Chimera esd-7

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Asha’s golden ear listened to the soul-sounds of the land of Aegyptus for the first time since arriving in the country, and she head a chorus of ancient and thriving creatures that she had never known before.

  There was a time when I lived for this. Just this. Experiencing new places, new plants, new animals. Spending days in one place to dig in the soil, to sniff the roots, to taste the flowers, to study the beetles and butterflies.

  It seems like another life now. Someone else’s life.

  She knelt at the side of the road and plucked a small red flower. As she stared into it, she wondered what oils or seeds she might take from it, what medicines or foods might be made from it. She wondered what it was called. But she didn’t wonder long.

  I have to find Bastet.

  She slipped the flower away into her bag and walked on.

  Her dragon’s ear went on cataloging and sifting through the soul-sounds around her. Grasses, trees, and flies were common. People and pack animals were fewer and farther between. But none of them resembled the doubled humming of an immortal and her sun-steel heart.

  Closing her eyes to the glare of the bright sliver of sunlight blazing on the edge of the world, Asha wandered off the dirt road into the tall grass, angling southward across a trickle of cold water in a ditch and over a small rise toward a copse of sycamores. From there she turned a bit more to the south, her eyes still closed and her golden ear searching for something, anything, that might be Bastet.

  Eventually she found the sound. Under the creaking of the locusts and the shivering of the tall grass, and between the cries of the shearwaters and storm-petrels in their nests by the distant sea, Asha heard the sweet duet of a young soul singing with itself. But that soul was singing a dirge, a mournful cry of aching loss and despair.

  At the top of a steep hill, she found the Aegyptian girl sitting in a circle of trampled grass. Bastet’s black and red dress lay wrinkled and twisted around her legs, and the little embroidered cats were tumbled upon each other in the folds. Her black cat’s mask had slipped off her head and fallen to the ground, where three lean and tawny little wildcats sat licking their whiskers and flicking their tails in silence.

  Asha stepped into the bed of flattened grass and saw the body lying beside the girl. The youth’s head rested in her lap where she was gently stroking his brow, and the rest of his long limbs were stretched out across the ground in peaceful repose, except for the ragged and bloody hole in the center of his chest.

  The stillness of the body felt wrong, even unnatural. In a rush, Asha recalled her handful of conversations with Anubis, the commanding sound of his voice, the arrogant mettle of his every gesture, the brooding look in his eyes, and even the sharp manner in which he struck his staff on the ground before he vanished into the aether. For a moment, she couldn’t reconcile her memory of that proud and straight-backed youth with the corpse resting on a bed of bloody grass and wrinkled skirts.

  “Bastet?” Asha whispered. She reached out and gently touched the girl’s shoulder.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, Bastet turned and looked at her. The girl’s face was pale, her eyes rimmed in red, her lips thin and colorless. “Asha.”

  “What happened?” Asha sat down beside her and let the girl lean against her body.

  Bastet sighed a weak and ragged sigh. “I think he fought with Horus. I found him lying here with his own staff through his chest. I pulled it out. He should have been fine. It should have only taken a moment. He should have… but he didn’t heal. He just… he just died.”

  “I’m sorry.” Asha put her arms around the girl, but the girl didn’t cry. She just sat very still and stiff, gently petting her cousin’s face and staring out over the plain as the rising sun streaked the land with bright golds and greens. Asha peered over Bastet’s shoulder at the body, trying to see it without the lens of memory or sorrow. She studied the wound and the dried blood, and her gaze traveled up to the youth’s neck.

  “His pendant?”

  “Gone.”

  Asha nodded. “I could tell how close you were. The way you spoke and acted toward each other. I could see how much you cared for each other. He knew that.”

  “I think I loved him,” Bastet whispered.

  “Of course you did.”

