Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Kella took a breath and slipped her hands back into her pockets where they grabbed the first pointy things they found. A knife and a caltrop. “I thought you left with your mistress, Shifrah.” A faint whiff of kerosene cut through the humid vapors like a cold blade.

  “And I thought I left you for the police. I guess your head is a little harder than I thought. But that job is over and now I need to get started on the next one.” She set the jug down as a stiletto appeared in her hand, and she threw it.

  The detective felt a strange mixture of pressure and pain as her left arm seized up at the shoulder. Her vision shuddered, threatening to vanish entirely into a sea of white. Struggling to ignore the blade buried under her collar bone, she clenched her teeth and focused on Shifrah, who was drawing another knife. Kella yanked her right hand free of her pocket and hurled a fistful of caltrops. Some glanced off the wall, some tumbled off the white coat, but one struck the Samaritan’s face, tearing a long thin mark across her cheek.

  Shifrah dashed into the room and the detective had less than an instant to steel herself against the onslaught of punches to her stomach and face. The second stiletto was at work as well, slicing at her clothes and flesh so swiftly that Kella couldn’t feel the cuts until several seconds after they were made. She threw up her arms, trying to focus on the Samaritan’s eyes and the knife at the same time, trying to keep the blade from her head and belly, but it was all happening too fast. Kella screamed at herself to do something, to do anything. But she was trapped in this injured old body, in the dark, against a whirlwind of fists and steel and half her mind had already realized that she was not going to survive more than a minute or so. A terrifying coldness was creeping into her bones through the knife buried in her left shoulder, and as she toppled to the floor all she could do was snag a few fumbling fingers in the lapels of the white coat and pull the Samaritan down on top of her.

  Kella felt the floor slam into her back and the weight of the other woman flopped onto her chest, but suddenly Shifrah was screaming and wriggling, kicking and rolling away, and the detective felt the weight on top of her vanish. The detective lay still on the floor, staring up at the naked bulb in the ceiling as the other woman went on screaming and sobbing. The throbbing pains of the cuts in Kella’s chest and face grew duller and colder, but her skin was warm and wet, her shirt sticking to her arms and growing heavier by the moment. Each breath came a little shallower and faster than the last. Lightheaded and dizzy, she blinked hard and prayed for it to just stop.

  All of it. The pain, the screaming, the whole world. Dear God, just let it all stop. I don’t want to see this or feel this. I’m done. Just make it stop.

  The other woman’s sobs droned on and all the horrific hot and cold and sharp and aching sensations in the detective’s flesh crashed into her mind again and again, as ceaseless as the tide.

  Like a broken wooden doll, Kella rolled onto her stomach, pushed up to all fours, and began crawling across the room to the open doorway. She passed the Samaritan balled up like an infant, her bloody hands clutching her face. For a moment, a gap appeared between her hands and Kella saw the pulpy, raw chasm where the killer’s left eye should have been. And as the detective completed the long journey to the door, the question began to nag at the back of her mind.

  What happened to her eye?

  The hall seemed to be a thousand miles long. At the end, the stairs rose higher than the peaks of Kilima Njaro, yet she climbed them. Shaking uncontrollably with bloody saliva dripping from her open mouth, she climbed. When she reached the top and looked down, she saw the unbroken smear of blood on every single step. She was about to turn away and claw back toward the workshop to collapse and die when she heard a bestial, labored breathing below her. Looking down again, she saw the Samaritan climbing the stairs with one hand plastered over the hole in her face where her eye should have been.

  How long is she going to keep this up?

  Kella lurched up to her feet, shivering and trembling. She slumped against the hallway wall and stumbled back into the workshop. Her clothes felt heavy, clinging tight against her skin. With slow deliberate steps, she stumbled across the room, knocking over shelves, dummies, and anything else she could grab. She crashed through the back door into the alleyway where a freezing wind whipped over her face and stung her in a hundred raw places, and she fell to her hands and knees.

  Not going to die in an alley, not in an alley, alone in an alley, stupid clichéd crap. Move. Move, damn it. You can die in the street, but not here.

