Nyx asked Rhys, “You need to see anything else?”
He shook his head.
“I think that’s it, then,” Nyx said. “Unless I can speak to Yah Inan.”
“She is away at the magicians’ quarters,” Kasbah said. “She was scheduled for a sabbatical many months ago.”
“You’ve already talked to Yah Tayyib?”
“He says he left Nikodem at the bookshop. He and Yah Inan went out for a late supper with her and paused to look at some organics books. She said she was going to visit an acquaintance living above the bookshop. She asked them to escort her home at mid-morning prayer. When they returned the next day, they found that no one lived above the shop. That’s when I had my technicians go through the security lenses.”
“She’s been gone a month now?” Nyx asked.
“Yes.”
“She could be dead.”
“That may be. If she is, we’ll need her body. As a former bel dame, you know how important it is for us to retain at least her head, for our own purposes. However, I doubt she is dead. If kidnapped or coerced, as you believe, her keepers would understand her importance to the war.”
“She’s not contaminated, is she?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So you’ve had a bunch of hunters and mercenaries looking for her in Nasheen for a month, the sorts of people who’d have access to every low-end cantina and fighting ring in the country, and they haven’t found her. We’re going to have to widen the net, then.”
“That is what the other bounty hunter said,” Kasbah said.
“The other bounty hunter?” Rhys asked.
But Nyx didn’t have to ask. She knew which one.
“Raine al Alharazad. You know him?” Kasbah asked.
“Intimately,” Nyx said.
Rhys got to his feet, keeping his hands on the back of the chair. “When you say widen the net—”
“I hope Anneke’s getting some sun,” Nyx said. “We’re going to Chenja.”
11
The burst sirens went off as Nyx and Rhys stepped out onto the busy main street. The palace filter over the sally port door popped behind them, and for a minute Nyx thought the keening cry of the sirens had something to do with the ringing in her ears from the quick succession of filters.
Rhys looked skyward, and Nyx touched his arm, nodding back down the street. “Let’s get inside and get some food,” she said. “You hungry?” The queen had given them a generous starting allowance, and she wanted to make the most of it. “I haven’t had good food in ages.”
“Starving,” he said, tucking his hands beneath his burnous, hunching his head and shoulders as if his guarded posture would ward off the blow from some burst.
Nyx heard the heavy whump-whump of the anti-burst guns, somewhere just to the north of them, and though she knew better, she picked up her pace. Inside or outside, a direct hit killed you, but it might be more comfortable getting hit inside. She’d be drunk.
As they walked, Rhys said, “I think Danika’s lying.”
“So do I,” she said. “I’m just not sure about what.”
She ducked into a café on the south side of the palace called the Grim Matron. She knew it from her year of training in Mushtallah as a bel dame. Rasheeda had loved their little green drinks.
Nyx and Rhys both pulled off their hoods as they entered, and the bar matrons all lifted their heads from their beer glasses and opium pipes and plates of fried grasshoppers. The hush of low conversation in the dim room ceased, and the smoky air suddenly felt a lot heavier.
Nyx pushed her burnous back over her shoulders, so her weapons were visible, and stepped up ahead of Rhys. She pushed through the scattering of tables to a tall, latticed booth at the back, seeming to ignore the gazes that followed after Rhys, but tracking every one of them with her peripheral vision, waiting for somebody to move.
Rhys followed her, careful not to touch anything, maneuvering his slim body around the tables and matrons.
Just as Nyx reached the table, a grizzled woman, one arm larger and darker than the other, her face a drooling mass of scarred flesh, hacked a gob of spit at Rhys’s face. Rhys caught the spit in his hand. Nyx appreciated that. The woman began to get up, opened her mouth to say something.
Nyx pivoted and tugged her whip from her hip. She caught the woman around the throat with it and stood behind the woman’s chair, holding her taut against the seat back. Rhys said he was going to find an ablution bowl to clean up.
Nyx leaned over and said, loud enough for the women and the nearest three tables to hear, “This man belongs to me. What you do to him, you do to me. Understand, my woman?”
