“You a little sticky about what your own government’s doing?”
Nyx smiled thinly. She knocked back a cup of buni and pulled her hat on, then stood. “Who ever wanted to know what their government’s doing? You know that, and you have to take responsibility for it. I have a good idea you know where I can find some bel dames in Shirhazi. All I need is an address and names.”
“I’ll… see what I can do. Where do I find you?”
Nyx considered that for a minute. Then she pulled out Khos and Inaya’s address from her coat and slid it across the table. Suha eyed the map with some interest.
“You have information, you tie a black string on the door of the gate here. I’ll come find you.”
Behdis curled her lip. “A little out of my way. They’ll stop me, coming into that part of town. They got wasp swarms to keep folks like me out.”
“Thought you were a magician?”
“Better than a lot you’d know.”
“Then I think you can handle a couple wasp swarms.” Nyx put a note down on the table, which covered the tea and buni four times over. “You let us know.”
Nyx left the table, and Suha followed. Behdis immediately snatched up the note.
“What’s that about?” Suha asked as they stepped onto the street. “You don’t want her knowing where we are?”
“I like keeping folks guessing.”
“And it gives you an excuse to stake out that shifter’s house?”
Nyx snorted. “I just don’t trust addicts. No offense.”
“We’d know more sooner if she could come to us.”
“Would we?” Nyx stepped onto the sidewalk outside the gym. two kids with a mangy sand cat on a chain ran past them. Both boys. She didn’t see many women on the street in the Ras Tiegan district. Nyx heard the sound of noon prayer start at the big central city mosque, heard it roll over the city. They had passed a row of Chenjan prayer wheels at the edge of the district, but Tirhanis had their own martyr and their own additions to the Kitab. Their prayer times were off, too.
“I didn’t like what I saw of her,” Nyx said.
“What? So, she’s an addict. You knew she was an addict.”
“It’s not that,” Nyx said. “Alharazad recommends her, sure, so I’m supposed to swallow that she’ll give us anything?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Nyx stared into the street, tried to work it out for Suha in words. “We all got morals, honor. Fucked up sorts, maybe, but we got them, even crazies. I don’t know hers.”
“Addicts don’t have morals.”
“Didn’t you? When you fucked up you still felt real bad, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes,” Suha said. “When I could remember.” She folded her arms and rocked back on her heels. “Don’t know how much you care when you’re in it. You’re just hungry. You don’t think about much else.”
“Cleaned up or not, I’d have taken you on.”
“Catshit.”
“Truth. Know why?”
“Why?” Suha spit sen.
“Cause some women you watch closer than others. And some you put on your team. I know the difference.”
“That always worked out for you?”
“No.” She thought of Khos.
“No doubt.”
“Come on,” Nyx said. She had a sudden, powerful need to get in a fight. “Let’s see who we’re pulling Eshe off tonight.”
“Kid’s got more kick than a cat in heat,” Suha muttered as they pushed inside.
“I was young once,” Nyx said.
“I wasn’t,” Suha said.
21.
R
hys spent all day at his storefront, cleaning the windows and organizing the translation desks. He had spent several days open for business during regular hours instead of by appointment, and had been rewarded with a note fifty from a poor widow who wanted to send a non-bugged letter to her son in the south.
Three days of work for a note fifty.
He stopped for something to eat at a cheap food stall, made midday prayer at the mosque, and took the elevated train out to the eastern edge of the city. The color of the city changed from pale and sterile to muted, hazy hues of maroon and turquoise, and the landscape drew closer to the ground, hunkered. The smell, too, changed. When he stepped off the train platform the world smelled of fried dough and curry. Ras Tiegans fried everything, from grasshoppers to pickles to hunks of curried dog.
Rhys had lived in the Ras Tiegan district when he first came to Tirhan, before he and Inaya and Khos moved into the suburbs. From the street outside the gym, he could see the roof of their old tenement building. Four blocks down, he and Khos used to drink honeyed tea and eat samosas by the handful while working on translations. Six streets over was the brothel where Khos’s contacts had gotten them all rooms for the first three weeks in Tirhan.
Six years. It felt longer, Rhys thought as he stood outside the gym. Some Ras Tiegan kids passed him and pushed inside. He followed.
The plump Ras Tiegan gym owner, Lisbel, waved at him from behind the lattice of her office window. She kept her hair covered. In all his years using this gym, he had never seen the flesh above her wrists or ankles, even when she boxed.
“Been a while, Yah Rhys,” she said, with a wink and a smile.
He walked across the gym floor, pulling off his bisht as he went. There was a small crowd around one of the rings at the back of the gym. Two brown Nasheenian fighters circled one other. He paused, and watched. One was nearly dark as a Tirhani, undeniably ugly, with a mashed in nose and protruding jaw. She had a stocky, powerful little body though. A woman who could square her body like that would keep her feet in the ring a lot longer than most.
Rhys walked toward the ring to get a better look. The other fighter had her back to him. She was tall and dark, big in the hips and shoulders, but too skinny for her frame. As she turned under the ring lights Rhys saw that there was something familiar about her. Something in the way she stood, the set of her shoulders.
