Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “You have any whiskey?” this was their tangle-haired leader again. Her voice was smoky, with a hard edge, like burnt pepper. She suddenly reminded him of Nyx, his former employer, and he felt a dull ache in his chest, like the throbbing of an old wound. Why had these women come here?

  “Beh Ayin is a dry town,” Rhys said.

  “Ah,” she said. She made a gesture to the third one, youngest of them, and slimmer, though still heavier than Rhys. At the gesture, the younger one walked back out into the rainy courtyard and posted herself at the gate.

  Tasyin asked for a translation.

  “They wanted liquor,” Rhys said.

  Tasyin showed her teeth. “Liquor before names?”

  “Would you like to introduce yourselves?” Rhys asked the bel dames.

  “Ah, yes,” the tangle-haired woman said. “I am Shadha so Murshida, lead councilwoman of the Muhajhadyn. This is Dhiya, my blooded right hand.”

  “Dhiya,” the tall one said.

  Rhys wasn’t sure how to translate “Muhajhadyn.” It wasn’t a term he was familiar with, so he left it out. In Tirhan, they used the term Muhajhadeen as the title of their Minister of War. This sounded similar, but that didn’t mean it was anything like its homonym. He’d learned that the hard way with many Chenjan and Nasheenian words.

  Shadha paced around her chair, like a cat. It was a full minute before she sat.

  Tasyin waited for her to sit, then followed suit.

  Rhys and Dhiya remained standing.

  Tasyin exchanged some pleasantries, through Rhys, to Shadha. They drank tea. Or, rather, Tasyin drank tea. Shadha fidgeted. She kept her hands on the table, as was polite among Nasheenians doing business—especially bel dames—but she was obviously uncomfortable with it. Keeping your hands on the table proved you weren’t holding a weapon. Holding a weapon while in negotiations was a foreign concept in Tirhan. Tasyin wouldn’t appreciate the gesture, but Rhys did. He didn’t like it when he couldn’t see a bel dame’s hands.

  Shadha tired quickly of Tirhani politeness and said, “Are we going to talk about the shit I humped across the mountain, or fuck over tea for another hour?”

  Rhys translated, “She’d like to know if you’re interested in beginning negotiations.”

  “Of course,” Tasyin said, “if she’s brought me the item she promised.”

  “She wants to see the goods,” Rhys said to Shadha.

  Shadha gestured to Dhiya.

  The tall bel dame shrugged out of a small pack set low on her back, hidden beneath her burnous.

  Rhys watched her carefully untie the leather pack. She reached inside and unwrapped a clear cylinder half-filled with what looked like gray sand. She set the cylinder at the center of the table, next to the tea biscuits.

  Tasyin peered through the opaque cylinder. Rhys knew it wasn’t glass; the composition of the material was all wrong for glass. Rhys guessed it was organic. His fingers tingled. Something whispered at the edge of his mind. If there was some kind of bug in the jar, or the sand was laced with something organic, it was nothing that would speak to him, nothing he could identify, not that that meant anything—he was a notoriously poor magician, which is why he’d never actually earned the title in Nasheen.

  “I want a demonstration,” Tasyin said. “This is nothing but desert silt.” She reached out and tapped the container.

  Rhys translated.

  Shadha snorted. “Tell that soft bitch to get it to a magician and lock it down. She wants a demonstration? You tap that thing yourself. You watch.”

  Tasyin waited.

  Rhys translated.

  “Well?” Tasyin said.

  Rhys shook his head. “Special consulate, if this is an organic contagion that—”

  “Do as she says,” Tasyin said, hard.

  “Pardon, mother,” Rhys said, using the honorific given a Tirhani crone, one whose only children were those orphaned in the conflict between Tirhan and Ras Tieg. It had once been a polite term, he knew, but had since fallen into slang as a derogatory name for a bitter old woman who had given up prayer and never married. “I was hired as a translator, not a beast.”

  Shadha, following their interaction with her eyes, said, “It won’t kill you. It’s sealed. Only a magician can open it.”

  Rhys looked again at the cylinder. He did not volunteer his paltry magician’s skill.