  At the end of the alleyway, the detective’s shaking hands refused to crawl any farther, so she sat up against the cold brick wall and stared at the open door behind her, praying that no one would come through it.

  And then the ground erupted beneath her. There was no tremor, no growling or rumbling, only the sudden titanic boom like a thundercracker in her skull. The cobblestones tossed her into the air as a chunk of the wall collapsed into the alley, bricks disintegrating into gravel and dust all around her. The stones under her hands began to lean and slope and she realized that the street itself was sinking and sliding toward the building. A steady crumbling, cracking, and crashing echoed from within the building as the walls broke up and fell inward, destroying more and more furniture and windows and equipment with each passing second.

  Kella took her hands away from her head and saw a low mound of rubble where the medical shop had been a minute ago. Dozens of tiny fires were burning merrily here and there on the pile of bricks and beams, snapping and crackling as they danced in the dark.

  The faint sounds of voices and fire bells intruded on the moment and the detective tore her gaze away from the burning wreckage to watch the street, to watch the people coming out, shouting and pointing. Suddenly there was a young boy in his night shirt standing over her, staring at her with wide eyes. He pointed at the knife in her shoulder and whispered, “What happened?”

  She looked down at the pointed handle of the stiletto and saw the butt of the weapon dripping with blood and also a thin watery fluid with little globs of white matter stuck in it. As white as an eye in the dark. Kella smiled and passed out.

  Chapter 30

  Syfax leaned back in the saddle to stretch his neck and shoulders. The position offered him a lovely view of the night sky, a blue-black river shimmering with stars and bordered by the leaves above either side of the road. The trees sighed and shivered as the breezes played through their branches and the cicadas droned on, though more softly than they had in the traveler’s camp a few hours ago.

  Someday, the railroad will come through here and they’ll pave this road, and all this forest’ll be razed for farms, he thought. Too bad, really. Although I won’t miss the bats.

  The view of the road never changed. It sometimes curved to the right or left, but essentially, in all the ways that matter when traveling, the view never changed. Gravel, dirt, holes, rocks, tree branches, and stars. Forever. Syfax slumped forward again and rubbed his eyes. Sometimes to his left the trees would thin and he would glimpse the tops of the northern ridges, just another shade of black on the horizon.

  She can’t be far ahead. She can’t. Chaou was only ever a few minutes ahead, an hour at most. And she’s old. Older than me, anyway. In a stage coach. Any minute now. Any minute now, around the next bend, I’ll see the coach, just a hundred yards ahead, rolling along in the dark. Alone. Exposed. She’ll hear me coming but she’ll have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. She’ll probably try to talk again. She’s a talker. Then she’ll try to grab me, to shock me, but I’ll be ready for that. My coat is heavy. I can wrap her arms up…

  The monologue droned on and on through the major’s mind, an unbroken chant that melted seamlessly into the noise of the cicadas and the crunch of gravel beneath the horse’s hooves. The stars overhead wheeled slowly, carrying the bright sliver of the moon across the void and casting it back down at the horizon. And then the world of black and silver grew hazy, gray, and pink to the east.

&n
bsp; The view changed. The trees thinned to reveal long stretches of grass. Meadows. Fields. Pastures. Open spaces studded with distant blocky shapes of houses and barns. Another hour of slow trotting passed and Syfax felt his muscles and bones turning to wood, stiff and hard, so stiff they forgot how to ache. The eastern sky was a pastoral wash of pinks and yellows and lavenders, and ahead of him, clustered around the road, mostly to the left, were buildings. Tall, heavy, imposing masses of pale brick standing shoulder to shoulder to block the wind and draw the line between wilderness and civilization. The major veered to the left as the road came alongside the railroad tracks coming up from the south from Maroqez. Dirt gave way to a brick-paved street as the scattering of small cottages became a solid wall of rowhouses. A handful of people were standing in the street and staring at him. After a moment, they stopped staring and resumed their hushed conversation.

  Arafez. At last.

