Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Omar felt a spike of adrenaline race down his spine.

  Yslanders! She’s seen them!

  He asked, “Was this last summer? Six months ago?”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “Four or five generations past, I think. I’m not sure how long I lay in the earth before I heard the call.”

  “What call is that?”

  “The call of the Fisher King. He lives beyond the ice in a golden hall,” she said. “Because of his wounded leg he cannot travel the world, and so he summons the souls of the faithful to find him in death, where he can bless them and keep them for all time.”

  Omar frowned. “I’ve never heard of this king before. But you hear his call now?”

  “Yes. But his call is not a sound to be heard. It is a summons that can only be felt in the hearts of the faithful.”

  Omar looked around them at the countless multitudes parading south across the glacier. “There are many faithful.”

  “Yes. There are.”

  “Has anyone ever returned from the south to tell you about the Fisher King? Do you know his name or the name of his country?”

  “Once there was a brave soul who found the royal hall and returned to his home in Gaul to tell his village shaman of the Fisher King. He said the great hall was made all of gold and stood alone on an island of barren rock high on a mountain slope. The island is guarded by huge white beasts who serve the Fisher King, and the island itself is so hot that it glows red in the night.” She paused. “The spirit said it nearly broke his heart to leave that place so that he could tell the shaman. And then he hurried back south again to take his place in the court of the Fisher King.”

  A hall on an island on a mountain? Huge white beasts?

  Omar squinted across the sea of misty faces around them. “Have you seen any Yslander ghosts since you began your journey? Are there any Yslander souls here?”

  “No,” she answered quickly without looking about. “The Yslanders always carry their dead back home with them. And they worship crueler and stranger gods than ours.”

  “I see. So they aren’t among the faithful, then?”

  “No.”

  Omar nodded. “Thank you. And good luck. I hope you find your golden hall soon.”

  “I will. Farewell.”

  Omar came to a halt and watched the dead woman wander away with her fellow ghosts. A moment later he shivered as the spirit of an old man shuffled through his body, and Omar danced away from the aether figure, and then began picking his way carefully through the shuffling crowd of ghosts back toward the Frost Finch.

  He stepped inside the gondola and sealed the hatch behind him, and felt his skin flush with the dry heat in the cabin from the ever-warm boiler in the engine compartment. His companions all lay just as he had left them, all reclining on or propped up against their food stores and supplies. Omar spent an unpleasant minute on the toilet, closing his eyes and trying to imagine that he enjoyed a moment of actual privacy, and then he bundled himself up in his seat and closed his eyes for the night.

  Omar awoke with a bony hand shaking his arm and he looked up through the morning light shining on the glacier to see the gaunt cartographer staring at him. “What? What is it?” Omar sat up and shook off the man’s hand, which seemed loathe to release him. “What?”

  Kosoko nodded across the cabin and Omar looked at Garai. Riuza stood over the little professor, her fingers pressed to the man’s throat. She sighed. “He’s dead all right.”

  The lieutenant stood behind her captain, and at the pronouncement she went back up to the cockpit alone.

  “Dead?” Omar sat up and looked at the corpse. Garai’s eyes were closed and his head still leaned against the tall pile of fish. But he did look a bit blue and gray around his eyes and lips. “When? How?”

  “Last night,” Riuza said slowly. She opened the professor’s shirt and poked around his neck and chest and belly. “I don’t know, I don’t see anything on him. You take a look, you’re the doctor, aren’t you?” She stepped aside.

  Omar wiped the dry crud from the corners of his eyes, yawned, and leaned over to look at Garai Dumaka. The man’s skin looked a bit dry and cracked, his lips chapped and split. There were no marks on his neck or face, and no bruises or wounds on his belly. And when he removed Garai’s gloves, Omar found the professor’s hands quite smooth, though dry and bluish around the nails.

  He shifted in his seat and casually rested his left hand on the pommel of his seireiken. The sea of dead faces filled the cabin of the Finch and he glanced around quickly to find and nod his head at a very small man leaning on a slender cane. He muttered, “Old man?”

