Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Are Hellan soldiers so fragile to be defeated by the heartbroken cries of one old woman?” Vlad asked. He grasped the short sword on his belt.

  Tycho frowned.

  We never should have gotten him that sword. Seireikens are for lunatics.

  “Prince Vlad, my soldiers have held this city against Darius’s armies for their entire lives,” Lady Nerissa said. “They were born to the clamor of battle, they were raised in shattered homes and streets strewn with rubble, and from the moment they are able, they serve to protect Constantia against the south. And it is their sacrifice that keeps the north free, from Rus to Raska to your own precious Vlachia.”

  The hawk-faced lord scowled and turned back to the maps on the table.

  But the Duchess continued, “When you pledged the support of these so-called immortals, I was led to believe they would have more to contribute to the war than the average person. But Koschei, for all his martial gifts, was merely one soldier, and his mother has been nothing but a distraction.”

  Vlad glowered up through his black brows. “I swore to defend this city against Darius and the infidels of the Mazdan Temple, and I will keep that vow. But I will not stand here and listen to you foul the names of the sainted mother and her valiant son.” He pushed away from the table and strode to the far end of the room to talk with his Vlachian commanders.

  Tycho watched him go. “He’s become more and more emotional and irrational since we brought him that damned sword.”

  “The sword isn’t the problem. He wanted proof of our commitment and we delivered it to him, as promised,” Lady Nerissa said lightly. “The real problem runs far deeper. Vlachia is a land of summer wars and sea battles. They aren’t accustomed to prolonged siege warfare. Win or lose, they want this war to end, and that may make the Vlachians a liability at some point.”

  “As distasteful as I find them,” Salvator said, “I can’t imagine they would betray you.”

  “Not willingly, no,” the Duchess said. “But in their hearts? A time may come when they don’t fight as fiercely, when the fire goes out of them, when they embrace the shadows in their hearts and admit defeat simply to end this war.”

  “I can see that day all too clearly,” Tycho said. “But what about Yaga? We need to do something about her. She’s scaring our soldiers, to say nothing of the conscripts from Italia and España.”

  “That’s not the only thing eating away at morale,” Salvator said. “There’s a rumor in the barracks that Prince Radu has been seen on the walls of Stamballa. If the Vlachians learn that Vlad’s own brother is leading the Turks, it could split their loyalties and we might actually find ourselves behind enemy lines very suddenly.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Tycho said. “From what I’ve heard, most of the Vlachians hate Radu for converting to the Mazdan Temple, and for turning against his own people. They see him as a traitor.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Lady Nerissa said. “In the mean time, I have something special for the two of you. This afternoon one of our gunboats sank a trawler carrying an imperial courier home from the north shore.”

  Tycho frowned. “Who do you think he was visiting on the north shore?”

  “That’s what I want the two of you to find out. He’s being held in the Sunken Palace. If there are imperial troops on the north shore, or worse, a traitor among our ranks, I don’t want some common soldier to be the first to learn of it.”

  The Italian knight nodded curtly. “We understand, Your Grace. We will be the very souls of discretion.”

  Tycho nodded as well and he followed Salvator out of the war room and down the dimly lit corridor. Their boots clacked and echoed on the polished marble floors and soaring walls covered in oil portraits of dead Constantian lords and tapestries of ancient Constantian battles. The men spiraled down the wide white steps of the west stairwell to the western doors, and then strode out through the massive Hellan columns into the cold night air. Soldiers stood at attention at every gate and door, and Tycho nodded seriously to each of them. Salvator ignored them all.

  They stepped into one of the small carriages that stood ever-ready to carry a person of importance into the city and with the horses trotting briskly they soon left the grounds of the Palace of Constantine and turned southwest to pass the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. Sitting on the left side of the carriage, Tycho gazed up at the centuries-old church towering above the boulevard like a black and gold mountain shining in the starlight. The great sweeping arcs of its domed roof, heavy pillars, and elegant archways conspired in the darkness to create the image of a many-legged, many-mouthed demon looming over the tiny carriage on the road.

