Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Taziri wanted to lash back at her, but what was the point? They would be stuck together for days or weeks in close quarters, and a looming argument or a flurry of insults wouldn’t make it any more bearable.

  Besides, it really doesn’t matter what happened that day, not now. Qhora’s right, anyway. She killed the assassin and saved the royal family while I just stumbled away from my wrecked ship and passed out.

  The low clopping of hooves echoed behind them and Taziri looked back. A lone rider, a man, approached them from the south. He wore his collar upturned in the Espani-fashion to hide his face from the wind. Taziri winced.

  And there it is again. That cold, sick feeling in my gut.

  Taziri reined up and turned to watch the man draw closer.

  Qhora looked back. “What are you doing?”

  “Just waiting for this gentleman to pass us.”

  Qhora frowned, but directed her huge eagle to strut over beside the Mazigh woman. The man’s horse stopped in the middle of the road, still quite some distance behind them. He lowered his collar to reveal an oiled mustache and small tuft of beard on his chin. Taziri suppressed a smile. He looked like the Espani devil.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” he called out. “I am Salvator Fabris, at your service.”

  Qhora drew a long straight Songhai knife from her boot. “You maimed an innocent boy, you death-worshipping filth!” Wayra screamed as her rider yanked on her reins.

  “No, stop!” Taziri held up her hand.

  The Italian had opened his coat and drawn his rapier. It shone in the midday light. “You there. Mazigh woman. What are these Espani paying you?”

  Taziri frowned. “What?”

  “Are you here to build the stone weapon, or merely to transport the stone itself?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No, of course you don’t. But I imagine you’ll recall the details once we have time to discuss the matter in private, as I slice apart your fingers. They’re terribly sensitive, the fingers.”

  Taziri swallowed. It was real now. Up until this moment, everything had been threats and fears and possibilities, but no longer. It was real. It was here. Capture, torture, and death. She began unfastening the buttons on her left sleeve. “I think you’re a little confused. I was shot down by an Espani warship. I never meant to come here. I was on my way to Tingis.”

  “Yes, I was there when the Lord Admiral gave the order to shoot you down. But nothing can explain why you were flying over Valencia in the first place, unless it was to visit your dear friend Don Lorenzo, who was about to set out on this little venture of yours.”

  “We were blown off course.” Taziri pulled back her sleeve and raised her arm. The medical brace gleamed brightly in the snow-glare, yellow sun on pale aluminum and warm copper. She touched the release switch and the long cylinder popped up with the soft hiss of an air ram, the twang of a spring, and the click of a gear.

  The Italian snarled, his face transformed into a wrinkled mass of rage. “Guns! Always guns with you damned Mazighs. A coward’s weapon. A weakling’s weapon!”

  “That’s right. A weapon for the weak. A weapon for all the people who can’t defend themselves with muscles and blades.” Taziri leveled the shotgun barrel at the rider. “A weapon to protect anyone.”

  “Protect? PROTECT?” Fabris had his horse dancing and sidestepping across the road, nervously wheeling in little circles, but never coming any closer. “One coward with a gun can kill an entire regiment of brave soldiers. Or a hospital full of the sick. Or a church full of wedding guests. Or a school full of children. Oh yes, we have a few of your precious guns in Italia, but I’m still waiting to hear a single story of them protecting anyone!” The Italian spun about one last time and galloped away, racing back south at a dead sprint and he didn’t slow until he was over the second hill and out of sight.

  Taziri exhaled and shuddered. She lowered her arm and pressed the cold metal tube back down into her brace.

  Qhora put away her knife. “Would you have shot him? Killed him?”

  “I guess we’ll never know.” Taziri tapped her arm. “It wasn’t loaded, except with pencils. I suppose we should hurry on ahead to tell your husband about this.”

  “No, we won’t.” Qhora shook her head. “If Enzo knew that this Italian was willing to come after us, alone, then he would send us away or lock us up in a tower. When it comes to protecting a woman, my husband tends to hold to some very old Espani traditions. It’s better that he doesn’t know, for now.”

