The waterworks was on the south side of Dadfar, which used to be an industrial quarter before Nasheen blew the hell out of it sixty years before. It had never been rebuilt. The south side was a morass of hulking, burned-out shells where squatters and draft dodgers made do. There were rude opium dens tucked into corners. The pervasive smell of marijuana filled the rubble-strewn streets. It wasn’t the sort of place Khos would have picked for a proper fight, but then, fighting wasn’t legal in Chenja.
And, in that case, Khos supposed the south side was perfect.
Rhys, as usual, was wearing too many clothes for the occasion. He had picked up a green turban sometime after they arrived in Dadfar, and that—paired with his long trousers, long tunic, and green burnous—made him look like some local man of importance. He kept everything too clean. And he was too pretty. If Khos drew attention for being a pale giant, Rhys drew it by being too well presented. If Khos had still been a thief, he’d have pegged Rhys as a perfect target, magician or not. Holier-than-thou men were smooth marks.
The night was dark; the moons were in far recession. Khos kept his high beams on and parked about four blocks away from the waterworks.
As Khos stepped out, he asked Rhys, “You ever fought a real fight, boxing?” Khos had learned all of his fighting from street brawls in Mhoria. The desert obsession with boxing interested him; he liked going to fights. “No. Boxing leads to gambling, and I don’t gamble.”
“It’s not gambling if you don’t bet on anyone.”
“Yes it is. Others gamble.”
“If you bet on yourself, you could call it being self-employed.”
Rhys sighed. He spent a few minutes calling up his bugs to guard the bakkie. When the wasps were settled, Khos made his way toward the waterworks and Rhys followed. Dark shapes skittered along the edges of his vision. He heard the hiss and chitter of giant scavenging bugs.
There were two men sitting around outside a set of double doors leading into the waterworks. Khos smelled bug-repelling unguent around the doors. Fuck, he hated contaminated cities. Behind the men, a globe full of glow worms gave off a faint light.
Khos still found it strange to see so many men around, even though they were old. He had lived in Nasheen for most of his adult life, and he had gotten used to the presence of women and the sound of Nasheenian. Mhoria was still a strictly sex-segregated society, which he’d hated enough to compel him to cross the border into Nasheen. He did miss some things, though. The food was better in Mhoria, and nobody was as suspiciously frightened… of everything. Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear. It got to you. He wasn’t sure why Taite had brought his sister out to the desert. She wasn’t built for it, and she hated it. Taite had invited him over to her place a couple of times, and he and Inaya had gotten along all right until she realized he was a shifter.
“Take care of her,” Taite had said that night in the Mhorian café.
And now Raine had Taite, and Inaya was Khos’s responsibility.
Damn this note, Khos thought.
The old men at the doors of the waterworks asked for nearly a buck to admit Rhys and Khos.
Rhys made to argue, but Khos paid it. The less fuss they made, the less likely they’d be remembered. A giant white Mhorian and a draft-age Chenjan would get plenty of attention without making a scene over money.
They entered a narrow corridor that stank of piss. Khos followed some glow worms to his left. He heard men talking in loud voices, old men, men who’d been to the front. You could tell. They talked differently from the ones who stayed home—rasping, bitter.
Khos turned in to the room. There was a raised ring at the center with plain organic ropes and unpainted corner posts. Lights hung over the ring, but the rest of the place was dark, except for a few globes at the end of the room where the bar was.
“You want a drink?” Khos asked Rhys.
Rhys just looked at him.
Khos shrugged. He had never much cared for Rhys and his buttoned-down coats and upturned nose. It was like he thought he had some kind of special relationship with God, like he was one of the First Families. Why didn’t Raine take you? he thought, but that just led to thinking about Taite again, cut up and tortured in some Chenjan offal house.
