Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Asha glanced at her companion, but saw only the same stern youth that she had seen before, striding along with his staff at his side, his golden arm bands and necklaces gleaming in the morning sun.

  What do I really know about this Anubis person? Can I trust him? I know that he’s immortal, I can hear the tiny piece of his soul sealed up in his sun-steel pendant. And I know he can transform his body into a cloud of aether, which I’ve never seen before. And I know he’s been spying on me at least since I arrived at the temple yesterday for the first time.

  That’s not much when it comes to whether I can trust him. But he seemed genuinely upset yesterday talking about his family. If those creatures were really his parents, then I guess I can trust his motives.

  Unless he hates his parents.

  Asha sighed loudly.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “The tension in your face and back suggests that you’re unhappy, uncomfortable, but not about the death of your friend. You’ve moved on from that. Now you’re uncomfortable with your surroundings, and with me. You don’t trust me, and you think I’m leading you into a trap. Your concern is unnecessary.”

  Asha looked at him sharply. “I… I haven’t moved on. I simply don’t have time to grieve for Priya every moment of the day. I can’t think about her and save Omar at the same time.”

  “Deception, or self-deception?” Anubis glanced at her again, his face completely expressionless. “Self-deception. You are not grieving anymore, but you wish to think you are, to honor the memory of your friend. You also wish to appear strong in front of me, a potential enemy but also a potential ally. Your desire to impress or intimidate those around you is strong, but again, unnecessary. You already possess the power to defeat an army, or destroy a temple, with your bare hands.”

  “How do you know what I feel?” she snapped at him.

  “I can see it in every tiny muscle in your eyes and lips,” he said. “People are open books, if you only learn to read them properly.”

  “Well, I’m not trying to impress anyone, and I am grieving. You’re wrong about me.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I’m never wrong about anyone.”

  They came to another intersection and Anubis paused, nodding at the building on the far corner. “That is The Cat’s Eye. Inside we will find Zahra El Ayat, her guards, and her staff. You can ignore everyone except Zahra. They all take their orders from her, and they are all extremely loyal, so it is unlikely anyone will harm you without her express order. She is one of the few women to obtain any real power within the Temple of Osiris, and she has attracted many dangerous women to her service. Try not to offend her. It will be easier than you think.”

  “She’s thin-skinned?” Asha asked.

  “She is vain, selfish, and immature,” Anubis replied. “She is also frequently drunk.”

  They crossed the intersection and Asha knocked on the doors. And then she knocked again. And then again, much louder.

  The locks clicked and the door jerked inward. A woman’s stern face looked out. “We’re closed. Come back tonight.”

  “Pardon my impatience.” Anubis pushed the door open and strode inside. “We’ve come to speak with Zahra. Now. Please.”

  The woman glared at him. “I think you’d better reconsider. I don’t take orders from you, and my mistress doesn’t appreciate strangers barging into her home.”

  “We haven’t come on a whim,” Anubis said. “She has information we need.”

  “Then you can come back later,” the woman hissed. She pointed at the open door to the street. “Now get out before I throw you out.”

  Asha frowned at the smaller woman. “Are you threatening us?”

  The woman reached into the wide sash around her waist and pulled out a small metal object, a device that Asha had never seen before. But from the way that the woman pointed it at them, she guessed the device to be a weapon. It vaguely resembled the smoking spears of the soldiers at the temple.

  “By all means,” Anubis said, turning his thinly clothed chest toward her. “Shoot.”

  “Lunatic,” the woman muttered, and the weapon fired. The noise pounded on Asha’s left ear and she winced away from it as a small puff of smoke and flash of fire erupted from the device directly at Anubis from only two paces away.

  But the dark youth’s chest merely swirled with a puff of aether that drifted from his back and chest like steam for a moment, and then it faded away, leaving his chest and tunic unblemished.

  They kill people with machines here? Innocent people, strangers, for no reason?

  Asha lashed out, but the hand that grabbed the weapon wasn’t one of brown flesh, it was armored in gold with burning ruby claws. The woman shrieked and pulled back, leaving the weapon in Asha’s grasp. Asha curled her hand into a fist, feeling the metal of the device warping and melting in her claws, and when she opened her hand again, a charred lump of iron fell to the floor. She shook her hand and let out a long breath to quiet the dragon and make her skin smooth and soft again.

  “Now.” She stepped in front of Anubis so that the woman’s eyes were on her. “Where is Zahra El Ayat?”

  The woman’s strained eyes darted anxiously from Asha’s hands to her face and back. “What the hell are you?”

  Asha held out her hand, reaching halfway to the woman’s face. “Is that really what you wish to discuss right now?”

  She shook her head.

  “We simply wish to talk to Zahra about the Temple of Osiris,” Asha said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. We don’t care what sorts of people you work with, or what business you are in, or anything else at all. We only wish to ask questions. Do you understand?”

