Kameron Hurley - God's War

“That’s all right,” she said.

“You need anything?” Khos asked. “You need some water? I’ve got some up front.”

“No, no,” Nyx said, “but I could use a whiskey.”

She rolled her head against Rhys’s shoulder and passed out.

Khos had spent his teenage years on the streets of Mhoria. He had spent one too many nights on the other side of the great divide that separated men’s and women’s worlds, and the priests—the rhabbams—had cast him out of polite society for it. So Khos had made his way as a petty thief and errand runner for a while, and had gotten into his fair share of fistfights. He had seen a lot of maggoty wounds, of bodies devoured by bugs and dogs. On Nyx’s crew, he had seen and done worse. But he had never seen it or done it to anyone on his team.

Nyx looked horrible. He sat at her bedside and tried to tell himself it was her own fucking fault. She was the most Nasheenian woman he knew, and that made her headstrong and arrogant and skilled enough to cut his head off if it caught her fancy.

“How did you find me?” Nyx asked. He and Rhys had gotten her to take in some water, a little food. Rhys had done some bug work on her face and cleaned up her legs, but they had to hire a local hedge witch to do the rest, which Rhys seemed to find embarrassing. Useless fucking magician, Khos thought. He never understood why Nyx kept him on the team. He wished she’d fuck the little prick and get it over with.

She lay behind a gauzy curtain in a discrete room. He’d shown her the lock on the door, and told her she was at the top of the house. There was a narrow grill far up on the wall. He could hear the splash of the fountain in the courtyard.

“I tracked your scent,” Khos said. There were no chairs in the room. The mattress sagged under his weight. “From where Anneke said she lost you. I could only keep up until the edge of the city. After that, Rhys sent out some bugs.”

“So what’s this place? You just on good terms with every brothel mistress in three countries?”

“No,” he said, and hesitated. Then, “All right, it’s a brothel, yes, but it’s also a safe house we use for the underground.”

“We?”

It was stupid to keep her in the dark about it now, but it had become habit over the years. Nyx was a dangerous woman. The people on her team knew that better than anyone, and everyone else she met had a pretty good idea. If she took issue with who he helped, who he betrayed, and the laws he broke, she would murder him for it. He had seen her kill people. It was never pretty.

“I’ve been helping the local whores in Nasheen smuggle their boys out for the last three years,” he said, all in a rush, as if he’d opened a vein.

“Oh, you fuckers,” Nyx said. She put a hand over her eyes. “I used to cut off the heads of men like you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Who else is here?”

“We’re all here. They agreed to take all of us.”

“And of course it’s a brothel.” Nyx crinkled her mouth. It looked like it hurt. “You must have gotten a lot of grateful women into bed.”

“Only the ones who were interested.” But none of them was you, Khos thought. He’d had his one night with her in Punjai, early on, before either of them knew who or what the other really was.

She grunted. “Can the underground do anything to help us?”

“You mean besides giving us a safe house where we can help you recover your ass?”

“You know what I mean. I have a great ass.”

“You do have a great ass,” Khos said. He’d spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, and one night with his hands on it. “Yeah, they’ll put us up, and, yeah, they can point us to the waterworks where we can check out fighters. The whores go with patrons to the matches.”

“Are any of these whores Nasheenian?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Nyx, but you couldn’t pass for a Chenjan whore. Trust me.”

“Not me. You should take Anneke.”

“Anneke couldn’t play a whore to save her life. In Chenja, she couldn’t even pass for a woman if she tried. Rhys and I will go.” He hesitated, added, “As men .”

“All right. Where’s Rhys?”

“He’s all right.”

“Good.” She was fading. They’d pumped her with some local drug Rhys had, but she didn’t talk or act like a woman who wasn’t in pain. She’d rebound, though, he knew. She’d rebound and forget the whole mess, go back to swaggering around. For one sharp moment, he realized he liked her this way, mostly helpless and incredibly vulnerable. But knowing that he was that type of man, that he liked her this way, frightened him. He looked away from her.

“You call a magician?” she asked, moving her maimed hand a bit. “I mean, a real one.”

“They’re hard to come by, and expensive.” Khos paused again. Repairing Nyx’s hand was delicate work, and they needed someone far more skilled than a hedge witch. “We don’t have the cash.”

“Who said that?”

“Rhys.”

“Can’t I sell something? A kidney? My liver?”

“I think you’ll need your liver.”

“Maybe a lung. I don’t have to run fast.”

“I’m not bringing a butcher in here, and a butcher is all we could afford.”

“You could just find my fingers and stick them back on.”

“You need some sleep, I think.”

Nyx tossed her head. “That little dancer will kill me yet.”

“I’ll have one of the women bring you something to help you sleep,” Khos said, and stood.

“At least it was my right hand,” Nyx said. Her eyelids began to close. “Rasheeda never could remember I’m a southpaw.”

Khos stood over her, and watched her mouth go slack, watched her drift. Half dead and mutilated, and she was already thinking about her next fight.

Rhys waited for Khos outside Nyx’s room, pacing the hallway. Rhys had done everything he could, called up every bug he had the capacity to control, and it hadn’t been enough. Every time he ran his hands over her, the severity of her injuries made him tremble. For all his talk of her godlessness, of God abandoning her, he had never expected this.

I never wanted this.

“How is she?” Rhys asked as Khos came out into the hall. Khos shut the door behind him and gestured for Rhys to follow him back into their shared room.

Inside, Khos said, “She’s ready and willing to sell off her body parts for bread, so about as expected.” He sat on the bed and stretched out his long legs. “She’s the most stubborn bitch I know. She’ll be all right. Not for a while, but she’ll be all right.”

“Did you tell her we haven’t been able to get a hold of Taite?”

“No, and she didn’t ask about him, praise be. Still nothing?”

“Nothing.” Rhys pulled on his burnous. It was almost dawn. None of them had slept, but he wanted to stop at the local mosque and pray before going to clean out the rest of their things from the garret. Khos had warned him that the bel dames had likely blown the place wide open by now, but Rhys needed to check. He had left the stash of Kine’s papers back at the garret, and he didn’t want the bel dames to find them. If they hadn’t already.

Khos stood as well. “I’ll drive you,” he said.

They’d spent a couple of hours repainting the bakkie with some borrowed paint from the brothel mistress and replacing the tags. Rhys had balked at Khos’s choice of safe house. Nasheenian brothels might have been places of political protest and intrigue, but in Chenja they were just brothels. They sold sex and liquor and little else. The whole house smelled of cheap jasmine perfume, liberally applied; it muted but did not cover up the smells of sex and bile and sticky opium.