Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Taziri swallowed her dry throat and tried to imagine freezing from the inside out. It sounded heavenly.

  Cold, cold, cold. Gooseflesh. Shivering. Wind.

  A warm breeze ran through her hair, but she couldn’t muster a single goosepimple.

  Crunching through the snow. Crunching…on gravel? Footsteps? Footsteps on the gravel! Someone’s here!

  Taziri opened her eyes and the glare on the pale stones seared her vision. Squinting, she struggled up to her feet just as the little girl from yesterday stepped into view at the far end of the Halcyon. She had a clay pitcher in her hand. “Tishna?”

  The pilot stood very still for a moment, listening. No one else was coming. She gestured for the girl to come closer, and when she offered the pitcher Taziri took it in shaking hands and gulped down the cool water as fast as she could, spilling a little down the sides of her face.

  With half the pitcher’s contents in her belly, Taziri stopped drinking to wipe her face and smile at the girl, who smiled back. “Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank. You. Wait, is it mamnoon? Whatever, you get the idea.”

  “Khahesh mikonam.” The girl giggled and let loose a soft babble of Aegyptian or Eranian or whatever she spoke.

  Taziri heaved a contented sigh and glanced down at herself. Her shoulders, arms, and stomach were all bare, and only the stiff cotton stay around her chest covered her breasts.

  And I’m still not wearing a shirt. That’s not a good idea in this country.

  The girl tapped on the side of the Halcyon and said, “Basirat andarun?”

  “What?” Taziri glanced at the machine. “You want to look inside again?”

  She nodded.

  Taziri shrugged. “Probably safer than standing around out here.” She led the girl back to the hatch and inside where she hoped the cabin might have cooled off a bit from the open windows and hatches. It hadn’t.

  They sat down together on the old tarp on the floor and shared the rest of the water. The girl spent every moment staring all around her at the walls, the seats, and the controls. She even leaned down to run her fingers over the rivets in the floor.

  “You like machines? Want to be an engineer one day?” Taziri said. “Well, keep up your mathematics and you too could have an exciting career in flying strange people to dangerous countries in the middle of the night.” She smiled at herself, but then her smile faded. “Do you go to school? Can you read?” She grabbed her little notebook of preflight checks and pointed at her crooked scrawl. “Can you read?”

  The girl shook her head.

  Damn. It’s one of those countries. She pointed to herself. “My name’s Taziri. Ta-zi-ri.”

  The girl nodded. “Hasina.”

  “Nice to meet you, Hasina.” Taziri waved to the cockpit. “Go ahead, take a look.”

  Hasina leapt up with a beaming smile and jumped into the pilot’s seat. She gently touched and caressed and petted the dials and buttons and switches and gauges.

  Taziri sat on the floor behind her, watching. Poor thing.

  Soon Hasina was babbling in Eranian again, asking questions about everything as she pointed from one console to another. Taziri stood up and leaned over her shoulder, naming each object in turn. “Throttle. Altimeter. Wind speed. Compass. Fuel. Oil. Temperature.”

  She has no idea what I’m saying. She’s twice Menna’s age, but Menna can already read better than this girl ever will.

  Thoughts of Menna and home took her back to Yuba puttering around the house, designing parks and fountains and gardens for his clients. Yuba in the kitchen. Yuba in the yard. Yuba, alive and well.

  How can Qhora just walk around, fly across the world, and stalk some stranger from city to city with her husband not even buried, not even cold? I’d be in pieces. I’d be lying in bed, crying my eyes out, squeezing Menna until the poor little thing couldn’t breathe. I’d be useless.

  But not her. She dealt with the police, went around the city looking for a way to chase down the assassin, even tracked me down, even agreed to work alongside Salvator Fabris, to Carthage, to Alexandria. She’s running. She’s fighting. She left her baby two thousand miles behind in the arms of a teenage boy.

  I can’t imagine what’s going through her head.

  Hasina leaned back, still grinning but no longer babbling and pointing. She smiled up at Taziri, and Taziri smiled back down at her.