  “You know, I’m surprised you’re still here,” Tycho said quietly.

  “So am I,” the Italian answered. “I had planned to leave before winter set in, but this war is just a bit too interesting to leave, just yet. I mean, two brothers leading opposing armies, a pair of immortal lunatics, and the chance to observe the latest in Eranian ships and weapons. And besides, I’m sure the king of Italia appreciates my efforts here to single-handedly defeat the Mazdan Temple. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but he’s not fond of the empire.”

  “I believe you have mentioned it,” the dwarf said. “But after we brought back the seireikens from Alexandria, I assumed you would be off to investigate the Osirians again. But you haven’t mentioned the Order of Osiris once since we arrived.”

  Salvator shrugged. “I did enjoy our little escapade in the south, but it also served to remind me that I’m not a young man anymore. A duel here and there, certainly. But crawling through dark passages, lying in cramped cellars, running from legions of armed cultists? No, my little friend, I think that part of my career is now behind me.”

  “Retirement, then?”

  “Of a sort. I think perhaps I should restrict myself to sitting in grand ballrooms, playing cards, drinking wine, and explaining Italian foreign policy to beautiful young princesses.”

  Tycho snorted. “Lady Nerissa has no interest in you.”

  “I should hope not!” Salvator exclaimed. And then with a grin, he said, “She’s far too old for me.”

  Both men chuckled in the darkness.

  Tycho nodded to the Hellan soldiers as the carriage rattled through the gates of the Sunken Palace. The two men dismounted the carriage and stood in the silent courtyard, glancing around at the wide green lawn and the huge granite slabs strewn about the field. Before them stood the only building, a small stone house not unlike a mausoleum, classical Hellan architecture in miniature with a single gaping doorway flanked by Hellan pike men and Vlachian archers carrying small recurve bows.

  Tycho had only to show his face and revolver for the guards to recognize him and allow him to enter. Inside the stone doorway a row of burning braziers led down a long stone stair. Tycho signed the log book with the officer on duty, sighed, and started down the steep steps.

  Salvator clumped along noisily behind him. “My word, this is a long stair. I don’t remember it being quite so long. I hope we reach the bottom in short order.”

  “Ha. And again, Ha.” Tycho grimaced and kept his eyes on his footing.

  “Yes, you see, I’m harassing you for being short and thus for taking too long to go down the stairs,” the Italian said. “I’m being witty.”

  “I hadn’t realized,” Tycho said. “Have you learned to parry a bullet yet, old man?”

  Salvator didn’t answer.

  Tycho reached the bottom of the stair with an ache in his hip, but he merely pressed his hand to his holster to silence the uneven clinking of his gun and continued across the small anteroom they had converted to an office. After just a few paces he passed the first cistern, a vast colonnaded chamber that had once been a grand dining hall, now filled with water nearly to its vaulted roof. A distant dripping echoed eerily in the darkness as they crossed the chamber on the elevated walkway.

  They passed two more cisterns, both smaller than the first, befor
e they came to a series of doors where four young Hellans in piecemeal armor and red cloaks sat around a rickety table playing cards. They glanced up and nodded sternly to Tycho, saying, “Evening, major.”

  “Evening.” Tycho glanced at the doors. “We’re here to see the new arrival.”

  Keys rattled, doors slammed, and Tycho and Salvator sat down in a narrow, windowless cell lit only by the small lantern that they borrowed from the soldiers and set on the floor. The man before them was just barely taller than Tycho, a lean little fellow with a shaven head and a greasy tuft of beard on his chin, and a pair of chains on his wrists.

  One of the soldiers lingered in the doorway. “He was twitchy when they brought him in this afternoon. And he’s been getting twitchier by the hour.”

  Tycho took a second look at the prisoner and saw the man’s eyes darting madly around the floor, his fingers shivering, his lips trembling with silent words. The major nodded and said, “We’ll proceed gently.”

