God's War (5 page)

When he arrived at Yah Tayyib’s
operating theater, he saw blood spattering the stones, hungry bugs lapping up
their fill. Another hard-up bel dame had come to collect
zakat
.
Another godless woman was destined to die.

Nyx struggled out of a groggy half
dream of drowning and fell off the giant stone slab in Yah Tayyib’s operating
theater. The floor was cold.

Yah Tayyib helped her up. One curved
wall of the theater was lined with squat glass jars of organs. Glow worms
ringed the shelves and hugged the glass. Nyx noted the long table at Yah
Tayyib’s left and the length of silk that covered his instruments, but her gaze
did not settle there long. She was interested in the medicine wardrobe at the
back. The one with the morphine.

She was naked. Blood trickled down
one leg.

“How do you feel?” Yah Tayyib asked.
He wore a billowing blue robe. Carrion beetles clung to the hem. He was a tall
thin man, well over sixty and gray in the beard. His face was a sunken ruin,
the nose a mashed pulp of flesh. But his hands, his all-important magician’s
hands, were smooth and straight-fingered.

Nyx wondered how she was supposed to
respond to that. Her head felt stuffed with honey.

“You were missing a kidney,” Yah
Tayyib said. “I replaced that as well.”

“I traded it for a ticket out of
Chenja. The other one wasn’t mine either.”

“I didn’t think it was,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I put it in there six months ago.”

“Ah,” Nyx said.

“I’m quite sorry about the womb,”
Yah Tayyib said. “It was your original, you know, and uniquely shaped.
Bicornuate. I would have bought it myself, though for much less than you likely
sold it.” He always talked about body parts like bug specimens—dry and purely
academic.

“I don’t care much how it’s shaped
or whose it is,” she said. “I care about what it can do for me. What time is
it? I’ve got Raine on my tail.”

She looked around for her clothes.
They were stacked neatly next to the operating slab. She started to get
dressed, slowly. It was like trying to work somebody else’s body. She was still
a big woman, but she was down to her dhoti and binding, and both were tattered
and loose, hanging off her like a shroud.

“You have a price on your head,” Yah
Tayyib said, and turned to wash his hands at the sink. Flesh beetles clung to
the end of the tap, bundling up drops of water in their sticky legs.

“Yeah,” she said. “More than fifty,
apparently.”

“You should turn yourself in to your
bel dame sisters. The bounty hunters won’t be so generous. They say it’s black
money this time. Gene pirates.” He wiped his hands dry on his robes and
regarded her. “What were you carrying?”

“Zygotes,” Nyx said. “Ferrier work.
I was supposed to hand it off on this end, but I had to drop it and sell it to
some butchers to keep my sisters busy. I figure they lost at least half a day
trying to figure out where I dropped it. No womb, no proof, no way to fully
collect their note on me.”

The fist in her belly tightened,
contracted. She felt dizzy, and leaned back against the stone altar.

“You’ve indebted yourself to us
again,” Yah Tayyib said. “This is not the place to settle a blood note. Yours
or theirs. Keep your bloody boys and your bloody sisters out of my ring.”

“Still got something against bel
dames?”

“You’ve never been a boy at the
front.”

“I can’t imagine you being
frightened of anything, Yah Tayyib.”

“We all manage our grief
differently,” Yah Tayyib said. “Three dead wives and a dozen dead children make
me more human, not less. You have chosen your path. I have chosen mine. This is
the last time I do this for you, Nyxnissa.”

“You say that every time. Is it too
late to bet on the boxers?”

“What in this world do you own to
bet?”

Nyx prodded at the red scarring
tissue on her right hip. “I’ve got good credit,” she said. She always paid her
debts to the magicians… eventually.

“I doubt that,” he said. “You’ve
nothing more than rags and flesh.”

She shook her head. Her vision swam.
“I’ll get paid when I’ve cleared the blood debt. I can buy whatever I need
after that.”

Yah Tayyib sighed. He walked over to
the big wardrobe next to the medicine cabinet.

“Am I done bleeding?” Nyx said.

Yah Tayyib pulled out a deep
mahogany burnous. “You’ll expel the usual bugs in a few hours. They’re aiding
in the last of the repairs. Here, this is the most inconspicuous I have.”

