Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Omar smiled kindly and leaned back a bit. “Oh, good. You’ve heard of it. That will make this so much easier. Are you a vala?”

  “No, but my sister was. Is. She is.” Freya pressed her lips together and glanced at Erik.

  “Was, or is?” Omar tilted his head.

  “What I mean to say is that she was bitten by a reaver three nights ago,” Freya said softly.

  “Oh.” Omar nodded. “I understand. And I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that, not yet,” Freya said. “Skadi said that if we could bring her the rinegold ring of Rekavik that the king wore, then she could talk to the ancient valas and cure the plague, and save my sister.”

  “She said that, did she?” Omar sighed. “Is that why you’re out here? You’re looking for Ivar’s ring? Then she’s betrayed you, just as she betrayed me. She sent you to your death, and all for nothing.”

  “I’ve never failed in a hunt before, and I’m not afraid of Fenrir.”

  He looked at her with a strange mixture of confusion and curiosity. “What is a Fenrir?”

  Freya stared at him. “The demon, the source of the plague!”

  “Demon?” Omar shook his head. “No, fair lady, I’m afraid you have it all quite wrong and backward. No demon brought this disaster to your people. No, it was Skadi who did it, and I helped her, God forgive me.”

  “What?” Freya whispered.

  “Allow me to go back to the very beginning again.” He paused. “No, allow me to gloss over the beginning.” Omar held out his empty hand to her. “Your knife, please.”

  Freya hesitated and glanced at Erik, who frowned and nodded slowly, so she handed over her least favorite bone blade. Omar took it, examined it thoughtfully for a moment, and then plunged it straight through his left palm. Freya and Erik started up, but the stranger waved them back. His face was twisted in pain, and he hissed and wheezed a moment, and then pulled the knife out and handed it back to her dripping with blood.

  “Now look, quickly!” He held up his bleeding palm, and before their eyes his torn flesh folded back together and stitched itself closed without leaving the slightest scar. Omar wiped the blood away on his bedding and held up his hand, clean and whole again. He exhaled slowly and wiped a tear from his eye. “Well, that was bracing.”

  “Nine hells.” Freya gripped her knives. “Are you… a god? Are you him? Woden?”

  “No, no, no. Just a man. A very old man.” He rubbed his left hand gently. “You see, a long time ago I discovered the sun-steel and began to play about with it. I learned that it absorbed aether, and that it could hold a human soul. I was enthralled. Obsessed. I devoted my whole life to studying it, and after many years I completed my masterpiece.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a slender black chain, and from this chain dangled a lumpy golden pendant. “Inside this sun-steel heart is a drop of my own soul.”

  “Your soul? How did you do that?”

  “I call it soul-breaking.” He put the pendant away. “It’s only a little painful and strange, and only for a moment. Soul-breaking can do the most marvelous things. For instance, if you seal a drop of your soul in a lump of sun-steel as I did, your body becomes just as timeless as the metal itself. I call it the transitive property of the soul. Never rusting, never tarnishing, never changing.”

  “Never? Does that mean you’re immortal?” she whispered.

  Omar nodded. “I am indeed, and that little discovery was only the beginning. I wanted to know everything. I had so many questions. What connects the steel to the aether to the soul? Is there even more to it that I haven’t found yet, like angels? Is heaven a tangible place, a place you can actually walk into? And ultimately, can we learn to meet God face to face? I had this notion in my head that a sun-steel compass would lead me along a path of aether all the way to the gates of paradise where I would ask the Almighty about, well, everything. The meaning of it all, the meaning of life itself, all the secrets of the universe.”

  He sighed. “So I traveled all the way to Nippon, where I founded a temple full of monks who searched for sun-steel and studied its secrets. Of course, one of the first things these monks did was learn to forge sun-steel into a weapon. Their idea, not mine. Thus, the seireiken was born. The spirit-sword.” He gestured to his shining blade leaning in the crack in the floor.

  “Where does the light come from?” Freya asked.

