God's War (38 page)

“Boss, this is the biggest gun
we’ve—”

“Leave it. Downstairs. Now.” Nyx
tightened her baldric and turned to Inaya. “Are you coming or not?”

Inaya looked back at the box
containing her brother’s head. From the other room, her son still cried.

“I’m better off here,” Inaya said.

“You’re not,” Khos said. He strode
up to her, despite Nyx’s look, and pressed his hand to her shoulder. He didn’t
care, in that moment, if she hit him. “Come with us, or he’ll kill you. If he
doesn’t, Nyx’s sisters will. You’re tied to her now, and if you’re tied to Nyx,
you’re dead without her. We all learned that a long time ago.”

“I don’t belong to her,” Inaya spit.

“I don’t either,” Khos said, “but if
you have to choose sides, choosing Nyx might keep you alive awhile longer.”

“Like it kept Taite alive?”

“He wouldn’t have made it this far
without her. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Come on, get up.”

“Leave her,” Nyx said. She was
pulling loops of bullet rounds over her head. She had a scattergun in one hand.

Khos ignored her, kept his attention
on Inaya. She was far too pale, her eyes hollowed. It was as if someone had
pulled something from her, drained her dry of blood and passion. He remembered
Taite telling him stories of his brash, arrogant sister, the one who had once
driven in from town with a stolen bakkie she had cut up and rewired, her hair
butchered because women weren’t allowed to drive. In her haste, it was the only
way she could think of to pass for a boy. In the back seat of the stolen bakkie
was a dying shifter who’d been stoned in the street.

“She cried,”
Taite
had said.
“She cried and cried, but she saved that woman’s
life.”

But this Inaya would not look at
him. This Inaya said, “Take my son. Your women will get him a place.”

Khos took her by the arm, a surprisingly
small arm, and pulled her—not ungently—to her feet. “Stand,” he said softly.
“Your son is yours, no one else’s. Don’t deprive him of a mother because you’re
too scared to stand.”

“We’re going!” Nyx shouted from the
door. “Grab Nikodem!”

“We ain’t all gonna fit in the
bakkie, boss.”

“You ride up top,” Nyx said. Anneke
was already pounding down the steps. Nyx hesitated in the doorway, turning back
to look at Khos and Inaya.

Khos met Nyx’s gaze, and for a long
moment they stared at each other. Her burnous was tied only at the neck and
hung behind her like a cape, so he saw her without any pretense, any added
bulk, no deception. Her eyes were hard and black, and she looked at him the way
she looked at everything else in her life—with cold determination, a
willingness to part with whatever she knew, she saw, she had, to accomplish
whatever she set herself to. She would leave him. She would leave Inaya. The
wounds snaking up her legs were almost healed. He noted the missing fingers on
the hand that clutched the scattergun, and the worn hilt of the sword sticking
through the slit in her burnous. The world could burn around her, the cities
turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get
up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in
search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.

“Yes or no?” Nyx said. “It’s a long
drive.”

Inaya gazed up at Khos, her face a
mask of mourning. Her son cried.

“Yes,” Khos said.

Nyx started down the stairs.

“Get your son,” Khos said.

Inaya went back to her room, and
Khos helped her pack her carpetbag. She put her son into a sling and held him
to her.

Khos herded her and her son down the
stairs. “I’ll be right behind you,” he said.

Inaya stumbled downstairs.

Khos walked over to the box
containing Taite’s head. Nyx couldn’t protect them. She had lost Taite, and she
would lose Rhys.

Khos had promised to look after
Inaya.

Damn him and his bloody fucking
promises.

He pulled the transceiver out of his
burnous pocket and called Haj.

“What do you have for me?” she said.

“Everything,” Khos said, and put the
lid back on the box.

Something inside of him hurt, and he
thought about why he’d come to Nasheen four years before. He thought about the
question Nyx had asked him when she interviewed him in that cramped little
storefront in downtown Punjai.

“Why leave a peaceful country and
come out here to wallow in all this war and shit?” she’d asked.

“I wanted to go somewhere where the
pain outside matched what I felt, here,” he’d said, and touched his heart, and
thought of his son. “A country at war with itself seemed like the best option.”

