something in Eranian. He lashed out, trying to grab her wrist. Qhora pulled back. Mirari stepped forward. The men said something and laughed. The masked woman pulled her long dirk and hatchet from the back of her belt and said, “Leave us alone.”
The bearded man stepped forward quickly, hands raised to grab the woman’s arms or weapons. His larger body crashed against her, but Mirari’s legs lashed out from behind her long Espani skirts. She kicked him viciously between the legs and when he stumbled back she leaned back to smash her boot into his face, sending him reeling against the two other men.
Shouting in Eranian, the bearded man pulled a small rusty pistol from inside his shirt.
Qhora blinked. She’d been watching Mirari struggle with the thug as though across a great distance, as though there was nothing she could do to help her friend, as though she were watching a dream. But the sight of the gun brought her back, and the alley no longer seemed a hundred miles long and Mirari was no dream-vision but a young woman who was trying to save their lives.
The Incan princess whipped her small body around in a half-circle and hurled her two knives at once. Both knives went wide, slicing the through the air just a hand-span to either side of Mirari’s head, and plunged into the throats of the two men closest to the street. They both fell to their knees with their hands groping their necks awash in blood. And then they dropped to the ground.
There was a moment of stunned silence when both Mirari and the gunman looked down at the two men dying at their feet and the rapidly spreading pool of blood on the paving stones. The man looked up first, no longer glaring, eyes a bit wider and more confused than before. And then Mirari’s knife came up, slashing aside the man’s hand holding the gun. As the man hissed and grabbed his bleeding hand, the mountain girl leapt up on a pile of old boards and then jumped down in the same heartbeat, letting gravity add its force to her swinging hatchet. The blade sank into the side of the man’s neck, and the man collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
Mirari gestured past the bodies. “My lady. If you will step out, I will clean up.”
Qhora nodded and paced out to the mouth of the alley and stared at the tide of human bodies streaming past in the street. No one gave her a second look. If anyone had seen the flash of steel or splash of blood or the dying men, no one cared.
She’d barely stood there a moment when Mirari tapped her on the shoulder and handed back her two knives, both blades shining and clean. Glancing back, Qhora saw that Mirari had dragged all three bodies into the shadows and arranged the refuse there over them, and then scattered a few small boards around the blood to discourage anyone from going too close by accident.
Alonso could never have done that so quickly and calmly. He wouldn’t have even thought to do it at all. He’s too kind, too gentle. I suppose that’s what brought him to Mirari. Endless kindness, endless patience. And some of that Espani chivalry, too.
Qhora paused to look at the masked woman. Her dark red hair was all loose and raggedy around the edges of her gleaming white mask with its black-rimmed eyes and bright red lips and little pink roses painted around the cheeks and forehead. To one side, a hint of silvery-blue skin poked out and Qhora reached up to gently arrange the woman’s hair to hide her twisted ear. “Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t hurt, my lady. He barely touched me.”
“No. I mean, are you all right? Are you really?”
The Espani woman hesitated, and with the mask hiding her features it was impossible to guess what emotions might have played over her lips or eyes in that moment. “I don’t like this place. I miss home. I miss the cold, and the quiet. I’ll be grateful to be done with this business and back in Madrid again. But don’t let that concern you, my lady. I’ll be by your side until Don Lorenzo’s killer is brought to the Father’s justice.”
The Father’s justice? But what if the Father is dead and all desire for true justice died with him? And what if the Mother, who is supposed to be the cradle of all life, is out hunting for the killer? And what if the Son, the voice of mercy and love, is far away in a strange land where no one can hear his cries?
Qhora touched Lorenzo’s triquetra medallion on her chest.
How did you ever make sense of your faith, Enzo? These images, these virtues. Peace and mercy. They make no sense in the real world.
She glanced back into the alley and tried to remember the faces of the two men she had just killed. She couldn’t. They were simply gone along with the dozens of other men she had killed over the years.
Men.
For so long, through the long war back home in the empire and then in Marrakesh and even in honorable Espana there had always been a need to kill men. It was simply a part of life. Killing predators before they could kill her.
But now, as she stared back into the alley looking for the hidden bodies, instead of men she saw boys. Little boys. Boys who had been babies. Babies with mothers.
They all had mothers, once. Then I killed them. Those poor women. I killed their babies.
Javier.
I need to go home to him. Alive.
“We couldn’t walk a hundred paces without being attacked. If there had been more of them, if there hadn’t been an alley, if someone had seen us…we might be dead now. We should be dead now,” Qhora said. “We have to be smarter. You were right. I’m sorry. Let’s go back to the Hellans. It would seem we do need them after all.”
“Indeed, it never hurts to have more eyes and hands in a dangerous place.”
“No. But it’s not their eyes or hands that will protect us while we’re walking about in broad daylight in this place,” Qhora said. “They may not be great fighters, but they have their uses. We’ll work with them until we can find the Italian again. If we ever find him again. He might be dead too by now, for all we know.”
They started back toward the Hellan Quarter.
“I doubt Salvator is dead, my lady,” Mirari said. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would die easily.”
“If Lorenzo had been another sort of man, he would have killed Salvator easily enough.”
“Maybe. But then he wouldn’t have been our Don Lorenzo.”
Qhora smiled sadly. That’s true enough.
Chapter 16. Shifrah
“This could take days.” Shifrah stood on the corner surveying the marketplace. Across an ocean of heads and hair and scarves and eyes, she saw only meaningless movement without faces.
“Do you know his usual haunts? Where does Aker live when he’s in town?” Kenan asked. “Who are his friends? What does he do for fun when he’s not working?”
Shifrah rolled her eye at him. Aker had been so much simpler than Kenan. Sure, they’d both been younger and simpler all around back then, but even still, Aker had never shown much depth in his virtues or his vices. “I suppose we should start with the brothels.”
“Brothels? Here? I thought they frowned on that sort of thing.”
Shifrah pushed away from the wall and led Kenan into the slow stream of bodies moving east down the boulevard. “In general, yes. The Aegyptians and their Eranian masters both frown on the sex trades, but not everyone here is a Mazdan, and not all the Mazdans are good Mazdans. So what happens when you make something illegal?”
“It goes underground,” Kenan muttered. “Are we talking about basements, back alleys, abandoned warehouses, and condemned mansions?”
“Only for the poor people.” Shifrah grinned at him over her shoulder. “Hey, get up here and walk next to me, not behind me.”
He quickened his pace to come alongside, which made it a bit harder to slip through the crowd but it couldn’t be helped.
“How long were the two of you together?” the detective asked.
“A year or so. We ran little jobs for Omar here in the city. We would pose as brother and sister, or
