Maybe selling herself as desperate wasn’t a great idea either. Nyx closed her eyes, and behind her eyelids she saw the mine explode again, felt something wet against her skin, a hard slap. Then the whole world was full of filth, offal; she watched half a dozen boys blow apart.
She had been good, once.
Nyx opened her eyes.
How negotiable? Getting back her bel dame title negotiable?
Duty. Honor. Sacrifice.
“These days, I only risk my life for cash,” Nyx said, opening her eyes.
Duty. Honor. Cash.
“Tell me, why did you volunteer for the front?” the queen asked.
“My older brothers died at the front. When they called up my youngest brother, I joined so I could watch his back.”
“A family woman, then,” the queen said.
“Not really,” Nyx said. “He died of dysentery during basic training.”
When she’d gotten back from the front after being reconstituted, the government had plowed over her mother’s homestead in Mushirah and put up a munitions factory. The locals later burned the factory down and reclaimed the farmland, but her mother had died of Azam fever when she relocated to a breeding farm on the coast. She was dead and buried long before Nyx was reconstituted.
“Let’s go ahead and talk money,” Nyx said.
“Money isn’t an issue,” the queen said. “Bring me the woman I want—alive— and we can negotiate the rest. I have half a dozen estates and twice as many servants, if you wish it. Women, of course.” She looked at Rhys. “Unless you’d prefer half-breeds. We have no end of male half-breeds.”
“Until we start sending half-breeds to the front,” Nyx said. “You want to know why women risk illegal pregnancy and keep pirates elbow deep in organs? Half-breeds who aren’t inoculated—who aren’t rich Firsts—don’t get drafted. They’d fall like rotten wasp nests at the front.”
“Perhaps we can eliminate the need for the draft altogether.”
“What do you mean?” This was the dangerous part. No legitimate note was ever pointedly removed from the bel dame queue.
“The woman I’d like you to retrieve can help us end the war.”
Nyx gave a soft grunt. And who would be more interested in ending the war than a former bel dame and war veteran who’d lost everything to it? Somebody just as good as a bel dame but with publicly severed ties to the council? Somebody the queen could put in her pocket?
Pocket, my ass, Nyx thought.
“We could put something together,” Nyx said. “Who is she?”
“A foreigner. An off-worlder called Nikodem Jordan.”
Fuck, Nyx thought. The carrier in Faleen. The boxers. Jaks. Prison. Her sisters. Aliens. A boy’s head in a bag. No coincidences.
Cause and effect.
The queen pulled the globe off the table and called up a still. She handed the globe to Nyx. “This gives her likeness and background. You’ll need to change the password.”
Nyx took the globe. It fit neatly in the palm of her hand. Nikodem’s images had date and time stamps. Nyx saw that several of the stills were dated eight years before. Just as she’d suspected. The same carrier. The same aliens.
Nikodem was a small woman, Chenjan in coloring, with a broad nose, wide cheekbones, and gray eyes. It was an arresting face, not so much alien as exotic. She had the smooth, unblemished skin of someone who’d never stood under the suns of Umayma. She was too little and big-eyed for real beauty, but there was some strength in that face—and cunning. It was the sort of face that kept others out, kept secrets.
“I’ll need to know everything about her,” Nyx said. She looked up from the projections, reluctantly. “How long has she been gone? Does she have friends? Other travelers with her? Who did she meet with when she was last here? Looks like that was eight years ago.”
Rhys tilted his head slightly and peered at the images projected from the globe. She saw his eyes widen, and he sat back. The woman wasn’t
Then the queen was talking, and Rhys looked away, and Nyx tried to listen. Nikodem had been missing for a month, the queen said. She came to Nasheen with three others. The off-worlders had come to Faleen for the first time sixteen years before, and they had come speaking the language Chenjans and Nasheenians used for prayer. Only mullahs spoke that language with any competence anymore, and most people would debate just how competent it was.
“What did they come here looking for?” Nyx asked.
“Some of that is confidential,” the Queen said. “What I can say is that they were very interested in finding other followers of the Kitab and its sister books. They have offered an exchange of technologies in the spirit of our shared faith. We’ve been in negotiations for nearly two decades.”
“They from New Kinaan?” Nyx asked.
“Yes. You know it?”
“Heard it secondhand. My sister works with foreigners on the coast,” Nyx said. Kine might be able to fill her in on what they were up to, though she hadn’t spoken to Kine since she got out of prison. Kine had wanted even less to do with her after the black mark. “I know that when we get in off-worlders, we’re always real interested in hauling them down to the breeding compounds and getting new tech from them.”
“You say they are followers of the Kitab. A sister book. But have you read it?” Rhys asked.
Nyx looked at him sharply. She didn’t know what that had to do with anything.
“As with any people, they believe they are the only true believers of the one God, the only people who know and understand Him through the words of His many prophets,” the queen said.
“God is unknowable,” Rhys said. “That is His nature. For them to claim to know God is arrogance at best. For them to claim more than one prophet isn’t heresy, but to claim there was another after ours… I couldn’t imagine doing business with such a people.”
That dagger was a little too sharp for Nyx’s taste. She opened her mouth to tell him to shut up.
“At one time, Nasheen and Chenja did business,” the queen said, “and it wasn’t called heresy then. It is no business of mine to tell my women how to worship. I do not require a call to prayer in any city. That is up to the mullahs and the people who elect them. Your Chenjan mullahs may be elected, but I am not. When our mullahs overstep, I intervene.” She smiled thinly. “Our balance of power has kept the soldiers at the front, the bel dames at work, and the mullahs sticking to matters of God. We have done this successfully for nearly three hundred years, while doing business with people of the Book. ”
“You say you give your people freedom to submit to God,” Rhys said, and Nyx wondered if he’d hoped to have this conversation with the Queen of Nasheen his whole life, “yet you have barred men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. I see some contradiction in that. How can you deny a man the right to submit to God as he believes God has directed him?”
Nyx sucked her teeth.
“We have different views of God, you and I,” the queen said.
Which explains that whole war business, Nyx thought.
“So, when can I see these Kinaanites?” Nyx asked.
The queen turned from Rhys and regarded her a long moment, as if she’d forgotten Nyx was even there. “Kasbah will take you to them,” she said.
10