Nyx drove them out of Dadfar and
into the desert. A fine dust coated the interior of the bakkie and the seams of
their skin. She wore a pair of goggles and a scarf tied over her butchered
hair. Nyx left a long trail of dead and dying beetles in her wake and tried not
to think too much about a dancer on the other side of Bahreha.

Inaya sat next to her, her little
body tense, clutching her baby to her breast. She stared out across the flat
plain of the desert, the monotonous line of the road, and said nothing.

Sitting next to the door, Khos kept
his rifle in his lap and his elbow jutting out the open window.

Anneke tapped on the windshield when
the heat got too bad, and they stopped to wait out the worst of the day at a
little roadside oasis.

The place was empty except for a
couple of stray cats and some black tumbleweeds rolling through the empty
courtyard of a long-abandoned market. Nyx knew Bahreha. In the spring, this
whole blasted desert heath turned green. She had laid mines just north of the
city and dug trenches out here, somewhere real close. The whole place looked
different in the summer. It was like she was traveling on some long road,
headed full circle.

Nyx popped the trunk and pulled off
the cooling tarp she’d thrown over Nikodem. Despite the tarp, Nikodem was
sweating a lot, too much. Her face was swollen, and when the tarp came up, she
didn’t do much more than loll her head back and squint. Her eyes looked funny.

Nyx pulled her out and hauled her
over to the relative shade of the massive stone arches bordering the courtyard.
A couple of mangy palm trees jutted up from the sandy ground near the fountain.
She saw some termite mounds in the far distance, but no trace of acid sprayers
or centipedes. Inaya moved after them to stand in the shade. Khos shadowed her.

Anneke trudged up to the fountain
and returned with a half-filled bucket of brackish water. Nyx doused Nikodem in
it. Anneke went back for more, and the two of them wet Nikodem through until
the off-worlder shivered and her eyes started to focus again.

“What did you give her?” Anneke
asked.

“Nothing. She’s overheated,” Nyx
said.

“Fool,” Nikodem murmured, and her
speech was slurred. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Nyx said.

Nikodem firmed up her mouth.

Nyx slapped her.

Nikodem slobbered all over herself
and started shaking. “Oh, it’s much better than you could imagine,” Nikodem
said, and grinned a stupid grin, then winced. Her lip was split and bloody. She
was brutally heat sick.

“You wanted to play Nasheen and
Chenja for fools, and now you’ll die for it,” Nyx said. “I’m not the one
looking the fool here.”

“I’ve created whole armies on our
world, the real world,” Nikodem said. “Dumb beasts. I could create armies here.
Different sorts of beasts, beasts you could never imagine. Your magicians and
shifters…. You have no idea of their potential. We just need to understand… The
Chenjans are more advanced than you are, did you know it? All that holds them
back is their religion. They fear God’s wrath. But I could breed you the sorts
of creatures you couldn’t even imagine. Armies. I can breed them full-formed,
like baby foals.”

Nyx had no idea what a foal was, but
it didn’t sound good. “Anneke,” Nyx said, “more water.” The water would keep
her talking.

Anneke walked back to the fountain.
Khos stood by, watching Inaya more than the road. Nyx didn’t like the way they
looked at each other. She didn’t like a whole lot of things right now.

Nyx crouched next to Nikodem but
kept one eye on the road.

“Listen, woman, listen,” Nikodem
said. “No longer will you have to see your sons and daughters, brothers and
sisters, dying at the front. You can manufacture these beasts and send them out
in your stead. Let God decide.”

“Beasts?” Nyx grimaced. “Shifters
aren’t beasts. What do you and the Kinaanites get out of this?”

Nikodem turned her head away again.
Nyx punched her this time. Closed fist.

Nikodem hiccupped and shook. She
bared her bloody teeth and spat. “You’ll find that ours is the only way to
understand God. There was only one prophet, one Son of God, and He bled and
died for
us
! Yours was a warmonger, just as you are,
and you will fight your war unto death. You say you are people of the Book, but
your religion is black, corrupted.”

“Yeah, your Prophet’s such a
pacifist he sends you to other worlds for weapons and tells you to keep us
fighting each other? Fuck that, you hypocrite alien.”

Nikodem coughed and hacked. “We have
a war to fight. You don’t understand. We fight in God’s name.”

“I understand just fine,” Nyx said.

