Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Good, good.” Gideon sat down beside her on the cold dirt floor. “I wish I had such good news. I never found Horus myself. Just a smashed up street and a lot of scared people. It sounded like Anubis had been there too, but I never found him. Some of the witnesses said he was out in the fields to the east of the city, but by then it was already dark and I didn’t think I’d be able to find him, so I came back here.”

  “What about Bastet? Did you see her?” Asha asked.

  “No.” Gideon rubbed his lip with his thumb. “But as long as Isis and Horus are here, then she’s in no danger.”

  Asha nodded.

  Maybe.

  “Would you mind staying here with Wren and watching our guests for a while?” she asked. “I’m going to take a look around for Bastet.”

  “Are you sure?” Gideon smiled a little. “I mean, I know she looks like a little girl, but she’s four thousand years old and can’t be killed.”

  “I know, but she can be hurt, in her own way.” Asha stood up. “And I need something to do.”

  “Sure.” Gideon nodded and scooted back against one of the wooden crates to sit more comfortably. “Good luck out there.”

  “Thanks.” Asha settled her blanket and her medicine bag on her shoulders, and headed out into the night.

  It was very late or very early, and while dawn was still hours away Asha felt entirely rested and entirely awake as she walked alone through the empty, silent streets. She headed east, watching the sky for the first pale hints of a sunrise she had no real desire to see.

  Let this night go on forever. Leave tomorrow beyond the veil. I don’t want to see what I’ll become when the new day begins. I was Asha of Kathmandu, a healer. I survived the doctors of Ming, and the Sons of Osiris, and even the golden dragon itself, only to be destroyed here, stamped out of existence by my own pride and impatience and stupidity.

  People are still suffering and dying.

  More may die today.

  How many will die because of me?

  She quickened her pace and hurried through the vacant market squares and the deserted avenues and the empty parks, always heading east, always watching the dark horizon for a glimmer of light. She found the street where the corners of the houses and the windows had been broken, where the rubble lay scattered in the road, where even at this hour there were candles flickering behind the glass and human shadows huddled in the corners, waiting for day.

  With her dragon’s ear, Asha heard the souls of the families in the houses. Their souls hummed and sighed with fatigue and fear, but the emotions were all blunted and worn with time, fading away as the night wore on. And she knew that when the sun rose and the shadows vanished, the specter of whatever had frightened these people would vanish completely and life would resume again in all its color and strength. So she continued east, looking and listening for Bastet.

  When the sky finally blushed in soft grays and yellows, Asha was striding down a dusty path with only a handful of small cottages dotting the roadside. On either side she saw young gardens full of tiny sprouts, brightly colored flowers, and delicate vine tendrils in rich beds of dark earth. There were long plowed fields as well and she wondered what would emerge from them over the summer and autumn months. Trees lined the road and the fields, rising high above the tall grasses. Huge sycamores cast long shadows over the land, shorter mulberries shushed and waved in the breeze, and rough-barked palms leaned here and there over the road bearing the buds of a fruit she had never seen before.

  Asha’s golden ear listened to the soul-sounds of the land of Aegyptus for the first time since arriving in the country, and she head a chorus of ancient and thriving creatures that she had never known before.

  There was a time when I lived for this. Just this. Experiencing new places, new plants, new animals. Spending days in one place to dig in the soil, to sniff the roots, to taste the flowers, to study the beetles and butterflies.

  It seems like another life now. Someone else’s life.

  She knelt at the side of the road and plucked a small red flower. As she stared into it, she wondered what oils or seeds she might take from it, what medicines or foods might be made from it. She wondered what it was called. But she didn’t wonder long.

  I have to find Bastet.

  She slipped the flower away into her bag and walked on.

  Her dragon’s ear went on cataloging and sifting through the soul-sounds around her. Grasses, trees, and flies were common. People and pack animals were fewer and farther between. But none of them resembled the doubled humming of an immortal and her sun-steel heart.