  “Listen, Hasina, you can’t come back here again.” Taziri tried to make meaningful gestures with her hands. “It’s dangerous. Someone might follow you. Follow? And find me. They could find me. Danger?” She sighed and picked up the empty water pitcher. “Look, thank you for the water. Thank you. But no more. Understand? No more. Don’t come back again. It’s dangerous. For you and for me, I’m guessing.” She pushed the pitcher into the girl’s hands.

  Hasina frowned down at the pitcher and then up at Taziri.

  The Mazigh woman withered a bit at the big sad eyes in the thin, drawn face. Then she glanced up at her little tool racks and netting and overhead compartments.

  Something I don’t need, something that won’t get her into too much trouble…here.

  “You can have this.” She held up the tiny compass. It was a bit dented and a bit rusty and a bit dirty and a bit faded, but it worked just fine. She turned it back and forth to let the girl see how the needle always swung back to north. “North. And that’s east, sunrise. And, well, you’ll figure out. Here.”

  Hasina took the compass and held it cupped in both hands as though it might break at the slightest breath of air.

  “You need to hide it.” Taziri took the compass and tried to slip it inside the girl’s sleeve, and then tried to poke around the front of her robe-like dress.

  Hasina nodded emphatically and took the compass and magicked it away into some hidden pocket. “Nihani?”

  “Right, nihani.” Taziri nodded. Whatever that means. “Big nihani. All right, you need to go, and remember, don’t come back. Please.” She gestured emphatically as many ways as she could invent to say no. “No come back here. Okay?”

  The girl leapt up to hug Taziri, and the woman felt a horrible pit open up in her belly, as though she was sending this girl away to some terrible fate, some terrible life.

  She’ll be fine. She will. It’s just different here, not worse. So what if she never goes to school? She’ll have friends, and a husband, and beautiful babies, and a life full of laughter and wonderful things. Probably.

  Taziri extracted herself from the girl’s embrace and saw her safely out of the hatch and watched her scamper away across the rail yard. Then she sat down in the sweltering darkness of the cabin again on her dirty old tarp and noticed the little knotted laces of her stay were plastered to her belly with sweat. Her shirt was still lying on the floor.

  I really should have put that back on at some point.

  Chapter 14

  The Italian stood in front of the building, checking the address against the information he’d wrung from the green-clad thug. The man had been most cooperative with a rapier against his throat, and even more cooperative with a rapier between his legs. The man identified himself as a Son of Osiris, and a resident of the Temple of Osiris, and several other things that the Italian hadn’t quite understood with his imperfect grasp of the Eranian language, but the address was really all he wanted anyway.

  Salvator had been fairly confident that the information was genuine, which was why he had dumped the man’s body in a barrel in an alley and gone in search of the building himself without going back for Qhora and the others. After all, the grieving widow and deformed mountain girl were hardly experts in intelligence, espionage, and assassination.

  And that white mask and that damned bird following them about. My God, it’s like they wanted to be noticed!

  But as he stood in the street considering the building in front of him, a flicker of doubt ran through the back of his mind.

  The Sons of Osiris. Sounds like a cult to me. But if this is their temple, then th
ey’re not as subtle as the average cultists.

  Across the avenue and rising story upon story above the other structures to either side loomed the unearthly mass of the Temple of Osiris. Salvator counted five levels of stone-cut windows before the roof erupted into a carefully designed wooden mountain, ten more levels, each slightly smaller than the one below, and each with an elegantly curving roof like nothing he had ever seen before. He saw no buttresses, no gargoyles, no statuary, no decoration that he had come to expect on religious buildings like the cathedrals of Rome, Constantia, and Tartessos. This temple, this palace of ancient golden stone and red-stained wood, this monument to a bygone age in which legions of slaves died for decades to build impossible things, had no equal in the northern world.

  Salvator studied the entrance, a wide stair of short but deep steps rising above the street to a landing where twenty men in green stood before a series of double-doors. Each of the men wore a sword and a single-shot pistol, and each of the men was resting his right hand on the butt of his gun. Salvator pouted thoughtfully.

