“Everything all right?”
“No, not really,” he said.
“You didn’t find Nadira?”
He narrowed his eyes at her for a moment, and then looked away. “No, and I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”
She sipped her wine. It tasted awful but she liked the warmth in her belly and the tingle in her fingers. Her gaze wandered over to Tycho again.
He has the most intense eyes.
“Do you want to stay here?”
Wren blinked and looked at Omar. He slouched in his chair, his head resting on his hand as he leaned over the table and stared down into his glass.
“Maybe. For a while,” she said. “I don’t know. Why?”
The Aegyptian shrugged.
“Aren’t we still going to Alexandria?”
“I do need to go back,” Omar said. “Eventually. Things to do. Loose ends to tie up. Mistakes to correct. Sins to atone for.” He drank.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He looked up at her. “Wren, you’re a very impressive young woman and I imagine you will have a very remarkable life, wherever you go or whatever you do. But there’s little need for you to follow me around anymore. You don’t need a teacher. Anything you need, you’ll find in that ring or you’ll figure out for yourself.”
Wren sat very still.
He’s never been like this before. These last few days, something has changed in him. Something very deep, very important.
She cleared her throat. “I won’t ask what exactly happened to you out there. Nadira. Koschei. That’s your past, and your business, and I know it’s probably very complicated and painful, and I’m sorry about that. But I thought we were going to solve all the mysteries of the universe together, and open the gates of paradise, and meet the gods. You’ve been doing this for, well, a very long time, and I wanted to be a part of that. I still do. Don’t you?”
Omar shook his head, his eyes gazing darkly into hers. “Wren, I stumbled into your country and caused a plague that nearly wiped out an entire people, and the best cure I could invent left you all deformed for life.”
She reached up and plucked lightly at one of her tall furry ears. The sensation sent a shiver down her scalp, and she smiled. “But isn’t the point that you saved us?”
“No.” He sipped his wine. “Five hundred years ago in Rus, I made a woman and her son immortal because I thought they were good people, and would make the world a better place. And that mother went mad with grief and raised the dead from their graves, and that son became a bloodthirsty butcher. And now Nadira’s gone, too. And you don’t even want to know about Lilith.”
Wren frowned. “You may have a played a part in all these things, but you’re not responsible for other people. Koschei killed those people, not you. Yaga lost control, not you.”
“But I made them!” Omar squinted up at the stained glass window on the far wall. “I made all of them. If it weren’t for my damned pride, none of this would have happened. Not here, not in Ysland. How many people would be alive today if it weren’t for me?”
“Maybe you did make mistakes, but you didn’t engineer these things. You certainly didn’t want them to happen. Yes, you made some people immortal, to help you. Don’t you see? That was humility, not vanity or pride. You knew you needed help on this search of yours, that you needed other people to uncover new truths and build a better world,” Wren said. “Those are all good things.”
“What better world? What have I actually accomplished? In four and a half thousand years, what have I done?” He shook his head. “Science? I didn’t invent the steam engine, or electricity, or flying machines. The Mazighs did that all on their own. Exploration? The Espani discovered the New World, two entire continents! And they did it with some of the worst sailing ships in the Middle Sea, too.”
Omar rubbed his eyes as his mouth twisted downward and his voice began to break. “Art. Music. History. Engineering. Politics. Philosophy. I haven’t added one bit to even the smallest corner of human achievement, in four millennia of life. I’ve just played with things I didn’t understand, and turned decent people into murderers and self-loathing shadows of themselves. How many people are dead because of me? How much of the world has been dented, broken, stained, and ruined by me?”
Wren played with her glass, swirling the last dregs of her wine around and around. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is that I’ve known you for the last year, and I think you’re a decent man with good intentions.”
Omar said nothing.
“You discovered sun-steel. You invented immortality. I’d say that’s something.”
“I invented a new sort of torture,” he whispered. “Seductive, and insidious, and unnatural.”
Wren sighed.
What does he want from me? He’s pouting like a child. Does he want me to forgive him, or tell him what to do? Is this just guilt and regret, or something deeper? How can he possibly feel responsible for what Koschei and Yaga did five hundred years after he left them?
“So what? Do you want me to kill you with that sword of yours? Put you out of your misery? I can, if you want,” she said sharply. “It would be a waste, I think, but if that’s what you want, then it’s the least I can do for you.”
He looked at her. “You’re young. The world is still new and interesting and simple to you. It’s still so easy for you to judge, isn’t it? Good and bad, right and wrong. You don’t see all the pitfalls and traps waiting for you out there.”
“You’re right, I don’t. You want to do good? Let’s do some good,” she said, sitting up a little straighter and looking around the room. “We’re in a war-torn city. Things are broken. People are hurt. We can stay here and fix things. You know, help.”
Omar sat up a little straighter too. “You’re right, we could. And you’re right, that would help. Although, now that everyone here knows who I am, it would be hard to avoid being caught up in the world again. In politics. In the next war. And I know myself. The next problem will come along, and I’ll want to help, but somehow I’ll go a bit too far, lose sight of the dangers, and make everything worse again.”
Wren leaned back and folded her arms. “Well, you need to make a decision. You need to go somewhere and do something with yourself. Fix a house, build a road, teach someone how to fish. Something.”
