Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Agreed.” Qhora gestured across the room.

  The woman led the way to a rear stair and they climbed to the second floor. They entered a small room on the right and the woman said, “Wait here. They’re just next door. When she leaves to use the powder room, I’ll knock twice on the door here. Wait a moment for me to leave, and then do your business. Be quick and be quiet, and then leave the way you came in.”

  Qhora nodded and the woman left.

  They stood together in the dark, she and Mirari and Tycho. After a moment she drew her knife and took a deep breath.

  Now. This is the moment. In a few seconds I’ll go in there. He’ll be lying in bed, unsuspecting. Just like we were. I’ll burst in on him, just like he did. I’ll kill him quickly, before he can even speak. And then I’ll take the sword. I have to remember the sword.

  Two soft knocks fell on the door outside and Qhora held her breath as she listened to the footsteps trailing away down the hall.

  Now.

  “I don’t like it, my lady.” Mirari stepped closer to the door. She spoke so softly Qhora could barely hear her. “It was too easy.”

  “Sometimes life gives you exactly what you want when you want it,” Qhora said. “It’s best not to question fate.”

  “But to meet exactly the right person at exactly the right time?”

  Qhora paused with her hand on the door knob. “This is a city of liars and killers. It was only a matter of time before we met someone who wanted to kill the same person that we do. Be grateful. And be quiet.”

  Qhora turned the knob and silently opened the door. As the gap widened to reveal the hall, she caught a glimpse of the man outside and the gun in his hand. “No!” She slammed the door as the gun barked once, twice, three times. The bullets thumped against the heavy door but did not break through. Then a heavy boot kicked the door so hard the jamb cracked.

  Mirari and Tycho threw themselves against the door beside her, and Qhora found herself face to face with the masked woman. “Don’t say it.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, my lady.”

  Qhora glanced over her shoulder at the room. It was furnished only with a small bed meant for a single person, a small writing table, and a thin-legged chair. Through the glass of the window she could see the lights of some distant quarter of the city. “The window?”

  Mirari nodded and raced across the room. She shoved the window open and looked down. “A sheer drop to the street. But we can try to jump to the roof of the next building. It’s close. Sort of.”

  Qhora shared a look with Tycho that told her the small man was even less enthusiastic about the idea than she was. “Fine. You go first!”

  As the heavy boot crashed against the door again and the jamb cracked apart a bit more, Mirari climbed out the window and vanished from view. A moment later her voice echoed up from the darkness, “It’s safe! Hurry!”

  “Go!” Qhora yelled.

  Tycho nodded and dashed to the window, catching the flimsy chair as he ran and he used it to climb out onto the sill. And then he vanished.

  The boot smashed into the door a third time and the jamb splintered apart, swinging the door inward a few inches before Qhora could shove it back closed. And then she ran for the window, partly climbing and partly diving to shove her body outside onto a very narrow ledge. The door crashed open and the gun fired again. With a sudden stinging plume of burning pain in her arm, Qhora leapt away from the ledge toward Mirari’s outstretched arms. The alley between the two buildings was very narrow, so narrow that only one or two people might squeeze down it at the street level. Qhora sailed across the gap easily but in the darkness she couldn’t tell the exact moment when she would land on the roof and her feet struck down an instant before she was ready.

  She crashed drunkenly into Mirari and the two women fell, nearly knocking down Tycho as they toppled over. Before Qhora could lift herself to all fours, Mirari had surged up beneath her, half carrying her away across the roof top with the Hellan running close behind. Over the far side of the roof they saw a pile of trash in the next alley. “Here, my lady. I’ll go down first.” The masked woman slipped over the side and lowered herself as far as her arms would reach and then dropped to the top of the trash heap. “It’s safe. Hurry!”

  Qhora knelt at the edge beside Tycho and exchange another brief look of uncertainty before they both lowered themselves down and dropped to the alley below.

