Over and over, he slid back and forth between the bright, bloody plains and the dark, bloody dreams where he hid in the shadows from the fire and the ice that scorched his flesh and screamed at him in many voices. Each time that he emerged into the daylight world, a small corner of his mind would remember who he was and where he was, and why. And he would dare to hope that this time the pain would end, this time he would breathe deep and sit up and feel the sun on his face. But each time, he only had a fleeting moment on that bright shore, gasping and shaking, before the dark tide pulled him back under into the recesses of madness.
There was one inconsistency that he could see but not understand in his shattered mind. Each time he returned to reality, the sky would look slightly different, slightly dimmer and redder, and it felt slightly cooler. And during those scant moments of life, he wondered if the world itself was dying, and if perhaps he might awaken sometime to find it as dark and dead as his nightmares.
He was in his fiery, icy hell when a great and terrible force ripped him outward, tearing him up from the depths of pain and confusion and darkness into the bright world of the grasslands one last time. He blinked up at a sky painted violet and slate blue, with tiny white specks beyond the thin white clouds. A red, tear-stained face leaned over him, a girl’s face.
Bastet.
In her hand he saw his own staff painted in dark blood, and all across his chest he saw more of the same glistening on his skin, congealing in his clothing, weighing him down. He could see the huge wound in his chest as well, a ragged hole that was slowly shrinking.
“Bastet?” he croaked.
“Shh.” She stroked his face. “Just wait. It’ll all be over in a moment. Just rest. You’ll be fine in just a minute. Everything’s going to be fine now.”
He nodded and laid his head back to watch the stars and wait for the throbbing, pulsing waves of pain in his chest to subside. But the stars grew dim, winking out one by one, and the throbbing pain faded away, and the sounds of the crickets in the grass fell silent, and…
Omar lifted his head and watched the monstrosity enter the room.
Oh, Horus. Your poor boy. You poor, beautiful boy. Look at what she’s done to you.
The falcon-man glared around the torch-lit chamber with his mad white eyes, and let his vague stare pause in the direction of the man on the table.
Omar nodded at him, hoping for some sort of recognition, some hint of the youth he had known ages ago when Aegyptus was a free nation, and a wise family of immortals had ruled it as living gods.
Horus turned his head and crossed the room.
Lilith met him at the doorway on the far side. “Horus! I knew you would find your way back here sooner than the others. The ladies always did enjoy their time out more than you.”
He held out one of his talon-fists. Lilith held out her hand beneath it, and Omar saw a glint of gold fall into her palm.
No, no, no…
“What’s that?” Omar asked. “What is it?”
“Hm.” Lilith glanced at the hovering, hulking form of Horus. “Go back up to the city and find the others. I want them back here where they belong. Go.”
The falcon-man snorted and thumped his way out of the room and out of sight, leaving only the beautiful woman, the chained man, and the poor serving girl with the slithering arms in the corner.
Lilith studied the thing in her hand as she paced closer to Omar’s table. She approached him on the right side, the side of his nauseating beetle-arm. He winced and tried to look past it. Lilith turned her hand and a pendant dangled from her finger. A small, lumpy, golden heart. She smiled. “I wonder whose it is? Not yours or mine. And not Horus’s. I wonder. Not his mother’s, or Nethy’s either, I assume. And who does that leave?”
Omar shook his head. “Lilith, whatever you’re thinking, don’t. Just don’t. Don’t do anything with that, please. Leave it alone.”
“Of course you would say that, old man.” Lilith turned away, still playing with the sun-steel pendant. “So whose is it? The handsome and noble soldier, Gideon?”
“Leave it alone!”
“Or could it belong to the sweet little girl. The homeless, friendless child you found in the street. The poor beggar you took in and called your granddaughter.” Lilith passed around to the other side of the table. “Could this belong to your darling Bastet?”
“Lilith, please.” Omar strained at his chains, even with his deformed arm, but they held him fast and he could not rise, could not even reach out to her. “Please, leave it alone. Leave her alone!”
Lilith bent down out of his field of view for a moment, and suddenly the corner of the room blazed with pure white light. She rose up with his naked seireiken in her hand. Tiny blue arcs of lightning danced along the burning edge.
“No! I’m begging you, don’t do it!” Omar pulled on his chains. “Lilith! Please!”
She smiled and dropped the pendant onto the blazing sword, and the little heart vanished in a flash of light and hiss of aether.
Bastet shook his shoulders. “Anubis?”
She glanced down at the wound and saw that it was no longer closing, no longer knitting itself shut, no longer shrinking away. And the steady trickle of blood at the edge of the torn flesh had stopped trickling, stopped pulsing with the faint beating of the young man’s heart.
“Anubis?”
She touched his cheek and gasped. It was cold. And as she peered down at him in the twilight gloom, she saw the change in his skin and hair, no longer shining black but dull gray like old stone.
“No, no, no…”
Bastet shook his shoulders again, and patted his cheek, and held her ear over his dry lips. But there was no warm, no breath, no life at all.
“Anubis?” She felt the tears running down her cheeks as her own breath caught in her throat.
