Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  A vicious snarling and growling came roaring up to the entrance behind her, and Asha turned and smashed her armored fist into the black snout that emerged from the passage. Set howled and fell back down inside.

  Asha strode to the front side of the pyramid and began descending the stepped walls, hopping down one level at a time.

  Wren. She wants Wren. She wants to make Wren one of her monsters! It wasn’t enough to take Omar. It wasn’t enough to kill Priya…

  Priya…

  Set killed Priya.

  SET!

  She stopped and turned to look up. Her dragon eyes showed her a giant dark stair rising up into the subterranean chamber, all cast in faint hues of red, and there at the top stood Set. As a man he must have been quite tall and lean, a figure of great speed and grace, a runner and perhaps even a dancer. He moved with a liquid ease, flowing across and then down the side of the pyramid behind her, moving on both his hands and feet. He did not leap or crash about as he came down the tiers, instead he ran and slid on his side and rolled on his shoulder like a living flood of muscle and black cloth.

  “You!” Asha raised her clawed hands and felt her back and head throbbing as the dragon yearned to grow its magnificent horns and flailing tail, but she held it back.

  You will serve me, dragon. You are mine to command.

  Set growled and leapt at her, and Asha struck, driving her burning ruby claws into his neck and arm. She grabbed him and held him, and slammed him down on the stone ledge. Pressing her scaled knee into his throat, she whispered, “You killed Priya.”

  The monster said nothing. His long thin snout snapped at her, his long thin teeth clicking and scraping together.

  Asha stood, lifted the beast over her head, and hurled him down into the darkness, and then she leapt after him.

  “Why Priya!?” she screamed. She crashed down onto the dark street in a pool of dim red light from her own claws and scales, and she felt the street stones crunch and crack beneath her. “Why!?”

  She stood and turned just as Set crashed into her, shoving her back into an obelisk, crushing her windpipe. But his fingers had no strength to match her golden armor, and Asha stared down the length of his arm into his mad eyes, two white blanks in the darkness. She reached out slowly and took hold of his neck and squeezed her burning claws together around his soft flesh.

  “What sort of man kills an innocent woman!?”

  Set howled and flailed, trying to escape her grip, but she was stronger by far. He felt small and fragile under her hands, a soft and brittle thing that gave way before her, twisting inward, cracking.

  “You’re not even a man anymore, are you?” She blinked. “You’re just an animal now. You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you?”

  She loosened her grip on him, and then let him go. He fell back to the ground, one hand clutching his throat while the other hand struggled to drag him away from her feet.

  “Asha!” Gideon called to her.

  She looked up through the darkness and saw a dim shape coming toward her. Everything was so dim, so dark. And she felt cold, so much colder than before. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her goose-pimpled skin.

  My skin? When did…?

  “Asha!” Gideon’s body burst into view as he released the locks on his gauntlet and the blazing white blade of his seireiken erupted from its sheathe. “Behind you!”

  “What?” She turned slowly and saw Set scrambling to his feet, his whole body coiled and springing toward her, one side of him painted silver by the light and the other side utterly black.

  Asha threw up her arms to shield her face as the beast-man’s hands reached for her.

  “No!” Gideon crashed into Set and the two rolled aside in a whirlwind of light and shadow. The creature in the dark robe screamed as it burst into flames, blue-white flames that consumed its clothing in an instant and then raced across its flesh an instant later. Gideon rolled against the obelisk beside Asha and came to a stop with a smoking gray skeleton cradled in his arms.

  Asha stared down at him, wincing from the glare of his sword, but unable to look away from the charred remains of the creature that had taken away her Priya.

  “But…” She swallowed.

  Why did…?

  When did…?

  “I’m sorry, I had to. You turned back,” Gideon wheezed as he stood up. “Your scales and claws were gone. He would have killed you.”

  “But… he was…”

  He was Anubis’s father.

