Chimera esd-7

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “So, can you do it?” Bastet asked. “Can you build something like that?”

  “An electromagnet? Sure. It’s pretty simple, really.” Taziri leaned back into the sofa and picked at her lip as she peered at the far wall in thought. “We’d need a generator, or a big battery, and a large copper coil. That’s all easy to get. The tricky part is the aetherium core. We’d need a really big chunk of aetherium to do this, and we’d probably want to shape the core to help tune the shape of the magnetic field.”

  “Don’t you have any more sun-steel here?”

  Taziri shook her head. “There are only a handful of pellets in the whole country right now. That government job I mentioned? They want me on the team to bring up the skyfire stone from the bottom of the Tarifa Strait. That huge ball of aetherium has been down there for years now, and we’ve had a steady stream of boiled fish washing up all over the shoreline ever since.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow is right,” Taziri said. “The salvage engineers finally have a plan, but they need help building the special equipment. When we get the skyfire stone out of the water, then we’ll have more aetherium than we know what to do with, but until then, it’s all just pellets, and those are all kept in laboratory vaults. Sorry.”

  Bastet pouted.

  Figures! We finally get rid of the stupid Temple of Osiris, and the first thing that happens is we need them back again to get us more sun-steel. It’s not fair. Why’d all those idiots have to go and get killed-

  “I can get the sun-steel!” Bastet beamed.

  “How?”

  “I know someone,” the girl nodded. “He’ll know where we can get all the sun-steel we need, by the ingot!”

  “Well, that’s great,” Taziri said. “I can get the rest of the gear together and meet you in Alexandria, I guess. We’ll need a workshop to put the magnet together, and then you should be all set.”

  “Great!” Bastet leaned over and hugged Taziri. “It’ll be just like old times. Speaking of which, can you make another torch thing, like before? When we’re all done saving Grandfather, I think we’re going to want to get rid of a lot of sun-steel. And I mean a lot. And some of it’s going to be really, really hot.”

  “Another plasma torch?” The Mazigh woman frowned. “Sure, I have a friend who can loan me one. But this one’s going to be made out of proper materials. Not like last time.” She shuddered.

  “Okay.” Bastet set the little brass cat back on the table. “Can you come soon?”

  Taziri pushed her hair back and tapped the top of her head for a moment. “I don’t know. I need to talk to my husband and cancel my classes, and figure out what to do with the repair shop and the store. I should be able to get the gear easily enough, though. Nothing special about copper wires, and who better to get a big battery than the person who holds four patents on batteries, right?”

  Bastet looked at her blankly. “I guess so.”

  Taziri tilted her head. “Didn’t we ever talk about that? I have the patents on the… You know, I invented the… never mind.”

  Bastet shrugged. “So how soon can you come?”

  “Tomorrow night,” Taziri said. “I don’t know when, exactly, but it should be before midnight. I’ll fly in on the Halcyon, and land on one of the western railways, just like before, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll be watching for you!” Bastet said.

  Chapter 10

  Echoes

  Asha followed Gideon through the winding tunnel beneath the dusty fountain, down into the cold and the dark. They carried two tiny pinpricks of light, one blazing white from the exposed tip of his sword and one burning dark red from the tip of her single ruby claw. Gideon’s light threw the contours of the tunnel walls into sharp relief, silvery white stones streaked with infinitely black shadows. And behind him, Asha let her own small light paint a tiny patch of wall and floor in faint crimson smears of rust and blood.

  “You’ve been down here before?” she whispered.

  “Many times,” he said over his shoulder. “In the old days I would visit the family down here. Not by this path, though. This is just a back door. Back then I came in through the main gates, a grand entrance onto the boulevard of the buried palaces where the retired deities of Death and War and Love and Cats all lived and played together.”

  “What about this place where Lilith is?”

  “Lilith’s retreat.” He paused, but didn’t turn to look at her. “I’ve been there twice. Both times to kill her creatures. Once with Horus. Once with Anubis.” He lingered a moment longer in silence, as though he had more to say, but he only shook his head and continued on down the tunnel.

