Nyx heard footsteps outside.
Yah Reza walked into the room. Suha looked the magician over with a surly frown, uglier than usual.
“There’s a Queen’s messenger here for you,” Yah Reza said.
Suha exchanged a look with Nyx. Nyx shook her head. Fucked so soon? she thought.
Nyx closed her eyes. She flexed her fingers. The skin still felt tight. She opened her eyes, turned to look at Yah Reza’s leathery face. Yah Reza had put off giving her access to Suha and Eshe until it was too late.
“You can let her in. But I’m not covering up, so she better not be a conservative with a weak stomach.”
“Of course, baby doll,” Yah Reza said. She walked back out.
“How we running this?” Suha asked.
“My plan just fucked out the window,” Nyx said. “Without Yahfia, I got nothing.”
“She’d have told you if it was a bel dame,” Suha said.
“I wouldn’t count on that. Yah Reza plays by her own rules.”
The door opened. Yah Reza escorted in a small, cloaked figure wearing trousers and sandals. The little messenger pulled back her hood; Nyx had expected someone young, to match the petite figure, but this woman was middle-aged, her hair cropped short. She had a narrow, severe little face like a stone crag.
“Thank you, Yah Reza,” the messenger said.
Yah Reza nodded. She shut the door behind her, leaving the three of them with the messenger. Nyx had a moment of fear. She was broken and weaponless, and the magician least likely to stab her in the back hadn’t been around for two days.
The messenger raised a hand. She held out a red letter. “Queen Zaynab sends her regards,” the messenger said.
“Excuse me if I don’t take that up,” Nyx said. She used to poison correspondence for jilted lovers, back in the day. All you needed was a half-assed magician and somebody hard up enough to put on some gloves and deliver it. “You killing me now or later?”
“That depends fully on your answers.”
Suha sat back down. Eshe hunched his shoulders and peered at the messenger.
Three roaches skittered in from under the door. Nyx grunted. What was the best way to assassinate her in a magicians’ gym? With a magician, of course. The messenger hadn’t played her hand yet, but Nyx suspected she’d at least have a low level of talent.
“I’m fit for answering,” Nyx said.
“Who approached you about this assassination?”
“I didn’t know I was infected any more than they did. My magician said I was clean not a week before. She’ll tell you that herself.”
“She has. We went over your case before I arrived. Do you know who targeted you?”
“No.”
“These are not satisfactory answers.”
“You could try torture,” Nyx said, “but I don’t know that there’s much left of me to torture.” She paused, eyed the little woman over again. “And you don’t look like the torturing type.”
Suha spit sen. Eshe shifted his weight from foot to foot. Nyx knew why they hesitated. Kasbah was an accident. This would be on purpose.
“You’re entirely right.” The magician walked to the edge of the slab and looked over Nyx’s ruined body.
“I’ve bled and fucked and died for this country,” Nyx said. It came out whiny, broken, not at all how it had sounded in her head. “Now you want to kill me? I’m out to protect Nasheen. After so much fucking and dying for one country, we’re practically the same thing.”
The corners of the messenger’s mouth turned up, though it looked more like a grimace than a smile. “There are few bel dames still loyal to the Queen. Few who uphold their blood oath. I am sorry we could not add your name to Alharazad’s as a true patriot of Nasheen.”
Alharazad again. Nyx’s stomach knotted.
“So, you going to kill her?” Suha asked in her slow drawl. She spit on the floor again.
“We’ll bring her to trial,” the messenger said. “There has been no decision.”
“No trial, no decision,” Eshe said softly. He sidled up behind the messenger.
The messenger eyed him sharply. “I’ve been tasked by the Queen to bring her in for the trial. It won’t take long for a decision.”
“Only if she gets there,” Suha said.
The messenger knit her brows. The locust on Nyx’s arm took flight—straight into the messenger’s face. She started, raised her hand to call it away—
Eshe moved so fast that all Nyx saw was his arm whipping into the messenger’s kidney. Heard the soft hiss of a short blade. The messenger fell. Suha locked both hands together and delivered a devastating hammer blow to the side of the messenger’s head.
The door opened.
Suha jerked back, raised her hands again.
But it was Yahfia. Fast as a shadow, she slipped into the room and shut the door. Almost immediately, a shimmery haze of red beetles bloomed up from the edges of the room and covered the surrounding walls. A perfect sound barrier.
“God be merciful, what have you done?” she said. “Couldn’t you wait?”
Nyx grit her teeth. She tried to sit up. With tingling, half-numb fingers, she pulled her legs from the bench and gingerly rested her feet on the floor. Her whole body burned.
“Don’t!” Yahfia chided.
“You getting me out some other way?” Nyx hissed.
“The messenger…” Yahfia said.
“She’s not dead yet,” Nyx said. “Eshe, strip the messenger and put her clothes on. Yahfia can escort you out. That buys us time.”
“They’ll know I’m not a magician,” Eshe said. “They can feel it.”
“Just keep your hood down. You think Yah Reza’s eyes are really that color? Magicians are just as good at making shit up as mending it. Yahfia, you can do a glamour?”
“I… you want me to fool half a hundred magicians that he’s a messenger? You overestimate my abilities.”
“The best way is back up through the magicians’ gateway in Punjai. You know it?”
“Yes,” Yahfia said. Her voice was rough.
“It’s not staffed heavy. By my reckoning, it’s not a fight night. Take him up through there and you might pass a couple of rookie fighters and a bored ring matron. Not a madhouse of magicians.”
