God's War (39 page)

Nyx parked, and Khos helped her move
some stones behind the back tires.

“I want you to stay here, Inaya,”
Nyx said. “When you see us heading back, I want you to take the stones out from
behind the tires and start the bakkie. Understand?”

“Yes,” Inaya said.

Nyx checked all of her gear and
cleaned her pistols. Khos cleaned his own. They did not speak. She nodded at
him when he was done, and Khos popped the trunk and pulled Nikodem out. Nyx
gave her some water, but the alien could barely keep her feet.

Nyx and Khos got Nikodem to walk by
holding her up between them.

They stumbled through some low-lying
scrub and into a rocky gully. The hills reared up on either side of them, a
pair of heavy breasts that Nyx might have found comforting under different
circumstances.

“Let’s keep out of the gully,” she
said. The sky was clear above them, but there were dark clouds just north, and
that meant it was raining up in the mountains. Gullies filled up hard and fast
in the desert. The water might be coming their way already. She didn’t trust
the weather. She didn’t trust much of anything.

They killed a couple of
acid-spraying chiggers along the way and surprised a centipede eating what
looked like a sand cat kitten, but they were all wild bugs—nothing Raine had
thrown at them.

Nyx and Khos—with Nikodem still
between them—skirted the edge of the gully, which meant treading through
waist-high brush. Long scratches lined Nyx’s already scarred legs, and a flurry
of biting bugs rose in soft clouds around them.

They cleared the scrub and rounded a
bend in the path along the gully, giving Nyx a clear view past the base of the
hill. She saw a tall, solitary figure wearing yellow robes. Bugs crawled along
the hem of the robe. Magician.

Nyx told Khos to hold up.

Nikodem sagged between them. Nyx
left her in Khos’s grasp and stepped forward to the lip of the gully. Sand and
stones tumbled down the soft slope and into the ditch below.

Nyx surveyed the surrounding
hilltops—there were plenty of rocky, scrub-filled places to hide. Why show his
magician up front? To keep her from doing something stupid? Raine knew it was
already too late for that.

Something moved just across the
gully. Nyx reached for her pistol with her bad hand. What had appeared to be
another swath of uninteresting brush blurred and morphed into a dark,
bare-headed man in a tattered robe lying in the rocky sand. Behind him stood
the hefty, barrel-chested Raine.

Nyx saw another man step out far to
the left of them. She recognized him as Dakar, a mercenary from the Cage. He
was broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with a crop of black hair
and legs that looked too big and beefy to carry him very far. Nyx remembered
that he was also a shape shifter, and a good shot.

Nyx held her pistol in her bad hand.
“You tell him to stand down!”

“Why?” Raine said.

Nyx grabbed Nikodem by the arm and
jerked her close. She put the gun to Nikodem’s head. “Because I’m a better shot
from here.”

Khos’s hands moved toward his
pistol.

Nyx dropped her gaze to Rhys. Rhys’s
face was turned away from her, and one arm rested limp on his chest. He had not
moved.

“He alive?” she barked.

Raine nudged Rhys with his sandaled
foot. Rhys put up a hand as if to ward off a blow.

“Alive enough,” Raine said.

“You get him up and push him across
the gully,” Nyx said. “I do the same with mine, and we walk off. You keen?”

“I’m disappointed, Nyx. No threats?
No lectures?”

“You’ve always been the blowhard.
You played this dirty from the start. I want this over.”

“You pass me the mark, and we’ll see
about your magician.”

“Don’t push, Raine. I’ve got nothing
to lose.” She tightened her grip on Nikodem.

Raine pulled a small curved blade
from his belt. Even from across the gully, she recognized it. It was the knife
she’d taken from him the night he took her ear. She’d cut off his cock with it.

“There are plenty more pieces of him
I can cut off,” Raine said.

Nyx took Nikodem by the collar and
pushed her toward the lip of the gully. The alien stumbled and muttered
something in her language. She was going to need more water. Her skin was loose
and dry.

Raine made no move toward Rhys.