The woman gurgled something, and Nyx watched the faces of her table companions. They were grizzled old war veterans as well, hard-faced and battle-scarred, and the looks they gave her were equal parts hatred and respect.
Nyx released her hold and knocked the woman back into her seat.
The woman grabbed at her throat and muttered something.
Nyx wound her whip back up.
“You don’t see many women carrying a whip,” one of the other women at the table said.
“It’s good for stealing weapons and drinks and tying boys up,” Nyx said.
“You use it a lot, then?”
Nyx saw Rhys returning to their table.
“You wouldn’t believe,” Nyx said.
She turned away from them and slid into her seat across from Rhys. There were partitions between the tables, which helped muffle the sound. The three veterans at the nearest table got up and went to the bar; the spitter still rubbed at her throat, muttering.
“Was that really necessary?” Rhys said, shrugging out of his burnous. Nyx caught herself admiring the breadth of his shoulders. If he wasn’t dancing anymore, how was he keeping in shape?
“This is Mushtallah,” Nyx said. “They push, you push back, or they’ll mow you over.” She pressed a hand to the table. The tiny bugs inside the tabletop displayed the menu in response to the warmth of her touch. “You think that last lens was doctored?”
Inside, the sound of the sirens was muffled, a dull whine. The stink of the opium was making Nyx nauseous.
“Yes,” Rhys said, “and worse. Any magician, including Kasbah, could tell that was a doctored bug. Some other magician with access to the same bug transmissions the palace uses doctored that last image of Nikodem and the bakkie, probably so they could edit themselves out. My concern is that Kasbah knew that and didn’t tell us.”
“Maybe Kasbah doctored the footage herself?”
“She’s not a complete imbecile,” Rhys said. “If she doctored the footage, we wouldn’t have been authorized to see the originals. She wanted us to know it was doctored but feared saying it out loud. She feared even putting that information on the globe.”
“Which means Nikodem probably went out with one of the palace magicians and didn’t come back,” Nyx said, “and the palace magicians doctored the footage.”
“So the palace has black agents, maybe black magicians,” Rhys said, shaking his head, “and she doesn’t want your bel dames on this note. I don’t like this, Nyx, and I don’t like where this note might take us.”
Nyx thought of Yah Tayyib. If Nikodem had been friendly with Yah Inan and Yah Tayyib, either of them could have set her up with someone to get her out of the country.
“I don’t see a motive for the magicians she was friendly with,” Nyx said.
Rhys made a noise that sounded like a laugh. “Magicians remember a time when they ruled the world. It’s the same with mullahs and magicians in Chenja. However, the queen isn’t paying you to take care of her internal security issue. She’s paying for a head, preferably attached to a living body.”
“More body swapping. I’m not keen on getting cut up over this note, but you know how that is. Wish I had my original womb. Bet I could get Yah Tayyib out of retirement to come and deal for it.”
“Why?”
“He liked it. Said it was shaped fu
nny.”
Rhys quirked an eyebrow. “Shaped funny?”
“Yeah, some big word. Biocurate. Biocarbonate. Bicoital. Something.”
“Bicornuate,” Rhys said. “A heart-shaped uterus.”
“What?”
“Most wombs are balloon-shaped. Bicornuate wombs are heart-shaped.” He used his fingers to draw a picture in the air of a stylized heart. “Makes delivery more difficult. It’s best you had it replaced.”
“No shit? I should have sold it for a lot more. I knew a kid who made good money selling mutant organs to magicians.” She moved her hand back over the menu. “What are you eating?”
Rhys looked down at the table and dithered over his choices. “Why doesn’t anyone in this country serve fish?”
“Unclean animals. All that water.”
“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Fish farming is a highly lucrative business in Chenja.”
The bar matron finally came over, looking like she was trying real hard not to stare at Rhys. Nyx stared at her instead. The bar matron brought them beer—local stuff—without them asking, the way Nyx would have been served water at the coast. Nyx remembered some things from the coast, little snatches. She’d spent the first three years of her life there, but most of her memories were of inoculation regimens: blinking syringes, yellow fluid, the stink of sulphur.
