Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

How many people suffered and died to make this obscenity?

  Tears spilled over her cheeks, and her chest shook in silent sobs.

  How many people choked to death on the dust, and were crushed by falling stones, and bled beneath the overseer whips, and…

  She fell to her knees, her whole body shaking as the vision consumed her mind. She couldn’t look away from the sight of it, painted across her mind’s eye. People beyond number, men and women and children, for time unmeasured and unremembered, screaming for mercy and begging for reprieve and praying for death, and all for some forgotten tyrant’s vanity, lust, and pride.

  She smelled the blood on the hot wind, and heard the voices crying out, and felt the earth groaning as it was torn apart and twisted into these strange stone shapes, far from the sun and the rain and green, growing things.

  So much death.

  So much suffering.

  On and on and on.

  For nothing.

  FOR NOTHING!

  Asha gasped and felt Gideon’s arms around her, and she fell against him and cried, and beat on his shoulders, and screamed, and shook, and sobbed until she was empty.

  She fell back from Gideon and sat on the cold stone road, just breathing, trying to be empty and flat and cold herself, trying not to remember everything she had just thought and felt. She didn’t have the strength to see it again.

  “Asha?” Gideon sat beside her, his sword withdrawn to hide all but the smallest gleam of its light, his eyes wide and frightened as he gazed at her face. “Asha?”

  “I’m all right.” She cleared her throat and spat a foul taste out into the darkness. “It’s all right, it’s over.”

  “Priya?” he asked.

  She pushed her hair back over her head and wished she had some cold water to wash her face and to rinse the faint taste of sick from her mouth. “Yes, some of it.”

  “And the rest?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all in the past now.” She stood up and took a deep breath. “Come on, we should hurry. We need to find Omar before something happens to him. Before something worse happens to him.”

  He stood and nodded. “All right.”

  They strode on down the dusty highway, between the great pillars and dark pyramids and the lonely towers, through empty squares and past deep amphitheaters where their footsteps echoed over and over in the dark. There were rats in the ground and bats roosting in the empty towers, but Asha heard them only with her dragon’s ear, only their tiny animal souls and not their tiny animal voices. No living thing crossed their path, or skittered in the shadows, or squeaked overhead.

  Asha felt her impatience rising with each passing moment, but she didn’t ask Gideon how much farther, how much longer. Instead she listened with her dragon’s ear, searching the vast echoing silence for the strange sound of dual souls, of soul-shreds trapped in sun-steel trinkets, of immortals, and of monsters.

  Eventually she heard it, the humming and keening of living things in the distance, and slowly the aetheric sounds grew louder and clearer.

  Immortals. Humans. Animals. Scores of them, all crowded together.

  “Close now,” Gideon whispered.

  She nodded.

  A dark shape loomed out of the deep shadows, one of the larger pyramids with the step-fashion walls that rose high above the road between two of the cyclopean pillars. A tiny yellow light writhed and shuddered up at the peak of the pyramid and Gideon pulled the tip of his sword back into his gauntlet, dousing its light and leaving them in utter darkness to gaze up at the lone yellow star dancing in the subterranean night.

  Gideon kept walking. “They won’t hear us, or see us,” he said. “Not unless we go right inside and announce ourselves. The beasts aren’t clever enough, not clear-headed enough for that. They’re all instinct and nerves and rage. I think Lilith’s hold over them isn’t as strong as she’d like, but it’s strong enough to keep her safe.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Just those two times, like I mentioned. We didn’t run in, swords drawn. We went in carefully, just like this,” he said. “Fighting a monster is like fighting any other big animal. Like a bear.”

  “I’ve fought bears,” Asha said. “And tigers. With needles.”

  “Sun-steel needles?”

  “No, just the regular sort.”

  “Really? You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.” He paused. “But we’re not just fighting monsters now. Set and Nethys, and Horus and Isis. They’re immortal, like me. Wounds will close as soon as they’re made. And in their current state, they don’t feel much pain. And they don’t feel much fear.”