  “From the thousands of souls sealed inside it. Those divine sparks heat the sun-steel until it glows so hot that it can only be contained with clay.” Omar tapped his sword’s scabbard. “But the great wonder is that if you hold the sword, you can see the faces of those souls, and hear their voices.”

  “Just like Wren’s rinegold ring. She can see her dead mistress in her ring, too. Whose souls are in your sword?”

  Omar shrugged. “Mostly old priests and doctors and scholars. I collected them on their deathbeds. For the most part.”

  “The dead warrior you spoke of before, the one who taught you to fight.” Freya nodded slowly at the sword. “He’s trapped in there, isn’t he?”

  “Ito Daisuke.” Omar smiled wistfully. “He challenged me to a duel in Marrakesh.”

  “And he lost.”

  “Oh no, he beat me quite easily.” Omar laughed. “I was ever the scholar and never the warrior. No, young lady, I had no chance against him. But I only had to cut him in the foot with my seireiken to draw out his soul and leave him cold on the ground.”

  “But, if that’s true, then is Leif’s soul in there now as well?”

  “Now that is a very good question! And as I said before, if I had fought him a few years ago, the answer would be yes. But since then I have learned the fine art of iaido, the art of drawing the sword, the art of the perfect cut. So now, with a great deal of effort, I can wield my seireiken without killing. Of course, I had to learn to do that to study the plague victims here. I certainly couldn’t help the reavers if I kept killing them with the slightest cut, could I?”

  Freya glanced in the direction of the bones on the slope behind them. “You’ve been trying to cure the plague?”

  “With very little success, I’m sorry to say.”

  Erik tapped his little steel knife on a rock, and when Freya looked at him, he signed, “He said they caused the plague, him and Skadi. Ask him about that.”

  “He wants to know… about the plague?” Omar squinted at Erik’s hand. “Is that right?”

  Freya’s eyes went wide. “You can understand him?”

  “I’ve seen hand-speech before. Yours is new to me, but I’m pretty good with languages. I should be. After all, I know most of them. Did you know that Yslander is almost identical to Old Rus?”

  “What’s Rus?”

  Omar smiled. “A faraway place. Anyway, you asked about the plague, and since you’ve come all this way into the wilderness in search of a cure that does not exist, I shall tell all.” He paused and frowned. “Eight? Yes, eight years ago I boarded an airship in Marrakesh bound for the northern wastes of Europa, and—”

  “Airship?” Freya slapped her hand on the ground. “The skyship in Hengavik!”

  “What? Oh, yes, that’s right. You’ve seen that too, have you? Well then, I can skip over that part. We crashed, obviously. Not that it was my fault, mind you. I was just a passenger.” Omar frowned at his sword, his brown face painted a ghostly white by its light. “You see, I was looking for a special place, an island from an old fairy tale. A country of seers who communed with the dead, a lost paradise where all the secrets of life and the universe were kept hidden from the world. An island where shining cities of sun-steel kept the land itself warm and fertile when it should have been buried under a wall of ice.”

  “You mean Ysland?”

  “I mean Ysland.” Omar nodded. “Imagine my horror and misery as I lay beside the wreckage of the airship in Hengavik, staring up at those damned volcanoes spewing their smoke and ash into the sky, listening to some man tell me that there was no gold on the whole isl
and.” His frown softened into weary resignation.

  And then he chuckled. “So much for paradise. So much for finding all the answers to all my questions. Paradise. God. The universe. It cost me my left arm to learn nothing at all. But it cost the rest of the crew their lives. Except the captain, that is.”

  “What do you mean, it cost you your left arm?” She stared at him. His left arm was exactly where one would expect it to be.

  “Hm? Oh.” He held up his left hand. “Looks just like the original, right down to the little hairs on my knuckles. It was torn off in the crash, the original, I mean. This new one grew back in less than a day. I screamed the entire time.” He shook his head. “Not my finest or proudest hour.”

  Freya peered at his hand. “It grew back because of the rinegold? Because you’re immortal?”