  The woman nodded. “This way.” She led them back through the foyer and into a wide open dining room filled with round tables and armless chairs. Only a few, thin shafts of light slipped between the curtains over the windows, casting strange lines across the floor and furniture, revealing splashes and slashes of color on the tiles and the carpets and the table cloths. Red and purple and gold. On one side of the room was a huge misshapen table with only three legs and a set of peddles on one side by a bench. Asha gave it a curious glance.

  “Piano,” Anubis said. “It makes music.”

  Asha nodded and they stepped through a curtain at the back of the dining room. Their guide brought them to a smaller room, one with a single table and several chairs on one side of it. “This is the office. Wait here. I’ll go and get her.”

  Anubis nodded and she scurried back through the curtained doorway.

  “Trap?” Asha asked.

  “No,” Anubis said. “Her hands shook, but in genuine fear and confusion, not with anger or malice. She fears us both, perhaps as much as her mistress. She’ll go to Zahra, and Zahra will come. Most likely with bodyguards, but she will hear us out.”

  Asha turned to him. “How do you do that? How do you know so much about people and what they’re going to do?”

  “I read them,” he said in his deep droning voice. “Hands, eyes, lips, the sound of a breath, the twitch of an eyelash, the flush of color in the throat and in the ears and cheeks. Humans are forever in motion, and mostly out of control, thralls to their passions and their instincts. And it is all on display, all on parade for anyone with eyes to see it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides,” he continued. “That woman is Aegyptian. She knows who I am. Perhaps she doesn’t believe it yet, but the doubt is gnawing at her heart. She’s afraid I may be exactly who I appear to be. If I told her my name, she might faint from the shock of it. It has happened before.”

  “Why?” Asha frowned.

  “Because here I am a god.” He looked at her, a calm and steady gaze of deep green eyes peering out of the shadows. “Once, long ago, my family was revered here as a pantheon of living gods. And we played the role fate gave us, for a time. Eventually we bored of it, and retired from public life. But our memory lives on. Our images are still carved into the walls of this city and many others,
reminding the people. Terrifying them.”

  “A god?” Asha asked. “What were you the god of? Mind-reading?”

  “Death. I was Death given form and voice, the Death that walked among the living, judging the souls of the quick and the dying, and shepherding the departing shades into the netherworld, to rest for all eternity.”

  Asha smiled a little. “Is that all?”

  He shrugged. “It helped to pass the time.”

  She started to pace across the little room, then looked back and said, “What was the weapon she had? The one I broke?”

  “It’s called a gun,” he said. “They’re made in the west by the Mazighs.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “For most people, very,” he said calmly. “Don’t let anyone shoot you with one, at least not without your armor on. And even then, it will probably hurt.”

  Footsteps shuffled and clumped about overhead, and a moment later booted feet descended a flight of stairs. The curtains covering the doorway parted and a woman strode inside. She was still young though middle age was on the horizon for her. She was also slender, her face thin and drawn, a face that had once probably been pretty but now seemed a bit abused by time, worry, and fear. She wore a dark blue dress with a black shawl around her shoulders and she moved with great precision, though little grace. She slumped into a chair on the far side of the table, jerked the chair closer to the table, and folded her hands artlessly in front of her. Her eyes carried dark bags beneath them, and her lips were dry and colorless.

  Two grim and unpleasant men followed her into the room, both with belts clinking with knives and much larger guns than the one Asha had destroyed. They also went behind the table and stood to either side of their mistress. Asha noticed that the servant woman who let them inside remained back in the doorway, peering nervously through the curtains.

  “I am Zahra El Ayat,” said the tired woman sitting behind the table. “I’m told you wish to speak with me. I’m also told that you’re demons or jinn come from hell to torment me.” She glared at the woman hiding behind the curtains.

  “We are neither. We are human,” Anubis said.

  “Probably,” Zahra said. “What do you want?”

  “Last night, a friend of ours was abducted near the Temple of Osiris,” Asha said. “He was taken by two very strange people.”

  “Was this before or after the temple was smashed into rubble by the golden demon?” Zahra asked dryly. “There’s been a lot of talk of demons lately.”

  “After,” Asha said. “We think our friend was taken into the undercity. That he was taken to a woman called Lilith. Do you know that name?”

  Zahra’s eyes flicked up sharply at the name, but otherwise she remained quite still and quiet. “Lilith is a story,” she said slowly. “Two stories, actually. In the streets, Lilith is a demon who rises up from the land of the dead to ravage the world of the living with her beasts, to drag naughty children down into the depths where she eats their bones and drinks their blood. But the Sons of Osiris have another story, a story about a woman who buys sun-steel by the ingot and keeps the Masters and First Knights shaking in their little green robes at night with threats that dare not be repeated, lest they come to pass.”

  “I did not think the Sons of Osiris ever sold their precious sun-steel,” Anubis said.

  “Not willingly, they don’t,” Zahra said. “Apparently, this Lilith is a very special exception.”

  “And she took it by the ingot?” Asha said. “Raw bricks and bars? Not the seireiken swords?”

  “She bought ingots, but she didn’t take them as such. I know because I saw the accounts, the ledgers, the real records inside the temple, down in old Jiro’s forge. She would buy an ingot, but leave with a box. About this big.” She held out her hands about the width of her shoulders.

