open some of the lattices.

Inaya raised her head, then turned
toward the wall.

“I know you don’t want to speak to
me, but I need answers that might get Taite back.”

Inaya looked at her.

“Did he give you anything before you
left? Supplies, papers, stuff like that?”

“He gave me some things from his
desk. And food. There was food and water in the bakkie.”

“Where’s the stuff from the desk?”

“In the bakkie. I put the
transmission canisters under the rug beneath the gas pedals, if that’s what
you’re after.”

“The bakkie? Who’s bakkie?”

“Husayn’s. I left it parked by that
place. Your other garret.”

Nyx tried to get her head around
that. “You got yourself
and
a bakkie over the
border?” Khos had said something about Inaya being a shifter, but shifters
couldn’t shift bakkies, for fuck’s sake.

“That’s my business,” Inaya said.

Well, shit, Nyx thought. “Thanks,”
she said.

She dragged herself back into the
main room.

“Rhys?”

“Yes?”

“I need you to go and find Husayn’s
bakkie. Inaya parked it outside that garret. I have no fucking idea how she got
it over, but I need whatever you can find inside it. Look under the gas pedals.
If we’re lucky, nobody else looked there.”

Khos sat next to the kid and Anneke.
He counted out violet bursts from his gunnysack. “That thing’s been gutted by
now. Or stolen altogether,” he said.

“I need to risk it,” Nyx said.

Rhys pulled on his burnous. “Do we
need anything else?”

“Pick up some rotis,” Anneke said.
“And milk.”

Rhys dug some money from their
coffers and headed out.

Nyx lay on the divan and waited.
There was nothing worse than giving orders from a divan. She pulled up her
trousers and looked at the ruined flesh of her legs. They were healing up. Not
prettily, but healing up.

Inaya stayed hunkered in the dark
bedroom. Anneke brought the kid in to Inaya when he started to fuss. The kid
ate a lot. Nyx played cards and thought about Yah Tayyib. She dozed and dreamed
of the war.