Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Was it loving? Did they speak of it before hand, or afterwards? Or was it a shameful deed, one done in shadows and silence, and in haste?

  Did Isis know what they were doing? Did she suggest the union, or watch it, or even join in that evening’s bliss?

  “I understand that part,” Anubis said. “I understand that desire, and that decision. Right or wrong, I understand it. I don’t need to know any more about that night, except that it was my mother’s choice. She wanted me, and that is all that truly matters.”

  Horus let out a small noise that was part croak and part shriek, and then he started slowly climbing the steep hillside.

  “But then came all the rest. You were raised by our father, Osiris, and I was raised by Set, who must have known or at least suspected that I was not his,” Anubis said. He turned and began walking along the crest of the hill, still gazing up at the stars. “The vicious beatings, the drunken slurs against me and my mother, the senseless damage to our home. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t fear him. I feared the sound of his voice and the sight of his face. I even feared the thought that he might be nearby, standing somewhere close, just out of sight. So I stayed away as much as I dared. I played in the street, and I hid in the alleys, and sometimes I didn’t come home for days. I didn’t even have the courage to stay for my mother’s sake. And I saw what he had done to her, afterwards. There were always signs. But our so-called grandfather never saw the signs, never saw the shadow behind the light. All that he could see were Osiris and Set, two clever men who could help him in his search for answers, his obsession with sun-steel. So he made them both immortal, not because they deserved it but because it was convenient to him. And you and I, and our mothers, and little Bastet were all brought along with them, swept up in the wake of their great deeds like sea foam.”

  Horus reached the top of the hill and cried his falcon cry up to the stars. Out in the grasslands, a strange silence stretched across the land as even the locusts fell quiet in fear.

  Anubis turned and looked up into the hideous white eyes of his brother. “Does it help? Screaming like that? I can only imagine what you’re thinking and feeling, with your flesh so mangled, with your perceptions distorted, and your will subjugated. I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

  Horus glared down at him for a moment, and then swung his deadly talons at Anubis’s head. But instead of dissolving into the aether, Anubis raised his staff and caught the talons just before they struck him.

  “But then, life is so rarely fair, and we mere humans so rarely get what we deserve.” Anubis slipped into the aether and emerged behind the falcon-man, and cracked him over the head with his staff. When Horus shrieked and spun around, Anubis was already gliding around him through the mist, and he struck the beast in the head again from behind, and again, and again. Horus turned and turned, and screamed and swung his talons, but he was always too slow, and with one last strike Anubis sent him sprawling to his hands and knees with a dark splash of red across the feathers on the back of his skull.

  “It wasn’t fair when Set terrorized me and my mother,” Anubis said. “It wasn’t fair when Set was made immortal, despite his crimes. And it wasn’t fair when I had to see you smiling and laughing, and playing and studying with your father. Our father.”

  He brought the butt of his staff straight down on Horus’s back and the beast fell flat on his chest.

  “This is an old story. A common story. Fate and luck, violence and shame, and hate.” Anubis walked in a slow circle around his wheezing brother. “There is nothing special about this. Fathers and sons, and brothers. It’s common. It should be beneath us. Beneath me. And yet, here we are.”

  He kicked Horus in the head.

  “Born to the same father, born to sisters more alike than two blades of grass.” Anubis stopped walking and sighed. “But I lived in terror and misery, burning with rage and shame every waking hour of my life. And all the while, you played and laughed and loved right in front of me. Because Osiris married Isis instead of Nethys. And now I have to live with the memory of it, forever. It’s not your fault, Horus. You didn’t do this. I know that. And yet I hate you all the same. I think I hate you more than Set, actually. He was a monster, something dark and foul. It was easy to respect myself even as I hated him, because I knew I was better than him. But you? You were everything I wanted to be. You had everything I wanted to have. And most damning of all, you had no idea what happened to me. You didn’t just live in joy. You lived in innocence. Yes, I think that’s it. That’s what I hate so much about you. Your innocence. You escaped all the pain and darkness of my life by a twist of chance, and you never even knew it, never knew how lucky you were, never felt any gratitude for what you had. Maybe if you had known what my life was like back then, if you had ever felt a moment’s thankfulness for what you had, if you had ever let a shred of that darkness into your heart so you could understand what you really had, then I wouldn’t hate you. But no. You were perfect and pure, and you lived in paradise. And now, four thousand years later, you’re a deformed monster and I still hate you.”

