Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  A voice rose up from the crowd, an old man’s voice speaking in Eranian, and he said, “…but when Master Omar returns with more sun-steel, then surely we will unravel the last riddle of the aether…”

  Asha shuddered as the voice faded back into the crowd.

  Her hand holding her sari up to smother the light felt cold. Very cold. Asha blinked and could barely open her eyes again. She felt herself sinking down, down, down into the cool black depths of her mind. Asha bit her lip, trying to shock herself back awake, but still she felt herself slipping away. Dimly she became aware of other people all around her. No one was moving. Everyone was standing very still and gazing up through the darkness at a small sliver of light overhead. Asha looked up at the light and saw two fingers holding a needle, and behind that a face. A woman’s face. Her own face, her eyes closed, her skin pale and ashen.

  “No!” she screamed.

  The hot needle’s tip softened into a rounded bulb, and the entire shaft began to curve and fold, breaking contact with the blade. Instantly the black space with its silent watchers vanished and Asha blinked up at her own hands and the floorboards and the shining sword.

  Asha dropped the melted needle and looked at her left hand. A thin trail of blood was escaping the scratch on her thumb, but the blood wasn’t running down. It was running up. The blood had trickled up her finger and along the melted needle toward the glowing sliver of steel.

  She shivered, staring at the blood.

  After a moment’s pause, she picked up her other needle and scratched at the scabbard instead of the blade and was rewarded with a few thin scrapings of a rough material that felt like broken pottery.

  Then she used her needle to push the exposed sword blade away from the crack in the floor, and with the light hidden she crawled back out from under the bunkhouse and carefully made her way back to her own tent. She crept into her blankets and lay very still, listening to the murmurs of the sleeping woman beside her.

  The old man’s voice echoed in her mind as she replayed his words over and over again.

  Master Omar.

  Sun-steel.

  Aether.

  Asha looked at her thumb and watched the single drop of blood roll down her finger toward the ground. Then she licked her wound and went to sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning, Asha made a last round of checks among her patients, trying to give them simple instructions for caring for their own injuries. But soon she had no more patients and no more chores, so she led Priya to the small passenger car of the train directly behind the engine and its huge bin of coal. They stood together on a small platform where the warm sun battled with the cool breeze to create some small comfort for them. The engineer sauntered past, explaining briefly that the train would be returning to Herat backwards, with the engine pushing instead of pulling. And then they were alone.

  “You’re very quiet this morning,” Priya said. “Did you find something interesting last night?”

  “Something troubling.” Asha squinted eastward across the camp to watch the men breaking and hauling stone away from the collapsed tunnel in front of the train. “There were voices in that sword. And the scabbard was made of this.” She pressed the shavings into the nun’s hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Fired clay. The blade melted one of my needles when I touched it, so this must be some sort of ceramic that can withstand the heat of the blade.”

  “But what does it all mean?”

  “That I was right. Sebek’s sword is the same metal as my aether siphon, and it’s full of human souls trapped inside the blade. I scratched my finger on my needle by accident and the sword tried to drink my blood, or more likely the aether in my blood, and my soul along with it. If the needle hadn’t melted away, I might have been trapped in the blade, too.”

  The nun froze, her lips parted in a soundless cry.

  “I know.” Asha took her hand for a moment.

  “We have to take it from him! We have to set those souls free!”

  “I’d love to, but I don’t see how. It’s too dangerous. We need to learn more about it, and him. When we know more, then maybe we can do something for those poor souls.”

  The train’s whistle blew. Hooooooot. Hoot-hoot.

  Asha glanced up to see the sun approaching its zenith. When she lowered her gaze, she saw Master Sebek striding across the yard toward them. He was not hurrying, but there was a power and purpose in his step. He came up to the train and smiled at the women. “Good day. I see you are on time.”

  “Yes,” Asha said. “Thank you again for your help on our journey.”

  “My pleasure.” He smiled briefly. “Do you believe that dreams have any real meaning?”