No, not him, not now, no, no…
“Anubis?” She lay down beside him in the bloody grass, put her arm across his cold body, and closed her eyes, clutching his bloody tunic tightly in her little hands, praying for sleep, and praying to wake from this nightmare soon.
Chapter 22
Engineers
Taziri glanced over her shoulder for the tenth time at the quiet man sitting in the first passenger seat. Jiro had only given the Halcyon III one quick distrustful look as they climbed on board, and over the following half hour, while she started the engine and backed the Mazigh locomotive out onto the main rail lines and struck out southward from the station, he had merely folded his arms over his chest and bowed his head, eyes closed.
Either he’s sleeping, or he’s trying not to be motion-sick.
Now as they clacked along through the poorer neighborhoods on the west side of Alexandria, Taziri found herself wishing that she wasn’t alone with this man. Both of them struggled to speak Eranian clearly enough for the other to understand them, and their brief moment of bonding over the aetherium magnet had been shattered along with the man’s workshop. He withdrew from her the moment that they emerged from under his work table, and he remained quiet and distant now.
The pieces of the magnet sat on the seat next to him. The battery, the wires, the switches. They were a bit dusty and dented, but all still intact.
The sun continued westward and the day’s heat began to fade, though the heat and noise inside the Halcyon made it difficult to enjoy the view. While the mechanical camouflage made the Halcyon appear to be a common steam-powered locomotive, it was in fact still driven by the same diesel engine that spun the propeller when the craft took to the air, and that engine, for all its marvels, was loud and dirty and hot.
“Are you all right back there?” she asked.
He grunted, arms still folded, head still bowed.
I’ll take that as a yes.
Taziri increased their speed as they left the small homes of Alexandria behind them and struck out southward from the city, speeding along the rails across the lush green plains. The railroad ran parallel to a wide dusty highway and to ei
ther side of them she could see vast tracts of farmland, huge fields of green growing things in carefully plowed lines, with dozens of women and children out among them, checking their crops and pulling weeds and fending off birds.
“It should only take another half hour or so to find this place,” she said over her shoulder. “Bastet’s directions were pretty clear, so I’m not worried about getting lost.”
Jiro grunted.
“So I take it that you’ve never been to this House of Geb before?”
Jiro sighed and rubbed his eyes. “No.”
“No.” Taziri nodded. “I got the impression from Bastet that it was one of her grandfather’s secrets. Someplace old that no one uses anymore. Does that sound right to you?”
Jiro did not answer.
Taziri shrugged.
We’ll find out when we get there.
They chuffed on down the line, beyond the softly rolling hills of the farmland and into a sparse forest of short trees and thick shrubs where Taziri saw all manners of flowers on the ground and in the bushes, and she wondered what sorts of berries they might grow in the weeks to come. Eventually, they reached the branch line that Bastet had described and Taziri turned off the main track to head east, and they rolled on through the woods, slower now, and more quietly.
Half an hour later than she had hoped, they arrived. Taziri let the Halcyon coast to a stop and she shut down the engine so she could peer out the windows in silence. “Now that is interesting.”
The branch line emerged from the woods into a clearing where the tracks ended at a pile of leftover ties that lay rotting on the ground, covered in mushrooms. And beside the tracks stood the house. It was a stone house, ancient and cracked, but well-scrubbed by the rain and wind, and the stone was bright gray. The house itself was round, shaped like a huge cheese wheel, and from its center rose a short roofed tower, just barely large enough for a single person to stand inside, and someone was standing inside it now. Taziri only had a moment to focus on the pale dots of the eyes staring back at her before they disappeared, and she heard the muffled sounds of movement inside the building.
“Someone’s in there, and they’ve seen us.” Taziri unlocked her safety harness and climbed out of her pilot’s seat. “Bastet didn’t say anything about there being people here. Do you suppose they’re friends of hers, or her grandfather’s, or maybe…”
Jiro stood up sharply, but paused to place one hand against the metal wall of the cabin to steady himself as he rubbed his eyes one last time and swallowed loudly. Then he slipped past her and opened the hatch, saying, “Wait here.”
Taziri watched him step out into the grass and dash across the overgrown lawn to the door of the house. “Wait here? It’s a house, not a war zone.” Shaking her head, she climbed down from the hatch and closed it behind her, and then walked softly across the lawn to stand beside the tall smith.
He frowned at her. Then he pointed back at the house and held up two fingers.
“Two of them, huh?” Taziri nodded.
He glared and placed his hand over her mouth.
She shook him off, and gave him a tired look. “Listen, I came here to do a job for a friend, not to play games in the woods. We’re all civilized people.” She stepped away from the wall to stand in front of the door and called out, “Hello? Is anyone home? We were sent to collect some materials here. Hello?”
The front door swung open and banged lightly against the frame. Taziri peered into the darkness within the house, and two angry orange lights sprang to life. The burning swords hummed softly in the shadows, and cast a faint gleam on the faces of the men holding them.
Seireikens! The Sons of Osiris. But are they here to guard the house, or to loot it?
Taziri took several steps back from the doorway and saw Jiro, still flattened against the wall where the two men couldn’t see him, drawing a steel knife from his sleeve.