  The floor was rough but flat and the walls were stacked blocks and bricks, though Asha saw no mortar between them. The farther they went, the staler the air became, but it reached a certain coolness and grew no colder. And after half an hour of quietly pacing down the dark corridor, straining to hear or see some sign of life or danger ahead, the tunnel leveled out and they emerged through a broken gateway into a vast black chamber.

  Asha didn’t see the transition so much as she felt it, felt the tight echo of the tunnel fade, felt the closeness of the walls spread out and away, and for a moment she recalled another tunnel that had brought her down into the darkness many years ago into a cavern where she had found something very unexpected.

  Priya.

  Priya, all alone, sitting on an altar, covered in lotus vines and blossoms. She was cold and still, and I brought her out of there. I brought her across India, Rajasthan, and Eran. We talked and traveled and struggled, for years, together… And she died.

  If I had never found her, if I had left here there in that cave, she would still be there now. All alone in the dark.

  But alive.

  Asha cleared her throat as she stared up blindly into the darkness, seeing nothing of the roof or walls, having no sense at all of how large the cavern might be. “You followed us back here from Eran?”

  “I did,” Gideon said quietly. “I was worried about you. About you both.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For worrying?”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. She wanted to smile back but her mouth refused as she said, “Yes. For worrying. For caring.”

  “Any time.”

  Asha took a few steps past him and the harsh glare of his sword. There were faint gray gleams out in the blackness. “Where to now?”

  “We’re on the eastern edge of the undercity,” Gideon said. “Lilith is to the south from here.” He pointed to their left at a veil of black nothingness.

  Asha looked up. “How far down are we?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If you shot an arrow up there, it might scrape the ceiling. A bit.”

  “And the entire city of Alexandria is up there?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You can’t see them from here, but there are pillars all around us holding up the city. Ancient pillars. Massive things.”

  She nodded. “Good. Pillars are good.”

  “This way.” Gideon started walking.

  Asha walked beside him. “Is there anything else down here besides Lilith and her… those… things?”

  “Not much. Nothing dangerous,” he said. “Rats, bats, snakes, spiders. All sorts of adorable little things.”

  “Oh.” Asha nodded to herself. “Bats are fascinating. Not very useful, but fascinating.”

  Gideon paused and reached for the little steel switches and bolts on his gauntlet. “I think we’re alone for the moment. So, let’s risk just a little more light.”

  Asha heard him releasing the lock on his gauntlet and the sun-steel blade quietly slid free of its sheathe on his arm, extending down past his armored hand. The blade was short, even shorter than a seireiken, and it was triangular in shape with sharpened edges on both sides.

  And it was bright.

  Gideon held up his weapon and the naked blade shone like an exploding star, scourging the shadows and banish
ing the darkness, revealing the subterranean world all around them. The exposed sun-steel was blinding, and Asha squinted away from it, but still she could see the tiny crackles of blue lightning shimmering and dancing across the ancient blade, and she could feel the harsh dry heat of it tightening her skin, making her sweat. She had only seen it once before, in broad daylight, and only for a few moments. But now she let herself think about what that blade really was.

  As an object alone, it was a miracle of science and artistry. The knowledge and skill needed simply to shape it had been a cataclysmic turning point in human history, even if most humans would never know of its existence. And the sword was beautiful, even though a person could only look upon it for a moment before it overwhelmed their fragile eyes. The light, the heat, the shimmer and shiver and hum of it was electrifying, like a living thing, a blazing reminder that gods had once walked the earth, and might walk the earth again.

  But it was so much more. That small sword was an entire necropolis, a vast and ever-growing world for the dead, a world where the souls of hundreds of thousands of men and women had been preserved and sheltered for thousands of years.

  What do they do in there? Do they sleep and dream? Or are they awake, living and speaking, meeting and parting, laughing and loving?

