Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “What about other places outside of the Temple?” Qhora asked. “Other places where the Osirians can be found? There must be some. This is a city of vices, isn’t it? Places to drink and whore and gamble. Can we find the Osirians in one of these places?”

  Tycho suddenly looked quite thoughtful. “Probably. In fact I think I’ve heard of a place like that, a restaurant where the gangsters do business. I thought it sounded like a place we’d want to avoid. Normally. Should I go look for your Italian friend first?”

  “No. I will.” Qhora stood up.

  “My dear, please,” Philo said. “I must insist. Let Tycho go. You would not be safe, perhaps not even here in the Hellan Quarter.”

  Qhora narrowed her eyes. “I go where I want. You should rest. I’ll be back soon with Salvator.”

  She stepped out of the old house into the sundrenched street with Mirari at her side. “What do you think of our new friends?”

  “They’ve saved us a little time and work looking for Don Lorenzo’s killer, but they don’t know much else,” the masked woman said. “I doubt they are of any more use to us. Certainly not as warriors, at least.”

  An old man and a young dwarf. No, not much help there.

  Qhora led the way down one narrow lane after another until they reached one of the larger streets at the edge of the Quarter. There wasn’t much traffic though it was still the middle of the day. Men streamed past in both directions, but all on foot. There were no mounts or carts here. She turned right and kept walking.

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched the street beside her, scanning for hints of green robes, searching for weapons, looking for trouble. She found it a moment later. There were three men standing on the far side of the street, most likely locals judging by their hair and clothes. All three men were middle-aged, tall, and muscular. And they were all three staring at Qhora and Mirari.

  Qhora quickened the pace and saw the men step boldly into the foot traffic in the street, angling to intercept the women. She looked up to the roof line but there was no black silhouette perched against the pale blue sky and no black silhouette gliding on wide wings above the street.

  Turi! Stupid bird. Oh Atoq, if only you were here now…

  “My lady?”

  “I see them.” Qhora turned into a narrow alley, hoping to run to the end of the building and slip away on the next street. But a stone’s throw from the entrance the alley ended in a wall of garbage, rotting crates, broken barrels, and chunks of old brick and stone. “Back!”

  They turned and saw the three men at the mouth of the alley. The men glanced around the street and then stepped into the shadowed corridor between the two buildings.

  Qhora drew a knife in each hand. The lead man, the one with the black beard, glared at her and grunted something in Eranian. He lashed out, trying to grab her wrist. Qhora pulled back. Mirari stepped forward. The men said something and laughed. The masked woman pulled her long dirk and hatchet from the back of her belt and said, “Leave us alone.”

  The bearded man stepped forward quickly, hands raised to grab the woman’s arms or weapons. His larger body crashed against her, but Mirari’s legs lashed out from behind her long Espani skirts. She kicked him viciously between the legs and when he stumbled back she leaned back to smash her boot into his face, sending him reeling against the two other men.

  Shouting in Eranian, the bearded man pulled a small rusty pistol from inside his shirt.

  Qhora blinked. She’d been watching Mirari struggle with the thug as though across a great distance, as though there was nothing she could do to help her friend, as though she were watching a dream. But the sight of the gun brought her back, and the alley no longer seemed a hundred miles long and Mirari was no dream-vision but a young woman who was trying to save their lives.

  The Incan princess whipped her small body around in a half-circle and hurled her two knives at once. Both knives went wide, slicing the through the air just a hand-span to either side of Mirari’s head, and plunged into the throats of the two men closest to the street. They both fell to their knees with their hands groping their necks awash in blood. And then they dropped to the ground.

  There was a moment of stunned silence when both Mirari and the gunman looked down at the two men dying at their feet and the rapidly spreading pool of blood on the paving stones. The man looked up first, no longer glaring, eyes a bit wider and more confused than before. And then Mirari’s knife came up, slashing aside the man’s hand holding the gun. As the man hissed and grabbed his bleeding hand, the mountain girl leapt up on a pile of old boards and then jumped down in the same heartbeat, letting gravity add its force to her swinging hatchet. The blade sank into the side of the man’s neck, and the man collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Mirari gestured past the bodies. “My lady. If you will step out, I will clean up.”