  Omar nodded. “Break me, and my little pendant will set me right again just as fast and as painfully as it can.”

  “What would happen if someone cut off your head?”

  The foreigner looked ill. “I have no idea, and no wish to find out. Maybe my body would grow a new head, or my head would grow a new body, or both, and then there’d be two of me, which is a fairly awful thought. Or maybe I’d just die. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Again Erik tapped his knife and signed, “The plague?”

  “Ah yes, quite right, my quiet friend. The plague.” Omar glanced up as though trying to remember. “Well, after the crash, I met a charming woman who called herself a vala, which seems to mean shaman or witch or something to you people, and this woman, Skadi, was quite interested in the airship, or what was left of it.”

  Omar stretched out sideways on his bed, propped up on one elbow. “So the captain, a beautiful Mazigh nymph who kisses quite forcefully, by the way, began teaching Skadi about the ship and I began sulking about my rotten luck. But as it turned out, Skadi was as obsessed with steam engines as I was with sun-steel. She took us to King Ivar, and there was some politicking and romance, all very boring, and finally Skadi married the king and set out to save the entire country using the Mazigh engine. Tapping a volcano to bring back the trees, would you believe? Anyway, the captain and Skadi built a new engine—”

  “Ivar’s Drill,” Freya said.

  “Yes, the drill. And they started drilling to release the magma. It was an ambitious plan. It might have even worked.” Omar shrugged. “And once they got up and running, I shook myself out of my gloom and decided to help. After all, they were digging a hole. Who knew? They might have even found some sun-steel in there. So I offered my services as foreman of the team and oversaw the last four months of drilling, right up to the day when we found the hot spot and Skadi brought the king to oversee her triumph over nature.”

  “And you released the plague?”

  “No, fair lady, we released about a thousand mosquitoes, or as you say, bloodflies. They must have been lying dormant in some pocket in the rock. They swarmed up out of the hole and stung the poor king nearly to death right in front of me. I suppose if I had been standing in that spot, they would have stung me instead, to no effect except my own immense though momentary discomfort, and none of this plague business would have happened. But they stung the king, and he became the first of your damned monsters.” Omar picked at the fur of his blanket. “Poor bastard. He was a nice man. Not very bright, but he was nice. He had a lovely singing voice.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “I didn’t. The king transformed right before our eyes, growing and changing, screaming and howling. Then he killed three men and ran off. We were still picking ourselves up off the ground when Skadi gave the order and Leif killed the rest of us right there. I supposed she didn’t want any witnesses telling tales about how she turned the beloved king into a murderous freak of nature.” Omar shrugged. “So after Leif killed me, I woke up and found I had very little desire to go back to Rekavik, as you can imagine, so I wandered off to sulk a bit more in the hills. But then when the plague became apparent, I set myself up here to try to cure it. I figured it was the least I could do.”

  Freya said, “That’s very generous of you. Although, you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t my fault!” Omar frowned at her. “It was that egomaniacal queen of yours and her rabid little lapdog, who is currently swimming down the Botsna to visit the sea.”

  Freya nodded and they both fell silent for a moment. Then she said, “So you came to Ysland by accident, and Fenrir is really Ivar, and the rinegold ring of Rekavik is probably still on his finger, which hardly matters because Skadi was probably lying about using it to end the plague.”

  “Don’t be so sure about the ring. Skadi must want to end this madness as much as anyone. It’s no joy ruling over a miserable country,” Omar said. “She might have been telling the truth about the ring. It does contain the souls of your ancient valas, although I have very little confidence that some Yslander relic has any real wisdom to bear on this crisis. I’ve traveled most of the world and seen only a handful of animals with a natural ability for soul-breaking like these bloodflies of yours. There is a golden dragon in China, for example, that can also—”

  “The bloodflies. Erik!” Freya dashed to her husband’s side and grabbed his hand. He tried to pull it away, but she wrenched it forward into the light. “No!”

