Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Then the nose dropped and everyone lurched toward the broken windows. The major crashed forward into Ghanima’s seat as the pilot struggled to brace herself against the controls.

  Taziri clung to her console. “More power!”

  “That’s all we’ve got!”

  Taziri scrambled out of her seat and clawed her way across the slanting cabin floor to the engine housing in the back of the gondola. The propellers on either side of her were growling and snarling, but another sound was beginning to overwhelm them: the whistling wind-scream of the falling airship. Taziri ripped the engine panels away and hauled herself up against the metal box where her massive batteries huddled in three rows, daisy-chained together just below the decoy steam engine.

  “Damn resistors!”

  She tore the main cable off the lead battery with her bare hand and felt ten thousand bees racing under her skin as the connection was broken and the propellers fell eerily silent. Her utility knife was already open in her other hand and she hacked the fat black resistor off the cable and then jammed it back under the battery terminal’s latch. A fiery shower of sparks leapt toward her goggled eyes as the propellers roared back to life and the airship surged forward.

  For a moment, they continued to fall with the Halcyon’s glassless cockpit still pointed at the jagged mountain face. But then the deck leveled out and the view raced upward in a blur of rock and scrub brush until a dozen massive temples and palaces and towers appeared ahead. Taziri dashed back to her seat and squinted through her partially scorched goggles at the airfield. The heavy cannons at the edge of the city were still firing and she could hear the bullets whining past them, but she didn’t hear a single ping against the Halcyon’s hull.

  Taziri focused on the prow of the queen’s skybarge, on the shining cockpit of the Star of Orossa. “A little to port! A little bit more!”

  “I’ve got it!”

  “Just a little more!”

  For a moment, Taziri let her eyes wander a bit to the side and she realized that although they were still falling, it was only at a shallow angle. The Halcyon was screaming along, faster than she had ever flown before, but she was almost level to the ground. Suddenly the view was obscured by a wall of gray as the tiny airship plunged into the Upper City, hurtling over a street through a sculpted canyon of stone and steel. Ahead, the airfield had erupted into chaos. People were running in every direction, some toward the queen but most away from the skybarge. Chaou was nowhere to be seen.

  Taziri grabbed Ghanima’s shoulder. “Steady! Steady! You’ve got it!”

  “I know! Shut up!”

  The Star of Orossa filled their forward view. There was nothing but gas bag and gondola, and the slender strip of grass beneath them.

  “You’ve got it!”

  “I said I know!”

  A dripping icicle of horror suddenly plunged into Taziri’s bowels as the golden airship and the ground thundered up to smash the Halcyon. She wrapped her arms around Ghanima and tried to haul her out of the pilot’s seat, but she slipped and fell to the floor behind the cockpit as they crashed into the earth.

  The sounds of crunching metal and screaming people rose to such unbearable decibels that all Taziri could hear was a painful screeching white noise as the deck drove into the airfield and everything inside the Halcyon that wasn’t bolted down flew forward. Taziri tumbled up against the back of the pilot’s seat, wrenching her neck and shoulders. Through her narrowed eyes, she watched the engine compartment of her ship tear itself in half as the electric motors and propellers plowed into the ground and ripped the walls of the Halcyon away. The little steam engine popped free without a sound and disappeared into the air and her batteries full of acid and sharp metal plates tumbled out of the stern and rained down on the three human bodies in the cockpit.

  And then everything was still.

  Taziri slowly lifted her head, and then ran her trembling hands over her own body. She discovered a rectangular, acid-soaked plate impaled in her right kidney. For a moment, she could not process the idea of something stabbing through her body, but the moment passed. She grabbed the plate with shaking fingers and eased it out of her flesh. Her world went white, spinning and hazy, nauseated and cold, but only for a second, and with her left hand clamped over her bleeding wound, she sat up.

