Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Taziri hurled him down and planted her boot on the man’s neck. Then she looked over at the woman crouched against the far wall, staring at them. “Are you all right? Can you stand up? Say something, please. What’s your name?”

  For a moment, the woman just stared at her. Then her lip shuddered and she said, “Oni.”

  “Oni.” Taziri took a moment to breathe, to think. But she couldn’t think, all she could do was feel, and each passing moment filled her with the desire to reach down and smash the man’s skull open with his own brick. “Oni, come here.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s all right. He can’t hurt you anymore. Come here.”

  “Why?” She stood up, arms wrapped tightly around her body.

  “You know him?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  She swallowed. “No, not yet. Not really.”

  Taziri didn’t know whether to believe her. “You’re sure?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “All right then, let’s just get you home.” She took her boot off the man’s neck and gently herded the woman back to the end of the alleyway. Oni jerked out of her hands, but did not try to move away. She just stood there, staring over Taziri’s shoulder, her face strangely calm.

  Feeling nothing but cold and uncertain, Taziri glanced back just long enough to be sure the man was still breathing. Then she moved in front of the woman. “Oni? Oni, look at me. It’s over. All right? Come on, I’ll walk you home, let’s go.” Taziri escorted the woman out into the street and then followed her two blocks to her house. They walked in silence and Oni stayed at arm’s length beside her, where she could see her. Taziri wondered if she should say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that felt helpful. So she watched Oni go inside and shut the door, and she hurried away, her mind racing.

  I’m sleeping. I’m asleep. This is a dream. A nightmare. This can’t be Marrakesh. This can’t be the country Grandfather fought for, that Mother worked for, that I live in. This can’t be real.

  The engineer sniffed the air and smelled City: people, machines, exhaust, food, animals, and a thousand other things. It almost smelled like home, like a great mass of living things and dying things and things that were neither, all resting beneath the stars, huddled in a great heap of brick and wood and iron. The walk home back to the inn was too long, but she didn’t remember any of it. She padded back to bed and lay on top of the sheets, imagining her husband’s arm across her belly, and her daughter’s voice babbling from her crib in the corner as she stubbornly refused to go to sleep. Instead, she heard the faint, distant echoes of young people shouting and glass breaking, and her dreams were plagued with fire and blood.

  Chapter 29

  The detective awoke with a groan and a hacking cough that filled her head with dizzy little pains that chased one another around her skull. Her chest and stomach and arms and legs all ached as well, and none were eager to move. The cold stones of the floor stung her bare hands and a wooden thumping beat on her ears.

  Thumping.

  She opened her eyes and saw the exposed planks of the basement ceiling in the failing light of the lamp still sputtering in the corner. Shadows moved beyond those planks, thin bits of darkness barely seen through the gaps and cracks in the floorboards. Kella sat up slowly, one hand pressed against her head, eyes blinking hard and long to clear her vision. She saw Jedira lying by the cellar door. The blood spattered across her body lay heavy and stiff on her clothing.

  How much time have I lost? Who is that upstairs?

  The detective stood up, still moving only as fast as her battered flesh would allow. The people walking around the house overhead were talking about something. Names. Addresses. She thought she recognized one of the voices as an officer from the police station. Wincing, she pulled off her blood-hardened jacket and trousers and threw them back into a dark corner, and then pawed through two boxes of old clothes to find replacements. The new pants and shirt hung large and loose on her, but she lashed them tight to her waist with a belt, took a deep breath, and pounded up the stairs just as one of the officers placed a boot on the top step.

  “You’ll need a light and you may want a mask.” She patted the young man on the shoulder as she passed him. “It’s not pretty down there.”

  “Detective Massi?” He froze, his eyebrows contorting into an expression of extreme confusion.

  “Yeah, I got a tip that someone was looking for this girl. Someone slipped a note under my door, knocked until I woke up, and then ran off. You?”

  “Uh, the same, sort of. Well, a tip, I mean. At the station. An old man saw a fight in the street outside here, and came all the way down to complain about the noise.”

  “Well, it looks like we were all a bit late getting here. I found Usem in the street. Knife work, and lots of it. Is this your first murder scene?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “Hell of a way to spend the day, kid. Sure you’re up to it?”

  He nodded again.

  “Good man. All right, well, get everyone down here. It’s going to be a long day. I’m going to go rattle some cages and see if I can shake loose some answers. I’ll come by later this morning to see what you’ve found.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Uh, ma’am?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just, your clothes?”

  “This?” Kella gave herself a bored glance. “I don’t sleep in uniform, and I don’t change before going to stop a killer. Priorities, officer.”

  “Right. Yes, ma’am.” He nodded curtly and turned his attention to the basement.

  Kella strode back down the hall and out the front door without seeing the other officers, and then she moved as quickly as she could down the street without running. With many roads and rows of houses and shops behind her, Kella slowed to a walk with her hands shoved deep in the cavernous pockets of her borrowed trousers.

  How long before someone puts the pieces together and comes up with me as the killer? Hours? Minutes? Should I have stayed back there and taken my chances with the flatfoots? No, there’ll be time for the question-and-answer game later.

