“She is away at the magicians’ quarters,” Kasbah said. “She was scheduled for a sabbatical many months ago.”
“You’ve already talked to Yah Tayyib?”
“He says he left Nikodem at the bookshop. He and Yah Inan went out for a late supper with her and paused to look at some organics books. She said she was going to visit an acquaintance living above the bookshop. She asked them to escort her home at mid-morning prayer. When they returned the next day, they found that no one lived above the shop. That’s when I had my technicians go through the security lenses.”
“She’s been gone a month now?” Nyx asked.
“Yes.”
“She could be dead.”
“That may be. If she is, we’ll need her body. As a former bel dame, you know how important it is for us to retain at least her head, for our own purposes. However, I doubt she is dead. If kidnapped or coerced, as you believe, her keepers would understand her importance to the war.”
“She’s not contaminated, is she?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So you’ve had a bunch of hunters and mercenaries looking for her in Nasheen for a month, the sorts of people who’d have access to every low-end cantina and fighting ring in the country, and they haven’t found her. We’re going to have to widen the net, then.”
“That is what the other bounty hunter said,” Kasbah said.
“The other bounty hunter?” Rhys asked.
But Nyx didn’t have to ask. She knew which one.
“Raine al Alharazad. You know him?” Kasbah asked.
“Intimately,” Nyx said.
Rhys got to his feet, keeping his hands on the back of the chair. “When you say widen the net—”
“I hope Anneke’s getting some sun,” Nyx said. “We’re going to Chenja.”
11
The burst sirens went off as Nyx and Rhys stepped out onto the busy main street. The palace filter over the sally port door popped behind them, and for a minute Nyx thought the keening cry of the sirens had something to do with the ringing in her ears from the quick succession of filters.
Rhys looked skyward, and Nyx touched his arm, nodding back down the street. “Let’s get inside and get some food,” she said. “You hungry?” The queen had given them a generous starting allowance, and she wanted to make the most of it. “I haven’t had good food in ages.”
“Starving,” he said, tucking his hands beneath his burnous, hunching his head and shoulders as if his guarded posture would ward off the blow from some burst.
Nyx heard the heavy
As they walked, Rhys said, “I think Danika’s lying.”
“So do I,” she said. “I’m just not sure about what.”
She ducked into a cafe on the south side of the palace called the Grim Matron. She knew it from her year of training in Mushtallah as a bel dame. Rasheeda had loved their little green drinks.
Nyx and Rhys both pulled off their hoods as they entered, and the bar matrons all lifted their heads from their beer glasses and opium pipes and plates of fried grasshoppers. The hush of low conversation in the dim room ceased, and the smoky air suddenly felt a lot heavier.
Nyx pushed her burnous back over her shoulders, so her weapons were visible, and stepped up ahead of Rhys. She pushed through the scattering of tables to a tall, latticed booth at the back, seeming to ignore the gazes that followed after Rhys, but tracking every one of them with her peripheral vision, waiting for somebody to move.
Rhys followed her, careful not to touch anything, maneuvering his slim body around the tables and matrons.
Just as Nyx reached the table, a grizzled woman, one arm larger and darker than the other, her face a drooling mass of scarred flesh, hacked a gob of spit at Rhys’s face. Rhys caught the spit in his hand. Nyx appreciated that. The woman began to get up, opened her mouth to say something.
Nyx pivoted and tugged her whip from her hip. She caught the woman around the throat with it and stood behind the woman’s chair, holding her taut against the seat back. Rhys said he was going to find an ablution bowl to clean up.
Nyx leaned over and said, loud enough for the women and the nearest three tables to hear, “This man belongs to me. What you do to him, you do to me. Understand, my woman?”
The woman gurgled something, and Nyx watched the faces of her table companions. They were grizzled old war veterans as well, hard-faced and battle-scarred, and the looks they gave her were equal parts hatred and respect.
Nyx released her hold and knocked the woman back into her seat.
The woman grabbed at her throat and muttered something.
Nyx wound her whip back up.
“You don’t see many women carrying a whip,” one of the other women at the table said.
“It’s good for stealing weapons and drinks and tying boys up,” Nyx said.
“You use it a lot, then?”
Nyx saw Rhys returning to their table.
“You wouldn’t believe,” Nyx said.
She turned away from them and slid into her seat across from Rhys. There were partitions between the tables, which helped muffle the sound. The three veterans at the nearest table got up and went to the bar; the spitter still rubbed at her throat, muttering.
“Was that really necessary?” Rhys said, shrugging out of his burnous. Nyx caught herself admiring the breadth of his shoulders. If he wasn’t dancing anymore, how was he keeping in shape?
“This is Mushtallah,” Nyx said. “They push, you push back, or they’ll mow you over.” She pressed a hand to the table. The tiny bugs inside the tabletop displayed the menu in response to the warmth of her touch. “You think that last lens was doctored?”
Inside, the sound of the sirens was muffled, a dull whine. The stink of the opium was making Nyx nauseous.
“Yes,” Rhys said, “and worse. Any magician, including Kasbah, could tell that was a doctored bug. Some other magician with access to the same bug transmissions the palace uses doctored that last image of Nikodem and the bakkie, probably so they could edit themselves out. My concern is that Kasbah knew that and didn’t tell us.”
“Maybe Kasbah doctored the footage herself?”
“She’s not a complete imbecile,” Rhys said. “If she doctored the footage, we wouldn’t have been authorized to see the originals. She wanted us to know it was doctored but feared saying it out loud. She feared even putting that information on the globe.”
“Which means Nikodem probably went out with one of the palace magicians and didn’t come back,” Nyx said, “and the palace magicians doctored the footage.”
“So the palace has black agents, maybe black magicians,” Rhys said, shaking his head, “and she doesn’t want your bel dames on this note. I don’t like this, Nyx, and I don’t like where this note might take us.”
Nyx thought of Yah Tayyib. If Nikodem had been friendly with Yah Inan and Yah Tayyib, either of them could have set her up with someone to get her out of the country.
“I don’t see a motive for the magicians she was friendly with,” Nyx said.
Rhys made a noise that sounded like a laugh. “Magicians remember a time when they ruled the world. It’s
