Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Oh good,” the prince exclaimed.

  “No, that’s bad. She’s too weak, too disconnected to feel pain. Her body is shutting down, slowly and gradually. She’ll die very soon without treatment.”

  “Can you help her?”

  “Maybe. Were there other symptoms before? Fever, chills, dizziness, vomiting, skin rash?”

  “No, none of that.”

  “What sort of health is her mother in?”

  “Her mother?” The prince frowned. “Strong as an ox, but only half as delightful.”

  “Hm.” Asha brought a slender golden needle out of her bag. She stared at the three notches on the needle for a moment as she wiped the metal clean with a bit of cinnamon bark. Then she carefully placed the needle over the woman’s chest and slipped it under the skin to the first notch. And then the second. And then the third.

  She pulled out the needle and wiped it clean again. “No reaction. She should have twitched at least a little.” Asha waved a series of salts and oils under the woman’s nose, also with no effect. Frowning, she reached down and struck the woman sharply just below the kneecap. “She’s completely unresponsive.”

  “Well, of course. She’s been like this for some time,” the prince said.

  “But she’s rigid. Here, feel her neck and shoulder, and arm. You can feel the stiffness in her muscles. That should be a sign that her mind is still sending commands to her body, even if they are the wrong commands. But no. This stiffness isn’t coming from her nerves.” Asha looked up at the prince. “It may be chemical. Something she was exposed to. A disease, a toxin, a poison. Even an exotic fruit, something she might be allergic to. Something that she has been exposed to in small doses over the past several months. Do you have any new animals in the palace? Maybe something new in the marketplace, or at one of her friends’ homes?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea about the market or her friends, but she has been confined to this room for the past six weeks and nothing strange has entered here in that time, I assure you. I’ve been quite careful to make certain that nothing could enter that might harm her. No visitors. No animals. The only people to enter this room have been myself, the maid, and four doctors.”

  “What about an injury? A cut, a scratch. It could be something very small, just large enough to allow a splinter under the skin.”

  “I don’t know. She never mentioned an injury.”

  Asha nodded. “Fine. I’ll need to spend some time observing her here, and then later I’ll take a look around the house for anything suspicious. Have there been reports of anyone else with this condition?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should have your people go through the markets and to your wife’s friends. They need to ask if anyone else is sick, or if anything strange has come into the area recently. Any food, cloth, or wood. Any sort of strange insects.”

  “I will.” The prince started for the door.

  “One last question. The four doctors who treated your wife. Were any of them foreigners? From the east?”

  “No, they were all from the city here. Why?”

  “It’s not important. I’ll send you a report when I know more.”

  The prince nodded and left, shutting the door securely behind him.

  Asha sighed.

  Priya sat down carefully in the center of a wide carpet and took Jagdish off her shoulder. “Any thoughts?”

  “No. For a moment it looked like some sort of severe arthritis, but no. I’ll examine her body now for any splinters or cuts. It may take a while.”

  The nun nodded as she petted the mongoose in her lap.

  * * *

  Asha spent the rest of the morning examining the princess. She studied the woman’s skin in detail, but found no punctures with infected motes floating beneath the surface. She studied the woman’s joints and muscles, and then her ears and nostrils, and with the door locked she looked everywhere else. But she found no cause for the princess’s strange condition.

  At noon the maid entered to spoon-feed the princess a bit of colorless mash, which Asha laced with several herbs and spices. The maid cleaned her mistress’s hands and face with a damp cloth, and left.

  Asha then spent the afternoon prowling through the palace, poking into jars and lamps, scratching at the cracks and holes in the mortar in the walls, sniffing the guards’ boots, and banging about in the kitchens in search of nests, hives, spores, and molds. She found several of each, but none that could harm a healthy young princess.

  Guards, valets, and maids responded to her every question, her every request. Unlock this. Open that. When was this last cleaned? What is that? Where did this come from? Every question was answered and every answer led nowhere.