  “What does she say?” Tasyin asked.

  “She says only a magician can open it.”

  Rhys hesitated a moment more. Tirhanis bought, sold, and manufactured weapons. He was under no illusion that the contents of the cylinder were innocuous. But he still felt that itch in his mind, that desire to know, to understand, the presence he felt locked inside the container.

  He reached toward the cylinder.

  As he did, the whisper at the back of his mind intensified. Something hissed and spat. His fingers touched the container. The dead sand leapt toward him like something alive. He jerked his hand away. The container toppled onto its side.

  Tasyin was stone-faced in her seat. Shadha’s smile was grim.

  “It’s hungry,” Shadha said. “That’s why it’s gray. Up north, that stuff is red as fresh blood. I don’t know how long it lasts before it needs to eat. You’ll want to get it to your magicians soon. Get it fed.”

  Rhys translated for Tasyin.

  “What does it eat?” Tasyin asked.

  “What do you think, woman?” Shadha said. “It eats blood.”

  Rhys translated, and Tasyin asked, “Whose blood? Not yours or mine? Just his?”

  “Oh, it would eat ours too,” Shadha said, “but Dhiya’s bleeding out, you know. The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless. It doesn’t kill bleeding women. This stuff is wild up north, but the nomads worked out ways to live on it.”

  Rhys tried to muddle out a polite way to use the word “menstruation.” In Tirhani, it was a mildly dirty word, and “bleeding” generally referred to something that only pertained to martyrs.

  “It does not attack women who… are at the end of their cycle,” he said.

  Tasyin’s eyes widened. He was doubly glad he hadn’t used the dirtier term.

  “How did you bring it down here?” Tasyin asked. “Something this volatile… if it got out…”

  Rhys muddled through a translation of that. “How did you get it out of the desert without contaminating everything you contacted?”

  “I told you—it has rules,” Shadha said. “Draw a circle around it, you can contain it. Break the circle, you die. It’s less likely to eat up women, and it won’t eat a woman who’s bleeding out. But boys, men, dogs… shifters. Yes, it will eat them just like you and me eat scaled chickens and cheese.”

  Rhys translated. They didn’t have scaled chickens in Tirhan. He said “lizards” instead.

  “All right,” Tasyin said. “I do have magicians on call, should we reach an agreement. But I still have no guarantee that what you’re here to sell me will do what you propose. You could have miniature flesh beetles in there tailored to male blood codes. Useful in itself, certainly, but not what I’m here to bargain for. I need to know where this contagion came from, and who my contact is on how to use it.”

  Shadha listened to the translation with head cocked, fingers splayed on the table.

  “It’s wild, not grown in a magicians’ gym or organic tech lab. That’s all we know. If you want more, we can get you more. But I don’t think you have a chance in hell of replicating it. I know a team that’s been trying for fifty years. But I can tap the source. If Tirhan wants it, I can get you access to it.”

  “You do know my next question, of course,” Tasyin said when Rhys had finished translating. “Why bring this to us? Why not Nasheen? If it does as you say, your magicians could tailor it to win your war for you.”

  Shadha shook her shaggy head. “Nasheen does not possess this weapon. The bel dames do. Smart bel dames aren’t looking for an end to the war, just an end to the monarchy. We know T
irhan isn’t looking for an end, either. What happens to your war economy then? All we ask is your support of the bel dames in Nasheen when the time comes.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Tasyin said lightly. She perched at the edge of her chair now. “I’ll speak with my superiors. We’ll need to test this… gift of yours before we make a formal agreement.”

  Rhys translated “formal agreement” as “blood oath,” in Nasheenian. Bel dames understood and respected blood oaths. “Formal agreements” were just words.

  Shadha frowned. She sat back in her chair and glanced up at Dhiya. The corners of Dhiya’s mouth turned down, and she turned her palms up flat, as if saying, “What more can you do?”

  “We’ll end here then,” Shadha said. “It’s a long way to come for half-assed promises. I could make the same offer to Mhoria and get a blood oath here at the table.”