  The first thing she noticed was that she was sitting on the grass looking at the crumpled remains of the Halcyon, which lay half-buried under the crumpled remains of the Star of Orossa. The second thing she noticed was that she was no longer inside her airship. The sun had just peeked over the eastern ridge and was stabbing her eyes through mud-caked goggles. Taziri pulled away her headgear and stared around for a moment, dazed and blinking.

  Everything hurt, but the pain in her body was distant and confused, obscured by the pain in her skull. Like a puppet on shredded strings, she stood up and stumbled toward the wreckage, not really seeing the great scar in the earth stretching out behind the Halcyon, not really hearing the voices of the dozens of people around him. Everything was too unreal, too sharp, too bright.

  One by one, a few facts trickled into her head. Words and names came into focus. Ghanima. Syfax. She glanced around but couldn’t see them. A high-pitched whine of white noise stabbed at her ears while green and purple spots danced across her vision. At her feet, she saw burnt and broken things she knew she should recognize, but didn’t. Bits of glass and metal sparkled in the dirt. A propeller stood leaning in the earth like a crooked tombstone just a few yards away. A wrench. A valve. A gauge. Taziri stumbled through the wreckage, breathing short, shallow breaths through clenched teeth as she clutched her side. She paused and glanced up. In the distance, off toward the west, she saw the gas bag of the Star of Orossa spiraling up into the sky, and she smiled.

  That’s good. I think.

  A wave of dizziness washed through her aching head and she shuffled a little farther around the remains of the skybarge, but all she saw were bits of airships and clumps of dirt. With a shiver and a sigh, she started walking toward the people on the far side of the field.

  Maybe they know what happened.

  Chapter 45

  The hidalgo stared down the hallway of the royal palace. At the far end he saw people dashing back and forth down the connecting corridor, alternately grim-faced and panicking. Servants, soldiers, and ladies in elaborate dresses. Lorenzo touched his medallion and reflected for a moment on what a strange week he was having. And then he ran.

  One of Lady Sade’s maids had taken Qhora away for some sort of private discussion about their meeting with the queen. He had almost insisted on going with her, but she assured him that she would be fine, and he had trusted her. His quiet time alone lasted a little over ten minutes before the gunfire began and he raced out into the hall.

  He charged down hallway after hallway, shouldering through the crowds, apologizing to each person he collided with. His hand clutched the spot on his belt where his sword should have been. Now it was sitting in a guard station down at the bottom of the Royal Road.

  Every hallway and doorway and stairway looked the same to him, equally new and equally unhelpful. People were pouring in and out every which way, offering him no hint as to where the danger was. He grabbed a young man carrying a pitcher of water and asked, “What’s happening? What were those shots?”

  “I don’t know!” The porter trembled. “Something about assassins in the palace. Assassins with guns! Lady Sade is dead, and some old woman, and I don’t know!”

  “Where are they? Where is Lady Sade?”

  “The Morning Garden. Back that way, turn right, end of the hall, in the courtyard on your left. I think.” The porter pointed down the hall, then backed away a few nervous steps, and darted off in the opposite direction.

  Lorenzo ran. He found the Morning Garden with a crowd of soldiers standing in the warm light on the grass around a profusion of bodies on the ground. He rushed around the corner and ran straight into a man in a white uniform, his face obscu
red by a white veil. The guard shoved him with the side of his rifle. “Stay back.”

  The hidalgo peered over the man’s shoulder and saw Lady Sade sprawled against the wall, her chest painted red, her eyes open and vacant. On the ground by her foot was another woman with two medics working furiously on a wound in her belly. To the left were four other women, all pinned on the ground beneath the other guards, and in the corner a huddle of children were being detained at gunpoint.

  One of the women on the ground wore a feathered cloak.

  “Qhora!” He lurched into the soldier again. “Please, let me pass! Let her go!”

  “No one beyond this point,” the guard said. “They’re all traitors and assassins. They will be imprisoned and tried for treason against the queen.”

  “What?” Lorenzo stared at the scene again, trying to guess how any of this had happened in the last ten minutes.

