“Important stuff first,” she said. “You know Chenjan?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
He immediately switched languages, and said something mostly unintelligible in Chenjan. All she could make out was “prisoners” and “desert.”
Nyx shook her head. “That’s fine.”
“I worked interrogation,” he said, in Nasheenian. The tone he said it in was flat, the way he would have said, “I worked in bakkie repair.” That explained the soft tone, and unmarred face. He was intel.
“You speak enough, then.”
“Enough.” Same flat tone. His gaze, too, was unemotional. A man used to putting on faces.
“Good with any other languages?”
“I know Khairian. Training camps were up there. We all picked up some.”
“You have a knack?”
“I can tell Tirhani from Chenjan. Order food in Ras Tieg, Heidia, and Mhoria. I learn quickly.”
“Lot of translating in my line of work. Anything else?”
“I also know Drucian,” he said, grudgingly.
“Where you learn that?”
“From Drucians,” he said.
Nyx took in the full measure of him again. Nothing special, she supposed, no different than the others. She liked the color of his eyes, now, though. It was growing on her.
“Former intel guys can be unpredictable,” she said. She tapped the beetle casing. “That going to tell me you’re mad as a violet-gassed magician?”
“I was processed through psych before discharge.”
“What’s your talent level with bugs?” She knew magicians ranked their own. He wouldn’t have been able to handle munitions without a higher than average talent. If they just stuck him in intel instead of R&D, he was likely no more skilled than a com tech.
“I had a strong rating,” he said. “But I moved to intel my first year. I was… better at it.”
“Better at torture than bugs?”
“It was my preference.”
“I suppose a talent with bugs makes for a good torturer,” Nyx said. She had the scars on her legs to prove it. “Why you want this job?”
“It’s what I’m good at,” he said.
“What’s that? Bugs?”
“Using bugs to get a job done.”
There was a fine line between madness and intelligence, and she still wasn’t certain which he was. “What makes you think I need a magician for killing?”
“Some of the other men had heard of you. I know you kill bel dames.”
“You have a grudge against bel dames?”
He shook his head. “I’m just looking for a job, matron.” He said “matron” instead of “sir.” No hero, then. That, at least, was promising.
“If you’re intel, you can handle a com, right?”
He nodded.
“Let’s prove it, then. I need you to sort out some transcriptions and hack some information for me on a politician. I need some work done on an old bakkie, too. Call it a test run.”
He hesitated. The words that came out were gravelly, a bit broken. “If I do it, can I get a meal?”
Something tugged at her, some errant emotion that had been building all day as she processed one starving, mangled, bug-ridden boy after another.
“Sure,” Nyx said. “If you’re as good as you say, I can even get you a room.”
The sniper was tougher.
In a flat desert, the person with the greatest advantage would be the one with the sharpest shot. Nyx’s aim had never been the best, and even years of training at Anneke’s firing range hadn’t improved her long-range shot.
The snipers and weapons techs who wandered in the next day in response to her new sign were all far outside Nyx’s pay range, and a few were just ridiculous. One girl showed up in some expensive bit of chainmail and the most impractical boots Nyx had ever seen. Her skin was so soft and unmarred that Nyx immediately pegged her as a First Family kid slumming.
“You ever held a gun?” Nyx asked her.
The girl puffed out her chest and declared that she had virtually killed over eight hundred opponents in something called a battlefield mimicry class. Run by rich people and their magicians, naturally.
Another girl came in like she was running headlong from her fifth-year graduation and into the wide world of bounty hunting. She was fleshy and bright-eyed and still had the use of all her limbs.
So when yet another little runt appeared at the door lugging a pack and ragged burnous that could have been nabbed off a corpse, Nyx didn’t have high hopes. She was so small that Nyx immediately guessed she was Drucian before she pulled off her hood. Drucians weren’t worth her time. They were notoriously frail little fuckers. She didn’t need a frail fucker on this job.
