Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  They ate in near silence, surrounded by unmarried fishermen and sailors who had no one to feed them, or no home to go home to, or more money than sense. The fire crackled merrily, the men talked quietly, and as her stomach grew fuller, Wren felt a lovely warm blanket wrapped around her belly and beer-addled brain. She leaned back in her seat and stared at the fire, and wondered what her friends in Ysland were doing that night.

  A soft thump fell upon the door, and a few men glanced up, but the door did not open.

  The door thumped again, a bit harder and sharper, and the iron handle rattled against the frame. The man behind the bar, a slender whip of a fellow with a small black mustache, sighed and came around the bar, and opened the door, saying, “It’s not locked. You just…”

  Wren looked up from the fire to see why the man had not finished his sentence, and she saw a dark figure standing just outside in the road. Then she heard the blood dripping on the ground, and she saw the barkeep slump to the floor. A bloody sword entered the room, followed by a one-armed man with an uneven gait.

  “Leif!” Omar stood up, knocking his chair over.

  Wren stood up beside him as the sudden flush of adrenaline brought her senses back into focus. Leif was standing just inside the door, his sword raised, but it was not the Leif Blackmane that she remembered. This man was pale beyond life, as white as new-fallen snow, but his face and hand were patched and veined in blue and black, and icy crystals glistened around his eyes and in his long black hair. He looked at her, and then he looked at the fire in the hearth, and he shuffled back out into the road, disappearing into the shadows.

  Two men knelt by the dead barkeep, one sidled over to the abandoned bar, and the rest were half-rising from their seats with grim looks on their faces and supper knives in their fists.

  “Everyone, stay here,” Omar said, his hand wrapped tightly around the grip of his seireiken. “Wren, hurry.”

  They jogged out the door into the road where a light snow was falling quietly on the seaside town, and they spotted Leif walking stiffly away down the road toward the water. Wren followed Omar as he drew his bright sword and suddenly the narrow lane was as bright as noon in summer, and the one-armed man turned to face them.

  Wren gasped.

  He’s dead.

  Leif’s throat was gone, his Adam’s apple torn out, leaving a ragged circle of blackened flesh between his collarbones and his jaw. The skin of his right cheek had also been ripped away to reveal his crooked teeth and black-veined gums in a permanent grinning rictus. His mouth moved, and a guttural moaning and grunting echoed out of the hole where his throat should have been.

  Omar raised his sword, but Wren raised her hand a little faster and hurled a wall of swirling white aether at the walking corpse. Leif staggered back, tripped, and fell on the icy stone walkway that led down into the water where a dozen small fishing boats rested on the beach.

  “What’s going on?” Wren asked softly as they both edged forward. “I know he’s not alive, but how did he turn into one of them? It has to be another soul-plague.”

  “It could be.” Omar nodded. “But I have another theory.”

  The half-frozen remains of Leif Blackmane slowly rose to his feet, the broad Yslander sword still in his hand. He pointed the blade at them, grunting from his chest. Another sound caught her attention, and Wren glanced back up the lane to see the beer hall patrons standing in the road, staring down at her. But then they turned and pointed to something else in the opposite direction, something Wren couldn’t see. “I think we have a problem.”

  “Hardly,” Omar said. “He can barely walk properly. He’s no threat to us, even with that oversized pig sticker.” The Aegyptian marched forward and slashed the Yslander sword aside. The blazing heat of the seireiken burned through the northern steel, and the pointed end of Leif’s sword flew off into the darkness to clatter on the pebbled beach.

  “I don’t mean him,” Wren said, still peering up the lane at the men.

  “One problem at a time, please.” Omar twirled his bright sword lightly at his side and slipped it back into its scabbard, dousing its light. He paused to set his feet, bend his knees, straighten his back, and rest his palm on the butt of his seireiken. Leif threw down his broken sword and growled from the hole in his neck, and then lurched forward, reached out with his one clutching, grasping hand.

  Omar drew his sword.

