I think I’ll leave those right where they are. Not worth the risk.
Not even slightly.
She ran after Kenan across the field and through the arena, and half a block down the next street she managed to come up alongside him. They ran with their entire bodies, arms pumping sharply, heads bobbing in unison, boots pounding the hard-packed earth of the dusty road. The cool night air blasted back through their jackets and hair.
Up ahead she could see Aker by the light of the stars. He was almost a block away, but his small black figure was definitely growing larger and she could see the uneven motion of his legs, and soon she could hear the heavy gasping of his wet and ragged grunting.
Between her own labored breaths, she glanced at Kenan and said, “So. That’s what you do. Yell at them. Drop your weapon? Down on your knees?”
“Yes.”
“Does it ever work?”
“Not as often as I’d like.” He grinned at her.
They ran harder, arms and legs flying like pistons, breath blasting through their lips and clenched teeth. Aker was only three buildings ahead now and he’d been reduced to a stumbling jog. And he was shouting in Eranian. “Gold! Twenty gold darics for the woman’s head! Silver! Ten silver shekels for the man’s gun!”
“What’s he saying?” Kenan asked.
“Nothing good.” Shifrah squinted as the cold air whipped in her eye. A shadow moved on her left. And then another. “Stop-stop-stop!” She grabbed Kenan’s arm and hauled him to a staggering halt. She stared across the street where the shadow had moved.
Just twenty yards away, Aker continued walking drunkenly down the street, shouting.
“Which way did we go?” she asked quietly. “From the arena. Which way?”
Kenan glanced at the stars. “East. Why?”
Shifrah took a step back as two shadows emerged from a distant alley and started walking toward them. “Feel like running some more?”
“Why? Who are they?”
“We’re in the Bantu district.”
“So? I’ve got plenty of bullets.” Kenan leveled his revolver at the shadow men.
“So Aker over there has just put out a contract on us. And the Bantu like bounty hunting. They like it a lot.”
Kenan shrugged. “Are Bantu bounty hunters bullet-proof?”
“No.” A small thundercrack across the street erupted from a small puff of smoke. Shifrah heard the bullet whip by her head and thump into the stone facade of the old shop behind her. “But neither are we.”
A second pistol fired, and then a third.
“Suddenly I feel like running some more,” Kenan said.
They turned and ran. But Shifrah grabbed Kenan’s arm and yanked him sideways into an alley. As they sprinted down the narrow corridor, she said, “Don’t worry. We’re not going to lose Aker again. We’re just going to have to do things the hard way.”
“What’s the hard way?”
Shifrah grimaced. “Bloody.”
Chapter 23. Qhora
She nestled inside her dead husband’s old coat, teasing out the faint smells lingering in the fabric. Wine. Cheese. Beef. Sea salt.
They had followed Shifrah and Kenan through the dark corridors of the Temple as far as the cellar, almost certain that they had not been noticed. They had seen Shifrah and Kenan leave through the shop upstairs, but at the cellar Salvator had insisted that they wait for a daylight crowd outside rather than try to escape as two running figures in the deserted streets in the night. With her injured leg aching and her arm throbbing, Qhora had agreed. The Italian had proven a deft field medic in dressing the gunshot wound, which was only a graze, and as she lay in the dark, the pain had faded.
Qhora sighed for the tenth time.
“Trouble sleeping?” a woman asked.
The nun again.
Qhora swallowed. “Enzo always said you had a bad habit of appearing behind him, back before you were trapped in the medallion. He said you scared him half to death, popping up behind his back in the dark with no warning. I hope you don’t plan on doing the same to me, Sister.” She rolled over and looked at her visitor.
Sister Ariel stood at arm’s length, her hands folded demurely in front of her, her dress and habit as immaculate in death as it had been in life. “I’ve been afraid for you nearly every minute of the last two days, Dona Qhora. Hm. And I thought Lorenzo was reckless. He gave me more than a few frights over the years, but he was only as reckless as a little boy who refuses to believe he can be hurt. You, on the other hand, are an entirely different sort of lunatic. Charging in blindly, surrendering to your enemies, leaping into the darkness.” The ghost stepped closer. “I’m scared for you, Qhora. And I’m scared for your son.”
