Shadha so Murshida was breathing hard, and bloody. Not all of the blood was Rasheeda’s. Four more bel dames stood with her. Another chased after those who had fled. Shadha finally lifted her gaze from the body and met his look.
She walked over to him. Blood dripped from her blade. Her face was ghastly.
“Haul them up!” she barked at the women behind her. The women jogged toward the well.
Shadha pulled a length of wire from the ground, knelt next to him, and—to his horror-began to savagely tie off the ends of his bloody stumps.
Rhys passed out. For how long, he didn’t know, but when he came to he lay on his side. Flesh beetles lapped at the bloody ground all around him. Shadha stood with a handful of other dark figures. When she saw him, she walked over and crouched next to him.
“Shouldn’t have gone that way,” she said. “Wasn’t you I was after. Rasheeda… she gets carried way. She plays her own games. This was the last one.”
Rhys stared at the sky behind her. The big bloody moons had risen above the trees. His head felt lighter than air. My hands, he thought, distantly. Stop the blood. Pull the girls out.
“Elahyiah?” he croaked.
Shadha glanced over her shoulder. “We have to go,” she said, and stood. “Sorry.”
The Nasheenian word for “sorry” translated into Tirhani as something akin to, “I’ll do it better next time.”
“Please,” Rhys murmured, but she was already moving. The women moved with her. And as they pulled away from the yard, he saw that they’d been standing around a dark, crumpled mass.
Rhys struggled up again to his knees. He was going to be sick. He pressed his forehead to the ground. Ninety-nine names of God…. Prayer. It must be past evening prayer. He hadn’t heard the muezzin.
Nyx would come for them. She would come. She would pull Elahyiah and his daughters from the well. She would stop the bleeding. She would pick him up in her strong arms. She would hold him like a child. She would drag his family from the well. She would ask, and he would tell her where Yah Tayyib the rogue magician was hiding. He would tell her about Shadha. Whatever she wanted, whoever she wanted to bring in. He would tell her everything.
They were not all lost yet. Not quite yet.
Please, God, let her come back to me.
His strength gave out. He collapsed onto the dusty ground.
Rhys screamed. He screamed with every sinew and cell of his body. He screamed like a dying man. He screamed and screamed under the bloody lights of the moons, nostrils thick with the stink of his own blood.
He screamed.
+
Nyx bolted through the park. Ten yards in, her left knee gave out. She stumbled, caught herself on her hands, and kept plodding forward despite her awkward gait and bleeding hands. She cursed her bloody, broken body. She cursed Khos and his drunken rambling. She cursed Rhys and his stupid family. But mostly, she cursed herself. Damned stupid fool woman, dragging her dying hide into Tirhan and pulling bel dames behind her like cats to a carcass. I was careful, she wanted to say. We weren’t followed from Nasheen. These bel dames were already here. But if she was so careful, how had they found her once she was here? Who had told them she was coming? And why take out Khos and Rhys? What did they have to do with anything? Why not kill her and be done with it?
The park smelled of smoke and loam. Not all of it was from the fire. She heard the soft
whizz-pop
of fireworks along the waterfront. The dim roar of distant cheering. A whole soft city drunk on the celebration of their Martyr.
As if the world didn’t have enough martyrs.
She passed a twist in the path and saw Rhys’s house, a gray shadow, across the street. No lights, no fire. Darkness. God willing, they were gone, out celebrating on the waterfront with the others.
Nyx slowed down, tried to catch her breath. She was sweating hard. I’m not broken, she told herself. I’m not broken. Get to the fucking house, woman. Go be broken at the house.
She reached for the scattergun at her back.
Heard something behind her. A wasp swarm, maybe? Some chigger mass. She turned to look.
She remembered, then. You start a fire in the cane fields to flush out the cane beetles.
Old and stupid. She was so fucking old and stupid.
She ducked and fired the scattergun. A burst of smoke. A flash of movement. Turned, too late.
A woman stepped out of the scrub behind her, flashed metal. Someone else surged onto the path ahead of Nyx and leapt over the figure she had caught with her gun. The woman was fast. Bloody fucking fast. She swung at Nyx with some kind of club.
The blow crushed Nyx’s jaw, sent her crashing to the ground.
Hot, black pain.
Nyx’s scattergun rolled across the ground.
Pain. Nyx choked and spit blood. There was something wrong with her face.
She turned onto her side before they could get on top of her. Yanked at her sword as she rolled to her feet.
Heard a pistol shot.
Fire burned her gut.
Nyx pulled the sword free and swung. Caught a slick-looking kid in the face. Saw the flash of an organic burnous. Turned again, lashed out, working on sound and movement now. She couldn’t see much. Her face was hot and black. Blood ran freely down her chin.
Two more shots.
Time was, she thought she could dodge bullets.
Pain shot through her left knee. She went down. Her whole body was on fire. She clawed at the ground with her free hand and lashed out with her left.
A tall, tangle-haired woman stepped forward, came right up on top of her, and slammed Nyx’s sword away with the edge of her gun. Pressed the barrel against Nyx’s mangled face. So cold it felt good on her burning flesh.
Pulled the trigger.
