God's War bda-1

by Kameron Hurley

  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.

  3

  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.

  Jaks grinned. It wasn’t an improvement on her face. “I suppose I owe you money,” she said. “I saw that you bet on me.”

  Nyx shrugged. “Seemed like a fine idea at the time. What kept you so long?”

  “Those off-world women chewed my ear clean off with all their talk,” Jaks said.

  “What, the ones from New Kinaan?” Yah Tayyib hadn’t been shitting, then. What kind of alien came all the way out to this blasted rock to talk to boxers?

  Jaks sat next to her. “Yeah. What about you, what the hell you doing in Faleen?” Jaks asked.

  “Looking for you,” Nyx said. She had never been a good liar, so whenever the truth worked, she used it. “What are you drinking?”

  “Whatever you are,” Jaks said. She was still beaming, and Nyx had a twinge of something like guilt. She let the feeling slide away, like oil on the surface of a cistern.

  The barmaid brought their drinks. Nyx moved closer to Jaks, so their knees touched. “You have family in Faleen?” Nyx asked.

  Jaks chattered about her kin. They lived just outside Faleen, she said. She’d been trying to build up to a magician’s fight since she was fourteen. She had two sisters and a handful of house brothers. Her mother was on the dole, the waqf, and not well off.

  “Boxing keeps me in bread,” Jaks said, polishing off her third whiskey. Like Nyx, she drank it straight. “And it’s good for picking up girls,” Jaks added.

  “I don’t have a place,” Nyx said. “You empty tonight?”

  “Mostly,” Jaks said. She was grinning like a fool now, like a kid. She was probably sixteen. She’d never been to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the grin, in the eyes.

  Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced around. She paid the tab and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Nyx hunched and shifted her weight to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to Jaks’s neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures hanging around outside but couldn’t catch their faces in the dim night. Her sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong boxer and wouldn’t be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.

  Jaks was only a little dr
unk; the liquor made her happy.

  “Listen,” Jaks said as they stumbled down the alley, groping at each other. “We need to be quiet. I’ve got company.”

  “I’m a spider,” Nyx said.

  Jaks took her down a dead-end alley near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx’s knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head, crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.

  Jaks laughed. “I should have warned you. They don’t spray around here. Lots of mutants.”

  They climbed a rickety ladder to the second floor. Nyx felt like she’d been running forever, since the dawn of the world. Time stretched.

  A boy’s sandal hung from the top rung of the ladder. In that moment, Nyx saw the pile of Tej’s things again, the detritus the Chenjan border filter had left of him. A sword, a baldric, his sandals.

  Nyx caught her breath as she peered into the little mud-brick room. A couple of worms in glass lit the place. There were two raised sleeping platforms on either side of the room. A boy looked down at her from the one at her right. He looked nothing like Jaks. He was large and soft where she was small and hard. His hair was curly black and too long for a boy his age.

  “My house brother,” Jaks said. “Arran. Sorry, he doesn’t do tea.”

  He didn’t look like he’d spent a day at the front, but he was the right age. Nyx had expected to feel something when she saw this one. Rage, maybe; bloodlust. But he was just another boy. Another body. Another bel dame’s bounty.

  Along the far wall was the kitchen space: a mud-brick oven, all-purpose pot, two knives, and a sack of what must have been rice or maybe millet, knowing a boxer’s take.

  Arran rolled back into the loft.

  “Come up,” Jaks said.

  Nyx came.

  She kissed and licked Jaks in a detached sort of way. It was like watching two people she didn’t know having sex.

  Nyx lay awake after, until Jaks slept. She was aware, vaguely, of being hungry. She moved like a dream, smelling of Jaks, and slunk down the ladder and into the darkness near the oven. She reached for the biggest of the kitchen knives and put it between her teeth.