“I know.” Qhora lay flat on her back and stared up at the cobwebbed ceiling of the cellar. She wrapped her fingers around Enzo’s old triquetra medallion on her chest. Its warmth sank softly into her flesh. “So am I.”
“Did you mean what you said before?” Ariel asked. “That you no longer want to find Lorenzo’s killer? That you’re ready to go home?”
Qhora nodded. “Yes. I miss my baby. And that old man was right. Javier will need a father. A living father. And one day I may even be ready to take another husband.” She paused. “I can’t imagine that. Even now, when I think about going back to Madrid, I keep thinking that Enzo will be there, as always. And now…I can’t remember the last time we didn’t spend the night together. Not since Cartagena. I think we’ve spent every single night together. Except for this one. And last night. Two nights without him. Tomorrow will be another, I suppose.”
Ariel nodded. “There were others, you know. There was a certain evening in a jail cell in Zaragoza, for one.”
Qhora glared across the room at Salvator’s sleeping form.
I can’t believe I’d already forgotten that.
Then she looked away. “I was stupid,” she said. “I was angry, and that made me stupid. I gave Javier to Alonso and just left them behind so I could kill some filthy idiot. And now I might die before I see my baby again. Mirari might never see Alonso again. Taziri might never see her family again. Even Tycho lost his foster father because of me. Because I was angry and stupid.”
“That’s hardly fair. Philo was killed by men. It was their fault, not yours,” Ariel said. “So what will you do now?”
Qhora yawned. “In the morning, we’ll find the others and go home. And then when we’re safely home, maybe I can hire someone to find this Aker El Deeb and his sword. I don’t know about that part yet. I can’t save Enzo. But I can still save everyone else. So I will.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the ghost said. “And Lorenzo would have been glad to hear it, too.”
Qhora nodded. She felt the slight rise in temperature that signaled the ghost’s departure and she closed her eyes and slept.
Chapter 24. Taziri
“No, we’re not going to build anything tonight. It’s already way past my bed time,” Taziri said. She lifted up a few loose boards in the rubbish pile to peer at the older trash underneath the newer trash, but the pale starlight didn’t reveal anything useful. She let it all fall back down to the ground again. “Let’s just try to scrounge up some materials while everyone with an ounce of sense is asleep, and then we’ll pick things up in the morning where we left off.”
Bastet sighed. The girl with the cat mask on her head hadn’t actually been helping so much as just following and talking. “So what exactly are we scrounging for?”
“A cowl and a hose.”
“What’s a cowl?”
Taziri paused, balancing precariously on top of the wobbly trash pile at the end of the alley. “It’s like a funnel, but we need it to fit over the entire propeller assembly. Like a hood. It could be metal, or wood, or sealed leather or even canvas.”
“Oh.” The girl stood well away from the trash and walked up and down a long crack in the bricks in the ground, balancing with her arms as though on a high wire. “Did you always want to
be an engineer?”
“I think so, yeah.” Taziri continued flipping through the loose bits of wicker and moldy fabric. “I always liked building things. I spent a lot of time in my mother’s shop. She was a seamstress, and she had one of the first mechanical sewing machines in Tingis. One night when I was about nine, I snuck into the shop and opened up the sewing machine to look inside it. I didn’t take it apart or anything, but for a whole week I would go downstairs to look at the parts and make little drawings, trying to figure out how it worked.” She smiled as she pictured the crude pencil drawings that had made her mother so proud. “What about you? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I used to want to be a princess,” Bastet said. “My aunt said that was silly, but I still want to be one. To wear the dresses and the jewels, and to have parties and music and feasts. To have a thousand friends. I’ve seen princesses, so I know all about them. It’s so much better than being a stupid goddess.”