  His smooth pale skin was prickled over with dark hair, and when she looked into his ice blue eyes she could see the bright slashes of gold forming across them. She pushed the hair away from his ears and found them stretched and pointed, and again she felt the great heat pouring off his body.

  Omar walked over and pulled his sword from the ground.

  “No, please!” Freya leapt up between the men, holding out her empty hands to ward the foreigner away. “Don’t kill him! The plague’s already taken my sister. You can’t take him too!”

  “When was he bitten?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Omar stared at her, his eyes dark with misery and sorrow. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for him. He has two days at most before the change takes him completely.”

  Freya whipped her knife free and pointed it at his throat as she eyed his bright sword. “Then help me find the Rekavik ring. Help me find a cure.”

  Omar ran his thumb down the edge of his jaw, and then across his nose, and then tugged his ear. “Again, the ring is probably useless, but why not? It’s little danger to me. And I suppose I can always kill him for you later, before he can hurt anyone else.”

  Erik pulled Freya around to look at him and he signed, “He’s right. I didn’t want to admit what was happening to me. I’m sorry, but he’s right. I can’t go with you. It’s too dangerous. I might turn on you, and you’d have to kill me.”

  Freya grabbed his shirt. “I’m not going to just leave you here. What if the other reavers find you here? Or what if you change and go running off into the wild?”

  Erik frowned a moment. “I’ll go back to the water mill that we saw on the road to Rekavik. If I’m quick, I can be there by morning. I’ll clear out the bodies and chain myself up where that man had his brother. I should be safe enough there, and you can come find me later when you have the cure.”

  Freya searched his eyes, her thoughts racing, but she couldn’t focus, couldn’t think of anything better than what he had described. So she nodded. “All right. You go on, and then I’ll come find you. And I’ll fix everything. I swear, I’ll come for you.”

  Chapter 16

  Freya and Omar took Erik back down the river’s edge past the empty vala’s house to the heavy chain strung across the water. She took her husband’s sweaty, hairy cheeks in her hands and gazed up into his blue-gold eyes. “I’ll be back soon. You know I will. Just stay safe until we get back with the cure.”

  He nodded and wrapped his arms around her and she pressed her cheek to his chest, her eyes closed, trying to hold on to that moment and pretend that it wouldn’t end, that
life wouldn’t go flooding on past them like the river at their side. But the moment ended and they pulled apart.

  He kissed her, gave Omar a stern look, and climbed swiftly across the chain to the far bank.

  “He’s doing very well,” Omar said over the churning noise of the river. “He may last another three days if he can keep his heart rate down and slow the changes.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Freya said as she watched her husband hiking down the gorge toward the east. “You’ll see. When we meet back up at the water mill, he’ll be there. And he’ll be himself still. He won’t be beaten by a little bloodfly.”

  “I sincerely hope not.” Omar nodded. “Let’s be off then.” He led her back up the river and into a narrow ravine that angled north and began to climb up from the level of the river back up to the hills above the Botsna.

  When they emerged from the gorge and stood in the free air again, Freya saw that it was late afternoon and the hills were already turning a molten shade of copper as the sun grew angry and red in the western sky. Omar pointed northeast across the vast snowy fields, and they marched on. The peak of Thaverfell stood on their left and Vingisfell stood on their right, and through the vale between them Freya could see the shimmer of a lake that she guessed to be Redar.

  They were all just names she had learned from her father and from the old trappers long ago, but even now as she looked upon them they were still little more than words. Hill, mountain, river, lake. She couldn’t see their wild beauty, or their ancient bones, or their hidden secrets. She only saw league after league of ground between her and the golden ring that could save her husband and her sister, and league after league that she would have to cross again to get back to them.

  Freya scanned the earth at their feet in the fading light, picking out a footprint here and a tuft of fur there. She saw signs of reavers on every side, along with sheep bones and broken fangs and strangely colored dung in the snow.

  “You see their trails?” Omar asked.

  “Yes. They’re everywhere. Dozens of them.”