God's War

“How did you find women to box in Chenja?” Rhys asked.

“You haven’t seen much boxing,” the old man said. “We’ve been getting in some Nasheenian girls this last year. Why do you think our entrance fee’s so high? We don’t risk our boys in the ring anymore. Too dangerous. Makes them unfit for the front. Gets people suspicious.”

“Husayn said she was losing fighters to this ring,” Rhys said, in Mhorian. Khos had only heard him speak Mhorian a handful of times. There were days when he wondered just how important Rhys’s family was. Chenjans and Nasheenians didn’t bother learning Heidian, Drucian, Ras Tiegan, or Mhorian, as a rule. Those were the lesser people, the latecomers who they fed the planet’s scraps. “But I didn’t realize they made up the entire card.”

“So you want to bet on anybody?” the old man asked. His eyes were eager. Khos wondered what his cut was.

“Yeah, sure,” Khos said. “I’ll put a buck on that second one, Tarsa.”

Rhys said, “A buck? Are you—”

“It’s my personal take,” Khos said. He counted out a buck in change and handed it over to the man. The man punched out a receipt with a dumb stylo on organic paper. If you wanted to make some contacts, you had to start by passing out money.

When he’d gone, Khos said, “You see any magicians in here yet?”

“No. We’re early, I think.”

“I’m going to the bar. Want anything?”

“Only if they have clean water.”

“Doubtful.”

Khos moved through the crowd to the bar. The advantage of being big and foreign was that most people got out of your way.

Khos ordered a bloody rum. The bartender was a stooped old man with half a face and a crusted black hole where one of his eyes should have been.

“You Mhorian?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Khos said.

The man contorted his face in what Khos took to be an attempt at a smirk. Maybe a grimace.

“What’s it like, never seeing women?” the man asked.

“It’s why I left,” Khos said, and found himself thinking of Inaya. Why had she left Ras Tieg in the first place? Taite always said she was happily married back home.

The man coughed out a laugh and handed over Khos’s drink. “I like my women in private spaces. Can’t get away with it much anymore. Not like old times.”

“But foreign women are different?” Khos asked, nodding at the ring.

“Foreign women are dogs,” the man said.

“I’m a shifter,” Khos said. “I take some offense at that.” He didn’t, really, but it was worth the fearful look on the man’s face. Khos was a head taller and thirty kilos heavier than he was.

“They’re just bad women,” the barman sputtered.

Khos turned away from the bar and bumped into a tall man wearing a long blue burnous cut like Rhys’s. He was old and too pale to be Chenjan. Khos saw a locust clinging to his cuff. When the man opened a hand and ordered a drink, roaches scuttled back up his sleeve.

Khos stepped away and looked over the press of people around the magician. He saw no one familiar, so he widened the sweep of his gaze around the tables to see if anyone was looking at the man. A veiled woman and a tall unveiled woman glanced at the bar from their places near the ring.

“Khos Khadija?”

Khos started. He reached for the short pistol at his hip with his free hand.

A lean, ropy-looking Nasheenian woman with a long, mean face stepped in front of him. She had a boxer’s face, one whose nose had been mashed in one too many times. She squinted at him.

“I thought that was you,” she said.

“I know you?” he asked. In his line of work, he knew a lot of women.

“No, but some of my women do. You helped some of my whores in Nasheen get their boys out.”

“You run a brothel?”

“It’s among the many things I do,” she said. “Have a drink with me.”

“I’m with someone.”

“He can wait. I have a private room.”

Khos hesitated. She wasn’t an attractive woman, certainly not the type he’d want to have a drink with under any other circumstances, but he was here to scout out news and make contacts, and she was offering. He’d also be interested to know how she was going around unveiled without an escort in Chenja.

And how she knew his name.

“All right, then. One drink,” he said. “You have a name?”

“In Chenja, I go by Haj.”

“Seriously?”

She grinned. He saw dark circles under her eyes. Nyx would say she was a bleeder. “Seriously.”

Haj led him up a winding set of stairs to the balcony overlooking the ring. She opened a battered metal door and revealed a lushly appointed viewing box with windows overlooking the ring.

Two young women slumped on the raised benches set against the windows. The benches were covered in an assortment of pillows that matched the gauzy veils the women wore. Both were Chenjan dark. They looked up at Haj and Khos with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Get this man a drink,” Haj told one of the women.

The woman got to her feet with the practiced ease of a dancer. She went to the private bar at the other side of the room and poured out two glasses of dark liquor.

“Sit,” Haj told Khos.

He pushed some cushions out of the way and sat next to the other woman on the bench. She smelled good, some kind of heady, flowery scent peppered with cinnamon. Haj was well off, but not well off enough to have boys.

Haj sat in an armchair across from him and took the liquor the woman offered her.

“I’d heard you were in town,” Haj said.

Khos felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Who else was tagging them?

“Is that so?”

“I run the brothel on East Babuk,” she said. “Oversee it, actually, for my employer. I found out they’re giving you sanctuary.”

“Is that so?” Khos repeated, still too startled to come up with anything else. He couldn’t imagine Mahrokh selling him out, but he’d been wrong before. Who the hell was this woman? “Who’s your employer?” he asked.

“Local magistrate,” Haj said, waving a hand. “No one important. I hoped to thank you for services rendered. You helped some good men dodge the Nasheenian draft. I’m grateful for that.”

“Kin of yours?”

A knock came at the door.

“Enter,” Haj said.

A bulky Nasheenian woman pushed into the room. She wore a set of dueling pistols, and one arm was paler than the other.

Khos tensed. He knew that woman.

A stocky kid came in behind her.

“You entertaining again?” Dahab said to Haj. She spared only a glance at Khos. Something else was on her mind, praise be. “I need to talk to you about Nikodem.”

Khos forced himself to drink more.

“Over here,” Haj said.

“You’re such a voyeur,” Dahab said. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

“So long as I pay you, you’ll make time. Come on.”