Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Ariel nodded. “There were others, you know. There was a certain evening in a jail cell in Zaragoza, for one.”

  Qhora glared across the room at Salvator’s sleeping form.

  I can’t believe I’d already forgotten that.

  Then she looked away. “I was stupid,” she said. “I was angry, and that made me stupid. I gave Javier to Alonso and just left them behind so I could kill some filthy idiot. And now I might die before I see my baby again. Mirari might never see Alonso again. Taziri might never see her family again. Even Tycho lost his foster father because of me. Because I was angry and stupid.”

  “That’s hardly fair. Philo was killed by men. It was their fault, not yours,” Ariel said. “So what will you do now?”

  Qhora yawned. “In the morning, we’ll find the others and go home. And then when we’re safely home, maybe I can hire someone to find this Aker El Deeb and his sword. I don’t know about that part yet. I can’t save Enzo. But I can still save everyone else. So I will.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” the ghost said. “And Lorenzo would have been glad to hear it, too.”

  Qhora nodded. She felt the slight rise in temperature that signaled the ghost’s departure and she closed her eyes and slept.

  Chapter 24

  “No, we’re not going to build anything tonight. It’s already way past my bed time,” Taziri said. She lifted up a few loose boards in the rubbish pile to peer at the older trash underneath the newer trash, but the pale starlight didn’t reveal anything useful. She let it all fall back down to the ground again. “Let’s just try to scrounge up some materials while everyone with an ounce of sense is asleep, and then we’ll pick things up in the morning where we left off.”

  Bastet sighed. The girl with the cat mask on her head hadn’t actually been helping so much as just following and talking. “So what exactly are we scrounging for?”

  “A cowl and a hose.”

  “What’s a cowl?”

  Taziri paused, balancing precariously on top of the wobbly trash pile at the end of the alley. “It’s like a funnel, but we need it to fit over the entire propeller assembly. Like a hood. It could be metal, or wood, or sealed leather or even canvas.”

  “Oh.” The girl stood well away from the trash and walked up and down a long crack in the bricks in the ground, balancing with her arms as though on a high wire. “Did you always want to be an engineer?”

  “I think so, yeah.” Taziri continued flipping through the loose bits of wicker and moldy fabric. “I always liked building things. I spent a lot of time in my mother’s shop. She was a seamstress, and she had one of the first mechanical sewing machines in Tingis. One night when I was about nine, I snuck into the shop and opened up the sewing machine to look inside it. I didn’t take it apart or anything, but for a whole week I would go downstairs to look at the parts and make little drawings, trying to figure out how it worked.” She smiled as she pictured the crude pencil drawings that had made her mother so proud. “What about you? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I used to want to be a princess,” Bastet said. “My aunt said that was silly, but I still want to be one. To wear the dresses and the jewels, and to have parties and music and feasts. To have a thousand friends. I’ve seen princesses, so I know all about them. It’s so much better than being a stupid goddess.”

  Taziri slipped and fell knee-deep into a pile of prickly broken baskets. She twisted around to look at the girl. “I’m sorry. Did you say goddess?”

  The girl shrugged her thin shoulders. “I mean, I know we’re not real goddesses, but it amounts to the same thing in the end. Not that it matters anymore. We have to live in the undercity now where no one ever goes, so no one even knows we exist anymore.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Taziri pulled her leg free and climbed down off the rubbish heap. “Go back. Now, when you say goddess, you mean…?”

  Bastet raised an eyebrow. “You know, goddess. Immortal. Divine. Holy. Magical. You know, you’ve seen me.”

  Taziri made several thoughtful faces as she tried to frame her answer as diplomatically as possible. “I’ve seen you move through a cloud of aether, that’s true. But I’ve been to the north where it’s so cold that the aether pools in every hole in the ground and ghosts are as common as sneezing. I’ve even seen a demonic ghost called a water-woman.”

  “Oh? What was she like?”

