Infidel (13 page)

The Queen had answered the message.
 

“Anything good?” Suha asked.
 

“A job,” Nyx said. “Possibly the one I’m looking for. I’m going back to the interior. You and Eshe are going to the safe house in Punjai. Three blocks from the old keg.”

“You want to separate?”

“That’s the job,” Nyx said. “Queen’s orders.”

“You’re joking.”

“No joke.”
 

“And you want me to babysit a boy that close to the border?”

“You put him in drag, then. I’m out of ideas,” Nyx said. She stepped from the alcove and into the humid hall. Suha followed.
 

“I know it’s not my business, but why the hell is the Queen of Nasheen answering your personal messages?” Suha asked.
 

Nyx walked into the deserted street. Suha trailed after her. The blast of hot, dry air was refreshing.
 

“The Queen only calls me when she’s out of options,” Nyx said. “Figured a broken council and a hit on Mushtallah would bring her out, so I checked my messages.” She looked at the lavender sky and pulled up the hood of her burnous.
 

Suha did the same, and pulled on her goggles as well. They trudged up the street. A couple of cat-pulled carts and an empty rickshaw trundled past.

“You don’t seem upset,” Suha said.
 

“This is what I was born to do,” Nyx said.

“What, get yourself killed?”
 

“Risk everything,” Nyx said. “It’s why I always make sure I have nothing to lose.”
 

“You ask Eshe what he thinks of that?”

“Eshe is a grown kid. He can handle himself.”
 

“You’re bloody fucking crazy,” Suha said.
 

“You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

8.

N
yx had grown up in Mushirah, or grown up there as much as any free Nasheenian could grow up in any city outside the coastal compounds. Back then, five was considered a small but legal family size, and after Nyx and her siblings had gone through the requisite three years of inoculations and modifications at the compounds, they were released to their mother’s farm in Mushirah.
   

Mushirah proper was situated along both sides of the Bashinda River, but the Bashinda didn’t show up on a map. At the northern border of Mushirah the river terminated in a muddy mouth at the edge of the desert, three hundred miles from the sea. Mushiran farmers used up all of the Bashinda’s water before it could get out of the city.

Nyx hitched her way from Basra to the refueling station where local farmers collected bug juice for their farming equipment and personal vehicles. Eshe and Suha were headed for the safe house in Punjai. She’d meet them there in a couple days. It was safer for them if she made this particular meeting alone anyway.
 

Nyx alighted and started to put on her goggles as she looked out over Mushirah, then stopped. She wouldn’t need her goggles here.

After the rolling desolation of the dunes and the flat white sea of the desert the last few days, the green terraced hills around Mushirah were a jarring change of scenery. She began the long walk to the river.

These were the hills of her childhood, the terraced green and amber fields that she had run into the desert to forget. Mushirah was an isolated oasis full of fat, soft, happy people. But the sand was never more than a few hours’ walk away, and the trains and bakkies that ferried goods in and out of Mushirah were operated by skinny, hard-bitten desert people who knew how to use a knife for something other than carving up synthetic fuel bricks. Mushirah knew exactly what sort of world lay outside its grassy limits. And to Nyx, the world outside the grassy ring that offered all these soft people a sense of false security was the real world. Anything less than the desert was a dream.
 

It was the thirty-first, so Nyx had the afternoon to find herself a place, contact Eshe and Suha in Punjai, and get cleaned up before the morning meeting at the mosque. The mosque was an ancient domed relic at the center of the city, on the eastern bank of the river. Six spiraling minarets ringed the mosque. During the call to prayer, all six were staffed with muezzins, all the better to reach the ears of the farmers in the sprawling fields surrounding the city.
 

Nyx walked into the main square at the entrance to the grounds of the mosque and looked around for public hotels. She remembered that there was a convention complex just south of the mosque that would do fine. Long lines of children followed after their mothers, carrying baskets of starches and giant ladybug cages. The people on the street gave her looks ranging from surreptitious glances to outright stares. Most desert traders didn’t come down to the square during the off-season, and bel dames and bounty hunters generally stayed out of rural areas—Nyx hadn’t seen her first bel dame until she was sixteen.
 

If Nyx didn’t want to be noticed at the mosque she’d need to buy some new clothes and swap out her sandals for work boots. She probably shouldn’t be going around armed in Mushirah, either.
 

Not visibly, anyway.

She scouted out a hotel in the complex and walked over to the marketplace on the other side of the river and bought some new clothes. She found a public bathhouse and changed, then unbuckled her blade and scattergun and stowed them in her shopping bag. For a handful of change she got herself a bath and had a girl re-braid her hair in a style more suitable to Mushiran farm matrons. Her mother had worn her hair the same way.
 

When Nyx walked back onto the street she got fewer looks, but the boots hurt and she felt half-naked with her sword in a bag instead of at her back. When she found a hotel, the clerk did a double take when she walked in, but the notes Nyx handed her were mostly clean and certainly valid, and after that she got no trouble.
 

Nyx spent an uneasy night staring at the main square from the filtered window of her little room. The solitude was strange. She’d gotten used to Suha and Eshe’s banter.
 

There was a balcony, so after it got dark she moved there and leaned over the railing. Nyx was tired and hungry. She ordered up enough food to feed a couple of people, ate it all, then fell into a sleep that felt like water after a day in the desert. Her dreams were cloying things; dark and tangled, full of old blood and regret.
 

The call to prayer woke her at midnight, and after that she couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the privy down the hall and vomited everything she’d eaten. After, she stayed curled around the hard stone basin of the privy with her cheek pressed against the rim while the roaches inside the bowl greedily devoured her vomit.
 

