Nyx told Khos to hold up.
Nikodem sagged between them. Nyx left her in Khos’s grasp and stepped forward to the lip of the gully. Sand and stones tumbled down the soft slope and into the ditch below.
Nyx surveyed the surrounding hilltops—there were plenty of rocky, scrub-filled places to hide. Why show his magician up front? To keep her from doing something stupid? Raine knew it was already too late for that.
Something moved just across the gully. Nyx reached for her pistol with her bad hand. What had appeared to be another swath of uninteresting brush blurred and morphed into a dark, bare-headed man in a tattered robe lying in the rocky sand. Behind him stood the hefty, barrel-chested Raine.
Nyx saw another man step out far to the left of them. She recognized him as Dakar, a mercenary from the Cage. He was broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with a crop of black hair and legs that looked too big and beefy to carry him very far. Nyx remembered that he was also a shape shifter, and a good shot.
Nyx held her pistol in her bad hand. “You tell him to stand down!”
“Why?” Raine said.
Nyx grabbed Nikodem by the arm and jerked her close. She put the gun to Nikodem’s head. “Because I’m a better shot from here.”
Khos’s hands moved toward his pistol.
Nyx dropped her gaze to Rhys. Rhys’s face was turned away from her, and one arm rested limp on his chest. He had not moved.
“He alive?” she barked.
Raine nudged Rhys with his sandaled foot. Rhys put up a hand as if to ward off a blow.
“Alive enough,” Raine said.
“You get him up and push him across the gully,” Nyx said. “I do the same with mine, and we walk off. You keen?”
“I’m disappointed, Nyx. No threats? No lectures?”
“You’ve always been the blowhard. You played this dirty from the start. I want this over.”
“You pass me the mark, and we’ll see about your magician.”
“Don’t push, Raine. I’ve got nothing to lose.” She tightened her grip on Nikodem.
Raine pulled a small curved blade from his belt. Even from across the gully, she recognized it. It was the knife she’d taken from him the night he took her ear. She’d cut off his cock with it.
“There are plenty more pieces of him I can cut off,” Raine said.
Nyx took Nikodem by the collar and pushed her toward the lip of the gully. The alien stumbled and muttered something in her language. She was going to need more water. Her skin was loose and dry.
Raine made no move toward Rhys.
Nyx tensed. She kept her hold on Nikodem’s collar. She wanted to throw her into the gully and be done with her.
Nyx licked the sweat from her upper lip. The sun was low in the sky. She saw something glinting up there on the hill, maybe ten yards up.
She heard a shot.
Nikodem jerked and crumpled. Nyx let her fall. Another shot rang out. Khos yelled at her. His gun went off.
Nyx leapt into the gully, and as she jumped she pulled one of the poisoned needles from her hair and flung it at Raine.
The needle bounced right off him, but he clawed at his left breast and stepped back. By the time he recovered, Nyx was up over the lip of the other side of the gully. She grabbed Rhys by one arm and one leg and yanked him down with her. They tumbled back into the ditch in a hail of sand and gravel.
Shots sounded behind her, close. She heard a dog bark. She regained her feet and turned just in time to see a brown dog leap at her.
Nyx dropped low and reached behind her. She pulled her sword from its sheath in one clean stroke with her good hand and brought it down in front of her. The dog met the blade, and another shot from the other side of the gully felled the dog. It collapsed at her feet and choked on its own blood while shedding hair and slowly half-morphing back into the form of Dakar.
Nyx heard a soft cascade of sand and stone behind her and turned with her blade to see Raine bearing down on her, sword drawn.
She put herself and her blade between Raine and Rhys. She heard more shots. Somebody was going to run out of bullets.
Raine hacked at her. She stepped left, caught the blow. She had to use both hands on the hilt to push him back. He outweighed her and he had the higher ground, but if she tried to reverse their positions she would leave Rhys unguarded.
She saw a blur of tawny blond lope up at her right. Khos had shifted. The dog grabbed Rhys by the ankle and started dragging him.
Nyx stepped back and tried to find solid footing on the gully floor. Raine swung again. She parried and moved her feet. Boxing and sword fighting were their own sorts of dances, but you learned the footwork for one and you knew how important footwork was for the other.
She thrust forward and ducked and moved again. The problem with Raine being bigger was that she couldn’t take many heavy blows. And she was missing two fucking fingers on one hand. She needed to avoid those blows at all costs.
For Raine the problem with being bigger was that he couldn’t move as fast as she could.
She danced back toward the other side of the gully. Raine pulled his knife again and came at her with both blades.
Nyx stumbled on a twisted bit of wood. She crouched and blocked a blow from above. Raine cut toward her with the knife in his other hand.
Nyx was already too close to the ground. She rolled and caught him around the legs. He toppled, and she used her grip on him for leverage. As he fell, she shot back up and thrust her blade down.
He twisted and rolled, and then she lost her feet.
Raine dropped his sword and used his free hand to take her sword hand by the wrist. He struggled on top of her, trying to pin her so he could use the knife.
Nyx caught his wrist in her bad hand and wrapped her legs around his torso. Stones bit into her back. Dust clogged her mouth. Raine’s sweat dripped into her face.