  They rode the rest of the morning at a brisk trot without saying another word, and shortly after noon they found Don Lorenzo and the others climbing a long gentle slope through a small wood. Qhora went forward to her husband’s side and Taziri ambled up to the three young diestros on foot. They all nodded and smiled and said hello. She passed them and came alongside Shahera and Dante astride the other two horses.

  “So you found her.” Shahera smiled. “I’m glad. I was starting to worry about you both. What was she doing?”

  “Fighting a ghost of some sort,” Taziri said casually, wondering if that’s how the Espani talked about the spirits among them when they were alone. For a people so intensely focused on their worship, scriptures, rituals, and the state of their immortal souls, they don’t seem very interested in the blessings or curses of the supernatural creatures living among them.

  “A ghost? How exciting! I love stories, please tell me everything,” Shahera said. And for the next few minutes, Taziri described what she had seen and what Qhora had told her about the water-woman and the farmer. Shahera stared thoughtfully up the road ahead. “It’s so sad. For the farmer and his son, I mean. They lost everything, even their home. I hope they have friends or family somewhere to take them in.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, who cares what happens to them?” Dante gave them a flat stare. “The man’s an idiot and so are his neighbors. We have just as many spirits wandering about in Italia, but you won’t hear any of this tragic nonsense back home.”

  “So what do you do when the dead come back to haunt you?” Taziri asked.

  “Nothing! We ignore them. They just want attention, and it’s not as though they can do anything to you except whine about their problems and shake their little hands at you.” Dante waggled his gloved fingers at them.

  Taziri shook her head. “No, this ghost attacked Qhora with water and birds.”

  “Then it wasn’t a ghost, was it? Some sort of rotting undead thing, I suppose, one that likes to lay with men and pump out squalling infants! That’s what happens when you don’t handle your corpses properly. Espani idiots.” Dante sniffed and spat in the snow. “Our priests have the good sense to teach us how to handle the dead. Bury them deep, ignore them, and they’ll go away. This drama is what you get from Espani romanticism. Water-women and iron imps and whatever else they call them.”

  Taziri fixed the Italian with a long stare. He was still ugly, maybe slightly uglier with the darkening stubble on his cheeks, and the cold air had left his face a bit more discolored. A little redder around the eyes. His nose was peeling. “How does a chemist earn enough money to fly from Rome to Tingis? Mixing tinctures must pay very well in Italia. I had no idea your people were so sickly.”

  “My business is none of yours.”

  “I don’t care about your business at all. But I care about those men who put two bullets in my plane trying to catch you. I was going to ignore that little show in Rome and leave it for the police to keep an eye on you in Tingis, but since I’m stuck with you, it’s my problem,” Taziri said. “Actually, it should be the major’s problem, but he isn’t here. So tell me what happened back there and whether it’s going to be a problem for us here.”

  Dante’s scowl brightened with a look of incredulity. “It’s not a problem, not here or anywhere except in Italia. And it’s personal. If you want to talk about problems, let’s talk about why you crashed us in this miserable cesspool and then set us on this death march to no
where instead of getting us out of the country.”

  Taziri sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dante. This is the plan, the best plan to keep us all alive as long as possible. We hide and we wait. With any luck, the major will be able to slip across the border and help will be on the way.”

  “And what about the swordsman who gave Enrique his first shaving lesson last night?” Dante asked. “You’re supposed to be hiding us from the military, but there’s already at least one of them following us now. And as soon as we pass a fort out here, he’ll have a hundred soldiers riding us down. I’m starting to think the DeVelli woman had the right idea. We should turn around right now and head south before this Quesada character gets us all killed.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Taziri kept her voice low so neither the hidalgo ahead nor his students behind would hear. “I’m taking you to Zaragoza and wherever else the Don goes until we know for certain that we can safely leave the country.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  Taziri grimaced. “As long as it takes.”