They danced around a few minutes more until the ugly one knocked the other woman to the mat with a hard left uppercut. Her opponent didn’t have a chance, thumped onto the mat, sprawled back.
And laughed.
Recognition cut through Rhys like a knife; a sudden burst of knowing.
The ugly one helped up the one on the floor. As the loser stood and turned to the crowd, Rhys knew her.
She saw him looking. Her jaw worked.
Rhys walked forward.
Nyx jumped out of the ring.
They stopped a pace from one another.
She was older, thinner, and there was something wrong with her skin. It looked oddly mismatched, and darker than he remembered. Had he aged as much as she had? He saw it in her face the most, but also in the way she moved. A little slower, less swagger.
Nyx put her hands on her wide hips. They’d been bigger hips, he remembered. She’d lost a staggering amount of weight. Loss of mass meant loss of leverage, loss of strength. Women like Nyx didn’t drop weight like that on purpose.
Rhys wanted to say something smart and dry. He wanted something to cover that cold terror and burst of recognition. He wanted to say something about his life, about Tirhan, about how happy he was. He wanted to tell her she looked like death.
But in the face of Nyxnissa so Dasheem, the words all left him in a rush.
“I—” he started, and stopped.
“We’ve been hanging around here a couple days,” she said. “Magicians in this quarter remember you and the Mhorian. Figured you’d show up eventually. I need a favor.”
Of course she wanted something. Why else cross half a continent? Certainly not for high tea.
He’d spent years imagining what he would say to her in this moment—how he would rebuke her, belittle her, revile her. Two years he had waited, expecting her to knock on his door.
Two years. Then he rebuilt his life.
And now she was here.
Of course she was here.
“I see you still frequent the same high-quality establishments,” he said. Getting that out made him feel better.
“I knew better than to look downtown. They only let real magicians in there.”
“And real women.”
“Which is why there were no Chenjan women there.”
“Still Godless?”
“Still Godful?”
“You’re not drunk. I expected that.”
“I’m a better shot when I’m sober.”
“No you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.”
She grinned.
He felt his resolve soften. This is the woman who’d sell you out as soon as look at you, he reminded himself.
But she hadn’t, had she?
And now she was here.
Because she wanted something.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Best we talk about that in private. You eat? I’m starving. Let me get my team and we’ll get out of here.” She turned away and called back at the ugly woman in the ring. “Suha! Clean up and get Eshe. We’re moving.”
Another team? Of course. Only the most foolish hunters ran alone.
“Come on,” Nyx said. She leaned toward him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I missed your catshit,” she said.
He felt something then, when she touched him. Something missing was suddenly full to bursting.
I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you. I’ll always come for you.
Six years missing—that feeling of absolute strength, safety, gone so long he’d forgotten to miss it at all. He had replaced it with something else, in Tirhan. His own strength, his own resolve. In a peaceful country, he did not need a woman like Nyx to protect him.
He knew then that everything was falling apart.
22.
R
hys stood on the veranda with a cup of mint tea in one hand and a fruit knife in the other, looking like he wanted to cut something out or cut something up. The fruit tray itself was on the tea table between them. Nyx had her feet on the table. She’d left her cane back at the dive they were staying in in the Ras Tiegan quarter. Rhys had insisted on something more upscale for lunch, something a little more upscale than Suha and Eshe could stomach. She watched them standing out in the garden beyond the veranda, talking about something that had Suha making sweeping motions with her hands. How to blow shit up, likely.
Rhys looked good, Nyx conceded as she watched him standing at the railing. He stood with a straight spine now, like a full citizen, not a Chenjan exile. He dressed in a loose-fitting robe too, and a silly, gauzy bisht. No belted trousers, no pistols at his hips. She had a sudden, passionate desire to see the outline of his legs. God, how she missed Rhys in trousers.
“I’m married,” Rhys said.
Nyx moved her gaze up from his covered legs to his face. He still looked out across the garden. Two women wearing immaculate azure robes and scarves moved passed them across the stones of the garden path.
“I figured,” Nyx said. She had a memory of Yah Tayyib, then, who’d been at her side the first time she saw Rhys. He’d told her Rhys was worth two of her. Nyx couldn’t debate that.
“She virtuous?” Nyx asked.
“Yes, she’s virtuous,” Rhys said.
A serving boy in a neat white tunic came by to refill their drinks. Nyx waved him away from the half-empty bottle of red wine she kept next to her chair. She picked it up, took a long swig. The serving boy eyed her askance and then danced away. Inside the restaurant behind them, someone played a stringed instrument, one she had no name for. Some kind of harp, maybe?
“You’re scaring the help,” Rhys said. He watched her now with his dark eyes.
“I scare a lot of people,” Nyx said.
“I’m not joining your team again.”
“I’m not here for that.”
“No?”
“No.”
“But there’s no magician on your team.”
“I’m hiring one out of Tirhan, for as long as we’re here. Won’t be too long. Six weeks, maybe.” Much longer than that, and whatever she came here to stop would be over already.