  Closing her eyes to the glare of the bright sliver of sunlight blazing on the edge of the world, Asha wandered off the dirt road into the tall grass, angling southward across a trickle of cold water in a ditch and over a small rise toward a copse of sycamores. From there she turned a bit more to the south, her eyes still closed and her golden ear searching for something, anything, that might be Bastet.

  Eventually she found the sound. Under the creaking of the locusts and the shivering of the tall grass, and between the cries of the shearwaters and storm-petrels in their nests by the distant sea, Asha heard the sweet duet of a young soul singing with itself. But that soul was singing a dirge, a mournful cry of aching loss and despair.

  At the top of a steep hill, she found the Aegyptian girl sitting in a circle of trampled grass. Bastet’s black and red dress lay wrinkled and twisted around her legs, and the little embroidered cats were tumbled upon each other in the folds. Her black cat’s mask had slipped off her head and fallen to the ground, where three lean and tawny little wildcats sat licking their whiskers and flicking their tails in silence.

  Asha stepped into the bed of flattened grass and saw the body lying beside the girl. The youth’s head rested in her lap where she was gently stroking his brow, and the rest of his long limbs were stretched out across the ground in peaceful repose, except for the ragged and bloody hole in the center of his chest.

  The stillness of the body felt wrong, even unnatural. In a rush, Asha recalled her handful of conversations with Anubis, the commanding sound of his voice, the arrogant mettle of his every gesture, the brooding look in his eyes, and even the sharp manner in which he struck his staff on the ground before he vanished into the aether. For a moment, she couldn’t reconcile her memory of that proud and straight-backed youth with the corpse resting on a bed of bloody grass and wrinkled skirts.

  “Bastet?” Asha whispered. She reached out and gently touched the girl’s shoulder.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, Bastet turned and looked at her. The girl’s face was pale, her eyes rimmed in red, her lips thin and colorless. “Asha.”

  “What happened?” Asha sat down beside her and let the girl lean against her body.

  Bastet sighed a weak and ragged sigh. “I think he fought with Horus. I found him lying here with his own staff through his chest. I pulled it out. He should have been fine. It should have only taken a moment. He should have… but he didn’t heal. He just… he just died.”

  “I’m sorry.” Asha put her arms around the girl, but the girl didn’t cry. She just sat very still and stiff, gently petting her cousin’s face and staring out over the plain as the rising sun streaked the land with bright golds and greens. Asha peered over Bastet’s shoulder at the body, trying to see it without the lens of memory or sorrow. She studied the wound and the dried blood, and her gaze traveled up to the youth’s neck.

  “His pendant?”

  “Gone.”

  Asha nodded. “I could tell how close you were. The way you spoke and acted toward each other. I could see how much you cared for each other. He knew that.”

  “I think I loved him,” Bastet whispered.

  “Of course you did.”

  She turned and looked up at Asha. “I mean, I really loved him. I never said anything. I didn’t know how. We’re not actually family, you know. Grandfather isn’t my real grandfather, and he isn’t related to Anubis’s family either.
But still, we’ve spent our whole lives acting like family. And then there’s this.” She gestured to her face and body. “For four thousand years, I’ve been this little girl, even to Anubis. And it’s true, some part of me will always be twelve and silly and confused, but a part of me isn’t. A part of me is four thousand years old, and lonely. That part of me wonders what I would look like if I ever grew up, and wonders what my children would look like.”

  “Immortals can’t have children?”

  “They can, but I can’t. I became immortal before my body changed, before my cycles could begin. And since immortality brings changelessness, I will never know what it means to be a mother.” Bastet shivered.

  “I’m sorry, I never thought…” Asha cleared her throat. “When we met, I…”

  “You saw me as a twelve-year-old girl,” Bastet said. She smiled sadly. “It’s all right. I am a twelve-year-old girl. I’m both, I guess. Young and old. Trapped in between. And most of the time, it’s fine. But sometimes I start to wonder what I lost, what I gave up, what I could have been. What we could have been. But it was too hard to say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I guess…” She hesitated, her smile wavering. “I guess the time was never right. On a bad day, I would never even think about telling him how I felt, or how I thought I felt.”