  “Rarely.”

  “Neither do I. Which is good, I think. I had the strangest dream last night that someone had stolen my sword. My seireiken.” His hand rested on the pommel of the short sword at his side. “The dream was so vivid, so real, that when I awoke I immediately reached for my sword, and I was relieved to find it right where I left it.”

  The locomotive’s whistle blew again and the engine shuddered, sending a rumbling vibration throughout the train. They began to roll very slowly, and Sebek began to walk alongside them.

  “But it was the strangest thing,” he continued. “My sword had been drawn. Just a fraction, just a hair, but enough to expose the blade. Very strange, don’t you think?”

  Asha nodded. “Very strange. You know, your sword reminds me of a story I once heard about a temple on the island of Nippon.”

  Sebek frowned.

  “The story tells of a brotherhood of warriors with heavenly swords that can split a hair lengthwise, and that shine with the light of the sun even in the deepest darkness. Have you ever heard of such warriors?”

  Sebek shook his head.

  Asha shrugged. “I heard the story when I received one of my medical tools. A golden needle, also from Nippon. A needle with strange properties.”

  The train picked up speed and Sebek strode faster to keep pace. His frown deepened.

  “I’ve always wondered about this needle.” Asha patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “Perhaps one day I will go to Nippon and learn more about it. Unless, that is, someone in the west could also tell me about it. Do you know of anyone who might know about it, Master Sebek?”

  “No.” He was jogging now, arms pumping and sword bouncing on his hip, and he was slowly falling behind.

  The train whistled a third time and the chuffing of its pistons and wheels forced Asha to raise her voice. “Perhaps when I reach the heart of Eran, I will be able to unravel these riddles.”

  Sebek’s eyes widened and he broke into a full sprint as the engine accelerated yet again. He had fallen back behind the passenger car, behind the coal car, and was now alongside the engine itself, and still falling farther behind.

  Asha shouted into the wind, “Perhaps Master Omar can tell me more about this sun-steel!”

  Sebek whipped his sword from its scabbard and with its bright golden light falling on his face he shouted at the engineer, but his words were lost beneath the noise of the engine, and he stumbled to a halt as the train raced out of the valley.

  Asha took Priya’s hand and helped her to step back through the narrow door into the passenger car and to sit down on the shaking, shuddering seat. The nun clutched her bamboo rod in one hand and Asha’s sleeve in the other. Jagdish clung to the saffron cloth of her robe. “Asha? What did you mean? Who is Master Omar? What is sun-steel?”

  “That’s what they call it, this metal in my needle and his sword. And I think Master Omar may have the answers we need, whoever he is.”

  “But why? Why did you taunt Sebek like that?”

  Asha smiled as she slipped a fresh sliver of ginger into her mouth. “Because after we find Omar and learn how to free the souls in that sword, it would be a terrible inconvenience to have to find Sebek again. It’ll be much easier if Sebek is following us.”

 
Priya shook her head. “I’m afraid, Asha. This isn’t right. This is evil. These people. That sword. I’ve always thought that killing was the most vile and destructive thing possible. But to capture a soul? To enslave the very essence of life? I never dreamed there could be such evil in the world.” She stiffened suddenly. “What if there are more of them?”

  Asha shrugged as she settled down into her seat. “Then we’ll just have to find them, too, won’t we?”

  The nun nodded. “I’m sorry, Asha. We came west to get away from those cruel doctors, and we’ve actually stumbled onto something worse.”

  “Much worse. A whole new kind of plague of men and metal.” Asha picked at her lip and stared out the window at the rocky hills rolling by. “I’m looking forward to curing it.”

  Chapter 8

  Cedars. Nothing but cedars. No firs, no oaks, no ferns, no fruit trees. Just cedars. They stood in sentinel rows up and down the mountainsides and across the valley floors. They leaned at agonizing angles, telling silent tales of landslides and flashfloods and lightning strikes. And they lay down as chewed and decayed piles of ruin on the cool earth.

