Asha nodded. “Very strange. You know, your sword reminds me of a story I once heard about a temple on the island of Nippon.”
Sebek frowned.
“The story tells of a brotherhood of warriors with heavenly swords that can split a hair lengthwise, and that shine with the light of the sun even in the deepest darkness. Have you ever heard of such warriors?”
Sebek shook his head.
Asha shrugged. “I heard the story when I received one of my medical tools. A golden needle, also from Nippon. A needle with strange properties.”
The train picked up speed and Sebek strode faster to keep pace. His frown deepened.
“I’ve always wondered about this needle.” Asha patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “Perhaps one day I will go to Nippon and learn more about it. Unless, that is, someone in the west could also tell me about it. Do you know of anyone who might know about it, Master Sebek?”
“No.” He was jogging now, arms pumping and sword bouncing on his hip, and he was slowly falling behind.
The train whistled a third time and the chuffing of its pistons and wheels forced Asha to raise her voice. “Perhaps when I reach the heart of Eran, I will be able to unravel these riddles.”
Sebek’s eyes widened and he broke into a full sprint as the engine accelerated yet again. He had fallen back behind the passenger car, behind the coal car, and was now alongside the engine itself, and still falling farther behind.
Asha shouted into the wind, “Perhaps Master Omar can tell me more about this sun-steel!”
Sebek whipped his sword from its scabbard and with its bright golden light falling on his face he shouted at the engineer, but his words were lost beneath the noise of the engine, and he stumbled to a halt as the train raced out of the valley.
Asha took Priya’s hand and helped her to step back through the narrow door into the passenger car and to sit down on the shaking, shuddering seat. The nun clutched her bamboo rod in one hand and Asha’s sleeve in the other. Jagdish clung to the saffron cloth of her robe. “Asha? What did you mean? Who is Master Omar? What is sun-steel?”
“That’s what they call it, this metal in my needle and his sword. And I think Master Omar may have the answers we need, whoever he is.”
“But why? Why did you taunt Sebek like that?”
Asha smiled as she slipped a fresh sliver of ginger into her mouth. “Because after we find Omar and learn how to free the souls in that sword, it would be a terrible inconvenience to have to find Sebek again. It’ll be much easier if Sebek is following us.”
Priya shook her head. “I’m afraid, Asha. This isn’t right. This is evil. These people. That sword. I’ve always thought that killing was the most vile and destructive thing possible. But to capture a soul? To enslave the very essence of life? I never dreamed there could be such evil in the world.” She stiffened suddenly. “What if there are more of them?”
Asha shrugged as she settled down into her seat. “Then we’ll just have to find them, too, won’t we?”
The nun nodded. “I’m sorry, Asha. We came west to get away from those cruel doctors, and we’ve actually stumbled onto something worse.”
“Much worse. A whole new kind of plague of men and metal.” Asha picked at her lip and stared out the window at the rocky hills rolling by. “I’m looking forward to curing it.”
Chapter 8
The Silver Dragon
1
Cedars. Nothing but cedars. No firs, no oaks, no ferns, no fruit trees. Just cedars. They stood in sentinel rows up and down the mountainsides and across the valley floors. They leaned at agonizing angles, telling silent tales of landslides and flashfloods and lightning strikes. And they lay down as chewed and decayed piles of ruin on the cool earth.
Asha had never noticed the scent of cedars before. Now she couldn’t escape the strange sweetness of them. It was their fifth day hiking along the old dirt path beyond the ruins of a city the locals had called Tesiphon. And it was their third day alone in the cedar forest.
“Asha?”
The herbalist glanced back. The nun stood at the bottom of the gentle slope leaning on her bamboo rod, her slender chest rising and falling visibly, the lotus blossoms in her hair shivering in the cool morning breeze.
Priya lifted her head. “Can we rest a moment?”
