Kameron Hurley - God's War

“No more likely than with any other woman who gives birth.” She traded one of her cards. “Kid might die, though. No inoculations.” She had promised Taite inoculations, she realized, back when she believed they’d all live to bring in this note. She looked at her mangled right hand. She already knew they wouldn’t make it out whole.

“But women still die doing it, right, even in Nasheen and Chenja?”

“Of course, yeah. What, you thought this was going to be a party?”

“What about Taite?”

“I don’t think he’s coming.”

Khos grimaced. “I mean, what will you do about him?”

“We don’t have anything to trade for him.” There was a lot going on with this note, and she was far enough behind to know that she was the player working with the least amount of information. It was a dangerous place to be. It got you mutilated. And dead.

“We know where to find Nikodem, or at least where to start,” Khos said.

“Yeah, but we don’t have her yet. I want you and Rhys to go to the waterworks tomorrow and ask around.”

“You want to get her first?”

“I think trading Nikodem for Taite is a safer deal.” And it would give her time to decipher the dictations and interrogate Nikodem when they found her. Trading Nikodem away without getting any information left her with exactly nothing…

Inaya let out a long, low sound of distress. It was worse than the shrieking.

“She sounds like she’s going to die,” Khos said.

“Well, it happens.”

“How can that be natural?”

“What, death?”

“Birth.”

“No more natural than death.” She won the hand.

Khos threw in his cards. “You’re making fun of me.”

“You make it so easy.”

Inaya’s noises were muffled now. She’d worn herself out. Then there was a long silence.

Khos looked over at Nyx with his big, blue Mhorian eyes. “She’s dead,” he said. They were pretty eyes, if only because she didn’t see the color that often, but right now, with a woman bleeding and shrieking in the next room, he wasn’t terribly appealing.

“Would you get off the death thing?”

Nyx heard a baby cry.

It was a strange sound, like a cat crying.

And then there was another sound of crying—Inaya’s crying. Not shrieking, just crying.

Nyx shuffled to her feet and opened the door into the little room with her good hand.

Anneke was rubbing down the purple-red mewling kid with a clean towel. Was it supposed to be that color? Rhys was trying to soothe Inaya, but she was still sobbing, great heaving sobs.

“What’s wrong?” Nyx asked.

Anneke said, “It’s a boy.”

The waterworks was on the south side of Dadfar, which used to be an industrial quarter before Nasheen blew the hell out of it sixty years before. It had never been rebuilt. The south side was a morass of hulking, burned-out shells where squatters and draft dodgers made do. There were rude opium dens tucked into corners. The pervasive smell of marijuana filled the rubble-strewn streets. It wasn’t the sort of place Khos would have picked for a proper fight, but then, fighting wasn’t legal in Chenja.

And, in that case, Khos supposed the south side was perfect.

Rhys, as usual, was wearing too many clothes for the occasion. He had picked up a green turban sometime after they arrived in Dadfar, and that—paired with his long trousers, long tunic, and green burnous—made him look like some local man of importance. He kept everything too clean. And he was too pretty. If Khos drew attention for being a pale giant, Rhys drew it by being too well presented. If Khos had still been a thief, he’d have pegged Rhys as a perfect target, magician or not. Holier-than-thou men were smooth marks.

The night was dark; the moons were in far recession. Khos kept his high beams on and parked about four blocks away from the waterworks.

As Khos stepped out, he asked Rhys, “You ever fought a real fight, boxing?” Khos had learned all of his fighting from street brawls in Mhoria. The desert obsession with boxing interested him; he liked going to fights. “No. Boxing leads to gambling, and I don’t gamble.”

“It’s not gambling if you don’t bet on anyone.”

“Yes it is. Others gamble.”

“If you bet on yourself, you could call it being self-employed.”

Rhys sighed. He spent a few minutes calling up his bugs to guard the bakkie. When the wasps were settled, Khos made his way toward the waterworks and Rhys followed. Dark shapes skittered along the edges of his vision. He heard the hiss and chitter of giant scavenging bugs.

There were two men sitting around outside a set of double doors leading into the waterworks. Khos smelled bug-repelling unguent around the doors. Fuck, he hated contaminated cities. Behind the men, a globe full of glow worms gave off a faint light.

Khos still found it strange to see so many men around, even though they were old. He had lived in Nasheen for most of his adult life, and he had gotten used to the presence of women and the sound of Nasheenian. Mhoria was still a strictly sex-segregated society, which he’d hated enough to compel him to cross the border into Nasheen. He did miss some things, though. The food was better in Mhoria, and nobody was as suspiciously frightened… of everything. Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear. It got to you. He wasn’t sure why Taite had brought his sister out to the desert. She wasn’t built for it, and she hated it. Taite had invited him over to her place a couple of times, and he and Inaya had gotten along all right until she realized he was a shifter.

“Take care of her,” Taite had said that night in the Mhorian café.

And now Raine had Taite, and Inaya was Khos’s responsibility.

Damn this note, Khos thought.

The old men at the doors of the waterworks asked for nearly a buck to admit Rhys and Khos.

Rhys made to argue, but Khos paid it. The less fuss they made, the less likely they’d be remembered. A giant white Mhorian and a draft-age Chenjan would get plenty of attention without making a scene over money.

They entered a narrow corridor that stank of piss. Khos followed some glow worms to his left. He heard men talking in loud voices, old men, men who’d been to the front. You could tell. They talked differently from the ones who stayed home—rasping, bitter.

Khos turned in to the room. There was a raised ring at the center with plain organic ropes and unpainted corner posts. Lights hung over the ring, but the rest of the place was dark, except for a few globes at the end of the room where the bar was.

“You want a drink?” Khos asked Rhys.

Rhys just looked at him.

Khos shrugged. He had never much cared for Rhys and his buttoned-down coats and upturned nose. It was like he thought he had some kind of special relationship with God, like he was one of the First Families. Why didn’t Raine take you ? he thought, but that just led to thinking about Taite again, cut up and tortured in some Chenjan offal house.

Khos remembered the first time he figured out Taite was looking a little too long at him, that his eyes spent a lot longer on the few young men they passed than the fleshy, friendly women. It had amused Khos to find somebody who thought bedding a man was some kind of sin, something you’d get beaten up or killed for. It was illegal in Ras Tieg, Chenja, and Nasheen, for no good reason except that it scared the shit out of people, and Khos had laughed and laughed about it, until he saw a young boy stoned in the street for kissing another boy in Ras Tieg.

Bloody fucking barbarians, he thought. In Mhoria, men were brothers and lovers and friends. Denying that was like cutting out a piece of yourself. What Mhoria didn’t get was that cutting women out was like cutting out a piece of yourself too. A society needed balance, Khos thought, but a society at balance was harder to control, and Umayma had been founded and built on the principles of control. You controlled the breeding, the sex, the death, the fucking blood that ran in your veins. The government thought they could control the world through will alone.