Khos remembered the first time he figured out Taite was looking a little too long at him, that his eyes spent a lot longer on the few young men they passed than the fleshy, friendly women. It had amused Khos to find somebody who thought bedding a man was some kind of sin, something you’d get beaten up or killed for. It was illegal in Ras Tieg, Chenja, and Nasheen, for no good reason except that it scared the shit out of people, and Khos had laughed and laughed about it, until he saw a young boy stoned in the street for kissing another boy in Ras Tieg.
Bloody fucking barbarians, he thought. In Mhoria, men were brothers and lovers and friends. Denying that was like cutting out a piece of yourself. What Mhoria didn’t get was that cutting women out was like cutting out a piece of yourself too. A society needed balance, Khos thought, but a society at balance was harder to control, and Umayma had been founded and built on the principles of control. You controlled the breeding, the sex, the death, the fucking blood that ran in your veins. The government thought they could control the world through will alone.
Like Ras Tieg and its war against the shifters.
You’ll never bother to understand how any of it works, he thought, pushing his way after Rhys through the crowd. You’ll never control a world you don’t understand. They’d been bleeding and dying for three thousand years on this planet, and nobody’d taken the time to understand it. They just wanted to control it.
Rhys found them a pair of rickety seats. An old man came around asking if they wanted to bet on any of the fighters.
Khos could follow most Chenjan and asked who was fighting.
“Good fight tonight,” the old man said, and grinned. He was missing most of his teeth. “We’ve got an outrider named Afshin Ahben fighting our own Khavar Puniz. Good fighters, both. You seen them? After, we have the really good stuff. We have Barsine Shifteh and Tarsa Zoya.”
Khos wondered if he’d heard right. “These are men boxing?”
The old man laughed. “Men? No, no. Barsine, you think that’s a boy’s name? Your Chenjan needs work, boy.”
“How did you find women to box in Chenja?” Rhys asked.
“You haven’t seen much boxing,” the old man said. “We’ve been getting in some Nasheenian girls this last year. Why do you think our entrance fee’s so high? We don’t risk our boys in the ring anymore. Too dangerous. Makes them unfit for the front. Gets people suspicious.”
“Husayn said she was losing fighters to this ring,” Rhys said, in Mhorian. Khos had only heard him speak Mhorian a handful of times. There were days when he wondered just how important Rhys’s family was. Chenjans and Nasheenians didn’t bother learning Heidian, Drucian, Ras Tiegan, or Mhorian, as a rule. Those were the lesser people, the latecomers who they fed the planet’s scraps. “But I didn’t realize they made up the entire card.”
“So you want to bet on anybody?” the old man asked. His eyes were eager. Khos wondered what his cut was.
“Yeah, sure,” Khos said. “I’ll put a buck on that second one, Tarsa.”
Rhys said, “A buck? Are you—”
“It’s my personal take,” Khos said. He counted out a buck in change and handed it over to the man. The man punched out a receipt with a dumb stylo on organic paper. If you wanted to make some contacts, you had to start by passing out money.
When he’d gone, Khos said, “You see any magicians in here yet?”
“No. We’re early, I think.”
“I’m going to the bar. Want anything?”
“Only if they have clean water.”
“Doubtful.”
Khos moved through the crowd to the bar. The advantage of being big and foreign was that most people got out of your way.
Khos ordered a bloody rum. The bartender was a stooped old man with half a face
and a crusted black hole where one of his eyes should have been.
“You Mhorian?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Khos said.
The man contorted his face in what Khos took to be an attempt at a smirk. Maybe a grimace.
“What’s it like, never seeing women?” the man asked.
“It’s why I left,” Khos said, and found himself thinking of Inaya. Why had she left Ras Tieg in the first place? Taite always said she was happily married back home.
The man coughed out a laugh and handed over Khos’s drink. “I like my women in private spaces. Can’t get away with it much anymore. Not like old times.”
“But foreign women are different?” Khos asked, nodding at the ring.
“Foreign women are dogs,” the man said.
“I’m a shifter,” Khos said. “I take some offense at that.” He didn’t, really, but it was worth the fearful look on the man’s face. Khos was a head taller and thirty kilos heavier than he was.
