“I lost my husband to one of your swords,” she said. Her words echoed alone down the hall.
After a moment, Khai said, “Is that why you’ve come? Revenge?”
“Yes.” She whispered the word. And then louder, “No. Not now. I don’t care about the person who killed my Enzo. I just want the sword that has his soul. I just want to take him home to our son.”
The older man grunted. “I see that life among the Espani had softened your sensibilities. From proud barbarian princess to sentimental housewife. Not that it matters. You’ll never take a seireiken from us, with or without killing its owner. You may never even leave this building, young miss.”
Qhora curled her fingers into a small bony fist. “I thought you’d already decided there was no reason to keep me here. You don’t care about the New World.”
“No, we don’t care about the New World. But we do care about outsiders infiltrating our ranks, stealing our secrets, and exposing our operations to the scrutiny of foreign governments.” Khai coughed. “I’m taking you to a room now. You’ll stay there while I discuss your future with my brothers. You may be retained here to work, or we may simply kill you. I understand that you chose to surrender to our people rather than try to fight them. That speaks well for you. Civilized people can be useful. Barbarian princesses cannot.”
A whirlwind of impulses and desires and red mists ran riot through her mind. Her hands wanted to kill this man, to tear down his temple brick by brick, to rip the head clean off Enzo’s killer, and to carry home the burning steel cage with her beloved’s soul inside it. But the sick gnawing in the pit of her stomach only wanted to run far, far away. And the cold splinter in the back of her mind was telling her that she was only one woman, alone, unarmed, unwanted, unloved, and soon to be unmissed by the world.
“I have a son.” Qhora wanted to say more, but she couldn’t imagine what maternal feeling or natural obligation this man might care about. Still she said, “He’s waiting for me. He’s only three months old. I can’t stay here.”
“If you truly valued him above all else, you wouldn’t have left him to come here. So don’t try my patience with your false sense of loyalty.”
“I was wrong.” The word left an aching knot in her throat. Wrong.
“Oh?”
“Wrong to come here. I came because that’s what I know. When attacked, I attack in kind. Blood cries out for blood. Let no trespass go unpunished. Absolute war. Death without mercy. That’s what kept me alive through…everything. Being stronger, faster, crueler. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. It was only a way to survive. To keep my blood on the inside.”
“There’s nothing shameful about survival,” Khai said. “Few scholars study the philosophies, passions, and beliefs of failed nations. After all, they’re dead. What can they possibly offer the living? To simply survive in this world at all is to understand a great deal about the human body, mind, and society.”
Qhora frowned. She was certain there was something wrong in what he had just said, but she didn’t care to dwell on it. “I just meant that if I could go back to that night when my husband died, I wouldn’t have left my son to find the killer. I would have stayed at home and taken care of my boy, and let others find justice for us. I can’t save Enzo’s life. I can’t even save his soul, can I?”
“No. You can’t free a soul from a seireiken,” Khai said. “But you can see them and hear them, for whatever that is worth. Would you want to see your dead husband again?”
“Of course!”
“And a year from now? Ten years? Twenty?” The older man glanced back over his shoulder at her. “You’re a young woman with a child to raise. Surely your fortunes would be better served if you were to find a new husband to provide for you. And besides that, surely you yourself would want to find a new companion for the many long years of your life still ahead of you. Would you truly want your dead husband’s ghost trapped in your home with you, watching you live your life with another man? Or would you forego a lifetime of love and security to keep a dead man’s soul in the palm of your hand? Would you deny your son a new father, a living father, just so you can hear that same voice from beyond the grave telling you that you are beautiful and that he loves you?”
Qhora rubbed her aching forehead. “Wouldn’t you want to keep the souls of your loved ones close to you?”
Khai stopped and turned. He touched the sword at his side. “I keep the souls of countless thousands of men and women close to me. I’ve known very few of them in life. I’ve known a few more of them in death. I’ve never loved any of them, and they have never brought me any measure of joy or even satisfaction. They are less than slaves. Only tools, nothing more. But to your question, no. If I had a wife or a child die, I would not wish to have them near me. Children are meant to leave the nest. And everyone dies, sooner or later. It is the measure of a person how they cope with loss. The dead must be let go for the living to truly carry on living.”
