Asha curled her fingers into a fist. “None of your men are dying. The injured will heal in just a few weeks. You don’t need to do anything except feed them.”
“No, that food will be needed for the new men we’ll have to hire in Herat. Food is my primary operating expense right now. Everything is at a premium since it has to be imported from so far away.” Sebek sighed. “Even if I did feed the injured, the sick would probably get jealous of that lavish treatment.”
“The men with dust-lung coughs aren’t dying.”
“And they aren’t working, either,” Sebek said loudly. “And you have done nothing but confirm my own suspicions. The injured and sick men cannot work. And since you cannot heal them, you and your blind friend are free to leave. Have a pleasant walk to Herat. If you follow the railroad, it should only take you six days to arrive, assuming you don’t die of thirst and hunger first. Good night.”
The young man by the door reached for her arm, but Asha stepped farther into the room, out of his reach. “I can heal the sick men.”
Sebek sighed again as he looked up from his papers. “And now you’ve resorted to lying to save yourself.”
“No, I can do it. At least, I think I can.” Asha frowned. “But I’ll need to use that big black steam machine of yours.”
“The train engine?”
“Whatever you call it. If I’m right, I can have all of the coughing men cured by noon tomorrow.”
“Really?” Sebek smiled. “If you do that, you and your friend can ride first class all the way to Herat.”
“Just promise you’ll keep feeding the injured men until they can work again.”
Sebek narrowed his gaze. “You’re confident you can cure them?”
“Yes. Mostly.”
“Very well. You have the engine, and you have until noon tomorrow.”
5
The sun rose small and yellow in a pink and blue haze as it crept above the eastern ridge. A steady breeze blew through the valley, drawing the smoke trails of the cook fires off to the south. A lone vulture circled high overhead. It looked very much like the same vulture from the day before.
Asha left Priya sleeping under the watchful eye of the scowling youth and went to speak to the yawning man shoveling coal at the back of the train engine. As she approached, she could just barely see the raging inferno through the little firebox door, and as she drew closer, the sheer number of gleaming iron pistons and rams and wheels and whistles and rails and plates left her staring and wondering what all of them were for. The man with the shovel paused to lean over the railing to peer at her. “So, are you her?”
“I’m Asha, the healer,” she said. “Master Sebek said you would help me to cure the men with the dust-lung cough.”
“Mm.” He nodded. “The master didn’t say how, though. What do you want me to do?”
“Just make steam. Lots of steam. It comes out there, right?” She pointed to the fat black funnel on the front of the boiler.
He squinted and nodded.
“Good. Then I’ll just need a ladder, a bellows, and a bucket.”
“I’ve all three of those, actually.” The engineer ducked down, and there was a brief clatter of metal on metal, and then he stood up again with a large steel bucket. The handles of the small bellows poked out above the rim. “Ladder’s on the back. Where do you need it?”
“Here, on the side, so the men can climb up to the steam.” Asha pointed.
The engineer nodded sagely. “You want them to breathe in the steam? So what do you need these for?” He swung the bucket and bellows on his finger.
Asha set her lips in a stern line. “For the hard part.”
Half an hour later, all of the sick men were lined up beside the engine and the ladder leading up to the funnel on top of the boiler. Asha balanced on top of the boiler with the bellows in her hand and the bucket sitting to one side.
The first man climbed the ladder and, following Asha’s instructions, placed his face over the funnel, deep into the bright white steam. Down below, the engineer kept the fires burning, though not too hot, and Asha stood counting the seconds. When she tapped her first patient on the shoulder, he turned to her, his face bright red and dripping with water. Asha placed the tip of the closed bellows in his mouth and said, “Exhale!” as she yanked the bellows open.
The man stumbled forward as the bellows popped out of his mouth and he fell to his knees, barely keeping his balance on the curved roof of the boiler. He fell straight down over the bucket and a small stream of black filth poured through his lips and into the bucket between his knees. For a moment he sat gasping and spitting and making quiet retching sounds, and then he exhaled and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. And then he looked up at Asha. He smiled a crooked smile.
He inhaled and exhaled. And again. And again. He did not cough. He waved down to the others and a soft cheer rose among them, followed by a fresh bout of hacking and coughing.
So for the next two hours, Asha stood on the hot boiler and violently yanked the black slime from the men’s lungs, slowly filling her bucket nearly to the brim. But each man stood up from the ordeal with a relieved smile and climbed down in good spirits. And an hour before noon, she was done.
As Asha climbed down the ladder, she saw Sebek striding across the yard toward her. He met her just as she set the bucket of black sludge down on the ground, and he said, “Well? I hear you’re done, and ahead of schedule.”
“I am. See for yourself. They’re all fine now.”
“Good. They’re all needed. That’s a clever trick of yours with the steam and the bellows. Who taught it to you?”
“No one. It was my idea.”
Sebek nodded. “I’d be willing to pay you a decent wage to stay here as our camp physician. I need someone like you to keep the men on their feet.”
Asha shook her head. “Thank you, but no. My friend and I need to be moving on when the train leaves for Herat.”
“Ah. Pity.” He began walking slowly back toward his office.
