"Nyx?" he repeated.

He heard a banging on the door below them. Heard raised voices in the house.

Nyx turned to him. "I know," she said.

The other magician had sniffed him out.

Another high whine sounded, close. "Down!" Nyx yelled, and pushed herself away from the window.

Khos dove flat next to Rhys. Rhys covered his head with his hands.

The world trembled; the windows shuddered, and cracks appeared. When Rhys raised his head, he saw that full night had spread over the city. The room was dark.

"Got another squad," Anneke said.

"Khos, check the other window," Nyx said.

Khos got up and went to the gauzy window, looked out. "There's another patrol over here too," he said.

The voices downstairs rose in pitch. Rhys heard the sound of a rifle shot. Screaming. A woman's scream.

He tried to see Nyx, but in the darkness she was only a dim outline. Outside, he saw the pale green and red streamers of bursts trailing out over the city. G.o.d help me, he thought, and began to recite the ninety-nine names of G.o.d. He drew his pistols.

"Khos, check the stairs," Nyx said.

Khos picked his way toward the door and opened it. He crept into the hall.

"They're coming up," Khos said.

Nyx moved across the room, walked right past Rhys. "Get back in," she said.

Rhys heard a pounding on the stairs.

"Get back in!" she hissed.

Khos stepped back inside. He stood a breath away from her in the dark and said, low, "G.o.ddammit, Nyx, they're f.u.c.king coming up. I'm not going to sit here like some martyr."

"You f.u.c.king hold," she said. "Move the f.u.c.k away from the door and listen the f.u.c.k up."

"I'm not going to-"

She shoved her gun against his chest.

Rhys opened his mouth to protest, then clamped it shut. Anneke said, "They've got backup in the alley!"

Rhys watched Nyx and Khos.

They were both shadows. He was taller, broader, outweighed her, and the outline of him-his wild ma.s.s of dreads, beefy legs, the breadth of his shoulders, the pistols in both his hands-was terrifying in the dark.

"I said hold," Nyx said, softly.

More shouts came from downstairs. Rhys heard another shot, then the familiar bat-bat of a pistol.

Khos turned his big body away from Nyx and moved to the window. "You're going to kill us all," he said.

"Not today," she said.

Rhys stood. He raised a hand, found a local swarm but couldn't call it. He could hear them singing in his mind, heard them acknowledge his call, but they did not change course. Useless magician, he thought. My G.o.d, why give me any talent at all if I can't use it now?

Something downstairs exploded. The house trembled again. Footsteps on the stairs. The smell of smoke, yeast, and the faint whiff of geranium.

Men in the hall, shouting. The squad was on the floor. Doors banged open. More screams.

Rhys kept hold of his pistols. He would not kill for her. He would never kill for her. But wounding... Sweat rolled down his back, between his shoulder blades.

Nyx had her gun pointed at the floor.

The ninety-nine names of G.o.d....

Lights. Movement. Shadows appeared in the doorway, green lights.

Nyx crouched low, raised her gun, yelled at them in Nasheenian. "Bel dame! Hold! I'm a bel dame on the queen's business!"

Wild cries, from the boys. They had green lights on the ends of their guns, and the flares swept the room. For a moment, Rhys was blinded. He turned his head away.

"Drop the guns!" the man at the head of the group yelled, in Nasheenian, then Chenjan. "Drop the guns!"

"We're yours! We're Nasheens!"

"Drop your f.u.c.king guns!"

"Drop the guns!" more yelling from the hall.

"I'm a bel dame, you drop your f.u.c.king gear or I'll cut off your f.u.c.king head!"

Rhys started to shake. A green light tracked along his breast. Why didn't she shoot them? She'd killed Chenjans and Nasheenians in droves. What were three or ten more?

And the boy said, "Who do you serve, woman?"

Nyx straightened and pointed her gun at the floor. She stepped in front of the squad, blocked Rhys and Anneke. "My life for a thousand," she said.

Outside, a huge purple burst lit up the sky, and for one long moment Rhys saw the whole room in violet light: Nyx and the squad, Anneke with her shotgun at her shoulder, Khos crouched at the window with his pistols, burnous discarded, as if he was getting ready to shift. The whole dilapidated room-the peeling paint, the dirty pallets, the bug-smeared windows-all thrown into sharp relief.

The man at the head of the squad raised a fist. The men behind him pointed their guns at the floor. He wore organic field gear gone black for night fighting, and there were black thumbprints beneath his eyes.

Then the room went dim again, lit only by the residual glow from the windows and the green lights of the guns.

More screaming sounded below. More pounding feet.

