Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “An aardvark,” Anubis corrected.

  “Nethys and Set,” Jiro said. “I did not think they would be so bold, or so reckless, as to be seen by strangers in the streets. I suppose the destruction of the temple caused them some alarm.” He turned to the black youth. “And you, sir? Who are you?”

  “My name is Anapa, and I live here in the city,” Anubis said. “I saw the abduction as well, and I wish to help this lady to find her friend, and to learn more about these creatures we saw.”

  Jiro nodded. “I understand your curiosity, but I know these two, Nethys and Set. The people they take do not come back. I doubt even Master Omar could escape this fate. He is gone. You must accept that.”

  “I don’t,” Asha said. “And I’m going to find him. But first we need to know what you were making for Lilith.”

  Jiro looked at her sharply. “How do you know of that?”

  “I have well-informed friends,” she answered. “I know you made her something, something forged from sun-steel ingots, something you delivered in wooden boxes.”

  “Zahra!” Jiro frowned. “You heard this from that woman, didn’t you?”

  “Does it matter?” Anubis asked.

  Jiro gave him a long, flat look. “No, it does not.”

  “Then please, can you tell us what you made for Lilith?” Asha asked.

  The man frowned for a long silent moment before he said, “Each box contained three hundred needles, each the length of my finger, sharpened at one end and blunted at the other.”

  “Sun-steel needles?” Anubis asked. “For what?”

  Asha opened her medicine bag and sorted carefully through her small jars, paper envelopes, mirrors, lenses, vials, and tools until she found what she needed, and held it up for the men to see. The golden needle in her hand was long and slender, with three faint notches scored into its side near the pointed end. “Were they like this?”

  Jiro leaned forward to look at the needle in her hand. “Similar, but smaller. Where did you get that?”

  “Ming.” She put the needle away carefully. “It’s an aether siphon, a doctor’s tool. It’s used to draw aether out of a patient’s body, usually from the blood. But it must be used very carefully and very briefly, or it will kill the patient.”

  “I doubt Lilith is using hers in such a delicate manner,” Anubis said.

  “No.” Jiro shook his head. “However she used them, consumed them. She never returned them to me to be reforged or repaired. When she came, it was to purchase a new ingot and order the needles. Always the needles.”

  Asha looked down again at the needle in her bag, gleaming darkly against her mortar and pestle and a pale yellow rag.

  An aether siphon will draw out the aether in the blood, but if left in for too long it will draw out the soul as well, leaving the patient dead and cold. Is Lilith using needles to steal souls? Is there a shelf in her citadel covered in sun-steel needles, each one trapping the soul of some poor innocent, waiting for her to use them in her horrific experiments?

  But then what? You can’t remove the soul from the needle without destroying the needle, and then the soul is gone. How is she using these needles to make her monsters?

  Asha looked down at her own hand.

  I become a monster when the dragon soul within me is set free. But the dragon soul is always inside me. Inside me… Lilith must be putting animal souls inside her victims. Inside them…

  She looked up at Anubis.

  Wren’s ears! The fox soul is contained, limited, focused inside her.

  Asha looked sharply at the door to the street.

  Lilith uses the needles to take out animal souls, and then she puts the needle inside the person she wants to change, just like injecting a drug, except she has to leave the needle inside the patient to control the transformation, otherwise the victim would become a raving monster. That’s why she always needs more needles.

  It’s genius. Lilith has learned how to balance these three elements perfectly. The human soul, the animal soul, and the sun-steel needles.

  “I know what she’s doing,” Asha said. She looked at Jiro. “She uses the needles to make her monsters. She used them to change Nethys and Set.”

  “How?” asked Anubis.

  “She stabs an animal, like an aardvark, with one of the needles. This puts the animal’s soul, or a portion of the soul, inside the needle,” Asha explained. “Then she puts the needle into her victim, sliding it under the skin, burying the animal soul inside the human soul.”