Taziri slipped and fell knee-deep into a pile of prickly broken baskets. She twisted around to look at the girl. “I’m sorry. Did you say goddess?”
The girl shrugged her thin shoulders. “I mean, I know we’re not real goddesses, but it amounts to the same thing in the end. Not that it matters anymore. We have to live in the undercity now where no one ever goes, so no one even knows we exist anymore.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Taziri pulled her leg free and climbed down off the rubbish heap. “Go back. Now, when you say goddess, you mean…?”
Bastet raised an eyebrow. “You know, goddess. Immortal. Divine. Holy. Magical. You know, you’ve seen me.”
Taziri made several thoughtful faces as she tried to frame her answer as diplomatically as possible. “I’ve seen you move through a cloud of aether, that’s true. But I’ve been to the north where it’s so cold that the aether pools in every hole in the ground and ghosts are as common as sneezing. I’ve even seen a demonic ghost called a water-woman.”
“Oh? What was she like?”
“I didn’t really get to talk to her. She turned into a flock of ravens and attacked my friend, so I shot her.” Taziri absently rubbed the medical brace under her left sleeve. “Bastet, tell me, are you a ghost? Are you dead?”
The girl laughed. “No, I’m not dead. I can’t die.” She tapped the little golden heart pendant on her chest. “I told you, my grandfather made these for everyone in my family. They’re made from sun-steel. This holds a piece of my soul, but just a piece. Not the whole thing, of course. Dividing the soul creates an immortal bond between the flesh and the steel. So as long as the steel exists, so do I. And with my soul permanently stretched through the aether between my body and this little gem, I can do all sorts of things with the aether, like move through it.”
Taziri nodded along slowly. “Okay. I think I follow all that. Divided soul. Immortality. So, how old are you exactly?”
“I don’t know.” Bastet pouted. “Four thousand, I think. I stopped counting when I got to two hundred. Birthdays really stop being important after a while.”
“Four thousand?” Taziri leaned against the wall of the alley. “And you don’t age, or get sick, or anything?”
“Nope.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
The girl grinned. “It’s not awful. Plus I have all the cats a girl could want to boss around.” As if in answer, a pair of gray and white cats sauntered into the entrance of the alleyway. The girl rolled her eyes. “Not now.” The cats left.
Taziri decided not to ask about the cats. “And what do you do? You and your family? Do you…answer prayers?”
Bastet laughed.
Taziri smiled, feeling foolish. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I mean, back in the beginning, we lived here in the city and did all sorts of things where people could see us. We were more like high priests than gods, I guess. I had a lot of fun back then with my cousins. But eventually my uncles and aunts decided to move into the undercity where they could rest and study and do whatever they wanted away from all the people. People can be pretty tiring after a while.”
“You keep mentioning your aunts and uncles. What about your parents?”
The girl shrugged and looked at her feet. “I don’t remember them. I think they died when I was little. Grandfather isn’t really my grandfather. He just found me and took me in, started calling me his granddaughter, and said the others were my aunts and uncles. And when he made the steel hearts, he made one for me too. So I’d never be alone again, he said.” She looked up. “I miss him.”
“What about the others? Do you get along with them?” Taziri asked.
“More or less. They’re my family now. What can you do?” She smiled. “I mostly play with my cousins though. We still have fun, even though we’re still playing the same games we did before we became immortal. That’s why I like things like trains. They’re new. New is good.”
“Yeah, I like new things, too.” Taziri smiled. “That’s why I build them. I could teach you to build things too, if you wanted.”
“Maybe later.” Bastet turned and pointed at the trash. “Hey, is that a cowl?”
Taziri wandered back into the garbage. “This?” She pulled out a large basket with a small hole ripped in the bottom. The inner frame of the basket was wicker, but outside it had a water-tight skin of oiled leather. “Yeah. This’ll do nicely. Now we just need a hose. Where can we find some rubber around here?”
