“You’re all safe now,” Asha said. “Do you all remember what happened? You were kidnapped, and brought down here below the city, and changed. But it’s all over now. You’re free, and you’re safe. We’re going to get you all home soon.”
They stayed there in the road for most of an hour, a bubble of light and life in the echoing darkness of the enormous cavern. When they were out of bandages and medicines, and everyone seemed fairly calm and in no danger of bleeding to death, Asha took Gideon aside.
“What should we do with them?” she asked. “I assumed we’d be saving them at the pyramid, that we would deal with all of this together. I wasn’t planning on saving them here alone.”
“If we take them back now, it will take hours,” he said. “Most of them can walk, but they’re in bad shape. And while I want to get them out of here, we’d be giving Lilith time to do… something else.”
“I know.” Asha glanced over at the door of a nearby tower. “Go in there and see if you can find anything that will burn.”
“A fire. Good idea.” He jogged away to the tower, taking the light of his sword with him. For a few minutes, the rest of the group stood and sat in the road, in the darkness, trying to stay calm and quiet while they listened to Gideon banging around inside the tower.
And then he emerged with an armload of broken chair legs and other bits of wood. Asha and Taziri went over and helped him move several large piles of broken furniture from the tower out into the road and when the bonfire was large enough, Gideon poked his seireiken at the corner of a single stick. It instantly caught fire, and soon the flames began to spread across the pile, throwing out bright sparks and belching out dark smoke that smelled of ancient Aegyptian wax and oil. Asha called out over the crowd, assuring them that she would come back and lead them to the surface soon, and that they should just stay and rest by the fire.
As they walked away from the people huddled around the bonfire, Taziri glanced back and said to Asha, “Does anyone else feel like that was the wrong thing to do? Just leaving them there like that?”
“It’s not ideal,” Wren said lightly. “But they are safe for the moment, and we have more work to do. Woden knows, if we spent the rest of the day taking care of them, Lilith could escape, or worse.”
“And it’s just that simple?” Taziri asked.
“Yes, it is.” Asha looked over at her. “It’s not kind. It’s not fair. But it is simple.”
They followed Gideon’s blazing white seireiken through the perpetual twilight realm of the silent city, their footsteps echoing faintly between the massive walls of the pyramids and columns. A colony of bats winged quietly overhead, squeaking softly high up near the ceiling of the cavern.
“There it is,” Gideon said.
Asha looked up and to her left and saw the pyramid. It looked much like all the other pyramids, and little about it was familiar from her first visit, except for the faint yellow signal fire high up at the apex of the ancient tomb.
“How many are in there, do you think?” Taziri asked.
Asha saw the sweat on the engineer’s face. Even without her scarf and coat, with her arms covered only by a thin white shirt to protect her from the cold of the undercity, she was sweating. Asha said, “I can only hear a few. Maybe four or five.”
“Lilith, Omar, and a handful of guards or servants.” Wren nodded. “Sounds easy compared to what we just did-”
A deafening roar filled the air, a roar that rose higher and bellowed louder and stretched on so long that Asha had to wince and cover her ears, and wave the others off the road with her elbows. Together, they all hurried across the road and slipped into the shadows behind an obelisk across from Lilith’s retreat, and it wasn’t until they were all off the road and Gideon had sheathed his blade that the roar died away.
“What in the nine hells was that?” Wren asked.
Gideon and Asha peered out into the darkness. Asha’s golden ear heard the murmur of souls, the rhythms of life, but she couldn’t identify what she was hearing. Human, beast, or otherwise.
“I can’t tell,” she said.
“Do we really need a name?” Gideon said with a frightened smile. “It’s big and mean. Was I the only one who got that impression?”
Wren straightened up. “Whatever it is, it’s alive and it has a soul. At least one, anyway. And that means I can hold it.” She stepped out onto the edge of the road and yelled up at the pyramid, “Come out, you hideous old hag! And bring your mangy dog with you!”
“What are you doing?” Taziri whispered as loudly as she dared. “You’re going to get us all killed.”
“It’s fine,” Wren said. “It doesn’t matter how large or strong the creature is. Not to the aether, and not to your magnet, and not to Gideon’s sword. We’re holding all the trumps here.”
Across the road at the base of the pyramid, a cloud of dust burst up from the ground as a deep shudder raced through the earth. Then the dust jumped again, this time with a metallic clang and the low grunting of a large, deep-throated animal. When the third impact came, Asha saw a large metal plate on the ground lift for an instant before it crashed back down against its locks and chains. And then all was still.
“What’s happening?” Taziri asked. “Where is it?”
Metal screamed and stone cracked, and the metal plate ripped free of its chains and flew high into the air with dust and pebbles trailing after it as it arced over the road and came streaking down toward the obelisk.
“Run, run!” Asha spun and grabbed Taziri’s arm to run back from the road down the dark alley. Gideon lingered at the roadside, beckoning to Wren to hurry back out of the open. A second later, the metal plate smashed into the ancient stone obelisk. The pillar exploded into large and small fragments of dust and etched sandstone, which rained down on the walls and ground and people.
Asha felt something strike her calf and her leg collapsed from beneath her. As she fell, Taziri turned to help her up just as another head-sized rock crashed down into the magnet device in her hand. The machine fell to the ground and all of the delicate wires and switches and screws were crushed and scattered into the darkness, leaving only the sun-steel rod intact, but trapped under the rubble. Taziri fell backward, clutching her arm as she struggled to get the heavy black battery off her shoulders. Asha rubbed her leg, finding it unbroken but bruised from knee to ankle and bleeding heavily from a long gash on the side. Standing up, she found she could put her weight on it and walk, though it hurt a great deal.
“Damn it.” Taziri stared down at the ruins of her invention. She looked up, devastated and lost. “I can’t fix it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about that now.” Asha helped Taziri up, and together they limped back toward the obelisk.
The huge metal plate rested on the shattered stump of the pillar like the lean-to shelters that Asha had once made as she traveled across the forests of India. Beneath the roof of the plate she saw a ragged mound of broken stones, some with smooth faces and some still bearing the ancient Aegyptian glyphs.
“Here, over here!” Taziri pointed at the ground at her feet and started digging with her uninjured hand.
Asha hurried over to help her. They could see Gideon’s head and shoulders, and underneath him, a large fox ear in a pool of dark red curls.
“Wren? Wren!” Asha grabbed the stones on Gideon’s back and dragged them off. “Wren!”
Gideon coughed.
There was one very large chunk of the obelisk lying across the soldier’s back, pinning him down. Asha set her feet, slipped both hands under it, and pulled with all her strength. The stone didn’t move, and neither did Wren.
“Wren, can you hear me?” Asha yelled through clenched teeth as she strained to move the stone.
Move, damn you, move!
As the jagged edges of the rock cut into her hands, she felt the dragon stir.
Not you, I don’t need you!
Still, the dragon purred and growled, and an angry heat began to build in her chest. She glanced down and saw the golden scales on her hands and on her feet. The rock began to rise.