  “So what was in these boxes?” Asha asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen two of them, and never seen inside them,” Zahra said. “The person to ask would be Master Rashaken, but I hear someone dropped a temple on his head, so he may not be very forthcoming.”

  Asha frowned.

  I can’t believe I was so reckless! That one mistake just keeps coming back to hurt us.

  “And there isn’t anyone else we can ask?”

  “You could ask Master Jiro,” Zahra said. “He retired from the temple last year after they had a little… internal turmoil. He’s living in the lighthouse district now, trying to get others from Nippon to establish their own little enclave here. Assuming he wasn’t visiting any friends at the temple yesterday, he’s probably still alive, and he would know what’s in Lilith’s little boxes. Whatever it was, he was the one making it, at least until last year.”

  Asha glanced at Anubis, and he nodded back. “All right then. Thank you for your help. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  Zahra nodded. “You might want to watch yourself around Jiro. His seireiken is smaller than most, which makes it harder to see it coming.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” Asha said as she left.

  Chapter 7

  Bastet skipped along the boulevard, humming an old lullaby and dragging Wren by the hand. The taller girl with the red hair seemed to want to stop every few steps to look at some market stall or temple gate or even just to stare at the zebras and steam carriages, but Bastet was determined to keep going.

  “Can we slow down please?” Wren asked in her halting Eranian.

  “We can go shopping later,” Bastet said. “Gideon is waiting for us! Don’t you want to meet him?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve met a lot of immortals in the last year,” the tall girl said. “They can be pretty strange, and dangerous too.”

  “A lot of immortals? Besides my grandfather and me?”

  Wren nodded. “Omar and I passed through Constantia a few weeks ago. We saw Nadira there, and the two Rus immortals, too. Did you ever meet them?”

  “The Rus? No. What are they like?”

  “Strange. Dangerous.” Wren hesitated. “They’re dead now. Not Nadira, I don’t think. Just the Rus. Both of them. Koschei and his mother.”

  “What?” Bastet stopped short and spun to look at the other girl. “Dead immortals? That’s impossible! You’d have to destroy their hearts.” She reached into the neck of her dress and pulled out a little gold chain with a little golden pendant. It was a lumpy effigy of a human heart.

  Not Grandfather’s finest work, but then he never was as good with his hands as he was at dreaming up big ideas. Still, it’s pretty in its own way.

  “Yes, I know. And we did. Or he did, I mean. Omar,” Wren said. “Omar said that Koschei used to be a good man, but over time he became this wretched, brutish killer. So Omar killed Koschei, killed him with his seireiken and then melted Koschei’s pendant with the sword’s heat. And Koschei’s mother, well, she just decided her time had come. She never wanted to be immortal, not really. She was happy, in the end. Happy that it was over.”

  “So Omar killed her too?”

  “No,” Wren said softly. “She killed herself, and died in my arms. And then Omar destroyed her pendant.”

  Bastet looked up past the other girl’s strange black dress and curling red hair and blue glasses and saw the pained look in her golden eyes. “I’m sorry. Were you close to her?”

  “In a way. But it’s all right now,” Wren said. “It’s the way it should be. Everything back where it belongs, more or less. It just took a lot of time and pain to get there. A lot of pain. And death.”

  Bastet nodded.

  And you’re all of twenty years old, aren’t you? Wait until you’re four thousand. The pain and death are always out there, always with us. But you know that now, don’t you? Poor thing.

  “Come on.” Bastet smiled. “Gideon isn’t like that at all. He’s not like any of us, except me, maybe. I guess that’s why I like him. He never got old on the inside. He’s fun!”

  They hurried through the streets, slowing down a bit as more and more p
eople, animals, and carts trundled out from their homes, stables, and carriage houses to begin the day. By the time they turned the last corner and saw the dusty fountain with its little stone fish, the traffic on the main road was quite loud and the vapors escaping from the engines and the animals were eye-watering.

  But none of that mattered, because there, lying precariously across the narrow lip of the fountain wall with his hands folded behind his head, was Gideon.

  He’d changed his clothing quite a bit since the last time she saw him. No more Persian silks or Indian coats. Now he wore a machine-tailored white cotton shirt under a brown leather jacket, both of which looked to be Mazigh, as well as his wrinkled canvas trousers and tall brown leather boots. But one thing was still the same. Over his boots he still wore his battered old brass greaves from his days as a soldier of Damascus.

  “Gideon!” Bastet let go of Wren and dashed down the lane. She reached him just as he started to sit up and she nearly knocked him into the empty fountain as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “It’s been so long! How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. And it’s lovely to see my favorite little cat goddess again. I swear, you’re growing like a weed!” He beamed and held out his hand by her shoulder. “Why, just last century you were only this high!”

  She shoved his hand away. The joke itself was stale beyond measure, but the ritual of hearing him say it each time they met was like its own sort of homecoming, proof that he was really there and still himself. He didn’t look any older than Wren, with his soft brown cheeks and deep brown eyes and thick black hair shining darkly with oils that smelled faintly like sandalwood.