  “Wouldn’t that transform the entire person?” Anubis asked. “Only Nethys’s arms and Set’s head have been changed.”

  Asha shrugged. “Lilith knows something we don’t. Maybe she can control the extent of the change by placing the needles in her victims a certain way. Maybe she placed the aardvark needle in Set’s head, and a pair of bird needles in Nethys’s arms.”

  “If that is true, then you can save these people,” Jiro said. “Simply remove the needles, and you remove the animal soul with it. The person will be restored.”

  “Possibly.” Asha paused to think. “I would have to take the needle out very quickly to keep it from drawing out the person’s soul as well, but yes, I think that might work.”

  “Then, you can save them?” Anubis asked. “All of them?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “It will be difficult,” Jiro said. “You would have to subdue the creature first, before you can begin the procedure. Even then, it might take hours of surgery simply to find where the needle is buried in the flesh, let alone the skill needed to remove the needle safely.”

  Asha nodded. “It will be difficult. You’ve worked with sun-steel, though. Do you have any tools that might help?”

  Jiro made a noncommittal shrug. “I have many tools. I still have a small workshop in the house next door. But I can’t imagine using any of my tools to find or remove a needle from a living body.”

  “I see,” Asha said.

  Explore inside a body? Cutting people apart? Looking for something as small as a needle? Oh gods, Priya, don’t tell me I actually need a doctor’s help!

  “Well, we should go.” Asha stood up. “Thank you for your time, Master Jiro.”

  “I am only Jiro now,” the easterner said, rising to his feet. “And I apologize for drawing my blade earlier. I thought you were assassins sent by Lilith. I was mistaken. If there is anything else I can do to help you, or Master Omar, you need only ask. I did not approve of Rashaken’s dealings with Lilith, but I obeyed my orders all the same. It would honor me to have the opportunity to undo some of those mistakes.” He bowed his head to her.

  Asha and Anubis left the small house by the harbor and headed back into the city.

  “Why did you lie to him about your name?” she asked.

  “There was no need to complicate our dealings with him,” Anubis said. “A learned man like him would undoubtedly know my name, and perhaps even suspect my connection to Set and Lilith. It’s simpler this way.”

  It took most of an hour to cross back through the busy city streets, through the rising heat of the late morning and the rising noise and exhaust of the traffic. For the first brief while, Asha found herself staring all around at the colors and sounds, the creatures and machines, and the endless parade of peoples from all across Asia and Ifrica.

  But eventually the exotic accents and instruments and engines just became a relentless noise, and the heat was just heat, and she stopped paying attention to the city at all. And for the rest of the walk, she simply felt the strange absence of Priya at her side, and wished that they were walking through a quiet forest glade, far away from any other people.

  Finally they reached the dead-end street with the dusty fountain and Asha saw Wren and Bastet talking with a smiling young man wearing strange western clothes and a metal device strapped to his arm. A half dozen stray cats lay in the sun by their feet.

  “Gideon,” she called as they walked down toward the fountain.


  The immortal soldier glanced up and smiled a bit more brightly. “Asha!”

  The greetings were brief, but the condolences over Priya were not. Asha saw the pain in Gideon’s eyes as he struggled to say just the right things about a woman he had only known for a few hours, and she thanked him for trying.

  “What did Zahra tell you?” Bastet asked when Asha and Gideon finally sat down on the fountain wall.

  “She told us that Lilith has been buying sun-steel from the Osirians,” Asha said. “And she pointed us to a retired Osirian, a smith, who made her orders. Needles. Hundreds and hundreds of sun-steel needles.”

  “What for?” Gideon asked.

  Asha quickly explained her theory of how Lilith was using the needles to embed the souls of animals inside her victims to transform and control them.

  “My God.” Gideon rubbed his eyes. “You’re saying we need to capture the Aegyptians, tie them down or drug them, and then cut them open for hours on end while we dig through their bodies for these needles, and then yanked them out and hope we’re fast enough so it doesn’t kill them?”

