“Hey now!” The cabbie yelled, his formerly neat, placid face suddenly erupting in a snarl. He held out a big fist. “You want me to call the order guard, eh? You thief! Thieves!”
At least, Nyx assumed the term was something a lot like “order guard.” Whatever word it actually was carried the same kind of righteous threat behind it.
“What?” Suha said, and her face got bunched up and ugly to match. Nyx smirked.
“You fat woman, you think this world is free?”
Suha cut a look at Nyx. Nyx shrugged. “Maybe he’ll learn how to ask for what he wants next time.”
“How much then, old man?” Suha said. There were no old men in Nasheen, not really. Good men died at the front. Old men were cowards. Nyx supposed the cab driver wouldn’t understand the insult.
“You are impolite whores of roaches,” the cabbie spat.
“Did he just call you whores of roaches?” Eshe said.
Nyx was sure that that particular insult would see some heat on the streets of Mushtallah when Eshe got back.
“Seems so,” Nyx said. She put a pinch of sen between her lip and teeth and surveyed the green, humming park at her left. Something moved and shimmered in the trees. “But he’s the one asking for money. Not so sure that makes us the whores. Maybe they do things different in Tirhan.”
Eshe snickered.
Suha and the cabbie haggled and insulted one another a good while longer.
Nyx holstered her cane at her back and started up the street, keeping the broad, leafy park at her left. Eshe had drawn up a map with Azizah. He held it out before him now as they walked.
Her body ached, but the pinching, painful protest was gone. She could go a couple hours more, she figured, before she needed to bring out the cane and look like a fucking invalid. That would be enough time to present herself at Rhys’s door like she was still a whole person.
“Here,” Eshe said at the next intersection. The streets were clean and sterile, cleaner than downtown, like a filtered laundry deep in the interior. Nyx had never seen streets so clean in Nasheen, not even around the Orrizo.
Eshe pointed across the street from the park at a big two-storied house. All the houses here had the same blue tile and scabby-looking exteriors.
Nyx looked for laundry on a line, maybe kids playing with dead bugs in the street, but there was none of that—just the low, lazy whir of hoppers and thorn roaches, the occasional wail of a palm bug, muted, from the park behind them. The whole row of houses was surrounded only by tall privacy fencing: flimsy, filled in with decorative, non-lethal vegetation. No filters. No buzzers or faceplates she could see. No fear.
Fuck me, Nyx thought.
It was clean and quiet as the Queen’s palace, but not a whiff of security beyond the occasional hum of some wasp swarm a couple streets over.
It was suicidal.
Nyx heard Suha catch up with them, and noted the
clunk-clunk-belch
of the taxi as it turned around in the dead-end roundabout and belched again.
“Sure this is it?” Nyx asked. She slid her wad of sen to the other side of her mouth.
“Think they’ll feed us?” Eshe asked
“Feed us or shoot us,” Nyx said.
She stepped across the street and walked to the gate of the house with Rhys’s return address. Her first impression had been right: no buzzers, no faceplates. How did you get in, then?
Nyx put a hand on the gate to move away some of the vegetation. Was it underneath something?
The gate swung open.
The gates weren’t locked!
“Fuck me,” she said aloud.
She walked across the front yard and onto the porch. She still expected a filter, maybe a bug swarm, somewhere between the gate and door, but she got there unchallenged.
The door was prism glass, smoked, and she finally saw the familiar soft haze of a filter. That was something, at least. She looked for a faceplate, but found a simple bell pull instead. She looked at it a long moment, then turned to Eshe beside her.
“You sure this is the right place?”
He knit his dark brows and peered again at the page in his hands. He kept his shoulders hunched.
“Mehr-Az,” he said, “Number 104.”
Nyx looked at the number engraved on the bug collection pillar adjacent the door. All the numbers and street names were in the prayer script; 104 was embossed in neat silver, vertically, down the pillar.
Well.
She didn’t realize how long she’d been staring at the hazy door until Suha said, “You reach the bell pull?”
“I can reach it just fine,” Nyx said. She snapped her arm out and jerked the bell pull.
She waited. Wrong house, maybe. It’d be the wrong house.
She pulled at her hat again and took a deep breath to ease the constriction in her chest. The air here just didn’t agree with her. Nothing about this place agreed with her.
She heard something inside the house. Voices, the low thump of movement.
The door pulled open.
Nyx opened her mouth.
A kid stood in the door, head at about the same height as the door knob.
The kid looked up at Nyx with big dark eyes and a serious mouth that put Nyx in mind of somebody, some other time.
“Hello,” Nyx said, in what she hoped sounded like Tirhani.
“Hello,” the kid said.
The kid didn’t seem all that startled to see them, which Nyx had to respect. They were kind of a fucked up bunch of people to find standing on your front porch.
“Mam!” the kid yelled over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off Nyx.
And as she did, Nyx thought, it’s all right—she’s the wrong color.
This big-eyed, tawny-skinned kid looked nothing like Rhys.
Wrong fucking house.
And then a large man came up behind the kid, and the bulk of him blocked the entryway. Nyx lifted her attention from the kid and looked the blue-eyed man in the face.
There was a staggering moment of dissonance.
She recovered first.
“Hello, Khos,” Nyx said.
19.
