God's War by Kameron Hurley Page A

time the train arrived in Mushtallah. She knew
Mushtallah. She had done all of her bel dame training there. Most magicians and
bel dames worked out of the capital, and she expected she was going to run into
a lot of women she knew. In the border towns she was somebody to fear, to
loathe—a former bel dame who brought in every bounty with the same
determination and brutality she’d taken in her bel dame notes. But in
Mushtallah, she was just another criminal. Nobody. Nothing. Just like she’d
been when they threw her in prison.
    Rhys pulled out a slim volume of
what looked like poetry from his robe.
    A voice came on over the platform
radio, and a misty woman’s head came into view just over the train tracks.
    “There will be a slight delay due to
unrest along the Bushair line running north-northwest. This will affect lines
Zubair, Mushmura, and Kondija. Thank you for your patience.”
    Somebody had blown up another track
along the Bushair line, then. Nyx allowed herself a minute to wonder how many
people had died. She wondered if it mattered.
    She sipped her drink and watched
Rhys while he read.
    “Would you mind reading out loud?”
she asked, hoping she sounded nonchalant. It felt too much like she needed something.
    He raised his gaze above the ends of
the pages and looked at her.
    Nyx kept staring at the tracks. She
wanted to do something with her hands.
    “You nervous?” he asked.
    “I’m never nervous.”
    “Of course not,” he said. “This is Petal Dancing .”
    “Oh, God, this isn’t something soft,
is it?”
    “Not everything that’s beautiful is
weak.”
    “No, it just makes you that way.”
    He smiled. “We disagree, then.”
    “We do,” she said.
    Nyx cupped her glass in both hands.
Rhys began to read, in that voice that could calm her during the worst
days—days when bugs got into the money bin and bodies piled up in the freezer
like cheap popsicles. Time stretched. His accent had gotten better since she’d
started asking him to read out loud. It had been a couple years now, she
supposed. She insisted he read in Nasheenian, not so much to improve the accent
but because hearing him speak Chenjan—hearing him speak the same language as
the people she’d spent two years throwing bursts at on the front felt obscene,
and there wasn’t much anymore that made her feel so fucked up down to her
bones.
    After a time, Nyx stopped her
fidgeting. She let herself forget some of the worst of the fear. Another
announcement came on over the station radio. The delay had been extended.
    She finished her drink.
    They boarded the train two hours
later and found their way to a private first-class cabin whose bench seats were
nonetheless so close that if they sat directly across from each other, their
knees touched. They didn’t sit that way.
    Rhys opened his copy of the Kitab,
and Nyx fixed herself at the window and watched the Nasheenian desert roll past
them in a blur of umber brown and violet blue. The sky was a pale amethyst
today, bruised purple along the western horizon, the direction of the front.
    “How fast do you think these go?”
she asked.
    “A hundred, hundred and twenty
kilometers an hour,” Rhys said.
    “Huh,” Nyx said. She wasn’t going to
argue. “You know anything about courts and royalty?” she said.
    He did not raise his eyes from the
Kitab. “I thought bel dames held intimate soirees with queens and politicians
all the time. You should be an old hand at this.”
    “We don’t flirt and whore ourselves
out like dancers,” she said. He flinched. Why did she always want to twist the
knife with him?
    “Just make it look good, all right?
It’s bad enough you’re Chenjan.”
    “I didn’t ask to go along. If you
take offense at the—”
    “It’s your fucking accent I can’t
stand.” Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it
even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.
    He shut his book and stood. “Excuse
me.”
    “Sit