Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “My Isis?” Osiris shook his head. “My Isis was a lovely girl from Karnak, not an immortal creature who played with kings like a child plays with dolls. Isis is not my Isis anymore. My Isis is gone.”

  “What about Horus? What about your son?”

  Osiris shrugged. “I will see them both in paradise.”

  Anubis spat on the old green man, who did not react, and the black youth picked up his staff.

  “I don’t know why I bothered,” he said. “I thought there was still a human being inside of you. I thought that if you still cared about anything or anyone, it would be us. But you’re not human anymore.”

  “What is human?” Osiris asked. “Is it flesh? Or thought? Passion, or instinct? Or memory? Can it be taken away, and can it be restored? I don’t know.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Anubis stared down at his father, watching the strange figure fold his legs up under him and return to the same seated posture as before. “I won’t be coming back. I don’t think anyone will. Enjoy paradise.”

  He raised his staff and struck the floor, and burst his body into a million tiny pieces, more than he could count or feel. The world itself, so hard and sharp and real, became soft and indistinct and distant. Anubis focused his mind on the task of holding his body apart, pushing each tiny particle away from the others and holding them all suspended in the aether. He focused on that task, and nothing else. And for several long minutes, as he drifted up through the empty cavern and through the earth and through the city, he was at peace.

  Then he stepped out of the mist onto the hot, bright streets of Alexandria, into the noise and the chaos, and smells and the bodies, and he began to think and feel again as he stood in the shadowed entrance to an alleyway just an arm’s length from a hundred other people.

  And in the shadows, Anubis covered his eyes, and wept.

  Chapter 14

  Asha strode through the marketplace, surveying the damage. Stalls lay on their sides, carts rested on smashed wheels, pottery lay shattered in the mud, and shreds of cloth fluttered in the evening breeze. The people were still picking themselves up off the ground, prodding themselves for injuries, limping out of the road, and staring at their smashed livelihoods with bleak, despondent eyes. A score or more of soldiers in red lay scattered over the ground. Some were beginning to stand up. Many were not.

  “Here, let me help you.” Asha knelt and lifted an older woman to her feet. The gray-haired lady gazed around the square as Asha asked, “When did this happen?”

  “It came from nowhere,” the woman muttered.

  “When? Just a moment ago?”

  We have to be close now.

  The woman nodded.

  “Was it a man or a woman?” Asha asked.

  Does it really matter at this point?

  The woman raised her empty hands to say, I don’t know.

  Asha nodded and hurried on past the woman with Wren and Gideon close behind. They kept pausing to help people up, or to lift a fallen table or cart, or a bundle of food, and she kept calling back to them to leave it where it was, to hurry up, to keep looking. But in her heart, she wished she didn’t. She wanted to stop, she wanted to help. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw the injuries and the blood, and she heard the cries of shock and pain. Her right hand clenched the strap of her medicine bag, and she wished she could stop and help them all, and she wondered whether there were any other sorts of healers nearby who would be coming soon, who would help these people. She doubted it.

  The sun was setting quickly now and the streets were growing darker. Torches were being lit, and through the windows of some of the houses on either side of the street Asha saw electric lights coming to life, glowing with their steady yellow gleams.

  How long are we going to run blindly through the streets, chasing after these people, these creatures?

  Most of the afternoon had been a complete waste as they set out into the city with no idea where to begin their search for falcon-headed Horus, or kite-winged Nethys, or steer-horned Isis. They circled and circled for hours, wandering through the streets and alleys and markets. It should have been easy to find a person, or even a crowd, who had seen one of the monstrous immortals. But there had been none, and Gideon suggested that the immortals may have gone into hiding somewhere on the roofs, out of sight. They didn’t often emerge in broad daylight, and they may have been confused, or even partly blinded by the afternoon sun.

  But then they heard the screams and heard the crashing, and Asha had found the trail at last. Chaos and ruin and pain, leading south across the city. Bastet had vanished in a burst of white mist, and returned again a moment later to confirm that one of Lilith’s creatures was indeed crossing the streets on foot and tearing up everything in its path.