  Her fruitless search brought her back to the walled garden in the inner courtyard. She sat on the wall and gazed blankly at the ferns and mangos and foxtail orchids. Her poisoned ear brought her the soft harmonies of the floral spirits. She heard the tinkling bells of the flowers, the muted gongs of the trees, and the windy whistling of the crickets. Nothing she hadn’t heard before.

  But then she did hear something new. It was a high reedy note and Asha frowned as she tried to recognize what sort of soul made that sound when she realized one of the guards was staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing, madam. You just looked confused at the bird call.”

  A bird call? It was a real sound, Asha realized. I’m starting to confuse what’s physical and what isn’t. “That’s right, I didn’t recognize the call. What sort of bird is it?”

  The guard shrugged. “I’ve never seen it. But I hear it now and then. Just that one note, just like we heard a moment ago.”

  Asha waited for the bird to call again, but it did not oblige. So she strained her right ear to track down the noise of the creature’s soul, but all she heard were the cranes far across the lake and a handful of fish deep in its waters.

  The supper hour found Asha sitting by her patient’s bed, staring out the open windows at the sun setting across the lake, and muttering to herself about pollen and fleas. One of the guards knocked and politely invited her to join the prince at dinner, but Asha declined, insisting that she needed to remain with the princess. But Priya was more than happy to play the proper house guest and she followed the guard to the dining room.

  The maid came with another bowl of colorless mash, which Asha laced with another mixture of herbs and spices. The maid cleaned her mistress’s hands and face with a damp cloth, and left.

  Every half hour, Asha inspected her patient, carefully measuring out the shallow breaths and faint heartbeats, but she couldn’t tell if there was any change from that morning. Priya returned from dinner in a very good mood, but Asha ignored her recitation of the evening’s culinary and conversational delights. Eventually Priya fell asleep.

  And eventually, so did Asha.

  The click of the door woke the herbalist and she sat up slowly, wiping the saliva from the side of her face as the timid young maid entered with her small tray bearing the familiar bowl of mash for breakfast. But when the maid knelt by the princess, Asha saw a hint of yellow in the dish.

  “Something new today?” Asha nodded at the bowl.

  “New?” The maid blinked. “Oh no, nothing new. Just her eggs. She loved them so much. I thought I would keep adding them to her breakfast. I thought she would like that.”

  “What sort of eggs?”

  The maid hesitated, her eyes blank.

  Asha sighed. “Don’t bother lying. Just tell me the truth. Where are the eggs from? If it’s not important to her condition, I won’t tell anyone.”

  The maid swallowed and nodded. “Peacock. They’re peacock eggs. The prince bought the peacock last year for my lady. She loves that bird. Loves to look at it. She said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. And she…”

  “She wanted to eat the eggs to make herself more beautiful.” Asha rolled her eyes.

  “It’s not the eg
gs, is it?” The maid’s hands trembled. “Did the eggs make her ill?”

  “No. At least, probably not. I’ll take a look at the bird to make sure it’s healthy, but no, cooked peacock eggs are perfectly safe. If not silly. Still, it’s better than what they do to tigers in the east.”

  “What do they do to tigers?”

  Asha shook her head. “Never mind. After you finish up here, you can show me the peacock so I can make sure it’s healthy.”

  It only took a few minutes for the maid to feed and wash her mistress and Asha followed her out to the kitchen. The maid set the tray and bowl aside and then led Asha back out to the walled garden in the central courtyard.

  “It’s in there,” the girl whispered, pointing into the ferns. “I don’t see it often, but its nest is back here in the corner.” She parted the emerald fronds to reveal a small circle of twigs and leaves on the ground. “Every morning there is a single egg, which I collect for my lady’s breakfast.”

  Asha frowned. She’d seen more than a few peacocks, and heard their calls, and heard their souls, too. She couldn’t hear one now. “Peacocks are pretty large birds. I’m surprised that one can hide in a garden this small.”

