Kasbah gestured for the two guards inside to take up posts outside the door. When Nyx entered, Kasbah shut and secured the door behind her. A wave of scarab beetles descended from the lintel.
The Queen was dressed in a simple vest and tunic and long, too-big trousers. Her burnous was red-brown and had the soft sheen of the organic about it. Nyx had stolen a good many organic burnouses from magicians over the years. They cost a fortune in blood and body parts. It was like being clothed in the dead.
“It has been some time,” the Queen said. She did not stand, but gestured for Nyx to sit. “You look terrible.”
“I’ve been better,” Nyx admitted.
The Queen exchanged a look with Kasbah. Kasbah appeared markedly older than the Queen, though Nyx suspected they were both sidling up over fifty.
“Looks like you got out of Mushtallah,” Nyx said.
“Indeed. Sit,” the Queen said.
Nyx eased onto one of the triangular stools facing the desk. Her head swam. She was forgetting something. As she sat, it occurred to her that Kasbah hadn’t disarmed her. And no one had properly searched her for organics.
“You appear to be missing your magician,” the Queen said.
“The last job you gave me was enough for him. He’s retired.”
“To Tirhan. Yes, I know.”
Nyx wondered what they were playing at. “You called me, remember?”
“Kasbah tells me you were in Mushtallah during the bombing.”
“Too big a job for me to pull off on my own.”
“I’m well aware of who poisoned my filter and destroyed my city,” the Queen said, “if that’s what you thought to trouble me with. But I will accept your offer of bringing her to justice.”
“So it
was
bel dames.” Nyx’s right hand began to tremble again. She stilled it with her left.
“Kasbah tells me you recently visited Bloodmount.”
“Had a rogue bel dame try to kill me. Turned in her head at the mount.”
The Queen and Kasbah exchanged another look.
“The bel dame council and the monarchy have a long history of… disagreement,” the Queen said. “As is well known. Over the last decade more than half of the members of the bel dame council have been killed or retired and been replaced. These new women are young radicals fresh from the front. One of them in particular has been sowing unrest for some time.
“Now the council is turning away notes that come from the palace and forcing me to rely more heavily on bounty hunters and my own private security forces. They have been recruiting bel dames at an accelerated rate.”
“You think the bel dames are putting together some kind of army?”
“Yes,” the Queen said.
“With who? They’re bloody women, but they can’t take over a whole country on their own.”
“Three members of the bel dame council are missing. They crossed the border into Tirhan six months ago. The government gave them asylum. Claimed neutrality.”
So Fatima hadn’t been blowing smoke. “Sorta ambitious, even for bel dames,” Nyx said.
“There have been many acts of terrorism this year. Not Chenjan in origin. Bel dame,” the Queen said. “Kasbah and her security team believe that some or all of the bel dame council have been conspiring to aid Chenja in overthrowing the monarchy.”
“Why? If Chenja wins the war, what does that leave for the bel dames?”
Kasbah stepped away from the door and walked to Nyx’s side. Nyx felt a sudden wave of dizziness. Her forehead prickled. When she wiped at it, her hand came away damp. Cold sweat.
“Simply put,” Kasbah said, “we don’t know.”
“But you’ve got somebody on the inside,” Nyx said. “That’s the one who got you all this information, right? Why not have her chop off some heads?”
“She was killed in the attack on Mushtallah,” the Queen said. “As was her sister, and two of our closest ancillary agents.”
“So they weren’t aiming for you. They wanted to kill their turncoats.”
“I’m sure the Queen would have been a pretty bonus,” Kasbah said. “Two decades ago, Alharazad cleansed the council of traitors to the monarchy. We need another Alharazad, and you all but volunteered. Why?”
“I’m no more Alharazad than the Prophet was a gene pirate,” Nyx said.
“I have fond memories of you delivering a note that no one else could bring to me,” the Queen said.
Nyx rubbed her eyes. “That was a long time ago. I have a price this time.”
“I paid your price last time. You squandered your advance on boys and drugs.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“I can feed you money until you burst, Nyxnissa, but I can’t invest it for you. Kasbah can give you all of the information she has.”
“My price,” Nyx said.
“Name it,” the Queen said.
“Make me a bel dame again.”
The Queen shook her head. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You can try.”
“I submitted a petition for your reinstatement six years ago,” she said. “There’s been no word.”
Fatima was telling the truth then, Nyx thought. That made a big difference. It had been worth the trip to Mushirah to find that out.
“So you can’t do it,” Nyx said.
The Queen’s eyes narrowed. “I can pay you whatever—”
“I don’t want money!” Nyx said. She slammed her fist on the Queen’s desk.
Kasbah jumped forward and put herself between Nyx and the Queen.
Nyx stood. “That’s all I needed from you,” she said, and turned.
“We are not done here,” the Queen said.
“Aren’t we?” Nyx said. “You not done using me yet? We all have a price. This is mine.”
“You bluff,” Kasbah said. She was within reach now. Nyx felt dizzy again, and sat back down. She was sweating heavily, but the room was cool. “You know what will happen to Nasheen if there’s civil war.”
“I know…” Nyx started, then shook her head. She couldn’t find the words. “I know everybody’s asking a lot from a washed up mercenary.”
“Desperate times,” the Queen said grimly.
Nyx laughed. She covered her mouth. Kasbah bent over her. “Are you mad?” Kasbah asked.
Nyx started to get up again. She needed to get out of there. She couldn’t breathe. She put a hand on the desk to steady herself, get some leverage. She stood, more or less. The world swayed.
“Are you all right?” Kasbah asked. She touched Nyx’s arm. Nyx’s skin prickled, a massive wave of pinpricks up her arm, across her chest, her neck.