  The light flashed again, bright as day, and just as quickly vanished back into its clay-lined sheathe. Wren blinked to clear her eyes. The harsh glare of the seireiken was always too much for her sensitive fox eyes, and it left bright orange and blue afterimages writhing across her vision. But when she could see again, she saw Leif lying still on the ground, his head resting beside his arm. The severed neck smoked faintly in the darkness.

  Omar gestured to the body. “There, you see? A flawless draw. Wherever Leif’s miserable soul is now, it isn’t in my blade.”

  “My compliments to your samurai instructor,” Wren said, remembering the ghost of the warrior she had met once when Omar had allowed her to hold his seireiken. It was the shade of the samurai, Ito Daisuke, who guided Omar’s hand in combat. “But we have another problem.” She pointed back up the lane to the men and the shambling shadows beyond them.

  “Ah.” Omar nodded. “Good. You go help them. I’m going to take a look at our dead friend here and see if I can figure out why he didn’t stay dead in Targoviste.”

  She stared at him. “Me? Alone?”

  He merely waved her away as he knelt beside the corpse.

  Frowning, Wren unwound her sling from her wrist and jogged up the lane toward the half dozen men standing just outside the beer hall. Some of them still clutched their glasses in their hands, and none of them had any weapons. She said, “Everyone, get back inside! It isn’t safe here.”

  But they merely shrugged and set their glasses down on the ledge of the nearest window. One of them muttered, “We know.”

  The sailors and fishers yanked up a few loose bricks from the roadbed, and one man cracked a long icicle from the roof of the beer hall, and one man simply rolled up his sleeves.

  Wren glanced from one grim face to another as she set a small round stone in her sling. “You’ve seen them before? You know about them?”

  The man with the icicle nodded. “The first ones wandered into town about two months ago. Don’t worry, girl. We’ll send them back where they came from.”

  Wren looked up the road again and saw nearly twenty of the blue men and women drawing near. They moved too stiffly to run, but they were trotting and jogging at a fair pace, their clumsy feet crunching on the snow and ice.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Wren asked the men. “Do you know what caused it?”

  “Naw, never seen anything like this before,” an old sailor muttered. “But once you see one varcolac or strigoi, you’ve seen them all. Demons. Skinwalkers. Blood-drinkers. Flesh-eaters. Sinners in league with the devil, every one of them. But that’s country folk, for you. Always burying their dead, and doing it wrong to boot. And here’s the fruit of their foolishness. The walking dead.”

  Wren stared at the man.

  Buried wrong?

  Wren wanted to ask him more, but there was no time. The twenty corpses in the lane were less than a hundred paces away and moving faster than before. She hurled her first stone, smashing in a blue woman’s knee and sending her sprawling on the ground, with two others falling over her.

  “That’s no good,” the old sailor said, his voice rising above the groaning of the corpses. “You’ve got to bash in the heads!” And the men charged forward, swinging their bricks at their enemies’ faces. Skull after frozen skull cracked and caved and shattered, and the walking dead began to fall. If a man lost his brick, he would resort to grabbing one of the blue corpses, hurling it to the ground, and stomping its head with his heavy boots. And as the bodies piled up, the men shuffled back, leaving the frozen limbs as a barrier across the lane. St
ill the other corpses came.

  Wren locked eyes with one of them, a dead woman maybe thirty winters old with ice shining in her ragged hair, a swath of glistening blue flesh on one side of her face and a desiccated patch of black skin on the other side. Her blue eye had frozen solid, no longer able to blink or move, and the woman had to turn her head stiffly to see. Her black eye was lost in the shadows on her face.

  Nine hells! Thora!

  The dead Yslander woman staggered over the fallen bodies, her clawing black fingers reaching out for Wren, and between her blue lips a tiny black tongue poked out of her mouth, a tongue shriveled and dried as a dead twig, and just as useless. The only sounds that came from her mouth were unintelligible moans, terrible gasping moans that dragged on and on between thin, wheezy breaths.