  So it’s not Nethys. That leaves Horus and Isis.

  Asha hurried down the street, following the scattered signs of violence through the evening crowds.

  “She’s never sent them out before,” Gideon said, just behind her. “Not Horus and Isis. Lilith always keeps them at home. Her personal bodyguards, I think. It was always Set and Nethys that she sent out, or one of her mortal slaves.”

  “Why? What’s different about Horus and Isis?” Wren asked.

  “I don’t know. Isis and Nethys are sisters, and not just in blood. They’re nearly one side of the same coin, if you know what I mean,” he said. “Very similar personalities. They even look similar, side by side.”

  “And Horus?”

  Gideon shrugged at the girl. “He’s about the same age as Anubis. They grew up together before they became immortal. And you’ve seen Anubis, you’ve seen how serious and quiet he is? Horus is the opposite. He’s bright and passionate. But Horus never had any interest in the same things as Anubis and Bastet. Aether things, I mean. Horus can’t move the way Anubis and Bastet can.”

  “Well, maybe Lilith just likes them better,” Wren said.

  “Or she trusts them less,” Asha said. “Maybe she keeps them close to keep them under control.”

  At the next intersection, the trail of destruction, injuries, and shocked onlookers grew thin and Asha stood in the middle of the road with animals and people and machines jostling past her on every side as she looked and listened for her quarry.

  Her dragon ear murmured with a thousand soul-sounds. Men and women, noisy children, tired and angry animals, and even the tall palm trees in the parks and the untended lots behind the older buildings. If she could hear the twinned soul of an immortal, or a hybrid creature, Asha couldn’t tell it from the noise of the crowd.

  And then she heard the crash of glass shattering. It wasn’t the single sharp sound of a goblet hitting the ground. It was the ongoing screech and clatter of an enormous window, or a whole building of windows, all falling to the ground in a great flood of breaking, cracking, bursting, tinkling, and crunching.

  “That way!” Gideon pointed and they all ran out of the intersection, shoving people and zebras and camels aside as they raced toward the shattering sounds, toward the looming façade of an ancient Mazdan Temple.

  The building dominated the street, from its high walls capped in ornate geometric, angular ironworks to the soaring, slender white towers in each corner of the grounds, to the enormous golden dome of the central temple itself. Everything about the place was huge, and even though time had faded the paint and chipped away at the gold leaf and cracked the walls, the inner gardens were immaculately maintained and the walkways were carefully swept, and the brightly colored flags flapped smartly in the cool breeze.

  But as Asha entered the gates and looked up at the temple, she saw the gaping holes of the windows, most with a few sharp teeth of glass still clinging to the edges of the frames. A window exploded outward on her left as a chair flew out through it, spraying the glass shards across the garden. Then the armored body of a soldier burst from a window on the right, high above the ground, and collapsed into splinters when it struck the earth below.

  “I think this is the
place,” Wren said.

  Bastet emerged from a cloud of aether just in front of them, her hands up to stop them from going in, and she said, “It’s Isis. She’s completely out of control. I tried to talk to her, but…”

  “I know. It’s all right,” Asha said. “We’ll handle it from here.”

  “Please don’t hurt her!” Bastet grabbed Asha’s hand. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. This isn’t her. Please!”

  Asha knelt down and pushed a lock of the girl’s black hair behind her ear. “I will do everything I can to save your aunt. I know this isn’t her fault. I know she’s a victim too. But you must understand that I may have to hurt her in order to stop her.”

  “I know.” Bastet swallowed and nodded. “Go. Hurry.”

  Asha led Gideon and Wren down the path to the front doors of the temple as another chair crashed through a window on the far side of the building.

  “And Gideon!” Bastet called from the gates. “Please be careful!”