  Gideon started walking again, and Asha followed as she dragged her narrowed eyes away from the blinding beacon on his arm and she looked around herself at the world they called the undercity.

  At first, as her eyes adjusted to the strange sight of the gray facades illuminated by the white light, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. And then she blinked, and she saw.

  The first pillar was directly in front of her, and it was indeed massive. She guessed its base to be the same width as the entire Temple of Osiris, and it rose up and up and up into the darkness to a shadowy ceiling that she could just barely see as she tilted her head all the way back. A faint pattern scored the face of the pillar, and she saw that it was a cylinder built from rectangular blocks with narrow gaps along their edges where the blocks had been angled apart to create the round shape of the pillar. The gaps alternated and shifted upward to create spiraling lines of black dashes across the pillar, so that it seemed to spin and swirl as it rushed up to meet the roof of the cavern.

  Asha followed Gideon down the broad dusty road and saw the other pillars, all of the same titanic size and the same spiraling brick construction. The pillars continued out in every direction, far beyond the reach of the white light, like a silent forest of petrified giants awaiting the end of time itself.

  Between the pillars stood the buildings, abandoned and empty and dark. Asha started to ask Gideon what they were, or what they had once been, but she didn’t. There was something humbling and frightening and beautiful in not knowing, in wondering, in imagining what might have been. Answers would have ruined it.

  She saw pyramids of every size and construction, some rising only as high as a small home and some soaring up into the center of the cavern. Some of the pyramids rose in step-fashion, each square level slightly smaller than the last, rising like staircases high above the ground. And still others had smooth faces, each side a perfectly flat triangle of stone, wrinkled and cracked with age, but still elegant and whole. Blemished, but unbroken.

  Between the pyramids Asha saw towers, slender stone cylinders like miniature versions of the huge pillars, and each one rising to support a round chamber with a twisting, pointed roof like an enormous stone turnip impaled upside-down upon a skewer, and set all around with small dark windows.

  Below the height of the towers stood the obelisks, countless stone needles and fangs, some as small as a lone woman and some as large as a lightning-blasted tree, stripped of its leaves and branches and left bare and burned, but still standing. The obelisks had flat, rectangular faces, and upon each one were countless carvings, symbols and characters that meant nothing to Asha, but she stared at each one as she walked by.

  “Who could have created something like this?” she whispered. “And why would they? Why would they even dream of such a place, let alone build it?”

  “I don’t know,” Gideon said. “I asked the same question when I came here for the first time.”

  “But Bastet and the other Aegyptians are four thousand years old,” Asha said. “Weren’t they here when it was built?”

  Gideon shook his head. “They were here when the Aegyptian kings allowed the Hellan engineer Alexander to transform the surface world from a struggling fishing village into a city worthy of being the capital of a great and powerful Ifrican nation. But this place? No. Horus and Osiris discovered this place much, much later. And they found it just like this. Deserted. No one knows who built it, or how, or why.”

  Asha stopped walking and stared up at nothing and everything all at once. The pillars, the towers, the pyramids, the ceiling so high she wasn’t certain she could see it, and the walls so far that she was certain she couldn’t see them at all. It was too big. It was too old. It was too impossible. Nothing else she had ever seen could compare to it, in any way. The immense space and silence reached down, pressed down, crushing her chest, making her head spin.

  It’s just a place. It’s just a thing. Stones, bricks. People made it, bit by bit. They cut the stones, dragged them here, and arranged them.

  Thousands of people.

  Millions of people.

  She swallowed and tried to breathe.

  How long would it take to build even one of these pillars? Just one? How many years?

  And to build it all, an entire vast city, and then to cover it over, hide it from the world. How many centuries?

  What sort of will would demand such a labor? What sort of mind would demand that these works be raised from the dust? That millions of people should slave for centuries, for generations, from cradle to grave, to build an entire world like this?

  “Are you all right?” Gideon asked.

  Asha swallowed again and closed her eyes.

  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.”