  “I think so,” Asha said. “This really isn’t my area of expertise. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life avoiding this sort of thing. Cutting people open, I mean. I always try to help people with medicines, therapies… gentler solutions than a knife.”

  “Even if we found a surgeon who was skilled in this work,” Anubis said, “there’s no guarantee he would find the needles quickly, or remove them quickly. The patients would be kept in agony for hours, maybe days, and then they may still die.”

  “Asha, do you think you could hear where the needles are?” Wren asked. “You know, with your ear?” She pointed to Asha’s right ear.

  Asha touched the scaled skin through the curtain of her hair. “It’s possible, but I would have to be very close and the patient would have to be still and calm. And even then, I might not be able to tell where the invading soul is.”

  “All right, well, what if we had another way to find the needle without cutting these people open?” Wren asked. “Like a compass or a magnet?”

  Gideon shook his head. “Sun-steel isn’t magnetic. That was one of the first things I learned about it, way way back.”

  “Well, we have to find Grandfather and the others first,” Bastet said. “We can worry about fixing everyone later.”

  “You’re right,” Gideon said. “It’s time I scouted the undercity to find Bashir and see whether he’s even still human. You should all stay here for now. It’ll be safer that way.”

  “No, I’m going with you,” Wren said. “I can help.”

  “I know you can,” Asha said. “But this is very dangerous and right now all we need to is to find out where our friends are and whether we can reach them.”

  “Dangerous?” Wren frowned. “I destroyed two fleets of warships at Constantia, as well as three airships, just using these bracelets and some aether. I can take care of myself.”

  Everyone stared at her, except Anubis, who continued to gaze coolly at the wall in silence.

  “Two fleets?” Gideon asked.

  “By yourself?” Bastet added.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Asha said. “Gideon and I will go down there, and the rest of you will wait here.”

  “Right,” Bastet said. “Except for me. I’m going to go find a friend of mine who might know something about finding sun-steel needles.”

  Asha paused. “All right, fine. Just be careful.”

  “I will!” Bastet grinned as her body melted away into a soft white cloud of aether and blew away on the warm midday breeze.

  Asha stared at the spot where the girl had been sitting a moment ago.

  Gods, this place is strange.

  “All right, Gideon. Please lead the way.” She gestured to the fountain.

  The soldier stood and stepped over the wall. Beside the stone fish, he reached down pressed several stone bumps along the statue’s base, and the entire center pedestal glided silently to the side, revealing a large circular hole in the ground. There was no stair, just a straight drop about as deep as Asha was tall, and then below she saw the tunnel sloping down and turning into the darkness.

  “It looks very dark,” she said.

  Gideon held up the short sword strapped to his arm. “I have a light.”

  Asha held up her finger and allowed a single ruby claw to emerge from her soft brown skin. The bony weapon glimmered, and then began to glow with a dull red light. “So do I.”

  Chapter 9

  Bastet paused on the front porch of the green house to brush off her dress and push her hair back from her face, where she secured it by resettling her cat mask atop her head. As she glanced upward, a soft distant droning noise suddenly swelled in volume and the huge black belly of a Mazigh airship swept across the sky, blotting out the sun and clouds for several seconds as it roared higher and higher into the northern skies and raced out over the sea.

  In the distance, Bastet heard a train whistle blowing, bells clanging, factories churning, trolleys rattling along their rails, and electric cables suspended above the streets humming and buzzing like busy insect swarms.

  Three little girls ran down the middle of the road, laughing. One of them pulled a kite on a string, but this kite had thin metal wings like a hawk that flapped in slow circular motions as the wind blew over them. Bastet watched them tire and jog to a stop at the end of the road, and one of the girls deftly caught the toy bird as it coasted down to meet her. The Aegyptian girl smiled at them, and then she knocked on the door, waited a moment, and dissolved into the aether.

