Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

“Which way did they go?” Gideon asked.

  “They each went a different direction,” the youth said. “Horus and Isis both left the roofs and went down into the streets to the south and west. Nethys flew north.”

  Asha looked at Gideon. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone in alone. I should have waited, or been more careful.” She reached down to rub her legs. Their run through the undercity had burned her muscles down to leathery bundles threatening to cramp and collapse under her. She waved Wren over to her, and took her medicine bag from the girl, and from the bag she took an ointment and began rubbing the warm clear oils on her legs.

  And there’s still the worst to come.

  Asha looked up and caught Gideon’s eye, and nodded slightly at Anubis. The soldier frowned, then nodded and stood up, straightening his sweat-stained shirt and dusty jacket.

  “Anubis?”

  “Yes?”

  Gideon paused. “When Asha came out of the pyramid, Set was the first to pursue her. Asha had her claws and I had my sword, and there was a brief struggle. And a moment came when he was about to attack her, and I stopped him. I had to, to save Asha.”

  “You used your seireiken?” Anubis asked quietly.

  “Yes. It happened very quickly.”

  The young man nodded solemnly. “I understand, Gideon. Thank you.”

  Asha frowned at them both, but said nothing. And then she saw Wren looked at the young man with pain in her eyes, and Asha took her hand, and they all stood and sat together in silence.

  Gideon broke the stillness, saying, “We need to find the others. We can’t let them run wild in the city. They’ll kill dozens, hundreds. And the more people who see them, looking the way they do, the more panic they’ll spread through the city. If we can’t catch all three of them soon, they could ravage Alexandria in a matter of days. The city guard will attack them with guns and steel, but neither will give the immortals much pain or pause.”

  The others nodded grimly.

  “I’m back!” Bastet’s voice echoed faintly down the street as she ran down toward the fountain, her long black hair flying out behind her, a bright smile on her young face. “Did I miss anything?”

  Asha looked from one face to the next, wondering what to say, what to think, what to do. Anubis was a cold wall, Wren looked tired and uneasy, Gideon stared into space with a haunted look in his eyes, and Bastet was still smiling, though she was beginning to look confused.

  Asha sighed.

  I’m going to have to kill them. Horus. Isis. Nethys. And Lilith, too. This isn’t some game of egos and politics. It’s not even a disease to be cured, and I don’t have time to try every option before the patient dies.

  I’m going to have to cut out the cancer, quickly and soon, or everyone will suffer even more. I can’t save everyone, and I’ll have to choose the innocents in this city over the enslaved innocents in the undercity.

  So, somehow, some way, I’ll end up killing them with my own two hands. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. And then Anubis and Bastet will be all alone. They asked me to save their family, and instead I’m going to destroy them. That’s how this ends. Because if I don’t, then there will be more Priyas all over this city, and it will be my fault.

  I let them out.

  “Gideon and I went into the undercity,” Asha said a bit too loudly. She set her jaw, trying to look stern and focused. “We went to Lilith’s home, and I went inside to find Omar. But before I could reach him, the immortals attacked me.”

  “Are you all right?” Bastet asked, rushing toward her.

  Asha nodded. “I’m fine. We’re all fine. Gideon and I made it back here, but… we killed Set, down there, when we were trying to escape.”

  Gideon straightened up. “I—”

  “We killed him,” Asha said. “I’m sorry.” She looked up at Anubis, who continued gazing dully at the wall behind her. “I’m very sorry.”

  Bastet rushed over to her cousin and wrapped her arms around his waist. Anubis merely pulled one hand free of her embrace and rested it on her back.

  “There’s more,” Asha said. “When we came back here to the fountain, there was an army of creatures on our heels. We fought them back. Wren fought them, she pushed them back into the tunnel without hurting them. She was… very impressive.”

  The northern girl blushed.

