Infidel (48 page)

“God called me to the front. Like he called you. And your brothers. And every Chenjan man but the first born.”

“You were first born—”
 

“My father insisted I go.”

“But disobeying your father, that’s—”

“Disobeying God, yes.”
 

“And… Wait. Hold on. You? But you’re… you’re…”
 

“That’s what he called me. Does it make it so? I don’t know. But every day I spent in Nasheen I wondered if I would have the chance to make it right, somehow. I knew I didn’t deserve this life, even before Rasheeda took it.”

Nyx shook her head. She heard the midnight call to prayer roll out over the city for the Chenjans and Nasheenians. Tirhanis didn’t have a midnight prayer. It sounded soft and low, muted. A flicker of a call, a whisper, then stillness. Those waiting for it would hear it. To the rest, it was just the background noise of a frontier city at the edge of the world.
 

Rhys stood. “I should go.”

“Yeah,” Nyx said. For a long moment, they faced one another across the table. Time stretched. She wanted to offer him a drink, but was afraid he would take it. She felt her heart beat just a little faster. Infidels did all sorts of… Oh, fucking stop it, she thought. This is Rhys. But then why was he still looking at her?

“Good night,” he said.
 

“Yeah, go,” Nyx said. “No, wait.”
 

“Yes?” His gaze was comforting, still, even after all the blazing, angry words and blood.

“If I wasn’t…” She stopped. Started over. “If I was something else… Not a monster. If I could be… something else…” She huffed in a long breath. “If I wasn’t… what I am…”

Something softened in his face. Big, dark eyes, the ones she had wanted to look at her forever. The beautiful but unskilled magician she had hired and kept safe in Nasheen, only to smash apart his life when he no longer needed her.
 

“If you weren’t what you are, and I wasn’t what I am, we’d both be dead,” Rhys said. “And we would have nothing to speak of.”
   

“The good ones all die at the front,” Nyx said.
 

“Yes. They submit to God. And they die for it. But after, they find a place at the feet of God in paradise. I suspect my wife and children will find that place also, but not me. Not after all I’ve done.”
 

“I don’t believe in God, Rhys. When I died… everything just stopped. There was no hell. No God. Just… nothing.”
 

Rhys shrugged. “Perhaps this is your hell then.”
 

“I don’t want to be a monster anymore.”

“I can’t help you with that, Nyx. That’s something you have to work out on your own.”
 

“I was always better with you around,” she said.
 

“No,” he said. “You are much worse.”
 

He left her. When the door closed, she had trouble finding her seat. Her hands trembled. She poured herself another drink. Felt hollow, adrift.
 

Being a bel dame had made her strong, honorable, powerful. Without it, she was nothing, wasn’t she? Just some monstrous bloodletter. A murderer.
 

She didn’t know how to be anything else.
   

39.

W
hen the great red stone Ras Tiegan church at the center of Beh Ayin was converted to a mosque, the remaining Ras Tiegans who did not convert to the Tirhani faith moved into the original stone church built along the edge of the filter back when Beh Ayin was a true colony. It was a squat little building with a standard ambulatory and radiating chapel on the east end, probably about a hundred feet from base to blue tiled roof, best Nyx could guess. She knew the parts and pieces only because the Ras Tiegan districts in Nasheen were generally dirty and poor enough that she frequented them. She’d killed some people in Ras Tiegan churches, and found the standard structure pretty useful for planning assassinations.
 

The bell tower sounded just as she and Inaya crunched up the gravel walk onto the church grounds. Eshe was perched on a mossy standing-stone property marker nearby at the edge of the old graveyard. Like most folks on Umayma, it had taken the Ras Tiegans a while to figure out that burying their dead was a bad idea. The tumble of headstones and broken, X-shaped markers in the yard made it clear nothing had been buried in the contaminated dirt for several centuries.
 

A few pale Ras Tiegans stood at the entrance to the church, greeting patrons as they arrived. It was still a little early in the day for Nyx, and she was nursing a slight hangover.
 

“How much did you drink last night?”

“Not enough.”

As they approached, Nyx saw that everybody entering the church was pale as piss. The women wore standard Tirhani abayas and headscarves, but there were no multiple wives here.
 

“Welcome, child,” one of the robed clerics—priests, Nyx amended—said in Tirhani as they walked up the broad stone steps. He held out his hands to Inaya.
 

She took them both in hers and bowed her head. “God bless,” she said.
 

“And God bless you. You are a visitor to Beh Ayin?”

“My mistress permitted me to come and worship during our stay.”

Nyx didn’t trust her Tirhani enough to say anything, which was probably best. She could follow along well enough to pass. “Indeed,” the priest said, and looked at Nyx. “All are welcome here, even unbelievers. Please let us know if you have questions about the faith. We encourage all God’s children to seek the True Path.” He looked Nyx over again. “She will need to cover her hair, however.”
 

Nyx was already looking past him, into the nave. She wore long trousers, and had buttoned up the collar of her coat to hide the rusty scar on her neck. “I need to check my weapons?” she asked, in Nasheenian.
 

Inaya began to translate
 

The priest raised a brow. “Oh, I know Nasheenian,” he said. He switched to it and said, “We have seen a few of your kind come through over the years.”

“Not for a good long time, I expect,” Nyx said.
 

His eyes narrowed, and she wondered if she’d fucked it.
 

But his expression cleared, and he smiled thinly. “No, not for some time. We are, indeed, at the edge of everything. But yes, we would appreciate it if you checked your weapons. The hair, first, however.”
 

He walked inside and returned with a long scarf. Nyx wound it around her head.
 