  Wren blinked, suddenly realizing that the townsmen were all busy with the other corpses and there was no one between her and Thora. She loaded her sling from the small pouch of stones on her belt, and then Wren hurled a shot at the blue and black face before her. The black side of Thora’s face crunched inward as the stone glanced off, but the corpse merely stumbled as it charged at the girl.

  Woden, if I die here I’ll never talk to you again, you lazy excuse for a god!

  Wren thrust her hand out and shoved the aether forward, blasting the dead woman and everyone else in the road with a rolling tide of white mist. Thora flew back onto the other bodies, and all of the men were thrown forward onto the last few walking dead. But the men kept their footing, and were soon bashing and kicking the remaining corpses into silent oblivion.

  But the blue and black corpse from Ysland was still moving, still struggling to sit up, still reaching out with her cold black fingers. With a lump in her throat and a few hot tears in the corners of her eyes, Wren darted forward, grabbed one of the bricks from the ground, and smashed the corpse in the face. Thora collapsed and lay still.

  Wren backed away, leaving the brick were it had fallen so it would cover the face at least a little bit. The sailors and fishers all backed away from the bodies with her, all huffing and sweating and muttering to themselves. But they were all alive, and all unharmed except for a few scrapes and bruises.

  When the pounding in her chest had faded, Wren said, “Will they rise again?”

  “Naw.” The old sailor shook his head. “Not with the heads all bashed in. There, watch.” He pointed at the bodies.

  Wren turned to look, and through the drifting aether she saw the pale shades of the dead men and women stand up out of their bodies, glance around blankly, and then fade into the darkness. Thora too emerged from her corpse and hesitated, gazing at Wren with wide, sad eyes, and then she vanished.

  They’re gone. Their souls are all gone now. It’s over.

  “See?” the sailor said. “Right as rain now.”

  “But what’s causing it?” Wren asked.

  The sailor shrugged. “Pacts with the devil? Some sort of curse? Who knows?” And the men headed back down the lane to the little beer hall overlooking the harbor.

  Wren followed them. “And the bodies?”

  “We’ll burn them tomorrow. No sense trying now. It’s too cold, and they’re all frozen,” the old sailor said as he went back inside.

  Wren lingered in the street, alone in the dark, listening to the wind whistling around the roofs and chimneys, listening to the gentle rocking of the fishing boats just a stone’s throw away on the dark waves. Omar sauntered slowly up the lane from the water’s edge and stood beside her. “I have a theory.”

  “They barely even care,” Wren said, still staring at the sea. “They fought a band of dead people in the street, bashed in people’s faces with bricks, and they just went back to their drinks like nothing happened.”

  Omar grinned. “Some people adjust to awful things better than others.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “People who are used to awful things happening to them.”

  Wren nodded slowly.

  “This is Vlachia,” Omar said. “It’s a cold, hard place. In times of war, the princes fight with Raska and Rus and Hellas for scraps of gold, a handful of women, or a herd of cattle. Nothing more. In times of peace, the governors fight with each other for even less. But the farmers do fairly well, and the fishers do fairly well. The wine here is excellent. And when the wine isn’t enough to warm their bones, there is always the Church of Constantia to soothe their souls.”

  “Church? You mean the gods?”

  “Not gods. God. Singular.”

  “Oh.” Wren pouted. “What’s his name?”

  “God. Just, God.”

  “If you only have one god, does that mean he doesn’t have a family?”

  Omar sighed. “According to the Constantian and Roman Churches, he does. But they’re wrong about that, of course. The Mazdan Temple has the truth of it.”

  “Oh.”

  So many things to learn still.

  Wren wrapped her sling around her wrist. “What’s your theory?”

  “Hm?”

  “About the walking dead,” she prodded. “You said you had a theory.”

  “Oh, that.” Omar nodded. “Well, you know that when most people die, their souls just rest there in their bodies or their ashes, just sort of sleeping. And even if they do wake up, it takes some effort and some aether for them to move about as ghosts.”

  “Right.”

  “And your aether-craft allows you to use the aether to move anything with a soul.”

  “Right.”

  “So it works both ways,” Omar said. “You can use the aether to move a ghost, and a ghost can move the aether too.”