She let Eshe screen her, and went back to her office. A few minutes later, Eshe ducked in and said, “You should probably talk to this one.” He lowered his voice. “Especially if she can shoot with her tail!”
“Drucians don’t have tails,” Nyx said.
“Everybody knows they cut them off to fit in,” Eshe said.
Nyx followed him.
The girl had pulled back her hood to reveal a sharp little Drucian face—tangle of black hair, gray eyes rimmed in yellow, petite features, sandy skin. On the whole, Drucians suffered a lot of asthma and sinus issues, in part, folks said, because of their tiny noses and crowded features. Whatever environment they had evolved to fit, it wasn’t this one.
The top of the Drucian’s head just reached Nyx’s chest. From what Nyx could see of her limbs beneath the too-long trousers and tunic, she was stick-thin. Nyx sometimes suspected that Drucian limbs were shaped a bit like mantids beneath all the clothes, which would explain their funny walk. They were more modest than any Chenjan, though, and she had never seen one naked.
“We’re not recruiting garbage collectors here,” Nyx said to her. Better to let them down quickly.
The girl did not meet Nyx’s eyes. She simply pulled the pack from her shoulder and began unloading it.
“I build my own guns,” the Drucian said, to the floor. Her accent was terrible, but Nyx had spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the way Drucians mangled Nasheenian, so at least she could keep up.
She set a fine piece on the table. “This is a Z1070 scattergun. Originally fired only dead ammo. I adjusted that. It does blister bursts now. Lengthened the barrel. Better range. Adjusted the spin.”
Nyx’s specialty was munitions and mines, but living with gun-loving Anneke had given her a greater appreciation for guns, so she picked it up and examined it.
“You did all this welding work yourself?”
The girl nodded. Still didn’t meet her eye. Another Drucian thing, and one of the most infuriating. They refused to look anyone in the face but lovers and close family. Worse than Chenjans.
“I’ve been interviewing all day and you’re the first who brought her own gun. Can you shoot it?”
“Yes.”
Nyx handed back the gun. “Let’s prove it.”
She brought the girl up onto the roof. Eshe followed them up. Ahmed the magician was still in the back, working on a bakkie she’d picked up. The space on the roof wasn’t big, but it was private, tucked between two slightly taller buildings.
Nyx pointed out across the scrappy line of other hopefuls to the beggar squatting against the tile of the building opposite, the same one she saw her first day at the storefront. When the lines thinned, he should have gone off as well, but he hadn’t. He was old, maybe fifty, skinny and sickly, with venom scars on his arms. Some hard-up war vet.
“I want you to kill that man. Can you do that?”
The girl’s face remained expressionless. It was like trying to read a stone.
“Is that a problem?” Nyx asked. She watched the girl carefully. This was the toughest test of all. Would she kill on command? Could she?
The girl slid up to the lip of the rooftop. Knelt. Steadied her gun against her shoulder.
>
“Nyx—” Eshe said.
“Hush,” Nyx said.
“You can’t be serious, Nyx,” Eshe said.
Nyx turned, and saw that Ahmed had joined them. He stood on the ladder leading up to the roof, only his head and shoulders visible.
“When am I not serious?” Nyx said.
She heard two shots in quick succession. Loud. Nyx pressed her hands to her ears, too late.
She went to the edge of the roof and looked down. The beggar was still. The Drucian had not shot him in the head, though. That injury would be too obvious. It was two to the chest. She must have hit some vital organ, because the man had simply bowed over, rather anticlimactically. No one outside seemed to be any wiser, though a few vets raised their gaze to the rooftop.
“Where you learn to shoot?” Nyx asked.
“Leaf bugs,” the girl said. “We have a lot of leaf bugs.” She began to pack up her gun, still expressionless.
Nyx had picked palm-sized leaf bugs out of her bed every night in Druce. “All right. What you want in exchange for service?”
“Room and board,” the girl said.