“All right.” Asha sat down in the middle of the path and leaned back against a mound of mossy earth. Her burning right ear brought her the sounds of the forest, its true sounds. The plant-souls of the cedars creaked like a sea of cicadas, droning softly in every direction. Ants and termites marched through the undergrowth, what little there was. And more than a few squirrels raced through the branches overhead. They were all unseen and far away from the two women on the path, and yet all perfectly clear to Asha’s golden ear.
After a moment, Priya said, “It doesn’t seem so very different from home.”
“I never thought it would be.” Asha glanced up. “Although I hadn’t expected so many cedars.”
“I’m serious.” The nun smiled. “At the monastery, I heard so many stories about the Ming Empire and Nippon, and the Isle of Lanka, the snow fields of Rus, and of course, Eran. Each of them always sounded so unique, so different from Kolkata. The weather, the food, the trees, and the flowers. I had always imagined that if I ever traveled the world, it would be an ever changing tapestry of shapes and smells and sounds.”
“But?” Asha felt through her bag for a sliver of ginger, but found none. She’d chewed the last of them over a week ago, but the habit kept her reaching for one more.
“But here we are, half way around the world, and it’s all still the same. The same earth and stones, the same trees and people and animals. Only the bread changes. And the music, sometimes.”
“We’re not half way around the world,” Asha said. “Not even close. Not yet.”
“I suppose there should be something comforting about the sameness. Everywhere you go, the world is still the same home you left behind. And yet, there is a corner of my heart that desires some newness, and is disappointed.”
Asha shook her head. “You should know better than to go desiring things. Suffering, and whatnot.”
“I know, I know.” Priya reached up to her shoulder and stroked the mongoose sleeping under her hair. “Sometimes I think little Jagdish here is the only person I’ve ever met who truly has the world figured out.”
Asha was about to agree with her when a sound drew her attention skyward. She scanned the leaves overhead. It was a distant sound, muted and faded by the winds and trees, but still a harsh and strident noise. A shout. A roar.
“I think I…” Asha trailed off as she stood up, straining to hear and wondering for a moment which ear she was hearing it in.
“I heard it too.” Priya stood up as well, her covered eyes directed at nothing in particular. “It sounded like the cry of someone in pain, someone in trouble.”
“But where?”
Asha stood very still, waiting to hear it again.
A high-pitched shriek split the silence as a small shard of metal plummeted out of the sky, sliced through the canopy, and impaled itself in the brown earth just a few paces from where Asha stood. The herbalist frowned and was about to go closer to it when a deep roar suddenly bellowed down from above, and she looked up again.
Through the leaves, she saw a huge shining beast race across the sky, gliding and falling and spewing black smoke in its wake. It passed from south to north, flashing across the dirt path where the two women stood and vanishing beyond the wall of cedars. A moment later, a new rumble of thunder echoed across the deep blue sky, followed by the cackling of stones tumbling down a mountainside.
“What was it?” Priya asked.
“A machine.” Asha grimaced. “Another machine, one that can fly. Or could fly. That didn’t sound like a gentle landing.”
“It fell out of the sky?” Priya frowned. “Which way? We should go, quickly. There may be people injured.”
; Asha nodded silently. “Probably.”
Together they turned off the path and began climbing the steeper, rockier slopes through the cedar forest. Their progress was slow as Asha carefully picked their way around towering boulders and fallen trees, and often hiked along at Priya’s elbow, ready to catch the nun should the slope prove too steep or the earth too loose. The sun reached its zenith and began drifting into the west.
A thin scrawl of black smoke drew a faint line down from the heavens to a cleft in the mountainside above them. Asha watched the smoke twist and writhe in the wind, and listened to the low hums in her right ear that told her there were two human souls somewhere in that cleft. She paused once to look back down the mountain behind her. There was a third hum out in the forest, one faint and uneven.
“What is it?” Priya asked.
Asha shook her head. “Maybe a wolf.”
They pressed on and reached the mouth of the cleft in the mountainside just as the sun kissed the western edge of the world and the sky flushed orange and violet.