  Qhora landed hard, her foot slipped on something wet, and she fell on her backside. She gasped. The pain in her arm had blossomed ten-fold when she hung from the lip of the roof and now it was throbbing and pulsing between hot and cold flashes. She heard men shouting, their voices echoing and distorted by the empty streets and the high rooftops. Mirari reached down and hauled Qhora up to her feet, but her right ankle refused to take her weight. Her foot wobbled and she gasped again as she fell to her knee.

  “My lady!”

  “Go on, run, both of you,” Qhora said. “Leave me here. They won’t find me. I can hide in the trash and you can lead them away. It’ll be safer that way. I can’t run and you can’t carry me. So go, now!” She sat back and started to pull a rough splintered board up over her legs.

  The masked woman hesitated and glanced at Tycho, who had run to the end of the alley to survey the street. The Hellan waved back at them. “We have to go now!”

  “Go!” Qhora hissed as she pulled a filthy old tarp over her head. “Go!”

  Mirari nodded. “Yes, my lady.” She ran to the end of the alley in a flourish of blue Espani skirts, and then she disappeared with Tycho around the corner. The sounds of the men shouting continued to bounce up and down the streets, but faded quickly.

  Qhora counted to fifty and hoped that would be enough time. She shoved off the filthy tarp and the splintery board and stood up on her weak ankle. With one hand clutching the bloody wound in her shoulder and her teeth grinding against the pain in her leg, she limped out to the mouth of the alley and into the street. She shouted, “I’m right here! Take me to your boss. Now!”

  And she prayed they understood Espani.

  After a moment, a man stepped out of the shadows at the end of the street. She could see the gun in his hand. Qhora raised her arms at her sides to display her empty hands. “I surrender!”

  The man started toward her but stopped abruptly as a high-pitched scream split the cool night air.

  What on earth?

  Qhora looked up just as the harpy eagle crashed down onto her extended arm and sank his massive talons into her unprotected flesh. She grunted both at the pain and the weight of the bird on her arm.

  Damn it, Turi! Not now!

  The man started toward her again and as he came closer she could see the smirk on his face. He waggled his gun at her and said something in Eranian that she took to mean she should go with him and she started walking back up the street toward the restaurant with Turi perched proudly on her aching arm.

  When she reached the intersection there were two other armed men and the stern-faced woman in black waiting for her. Qhora managed to smile at the woman while the men roughly searched her and took her knives. “A pleasure to see you again, madam.”

  “It won’t be for long,” she replied. “My mistress wishes to speak to you.”

  As the men shuffled her inside, Qhora had to wrap her free arm around Turi to keep him from shifting his talons and flapping his wings. “Your mistress? And the man, Aker?”

  “He isn’t here.” The woman raised an eyebrow. “That was a lie. I lied to you.”

  “Yes, thank you, I see.” Qhora felt the earth fall out from under her heart.

  He isn’t here? I gambled and lost. There’s nothing for me here. If they shoot me now, I’ve left Javier an orphan. And if they kill me with a seireiken, even my soul will be denied to my poor son. I’ll be imprisoned with the souls of whatever trash these people kill on a regular basis.

  She was led to a table in the large dining room and shoved into a chair. She laid
her forearm on the table to give her shoulder a rest, but her other arm was still bleeding. She could feel the warmth trickling down her skin, plastering her sleeve to her arm.

  After a few minutes of waiting in silence, another woman joined them. This one was younger than the grim lady in black and she carried a small lamp, which she sat on the table in front of her. “Who are you?”

  Qhora paused. For over five years she had grown accustomed to being recognized on sight throughout España and parts of Marrakesh. In some corner of her mind she had assumed that here too the people of influence and means would know her.

  Is there a benefit to lying? Who should I claim to be?

  “I said, who are you?” The woman produced a small Italian pistol from her sleeve and set it on the table in front of her.

  “I am Dona Qhora Yupanqui Quesada, wife of Don Lorenzo Quesada de Gadir, first cousin of Manco Inca, Emperor of Jisquntin Suyu, and exile from the land you call the New World.” She rattled off the answer almost without thinking. A lifetime in one court or another had accustomed her to certain titles and pronouncements and introductions, and the answer produced itself unbidden and on instinct.