  “But three of them escaped into the city. The immortals. Your family.” Asha frowned and glanced at Gideon, who looked up into her eyes, but said nothing. “And now we need to find them and stop them before they hurt anyone else. It’s the middle of the day. The streets are full of people. It’s crowded, it’s dangerous. It will be easy for three crazed monsters to start a panic. People will be hurt, or killed.”

  Bastet turned her face to look up at the tall Indian woman and nodded. “I understand. I know. You need to stop them. And I wish you could save them, but I know… I know what you need to do. So it’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Asha said. “But it may be necessary.”

  Bastet smiled a sad little smile. “I know I look like I’m twelve, Asha, but I’m four thousand, one hundred, and something years old. I’m not scared of death, or loss. I’m just sad. But it’s okay. Just go do it, please. They would want it too, you know. Aunt Isis, and the others. They don’t want to be like this. And they don’t want to hurt people. So it’s okay.”

  Asha nodded slowly. “I know it’s asking a lot, but can you help us find them? You can move around the city faster than we can. Can you help us look?”

  Bastet wiped her sleeve across her tear-streaked face and nodded. “Sure. I’ll help. Anubis? Will you come too?”

  Anubis looked down at her, and looked up at Asha, and he said, “You go. Do what needs to be done. There’s something else I need to do first.” He stepped away from Bastet and slammed his staff down on the stone street and the youth shattered into an aether mist, and blew away on the breeze.

  Asha looked at Bastet. “All right. Whenever you’re ready, let’s start looking.”

  Chapter 13

  Anubis let the aether wind carry the tiny particles of his body and the drifting cloud of his mind across the city, slipping swiftly and painlessly through walls and floors, through people and machines. When he found the place he was looking for, he nudged his misty form downward and plunged beneath the streets, through the earth and the huge stone plates that separated the world above from the world below, and he floated down into the undercity.

  It took a constant effort, a constant mental focus to hold his body apart, suspended in space as the tiniest of elements, but he had many long centuries of practice and the effort was no distraction to him. He held himself open and apart as he drifted down through the darkness, and when he reached the floor of the forgotten city, he simply stopped pushing outward and let the natural forces of flesh and soul push him back together. He felt himself become solid and whole all at once in one great thump and there he was, standing in the darkness. He thumped his staff again and the golden rings at the head of the staff glowed with a warm golden light.

  He stood in the middle of one of the many ancient, dusty roads of the black city. Bits of rock from the crumbling ceiling and chunks of the pillars and obelisks lay in the dirt here and there, casting long shadows that leaned away from his light. A thick white mist rolled and flowed lazily across the ground, lapping coldly at his ankles. The fragile tendrils of aether moved around him, mostly flowing to his right but also occasionally floating up and over a stone as though exploring the world with its blind fingers, searching for something it had lost.

  Before him stood one of the small onion-domed towers, nearly identical to every other tower down in the dark, except that he knew that this one was not empty. Anubis walked up to the front door and glided through the solid stone and iron barrier in a quick swirl of aether and stood inside the base of the tower for a moment, listening. And after a long pause, he heard breathing.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Anubis. I’m coming up.”r />
  He started climbing the stairs that spiraled up the wall of the tower, rising slowly toward the distant chamber above. The only light came from the head of his staff and the only sound came from his soft sandals chuffing lightly on the dusty steps. He passed a window and through it he saw nothing but the endless black night of the undercity.

  The door at the top of the stair no longer existed and Anubis stepped out into the room at the top of the tower. It was just the same as the last time he had seen it, and he was not surprised. A single square carpet covered the floor, reaching nearly from one wall to the other so that only a few edges of the scratched floorboards could be seen around it.

  There was no furniture in the room at all. No desk or table or chair, no hearth or stove, and no bedding of any kind. Only the carpet, and the man sitting on it.

  Anubis stood on the edge of the carpet and for a moment he ignored the man and gazed through the window at the unbroken darkness beyond, where he knew a forest of massive pillars stood, holding up another, very different city above their heads. But he couldn’t see it. And somehow, despite everything he knew and had seen over countless years and mortal generations, being unable to see it now made it feel less real, as though he had only dreamed it, and had no proof that any of it truly existed.