Asha paused to stare across a vast ledge of tumbled stone with the mountain peak rising to her left and the broken cliff wall of the cleft spearing up to her right.
“Are we there?” Priya asked. “Can you see the flying machine?”
Asha blinked. “Oh, I can see it all right.”
2
As they walked into the shadows of the cleft in the mountain, Asha described to Priya the object before them.
The bulk of the machine towered over them, an elegantly rounded mass of shining steel like an enormous silver melon so large and so high that they were soon walking in its shadow, though it was far too high above them to touch. Ahead, Asha could see the underbelly of the machine sloping down to meet the earth and where the two met another smaller steel object was lodged. Thin trails of black smoke snaked up from this smaller chamber, rising up both sides of the great steel mass above it.
Moments later they stood beside a small steel cabin with long glass windows and many steel rods bolting the chamber to the enormous melon. One of the windows had shattered and the smoke spilled upward from it. There was a metal door in the center of the cabin and Asha reached for the handle.
“I’d wait if I were you.”
Asha spun to see a man sitting back in a sheltered cave just behind her. He was young-faced and smiling with thin black hair hanging in his eyes, and when he stood he towered over Asha by more than a head. He wore dust-streaked tan trousers that plunged into bronze greaves over black leather boots. His brown jacket was open to reveal a wrinkled white shirt, but it was the device on his right arm that caught Asha’s eye. His jacket sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, where the device began and continued down to his wrist, wrapping his arm in bright brass plates and rods and wheels, with a wide flat box on the outside of his forearm. A thick leather glove covered his right hand.
“I saw this machine fall out of the sky,” Asha said. “Is it yours?”
“I don’t own it, but I was riding in it,” he said. “Have you ever seen an airship before?”
“No. My name is Asha, and this is Priya. I’m an herbalist. Are you injured?”
His smile was quickly replaced by a look of earnest concern. “No, but the pilot was. She’s back here. Can you help her?”
Asha nodded and followed him back into the cave, leaving Priya to find her own way with her bamboo rod. In the shadows there was a young woman lying on a level bed of dry earth and small stones with a bundle of cloth under her head. Asha set her bag aside and inspected her patient.
“I’m Gideon, by the way,” the young man said. “And she’s Kahina.”
“Mm.” Asha carefully moved from the woman’s eyes and mouth to her neck and chest and belly. “Bruises. No cuts. Strong pulse, dry breathing. She’s fine. Just unconscious. What happened to you?”
“No idea,” Gideon said. His Eranian was slow and clear, but he had an odd way of clipping his syllables off sharply. “One moment we were flying safely, and then suddenly there was all this noise and smoke. Kahina was too busy with the controls to tell me what was happening. And then we just crashed, and I’ve been waiting for her to wake up all afternoon.”
Priya came to sit beside Asha, and the nun said, “But you weren’t hurt at all?”
He shrugged. “If I was, it wasn’t serious.” A tiny bit of gold glinted on his chest and Asha saw a small egg-shaped pendant hanging from his neck.
“Still, I should take a look at you,” Asha said. “You could be bleeding inside, or have a cracked rib.” She stood up.
Gideon grinned and glanced away. “I doubt it, but you can look if you like.”
Asha did not smile. She pushed his jacket back off his shoulders roughly and examined his chest and belly with a series of sharp jabs and found him unharmed. She passed her right ear quickly over his chest, listening for a warble in the humming of his soul that might tell of some mortal injury that could not be seen. But instead of one hum, she heard two.
Frowning, she picked up the golden pendant on his chest between two fingers and found it quite warm against her skin, and one of the two hums rose half a note in her poisoned ear. “An egg?”
He smiled and gently took the golden bauble from her. “A heart, actually.”
Asha stepped back from him and sat down beside her patient. “And on your arm?”
Gideon glanced at the device on his right arm. “Just a little something I picked up in Marrakesh. Which is where this airship came from, originally. An old friend of mine in Damascus bought it for some ridiculous amount of money. Usually the Mazighs don’t sell such things to foreigners, but they made an exception because this one is so old. Which is probably why it fell out of the sky today.”
