“What should we do now?” the girl asked softly.
“We should see to the body,” Asha said.
Bastet laughed through the sniffs and breathless gasps. “He was the God of Death. I suppose we could preserve his body as the ancient kings did.”
“How do we do that?”
Bastet sniffed and sat up straighter. “Well, we remove the organs and seal them in jars, and then fill the body with embalming fluid and wrap it in cloth, and then place it in a golden sarcophagus and seal it away in a tomb built by fifty thousand slaves.”
Asha blinked. “Oh.”
“Or maybe not,” Bastet whispered. “We’ll send him to his mother in the old way.”
Together they gathered armfuls of dry branches and grasses and piled them on the warm earth with the sun rising brighter and warmer by the moment. Asha placed the body on the pyre, and Bastet kissed her cousin’s cheek.
Then Asha lit the kindling with Bastet’s flint and they both stood back and watched the flames flicker and grow, and consume the body of the God of Death.
When the fires had died down to glowing embers and smoking ashes, the two women turned and began wading back through the tall grasses toward the dusty road and the distant outline of Alexandria.
“If it could be done, would you choose to be mortal again?” Asha asked.
“Yes,” Bastet said without a moment’s pause to consider the question. “I’ve had more than enough time to learn what it means to be twelve. But I know I can never go back, and it’s all right. A long time ago, I asked Grandfather whether he could undo it, and he said he couldn’t, so I’ve had a long time to live with the idea that this will never change. That I will never change.”
“Why couldn’t he undo it?”
“Because only a seireiken could destroy the pendant, and then the sword would swallow that piece of my soul inside the sun-steel heart.”
“And then that piece of your soul would just be trapped in another piece of sun-steel,” Asha realized.
“Yes.”
“But what if you could destroy the pendant another way? With something that wasn’t made of sun-steel? Something that would let that piece of your soul go back to you?”
Bastet pouted as she considered it. “Then I suppose I might be mortal again.”
Asha nodded and together they walked back to the city.
Chapter 26
It took most of the morning for Asha to walk back to the warehouse with Bastet, where she found Gideon and Wren sharing a breakfast of steaming hot fuul medames and t’aamiyya, both of which she discovered were full of fava beans and wonderful spices. They ate in the shadows of their chained prisoners and Bastet quietly related the last moments of Anubis to Gideon, who took the news with a strangely grim silence that Asha thought bordered on rage, but quietly subsided and he was soon himself again, though far less boisterous and less inclined to smile.
It was nearing noon when Wren said, “Should one of us go check on the lady with the machines?”
“Taziri.” Bastet looked up, her face still looking pale and haunted. “Her name is Taziri.”
“I’ll go,” Asha said.
“No, this time I’ll go.” Gideon stood up quickly. “I need to stretch my legs anyway.” And he strode out of the warehouse.
“He doesn’t like being sad,” Bastet said. “I don’t think he really knows how to be sad, actually. Like asking a mute to sing, he just doesn’t know how, and I think he’s ashamed of it. Like it’s a flaw, something he’s failing to do.”
Asha frowned and glanced toward the doors, but the soldier was already gone.
For the next hour, the three women talked in low voices about death and monsters. Bastet described some of the horribly deformed people that Lilith had created and released into the city over the last few years. Wren talked about a huge fox demon that had besieged a city at the top of the world, and her friend who had died fighting it. And Asha told them both about the bear she once fought in India, and the basilisk she discovered in Rajasthan, and the golden dragon she faced in the hills above Damascus with the immortal warrior Nadira, and her friend Priya.
Their mood was as gray as the light coming through the narrow warehouse windows when Gideon finally returned with Jiro and Taziri. They carried a long box between them, which they set on the floor and uncovered to reveal the product of their labors.
“That’s it?” Wren asked.
“That’s it,” Taziri said. “An aetherium electromagnet.”
Asha studied the device lying in its bed of straw. The sun-steel core drew her eye first. It was a long reddish gold cylinder the length and width of her arm, and it gleamed even in the weak light inside the warehouse.
Raw sun-steel. Virgin. Not yet forged into a tool or weapon. Not yet charged with the souls of the dead… or the living. It’s almost pretty.
Asha moved on from the cylinder to the looping copper wires and bands that encircled the bottom half of the sun-steel, ringing it without touching it. These wires spiraled inward toward the base of the cylinder where they ended in a block of black-grained wood, and the encircling wires were connected to yet more wires that snaked over the straw to a large black case that had two canvas straps bolted into it.
“How does it work?” the herbalist asked.
“It’s very simple,” the Mazigh woman said. “You press this switch and aim it at whatever you want to attract.”
Asha nodded. “All right. Then I believe we should test it.” She turned and looked up at Isis and Horus. The mother and son hung by their wrists, both very still and quiet, their white eyes barely open. The youth’s falcon head dipped forward, almost touching his beak to his chest. The steer-woman’s head rested on one of her up-stretched arms, her curving horns looking dull and gray in the half-light and her shaggy, hoofed legs dangling just above the floor.
Taziri looked up at Jiro. “Would you care to do the honors?”
“No.” The smith backed away. “I wouldn’t.”
With a shrug and a grin, Taziri lifted the black case and slipped the canvas straps over her shoulders to wear the contraption on her back. Then she hefted the sun-steel cylinder and its wire rings by a pair of black wooden handles and stepped away from the crate. She winced just a little as she took the full weight of her invention on her back and shoulders, but she walked easily across the smooth warehouse floor.
She reached up with one hand to quickly pull her brass-rimmed goggles over her eyes and she glanced over at the others. “You should probably get back, just to be safe.”
The group shuffled over behind her.
“No, no, not behind me,” Taziri said, jerking her head toward the far wall. “Over there. Away from me.”
The group shrugged and shuffled over to the gap between two towers of crates.
“All right. Here we go.”
Asha watched as Taziri flicked the switch on the device and then aimed the red-gold cylinder of sun-steel up at the two prisoners. Instantly, a high-pitched whine unlike anything Asha had ever heard before sliced through her mind, forcing her to cover her ears and narrow her eyes to slits. In that same instant, both of the hanging prisoners swung forward on their chains, swinging toward the Mazigh woman. Both the falcon-man and the steer-woman jerked their heads up, their eyes wide with shock, and the warehouse erupted with avian shrieks and bovine screams as the prisoners shook and writhed between the chains holding them up and the device pulling them down.
“I’m turning it up!” Taziri shouted over the noise.
Asha winced as the high-pitched whine rose even higher and louder, and just as she was about to look away, to shuffle farther back from the hideous sound, she saw the needles. Tiny golden glints of light appeared on Isis’s hairy legs and hoofed feet, and the same metallic gleams appeared on Horus’s feathered head and scaled hands. Both of them screamed and shook against their chains, making the heavy beams overhead groan and crack as trickles of dust fell from the roof, but the rafters held.