Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  The tunnel curved around them, turning gently to the right in an endless spiral as they trekked lower and deeper into the earth. The walls alternated between smooth bricks and rough-cut stones, and sometimes Asha saw soft earth in the crevices, and even tiny roots poking out into the naked air.

  The heat from Gideon’s sword reflected off the walls, and the hot air rolled back along the tunnel ceiling, growing thicker and more oppressive by the minute. Asha felt the sweat trickling down her neck, but she said nothing. Wren pulled a black ribbon from her pocket and tied her long, curling red hair back from her face and shoulders, and Taziri tied her own brown hair back with her blue scarf. Asha left her hair as it was, ignoring the heat and focusing on the sounds.

  Their footsteps echoed and clattered in the narrow tunnel, but there were other sounds to be heard. Asha’s golden ear roared with the anxiety of three other people right in front of her, including the duet sung by Gideon and his sun-steel pendant, and the little chorus of Wren and her fox and her shred of Omar Bakhoum. Beyond those living rhythms, she heard the strange warbling drone that came from the tens of thousands of souls sealed away in the sun-steel blade that lit their way.

  How many souls are in that sword? He said once that it was the most powerful one in the world, and the worst one in the world. Not from killing people, but from shattering other seireikens, from releasing thousands of enslaved souls, only to swallow them up within itself.

  One day, there will be no more seireikens, and then what will he do? How will he destroy that thing on his arm?

  The four of them spiraled on and on, down and down, and then quite suddenly the tunnel stopped, the brick walls fell away, and the vast subterranean chamber of the undercity was revealed. The light of Gideon’s sword reached far out and up, painting the cyclopean columns in white, gray, brown, and red. Before them stretched the vast avenues, wide and empty, and lined by obelisks, towers, and monstrous pyramids.

  “My God.” Taziri stared. “How did they build this? How old is it? What sort of stone? How did they raise the stones for the columns? And the roof! The roof is supporting the weight of Alexandria! How is that possible?”

  “Nine hells,” Wren whispered as she gaped at the sprawling city in the darkness. “Why would anyone do this?”

  “Pride?” Gideon shrugged. “Vanity?”

  “Selfishness.” Asha strode past him, setting out down the empty road.

  “Selfishness?” Wren caught up to her. “What do you mean?”

  “Whoever built this had incredible resources and power,” Asha said. “They could have built gardens and schools and hospitals, not just here but all across this country, maybe all across Ifrica. They could have given great things to the world. Instead, they built this. An entire city of palaces and tombs for princes and priests, and they hid it away underground so their corpses could sleep soundly with their worthless gold and jewels.”

  “So you don’t think it was a real city?” the girl asked. “It’s a necropolis?”

  “What else? There are no farms, and no stables or pens, which means no food. There are no shops or markets, so there was no trade.” Asha shrugged. “I don’t know, but I can’t see how people would have lived here. But I can easily imagine it housing the dead. Gideon?”

  “Maybe,” he said, as he passed her to take his place at the front of their procession. “I’ve only been here a few times, and well, I was always eager to leave. I never gave it much thought. And I never asked.”

  Asha fell back behind Wren and Taziri, and focused on listening to the yawning chasm, to the souls of the bats and the rats, and…

  “I can hear them,” she said softly. “I can hear Lilith’s creatures. Lots of them.”

  “Are they close?” Wren asked.

  “No,” Gideon said. “We’ve got quite a long walk before we reach them.”

  Asha frowned. The sounds in her dragon ear were shifting, changing pitch, changing volume. She looked up. “They’re coming. They’re still far away, but they are coming this way.”

  Gideon glanced back at her once and nodded, and then continued on.

  They walked briskly down the center of the avenue, turning when Gideon turned, and otherwise simply staring in silence at the huge columns and pyramids all around them, wondering what lay inside. But eventually they all began to hear the soft patter of bare feet in the distance, and the huffing, grunting sounds of labored breathing.

  Something screamed, and the scream echoed across the city.

