Halcyon est-1

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Merda!” Salvator followed close behind her and together they plunged into the darkened hall.

  Chapter 21. Taziri

  She sat in the pilot’s seat, wearing her leather jacket with the long dirty tarp wrapped roughly around her shoulders. She’d toyed with the idea of turning on the electric heater, but with the Halcyon ’s wings folded shut the solar sheeting couldn’t recharge, and she didn’t dare risk draining the battery.

  Taziri sat sideways in the seat with her legs over the arm rest so she could face the locked hatch. It had been a long boring afternoon sweating on the cabin floor, and when the evening shadows brought her some relief from the heat, she found the cold and the dark just as dull as the scorching light.

  She rested her head on the top of the seat, forcing herself to keep one eye open and focused on the hatch.

  If Bastet comes back, I’m going to see it. I’m going to see how she gets in, and how the aether works. Maybe she’s a ghost, or maybe she’s a scientist who uses aetherium to control the aether. Either way, I’m going to see how she does it.

  Taziri was still muttering to herself in her mind when she saw the first pale wisp of vapor slide in under the hatch. She sat up sharply and leaned forward over the armrest to peer at the aether streaming into the cabin. She watched it flow in, and she watched it pool on the floor, and she was still peering at its ghostly ripples when a voice said, “Good evening, Taziri.”

  She blinked and saw a figure sitting in one of the passenger seats, the last one farthest back in the shadows.

  But…when did she…? Damn it.

  Taziri smiled and pushed the old tarp off her shoulders. “Hello again.”

  “I brought you supper.” Bastet stood up and came forward to sit in the nearest seat. She still wore the black dress with the tiny cats on the sleeves, and her mask rested on her head, and her golden heart hung on her chest. In her hand was a basket, which Taziri took warily. She squeezed the straw gently but found it very sturdy and common.

  If this is a trick, I can’t see the trap doors and wires yet.

  The ends of the straw poked her hands, and flakes of dirt fell from the basket as she moved it around and lifted the cloth from the top to look inside. She found a small loaf of bread studded with dates and coriander seeds, and beside it a pomegranate, a handful of pistachios, four dates, a freshly cut bunch of grapes, and a small earthenware cup. Taziri lifted out the cup and sniffed it. “Oatmeal?”

  Bastet laughed. “Beer.”

  “Ah. Well, thank you very much. Will you join me?”

  “Just a little.” The girl took one of the dates and Taziri set to her meal. At first she was more than a little self conscious about eating with an audience, but Bastet seemed perfectly content to lean back in her seat and stare at the cabin walls. As loathe as she was to do it, Taziri started to make conversation while she was eating, but the girl waved her hand and said, “When you’re finished.”

  So Taziri ate. She ate with her eyes on the food and not the girl and she relished every bite, including the Aegyptian bread and even the thick broth they called beer, which was nothing at all like the Espani ale she had tried once and everything like the Espani oatmeal she had eaten many times over. When she was finished, she set the basket on the floor and leaned back with a contented smile. “Thank you, again.”

  “My pleasure.” The girl smiled. “I thought you could use it after sitting in this oven all day long.”

  “You thought right.”

  “So you’re still waiting for your friends? Your passengers?” Bastet wandered back to the end of the cabin, running her fingers over the metal plates and rivets and welds.

  “I still haven’t heard from any of them. I hope they’re all right. We didn’t work out a schedule or anything for this trip. The plan was just that I wait here until they come back,” Taziri said. She chewed her lip. “Which is a really bad plan.”

  Bastet laughed. “You’re right, it is. So these passengers are just visiting the city? Are they from Marrakesh too? Why did they come?”

  Taziri sighed. “A friend of mine, Lorenzo, was killed the other day. He was murdered by someone from Alexandria, a man dressed in green carrying a burning hot sword.”

  “Right, a Son of Osiris,” Bastet said.

  “Oh. Is that who they are? You’ve heard of them. Of course you have, sorry.” Taziri nodded. “So Lorenzo’s wife and friends came here to find the killer. Actually, we went to Carthage first, but they escaped us. And then we came here. It’s so awful. Lorenzo was a good man. Handsome, charming, kind.”