  “I will!” the soldier called back with a grin. But when he turned back to Asha he wasn’t grinning. He looked at her with an ashen, resigned expression, and he said, “If we can’t save her, I’ll do it. I already killed Set. It’s better if the burden is mine to bear, all of it. They’re my family too, in a way.”

  Asha opened the doors. “No one else is dying today.” And she went inside.

  The temple floor was a tile mosaic, bordered in geometric patterns of repeating and interlocking squares and triangles that flowed elegantly around the room, and around the base of the pillars, and across the center of the floor. The tiles shone with candlelight, illuminating the bright whites and dark golds, and bloody reds and vibrant greens, making the floor come alive in the evening shadows. But scattered over that floor were hundreds of long wooden splinters and torn carpets and the sharp, bright pebbled remains of the shattered windows.

  Asha slipped her bag off her shoulder and set it down just inside the door, and then moved deeper into the temple. She could hear Isis huffing, snorting, and moaning softly. Hoofs clomped and clattered on the tiled floor. And every few moments something wooden scraped across the floor, or cracked under some great weight, or smashed through a window.

  Gideon moved gracefully into the inner prayer chamber, the vast hall that made up most of the temple beneath its great dome, and he crept softly in a sideways fashion, his hands held low so that he might release his seireiken at a moment’s notice. Wren tiptoed along behind him, her arms crossed over her belly to hold her jangling silver bracelets silent.

  Asha strode past them both, her sandals slapping loudly on the tiles, and grinding sharply on the broken glass. “Isis! Come out here! Isis!”

  She saw the look of surprise on Gideon’s face, but said nothing to him.

  A deep bellowing cry answered her from the back of the temple, and Isis stepped out from behind a marble pillar into the light of the candles. The immortal’s hoofs stomped like stone weights slamming into a muddy field, and her bovine legs pumped and moved like steam-driven pistons on a Mazigh engine, but above the waist she was a woman. Still soft flesh, still a slender waist and arms and neck. There was something smooth and willowy about her human body compared to the unnatural stampeding power of her transformed legs. Her stained and ripped dress still covered her from the shoulders to below her knees, though it was torn from the waist down to let her monstrous legs move about freely.

  “Isis?” Asha stood in the center of the huge, echoing chamber, surrounded by debris, holding out her empty hands. “Can you understand me? My name is Asha. I’m a friend. I’m a healer. I’ve come to help you. Can you understand me, Isis?”

  The immortal woman grimaced and stomped a bit farther around the pillar, and kicked a half-broken chair across the room into a brazier of several dozen candles, knocking them to the floor and dousing half of them. Isis placed her hand on the pillar, and moaned. Her face was half hidden by her stringy black hair, which fell neatly to her jaw line in dirty locks, and her white pupil-less eyes stared out through those locks at Asha. Atop her head rose the horns, two great curving steer horns raised like deadly dancers, petrified back to back, waiting for some otherworldly music to bring them to life.

  “Isis?” Asha took a few steps toward her. “Isis, I know you’re tired. I know you’re in pain. I can see it. I can hear it. Look at me, I’m like you.” She pulled the hair back to reveal her right ear, the ear that burned with the dragon’s venom, the ear covered in golden scales.

  Isis said nothing. Slowly, she moved to place her back against the pillar and she reached up with both hands to touch the curving marble, tilting her face up toward the high golden dome of the temple, her horns tapping gently on the pillar behind her.

  “What do you see, Isis?” Asha glanced up. “The ceiling, the sky? Tell me what you need, if you can. I want to help you and your son. I’m going to heal you and free you from Lilith.”

  Hearing that name, Isis snapped her eyes down to glare at Asha, and the steer-woman screamed a deep bellowing scream as though a thousand mother beasts were all crying out together for their lost children, screaming in pain and rage. Isis crouched upon her massive hoofed legs, and she leapt at Asha.

  In the brief span of time between when Isis jumped and when she reached Asha, the healer raised her hands and thought of all the innocent children, all the families, all the young lovers who might die that night if this creature escaped into the city again. Her arms tightened and burned as her skin swelled and hardened into golden scales, transforming her into pillar of bronze in the center of the temple. Isis came crashing down upon her, and Asha grabbed the dark iron hoofs out of the air and slammed the woman down to the floor.