  “They’re close,” Asha said. “We should stop and wait for them here.”

  “Should we take cover?” Taziri glanced off toward a slender tower nearby.

  “No. We stay together, here in the open.” Asha checked her bag for the steel needles coated in the sedative. “Remember the plan. Wren herds them, you pull the needles out, and Gideon melts them down. Every needle we destroy makes Lilith weaker.”

  They nodded and shuffled their feet, waiting. Taziri checked her switches and wires, and jostled the shoulder straps of the black box on her back. Gideon leveled his blade at the road ahead and stood as still as a statue. And Wren stood in front of them all, playing with the eight bracelets jangling on her wrists.

  “Do you think they’ll all be like Horus and Isis?” the northern girl asked. “Animal heads and legs? Or will they be something else? Something… worse?”

  “I think they’ll all be the same as the others we’ve seen,” Asha said.

  I hope that’s all they are.

  In the distance, at the very edge of the light cast by Gideon’s sword, the strange mob appeared as a dim, writhing mass of faces and bodies.

  “Here they come!” Gideon slammed the levers of his gauntlet into place. “Be ready!”

  Wren glanced back at him, and smiled. “Just stay behind me, all right?”

  Chapter 28

  As Lilith’s horde of monstrous slaves came closer, Asha began to pick out the details among them. Wings and horns stood high above the crowd, and in large numbers. Tails lashed the road between the stampeding feet and hoofs. Within the roar of the crowd, Asha heard the cries of birds of prey, the growls of hunting cats, the hissing of serpents, and other sounds that she did not recognize at all. The mob raced forward, loping and galloping, and screaming.

  Wren sat down in the middle of the road.

  “Wren?” Asha looked from the girl to the beasts and back. “Wren? Are you all right?”

  “Hush please,” she said.

  Asha frowned. The creatures were getting closer, and looked to be moving faster. She could see the wild white-in-white eyes now, and the dripping fangs, and the long sharp claws all shining by the light of Gideon’s sword.

  “Wren?” Asha grimaced.

  What if she can’t do it?

  Did I ask her to do more than she can?

  Am I about to get her killed too?

  And then Wren leaned forward and placed her hands on the ground. A freezing cold whirlwind roared up out of the earth, swirling around the flame-haired girl in a howling vortex that rose higher and higher into the air. Asha shielded her face with her hands, but it did not stop the white storm from leeching the warmth from her skin.

  Aether! So much aether!

  Asha grabbed Taziri and Gideon by the arms and pulled them back even farther away from the spinning storm in the center of the road. Through the flying white mists, she could still see Lilith’s slaves, now just a few seconds from reaching the aether.

  Wren stood up, a tiny figure in black and red surrounded by white. She raised her hands over her head, and then quickly brought them down in front of her, out of sight from where Asha stood behind her. And the blasting whirlwind of aether quickly unraveled, shredding apart as the white wisps flew downward and inward, flying down in front of Wren.

  Asha frowned, straining to see what was happening, but the light of Gideon’s sword only illuminated the girl’s back.

  Then Wren shifted her feet and turned a bit to the side, revealing her hand
s cupped around a spinning white orb of pure white light.

  She condensed it into that tiny sphere?

  “Stay down,” Wren yelled over the whine of the spinning aether and the roar of the beasts. And just as the creatures reached the girl, the girl whipped her arms out to her sides and her orb of aether exploded into a thousand ribbons of white light and shimmering mist.

  Asha grabbed Taziri and Gideon again, and yanked them down to their knees.

  The ribbons of light flew out around the creatures, wrapping around arms and legs, around chests and throats, slithering like serpents through the cold air over and under and around every living body in that mob of raging beasts and slaves. Wren stood very still, her arms outstretched as though frozen in the gesture of throwing something forward with both hands. And then she began to move, stepping gracefully from side to side, casting her hands left and right, sometimes in unison and sometimes separately. As she wove her hands through the air, the white aether ribbons wove themselves tighter around her prisoners, jerking them back away from her and pulling them all together into a struggling, screeching mass of misshapen bodies.