  She tore her eyes away from the bones and looked up into the young and worried eyes of the soldier. “We were supposed to save him, too.”

  A screaming roar boomed across the chamber and she turned to look back at the summit of Lilith’s pyramid where she saw three figures silhouetted by the signal fire.

  Gideon slid his sword back into its mechanical scabbard, plunging them into darkness. “Three of them. Nethys, Horus, and Isis. It’s going to be all right. We can fight three. I can fight three.”

  “No.” Asha listened with both ears and she heard the cacophony of souls and half-souls writhing about near the top of the pyramid. “There are more than three.”

  Chapter 12

  Asha ran, and Gideon ran behind her. They raced down the dark stone streets of the undercity, their footsteps echoing through the vast chasms between the massive pillars. And behind them followed the thumping of heavy feet and the flapping of long wings.

  Again and again, Asha tried to rouse the dragon, just enough to make her legs stronger and faster, just enough so she could carry Gideon to safety. But each time she lost focus, lost the memory, lost the will to rage and fight and defy the world. Each time, all she could see was Priya’s covered face beyond a veil of funeral flames, and the charred skull of a man, of a father, whom she had failed to save.

  They ran and ran through the dark. Gideon pointed his gauntlet at the path ahead, letting his blade shine a thin beam of white light to guide them around holes and stones and rats. Asha felt her legs turning wooden and hollow, and she forced them to go on and on, one foot after the other, no matter how much they ached and cried out to her to stop.

  On two occasions, a screaming shadow dove down at them from above in a rush of feathers and talons, and each time Gideon would turn back and draw his seireiken to force Nethys and the others back. Whatever mad rage drove the three beasts to follow the fleeing man and woman, the creatures still feared the white blade and its blinding light.

  But farther back behind the immortals, running on soft bare feet and wailing with mangled voices, came the others, the slaves, the mortal victim’s of Lilith’s twisted imagination. But Asha couldn’t see them, and she didn’t try to.

  The race through the undercity dragged on, and Asha peered up at every pillar, at every tower, hoping that she might see something familiar, some sign that they were near the tunnel that would take them back up to the fountain and the world of sun and sky. Finally Gideon grunted the word “Right” and they turned and plunged into the dark and narrow confines of the rocky passage that angled and spiraled up and up as the air grew warmer. Asha limped as fast as her cramping legs would let her, shoving off the curving walls as hard as she could to keep moving forward.

  “Here!” Gideon looked up through the ceiling to a piercing blue sky streaked with thin white clouds. The soldier made a saddle with his hands and Asha climbed up into the dusty fountain where Anubis and Wren caught her hands and helped her out of the darkness. Gideon leapt up on his own, clutching at the rim of the hole, and then hauled himself up with one long, miserable grunt, and he rolled away. “Close it!” he gasped.

  Anubis lunged toward the stone fixture with its plinths and carved fishes, but he had barely touched it before a sea of filthy, sooty hands appeared in the tunnel below, and heads and bodies began surging upward, struggling out of the cavern.

  Asha took one brief look at a man with the head of a horned bull, and she grabbed Wren’s hand, and ran. They made it to the end o
f the street, to the edge of the intersection, when Wren forced her to stop.

  “Asha! Asha, I can stop them!” Wren yanked her hand free and held out both of her arms to her sides, her many silver bracelets jangling on her wrists.

  Asha saw the creatures climbing up out of the pit. She saw wings, claws, horns, and tails, and the half-naked slaves screamed and roared, bleated and barked as they scrambled up into the afternoon sun. Anubis gave up trying to shove the fountain back into place, and the black-skinned youth vanished in a burst of aether. Gideon waved his blinding sword at the creatures, shouting at them to go back into the pit, but they only flinched away from his blade as they continued up and out onto the street on the far side from him.

  And then Wren waved her arms.