  “He can’t hear you, he’s dead,” the captain said, frowning. “And he’s not that old.”

  Omar ignored her and focused on the old Hindu physician, a master of the Ayurveda school who had surrendered himself to Omar’s sword willingly on his deathbed. The elderly healer limped forward so that he appeared to stand in the narrow space right in front of Garai and he peered down at the dead man for a moment before saying, It may have been his heart, though he is rather young for that, some families simply have weak hearts. Any number of mushrooms or serpent venoms might produce the same appearance as well, though few kill very quickly or quietly unless given in a massive dose. It was probably just his time, as untimely as it was. A pity.

  The ghost receded into the crowd of souls in the seireiken and Omar took his hand off the sword. He leaned back again with a frown. “How old was he?”

  “Not very. Late thirties, maybe,” Riuza said.

  “Well, since he’s eaten the same food as us, and he isn’t very cold… if I had to guess, I’d say his heart just gave out in his sleep. A pity,” Omar said.

  “I suppose.” Riuza nodded. “All right then. Help me with him.” She took hold of Garai’s sleeve and waved Omar to stand up.

  Omar stood. “Help you with him?”

  “Yes,” the captain said with a touch of exasperation. “Help me. With him. Outside. Now.”

  “You don’t mean to dump his body out there, do you?”

  Riuza let go of the professor’s sleeve and straightened up. “I’m sorry, did you want to keep a corpse in here for the next twelve days? Because he isn’t going to last long in this heat, and I can’t exactly shut off the boiler if you ever want to see home again.”

  “But he was your friend, dear lady, your colleague! And you’re just going to dump his body out in the wilderness, alone, unburied, and forgotten?”

  “He wasn’t my friend. And yes, I am going to dump his body in the wilderness. I have a schedule to keep, a mission to carry out, and several living people to see safely home. There isn’t time for a burial detail. I suppose we could lash his body to the outside of the gondola where it will freeze and keep well enough until we return to Marrakesh. Would you like to try that?”

  Omar sighed. “No.”

  “Then help me with him. Now.”

  Omar still wanted to argue, but he couldn’t see any way around the facts as she had stated them. “So then you mean to continue the expedition without a naturalist? We’re not going back for a replacement?”

  “Well, we won’t be stopping to inspect the local wildlife, but yes, we’re still heading north. We don’t scrap a mission just because something goes wrong. As long as we can fly, we do fly. The professor here knew the risks when he signed on. And we can still map the islands we came to see, including yours. Now, if you please.” She gripped the professor’s sleeve again.

  Omar frowned, but there was nothing left to say. He grabbed hold of Garai’s coat and helped the captain wrestle the little man out the hatch and onto the glacier. They laid him out on his back in a restful looking position, and then went back inside.

  He made up a quick breakfast of boiled oats and fruit, which they ate quickly and in silence. As soon as everything was stowed and ship-shape, they trundled outside to free the Frost Finch’s lines from the icy rocks and jagged spires frozen into the surface of
the glacier. Omar gave one last look over the body of Garai Dumaka, already frosted with fresh snow and ice, and then he followed the others inside.

  They lifted off the Bayonne Glacier less than an hour after dawn and climbed up into a clear blue sky to sail among islands of huge gray clouds. Below them, the world became a single sheet of ice, veined in blue and white and black.

  Kosoko Abassi closed his eyes and looked sick, Morayo Osaze fiddled with her console, and Riuza Ngozi sat tall and stiff at the controls.

  Omar grimaced at the sight of the toilet beside him and then he tried to go back to sleep.