  Asha had never noticed the scent of cedars before. Now she couldn’t escape the strange sweetness of them. It was their fifth day hiking along the old dirt path beyond the ruins of a city the locals had called Tesiphon. And it was their third day alone in the cedar forest.

  “Asha?”

  The herbalist glanced back. The nun stood at the bottom of the gentle slope leaning on her bamboo rod, her slender chest rising and falling visibly, the lotus blossoms in her hair shivering in the cool morning breeze.

  Priya lifted her head. “Can we rest a moment?”

  “All right.” Asha sat down in the middle of the path and leaned back against a mound of mossy earth. Her burning right ear brought her the sounds of the forest, its true sounds. The plant-souls of the cedars creaked like a sea of cicadas, droning softly in every direction. Ants and termites marched through the undergrowth, what little there was. And more than a few squirrels raced through the branches overhead. They were all unseen and far away from the two women on the path, and yet all perfectly clear to Asha’s golden ear.

  After a moment, Priya said, “It doesn’t seem so very different from home.”

  “I never thought it would be.” Asha glanced up. “Although I hadn’t expected so many cedars.”

  “I’m serious.” The nun smiled. “At the monastery, I heard so many stories about the Ming Empire and Nippon, and the Isle of Lanka, the snow fields of Rus, and of course, Eran. Each of them always sounded so unique, so different from Kolkata. The weather, the food, the trees, and the flowers. I had always imagined that if I ever traveled the world, it would be an ever changing tapestry of shapes and smells and sounds.”

  “But?” Asha felt through her bag for a sliver of ginger, but found none. She’d chewed the last of them over a week ago, but the habit kept her reaching for one more.

  “But here we are, half way around the world, and it’s all still the same. The same earth and stones, the same trees and people and animals. Only the bread changes. And the music, sometimes.”

  “We’re not half way around the world,” Asha said. “Not even close. Not yet.”

  “I suppose there should be something comforting about the sameness. Everywhere you go, the world is still the same home you left behind. And yet, there is a corner of my heart that desires some newness, and is disappointed.”

  Asha shook her head. “You should know better than to go desiring things. Suffering, and whatnot.”

  “I know, I know.” Priya reached up to her shoulder and stroked the mongoose sleeping under her hair. “Sometimes I think little Jagdish here is the only person I’ve ever met who truly has the world figured out.”

  Asha was about to agree with her when a sound drew her attention skyward. She scanned the leaves overhead. It was a distant sound, muted and faded by the winds and trees, but still a harsh and strident noise. A shout. A roar.

  “I think I…” Asha trailed off as she stood up, straining to hear and wondering for a moment which ear she was hearing it in.

  “I heard it too.” Priya stood up as well, her covered eyes directed at nothing in particular. “It sounded like the cry of someone in pain, someone in trouble.”

  “But where?”

  Asha stood very still, waiting to hear it again.

  A high-pitched shriek split the silence as a small shard of metal plummeted out of the sky, sliced through the canopy, and impaled itself in the brown earth just a few paces from where Asha stood. The herbalist frowned and was about to go closer to it when a deep roar suddenly bellowed down from above, and she looked up again.

  Through the leaves, she saw a huge shining beast race across the sky, gliding and falling and spewing black smoke in its wake. It passed from south to north, flashing across the dirt path where the two women stood and vanishing beyond the wall of cedars. A moment later, a new rumble of thunder echoed across the deep blue sky, followed by the cackling of stones tumbling down a mountainside.

  “What was it?” Priya asked.

  “A machine.” Asha grimaced. “Another machine, one that can fly. Or could fly. That didn’t sound like a gentle landing.”

  “It fell out of the sky?” Priya frowned. “Which way? We should go, quickly. There may be people injured.”

  Asha nodded silently. “Probably.”

  Together they turned off the path and began climbing the steeper, rockier slopes through the cedar forest. Their progress was slow as Asha carefully picked their way around towering boulders and fallen trees, and often hiked along at Priya’s elbow, ready to catch the nun should the slope prove too steep or the earth too loose. The sun reached its zenith and began drifting into the west.