“And yet you keep that sword, and you keep filling it with the souls of the dead. You don’t let them go, do you?”
“No. I don’t.” He continued down the hall.
Either he’s insane or he’s so detached from normal life that he might as well be crazy. Even if he doesn’t kill me today, he’ll kill me one day all the same. One more slave to serve his twisted ambitions.
They were reaching the end of a corridor. Ahead were two doors on the left but on the right was an opening where she saw a spiraling iron stair rising up and plummeting down into the darkness. The old man passed the stair and approached the last door. “Here we are.”
Qhora leapt over the iron railing and crashed down on the rattling stairs. As she bolted forward and down, she heard the crackling hiss of the man’s drawn seireiken scorching the air and a blinding, colorless light filled the stairwell, drawing nightmare shadows around her body and down the steps.
“Stop!” The man’s voice boomed down the stairwell.
Qhora spun and looked up through the iron rails and steps. The light of the sword was blinding, obliterating all details of the man holding it.
“Come back here, young lady.”
She shifted down a few more steps, moving crablike to keep her eyes on the sword.
“I need only drop the seireiken and it will burn straight through those iron stairs,” Khai said wearily. You son will be orphaned long before the blade strikes the foundation at the bottom of the stairwell.”
“Somehow I doubt you would take the risk,” she said. “While I have no doubt the sword is up to the task, are you? What if you miss me? And what if I reach the sword before you do?”
He didn’t answer and she took the opportunity to slip down several more steps. She was at the next floor down. The hallway was empty.
But I want to keep going down.
She peered up at him. The sword was still hovering out over the stairwell, not pointed down, not walking down, not falling down.
Qhora ran.
She leapt down the tiny, curving, rattling iron steps two and three at a time, using the railings to hurl herself on and on, crashing around the never-ending bends of the spiraling staircase. She passed a second floor, and then a third. Over the clangor of her own feet on the stairs it was impossible to tell whether anyone was following her down the steps, but she didn’t dare stop now.
Faster, faster!
She crashed around a bend in the stair, her hip colliding sharply with the rail, but there wasn’t time for pain, there was only time to run and run faster. A face flashed by on the next floor, a young man wearing a sleepy-eyed look of surprise. She ran on, down and down, jumping and leaping and pulling herself down by the railings.
How far? How far down? How far up was I? Do I hide? Do I look for the man who killed Enzo now, or wait? How long can I dare to wait? An hour? A day?
She grimaced. There was a man just below her, slowly making his way up the steps. He looked up at her, a frown twisting his bearded cheeks as he said, “Exc
use me.”
She shoved him aside and ran on. She wasn’t even running anymore. She had fallen into a pattern of leaping down a quarter turn of the spiral stair at a time, four or five steps at a time. Jump, crash. Jump, crash.
Damn me if I turn my ankle again now!
A warm yellow light filtered up through the gaps in the stairs below her and Qhora slowed down just a bit, stutter-stepping as she glanced up and down in search of pursuers.
Whatever that light is, it means people. Damn!
She hesitated just above the opening in the stairwell that led out onto the brightly lit landing. A man and woman were yelling. The crashing and scraping of swords. The clatter of wooden furniture overturning. A man laughing.
Wait, that voice, could it be…?
Qhora stepped out onto the landing and hurried to the closed door obscuring the noise and the yellow light under its sill. For several seconds she listened and caught her breath.
It is him!
Qhora threw the door open and saw the tall Italian dashing around the room, slashing at a one-eyed woman while a lean figure in black held a matte black revolver pointed at the ceiling. She shouted, “Salvator!”
The Italian barely spared her a glance. “Your timing is otherworldly, my dear.” He leaped from the top of a massive anvil, contorting his long, lithe form to avoid a slashing stiletto. He landed lightly and lunged at the one-eyed woman. “If you’d care to help, you’ll find a pair of knives just beside your head.”