  Qhora nodded and paced out to the mouth of the alley and stared at the tide of human bodies streaming past in the street. No one gave her a second look. If anyone had seen the flash of steel or splash of blood or the dying men, no one cared.

  She’d barely stood there a moment when Mirari tapped her on the shoulder and handed back her two knives, both blades shining and clean. Glancing back, Qhora saw that Mirari had dragged all three bodies into the shadows and arranged the refuse there over them, and then scattered a few small boards around the blood to discourage anyone from going too close by accident.

  Alonso could never have done that so quickly and calmly. He wouldn’t have even thought to do it at all. He’s too kind, too gentle. I suppose that’s what brought him to Mirari. Endless kindness, endless patience. And some of that Espani chivalry, too.

  Qhora paused to look at the masked woman. Her dark red hair was all loose and raggedy around the edges of her gleaming white mask with its black-rimmed eyes and bright red lips and little pink roses painted around the cheeks and forehead. To one side, a hint of silvery-blue skin poked out and Qhora reached up to gently arrange the woman’s hair to hide her twisted ear. “Are you all right?”

  “I wasn’t hurt, my lady. He barely touched me.”

  “No. I mean, are you all right? Are you really?”

  The Espani woman hesitated, and with the mask hiding her features it was impossible to guess what emotions might have played over her lips or eyes in that moment. “I don’t like this place. I miss home. I miss the cold, and the quiet. I’ll be grateful to be done with this business and back in Madrid again. But don’t let that concern you, my lady. I’ll be by your side until Don Lorenzo’s killer is brought to the Father’s justice.”

  The Father’s justice? But what if the Father is dead and all desire for true justice died with him? And what if the Mother, who is supposed to be the cradle of all life, is out hunting for the killer? And what if the Son, the voice of mercy and love, is far away in a strange land where no one can hear his cries?

  Qhora touched Lorenzo’s triquetra medallion on her chest.

  How did you ever make sense of your faith, Enzo? These images, these virtues. Peace and mercy. They make no sense in the real world.

  She glanced back into the alley and tried to remember the faces of the two men she had just killed. She couldn’t. They were simply gone along with the dozens of other men she had killed over the years.

  Men.

  For so long, through the long war back home in the empire and then in Marrakesh and even in honorable España there had always been a need to kill men. It was simply a part of life. Killing predators before they could kill her.

  But now, as she stared back into the alley looking for the hidden bodies, instead of men she saw boys. Little boys. Boys who had been babies. Babies with mothers.

  They all had mothers, once. Then I killed them. Those poor women. I killed their babies.

  Javier.

  I need to go home to him. Alive.

  “We couldn’t walk a hundred paces without being attacked. If there had been more of them, if there had
n’t been an alley, if someone had seen us…we might be dead now. We should be dead now,” Qhora said. “We have to be smarter. You were right. I’m sorry. Let’s go back to the Hellans. It would seem we do need them after all.”

  “Indeed, it never hurts to have more eyes and hands in a dangerous place.”

  “No. But it’s not their eyes or hands that will protect us while we’re walking about in broad daylight in this place,” Qhora said. “They may not be great fighters, but they have their uses. We’ll work with them until we can find the Italian again. If we ever find him again. He might be dead too by now, for all we know.”

  They started back toward the Hellan Quarter.

  “I doubt Salvator is dead, my lady,” Mirari said. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would die easily.”

  “If Lorenzo had been another sort of man, he would have killed Salvator easily enough.”

  “Maybe. But then he wouldn’t have been our Don Lorenzo.”

  Qhora smiled sadly. That’s true enough.