  “But aether is just a mist. It can’t move anything at all. It just makes images of dead people.”

  “Ah.” Omar smiled mysteriously. “But what if the aether wasn’t a mist? It evaporates in the sunlight, in the heat, but it also thickens in the dark and the cold. What if the aether froze solid? What if the aether in a corpse’s dead blood froze solid?”

  Wren’s eyes widened. “Then the ghost could move the frozen aether crystals, they could move their own dead body like a puppet!” She recoiled. “Ew!”

  “Ew indeed, little one, ew indeed.” Omar nodded sagely. “These corpses are buried in the permafrost, their bodies well-preserved in the cold, their blood frozen solid within hours of dying. And then, when their souls wake up, instead of just carrying their faces and voices out into the aether mist, they take their own dead bodies with them out into the world.”

  Wren shuddered. “So they might not even realize they’re dead?”

  “Oh, I think they do. After all, they all have to dig and crawl their way out of their own graves. Imagine falling asleep in your own bed, and then waking up in your own grave, digging up through the frozen earth, and staggering up into a graveyard on frozen, dead legs, looking down at your own frostbitten and desiccated fingers, unable to speak with your shriveled up tongue. It’s enough to drive you mad, don’t you think? And the fresh ones, like Leif, might even think they’re still alive, just wounded or sick.”

  “But they’re dead! Why aren’t they just floating away like normal ghosts? Why are they clinging to their bodies at all?”

  Omar shrugged. “Force of habit? Human nature? The will to live? Why ask me, I’m not a deranged corpse.”

  “So, then we only need to worry about them at night, when it’s coldest, right? If they get too warm, the aether in their bodies will melt away and their souls will come free, right?”

  “Maybe. Then again, this land is awash with aether. If the soul doesn’t leave the body promptly during the day, then more aether could simply freeze into the body the next night. The process could cycle on and on, forever.” He crossed the lane and opened the door to the beer hall. “Come on, it’s time for bed.”

  Wren nodded and took one last look at the bodies in the road. “They move pretty fast, for dead people. And they’re strong, almost as strong as they were in life, I suppose. I just hope they can’t
swim, too.”

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, Wren emerged from her warm bed and her warm breakfast onto a bright, cold street. Uphill to her left she saw a pair of men with a wheelbarrow loading and moving the blue bodies. Other yawning men and women were already out, calmly going about their chores and stepping carefully over the corpses in the road. Omar stepped out beside her, resplendent in his finely tailored Mazigh coat and boots, with his blue sunglasses hiding his eyes. Without a word, he headed down to the water and strode out onto the lonely wooden pier that reached out into the Black Sea, and began a quick negotiation with the captain of a sailing ship that was about to leave port.

  It was the largest and strangest ship Wren had ever seen. Ever since she was a little girl in Ysland, the stories and pictures of the warriors’ longboats had loomed large in her imagination, tales of narrow ships bristling with oars and spears, bearing only a single mast and square sail, gliding silently as serpents up the rivers of Alba to strike at the people of Edinburgh and other southern towns.

  But this ship before her now, this La Rosa de Valencia, was more than thirty paces long and six paces wide, and it rode high in the water bearing two masts and triangular sails like the wings of gulls. Omar called it a caravel, a trading vessel from the distant land of España, which was just as cold and hard as Vlachia, where they worshiped the same nameless God, though they served another church.

  The captain was a small, sharp-eyed man named Ortiz, and Omar negotiated their passage rather quickly in fluent Espani, and soon Wren was climbing the narrow, bouncing plank to the deck of the ship. Ropes slapped, canvas flapped, and chains clinked, and within a few minutes the merchant vessel was gliding away from the port of Varna and heading out into the Black Sea. Dark gray clouds filled the sky, and a sharp chill rode the breeze from the north, whipping the dark waves into pale green foam.

  Wren stood at the railing and watched Varna shrinking behind them, a gray collection of walls and roofs dressed in snow with a dozen trails of smoke rising from its chimneys. Omar stood beside her, gazing out at the sea.