  “It’s her, it was all her!” cried a woman in a blue dress. “The foreign one! You should have heard her at dinner. Every word out of her mouth was rebellion and revolution and war against the crown. She’s a blood-thirsty savage!”

  Qhora rolled over and kicked her.

  The woman in blue wailed. “You see! She’s a violent savage!”

  Two guards converged on Qhora.

  Lorenzo examined the garden, noting the positions of the eleven guards, and which ones were holding their weapons, and which ones were looking away from him. It felt like a destreza lesson from his youth. Angles and lines of attack, circles of movement. Simple geometry.

  I can do this. Rifles are simple things. Long straight weapons that only shoot in long straight lines. Known points of origin. Limited fields of fire. Simple geometry. He swallowed. No. I can’t fight eleven armed men.

  The two guards reached for Qhora. “Get her up. Let’s get her somewhere secure.”

  Lorenzo’s first instinct was to surge into the garden and tear the men apart with his bare hands. His second instinct was to leave, which he did. He waited long enough to see which way they were taking Qhora and then he ran back the way he had come and began working his way around to the right to intercept them. For two panicked minutes, he hurried through unfamiliar hallways with no way of knowing whether he was actually getting closer to them when he turned a corner and almost plowed into the two guards escorting Qhora down the passageway.

  “Enzo!” she called out.

  Lorenzo glanced down at the rifle between him and the first guard. He didn’t know much about rifles and he knew that combat was a poor time and place to start learning new things. But there was one part of the rifle he recognized. He wrenched the long bayonet off the barrel of the rifle, twisted the gun across the guard’s body, and plunged the blade through the trigger guard to jam the weapon and impale the soldier’s hand. The man gasped and stumbled against the wall, out of the way.

  His gaze flashed over Qhora’s startled face to the second guard who was raising his rifle to his shoulder. Lorenzo slipped sideways, grabbed the rifle, and twisted it back against the man to break most of the fingers of his right hand. Unable to think of anything else to do, Lorenzo again slipped the bayonet off the rifle and jammed it through the trigger guard, impaling the man’s hand to his weapon.

  He turned to find Qhora yanking the first man’s bayonet out of his hand. “Come on,” she said. “They’re going to kill the queen and her family. We need to find the old woman with the cat.”

  Lorenzo blinked. “What cat?”

  Chapter 46

  With a blade in her hand and Lorenzo at her side, the world felt less insane. Everything had been going so well right up until she walked into Lady Sade’s room and found the ladies in an uproar, and she followed them out, apparently in search of a boy with a cat. The rest of the last half hour had been a blur of running and shouting in Mazigh so fast and angry that she could barely understand what had happened. Sade was dead and so was the old woman in the green dress. Of that Qhora was certain, though the rest was made almost no sense. At best, she knew that the older woman from the carriage had taken the cat, and the cat was dangerous.

  Whatever this queen deserves, her family should not suffer for her mistakes.

  She dashed in and out of rooms, looking for doors, peering through windows, and finally she found a wide courtyard that opened out onto a vast green lawn where absolute chaos had been unleashed. Men and women lay unconscious or dead on the ground while others tried to carry or drag them toward the palace. Children ran screaming back and forth. Large and small chunks of burnt and twisted metal lay scattered across the ground. And in the distance, two flaming machines vomited twin columns of smoke into the late morning sky. High overhead, a huge black cloud was expanding and fading while a shining silver balloon wobbled in the air, buffeted by the shifting mountain wind. The balloon’s skin was burning brightly and it slowly crumpled in upon itself as it hovered lower and lower over the field.

  “Enzo, get those children out of here.”

  “Get the…what?” He stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Right. The children.” And he dashed away to the first group of little figures huddled beside the body of a young woman.

  Qhora strode across the grassy field, scanning for the old woman with the cat.

  What was her name? Cho? Chow?

  Instinct drew her toward the burning wreckage at the far end of the lawn where she found a scrapheap of blackened and shredded machines strewn all around her. A handful of bodies lay on the manicured grass, all impaled by broken brass rods and iron plates. One man had a long shard of glass through his neck. Qhora didn’t bother to check whether any of them were still alive.

