Juon marched into the back.

Shajin grinned. "She'll have none of you, my woman. She just got a letter from that boy of hers at the front."

Nyx snorted. "Probably six months dead. The flies have him."

Amid the low murmur of exchange and the occasional outburst from an irate hunter or wheedling bounty came a deep, familiar voice.

"So the huntress returns," Raine said.

Nyx took half a moment to loosen up her suddenly rigid body. She turned and showed her crimson teeth.

Raine stood near the main door with three of his crew. On a good day, he had a dozen veterans and half as many irregulars.

She saw Raine around the Cage a lot and more around the local pubs, but-not being half a fool-he avoided her personally. He usually sent out his veterans to hara.s.s her. She had sent the last one back without an ear.

"I see you've gotten better at eavesdropping on our com," Nyx said.

"Taite's security is terrible," Raine said. "I taught him everything I know."

"Which must not have been much," Nyx said.

"There is much more I could teach you, Nyxnissa, if you could set aside your arrogance."

"You're the one who thinks he's some f.u.c.king prophet 'cause he had a s.h.i.tty time at the front. I heard you got arrested during a protest in Sahlah. I'm surprised n.o.body's put you in prison yet for blasphemy. Why hasn't your mother gutted you, the way she did the council?"

"I know faith and belief are concepts you have a difficult time understanding, Nyxnissa, but some of us have an interest in righting wrongs, not perpetuating them."

"I believe in myself. That's enough."

"For you? And your crew?"

"Why don't you go off and get married and settle down like a good little war vet, huh? I'm sure you could find some dumb b.i.t.c.h to put you up."

"We're a sorry pair of veterans, aren't we? I think you have as much interest in becoming a kept thing as I do."

"Hey, hunters!" Shajin said. "You take your personal business outside."

"I've got a file," Nyx said.

"I have mine," Raine said. He clapped his hands. His three regulars headed for the door.

"Watch yourself," Raine said. He put his back to her and walked out.

"Watch your regulars," Nyx said. "I may find a use for them."

She wasn't the only one Raine was stirring the pot with these days. It wasn't just the protests in small cities like Sahlah. Rhys had word of Raine at rallies in Mushtallah and boys' rights gatherings in Amtullah. Those were bad places to be seen protesting anything that had to do with G.o.d or the queen or the bel dames. It was like he was presenting himself to a butcher and asking them to chop something else off. But he had taught her how to drive, how to use a sword, and how to patch a bakkie-this old man with the dead eyes and bizarre family history who couldn't leave the war alone.

She supposed there must be something redeemable about him.

Khos spit on the floor next to Nyx.

"Those three were ours," Anneke said. "Honest, boss, I had them."

"Well, you don't have them now, do you?" Nyx said, too sharply. She turned back to the desk.

Juon handed Shajin the file.

"Says here you get thirty for a live catch," Shajin said, "and twenty fora dead. Too bad." She filled out the pay receipt. "You know the routine."

Nyx handed the receipt to Anneke, who followed Khos through the throng to the body drop-off and cashier.

Juon leaned over and whispered into Shajin's ear.

"What's that? Ah, yes. You have a note," Shajin said.

Juon went to the sorting cabinet behind Shajin and plucked out a red letter.

Nyx's heart skipped. The old bullet wound in her hip throbbed.

Red letters were straight from the desk of the queen. The queen only sent red letters to n.o.bles, amba.s.sadors... and bel dames.

Juon handed the letter to Shajin.

Shajin handed it to Nyx.

Nyx's fingers trembled. She took the letter and tucked it carefully into the top of her dhoti. A pardon from the Queen? Back to bel dame work? Back to prison? Had she f.u.c.ked anything up recently?

"Thanks," she said. "They've been giving them out to the top hunters," Shajin said. "Must be somebody pretty important."

"Oh," Nyx said. Not a pardon, then. "If it's that important, they'd give it to the bel dames, not the hunters."

Shajin shrugged. "I don't make policy. Come now, you're holding up the line, my woman."

Nyx pushed away from the counter. She waited for Anneke and Khos, and when they returned with the bounty money, she tucked that, too, into her dhoti and told Khos to drive.

Nyx rode shotgun. She pulled out the red letter. Khos looked at her as he started the bakkie.

It took a long time to read the letter. If she went too fast she got the characters backward. By the time they reached the keg, she'd read it twice.

The letter read:

We, G.o.d's Imam, Queen Zaynab sa Boliard so Amtullah, on the forty-eighth day of the Sahfar in the year nine hundred eighty-nine, hereby summon G.o.d's servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem to the Al-Ahnsalus Palace at Mushtallah on behalf of Almighty G.o.d and the people of the Holy Empire of Nasheen.

In view of the authority conferred to us by G.o.d, and to further the glory of G.o.d and His servant Nasheen, we seek the covert recovery of a fugitive, to be apprehended by G.o.d's servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem and whose recovery will be rewarded most graciously.

G.o.d's servant may exchange this imperial summons at the nearest train repository for complementary roundtrip tickets to G.o.d's seat, Mushtallah.

Someone had written in, at the bottom, using the same pen stroke as the queen's signature:

Recompense for the apprehension of the agent is negotiable. Details forthcoming when you arrive. Discretion advised.

The second part was a lot easier to read, and much more Nyx's style. It made her wonder how much of her file they'd read before sending the summons.