  “Oh, it’s a very small peacock. Some sort of pet breed, I think.”

  “A hybrid?” Asha frowned a little deeper. “Thank you for your help. If my friend asks for me, tell her I’m out working on the case.”

  The maid bowed and scurried away.

  Asha glanced around the courtyard at the four guards by the far doors. None of them were looking in her direction, so she leaned down and slipped over the low wall into the garden and lay down flat beneath the thick ferns where no one was likely to see her or her yellow sari. She backed away and arranged herself on the lumpy earth so she still had a clear view of the peacock’s nest, and settled down to wait.

  She fell asleep four times. Each time she jerked awake to see that the nest was still empty and the sun had crossed a bit farther overhead. She tried chewing on a sliver of ginger, and then on a few old tea leaves, and she was wondering what else she had to spare when she fell asleep again.

  Asha awoke in the dark. The stars winked down through the ferns, the cicadas creaked, and the palace was shadowed and silent. A foul odor hung in the sultry night air, clinging to her nostrils.

  Did I really sleep all day? How late is it now?

  She blinked and stretched, and froze. The nest was no longer empty.

  A small plump bird sat there, prim and unconcerned with her new human companion. The bird blinked, turned its head, blinked, shivered, and blinked again. The starlight shone dimly off the bird’s blue and green feathers. A long folded fan of tail feathers rested on the ground behind it.

  “Well, a miniature peacock,” Asha whispered. “That’s new.”

  The peacock shivered again and stood up to reveal a pale little egg between its legs. With another shiver, it stepped carefully out of the nest and strutted away into the garden. Just as it passed out of view, it lifted its tail feathers to hide its body behind a green and blue screen.

  Asha inhaled sharply. Beneath its tail feathers, the peacock had a second tail, a green scaled whip of a tail stretched out just above the ground.

  And then the creature was gone.

  * * *

  Asha took a few stumbling steps out of the brush, waist deep in ferns, scanning for the little bird, but it was gone. Out of sight and out of hearing. And that was the most troubling part. Even when she had the tiny peacock right in front of her, Asha still had not been able to hear the animal’s soul. If anything, there had been a ripple in the background noise of the rest of the garden and palace, a warble in the sounds of vegetable, insect, and human souls singing together in accidental harmony.

  When she finally stopped studying the ground and looked up, Asha saw the guards on the far side of the garden frowning at her. She smiled and retreated to the corner where she snatched up the still-warm egg and slipped over the wall onto the tiled walkway. The egg was a dark golden hue, glowing dimly with citrine blemishes like an orb of ancient amber. She considered the egg only for a minute before striding off in search of the prince.

  The lone guard at the west end of the palace confirmed that she had found the prince’s bedchamber, but he refused to allow her to disturb his sleeping lord and master.

  “This is important. I need to speak to him,” she insisted.

  “I’m sorry, madam. I have my orders. No disturbances before dawn.”

  “I don’t care about your orders.” She tried to push past him, but he blocked her way and gently but firmly pushed her back. She tried again, and again, but each time the armored man proved just a bit faster. She never came close to the prince’s door.

  “All right.” Asha chewed her lip for a moment. “The moment that he comes out of there, you tell the prince to come see me. Immediately. Tell him I know what happened to his wife.” And she returned the princess’s chamber to check on her patient.

  An hour later a few soft rustling sounds murmured under the door, and a few minutes later Pratap Singh burst into the princess’s room with his red sherwani jacket unbuttoned and flapping around his white silk shirt. He stared at her. “Mistress Asha, good morning. My man said you had some news for me.”

  “Tell me about the peacock.” Asha held up the amber egg. She grit her teeth and glanced at the grim-faced guard behind the prince. “Please. Your Highness.”