  She turned and looked up at Asha. “I mean, I really loved him. I never said anything. I didn’t know how. We’re not actually family, you know. Grandfather isn’t my real grandfather, and he isn’t related to Anubis’s family either. But still, we’ve spent our whole lives acting like family. And then there’s this.” She gestured to her face and body. “For four thousand years, I’ve been this little girl, even to Anubis. And it’s true, some part of me will always be twelve and silly and confused, but a part of me isn’t. A part of me is four thousand years old, and lonely. That part of me wonders what I would look like if I ever grew up, and wonders what my children would look like.”

  “Immortals can’t have children?”

  “They can, but I can’t. I became immortal before my body changed, before my cycles could begin. And since immortality brings changelessness, I will never know what it means to be a mother.” Bastet shivered.

  “I’m sorry, I never thought…” Asha cleared her throat. “When we met, I…”

  “You saw me as a twelve-year-old girl,” Bastet said. She smiled sadly. “It’s all right. I am a twelve-year-old girl. I’m both, I guess. Young and old. Trapped in between. And most of the time, it’s fine. But sometimes I start to wonder what I lost, what I gave up, what I could have been. What we could have been. But it was too hard to say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I guess…” She hesitated, her smile wavering. “I guess the time was never right. On a bad day, I would never even think about telling him how I felt, or how I thought I felt.”

  “And on a good day?”

  Bastet shrugged. “Why spoil a good day with an argument you can always have later?”

  Asha nodded.

  “What should we do now?” the girl asked softly.

  “We should see to the body,” Asha said.

  Bastet laughed through the sniffs and breathless gasps. “He was the God of Death. I suppose we could preserve his body as the ancient kings did.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Bastet sniffed and sat up straighter. “Well, we remove the organs and seal them in jars, and then fill the body with embalming fluid and wrap it in cloth, and then place it in a golden sarcophagus and seal it away in a tomb built by fifty thousand slaves.”

  Asha blinked. “Oh.”

  “Or maybe not,” Bastet whispered. “We’ll send him to his mother in the old way.”

  Together they gathered armfuls of dry branches and grasses and piled them on the warm earth with the sun rising brighter and warmer by the moment. Asha placed the body on the pyre, and Bastet kissed her cousin’s cheek.

  Then Asha lit the kindling with Bastet’s flint and they both stood back and watched the flames flicker and grow, and consume the body of the God of Death.

  When the fires had died down to glowing embers and smoking ashes, the two women turned and began wading back through the tall grasses toward the dusty road and the distant outline of Alexandria.

  “If it could be done, would you choose to be mortal again?” Asha asked.

  “Yes,” Bastet said without a moment’s pause to consider the question. “I’ve had more than enough time to learn what it means to be twelve. But I know I can never go back, and it’s all right. A long time ago, I asked Grandfather whether he could undo it, and he said he couldn’t, so I’ve had a long time to live with the idea that this will never change. That I will never change.”

  “Why couldn’t he undo it?”

  “Because only a seireiken could destroy the pendant, and then the sword would swallow that piece of my soul inside the sun-steel heart.”

  “And then that piece of your soul would just be trapped in another piece of sun-steel,” Asha realized.

  “Yes.” />
  “But what if you could destroy the pendant another way? With something that wasn’t made of sun-steel? Something that would let that piece of your soul go back to you?”

  Bastet pouted as she considered it. “Then I suppose I might be mortal again.”

  Asha nodded and together they walked back to the city.

  Chapter 26

  Reunion

  It took most of the morning for Asha to walk back to the warehouse with Bastet, where she found Gideon and Wren sharing a breakfast of steaming hot fuul medames and t’aamiyya, both of which she discovered were full of fava beans and wonderful spices. They ate in the shadows of their chained prisoners and Bastet quietly related the last moments of Anubis to Gideon, who took the news with a strangely grim silence that Asha thought bordered on rage, but quietly subsided and he was soon himself again, though far less boisterous and less inclined to smile.

  It was nearing noon when Wren said, “Should one of us go check on the lady with the machines?”