  A tall Mazigh woman in a white dress shirt and blue skirt opened the door and looked at her empty porch. She had dark brown hair and eyes, and on her left forearm she wore a brass medical brace that covered most but not quite all of the burn scars between her elbow and wrist, and it was also attached to a half-glove to support her hand’s nearly useless wrist. She leaned out to look around at the quiet, empty street of her quiet little neighborhood in the suburbs of Tingis. There were three children playing down at the end of the road, and a small steam carriage puttered through a distant intersection, but nothing and no one else was near. Shrugging, she stepped back inside, closed the door, and turned around.

  Bastet smiled up at the woman. “Hello, Taziri!”

  Taziri Ohana jerked back with a curious smile lighting up her face. “Where did…? Bastet? Bastet!”

  The two hugged, and the Mazigh woman laughed. “You scared me half to death. You should know better than to sneak up on people like that.”

  “I should, but I don’t,” the girl said. “How are you?”

  “Good. Tired, but good.” They stepped back and Taziri ushered her guest into a sitting room furnished with luxuriously upholstered Mazigh sofas and armchairs and foot stools, and even a pair of little child-sized rocking chairs all clustered around a long thin coffee table strewn with toys and papers. “Yuba took Menna down to his brother’s house for the afternoon. Can you stay long? I think you’d really like to meet them. Or… When did you come to Tingis? Wait, how did you come?” she asked suspiciously.

  “By aether,” Bastet said. “It’s a lot faster and safer than camels and trains, you know. It wasn’t easy. I had to shift more than twenty times, though. I lost count somewhere in Numidia. And it took over an hour, too!”

  “Mm hm. A whole hour to travel the entire width of Ifrica? You poor thing.” Taziri sat down on a dark red sofa with a colorful blanket spread across its back, and Bastet sat beside her.

  “So, what have you been doing?” the Aegyptian girl asked. “Still flying?”

  Taziri smiled. “Not really, not much. I’m teaching a few classes at the university, and I have a small repair shop in town with a few apprentices, and I just opened a little store down by the harbor, selling toys, actually.” She gestured at the little mechanical animals and people resting on the coffee table. “My daughter tests them for me. She just turned six.”

  “Aw!” Baste
t picked up a wind-up sivathera and admired its painted spots and antlers, and the tiny gears just barely visible behind its jointed legs.

  “So, how is that cousin of yours? Anubis?”

  “The same,” Bastet said. “Grumpy. Annoying.”

  “And the temple?” Taziri asked warily. “Are the Osirians staying out of trouble?”

  “They are now,” Bastet said, looking up at her. “The temple’s been destroyed and a lot of the Sons of Osiris died when the building fell on them. And then a bunch of other stuff happened, and that’s sort of why I’m here. I need your help. I need you to come back with me. Well, not with me, of course. You can’t shift. But you know what I mean.”

  Taziri gave her a small, tired smile. “You know there’s nothing I’d like more than to run back to Alexandria with you and sit in a sweltering train for a few days while crazed cultists and mercenaries try to kill us again, but I’m not much of a world traveler anymore. Plus I have this new government contract coming up, too, a big six-month job. There’s so much to do right now. What is it you need, exactly?”

  Bastet chewed her lip for a moment, and then said, “Remember how I told you once that my grandfather was missing?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, he came back. Last night, I guess. He came back to Alexandria last night.”

  Taziri almost smiled, almost congratulated her, but then she saw the look on the immortal girl’s face. “Isn’t that a good thing? You don’t seem very happy about it. I thought you wanted to see him again.”

  “I did, I mean, I do. But I haven’t seen him yet,” Bastet said. “Right after he arrived, he was kidnapped by these… Sorry, it would take too long to explain.”

  “By bad people?” the engineer asked.

  “Yeah, by bad people.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Taziri said. “I wish I could help. Aren’t there… No, I suppose if there were police or soldiers to help you, you’d be talking to them instead of me. So why are you talking to me? How can I help? I don’t know, maybe there’s something I can do after all.”

  “Well.” Bastet sighed. “It’s really complicated.”