“Anyway, I’m not here for you,” Nyx said. “This’ll be quick.”
Khos kept his distance. He stood by the butcher block while Inaya poured the soda. Eshe, realizing he wasn’t going to be asked to play house boy, sat gingerly next to Nyx. He didn’t relax, but sat as straight as he could make himself, jaw clenched.
“I know you’re not,” Khos said, and his voice was, what—hard? Something else was there, something that wasn’t anger. Disappointment, maybe? “You wouldn’t come all this way for either of us. You’re here for Rhys.”
“Yes,” Nyx said. She met his look. Hard blue eyes, milky blue like that inland sea. Yeah, he’d been a good fuck, once upon a time. How long had it been since she took somebody to bed? “I’m here for Rhys.”
“He’s not here,” Inaya said. She brought the soda to Eshe and Suha and Nyx, like a good Ras Tiegan wife. Nyx let hers sit on the table. Suha took her glass over to the window. Keeping watch, whether asked to or not, got to be a habit after a while. Eshe drained his glass and grabbed Nyx’s.
“You still know how to shoot?” Nyx asked Inaya.
“I don’t have a reason for it here.”
“Yeah? Peaceful little country, I guess.”
“It was,” Inaya said, and looked pointedly at her.
Half a decade before, Khos and his freakish shifter wife wouldn’t have compelled her to move before she was ready. But Nyx had made this trip with a cane, a team of two, and a lot of luck. Her muzzy brain and fucked up body were getting better, sure, but she didn’t expect miracles from magicians. Old bitches learned new tricks or died in the desert.
“I didn’t want to hit up your house.” Nyx pushed off the table. “This was the address Rhys gave Anneke. Thought we’d find him here, bumped into you instead. You know where he is?”
Khos opened his mouth.
“No,” Inaya said.
Nyx waited for Khos. He shut his mouth. She looked over at Inaya again. “No? But he was here, right? All three of you together, before the family got too big? Before he got his own, maybe?” She looked right at Khos as she said it. He was the one she’d been able to read, when? An age ago. A bloody fucking age ago. He was a little heavier now and it showed—especially in the face. He’d cropped his hair, too. No more dreads. The blue tattoos were unmistakable though, as were the eyes, but his face was carved deep like the desert now.
“You should go,” Inaya said. “We have another life now.”
“Yeah, I see that,” Nyx said, taking in the clean, bright interior of the house again. “What secrets you sell to the Tirhanis for this? How much did you whore out?” She felt the heat in her voice as she prepared to rattle off the next bit, wanted to call out Khos for pimping his bony little wife.
“Nyx, can we go?” Eshe said from behind her.
She turned. He had finished her soda and was standing now, still slightly hunched over, skinny arms hugging his chest. He had a pale, sick look about him. Sugar-sick, likely. They hadn’t been eating well.
“Yeah, we’ll go,” she said. Fuck this fucking country, she thought.
She grabbed her hat off the table.
“I’ll walk you out,” Khos said.
“I know my way,” Nyx said. She herded Eshe ahead of her, and waited for Suha on the porch. The day was still too bright, so much brighter than the house. Bloody fucking fools, to make all their streets and sidewalks some pale fucking color. She wondered how many Tirhanis it blinded every year.
Suha walked out. Khos was right on her heels. He breached the foyer just as Nyx was putting her hat back on.
“What are you doing here?” he said, voice low. He stood half inside the doorway. “What happened? You look horrible. Are you sick?”
“You get news from Nasheen?”
“Sometimes.”
“What have you heard?”
“I don’t listen much, Nyx.”
“My fuckups are so big now that I make all the swarms.”
“Are they back?”
“Who?”
“The aliens.”
Nyx shrugged. “Not that I heard. You’d have heard that, even you, if somebody had docked in Nasheen. No, this is old catshit. Bloody bel dames and arms deals.”
“You don’t have bel dames after you, do you?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He pulled back into the doorway. He’d always been a bloody coward, when it suited him. “You should go.”
“Yeah, I know. Don’t bust your big head. You’re not the one I’m here for.” She turned to start down the porch.
“Nyx?”
When she looked back, she saw that he was standing on the porch again, hand almost outstretched, as if he were thinking better of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What for?”
“The bakkie. When I left you in the desert. In Chenja.”
Nyx grinned, shook her head. “There’s always somebody on my team that betrays me. At least you came back when it counted. Even if it took Inaya to get you there.”
She patted Eshe on the shoulder and descended the porch with her team. She remembered that blue-dawn morning back in Chenja when her team drove off and left her. Not one of them had looked back. Not one. Not even Rhys. She knew. She had watched them until their bakkie was swallowed by the dawn.
And now, in Tirhan, she did not look back. She didn’t need them.
This wasn’t their fight.
20.
“S
he’s got a face like a battlefield,” Suha said.
The magician fighting in the ring was in fine form; her left hook was good, and the wasp swarm that shut up the shifter dog on the other side of the ring wasn’t half bad either.
Problem was, that wasn’t the magician they’d come in here looking for. The one they wanted was emptying the spit buckets into a drain on the far side of the gym. Her eyes were gray and bloodshot. As she shuffled across the floor, Nyx noted the trembling in her right hand, the slack-eyed, slack-jawed look of her—clear signs of old and established venom addiction.
And, like Suha said, she wasn’t much to look at.
“Let’s talk with her, at least,” Nyx said. “Alharazad isn’t much to look at either, but she recommended her.” Nyx watched the puttering old woman, noted, again, the trembling hand. “I don’t like working with addicts.”