  Asha watched, spellbound, as the beautiful glowing threads danced through the shadows, elegantly weaving and flowing around each other.

  At last, Wren lifted her hands above her head, and then slammed them both downward, and the entire bound mob of tigers and eagles and snakes and dogs, and men and women, came crashing down to their knees. The pale girl glanced over her shoulder and nodded. “I have them.”

  Asha helped Taziri to her feet as the weight of her device threatened to keep her on one knee, and together they walked up beside Wren. They could feel the chill in the air from the aether, and the stench of animal flesh and sweat assailed their nostrils.

  “Keep it away from Wren,” Asha reminded the engineer.

  Taziri nodded as she raised the barrel of her sun-steel magnet, which shone bright gold in the white light of the seireiken and the aether, and she switched it on.

  Tiny golden needles flew out of the bound creatures with alarming speed and volume, and within a moment they were clattering and ringing and banging on the sun-steel core of the magnet like rain on a metal roof.

  Only worse.

  The monsters cried out in pain, and flecks of blood mingled with the flying needles. Taziri grabbed her blue scarf and wrapped it across her face as the tiny poisoned missiles continued to hurl themselves in her direction.

  Gradually, the bellows and roars and shrieks became wails and moans, and cries for help. Asha saw them changing, one by one, as wings became hands and hoofs became feet, and animals became men and women.

  The pinging of metal on metal began to slow, and then it stopped altogether. Asha glanced over and saw that hundreds of needles were clinging to the end of Taziri’s magnetic device, clustered together at various angles to form a nest of gleaming, bloody gold.

  That’s it. That’s all of them.

  “Gideon?” Asha pointed at the needles on the magnet.

  The soldier stepped forward and knelt down in front of Taziri, holding out the blade of his seireiken under the end of the magnet. He nodded up at her.

  Taziri switched off the magnet and the needles fell as a single bright mass of gold. They crashed onto the blade of the seireiken with an angry hiss as the sun-steel was instantly reduced to molten slag and smoke. The needles dripped off the sword as a dirty gray puddle, and for a moment a pale cloud of aether hovered around the burning seireiken, and then the cloud was swept down into the blade itself and vanished entirely.

  Gideon stood up. “It’s done.”

  Wren shook her hands, the bracelets on her arms rang out, and the countless white threads she had wrapped around her prisoners all shattered into a fine white mist of aether, which drifted apart and sank softly back down into the earth.

  “It worked,” Taziri said. She straightened up and smiled. “It really worked.”

  “You sound surprised,” Gideon said.

  Taziri shrugged. “Spend a little more time around me. I’m used to things going wrong.”

  Asha and Wren looked down at the fifty-odd men and women sitting on the road before them. The people looked up, shivering and shaking. They were all covered in dozens of cuts, all dribbling dark blood. Some of the needles had come out straight, but many had been ripped out sideways, and some had been pulled through their bodies from the back. Many of them sobbed quietly, and many of them reached out with shaking, bloody fingers, begging for help.

  Asha and Wren dashed forward among them and knelt down to examine the injuries. As Asha went through her bag, pulling out powders and droppers full of painkillers and wards against infection, Wren began tearing her lacy dress to pieces to make bandages, which she deftly tied over every wound she could reach. Taziri set down her device and waded into the crowd, offering her scarf and leather jacket to a shivering couple, and she spoke softly to them, trying to answer everyone’s questions and reassure them.

  “You’re all safe now,” Asha said. “Do you all remember what happened? You were kidnapped, and brought down here below the city, and changed. But it’s all over now. You’re free, and you’re safe. We’re going to get you all home soon.”

  They stayed there in the road for most of an hour, a bubble of light and life in the echoing darkness of the enormous cavern. When they were out of bandages and medicines, and everyone seemed fairly calm and in no danger of bleeding to death, Asha took Gideon aside.

  “What should we do with them?” she asked. “I assumed we’d be saving them at the pyramid, that we would deal with all of this together. I wasn’t planning on saving them here alone.”

