Infidel (20 page)

“They’re all alike,” Nyx said. “They’ll take you for what they can and dump you.”

“Not every family’s like yours.”

“Never said that’s what mine did,” Nyx said. She tried rolling over onto her side so she could reach the ointment next to the bed. Her new skin protested. She cringed. Suha leaned over and handed her the ointment. Yahfia had stuffed it into her hand before ducking back into the twisting corridors of the magicians’ underground quarters. Nyx would remember her look. Furtive, intense—a woman who had just risked everything for a lost cause. Nyx wondered if she’d ever looked like that. Had Nyx ever really risked anything for anybody else?

You’ve never cared about anybody that much, she thought. Not anybody she’d admit to, anyway.
 

“First Families as fucked up as ours rule the world,” Suha said. “Who says bel dames running things would be any worse?”
 

Nyx rubbed the ointment onto her new, darker skin. She was nearly as dark as Suha now. She supposed it would protect her from more cancers, but it was funny-looking. At least her face was the same. At least her face didn’t look Chenjan.

I’m never going to get laid again, Nyx thought.
 

“You heard the old stories about the bel dames?” Nyx asked.
 

“I know all the stories. That was a long time ago.”

“You ever think the bel dames want to get back to a time when they were the only ones policing the world? You know what they got away with back then?”

“That’s ancient times.”
 

“Not to them,” Nyx said. “All we need to do is bring in a body. The Queen does the rest.”

“You trust she can do that?”

Nyx rubbed at her other elbow. No, she didn’t trust the Queen to fix this bloody mess, but she wouldn’t say that out loud. She had an idea of where this was all going, and she didn’t like it. She could see the corpses already, the long line of bodies between her and the last rogue bel dame to fall. But she could also see the alternative, and she didn’t like that either

“You really think she’ll forgive you for Kasbah? And the messenger?” Suha persisted.
 

 
Nyx set the ointment back on the counter. Suha had not raised her head again from her cleaning. Nyx listened to the whisper of oil on metal.
 

“No,” Nyx said.
 

Eshe returned with breakfast. Suha put her gun back together without looking at Nyx. The silence stretched. Nyx wondered sometimes why people stayed on her team. Eshe, she understood. He’d stay until he got caught up with some girl, or until the war took him. Suha would stay until she found another job. Or pissed on her family. Nyx didn’t know why she wasn’t on her way to doing one or the other. Or both.
 

They ate. Eshe helped Nyx get dressed. Covering up her new skin was agony.
 

Suha drove, and kept the silence. Nyx liked it that way. Talking about things just made everything messy. She needed silence now. She had a lot to work out.
 

They turned off the Queen Mushana Way, the highway that would have taken them northeast, toward the far coastal cities. Instead, they followed the pitted track of Road 10, which was the only route in Nasheen that went more or less directly north. The color of the desert changed as they moved north, from pale dunes and blinding white flatlands to crumbling red-brown rock and pitted amber gullies, their bottoms muddy with the memory of water. The rocky gulches became reddish scrubland of stunted everpine trees with enormous, sap-laden cones the size of a child’s head. Twisted bulb trees cast red-hued leaves across the sandy soil, their bloated, water-laden roots bulging aboveground where they provided water and shelter from the wind for a dozen kinds of flowering sage and desert grasses. All along the roadway were the broken, twisted remains of abandoned waterworks and irrigation pipelines leftover from the days before they’d drained the aquifers. In the distance, Nyx sometimes saw the outline of a farmstead or a telltale ladybug swarm marking a plot of cultivated land otherwise hidden from view by the rocky landscape.
 

Most of Nasheen’s proper farming went on at the coast or in oases like Mushirah. People who set up out north were small-time homesteaders, most of them fleeing the constant warring along the border and high cost of the coast. The problem with the north was that the bulk of the water reserves had been piped out centuries ago, and what was left was still wild with contagion. The air and soil in the north were just as contaminated; mutant bug swarms ruled the wasteland.
 

The magicians that had reworked Umayma into a habitable world had been good, but they weren’t gods. The bugs they tailored to remake the world had gone rogue and viral half the time. They’d lost control of most of their concoctions. They were still wreaking havoc. The magicians had cleaned up the worst of the problems in the interior over the centuries, but the north was still wild. Only law breakers, rogue magicians, and crazy people settled in the north.
 

Nyx supposed it was a fitting place for Alharazad.

She knew Alharazad by reputation; most people did. Alharazad had been clearing blood debt for fifty years. Nyx had heard a hundred harrowing stories about bug-addled magicians, cross-dressing Chenjan mullahs, and rogue Nasheenian princesses the old woman had brought in over the years. Bel dames spent most of their time running after criminals in dingy, unfiltered cities, making enemies with other bel dames whose notes they stole, girlfriends they fucked, and sons they killed. Among bel dames, staying alive was an endurance sport, and Alharazad had been the best at it.

They followed the signs for Faouda, but got lost on bug-grazed tracks and back roads. They stopped and asked for directions from a blind creeper with a net full of sand roaches camping out on a lice-ridden sand cat pelt.
 

Suha followed a sandy paved road around a low, rocky plateau. As the bakkie pulled around the curve, Nyx saw what passed for the town of Faouda in the shallow valley below. Two tall, rusted towers to the north and east were contagion sensors; Nyx had seen a few like them at the front. When mutant bugs or miasmas came in from the wasteland, the towers let out a high, keening cry and saturated the air with a neutralizing agent. Sometimes the bugs got through; sometimes they didn’t. When the sirens went off, it was best to turn on your filters and cover up.
 

They stopped for bug juice outside a rusty little diner. Suha filled the cistern with bug juice at an overpriced pump. Nyx sprayed the bakkie with repellent. Finger-length fire ants crawled up from the seams between the stones at the fuel station.
 