“They’re just bad women,” the barman sputtered.
Khos turned away from the bar and bumped into a tall man wearing a long blue burnous cut like Rhys’s. He was old and too pale to be Chenjan. Khos saw a locust clinging to his cuff. When the man opened a hand and ordered a drink, roaches scuttled back up his sleeve.
Khos stepped away and looked over the press of people around the magician. He saw no one familiar, so he widened the sweep of his gaze around the tables to see if anyone was looking at the man. A veiled woman and a tall unveiled woman glanced at the bar from their places near the ring.
“Khos Khadija?”
Khos started. He reached for the short pistol at his hip with his free hand.
A lean, ropy-looking Nasheenian woman with a long, mean face stepped in front of him. She had a boxer’s face, one whose nose had been mashed in one too many times. She squinted at him.
“I thought that was you,” she said.
“I know you?” he asked. In his line of work, he knew a lot of women.
“No, but some of my women do. You helped some of my whores in Nasheen get their boys out.”
“You run a brothel?”
“It’s among the many things I do,” she said. “Have a drink with me.”
“I’m with someone.”
“He can wait. I have a private room.”
Khos hesitated. She wasn’t an attractive woman, certainly not the type he’d want to have a drink with under any other circumstances, but he was here to scout out news and make contacts, and she was offering. He’d also be interested to know how she was going around unveiled without an escort in Chenja.
And how she knew his name.
“All right, then. One drink,” he said. “You have a name?”
“In Chenja, I go by Haj.”
“Seriously?”
She grinned. He saw dark circles under her eyes. Nyx would say she was a bleeder. “Seriously.”
Haj led him up a winding set of stairs to the balcony overlooking the ring. She opened a battered metal door and revealed a lushly appointed viewing box with windows overlooking the ring.
Two young women slumped on the raised benches set against the windows. The benches were covered in an assortment of pillows that matched the gauzy veils the women wore. Both were Chenjan dark. They looked up at Haj and Khos with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Get this man a drink,” Haj told one of the women.
The woman got to her feet with the practiced ease of a dancer. She went to the private bar at the other side of the room and poured out two glasses of dark liquor.
“Sit,” Haj told Khos.
He pushed some cushions out of the way and sat next to the other woman on the bench. She smelled good, some kind of heady, flowery scent peppered with cinnamon. Haj was well off, but not well off enough to have boys.
Haj sat in an armchair across from him and took the liquor the woman offered her.
“I’d heard you were in town,” Haj said.
Khos felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Who else was tagging them?
“Is that so?”
“I run the brothel on East Babuk,” she said. “Oversee it, actually, for my employer. I found out they’re giving you sanctuary.”
“Is that so?” Khos repeated, still too startled to come up with anything else. He couldn’t imagine Mahrokh selling him out, but he’d been wrong before. Who the hell was this woman? “Who’s your employer?” he asked.
“Local magistrate,” Haj said, waving a hand. “No one important. I hoped to thank you for services rendered. You helped some good men dodge the Nasheenian draft. I’m grateful for that.”
“Kin of yours?”
A knock came at the door.
“Enter,” Haj said.
A bulky Nasheenian woman pushed into the room. She wore a set of dueling pistols, and one arm was paler than the other.
Khos tensed. He knew that woman.
A stocky kid came in behind her.
“You entertaining again?” Dahab said to Haj. She spared only a glance at Khos. Something else was on her mind, praise be. “I need to talk to you about Nikodem.”
Khos forced himself to drink more.
“Over here,” Haj said.
“You’re such a voyeur,” Dahab said. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
“So long as I pay you, you’ll make time. Come on.”
Haj moved to the far end of the room with Dahab. The girl who’d come in with Dahab hung around pretending not to look at Khos and the women.
“You’re a good man,” one of the women next to Khos murmured, in Chenjan. She put a soft hand on his shoulder. He didn’t feel so great at the moment.