Click
.
She was out.
My lucky day, Nyx thought, distantly. She released her sword and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands.
The woman kept hold of the gun with one hand and reached behind her for a dagger. Nyx brought her knee in and kicked up and out into the woman’s groin. The woman caught her leg and twisted, hard.
Pain shot through Nyx’s leg. Her body followed the leg, desperate not to break it. She lay on her belly, flopping like a fish, reaching for her sword, bleeding across the gravel while darkness ate at her vision.
It was over in a breath.
A cool ribbon of fire slipped between her ribs. Felt a knee on her back, a heavy body. A knife, clean and neat. Somebody else with half a face stepped forward and jerked her head back by the braids, bared her throat.
The knife cut cleanly across her throat. Nyx had done it so many times she never wondered what it felt like. Her chest was suddenly warm and wet.
Nyx clawed at her head. Sought one of the needles in her hair.
Fuck you you’re coming with me you fucking black death one clean cut I have eight more seconds you bloody…
But the woman was quick. She yanked Nyx over onto her back and pinned her to the ground beneath her. Held her while she bled out. Stared into her face. Right into her face.
Nyx spit blood at her.
A young woman, a mane of tangled hair. But it was the expression that struck Nyx: the expression on the bel dame’s face as the world went wholly dark, as Nyx’s hands cooled. Life, blood, darkness.
The bel dame’s mouth was a thin line. Her eyes were big and dark and completely blank, like looking into the blackest part of the sky in the desert, that big reach of darkness where there were no stars, just emptiness. Umayma, at the edge of everything.
Nyx choked on a word.
But there was only blood. And blackness…
And a desperate, passionate desire to live.
Don’t.
That was the word.
Please don’t. Not yet.
She had a staggering moment of vertigo. I’m drowning in my own blood, she thought.
Rhys, I’m drowning.
Then it was over.
26.
W
hen Rhys next woke, the moons had moved across the sky. A few lights were on in neighboring houses. He heard the sound of low laughter, felt the muted hum of a wasp swarm. He lay on his right side, his arms… the stumps of his arms in front of him. Congealing blood glistened on the ground. Something moved at the ends of his ruined arms. He heard the soft chittering of flesh beetles. The beetles’ sticky saliva had sealed his wounds. Had they come on their own, or had he called them?
Then, pain. As if his hands were crushed. Ghostly pain. Hands no longer attached to his body.
Rhys pushed himself up against the side of the well, and rested his head against the smooth stone.
The neighbors. There was a light on in the house nearest him. He knew the family. Their gardener was his housekeeper’s father.
Rhys hooked his elbow over the lip of the well and pushed himself to his feet. Did not look into the inky blackness.
He stumbled forward, fell. Reached out his hands to hold himself—
He remembered, too late. He landed on the stumps of his arms. Pain smeared his vision. He screamed.
Blackness.
When he opened his eyes next, a man stood over him. The hulking shape blotted out the moons. A large shaven head, broad shoulders, thick legs…
“Khos?” Rhys croaked. He was thirsty. Incredibly thirsty. “Elahyiah. The well. The children.”
Khos picked him up.
Rhys was fascinated by the ease of the movement, the massive spread of the man’s hands. Khos could squash Rhys’s head between those hands.
“Elahyiah,” Rhys said.
“Where is she?”
“In the well. They put them in the well.”
Khos walked over to the well, shifted Rhys’s weight in his arms, looked over his shoulder into the blackness. “There’s nothing down there, Rhys.”
“Elahyiah. The children.”
“Let’s get you out of here.”
“The bel dames. The bel dames are coming.”
“I know.”
“Where’s Nyx?” Rhys murmured. “Is Nyx here?”
“I’m going to take you someplace safe. The girls? Both your daughters were in the well, too?”
“Yes.”
“Your girl, too?”
“The housekeeper… yes. In the house. Dead, in the house.”
Khos grunted. He walked across the garden and to the street. A bakkie waited outside, spitting dead beetles from the exhaust.
“Nyx?” Rhys asked.
An ugly woman pushed open the back door. Rhys recognized her as Nyx’s weapons tech, Suha. Inaya was at the wheel. She turned to look at him. Her face was pinched and drawn. Her headscarf was gone. He saw dirt and soot on her face.
“We don’t know,” Khos said. He lifted Rhys into the back seat. The flesh beetles fell free of his arms, skittered across the seat.
“Where are the girls?” Inaya said. “Elahyiah? Where are Elahyiah and the girls, Rhys?”
“They’re gone,” Khos said. He slammed the door.
Rhys let his head drop against the seat. The smell of Suha, next to him, was sour and fermented, old sweat and new fear. She had a custom organic shotgun set with the butt at her feet. She kept her attention out the window.
He listened to Khos and Inaya talking, low. His attention drifted. He closed his eyes, saw the black well again. Dark water. Emptiness. Gaping darkness. The bite of the machete. Screaming. His or the girls’?
He choked on something like a sob. Khos and Inaya’s voices swam at the edge of his grief.
“Where are you going?” Inaya said.
“I’m going to look for Nyx,” Khos said.
“Don’t be a bloody fool. Let me do it.”