  “You liked him.” Bastet smiled.

  “Yes, I did. He was easy to talk to. Things felt so much easier and simpler around him. He and his wife seemed to have nothing in common, but they were happy together. I could see that, and I envied that. Their marriage. It was strange, but it worked.”

  “Not like yours?”

  Taziri shrugged. “My marriage is more complicated. I think there’s more arguing in my house than in half of Espana. Everything has to be difficult. I mean, Yuba is a good man and a great father. He’s a talented artist. He’s tall and strong. I love him. I do. And things were easy back when we first got married. But then my career started to take off, and his career stalled, and we had Menna, so his career ended, basically. We had money troubles for a while. Menna had some trouble with her hearing, so there were doctors, and I was always away working. You know, it was just never easy. And I would come home and he would be angry about something. And the thing is, he was usually right about whatever it was, but there was never anything I could do about it. I couldn’t fix his job. I couldn’t change my job. I couldn’t make more money.” She sighed. “It’s been easier this last year. It really has. Since I resigned from the Air Corps, I mean. I’m home more, and we have more money, and he’s working again, and Menna is fine, thank God. Everything is better now. But it’s still never really easy.”

  Bastet nodded as she curled up on the nearest passenger seat. “I can’t really tell whether most marriages work well or not. They’re all different. The people are different, the problems are different. Some seem happy, but aren’t. Some seem miserable, but aren’t.” The girl took her cat mask off her head and fiddled with it in both hands. “My family used to be happy, but everyone got older and grouchier and touchier. They fought a lot, for a while anyway. Things are quiet now, but not as happy. Not like they used to be.”

  Taziri nodded back. “Sorry to hear it.”

  “So your friend was killed with a seireiken? That’s rough. His wife must want to get his soul back, I guess.”

  Taziri blinked. She hadn’t thought of that. In all the rush, all the planning, all the talk of revenge and killing, there hadn’t been a single mention of Lorenzo’s soul.

  But of course, if the sword was made of aetherium, then it would have absorbed his soul. Stupid. I should have realized that.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “That’s nice. For her, I mean. And for him, I suppose. I didn’t know that people in the west knew how to release a soul from a seireiken,” Bastet said.

  Taziri shook her head. “I don’t. I don’t know of anyone who does. We only discovered aetherium two years ago.”

  The girl looked up, incredulous. “Two years?! But it’s been…oh, right, the Sons of Osiris have been collecting it all this time. I suppose they got all the sun-steel in the west then a long time ago.”

  “I guess so, maybe. We haven’t found any in Marrakesh that I know of.” Taziri leaned forward. “So, you know how to release a soul from a seireiken?”

  “Oh, sure.” The girl nodded. “I mean, it’s very hard to do, but you can certainly do it.”

  “How?”

  “You just need to melt the steel. When it’s melted, it releases the aether and the souls with it.”

  Taziri felt a dull weight of disappointment in her chest. “But when the aetherium is charged with souls, it’s already blazing hot. We had a lump of it two years ago that
was so hot it burned straight through an entire ironclad warship in just a few seconds. Aetherium can withstand unbelievably high temperatures. How on earth are we supposed to melt it down?”

  “I said it was very hard to do. Obviously, it’s easier to forge aetherium when it’s cold, when there are no souls in it. I don’t know how you would melt it once it’s already hot, but that’s what you have to do. Maybe you can drop it in a volcano or something.”

  Taziri shook her head and waved the suggestion away. “No, wait, let me think. Regular steel melts around two or three thousand degrees, depending on impurities. Charged aetherium is much hotter, say five thousand. So we need to create a controlled heat source that can generate over five thousand degrees of heat. Focused, controlled heat.” She picked at her lip as she slowly turned to look at the darkened instrument panel of the cockpit.

  So what do I have? An engine with five minutes of fuel left. A propeller. A fully charged battery. And some wire.