Nyx tensed. She kept her hold on
Nikodem’s collar. She wanted to throw her into the gully and be done with her.

Nyx licked the sweat from her upper
lip. The sun was low in the sky. She saw something glinting up there on the
hill, maybe ten yards up.

She heard a shot.

Nikodem jerked and crumpled. Nyx let
her fall. Another shot rang out. Khos yelled at her. His gun went off.

Nyx leapt into the gully, and as she
jumped she pulled one of the poisoned needles from her hair and flung it at
Raine.

The needle bounced right off him,
but he clawed at his left breast and stepped back. By the time he recovered,
Nyx was up over the lip of the other side of the gully. She grabbed Rhys by one
arm and one leg and yanked him down with her. They tumbled back into the ditch
in a hail of sand and gravel.

Shots sounded behind her, close. She
heard a dog bark. She regained her feet and turned just in time to see a brown
dog leap at her.

Nyx dropped low and reached behind
her. She pulled her sword from its sheath in one clean stroke with her good
hand and brought it down in front of her. The dog met the blade, and another
shot from the other side of the gully felled the dog. It collapsed at her feet
and choked on its own blood while shedding hair and slowly half-morphing back
into the form of Dakar.

Nyx heard a soft cascade of sand and
stone behind her and turned with her blade to see Raine bearing down on her,
sword drawn.

She put herself and her blade
between Raine and Rhys. She heard more shots. Somebody was going to run out of
bullets.

Raine hacked at her. She stepped
left, caught the blow. She had to use both hands on the hilt to push him back.
He outweighed her and he had the higher ground, but if she tried to reverse
their positions she would leave Rhys unguarded.

She saw a blur of tawny blond lope
up at her right. Khos had shifted. The dog grabbed Rhys by the ankle and
started dragging him.

Nyx stepped back and tried to find
solid footing on the gully floor. Raine swung again. She parried and moved her
feet. Boxing and sword fighting were their own sorts of dances, but you learned
the footwork for one and you knew how important footwork was for the other.

She thrust forward and ducked and
moved again. The problem with Raine being bigger was that she couldn’t take
many heavy blows. And she was missing two fucking fingers on one hand. She
needed to avoid those blows at all costs.

For Raine the problem with being
bigger was that he couldn’t move as fast as she could.

She danced back toward the other
side of the gully. Raine pulled his knife again and came at her with both
blades.

Nyx stumbled on a twisted bit of
wood. She crouched and blocked a blow from above. Raine cut toward her with the
knife in his other hand.

Nyx was already too close to the
ground. She rolled and caught him around the legs. He toppled, and she used her
grip on him for leverage. As he fell, she shot back up and thrust her blade
down.

He twisted and rolled, and then she
lost her feet.

Raine dropped his sword and used his
free hand to take her sword hand by the wrist. He struggled on top of her,
trying to pin her so he could use the knife.

Nyx caught his wrist in her bad hand
and wrapped her legs around his torso. Stones bit into her back. Dust clogged
her mouth. Raine’s sweat dripped into her face.

She pushed herself up on her right
shoulder and rolled him over.

She let go of the sword—it was too
long, this close.

Beneath her, Raine was a barrel of
heat, fat, padding-thick muscle. He stank of old leather and fermented wine and
the distasteful funk that was Raine—a scent altogether too spicy, too strong,
like a musk that had gone sour.

He had her by one wrist, but with
her other hand she had his left wrist, the one with the dagger. He gritted his
teeth. She kept him locked between her legs.

While they grappled, she heard a
distant sound. Somebody calling her name. A wasp landed on her arm. Another
buzzed past Raine’s head.

And she realized there was only one reason
Khos would have shifted in the middle of a firefight.

Bullets could kill dogs as well as
people.

But bugs were tailored to go after
humans.

Fucking
magician
.

Raine’s expression was grim, and
sweat poured down his darkening face.

Bugs. Well. Let him send bugs.

I have lived through worse, she
thought, and she said it aloud, bit through the words: “I’ve survived worse
than you.”

