Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  The music grew louder with each step and after half an hour of wandering the unfamiliar streets and hearing several more old songs, Taziri stumbled upon another grassy square, this one strung with small lanterns and filled to bursting with cheering, laughing, joyful dancers. There must have been at least three hundred bodies crammed into the square, drawn up into rows, ragged lines of singers, chanters, drummers, and strummers forming a rough ring around a dozen dancers, young men and women performing a routine Taziri did not recognize. She moved quietly among them, feeling terribly awkward though not unwelcome. Many strangers smiled at her, offered her food or drink, and encouraged her to help mark time with her hands and feet. And though she wanted to join them, more than anything she wanted to find a cluster of familiar faces, friends and relatives who would surround her and remind her that she was not as alone as she felt. But this crowd of happy strangers was almost as good. After a few minutes of wandering among them, Taziri found a quiet corner outside the throng where she could watch.

  It was a wedding, she realized suddenly as a break in the crowd revealed the bride and groom sitting with their families at one side the dancer’s ring. She smiled.

  There were several men leaning against the wall alongside her, and the fellow to her right cleared his throat. “Good evening. Are you family?”

  Taziri blinked at the bride and groom. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I was just passing through and heard the music. I didn’t mean to intrude on a private party.”

  The man smiled. “No, you’re very welcome to stay. Half the neighborhood is here.” He leaned a little closer, peering at Taziri’s clothes. “You’re a firefighter?”

  “Electrician.” She glanced down at her soot-stained orange jacket. “With the Air Corps.”

  “Ah.” The man nodded and returned his attention to the dancers.

  “What do you do?” Taziri asked the question for no particular reason, except that having a dull exchange of small talk at a party seemed like the ideal vacation from reality.

  “I keep house. Watch the children. We have five.” The man smiled and his whole body rocked slightly with the rhythm of the music.

  “Five? What’s that like, keeping house?” Taziri imagined her grizzled, leathery grandfather lecturing her on the value of work, of earning, providing, and supporting. The old man probably would have burst into flames at the suggestion of keeping house. Taziri tried to imagine her grandfather living today in any occupation, but the scenarios all ended with a small bearded man screaming at a world gone mad: What of the castes? What of order and tradition? What of a man’s duty to his family!

  “It’s the best. I send the children off to school in the morning, and then spend all day working on the house. We have a townhouse a few streets over from here. Two stories. I just finished replacing all the floors. Beautiful stuff. Next, I’m thinking about building a spare room where the garden is, and then putting a greenhouse on top of that. I’d like to get a fruit tree growing in it. Maybe oranges. I love oranges. Do you like oranges?”

  Taziri lost track of the music at the thought of her own home, one level, old creaking floors, a spotty garden in back. Yuba could do so much with our house if he wanted to. He used to talk about it, he had so many plans. But now, I can’t remember the last time he talked about the house or the future.

  “I also started making furniture last year.” The man waved at someone across the crowd as he spoke. “Listen to this. I made a table for the dining room that slides open and you can put extra planks in the middle to make the table bigger, for parties. It only takes a minute, no tools. Everyone loves it. I’m thinking about selling them as a side business.”

  A side business? Suddenly a hundred tiny ideas that Taziri had played with while flying across the continent were transformed into a hundred tiny business propositions. She could make things, she could sell them. Good things, useful things, electrical things. Just as soon as I find the time. If only Isoke didn’t have so much riding on the Halcyon, I would quit the Corps and Yuba could go back to work and I could start my own store. But even the thought of blaming Isoke made her blush with guilt and she put the whole notion away.

  “My wife says I should try it, so I suppose I will.” The man settled back against the wall again and glanced over at Taziri for only the second time. “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s the landscape architect for the university in Tingis.” Taziri beamed. “Though he’s only part-time right now, because of the baby. What does your wife do?”