  “You know, back in Marrakesh, in the factories, they sometimes weld regular steel using electricity. It’s called arc welding.”

  “Can you do that to a seireiken?”

  “I don’t know. But I was thinking of trying something a little different. Over the last year, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles coming out of the university about new kinds of energy and new kinds of matter. There is a theory that after you heat ice into water, and then heat water into steam, you can heat steam into something else even hotter.” Taziri smiled. “How would you like to help me with a little science experiment?”

  “Right now?” The girl’s face lit up. But then just as quickly she frowned and turned toward the hatch. “Someone’s here. A tall one and a short one.”

  Taziri slipped out of her seat. “It must be Mirari and Qhora!” She peeked out the little window in the hatch and saw Mirari’s masked face near the glass, so she unlocked the door and stepped back to let them enter.

  The Espani woman stepped inside and stopped short when she saw Bastet. “Who is that?”

  But Taziri was frowning at the little man behind Mirari and she switched into Espani to ask, “Who is that?”

  The young man managed a weary smile. “Tycho of Constantia. Good evening to you, captain.”

  Taziri grabbed Mirari’s sleeve. “Where is Dona Qhora? Where is the Italian?”

  Mirari didn’t move. “Who is the girl? Why is she here?”

  Taziri glanced at the end of the cabin where the Aegyptian girl was sulking in the shadows. “That’s Bastet. She lives near here. She helped me get rid of some people snooping around the Halcyon, and she brought me food, which is more than you’ve done, thank you very much. Now where is Dona Qhora?”

  Mirari’s shoulders relaxed and she sat down in the nearest passenger seat. The young man hauled himself up the steps into the hatch and plopped down on the floor. The masked woman sighed. “We were separated. We tracked the killer to the home of his lover, and learned that his name is Aker El Deeb. But it was a trap and we barely escaped with our lives. My lady was hurt and chose to hide herself while Tycho and I ran away to divert the men chasing us. But then, after we had gone, Dona Qhora surrendered to them. She just stepped out into the middle of the street and gave herself up.”

  “What? Why?”

  “To get inside, of course,” Tycho said. “She let herself be taken so she could get inside the Temple of Osiris. Quite a gamble, but it seems to have worked. We followed their carriage across half the city, right to the Temple itself. She’s inside now. No way to help her.”

  Taziri blinked. “The temple…of the Sons of Osiris?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  She blinked at the dwarf. “I’m sorry, who are you again?”

  “Tycho of Constantia. I ran into your friends in the market this morning. They were looking for a seireiken, the same as me and my master, Philo.” He grimaced and swallowed, but then managed another tired smile. “We lost him today. Philo. Killed in the Hellan Quarter. I’m not even sure who killed him, or why. Probably just thieves. Or maybe someone hired by the Temple because we’d been asking the wrong questions. I don’t know. I may never know.” He shrugged.

  Taziri glanced at the other two women, who both looked back with tired and helpless eyes that had nothing to offer her or him. The pilot looked down at the young man again with a sudden swell of pity for him, in part for his story but also in part for his imperfect body. It wounded something inside her, the part of her that loved to fix things, to see a person she could not fix. “I’m sorry to hear that. But now you’re helping Dona Qhora?”

  “We’re helping each other. I mean to help her find the sword that took her husband’s life, and in turn she is helping me to obtain a seireiken sword for myself. It is my mission to find such a blade and return it to the prince of Vlachia as a gift from my Lady Nerissa.” There was something artlessly kind and hopeful in his bright eyes and valiantly upturned lip.

  He’s going to die.

  Taziri put her hand to her eyes and pretended to massage her temples.

  Whoever he is, whatever he is, he’s going to die. People like him always die. The good ones. The kind ones. The ones who don’t understand the bleak and terrible truths about people and life and the world. He’s going to die. And it’s not fair.

  “I take it that Senor Fabris has not returned at all today?” Mirari asked.

  “No, no one,” Taziri said. “Is he lost too?”

  “He went chasing after a green man this morning and never returned. He may be dead.”