I can’t fuck up now, she thought, and she tried to hold that thought in her fist like a stone. Instead, thought and reason slipped through her fingers like sand: bloody red and fine as silt.

She realized, then, how close she was to dying out here alone, hugging the stone bowl of a privy in some anonymous hotel room in the town she grew up in.
 

The thought terrified her enough to keep her awake all night.
 

+

When dawn prayer sounded over Mushirah, Nyx waited outside the mosque in the blue light of the first dawn. Her right hand had a tremor now that she could not still, and she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Her exhaustion was deep, like sleep was her natural state. Standing outside at dawn felt like breathing underwater.
 

So when a woman passed by her into the mosque and gently tugged at her burnous, Nyx actually made a half-hearted attempt to grab at the scattergun that was no longer stowed at her back.
 

“Hold,” the woman said, and turned to look at Nyx, her fingers still clutching Nyx’s burnous.
 

The woman wore a hood, and in the dim blue light, her face obscured, Nyx didn’t know her.
 

“It’s this way,” the woman said slowly, deliberately. “I advise you to follow.” Nyx remembered the voice then. Kasbah, the Queen’s security tech.
 

“Yeah,” Nyx said, and shambled in the direction Kasbah was moving.
 

But Kasbah stayed firm. “Are you all right? Are you drugged?”

“Of course not,” Nyx said.
 

“You aren’t well. If you weren’t well why did you answer the summons?”

“I’m fine,” Nyx said.
 

Kasbah released her elbow. Kasbah was a tall, bold-faced woman with good hands and lean shoulders. Nyx thought she would have made a good bel dame, if she hadn’t been born a magician.
 

“I want an identity verification,” Kasbah said. She held out a small red patch of paper.
 

“Been that long?” Nyx muttered. “I don’t have any infections. My magician just checked me out.”

Nyx pulled a wad of sen from her pocket, tucked it between her lip and teeth. She held out her other hand and pressed her fingers to Kasbah’s coded paper. If Nyx was clean, she’d live. If she was contaminated, she’d die
.

She didn’t die.
 

Pity, she thought.
 

The second sun was beginning to come up over the horizon. Women streamed past them into the mosque. Kasbah had her head turned up now to peer at Nyx, and Nyx saw her frowning. Like the rest of them, Kasbah had gotten old. The braided hair that escaped from the bowl of the hood was pale. It was possible to dye one’s hair, of course, but in Nasheen graying hair was a sign of strength. Not many people lived long enough to go gray.
 

Nyx let the sen work itself into her system. It was beginning to ease the pain in her joints.
 

“I told you I’ll be all right. I’m just tired,” Nyx said.

Kasbah spent another long moment staring into her face, then nodded. “Come with me,” she said.
 

Nyx followed her into the throng of women heading into the mosque. Kasbah turned away from the group and took her through a low arched doorway. A woman dressed in the black robes of a mullah held the door open for them. When Nyx passed through, the mullah shut the door. Kasbah picked up a hand lantern set in a high niche in the wall. Nyx heard the chittering of scarab beetles. When she looked back, the door pulsed with their shiny, blue-black forms.
 

Ahead of her, Kasbah continued down the ill-lit stairway. Glow worms lined the stone, but most of them were dead or dying.
 

Nyx had heard about the catacombs under some of the earlier mosques, but she had never seen them. In a place so vulnerable to bugs and contagion, she couldn’t imagine anyone in their right mind burying their dead instead of burning them—especially when you saw what happened to them when the heads weren’t chopped off—but it had been standard practice back at the beginning of the world.
 

They stepped into a low chamber; the air was cool and dry. The walls were dusty red, not stone or bug secretions, but something else, and they had names and dates engraved on them in prayer script, the same written language that Nasheen shared with Chenja and Tirhan. The neat rows of names reminded Nyx of the silver memorial slabs at the coast, and the Orrizo, of course. Nyx put out her hand. The wall felt smooth, like a slab of metal. She pulled her hand away and followed after Kasbah into the semi-darkness.
 

Kasbah led her through a maze of chambers and then up a short stair. When they came to another door guarded by scarab beetles, Kasbah waved her hand in front of the doorway. The beetles retreated into the lintel. She pushed the door open. They came up in a round cell whose walls were decorated in gilt calligraphy. A swarm of wasps had collected around a light fixture. The swarm pulsed and droned. Three women in dark burnouses sat playing cards at the center of the room on a line of prayer rugs. They looked up when Nyx and Kasbah entered and reached for the guns at their hips.
 

Kasbah pushed back her hood. The three guards relaxed and went back to their game. The wasps quieted. Nyx wondered which of the guards was a magician. Maybe all of them. Behind the guards was an arched doorway into another room where two more black-clad women stood speaking. When they saw Kasbah, they moved away from the doorway.
 

Inside, the Queen sat at what looked like a real wooden desk. Behind her, a great metal disk with the phrase “submission to God” engraved in gold was affixed to the wall. All around the top border of the room ran red-and-gold gilt calligraphy that repeated two popular phrases from the prayer rote.

Queen Zaynab was a short, plump woman. Her hair had gone fully white now, a wispy cloud pinned at the base of her skull. Her face was soft and round, and though Nyx saw lines now at the edges of her black eyes and a sagging heaviness to her jowls that had not been there six years before, the Queen still looked far younger than her actual years. She looked the way the women from the First Family houses all looked; women who had lived out their lives for generations behind filters, shielded from the harsh light of the suns and the contagion-saturated winds from the front. The Queen had no descendents, had named no successor, had never married. It was in Nasheen’s interests—and therefore, Nyx’s—to keep the Queen alive. Especially now. A Nasheen engaged in civil war was a Nasheen soon overrun by Chenjans.