  This is going to be tricky.

  A moment later, a group of men approached the front of the temple bearing several large crates. They climbed the steps near the right-most doors.

  Aha! Deliveries. This just got easier.

  The guards stopped the porters and opened each crate, rifled through them in detail while holding their drawn pistols by their sides. It took a full quarter hour to get the six crates inside.

  Maybe not.

  Salvator made a slow circuit of the building looking for other doors, for open windows, for raised walkways, and even for sewers that ran close to the foundation. There were none. And after an hour of walking up and down the street outside watching for other people coming out or going in, he arrived at a solution. He grimaced.

  It took a little while to find the right alley, and but then only a moment to find the right barrel. With no one around to watch, he pulled the body out and removed the man’s green clothes. The corpse was a bit too short and a bit too heavy, but Salvator had years of experience contorting his body to the needs of the moment. With a bit of slumping and hunching, he made the clothes look appropriate. He hooked the Aegyptian’s short sword of common steel on his belt and carried his own rapier in his hand.

  Back in front of the Temple of Osiris, his stolen clothes were not giving him much confidence, despite the scarf to hide his lower face. The smell of death, feces, and fish wafted up from his collar. Inspiration emerged from the stench. Doubled over and limping, he climbed the stairs along the left-hand side and just as he reached the row of guards, he slipped his hand up under his cloak and scarf and put his finger in his throat.

  I swore I would never do this again.

  Drenched in vomit, he stumbled into the first guard. The man swore, grabbed Salvator by the neck, and shoved him through the door being held open by a second guard.

  Throwing me inside? How stupid are these people?

  Hearing the door slam shut behind him, Salvator spat the last of his breakfast on the floor and straightened up to sound of multiple pistols being cocked.

  Ah. They kill people inside where there are no witnesses. Rather smart, actually.

  There was one man to his immediate left pointing a gun at Salvator’s head while three more men strode forward on the right with guns raised.

  I hate guns.

  Quick as lightning, Salvator slapped the nearest man’s hand forward so the gun pointed past his face at the other guards. The gun discharged, throwing a cloud of gun smoke in the Italian’s eyes. The bullet struck the first of the approaching men square in the chest.

  One.

  Salvator whirled around the startled shooter as the other two men opened fire and the Italian both heard and felt the two bullets slam into the body of the guard he was using as shield. The vibrations shook his backside as the guard gasped and fell to his knees.

  Two.

  He saw a small black door right in front of him. Salvator lurched forward just as his shield fell prone and he kicked in the narrow wooden door and raced into the dark room beyond. A bit of light from the hall followed him inside to reveal his surroundings.

  Hm. The evil cultist coat check room.

  Salvator hurled away his soiled scarf and cloak and drew his rapier as the narrow door crashed open again to reveal two men in green. They held swords, not pistols. The Italian smiled.

  A moment later both guards lay dead in a neat pile in the corner with their throats cut and the blood pooling into a balled up woolen overcoat.

  Three and four.

  A quick glance outside showed no one else coming to investigate. The outer hall, a narrow space between the outer doors and the inner doors, was empty. Except for the two shooting victims, of course.

  With time to breathe, Salvator stood in the coat room stripping off his ill-fitting disguise and piecing together something a bit more appropriate from his two new clothing donors and the assorted garments piled on the boxes, and in the chests, and on the racks all around him. The dust and cobwebs spoke silent volumes.

  He took the guards’ belts of small knives and vials, but left their short blades and guns in favor of his own rapier. Longing for a mouthful of wine and a bit of garlic bread, Salvator stepped briskly out into the hall and grasped the handle of the left-most door leading to the inner chambers of the temple. The handle turned and the room beyond, which was actually another hallway, was empty.

  I’m in.

  Salvator strode down the corridor, his shoes tapping lightly on the bare stone floor. The narrow windows on his left were barred with iron and only let a few painfully thin blades of sunlight inside. The hall terminated at two doors and a spiraling iron stair that vanished up into a dusty haze and down into utter darkness.