  “I didn’t really get to talk to her. She turned into a flock of ravens and attacked my friend, so I shot her.” Taziri absently rubbed the medical brace under her left sleeve. “Bastet, tell me, are you a ghost? Are you dead?”

  The girl laughed. “No, I’m not dead. I can’t die.” She tapped the little golden heart pendant on her chest. “I told you, my grandfather made these for everyone in my family. They’re made from sun-steel. This holds a piece of my soul, but just a piece. Not the whole thing, of course. Dividing the soul creates an immortal bond between the flesh and the steel. So as long as the steel exists, so do I. And with my soul permanently stretched through the aether between my body and this little gem, I can do all sorts of things with the aether, like move through it.”

  Taziri nodded along slowly. “Okay. I think I follow all that. Divided soul. Immortality. So, how old are you exactly?”

  “I don’t know.” Bastet pouted. “Four thousand, I think. I stopped counting when I got to two hundred. Birthdays really stop being important after a while.”

  “Four thousand?” Taziri leaned against the wall of the alley. “And you don’t age, or get sick, or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Doesn’t sound too bad.”

  The girl grinned. “It’s not awful. Plus I have all the cats a girl could want to boss around.” As if in answer, a pair of gray and white cats sauntered into the entrance of the alleyway. The girl rolled her eyes. “Not now.” The cats left.

  Taziri decided not to ask about the cats. “And what do you do? You and your family? Do you…answer prayers?”

  Bastet laughed.

  Taziri smiled, feeling foolish. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I mean, back in the beginning, we lived here in the city and did all sorts of things where people could see us. We were more like high priests than gods, I guess. I had a lot of fun back then with my cousins. But eventually my uncles and aunts decided to move into the undercity where they could rest and study and do whatever they wanted away from all the people. People can be pretty tiring after a while.”

  “You keep mentioning your aunts and uncles. What about your parents?”

  The girl shrugged and looked at her feet. “I don’t remember them. I think they died when I was little. Grandfather isn’t really my grandfather. He just found me and took me in, started calling me his granddaughter, and said the others were my aunts and uncles. And when he made the steel hearts, he made one for me too. So I’d never be alone again, he said.” She looked up. “I miss him.”

  “What about the others? Do you get along with them?” Taziri asked.

  “More or less. They’re my family now. What can you do?” She smiled. “I mostly play with my cousins though. We still have fun, even though we’re still playing the same games we did before we became immortal. That’s why I like things like trains. They’re new. New is good.”

  “Yeah, I like new things, too.” Taziri smiled. “That’s why I build them. I could teach you to build things too, if you wanted.”

  “Maybe later.” Bastet turned and pointed at the trash. “Hey, is that a cowl?”

  Taziri wandered back into the garbage. “This?” She pulled out a large basket with a small hole ripped in the bottom. The inner frame of the basket was wicker, but outside it had a water-tight skin of oiled leather. “Yeah. This’ll do nicely. Now we just need a hose. Where can we find some rubber around here?”

  “Can’t. Rubber only comes from the New World, right? Well, there’s been a quarantine for a couple years now. They’re all afraid of some plague or something. You need rubber
to make a hose? A hose is like a pipe, but bendy, right?”

  Taziri nodded.

  Bastet grinned. “I have an idea.”

  A few minutes later they were standing in a dark street looking at a small, closed shop. Taziri frowned. “I think that’s a butcher shop.”

  “It is. You need a long bendy pipe, right?”

  Taziri grimaced. “Really? There isn’t anything else in Alexandria that we can use?”

  Bastet crossed her arms. “Well, I’ve only lived here four thousand years, so maybe I’ve missed something. If you want to go looking around somewhere else, be my guest.”

  Taziri sighed. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”

  Bastet walked up to the door and vanished in a swirling cloud of white mist. A moment later the door opened and Taziri walked in. The girl pointed to the ceiling. “I think that’s what you want.”

