Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 22
“Bloody amateur,” Nyx said, and lunged.
The girl fumbled with the gun, frantically clicking the locked trigger. Nyx ripped the weapon away and bashed her on the side of the head with it. The girl stumbled against the bullet-riddled wall of the hallway and sat hard on her rump.
The door to the stairwell behind the girl popped open. Anneke burst in, rifle first. She brought with her the stink of gun oil and citronella. Anneke was a wiry, fearsome little woman with a face like a hammer. She was nearly as dark as a Chenjan, but far less modest, geared up in her dhoti and breast binding—though she really didn’t need one—and little else. Her lips were smeared red with sen, and when she spoke, she showed crimson-stained teeth, like some demon from a Chenjan parable.
“Lotta fucking stairs, boss,” Anneke said, huffing hard. “You seen any more of her team down there?” Nyx asked.
“We’ve got four more notes to fill.” “Naw, just the one in the morgue.” “Where’s Khos?”
“Got tied up at the morgue with Rhys.” “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Rhys said, uh, autopsies take time.” “She had a gun at my head.”
“Bad place for it,” Anneke said, “hardest place on the skull, there.” Anneke spit on the floor next to the girl. The sputum was bloody red with sen. She nudged the girl with her boot. The girl squinted up at Anneke, vomited, and promptly passed out.
Nyx might have hit her too hard. Could have been Nyx down there on the floor, bloody and vomiting her guts out. If only.
“You sure this is the girl on the note?” Anneke said, picking at her teeth. “Real raw to pull a gun and not a swarm, you know? I mean, if she’s a magician like she’s supposed to be.”
Nyx knelt beside the girl and pulled up the sleeves of her tunic. Both forearms bore thorny black tattoos that marked her as a member of the rogue Death Magicians. Nyx pushed back the dark mat of hair on the girl’s head and found the shiny scar on her forehead where she must have had the other marks removed.
“Didn’t have much time for conversation,” Nyx said, “but the markings are right.”
“Let’s throw her in the trunk and eat,” Anneke said. “I’m starving.”
“Morgue first, then food.”
“Story of my life, boss.” Anneke slung her rifle over her shoulder and moved to do the same with the girl, but Nyx stopped her.
“Let me search her,” Nyx said. She rifled through the woman’s burnous and came out with a couple of notes, two death beetle larvae in matchboxes, and a pamphlet adver- tising the theatrical production of The Horned Magician in Mushtallah at the brothel next door. Nyx pocketed the cash and frowned at the rest. Part of her wanted to know what the kid was up to, but most of her just wanted to get paid and move on. She wasn’t being paid to solve some mystery. She was being paid for a head. Several of them.
The girl was still out. Nyx figured any brain injury wouldn’t be permanent. Probably. Once she turned the girl over, the junk in her pockets was somebody else’s concern.
“Load her up,” Nyx said.
Anneke hefted the girl up over her skinny shoulders and hauled her downstairs. Nyx followed, shoving the girl’s contraband into the sack at her hip that she usually used for carting around heads. Girl should be thankful that the government paid more for her alive than dead. The Death Magicians were up to all kinds of scary shit. The Queen wanted her piece of that before she burned them all alive or whatever it was the government did to rogue magicians. Unlike bel dames—the elite assassins the government hired out—magicians were still largely policed by government agencies. She was fine not knowing what the government did to them after she brought them in.
Anneke rolled up their catch into a cooling blanket and then secured her in the trunk. Nyx strolled across the dusty street to the morgue just as mid-afternoon prayer began at the mosque at the edge of town. This was Shibaz, a northern border town. The call this far out from the big cities was a lot nicer. In Amtullah and places like that on the interior, dozens of mosques competed with one another, each starting the prayer just ahead of or behind the mosque down the street, until all you could hear was discordant warbling.
