Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Don’t be silly,” she said haughtily. “I’m twice your age, and don’t you forget it!”

  “I’ll try,” he said with a smile. “And who is your lovely young friend here?”

  They both looked up at the girl holding the mongoose.

  “This is Wren,” Bastet said. “Wren, Gideon.”

  “A pleasure.” He took her empty hand and kissed it. “Always nice to meet new friends, especially ones bearing gifts. Is he for me?” He reached for Jagdish.

  Wren smiled and deftly moved her furry friend out of his reach. “Absolutely not. He’s not even mine. I’m just watching him for a friend.”

  “Oh, I see,” Gideon said. “A friend. Of course.”

  “A mutual friend,” Bastet said. “Someone you’ve already met, I think.”

  “Someone I’ve met with a…” His eyes widened. “So they are here? Asha and Priya? Oh, thank God, I’ve been so worried about them. It’s been a couple months now since I’ve seen them, and I felt so bad about leaving them on their own before, and I’ve just been worried ever since. And then I ran into Nadira and she told me about the business with the dragon. Do you know about the dragon?”

  Bastet nodded with a grin.

  “And I’m rambling, aren’t I?” Gideon laughed.

  “It’s all right, it’s good to hear you ramble. It means you’re still breathing,” Bastet said. “What I want to know is, what is this ugly thing and why are you wearing it?” She wrapped her knuckles on the brass and steel contraption strapped to his right forearm.

  “Ugly?” He feigned shock and offense. “Ugly? How dare you! I’ll have you know I paid a lot of money to a very nice woman in Marrakesh to make this for me. It’s a one-of-a-kind original sort of thing, and you’re lucky I’m even letting you look at it.”

  “Mm hm. What is it?”

  “My sword,” he said quietly, with a suddenly somber cast in his eyes. “I had the blade refitted into a new clay lining and mounted into this device and strapped to my arm.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s getting pretty dangerous,” he said. “The blade is so hot and bright now… I was in a little dust-up with some men in Numidia, and I dropped it, and it set a whole house on fire, and I…” He paused and shook his head a little. “It’s getting pretty scary, actually. I had this new sheathe built so I could never drop the sword again, and so no one could ever try to steal it, you know, by pulling it out of the scabbard. It’s just a little thing, but it’s still so dangerous.”

  “You have a sun-steel sword? A seireiken?” Wren asked.

  Gideon nodded. “It’s only about fifteen hundred years old, not nearly as old as some, but it’s killed more than any other, maybe more than all of them combined. It has more souls trapped inside it than any other,” he said.

  “Oh.” Wren shifted her nervous look from Gideon to Bastet.

  “Oh, no!” Bastet grabbed her hand. “Gideon doesn’t kill a lot of people or anything. Mostly he just kills the Sons of Osiris, and folks like them. His sword is full of souls because he uses it to break seireikens.”

  “Oh.” Wren sat up a bit straighter and suddenly looked far more interested.

  “Yeah.” Gideon smiled wryly. “The only thing that will break a seireiken is a hotter seireiken. So, there’s the rub. I have to use a seireiken. And each time I shatter one the aether spills out, and the souls spill out, but they mostly just get drawn right back into my blade instead of going free. It’s not really a perfect solution, is it? I’m just moving them from one prison to another. But at least this way they’re not being used by the Osirians.”

  “Oooh!” Bastet beamed. “I have a surprise for you. I think I’ve solved your little sword problem. But I’ll tell you about it later. It’s complicated. Right now, we have other things to talk about. Like Asha.”

  “Asha and Priya.” Gideon nodded. “Two of the more remarkable women I’ve ever met.”

  “Actually,” Wren said, “it’s just Asha now. Priya… we lost Priya yesterday.”

  Gideon’s bright boyish grin vanished and he stared at the girls, his face ashen and expression leaden with despair. He whispered, “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wren said. “I… There was this man with a sort of animal head.”

  “It was Set,” Bastet explained. “Set and Nethys were digging through what’s left of the temple, and Set killed Priya.”