  The detective took a deep breath and peered up at the shop signs around her. Books, paintings, flowers. All sorts of pretty things for sale. Kella frowned, then turned and hurried up the road. Half a dozen turns later she was wrestling with the old lock at her own apartment. Inside, she cast aside the oversized clothes and scrubbed the flecks of dried blood from her face and hands over a sink full of cold water.

  What’s the plan, detective? If you don’t get that Samaritan woman in irons soon, they’ll have you in a cell and what’s left of your career on a pyre.

  She dressed in bland grays and browns, and pulled her mother’s old duster on over it all. Into the coat’s inner pockets she shoved fistfuls of fruit, rolls, and nuts from the little bowl on her coffee table. In the back room, she knelt beside her bed, reached underneath the thin metal frame, and yanked an old box from between the squeaking bedsprings. She stared down at the brass knuckles, knives of all sizes and shapes for all manners of work, caltrops for unfriendly feet, a little box full of tools for opening locked things, and several small vials of white powder. After a moment’s hesitation, everything was pawed up and shoved into the duster’s pockets, inside and out, all but the bottles, which she poured into the sink.

  No one needs to find those.

  Back out on the street, she smelled a strange emptiness in the cold and the dark. It was no longer late in the night but early in the morning. No last traces of suppers or parties lingered in the air, no distant voices echoed in faraway alleys or squares. The faint menace of the darkness itself was gone, as though even the killers and demons had at last gone to sleep, leaving the city streets truly and utterly empty but for the cold and the shadows to await the coming dawn. Kella knew better. She wrapped her cold fingers around the deadly things in her pockets and hurried away. By the time she reached her destination, the ach
es and stiffness from lying on the basement floor had faded.

  Well, she thought, if I can’t catch one criminal, at least I can get some evidence against another one.

  The back door of the prosthetics shop appeared undisturbed, though she heard the distant huffing of an engine. Kella knelt at the lock with her little box of tools and began picking away with a pair of bent needles. The tumblers inside the lock clicked up into position one by one and the door swung open. Inside, she found the room of metal arms and legs piled in boxes and on shelves, and the detective wound her way silently around them to the far side of the room and the door to the main corridor. From there she crept, slower with each step, down the stairs and down the hall toward the door to the lab, but long before she reached it she heard voices, many voices, arguing in sharp and angry tones, somewhere just around the corner. Kella backtracked toward the bottom of the stairs and found a closet. She slipped inside behind the leather curtain and tried not to breathe.

  After a few minutes, she counted three distinct voices but also guessed at least two other people coughing, sneezing, and shuffling their feet. Two of the speakers were clearly Lady Sade and the Samaritan. While they argued at length about the terms of a certain contract and the precise definitions of certain words, most prominently dead, the others seemed to be hard at work moving heavy metal objects. Kella heard the hollow and metallic ringing when the objects banged into each other. The cages?

  The detective strained to hear more clearly. People were moving, cages were thumping, animals were grunting and huffing, people were talking, and it was all muffled by the thick rock and iron-bound wood panels of the walls and floors of the basement.

  Seconds ticked by and still the muffled noises continued. The argument in the hallway grew softer and finally fell apart with the sounds of laughter. Several people laughing together, some more genuinely than others. And they were closer now, no longer around the corner but just a few yards from the closet, coming closer to the stairs. Kella squeezed her face up to a tiny crack along the edge of the door and doorframe, straining to see the people in the hall.

  The tall blur might have been Sade and the pale blur might have been the Samaritan. When the two speakers and their companions came to the base of the stairs, Kella could only see the wrinkled black trim of someone’s coat and the corner of a scuffed shoe, but she could hear them clearly.

  “…the timer for twenty minutes. Soon this whole building will be one large insurance claim. And I don’t care what Barika told you,” Lady Sade said. “She is no longer in a position to give you instructions.”

  “Because she wanted them dead?” asked the Samaritan.

  “And I want them alive. I’m taking the girl to see the queen tomorrow. I had wanted you with me as well, but obviously that’s out of the question now that they’ve seen your face.” Sade sighed. “And where is Barika?”

  “I don’t know. The telegram came from Port Chellah late last night.”

  “Chellah? Who does she know in Chellah? I swear, if she ever shows her face here I will kill her myself. Sometimes I think she is trying to destroy me.”

  “I got the impression she thought she was helping you by getting rid of the princess and her little entourage. She said the replacements would ruin everything, whatever that means.”

  “She’s an incompetent cow,” said Sade. “Who cares if Valero sends a cat instead of an armadillo? Only Barika would panic at something so trivial. You’re the only one who hasn’t completely ruined this entire endeavor. The medical technicians are all dead. Medina will be on her way back to España later today. I will make sure that Merin is released before noon, and then I want him dead as soon as he is away from the police station. And while you’re there, take a quick look through the cells to make sure no one else on my payroll is in there, and if they are, get them out. Is that clear, Shifrah?”