  Chapter 16

  “This could take days.” Shifrah stood on the corner surveying the marketplace. Across an ocean of heads and hair and scarves and eyes, she saw only meaningless movement without faces.

  “Do you know his usual haunts? Where does Aker live when he’s in town?” Kenan asked. “Who are his friends? What does he do for fun when he’s not working?”

  Shifrah rolled her eye at him. Aker had been so much simpler than Kenan. Sure, they’d both been younger and simpler all around back then, but even still, Aker had never shown much depth in his virtues or his vices. “I suppose we should start with the brothels.”

  “Brothels? Here? I thought they frowned on that sort of thing.”

  Shifrah pushed away from the wall and led Kenan into the slow stream of bodies moving east down the boulevard. “In general, yes. The Aegyptians and their Eranian masters both frown on the sex trades, but not everyone here is a Mazdan, and not all the Mazdans are good Mazdans. So what happens when you make something illegal?”

  “It goes underground,” Kenan muttered. “Are we talking about basements, back alleys, abandoned warehouses, and condemned mansions?”

  “Only for the poor people.” Shifrah grinned at him over her shoulder. “Hey, get up here and walk next to me, not behind me.”

  He quickened his pace to come alongside, which made it a bit harder to slip through the crowd but it couldn’t be helped.

  “How long were the two of you together?” the detective asked.

  “A year or so. We ran little jobs for Omar here in the city. We would pose as brother and sister, or newlyweds, or vagabonds, whatever was needed to get the job done.”

  “To kill people?”

  “Yes, Kenan, to kill people. I think it’s time you moved past all that.”

  He was quiet for half a minute. “I thought you had moved past all that.”

  “Of course not. In Tingis, I took my cues from you. I set up my own business. People hired you to find lost loved ones or to find evidence of wrong-doing, and people hired me to kill their enemies. If it makes you feel better, I usually only killed bad people. You would have approved of most of my jobs, I think.”

  “No, I wouldn’t!”

  “Really?” She ticked them off on her fingers. “A factory supervisor who pushed a worker into a furnace. A father who beat his son to death. An importer who doubled his sales volume by cutting his wine with toxic chemicals. A mother who locked her children in a basement to starve them to death. I saved the children, by the way. A student who bullied three schoolmates into committing suicide. I was surprised. I really was. After everything I had heard about it, I didn’t expect Marrakesh to be such a cesspool.”

  “Shut up.” Kenan rubbed his eyes. “Just stop.”

  “Why? Because it turns your world upside-down to think your society isn’t pure and beautiful? That your civilized people are just as cruel and monstrous as us dirty barbarians?”

  Kenan sighed and squinted around the street. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. I just needed to move my legs.” Shifrah took a long breath as she looked around them.

  If I was Aker, where would I be? So, I’m Aker. I’ve just killed an Espani fencer, fled a country, started a gang war, and now I need…what? To hide, or run, or just brag about the whole thing?

  “I want you to give it up.”

  Shifrah stopped dead and turned slowly to look at him. “What?”

  “You heard me. Give it up. Stop the contracts. Stop killing. If you want to help people, you can work with me to do it the right way, to work within the law,” Kenan said.

  “No.” Shifrah started walking again.

  Kenan kept pace beside her. “Why not? Damn it, why not? I want us to be together, I want to make this work, but you’ve got to meet me in the middle on this.”

  “The middle? How is giving up my career the middle? I’m pretty sure giving up my career is your side.” She kept walking. There was a familiar itch in her fingers, the itch to solve the problem at hand with a stiletto under the arm straight into the heart. But there was no rage.

  Why not? I was always angry at Aker and Salvator. Why not Kenan?

  “Whatever the middle is, it has to be no more killing,” he said.

  “No.” She walked a little faster, still scanning the crowd with one corner of her mind wondering where she should be going.

  I got angry at Aker because we were always competing, always trying to outdo each other, always vying for Omar’s approval. I got angry when he won, or made me doubt myself. It seems like I was angry at him more days than not. But not Kenan.