“You have,” Raine gasped, and he
made to roll her again. “But in the end I realized I made you, and because of
that, it’s my duty to end you.”

She twisted her other hand free and
grappled for the dagger, two-handed now.

They rolled again along the gully
floor. The blade cut the inside of her left arm. She pushed back.

He was on top of her again. Her arms
shook as she held him away. His free hand came down on her throat. She pressed
her chin down and pushed her body back a half inch, enough to get a breath.

“Look at what you’ve become,” he
said, and he was sweating into her face again, big salty drops that fell onto
her cheeks, her lips. The veins in his neck stood out. “Do you realize what
you’ve become? You have no honor, no purpose. You bleed others for money with
no idea of the consequences. What a fool you are to think that killing this
woman solves anything at all.”

His grip tightened on her throat.
She stabbed her foot into the sand again and pushed back, caught her breath.

“And you’re a fool for thinking that
killing me is some kind of epic duty,” Nyx said.

How many men had made her? Her
brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose
heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and
how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine’s half-breed muscle? They were
just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and
Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hordes of
sisters, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for
getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or
none of them. It wasn’t what was done to you. Life was what you did with what
was done to you.

“You didn’t make me,” Nyx gasped. “I
made
myself
.”

She released her bad hand from the
dagger and wrapped her fingers around Raine’s face. She shoved her thumb into
his eye. Press and pop. She dislodged the eye from the socket and punctured the
orb. Blood and fluid leaked into her face. He jerked away from her before she
could severe the optic nerve. The eye bobbed against his face.

Raine swore. He grabbed at his
smashed eye.

Nyx heard a buzzing sound above her,
and something dark moved across the sun.

Nyx jabbed her knee into Raine’s
side and pushed him over again. He started to bellow at her, just nonsense. She
couldn’t make anything of it over the buzzing of the bugs and pounding of her
heart. She wrapped both hands around Raine’s knife and plunged the dagger down
at him. He pushed back at her. She leapt off him suddenly, rolled left, and
grabbed his forgotten sword. It was better than hers.

He’d lost his vision on that side,
and while he tried to scramble to his feet and turn his head to catch sight of
her, Nyx took up the blade and brought it down where he still floundered in the
sand. The blade slid right through him, through fat and muscle alike. She
pressed into him until the hilt lodged against his chest and the length of it
buried itself in the sand.

Raine grunted.

Above her, a cloud of wasps circled.

Nyx was breathing hard. Blood
trickled from the cut in her forearm. Her knees and elbows were bruised and
bloodied. She took up the dagger.

Raine gasped. He had both hands on
the hilt of the sword. She pressed her knee into his chest and leaned into him.
His eye dangled from its socket. Blood leaked from the corner.

Nyx grabbed his ear. A dozen wasps
buzzed around the hood of her burnous. Three of them crawled along her arm. She
felt more of them alighting in her hair.

The knife was sharp. Raine kept his
gear in good shape.

She sawed off his ear, and he
writhed and bellowed at her. She leaned over him so he could see her tuck it
into her dhoti.

“Deliver her to the Queen,” he said,
spitting blood. “Don’t kill her.”

“I’ll be as merciful to her as
you’ve been to me,” Nyx said.

She put her other hand on the hilt
of the sword, pressed on it as she moved her face within inches of his. She
whispered, “I intend to collect you in pieces.”

“Nyx!”

Her name, on the wind, above the
buzz of the bugs. A cloud of wasps circling her. One of them stung her arm.

Nyx pushed herself back up. She
stood amid a swarm of wasps. She could not see either side of the gully. The
world was a buzzing, hissing swarm. She put a hand over her mouth, tried to
breathe without inhaling wasps.

But what did it matter? What did it
matter?

Raine’s ear cooled against her skin.
She felt the blood leaking down her belly.

“Nyx!”

Why did they call her? Why bother?
They were all dead anyway. They should have died the night Fatima and Rasheeda
took her. Then she would be dead too, and all this would be over.

“Nyx!”