“None for him,” Nyx said. “Can you bring him tea?”
The matron moved to take away his beer.
“No, I’ll drink that too,” Nyx said. “Can I get something with a lot of meat? Like a slab of dog and some curried sweet potatoes?”
Rhys grimaced. “Soup, please,” he said. “The curried noodle. Do you have protein cakes?”
“Do I have what?” the matron asked.
He asked for that Chenjan shit at every inn, café, restaurant, and cantina Nyx had taken him to for the last six years. In Chenja, they served that woodchip-tasting crap with rice and some kind of brown sauce. When she was passing time across the border or as part of Raine’s crew, Nyx had fed that stuff to the dogs.
“Never mind,” Rhys said. “Just the soup and some bread. Plain bread.”
The matron nodded and left them.
Nyx took a slug of her beer and kept her eye on the front door. This was bel dame country, and the war vets at the bar had moved off. Word of a Chenjan man in a café would get around.
“I need to have Taite hack Raine’s com,” Nyx said. “I want to see how far the old man’s gotten on this one.”
“Do you want me to find out who the other mercenaries are on this note? I’m sure there’s a record at the Cage.”
“Call up Taite once we’re outside the filter and have him send Anneke and Khos to do that. I want that information in a file when we get back to Punjai.”
“You think Khos will stay on?”
“I can’t afford to spend time looking for another shifter.”
Nyx heard the burst siren dying off. She felt her body start to unwind. Fucking siren.
Then she heard someone snicker.
It was a very familiar snicker.
Nyx had kept an eye on the front door, but the two women had come in the back.
Rasheeda was older—not as beautiful as Nyx remembered, though that wasn’t because of her age. Warm, crinkle-eyed, matronly women were some of the most sought-after bed partners in Nasheen. But Rasheeda lacked the warmth.
Rasheeda was still shrugging her shoulders, shivering, as if she had just finished shifting. Luce stood next to her, head just reaching Rasheeda’s shoulder. She had a grim little face.
Nyx leaned back in her chair. She saw Rhys’s hands twitch toward his pistols. It was illegal to kill a bel dame, but using whatever force necessary short of killing to subdue them in self-defense was all right. Bel dames were tough to kill.
Nyx knew.
Rasheeda kicked one of the chairs around and sat backward on it, folding her arms over the headrest. Luce slouched in the chair next to her and let her burnous fall back to reveal the ivory hilts of her pistols. Rasheeda didn’t usually wear weapons—it made shifting easier, and she didn’t have to worry about losing anything when she made a quick escape. Not that Rasheeda being unarmed was any comfort. Nyx had watched her claw out women’s eyes and eat them.
Rasheeda snickered again.
“Small town,” Nyx said. “You two had your fill of the local boys?”
Luce hadn’t bedded a boy in her life. They made her nauseous, as Nyx recalled. Rasheeda usually just ate them.
“You had business with the queen,” Luce said.
“I did. And that business is none of yours.”
“Funny woman,” Rasheeda said. “You know we know all business.”
“The council asked us to tell you that working on this bounty isn’t in your best interest,” Luce said.
“Well, then, let me hang up my guns,” Nyx said. “You know what high regard I have for the council.” And some fucked-stupid queen who couldn’t keep bel dame bugs out of her palace. If the council had bugs in the palace, it meant the animosity between the queen and the council was a lot deeper than Nyx realized.
Not your problem, Nyx reminded herself. But staring into her sisters’ faces, she had a hard time figuring out why it wasn’t her problem if what she didn’t know ended up getting her killed.
“Drop the commission and Dahab won’t drop you,” Rasheeda said.
“Sister, where’s your sense of subtlety?” Nyx asked. “How about you fuck off? I’m working a queen’s bounty. You try to pin some silly shit on me and I’ll have your heads.”
The matron brought Rhys’s tea.
