God's War

Life was what you did with what was done to you.

The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.

Take me there. Or is this a kidnapping? Don't confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued.

Most people who watch a fight think it's all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.

Nobody knows anybody. We’re all working on blind faith.

How many men had made her? Her brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine's half-breed muscle? They were just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hoards of sistesr, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or none of them. It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you. "You didn't make me," Nyx gasped. "I made myself.

Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her own life. Things hadn't turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she could just be the hero of someone else's life, but there was no one who cared enough about her to keep her that close. Hell, there was nobody she'd let that close. No one wanted a hero who couldn't even save herself.

The cunt is not the heart, though a lot of people get the two confused.

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

The dagger strapped to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles.

I hate surprises, boss. The last surprise I got, somebody died. Yeah, well. the last surprise I got, I went to prison.

The motto above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the prayer language: My life for a thousand. She remembered swearing an oath with that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen. My life for a thousand.

(...) then went into his room in the middle of the night after a long, heavy day of footwork and drinking; a coward's fight. She'd trussed him up and cut off his cock. She considered the act her formal resignation.

Good luck to you," he said, and she remembered how he had looked at her as she pinned Yah Tayyib, as if she was some kind of monster. Maybe she was.

She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She'd never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.

I have lived through worse, she thought, and she said it aloud, bit through the words: "I've survived worse than you." "You have," Raine gasped, and he made to roll her again.

Women in Nasheen didn't grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.

It wasn’t what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you