Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Miss Wren?” The Duchess stepped gracefully out of the way of four men with a chest of drawers. “I understood this particular crisis to be over. You subdued Baba Yaga, didn’t you?”

  “I did, and this isn’t her fault,” Wren said. “Well, I mean it is, but it’s not a new problem. You see, Yaga did wake up the corpses from the graveyards for hundreds of leagues all around, that’s true, and she did twist up those poor souls pretty badly with her nightmares, but she didn’t create them, and she didn’t control them. She just woke them up, is all.”

  “Ah.” Lady Nerissa nodded calmly. “So then, all of the dead souls that she woke up will continue to walk the earth on their own until something or someone stops them?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Wren glanced at an over-turned chair by her foot. Part of her wanted to grab the chair and rush to help build the barricade, but the rest of her wanted to stay as far from the doors as possible.

  And besides, one more chair won’t make any difference.

  A young man shrieked, and the sound echoed through the dark hall, bouncing and bouncing again from every angle. Wren winced and spun about, trying to find the source of the cry, and she caught sight of a clerk on the far side of the office area pointing not at the doors where Tycho was directing the construction of the barricade but to another pair of doors at the opposite end of the room. The doors were open and three corpses stumbled through them, grunting as they clawed at the stale air.

  Nine hells!

  “Hey! We need that there, I mean, back there! Go, that way!” Wren waved and pointed frantically at the open doors as she tried to catch the attention of the servants still rushing to block Tycho’s doors. A half dozen of them saw her and turned to look where she was pointed, and a chorus of panicked curses and shouts erupted from their pale lips.

  “Come on, there’s only three of them!” Wren grabbed the chair at her feet and rushed across the dark chamber, splashing through the cold puddles as quickly as her long black skirts would allow.

  Two more corpses staggered out of the doorway. And then another.

  Wren glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was following her, and her heart dropped into her belly when she saw only two young men with chairs and candlesticks jogging halfheartedly in her wake. They were at least a dozen paces behind and falling farther behind with every step she took.

  Oh gods, I’m alone.

  Wren splashed to a halt in the middle of a puddle and threw her chair out in front of her, perhaps in the hope that it might make the dead men and women stumble for half a second. But the six corpses shuffled forward faster and faster, parting to pass around the chair on both sides, their rotting faces hanging apart on threads of skin and strings of muscle, their filthy bones exposed around their eyes and fingers.

  All six of them reached for her.

  All six of them stared at her with frozen black eyes.

  All six of them moaned with frozen black tongues.

  “No!” Wren threw up her arms, praying that there was enough aether in the sunken chamber to form a solid wall in front of her.

  The thin wisps of white vapor on the floor rushed forward and upward like a wave, but instead of rising into a barrier, it swept on through the six corpses like a hurricane. Wren watched in wide-eyed wonder as the aether wind tore at her stumbling attackers, forcing them backward with their arms raised to shield their frostbitten faces. Then one of the corpses collapsed to the floor, and Wren, with arms still raised to guide the aether, stared at the pale ghostly shape that washed out of the fallen body.

  Then a second corpse fell, tipping over backward very slowly and gently until it smashed into a puddle of filthy water in a depression in the floor, and again, Wren saw the dim face of a ghost flying away into the shadows.

  Nine hells! I’m knocking the souls right out of their bodies? Is that even possible? I mean, it must be, obviously, but still, shouldn’t Omar have warned me I could tear a soul from a body? Unless, he didn’t know…

  Wren dropped her arms to her sides for a moment to rest her shoulders and stumble back from the four remaining dead men and women, who tottered uncertainly on their frozen legs and then began stumbling toward her again.

  “Stay away!” She shoved both hands toward just one of the corpses and the resulting blast of aether knocked the fragile ghost of an old woman free of the body, which smashed down to the floor. The shadow form of the woman hovered above her desiccated corpse for a moment, and then vanished.

  I can stop them. I can stop all of them!

  Wren shoved her hands out toward the remaining corpses, her silver bracelets jangling as they slammed against her wrists, and she hurled the aether through the frozen bodies to yank the souls free and send them drifting into the darkness. The last three bodies slumped to the floor in a haphazard pile of black and white and blue limbs gleaming dimly with aether crystals in the torchlight.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw the two porters still standing a few paces behind her, clutching their chairs and candlesticks. “It’s all right,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now.”

  The young men slumped forward with exhausted smiles and set their chairs down.

  Wren looked out across the dark cavernous space to the far end of the room where Tycho and the others were still piling furniture up against a single pair of doors. She waved at them, knowing that they couldn’t possibly see her in the gloom, and called out, “It’s all right! I can stop them! We’re going to be all right! Don’t worry!”

  “Miss!” one of the porters cried.

  Wren saw him pointing over her shoulder and she turned to look over the bodies of the six soulless corpses to see three more dead bodies rush out of the open doorway behind her, with more shadowy forms rustling in the darkness beyond them.

  “Everybody get behind me!” Wren shouted as she backed toward the office area.

  If I can knock a soul free of a dead body, it can’t be much harder to knock one free of a living body, can it? I need to be careful. Very, very careful, or I might kill everyone in the room.