She pushed herself up on her right shoulder and rolled him over.
She let go of the sword—it was too long, this close.
Beneath her, Raine was a barrel of heat, fat, padding-thick muscle. He stank of old leather and fermented wine and the distasteful funk that was Raine—a scent altogether too spicy, too strong, like a musk that had gone sour.
He had her by one wrist, but with her other hand she had his left wrist, the one with the dagger. He gritted his teeth. She kept him locked between her legs.
While they grappled, she heard a distant sound. Somebody calling her name. A wasp landed on her arm. Another buzzed past Raine’s head.
And she realized there was only one reason Khos would have shifted in the middle of a firefight.
Bullets could kill dogs as well as people.
But bugs were tailored to go after humans.
Fucking magician.
Raine’s expression was grim, and sweat poured down his darkening face.
Bugs. Well. Let him send bugs.
I have lived through worse, she thought, and she said it aloud, bit through the words: “I’ve survived worse than you.”
“You have,” Raine gasped, and he made to roll her again. “But in the end I realized I made you, and because of that, it’s my duty to end you.”
She twisted her other hand free and grappled for the dagger, two-handed now.
They rolled again along the gully floor. The blade cut the inside of her left arm. She pushed back.
He was on top of her again. Her arms shook as she held him away. His free hand came down on her throat. She pressed her chin down and pushed her body back a half inch, enough to get a breath.
“Look at what you’ve become,” he said, and he was sweating into her face again, big salty drops that fell onto her cheeks, her lips. The veins in his neck stood out. “Do you realize what you’ve become? You have no honor, no purpose. You bleed others for money with no idea of the consequences. What a fool you are to think that killing this woman solves anything at all.”
His grip tightened on her throat. She stabbed her foot
into the sand again and pushed back, caught her breath.
“And you’re a fool for thinking that killing me is some kind of epic duty,” Nyx said.
How many men had made her? Her brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine’s half-breed muscle? They were just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hordes of sisters, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or none of them. It wasn’t what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you.
“You didn’t make me,” Nyx gasped. “I made myself.”
She released her bad hand from the dagger and wrapped her fingers around Raine’s face. She shoved her thumb into his eye. Press and pop. She dislodged the eye from the socket and punctured the orb. Blood and fluid leaked into her face. He jerked away from her before she could severe the optic nerve. The eye bobbed against his face.
Raine swore. He grabbed at his smashed eye.
Nyx heard a buzzing sound above her, and something dark moved across the sun.
Nyx jabbed her knee into Raine’s side and pushed him over again. He started to bellow at her, just nonsense. She couldn’t make anything of it over the buzzing of the bugs and pounding of her heart. She wrapped both hands around Raine’s knife and plunged the dagger down at him. He pushed back at her. She leapt off him suddenly, rolled left, and grabbed his forgotten sword. It was better than hers.
He’d lost his vision on that side, and while he tried to scramble to his feet and turn his head to catch sight of her, Nyx took up the blade and brought it down where he still floundered in the sand. The blade slid right through him, through fat and muscle alike. She pressed into him until the hilt lodged against his chest and the length of it buried itself in the sand.
Raine grunted.
Above her, a cloud of wasps circled.
Nyx was breathing hard. Blood trickled from the cut in her forearm. Her knees and elbows were bruised and bloodied. She took up the dagger.
Raine gasped. He had both hands on the hilt of the sword. She pressed her knee into his chest and leaned into him. His eye dangled from its socket. Blood leaked from the corner.
Nyx grabbed his ear. A dozen wasps buzzed around the hood of her burnous. Three of them crawled along her arm. She felt more of them alighting in her hair.
The knife was sharp. Raine kept his gear in good shape.
She sawed off his ear, and he writhed and bellowed at her. She leaned over him so he could see her tuck it into her dhoti.
“Deliver her to the Queen,” he said, spitting blood. “Don’t kill her.”
“I’ll be as merciful to her as you’ve been to me,” Nyx said.
She put her other hand on the hilt of the sword, pressed on it as she moved her face within inches of his. She whispered, “I intend to collect you in pieces.”
“Nyx!”
Her name, on the wind, above the buzz of the bugs. A cloud of wasps circling her. One of them stung her arm.
Nyx pushed herself back up. She stood amid a swarm of wasps. She could not see either side of the gully. The world was a buzzing, hissing swarm. She put a hand over her mouth, tried to breathe without inhaling wasps.
But what did it matter? What did it matter?
Raine’s ear cooled against her skin. She felt the blood leaking down her belly.
“Nyx!”
Why did they call her? Why bother? They were all dead anyway. They should have died the night Fatima and Rasheeda took her. Then she would be dead too, and all this would be over.
“Nyx!”
She stumbled toward the voice without knowing why. She felt the wasps sting her face, her arms, her legs. She had sweated away most of the unguent. She kept her hand over her face.
She fell, and banged her knee on a stone. She dropped the dagger and put both hands down to catch herself. Her hands came away wet.
Water. Why was there water in the gully? Unless…
Nyx ran blindly toward what she hoped was the other side of the gully.