  “And who’s to say you have not or will not?” Tasyin said after Rhys translated. “You say you give us a weapon your bel dames already possess. A weapon shared by the whole world is a useless weapon, no matter how powerful.”

  “I offer you an edge,” Shadha said. “Tirhan alone. Swear the bel dames a blood oath and it’s yours. Tirhan and Nasheen will control the world. Provided, of course, you do not sell it. To Chenja, the Nasheenian monarchy, Mhoria, and of course, not to Ras Tieg. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? No, you’d use it to burn what’s left of Ras Tieg to the ground. And that would be fine with us, you understand? We’ll expect a deal soon. I want this done before the season turns.

  “There is a great shift coming, woman,” Shadha continued, pushing back from her seat. Dhiya moved away from the table. “You can play partner to all sides or none. It doesn’t concern me. What should concern you is whose side you’re on when the bel dames take power in Nasheen. Will you be able to match us? Or will we take you by force? That is up to you and your mullahs and ministers.”

  Shadha joined Dhiya at the edge of the yard. Tasyin stood. Rhys rapidly translated.

  Rhys asked Tasyin, “Do you want to respond?”

  Tasyin’s mouth was hard. She gave a small shake of her head. “Let them go.”

  They watched the bel dames exit the yard. The women joined their companion at the gate and walked off quietly down the wet street.

  Rhys turned his attention to the cylinder on the table.

  “You can still make the evening train to Shirhazi,” Tasyin said.

  “Special consulate—” he began.

  “The Tirhani Minister will handle the deposit to your account. You’re no longer needed.”

  “Yes, special consulate,” he said, and bowed his head.

  Tasyin reached forward and carefully wrapped her napkin around the cylinder. The sand hissed softly. She kept it tucked against her body, braced with both hands. She walked inside.

  Rhys remained on the veranda, watching the rain flood the courtyard. His job was done. He needed to get on a train. What happened between Tirhan and Nasheen was none of his concern. Coups in Nasheen were none of his concern, either, not anymore. But Tirhan at war with Ras Tieg…? Chenja at war with Nasheen? Bel dames at war with the monarchy?

  Rhys turned his gaze to the metallic sky. He pulled the white feather out of his pocket, remembered bloody days in Nasheen.

  “Wars don’t end,” Nyx once told him. “They just get bigger.”

  10.

  There’s nobody going to save you but yourself,” Nyx said. The cantina was crowded and the crowd was boozy. Everything smelled of sen and opium. She knew then that something wasn’t right because the smell of opium made her sick—too sweet—and for some reason she felt good.

  “What about you, at the front? After you got all burned up somebody had to save you,” Eshe said. He was eight years old again, a pouty-mouthed street maggot with hooked fingers and a curve in his spine from too many shiftings. Most kids weren’t able to shift before puberty, but Eshe had taken to shifting like a bel dame to bloodletting.

  Nyx opened her mouth to say, “I didn’t want to be saved,” and took another drink instead. Whether she wanted it or not, she had been, and she was sitting here because of the quick work of others. And that knowledge of her dependence, her reliance on something besides herself, always pissed her off.

  Too bad no one had figured out how to kill her yet.

  It was the same thing she thought every time they brought her back.

  +

  “Do you know where you are?”

  Nyx opened her eyes. Her head hurt, but the rest of her was dead weight. She was in some kind of tub. Reddish water bubbled around her. The light in the room was bad, or maybe that was her eyes. There was a woman crouched next to the tub, peering at her intently. The woman wore clothes in somber men’s colors, and there was something very angular about her face, something very off.

  “Nyx?”

  “Yahfia,” Nyx said.

  “I’m pinching your foot. Can you feel it?”

  Yahfia had her hand in the water at the base of the tub. The water was so red that Nyx could see nothing of what she touched.

  If I’m in the water, why don’t I feel wet? she thought. Her face was damp, but the rest of her only felt warm.

  Then, suddenly, she felt pressure on her right foot. The pressure became shooting needles of pain.

  “Yeah, yeah, stop!” she said, and squirmed in the water. Something moved beneath the bubbling water, something ropy and red-violet, like raw meat.

