guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy
“Would you put some shit behind it?” Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?”
Rhys kicked the grille. Better.
The bugs hissed, and something inside the semi-organic cistern belched.
“In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.
Rhys leapt in as the bakkie began rolling down the dusty hill toward Punjai.
There was a hot desert wind blowing in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and settling a misty cloud of red silt over the cityscape. The double dawn had risen; the orange sun overpowered the wan light of the blue sun, and the silt-filtered light caught the world on fire.
Nyx shifted pedals as the road straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple of roach nymphs wiggled free from the leak in the hose by her feet and flitted through the open windows.
They came over the top of a low rise, and Punjai spread before them like a jagged wound, a seething black groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. Three years before, the front had been closer, and all of the minarets outside the Chenjan quarter of the city had been bombed. Truckloads of dead and dying men were still carted into the city during the worst of the skirmishes, but for the most part, magicians liked to patch up their charges at the front. The more men that got away from the front, the more likely it was that somebody would figure a way to smuggle them out—and the greater the danger they posed to the city if they were contaminated. Bel dame business was brisk in Punjai. Not that Nyx was licensed to do that type of thing.
But it didn’t keep her from thinking about it.
At the edges of the city, the desert stirred, set free by centuries of bug storms and heavy warfare. Bursts had seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped spirals of the remaining minarets, long since converted to more practical watchtowers equipped with long-range anti-burst weapons and scatterguns. The only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer in Punjai was a crumbling black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.
“Taite briefed you on the file?” Rhys asked as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black burnous.
Nyx watched him fiddle with the frogged tie at his collar.
“Yeah,” she said, “I looked over the file. Some Chenjan terrorists. Expected to be armed. Good boxers. I sparred with one of them in Aludra a couple of years ago.”
“I expected they’d be friends of yours,” Rhys said.
“I run with a lot of questionable characters,” Nyx said, giving him a sidelong look. “We’re stopping at the storefront. I need to off-load your body.”
“It’s Khos’s body. Is Anneke in?”
“She’s already posted. Less picky about where she spends morning prayer.” Anneke had been one of the easier additions to her crew, once Nyx made up her mind to cannibalize Raine’s team. All Anneke had wanted was a bigger gun.
“I hate this city,” Rhys said.
Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting out of the dash. “Find something useful on. You have some sen?”
He obediently switched on the tube. It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at them. Local politics. Queen Ayyad had abdicated to her daughter Zaynab four months before, and the talking heads were still preoccupied with what that meant for relations between Nasheen and Ras Tieg. Nyx was more interested in what Zaynab’s policies would be regarding the capture of terrorists. Queens and bel dames did not, traditionally, get along, and the livelihood of mercenaries and bounty hunters didn’t even show up as a line item during the low council meetings. The queen got on best with her decadent group of high-council nobles— representatives from the richest houses in Nasheen, descendants of the First Families. It was a hazy kind of history, and Nyx didn’t remember half of it. Most of her schooling consisted of adding and subtracting bullets and calculating the trajectory of burst guns, interspersed with some theology from the Kitab and exaltations about the power of submission to God—dead words from some other dead world. Actual Umayman history was usually just a nod to how everything that ever went wrong on Umayma was the fault of the Chenjans.
Nyx changed the station. The air tingled, and the voices were briefly garbled, but then cleared up. More news: local gossip. Talk about the upcoming vote on whether or not half-breeds should be drafted. A couple of serious-sounding women discussed the arrival of a ship that had put down in Faleen. Where were all these antiquated wrecks coming from? Nyx thought. When was the last time I saw one?
When you went to prison, she remembered. She grimaced and turned the radio off. It was a night she didn’t like to dwell on. The mist receded. Sound faded to silence.
“You know I don’t poison myself with narcotics and pollutants,” Rhys said, and she realized he was talking about the sen.
Nyx hoped he’d start ranting about submission and God and pollutants.
She could use the diversion.
He rarely disappointed her these days.
“I only drink the blood of my enemies,” Nyx said, “and may be some whiskey and water. Beer with a little lime.”
Rhys snorted.
She considered selling him to a mardana, a brothel populated entirely by men. It was one of her more frequent fantasies.
The hunched black smudge of the city grew closer. Umber-clad women moved along the side of the road, balancing baskets on their heads. Girls herded giant spiders and a couple of dogs along the drainage ditches flanking the road. Some creepers in blue and gold carried baskets of beetles and grasshoppers in tiny wooden cages. Giant drooping nets hung over their lean shoulders.
They passed under the burst-scarred main gate and into Punjai.
Nyx parked outside their storefront, badly, and pushed into the reception area they called the keg. Before Nyx sold bounty services out of the storefront, she had sold kegs of beer to wedding parties and war veterans. Taite started calling it the keg the fourth time a drunken government clerk came looking for cheap booze in the middle of the night.
Taite, another crew member scalped from Raine, was working her com now. Upon her arrival, the skinny pock-faced kid ducked his head out of the gear room in the back and widened his eyes. He was a crackerjack with the com, but he still cringed in the face of her moods, and there were days she wished he had a straighter spine. He must have been in his early twenties now, but in her head he was still just the fourteen-year-old refugee of Raine’s with the Ras Tiegan accent.
“Khos?” he said hopefully.
“Khos,” she said.
“He’s already posted at the location.”
“Fucker,” Nyx said. “Let Rhys know if that fucker calls off. If he gets tangled up with his whores before this job, I’m going to tear up his contract.”
She went back out to get Rhys to help her with the body. The two of them hauled it down into the freezer under the gear room.
When they came back up, Taite was looking jittery. He usually only looked that way after he’d talked to his sister, another refugee half-breed. Nyx had seen her once, looking down at the bakkie from a dirty window when Nyx dropped Taite off. She was prettier than Taite, though just as fine-boned and frail. Neither of them had been inoculated, and they were allergic to everything.
“There’s a problem, Nyx,” Taite said.
“I hate problems.”
“Anneke says Raine’s there trying to pick up our bounty. Khos moved without your leave. She thinks Khos lost the bounty.”
“Shit,” Nyx growled. “Get in the fucking bakkie, Rhys.”
She and Raine had been netting each other’s prime catches for years, ever since she stole Taite and, later, Anneke from him. Taite was the only com tech she knew who could keep a line secure without resorting to venom addiction, but whoever Raine was using now consistently hacked Taite’s com. She had lost her last two bounties to
