Michel once told her that she and Eshe had aged faster in Ras Tieg than he expected. The face she saw in the polished mirror each evening was different than the one she had brought with her nearly seven years ago. Fine lines creased her face now, and she felt as if her body had already begun to bend and sag in all the wrong places. Her muslin habits had become baggier as the stress and low rations had taken their toll. Eshe, for his part, was a young man, lean and well-muscled, and a head and shoulders taller than her now—a very Nasheenian build that made him stand out more in crowds. His height was even harder to hide than his half-breed complexion, so he stooped more, even in her headquarters among his own kind.
Inaya reached out and took his hands. His were nearly as rough as hers, darker, though she was part Nasheenian, too. The Nasheenian part of him had not balanced well with the Ras Tiegan features, and he had a typically flat Ras Tiegan face with a bold Nasheenian nose and broad cheekbones. When she looked at him, it reminded her all too often of how imperfectly the two of them tried to straddle the line between one world and another.
“I asked Isabet to report back to me about your methods,” Inaya said softly. She watched him carefully as she said it.
He immediately pulled his hands away. “Her? You asked her to spy on me?”
“I’m worried about your violence, Eshe. I’m worried—”
“You’re worried I’m going to be like her,” he said.
“It is a fine line we walk, Eshe. Not all of our goals can be accomplished by violence. The more violent shifters are, the easier it is to dismiss our cause—”
“And the easier it is to roll all over you,” Eshe said. He stood, color blazing on his face. “These people were a bunch of bloody cowards before we came here. Bloody kittens. I taught the younger ones to fight, just like you asked. Now you want to rein us in?”
“Not them,” Inaya said. “You. I know you are not like her at all, not really, but you try so hard to be. It puts our people in danger. And the caus e.”
“I’m saving—”
“You are killing people for crimes long done and buried. I need the support and voices of these men, Eshe, and you are making that… difficult.”
“When did we stop getting things done and start licking priests’ asses?” Eshe spat.
Inaya stood. “That priest whose wake you just attended has a family, and they’ve asked for blood debt. God’s Angels rounded up a dozen shifters in retaliation. Now your face and local name are on the list. Those Angels will be coming for you next, and none of us can afford that. All killing gets us is more killing.”
“They’re thugs, not angels. Call them what they are.”
“It’s what the people call them. It’s who will come for you if you don’t listen to sense.”
“It’s what Ras Tiegans call them,” Eshe said.
“Aren’t you Ras Tiegan?” She hated the way it came out—pleading. She had wanted to believe they were alike, in some ways. And more—she wanted to believe he could be saved. But her hardships were not like his. A dead brother, murdered parents, broken family—these were small things to a Nasheenian-raised street boy who had been grown in some coastal compound and farmed out to a dozen different house mothers as a source of cheap labor and cheaper sex.
“I wanted to be,” he said.
“Eshe….”
“You know how that priest died?”
“The one before the one you killed last night? Yes. You stabbed him. Repeatedly.”
“I walked in on him and Isabet. You know, the one you sent in to do some talking. One rich person to another. Trouble is, she’s just a girl to them, not anybody with clout, and they treated her like it. He was so fast on her she didn’t make a sound. When I got there he’d wrapped a bag around her head and started beating her. Tell me words would have fixed that, Inaya.”
Inaya felt something inside of her harden. It was a twisted game she played, and some days, she felt terrible guilt over it. “I have seen horrible things here too, Eshe.”
“Tell me words would have fixed it!”
“The right words would have.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Maybe so. I just don’t think Nasheen’s way of doing things is going to work here.”
“We are Nasheenian.”
“I’m not,” Inaya said. She was many things, but not… like those women.
“Nyx got things done.”
“She’s just a killer.”
“So am I.”
Inaya slapped him.
It happened so suddenly she didn’t realize she’d done it until she pulled her hand away. The color drained from his face. He stared dumbly at her. She wasn’t certain which of them was more shocked.
“Go back to that bloody place then,” she said. “And see what mercy God will grant you.”
“You’ll lose your war if you fight it nice,” Eshe said. She saw his eyes fill.
Her heart broke.
He turned away, and opened the door.