  From the pale dust clouds hovering around their feet, a thin white haze rushed up out of the earth. The aether mist washed down the street toward the fountain and crashed into the mound of angry bodies, where the wave broke into dozens of writhing misty snakes that coiled about the deformed people, wrapping around wings and claws and horns, and hauled them downward, pulling them back into the dark mouth of the tunnel.

  “Gideon!” Asha shouted. “Close it!”

  The soldier nodded his astonished face and he dashed around the creatures wrestling with the aether serpents to the far side of the fountain, and he started shoving the dais back into place, pushing even more of Lilith’s hideous servants back into the darkness.

  The creatures wailed and shrieked and howled as they fell onto one another, kicking and clawing, and tumbling one by one back into the undercity, bodies thumping on one another in the shadows. Wren stood perfectly still, her arms outstretched in front of her, her hands held flat, palms down, and she slowly pushed downward through the empty air as the aether serpents forced the creatures into the pit.

  Asha didn’t move, unwilling to risk breaking the northern girl’s concentration.

  She truly is powerful.

  “Look out!” Gideon yelled as he shoved the fountain across the opening.

  At the rear edge of the pit, three of the creatures were climbing up as the pale aether whips slipped from their bodies. The first one Asha recognized.

  Nethys.

  The woman flapped her wings with powerful, vicious strokes and broke free of the aether web, crashing into the back wall of the dead-end street. She turned, and Asha saw her face. Nethys stared back with the same dead white eyes as Set, with the same enraged expression on her snarling lips. Her black hair stood up in ragged, tangled knots and half her face and neck were covered in small white feathers in uneven, discolored patches of gray skin.

  To her left, a second figure rose, a man. He wore a ragged white tunic and loose white trousers streaked with soot and ash, and nothing else. Like Set, it was his head that Lilith had transformed. From the shoulders up, this one was a falcon with a dark brown crest of feathers across the top of his skull and many lighter browns down the sides of his inhuman face. He had huge round eyes, as white and unfocused as those of a blind man, and in the center of his face was a sharp little beak, which he opened to shriek at the creatures in the pit. And when he raised his fists, Asha saw that instead of hands, the man had gray-scaled talons.

  Horus, I presume. Bastet’s cousin. Gideon’s friend.

  The third figure to escape the pit and crawl free of the aether web was another woman, one dressed in a pale golden dress smeared with dirt and grime. Upon the top of her head two massive bull’s horns stood tall in her black hair, and from the torn skirts of her dress Asha saw that she had the legs of a cow and walked upon hard hooves, with a slender brown tail swaying behind her. But like the others, she stared about with the unfocused, uncaring white eyes of a rabid beast, screaming and brandishing her horns at Gideon.

  This must be Isis, mother of Horus.

  Asha saw that Gideon had nearly closed the fountain over the tunnel mouth, but in addition to the three white-eyed monsters, a handful of the other creatures had crawled away from the pit and now lay gasping and shaking, lowing and whining in the corners of the street. A man with the head of crocodile, a woman with the head and legs of a crane, a man with the arms of a crab, and a woman with the face of an elephant. “Wren, some of them are escaping!”

  “I know,” the girl said softly. “But it’s too warm, too bright. There isn’t enough aether here, and it would take too long for me to summon more of it. I can’t get them all.”

  “All right, then just get as many as you can. Gideon! Get that thing closed!”

  The soldier nodded as he shoved the fountain statue back the last few paces and the stonework crunched as it fell back into place over the pit. He released his sword, deftly unlocking the mechanism with his left hand and then swinging his arm sharply to the side to make the blade slip free of the sheathe and lock into place behind his armored fist. The sun-steel shone with a perfect white light and crackled with pale blue arcs of lightning, and he pointed it at the monstrous people at the end of the street.

  Asha shook her head.

  If they escape, people will die. And all because I insisted on going with Gideon, and because I insisted on entering the pyramid alone.

  Asha ran forward past Wren as the flame-haired girl lowered her arms and stumbled back, her hands massaging her temples.