  “Taziri.” Bastet looked up, her face still looking pale and haunted. “Her name is Taziri.”

  “I’ll go,” Asha said.

  “No, this time I’ll go.” Gideon stood up quickly. “I need to stretch my legs anyway.” And he strode out of the warehouse.

  “He doesn’t like being sad,” Bastet said. “I don’t think he really knows how to be sad, actually. Like asking a mute to sing, he just doesn’t know how, and I think he’s ashamed of it. Like it’s a flaw, something he’s failing to do.”

  Asha frowned and glanced toward the doors, but the soldier was already gone.

  For the next hour, the three women talked in low voices about death and monsters. Bastet described some of the horribly deformed people that Lilith had created and released into the city over the last few years. Wren talked about a huge fox demon that had besieged a city at the top of the world, and her friend who had died fighting it. And Asha told them both about the bear she once fought in India, and the basilisk she discovered in Rajasthan, and the golden dragon she faced in the hills above Damascus with the immortal warrior Nadira, and her friend Priya.

  Their mood was as gray as the light coming through the narrow warehouse windows when Gideon finally returned with Jiro and Taziri. They carried a long box between them, which they set on the floor and uncovered to reveal the product of their labors.

  “That’s it?” Wren asked.

  “That’s it,” Taziri said. “An aetherium electromagnet.”

  Asha studied the device lying in its bed of straw. The sun-steel core drew her eye first. It was a long reddish gold cylinder the length and width of her arm, and it gleamed even in the weak light inside the warehouse.

  Raw sun-steel. Virgin. Not yet forged into a tool or weapon. Not yet charged with the souls of the dead… or the living. It’s almost pretty.

  Asha moved on from the cylinder to the looping copper wires and bands that encircled the bottom half of the sun-steel, ringing it without touching it. These wires spiraled inward toward the base of the cylinder where they ended in a block of black-grained wood, and the encircling wires were connected to yet more wires that snaked over the straw to a large black case that had two canvas straps bolted into it.

  “How does it work?” the herbalist asked.

  “It’s very simple,” the Mazigh woman said. “You press this switch and aim it at whatever you want to attract.”

  Asha nodded. “All right. Then I believe we should test it.” She turned and looked up at Isis and Horus. The mother and son hung by their wrists, both very still and quiet, their white eyes barely open. The youth’s falcon head dipped forward, almost touching his beak to his chest. The steer-woman’s head rested on one of her up-stretched arms, her curving horns looking dull and gray in the half-light and her shaggy, hoofed legs dangling just above the floor.

  Taziri looked up at Jiro. “Would you care to do the honors?”

  “No.” The smith backed away. “I wouldn’t.”

  With a shrug and a grin, Taziri lifted the black case and slipped the canvas straps over her shoulders to wear the contraption on her back. Then she hefted the sun-steel cylinder and its wire rings by a pair of black wooden handles and stepped away from the crate. She winced just a little as she took the full weight of her invention on her back and shoulders, but she walked easily across the smooth warehouse floor.

  She reached up with one hand to quickly pull her brass-rimmed goggles over her eyes and she glanced over at the others. “You should probably get back, just to be safe.”

  The group shuffled over behind her.

  “No, no, not behind me,” Taziri said, jerking her head toward the far wall. “Over there. Away from me.”

  The group shrugged and shuffled over to the gap between two towers of crates.

  “All right. Here we go.”

  Asha watched as Taziri flicked the switch on the device and then aimed the red-gold cylinder of sun-steel up at the two prisoners. Instantly, a high-pitched whine unlike anything Asha had ever heard before sliced through her mind, forcing her to cover her ears and narrow her eyes to slits. In that same instant, both of the hanging prisoners swung forward on their chains, swinging toward the Mazigh woman. Both the falcon-man and the steer-woman jerked their heads up, their eyes wide with shock, and the warehouse erupted with avian shrieks and bovine screams as the prisoners shook and writhed between the chains holding them up and the device pulling them down.