  “Inca?” The woman frowned and nodded. “That explains the bird. I’ve heard some interesting things about your people, but the fact remains that they’re simply too far away to enter into our affairs here in the real world.”

  “That’s probably just as well. Most visitors from the east don’t fare well in the empire. Only a tiny percentage of you Old Worlders tend to survive the Golden Death.”

  “Ah, yes. The plague. One more reason your empire has no importance to the rest of the world. It’s contaminated.” The lady gestured to her woman in black, who left the room. “You came to kill Aker.”

  “He killed my husband.”

  “Did he now?” The lady shrugged. “And you want revenge.”

  I want to go home to my baby boy.

  Qhora nodded. “But I would settle for his sword and my husband’s soul.”

  “Hm. Tell me, you said you were the cousin of the Incan Emperor just now. Why would an imperial princess leave her empire to live in España? Don’t tell me it was because you fell in love, because I will kill you for an answer so trite and pathetic.” The lady held up her hand just as the woman in black returned to place a wine glass in her raised fingers.

  “No, I had to leave. Enzo was…At the time, Lorenzo was simply my best chance to survive. We fell in love afterward.” Not so very long afterward. Qhora said, “When the Espani invasion began, we had no idea how easily it would be defeated by the plague. We assumed there would be much bloodshed. So the emperor, my cousin, invoked the articles of war. Summoning the militias, conscripts, rations, taxes, and so on. And to ensure our victory, he chose me to serve as the goddess of war.”

  “Is that a political post?”

  “No. A sacrificial one.” Qhora blinked and focused on keeping her voice calm and level. Will this story buy me any sympathy from a person like her? “The chosen woman is sealed in a stone chamber with a small ape infected with the pure strain of the plague, the strain that not even my people are immune to. After three days, the woman is taken from the room and bound in golden shackles and collar and chains and mounted on a war eagle. And then a small honor guard parades the goddess throughout the country. This doesn’t harm our people. The woman is a host to the plague, but is not contagious. She is slowly consumed as the sickness progresses. Her skin erupts with leaves and blood-red blossoms as the plague spores take root. Her skin grows hard and rough, like bark. Eventually she dies, but the blossoms continue to grow. From the mouth. From the eyes. By then, the body is completely rigid, like wood, like a tree, covered in leaves and flowers, but still in the shape of a woman with her head erect and hands raised, because of the collar and shackles. Then she is brought back to the palace in Cusco and placed on display for all to see. To inspire our people. To terrify the enemy. To demonstrate our devotion to the gods.”

  The woman sighed. “And you declined this honor?”

  “I did.”

  “Fascinating.” The lady sipped her wine. After a moment, she lowered her glass and spoke in rapid Eranian to the woman in black and the armed guards. The men grabbed Qhora and lifted her roughly from her chair.

  “What’s happening? Where are we going?” Qhora gasped as one of the men grabbed her arm too close to the bullet wound. Turi shrieked and flapped away, hopping and winging to the next table, and the next. It took the guards a moment to herd the eagle toward the doors and out into the street.

  “I’m offering you up to my own god, so to speak. We’ve never met anyone from your country before. I had no idea that you used the plague in such strange ways. I’m sure someone in the Temple will find a use for that knowledge. Assuming, of course, that you share your knowledge with them before they kill you.”

  Chapter 19

  While it is gratifying to know that I can still do this as well as I could ten years ago, I think it’s time to move on.

  Salvator crawled out from under the tiny shelf at the bottom of the pantry and stood up slowly, listening to the tiny creaks and pops in his back as he straightened out his spine. His hiding space had been several inches too low, too short, and too narrow, yet he had lain there in perfect silence for over an hour. Before that he had squatted in an ancient dumbwaiter for half an hour, dashed up and down a back staircase for half an hour, and spent seven very long minutes clinging to a rafter above a privy while a tall man in green used the facilities with considerable gusto.