  She kept her eyes on the dead people pouring out of the ancient doors. On and on they came, more and more frozen and rotten faces plunging out of the shadows.

  Where on earth are they all coming from? There really must be nine hells after all!

  The new wave of corpses moved faster than the last, stumbling and loping as quickly as their frozen legs would allow, their fingers fixed in icy fists and claws, their crystallized eyes locked open, their blackened tongues raised behind yellow teeth, and all of them moaning and grunting as they raced toward the warm bodies in the light.

  “Stay behind me!” Wren yelled over her shoulder.

  Woden, be my shield!

  She swept her arms left and right, dragging thin waves of aether back and forth across the floor to knock the corpses from side to side, and occasionally ripping a ghost free to let its body crumple to the floor. But with each sweep of her arms, the aether drifted a bit farther away into the darkness, leaving it a bit thinner and weaker as it struck the oncoming wave of dead bodies.

  The chamber was enormous and the distance between the doors and the torches would have taken a healthy man several long seconds to run across on warm, living legs. The corpses limped and ambled at a fraction of that speed, but still they moved faster than a mere walk, and they spread outward from the doors, slowly filling the vast ballroom with groaning, stumbling figures.

  And the first of them were about to reach the torchlight.

  Guns began to fire, some of them booming right in Wren’s ear, making her wince as her head filled with watery white noise. Men were shouting behind her and small objects began flying over her head toward the corpses. Chair legs, candles, pens, knives, ink wells, jars, and even a boot or two whizzed by her, nearly hitting her tall ears more than once.

  Wren wrapped her fingers together, turning her hands into one massive fist, and she swung both arms together through the air, trying to coax all eight bracel
ets into resonating through the aether one last time, but the otherworldly mist was simply too thin now and it barely nudged the corpses sideways as they rushed into the light.

  The body of a middle-aged man lunged at her, and she threw up both of her arms to shield her head as she closed her eyes and hoped…

  Eight silver bracelets veined with sun-steel crashed together as she crossed her arms, and they resounded with a horrible metallic whine. Wren opened her eyes and jerked her face back from her arms and the noise coming from the trinkets on her wrists, and then she saw the corpse standing just in front of her, wobbling in place, stutter-stepping sideways.

  The sound!

  She crashed her arms together again and again, letting the bracelets ring out with their buzzing, hissing, growling whines. And with every crash, the dead bodies stumbled and turned and tripped and fell. But only for a moment. As the ringing died, the corpses recovered, crawling back up to their feet and turning back toward the clerks and soldiers gathered within the ring of torches.

  “Wren!” Tycho appeared at her side, fumbling with the bullets for his revolver. He snapped the gun shut and pointed it at the dead men and women. “Get behind me!”

  He fired twice and two corpses slumped to the floor. But in the shadowy corners of the room, Wren’s keen fox eyes saw the dead bodies still pouring in through more and more doors by the dozens, by the hundreds. She clutched Tycho’s shoulder to steady herself as she stared at the countless dead faces stumbling toward her out of the darkness.

  Aether. I need more aether! How? HOW???

  And a familiar voice whispered to her, “Draw it up from the earth.”

  Wren’s eyes snapped to her finger where the slender ring of Denveller gleamed with coppery gold.

  “Is that… Hrist?” Wren asked. She frowned at the ring, not certain when she had last heard Hrist’s voice. She had always been the quietest of the Yslander ghosts.

  “It is I,” the dead vala answered. “Draw the aether you need up from the earth using the bracelets.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Sit on the ground,” Hrist said. “Place your palms on the ground, and shiver your soul just as you do when you move the aether around you. But this time, imagine the shivers rippling upward through your body, like ripples on the surface of a lake when the wind blows straight across it.”

  “No, not straight across,” a second voice said from the ring.

  “Kara?”

  “Yes, Wren. Do as Hrist says, but picture the shivers spinning around you like a water spout, rising as it spins, faster and faster. Do it now!”

  Wren jerked away from Tycho and ran to the center of the office where Lady Nerissa stood calmly, though very pale, surrounded by her servants. Wren dropped to the cold floor and placed her hands on the damp tiles. Closing her eyes, she tried to forget about the yelling and the shuffling and the gun shots.

  Making her own soul shiver was easy enough. Over the last few months, it had almost become a comfortable reflex from her long hours of practice with Omar’s guidance. It then took several moments of effort to make the tiny ripples in her ghost start to turn, to revolve around her, sweeping over her skin from right to left like a wave of gooseflesh, faster and faster, until she was trembling uncontrollably as though she were standing naked on a glacier, her whole body shaking as her flesh tried desperately to stay warm against the freezing elements.

  “Faster!” Hrist cried.

  “Faster!” Kara ordered.

  Wren bore down on her chest, tightening her muscles, making herself smaller so her shivering ghost could spin ever faster. And suddenly the trembling stopped and she felt strangely warm. She knew, dimly, that her ghost was whirling within her body, spinning like a top, but spinning so fast that she could barely feel it anymore.

  Wren opened her eyes.