“Might sell us out, sure,” Suha said. “But knowing we’re a sure source of a drip might keep her close. I ain’t got no advice on that.”
“No advice for somebody on a drip? Really?”
Suha pushed out her mouth into that trout-look that Eshe so loved to tease her about. Eshe looked up from halfway across the gym where he was practicing with some other kids on a speed bag, and snickered.
“Giving up the drip is up to God and chance,” Suha said. “There’s no advice to run on about. You do or you don’t.”
“I never did like the idea of luck,” Nyx said. Probably because it never favored her any.
She crossed the dim floor and approached the stooped old woman. Not so old, she realized as they met under the cupped, hooded glow of a bug light. The magician’s hair was a ratty gray nest twisted back from her skinny little head. Her face was haggard, yes, but the hands that gripped the bucket were strong and smooth. Magicians’ hands. The flesh of her neck was loose, but not fleshy folded like an old woman’s. What was she, then, forty? Forty-five? Old for a bel dame, maybe, but not for a magician.
“I’m looking for a half-gifted magician,” Nyx said.
The woman peered up at her. “That so, eh? I want a good fuck. Get outta the way.” She pushed out her elbow and caught Nyx in the gut. The blow was enough to make Nyx unsteady on her feet. Damn, I’ve gotten soft, Nyx thought.
“You Behdis ma Yasrah?” Suha asked.
“Lot of old women’s names out here. I ain’t heard that one. Ain’t heard that one even longer without a yah-yah at the front of it.”
She kept walking.
“Alharazad said it’s been a long time since you heard anybody yah-yahing at you. Thought you’d be used to it,” Nyx said, watching her.
Behdis paused. She turned, squinted at the two of them.
“Who said that?”
“You heard,” Nyx said. “I buy you a drink?”
“Gotta warn you, woman. They don’t serve hard shit here.”
“Yeah, I figured. I pay for drinks… and drips if the information’s right.”
“I ain’t that hard up.”
“Sure you ain’t.”
Nyx told Eshe they’d be across the street and left him to flirt with the girls. At least they let the girls box here. Nyx had never seen so many Ras Tiegan half-breeds. Eshe fit right in. The three women walked over to a Ras Tiegan tea house on the other side of the bright, cracked surface of the road running along the ass-end of the gym. Turned out not every district in Tirhan was cleaner than a breeding compound, but it had taken them three magicians’ gyms to find one this shoddy. Magicians in Tirhan were a publicly groomed and traded lot, and the big magicians’ gyms downtown catered to an elite clientele. Finding the outcasts’ gym was a matter of smell and feel. Nyx had a way of finding herself in the worst parts of town with the least amount of effort.
A couple of Ras Tiegan girls brought them tea, and hot buni for Nyx, who still couldn’t stomach the idea of drinking something that didn’t alter her blood chemistry.
“I’m looking for a new magician for my team,” Nyx said right off. “Somebody with ties to Tirhan, maybe access to some back channels. I watched you around the gym, heard you speaking Tirhani. It’s not bad. You ain’t respected around there, but that suits me fine. You’re the sort nobody notices. I need somebody who doesn’t warrant notice.”
Behdis snarled into her tea. “There was a time I danced that ring like a Chenjan harem girl at dusk during the fasting month. I’d have pounded those girls silly.” She reached for her tea with her left hand, but she wasn’t a south paw. The right hand stayed clutched in her lap, to hide the trembling.
“How long you been on the drip?” Suha asked.
Behdis cut a look at her, peered for a long moment. “How long you been off?”
“Five years,” Suha said.
“Eh, big girl then, aren’t you? Went to the front and they hooked you up.”
Suha leaned back in her chair, frowned.
The buni arrived in a clay jar. The Ras Tiegan girl holstered it on a rattan-wrapped ring at the center of the table and placed a tiny clay cup in front of Nyx. They never did anything to excess in Ras Tieg, not even sex, which probably explained something about Khos and Inaya’s uptight attitude.
Nyx poured herself a drink.
“I quit a couple times,” Behdis said, hedging. She sipped at her tea and scanned the empty tables, as if expecting one of the wanna-be magicians across the way would appear and recognize her. Recognize her as what? The janitor? Who noticed one more washed-up, underemployed foreign woman slumming around the seediest part of Shirhazi? Nyx had asked six people at the gym for Behdis by name, and not one of them knew who the hell she was talking about. It was the seventh—the delivery boy they bumped into out back—who knew that Behdis was “that old lady who mops up the blood and vomit.”
“I don’t mind keeping an ear out. I gotta know payment, though. Know what I’m digging for.”
“What’s your drip go for these days?” Nyx asked.
“Depends on the day,” Behdis said.
Nyx exchanged a look with Suha.
Suha shrugged.
“I’ll pay you based on what you dig up. You bring me something solid, I give you ten notes.”
“Nasheenian or Tirhani?”
“Nasheenian.”
“Your currency ain’t worth enough to wipe my ass,” Behdis said.
“Unless you’re looking for venom,” Nyx said. “Last I checked, Nasheen supplied the cheapest. Where you going to find good venom in Tirhan that isn’t priced for those magicians at the city center?”
“What you think I can get you, woman?”
“Bel dames,” Nyx said. She watched the old woman’s face as she said it.
Behdis sneered. “Alharazad sent you, you say?”
“You check with her if you want. She said if anybody’d know anything about bel dames in Tirhan, it’d be you.”