She immediately regretted it. All of it. The words, the violence. “I’m sorry, Eshe. Don’t go. Let me explain.”
He rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. His face was red and wet. “You’ll lose and you’ll all die here.”
“God bless you, Eshe.”
“Fuck you. And fuck your maggoty little parrot, too. You’re a married fucking woman, Inaya.”
He slammed the door behind him.
She thought to call Michel, or Adeliz, someone who could talk some sense into him. He needed to lie low now, preferably in shifter form, until the blowout from the priests’ murders was done. But Adeliz had gone out, and Eshe had never listened to a word Michel said, not since the rumor started that he spent nights in Inaya’s quarters. She had denied those rumors, but they persisted.
She walked back into her communication room and opened the slide. She needed to decide what to do with Isabet if he left. Putting her with Eshe had been the safest place, the one least likely to result in anyone discovering who Isabet was. Eshe knew little of what happened at the higher levels of Ras Tiegan politics. What motivated Eshe was nurturing a woman he still believed needed saving. Isabet was a fine choice to play that role. But now God’s Angels would round him up, and Isabet would need another protector. Because if Inaya had to choose between the Nasheenian boy shifter who had loyally stood by her side for seven years or the renegade rich girl who could win her people the revolution… she would choose the rich girl. She had been in Ras Tieg so long now, making so many choices just like this one, that the guilt was easy to suppress. She tucked it into that part of her where she kept the memory of her children, and all that she had given up to see this through.
They were sacrifices she did not intend to make in vain.
“Inaya?”
One of her cadre commanders waited in the doorway. “We’re ready to start the recovery of the missing operatives.”
Inaya nodded. “Let’s begin.”
N
yx had saved a lot of women in her time. Killed a few, too. But most of the people she killed were men. That was the way of the world. Or at least the one she remembered.
Until after morning prayer, the streets were strangely quiet. She saw a few in doorways and alleys and heard the far-off scuff of order keeper boots on cobbles. The soft buzz and whir of bakkies puttering off through the city. Saw a spotlight searching the skyline.
But as the suns rose, the streets filled, and Nyx stepped into a heaving mass of men the likes of which she hadn’t seen since her days at the front. The roads further inside Amtullah were too narrow for bakkies or rickshaws, so Nyx walked.
The crowds for the time of day were unexpected. The warm morning air was invigorating, but the potential threat was more so, especially with the tarry stink of the night’s riots still in the air. Boys and young men clotted the sidewalks. Most were just making their way to tea houses or bars or pushing back home from the mosque after morning prayer. But others had made the street their permanent home, and they lurked in doorways, slumped in alleys, begged for handouts, or talked up passersby in the hopes of selling grapes or prayer rugs or bootleg whiskey. Nyx wondered where all the itinerants went at night. The stink of them as she passed hinted that they took up residence in the sewers.
Nyx raised a hand to push a boy out of the way, but he darted back before she could touch him. Old women who walked like bel dames had always put Nasheenian boys on guard. It was good to know some things hadn’t changed.
Someone was yelling from the direction of the mosque. Nyx rolled her shoulders and glanced to her right. The crowd stirred. A few heads turned. She rested a hand on her pistol.
Then she moved down another street, the main way running outside the square, and some of the noise died down. Nyx waited another breath before pulling her hand away from her pistol. Ahead of her, she saw a dozen blue-clad order keepers swarming the sidewalk. She was close to the address Mercia had given her.
She turned down another thoroughfare. There were more order keepers here, and something else—women dressed in deep brown and crimson burnouses who had the arrogant stance of bel dames. She couldn’t ever remember seeing bel dames and order keepers congregating together. Order keepers hated bel dames, and bel dames thought order keepers were a bad joke.
She stepped up to the banded gate bearing Fatima’s address and presented the invitation Mercia had given her to the bel dame at the gate.
The bel dame keyed Nyx into the filter and opened the gate. “Sorry for the filter. Three boys got in last week. We’ve had to tighten it a lot. No more boys get in, though.” She gestured for Nyx to go in. “Welcome to Blood Hill.”