  Chapter 14

  The major had to admit that the last hundred miles had made quite a difference in more than just the Espani weather. On the road from Toledo he had seen the land swelling with color, if not with life. As the snow thinned, the warm browns and cool grays of the mountains struck dark outlines against the overcast sky and the pines and firs stood in bright greens up and down the hills. What little moisture fell from the sky was mostly sleet and left pale slush on the road that was equal parts hard ice and watery puddles. Both were treacherous, but both were easier to walk through than snow.

  Syfax paused to consider the line of roofs and steeples on the horizon and the handful of round windmills standing out in the fields. “Any idea what this place is called?”

  Kenan trudged past him, hands shoved in his pockets, face half-nestled in the upturned collar of his borrowed coat. “Ciudad Real.”

  Syfax started walking again. “We’ll stay here tonight. Dry out and get some warm food. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I feel fine.” The lieutenant sneezed, leaving a long shining trail of slime hanging from the stubble on his chin. He wiped his face and rammed his fist back into his pocket.

  “Come off it. You’re as sick as a dog.”

  Kenan glanced up at him. “Just so long as we stay somewhere really quiet and out of the way. That mess back in Toledo was a little too close.”

  “Nah, it was all right. No one got shot. Hell, those guys wouldn’t have shot us anyway. We learned that back in basic training. Espani don’t like shooting folks anymore than I do. They think knives and swords are more honorable or holy or something.”

  Kenan sneezed again. “I don’t even remember basic.”

  Syfax grimaced. I’m sure you don’t, kid. There was a good reason I took you with me when I went over to the marshals. Any longer in the army and you would have met a Songai arrow with your name on it.

  Just outside Ciudad Real, Syfax paused to ask an old woman where they might want to stay the night. She described two places. The first was a large inn near an even larger church. The second was a small tavern near another, larger tavern. The major steered his subordinate to the larger tavern with a grin.

  It was late in the evening when they found the Red Swallow, and they found the dining room overflowing with travelers and laborers who were already quite drunk. Two young men in the corner were abusing a pair of guitars and the lyrics of an old ballad between glasses of lager and most of the tables were rustling with piles of coins and stained playing cards.

  After cramming some hot food into the sniffling lieutenant and depositing him in a bedroom in the back of the building, Syfax returned to the dining room to see if he could turn one handful of Espani reales into two or three handfuls. He found a table of stone masons who were all too happy to invite a stranger into their game. They were just dealing the first hand when a tall figure stepped up the table and said, “Good evening, gentlemen. Would you mind if I joined you?”

  Syfax looked up, stone-faced. It was the Italian woman, Nicola DeVelli. She peered down at the table with a smug little smile and two of the men made room for her. But to the major’s relief, the woman never once made eye contact with him, never once gave any hint that she recognized him at all. They played monte for over an hour, the deal rotating around the table with every hand. And the hands were quick as the masons showed little care in placing their bets and only slightly more care in losing them. Syfax struggled to break even. There was no skill, no bluff, no real playing at all. Only the bet and the flip of the gate, and the sweeping of the coins this way or that.

  By the time most of the men were ready to leave, the largest pile of reales sat in front of the tall woman from Italia. Syfax watched the masons leave the tavern before he leaned across the table and said, “You’ve got some stones on you, lady. What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you with Ziri and the others?”

  Nicola swept her winnings into her pocket and unbuttoned her coat, folding down the high collar and moving her hat from her lap to the table. “Major, I never intended to ride off into the north and disappear into some church with a group of zealots and lunatics when my best chance for leaving the country was heading south to the coast. I left them on the first evening. I had thought I’d be able to catch up to you on the road rather quickly, but you moved quite quickly yourself, especially after Toledo, and I have found the weather to be uncommonly disagreeable.”

  “Toledo? What do you know about Toledo?”