  “Good,” Yahfia said.

  Her body was starting to hurt—a dull, all-over throbbing. She tried to lift her arms.

  “Not yet,” Yahfia said. She dipped her hand into the muddied water again and pressed gently on her sternum. Nyx felt more pressure, the promise of pain.

  Nyx closed her eyes. “What the hell happened?”

  “You made a mess of a mosque in downtown Mushirah,” Yahfia said. She reached into the water again, pinched at Nyx’s arm.

  “Feel that?” Yahfia asked.

  “Yeah. Pressure.”

  “No pain?”

  “No.”

  “Give it a while yet. Can you make a fist?”

  She could, but it was like her veins were full of lead, and her palms hurt. There was something wrong with her hand. What she could feel of it, the texture, was all wrong.

  “Where is everyone? Where’s Eshe and Suha?”

  “They’re here, in Faleen.”

  “Faleen? What the fuck am I doing in Faleen?” She tried to get up. Yahfia pressed her hand to Nyx’s sternum again. Her firm touch was enough to keep Nyx down. That alone was remarkable.

  “You’ll be here awhile yet,” Yahfia said.

  “What happened?”

  Yahfia did not look at her. “You were infected,” she said.

  “What? In Mushtallah?”

  “We’re not certain when. What was left of you was sent here to Faleen because it has the highest concentration of magicians outside of Mushtallah. Yah Reza called me in because I had your case history. You’re lucky I was in Amtullah when the burst hit. Mushtallah is still closed, even the magicians’ gateways between the cities.”

  “How long has it been? How bad was it?”

  “A few days. Don’t worry about Suha and Eshe. I put them up at the magicians’ gym. Eshe wasn’t terribly happy about it, but with your status uncertain, neither of them had access to your accounts, and with their relationship to you…” Yahfia trailed off, looked away.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Yahfia moistened her lips. “It’s not common knowledge that you’re alive. We’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Yah Reza has requested—”

  “Is the Queen still alive?”

  Yahfia paused a long moment. Too long. Then, “Yes.”

  “But? There’s a but in there, isn’t there?”

  “Kasbah, her head of security, is dead.”

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  No wonder Yah Re
za wanted to keep her dead awhile longer. Dead women didn’t get hunted down by rightfully pissed-off monarchs.

  “Yah Reza called you,” Nyx said, “but who called Yah Reza?”

  “The Queen. She wanted you brought to the Plague Sisters for reanimation. Yah Reza called me in to see if we could do it without them.”

  So Nyx had been contaminated, like a boy at the front or a body carted home from the field. The probability of Nyx picking up a random infection at the front or in a morgue and harboring it until now were pretty slim. But when? An infection tailored to go off in the presence of a particular individual—like the Queen of Nasheen—could have been planted on her at any time. But that infection should have chemically altered Nyx’s blood code. Yahfia should have caught an infection during her last exam; it was why she’d been so confident when Kasbah tested her in the mosque.

  “Why didn’t you find it?” Nyx asked.

  “It’s a subtle contagion,” Yahfia said. “Instead of propagating itself outside of the cells it replicates itself within a cell and effectively becomes a part of the body. Once the conditions it’s been programmed with are present, it mutates and fires from within the cells where it’s incubated. This is something I’ve never seen before—probably not Nasheenian.”

  Nyx struggled in the tub. Water splashed over the lip. The body moving under the water was hers, but the meaty color was not.

  Yahfia pressed her palm to Nyx’s sternum again. “Don’t. You’re not ready,” she said.

  “What did I lose?” She wasn’t sure how much of her actual body was in the water.

  “To hear Yah Reza tell it, your skin bubbled and burst. You lost most of the tissue on your arms, neck, and chest. It meant you had no protection for your organs on the ride here. We wanted to take you via the magicians’ gateways, but Yah Reza didn’t want to risk infection of the system until we knew what you had. The suns did a lot of damage. I had to give you something for radiation poisoning. I cut out some cancerous tissue.”

  “But the Queen’s alive?”