“Blood Hill, huh?” Nyx said. Bel dames were never much for creativity. She’d bet her left lung Fatima had named the place. Bloodmount in Mushtallah was mostly abandoned now, she heard. Kept on for show, but the real shit went down here, far from the Queen’s most supportive city. The bel dames who moved through the halls were all hard-bitten, straight-backed women with ropy muscles and keen stares, but for all their mental maturity, they were—physically—young, including the four escorting Nyx to Fatima’s office. They passed strutting sixteen-yearold novices and bitter veterans with scarred twenty-year-old faces. The cranky weapons teachers and protocol specialists—the ones Nyx always thought looked like the desert had eaten them up and spit them out— were a ripe old thirty.
Nyx was painfully aware that she was the oldest person in every room by nearly a decade. Every room but the last.
The one Fatima waited in.
Fatima sat at a deep mahogany desk of real wood. Her backless chair was padded in deep umber brown. The name of God was scrawled along the top border of the room, repeated endlessly like something from a Chenjan prayer wheel. No windows in this room—not surprising. It was nicer, but smaller than the bel dame’s former quarters on Bloodmount.
“Have a seat,” Fatima said, gesturing to one of the padded, backless chairs. There was a large slide hung against the far wall, blank now. Nyx wondered what they planned and plotted on that monstrosity. She had never seen a slide so big, and wondered how many new magical gadgets and super weapons had been pushed through production in her absence.
Watching Fatima’s savage, skinny frame easily inhabiting the space behind the desk where she picked over government policy made every muscle in Nyx’s body tense. Fatima had done well for herself, she’d give her that. Sucking at the government’s tit was a good way to make a living. But Nyx liked to think that remaining a free agent helped preserve what little honor she had left.
Nyx nodded at her bel dame escorts. “You want to keep them around?”
“I think we’ll be all right. Won’t we?”
“You tell me.”
Fatima dismissed the bel dames. They shut the door.
Nyx sprang across the table.
It was not the action of a young woman, and as soon as she leapt, she regretted it. She had expected to move a lot faster.
But then, Fatima wasn’t young either.
Fatima ducked left, twisted right, and snapped her elbow back. Nyx dodged. Fatima’s elbow glanced off Nyx’s brow instead of her temple. Nyx slammed her full weight into Fatima’s torso. The two went down together.
Nyx pinned Fatima between the desk and the wall, one knee pressing hard into the small of her back. She got a good grip on Fatima’s free hand and twisted her arm behind her, pulled it taut.
Fatima made a strangled sound, somewhere between a bark and a snarl. She tried kicking at the back of Nyx’s head, but Nyx caught her leg and pinned it with her own.
“Give me a reason,” Nyx said.
Fatima hissed in a breath. “I could have sent a dozen bel dames after Mercia.”
“Not good enough.” Nyx yanked Fatima’s arm back sharply. Felt it pop out of the socket. Fatima shrieked as her arm went limp.
“Cat bitch, I’m not here to kill you!” Fatima said.
“And I’m not here to get used again. What the fuck do you want, and why did you pay Mercia to get it?”
“Talk, just talk. Goddammit, Nyx.”
“Bel dames don’t talk,” Nyx said. “And you’ve gotten slow.”
“I’m a high councilwoman. All we fucking do is talk. I could call half a dozen women in here.”
“If that was true you’d have done it.”
“Let me speak—”
“I haven’t cut your throat yet. Talk.”
“The Queen asked for you. Not to kill you! In case you haven’t noticed we have some… issues here. We need someone not associated with the bel dames or the monarchy. Your name always comes up when we have those jobs. If it was up to me, I’d let the exile stand and let you wither away in whatever shitty hole you crawled into.”
“This better be good.”
Fatima nodded to the door. “Haven’t you seen them out there? The Queen asked for you by name. I don’t fucking know why. She pardoned all criminals and made sure your name was on the list. Rumor is she’s dying, and that’s the only reason she did it.”
“Catshit.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Swear to God.”
“I swear to God—the compassionate, the merciful. I swear on my oath as a bel dame. You hear that?”
Nyx heard it. There were a lot of things Fatima would do for the Queen, but shitting on God or her oath wasn’t one of them. Nyx released Fatima’s arm and stood. Went back around the desk. She waited while Fatima struggled to her feet, useless arm dangling.