Nyx donned the burnous. It was
surprisingly soft. “Organic?” she asked.

“Yes. It will breathe for you, if
you need it to.”

“Great,” she said, as if that would
make any difference tonight. “Walk me out?”

Yah Tayyib escorted her back through
the labyrinthine halls of the magicians’ quarters, all windowless. He took her
to the internal magician’s betting booth, where a young woman Nyx knew from her
days at the gym stood at the window collecting baskets of bugs.

“I still have credit here, Maj?” Nyx
asked.

“You always have credit,” Maj said.

Yah Tayyib huffed his displeasure as
Nyx set down a bet on Jaks so Hajjij for fifty.

“You’re a mad woman,” he said as Nyx
picked up her receipt and then pushed back through the crowd of magicians.

“Maybe so,” she said. But this would
get her Jaks, and Jaks would get her the boy, and the boy would put money in
her pockets—and save some Nasheenian village from contamination.

That was the idea, anyway.

Yah Tayyib brought her back to the
gym, which had been transformed into a fighting arena. The lights outside the
ring were dim. The last of the speed bags had been put away. A man who looked
remarkably like a Chenjan dancer moved under the ring-lights and it took Nyx
half a minute to realize the dancer really
was
Chenjan—and
male. Some instinctual part of her thought he’d look a lot better blown up, but
there was something she liked about him, something about the way he moved, the
delicacy of his hands.

She and Yah Tayyib negotiated the
crowd to a bench at the back, along the edges of the darkness. Nyx kept her eye
on the dancer.

“Who’s he?” Nyx asked.

“The boy?”

He was probably eighteen or
nineteen, old enough for the front. Not so much a boy, in Nasheen.

“Yeah,” she said.

“A pet project of Yah Reza’s,” Yah
Tayyib said. “A political refugee from Chenja. He calls himself Rhys.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“A
nom de guerre
,”
he said, using the Ras Tiegan expression. “Yah Reza tells me he used to dance
for the Chenjan mullahs as a child. When his father asked him to carry out the
punishment of his own sister because he himself was unable, Rhys refused, and
was exiled. That’s the story he tells, in any case.”

“Does he do anything besides dance?”

“He’s not a prostitute, if that’s
what you’re asking,” Yah Tayyib said.

“Then what’s he do?” she asked.

Yah Tayyib folded his hands in his
lap. “He’s good with bugs.”

“A bel dame could use someone good
with bugs.”

“He’s worth three of you.”

“You saying I’m a bad girl?”

Yah Tayyib’s expression was stony.
“I’m saying you’re less than virtuous.”

Well. She’d been called worse.

The dancer slowed and stilled. The
match was about to start, and his time was up.

Nyx scanned the crowd for Raine and
his crew, in case they’d gotten in through the cantina entrance. Her gaze found
a handful of very different figures instead. Three tall women with the black
hoods of their burnouses pulled up, the hilt of their blades visible at their
hips, moved through the throng of spectators, sniffing at glasses of liquor and
brushing bugs from their sleeves.

Her sisters.

Not the kind she was related to by
blood.

Nyx hunkered on the bench. Her
insides shifted. She winced.

“How much longer until it starts?”
Nyx asked.

“A moment. The visitors wished to
speak with the boxers.”

“The visitors?”

“There’s a ship in from New Kinaan.
Had you not heard?”

“What do they care about boxing?”

“Not only the boxing,” Yah Tayyib
said. “The magicians. Ah, there she is.”

At the far end of the room Yah Reza
stood in a door that opened into blackness. Husayn strode in from the darkness,
followed by a wave of purple dragonflies that coasted out over the heads of the
spectators and swarmed the ring lights. Nyx had known Yah Tayyib’s blind-eyed
boxer for years. They’d trained together back when Nyx came in from the front.
Husayn was a decade older than Nyx, big in the hips and thighs, with the beefy
legs of a woman who spent most of her days running—from what or to where, only
Husayn knew. She had a mashed-in pulp of a nose and a misty right eye that
wasn’t commonly talked about. Husayn kept a long list of dead men and women in
her locker—the ones she’d served with at the front.