Nyx scanned the horizon. Six missing magicians could do a lot of damage on the interior, which begged the question as to why they had come all the way out here. The note she’d picked up made it sound like they were running illegal contraband—poison agents, shit like that. The border was a good place for that, she knew. She used to run her own illegal shit around the border towns, back before she got caught. Prison hadn’t been all that inspiring. Mercenary work was more legal, but didn’t pay as well. At least sometimes the view was good.
The smudge of low mountains to the north hinted at something other than desert out there, but Nyx knew better. By all counts, the northern desert went on and on, more wild and contaminated than anything south of here. She hoped she never had a reason to go any further north than this shitwater for whatever remained of her life. Thirty was such a great age for dying, really, before any of this shit could catch up to her. Maybe this job would do her in, finally. Rounding up a gang of rogue magicians with just one mediocre magi- cian, a moralist shapeshifter, felon sniper, and snot-nosed kid of a com tech was pretty much doomed to fail. But weren’t they always doomed to fail? It’s what made it so exhilarating when they survived the day. Or the hour. The minute, really. This was why she drank so much.
“What you frowning at?” Anneke asked as they crossed the dusty street. The air smelled like wood smoke and brine—not a natural combination out here. It was most likely something left over from a spent burst heaved over from the Chenjan side of the front.
“Thinking about our odds,” Nyx said.
“We can just take her and go back,” Anneke said. “Figure her dead friend in the morgue, plus her, that’s a good pay day.”
“Naw,” Nyx said. “Too easy.”
“How much trouble we get into ’cause we’re bored, boss?” “A fucking lot,” Nyx said.
“I do like trouble,” Anneke said.
The local morgue was in the basement of the general store, a not uncommon combination in these little towns. Signs outside the store proudly proclaimed that they also offered moneylending, tattoo, and discount inoculation services. All three of those were either illegal or highly regulated services, which had signaled to Nyx that the owner would be more than happy to let them into the morgue to examine unclaimed bodies—for a fee. Which is, of course, what she’d done.
Nyx walked past the grocery clerk, who studiously pre- tended to be engrossed in the misty yakking projections oozing from the radio. Nyx descended the steps into the basement, Anneke close at her heels, and ducked to clear the low beam at the end of the stairs. She slid through a transparent filter, noticeable only because it made her skin prickle. Once through it, the smell of death clogged her nostrils, a smell so heavy that it felt like a physical force. The filter was an expensive thing for the shop owner to invest in, but clearly necessary to keep the patrons upstairs from fleeing en masse.
Khos, her shapeshifter, stood over the sink at the back, pressed back his mane of yellow dreads as he dry-heaved. Three bodies lay on stone slabs behind him. One of the bodies was relatively fresh, but the other was pretty far gone. Jars of mostly human organs lined the walls, just as they would in a magician’s operating theater, and Nyx wondered if they did illegal tissue repair here as well. Should have that up on the door, too.
Rhys, Nyx’s magician, was elbow deep in a pretty fresh corpse at the center of the room. Next to him was a skinny woman with tangled hair, the current clerk on duty. She gnawed at her nails while watching him work. Nyx had paid her five notes to get access down here. The clerk wasn’t the owner, though, and getting caught down here could get messy.
“You got the goods?” Nyx said.
Rhys didn’t look up, but the clerk did. She spit bits of her nails across the body. “I need you gone in an hour. I keep telling this fucker—” she sputtered.
“He’s my fucker,” Nyx said, “not yours. He answers to me. And I told him to stay until he found what that dead magi- cian was smuggling in that meat suit of hers. My note is for the girl and her friends and the goods they’re carrying. If they dropped the goods, I need to know.”
“Here it is,” Rhys said. The clerk took a step back as Rhys pulled a slimy black blob from the body’s chest cavity.
“Bag it,” Nyx said.
“I need to neutralize it.”
“Can it travel without doing that?”
“Certainly, but there’s a chance it could burst and give us all . . . whatever this is. You want to risk that?” His gaze met hers, all big eyes and long lashes, daring her to risk it so he could get all self-righteous about it.
“Do it,” Nyx said.
