Do I tell her everything? I don’t even think I could explain everything about the needles too well. Asha should be the one to explain it, she knows what she’s talking about.
“These bad people, the ones who took Grandfather,” she started again, “they’re slaves, most of them. And we need to free them, along with Grandfather. But to do that, we need to get some sun-steel needles out of their bodies. The needles keep them slaves, you see. And finding them and taking them out is really hard to do.”
“Sun-steel needles?” Taziri frowned. “Are you saying that they have slivers of aetherium surgically implanted under their skin?”
“Something like that,” Bastet said. “My friends were all talking about it. There’s a bunch of us trying to help Grandfather and the other slaves. There’s this healer from India, and she said it would be really hard to find the needles, and then it would be really hard to take them out, because if we don’t take them out fast enough, the needles will kill the people.”
Taziri leaned back and said softly, “Wow. That’s a heck of a problem.”
“Yeah.”
“Did these friends of yours have any ideas about how to do it?”
“One girl said we should use a magnet to find the needles, but then Gideon said magnets don’t work on sun-steel.”
Taziri nodded. “Right. There have been a lot of articles in the journals over the last year. Half the universities in Marrakesh are researching aetherium right now. I remember reading something about magnetism just the other day.” She frowned. “One moment.”
She got up and left the room, leaving Bastet to fiddle with the little mechanical menagerie lying on the coffee table. She picked up the shiny brass figures one by one, admiring their little feet and expressive eyes, and then she began arranging them in a winding line.
When Taziri walked back in holding a small magazine, Bastet had finished arranging all of the toys on the table. She pointed to the design she had made and said, “See? It’s a cat.”
“Right.” Taziri sat down beside her. “I remember how much you like cats.”
“No, I told you before. I don’t like cats. They like me. They follow me around, just like this one,” she said, pointing to the feline outline on the coffee table with a grin.
“Riiight.” Taziri nodded. “Anyway, I found that article. Can you read Mazigh?”
“Nope.”
“All right, well, it says here that a team of graduate students in Arafez succeeded in creating an electromagnetic field around an aetherium core using a copper coil,” she explained, pointing at the text of the article. “And this allowed the core to exert a magnetic pull on a second piece of aetherium.”
“So…” Bastet looked at all the tiny black letters on the page of the magazine.
No pictures at all?
“So, they made one piece of sun-steel work like a magnet on another piece?” the girl asked.
“Exactly.” Taziri turned the page and scanned to the end of the article. “Oh, here are the specs from the experiment. It looks like the aetherium core they used was about the size of pea, and the resulting magnetic field was a little more than one-tenth estla of magnetic force. Hm.”
“Is that strong?” Bastet asked.
“No, not really. Why? How strong does your sun-steel magnet need to be?”
“I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be best if the magnet could just yank the needle out really fast?” Bastet picked up a toy sabertoothed cat and stared at its tiny brass fangs. “You see, the slave people who have the needles inside them are pretty vicious, and it could be really dangerous if we have to catch them and hold them down while we look for the needles. So I was thinking…” She shrugged.
“You were thinking, what if the magnet was strong enough to yank the needles out from far away?” Taziri raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. The magnet would need to be very strong, and the field would also need to be tuned so you could direct it at the person. You wouldn’t want the magnetic field to just expand outward in a giant sphere, it would waste energy and it could pull in all sorts of aetherium bits from all around you… if there were aetherium bits around you.”
“So, can you do it?” Bastet asked. “Can you build something like that?”
“An electromagnet? Sure. It’s pretty simple, really.” Taziri leaned back into the sofa and picked at her lip as she peered at the far wall in thought. “We’d need a generator, or a big battery, and a large copper coil. That’s all easy to get. The tricky part is the aetherium core. We’d need a really big chunk of aetherium to do this, and we’d probably want to shape the core to help tune the shape of the magnetic field.”
“Don’t you have any more sun-steel here?”
Taziri shook her head. “There are only a handful of pellets in the whole country right now. That government job I mentioned? They want me on the team to bring up the skyfire stone from the bottom of the Tarifa Strait. That huge ball of aetherium has been down there for years now, and we’ve had a steady stream of boiled fish washing up all over the shoreline ever since.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right,” Taziri said. “The salvage engineers finally have a plan, but they need help building the special equipment. When we get the skyfire stone out of the water, then we’ll have more aetherium than we know what to do with, but until then, it’s all just pellets, and those are all kept in laboratory vaults. Sorry.”
Bastet pouted.
Figures! We finally get rid of the stupid Temple of Osiris, and the first thing that happens is we need them back again to get us more sun-steel. It’s not fair. Why’d all those idiots have to go and get killed—
“I can get the sun-steel!” Bastet beamed.
“How?”
“I know someone,” the girl nodded. “He’ll know where we can get all the sun-steel we need, by the ingot!”
“Well, that’s great,” Taziri said. “I can get the rest of the gear together and meet you in Alexandria, I guess. We’ll need a workshop to put the magnet together, and then you should be all set.”