  The prisoner leapt forward, his eyes wide and pleading, his hands reaching for Salvator’s face. The Italian smashed his fist into the man’s nose and sent him sprawling back against the stone wall. Salvator glanced at his comrade. “But not too gently.”

  Eventually, with much coaxing and a few bribes, they got the man to sit up and look them in the eye and speak in a fairly calm voice. He said his name was Tahir, and he came from a village in Turkiya just a few miles south of Stamballa.

  “You were captured leaving the north shore,” Salvator said.

  “Yes.” The Turk nodded many times.

  “Were you sent to observe our troops?” Tycho asked.

  “No.” He shook his head violently.

  “Were you sent to meet with someone?” the Italian asked.

  “No, no, no.” More head shaking.

  “All right, all right, settle down.” Tycho paused. “All we want to know is why you were on the north shore. Where did you go? Who did you speak to? And what were you going to tell your people when you got back to Stamballa?”

  For a moment, the man’s lips shook in silence. Then he said, “I saw them. I was told to look for them and I did, I saw them, a lot of them.”

  “Who?” Tycho leaned forward. “The Hellans? The Vlachians?”

  “The dead. The dead people. I saw the dead people… walking.”

  Tycho leaned back and looked at Salvator.

  The Italian sighed and stroked his mustache. “The dead. This again. It must be the fifth time this month. What the hell are these people talking about? Walking corpses. Bodies crawling out of their graves. First it was the farmers, then the Vlachians, and now even the Eranians are saying it.”

  “Well, they sure as hell saw something.” Tycho grimaced and leaned forward again and caught the Turk’s eyes. “All right, Tahir. Now, tell us, exactly how many of these dead people did you see?”

  “Dozens. Hundreds.”

  Salvator shook his head and muttered, “It can’t have been that many. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Whoever these dead people are, if there were hundreds of them out there, we would have had official reports of them by now. What do you think? Rus mercenaries? Or raiders from Jochi?”

  “Maybe.” Tycho cleared his throat. “Tahir. Where did you see the dead people?”

  “S… Saray.”

  Tycho’s fist closed around the grip of his revolver and he gritted his teeth.

  No! That’s impossible.

  Salvator paused. “What is that, a fort? I’ve never heard of it. Where is Saray?”

  “It’s in the province of Thrace.” Tycho turned to look into the cynical eyes of the Italian knight. “It’s less than eighty miles from here.”

  For the next half hour, Tycho and Salvator battered the Turk with questions but the shaking prisoner did not have much else to offer. He had left Stamballa less than ten days ago, crossed the Strait under cover of night, and then simply walked northwest along the main highway, apparently under orders to look for the so-called deathless army. And after he found them in Saray, he had turned right around and run all the way back to Constantia where a poorly transacted bribe with a Hellan fisherman had delivered him into the hands of the Constantian army. The last thing Salvator was about to wring from Tahir was that the officer who gave him the order wore a green uniform.

  “Well, clearly he’s lying. The Turks wear blue, not green,” the Italian said. “Lying, or colorblind, or insane. Take your pick.”

  But Tycho frowned. “No. You and I have seen green uniforms in the empire before, in Alexandria.”

  Salvator raised an eyebrow. “The Osirians? Now that is an interesting thought.”

  Satisfied that they would get no further details from the prisoner, Tycho and Salvator left the cells and told the guards not to let anyone speak to the Turk without Lady Nerissa’s approval. Then they crossed back through the dark, echoing chasms of the cisterns and began the long, slow climb up to the surface of the city.

  “In ancient times, the Persians had an army called the Immortals,” Tycho said. “Maybe this deathless army is something similar.”

  “But from where?”

  “Probably not from Jochi. They still call their armies the Hordes.” Tycho huffed as he worked his way up the stairs as quickly as he could. “In Rus, I hear they sometimes call Koschei the Deathless. Perhaps it’s a Rus army.”

  “But Koschei actually is immortal. You and I both saw his little demonstration. It took days to get the blood out of the carpets,” Salvator said. “Are you suggesting there is an entire army of Koscheis marching down the peninsula toward us?”

