“But the Queen’s alive?”
“It wasn’t meant for the Queen. Yah Reza says you never touched her. The infection was tailored to trigger only when you came into physical contact with the intended victim.”
“Hold on.” Nyx closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see any more of her own blood bubbling around her in the tub. “You’re telling me I got a virus meant for the Queen’s head of security, not the Queen?”
“Yes.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“We can’t all be hill assassins.”
She opened her eyes again, and saw Yahfia smiling. Yahfia reached out and touched Nyx’s forehead. “It’s good to see you cognizant.”
“I’m too stubborn to die.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“You going to graft some new skin, or what?”
“I have a flesh beetle skein that I put over you each evening after this water treatment. It should take, but it will be some time.” Yahfia stood and washed her hands in the big stone basin at the center of the room.
“How long?”
“Another three, four days.” Yahfia wiped her hands on her apron and approached the tub.
“That’s too long.”
“There’s more to it, Nyxnissa.” She resumed her seat and neatly folded her hands in her lap.
“What do you mean?”
“Yah Reza wants to speak with you. Kasbah is dead, and the Queen isn’t too keen on that. She has some questions for you.”
“And if I don’t answer right, Yah Reza kills me or turns me over to the Queen, is that it?”
“This is a delicate time, Nyxnissa.”
“No shit. How much is that going to cost? For the rebuilding?”
“There’ll be some state support, if…”
Yahfia made a vague gesture
.
“If I live.”
“If you live.”
“Fuck,” Nyx said. “Why does everyone want to kill me
now?”
“Perhaps you’ve been snooping where you’re not wanted, Nyxnissa.”
“You heard something about that?” Nyx looked at her sidelong. Information was at a premium right now, and Yahfia was a more or less respected magician. They trusted her with things Nyx couldn’t buy with twenty kilos in notes.
“I know you, Nyx,” Yahfia said. She sighed. “And I know the Queen wouldn’t call you in for a Chenjan dispute. She has bel dames for that.”
“Then you know why I need to get out of here alive.”
“That is for Yah Reza to decide.”
Nyx studied her. “I might need to call in that favor, Yahfia.”
Yahfia frowned, averted her gaze. “That is a very large favor. I’ve mended you half a dozen times, and now I’ve rebuilt you once. We are even, you and I.”
“The bel dames are going rogue,” Nyx said. “Without me, you’ll see another city go just like Mushtallah.”
“There are other agents.”
“Nobody like me.”
“We are even, Nyxnissa.”
“It’s not rebuilding if Yah Reza guts me tonight. We’re not even if I don’t get a chance to live. One last time, Yahfia.”
Yahfia pursed her lips. She looked across the tub at the far wall. Nyx tried to turn to see what she was looking at. Pain webbed across the back of her neck, through her left shoulder. She winced. But the struggle had afforded her a glimpse of a giant dragonfly as big as her palm, its blue iridescent wings perfectly still.
“We will see what Yah Reza says,” Yahfia said.
“And if she says I die?”
Yahfia still did not look at her. She moved her hand, and Nyx heard something fall softly to the floor. The dragonfly was dead. Yah Reza’s little spy.
“Then I need you to bring me a body,” Yahfia said. “As fresh as you can make it.”
11.
T
he magicians’ gym in Faleen was probably one of the most secure places in the country, but for Nyx that safety was based on the assumption that the magicians inside its ever-shifting walls were on her side—the side of God, Queen, and county. Right?
Most bel dames had trained with the magicians at one time or another, including Nyx, and loyalty was a tricky thing. When she had come back from the front, the magicians handled her reconstitution in Faleen. After a stint working at the morgues to pay off her debts, they had even taught her how to box professionally. Nyx’s memories of Faleen were of pain and blood and body parts.
Yes, loyalty was a tricky thing.
There was a new crop of apprentices at the magicians’ quarters. The girls and boys—boys too young for the front but soon to enter government training—helped Yahfia with the restoration of Nyx’s skin. A couple other magicians checked in on her that day, women she’d known back when she used to box.
It was full evening, best Nyx could guess by the water clock, when Yah Reza, lean and neat, showed up at the entrance to Nyx’s little cell-like room. She gazed at Nyx with her illusionary sapphire-fly eyes. She didn’t squint, but her magician-tinted eyes looked too small, nearly lost in the loose, leathery folds of her face. Yah Reza grinned at her while chomping sen, showing red-stained teeth. She was sixty or seventy now, and her matted nest of hair had gone completely white a long time before. She wore it proudly, like a crown.
“You’re looking a lot better, baby doll,” Yah Reza said.
Nyx lay on a padded slab atop a couple layers of white muslin. The flesh beetle grafts on her back and ass and thighs had already taken. Yahfia had her lying on her back. The apprentices were busy slathering the grafts on her front with organic paste to keep her damp and the bugs fed.
Nyx looked over her body. The papery, foreign-looking skin was oily and wet. Beneath the oil, the skin seemed to pulse faintly as the bugs worked their way into her flesh and fused with it. They hadn’t had to cut off her nipples, but she’d lost some breast tissue, and when Yahfia had asked her if she wanted to have fat from her ass taken out to restore her profile, she’d declined. Her tits had always been too big anyway. And she liked her ass just the way it was.
Even so, it was hard to wrap her head around the idea that this too-skinny, small-breasted woman with the oily skin two shades darker than the hue she’d been born with was actually, well… Nyx. She wondered how much of her had to get replaced before she became a new person entirely.