  “If we take them back now, it will take hours,” he said. “Most of them can walk, but they’re in bad shape. And while I want to get them out of here, we’d be giving Lilith time to do… something else.”

  “I know.” Asha glanced over at the door of a nearby tower. “Go in there and see if you can find anything that will burn.”

  “A fire. Good idea.” He jogged away to the tower, taking the light of his sword with him. For a few minutes, the rest of the group stood and sat in the road, in the darkness, trying to stay calm and quiet while they listened to Gideon banging around inside the tower.

  And then he emerged with an armload of broken chair legs and other bits of wood. Asha and Taziri went over and helped him move several large piles of broken furniture from the tower out into the road and when the bonfire was large enough, Gideon poked his seireiken at the corner of a single stick. It instantly caught fire, and soon the flames began to spread across the pile, throwing out bright sparks and belching out dark smoke that smelled of ancient Aegyptian wax and oil. Asha called out over the crowd, assuring them that she would come back and lead them to the surface soon, and that they should just stay and rest by the fire.

  As they walked away from the people huddled around the bonfire, Taziri glanced back and said to Asha, “Does anyone else feel like that was the wrong thing to do? Just leaving them there like that?”

  “It’s not ideal,” Wren said lightly. “But they are safe for the moment, and we have more work to do. Woden knows, if we spent the rest of the day taking care of them, Lilith could escape, or worse.”

  “And it’s just that simple?” Taziri asked.

  “Yes, it is.” Asha looked over at her. “It’s not kind. It’s not fair. But it is simple.”

  They followed Gideon’s blazing white seireiken through the perpetual twilight realm of the silent city, their footsteps echoing faintly between the massive walls of the pyramids and columns. A colony of bats winged quietly overhead, squeaking softly high up near the ceiling of the cavern.

  “There it is,” Gideon said.

  Asha looked up and to her left and saw the pyramid. It looked much like all the other pyramids, and little about it was familiar from her first visit, except for the faint yellow signal fire high up at the apex of the ancient tomb.

  “How many are in there, do you think?
” Taziri asked.

  Asha saw the sweat on the engineer’s face. Even without her scarf and coat, with her arms covered only by a thin white shirt to protect her from the cold of the undercity, she was sweating. Asha said, “I can only hear a few. Maybe four or five.”

  “Lilith, Omar, and a handful of guards or servants.” Wren nodded. “Sounds easy compared to what we just did—”

  A deafening roar filled the air, a roar that rose higher and bellowed louder and stretched on so long that Asha had to wince and cover her ears, and wave the others off the road with her elbows. Together, they all hurried across the road and slipped into the shadows behind an obelisk across from Lilith’s retreat, and it wasn’t until they were all off the road and Gideon had sheathed his blade that the roar died away.

  “What in the nine hells was that?” Wren asked.

  Gideon and Asha peered out into the darkness. Asha’s golden ear heard the murmur of souls, the rhythms of life, but she couldn’t identify what she was hearing. Human, beast, or otherwise.

  “I can’t tell,” she said.

  “Do we really need a name?” Gideon said with a frightened smile. “It’s big and mean. Was I the only one who got that impression?”

  Wren straightened up. “Whatever it is, it’s alive and it has a soul. At least one, anyway. And that means I can hold it.” She stepped out onto the edge of the road and yelled up at the pyramid, “Come out, you hideous old hag! And bring your mangy dog with you!”

  “What are you doing?” Taziri whispered as loudly as she dared. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

  “It’s fine,” Wren said. “It doesn’t matter how large or strong the creature is. Not to the aether, and not to your magnet, and not to Gideon’s sword. We’re holding all the trumps here.”

  Across the road at the base of the pyramid, a cloud of dust burst up from the ground as a deep shudder raced through the earth. Then the dust jumped again, this time with a metallic clang and the low grunting of a large, deep-throated animal. When the third impact came, Asha saw a large metal plate on the ground lift for an instant before it crashed back down against its locks and chains. And then all was still.