“Can’t. Rubber only comes from the New World, right? Well, there’s been a quarantine for a couple years now. They’re all afraid of some plague or something. You need rubber to make a hose? A hose is like a pipe, but bendy, right?”
Taziri nodded.
Bastet grinned. “I have an idea.”
A few minutes later they were standing in a dark street looking at a small, closed shop. Taziri frowned. “I think that’s a butcher shop.”
“It is. You need a long bendy pipe, right?”
Taziri grimaced. “Really? There isn’t anything else in Alexandria that we can use?”
Bastet crossed her arms. “Well, I’ve only lived here four thousand years, so maybe I’ve missed something. If you want to go looking around somewhere else, be my guest.”
Taziri sighed. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”
Bastet walked up to the door and vanished in a swirling cloud of white mist. A moment later the door opened and Taziri walked in. The girl pointed to the ceiling. “I think that’s what you want.”
Taziri grimaced again and started breathing through her mouth. “What is it? Cow?”
“Horse, I think.”
With a bit of stumbling in the dark and a few eye-watering gasps, Taziri pulled the coiled intestines down and looped them over her shoulder. As she turned to leave, she dug into her pocket and pulled out a fistful of Mazigh coins, which she slapped on the butcher’s counter as she walked out. Bastet closed the door and walked beside Taziri all the way back to the rail yard with a playful whistle on her lips. Taziri focused on not breathing too deeply.
Four thousand years old, and still a little girl? I…I just can’t imagine… Lorenzo never said anything about divided souls or living forever. I wonder what else he didn’t know about ghosts and aether.
When they returned to the Halcyon, she stowed her makeshift cowl and hose in the back of the cabin. “All right, now it is definitely time for some sleep. Can you wake me up before sunrise? We need to start working before the sun gets too high and our hose starts to rot.”
Bastet nodded. “I’ll see you then.” And she vanished through the closed hatch.
Taziri lay down on her tarp on the floor with her feet toward the coiled guts. A minute later she was settling in for the night up in her flight chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was a few inches farther from the rear of the cabin. She was asleep in moments.
Suddenly a hand was shaking her shoulder and she was mumbling and there was pale sunlight streaming in through the windscreen onto her lap. Taziri blinked
and sat up.
“Good morning!” Bastet held out a piece of flatbread cupping a handful of dates. “Did you sleep well?”
“Good morning, thanks.” Dates again. Taziri ate slowly. “It felt like the night just flew by. Did you get much sleep? Do you sleep?”
“I did. But first I had to visit my cousin. I sent him on a little errand for you.”
“For me? Well, I hope your cousin didn’t mind the late visit.”
“He didn’t.” She smiled but said no more.
Taziri wiped her hands on her pants and climbed out of her chair. “All right then. Time for us to build something. Are you going to help or just watch?”
“Uhm. I think I’ll just watch for now.” The girl winked and flopped down on the nearest passenger seat.
Can’t say I’m entirely surprised by that answer from a girl who says she still wants to be a princess.
Taziri went to the back of the cabin and picked up her leather-clad basket and coil of horse gut. “Do you think it will be safe for me to work outside? Will anyone come looking around back here if they hear me working?”
“No, my four-footed army is sleeping on the freight cars and the rails and platform,” Bastet said. “No one will be bothering you today.”
“All right then.” Taziri climbed out the hatch and found the early morning sun bright but still cool. She tossed her gear on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and popped open the little compartment on the bottom of her arm brace to get a wrench. She climbed up on the nose of the Halcyon and started loosening bolts. “First I’m going to reverse the propeller to turn it into a fan.”
Bastet stepped out onto the gravel. “Do you ever get a bad feeling right before something terrible happens?”
Taziri kept working. “All the time. Why? Are you getting a bad feeling right now?”
“No. But I think I will in a little while.”
Taziri removed the propeller, flipped it over, and bolted it back on. “All right, now hand me the basket, our new cowl.”
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