“I wish we had a magician,” Eshe said, grinding one of the giant ants under his sandal.
 

“Yeah,” Nyx said, “but I’m not exactly in favor with any magician on the dole right now.” It would take a long time for Yah Reza to forgive her about the messenger. If ever.
 

“Tell me about this Alharazad,” Suha said, capping off the tank. “If her sort are gonna rule the world, I should know something about them.”
 

Nyx peeled off a buck and gave it to Eshe to feed into the big central money repository. “She retired when I was still a bel dame, back before Queen Ayyad abdicated,” Nyx said. “There was a big shift in the bel dame council after Ayyad restricted notes to terrorists and draft dodgers. Made the bel dames more an arm of the monarchy than an independent force, you know?”

“And she didn’t take to that?” Suha said.
 

“Alharazad goes by the old code. Nobody liked it, but bel dames take a blood oath to the Queen. That’s new since the monarchy, sure… we didn’t swear to shit before that. But we all swear that her word’s God’s law. You break a blood oath, you know what happens?”

“Bel dames kill you,” Eshe said. He gave her the change. Nyx took it and nodded.
 

“Yeah, bel dames kill you. Alharazad reminded the council of that after she watched them vote on whether or not to split from the Queen. The ones who voted yes? She chopped their heads off.”
 

“Must have made her real popular,” Suha said, spitting sen.
 

“To some people, sure. Can’t pick and choose with the law. You break your blood oath in favor of some old Caliphate law that says bel dames rule the world, and you get taken out for breaking the first blood oath. Not the Caliphate law.”
     

“Is that why you keep taking the Queen’s notes?” Eshe asked.
 

Nyx peered at him. He was running around uncovered, as usual, burnous flapping loosely behind him, no hood, shoulders bare.
 

“Cover up, would you?” she said. “You’re going to get cancer.”
 

He rolled his eyes, pulled the burnous back over his shoulders. “Is it? Is that why you took the note?”

“I took the note because it’s what I do,” Nyx said. She shuffled back toward the bakkie. She hadn’t told them this wasn’t an official note.
 

Suha opened the door for her. “I bet Alharazad thought it was her job to kill half the council, too,” Suha said.
 

“No shit,” Nyx said.

Suha shut the door.
 

Nyx leaned out the window. “Let’s have you drive, Eshe.”

“Why?” he said.

“Cause Alharazad won’t shoot a boy unless she’s provoked.” She saw Eshe lose some color. “This is why I taught you how to use a pistol,” she said.

“And we’re lucky he’s a better shot than you are,” Suha said.
 

She switched places with Eshe. He started the bakkie and got them back on the road.
 

Nyx sat up front and watched the pitted landscape roll by.

“She have any kids, Alharazad?” Suha asked.
 

“Why, you planning on pissing her off?”

“Just wondering if she lives alone,” Suha said. “I need to know if I’m facing some old bel dame or a bel dame army.”
 

Nyx grunted. “Her twenty kids all went to the front. Three came back. Crazy girl got killed in a locust storm out along the badlands border. Another girl went so bug-crazy after her year in the trenches she got locked up in a ward in Mushtallah.”
 

“What about the other one?” Eshe said.
 

“Did you get any rotis or fried grasshoppers when we were back there?” Nyx said.
 

“Nobody asked me to,” Eshe said.

“What, no food?” Suha said. “Shit.”

Nyx let them bicker. She thought about Raine al Alharazad, the only one of Alharazad’s boys to come back from the front. A boy actually coming back from the front—living all the way to retirement age—was odd enough. But he had come back with strange ideas, too, about how Nasheen should be run. He became a bounty hunter, started hanging around the magicians’ gyms in Faleen, recruiting boxers and girls fresh off their own mandatory two years at the front. He was known for his strong moral and religious arguments against the drafting of men, his passionate desire to disband the bel dame council, and his uncanny ability to hunt down terrorists. He believed bel dames were an unregulated army of bloodletters. They answered to no Queen, no Imam, not even God.
 

He’d recruited Nyx at the magicians’ gym when she was twenty and taught her how to bring in a bloodless bounty, kill with her bare hands, and how to drive a bakkie like a bel dame on a blood note.
 

Ten years after leaving his crew, she put a sword through his gut and left him to die in a gully in Chenja.

So she was really looking forward to meeting his mother.
 

Eshe drove them deeper into the wasteland. They got lost three or four more times, and finally pulled down a winding dirt drive. Pits of yellowish runoff lined the road. Twisted, cancerous pine trees clawed at the pale violet sky. There wasn’t a lot of shade; all the trees were stunted, and the low hills of rubble and stone and battered metal-and-mesh didn’t cast much shadow.
 

The house was built into the side of a derelict that had taken on the form of a corroded hill; bloody amber rivulets were carved into the face of it—traces of the minerals left behind by wind and rain or the interior of the metals revealed after thousands of years of exposure. Alharazad had converted the shell of some old ruin; there were a lot of them out in the wasteland, sky pods and flying machines, abandoned subsurface dwellings and bunkers and sealed, self-sufficient agricultural gardens whose contents withered and died after exposure to the contaminated air. Most of them had been hacked up and broken down for parts, their guts hauled into the interior, but the organic mesh shells remained.
 

There was a stone porch at the front. The door was round and filtered, not an original entrance. Somebody had blasted or eaten their way in and looted whatever was inside a long time before, but the edges of the entryway had been smoothed, and the hull of most derelicts acted like a smart door most days—letting you see out, but nobody see in. There was laundry hanging on a line at the far end of the porch. The dark, shiny material of the tunics and trousers stirring in the wind was just starting to turn green. When you hung out your laundry in the sun it was to feed the bugs that made up the weave. Expensive stuff.