God's War

and tangled the fingers of her other hand into his dreads.

He carried her outside the little room and up the stairs. They were in some kind of busted-out tenement building. It stank of piss and dogs and human shit. Anneke yelled something at Khos. Rhys was at the top of the stairs. A halo of dragonflies circled his head. He was very beautiful.

“Out,” Rhys said. “Right now. She’s coming in the back.”

They barreled out the front of the building. Khos set Nyx in the back of the bakkie as if she were made of glass. Blood smeared the seat. Khos started the bakkie, and Anneke slung into the front. Rhys climbed in next to Nyx and held her.

It was strange, being held.

Anneke had her rifle pointed out the window. “Go! Go!” she yelled. She fired.

Nyx heard something scream.

Anneke fired again.

“What the fuck was that?” Khos said.

Anneke spit out the window. “It ain’t illegal to kill bel dames in Chenja.”

“Is anything broken?” Rhys asked Nyx as he ran his hands over her. “You know what day it is?”

She named a date, two days after her market trip with Anneke.

“That’s about right,” he said. He pushed her cropped hair out of her bruised face. “Did they break anything?”

“Been coughing up blood,” she murmured.

“All right,” he said. He touched her bandaged hand. “They put anything on this?”

“No.”

“All right. I can put something on it. You’ll lose the whole hand if it goes gangrenous.” He passed his hand over her legs, and she felt a nasty prickling. The worms writhed.

Rhys knit his brows, splayed his fingers, and as the minutes slid by, the worms began to drop off, one by one.

My magician, she thought.

“Where are we going?” Nyx asked.

“I have a place,” Khos said. “Don’t worry about it. They’ll give us harbor as long as we need it. We cleared out after you went missing. Before they searched the safehouse.”

“Yes,” Nyx said.

“They told you about that?” Rhys asked.

“They said you were all dead.”

“We don’t go down that easy,” Anneke said.

“No,” Nyx said as the lights outside blurred past, as Rhys sat with one arm holding her to him as Anneke kept watch at the windows, her rifle out, and as Khos drove to someplace she’d never been, in a foreign country that hated her and her people almost as much as she hated them. Her head felt like someone else’s. Someone else’s broken body. She had been here before.

“That’s all right,” she said.

“You need anything?” Khos asked. “You need some water? I’ve got some up front.”

“No, no,” Nyx said, “but I could use a whiskey.”

She rolled her head against Rhys’s shoulder and passed out.

23

Khos had spent his teenage years on the streets of Mhoria. He had spent one too many nights on the other side of the great divide that separated men’s and women’s worlds, and the priests—the rhabbams—had cast him out of polite society for it. So Khos had made his way as a petty thief and errand runner for a while, and had gotten into his fair share of fistfights. He had seen a lot of maggoty wounds, of bodies devoured by bugs and dogs. On Nyx’s crew, he had seen and done worse. But he had never seen it or done it to anyone on his team.

Nyx looked horrible. He sat at her bedside and tried to tell himself it was her own fucking fault. She was the most Nasheenian woman he knew, and that made her headstrong and arrogant and skilled enough to cut his head off if it caught her fancy.

“How did you find me?” Nyx asked. He and Rhys had gotten her to take in some water, a little food. Rhys had done some bug work on her face and cleaned up her legs, but they had to hire a local hedge witch to do the rest, which Rhys seemed to find embarrassing. Useless fucking magician, Khos thought. He never understood why Nyx kept him on the team. He wished she’d fuck the little prick and get it over with.

She lay behind a gauzy curtain in a discrete room. He’d shown her the lock on the door, and told her she was at the top of the house. There was a narrow grill far up on the wall. He could hear the splash of the fountain in the courtyard.

“I tracked your scent,” Khos said. There were no chairs in the room. The mattress sagged under his weight. “From where Anneke said she lost you. I could only keep up until the edge of the city. After that, Rhys sent out some bugs.”

“So what’s this place? You just on good terms with every brothel mistress in three countries?”

“No,” he said, and hesitated. Then, “All right, it’s a brothel, yes, but it’s also a safe house we use for the underground.”

“We?”

It was stupid to keep her in the dark about it now, but it had become habit over the years. Nyx was a dangerous woman. The people on her team knew that better than anyone, and everyone else she met had a pretty good idea. If she took issue with who he helped, who he betrayed, and the laws he broke, she would murder him for it. He had seen her kill people. It was never pretty.

“I’ve been helping the local whores in Nasheen smuggle their boys out for the last three years,” he said, all in a rush, as if he’d opened a vein.

“Oh, you fuckers,” Nyx said. She put a hand over her eyes. “I used to cut off the heads of men like you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Who else is here?”

“We’re all here. They agreed to take all of us.”

“And of course it’s a brothel.” Nyx crinkled her mouth. It looked like it hurt. “You must have gotten a lot of grateful women into bed.”

“Only the ones who were interested.” But none of them was you, Khos thought. He’d had his one night with her in Punjai, early on, before either of them knew who or what the other really was.

She grunted. “Can the underground do anything to help us?”

“You mean besides giving us a safe house where we can help you recover your ass?”

“You know what I mean. I have a great ass.”

“You do have a great ass,” Khos said. He’d spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, and one night with his hands on it. “Yeah, they’ll put us up, and, yeah, they can point us to the waterworks where we can check out fighters. The whores go with patrons to the matches.”

“Are any of these whores Nasheenian?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Nyx, but you couldn’t pass for a Chenjan whore. Trust me.”

“Not me. You should take Anneke.”

“Anneke couldn’t play a whore to save her life. In Chenja, she couldn’t even pass for a woman if she tried. Rhys and I will go.” He hesitated, added, “As men.”

“All right. Where’s Rhys?”

“He’s all right.”

“Good.” She was fading. They’d pumped her with some local drug Rhys had, but she didn’t talk or act like a woman who wasn’t in pain. She’d rebound, though, he knew. She’d rebound and forget the whole mess, go back to swaggering around. For one sharp moment, he realized he liked her this way, mostly helpless and incredibly vulnerable. But knowing that he was that type of man, that he liked her this way, frightened him. He looked away