"This room is clear!" the squad leader shouted.

The men behind him fell back.

For a long moment more, Nyx and the squad leader stood eye to eye, the way she had with Khos.

"You're on the wrong side of the border, bel dame," the man said softly.

"We all are," Nyx said.

And then the man turned back into the hall. He kicked the door closed.

Rhys let out his breath.

"f.u.c.k," Khos muttered.

The sounds of the men and the shouting receded, headed further downstairs.

"The second squad's holding," Anneke said, from the window.

Nyx turned back into the room. Rhys watched her. She looked at him. Khos walked across the room to keep watch at the window with Anneke.

"They're clearing out," Khos said.

"Yes," Nyx said.

Rhys sat back down on the pallet on the floor, suddenly sick. "What were you going to do if they didn't stand down?" he asked.

"Kill them," Nyx said.

Rhys shook his head.

Nyx crouched next to him and leaned in so their faces were a hand's breadth apart. "What were you you going to do?" she said. "Where was my wasp swarm, magician? Where were the bugs I pay you for?" going to do?" she said. "Where was my wasp swarm, magician? Where were the bugs I pay you for?"

Rhys didn't answer.

"That's what I thought," she said, and joined the others at the window.

19.

Nyx stumbled into a call booth after the others were asleep in the garret room she'd secured at the low end of Dadfar. The streets of Dadfar were dark, too dark, and they stank like Chenja. She hated the way their cities smelled, and she hated the sounds of their stupid language. It was enough like Nasheenian that when they started talking she expected she could understand them. Then she really heard them, and realized they were speaking something entirely different. The streets were wet; they had gotten into town the day before at the end of some local celebration, probably a ma.s.s wedding or a ma.s.s funeral involving decadent displays of water wealth.

She made a call. She was very drunk. The liquor wasn't local. Chenja was dry, as a rule, and she'd had Anneke smuggle in several bottles of whiskey. She was going to need all of them to get through this job.

She heard the faint whir of a burst siren, somewhere to the east. Burst sirens sounded the same everywhere. They were all manufactured in Tirhan.

The line opened up, crackled, spit, then: "Yes?"

"I'm looking to speak to Yah Tayyib," Nyx slurred.

"May I say who's calling?"

"Nyxnissa so Dasheem." She nearly added, "Tell that f.u.c.ker I'm coming for him, and I've got the queen's leave to do it if he's bloodied his hands with this." But she bit her tongue. A teenage boy ran down the street. Someone shouted from the rooftop. f.u.c.k it all if it wasn't nearly midnight prayer. The street was going to be singing a dead language in about five minutes.

A long pause.

"One moment."

Nyx waited. There was some noise coming from the other end of the line-the low hum of bugs, the sound of somebody practicing on a speed bag.

"I'm sorry, Yah Tayyib is indisposed."

"You told him who this is?"

"Yes."

"Tell him again. Tell him I have a question for him."

"I'm sorry, Yah Tayyib isn't taking calls."

"Tell him I know what he's doing with Nikodem."

The muezzin cried. The speakers along the street took up the call. The world was full of prayer, social submission to G.o.d.

Nyx hung up.

Nyx woke just before dawn, as the call of the muezzin to dawn prayer sounded across Dadfar. The city pooled at the edge of the desert sea just northwest of the mining town of Zikiri in the Chenjan interior. When the wind blew the wrong way, Dadfar got misted over in a fine haze of toxic grit. The city used to sit along a broad river, maybe a thousand years before, but the river was gone now, and the sand had swallowed any record of it.

Nyx pushed off her sweat-soaked sheet and swung her legs to the floor, rubbing at her eyes. From her garret room, with the shutters open, she saw a sliver of b.l.o.o.d.y red light spread across the city's skyline and swallow the blue haze of the first sun. She felt stiff and sore. She stretched out as dawn broke.

In the main room, she heard Anneke and Khos stir. Rhys was already praying. She was tired.

She poured herself a shot from the bottle by the bed and sank it.

Something was pulling at her, something she was unhappy with. She couldn't name it. She had taken a risk with the call to Yah Tayyib, but if he thought she knew more than she did, he might try playing all his cards too soon-if he was the magician who ran off with Nikodem. Nyx would have bet her left kidney he was. Yah Tayyib was in the breeding compound records, and he'd been with Nikodem the night she disappeared.

She took another shot of whiskey and got dressed.

Nyx pushed back the curtain into the common room.

"Anneke, I need you to bind me up."

Anneke trudged in, tossed her scattergun on the bed, and re-bound Nyx's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She yanked at the fabric and grunted as she fastened it.