Infidel (43 page)

Nyx walked back to her, crouched next to her.
 

“Alharazad?” Nyx said.
 

“She wants you alive. I don’t know! That’s what I heard. I heard it. I don’t know! Please kill me.”

Nyx broke the cap on the phial. Pulled out the syringe.

“Noooo!” Behdis shrieked.

“Where are they in Beh Ayin?” Nyx asked.
 

“I don’t… Beh Ayin? I don’t know! Please, I don’t know!”

“Who’s protecting them? I need to know where they are, Behdis, or you’re going to die very badly.”
 

“Please,” Behdis sobbed. “Please. Ask Alharazad. She knows. She knows everything. Kill me, please!”
 

Nyx filled the syringe. She met Behdis’s eyes. “I am,” she said, and plunged the syringe into Behdis’s thigh.
 

Nyx stood, tucked the syringe into the pocket of her tunic. “Cut her down,” she told Suha.
 

Behdis’s head slumped. She started convulsing.
 

“Where are we dumping her?” Suha asked.
 

They loaded the body into the bakkie and dumped it on the far eastern side of the inland sea. The drive back was quiet. Suha drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Nyx concentrated on the road.

They picked up Eshe at a boxing gym in the Ras Tiegan quarter. His face was still forgettable and Ras Tiegan enough to not get him much notice, and he was good with the handful of girls whose fathers allowed them to take up boxing, generally because they were showing some interest or affinity for working with bugs.
 

Eshe slipped into the back seat.

“Nyx?” Eshe asked after a long minute.
 

“Yeah?”
 

“You think God wants me to go to war?”

It was just after midday prayer. Suha had made her stop on the way there to pray. Nyx watched him in the rearview mirror. He was sitting up straight, hands in his lap, gazing at the window with brow furrowed.
 

“I don’t know what God wants, Eshe.”

“The mullahs say they know what God wants,” Eshe said. “You believe them?” He met her look in the rearview mirror.
 

Nyx looked back at the road. “The mullahs can’t figure out what they want for dinner,” she said.
 

“I’ve been thinking about the war. It’s not so different from what we do.”

“It’s a lot different,” Nyx said.
 

“How?”

Suha snorted.
 

“It just is,” Nyx said. “Who said what we do is like the war?”

“I was just thinking it was.”

“We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying,” Nyx said. “Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”
 

“You think God likes what we do? You think that’s why God brought you back?”

Nyx sighed. She wanted to say, I don’t give a fuck what God thinks, but snatched the whiskey bottle from Suha instead and took a long pull.
 

“God didn’t bring me back,” she said. “Yah Tayyib did. There’s a big difference.”
 

They drove to the edge of the quarter. Suha got her a line to Anneke.
 

“The fuck you up to out the fuck there?” Anneke said over the hissing, spitting line.
 

“Need a favor,” Nyx said.
 

“Ohhhhh fuck,” Anneke said.
 

Nyx returned the rented bakkie and bought a new one—new to Nyx, anyway—from an orange vendor in the Mhorian district. They picked up some supplies. A table slide, enough food to last a week, some household goods she and Suha could convert to explosives, deadtech bugging devices, and homemade security traps.
 

They started cleaning up the top floor of the abandoned warehouse. The corner storage room had easy access to two fire escapes. Nyx found more mattresses in a dump heap in the Heidian district that still smelled of cabbage. She splurged on new sheets, a short sword, and a full-sized scattergun that she immediately converted to a portable sawed-off.
 

Then she sat at her worktable with Suha and started putting together explosives.
 

She was due to pay a visit to Yah Tayyib.
 

+

It was a gorgeous day in Shirhazi. Clear lavender sky. The air didn’t smell like rotting shit—a nice change. Nyx figured the place could almost be pleasant if the wind kept up.
 

The magicians’ gym downtown was typical of Tirhan. She swore some of the inlay was real gold. A swarm of locusts blackened the dome. The whole gym was surrounded in a filter, a filter that wouldn’t take kindly to a Nasheenian woman’s blood code.
 

The power supply wasn’t hard to find. Tirhan was a soft country, drunk on love of itself, and the power station was just a little one-room checkpoint tower near the entrance where the magician in charge of feeding and directing the bugs kept the primary bug nest pumping out bugs with the right instructions.
 

She walked right up to the guard tower, and said she had a delivery in her broken Chenjan. She haggled with the actual guard on duty for a couple of minutes while she planted the mine.
 

Nyx kept hold of her package, and found a good, unguarded entrance on the other side of the building to wait.
   

The mine going off was a small sound, a muted boom. Then the filter popped and blinked out. She walked right in. She thought of babies and candy, and that made her think of Mercia with her sweet stick, running through the streets of Mushtallah.
 

Babies, indeed.
 

She walked into a broad reception area and asked the woman in Tirhani if she spoke Nasheenian.
 

The woman said she did. Nyx said she had a delivery for Yah Tayyib. Behind the reception desk, Nyx saw the most amazing thing—a big shimmery display board with the names of magicians on it. And the call patterns for their offices.
 

Sweet fuck, Nyx thought. Yah Tayyib was on the third floor, room 435.

The receptionist told her to leave the package.
 

