Wild cries, from the boys. They had green lights on the ends of their guns, and the flares swept the room. For a moment, Rhys was blinded. He turned his head away.
“Drop the guns!” the man at the head of the group yelled, in Nasheenian, then Chenjan. “Drop the guns!”
“We’re yours! We’re Nasheens!”
“Drop your fucking guns!”
“Drop the guns!” more yelling from the hall.
“I’m a bel dame, you drop your fucking gear or I’ll cut off your fucking head!”
Rhys started to shake. A green light tracked along his breast. Why didn’t she shoot them? She’d killed Chenjans and Nasheenians in droves. What were three or ten more?
And the boy said, “Who do you serve, woman?”
Nyx straightened and pointed her gun at the floor. She stepped in front of the squad, blocked Rhys and Anneke. “My life for a thousand,” she said.
Outside, a huge purple burst lit up the sky, and for one long moment Rhys saw the whole room in violet light: Nyx and the squad, Anneke with her shotgun at her shoulder, Khos crouched at the window with his pistols, burnous discarded, as if he was getting ready to shift. The whole dilapidated room—the peeling paint, the dirty pallets, the bug-smeared windows—all thrown into sharp relief.
The man at the head of the squad raised a fist. The men behind him pointed their guns at the floor. He wore organic field gear gone black for night fighting, and there were black thumbprints beneath his eyes.
Then the room went dim again, lit only by the residual glow from the windows and the green lights of the guns.
More screaming sounded below. More pounding feet.
“This room is clear!” the squad leader shouted.
The men behind him fell back.
For a long moment more, Nyx and the squad leader stood eye to eye, the way she had with Khos.
“You’re on the wrong side of the border, bel dame,” the man said softly.
“We all are,” Nyx said.
And then the man turned back into the hall. He kicked the door closed.
Rhys let out his breath.
“Fuck,” Khos muttered.
The sounds of the men and the shouting receded, headed further downstairs.
“The second squad’s holding,” Anneke said, from the window.
Nyx turned back into the room. Rhys watched her. She looked at him. Khos walked across the room to keep watch at the window with Anneke.
“They’re clearing out,” Khos said.
“Yes,” Nyx said.
Rhys sat back down on the pallet on the floor, suddenly sick. “What were you going to do if they didn’t stand down?” he asked.
“Kill them,” Nyx said.
Rhys shook his head.
Nyx crouched next to him and leaned in so their faces were a hand’s breadth apart. “What were you going to do?” she said. “Where was my wasp swarm, magician? Where were the bugs I pay you for?”
Rhys didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and joined the others at the window.
19
Nyx stumbled into a call booth after the others were asleep in the garret room she’d secured at the low end of Dadfar. The streets of Dadfar were dark, too dark, and they stank like Chenja. She hated the way their cities smelled, and she hated the sounds of their stupid language. It was enough like Nasheenian that when they started talking she expected she could understand them. Then she really heard them, and realized they were speaking something entirely different. The streets were wet; they had gotten into town the day before at the end of some local celebration, probably a mass wedding or a mass funeral involving decadent displays of water wealth.
She made a call. She was very drunk. The liquor wasn’t local. Chenja was dry, as a rule, and she’d had Anneke smuggle in several bottles of whiskey. She was going to need all of them to get through this job.
She heard the faint whir of a burst siren, somewhere to the east. Burst sirens sounded the same everywhere. They were all manufactured in Tirhan.
The line opened up, crackled, spit, then:
“Yes?”
“I’m looking to speak to Yah Tayyib,” Nyx slurred.
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem.” She nearly added, “Tell that fucker I’m coming for him, and I’ve got the queen’s leave to do it if he’s bloodied his hands with this.” But she bit her tongue. A teenage boy ran down the street. Someone shouted from the rooftop. Fuck it all if it wasn’t nearly midnight prayer. The street was going to be singing a dead language in about five minutes.
A long pause.
“One moment.”
Nyx waited. There was some noise coming from the other end of the line—the low hum of bugs, the sound of somebody practicing on a speed bag.
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib is indisposed.”
“You told him who this is?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him again. Tell him I have a question for him.”
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib isn’t taking calls.”
“Tell him I know what he’s doing with Nikodem.”
The muezzin cried. The speakers along the street took up the call. The world was full of prayer, social submission to God.
Nyx hung up.
Nyx woke just before dawn, as the call of the muezzin to dawn prayer sounded across Dadfar. The city pooled at the edge of the desert sea just northwest of the mining town of Zikiri in the Chenjan interior. When the wind blew the wrong way, Dadfar got misted over in a fine haze of toxic grit. The city used to sit along a broad river, maybe a thousand years before, but the river was gone now, and the sand had swallowed any record of it.
Nyx pushed off her sweat-soaked sheet and swung her legs to the floor, rubbing at her eyes. From her garret room, with the shutters open, she saw a sliver of bloody red light spread across the city’s skyline and swallow the blue haze of the first sun. She felt stiff and sore. She stretched out as dawn broke.
In the main room, she heard Anneke and Khos stir. Rhys was already praying. She was tired.
She poured herself a shot from the bottle by the bed and sank it.
Something was pulling at her, something she was unhappy with. She couldn’t name it. She had taken a risk with the call to Yah Tayyib, but if he thought she knew more than she did, he might try playing all his cards too soon—if he was the magician who ran off with Nikodem. Nyx would have bet her left kidney he was. Yah Tayyib was in the breeding compound records, and he’d been with Nikodem the night she disappeared.
She took another shot of whiskey and got dressed.
Nyx pushed back the curtain into the common room.
“Anneke, I need you to bind me up.”
Anneke trudged in, tossed her scattergun on the bed, and re-bound Nyx’s breasts. She yanked at the fabric and grunted as she fastened it.
“I’d like to breathe,” Nyx said. “Ease up.”
“Your tits are too big.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints.”
“I’m complaining.”
“Huh,” Nyx said. She pulled on a long tunic and burnous and tucked her botched hair up under a gutra and fastened it with an aghal. She needed to cut her hair again properly. She hated short hair.
“You ready, Anneke?”
Anneke slung her scattergun over her shoulder and went back out into the main room for her rifle. “Ready, boss.”
“You don’t think that’s a little much?”
“Not where we’re going,” Anneke said.
“Khos, you’re doing recon today,” Nyx said.
“Yeah,” he said.
She glanced at the curtain Rhys had hidden himself behind. Didn’t bother. Sometimes he just exhausted her. He wasn’t happy about Chenja. Or the liquor. He was never happy about anything.