“One moment.”
Nyx waited. There was some noise coming from the other end of the line—the low hum of bugs, the sound of somebody practicing on a speed bag.
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib is indisposed.”
“You told him who this is?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him again. Tell him I have a question for him.”
“I’m sorry, Yah Tayyib isn’t taking calls.”
“Tell him I know what he’s doing with Nikodem.”
The muezzin cried. The speakers along the street took up the call. The world was full of prayer, social submission to God.
Nyx hung up.
Nyx woke just before dawn, as the call of the muezzin to dawn prayer sounded across Dadfar. The city pooled at the edge of the desert sea just northwest of the mining town of Zikiri in the Chenjan interior. When the wind blew the wrong way, Dadfar got misted over in a fine haze of toxic grit. The city used to sit along a broad river, maybe a thousand years before, but the river was gone now, and the sand had swallowed any record of it.
Nyx pushed off her sweat-soaked sheet and swung her legs to the floor, rubbing at her eyes. From her garret room, with the shutters open, she saw a sliver of bloody red light spread across the city’s skyline and swallow the blue haze of the first sun. She felt stiff and sore. She stretched out as dawn broke.
In the main room, she heard Anneke and Khos stir. Rhys was already praying. She was tired.
She poured herself a shot from the bottle by the bed and sank it.
Something was pulling at her, something she was unhappy with. She couldn’t name it. She had taken a risk with the call to Yah Tayyib, but if he thought she knew more than she did, he might try playing all his cards too soon—if he was the magician who ran off with Nikodem. Nyx would have bet her left kidney he was. Yah Tayyib was in the breeding compound records, and he’d been with Nikodem the night she disappeared.
She took another shot of whiskey and got dressed.
Nyx pushed back the curtain into the common room.
“Anneke, I need you to bind me up.”
Anneke trudged in, tossed her scattergun on the bed, and re-bound Nyx’s breasts. She yanked at the fabric and grunted as she fastened it.
“I’d like to breathe,” Nyx said. “Ease up.”
“Your tits are too big.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints.”
“I’m complaining.”
“Huh,” Nyx said. She pulled on a long tunic and burnous and tucked her botched hair up under a gutra and fastened it with an aghal. She needed to cut her hair again properly. She hated short hair.
“You ready, Anneke?”
Anneke slung her scattergun over her shoulder and went back out into the main room for her rifle. “Ready, boss.”
“You don’t think that’s a little much?”
“Not where we’re going,” Anneke said.
“Khos, you’re doing recon today,” Nyx said.
“Yeah,” he said.
She glanced at the curtain Rhys had hidden himself behind. Didn’t bother. Sometimes he just exhausted her. He wasn’t happy about Chenja. Or the liquor. He was never happy about anything.
“Let’s go,” she said.
She and Anneke walked out to the bakkie. Nyx did a quick check for explosives, then they both got in and drove to a local teahouse.
Chenjans dressed far more conservatively than Nasheenians, and it was probably the reason they suffered from fewer cancers. The people they drove past and shared the road with wore brightly colored vests and long coats and trousers and aghals and burnouses, and even some of the men veiled their faces. She expected to see more men in Chenja than she did in Nasheen, but unless there was a political rally or she stood outside a mosque around prayer time, the people on the street were still mostly women. All of the women wore veils and covered their hair, and most wore chadors. The few men she saw were swaggering old men or boys young enough to be the grandsons or great-grandsons of the old men. In Chenja, all of the street signs were in the prayer language, not local Chenjan, which was a similar script but not identical. Nyx’s Chenjan wasn’t the best, but she was better with the prayer script.
Luckily, Anneke knew the streets of Dadfar pretty well. She and Raine had worked in Chenja for a couple of years, and she had family in the city, so when Nyx said they needed to find out about a boxing gym—violent sports and gambling were outlawed in Chenja—Anneke knew the right teahouse.
The tea house sold tea and marijuana, and business looked slow. A couple of prayer wheels hung in the window. Most of the patrons were men either too young to be at the front or too old to get sent back. The old men played board games and smoked marijuana. The boys talked about weapons and girls. A gaggle of chador-clad women sat at the back, laughing in high, loud voices. Like all Chenjans, they wore clothing in gaudy, mismatched colors, as if making up for the fact that they had to live without liquor.
Nyx found a table close enough to the rear door to comfort her and sat with her back to the wall. Behind her there was a massive flaking gilt frame with a picture of some Chenjan martyr on it. Maybe the owner’s son. Nyx wondered why it was that the prescription against images of living things didn’t apply to martyrs, just the Prophet and everything else.
“You sure this is the right place?” she asked Anneke in her broken Chenjan.
Anneke waved over the older woman standing behind the counter and started chatting to her in Chenjan. The woman, unveiled and pushing fifty, brought them tea and sat down and drank it with them. Nyx could follow most of what she said. The bar matron knew one of Anneke’s sisters. She’d been widowed. Owning the teahouse paid the bills. She and her daughters kept it running. The man on the wall was her husband. He had been one of the suicide soldiers who bombed the Nasheenian breeding compounds three decades before.
Nyx looked up at the image on the wall again, examined the eyes. She wondered if she’d ever looked like that: the absolute faith, the grim purpose.
They exchanged a few more words about abandoned buildings and boxing, and then the bar matron lowered her voice and nodded.
Anneke said to Nyx, in Nasheenian, low, “Yeah, she’s heard rumors of fights. Doesn’t much like the idea of fighting in this town, but her husband used to do some of it.”
They finished their tea, and the matron left to tend to the others. Anneke stood.
“We’re good?” Nyx said.
“Yeah. There’s supposed to be a fight in a few days about three or four kilometers from here at an abandoned waterworks. They hold a lot of illegal fights there.”
“Good,” Nyx said.
Anneke shrugged as they stepped back out into the heat of the day. “Well, that was easy. Let’s get lunch. She owns the bakery next door.”
“I’m not in the mood for sweets,” Nyx said.
They picked up a couple of stuffed rotis at a food cart in the town square. It was market day, and the square was choked with merchants selling prayer rugs, scarves, hijabs, burnouses, baskets, dried meat, protein cakes, rotis, braided bread… just about anything Nyx could think of, and more besides. There were butchers and pseudo- magicians and what Nyx figured were probably gene pirates selling their services—real magicians didn’t advertise in markets—and one of the fakes was hawking what he said were human organs in jars laced with ice flies.
She saw a long line of people—men and women—dressed from head to toe in white, making their way across the square. The white marked them as Tirhani pilgrims, and they bore their temporary visas around their necks. Dadfar was the death place of the Tirhani martyr, Manijeh Nassu, one of the daughters of the Chenjan caliph, back when they had one. She had led southern Chenja in revolt against the north and died trying to get