“I’m sorry,” Nyx said, “it’s from another magician. Yah Rhys. I was given explicit instructions to deliver this to Yah Tayyib. I’ll either need to drop it in his rooms, or you’ll need to call him out.”

“I’m sorry—” the receptionist began, and then seemed distracted. There would be some kind of emergency call on her console by now. Somebody had probably sent a swarm as well. It wouldn’t take long to get the filter back up. She didn’t have much time.
 

“Listen, I can see you’re busy,” Nyx said.
 

The receptionist’s brows were knit.
   

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Nyx said.
 

The receptionist raised her eyes, gave a guilty smile.
 

“It’s no problem,” Nyx said. “I’ll just take this to 435, all right? Third floor. I’ve visited him before. Old friend, you know? Nasheenian.” She winked. It felt totally unconvincing.
 

You’re going to get your ass thrown out, she thought.
 

But there were more people coming in now. Nyx could see sweat on the woman’s brow. She was reaching for her transceiver. “All right. Just hurry down, please,” she said.
 

Nyx headed left.
 

“Mother?” the receptionist said.
 

Nyx felt her heart squeeze. Dammit. Did she look that old?

“The lifts are the other way,” the receptionist said pleasantly.
 

“Of course. Yeah,” Nyx said. She went to the lifts, but walked right past and went up the stairs. She had never used a lift before, and didn’t like the look of them.
 

The room was easy to find, but when she knocked, no one answered. It was locked, but not filtered. Odd. She supposed the filter outside kept out most folks. She checked the hall, then jimmied open the door with a couple of hijab pins. Old Chenjan trick. Easy to crack a place with low security.

The door opened. She stepped into a dimly lit room and shut the door.
 

She noticed the sound first, the low hum.
 

“Fucking shit,” she said, and grabbed for the door again.
 

A wasp swarm engulfed her. She shut her mouth and covered her ears.
 

“Nyx?”

The swarm abated. When she looked up, Yah Tayyib was standing in a doorway leading into another room.
 

She looked around. Stone slab for a desk, some antique books, a couple of bugs in jars.
 

“Seems kind of a shitty time to decide to kill me,” Nyx said. She spit out a wasp.
   

“They wouldn’t have killed you,” Yah Tayyib said. “What are you doing here?”
 

“Alharazad,” Nyx said.
 

Yah Tayyib drew himself up a little straighter, sighed through his nose. “Yes,” he said. “Come in. Rhys has been looking for you.”

He motioned her into the next room.
 

“Rhys?”

It was his operating theater. At the center was a great stone slab. The walls were lined in jars of organs. Flesh beetles squirmed around in the bowl of the sink at the head of the slab. There was a dead boy on the slab, his chest pinned open. The head was in a jar of solution sitting on a counter at the back. Roaches busied themselves at something in the boy’s chest cavity.
 

“I’m interrupting?” Nyx said.
 

“Always.”
 

Nyx sat on a stool on the other side of the body. She watched Yah Tayyib as he began to work again.
 

“You said Rhys was looking for me?”
 

“He left a call pattern. It’s on my desk.”
 

“Why’d you bring me back?” she said.
 

“I thought you knew.”
 

“I’m too tired for games, Tayyib.”
 

“You and I have a mutual enemy,” he said.
 

“Alharazad.”
 

“Just so.” He picked up a scalpel and cut something out of the boy, some fleshy bit, and placed it in a jar of solution.
 

“When did she turn?”

“Decades ago, when the first of the aliens visited. She saw them as a threat to Nasheen. Their meddling with the world, she believed, would ruin everything we created here. It is the world that makes us unique, and it is the world that keeps us bound here. Ships don’t stay long on Nasheen. When they do, the bugs of our world eat out their innards and leave them stranded. Just as they did to those who first fell from the sky. She approached a good many of us with her concerns. She even tried hijacking a vessel herself with several of us using tailored swarms.” He waved his hand over the body, and four roaches crawled out. He pulled a handful of flesh beetles from the sink and drove them deep down into the boy’s guts.
 

“You were working with the aliens, though,” Nyx said.
 

“I’ve worked for many sides, when I believed one was working harder than the other for what I wanted.”
 

“And what did you want?”

“What you want. An end to the war.”
 

“Shitty way of going about it.”

“You think so?” Yah Tayyib washed his hands in the sink. “Alharazad has moved many of us around on her chessboard for decades. I no longer wanted to be moved. I acted on my own. Perhaps my judgment was misguided-”
 

“Misguided?” Nyx said, “You wanted to teach Chenja how to breed monsters to kill our boys.”
 

“No.” He dried his hands on his apron. “I wanted an end to the war. That would only happen if both sides had the ability to annihilate each other. I realize you have no love of history, but we have warred a good deal longer than any realize. Disagreements between our people go back to the days before the beginning of the world.”

“There was nothing before that.”

“There was the moons.”

Nyx waved a hand. “Old stories. You can’t expect to believe anything that old.”

“We bickered on those moons a thousand years while the magicians worked to make this world habitable. Yes, a good deal was lost, and much that remains is myth, but there are seeds of truth to every myth.”
 

“So what stopped the war? Coming down here?”

“No. It ended before that, when both sides got perilously close to losing everything. They developed a weapon so powerful it had the ability to completely annihilate the other. There was as much spying and espionage then as now, and it didn’t take long for both sides to gain this power.”