The spectators were finding their
seats. Nyx watched her sisters take up a position along the far wall. They did
not sit. They would look for a lone woman congratulating the winner at the end
of the bout—Nyx knew enough about the game not to bet on losers.

Unless she wanted to.

Jaks appeared from the more
traditional entrance, the one from Bashir’s cantina. She was a tough, skinny
little fighter with a face like death—long and hard and forgettable. She was so
sun sore she looked Chenjan. She had her chin tucked and her shoulders rolled,
and she walked with her hands up. She had no patron, no cut woman, no manager.
She walked alone and looked just the way she should: like a scared kid pulling
her first fight in a magicians’ gym.

Another of the magicians, Yah
Batool, stepped up into the ring and announced the fighters.

Jaks and Husayn touched fists. The
stir of dragonflies circled the lights, casting wide, weird shadows over the
faces of the crowd.

When the buzzer sounded among the
caged insects kept just below the gym’s water clock, Jaks leapt forward and
opened with a neat right double-jab-crosshook combination. She was young, and
overeager. She could probably outlast Husayn if she wanted to, but when the
bugs signaled the end of the round, Jaks was already breathing hard, and her
face was bloody. Husayn had clipped her open. Yah Batool sealed the cut and
sent her back out.

Rounds were three minutes long, and
in a magicians’ ring, the boxers fought it out until somebody was knocked down for
the duration of a nine-second count or tapped out in their corner. Nyx had seen
outriders go down three seconds into the first round. She’d also stayed up all
night watching two magicians pummel each other until one of them had an eye
dangling from its socket and the other was spraying blood every time she
exhaled.

Jaks’s bleeding made Husayn
arrogant. Jaks knocked Husayn down in the third round. The knockdown sent Yah
Tayyib and the rest of the crowd to their feet. The air filled with a
collective roar of dismay.

Nyx took the opportunity to slip
past Yah Tayyib’s elbow and make her way toward the back of the room.

Yah Batool started the count.

Nyx circled around to the front of
the cantina, keeping to the darkness at the rear of the ring and avoiding her
sisters. Behind her, Nyx heard the crowd give a yell at the count of seven, and
she turned to see Husayn back on her feet.

Husayn wouldn’t lose this fight. It
was why Nyx
hadn’t
bet on her. Jaks would visit the
betting booth to collect her money for the night, and like every new boxer at a
magicians’ gym fight, Jaks would want to know who had bet on her. Jaks would
check the books and see Nyx’s name. There was no faster way to get a losing
boxer to take you home than to bet on her when nobody else did. And if Nyx had
done her job the night before, Jaks would be giddily looking for Nyx in the bar
later.

The bodies inside the cantina were
packed so tight that Nyx had to shoulder her way through to a free patch of
counter space. She edged a smaller woman out of a seat and ordered a whiskey
from a slim half-breed barmaid.

Nyx perused the bar. She saw Anneke
standing outside the door to the street. Raine and his team were likely worried
the magicians had filtered the place against them. Bashir should have been looking
for Nyx too, but Bashir spent fight nights watching the fight, and business
dictated that she attend the postfight parties with the local tax and gaming
merchants. She wouldn’t be running the bar.

Nyx looked for a good way to blend
in with the chattering locals and decided to flirt with the sour-faced woman at
her left, who turned out to be a gunrunner from Qahhar.

Nyx heard the fight end in round
five. A wave of celebratory dragonflies cascaded from the arena and into the
cantina through the open door. They brought with them a wave of scent—lime and
cinnamon—that drowned out the musky stink of sweat-slathered women and warm
beer. Dragonflies meant the magician-sponsored fighter had won.

The bar got louder. The winning
betters bought rounds of drinks, and the gunrunner started weeping into her
beer, grieving for her wayward girlfriend. She bid Nyx good night.

Nyx watched Anneke leave the doorway.
Anneke would take up a position on higher ground, where she could get a better
view as the cantina began to clear out en masse.

Jaks came through the door half an
hour later, both eyes going purple, lip swollen. Blood oozed through a heavy
wad of salve smeared above her brow. She walked like she had the last time she
lost a fight—like a woman who believed she’d never see another break.

When Jaks got close, Nyx tugged her
hood back so Jaks could see her face.

“Buy you a drink?” Nyx asked.