Qhora turned and saw two Italian stilettos embedded in the wooden door. She ripped them free and charged after the one-eyed woman in white. Dimly, she noted the two other men in the room, the older one sitting in the corner and beside him a taller man in a heavy leather apron. They both seemed to be watching the fight in mild amusement.
The woman in white whirled to catch Salvator’s rapier on her slender knife, and Qhora glided up behind her to stab her through the upper arm.
The woman screamed and threw a powerful back-hand punch, catching Qhora in the side of the head and sending her sprawling to the floor, her vision broken by flurrying specks of black and white and red.
“Kenan!” The one-eyed woman bolted away from Salvator, and the Italian deftly slashed her across the back, but only deep enough to shred her white jacket and draw a thin red line across her scarred shoulders.
She stumbled to the corner with the young man in black on her heels. Together they grabbed the old man seated in the shadows and crashed through a narrow door in the far wall.
As Qhora pushed up to her feet, Salvator was already vaulting over the anvil in pursuit, but then the tall man in the apron stepped forward to block his path.
“Stand aside!” the Italian snarled.
The man reached to the small of his back and drew a small, straight knife with a single edge. It was barely length of his own hand, but the blade shone as bright and white as the sword Khai had shown her a few moments ago.
Salvator slid to a halt. “I’ve no wish to hurt you.”
“You have no skill to hurt me,” the man said. He held the small knife out in front himself at arm’s length, the blade level to the floor. “You were free to fight the Samaritan and the boy. But not Master Rashaken. I know they will not harm him. But you will not pass. And per Master Rashaken’s orders, it falls to me to see that you do not leave this place with the answers you have found.”
Qhora looked down at the one poor knife left in her hand. “Salvator?”
The Italian did not move. “That man just now, the old one they took, he knows all about the aetherium steel. He knows all about this place. He can tell you how to find Don Lorenzo’s soul, I’m sure of it! This one here might, too, but he’s more likely to put up a fight, I think.”
A shiver ran up her spine. Again her hands longed to wrap about the throat of her enemies and tear the life from them, but every other shred of her flesh and heart and spirit turned her away.
But do I still want the sword? Khai said a soul cannot be freed from a seireiken. Do I want Enzo’s soul trapped in my home, reminding me of what I’ve lost, of what Javier will never know?
Qhora shook her head.
Whatever I want for Enzo, or even for myself, Javier needs more than a ghost.
She said, “You can’t fight this man. You can’t fight that blade. One touch of it would kill you. If he threw it now, you would be dead in an instant. We need to go. We need to get out of this place. Now.”
Salvator kept his face to the stranger and his back to her, but she saw him nod. He backed toward her and the door, and Qhora saw the shining white blade move.
She hurled her stiletto at the tall man’s throat even as she bolted for the open door, and the last thing she saw was the white steel rising to catch the stiletto, and the stiletto dissolving into a pale cloud of vapor as the two blades touched.
“Merda!” Salvator followed close behind her and together they plunged into the darkened hall.
Chapter 21
Taziri sat in the pilot’s seat, wearing her leather jacket with the long dirty tarp wrapped roughly around her shoulders. She’d toyed with the idea of turning on the electric heater, but with the Halcyon’s wings folded shut the solar sheeting couldn’t recharge, and she didn’t dare risk draining the battery.
Taziri sat sideways in the seat with her legs over the arm rest so she could face the locked hatch. It had been a long boring afternoon sweating on the cabin floor, and when the evening shadows brought her some relief from the heat, she found the cold and the dark just as dull as the scorching light.
She rested her head on the top of the seat, forcing herself to keep one eye open and focused on the hatch.
If Bastet comes back, I’m going to see it. I’m going to see how she gets in, and how the aether works. Maybe she’s a ghost, or maybe she’s a scientist who uses aetherium to control the aether. Either way, I’m going to see how she does it.
Taziri was still muttering to herself in her mind when she saw the first pale wisp of vapor slide in under the hatch. She sat up sharply and leaned forward over the armrest to peer at the aether streaming into the cabin. She watched it flow in, and she watched it pool on the floor, and she was still peering at its ghostly ripples when a voice said, “Good evening, Taziri.”