  Syfax had to clear his throat twice to revive his voice. “Excuse me.” He approached the four men loitering by the tracks. They stared at him as though unsure of the proper response and seemed to agree that none would suffice. “Have you seen anyone else come this way?”

  “You mean…” The one man cast a confused look at his friends. “You mean on the train? Not yet.”

  “No, I mean on the road. The stage coach from Meknes.”

  “Sorry, no. We’ve only been here a few minutes.”

  Syfax nodded, nudged his horse to the far side of the street, dismounted, and sat down on a long bench outside what seemed to be a warehouse. It stank of rotten vegetables. He sat and watched the sun rise, his mind cold and thick, unable to focus, unable to plan.

  Chaou was definitely…where? Definitely on the ferry. And a witness put me on the road to Khemisset. And she was probably at Othmani’s house. And probably on the coach to Meknes. And probably on the coach to Arafez. Damn. That’s a whole lot of “probably.”

  It didn’t matter anymore. The trail was cold, the old bat was gone. Syfax blinked. He would have to start again from scratch. Searching door to door and questioning everyone on the road. He would need the local police. He would need the Arafez marshals, even though he couldn’t afford to trust them.

  Anyone might be in Chaou’s little murder circle.

  A low whistle startled him and Syfax peered south across the fields, down the track, following the rails as they curved away and vanished into the trees behind a hill. And just beyond that hill, he saw a thin trail of steam rising in steady puffs above the tree tops. The locomotive appeared a moment later, chuffing and clacking with a long dark line of cars trundling along behind it. Quick little train, he mused, probably going to come screaming in here for a short stop before screaming off to the North Station. Engineers are all lunatics.

  The train was still steaming at full speed when it reached the first cottages and only began breaking as the engine slipped into the shaded canyon of the South Station and Syfax saw why. The train was immensely long, stretching out across the fields with car after car of passengers and freight. It wouldn’t stop until most of them were near the platform, so there was still quite a ways left to travel.

  “Hey there!” One of the men waved from across the tracks a few moments before the locomotive entered the station. “Is that your coach up there?”

  Syfax followed the man’s pointing finger up the street to a dark shape jutting out from behind the corner of a shop at a distant intersection. It could have been anything, including the rear end of a stage coach. The major stood up, glaring. “I think so.”

  “Well, you’d better get back across,” the man shouted.” The six o’clock will be here in a minute.”

  Crap. This is like the canal all over again.

  Syfax grabbed his horse and yanked the nervous animal across the tracks with the dusty cowcatcher of the oncoming train only a few moments away. The major steadied the horse as the locomotive thundered past behind them, and then he glanced up the street at the shape near the intersection. It had backed up a foot or two.

  Definitely a stage coach.

  He cast a worried eye at the train rolling steadily by behind him in an unbroken line of cars all the way up the street past the distant coach. “What’s on this train?” Syfax hauled his aching legs up into the saddle.

  “Everything. Coming in from Maroqez. Let’s see, they’ve got our goats, or at least they’d better.”

  The other men chuckled.

  “Then there’s the apricots, limes, spinach…”

  “Strawberries!” Another fellow grinned.

  “Right, it’s strawberry season, isn’t it? Uhm, peas. Always lots of peas. Never liked them myself. Maybe oranges. Rhubarb, ech! The foreign stuff isn’t so reliable, not yet anyways. I hear they’re having quite a bit of trouble with the farms on the eastern slopes. Clay or something in the soil. The East Asian crops aren’t taking to it, apparently.”

  The train was slowing now and a soft conversation between cows and goats and pigs and chickens filled the quiet platform all the way down the line. Syfax said, “So it’s carrying food then? This is a freight train?”

  “Freight, yes.” The men nodded.

  Syfax breathed a little easier. “No passengers?”

  “Passengers? Oh, sure. Hundreds of them.” The men nodded.

  The major felt every muscle in his back tighten. The train shuddered to a hard stop amidst a great squealing of brakes, hissing of valves, and the familiar dull roar of people, hundreds of people, all crammed together in little wood and iron boxes, eager to spill out all over the platform, the streets, the buildings. So many people.