  “And they’re family,” Asha finished. “For Bastet and Anubis, at least.”

  “Right. This is more dangerous than anything I’ve done before.”

  “Well, I don’t wish to die today,” Asha said. “So we will be very careful in the house of the monsters.”

  Chapter 11

  “I see no windows,” Asha said. “Is there a way to see inside without going inside?”

  “No.” Gideon stopped at the edge of the dark avenue behind a small pointed obelisk to check his gauntlet one last time. “We have to go inside to find Bashir. I mean, Omar. And there’s only one way in. Through the front door.”

  Asha peered at the black pyramid, but could not see the door. “How many of the immortals do you think are inside? I can’t tell from the sounds of them. There is too much noise.”

  “I would guess that they’re all in there,” Gideon said. “Lilith, the Aegyptian immortals, and some number of poor souls who were snatched off the street to work down here as servants and test subjects.”

  Asha frowned at him. “All of them? All together? And you believe we can simply walk inside, just the two of us?”

  “It’s the only way,” he said. “We need to know where he is, and how he is.”

  “We do know where he is,” she hissed. “He’s in there!”

  “Not good enough. That pyramid is huge, and none of us have been inside beyond the first chamber,” he said. “We’re completely blind. When we come back with the others, we’ll need a plan. We’ll need to know where we’re going.”

  “But the moment we go inside, they’ll hear us and see us and smell us,” Asha said. “They’ll come running before we can take two steps over the threshold. These people have the senses and instincts of wild animals, predators. They won’t be distracted by idle conversation or music or a glass of wine. All of their senses will be focused on us, immediately.”

  “I think you’re giving them too much credit,” Gideon said.

  “If we’re going to go all the way inside to find Omar, why don’t we simply get him out right now?”

  “That would be very reasonable,” he answered. “But I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, and there’s nothing reasonable about a fight with an animal, or a fanatic. It’s going to be messy, and it’s going to go wrong. I guarantee that. And what if Omar is already some sort of animal-monster? He isn’t going to sneak out with us, or help us fend off Lilith’s beasts. He’s going to try to kill us every step of the way. No, we stick to the plan. Find him. Just find him, for now.”

  “Very well.” Asha started walking and didn’t wait for him to follow. “But if we find Omar, and he’s still himself, I’m taking him out of there.”

  She tried to keep a straight path in the darkness by watching the small yellow flame at the top of the pyramid, but after stubbing her toe several times on the blocks at the edge of the thoroughfare, Asha made a fist and transformed her right arm from the elbow down, armoring her skin in golden scales and extending her bright ruby claws that burned like angry jewels in the darkness, casting their red light on the ground.

  There’s no need for caution here. If there are no windows, then they can’t see my claws out here against the black.

  She quickened her pace, jogging briskly across the front of Lilith’s citadel, and suddenly the long st
one ledge of the bottom level of the pyramid cut off abruptly to reveal a gap, an opening of deeper darkness.

  The door.

  Asha slowed and crept off the road into the square tunnel with Gideon just behind her. By the light of her claws, she saw dark stains on the walls and ground, and deep gouges that could only have been made by claws. Very large claws.

  She moved carefully but as quickly as she dared, and she let the dragon wrap her left hand in scales and claws as well.

  Gideon was right about one thing. This will go badly, eventually. Something will go wrong. We will be attacked. Here, in the dark, in these narrow passages. There may be some warning. Growling and pawing. The flap of wings. Perhaps even a torch light in the distance. But it could just as easily come from nowhere and take us by surprise.

  Asha strained her eyes, peering into the distant shadows for some hint of what lay ahead, but there was only darkness. She listened with her dragon’s ear, but still the soul-sounds around her were muddled and wild. Human and animal, whole and broken, and all twisted together. She couldn’t tell where anything was, precisely. Only that it felt like the creatures were in front of them, and above them, somewhere.

  The walls opened up and they stepped out into a chamber where their footsteps echoed faintly. Asha raised her claws and saw the flat faces of the walls etched with more of the symbols from the obelisks outside, but nothing else.