  In the moment of waking, how do we tell our dreams from our lives?

  He frowned.

  By the sudden rush of relief or disappointment, I suppose.

  Sighing, Anubis sat down on the edge of the carpet in front of the other man. He laid his staff on the floor, leaving its sun-steel rings glowing softly to illuminate their meeting.

  “Osiris?”

  The older man did not move. He sat cross-legged, his hands resting limply on his knees, his eyes staring blindly straight ahead. A colorless pile of tattered cloth covered his waist and thighs, but the rest of his clothing had rotted away years ago, and Anubis suspected that it would take only the gentlest of breezes to blow away what little remained.

  Osiris had thin arms and a flat, hairless chest. His face could have been that of a young man with many cares or the face of an old man with few troubles. It was timeless and ageless, and beardless. A thin veil of black hair hung from his head, but it reached only down to the man’s shoulders and no farther.

  The hair only grows when we eat. It is the one thing that still changes as though we were normal, living beings, unconstrained by the changeless immortality of our sun-steel hearts. But his hair hasn’t grown since the last time I saw him. He hasn’t eaten in years. He probably hasn’t moved in years.

  “Osiris?”

  The older man did not answer. Only his thin breathing betrayed the fact that he was indeed alive and not some lifelike statue. Though as lifelike as he appeared, he was not completely natural in complexion. His skin, once light brown, had tarnished to a sickly green hue. The first time that Anubis had noted the change, it had been shocking. He ran to tell the rest of the family that something had happened, that something was wrong. Their sun-steel hearts were supposed to be changeless, and to make their bodies changeless in turn. But Osiris had changed. He was green.

  And after days of study, it was his wife Isis who had discovered why. The sun-steel wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t changeless, not entirely. Like glass, it merely looked to be solid and permanent, but in truth it could shift and slide and flow, but slowly. Very slowly, and only under certain conditions. Ages ago, Osiris had led his family out of the sun-kissed world and its mortal concerns, and retired to the city in the darkness to rest and study, to await something else, something new, something worthy of their time.

  But the rest of the family had their own interests and ambitions. And while they did live in the undercity, they did not dwell there in silent repose awaiting the next epoch of humanity. They lived new lives. Set and Nethys had gone out often to explore the rest of Ifrica, to see its wars and weapons, to see its storms and plagues, and to play their strange games amid the chaos of the wider world. Isis and her son Horus continued to pursue their true passion, politics. They slipped up into Alexandria, into the halls of power among the warlords and queens, to whisper words of wisdom into receptive ears and to watch the grand spectacle of the Aegyptian court playing out over the centuries.

  This left young Anubis and his cousin Bastet to play in the streets, daring one another to test the boundaries of what it meant to be immortal, and through shocking and wondrous moments, learning such remarkable abilities as aether-walking and cat-talking. And when they weren’t slowly marching farther and farther from what it meant to be truly human, they wandered the streets with the mortal children, watching over them, trying to preserve what little innocence there was to be found in Alexandria between the wars and the politics and the relentless tides of history.

  But Osiris remained all alone in the darkness, true to his word. He sat and rested, and awaited the dawning of the next age of mankind. Whatever that might be. But there in the dark, drenched in the cold mists, the little golden pendant hanging from his neck had drawn in more and more aether, swallowing an endless flood of aether, year after year. And somehow, that vast ocean of aether, compressed into the tiny sun-steel trinket, had begun to warp and tarnish the metal. The hand-crafted human heart was rounder and smoother and beginning to resemble a drop of falling water in its shape. It had taken a greenish tint, not unlike rusting copper, and now the man who shared his soul with the sun-steel also had that color, and that strange smoothness in his skin. Not that he ever noticed.

  Anubis squinted in the dim half-light.

  Where is his pendant? Perhaps the chain rusted away, and it fell down into the tower somewhere. No matter.