  “If there is, they might be coming to support Koschei himself. Perhaps they heard about his capture, and they’ve come to save him.”

  “Maybe. I don’t like it, either way.” The Italian quickened his step. “There’s far too much strangeness in the world these days for my taste. In Italia, there are no cults or immortals or secret armies. Just lies and murder and conspiracy and court intrigue. King versus pope, as it should be. Clean and simple. One wins, one loses, and the rest of us drink and wench the night away, to prepare to do it all again the next day.”

  Tycho chewed his lip. “I admit, there’s a certain appeal in that. The politics in your country may be vicious, but at least they’re straightforward. Greed. Lust. Fear. But here, every time I turn around there’s some damn ritual or custom or law that makes everything grind to a halt. Festivals, feast days, mourning days, supplications. Every day, the church complains, the guilds complain, the nobles complain. We have drunken Vlachians and Rus and Raskans brawling in the streets. I can’t understand how Lady Nerissa manages it all.”

  They reached the top of the stair and Tycho signed the log book again before they stepped out into the brisk night air.

  “Where to now?” the Italian asked.

  “Well, we have a thousand Vlachian mounted archers just loitering about the north gate,” Tycho said, rubbing the stitch in his side. “They could be in Saray by dawn. And a messenger could be back here again by noon tomorrow.”

  “And then we would know what’s really going on out there.”

  “Precisely.” Tycho climbed into the waiting carriage and told the driver to take them to the north gate. Then he leaned back into the padded seat and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Dreaming of raven tresses and long white legs?” Salvator asked.

  “Dreaming of bed,” Tycho said.

  “Hm. Whatever happened to that girl, anyway?”

  Tycho sighed. “She went back to Athens months ago.”

  “Oh, I see. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Tycho said. “She left before I could make a fool of myself.”

  Salvator laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

  Tycho stared out the window at the dark streets of Constantia rattling past. He saw narrow brick row houses huddled shoulder to shoulder, and several shops with huge glass display windows, and a stable full of sleeping draft horses. They passed a small band of men with rif
les slung over their shoulders, but they wore no uniforms. Tycho rubbed his eyes and said, “She told me that very same thing herself.”

  Chapter 6

  Wren sat up in her hammock with a sharp gnawing hunger in her belly. The Espani caravel rocked gently at anchor in the Strait and a sickly gray light fell through the cracks in the deck overhead. Boots paced lazily above her, and in the distance she could hear the wooden creaking of other ships nearby. Wren frowned as her fox ears twitched.

  “Omar? Are you awake?”

  The old man snorted loudly in his hammock and mumbled, “No.”

  “I hear something. A ship.”

  “We’re in a ship,” he muttered.

  “No. Out there. Another ship. It’s coming this way.” She slipped down to the floor and crept along the curving wall toward the stairs that led up to the main deck. The watery rippling sound grew louder, a steady rushing like the distant roar of a waterfall undercut with the heavy thrumming of an inhuman heart beat.

  A steam engine!

  “Omar? I think you should get up.” She jogged up the steps and emerged into the foggy gloom of a cold morning mist. Beyond the dark brown rails of La Rosa floated an endless white cloud that hid the water and the shore. Only the sharp tips of the neighboring ships’ masts could be seen swaying in the fog, and beyond them the blunt walls of Stamballa stood still and silent in the distance.

  Dammit Woden, why did it have to be fog? Not aether, just fog. Here I am, thousands of leagues from your holy Ysland, lost in a strange land, the lone voice a reason in a mad world of walking corpses and metal ships, and you have to give me fog? What sort of god does this to his most loyal daughter?

  Beside her, a handful of the Espani sailors lingered by the starboard rail, peering into the mist and whispering to each other. Up on the quarter deck, Captain Ortiz gave the heavy brass bell beside the wheel a single clang. A moment later, Omar trudged up the steps and stood beside her. He yawned.

  “Something’s coming,” Wren said. “And I think it’s big.”