A knocking sound came from the direction of the stairs. “Now the fuck what?” Nyx said, turning. “This place is fucking closed until further—”
Nyx saw the big glowing barrel of a buzz gun pass over the threshold of the doorway. She didn’t wait to see who wielded it. She’d already had enough of gun barrels in her face today. She pulled her pistol, let off two wild shots in the direction of the interloper, and rolled behind the nearest slab.
“Let it alone!” the woman on the stairs yelled. “Don’t touch another body!”
Nyx chanced a look around the slab, gun first. The woman on the stairs was young, with the elaborate locs and dress of a Mhorian, but her bold features and complexion were Nasheenian. She was a skinny young thing, all sharp angles and elbows. The lack of flesh made her fearful expression that much more intense. Another fucking scared kid with a gun. Nyx was used to grizzled war vets and tough old cats here at the edge. What the fuck were all these kids doing out here? Back in her day . . .
“Drop that!” the woman said again, to Rhys.
Rhys raised his hands. The black bag of contraband rested on the body’s bloodless hip.
“I’ve got a note on this body and its goods!” Nyx said. She hoped that would swing the barrel her way, but the woman kept it fixed at Rhys. Buzz guns were nasty things. They packed a big, poisonous punch. At this range, at Rhys’s weight, the chances of him surviving a single blast without immediately rolling him into a magician’s gym were slim.
While the barrel’s trajectory didn’t shift, the woman did spare a glance Nyx’s way. Nyx considered tossing off a few more shots, but even at this distance she wasn’t liable to hit anything. At best, she’d just be making a bigger distraction, and that hadn’t worked so far.
“This is a government note,” Nyx lied. It sort of was, kind of. It was a mercenary note, not a bel dame note, but it was close enough. She had been a government-sponsored bel dame once, running down deserters and other criminals for the government, but that hadn’t lasted. She wasn’t so good at rules. But this kid didn’t need to know that. “You interfere, you go to prison. I’ve been to prison. It’s not fun. What do you think they’d make of a kid like you?”
That swung the barrel.
Well, shit, Nyx thought, I need to try words more often.
The girl hefted the buzz gun Nyx’s way, and stared straight down over the top of the barrel at her. Nyx flashed her teeth. Flexed her fingers on the hilt of her pistol. Anneke and Khos were better shots than her, but neither had moved as fast as Nyx had in bringing out a weapon, and that meant she was the only one in the party currently armed.
“I’m twenty-six,” the woman said, and Nyx had a moment of dissonance at that. She looked nearly a decade younger.
“What,” Nyx said, “you some rich kid? What the fuck are you doing down here mucking around in flesh? Go back and sit behind your filter and fuck your cousins.”
“Could we lower the guns and talk, maybe?” Rhys said. He still had his gore-covered hands in the air.
“No,” Nyx and the woman said at the same time. “Put up your hands,” the woman said to Nyx.
“I’m Rhys,” Rhys said. “This is Khos, Anneke, Nyx, and over here is Khalida. But you know her, right? We’re not here to cause trouble.” Nyx snorted, and he glared at her. “I can show you the note for this woman, and others,” Rhys said. “This is all perfectly legal and none of us wants you to get into trouble.”
“There’s been an outbreak,” the woman said.
“Of what type?” Rhys said. “Sin,” she said.
Nyx sighed. “Oh, fuck, not another crazy—” Rhys talked over her. “Sin?”
“I’m Abdiel,” she said. “I’m doing . . . it’s important research on the seat of the soul. These people are dying of sin. I need to study them so I can help others.”
“You think this bag inside of her is . . . sin?” Rhys said. “It’s organic,” she said. “It’s native to the body. I was doing research here. Khalida seemed all right with that, but I suppose you paid more.”
“Why the fuck is some Mhorian in a border town re- searching sin?” Nyx said.
“It’s called the luz,” Abdiel said. “It’s supposed to be located somewhere in the spine. About the size of an almond. This is my life’s work. I’m very close to a breakthrough.”
“That’s big enough that it should already be found,” Nyx said. “Maybe it’s not a bag of sin in there, just black market goods like it says on their notes. Maybe talk to your Mhorian elders and get another project.”