  “Just what I was told. That two Mazigh spies matching your description had fought and escaped from the soldiers. In fact, if my Espani accent wasn’t so well-practiced, I might have ended up in a cell myself. They were interrogating everyone leaving the city. Thank you very much for that, major. It was one more delay on my journey south to find you.”

  “Not my problem, lady. You’re Ziri’s passenger, not my charge. She made that pretty clear.” He rolled his empty cup between his fingers. “But I guess you’re going to keep following us anyway, and you’ve got a nice little pile of money there, so I suppose I’ll let you tag along.”

  “How generous, major.” She smiled awkwardly. “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “Nah, I don’t touch the stuff. Tastes like piss to me.”

  “I’m intrigued at your choice of comparison, though I don’t want to know how you came to that particular conclusion. Do you drink at all?”

  “Not at home. It’s illegal in Marrakesh.”

  “But you travel a great deal. Surely outside your country…?”

  Syfax shrugged. “I do like sweet liquors. And I had something called mead once. Made from honey. Better than beer, but not by much.”

  “What about vodka?” Nicola flagged down the barkeep and had him fetch a bottle and a pair of glasses. She poured the clear liquor.

  “What is it?” Syfax sniffed his glass and the vapor stung his nostrils.

  “It’s from the land of Rus originally, but now you can find it everywhere in the north. They make it from potatoes, if you believe that. It’s not sweet, but I think you’ll warm to it.” She swallowed her glass in one gulp.

  Not to be outdone, Syfax imitated her and almost choked on the burning in his throat, but he held it back and managed a grin. “You drink this for fun?”

  “No, I drink it to get drunk, major. When you live in a climate like this, some nights are best spent with your brain on fire, burning your blood from the inside out. Another?” She had already refilled her glass.

  Syfax nodded. Soon the bottle was half empty and the major felt his skin burning and his head swimming. She was right about one thing, he thought. This is better than being wet and cold in a hellhole like this. He thumped his glass and the Italian woman poured him another. She was smiling almost constantly now, and she had shifted her chair a bit closer to his to lean over the table toward him.

  At the far end of the room, a woman with a husky voice y
elled out, “Whoever thinks he’s man enough to lie between my legs can line up right here, right now!”

  Syfax leaned over sharply to see who was making the offer, but his blood cooled rather quickly at the sight of the woman by the door. She was tall enough and trim enough, but too ugly, even to his weak eyes. A wide mouth, a jagged beak of a nose, and an eye patch surrounded by twisted, scarred flesh. Syfax had never thought himself very picky when it came to women, but he was feeling picky now at the sight of her. Still, a knot of drunken Espani soon formed around her and she herded them off to a corner, and within a few minutes men were queuing up to arm-wrestle each other for the privilege of bedding the hatchet-faced woman.

  Syfax shared another shot with Nicola, and another after that. Through a gap in the crowd, he saw the one-eyed woman had taken off her coat to reveal her muscular shoulders and scarred arms. Suddenly she looked a bit more appealing, and the longer he studied the line of men trying to prove their strength and stamina for her, the more he started to think he ought to be in that line himself.

  Who cares if she only has one eye? I bet she’s a demon in the dark.

  Still, he knew he was drunk and tired and had to deal with a sick, whiny lieutenant in the morning as well as this leering Italian woman who was looking more and more like his dead uncle with every sip of liquor. Nicola edged forward. He edged back.

  The feats of strength in the corner evolved from arm-wrestling to gut-punching to all-out fighting in just a few minutes and Syfax grimaced at the three men at the center of the brawl. Big fellas. Gonna be trouble. And I’m drunk, damn it. He didn’t want to deal with them. He hoped they didn’t move any closer to…

  The tangled fighters stumbled into the table right in front of the major, shoving Nicola back in her chair and destroying the table top, vodka bottle, and glasses. But they missed Syfax’s knees by an inch, leaving the major to sit, unperturbed, looking down at the two men grappling on his boots.