  “Horus and I killed some of them here,” Gideon whispered. “A few years ago.”

  He pointed to the opening in the far wall, and they moved on.

  Asha kept close to the wall, and not far down the next corridor she paused to listen. New sounds were mingling with the muddled soul-noises. Real sounds, echoing faintly through the walls. Grunting. Snorting. Stamping.

  And voices?

  Asha started moving again.

  Please, Omar, give us something. Yell at her. Or yell in pain. Yell something. Tell us where you are.

  At the next chamber they found much more than in the last. Here there were empty iron torches standing dark in the corners, and faded tapestries hanging on the walls, and a large block of stone in the center of the room like a table or an altar. Doorways on the right and left opened directly onto other small rooms, also filled with bits of broken furniture and cloth scattered over the floor.

  Asha stopped. “This is wrong.”

  “What?”

  “This. Everything.” She gestured to the rooms. “Lilith is keeping a menagerie of monstrous slaves here, and conducting experiments. There should be some normal signs of life. Food, scat, tools, equipment, light. And if these monsters are roaming around, there shouldn’t be anything left intact here. But look. The tapestries aren’t shredded, the furniture is only knocked over, not shattered. This place is abandoned.”

  “But I can hear them.” Gideon glanced up. “Can’t you hear them?”

  “Oh yes.” She nodded. “They’re up there. But they aren’t down here. They don’t come down here. Which tells me they have a different door. Lilith may have even sealed off this area so no one can get in this way.”

  “Or get out this way.” Gideon straightened up and relaxed his posture a bit. “You’re right. She must have changed it after Horus and I were here last. We’re not going to be able to get to Omar from down here, are we?”

  Asha shook her head. “No. We go back.”

  They moved quickly back the way they had come, jogging down the corridors and back out into the vast darkness of the undercity. And there they turned and looked up at the dancing yellow flame high above them.

  “This is going to be even more difficult than I thought,” Gideon said. “I suppose we can scout around the building and try to find the other entrance.”

  “No, the longer we’re here, the more likely it is that they’ll find us,” Asha said. “I’ll go alone. I’ll find a way inside. You wait here.”

  “Go alone? No, that’s not the plan.”

  Asha wasn’t listening. She reached down into her memories of all the horrible things she had seen people do to each other, and she roused the dragon a bit more. As her skin hardened into unbreakable golden scales, she felt herself being cut off from the world outside her body. Everything outside was cold and distant and dark, but inside her skin she was warm and solid and bright. She watched the blackness shift in a warm hazy crimson, where living bodies shimmered in naked white.

  Everything was simpler when she wore the dragon. There was nothing to fear, nothing that could hurt her, nothing that could hide from her. Her own soul called out, cautioning her not to lose control, not to give in to the dragon’s bestial seduction.

  I must remember to fear it, even now. I could kill Gideon, or Omar, or everyone in Alexandria if I gave in. I could spend the rest of my life raging across continent after continent, crushing and tearing and burning through city after city, killing and destroying everything I find.

  But if I did… If I gave in, I wouldn’t care anymore. I wouldn’t be Asha anymore. I would be the dragon, and the dragon would not care. It would only go on living and raging, a force of nature without conscience or guilt, without remorse or regret.

  And that’s the real seduction. Not the power.

  The freedom.

  Asha looked up at the dancing white flame at the top of the citadel, and saw faint white shapes moving about below it.

  Seek.

  Save.

  Asha gripped the stone wall before her and leapt up into the darkness. She was aware of the cool air rippling over her golden skin, but she could not feel it. She moved through it like a spirit, a creature of another world, untouchable. Her feet landed on one of the many step-like levels of the pyramid, and she leapt again, and again, each time flying higher and closer to the white flame. To her left and right, she could see more and more of the city spread out below her as her perspective shifted higher and higher. The obelisks were reduced to stone needles, and the towers become little more than trees. Only the pillars remained massive and otherworldly.