  A thin scrawl of black smoke drew a faint line down from the heavens to a cleft in the mountainside above them. Asha watched the smoke twist and writhe in the wind, and listened to the low hums in her right ear that told her there were two human souls somewhere in that cleft. She paused once to look back down the mountain behind her. There was a third hum out in the forest, one faint and uneven.

  “What is it?” Priya asked.

  Asha shook her head. “Maybe a wolf.”

  They pressed on and reached the mouth of the cleft in the mountainside just as the sun kissed the western edge of the world and the sky flushed orange and violet.

  Asha paused to stare across a vast ledge of tumbled stone with the mountain peak rising to her left and the broken cliff wall of the cleft spearing up to her right.

  “Are we there?” Priya asked. “Can you see the flying machine?”

  Asha blinked. “Oh, I can see it all right.”

  * * *

  As they walked into the shadows of the cleft in the mountain, Asha described to Priya the object before them.

  The bulk of the machine towered over them, an elegantly rounded mass of shining steel like an enormous silver melon so large and so high that they were soon walking in its shadow, though it was far too high above them to touch. Ahead, Asha could see the underbelly of the machine sloping down to meet the earth and where the two met another smaller steel object was lodged. Thin trails of black smoke snaked up from this smaller chamber, rising up both sides of the great steel mass above it.

  Moments later they stood beside a small steel cabin with long glass windows and many steel rods bolting the chamber to the enormous melon. One of the windows had shattered and the smoke spilled upward from it. There was a metal door in the center of the cabin and Asha reached for the handle.

  “I’d wait if I were you.”

  Asha spun to see a man sitting back in a sheltered cave just behind her. He was young-faced and smiling with thin black hair hanging in his eyes, and when he stood he towered over Asha by more than a head. He wore dust-streaked tan trousers that plunged into bronze greaves over black leather boots. His brown jacket was open to reveal a wrinkled white shirt, but it was the device on his right arm that c
aught Asha’s eye. His jacket sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, where the device began and continued down to his wrist, wrapping his arm in bright brass plates and rods and wheels, with a wide flat box on the outside of his forearm. A thick leather glove covered his right hand.

  “I saw this machine fall out of the sky,” Asha said. “Is it yours?”

  “I don’t own it, but I was riding in it,” he said. “Have you ever seen an airship before?”

  “No. My name is Asha, and this is Priya. I’m an herbalist. Are you injured?”

  His smile was quickly replaced by a look of earnest concern. “No, but the pilot was. She’s back here. Can you help her?”

  Asha nodded and followed him back into the cave, leaving Priya to find her own way with her bamboo rod. In the shadows there was a young woman lying on a level bed of dry earth and small stones with a bundle of cloth under her head. Asha set her bag aside and inspected her patient.

  “I’m Gideon, by the way,” the young man said. “And she’s Kahina.”

  “Mm.” Asha carefully moved from the woman’s eyes and mouth to her neck and chest and belly. “Bruises. No cuts. Strong pulse, dry breathing. She’s fine. Just unconscious. What happened to you?”

  “No idea,” Gideon said. His Eranian was slow and clear, but he had an odd way of clipping his syllables off sharply. “One moment we were flying safely, and then suddenly there was all this noise and smoke. Kahina was too busy with the controls to tell me what was happening. And then we just crashed, and I’ve been waiting for her to wake up all afternoon.”

  Priya came to sit beside Asha, and the nun said, “But you weren’t hurt at all?”

  He shrugged. “If I was, it wasn’t serious.” A tiny bit of gold glinted on his chest and Asha saw a small egg-shaped pendant hanging from his neck.

  “Still, I should take a look at you,” Asha said. “You could be bleeding inside, or have a cracked rib.” She stood up.

  Gideon grinned and glanced away. “I doubt it, but you can look if you like.”