  At first, all she could see was white. Then she blinked and saw that the white was moving, flying, whirling past her face, whirling around her body. She turned her head and saw through the tiny wispy gaps in the white wall to the faces of the men and women standing around her, staring in at her in fear.

  I did it.

  She looked up and saw that the column of aether reached all the way up to the distant ceiling.

  I really did it!

  “Now use it!” Kara grumbled.

  Wren rose to her feet, careful to keep her hands close to avoid touching the aether storm.

  “Everyone get back!” She yelled through the white wall. “Everyone get down on the floor!”

  She squinted through the whipping clouds, but couldn’t tell if anyone had heard her.

  “Get down now!” she screamed.

  Wren raised her arms over her head, letting the bracelets fall to her elbows. She could still feel her soul revolving within her flesh, spinning like the stars in the night sky, flying like the leaves on an autumn wind. She brought her hands together, feeling the humming vibrations in her ring and in her bracelets, and slowly she brought her hands down in front of her as she pulled the aether out of the storm cloud, drawing it in tighter and tighter into a ball of freezing white mist rolling between her hands.

  As she pulled the aether down to her, the wall of the storm grew thinner, revealing a room full of people lying flat on the floor with their hands over their heads, and a few young men in the distance on their knees, still shooting at the dark figures out beyond the torches.

  Wren inhaled and in one final gesture she pulled all of the aether into the whirling sphere of storm clouds trapped between her palms. Now she could see everything. The terrified people, the broken furniture, the guttering torches, and the sea of rotting faces clambering over the fallen dead to reach the huddled survivors.

  Wren turned her hands so that one was below the storm-sphere and the other was above it, and with a silent prayer she ripped her hands away from each other. The aether exploded outward in a flat arc, tearing across the entire room like a pair of enormous white bullwhips snapping through the darkness. And everywhere that the aether whips struck a cold body, a soul would fly free up into the air as the corpses toppled over to the floor.

  In an instant every dead body in the entire chamber was lying on the ground and a thousand pale faces and figures hovered in the air looking lost and frightened and sad, but also relieved and grateful. They looked down at her, a multitude of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, farmers and soldiers and sailors and fishers, and the ghosts smiled gently as one by one they faded away into the darkness.

  Wren stood very still, staring into the shadows with her fox eyes and listening with her fox ears. But no more figures shambled through the open doors, no more frozen tongues murmured, and no more dead feet scraped over the tiled floor. Everything was still and silent, except for the dripping of the water and the purring of the torches.

  “Tycho?”

  The major scrambled up and dashed to her side. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She could still feel her soul spinning, though much slower now and slower still with each passing moment. It had filled her with warmth and a wild sharpness, like lightning in her skin, but now it was fading, leaving her chilled and tired. She leaned on his shoulder slightly. “Can you please close those doors now?”

  He smiled. “Yes, I think I can.”

  Chapter 24

  Nadira descended the stairs slowly, her hand sliding down the cold stone wall, feeling the grain of it, the age of it, wondering how many other hands had passed over it. She wore a heavy brown robe over her borrowed clothes, a worn monk’s habit draped over a servant’s sturdy green dress. It felt strange not to be wearing trousers, feeling the air on her legs, feeling the cloth flowing around her. It stirred very, very old memories of her life in Damascus. Her first life, in the nunnery.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she found a cellar. It was a long room with doors leading to other chambers, but the center of the floor directly in front of her was home to a pile of old Persian carpets and bearskin rugs flanke
d by three iron braziers, and on top of the mound of carpets lay an old woman with long white hair.

  Nadira glanced around the space as she stepped farther in, and saw nothing of interest. No windows, no furniture, no alcoves where an enemy might be waiting to strike. She sat down on the carpets and peered at the old woman. “Wake up.”

  She poked the woman. “Hey, you alive? Wake up.”

  The woman didn’t move.

  Nadira sighed. “Well, I can see why they left you here, at least.”

  “Left?” The woman blinked and rolled her head to look at her guest. “Who are you?”

  “Nadira.” She wiped her nose and sniffed violently. “I’m new around here. And you are?”

  “Yaga, mother to Koschei the Deathless.”

  “Oh, you’re Koschei’s mother?” Nadira smiled. “I think I met him once or twice.”

  “I doubt it. He is a warrior. He does not consort with palace maids.” The white-haired woman sat up slowly.

  “I’m no maid.” Nadira reached into her dress and pulled out the chain around her neck to display the little golden pendant shaped like a human heart.

  Yaga plunged her own gnarled hand into her blouse and held out a matching sun-steel heart. Slowly, they both put them away.

  “So,” Nadira said. “I hear you were the last ones that received Bashir’s little gift.”

  “Bashir? Oh, you mean Grigori? Yes, I believe we were the last. Five hundred years ago. You?”

  “Two thousand, or so.”

  Yaga sneered. “Typical. He took you young and beautiful. And me? Look at this.” She waggled the loose flesh around her neck. “This, for five hundred years. Bah!”

  Nadira shrugged.

  “Where is everyone? Where is Wren?” Yaga asked.

  “Everyone’s gone,” Nadira said. “The palace is empty. I heard them running around in the halls, and then I came out and watched them leave, scurrying like mice to get away.”