  Gideon slumped forward and rubbed his eyes in silence for a moment. When he sat up again, he kept his gaze on the road. “I saw the temple last night when I arrived. I could barely believe it. It’s just broken, just gone, just like that. How many times did I burn that place down? Four? Five? Unbelievable.”

  “Asha did it,” Wren said. “She pulled the temple down. Set and Nethys came later.”

  Gideon stared at her, though with a bit less amazement than before. “I see. So she really has learned to control the soul of the dragon? Asha, I mean.”

  The girls nodded.

  “Good for her,” he whispered.

  “There’s more,” Wren said. “When Set killed Priya, a winged woman grabbed Omar and we think she took him down to someone called Lilith.”

  Gideon‘s brow wrinkled. “Who is Omar?”

  “You know, Grandfather!” Bastet said. “He’s been traveling with Wren, calling himself Omar Bakhoum.”

  “Oh God, Bashir! Lilith has Bashir!” Gideon leapt up and turned to look at the center of the fountain with horror, as though it were a venomous serpent about to strike him. “We have to get him out of there!”

  Bastet jumped in front of him. “It’s all right, we will, we will. But right now we need to wait for Asha and Anubis. They’re trying to figure out how Lilith turned everyone into monsters and things, so we can free them.”

  “We can’t wait,” Gideon said. “We can’t wait at all. We have to get him out of there. We can figure out how to help your family later, but we need to get him out before she does something to him. How long has she had him?”

  “Since last night. Half a day,” said Wren.

  “Half a day?” Gideon grimaced. “Damn it. She could have done it already. I need to get down there, now!”

  “No!” Bastet yelled, planted her palms on his stomach and shoving him back. “No one is going down there, not alone and not without a plan.”

  “But!”

  “No buts!” she yelled, pushing him again. “This isn’t like the Osirians. We’re not talking about some idiots with robes and swords. We’re talking about Lilith. We’re talking about fighting immortals, monsters, and insane slaves. You’ve never done anything like that before, none of us has! And she hasn’t had any trouble defeating us before. As soon as she took Set, it was already over. After him, how easy was it for her to get Nethys, and Horus, and Isis? And now she has Grandfather too!” She beat her fists on his stomach as the tears burned her eyes. “So you’re not going anywhere near her! I’m not losing you too!”

  “Shh, shh.” He knelt down and wrapped his arms around her. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. It’s okay.”

  She folded against him and cried, but only a little, only for a moment. She wiped her eyes and smelled the leather of his jacket. “I like your jacket,” she said softly.

  He laughed. “Thank you, that means a lot to me.”

  After another quick squeeze they separated and sat back down on the wall beside Wren.

  Gideon sighed. “Oh, Lilith.”

  “Did you know her?” Wren asked.

  He nodded. “Bashir made us immortal within a day of each other. It was about two thousand years ago, in Damascus. I was actually assigned to be his guide and bodyguard while he was in the city visiting the prince. We got to be friends, mostly because I kept pulling him out of bar fights.”

  “Omar? In bar fights?” Wren smiled a little.

  “Well, I don’t know about your Omar, but my Bashir could be a sloppy drunk when he wanted to be, which was most nights, actually,”
he said. “He was in a dark place. Having second thoughts, having a lot of regrets. He didn’t explain why, really. He mentioned another immortal in India, but it was all a bit vague.”

  “What was Lilith like back then?” Bastet asked. “You never talk about her.”

  “No, I don’t.” He paused. “She was a royal courtesan. She slept with the prince, and sang, and painted. I knew her name before we met. She was well regarded as a great beauty as well as a talented artist. Everyone seemed a bit taken with her, though she had a temper and didn’t like to be ignored. She enjoyed having the room’s attention when she walked through the door. She was definitely beautiful, but she never really caught my eye.”

  “Why did Omar make her immortal? I thought he only did that when he thought someone was really special, or could really make the world better, somehow,” Wren said.