  “Accountant.” The man shook his head. “It’s crazy. I went to her office once to see where she works. It was horrible. She sits at a desk, all day. Literally, sitting all day. Almost never stands up. It’s as bad as a factory, but instead of building things, she just adds numbers all day for rich people. And the only time she really talks to another person is during these meetings where everyone sits around blaming each other for mistakes while pretending to be polite about it.” He shook his head again and ran his hands over his shaved scalp. “When she comes home, well, sometimes I think she wants to strangle someone, and sometimes I think she wants to cry. That’s her job. I can’t understand why she does it, but it pays the bills.”

  Taziri nodded, not knowing what to say. The flights back and forth between Tingis and the northern cities of Numidia were countless hours of sitting at a station, rarely moving, rarely talking. But there was no arguing with Isoke, in earnest or otherwise. Isoke. She tried to remember her captain’s face, but all she could see was the flick of Hamuy’s knife, and the smoke, and the blood on the floor. She shuddered and turned her attention back to the music.

  A young woman was singing a sweet old lullaby, but it ended too soon and a strange silence seemed to emanate from the direction of the musicians as the absence of music made itself felt. Then a terrific booming began pounding and throbbing from the bass drum and Taziri pushed away from the wall, craning her neck to see them, wondering what they were doing. The entire crowd began to cheer like never before, no longer as wedding revelers but as wild youth driven mad with excitement and anticipation. They waved their fists in the air in time with the pounding bass and began shouting to the drummers.

  The drummers responded. As a man, they descended upon the taut skin heads with mallets and bare hands in an angry frenzy, a racing and deafening rhythm that Taziri had never heard before, but even as she listened she felt her own feet beginning to rock in time with the fast-paced percussions, and then her hands began to clap in time as well.

  Then the strummers leapt into the dance circle, three young men with large heavy lutes strung with gleaming wires that they struck with metal picks, creating a strange and bestial harmony like vicious hornets and stampeding wildebeests all at once. Three more strummers lingered behind them, flicking their fingers across the gleaming strings of Espani guitars. There was no real melody, only the same four chords repeated over and over, yet the crowd grew wilder and louder, calling for more, calling for the song to begin.

  A bare-chested youth stepped out from the crowd, his fist beating the air, and his audience shrieked their approval. The strummers reached the end of the fourth chord, and as they returned to the first chord the boy began to sing, but he didn’t sing. He shouted. He hollered. He yelled at the crowd and they yelled back a thousand fold.

  A man sweats blood on an eastward rail,

  And when the steel falls we hear him scream and wail,

  So now he sits and starves, and he cries and begs,

  Because he lost his legs!

  He lost his legs!

  Taziri faltered in her clapping and stomping as the words crept into her ears and their meaning snapped into focus. What sort of song was this? She had never heard it before, and yet clearly everyone else here knew it by heart, and they loved it. They loved it like rabid dogs love meat, like flies love garbage, like vultures love carrion. She saw joy and madness in the eyes around her, in the young and old, in men and women alike. She saw rage, a human firestorm surging arou
nd a few drummers and strummers, and a screaming boy.

  A man coughs blood in a miner’s shaft,

  And when the rock falls we hear his sobbing gasp,

  So now he sits and starves, that’s what fate demands,

  Because he lost his hands!

  He lost his hands!

  The crowd was a single living creature now, an organism that exhaled horror and misery and rage all at once. Taziri winced, shrinking back into the shadows, glancing around for the easiest path out, a path away from the insane creature that had emerged from this wedding banquet.

  A man weeps blood on the factory floor,

  And when the boiler bursts it makes a mighty roar,

  It cuts him to the core!

  It fills the air with gore!

  So now he lies still in his earthen bed,

  Because he lost his head!

  He lost his head!

  To the honored dead!

  The honored dead!