  “Osiris!” the youth shouted in his deep, commanding voice. The name echoed over and over down inside the tower and out in the streets of the deserted city.

  The older man blinked and shifted his face ever so slightly toward the youth seated in front of him.

  “Are you still alive in there, old man?” Anubis frowned at him.

  Osiris made a thin, crooked smile. “Always.”

  “We have a problem,” Anubis said. “And we need your help.”

  “Problems do not concern me. Step back. Step away. Wait for this problem to resolve itself. Wait long enough, and it will simply go away,” the green man whispered. “And when it is gone, you will ask yourself, why was I ever worried about this?”

  “No, not this time. This is not some mortal issue, or politics, or even religion. This is a family matter.”

  Osiris went on smiling as his dim eyes swept across the shadowy room. “Family. Politics. Is there really any difference?”

  “This isn’t about politics, old man,” Anubis said. “This is about life and death. Set is dead.”

  Osiris paused, his face lined with worry for a moment, but the moment passed. “I’m sorry to hear it, for your sake. I remember when my father died. Dimly. But I remember. It was a strange loss. It made me feel older, very suddenly, because he was no longer there between me and my own death. It made death feel nearer, somehow.”

  Anubis sighed. “I know that Set wasn’t my blood father. I know that Mother came to you for a child, because Set wouldn’t, or couldn’t. I know it all.”

  Osiris nodded. “It’s good that you know. Truth is always good.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Anubis said. “The truth is that Set is dead, and your beloved Isis has been turned into a rabid steer running through the city streets above us. And if we can’t stop her and save her, then we will have to kill her. And your son. And my mother. There is nothing good about the truth today.”

  Osiris went on nodding gently. “I understand.”

  “You understand?” Anubis glared at him. “I didn’t come here for your understanding, I came here for your help. Innocents will die today, unless we can undo this madness.”

  “Wait. Watch.” Osiris exhaled slowly. “The world will unravel itself, and all its problems will vanish on the tides of eternity. There is no need for suffering.
Stay here with me, my son. Sit with me, and wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Anubis shouted. “For our family to die?”

  “Wait for the next world, the better world,” Osiris whispered. “It’s coming, day by day. The world is growing, evolving, improving, by tiny degrees. And one day, it will be the paradise that you and I deserve to live in. In the mean time, sit with me, my son, and let go of your pain and your worry.”

  Anubis clenched his teeth and stared at the old green man with hate in his eyes. “Get up!” The youth leapt to his feet, grabbed Osiris by the arms, and hauled him up to stand in the center of the room, face to face.

  “Listen to me!” Anubis roared. “Isis and Horus and Nethys are all slaves, all suffering, and all in danger. They will slaughter innocents, unless they themselves are slaughtered. I don’t give a damn about the world or the future. I only care about them. My mother! Your wife and son! Your precious world and precious future don’t care about them. Only we care about them. The world is an empty stage, not a warm embrace. It’s a place, not a person. It doesn’t care about anything, and least of all you!”

  Osiris’s forehead creased ever so slightly with confusion.

  “Stand up!” Anubis shook his father. “Come with me, help me!”

  Osiris wriggled weakly against the youth’s iron grip, and eventually twisted loose and fell back to the floor. He sat on his side, leaning over, wheezing quietly. “There is so much rage in you, my son. There always has been, just below the surface. I’m sorry. Please, sit down. Sit with me. Together, we can calm your heart, and find peace for the long wait between here and paradise. Please, sit.”

  “Isis!” Anubis knelt down again. “Your beautiful Isis! Remember when Set killed you, hacked you up into a dozen pieces and threw your body to the jackals of the desert? Isis, your love, she came for you. She found you, all the twisted and horrible pieces of you, and she brought you back, she healed you, she stitched you back together and brought you back to life. She fought beasts and men and storms to bring you back, safe and whole. Why won’t you do the same for her now? She needs you!”