“I feel like shit,” Nyx said.
“I know that’s a feeling you’re intimately familiar with,” Yah Reza said, “so I’ll take your word for it.”
“You here to kill me?”
“Are you here to die?”
“Not my intention, no.”
Yah Reza snorted. She wore a saffron robe with red bands at the hem and crimson trousers. Cicadas clung to the hem of her robe. A couple of dragonflies circled her head.
“I’m glad you procured yourself a magician to replace Yah Tayyib,” Yah Reza said. “I have always been fond of Yah Yahfia. I do have to wonder why one of her standing took on a bit of gutter trash like you. No doubt she favors you.”
Nyx grimaced. “Is my magician around?”
“Yah Yahfia, or Yah Tayyib?”
“I’d take either right now.”
Even bloody traitor Yah Tayyib. Where had Nyx left him last? Ah, yes—stumbling out the door of an abandoned waterworks in Chenja with a knife in his chest. Her magicians never made out well.
“None of us have seen Yah Tayyib since the incident in Chenja. I have heard rumors, of course. Tirhan is notoriously short on magicians, and welcoming of foreigners like Yah Tayyib. Heidia and Ras Tieg are less accommodating.”
The apprentices finished slathering and wiped their hands on the organic aprons they wore. The aprons ate the paste. The apprentices bid Nyx and Yah Reza good day and said they would return in an hour to wipe Nyx down again.
“Do you know who contaminated you?” Yah Reza asked.
“If I knew that I wouldn’t be here. What kind of idiot gives you a contagion for the Queen’s head of security and not the Queen?”
“Oh come now, has the disease rattled your brain that badly? You weren’t the assassin, just the pawn. They moved you to take out the Queen’s primary piece.”
“She’s just a security tech.”
“Kasbah is more than her security detail. She’s the Queen’s primary advisor… and her lover. It’s like taking away the King on the chessboard, isn’t it, baby doll? The game isn’t over, but the Queen is left with shockingly little maneuverability.”
I’m pretty fucked then, Nyx thought.
Nyx shook her head. “You know I wasn’t in on it.”
“You’re not the self-sacrificing type, baby doll. If I’d thought you purposely contaminated our Queen’s little security piece, I’d have cut your throat myself.”
Nyx grunted. “Yeah, I grew out of that.”
“Most of us have. That leaves us with few options. The Queen may know you weren’t aware of the contagion, but I can’t believe she’d let you walk away after Kasbah’s death. If we feign your death, well… I’ll have half a hundred of the Queen’s magicians nosing around my gym… and next thing you know, six of my best apprentices get purged for minor paperwork discrepancies and perhaps an unreported cock or two.”
“Don’t tell me you harbor boys here.”
“I harbor a good many undesirables here.”
“Tell her I’m dead. What difference does it make to you?”
“I believe I explained the difference.”
“So sacrifice a few boys on my behalf.”
“Spoken like a bel dame.”
“I need to find out who put out the hit on Mushtallah,” Nyx said. “Best guess is there are rogue bel dames involved.”
Yah Reza showed her crimson-stained teeth. “Oh, baby doll, it’s always interesting when you show up in my gym.”
“You do what you got to do, Yah Reza.”
Yah Reza flicked back her sleeves, revealing three large locusts clinging to her wrists. The bugs crawled back up into the darkness of the sleeves. Yah Reza settled neatly on the hard stool at Nyx’s bedside.
She leaned in close. Nyx could smell the tangy sen on her breath. “Here’s what we’ll do, doll,” Yah Reza said. “I’ll wait on what the Queen says she wants to do with you. You sit it out here like a pretty little boy. We understand each other?”
“Perfectly,” Nyx said. She wondered what the hell else she was supposed to say.
+
It was another two days before Yah Reza let her see Suha and Eshe. By then, Nyx was bored and increasingly uncomfortable. Her new skin itched, and Yah Reza’s kid techs weren’t very sympathetic. She hadn’t seen Yahfia. Whether there was still the promise of help if she could procure a body, Nyx didn’t know. But it was what she had.
Suha walked right in, but Eshe lingered at the door. He looked skinny and worn out. Suha, for her part, had dark circles under her eyes. She walked like somebody who’d been walking for days.
Suha dropped onto the stool next to Nyx and said, “I heard you killed the Queen’s head security tech.”
“Shit happens.”
“How you feeling?”
“Fit as a harem girl.”
“You’re as much a harem girl as I am a mullah,” Suha said.
“I need you to make a delivery to Yahfia.”
Suha nodded slowly. She spit a wad of sen on the floor, gestured for Eshe to come close. “We figured things might be bad. She got bugs in here?”
Nyx nodded. She only trusted a conversation in a magicians’ gym when she had another magician with her to block communication. Two standards and a shifter didn’t have a chance. You had a team long enough, you got used to talking around what needed saying.
“What’s the delivery?” Suha said.
“That second package in our freezer.”
Suha raised her brows. “You kidding? Mushtallah is still closed.”
“To civilians. Not magicians. Rumor around here has it they opened up the magicians’ tunnels into Mushtallah this morning. Go ask around for Yahfia. Have her escort you to Mushtallah through the magicians’ tunnels. Go through here and it won’t take you an hour. It’s something I owe her.”
Suha grunted and stood. Her movement startled a locust on the far wall. It fluttered madly for a long moment, then landed on Nyx’s elbow. Her fragile skin tingled. She flinched and sucked her teeth.
Suha waved away the insect.