  Taziri slipped through the back of the crowd, discovered the dark corridor of an alley, and hastened down it, plunging into shadows where the air was a bit cooler and the gentle starlight allowed her eyes to rest from the fiery glare of the lanterns and lamps behind her. The song ended, but only for a moment, as the crowd went on stomping and chanting, the musicians began again from the top. She had to cross a half dozen streets before the sound of it finally faded into the night, leaving Taziri alone in the dark, trudging along unfamiliar roads in the general direction of Ghanima’s favorite bed-and-breakfast. Along the way, she turned the words of the song over and over in her head, wondering why lyrics she had never heard before could sound so familiar. Until she remembered.

  On her brief layovers at home, she sometimes read the papers, trying to have some sense of her own country between the long spells in the Halcyon. Among dozens of other things, she saw the tiny, almost marginal notes about recent industrial accidents. The railway. The mines. The factory. Each verse of the song had described an actual event, a man maimed or killed, in just the past few months.

  Tomorrow I’m going to find the Espani doctor, Medina. Then I’ll take Evander to Orossa. And then I’ll go home to my family. Things are bad, worse than I thought. I should be home doing something about it.

  If I had kept working on my batteries instead of hiding them in an airship, I could have made the world a safer place. Bright clear lights at night, out on the streets to keep people safe and in the factories to keep workers safe. More telegraph lines. Better clocks. Electric safety shut-off switches. So many things I could have been building all this time.

  But I didn’t. And now the pastoralists are ready to burn the country to the ground. Innocent people will die. Innocent people have already died.

  I could have stopped this.

  This is my fault.

  She stopped under a streetlight and looked around at the unfamiliar buildings, their dark windows offering only dim reflections of the cobbled road.

  I can’t just go to bed now. I need to do something. I need to fix things. I need to find that doctor. Medina.

  Slowly, Taziri turned and headed back toward the marriage celebration still roaring its strange and angry songs into the night.

  If they know so much about people getting hurt, then I’m sure someone there will know about the local doctors, especially an Espani doctor.

  Chapter 22

  There had been a brief uncomfortable moment in the bedroom as he set the bags down in the corner when Qhora had stared at him with a strange softness in her eyes. She parted her lips as if to speak, but after a brief hesitation she merely thanked him and turned away. So after depositing the cubs and other luggage, and pausing in the kitchen long enough to stuff his pockets with a few rolls, a chunk of cheese, and two apples, Lorenzo returned to the train station.

  Standing on the deserted platform, he was grateful for the quiet and the stillness. No people. No fighting. No yelling. No games. Just a broad wooden deck and little dark office, a smattering of early stars in the evening sky, and two iron rails pointing out through an old neighborhood to the vast wilderness beyond the city where two beasts from the far side of the world were slowly making their way south toward their mistress.

  A cool breeze rippled through the grassy plains and stirred the dust in the streets. He counted four blocks of small houses between himself and the end of civilization. Four cross-streets and a few hundred homes, but precious few lights and no voices. The hidalgo tugged his hat down firmly on his head and gathered his long black coat tighter around his belly, but he needn’t have bothered. It was only a lifelong habit as the night drew closer, but here in the south the night was scarcely colder than the day. At least to an Espani.

  Feeling foolish, he relaxed his shoulders and let his coat flap open as he pulled out one of his apples and began to eat. For a time, he considered walking out beyond the houses to the very edge of the plains to try to catch sight of Atoq and Wayra before they came too close to the city. No, he reasoned, this is where Qhora stepped off the train. This is where her scent will be strongest. This is where they will come.

  The sky faded from slate blue to violet to black. As the last glimmer of color vanished from the northern horizon, he thought he glimpsed a small dimple, a tiny black figure that hadn’t been there before.

  Well, either it’s them, or it isn’t.