Nyx raised her brows. “That it?”
“I just need to… get away.”
They always needed to get away.
“What’s your name?”
“Isao Kage.”
“Kage, then,” Nyx said. Second name first, with Drucians. “It’s a deal.” Certainly the best deal she ever made for a sniper, but then, Drucians didn’t know how to deal properly. It put them at a disadvantage, one she was more than happy to exploit.
“You don’t know he was a threat,” Ahmed said.
Nyx stood with him at the window downstairs as the shadows lengthened in the street. “No? You see tomorrow. They’ll be another beggar out there. Another addict, or worse. Somebody so hungry they don’t care about the risk. Some dumb body. You wait,” she said.
But the next morning, there was no new beggar.
Not until dark.
Nyx called Ahmed over. She watched as the young beggar pulled at the sleeves of his tattered slick to hide the venom scars on his arms.
“Satisfied?” Nyx asked.
Ahmed’s eyes were half-lidded, his face—unreadable.
“You’re the boss,” he said.
“I am. Don’t forget it.”
She turned and went back into her office. Shut the door.
Nyx sat behind the desk and took a deep breath. Loyalty was a tricky thing. Aside from Eshe, her team was brand new, and she needed to win their loyalty. This was always the hardest part, being right all the time. Not fucking up. Killing stuff had always been easy for her, but getting a bunch of vets and outcasts to fuck around with her to the ends of Umayma—that was tough, and she didn’t have a lot of time on her hands to make it all right.
Somebody was having her storefront scouted, somebody who thought they could follow her into the desert. If it was one of Fatima’s bel dames, Nyx decided then and there that she would burn Blood Hill to the ground.
If it was somebody else… well, then she was already way behind in this race, and her chances of catching up were getting slimmer by the day. I’m being played, she thought, but I have no idea by who, or what the fuck for.
10.
The sky overhead was on fire.
Rhys stood just outside the circled carts and pitched tents of the caravan, smoking. It was the only way he could get warm. Above him, purple waves of mist billowed in the sky like a massive shroud. He had spent most nights out here at the edge of camp, watching the sky, since the lights started. The caravan was one of Payam’s, led by a caravan leader named Araok who told him that’s just what the sky did out here. During the day, the caravan was a sprawling, noisy affair—eighteen sand caterpillars, four sand cats, seven carts, and twenty-six people.
Rhys’s appeal to Elahyiah had won him her company on the journey, but she had not spoken to him since they began. She spent her time in their cart with the children. When he spoke to her, she didn’t look at him.
He believed all she needed was some new perspective. A fresh vista.
Rhys rode along with the caravan, sitting on the back of a caterpillar-pulled cart, while the heat soaked into his bones and water ruled his dreams.
At night, he sat with the other men at the fire and traded stories. When he bedded down with Elahyiah and the children, he began to take some joy in Rahim’s constant squalling. The crying meant Rahim was alive, they were all alive, even after all the grit and horror the world had thrown at them.
Rhys put out his cigarette and tucked the remainder into his pocket. He walked back to the ring of firelight where the men spoke in low tones. There were two other families on this trek, one of them relocating to a settlement called Tejal and the other paying their way to join family in another Chenjan settlement just a few more days north.
Beyond the ring of firelight, Rhys could see the darkness around them writhe. He shuddered. There were more insects out there, and… other things. Larger, more fearsome, and more terrifying than what ended up in the pot every night. They had encountered one of the mauta kita the day before, a monstrous creature fifteen feet long, banded in purple scales, that had devoured one of the fat, slow-moving caterpillars that pulled the carts.
Rhys trudged into the warmth of the fire’s circle. He saw the men passing around a bottle. They drank a terrible concoction of fermented cats’ milk called ashora that turned Rhys’s stomach just to smell it.
“Would you like some ashora, Rhys?” one of them asked. He was a Tirhani man called Rafshan.
“He is Chenjan. He does not drink,” said one of the Khairians, Abhinava.