Back at the keg, Nyx handed Rhys the red letter.

"This for real?" she asked.

He ran his hands over it. "It appears genuine," he said.

"Best you can tell, right?" she said.

He grimaced. "You pay me for an acceptable level of talent. You get what you pay for."

"I want you to go with me," she said.

His dark eyes widened-pretty eyes with long lashes. There were days when she couldn't get enough of them, and days she wanted to cut them out for the same reason.

"The Nasheenian court? Palace Hill? You must be joking," he said.

"Listen. I take Anneke or Khos with me, they don't speak very good, all right? I take Taite, and you know he gets sick when he's nervous. I want you there."

"Nyx, I-"

"Thanks," she said. "Just don't worry about it." She turned away from him before he said any more. She needed Rhys, her mediocre magician. There were other things he was good at: well-read, well-spoken, well-mannered. He was Chenjan, sure, but she didn't know anybody else around with his manners. He never missed a prayer; he talked about G.o.d all the time and drank tea instead of whiskey. He made her look good. He made the whole team look good.

Nyx walked into her office and dumped her gear onto her desk. As she saw Khos walk in to the keg she hollered that she wanted to talk to him. Rhys was still standing near the door, at the ablution bowl she had set out for those who wanted to wash themselves before and after they spoke to her. Her business had that effect on people. Rhys had his hands in the water, sleeves up.

She turned back in to her spare office, kicking her chair away. It wasn't even noon, so the light coming through the latticed windows was low. She climbed up on to her battered desk and propped open the old entrance in the ceiling.

Better.

Khos knocked on the open door.

"Get in here," Nyx said.

She climbed down from the desk as Khos came through the doorway. He needed a wash.

"Funniest thing," Nyx said. "I had a body in my trunk this morning."

"Yeah."

"Sit."

Khos lumbered over to one of the backless chairs in front of her desk. They were mismatched chairs, trash she and Taite had picked up years before when they moved out of their firebombed storefront in the Chenjan district and onto the east side. He'd been allergic to the original upholstery, and she'd had to redo most of it herself.

Nyx took off her burnous and draped it over her chair. She removed the most extraneous of her weapons and piled them up next to her for cleaning.

"You want to step away from the crew?" Nyx asked.

If Taite was a good but fragile kid, Khos was like the kid's lumbering, towheaded older brother. Nyx had picked up Khos Khadija at a brothel outside Aludra three years before. They were both there to see the same girl and had b.u.mped into each other on the stairs. When she found out he was Raine's new shifter, she hired him at twice the cut Raine was giving him. She'd been very drunk. She'd also been very drunk later, when she slept with him. She didn't like big men all that much, but it had been a hot f.u.c.k for all that. She knew it had been a while since she'd been to bed with anybody at all, because right about now he was starting to look half good again.

Khos shrugged. If the seat had a back, he would have slumped.

"It was side work. I forgot about it."

She climbed into her chair and perched up on the back, her feet on the seat. She leaned forward.

"You were supposed to wait on me and Rhys. Instead, you panicked and moved too soon, and we lost our take."

"I told you, Raine showed up and they were heading out. We would have lost all of them if I hadn't gone in when I did."

"So instead, all three of them lit out the back window, right into Raine's ambush, and we ended up with some dumb kid who was worth more alive than dead."

"I wasn't-"

"Is this your crew? Did I sign a contract of yours, or did you sign one of mine?"

He grimaced.

"Answer me."

"No, it's not my crew."

"You know how many hunts me and Anneke have been on? A h.e.l.l of a lot. There's nothing we haven't seen."

"Nyx-"

"I don't want to hear about Mhorian chivalry. You don't like working with women, you shouldn't be in Nasheen. As I heard it, it's your love of women that got you here in the first place. Women can fight as well as f.u.c.k, you know it?"

He shifted in his seat, looking toward the window. She knew he hated it when she swore. Mhorians were a strange bunch of refugees, a late addition to Umayma. They'd been given some of the s.h.i.ttiest, least developed land in the world, and the vast majority of them had died within the first year of landing. A thousand years worth of hard living had made them a p.r.i.c.kly, stubborn sort of people. Most of them were religious zealots, worse than any Chenjan, obsessed with laws and prescriptions about marital relations and the segregation of men and women. A full three-quarters of their Book dealt with rules about marriage, s.e.x, and birth. Nyx had been with Khos the first time he saw a topless woman on the streets of Nasheen, burning an effigy of the Queen in protest of some new regulation about births completed off-compound. The look on his face had been worth a thousand notes.

Mhorian women also cost money, like bugs. Nyx supposed that in a society where most of you were dying and you didn't have much initial bug tech, women's wombs would go for more. Khos had lit out of Mhoria looking for a good wife he didn't have to pay for, and he hadn't had much luck in Nasheen. Who wanted to shack up with some Mhorian shifter and push out useless half-breed babies? Half-breeds didn't get free government inoculations. The vast majority died within the first three years as a result. Nyx figured it was why Khos spent most of his time in brothels. Maybe he thought those women were hard up? What he didn't seem to get was that women in Nasheen who made a living as prost.i.tutes were usually doing so for political reasons, not because they were desperate for money or anxious about having husbands. Women in Nasheen didn't grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.

"I need to know you'll follow the plan," Nyx said. "If I can't count on that, I cancel your contract. I can get another shifter, you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."