“Great!” Bastet leaned over and hugged Taziri. “It’ll be just like old times. Speaking of which, can you make another torch thing, like before? When we’re all done saving Grandfather, I think we’re going to want to get rid of a lot of sun-steel. And I mean a lot. And some of it’s going to be really, really hot.”
“Another plasma torch?” The Mazigh woman frowned. “Sure, I have a friend who can loan me one. But this one’s going to be made out of proper materials. Not like last time.” She shuddered.
“Okay.” Bastet set the little brass cat back on the table. “Can you come soon?”
Taziri pushed her hair back and tapped the top of her head for a moment. “I don’t know. I need to talk to my husband and cancel my classes, and figure out what to do with the repair shop and the store. I should be able to get the gear easily enough, though. Nothing special about copper wires, and who better to get a big battery than the person who holds four patents on batteries, right?”
Bastet looked at her blankly. “I guess so.”
Taziri tilted her head. “Didn’t we ever talk about that? I have the patents on the… You know, I invented the… never mind.”
Bastet shrugged. “So how soon can you come?”
“Tomorrow night,” Taziri said. “I don’t know when, exactly, but it should be before midnight. I’ll fly in on the Halcyon, and land on one of the western railways, just like before, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll be watching for you!” Bastet said.
Chapter 10
Asha followed Gideon through the winding tunnel beneath the dusty fountain, down into the cold and the dark. They carried two tiny pinpricks of light, one blazing white from the exposed tip of his sword and one burning dark red from the tip of her single ruby claw. Gideon’s light threw the contours of the tunnel walls into sharp relief, silvery white stones streaked with infinitely black shadows. And behind him, Asha let her own small light paint a tiny patch of wall and floor
in faint crimson smears of rust and blood.
“You’ve been down here before?” she whispered.
“Many times,” he said over his shoulder. “In the old days I would visit the family down here. Not by this path, though. This is just a back door. Back then I came in through the main gates, a grand entrance onto the boulevard of the buried palaces where the retired deities of Death and War and Love and Cats all lived and played together.”
“What about this place where Lilith is?”
“Lilith’s retreat.” He paused, but didn’t turn to look at her. “I’ve been there twice. Both times to kill her creatures. Once with Horus. Once with Anubis.” He lingered a moment longer in silence, as though he had more to say, but he only shook his head and continued on down the tunnel.
The floor was rough but flat and the walls were stacked blocks and bricks, though Asha saw no mortar between them. The farther they went, the staler the air became, but it reached a certain coolness and grew no colder. And after half an hour of quietly pacing down the dark corridor, straining to hear or see some sign of life or danger ahead, the tunnel leveled out and they emerged through a broken gateway into a vast black chamber.
Asha didn’t see the transition so much as she felt it, felt the tight echo of the tunnel fade, felt the closeness of the walls spread out and away, and for a moment she recalled another tunnel that had brought her down into the darkness many years ago into a cavern where she had found something very unexpected.
Priya.
Priya, all alone, sitting on an altar, covered in lotus vines and blossoms. She was cold and still, and I brought her out of there. I brought her across India, Rajasthan, and Eran. We talked and traveled and struggled, for years, together… And she died.
If I had never found her, if I had left here there in that cave, she would still be there now. All alone in the dark.
But alive.
Asha cleared her throat as she stared up blindly into the darkness, seeing nothing of the roof or walls, having no sense at all of how large the cavern might be. “You followed us back here from Eran?”
“I did,” Gideon said quietly. “I was worried about you. About you both.”
“Thank you.”
“For worrying?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. She wanted to smile back but her mouth refused as she said, “Yes. For worrying. For caring.”
“Any time.”
Asha took a few steps past him and the harsh glare of his sword. There were faint gray gleams out in the blackness. “Where to now?”
“We’re on the eastern edge of the undercity,” Gideon said. “Lilith is to the south from here.” He pointed to their left at a veil of black nothingness.
Asha looked up. “How far down are we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “If you shot an arrow up there, it might scrape the ceiling. A bit.”
“And the entire city of Alexandria is up there?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can’t see them from here, but there are pillars all around us holding up the city. Ancient pillars. Massive things.”
She nodded. “Good. Pillars are good.”
“This way.” Gideon started walking.
Asha walked beside him. “Is there anything else down here besides Lilith and her… those… things?”
“Not much. Nothing dangerous,” he said. “Rats, bats, snakes, spiders. All sorts of adorable little things.”
“Oh.” Asha nodded to herself. “Bats are fascinating. Not very useful, but fascinating.”
Gideon paused and reached for the little steel switches and bolts on his gauntlet. “I think we’re alone for the moment. So, let’s risk just a little more light.”
Asha heard him releasing the lock on his gauntlet and the sun-steel blade quietly slid free of its sheathe on his arm, extending down past his armored hand. The blade was short, even shorter than a seireiken, and it was triangular in shape with sharpened edges on both sides.
And it was bright.