Asha followed. “May I ask about your sword? I saw you use it yesterday. The wound was so small and there was no blood, but that man died instantly. Why?”
Sebek smiled briefly and patted the blade on his hip. “Magic.”
“No, really. What is it?”
He stopped abruptly to frown down at her. “It’s something deadly. Something dangerous. Something you should ignore, lest I draw it out for another demonstration of its properties.”
Asha nodded slowly.
“You kept your end of the bargain,” Sebek said. “The injured men will be fed until they can work again. And you are welcome to ride the train back to Herat tomorrow. It will leave at noon. Be on time. It will not wait for you.”
“I understand. Thank you.” Asha watched the man in green return to his office and then she paced slowly back to sit beside Priya in the shade of their tent near the injured men.
“What’s wrong?” the nun asked.
“How do you know something is wrong?” Asha said.
“You breathe slower when something is wrong.”
“Oh.” Asha sighed. “Well, I’ll tell you. In my bag, there is a special needle-”
“The one with the three notches?”
Asha looked at her sharply. “How do you know that?”
“I went through your bag once and handled all of your tools.” Priya smiled.
“Why?”
“In case you were ever in trouble and needed me to hand you something. I thought it best to be prepared if there was such an emergency. And because I was curious.”
Asha shrugged. “Well, yes, the needle with the three notches. It’s an aether siphon. I insert it under the skin to draw out excess aether in the blood. When I was taught to use it, I was told that if I ever drove the needle in too deep, or left it in for more than a few seconds at a time, it would kill the patient.”
“Is the needle poisonous?”
“No. But it is made of a strange metal that looks like copper, or gold.�
� Asha reached into her bag for a sliver of ginger, which she poked into the corner of her mouth. “But now I’m beginning to wonder. What if the siphon can draw out more than just aether? After all, aether can move with or cling to a soul. So what if the needle could draw out a person’s soul? That would kill them instantly.”
Priya nodded.
“Sebek’s sword.” Asha frowned. “It gives off a strange light. And it kills instantly without making a fatal wound. What if his sword is one giant aether siphon? What if it’s made of the same metal?”
“That would be terrible. No one should have such a weapon. You should speak to him about it right away. He may not understand what he has.”
“No. He didn’t appreciate my curiosity just now. And I got the impression he understood just fine. So it might be better if I take a look on my own. Tonight.”
6
After a long afternoon of adjusting splints and changing bandages, and after a bland supper of flat bread and some sort of flavorless paste, Asha sat in her tent and waited for darkness. Priya stretched out on her blanket with little Jagdish on her stomach, and soon both the nun and mongoose were fast asleep. When the sky was black and the camp was silent, Asha stepped out into the pale starlight.
She made a wide circle around the camp, quietly hiking up the southern hillside to come around behind the wooden houses and offices. Sebek’s office had no windows, but the light of his lantern shone through the cracks in the walls. So Asha waited.
Eventually the lantern in the office dimmed and Asha saw Sebek emerge on the far side of the little buildings and make his way down the row to another identical house. Once inside, his lantern again shone through the cracks where the boards were warped and no longer fit together, but after only a few moments the light was extinguished and the house was dark.
Asha crept down the hillside, moving with excruciating care to prevent the loose dusty pebbles from rolling down the slope and revealing her presence. Her poisoned ear brought her the low hums of the souls of men scattered throughout the camp, but she focused on the one right in front of her. Sebek was alone.
When she reached the bottom of the slope, Asha sat down in the shadows against the back side of Sebek’s bunkhouse. She sat in the cold and the dark, listening to the man behind her as he undressed, moved about the room, lay down on the creaking bed, and then slowly, very slowly, fell asleep. Then Asha knelt and peered through the narrow cracks in the walls, willing her tired eyes to focus on the dim shapes inside the room. A bed, a trunk, a chair. She shifted to another crack and studied the room again, but she could not see the sword.
Easing down to the ground, her eye passed over a smaller crack and a black shape caught her attention. Peering through the tiny gap, she saw the outline of the sheathed sword lying on the floor beneath the bed.
The little house stood on four thick wooden blocks, leaving a narrow gap between the floor and the ground. Moving slowly and quietly, Asha crawled under the bunkhouse, squeezing through the small space between the freezing earth and the warped boards. Peering up through the dark cracks she saw the sword above her lying diagonally across the boards. With a pair of plain steel needles, she reached up through the gap and pushed the sword over until she could see the point where the scabbard ended and the hilt began. Then she pressed the tips of her needles into the gap and pulled them apart. The sword edged out from its scabbard by a hair, and then a hair more. And suddenly a warm golden light was shining down into her eyes.
Asha grabbed the hem of her sari and pressed it up over the gap in the boards to smother the light pouring down onto her face. Through the cloth in her hand, she felt a dry heat radiating from above.
With her sari in one hand and a needle in the other, she exposed a tiny section of the sword and carefully touched the bright blade. Instantly the needle grew hot in her fingers and her hand shook. The tip of the needle scratched her other thumb as she pushed the slender steel tool back up against blade.