He took another drink and kept his head tilted toward Dahab and Haj. He’d seen Dahab two or three times around the Cage, but it looked like she hadn’t recognized him.
“I can’t protect a woman who goes out to fights,” Dahab said.
“You could have protected her just fine if you brought me that bitch you said you had in Jameela.”
“I ain’t God.”
“Neither is she.”
Dahab and Haj said something else, and then Dahab was marching past him and out the door. Her squirt followed after her, sparing one last look back.
Haj sat across from him as the Chenjan woman next to him kissed his neck. Memories of his night with Nyx, years before—the smell of her skin, the strength in her legs, her perfect naked ass—showed up in the strangest places.
When the woman pulled away from him, he saw a smile touch Haj’s plain face.
“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about what I can offer you for Nyxnissa’s head—and the safety of your little white bitch.”
Khos took another drink.
27
“You sure about that?” Nyx asked from her seat on the tattered divan. Her fingers throbbed—the ones that weren’t there. She had lost an arm in a tangle with a sand cat once, but she was under the magicians’ protection then, and after passing out from blood loss, she’d gone only half a day without an arm before getting fitted with a new one. Ghost pains were new to her.
Rhys shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Khos leaned against the card table in front of her, chewing on his thumb. Anneke was wandering around the room, holding the brat in her ropy arms and muttering in low tones. She was probably telling the kid prison stories.
“We tailed Nikodem and the magicians after the fight,” Khos said. “They’re living in an upscale hotel on the east side. Rhys got a list of the tenants, and there’s a party of three under Yah Tayyib’s name.”
Once again—Yah Tayyib. Nyx supposed she should have been gleeful. Instead, she was exhausted. Being right didn’t make it any easier.
“But you didn’t see Yah Tayyib at the fight?”
“No,” Rhys said. “I called Yah Reza, and she has Yah Tayyib written in as being under residence at the gym in Faleen.”
“That just means his name’s on a docket. Doesn’t mean he’s there,” N
yx said. “When’s the next fight?”
“A week from now. You don’t want to nab her at the house?” Khos asked. He started fussing with his dreads. Always a bad sign. Something had gotten him worked up at the fight.
“It’ll be easier to take her at the next fight. I’ll be in better shape then. If we move now, we’re one person short.”
“Two,” Khos said. “There’s Taite.”
“I haven’t forgotten about Taite.” Nyx nodded at Anneke, who had settled the kid on the floor in a spill of blankets. Anneke pulled out her shotgun and started polishing it, still nattering. She was telling the kid how to take apart an X1080 assault rifle. “Kinda hard to forget, isn’t he?”
“Sure,” Khos said, and grimaced at the floor.
“Anneke, I want you scouting out this building of hers. Get me as much information as possible,” Nyx said. “How about that woman? She ready for visitors?” She nodded toward Inaya’s room.
“Not really,” Anneke said.
“Too bad,” Nyx said. She hobbled to her feet and waved away Rhys’s help. It was time to move. In every sense.
She knocked on the door with her good hand and entered before Inaya said anything. The room was too hot, airless, and dark. She needed to open some of the lattices.
Inaya raised her head, then turned toward the wall.
“I know you don’t want to speak to me, but I need answers that might get Taite back.”
Inaya looked at her.
“Did he give you anything before you left? Supplies, papers, stuff like that?”
“He gave me some things from his desk. And food. There was food and water in the bakkie.”
“Where’s the stuff from the desk?”
“In the bakkie. I put the transmission canisters under the rug beneath the gas pedals, if that’s what you’re after.”
“The bakkie? Who’s bakkie?”
“Husayn’s. I left it parked by that place. Your other garret.”
Nyx tried to get her head around that. “You got yourself and a bakkie over the border?” Khos had said something about Inaya being a shifter, but shifters couldn’t shift bakkies, for fuck’s sake.
“That’s my business,” Inaya said.
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