“Damascus?” Priya sat up a bit straighter. “Is that a city? Is it close?”
“It is a city, and it is very far away,” he said apologetically. “I spent a month begging my friend for the chance to fly in his airship, and when he finally agreed…” Gideon threw up his hands. “Here we are.”
Asha frowned. “It’s going to be cold tonight. Would you mind building a fire?”
The young man smiled. “My pleasure.” He strode out of the little cave into the last fading gleam of the evening light and his boots crunched on the gravel as he made his way down to the forest. A moment later he began whistling a jaunty little tune.
“He seems very pleasant,” Priya said.
Asha stroked the dark curls away from her patient’s face. “He does seem very pleasant,” she said softly. “Friendly. Helpful. Well-traveled. He also has two souls.”
“What?” Priya turned her covered eyes toward her friend. “Two souls? Do you mean he’s possessed by a ghost?”
“No.” Asha leaned back against a cold stone. “There’s one soul in his body, and there’s another soul in that little golden heart hanging around his neck. And both of the souls are most definitely his.”
An hour later, they shared a meager supper and they all went to sleep around a low fire that filled the cave with enough warmth that they could sleep comfortably. But Asha lay awake, watching the man across the fire. She watched him lie there for an hour, and then a second hour, and all the while she listened to his two souls murmur.
Gideon sat up quietly, his features lost in shadow. He reached across the smoldering coals, lifted Asha’s shoulder bag from the stone floor right in front of her lidded eyes, and silently set it down in his own lap. Asha slipped one hand along under her blanket to grab a sharp stone from the ground, and she held it close to her chest, watching and waiting.
The man picked through her bag, quietly nudging aside the clay jars and glass vials and leather pouches and paper envelopes. There was a soft clink of metal. His hand rose from the bag clutching several tools. The steel scalpels went back into the bag. The steel needles went back. The steel tweezers went back. The steel mirror went back. Only one object remained in his hand.
A small needle that gleamed faintly of gold.
Gi
deon ran his thumb up and down the needle for a moment and squinted at it.
Asha clutched her sharp stone a little tighter and placed her empty hand on the ground, ready to push herself up, ready to lunge at him, to catch him unaware.
But then Gideon set the needle back in her bag, and reached across the fire pit to deposit the bag where he found it. And then he lay back down, and soon he began to snore.
Asha set her stone on the ground and exhaled.
3
Dawn crept into the mountain cleft slowly, illuminating first the enormous silvery airship and then later the stone cradle in which it lay. Asha woke to find Gideon and Priya missing.
She leapt from her blanket and dashed out of the cave into the pale morning light where she saw the stranger guiding the blind nun into the airship’s glassy cabin. Asha strode over to them. “Good morning,” she said tersely.
“Good morning!” Gideon beamed at her. “I’m so glad you’re up. I was just about to show your friend how the airship works now that the smoke is all cleared and it’s safe again.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Asha followed them into the cabin, a small metal room with one chair bolted to the floor in front of a metal desk covered in levers and a small bench bolted to the floor behind it. At the opposite end of the cabin hunched a mound of pots and pipes and wires and struts that reminded her of the engine of the steam train they rode to Herat.
Gideon shrugged. “Pretty sure.”
“It’s all right,” Priya said. “I asked him to show me. How is the pilot?”
Asha grimaced. “I’ll check on her.” She strode back out into the cool morning air and when she entered the cave she found the woman Kahina sitting up and staring at the gray coals of their fire.
“Hello.”
Kahina looked up, her thick curling hair bouncing with every movement of her head. “Hello? Who are you?”
“My name is Asha. My friend and I saw you crash yesterday and came to help. I’m an herbalist. You’re going to be just fine. You’re not hurt.” She lingered near the mouth of the cave where she could glance back out at the airship. She could just see the red of Priya’s robe through the cabin’s windows.
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