  The passenger cars were strung out far past the platform, up the street most of the way between him and the coach, their open windows dark with the shadowy press of bodies. Car after car full of people, each one a little louder and rowdier than the last. The doors opened just as Syfax kicked the exhausted horse and shouted, “Hya!”

  People were spilling out of the cars onto the platform and down onto the road. Hundreds of people. Thousands of people. Women and men and children, bearing bags and sacks and boxes and baskets, all poured through the doors with a vast murmuring, scolding children, shouting directions, and asking questions.

  “Where’s my bag?”

  “Which way to the warehouse?”

  “Well, where did you put it?”

  The crowd grew larger with each passing second until the road was nothing but a sea of heads and hair and hats for as far as the major could see. He drove his horse in a mad dash halfway up the street before the press became an immovable sludge of bodies and luggage, forcing him to rein up and begin the laborious business of shouting at each and every person to turn around, look where they were going, and get the hell out of his way.

  Over a thousand bobbing heads, Syfax saw the coach roll back a few feet into view, and then roll forward around the corner. “Damn it.” He glared in every direction, searching for some way out of the mass of bodies. “Marshal! Everybody out of the way! Make a hole! Move, move, move! Marshal!”

  A few nervous faces looked up at him, and perhaps they tried to shuffle out of his way, but there were always three more people ready to slide into any gaps in the crowd. Syfax ground his teeth, wishing for once that he still had his sidearm. “Hya!” He kicked his poor horse again and again, forcing the exhausted animal to stumble into person after person, and the major’s frustration gave way to a sudden fear that there would be a child somewhere down in that sea of bodies.

  “Damn it!” He leapt out of the saddle and charged through the crowd. The coach is leaving. Heading east on the next street. Need to head it off. Need to talk to the driver.

  There were no side streets, no alleys, no way to get off the street until he reached the intersection, which was still twenty yards away. And then he noticed the half-open window of the old warehouse on his right. Shoving aside one last man, Syfax got to the window, pushed it up, and dove into the dark room.

  The warehouse was one long dusty chamber w
ith a handful of broken barrels and crates along one wall. Syfax raced to the back of the building, his footsteps echoing across the empty space. He spotted a door in the back wall outlined by a few feeble rays of sunlight, and he crashed his shoulder through it. Half the door clung to the hinges and the other half clung to the lock, but the center burst apart and spilled the major out onto another street. An empty street.

  He swung left and pounded up the lane to the next intersection where he stumbled to a halt, his head swiveling every which way, searching, searching. There was no coach. It was gone. The driver was gone. Chaou was gone.

  “Yaaaa!” Syfax put his fist through an old rain barrel standing at the corner behind him. The boards shattered, the bands bent, and several gallons of worm-infested mud slid out onto the ground at his feet.

  There. At least I can do that right.

  Chest heaving and legs shaking, he straightened up and glared at the people staring at him, and they hastily looked away. “What are you looking at?”

  He studied the crowd for a minute.

  All right. Arafez. Half a million people. Thirty square miles. One old hag.

  How hard can it be?

  Chapter 31

  Taziri stood in the street behind a makeshift barricade of sawhorses and fire brigade ropes and watched women and men in yellow coats carefully picking their way through the smoking debris of what had been Medina’s prosthetics shop the night before. It was a colorless morning and she scanned the cloud-spattered sky. It would rain soon.

  Menna loves the rain.

  She rolled her shoulders about in her heavy orange jacket as she sauntered along the line of sawhorses and ropes down the middle of the street. There were quite a few people gathered to watch, and after a few moments walking through the crowd Taziri began noticing the peg-legs, the hook-hands, and even the odd discolored glass eye among them. She hesitated, suddenly feeling rather out of place, as she realized that nearly two-thirds of the onlookers were wearing some sort of prosthetic. She felt a sudden urge to be included or to show her solidarity with them so she took her left hand out of her pocket and rolled up her sleeve to reveal her new arm brace and glove.