  “Why not? Why not give it up, if not for your own safety then for me?”

  She stopped and looked back at him. He had stopped a few paces behind. “If this is how you feel, why are you even with me?”

  He looked lost, his eyes searching the hot cobblestones for answers, his empty hands making small half-hearted gestures, his shoulders rolling in a serious of confused shrugs. Then he looked straight at her. “Because I love you.”

  She looked straight back at him. “You love me? But not where I come from, or how I grew up, or who I’ve been with, or what I’ve done, or how I live, or how I feel about how I live? Is that right?”

  If it was possible, he managed to look even more lost. “Yes.”

  “If none of that, then what? What about me do you love?” She walked back toward him and tapped her eye patch and the scarred skin around it. “Do you love this?” She groped her breasts. “Or maybe these?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Then what?” She stared at him, waiting. When he had no answer, she turned away and continued walking.

  I got angry at Sal because he was so damned good at everything. Languages. Swords. Knives. Lying. Stealing. Planning. Singing. And everything had to be his way, his rules, his orders, and I put up with him because he opened the right doors for me. It was fine at the beginning, but by the end I was ready to leave his headless corpse in a ditch. But not Kenan.

  A moment later she glanced back and saw that Kenan was once again following her a few steps behind. As she studied his face, she tried to define what it was that she thought of him, what she felt about him. But only a great echoing silence answered her. Once upon a time, he had been exciting and different, young and dangerous. She had thought to follow him into strange places and exotic adventures. In the space of a week she had seen him defy his commanding officer, cleverly free two captives from an Espani jail, cold-bloodedly sabotage a warship to send a thousand men to their deaths, defy another commanding officer, and then renounce his commission and establish his own private investigation firm. In one week.

  But since then, nothing. The same work. The same home, the same food. No more defiance, no more adventures. She had accepted that. For a time, it was convenient. A place to sleep and a pair of trustworthy eyes to watch her back, and a competent pair of hands to mind the rest of her body. But it was over now
. They could blame time or fate or Aker, but it was over.

  “Go home, Kenan,” she called over her shoulder. “We’re done here.”

  “Home? Did you say go home?” He raced up beside her again and when she glanced at him this time there was a gleam of that old fire in his eyes. “What home? I can’t go home, thanks to you and your damned Aker. The police saw me, they know it was my home, and I had that Espani medallion in my hand!”

  “If you believe in Mazigh law and justice, you have nothing to fear. Go home and tell the truth and go back to your old life. And leave me alone.”

  “You know damned well they’ll imprison me for the murder of Don Lorenzo! Conspiracy, or aiding and abetting!” He grabbed her arm.

  Shifrah had both hands on him in an instant, snaked her foot behind his leg, and hurled him to the ground. He stared up at her with a bright spot of blood on his lip. She stepped back. “I said we’re done. Leave me alone.”

  Kenan stood up again, slowly but steadily. There was no shrugging or aimless searching or meaningless waving now. At his full height he was still several inches shorter than her, but at that moment he seemed larger somehow. He rested his hand on the butt of his black revolver and gazed at her face, his mouth drawn tight in a small line, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes adding a few more years to his bearing. “Then we’re done. Fine. But I can’t leave without Aker. He’s a wanted man. And I’m going to bring him in. So I’m staying with you.”

  “When I find Aker, I’m taking him to Zahra.”

  “And when she’s done with him, I’m taking him to Tingis.”

  Whatever you say, detective.

  Shifrah gave him one final, fatally brief glance and then focused on the road ahead. They were in the central corridor of the city, a series of markets and bazaars and shops and dark alleys full of nervous eyes and loose knives.

  Aker, Aker, who has the Aker?

  She ducked into a tavern, glanced about, and continued on. She poked her head into the next wine shop, and the next ale house. Every place had its own smells and its own costumes and its own accents. Songhai, Kanemi, Bantu, Puntish, Hellan.