“Dissection isn’t permitted in Mhoria,” Khos said. He was still painfully pale from all of his dry-heaving.
“What?” Nyx said. “Not even on dead people?” Khos said, “No, not even on . . . dead people.”
“So you’re grave robbing for theology, then?” Nyx said. “That’s a big word for you, Nyx,” Rhys said dryly.
“Fuck you,” she said, then, to Abdiel, “The dead get burned up here for a reason. You can’t keep them overnight. Bad shit happens. This one should have been burned already. It’ll be walking in an hour.”
“I assure you I dismember them in a way that makes it nearly impossible for them to become reanimated,” Abdiel said. “Nearly isn’t good enough,” Nyx said. Her hand was get- ting slick with sweat, but she dared not release her grip on the pistol.
“The government doesn’t like my research,” Abdiel said. “The Nasheenians find it quite valuable, but in Mhoria it’s . . . repugnant. They say one should simply believe that the luz exists, though it is only theoretical. Belief should be enough. But I find there are too many questions left unanswered in the holy book. And it is such an easy question to answer! Much easier than many other riddles.”
“What’s the Mhorian holy book?” Nyx asked.
“The Sifarim,” Khos said. “Collectively, that’s what they’re called. There are eight. For some people there are ten. My father really only considered four of them to be canonical. It. . . depends on who you ask.”
“Yeah, all right, enough about books,” Nyx said. “I don’t know why I bothered asking.”
“You say you have . . . other warrants,” Abdiel said. “Notes, yeah,” Nyx said. “Looking for four more people
involved in this racket. Not a sin racket. Well, I guess techni- cally they have probably sinned, but it’s not strictly sin I care about.”
“You have a dead end,” Abdiel said. “I can take you to where I collected this body. There were more, but . . . I wouldn’t be able to study them all before they became reanimated. They may be the ones you’re tracking. We could help each other.”
“Why not go back alone?”
“Because it’s ten kilometers west,” she said, “and I don’t
have transport. If you take me there, I could get them with just enough time to study them before I needed to dispose of them.”
Nyx curled her lip. “The front,” she said. “You found them at the front.”
“They were caught in a border town,” Abdiel said. “It’s under Chenjan control now. That’s why I need your help to get back.”
“You have a government sponsor for this work?” Nyx said. Abdiel shook her head. “I . . . this is a personal project.” “Fuck and fire,” Nyx said, “I don’t believe in a soul, or cutting up bodies for no good reason. You aren’t even saving their parts for anything. You’re worse than a magician. You nuts?”
“I’m perfectly sane,” Abdiel said. “What do you care, though, about my purpose or my mental health, if I can get you what you want? That’s what you are, you said. A mercenary.”
Rhys interrupted, thankfully. “Could we put the guns down now?” he said.
“Her first,” Abdiel said.
Nyx slid her pistol across the floor. She had another just like it on her other hip, and a scattergun strapped across her back, hidden by the length of her brown burnous, but it made it look like she was ready to play nice. The gesture didn’t generally work with other mercenaries or bel dames, but dumb kids fell for it every time.
Abdiel took a step back into the stairwell. Nyx got up, hands raised.
“So,” Nyx said, “you ready to trust a bunch of bloodthirsty mercenaries?”
“Not you,” Abdiel said, and she gestured to Khos with the gun. “Him.”
The gun went off.
The expression on Abdiel’s face when the gun roared was almost as startled as Nyx’s. A massive glowing arc of fiery shrapnel scraped through the air as the thunderous boom of the gun shook every body in the room. The stink of ozone and burnt lemon made Nyx’s eyes water. The kick of the gun took Abdiel off her feet. She landed hard against the stairs and let out a shriek.
Nyx dove for Abdiel. She ripped the gun from Abdiel’s hands and disarmed it, removing the internal and exter- nal trigger mechanisms. A deep, yowling cry reverberated through the room. Nyx’s gut clenched, and she broke out in a cold sweat.