“The atishi baluka may strike at any time,” Rafshan said. “You should enjoy the time you’re given.”
Atishi baluka was one of the first foreign terms Rhys had learned when coming to the north. It referred to the flesh-eating sand, the sand that burrowed into wounds to devour the blood within, leaving behind a gutted, deflated corpse. Rhys had yet to see any of it out here, but he had witnessed a variant of it in action at a church in Tirhan a long time ago. He had no interest in encountering it here.
Rhys sat with the men in the sand. Somewhere nearby, a caterpillar snuffled.
“That boy of yours is quiet tonight,” Abhinava said.
“God is good,” Rhys said.
“Watch your family as we go further north. Be sure your girls do not wander of,” Abhinava said. “It is easy to get lost here, and some of the nomads take slaves.”
In the morning, after prayer, the caravan was moving again. A ceaseless routine of packing, sweating, eating, unpacking, smoking, sleeping. Rhys found it comforting. The suns were high and hot, but inside, the cart was hung with an organic drape that kept the interior bearable.
At dusk, three weeks into their journey, they came to Tejal where one of the families, Rafshan’s, said goodbye to the caravan.
Rhys took the man by the elbow and wished him well.
“Luck to your family,” Rafshan said. “And God go with you.”
“And with you.”
That night, Rhys slept well. He woke before dawn to pray with the other Chenjan and Tirhani men in the party and prepared for another day on the road. The heat was not terrible, so he traveled much of the way by foot, and rode for a time with Abhinava on his cart, trading stories about bacterial remedies and the most useful type of flesh beetle to treat burns.
At dusk, the caravan camped, and Rhys prepared to spend another night telling stories on the sand. He walked back to his family’s cart. It was strange not to hear Rahim wailing this time of day.
He pulled back the organic sheet that protected his family from the worst of the heat… and froze.
The cart was empty. Not just empty of people, but empty. Their belongings were gone, everything but a single pack he had brought for himself. His heart thudded loudly. Some terrible sound filled his ears.
Rhys walked over to Abhinava’s cart. The man’s wife and Elahy
iah had spoken often during their weeks of travel.
“Have you seen my wife?” he asked her.
Abhinava’s wife shrugged. “I have not seen her.”
Rhys moved into the opening of the cart. The woman shrank back. “I will ask again,” Rhys said. “Have you seen my wife and children?”
“They got off at Tejal, after the caravan got underway,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was her right.”
“Her right?” Rhys said. “I am her husband.”
“Among my people,” the woman said, “it was her right.”
Rhys’s hands itched for his pistols. He backed slowly away from the woman. Tejal. Less than a day behind them. He would go there and find her. Bring her back. What madness was this? What was Elahyiah thinking, to betray him like that?
He walked to the popping fire to beg a caterpillar from the caravan leader. But as he approached the fire, he saw there was no one standing near it.
Three figures spoke in low tones several paces distant. He searched for the others.
“Rhys!” Abhinava called. “Arm yourself!”
“What?”
The attack was sudden, and fierce.
It took Rhys several breaths to realize what was happening. He heard three shots. Abhinava ran past him, shouting for his wife.
Rhys pulled his pistols and darted behind the nearest cart.
Whirling figures moved into camp in groups of two and three. They had covered their faces with long red scarves. As he watched, they cut the harnesses off the sand caterpillars, and called to them in a language he did not recognize.
More shots. The figure nearest him collapsed onto the sand, clutching at his chest. Blood welled. The attacker wadded up the length of his turban—Rhys realized the scarves were simply the longer ends of their turbans, pulled over their faces—and tried to quell the blood.
With the face revealed, Rhys realized the attacker was a woman. Or perhaps a very young boy. Tall, dark haired, with reddish skin and broad features, she did not look Khairian at all.
“Rhys!” he looked up. Abhinava shot the struggling woman in the sand, this time in the head. She went still.
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