Yahfia shook her head. “Nyx, I don’t—”
“What was
your
plan, exactly?”
“I—” Yahfia began. She stared down at the unconscious messenger. “I hoped to reason with her.”
“I like Nyx’s plan better,” Suha said. She started unpacking her pack.
“I liked my first plan better,” Nyx said. She stared at the messenger’s body. “What can you do with that body, Yahfia? Can you still do what I asked?”
Yahfia’s face was stricken. “They won’t swallow this deception. They’ll blame you for the death. I wanted the body of some unfortunate, not a messenger of the Queen of Nasheen. A dead messenger… This is worse than Kasbah. At least you could claim ignorance of Kasbah.”
“Like anyone is going to believe that? Listen, you don’t have to kill her. She just needs to wake up somewhere else. I need you to think fast on this one, Yahfia. I don’t have a lot of cards.”
Yahfia firmed her mouth. “I do this, and I never see you again.”
“Never again.”
Suha handed Nyx a loose tunic from her pack. Nyx tried to pull her arm through a sleeve, cringed.
Eshe helped her put it on. Did he look more grim? Or less? She couldn’t tell.
“The body’s as fresh as I could make it,” Nyx said. “Now I need you. I gave you your life back. You know that? If you lose it again, think of all the extra years you got.”
“Hardly a fair trade.”
“No? I’ve been to the front, Yahfia. You know how many boys actually make it back at forty? How many have you seen around? Figure out a way to do what you need to do while keeping the messenger alive and you’ll be doing Yah Reza a favor. Tell her if she doesn’t you’ll turn in her boys.”
“She’s harboring boys here?”
“Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“We should go,” Suha said. “I can’t get any com out from a magicians’ gym.”
“Where are we going?” Eshe asked. He began to strip the messenger.
Nyx looked over at Yahfia. “Well?”
“All right. Punjai. As you said.” She began to wring her hands. The bugs along the walls shivered.
Nyx shuffled over to Yahfia. Nyx’s body seemed to writhe and ripple just beneath her new skin, as if her body wanted to slough the whole skin off. She put a freshly skinned hand on Yahfia’s shoulder, met her look. The magician’s eyes were wide, terrified.
“I’m going to need a drink,” Nyx said. “And a stretcher.”
12.
I
naya arrived at the embassy alone, dressed in a tasteful abaya and proper Ras Tiegan headscarf, a wimple. She found the attire often attracted more attention than it dissuaded in Tirhan, but this was a Ras Tiegan party, not a Tirhani one, and she needed to look properly Ras Tiegan, even if it made her face look like it had wings.
The party at the embassy was not one she had particularly looked forward to, but her work demanded she at least make a showing. Relations between Mhorians and Ras Tiegans were not traditionally easy, which was why her marriage was so often commented upon. Part of her was disappointed it did not represent the possibility of peace that people imbued it with.
She met several other women she worked with just inside the embassy gates, and they immediately made their way out of the warm night and into the cooler inner courtyard where the food was set out. It wasn’t often Inaya ate authentic Ras Tiegan food she wasn’t cooking herself. The smell of curry and fried bread was a delight.
The Mhorians had brought their own spread, kosher meats and cheeses, bland breads and crackers, and a peculiar dish that Inaya had heard was actually a blood soup cooked inside of a cat’s stomach.
After a time, she wandered away from her gaggle of coworkers and walked away from the din of talk and whirl of bishts and habits and abayas down to the fountain at the other side of the courtyard. A Ras Tiegan man waited there, tall and lean, with a balding pate and a slight paunch. He had a kind face set with blue eyes, like a Mhorian.
“I see you are partnerless as well this evening, Philie,” Inaya said.
“God bless, Inaya. It is ever a pleasure to hear someone pronounce my name correctly.”
“How long have you been in country this time?”
He dabbed at his sweaty face with a kerchief. Inaya had met Philie through Elodie two years before. He was special assistant to the deputy ambassador, and spent much of his time traveling between Ras Tieg and Tirhan. She did not envy him his job, though it gave him access to a wealth of information she could only dream of.
“Six weeks in Ras Tieg. Gisele stayed behind this time. She insists that the heat disagrees with her.”
“The heat is much better than Nasheen,” Inaya said.
Philie shook his head. “How a woman as delicate and refined as yourself endured such a place, I have little idea. You know, I finally met some of those women your husband always goes on about.”
“Nasheenian women? They are a varied lot.”
“No, no, the assassins. Those women assassins.”
“Bel dames?”
“Yes. Inaccurately named.” In Ras Tiegan, “bel dame” was a homonym of the Ras Tiegan term for “beautiful woman.”
“Oh? I didn’t expect Ras Tiegans were interested in them. They don’t speak for the government,” Inaya said carefully. Was Philie one of the people who’d told Elodie the Ras Tiegans were meeting with bel dames? Or was it some other agent? Inaya couldn’t hope to know them all. Her assumption that Philie worked for the underground was a dangerous one at best. Elodie had never come out and said it, merely noted that he was a shifter sympathizer. Feeling sympathy for a cause and risking one’s life for a cause were entirely different things.
“There are—” Philie began.
He was interrupted by the arrival of two more Ras Tiegan men, whom Inaya did not recognize: a slight, blunt-nosed man and a beefier young man, both well-dressed.
“Philie, a pleasure to see you here,” the slight one said.