  Information or weapons? Or both? Yes, both. Up it is.

  He climbed quickly, dashing up two stairs at a time on the balls of his feet, pausing only slightly at each landing to poke his head up and check for guards before running up and up again. There were signs of life everywhere. Voices echoed in the distance. Doors creaked open and slammed shut. Swords clashed. Torches burned. Candles burned. Footsteps echoed. But at each new level, Salvator always found his stairwell abandoned and ignored. Once he caught someone disappearing behind a door, but no one caught him.

  No one ever catches me.

  After three flights his legs were burning and after five he was slowing quite a bit. Here the ancient stone fortress transitioned to the polished wooden temple, a much younger and airier place. The inner walls appeared to be a thin white fabric, almost like paper, which allowed a small amount of light and shadow to come through.

  At the seventh floor, he stepped away from the stair and leaned against the wall to stretch. There was an old Persian carpet on the floor and a series of faded tapestries hanging along the corridor wall. He considered the two closed doors beside him at the end of the hall.

  The left door opened on a primitive water closet, a bare wooden seat that exhaled a foul wet odor.

  Lovely, I’ve been climbing up the stairs alongside the cultist shithouse.

  The right door opened on what appeared to be a small class room. Rows of benches and chairs faced a tall blackboard with many faded and poorly erased markings on it. Salvator paced inside to squint at the markings in the dark. They meant nothing to him.

  A voice in the hall drew him to the door and he peeked out to see two men standing together at the far end of the corridor speaking in low voices. When their conversation ended, one of the men turned away but the other turned toward Salvator’s end of the hall and strode purposefully along. Salvator drew his rapier and waited.

  The figure of the man swept past the classroom door and the Italian heard another door creak open and slam shut, and then he heard the man wriggling out of his clothing.

  Well, these people do eat a lot of hummus.

  The Italian darted across the hall and clambered up the iron stairs one more floor before he c
ountered a heavy iron lid bolted across his path, barring him from the ninth floor.

  Aha! Finally. Locks. Locks mean something to protect, and that means something worth taking.

  He fished a pair of steel needles from his pocket and deftly picked the lock with a few careful gestures and choice expletives as bits of rust fell down in his face. With the lock open, he listened carefully for sounds of life above, and hearing none, he pushed the lid up and climbed out onto the ninth floor.

  The stair ended. He stepped out of the stairwell not into another hallway but into a massive chamber that seemed to span the entire width of the building, a vast space interrupted only by a few ironwood pillars no doubt needed to support the other six or so levels of the temple above.

  The wooden floor here was badly scuffed and scraped and scratched. Salvator trod carefully across the room, peering down at the marked wood.

  A training room. But shouldn’t something like this be on a lower level? If you filled this room with men all lunging and stomping around, you’d have someone crashing through the floor sooner or later.

  Most of the marks on the floor were pale brown or even white with flecks of dust around them. But some marks were black. He knelt to scratch at one of the black marks and found the wood charred and brittle.

  Practicing with burning swords in a wooden room? Sounds almost suicidal. Unless that’s the point of the lesson. Hm. Seems like everything about these cultists looks stupid on the surface until you see the face behind the mask.

  There were large doors at either end of the room and he guessed the ones toward the front of the temple would lead to the main stairs for whatever poor souls were forced to trudge up here to train with their fiery seireiken blades.

  Which leaves the rear door.

  With his ear pressed to the rear door, Salvator heard new sounds of life. A creaking floorboard. The scuff of a shoe. The flap of paper. A cough.

  Perfect.

  Salvator swung the door open and strode inside with his right hand ready on his sword. The room was only a fraction the size of the practice room, and it was a jumble of furnishings and equipment for a jumble of purposes. Directly in front him were racks of wooden and steel staves and practice swords, and knives, maces, boomerangs, chakrum, flails, crossbows, and ornate rifles that might have been old Espani blunderbusses.