F
or a long minute, Nyx didn’t think he recognized her. His large,
square face was hard and blank, like the face of the mountain pass they’d just trudged through. He went very still. Then something in him seemed to catch, and his gaze darted to Eshe and Suha beside her, and out again into the street, as if they brought a plague of locusts with them.
“Get in,” he said, and pressed his hand to the filter release inside the doorway. The haze of the filter popped.
Nyx took off her hat as she stepped inside. Her boots squelched on the organic flooring. Khos was a big man. She had to turn sideways to move past him into the foyer. She was oddly aware of the heat of him behind her. As a general rule, she didn’t fuck people on her team anymore. He’d been a fun but brief exception.
“I’m not looking for you,” Nyx said. “Came looking for someone else.”
Khos shut the door behind Eshe and Suha. The foyer was suddenly dim. Nyx blinked and looked into the courtyard at the center of the house. To her left, the kitchen was brighter. The house had a funny smell, like old books and leather fermented in wine.
“This is Eshe and Suha,” Nyx said, without looking back at them. She stepped into the kitchen. The floor sucked the dust and grit on the soles of her boots. A thin shouldered but broad-hipped woman stood at a massive butcher block, hands elbow-deep in pastry dough. A smear of flour powdered her already pale face. Her hair was covered, tightly bound in a blue scarf. She raised her head and met Nyx’s look. Her battle with the pastry ceased.
A boy stood next to her, one chubby hand clutching at her apron string. It was all very domestic, all very Tirhani. If they had a couple more wives bickering upstairs with the nanny and a Ras Tiegan servant out back finishing up the laundry, Nyx would have called them native.
“You breeding an army?” Nyx asked.
“Women have babies,” Inaya said, pulling her hands from the dough as nonchalantly as if Nyx showed up at her house every ninth day for fried grasshoppers and tea. “Some of us even enjoy them.”
The kid turned his attention to Nyx. He was, what, five? Six? Had to be about right. Nyx was bad at guessing how old kids were. She didn’t see a lot of them, and certainly not all sorts of ages of them together.
“This is Taite,” Inaya said. “Taite, this is a bad woman.”
Well, Nyx thought. At least nothing’s changed.
The kid turned his eyes toward Nyx, and sized her up with the dead reckoning of a six-year-old from the desert. “What did she do?”
“Question is, what haven’t I done?” Nyx said. “Taite, huh?” She grimaced. “Tell your mother she’s morbid.”
Taite. Walking and talking. She remembered the squalling brat Anneke had carried around the garret back in Chenja, the wailing little feeder always at Inaya’s breast. And here he was, a real person. It always startled her, how that happened. She had seen magicians do some pretty fantastic, impossible things, but turning a squalling, half-formed brat into a person, well, that sort of happened all on its own, but it was no less fantastic for all that.
“I have a baby sister,” the kid said. “She’s three.” He held up the appropriate number of fingers.
“Yeah, I saw her,” Nyx said. “I used to have a sister.”
“Where is she?” the kid asked.
“Dead,” Nyx said.
“Like Uncle Taite,” the kid said.
“Yes,” Inaya said, placing a floury hand on the boy’s head. Nyx wondered if it was Nasheenian flour. Nasheen traded bugs and magicians for guns most often, but she’d heard they lost a lot of homegrown food that way, too. Good old Mushiran rye.
“Why don’t you take your sister and go play? Papa and I need to talk to this bad woman.”
The kid clung a moment longer to her apron string. But when Khos and the other kid came in, he ran past Nyx to Khos and caught at Khos’s sleeve instead, cut another look at Nyx.
“Go on,” Khos told the boy.
Taite took his sister’s hand. The two of them wandered toward the dim front room.
Nyx raised a brow at Khos. “Papa?”
Khos blushed. She’d forgotten how easy it was to make him blush.
“I’ve been known to answer to it,” he said.
“Can I get you tea?” Inaya asked. “Sugar soda?”
“What, you don’t have servants for that?” Nyx said, and it came out slyer than she meant it to. A chaff-scrubbed little Tirhani family in this big, neat house, they were, getting fat on dead Nasheenian boys, just like the rest of Tirhan. The whole country was soft as old cheese.
“Our girl’s off today,” Inaya said.
Nyx remembered that she’d once watched this woman shoot a hole through a terrorist. Step light, she reminded herself. It’s their house. You’re the one who needs a favor, not them. She hadn’t had enough whiskey this morning to be that bold.
Nyx helped herself to a seat at the table in the dining room. The ceiling was high and bright. She saw the large, silky webs of house spiders crisscrossing the eaves, tangling the chandelier. Nyx ran her hand over the tabletop. “Real wood?” she asked.
“I’ll have sugar soda,” Eshe said, still hovering on the other side of the kitchen, expecting Inaya to ask him to dole it out like he was a house boy.
“We have fizzy lemon soda,” Inaya said. She pumped water into the sink and washed her hands, then moved to the ice box.
Suha wandered over to the filtered picture window on the other side of the dining room and peered into the back garden. Nyx had wanted to leave her as lookout on the porch, but in this neighborhood, bashed-up Suha spitting sen on the porch would just attract attention. The last thing Nyx needed was to answer questions from Tirhani order keepers. Order guards. Whatever they called them here.
Nyx sat on the edge of the table. Her cane bumped the tabletop. She shifted it under her coat.