Free God's War by Kameron Hurley Page B

of roach nymphs wiggled free
from the leak in the hose by her feet and flitted through the open windows.
    They came over the top of a low
rise, and Punjai spread before them like a jagged wound, a seething black
groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. Three years before, the front had
been closer, and all of the minarets outside the Chenjan quarter of the city
had been bombed. Truckloads of dead and dying men were still carted into the
city during the worst of the skirmishes, but for the most part, magicians liked
to patch up their charges at the front. The more men that got away from the
front, the more likely it was that somebody would figure a way to smuggle them
out—and the greater the danger they posed to the city if they were
contaminated. Bel dame business was brisk in Punjai. Not that Nyx was licensed
to do that type of thing.
    But it didn’t keep her from thinking
about it.
    At the edges of the city, the desert
stirred, set free by centuries of bug storms and heavy warfare. Bursts had
seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock
the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped
spirals of the remaining minarets, long since converted to more practical
watchtowers equipped with long-range anti-burst weapons and scatterguns. The
only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer in Punjai was a crumbling
black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.
    “Taite briefed you on the file?”
Rhys asked as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black
burnous.
    Nyx watched him fiddle with the
frogged tie at his collar.
    “Yeah,” she said, “I looked over the
file. Some Chenjan terrorists. Expected to be armed. Good boxers. I sparred
with one of them in Aludra a couple of years ago.”
    “I expected they’d be friends of
yours,” Rhys said.
    “I run with a lot of questionable
characters,” Nyx said, giving him a sidelong look. “We’re stopping at the
storefront. I need to off-load your body.”
    “It’s Khos’s body. Is Anneke in?”
    “She’s already posted. Less picky
about where she spends morning prayer.” Anneke had been one of the easier
additions to her crew, once Nyx made up her mind to cannibalize Raine’s team.
All Anneke had wanted was a bigger gun.
    “I hate this city,” Rhys said.
    Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting
out of the dash. “Find something useful on. You have some sen?”
    He obediently switched on the tube.
It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at them.
Local politics. Queen Ayyad had abdicated to her daughter Zaynab four months
before, and the talking heads were still preoccupied with what that meant for
relations between Nasheen and Ras Tieg. Nyx was more interested in what Zaynab’s
policies would be regarding the capture of terrorists. Queens and bel dames did
not, traditionally, get along, and the livelihood of mercenaries and bounty
hunters didn’t even show up as a line item during the low council meetings. The
queen got on best with her decadent group of high-council
nobles—representatives from the richest houses in Nasheen, descendants of the
First Families. It was a hazy kind of history, and Nyx didn’t remember half of
it. Most of her schooling consisted of adding and subtracting bullets and
calculating the trajectory of burst guns, interspersed with some theology from
the Kitab and exaltations about the power of submission to God—dead words from
some other dead world. Actual Umayman history was usually just a nod to how everything
that ever went wrong on Umayma was the fault of the Chenjans.
    Nyx changed the station. The air
tingled, and the voices were briefly garbled, but then cleared up. More news:
local gossip. Talk about the upcoming vote on whether or not half-breeds should
be drafted. A couple of serious-sounding women discussed the arrival of a ship
that had put down in Faleen. Where were all these antiquated wrecks coming
from? Nyx thought.