  Taziri grimaced again and started breathing through her mouth. “What is it? Cow?”

  “Horse, I think.”

  With a bit of stumbling in the dark and a few eye-watering gasps, Taziri pulled the coiled intestines down and looped them over her shoulder. As she turned to leave, she dug into her pocket and pulled out a fistful of Mazigh coins, which she slapped on the butcher’s counter as she walked out. Bastet closed the door and walked beside Taziri all the way back to the rail yard with a playful whistle on her lips. Taziri focused on not breathing too deeply.

  Four thousand years old, and still a little girl? I…I just can’t imagine… Lorenzo never said anything about divided souls or living forever. I wonder what else he didn’t know about ghosts and aether.

  When they returned to the Halcyon, she stowed her makeshift cowl and hose in the back of the cabin. “All right, now it is definitely time for some sleep. Can you wake me up before sunrise? We need to start working before the sun gets too high and our hose starts to rot.”

  Bastet nodded. “I’ll see you then.” And she vanished through the closed hatch.

  Taziri lay down on her tarp on the floor with her feet toward the coiled guts. A minute later she was settling in for the night up in her flight chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was a few inches farther from the rear of the cabin. She was asleep in moments.

  Suddenly a hand was shaking her shoulder and she was mumbling and there was pale sunlight streaming in through the windscreen onto her lap. Taziri blinked and sat up.

  “Good morning!” Bastet held out a piece of flatbread cupping a handful of dates. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Good morning, thanks.” Dates again. Taziri ate slowly. “It felt like the night just flew by. Did you get much sleep? Do you sleep?”

  “I did. But first I had to visit my cousin. I sent him on a little errand for you.”

  “For me? Well, I hope your cousin didn’t mind the late visit.”

  “He didn’t.” She smiled but said no more.

  Taziri wiped her hands on her pants and climbed out of her chair. “All right then. Time for us to build something. Are you going to help or just watch?”

  “Uhm. I think I’ll just watch for now.” The girl winked and flopped down on the nearest passenger seat.

  Can’t say I’m entirely surprised by that answer from a girl who says she still wants to be a princess.

  Taziri went to the back of the cabin and picked up her leather-clad basket and coil of horse gut. “Do you think it will be safe for me to work outside? Will anyone come looking around back here if they hear me working?”

  “No, my four-footed army is sleeping on the freight cars and the rails and platform,” Bastet said. “No one will be bothering you today.”

  “All right then.” Taziri climbed out the hatch and found the early morning sun bright but still cool. She tossed her gear on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and popped open the little compartment on the bottom of her arm brace to get a wrench. She climbed up on the nose of the Halcyon and started loosening bolts. “First I’m going to reverse the propeller to turn it into a fan.”

  Bastet stepped out onto the gravel. “Do you ever get a bad feeling right before something terrible happens?”

  Taziri kept working. “All the time. Why? Are you getting a bad feeling right now?”

  “No. But I think I will in a little while.”

  Taziri removed the propeller, flipped it over, and bolted it back on. “All right, now hand me the basket, our new cowl.”

  For the next quarter hour, Taziri fumbled with her shining steel tools and her flimsy wicker basket to fix the cowl over the propeller to catch the blasting air and funnel it into the hole in the bottom of the basket. The next half hour after that was a foul-smelling pantomime as she tried over and over to tie, staple, and bolt the end of the slippery horse intestine over the hole in the basket. Time and again she would step back and pronounce the job done, only to watch the pale pink gut slip free and fall to the ground. When it was finally attached, Taziri’s shirt was plastered to her back with sweat and she could feel the sun’s heat radiating up from the gravel through her shoes. “First part’s done!”

  Bastet sat up, blinking and yawning. “Oh good. Now what?”

  Taziri pursed her lips.

  Four thousand years old and she’s still a teenager.

  “Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when I’m all done.”

  “Okay!”