  She found the old woman kneeling a few yards from one of the smoking machines. A thin trickle of blood ran from her temple. The cat in her hands was not moving.

  “Chaou!” Qhora yelled. “Put the cat down.”

  Chaou stood up, one hand pressed to her bleeding head. She looked once at Qhora and then turned to the wreckage behind her. Qhora followed her stare to see a well-dressed woman lying beside two soldiers on her right. The queen, I suppose. To the left she saw a maid and five children slowly regaining consciousness a few yards from the broken machines.

  Chaou held up the cat. “This is it. This is the moment. The end and the beginning!”

  “Get away from them!” Qhora circled to place herself between Chaou and the children. “Put the cat down.”

  “Get out of the way, girl.” Chaou inched closer to the queen, who was still motionless on the ground. One of the soldiers began to stir beside her.

  “You’re not killing these children!” Qhora lifted her bayonet, ready to throw it, unsure of what might happen if she stabbed the dead cat by accident. Her best guess was that the cat carried an infectious pathogen, perhaps the Mazigh equivalent of the Golden Death.

  Chaou stumbled forward a few more steps, still clutching her head. Qhora yelled over her shoulder at the maid in her broken Mazigh, “Go! Take the children! Go!” The maid nodded and grabbed up the children, barking orders in a shaking voice. The group got to their feet, boys and girls from three to thirteen, all stumbling and crying. When Qhora looked back at Chaou she saw the anger in the old woman’s eyes, and Chaou started toward the children.

  “No!” Qhora hurled the bayonet and the long thin blade sank into the dead cat clasped to the old woman’s chest. The cat and woman vanished into a sudden flash of light and flame, and a blast of hot air shoved Qhora back onto the ground. She sat up to see the grass burning, Chaou’s body burning, and the wreckage behind them awash in fresh flames. Beneath the collapsing, burning metal and wood, Qhora saw the queen and her soldiers. The queen’s head shifted and her hand rose an inch off the ground. For a moment, the two women’s eyes met. The queen’s lips moved, her trembling hand reaching out.

  Qhora stood up, brushed herself off, and walked away after the retreating children. A moment later, she heard the roar and the crush of the burning balloon falling back to earth behind her. She looked back once
to see the queen’s barge hidden by curtains of flame, and then she went to find Lorenzo.

  Chapter 47

  When she opened her eyes, Taziri saw her grandfather leaning over her, except his face was all wrong. It was too old and too serious, and too blotchy. After a few seconds of looking and blinking she recognized the doctor, Evander.

  Her head was throbbing and her mouth had gone dry. “I crashed the ship. I’m sorry.” Her memory of the crash was a blur of images and fear, but the idea was clear enough. She felt her hand trembling on the sheets. “I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  He nodded. “It’s all right. Everything is all right. How do you feel?”

  She wanted to throw up, sleep for a week, and then die. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been asleep for most of the day, but you’re going to be just fine. That gash in your side was ugly, but you only lost a kidney, which you shouldn’t miss too much.” He sniffed. “I like that brace on your left arm. Very nice piece of work. Too bad you didn’t show me that burn when it happened or I might have been able to save you the trouble.”

  Her hand glided down under the sheets to the bandages wrapped around her belly, and then she glanced around the room as she sat up in the huge bed. The room was like nothing she had ever seen before. Paintings of strange lands hung on the walls, statues of strange people stood in the corners, and thick carpets lay on the floor. Through the open window she saw stars and felt a cool breeze blowing. I’m in the palace. “Ghanima?”

  Evander shook his head. “I’m sorry. She died in the crash.”

  Taziri stared at him, her jaw trembling. It’s my fault. I should have been in that chair.

  “But the major is still in one piece,” the doctor said. “They found him in the street somewhere with just a few hundred bruises and some mild acid burns. Nothing he won’t shrug off in a few days.”