  We should be so lucky. Taziri sighed. “So what do we do now? How can we help Qhora if she’s locked in this Temple? Can we break in?”

  “No, there’s no hope of that,” Tycho said. “We may be able to buy a few answers from the right people, but there’s nothing we can do for the lady now but wait.”

  “Crap.” Taziri pushed her hands back through her hair. “So they may both be dead, or soon to be dead, or locked away in some prison. Damn it. Bastet was just telling me how to free a soul from a seireiken, too.” She shook her head.

  “What?” Tycho sat up. “You can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can,” Bastet said, her first words since the others entered the cabin. Her Espani had an archaic lilt to it. “It’s just very difficult. But I think your clever captain here was about to figure out how to do exactly that.”

  “Is that true?” Mirari asked. “Can you really free Don Lorenzo’s soul?”

  “Maybe. I think so.” Taziri shrugged. “Probably, yes. I’ll need to build a special tool, but I should be able to do it.”

  “Ha!” Tycho slapped his leg with a wide grin. “Amazing. I’d like to see that.”

  “You will.” Mirari stood up. “Dona Qhora must know this, immediately. So we must find her, and we must rescue her and find the sword that killed Don Lorenzo. Captain, can you build your tool now?”

  “I suppose so. It would be easier once we get back to Tingis, but since the Halcyon won’t be flying anytime soon, there’s no reason why I can’t fabricate the tool right here and now.”

  “Excellent. Please begin your work. We’ll be back as soon as we can.” Mirari pushed out through the hatch.

  Tycho shoved himself up onto his short legs and hurried after the tall Espani woman.

  “Wait a minute,” Taziri said. She reached down and unstrapped the revolver from her thigh. “I want you to have this.”

  The Hellan eyed the gun. “I’ve heard bad things about those. Blow up in your hand, rip your fingers off, shoot your toe off when you’re asleep. I think I’ll stick with my knife.” He patted his belt.

  “No, that’s all cheap little Eranian guns. They don’t know what they’re doing. This is a Mazigh revolver. No exploding, no jamming, no misfires. Just point and fire.” She quickly showed him how to open the barrel and replaced the six bullets, and then gave him a small box of ammunition. “Fifty shots. It should last you a while.”

  Tycho strapped the gun to his le
g and practiced drawing it. “Fifty, eh? And all I have to do is aim straight?”

  “Do you have good eyes?”

  He laughed. “Of course! How else do you think I can tell you people apart from down here?”

  Taziri laughed with him. It made the ache in her chest all the worse because it did nothing to dissuade her from believing that she was sending this young man off to die.

  “You’re sure you won’t be needing it?” he asked.

  “No.” She patted her armored medical braced under her sleeve. “I have a spare.”

  “All right then. Thank you very much. I’ll treasure it always. Until it blows my finger off.” He leapt out the hatch with a grin.

  And Taziri couldn’t help but grin as she pulled the hatch shut. She leaned back into her pilot’s chair and sighed as she rubbed her hand through her hair, which was starting to feel a bit dry and stiff from spending all day in the oven of the Halcyon. She looked up at Bastet, who was picking at her lip. “Well, I guess we need to build a very hot tool, don’t we?”

  “What’s it called?” the girl asked. “You said we need to make something hotter than steam to melt the steel. So what’s hotter than steam?”

  “It’s called plasma,” Taziri said. “We’re going to build a plasma torch.”

  Day Four

  Chapter 22. Shifrah

  They ran down the dark, narrow passage, their shoulders crashing into the rough stone walls and footsteps echoing over and over, chasing them along in the shadows. Shifrah kept one hand on Rashaken’s arm and the other stretched out in front of her to probe the darkness. Her hand struck smooth wood and she shoved through the door into a small room illuminated by the torchlight in the hall slipping under the other door on the far side. The room was empty except for the dim outlines of a bench, a chair, and a pile of kindling in the corner.

  Shifrah dashed to the far door to look and listen, but there was no one on the other side. Behind her Kenan closed the door to the narrow passage and signed that it was all clear behind them as well.