  “I’m turning it up!” Taziri shouted over the noise.

  Asha winced as the high-pitched whine rose even higher and louder, and just as she was about to look away, to shuffle farther back from the hideous sound, she saw the needles. Tiny golden glints of light appeared on Isis’s hairy legs and hoofed feet, and the same metallic gleams appeared on Horus’s feathered head and scaled hands. Both of them screamed and shook against their chains, making the heavy beams overhead groan and crack as trickles of dust fell from the roof, but the rafters held.

  And then the needles came free.

  Over a dozen of the tiny things burst from the two prisoners, shooting cleanly from tiny holes in the skin and also tearing sideways from ragged rents in the flesh. The needles flew across the room faster than Asha could track them, but she heard them clatter softly against the sun-steel core of the magnet.

  Taziri switched the device off and set it down on the ground, and the tiny needles fell to the floor. Gideon stepped out from behind the crates first, his hand straying to his sword-gauntlet as he stared up at the two figures on the chains. Asha and the others followed him out and looked up.

  Only a few thin patters and drips of blood fell from the wounds before their bodies healed themselves, the punctures and cuts slipping closed like water to become a seamless whole once more. And as the wounds vanished, so did the monstrosities.

  Asha watched in spellbound fascination as the tall horns fell from Isis’s head and thumped on the floor. The thick brown hair on her legs rained down on the ground, quickly revealing two soft brown legs that were slowly shrinking back to their original size. One by one, the woman’s little toes popped free of the fused mass of her hoofs. And then it was over. Isis opened her eyes, her weary dark brown eyes, and she moved her thin, cracked lips to make faint gasping sounds.

  “Can’t… breathe…”

  “Wren, lift her up!” Asha said. “Lift both of them!”

  The northern girl stepped forward and raised her empty hands, making the heavy silver bracelets on her wrists ring out across the warehouse. The swirling white aether rose from the earth in two thick columns and gently lifted Isis and Horus so they were no longer suspended by their chains. Gideon dashed to the side of the room, slipped his blinding white blade out of its sheathe and smashed the ends of the chains. Mother and son dropped their arms to their sides, and Wren lowered her hands, letting the aether pillow beneath them and deposit them softly into Asha’s and Bastet’s arms.

  As she eased the young man down to the floor, Asha looked at Horus’s
face for the first time. She hadn’t seen the feathers fall out or the beak break off, but they all lay on the ground beside her. And now the groaning, gasping youth looked up at her with his all-too-human eyes and chattering lips and rasped, “I’m sorry.”

  Asha stroked the thin black hair on his head and rocked him gently as he cried into her arm, soaking her sari with his hot tears. She looked over him to Bastet and Isis, and saw them smiling and crying, shaking and holding each other. After a few moments, Horus sat up enough to drag himself over to his mother and they embraced, and cried all over again.

  Searching the faces of her comrades for guidance, Asha stood up and went to sit on a crate. Wren sat beside her, and a moment later Gideon and Taziri joined them, and they all tried not to stare too intrusively at the three immortals weeping on the floor. Jiro frowned, nodded once at Taziri, and left the warehouse. Gradually, the emotion of the moment faded and left the threesome quiet and tired, looking vaguely sick and confused as to what to do next.

  Asha cleared her throat and said, “We’re all very sorry for what you’ve had to suffer through, and for your losses. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save the others.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Isis rose to her feet. Her hair was tangled and dirty, and her dress was stained and torn, yet she composed herself with a queenly bearing, folding her hands together in front of her and speaking in a calm yet commanding voice. “You’ve all worked tirelessly to protect this city from us, and to protect us from ourselves. And now, you have done the impossible. You’ve given us back our bodies, and minds, and spirits. I cannot thank you enough for all you have done for us, and for Alexandria.”