  “Bashir wanted people to help him with his studies,” Gideon said. “He wanted me to experiment with sun-steel, and he asked Nadira to study aether. These were fairly straight-forward sciences, really, they just needed to be explored more. But there was a third part to Bashir’s strange world, which was not so straight-forward, or scientific.”

  “Soul-breaking,” Bastet said.

  “Omar hasn’t told me much about that,” Wren said. “But he does make it sound more like a craft or an art than a science.”

  “And that’s why he picked Lilith to study it for him,” Gideon said. “Because she was an artist. And because he thought she was pretty.”

  “That sounds like him,” Wren said.

  “The trouble was that Lilith wasn’t like us,” Gideon continued. “Nadira and I cared about our tasks, for a while. We thought it was good and noble work, but eventually time caught up to us. You start to see the world a bit differently when years cycle past as quickly as days. Nadira gave in to the pain of it. She gave up her work, gave up her dedication to the Mazdan Temple, and became a wandering soldier, a living ghost who hunted thieves and murderers, trying to push back the darkness with her own two hands.”

  “What about you?” Wren asked.

  “I guess I swung the other way.” He grinned sheepishly. “I stopped worrying about the big picture. I figure, let history take care of itself. Of course, I deal with the occasional Osirian, but beyond that, there are just so many things I want to see, and hear, and taste. It’s really an amazing world out there, and I’ve been trying to enjoy every little bit of it. Meeting the people, eating the food, playing with the toys.”

  “Toys?” Bastet asked.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Gideon said seriously. “You’d be amazed by some of the toys they make for children in some places. Beautiful dolls, hand-carved animals, funny little mechanical things in Marrakesh.”

  Bastet put her fists on her hips and pouted. “And why haven’t I ever gotten any of these toys?”

  Gideon grinned. “Well, I don’t usually take any with me. I just play with them for a while.”

  “Uhm, sorry, but, Lilith?” Wren asked.

  “Right, Lilith.” Gideon nodded. “Well, she threw herself into learning everything about soul-breaking, and she never came up for air. Every time I saw her, she was more excited than the last time about some new discovery, some new masterpiece. But it wasn’t until much later that I learned what exactly she was doing. Blending men and women together, blending animals together, blending animals with people.” He shuddered.

  “She moved around a lot,” Bastet said. “Mostly around Syria, Babylonia, and Turkiya. But then, a few years ago, she came here. I think it was so she could get more sun-steel from the Temple of Osiris. Then she started taking people from the streets and turning them into monsters, and letting them roam around the undercity. That was bad enough. But then she took Set, and everything fell apart.”

  Gideon put his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, little one. Uncle Gideon will put it all right soon enough. I promise.”

  “Nephew.”

  “What?”

  “If we’re family, then I’m your aunt and you’re my nephew,” Bastet said. “You’re half my age, remember?”

  He smiled. “Whatever you say.”

  “So I guess we just need Asha and Anubis now,” Wren said. “I wonder where they are.”

  Chapter 8

  Asha knocked on the door and then stepped back into the street beside Anubis. There was little traffic on the road itself and most of the noise of the city rose from the water just a hundred paces away to their right. Steamers blasted their horns and trawlers rang their bells, and men were shouting about ropes, fish, and oil.

  The house in front of them was an ancient stone block with a flat roof standing shoulder to shoulder with half a dozen other stone blocks. The doors were all neatly spaced apart, and there were no windows to give them any hint of what, or who, might be inside.

  “What if he isn’t here?” she asked.

  “Then no one will answer the door,” Anubis replied.

  She frowned at him just as the door clicked and swung open, revealing a very tall man. Asha recognized him as an easterner, though he didn’t quite look like the doctors or monks she had known in Ming. He had shaved his head, but not recently judging by the darkening stubble on his scalp. He wore no beard, and his cheeks and eyes were marked with many fine lines that could have been from laughing or squinting, but didn’t appear to be from age.

  He might have been forty or fifty, and his hands were heavily veined, his fingers criss-crossed with countless tiny white scars, and his bare feet showed bright calluses around the edges. Over his lean frame he wore a light brown shirt with wide, loose sleeves and matching trousers that all shuddered and rippled in the breeze blowing off the harbor.

