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 27
3 
Nyx struggled out o a groggy hal dream o drowning and ell o the giantstone slab in Yah Tayyib’s operating theater. The oor was cold.Yah Tayyib helped her up. One curved wall o the theater was lined with squatglass jars o organs. Glow worms ringed the shelves and hugged the glass. Nyxnoted the long table at Yah Tayyib’s let and the length o silk that covered hisinstruments, but her gaze did not settle there long. She was interested in themedicine wardrobe at the back. The one with the morphine.She was naked. Blood trickled down one leg.“How do you eel?” Yah Tayyib asked. He wore a billowing blue robe. Carrionbeetles clung to the hem. He was a tall thin man, well over sixty and gray inthe beard. His ace was a sunken ruin, the nose a mashed pulp o esh. Buthis hands, his all-important magician’s hands, were smooth and straight-fngered.Nyx wondered how she was supposed to respond to that. Her head eltstued with honey.“You were missing a kidney,” Yah Tayyib said. “I replaced that as well.”“I traded it or a ticket out o Chenja. The other one wasn’t mine either.”“I didn’t think it was,” he said.“Why not?”“I put it in there six months ago.”“Ah,” Nyx said.“I’m quite sorry about the womb,” Yah Tayyib said. “It was youroriginal, you know, and uniquely shaped. Bicornuate. I would havebought it mysel, though or much less than you likely sold it.”He always talked about body parts like bug specimens—dry and purely academic.“I don’t care much how it’s shaped or whose it is,” she said. “I care aboutwhat it can do or me. What time is it? I’ve got Raine on my tail.”She looked around or her clothes. They were stacked neatly next to the
 
 28 — God’s War 
operating slab. She started to get dressed, slowly. It was like trying to worksomebody else’s body. She was still a big woman, but she was down to herdhoti and binding, and both were tattered and loose, hanging o her like ashroud.“You have a price on your head,” Yah Tayyib said, and turned to wash hishands at the sink. Flesh beetles clung to the end o the tap, bundling up dropso water in their sticky legs.“Yeah,” she said. “More than fty, apparently.”“You should turn yoursel in to your bel dame sisters. The bounty hunterswon’t be so generous. They say it’s black money this time. Gene pirates.” Hewiped his hands dry on his robes and regarded her. “What were you carry-ing?”“Zygotes,” Nyx said. “Ferrier work. I was supposed to hand it o on this end,but I had to drop it and sell it to some butchers to keep my sisters busy. I fgurethey lost at least hal a day trying to fgure out where I dropped it. No womb,no proo, no way to ully collect their note on me.”The fst in her belly tightened, contracted. She elt dizzy, and leaned backagainst the stone altar.“You’ve indebted yoursel to us again,” Yah Tayyib said. “This is not the placeto settle a blood note. Yours or theirs. Keep your bloody boys and your bloody sisters out o my ring.”“Still got something against bel dames?”“You’ve never been a boy at the ront.”“I can’t imagine you being rightened o anything, Yah Tayyib.”“We all manage our grie dierently,” Yah Tayyib said. “Three dead wives anda dozen dead children make me more human, not less. You have chosen yourpath. I have chosen mine. This is the last time I do this or you, Nyxnissa.”“You say that every time. Is it too late to bet on the boxers?”“What in this world do you own to bet?”Nyx prodded at the red scarring tissue on her right hip. “I’ve got good credit,”she said. She always paid her debts to the magicians… eventually.“I doubt that,” he said. “You’ve nothing more than rags and esh.”She shook her head. Her vision swam. “I’ll get paid when I’ve cleared theblood debt. I can buy whatever I need ater that.”Yah Tayyib sighed. He walked over to the big wardrobe next to the medicinecabinet.“Am I done bleeding?” Nyx said.Yah Tayyib pulled out a deep mahogany burnous. “You’ll expel the usualbugs in a ew hours. They’re aiding in the last o the repairs. Here, this is themost inconspicuous I have.”Nyx donned the burnous. It was surprisingly sot.
 
Kameron Hurley — 29
“Organic?” she asked.“Yes. It will breathe or you, i you need it to.”“Great,” she said, as i that would make any dierence tonight. “Walk meout?”Yah Tayyib escorted her back through the labyrinthine halls o the magicians’quarters, all windowless. He took her to the internal magician’s betting booth,where a young woman Nyx knew rom her days at the gym stood at the windowcollecting baskets o bugs.“I still have credit here, Maj?” Nyx asked.“You always have credit,” Maj said.Yah Tayyib hued his displeasure as Nyx set down a bet on Jaks so Hajjijor fty.“You’re a madwoman,” he said as Nyx picked up her receipt and then pushedback through the crowd o magicians.“Maybe so,” she said. But this would get her Jaks, and Jaks would get her theboy, and the boy would put money in her pockets—and save some Nasheenianvillage rom contamination.That was the idea, anyway.Yah Tayyib brought her back to the gym, which had been transormed intoa fghting arena. The lights outside the ring were dim. The last o the speedbags had been put away. A man who looked remarkably like a Chenjan dancermoved under the ring-lights and it took Nyx hal a minute to realize the dancerreally 
was
Chenjan—and male. Some instinctual part o her thought he’d looka lot better blown up, but there was something she liked about him, somethingabout the way he moved, the delicacy o his hands.She and Yah Tayyib negotiated the crowd to a bench at the back, along theedges o the darkness. Nyx kept her eye on the dancer.“Who’s he?” Nyx asked.“The boy?”He was probably eighteen or nineteen, old enough or the ront. Not somuch a boy, in Nasheen.“Yeah,” she said.“A pet project o Yah Reza’s,” Yah Tayyib said. “A political reugee rom Chenja.He calls himsel Rhys.”“What kind o a name is that?”“A
nom de guerre
,” he said, using the Ras Tiegan expression. “Yah Reza tells mehe used to dance or the Chenjan mullahs as a child. When his ather asked himto carry out the punishment o his own sister because he himsel was unable,Rhys reused, and was exiled. That’s the story he tells, in any case.”“Does he do anything besides dance?”“He’s not a prostitute, i that’s what you’re asking,” Yah Tayyib said.
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