Gideon held up his weapon and the naked blade shone like an exploding star, scourging the shadows and banishing the darkness, revealing the subterranean world all around them. The exposed sun-steel was blinding, and Asha squinted away from it, but still she could see the tiny crackles of blue lightning shimmering and dancing across the ancient blade, and she could feel the harsh dry heat of it tightening her skin, making her sweat. She had only seen it once before, in broad daylight, and only for a few moments. But now she let herself think about what that blade really was.
As an object alone, it was a miracle of science and artistry. The knowledge and skill needed simply to shape it had been a cataclysmic turning point in human history, even if most humans would never know of its existence. And the sword was beautiful, even though a person could only look upon it for a moment before it overwhelmed their fragile eyes. The light, the heat, the shimmer and shiver and hum of it was electrifying, like a living thing, a blazing reminder that gods had once walked the earth, and might walk the earth again.
But it was so much more. That small sword was an entire necropolis, a vast and ever-growing world for the dead, a world where the souls of hundreds of thousands of men and women had been preserved and sheltered for thousands of years.
What do they do in there? Do they sleep and dream? Or are they awake, living and speaking, meeting and parting, laughing and loving?
Gideon started walking again, and Asha followed as she dragged her narrowed eyes away from the blinding beacon on his arm and she looked around herself at the world they called the undercity.
At first, as her eyes adjusted to the strange sight of the gray facades illuminated by the white light, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. And then she blinked, and she saw.
The first pillar was directly in front of her, and it was indeed massive. She guessed its base to be the same width as the entire Temple of Osiris, and it rose up and up and up into the darkness to a shadowy ceiling that she could just barely see as she tilted her head all the way back. A faint pattern scored the face of the pillar, and she saw that it was a cylinder built from rectangular blocks with narrow gaps along their edges where the blocks had been angled apart to create the round shape of the pillar. The gaps alternated and shifted upward to create spiraling lines of black dashes across the pillar, so that it seemed to spin and swirl as it rushed up to meet the roof of the cavern.
Asha followed Gideon down the broad dusty road and saw the other pillars, all of the same titanic size and the same spiraling brick construction. The pillars continued out in every direction, far beyond the reach of the white light, like a silent forest of petrified giants awaiting the end of time itself.
Between the pillars stood the buildings, abandoned and empty and dark. Asha started to ask Gideon what they were, or what they had once been, but she didn’t. There was something humbling and frightening and beautiful in not knowing, in wondering, in imagining what might have been. Answers would have ruined it.
She saw pyramids of every size and construction, some rising only as high as a small home and some soaring up into the center of the cavern. Some of the pyramids rose in step-fashion, each square level slightly smaller than the last, rising like staircases high above the ground. And still others had smooth faces, each side a perfectly flat triangle of stone, wrinkled and cracked with age, but still elegant and whole. Blemished, but unbroken.
Between the pyramids Asha saw towers, slender stone cylinders like miniature versions of the huge pillars, and each one rising to support a round chamber with a twisting, pointed roof like an enormous stone turnip impaled upside-down upon a skewer, and set all around with small dark windows.
Below the height of the towers stood the obelisks, countless stone needles and fangs, some as small as a lone woman and some as large as a lightning-blasted tree, stripped of its leaves and branches and left bare and burned, but still standing. The obelisks had flat, rectangular faces, and upon each one were countless carvings, symbols and
characters that meant nothing to Asha, but she stared at each one as she walked by.
“Who could have created something like this?” she whispered. “And why would they? Why would they even dream of such a place, let alone build it?”
“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “I asked the same question when I came here for the first time.”
“But Bastet and the other Aegyptians are four thousand years old,” Asha said. “Weren’t they here when it was built?”
Gideon shook his head. “They were here when the Aegyptian kings allowed the Hellan engineer Alexander to transform the surface world from a struggling fishing village into a city worthy of being the capital of a great and powerful Ifrican nation. But this place? No. Horus and Osiris discovered this place much, much later. And they found it just like this. Deserted. No one knows who built it, or how, or why.”
Asha stopped walking and stared up at nothing and everything all at once. The pillars, the towers, the pyramids, the ceiling so high she wasn’t certain she could see it, and the walls so far that she was certain she couldn’t see them at all. It was too big. It was too old. It was too impossible. Nothing else she had ever seen could compare to it, in any way. The immense space and silence reached down, pressed down, crushing her chest, making her head spin.
It’s just a place. It’s just a thing. Stones, bricks. People made it, bit by bit. They cut the stones, dragged them here, and arranged them.
Thousands of people.
Millions of people.
She swallowed and tried to breathe.
How long would it take to build even one of these pillars? Just one? How many years?
And to build it all, an entire vast city, and then to cover it over, hide it from the world. How many centuries?
What sort of will would demand such a labor? What sort of mind would demand that these works be raised from the dust? That millions of people should slave for centuries, for generations, from cradle to grave, to build an entire world like this?
“Are you all right?” Gideon asked.
Asha swallowed again and closed her eyes.
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