She blinked and saw a figure sitting in one of the passenger seats, the last one farthest back in the shadows.
But…when did she….? Damn it.
Taziri smiled and pushed the old tarp off her shoulders. “Hello again.”
“I brought you supper.” Bastet stood up and came forward to sit in the nearest seat. She still wore the black dress with the tiny cats on the sleeves, and her mask rested on her head, and her golden heart hung on her chest. In her hand was a basket, which Taziri took warily. She squeezed the straw gently but found it very sturdy and common.
If this is a trick, I can’t see the trap doors and wires yet.
The ends of the straw poked her hands, and flakes of dirt fell from the basket as she moved it around and lifted the cloth from the top to look inside. She found a small loaf of bread studded with dates and coriander seeds, and beside it a pomegranate, a handful of pistachios, four dates, a freshly cut bunch of grapes, and a small earthenware cup. Taziri lifted out the cup and sniffed it. “Oatmeal?”
Bastet laughed. “Beer.”
“Ah. Well, thank you very much. Will you join me?”
“Just a little.” The girl took one of the dates and Taziri set to her meal. At first she was more than a little self conscious about eating with an audience, but Bastet seemed perfectly content to lean back in her seat and stare at the cabin walls. As loathe as she was to do it, Taziri started to make conversation while she was eating, but the girl waved her hand and said, “When you’re finished.”
So Taziri ate. She ate with her eyes on the food and not the girl and she relished every bite, including the Aegyptian bread and even the thick broth they called beer, which was nothing at all like the Espani ale she had tried
once and everything like the Espani oatmeal she had eaten many times over. When she was finished, she set the basket on the floor and leaned back with a contented smile. “Thank you, again.”
“My pleasure.” The girl smiled. “I thought you could use it after sitting in this oven all day long.”
“You thought right.”
“So you’re still waiting for your friends? Your passengers?” Bastet wandered back to the end of the cabin, running her fingers over the metal plates and rivets and welds.
“I still haven’t heard from any of them. I hope they’re all right. We didn’t work out a schedule or anything for this trip. The plan was just that I wait here until they come back,” Taziri said. She chewed her lip. “Which is a really bad plan.”
Bastet laughed. “You’re right, it is. So these passengers are just visiting the city? Are they from Marrakesh too? Why did they come?”
Taziri sighed. “A friend of mine, Lorenzo, was killed the other day. He was murdered by someone from Alexandria, a man dressed in green carrying a burning hot sword.”
“Right, a Son of Osiris,” Bastet said.
“Oh. Is that who they are? You’ve heard of them. Of course you have, sorry.” Taziri nodded. “So Lorenzo’s wife and friends came here to find the killer. Actually, we went to Carthage first, but they escaped us. And then we came here. It’s so awful. Lorenzo was a good man. Handsome, charming, kind.”
“You liked him.” Bastet smiled.
“Yes, I did. He was easy to talk to. Things felt so much easier and simpler around him. He and his wife seemed to have nothing in common, but they were happy together. I could see that, and I envied that. Their marriage. It was strange, but it worked.”
“Not like yours?”
Taziri shrugged. “My marriage is more complicated. I think there’s more arguing in my house than in half of España. Everything has to be difficult. I mean, Yuba is a good man and a great father. He’s a talented artist. He’s tall and strong. I love him. I do. And things were easy back when we first got married. But then my career started to take off, and his career stalled, and we had Menna, so his career ended, basically. We had money troubles for a while. Menna had some trouble with her hearing, so there were doctors, and I was always away working. You know, it was just never easy. And I would come home and he would be angry about something. And the thing is, he was usually right about whatever it was, but there was never anything I could do about it. I couldn’t fix his job. I couldn’t change my job. I couldn’t make more money.” She sighed. “It’s been easier this last year. It really has. Since I resigned from the Air Corps, I mean. I’m home more, and we have more money, and he’s working again, and Menna is fine, thank God. Everything is better now. But it’s still never really easy.”
Aetherium (Omnibus Edition) Page 89