Satisfied, the priest said, “This way, please.”
 

He took her inside to a small alcove while Inaya engaged the other priest. Nyx glanced over her shoulder and saw Eshe fly in through the unchecked door. He went straight into the rafters above the doorway and settled in the darkness.
 

Nyx checked her scattergun. She pulled out the short knife at her hip, but the priest merely smiled and waved his hand. “No need,” he said. “Personal tools are allowed.”

Nyx nodded. People who thought you couldn’t do much with a little knife deserved whatever was coming to them.
 

Inaya met her in the nave. Men sat on the left side of the church, women and children on the right. Nyx hadn’t expected that. She needed to be on the left.
 

Inaya met her look. “There are worse things,” she said, and found them seats on the far right, toward the middle.
 

The church wasn’t anywhere near full. Capacity was probably three or four hundred, and by Nyx’s count, maybe thirty men and forty women were in attendance. It was still a half hour until the service started, but it seemed a pretty poor showing, even by Nasheenian standards.
 

Nyx wondered how good the chances were that somebody else spoke Nasheenian. The priest’s knowledge had given her pause. At this point, though, if she needed to give Inaya any more instructions, she’d done a poor job in planning, and they were fucked anyway.
 

She took a breath and straightened in her seat. The benches were cold stone padded in dog hair, and about as comfortable as they looked. A stone basin filled with water stood in front of the apse. She watched as a half-dozen young boys in long blue robes began to transverse the ambulatory and light the tall candles under the bug globes. The smell of amber incense tickled her nose. She turned to see another boy wandering down the nave, swinging a sieved incense burner in front of him. She supposed it improved the smell, at least. The stone building was crude, without water cooling or conditioning, and that meant that in about an hour, they’d all be sweating and stinking and ready to claw their way out of this oven.
 

 
Nyx waited a few minutes more while others began to funnel into the church. Then she stood and made her way to the far left transept. She had to go all the way around the men’s side to do it, but no one stopped her. She slipped into a small priest’s hall that ran the length of the building, and neatly stepped into the side door they had spotted from the outside. She pressed herself into the doorway—flat as she could make herself—and started working on the lock.
 

“Help you, matron?”
 

Nyx gave the lock a final nudge. Heard a satisfying click. She slipped her tools back up into her sleeve and turned. A fresh-faced young Ras Tiegan boy stood a few feet away with a puzzled look on his face.
 

Nyx stepped away from the door, looked up at the lintel. “Sorry. Looking for the privy. Up here?” She pointed further along the hall where the stairway went up.

“No,” he said, then—something, something—“quarters”—something—“women’s privies”—something, something—“you new?”

“Sorry, my Tirhani’s not good,” she said. “Show me?”

The boy still didn’t look quite convinced, but it got him away from the door. He led her across the nave and into the opposite transept and another long corridor.
 

“Down here,” the boy said. Something, something “service.”
 

Nyx ducked down the hall and paid her respects to the privy, then made her way back to her seat.
 

“That’s him,” Inaya said, nodding to a slender, high-browed Ras Tiegan man stepping up behind the basin in the apse. He wore a fine red coat over loose trousers and a gauzy bisht, an odd pairing of sensible Ras Tiegan attire and traditional Tirhani garb.
 

“Welcome,” the magistrate said. “Please be seated while we open today’s prayer.”
 

Inaya bowed her head. Nyx bowed hers, too, but kept her eyes open. She noted Eshe fluttering in the rafters, making his way to the nave.
 

The magistrate began to recite some Ras Tiegan prayer about dust and honor and forgiveness.
 

As he spoke, two figures turned down Nyx’s aisle. Nyx raised her head.
 

A tangle-haired woman sat next to her. She casually draped her arm over Nyx’s shoulder and leaned in. In her other hand, she held a slim pistol. She gently pushed it into Nyx’s side.
 

Nyx’s whole body tensed. Inaya’s head remained bowed.
 

“Let’s get up before the sermon starts. Ras Tiegan sermons are pretty boring,” Shadha so Murshida said.
 

This close, Nyx realized how young she was. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Barely older than Nyx was when she got tossed out of service. Her dark hair was a matted tangle, tied back from a hard, flat face that looked a tad Ras Tiegan. It was the eyes Nyx remembered, though. Those flat black eyes that had held hers while her life drained across the park.
 

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to cover your hair in church?” Nyx said.
 

Nyx saw two more Nasheenian women, wearing long coats and trousers, sit down behind them.
 

Inaya looked up now, and the color drained from her face.
 

“I’ve been kicked out of a mosque or two,” Shadha said. She had a hard, smoky voice. Nyx might have found it sexy under different circumstances. “Need a couple churches to complete the set. C’mon now, let’s get upstairs. Seems we have a lot to talk about.”

“Don’t know if talking is what I had in mind,” Nyx said. It took a lot of effort to look away. She watched the magistrate finish his prayer and then introduce the high priest. Adrenaline made her blood sizzle. Everything looked especially clear and sharp, the way it did back when she was Shadha’s age and the whole world was a big black pit she needed to fill with blood.
 

“C’mon,” Shadha said, squeezing her shoulder hard enough to hurt, pushing herself up against her. “We’ve spent long enough running around after each other. Let’s make up.”
 

“If you think I’m above killing you in a church, you don’t know much about me.”

Shadha twisted the gun into her hip. Old wounds throbbed. She’d been shot there a couple of times, and didn’t fancy getting shot there again. “You think I’m not keen on shooting you right here, you don’t know
me
very well. I thought you’d know exactly what I’m capable of by now.”