  The immortals will be hard to control, but the others will be weaker, slower to recover, slower to heal. And they’re afraid of Gideon’s sword. They may be rabid beasts, but they know danger when they see it. They know fear.

  This time when she called, the dragon answered and armored her hands in golden scales and ruby claws once again. She ran to the side, into the knot of feral slaves beside the fountain, and she struck. They rose to meet her, half a dozen men and women covered in feathers and scales, all with milky white eyes and shaking, clawing hands. Asha swung her armored fists again and again, knocking them aside, knocking them down, smashing them across the heads and chests and sending them sprawling across the ground and on top of each other. And in just a few moments, all of them lay gasping and groaning in a pile.

  “Asha!”

  She looked and saw Gideon grappling with Horus. The falcon-man had wrapped his talons around Gideon’s wrist to hold the seireiken away, and they were both struggling to control the blazing white weapon. Behind them both, Nethys spread her wings and leapt into the air, flying higher and higher into the afternoon sky until she vanished beyond the clouds. The horned woman Isis looked at Asha and bellowed, and then bent her thick legs and jumped to the rooftop behind her, and dashed out of sight.

  Asha glared upward at the escaping women as she ran around the fountain toward the men. “Gideon!”

  “Watch out!” he yelled.

  Horus yanked his arm around, brandishing the seireiken long with half of Gideon’s body to keep Asha back. But Asha dove to the ground beneath the sweep of the white blade and she smashed her armored fists into the falcon-man’s legs.

  Horus screamed his high falcon scream as he shoved Gideon back into the fountain, and then he too jumped for the high walls around them. He couldn’t take wing or even reach the rooftops, but he drove his talons into the stone walls and hauled himself up, and then he was gone as well.

  Asha and Gideon sat on the dusty ground, catching their breath and listening to Horus and Isis escape across the rooftops. After a moment, Asha noticed that her armor had vanished, and Gideon locked his sword away in his gauntlet, and they both glanced back at the creatures lying semi-conscious behind them.

  We should be trying to heal them, but there’s nothing I can do for them yet. No way to remove the needles. No way to even find the needles. Not yet. All I can hear from their souls is pain and panic. At least if we let them return to Lilith, she might care for them.

  Wren jogged up to the far side of the fountain, her elaborate black dress shining darkly in the sunlight. “I can give you a hand with them, pushing them back in, I mean. If you open the fountain for me.”

  Asha nodded.


  Credit where credit is due. This girl does not frighten easily. And she doesn’t shy away from doing what needs to be done.

  Together, they opened the fountain cover, just a bit, and dragged the poor deformed creatures to the edge and gently rolled them down into the darkness. Many strange animal sounds echoed up from the shadowed tunnel, but no hands or claws tried to escape again, and soon the fountain was back in place and all signs of the struggle had been erased.

  As soon as they were finished, Gideon said, “We need to go after the others. They rarely come out, and never in daylight, and never for long. They’re used to being close to Lilith. And if they’re afraid of us guarding this entrance to the undercity, they won’t be coming back here. They’ll try to find another way in.”

  “Are there other ways in?” Asha asked.

  “A few. There used to be more, but with all the changes to the city over the years, many of them were destroyed from the top, and Lilith sealed up others from the bottom.” Gideon shrugged. “I’m really not sure where they can go, let alone where they will go.”

  Asha nodded, and she was about to speak again when a white swirl of mist glided across the empty fountain and a slender, stern-faced youth stepped out of thin air. “Anubis?”

  “Is everyone all right?” he asked.

  “No thanks to you!” Wren snapped.

  “Stop!” Asha glared at the girl. “Calm down. He did the right thing. He can’t do what we can do. If he had stayed, he just would have gotten himself hurt, or worse. He made the right choice. He got out of the way.”

  Anubis made no sign that he was bothered by the exchange and he said, “I watched the encounter from the roofs and saw my mother and the others fleeing.”