Taziri held out her empty hands. “I’m not here to fight you gentlemen. I was sent here to pick up some supplies. It’s very simple. I was sent for a bar of aetherium. I mean, sun-steel. Sun-steel, you have some here, yes?”
The blazing orange swords seemed to float in the darkness and they emerged slowly onto the lawn with the grim Sons of Osiris robed in dark green. Jiro now stood behind them, his knife ready. The two men raised their swords, still exchanging curious looks with each other and studying Taziri’s knee-high boots, buff trousers, and leather flight jacket. The men whispered something, and one of them nodded as he raised his sword.
Taziri grabbed the cuff of her left jacket sleeve and shoved the warm leather to her elbow. “You gentlemen should know, before you do something that you might regret, that I have a friend, well, he used to be a co-worker and now he’s more of an acquaintance, really. Anyway, he taught me something once that seems very, very appropriate to this situation.”
She got her sleeve up to her elbow, revealing the brass and aluminum medical brace that covered her forearm, protecting her old burns. Two sturdy rods connected the brace to the glove on her left hand, providing the strength and support that her wrist could no longer offer. She reached over and pulled back a small switch and the top half of the brace swung open, allowing the modified revolver to rise and click into place, and a small metal arm swung up into her left hand, placing the gun’s trigger against her finger.
“He taught me to always bring a gun to a knife fight.” She pointed the revolver strapped to her arm at one of the swordsmen, and then the other. “Now I’ll ask you one last time. I would like one rod of sun-steel. Please.”
The Osirian with the raised sword grimaced, and charged at her.
Taziri fired twice and both men fell to the ground, groaning and wailing. The seireikens tumbled into the grass, which began to smoke and crackle with fire. She circled around them and walked up to the doorway where Jiro was looking at the fallen men as he slipped his knife away.
“I thought the Mazigh people disapproved of killing,” he said.
“We do, generally,” she said. “Which is why I shot them both in the knee.”
Jiro frowned.
“Fine, you watch them while I find the aetherium. Sun-steel. Whatever.” Taziri ducked inside the house and found it a rather pleasant and airy place with wide open windows and a tidy arrangement of small tables and chairs and beds. Spartan as it was, everything appeared to be in good order, right down to the spoons and knives laid out beside the wash basin to dry.
A wooden ladder in the center of the room led up into the little watch tower, and near the base of this ladder was a door in the floor. She flipped the door up and found a wooden staircase leading down into the cellar. From the bottom of her medical brace, Taziri pulled out a small flashlight, turned it on, and set it between her teeth as she started down the steps with both hands on the rails to guide her.
In the cellar she found a single dirt room, also just as neat and tidy as the room above, with two long crates stacked against the wall. She opened the top crate and found a half dozen rods of golden aetherium nestled in a bed of straw. After taking a moment to fold up and lock away the revolver into her brace, she picked up two of the rods and went back upstairs.
Never hurts to have a spare.
Outside she saw Jiro standing over the grim-faced Osirians clutching their bleeding knees. The smith held both of the sheathed seireikens in his hands.
“We’re all set,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“And them?” Jiro pointed at the men on the ground.
“Leave them.” Taziri shrugged.
“Master Omar wanted the temple destroyed,” Jiro said. “We should honor his wishes and kill these men as well.”
“I don’t know who Master Omar is, and I don’t care. We’re not executing two wounded, helpless men. They’re in the middle of nowhere, unarmed, in possession of a metal that no one except you knows how to forge properly,” Taziri said, continuing over to the Halcyon. “So leave them, and let’s get going. We have a machine to build and people to sa
ve. And the faster, the better. I have a family, two businesses, and hundreds of students to get back to, and I don’t like wasting time.”
Jiro hesitated, and then followed her on board the Halcyon.
With no switches or turntable on the tracks, Taziri was forced to drive the locomotive backward along the line, minding the rails ahead through the mirrors on either side of her cockpit. Confident of where she was going, but not quite as confident that the Aegyptian rail authority might have another train on the line, she left the branch line in the woods and rejoined the main track heading north back to Alexandria, and all the way home she kept a close eye on the rails ahead, dreading the thought of seeing some ramshackle excuse for an Eranian engine huffing toward her. She didn’t try to talk to Jiro this time.
I think he really was motion-sick. Best to leave him alone for now.
Only once on the long ride home did she see another train on the line, and she saw it with ten minutes to spare, giving her plenty of time to stop and back up onto a siding to let the Eranian freight train pass before she set out again, and they reached the rail yard without incident shortly after sunset. Taziri pulled the Halcyon into a shed and hopped out to close the doors and hide her machine from prying eyes. When she came back, Jiro was stepping out of the hatch with their sun-steel magnet in his arm.
“You finished it?” she asked with a smile.
“I bolted it back together, like we had it before,” he said. “But you’ll have to finish these wires.”
“She took the device from him and set it down on a bench near the door of the shed. “Nice work. I thought you didn’t feel well in there. I didn’t think you were working on this.”
“Working kept my mind occupied,” he said.
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