  Chapter 6

  For two more days the Frost Finch cruised up the western coast of Europa following the ragged line where the glaciers met the sea. They passed over deep ravines and long fjords that reached inland like bony fingers. In those gaps in the earth, Kosoko and Riuza pointed out the tiny fishing villages that they had already discovered and visited. Blaye, Acres, Royan, Fouras, and Charron. The names did not sound very Rus to Omar’s ear, but the captain assured him that the people there did speak a sort of Rus mixed with Espani. Each village was home to fewer than a thousand people, each one clinging to a fragile thread of life between the angry sea and the towering glaciers where they fished the cold waters of the North Atlanteen for seals, crabs, eels, and whales.

  On the fifth day of the expedition, after crossing the vast green plateau of the Mayenne Glacier where the late Garai Dumaka had believed a forest was thriving hundreds of feet below the ice, the Frost Finch emerged from a cloud bank above a black spit of land thrust out into the white sea like an accusing finger. At the tip of the finger Omar could see the pale gray shapes that he had come to recognize as Europan buildings hidden between the frozen snow on the ground and the frozen snow on their roofs. But this village was larger than the last few and he pointed it out. “Have you been there before?”

  “Once,” Morayo said. “It’s called Cherbourg. About seven thousand people.”

  “You’ve only been there once?”

  The engineer shrugged. “Sure. Kosoko mapped it, Garai picked some pinecones, and we got the name of the place. So why go back? There’s nothing special there. They don’t even have enough spare food to trade with us.”

  They sailed on across the white sea to another dark shore that was marked Alba on both Kosoko’s new map and Omar’s old one. The Aegyptian slouched against the window, peering down at the world through his blue glasses. “It just goes on and on, doesn’t it? Just snow and ice, rocks and trees.”

  The cartographer shrugged. “Well, of course it does. What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know,” Omar said. “Something more interesting.”

  Kosoko raised an eyebrow as he chewed yet another tiny sliver of his ginger. “The captain said you came along because you want to see if there’s snow on an island at the top of the world. That hardly sounds interesting to me.”

  Omar smiled. “No, I don’t suppose it does. Still, I do want to know. Very, very much.”

  On the morning of the sixth day, Omar awoke to a soft babble of new sounds and the strange sensation of stillness. Through the window beside his seat he saw that they were on the ground with the hatch open and a small crowd of people stood outside the airship talking to Kosoko while Riuza and Morayo ran their mooring lines around a few large stones sitting in the snow. He stood up, intending to hurry out and help them with the chores of securing the Finch, but the motionless deck beneath his feet seemed to tilt and weave and he stumbled into the wall of the cabin. After a moment, the dizziness passed and he stepped outside into the thick snow to help with the lines.

  “I almost couldn’t walk,” he said to Morayo as they tied the last rope to a boulder. “I felt seasick, but we were on the ground.”

  “You were landsick,” she said. “You got used to the Finch shivering around under your feet all day and night, and you forgot what it’s like to walk on solid ground. That’s all. Happens to everyone.”

  “Even you?”

  “No.” She grinned.

  “So what’s this place called? Where are we?”

  She pointed across the field to the snaking line where the frothing white sea lapped up on the dark gray stones of a beach, and above that beach stood a town. It was encircled by a ragged stone wall twice as tall as a man so that all Omar could see of the homes within were the peaks of the roofs and the tips of the chimneys, but suddenly his gaze was drawn to a dark shape rising high above the top of the wall. “What is that?”

  It was a rude but solid structure of black stones that rose three times the height of the town wall, and Omar counted three small towers at the corners of the keep. Slate tiles covered the roof, though they were grimed with frozen filth, and what few windows he could see were all shuttered and sealed. No light escaped from the building, but smoke poured upward from half a dozen of its chimneys to mingle with the smoke of hundreds of other homes high above the town. The sight of so many columns of smoke reminded him of the tales of dragons sleeping in their lairs, their burning bellies spilling dark fumes from the ancient mountains. “Is that a castle?”

  “Yes it is, and home to the king of Edinburgh.”

  “A king? Here?”

  “I admit, it’s not much of an accomplishment.” Morayo laughed. “If you like, I can tie a string around your head and call it crown, and you can be the king of the back of the cabin.”