  The prince took the egg, studied it briefly, and returned it. “The peacock was a gift for my wife. I found it in the bazaar one day. A traveling menagerie. I’m sure you’ve seen such things. I certainly have. Usually just an assortment of common monkeys and snakes and beetles, but I found this little peacock among them. The seller claimed the miniature breed was quite popular in Maharashtra, and would never grow any larger, so I bought it for her. But that was over a year ago, long before she fell ill.”

  “Did you know that your wife has been eating the peacock’s eggs?” Asha asked.

  The prince frowned. “No. But such things are not unknown.”

  “Don’t you find it odd that a male peacock is laying eggs at all?”

  Now the prince blinked in surprise. “Male?”

  “Only the male peacock has the beautiful tail feathers, for seducing his mate. The females are brown and much less impressive.”

  The prince stared at the egg in her hand. “But how is that possible? How can a male peacock lay eggs at all?”

  “It can’t. You don’t have a male peacock, Your Highness. You have a female cockatrice.” Asha took a clean rag from her shoulder bag and wrapped the egg in it. “Your peacock has a second tail, one that is green and scaled like a lizard’s tail. The cockatrice is an artificial cross between our native peacocks and a poisonous lizard from the far west, from a frozen land called Europa.”

  “The eggs are poisonous!” The prince covered his mouth and backed away from the wrapped bundle in her hand.

  “Quite poisonous, yes. The cockatrice’s venom is a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes the victim so severely that primitive people thought the victims had actually turned to stone. These unfertilized eggs don’t contain that same venom, of course. Instead, the egg contains a powerful anti-venom to protect the unborn young, but the anti-venom is only meant for the young cockatrice. In any other creature, including a human, the effect of the anti-venom is almost identical to the venom itself, only less dramatic. It probably also helped that the eggs were cooked before your wife ate them. That further reduced their potency. Still, daily exposure over several months has left the princess almost completely paralyzed. If I can’t reverse the effect of the poison quickly, it will seize the base of her brain and her heart will cease to beat.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, please, save her!” the prince implored. “You should not have delayed to speak to me. Only her life matters.”

  “Well, I need something and thought I should ask permission.” Asha pointed out the door toward the garden square. “To make
a cure for this anti-venom, I’m going to need the cockatrice itself. Bring it to me as quickly as you can. Dead, not alive. And tell your men to be careful of its bite.” She paused. “Actually, you need to stay away from its mouth altogether. It exhales traces of a poisonous fume wherever it goes. If it wasn’t for all the ginger I eat, its breath might have killed me last night as I lay in the garden.” She wiped roughly at her nose.

  As the prince hurried out of the room, Asha quickly examined the patient once more for changes. There were none that she could find, but the princess seemed as close to death as ever, and Asha busied herself by spreading her tools and supplies across the floor beside the woman’s bed. Priya sat by the window, gazing out across the lake as though her eyes were not covered by a heavy band of cloth. “Asha? Is everything going to be all right?”

  “I have the cause. Cockatrice egg anti-venom. Now I just need the cure.”

  “Is there a cure for such a thing?”

  “Of course there is,” Asha said. “I just need to invent it. Quickly.”

  After an hour of arranging and cleaning and rearranging her materials, Asha was still waiting beside the princess’s bed for the dead cockatrice. And it was approaching the second hour when she finally stood and marched back out into the central courtyard to see what was the matter.

  Over the short wall she saw a dozen men with drawn swords peering down through the ferns and flowers, muttering to one another, and poking and prodding at the unseen ground. The prince was coordinating the disorganized search from atop the wall itself, pointing here and there, occasionally barking at one man to go this way, or another to dive that way.

  Asha called out, “Where is the cockatrice?”

  The prince glared. “It seems to be hiding. We’ve spotted it several times, but each time it runs to a new hiding place and we have to start all over again. It’s silent, absolutely silent. Once it hissed at one of the men and a blue miasma wafted out of its beak. The venom you spoke of, I assume. So the men are being very cautious.”