  “Stay down, Isis!”

  But the immortal kicked and flailed her powerful legs, and shot free of Asha’s grip, sending her hurtling across the floor and into the base of a pillar. Asha fell back in the opposite direction, though she hardly felt the fall through her dragon armor. She scrambled back to her feet and dashed toward the fallen Isis, hoping to tackle her and hold her down before she could rise again.

  A blast of cold air struck Asha in the side and sent her stumbling across the room, but she kept her footing and turned to see Wren striding out into the grand prayer chamber. The pale northern girl with her flaming red hair held both of her arms out, one hand pointed at Asha and the other pointed at Isis.

  “I have her,” Wren said. She moved her hand away from Asha to point it at Isis as well. Her silver bracelets were shivering and singing on her wrists, and the white aether mist was flowing up from the floor over her body and then racing down her arms like a rushing waterfall, blasting Isis against the base of the pillar.

  Asha moved back to the center of the room to stand near Wren and watch her bend the endless aether currents to her will.

  This is girl is like no other in all the world. There’s no end to what she might do with this power. And she’s still so young. In time, who know what she’ll learn to do?

  “What now, Wren?” Asha asked quietly.

  Isis kicked and roared, struggling to kick and claw her way out of the aether tide, but the mist held her firmly in place.

  “I don’t know,” Wren said. “I can’t tell where the sun-steel needles are inside her, and I can’t do anything about Lilith’s hold over her. All I can do is hold her still.”

  “For how long?”

  “A while.” Wren smiled a little. “I can do this sort of thing for a long time, if there’s enough aether. And it’s only going to get colder for the next few hours, so the aether will grow thicker and rise from the earth more easily. What should I do with her?”

  Asha frowned and looked at Gideon.

  The soldier paced slowly toward them, his gauntlet swinging forgotten at his side, and he shrugged as he said, “We’ll need to lock her up until we can find a way to undo this, and restore her. But, well, just look at the floor.”

  Asha looked down and in the meager light of the remaining candles,
she looked over the broken and shattered remains of the furniture, and under them, she saw the shallow but wide craters where Isis had stomped her hoofs on the ancient tile and stone floor.

  “I have no idea what sort of prison we’ll need to hold someone as strong as her,” Gideon said.

  “A normal one will do,” Asha replied. “Just as soon as I sedate her.”

  She walked back toward the door of the temple and felt her scales melting away, leaving her feeling a bit colder and thinner and smaller. To the side of the door she found her medicine bag in the shadows and brought it back to the others. Then she swept a space clean on the floor and sat down.

  “What are you doing?” Wren asked, her arms still held out straight in front of her, her bracelets still humming and singing quietly to each other.

  “Making a sedative.” Asha glanced over at the struggling creature trapped in the aether flood. “A very strong sedative. Gideon, I could use some light.”

  The soldier came and sat beside her, unlocked his seireiken, and slid a fraction of the blade out of the gauntlet, letting its piercing white light illuminate Asha’s supplies.

  Then she began taking out her paper envelopes, copper tubes, and clay jars filled with seeds, leaves, bark, and dried animal glands and she arranged them neatly in front of her. She took out her mortar and pestle, and a clean bowl, and a clean needle, and she set to work.

  “What is all that?” Wren asked, glancing down out of the corner of her eye.

  “This is…” Asha smiled sadly. “This is me. Asha, without the dragon. A little bag of old seeds and leaves.” She began measuring out her ingredients and tapping them lightly into the mortar, and then set to grinding them down together into a powder.

  “I used to study herbs, too,” Wren said. “Gudrun taught me when I was younger. And my friend Katja too. But since I left home, I’ve just been studying aether-craft. I really don’t know much about southern plants.”

  “If you want to learn, I could teach you.” Asha frowned down at her working hands.