Suddenly, a chorus of voices rose in her mind. She heard men and women muttering and whispering, perhaps to each other or perhaps to themselves. They spoke Eranian as well as two or three other languages that Asha did not know, but as she lay still trying to understand what she was hearing, an image appeared in her mind. She saw a city, an ancient city of huge stone fortresses and shining marble temples, wide avenues teeming with people and animals and carts, a long harbor full of sailing ships and heavy barges that belched steam just like the black train engine, and in the center of the harbor an enormous lighthouse towered above the sea, its powerful lantern sweeping the horizons with a blue-white light.
A voice rose up from the crowd, an old man’s voice speaking in Eranian, and he said, “…but when Master Omar returns with more sun-steel, then surely we will unravel the last riddle of the aether…”
Asha shuddered as the voice faded back into the crowd.
Her hand holding her sari up to smother the light felt cold. Very cold. Asha blinked and could barely open her eyes again. She felt herself sinking down, down, down into the cool black depths of her mind. Asha bit her lip, trying to shock herself back awake, but still she felt herself slipping away. Dimly she became aware of other people all around her. No one was moving. Everyone was standing very still and gazing up through the darkness at a small sliver of light overhead. Asha looked up at the light and saw two fingers holding a needle, and behind that a face. A woman’s face. Her own face, her eyes closed, her skin pale and ashen.
“No!” she screamed.
The hot needle’s tip softened into a rounded bulb, and the entire shaft began to curve and fold, breaking contact with the blade. Instantly the black space with its silent watchers vanished and Asha blinked up at her own hands and the floorboards and the shining sword.
Asha dropped the melted needle and looked at her left hand. A thin trail of blood was escaping the scratch on her thumb, but the blood wasn’t running down. It was running up. The blood had trickled up her finger and along the melted needle toward the glowing sliver of steel.
She shivered, staring at the blood.
After a moment’s pause, she picked up her other needle and scratched at the scabbard instead of the blade and was rewarded with a few thin scrapings of a rough material that felt like broken pottery.
Then she used her needle to push the exposed sword blade away from the crack in the floor, and with the light hidden she crawled back out from under the bunkhouse and carefully made her way back to her own tent. She crept into her blankets and lay very still, listening to the murmurs of the sleeping woman beside her.
The old man’s voice echoed in her mind as she replayed his words over and over again.
Master Omar.
Sun-steel.
Aether.
Asha looked at her thumb and watched the single drop of blood roll down her finger toward the ground. Then she licked her wound and went to sleep.
7
The next morning, Asha made a last round of checks among her patients, trying to give them simple instructions for caring for their own injuries. But soon she had no more patients and no more chores, so she led Priya to the small passenger car of the train directly behind the engine and its huge bin of coal. They stood together on a small platform where the warm sun battled with the cool breeze to create some small comfort for them. The engineer sauntered past, explaining briefly that the train would be returning to Herat backwards, with the engine pushing instead of pulling. And then they were alone.
“You’re very quiet this morning,” Priya said. “Did you find something interesting last night?”
“Something troubling.” Asha squinted eastward across the camp to watch the men breaking and hauling stone away from the collapsed tunnel in front of the train. “There were voices in that sword. And the scabbard was made of this.” She pressed the shavings into the nun’s hand.
“What is it?”
“Fired clay. The blade melted one of my needles when I touched it, so this must be some sort of ceramic tha
t can withstand the heat of the blade.”
“But what does it all mean?”
“That I was right. Sebek’s sword is the same metal as my aether siphon, and it’s full of human souls trapped inside the blade. I scratched my finger on my needle by accident and the sword tried to drink my blood, or more likely the aether in my blood, and my soul along with it. If the needle hadn’t melted away, I might have been trapped in the blade, too.”
The nun froze, her lips parted in a soundless cry.
“I know.” Asha took her hand for a moment.
“We have to take it from him! We have to set those souls free!”
“I’d love to, but I don’t see how. It’s too dangerous. We need to learn more about it, and him. When we know more, then maybe we can do something for those poor souls.”
The train’s whistle blew. Hooooooot. Hoot-hoot.
Asha glanced up to see the sun approaching its zenith. When she lowered her gaze, she saw Master Sebek striding across the yard toward them. He was not hurrying, but there was a power and purpose in his step. He came up to the train and smiled at the women. “Good day. I see you are on time.”
“Yes,” Asha said. “Thank you again for your help on our journey.”
“My pleasure.” He smiled briefly. “Do you believe that dreams have any real meaning?”
“Rarely.”
“Neither do I. Which is good, I think. I had the strangest dream last night that someone had stolen my sword. My seireiken.” His hand rested on the pommel of the short sword at his side. “The dream was so vivid, so real, that when I awoke I immediately reached for my sword, and I was relieved to find it right where I left it.”
The locomotive’s whistle blew again and the engine shuddered, sending a rumbling vibration throughout the train. They began to roll very slowly, and Sebek began to walk alongside them.
“But it was the strangest thing,” he continued. “My sword had been drawn. Just a fraction, just a hair, but enough to expose the blade. Very strange, don’t you think?”
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