  Omar smiled. “Very funny. Though I’ve seen men rule over less. I was just surprised to hear someone up here in the middle of nowhere style himself as royalty.”

  “Well, he’s the master of twenty thousand souls,” the engineer said. “That’s more than I can say for myself.”

  With the ship secure, Omar found Riuza and asked, “Can we go see the town now?”

  “No, we stay with the ship at all times.”

  His smile vanished. “But why?”

  She jerked her chin at the stream of people coming up the icy road from the town. Most of them carried sacks or trays or even pulled small carts behind them. “They come to us. Talk. Buy. Sell. Whatever you like. Just don’t fight with them. These are the friendliest people we’ve found this far north. We need to keep them friendly. But we don’t leave the Finch.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust them.”

  “Because they’re Europan?”

  “Because they’re primitive savages.” She gave him a serious look and then walked away.

  For the rest of the morning, Omar wandered through the cluster of merchants with their wares spread out on blankets on the snow. He saw crudely carved figures of rock and bone, poorly polished stones of no particular value, bruised fruit, ragged blankets, and rusty tools. The only things that really caught his eye were the fresh fish and the huge cuts of seal steak laid out on the snow. Since Garai’s death, they had only stopped on the ground once more to refill the boiler and have one hot lunch. Every other meal had been cold rations, all salted and dried and tiresome. The allure of a savory seal steak supper quickly had him haggling with the fisherman, and he walked away with several pounds of meat in exchange for all of his spare gloves and hats.

  After stowing his precious treasure, Omar found Kosoko engaged in an intense discussion with two elderly locals about the markings on the cartographer’s working map. Through the broken bits of their mismatched Rus dialects, Omar picked out the points of confusion about this island or that mountain and he pulled out his own leather map for comparison. Instantly the two northerners’ faces brightened as they scanned the ancient writings, pointing excitedly at this symbol or that word. As the pair muttered to each other, they confirmed to Omar that his old Rus map was indeed correct, at least for this area.

  They were still leaning over the map when a low horn blast echoed across the field from the south where a line of small fir trees obscured the woods beyond. In a heartbeat, every merchant had his wares bundled up and was trudging quickly back to their walled home. The two old men peered at t
he southern edge of the field with pained looks of worry wrinkling their brows. A moment later the stunted fir trees shivered, shaking loose their coats of frost and shining icicles, and a pack of wolfish hounds darted out into the field. They were shaggy beasts with fur the color of old iron, and they ran with their black tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths. But they slid to a halt in the center of the field and turned to face the bracken behind them. Again the little firs bent apart and now a band of men in brown fur coats came charging out of the wilderness with axes and bows in hand.

  Omar took a nervous step back, his gloved hand straying to the hilt of his seireiken.

  The men raced across the field and when they passed through the hounds the animals turned to follow their masters. Together the hunters converged on the Frost Finch, and Omar could hear them shouting in their strange Rus accents, “One horn! One horn!”

  He frowned at Kosoko, who merely shrugged back. But the two old men beside them snatched up their walking sticks and set off for the town.

  The hunters running across the field angled away from the airship, heading for the town, and the dogs stayed close to their masters. But they stopped short of the town gate and turned to stand shoulder to shoulder and form a small shield wall on the icy road. The archers nocked fresh arrows and made ready to fire while the others raised their small hatchets to hurl.

  A deep-throated bellow erupted from the trees across the field, and Omar’s first thought was that an elephant had followed him all the way from North Ifrica to this frozen hell. But the beast that came crashing through the firs was no elephant. It charged through the underbrush with its head lowered, smashing aside the brittle trees with its massive legs and shoulders. Of its head, Omar could only see that it was long and broad with tiny black eyes and tiny brown ears set on either side. Its thick coat of brown fur shook and shuddered with every thundering step that the beast took, and Omar wondered if this might be a monstrous sort of bear.

  But then the creature shook its head and Omar saw it, for brief a moment, in profile.