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keep my sisters busy. I figure they lost at least half a day
trying to figure out where I dropped it. No womb, no proof, no way to fully
collect their note on me.”
    The fist in her belly tightened,
contracted. She felt dizzy, and leaned back against the stone altar.
    “You’ve indebted yourself to us
again,” Yah Tayyib said. “This is not the place to settle a blood note. Yours
or theirs. Keep your bloody boys and your bloody sisters out of my ring.”
    “Still got something against bel
dames?”
    “You’ve never been a boy at the
front.”
    “I can’t imagine you being
frightened of anything, Yah Tayyib.”
    “We all manage our grief
differently,” Yah Tayyib said. “Three dead wives and a dozen dead children make
me more human, not less. You have chosen your path. I have chosen mine. This is
the last time I do this for 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 flesh.”
    She shook her head. Her vision swam.
“I’ll get paid when I’ve cleared the blood debt. I can buy whatever I need
after that.”
    Yah Tayyib sighed. He walked over to
the big wardrobe next to the medicine cabinet.
    “Am I done bleeding?” Nyx said.
    Yah Tayyib pulled out a deep
mahogany burnous. “You’ll expel the usual bugs in a few hours. They’re aiding
in the last of the repairs. Here, this is the most inconspicuous I have.”
    Nyx donned the burnous. It was
surprisingly soft. “Organic?” she asked.
    “Yes. It will breathe for you, if
you need it to.”
    “Great,” she said, as if that would
make any difference tonight. “Walk me out?”
    Yah Tayyib escorted her back through
the labyrinthine halls of the magicians’ quarters, all windowless. He took her
to the internal magician’s betting booth, where a young woman Nyx knew from her
days at the gym stood at the window collecting baskets of bugs.
    “I still have credit here, Maj?” Nyx
asked.
    “You always have credit,” Maj said.
    Yah Tayyib huffed his displeasure as
Nyx set down a bet on Jaks so Hajjij for fifty.
    “You’re a mad woman,” he said as Nyx
picked up her receipt and then pushed back through the crowd of magicians.
    “Maybe so,” she said. But this would
get her Jaks, and Jaks would get her the boy, and the boy would put money in
her pockets—and save some Nasheenian village from contamination.
    That was the idea, anyway.
    Yah Tayyib brought her back to the
gym, which had been transformed into a fighting arena. The lights outside the
ring were dim. The last of the speed bags had been put away. A man who looked
remarkably like a Chenjan dancer moved under the ring-lights and it took Nyx
half a minute to realize the dancer really was Chenjan—and
male. Some instinctual part of her thought he’d look a lot better blown up, but
there was something she liked about him, something about the way he moved, the
delicacy of his hands.
    She and Yah Tayyib negotiated the
crowd to a bench at the back, along the edges of the darkness. Nyx kept her eye
on the dancer.
    “Who’s he?” Nyx asked.
    “The boy?”
    He was probably eighteen or
nineteen, old enough for the front. Not so much a boy, in Nasheen.
    “Yeah,” she said.
    “A pet project of Yah Reza’s,” Yah
Tayyib said. “A political refugee from Chenja. He calls himself Rhys.”
    “What kind of a name is that?”
    “A nom de guerre ,”
he said, using the Ras Tiegan expression. “Yah Reza tells me he used to dance
for the Chenjan mullahs as a child. When his father asked him to carry out the
punishment of his own sister because he himself was unable, Rhys refused, and
was exiled. That’s the story he tells, in any case.”
    “Does he do anything besides dance?”
    “He’s not a