  Anubis swung his staff down again, and Horus snatched it out of the air and yanked it out of his hands, throwing Anubis off his feet and sending him tumbling down the hillside. The world spun around and around, earth and sky and earth, and he wrapped his arms around his head and waited for it to stop. When he hit the ground at the bottom of the hill, Anubis stood up slowly, trying to control his breathing and focus on the distant, dark horizon to overcome the whirling vertigo spinning through his brain.

  “Horus?”

  Like any other bodily wound, the pain and disorientation in his head cleared quickly and he turned around to face the hill again. A scaled fist struck him in the stomach and sent him flying up and back through the warm night air, and he crashed down on his back into a thick bed of soft green grass with a hard grunt.

  Apart. I need to pull apart, into the aether…

  Thick, muscular talons wrapped around his face and lifted him off the ground by his head. He grabbed at the scaled claws, but they were as immovable as iron, tightening and crushing his skull even as his skull continued to heal itself in defiance.

  Apart…

  An instinctual part of his mind wanted to grab his staff and strike it on the ground, to complete the little ritual that he now associated with his transition into the world of mists. But deprived of his staff, deprived even of contact with the ground itself, his concentration stumbled. He couldn’t quite focus on the act of dissolving his body without the gesture, without the feeling in his arm, without the sound of the staff thumping on the dirt or cracking on the stone.

  Apart…

  The pressure on his head suddenly vanished. All sensations vanished as he faded into the mist and sank down and away from his brother’s scaled hand. Bright red drops of blood glistened on Horus’s talons in the starlight.

  Anubis let the aether carry him away from the beast and he stepped back out into the moonlight a few dozen paces away, where he knelt and retrieved his staff. He straightened up again and said, “Horus, can you still understand me?”

  The great falcon head swiveled to look at him, and nodded, and hissed.

  “Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you understand why I hate you?”

  Again Horus nodded, and began stalking slowly forward.

  “So tell me now, knowing what I’ve just told you, brother, do you regret the past? Our past, our childhood?” Anubis asked.

  Horus paused, his long lean frame hunching forward, his bloody talons curled and ready at his sides. The creature shook its head from side to side, and shrieked.

  Anubis clenched his staff and glared. “How dare you! You prideful, selfish, worthless filth!”

  Horus charged up the grassy slope and lunged at the black skinned youth with both hands. Anubis raised his staff to strike the earth, but a rough-skinned talon wrapped around his fingers, crushing his hand against the hardwood stick in his grip. The
youth cried out, gasping, his eyes fixed on his hand buried in the dark scaly fist. And he was still staring when a second fist struck him in the head.

  Anubis fell back and would have fallen to the ground if Horus had not kept his iron grip on his hand, holding him up, dangling him by his arm and his staff. The world flashed and sparkled for a moment and Anubis blinked hard as he hung there, helpless and trapped.

  Fast… he’s so fast…

  He tightened his grip on the staff still clenched in his hand, and felt Horus’s talons crush inward sharply, and he felt his fingers breaking one by one. Anubis gasped and fell to his knees.

  He said, “Look how far you’ve fallen, brother. Once the mighty warrior, the beloved prince of all Aegyptus, now nothing more than a rabid animal serving a filthy harlot who AAAAGH!”