Water rushed past her ankles. As she ran, the water rose, and then she was slogging through it. The wasps stung.
She hated it when she was right about the fucking weather.
She lost her fight with the water.
Nyx let herself drop under. The buzz of the bugs abruptly stopped. Her burning skin was suddenly cool. The current was strong. Bits of stone and wood and some dead thing smashed into her. She broke the surface, tried to stand. The water was chest-deep now.
She could not swim, of course.
When she looked up, the cloud of wasps was somewhere behind her. She tried to find her footing, but the current was too strong.
Nyx collided with the side of the gully. She groped for a handhold and found a loose root. She held on and hauled herself out of the water. She rolled onto the other bank like a beached log and gasped. Anneke was running over to her from just upriver, her gun slung behind her, bumping against her ass.
“Where’s Rhys?” Nyx asked.
“You breathing, boss?”
Anneke crouched next to her, cloaked in a sheen of sweat.
“Where’s Rhys?” she repeated.
“Still upstream, boss.” She looked over her shoulder at the raging water in the gully.
Nyx pulled herself into a sitting position and gazed out at the gully as well. Raine had been in there. Pinned to the ground with a sword. She reached for the ear she’d tucked into her dhoti, but it was gone, torn away by the water.
She looked for the cloud of wasps but saw nothing upstream.
“Where’s Khos?” Nyx asked.
“Last I saw, the fucker was running back toward the bakkie.”
Nyx knitted her brows. Her arms and face stung. “Go see if the bakkie’s still there,” she said.
Fucker, she thought. Cowardly fucker. And perhaps something worse. If Khos had headed out before the end of the fight, it was more than possible that he had either set himself up with a back exit or, worse… Please, fuck, she thought, let that not be it. That’s not it. He wouldn’t do that. Nobody on my team would do that.
She got to her feet. Anneke ran off toward the bakkie.
Nyx stumbled along the bank toward the scrub, searching for Rhys. She saw one dark arm flung out from a line of scrub, palm open toward the sky. She had a sudden memory of her sister, Kine, in the tub, bloodied, eyeless.
She fell to her knees and scrambled toward him. He opened his eyes, squinted at her. Closed his eyes.
“You,” he said.
“Me,” she said.
“I saw you fall.”
“Thought you could get rid of me so easy?”
“Hoped,” he said, and opened his eyes again.
“I think I killed Raine.”
“Never liked him anyway,” Rhys said.
“You still drugged?”
“Yes. But it should wear off. I was due for another dose.”
“They fuck you up?” Nyx asked.
Rhys closed his eyes again, grimaced.
“We need to go,” she said.
“Their magician was shot, but she’ll be coming around.”
“It’s not the magician I’m worried about,” Nyx said. She looked behind her at the raging water in the gully. Where was Nikodem? Had she fallen and washed down the gully too? Or had she scrambled back up the way Nyx had, heading for the road?
She glanced back down at Rhys, at the shallow rise and fall of his chest. She saw now that there was something wrong with his hands. The fingers looked twisted. Broken.
She wanted to kill Raine again. Even dirtier this time.
Nyx closed her mouth, leaned back away from Rhys. Her heart ached. This wasn’t the time for petty sentiment. She had spent so long tr
ying not to feel anything.
“We need to go. I’ll carry you,” she said.
She squatted and pushed her arms underneath him. She was nearly the same size as Rhys, but as she lifted him, she had to go easy, find her balance. She was exhausted.
The stings hurt, and her vision was going blurry. Her knees nearly buckled. The heat was rapidly sucking the moisture from her hair and clothes.
She followed the gully back down through the hills. The water was already lowering, bleeding off. She looked behind her and no longer saw any storm clouds. At least when it rained up there it didn’t last long.
Sand stuck to her skin. She’d lost a sandal somewhere in the gully. She walked with a limp. As she walked, she became increasingly certain that Khos had taken Inaya and the bakkie and fucked off. And Rhys was getting heavier. Her breath came hard. She stumbled.
She looked at Rhys, in her arms. A couple of hours. Could he walk in a couple of hours, after the drugs wore off?
A shot sounded ahead of them. The sound of a rifle.
Nyx stopped, and was going to drop Rhys and reach for her pistol when she realized she didn’t have it. She was down to two poisoned needles in her hair and a razor blade in her one remaining sandal.
She had to make a decision. The shot was had come from the direction of the bakkie, which likely wasn’t there anyway. Behind her was more Chenjan desert, a desert she had last seen a decade before, in the spring. A desert she had blown apart. Something flew over her head, circled them, flew back toward the bakkie.
A white raven.
Nyx looked behind her. They could skirt the other side of the hill, hole up in a cave until dark, and wait for Rhys to get his strength back. They could walk out.
Someone snickered.
Nyx turned.
Rasheeda strode toward them, naked and still shivering. A hail of white feathers blew out behind her.
Nyx tensed.
She needed to run. Taite was dead. Anneke probably was, too. They’d kill Rhys and her, eventually. If they caught her.
Run.
Drop the fucking Chenjan and run, she thought. Fucking run.
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