  He tossed the gnawed core of his apple off the edge of the platform and began alternately biting off chunks of his cheese and bread. The rolls weren’t as dark or rich as the bread at home and the cheese was far less pungent, leaving the meal somewhat tasteless and hollow. The last apple beckoned from his pocket, but he refrained. His eyes had adjusted to the brightening starlight and now he was certain he could see something in the distance, a hard black shape far out on the train tracks, still small but distinct in the silvery sea of grass that rippled and shivered in the rising wind.

  It was a train. He heard it huffing and clacking before he could see the trail of steam above it. Maybe ten minutes away now. Did they send someone to get the other engine from the crash site? He glanced around the empty platform again. If they did send someone out there, they sure forgot to leave anyone here to meet them. No. What if it’s the woman in white?

  Lorenzo rested his left hand on the pommel of his espada. I only cut her hand. I didn’t mean to hurt her much, but maybe I should have hurt her a little bit more. Enough to scare her away. He took his hand off his sword. No. No more blood today.

  When the train rolled slowly into the station, the trail of steam from the funnel had already been reduced to a few pale wisps in the night air. The wheels hardly squeaked as the brakes were applied and the locomotive halted at the edge of the platform. It was too dark to see much of the boiler but the twisted and broken outline of the cab was distinctive enough. Lorenzo strolled down to meet it, but stopped well away from it. “Hello?”

  The woman in white stepped out of the crushed and mangled remains of the cab. In the half light, he couldn’t make out the details of her face, only the pale gleam on her nose and cheeks, and the white bandage wrapped tightly around her left hand. She gave him a long, tired look before shrugging and saying, “You again.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She held up her bandaged hand. “You’re better than Salvator Fabris.”

  He blushed and was grateful for the darkness. “I doubt that.”

  “He could never cut me.”

  “You were lovers. I doubt he wanted to.” Lorenzo exhaled slowly, praying for a visible trace of his breath, but his prayer went unanswered. It was too warm. Still, he touched the medallion beneath his shirt and tried to imagine what a kind and saintly person would say to this woman. “Why did you attack us?”

  “For the money.”

  “Our money? Whose money?”

  She shook her head. “No names. I still have my knives, Espani.”

  “And I have my sword. We both have things. How nice for us.” He gestured down the platform, inviting
her to walk with him. “Your name is Shifrah, yes? I’m Lorenzo.”

  She stared at him and then at the platform. Slipping her hands into her pockets, she began walking slowly parallel to him, never closer than three yards. “Why are you guarding that savage girl, Lorenzo? For her gold?”

  A flicker of anger in him wanted to slap her. But only a flicker. “In her country, she is a princess. And no, she has nothing but her cloak, her animals, and her name,” he said. “She had one other friend, but you killed him today.”

  “I did indeed. Will you kill me for that?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He really didn’t know and that question loomed large in his mind, not only for his bodily safety but that of his soul as well. “Do you believe in God?”

  Shifrah laughed. “Whose god? Yours? The one with the happy little family that came down from heaven to learn what it means to be human?”

  “God comes to different people in different guises. You’re a Persian, aren’t you?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I’m a Samaritan.”

  “I see.” He frowned. Her answer only raised more questions. The Samaritan sect was tiny, a footnote in the Espani holy text about a group of people claiming to have the only true Word of God hidden away on their sacred mountain and lording it over the Judeans, Syrians, Babylonians, and anyone else who claimed to worship the one God by any name, be it El, Adonai, or Ahura Mazda. Whatever their claims, he knew the Samaritans only to be scholars, not warriors. “I’m sure the path that brought you to this place was a hard one.”

  “No harder than most.”

  “I didn’t mean the road from Persia to Marrakesh.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Could she be a holy scholar as well as a killer? He swallowed. Why not? Aren’t I?

  “You’re a mercenary? An assassin? That seems a hard road. I’ve killed quite a few people myself. Some were in duels. Most were in war,” Lorenzo said. “But I haven’t killed anyone since I returned from the New World. I vowed not to, though I haven’t told anyone of my vow yet. I’ve even faked killing for the sake of my lady. For her peace of mind.”