  “Yes.” The Samaritan sounded annoyed.

  Kella mouthed name to herself: Shifrah.

  “Good. We’ll be leaving on the evening train. You’ll arrive at the station alone and you won’t speak to us. Be prepared to submit to a thorough search of your person. The transit authority is up in arms over this mess in Tingis and every agent in the country is looking to make her next promotion by catching a terrorist on a boat, train, or airship. No knives.”

  “Understood.”

  “You’ll have to ride in the back of the train where the little princess and her diestro won’t see you. Once we’re underway…” The voices faded into vague noise as the stairs creaked on their slow climb back up to the ground floor.

  Kella crouched against the curtain, straining to hear, squinting at the edges of the leather flap, but she caught nothing else that made sense. Settling back on her rear, she rested her head against a dirty wooden shelf and waited. A door upstairs banged. A distant mechanical puttering and hissing reverberated through the walls and the detective tried to guess how large the steam carriage was to be making so much noise that could penetrate so far underground.

  At that same moment, the hall filled with the sounds of shuffling feet, male grunting, and the occasional thud of something large and heavy bumping against a wall. From her position at the crack in the closet curtain, Kella watched two shadowy figures struggle down the hall toward her, each carrying a cage or crate, the last one staggering more than the others. The stairs creaked and groaned again as they bore their loads upwards and a moment later the door banged again. The mechanical rhythms of the carriage continued to rumble down into the building, but then the cycling of the engine quickened and the noises swiftly faded away until the building was left in perfect silence. Kella counted to a hundred, just to be sure, and then stepped out into the hall.

  Hearing nothing above her, she dashed around the corner and back to the laboratory door. It stood ajar, though only a little, and an eye-watering stench wafted out from the dark chamber. With one hand over her nose and mouth, she shouldered the heavy door open and entered. Yesterday, the cages and machines had been neatly arranged along the walls, half-hidden in the shadows, but now everything was scattered across the floor. Hulking machines and blocky little trolleys and heavy tables filled the space, but that was all. There was nothing small or lightweight left in the room, no lamps or chairs, no tools. The cages stood in disarray, some on their sides or leaning against the back wall. The animals lay still inside them.

  The table in the center of the room was bare but it glistened with watery smears and specks of dried blood. Kella only glanced at it as she crossed the room to the stone slab projecting from the wall, upon which lay the body of a once beautiful serval, the great cat’s gold and black coat now dull, matted, and clotted with dirt and blood. It stared at her through clouded eyes. A thick black gash ran across its throat, almost from ear to ear, so that its head tilted back unnaturally far. At her feet, the detective saw the blood still dripping off the slab onto the floor. The bilious stench of fresh blood and scat stung her nose.

  Kella studied the body, or what was left of it. The front legs were strapped to the slab, but the left paw had been removed at the wrist and the wound sewed shut with great care and precision. The right rear leg below the knee was similarly missing, though the remains of the leg were firmly tied down. Hints of metal glinted in the thin light coming through the open doorway. A copper disc embedded in the thigh, a strip of aluminum in the foreleg, a spidery tangle of wire across the chest muscles like worms beneath the skin. But the strangest and largest of them was the cylinder in the serval’s belly. It was nearly as wide as the body itself, and the flesh bulged around the sides to accommodate the intrusion. The top of the metal cylinder had a seam running straight down the middle, and Kella probed this seam with a hesitant finger. She set her nail in the gap and tugged. One half of the lid tilted up toward her, and the detective edged sideways and leaned closer to look inside.

  It was empty. It was a metal drum, as wide and deep as the cat’s body, empty and dry, like a brass hat box thrust inside the animal.r />
  Kella closed the lid and noticed the border of the serval’s pale skin against the bright metal. Some of its flesh had rippled into pink and white scars, and some had blistered into angry red infections, and some places were black and stank of pus.

  It lived through this. It lived with this thing inside it for days, maybe even weeks.

  She stepped back from the slab, still staring at the amalgam of flesh and machinery dripping thick blood on the floor. A dead wolf with glass lenses screwed into its skull. A dead bear cub with mechanical forelegs. The head of a dead hartebeest riddled with rubber tubes and hoses. A pair of dead flying foxes with wooden wheels mounted where their wings should have been. The sheer volume of it, the countless glassy eyes, the still bodies, the grotesque poses, the bizarre machinery, it all numbed her. She had seen nearly a hundred crime scenes, at least three hundred corpses, but they had not prepared her for this.

  At least they’re dead now. It’s over now.

  There was something else in the corner, something round and irregular, and not in a cage. She crept closer and saw it was the dead body of a strange creature. The huge shell on its back reminded her of a tortoise, but it had the head of a dog and a tail like an iron mace. Whatever it was, it lay in a pool of fresh blood seeping from a deep cut under its jaw. She backed away without touching it and turned to leave.

  The Samaritan stood in the doorway watching her. The woman in white leaned against the door frame, her features completely lost in shadow as the lamp in the wall behind her cast a vague nimbus through her dark hair. She held a jug in her bandaged hand.