  Her last leap carried her all the way to the very top of the pyramid, and she landed lightly beside the white fire dancing in an iron bowl.

  A signal. A guide. It calls to them in the darkness, and brings them home.

  Slowly Asha prowled around the signal fire, studying the walkways at her feet for some spoor, some trail that would lead her down inside. And she found it. On three sides of the pyramid, the light from the iron brazier revealed the stone walls below it, but on the fourth side there was only darkness.

  A hole.

  Asha crept to the edge of the hole, and dropped down inside the citadel. The air was warmer here, and the chamber echoed softly with sounds of life. Voices, human and not-so-human. And just ahead of her, there was light. Asha edged forward, placing her feet carefully so that her claws did not click or scratch at the stone floor. At the corner she peeked out and saw a round chamber with a single burning torch to one side, and in the center of the small room, another hole in the floor.

  Voices. Louder. A woman. A man.

  Asha knelt at the edge of the hole and looked down. The distance to the next chamber was a rather long drop, but the chamber itself was far larger than the round room in which she was kneeling. There were many more torches and the floor was bright with flickering light and moving shadows. And from watching those shadows and the thin white figures that her dragon eyes could see through the stone walls, Asha guessed that Lilith and Omar were to her right, and something else, something larger, was sleeping to her left.

  “…don’t believe that for a moment,” Lilith was saying. She spoke Eranian with an accent that Asha recognized, but it took her a moment to realize it was the same Syrian clip that Gideon and Nadira used. But where those two had allowed their speech to evolve and muddle with the passage of time, Lilith had not. “If you took on an apprentice, it must be for a very special reason. This girl Wren has something, or knows something, and whatever it is, I want it. And I’ll warrant that you have a way to find you
r precious protégé, as well. Some little aether trick, perhaps?”

  “None comes to mind,” Omar said. “But at my age, my memory isn’t what it once was. You should probably consider me an unreliable source.”

  The sound of a wooden truncheon smacking bare flesh, and a man’s groan.

  “You’ve actually been very reliable,” Lilith said. “You’ve already confirmed so many things that Nethys told me. What the girl looks like, what she wore, how she spoke. A red-haired girl from Rus will be fairly easy to find in Alexandria, don’t you think?”

  “She won’t be easy to find at all. I taught her well,” Omar said softly. “And if you do find her, she won’t be easy to capture.”

  “Really? Does she have an immortal’s pendant? Does she have a seireiken? Because you had both, and my little ones didn’t have much trouble with you at all.” Lilith hummed as she moved around the edge of the room, out of Asha’s line of sight.

  “Wren is different,” Omar said. “You’ll never lay a hand on her.”

  “Oooh, how intriguing,” Lilith purred. “I can’t wait to meet her. What sort of souls should I pierce her with? An ostrich? Or a crocodile? There are so many to choose from.”

  She wants Wren!

  Asha gripped the edge of the stone floor in her ruby claws, and the lip crumbled in her grasp. A trickle of dust and tiny crumbs of rock fell down into the lower chamber and crackled on the naked floor below.

  “Set!” Lilith barked. “Up! Smell! Hunt!”

  Asha stood up and backed away from the hole.

  The dog-man. Aardvark.

  The danger is small. I can defeat one of them. And then I’ll save Omar.

  “Nethys!” Lilith shouted. “Horus!”

  Three of them? Damn my luck.

  A huge shadow flashed across the room below, and a throat growled. A figure in a black robe dashed into view under the hole and the murderous white eyes of the beast-headed Set glared up at Asha.

  She turned and ran back down the narrow corridor and heard barking and yipping echoing through the chambers behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a long black head rise up through the hole as the robed man hauled himself up into the round room. Asha ran lightly, her razor-sharp claws scoring the stone floor with every fleet-footed step. At the end of the passage, she leapt up and out of the corridor and stood on the exposed face of the pyramid high above the black streets, knowing that somewhere down in the distance, Gideon was waiting for her.