  “And on a good day?”

  Bastet shrugged. “Why spoil a good day with an argument you can always have later?”

  Asha nodded.

  “What should we do now?” the girl asked softly.

  “We should see to the body,” Asha said.

  Bastet laughed through the sniffs and breathless gasps. “He was the God of Death. I suppose we could preserve his body as the ancient kings did.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Bastet sniffed and sat up straighter. “Well, we remove the organs and seal them in jars, and then fill the body with embalming fluid and wrap it in cloth, and then place it in a golden sarcophagus and seal it away in a tomb built by fifty thousand slaves.”

  Asha blinked. “Oh.”

  “Or maybe not,” Bastet whispered. “We’ll send him to his mother in the old way.”

  Together they gathered armfuls of dry branches and grasses and piled them on the warm earth with the sun rising brighter and warmer by the moment. Asha placed the body on the pyre, and Bastet kissed her cousin’s cheek.

  Then Asha lit the kindling with Bastet’s flint and they both stood back and watched the flames flicker and grow, and consume the body of the God of Death.

  When the fires had died down to glowing embers and smoking ashes, the two women turned and began wading back through the tall grasses toward the dusty road and the distant outline of Alexandria.

  “If it could be done, would you choose to be mortal again?” Asha asked.

  “Yes,” Bastet said without a moment’s pause to consider the question. “I’ve had more than enough time to learn what it means to be twelve. But I know I can never go back, and it’s all right. A long time ago, I asked Grandfather whether he could undo it, and he said he couldn’t, so I’ve had a long time to live with the idea that this will never change. That I will never change.”

  “Why couldn’t he undo it?”

  “Because only a seireiken could destroy the pendant, and then the sword would swallow that piece of my soul inside the sun-steel heart.”

  “And then that piece of your soul would just be trapped in another piece of sun-steel,” Asha realized.

  “Yes.”

  “But what if you could destroy the pendant another way? With something that wasn’t made of sun-steel? Something that would let that piece of your soul go back to you?”

  Bastet pouted as she considered it. “Then I suppose I might be mortal again.”

  Asha nodded and together they walked back to the city.

  Chapter 26

  It took most of the morning for Asha to walk back to the warehouse with Bastet, where she found Gideon and Wren sharing a breakfast of steaming hot fuul medames and t’aamiyya, both of which she discovered were full of fava beans and wonderful spices. They ate in the shadows of their chained prisoners and Bastet quietly related the last moments of Anubis to Gideon, who took the news with a strangely grim silence that Asha thought bordered on rage, but quietly subsided and he was soon himself again, though far less boisterous and less inclined to smile.

  It was nearing noon when Wren said, “Should one of us go check on the lady with the machines?”

  “Taziri.” Bastet looked up, her face still looking pale and haunted. “Her name is Taziri.”

  “I’ll go,” Asha said.

  “No, this time I’ll go.” Gideon stood up quickly. “I need to stretch my legs anyway.” And he strode out of the warehouse.

  “He doesn’t like being sad,” Bastet said. “I don’t think he really knows how to be sad, actually. Like asking a mute to sing, he just doesn’t know how, and I think he’s ashamed of it. Like it’s a flaw, something he’s failing to do.”

  Asha frowned and glanced toward the doors, but the soldier was already gone.

  For the next hour, the three women talked in low voices about death and monsters. Bastet described some of the horribly deformed people that Lilith had created and released into the city over the last few years. Wren talked about a huge fox demon that had besieged a city at the top of the world, and her friend who had died fighting it. And Asha told them both about the bear she once fought in India, and the basilisk she discovered in Rajasthan, and the golden dragon she faced in the hills above Damascus with the immortal warrior Nadira, and her friend Priya.