  “Yes?” he said. His eyes darted over Asha, but lingered on Anubis.

  “I am Asha of Kathmandu,” the herbalist said. “Are you Master Jiro, formerly of the Temple of Osiris?”

  He leaned out the doorway just a bit to look up and down the empty street. “I was.”

  He stepped out into the road and crossed his arms over his chest, slipping his right hand into his left sleeve and his left hand into his right sleeve, out of sight.

  Asha wondered what might be hidden in those sleeves. “We’re trying to find someone who was taken from us last night. We think his life is in danger,” she said. “We have already learned a good deal about the people who took him, but there is a piece of the puzzle missing, and we were told you might be able to help us.”

  Jiro continued to peer down at them both with a very calm yet stern expression. “I am no longer with the temple. I do not know what happens there now.”

  “Nothing happens there now,” Anubis said. “The temple was destroyed last night, and many Osirians were killed, by the very woman standing before you.”

  “Truly?” Jiro narrowed his eyes a bit. He whipped his right hand from his sleeve and Asha saw the blazing white line of a small sun-steel knife. Jiro held the knife not tightly in his fist but loosely between two fingers, and he lunged at Asha’s throat with a deft and graceful flick of his blinding white blade.

  We don’t have time for this!

  Asha lashed out and grabbed the man’s wrist, wrapped her golden-scaled fingers around the small bones behind his hand, and she squeezed. The sun-steel knife clattered to the ground and the man gasped. Asha let her claws extend from her fingertips, bright flashing shards of ruby that sliced gently into his sleeve and pressed down against his skin.

  Jiro winced, but made no sound. He grimaced for a moment, and then Asha felt his arm go slack in her grip. She released him and he stepped back to rub his injured arm.

  “You’re one of them,” he said. “One of her monsters?”

  “No,” Asha said. “I’m something else.”

  She bent down and picked up the sun-steel knife with her armored hand, holding it up for the easterner to see. And then she crushed the blade between her golden fingers, letting her blazing red claws melt and shred the metal into twisted scraps that drippe
d on the street. She dropped the remains of the knife, its blade dark and deformed. A thin cloud of aether drifted up from the ruined sun-steel and Asha said a silent prayer for the souls that were now tasting their first moments of freedom since the day they died.

  “I’ve come to stop her,” Asha said. “I’ve come to free the people she has taken. I’ve also come to free all the souls that the Osirians have taken. But I have no quarrel with you, Master Jiro. I need your help to stop Lilith and to rescue my friend, a man called Omar Bakhoum.”

  He looked at her sharply. “Master Omar has returned?”

  “Yes,” Asha said. “He returned, apparently to destroy the Temple of Osiris, only I arrived a little before him and did the deed myself. Now I need your help to save him, and to continue his work.”

  “So, he wishes to destroy the temple? If I was any other man of the temple, I would not believe you. But I understand his wishes. I myself left the temple for many reasons. Lilith was one of them.” Jiro nodded thoughtfully. “Regardless, it does not appear that it is within my power to refuse you, Asha of Kathmandu. Therefore, I ask that you overlook my actions a moment ago, and allow me to welcome you into my home.”

  Asha shook her hand and let the anger wash out of her, and felt her skin become her own again. She and Anubis followed Jiro inside, and he closed the door behind them. The interior of the stone building was much the same as the exterior, and the entire home was a single room with a rear door in addition to the front one. Thin rectangular mats lay on the floor at perfect right angles to the walls, and circular cushions sat along the edges of the mats beside a low table. There were no chairs. A fragile-looking screen divided the front of the space from the back, and behind it she glimpsed a bed of thin blankets and several small shelves and jars in the corner. The light in the room fell through a single window, not in a wall, but in the ceiling.

  Jiro sat on one of his round cushions and gestured to them to sit beside him, which they did. “How can I help you?”

  Asha said, “Last night, Omar was taken by two strange creatures. The woman had feathered wings for arms, and the man had the head of a dog.”