  Anubis screamed as Horus lifted him up high into the air by his hand, wrenching Anubis’s arm to the side, dislocating his shoulder, and leaving him to dangle again, this time with his feet off the ground and his face hanging just in front of the falcon’s cruel beak.

  The falcon shook his head.

  “No?” Anubis whispered, struggling to breathe through the pain in his shoulder and the pressure stretching out his ribs and lungs as he swung from his useless arm. “What do you mean, no? No, you aren’t a hideous monster? No, you don’t serve Lilith?”

  Again, the falcon shook his head.

  “Of course you serve her, you idiot,” Anubis spat through his clenched teeth. “You live in her house, you bring innocent victims to her for her depraved experiments, and this very night you were terrorizing an entire neighborhood of helpless families in your desperation to return to her side.”

  Horus nodded once.

  “You know this is true? You know you’re her slave? Then why were you shaking your head?”

  Horus pointed at himself.

  “You?”

  Horus pointed at the ground.

  “Here?” Anubis frowned, trying to think through the pain in his arm and chest. And then the monster’s meaning became clear. “You mean to say that here and now, in this moment, you’re not her slave? You’re fighting me because you wish to?”

  Horus nodded, and then screamed in the youth’s face.

  Anubis winced, and then opened his eyes again. “I understand. Thank you.” He wrenched himself apart into the mist again, slipping free of the talons and the pain, and he drifted away across the grass to appear whole and healed a short distance away. “You want to hurt me, Horus? Then come here and hurt me.” He reached up and pulled his black jackal mask down over his face and let the drifting aether distort his appearance, blurring the line between flesh and wood, between man and beast.

  I am Anubis. I am Death.

  Horus screamed and raced toward him with talons raised.

  Anubis met the assault head-on, lashing out with his ironwood staff, striking high and low, smashing the falcon across the face and into the gut. The God of Death became a whirling black cyclone of fists and bludgeons, pounding and beating on the monstrous head of his half-brother again and again. Within moments, his arms began to tire, but he pressed through the aching pain as his hands cracked and tore and broke from striking the thick falcon skull and the powerful falcon beak. And yet he fought on.

  Horus reeled back, and tried to raise his talons to shield his head, but the blows fell fast and faster, and if he blocked high the strikes would come low, and soon the falcon was gasping for breath, clutching his bruised ribs and bleeding face.

  Anubis felt the rage seething through his pulsing hands and aching arms.

  This is our destiny. My revenge. His punishment. My justice. The universe has finally come into balance, and I shall be elevated as he is laid low.

  Anubis swept the falcon’s legs out from under him, dropping him to the earth, and he planted the butt of his staff in the hollow of Horus’s throat, making him croak and gasp.

  “If we were mortal creatures, I would kill you,” Anubis said. “And then perhaps I would kill myself just to end all the pain, and to silence all the memories. But such dramas are beneath us. You will suffer until I decide you have suffered enough, until I no longer care to see you suffer, and then it will end. Take solace in that. It is more hope than I ever had as a child. I lived every day with the question, will today be the day he kills me? So you see, I am kinder than fate itself. I promise you that your torments will end. When I have judged them to be enough.”

  Anubis lifted his staff away and stepped back. Horus rose slowly to his feet, staggering up as he clutched his throat.

  “Tonight, my task was to find you and restrain you until you could be cured. Restored. Set free.” Anubis nodded to himself. “All that will be yours, and soon. But for now, you shall know pain, until your heart is as heavy and as weary as mine.”

  And to hell with the rest of the world.

  Chapter 18

  Bastet flitted from street to street, from roof to roof, flying gracefully and effortlessly through the warm night’s aether in search of the sounds of violence.

  Where can they be? Nethys, Horus, where are you?

  She paused on the top of a brick chimney at the end of a new house, a long white estate built in the Italian style with many ornate arches and colored windows and covered walkways. There were two chimneys, one at each end of the main house, and Bastet wondered idly whether the people inside ever felt the need to build a fire in their hearths to keep warm, here on the Ifrican coast.