“Can I get a little green drink?” Rasheeda asked.
“What kind?” the matron asked.
“A Green Beetle,” Rasheeda said.
“That’s not their best drink,” Nyx said. “I recommend the Holiday Beetle. I’m sure you know it.”
Rhys sipped his tea. His other hand stayed near one of his pistols.
“Just drop the fucking bounty, Nyx,” Luce said. “The last time you pissed the council off, you lost everything, and you have a lot more to lose this time.”
Nyx took a pull of her beer. “I don’t drop notes.”
“It’s not a note,” Luce said. “You aren’t a bel dame. It’s a bounty. There’s no honor in bounties.”
“I know what I am. Does the council have you working actual notes, or are you just here to bully like a couple of border toughs?”
“We’re always working on notes,” Rasheeda said. She snapped her teeth at Rhys. “I ate a Chenjan just yesterday.”
“I hope you choked,” Rhys said.
“Keep your mouth locked, black man,” Rasheeda said. “My business isn’t with dumb bags or baby stealers.”
“Try to close it,” Rhys said.
Nyx grinned at that. She wanted to see Rhys shoot an organic target. He was a good shot.
“I heard you were fucking Chenjans,” Luce said, “but I didn’t believe it.”
“You women paying for lunch?” Nyx asked. “Or is that all?” Rhys might have an aversion for hurting living people, but she didn’t.
Luce said, “You think the council’s joking?”
“No,” Nyx said. “I think everything you honey pots could think of to do to me has been done. You stripped me of my bel dame license and sent me to prison. What, you want to set me on fire? Cut off bits and pieces and sell them to collectors? Send me to the front? It’s all been done. Fuck off.”
“We have other ways to hurt you, Nyx,” Luce said quietly.
“No, you don’t. My mother and brothers are dead. The only blood sister I have thinks I’m headed straight for hell. God left me in a trench outside Bahreha. You’re all the sisters I have, and you’re the ones who sent me to prison. Have a nice night.”
Luce kicked Rasheeda. “Up,” she said.
Rasheeda said, “I haven’t gotten my little green drink.”
“Get it at the bar,” Luce said.
The bel dames stood.
Nyx watched them walk to the bar.
The bar matron arrived with their food. There was soup for Rhys, and a steaming heap of meat for Nyx that made her even more nauseous than the opium smoke. She drew her dagger and stabbed at the hunk.
“Why haven’t they killed you yet?” Rhys asked.
“Nobody likes to kill bel dames,” Nyx said. And she was a lot more valuable to them alive. “I’ve been inoculated against every known contagion, and I can pass through any filter in the country. I can power down a city with one good burst slapped together with bug juice and scattergun acid.” Nobody killed a bel dame. At worst, you were thrown out. Or permanently imprisoned and cocooned.
“So there’s someone on that council who wants you alive to use for later.”
“Yeah. It’s why I went to prison and not back to the front.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. Some old lady, probably.”
“But they don’t like the queen. Do you think some of them would kill you anyway?”
“And piss off the old ladies? Luce won’t. Fatima would arrange an accident. Dahab and Rasheeda might. Others, no. They’d stick to clean notes.”
Nyx stared at the hunk of meat on her plate. It had taken four bel dames to bring her down last time. She had been on her own then, without a com tech, a shape shifter, a magician, or any kind of hired gun.
“So what do you think this alien knows that makes the queen and the bel dames want her so badly?” Rhys asked.
“What it is isn’t as important as what it can do,” Nyx said. “If it could end the war, it could end it in favor of either side. Think of her like a weapon we need to get back.” She considered. “I need to go to the coast and talk to my sister. She was passing information with New Kinaan at about the time Nikodem was last here. She might know something that’ll help.” Kine could also tell her a lot more about the aliens—and maybe their real motives—than they’d tell her themselves.
“I can go to the archives,” Rhys said.
“Too conspicuous.”
“I mean, the archives in the Chenjan district. I won’t be conspicuous there.”
“Hold off until I get back.” Nyx poked at her food.
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