“I’m fine,” Nyx said. A ripple of intense heat moved through her body. A breath of fire.
“There’s something wrong with her eyes,” the Queen said. She took a step back.
“No, really,” Nyx said. “I just need to take a piss.” She let go of the desk and turned abruptly, just to prove how well she was, how capable.
She tripped over her own feet and fell hard.
Kasbah and the Queen started yelling, but their voices were muted. Nyx felt like she was at the bottom of a deep well. Her head hurt. There was something wrong with her arm. Yes. She had fallen on it.
Nyx tried to push herself up. She saw blood on the floor. She wiped at her throbbing head. Her hand came away bloody.
“I’m just a little tired,” Nyx slurred.
Kasbah grabbed her by the braids and yanked her head back. Nyx was too tired to resist.
“Shit,” Kasbah said.
Then everything stopped.
9.
T
he night train to Beh Ayin took Rhys southeast, across some of the most contaminated wilderness in the world. Unlike the interior, much of Tirhan was vividly green and verdant, so full of color it hurt Rhys’s eyes. The abundance, however, was deceptive. The blue morning laid bare groves of giant, twisted mango trees draped in ropy clematis and pink-budded coral vine. Swarms of giant flying assassin bugs clotted the air above the groves, and though they were too small to see, Rhys could feel hordes of mites and scalebugs chewing at the mango grove, ladybugs and mantids eating at the pests, and more—mutant cicadas, wild locusts, giant hornets, pulsing wasp swarms with nests so big he felt their heartbeats from the train.
As the second dawn swallowed the first, the train passed through the mango groves and into the sprawl of the jungle. Rhys watched the tangle deepen, the wood darken, the light change as the train pushed on. The trees here were monstrous, three hundred feet high, and the world went dusky violet in their shadow. Giant orange fungus—bleeding yellow pus—cloaked the bases of the trees. He caught the smell of wet black soil and loam, sensed the stir of leaf beetles and mutant worms. The swarms here were vibrant, more alive than anything he’d felt outside of a magicians’ gym. It was a beautiful world, and dangerous. Nothing human lived out here. Not for long.
The train went on.
They emerged from the dense jungle sometime around mid-afternoon and ascended into the more habitable part of the southeast, up into mist-clouded hills shorn of their undergrowth. Rhys had never been to Beh Ayin, though he knew it was once a political and cultural center for the Ras Tiegans before the Tirhanis invaded and burned it out. The city walls were fitted stone draped in low-res filters. The flat black plain of Beh Ayin was not a plain at all but the top of a low mountain, cut smooth. The mountain was called Safid Ayin, after the Tirhani martyr who died there while trying to burn out the Ras Tiegans. In the end, the Ras Tiegans had thrown themselves from the sheer walls of the mountain rather than face death at the hands of infidels. Not so long ago, by Chenjan or Nasheenian standards—only a hundred and thirty years.
The train moved into Beh Ayin from below, curving into the dark recesses of a smooth tunnel bored into the mountainside. They ascended into the belly of the train station—an airy, amber-colored way post made of delicate arches.
At the station, a thin Tirhani woman immediately approached Rhys as he stepped off the train. She introduced herself as Tasyin Akhshan, special consulate to the Minister of Public Affairs.
“And what exactly is it that a special consulate does?” Rhys asked as they walked along the platform.
Tasyin smiled. She was, perhaps, forty, maybe fifty, difficult to say this far from the filters and opaqued windows of the cities. She could have been far closer to his age, though by the look in her eyes and the set to her shoulders, he doubted it. She dressed in simple, professional Tirhani garb; long loose tunic and loose trousers, pale gray khameez. But out here in the jungle, she wore boots instead of sandals and a deep purple wrap around her dark head. It made her eyes stand out all the more; pale whites with dark centers.
“We spend too much time on mountaintop train platforms,” she said, “wondering why we’ve been sent a Chenjan for the translation of Nasheenian.”
“I spent seven years in Nasheen,” he said, and tried to keep his tone light. He was always a foreigner and a Chenjan, even—or perhaps especially—among the Tirhani. He’d spent his entire adult life proving that being foreign did not make him incompetent.
“Explain that to the Nasheenians,” Tasyin said. “Let’s get off this drafty platform. It’s warmer at the hotel.”
The hotel was a squat, white-washed, converted residence at the top of one of the city’s artificial hills. A rolling curtain of dark clouds obscured the sky, and the wind was high and cold. They passed through an old Ras Tiegan gate and up a cobbled way that dead-ended at the hotel.
Tasyin buzzed him through the gate and into the courtyard, a tangle-filled garden with broad palms and heart-vines dressed in leaves twice the size of his head. Giant yellow lizards scampered through the undergrowth. The house staff had prepared a late breakfast for them.
Rhys sat down with Tasyin and ate a light meal of lizards’ eggs, burnt toast, and cinnamon squash while she explained why she needed a Nasheenian translator at the edge of the civilized world.
“You’ve done work with the Minister before, so I trust you are discreet,” Tasyin said. She crossed her legs at the ankle and started stuffing a pipe full of sen. “I want you to convey my words exactly, and if that means it takes you extra time, so be it. The client is sensitive, but I need to be clear about their intentions. Do you know anything about Nasheenian culture?”
Rhys considered telling her that he’d once spoken to the Queen of Nasheen, but thought better of it. “I’m familiar with several levels of Nasheenian society, yes, and the social mores of each. Are they First Families? Magicians? Or a lower sort?” He was more comfortable with the lower sort. He’d been a member of the lower sort for six years.