  The Italian spent a moment stretching his neck and shoulders. He sniffed his sleeve.

  Pepper. I’ve smelled worse.

  Hearing nothing outside the door, he stepped out into the kitchen and glanced around the long room of iron stoves and brick ovens and wooden blocks full of shining steel knives. It smelled of bread. He snatched up a handful of something that didn’t quite look like proper bread, but tasted better than a belly full of nothing and he chewed thoughtfully as he made a quick circuit of the room. There were noises beyond the door at one end, so he hurried to the far end of the room, heard nothing, and stepped out into a cool corridor.

  During his wild chase through the Temple, he had headed down at every opportunity, in part to get closer to the ground level to make his escape and in part because it was easier on his hips to go down than to go up. And while he had returned to the stone levels of the fortress, somewhere in all the turns and backtracks and dark rooms he had lost count of the floors, and with no windows to tell him how high above the street he still was, he had no choice but to find the next stair and continue down.

  There were two close calls as he rounded corners when he almost ran straight into a quiet gentleman in green coming the other way, but each time Salvator leapt back into a dark nook with his hand on his rapier and waited in silence for the other man to pass.

  Always a man and never a woman. Such a disappointing cult.

  In just a few minutes he had descended several more floors and was just thinking that he needed to find a window to assess his location when he heard a sharp clang. Peering down the spiral of the iron stair, the Italian spied a dull orange light below.

  He sniffed the air.

  Iron? Sulfur? And something else.

  He descended again, walking almost crab-like on the stairs so that he could look down past his feet to be sure no one was waiting nearby to skewer him on a burning hot blade, and so he slowly came down to the source of the orange glow. It was not the bottom of the iron stair, but it must have been close, judging by the extreme darkness of the floors below him. Salvator stepped away from the stair.

  Just down the hall was a door standing half open to reveal the warm fiery light from the room beyond. A hammer banged on hard steel. Steam hissed. Bellows blew.

  A forge. And voices. Two men.

  He slipped to the edge of the door and looked inside. The forge within was a perfectly medieval establishment. It looked very little like the mo
dern smithies he had known in Italia, and far less like the factories of Marrakesh. The floors and walls were all of huge stone blocks. The anvil was little more than a short iron plinth. The source of the orange light was a huge open fire pit full of glowing coals and it was supplied with air from a bellows at its base that looked like the recently acquired stomach of a camel or ox.

  The man standing over the anvil and hammering at the glowing length of steel stood out in sharp contrast from his surroundings. He was tall and lean, with his black hair bound in a tight oiled knot on top of his head, and though his back was to the door, Salvator could see he was clean shaven. There was no soot or ash on his bare arms, and no obvious scars or burns to mar his corded brown flesh. And when he spoke, his words were quick and soft. In the Italian’s mind, such a man belonged in a princely court.

  To the left sat a second man, one better suited to the ancient forge. He was shorter and older, with unkempt gray hair and an unkempt gray beard, and his green robes hung about him in wrinkled disarray, pushed up here and hanging down there and falling open to reveal his stained shirt in a crooked manner.

  The tall smith said something and both men laughed.

  They were speaking Eranian, Salvator was certain, but over the hammering on the anvil and the quenching in the water tub, he couldn’t hear more than two words clearly at one time.

  So he stepped inside with his rapier drawn, and bowed. “Gentlemen, good evening to you both. My name is Salvator Fabris.”

  The bearded man sitting on the left squinted at him and then burst out laughing. He turned to the smith and said, “It’s the Italian who scared Khai this afternoon! Ha! He’s still here. I told you, Jiro, I told you Khai was lying. He’s still alive!” And then he turned to Salvator and said, “Khai’s told everyone he found you and killed you himself. As if that old crow could chase down anything nimbler than a dead wildebeest. Ha!” He slapped his leg and leaned back with a smug smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.

  Salvator smiled back as he shut the door behind him.