Nikodem rattled off something that
sounded like a curse. “With shifters and magicians, we could pound our enemies
into submission. We can do much, blending your genes with ours.”

So Nikodem was just another gene
pirate, a fucking
interstellar gene pirate
,
manufacturing weapons for her own God’s war, calling Nasheenians and Chenjans
dung beetles, like some holier-than-thou Tirhani.

“I should cut your head off right
now,” Nyx said.

Anneke returned with more water. Nyx
dumped it over Nikodem’s head.

The woman shivered, then spat, “Oh,
what do you know? You’re just an uneducated bloodletter. What do you know about
God’s plan, about the salvation of your soul?”

“No more than a butcher,” Nyx said.
“But a butcher knows how to serve it halal.” She stood. “Anneke, put her back
in the trunk.”

Two-faced, two sides, like Rasheeda.

It all made her head hurt. She had
one good solution to this problem, the same old solution, but Raine wanted
Nikodem alive. Nyx could kill her later.

After Anneke dragged Nikodem back
into the trunk, Nyx turned to her and Khos. “Khos, I’m going to need your shot.
It’s not as good as Rhys’s, but it’ll do. Can you work your way around from the
other side of the hills? I want you to fire on Raine if he pulls first.”

“And if he doesn’t pull?”

“We walk away.”

“And leave Nikodem?” Khos said, and
she heard the surprise in his voice.

“When we walk away, I want you to
shoot her.”

“I won’t do that.”

“I’m a bad shot, Khos. I can’t do
point.”

“I’ll do it, boss,” Anneke said.
“I’m a better shot than the old dog anyway.”

“Fine.” Nyx pulled a ball of sen out
of her pocket, rolled it between her fingers. “He’ll have his own shooter up
there. You take that one out. When me and Khos are clear, I need you to shoot
Nikodem.”

“And Raine?”

“You leave Raine to me.”

“You know he travels with a
magician,” Khos said.

“We’ll have ours there.”

“He’ll be drugged,” Khos said. “And
he’s hardly a magician even when he’s sober.”

Nyx pocketed the sen. “I’ve got some
unguent in the back. We’ll slather ourselves with it before we go in. It’ll
slow the bugs down, at least. Confuse their sense of smell.

“Keep your transceiver on you. If
the plan changes, I’ll let you know,” Nyx said. “When we have Rhys—after we get
some distance—you take Nikodem out. Or, if Raine tries to pull when we back up,
you shoot whoever pulls the weapon. You can try shooting at the magician, but
she’ll likely have some defenses up. Lay down some cover fire, and I’ll deal
with Raine. Me and Khos can take Nikodem’s head and wrap it in the organic
burnous. Then we get the fuck out of here and go home and collect our money.”

“Sounds thin,” Anneke said.

“Sounds like all we’ve got,” Khos
said, and pulled up the hood of his burnous. “Can we go now?”

They drove out past the shrine
marking the sandy road that headed up toward the hills. Nyx dropped Anneke off
with a good burnous and a bag of water, and Anneke loped off toward the hills
with her rifle slung over her shoulder.

Nyx looked over at Inaya and her
kid, at Khos. He was staring out the window. “You ready?” she asked.

“Let’s get it over with,” he said.
Inaya’s kid started crying again.

“Give Anneke a minute to set up,”
Nyx said. She got out of the bakkie and walked around the shrine. She needed
some space.

Nyx sat down on the other side of
the shrine, in the shadow of the great curved slab, and watched a couple
lizards scuttle away from her. She took a deep breath and clenched and
unclenched her hands, taking a good look at them. She thought about Raine.
Tried not to think about Rhys, about what Raine had done to him.

Raine knew her, knew how she worked.
He’d taught her how to work that way. He knew all about Bahreha. It was why he
asked her out here.

She rubbed at her eyes with her
palms.

“Nyx,” Khos said.

She looked up. He stood over her,
too tall and too broad, a foreign man in a foreign country. But, then, here in
the Chenjan desert, she was a foreigner too. And an infidel. An enemy.

“Anneke’s reached the top,” he said.

“Yeah. All right.”

She pulled out the unguent from one
of the gear bags. They wiped themselves down with it and then got into the
bakkie and drove out to the base of the hills, until the road got too rocky to
drive on.