  There was no sign of the beastly immortals. No cries of fear or panic, no crash of breaking windows, no wails of frightened animals. All was quiet.

  Bastet stood still, feeling the warm breeze flowing through her skirts and hair as she scanned the heavens, naming constellations and searching for bright planets. She was staring up toward the west when she noticed a star she didn’t recognize. After four thousand years of stargazing, she had come to know them all quite well, and the sight of a bright white gleam without a name startled her, making her wonder if she was even looking to the west at all.

  And then she saw the star move.

  Squinting and frowning, she watched the star slowly creep across the sky, moving ever so slightly from north to south.

  Is it… growing larger?

  She went on watching the strange little star until she realized that she was hearing a strange little sound as well. It was a soft buzzing or droning, like an insect, or a wagon rolling through the street, or a steamship idling at anchor.

  An engine?

  Her eyes went wide.

  Taziri!

  Bastet clapped her hands and smiled up at the drifting star, watching it grow slowly larger and louder high above the western plains outside Alexandria.

  I can’t believe I almost forgot about her.

  Bastet skipped across the rooftops, drifting lightly through the aether on her way toward the western end of the city where the railways entered the metropolis from the provinces of Marmarica and Cyrenica, and farther still from Numidia and Marrakesh itself. She headed south toward the small rail yard where she had first met Taziri, huddled alone inside her machine, roasting in the Aegyptian heat. But then she paused.

  There’s no reason to think she’ll use the same line again. I’ll have to watch and wait, and follow her.

  As the moments passed, the light of the Halcyon III grew larger and sharper, and the droning of its engine grew louder. A faint outline appeared against the thin, silvery clouds and Bastet thought she recognized the round body and long wings of the aircraft, a dark wraith speeding across the night sky.

  I wonder what her magnet machine will look like. I hope it doesn’t hurt Isis and the others too much when it removes the sun-steel needles.

  The Halcyon banked and began a graceful descent toward the city. Faint streamers of smoke and vapor trailed from the metal wings.

  As Bastet stood on the roof of an old Mazdan Temple prayer tower, she felt a blast of wind shove her against the dusty tiles and she nearly fell from her perc
h as she grabbed the small iron spire at the top of the tower. Turning her head, she saw a huge black shape race past her, flapping its great gray wings as it climbed higher and higher into the sky, racing up toward the Mazigh aeroplane.

  Nethys! No, not now!

  Bastet ran off the edge of the roof and burst apart into a shimmering white aether mist and slipped upward into the sky as fast as she could will herself. The aether was thin up here and there was no current to speak of, so she had to propel herself by desire and thought alone. Faster and faster, she soared up into the warm darkness, flitting past the winged woman, and pushing harder and harder until she slipped through the metal walls of the flying machine and let her body snap back together again.

  Her momentum carried her across the cabin and she slammed shoulder-first into the far wall and crumpled to the floor.

  “What the…?” Taziri’s voice was faint over the hideous growling of the engine.

  “Turn!” Bastet wheezed. She straightened up as she struggled to catch her breath and blink away the pain in her side. “Turn left, now!”

  “Bastet?” The Mazigh pilot twisted around in her seat to look behind her.

  “TURN LEFT!” Bastet lunged forward against the pilot’s seat.

  “Turning!” Taziri shoved a lever and the entire cabin leaned to the left.

  Bastet felt herself floating off the floor for a brief, weightless moment before she fell to the floor again with a grunt.

  “Aah! What was that?” Taziri shouted. “I saw something out there! Bastet? Bastet?”

  The Aegyptian girl pushed herself up again and this time she wrapped both hands into the little canvas straps bolted into the walls to hold herself in place. “It’s Nethys. My aunt.”

  “Your aunt can fly?”

  “At the moment, yes.” Bastet squinted through the small windows in front of the pilot, but all she saw was darkness.