  Their mood was as gray as the light coming through the narrow warehouse windows when Gideon finally returned with Jiro and Taziri. They carried a long box between them, which they set on the floor and uncovered to reveal the product of their labors.

  “That’s it?” Wren asked.

  “That’s it,” Taziri said. “An aetherium electromagnet.”

  Asha studied the device lying in its bed of straw. The sun-steel core drew her eye first. It was a long reddish gold cylinder the length and width of her arm, and it gleamed even in the weak light inside the warehouse.

  Raw sun-steel. Virgin. Not yet forged into a tool or weapon. Not yet charged with the souls of the dead… or the living. It’s almost pretty.

  Asha moved on from the cylinder to the looping copper wires and bands that encircled the bottom half of the sun-steel, ringing it without touching it. These wires spiraled inward toward the base of the cylinder where they ended in a block of black-grained wood, and the encircling wires were connected to yet more wires that snaked over the straw to a large black case that had two canvas straps bolted into it.

  “How does it work?” the herbalist asked.

  “It’s very simple,” the Mazigh woman said. “You press this switch and aim it at whatever you want to attract.”

  Asha nodded. “All right. Then I believe we should test it.” She turned and looked up at Isis and Horus. The mother and son hung by their wrists, both very still and quiet, their white eyes barely open. The youth’s falcon head dipped forward, almost touching his beak to his chest. The steer-woman’s head rested on one of her up-stretched arms, her curving horns looking dull and gray in the half-light and her shaggy, hoofed legs dangling just above the floor.

  Taziri looked up at Jiro. “Would you care to do the honors?”

  “No.” The smith backed away. “I wouldn’t.”

  With a shrug and a grin, Taziri lifted the black case and slipped the canvas straps over her shoulders to wear the contraption on her back. Then she hefted the sun-steel cylinder and its wire rings by a pair of black wooden handles and stepped away from the crate. She winced just a little as she took the full weight of her invention on her back and shoulders, but she walked easily across the smooth warehouse floor.

  She reached up with one hand to quickly pull her brass-rimmed goggles over her eyes and she glanced over at the others. “You should probably get back, just to
be safe.”

  The group shuffled over behind her.

  “No, no, not behind me,” Taziri said, jerking her head toward the far wall. “Over there. Away from me.”

  The group shrugged and shuffled over to the gap between two towers of crates.

  “All right. Here we go.”

  Asha watched as Taziri flicked the switch on the device and then aimed the red-gold cylinder of sun-steel up at the two prisoners. Instantly, a high-pitched whine unlike anything Asha had ever heard before sliced through her mind, forcing her to cover her ears and narrow her eyes to slits. In that same instant, both of the hanging prisoners swung forward on their chains, swinging toward the Mazigh woman. Both the falcon-man and the steer-woman jerked their heads up, their eyes wide with shock, and the warehouse erupted with avian shrieks and bovine screams as the prisoners shook and writhed between the chains holding them up and the device pulling them down.

  “I’m turning it up!” Taziri shouted over the noise.

  Asha winced as the high-pitched whine rose even higher and louder, and just as she was about to look away, to shuffle farther back from the hideous sound, she saw the needles. Tiny golden glints of light appeared on Isis’s hairy legs and hoofed feet, and the same metallic gleams appeared on Horus’s feathered head and scaled hands. Both of them screamed and shook against their chains, making the heavy beams overhead groan and crack as trickles of dust fell from the roof, but the rafters held.

  And then the needles came free.

  Over a dozen of the tiny things burst from the two prisoners, shooting cleanly from tiny holes in the skin and also tearing sideways from ragged rents in the flesh. The needles flew across the room faster than Asha could track them, but she heard them clatter softly against the sun-steel core of the magnet.

  Taziri switched the device off and set it down on the ground, and the tiny needles fell to the floor. Gideon stepped out from behind the crates first, his hand straying to his sword-gauntlet as he stared up at the two figures on the chains. Asha and the others followed him out and looked up.