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So what the hell’s wrong with me?” Nyx eased off the marble slab. “Besides your deviant moral flexibility and severe phobia of emotional commitment?” Yahfia asked. “I consider those virtues,” Nyx said.
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He’s grown into quite the young man since you took him in.” “You say that like being a man’s a good thing,” Nyx said.
Rumor has it you’ve turned castration into an occupation.” “You go cutting one guy’s cock off and you never hear the end of it,” Nyx said.
“Women are just women.” Mercia’s forehead wrinkled. “Those women were bel dames.”
“These bloody black roaches think that covering up women’s faces makes the lot of them more pious.
He supposed all marriages must be like this; great chunks of contentment, frustrated daily living, shot through with moments of absolute terror and doubt and disappointment.
the love of one’s life was never that which you wished for or hoped for or forgot or lost or mistook; it was the partner you spent your long days with,
Nyx had finished off a fifth of vodka for breakfast, since she’d sworn off whiskey.
Nyx was a lot of things, but forgettable wasn’t one of them.
The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless.
“Wars don’t end,” Nyx once told him. “They just get bigger.”
She wondered how much of her had to get replaced before she became a new person entirely.
“How you feeling?” “Fit as a harem girl.” “You’re as much a harem girl as I am a mullah,” Suha said.
“I’ve bled and fucked and died for this country,” Nyx said.
It will be like that until someone decides to change it. All of it. But how did you change an entire culture? Revolutions were about politics, not perceptions, weren’t they?
Bel dames spent most of their time running after criminals in dingy, unfiltered cities, making enemies with other bel dames whose notes they stole, girlfriends they fucked, and sons they killed.
When you hung out your laundry in the sun it was to feed the bugs that made up the weave. Expensive stuff.
“I’m a bloodletter, not a politician,” Nyx said. “I just take off heads.”
Of course she wanted something. Why else cross half a continent? Certainly not for high tea.
“You’re scaring the help,” Rhys said. He watched her now with his dark eyes. “I scare a lot of people,” Nyx said.
“You would be amazed what I can do with a few bugs and a bel dame,” Yah Tayyib said.
She had traded that first womb for twenty notes and a case of Ras Tiegan beer.
Inaya showed up a little later with a clean tunic and trousers and long Ras Tiegan coat. “Thought you’d hand me an abaya,” Nyx said. “Since when have you presented yourself as a real woman?” Inaya said. “Good point.”
“I have a coup to put down and a country to save,” Nyx said.
“Some days I wonder if that’s your problem, Khos. You can’t decide whether to fuck me or kill me.”
“I love you,” she said. “I love you. They took everything. Oh, God is great but so cruel. God is so cruel.”
“I don’t know what God wants, Eshe.” “The mullahs say they know what God wants,” Eshe said. “You believe them?” He met her look in the rearview mirror. Nyx looked back at the road. “The mullahs can’t figure out what they want for dinner,” she said.
“We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying,” Nyx said. “Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”
People who thought you couldn’t do much with a little knife deserved whatever was coming to them.
“I’ve been kicked out of a mosque or two,” Shadha said. She had a hard, smoky voice. Nyx might have found it sexy under different circumstances. “Need a couple churches to complete the set.