He smiled sadly. “I’m a very old man, Wren, and I’m afraid I’m more than a little bit set in my ways to start over, just like that. I’ll lose interest. I’ll start making the same mistakes all over again, sooner or later.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. “Give me your sword. I’ll make it quick, I promise.”
He blinked up at her, a vague horror in his face. “No. At least, not yet. There are other things I can do. Or we can do together, if you like.”
“Like what?”
He smiled again, this time with a hint of his old playfulness. “Well, I was just thinking that we could go undo all the things I’ve done. There’s a world full of immortal people and deadly weapons and unholy trinkets out there. I think the world would be a better place without them.”
There’s the old Omar. I knew he was still in there.
Wren smiled. “And I can’t think of anyone better qualified to find them, and unmake them.”
“So you’ll come with me? Help me?”
Wren’s smile faded as she looked across the room at Tycho, who was still talking with the soldiers and clerks, reviewing reports and giving orders as the sour-faced Italian loomed over his shoulder and muttered what must have been snide remarks.
He won’t leave. This is his home. This is where he belongs. He’ll stay here and help his people, and I guess that’s the way it should be. He’s a patriot, and a hero, and I can’t ask him to leave, even if I thought he’d come along. This is where he needs to be. And that’s all right. Maybe one day, I can come back here, maybe even to stay. But not yet. There’s still so much to see, and
learn, and do.
She looked at Omar. “Yes, I will. I’ll come with you. After all, someone needs to keep an eye on you and make sure you stay on the straight and narrow. So, where will we start?”
The Aegyptian looked thoughtfully up at the stained glass portrait above them again. “I suppose we should start at beginning. Do you still want to see Alexandria?”
Wren nodded. “Absolutely.”
Epilogue: Alexandria
Wren and Omar stayed in Constantia for five weeks after the destruction of the airships and the fleets. Vlad returned from Stamballa with his younger brother in irons and after much politicking flavored with Vlachian sibling rivalry, a new treaty was signed between the Hellans and the Turks. Wren spent the days down in the streets by the waterfront, helping to mind the children while the soldiers and marines slowly rebuilt the shattered homes and shops and warehouses and docks. From time to time, someone would call her out to another neighborhood, or into the countryside, or just down to a graveyard where some poor soul was still trapped in its half-frozen corpse, and she would rattle her silver bracelets and gently set them free.
She spent her nights in Tycho’s bed.
By the time she and Omar boarded their ship to Aegyptus, both the bombed district of Constantia and the burned district of Stamballa were well on their way to being fully restored, although the beached warships remained stranded high above the water on both sides of the Strait and no one had any idea what to do with them yet.
The journey to Alexandria only took two days by Mazigh steamer, and they stepped onto the docks as the setting sun painted the Middle Sea in shining gold and the great lighthouse tower in deepest crimson. Omar led her into the dusty streets bustling with porters and merchants, wagons and carts, horses and zebras, huge lumbering sivatheras, and huffing steam carriages.
They walked down broad boulevards of pale stone buildings all hundreds of years old with the slender towers and shining domes of ancient palaces and temples in the distance. It was a city of babbling noises, voices and animals and machines all competing for attention in the markets and in the streets and alleyways. It was a city of smells, of cooking meats and rotting vegetables and burning oil and mounds of elephant dung in the middle of the road.
Wren hurried down the streets behind Omar, one hand clutching her bag and the other hand clutching her scarf to keep it in place over her ears and hair as she stared up and around at everything, trying to see and hear and smell it all at once. She was so overwhelmed by the sheer size and life and strangeness of it all that she ran straight into Omar when he stopped walking. She stepped back and looked up at the building in front of him.
At its base it was a massive stone fortress, similar to the stone houses and shops around them only much, much larger, but rising above the stone fortress was an elegant wooden temple, each level slightly smaller than the one below, until her eyes reached the tiny wooden shrine at the very top where a single bell hung in the early evening light.
“What is this place?”
“The Temple of Osiris,” Omar said. “A nest for priests and scholars, and thieves and assassins.”
“Tycho told me about the Osirians,” she said. “They’re dangerous.”
“Very,” he agreed.
“So why are we here?”
He smiled. “Didn’t I tell you? I live here.”
She stared at him. “You live here? You’re one of…? Nine hells, you created this place, didn’t you?”
“I helped,” he admitted. “But now I’m going to raze it to the ground. Care to join me?”
She grinned. “Love to.”
They approached the main doors and the row of green-robed guards protecting the entrance, but a flash of color caught Wren’s eye and she turned and nudged her blue glasses down her nose to get a better look at the two women standing in the road beside her, staring up at the temple. One of the women wore a yellow dress and carried a brown bag on her shoulder, and she gazed around at the passing foot traffic with stern, almost angry eyes. Her shorter companion wore a red robe, with a strip of red cloth tied over her eyes, and bright white flowers nestled in her long black hair, and unlike the woman in yellow she seemed to be unable to stop smiling. And on the smiling woman’s shoulder hunched a small furry creature with tiny black eyes. The women both had light brown skin and wore thread-bare sandals on their dusty feet, and they were talking in a strange language like nothing Wren had ever heard before.
She smiled at them and offered a little wave, which the blind woman didn’t notice and the serious woman didn’t acknowledge. Wren followed Omar up to the temple doors.
What a strange city. I’ve never seen anyone like those two ladies before. This is all so exciting!
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Wren the Fox Witch es-6 Page 26