  Chapter 25

  Lying on the rooftop, they had an unobstructed view of the universe. A million stars on the left and a million more on the right. Shifrah sighed. A colorless blur was invading the eastern sky, swallowing up the stars beyond a gray veil.

  “Are you awake?”

  She smiled. “No.”

  “You had me worried for a while back there,” Kenan said. He lay an arm’s length away on the hard roof tiles. The slope of the roof was very slight and they had both stretched out with their heads near the peak of the roof and their feet pointing down to the stone lip where the roof ended. “It must have been hard, fighting with just one knife.”

  Two short hours ago, a dozen Bantu bounty hunters had emerged from the shadows to answer Aker’s call. They each came alone, but they were all nearly identical in the dark. All of them tall and lean, armed with an inventive arsenal of throwing weapons, and judging from the soft whistles and clicks that two of them had exchanged during the fight, they were probably from one of the Shona or Zulu kingdoms.

  The chase had been a blur of running and hiding, the hiss of a slender spear through the air, or the warble of a throwing axe, and the bullwhip crack of Kenan’s revolver.

  We got three of them, at least.

  Shifrah sighed. “It was hard enough. Is he still in there?”

  Kenan rolled to his left to look down over the edge of the roof at the house across the intersection. From their vantage point, they could see both the front and right side of the building, while the other two sides sat wall-to-wall with the neighboring houses. He rolled back. “No sign of life yet. It’s still early. He probably thinks we’re dead.”

  “We will be dead if those other bounty hunters find us up here. How many bullets do you have left?”

  “Fourteen shots in all, if there’s time to reload.”

  “Not a lot, is it?”

  “Nope.”

  Shifrah arched her back to stretch her arms and legs. As she tilted her head back, she saw the dark bare foot just above her hair. “Kenan!” She sat up with her stiletto in hand and heard the revolver yanked free of its holster. Then she saw the man standing on the peak of the roof clearly and realized that he was not who she had expected. “Wait. Who are you?”

  He had looked Bantu at first, both tall and dark, but as she looked at him right-side-up now, she saw that this was a very different sort of person. His skin wasn’t merely dark but absolute black, so impossibly black that she could see no lines or shadows or textures on his face or hands, which made him resemble the marble statues of the Roman saints she had seen in Italia.

  He wore a simple white garment that fol
ded across his flat chest like a robe, but it had no sleeves and so the corded muscles of his arms rippled down his sides in sharp contrast to his clothing. The garment continued down to his knees where his bare legs emerged. Thick golden bracelets covered his wrists and a thick golden belt hugged his robe tight around his waist. He wore his black hair braided back into a thick mane and each braid ended in a golden bead, and they clicked against each other as the morning breeze swept over the roof. A small golden pendant rested on his chest at the end of a black cord around his neck, and he held a slender black staff in one hand.

  Slowly, he lowered his gaze from the distant horizon to look at her and Shifrah saw a strange shape on his head.

  A hat? No. A mask!

  The mask too was perfectly black, but from her angle she could see nothing more about it.

  “A woman with a blade and a man with a gun. You are the two travelers from the west, are you not?” he asked.

  Shifrah blinked.

  His voice. He’s not a grown man yet.

  “Yes, we are. Who are you?”

  “A messenger. And a guide. I was sent to help you.” He gazed down at her without a trace of emotion in his eyes. “You are searching for a murderer named Aker El Deeb and for his sun-steel sword?”

  “Yeah.” Kenan kept his gun trained on the man. “Who are you? Who sent you?”

  “A friend of a friend.” The man turned to look at the detective. “Strange. Are you ashamed of your love for this woman because of what she is or because of what she’s done? Or are they the same thing to you?”

  Kenan’s hand faltered and he glanced across at Shifrah. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “For a lawman and manhunter, you are surprisingly careless with your body language,” the man said. “Regarding your task, you will find that El Deeb is in that house there.” He pointed across the intersection.