Chapter 8
Asha knocked on the door and then stepped back into the street beside Anubis. There was little traffic on the road itself and most of the noise of the city rose from the water just a hundred paces away to their right. Steamers blasted their horns and trawlers rang their bells, and men were shouting about ropes, fish, and oil.
The house in front of them was an ancient stone block with a flat roof standing shoulder to shoulder with half a dozen other stone blocks. The doors were all neatly spaced apart, and there were no windows to give them any hint of what, or who, might be inside.
“What if he isn’t here?” she asked.
“Then no one will answer the door,” Anubis replied.
She frowned at him just as the door clicked and swung open, revealing a very tall man. Asha recognized him as an easterner, though he didn’t quite look like the doctors or monks she had known in Ming. He had shaved his head, but not recently judging by the darkening stubble on his scalp. He wore no beard, and his cheeks and eyes were marked with many fine lines that could have been from laughing or squinting, but didn’t appear to be from age.
He might have been forty or fifty, and his hands were heavily veined, his fingers criss-crossed with countless tiny white scars, and his bare feet showed bright calluses around the edges. Over his lean frame he wore a light brown shirt with wide, loose sleeves and matching trousers that all shuddered and rippled in the breeze blowing off the harbor.
“Yes?” he said. His eyes darted over Asha, but lingered on Anubis.
“I am Asha of Kathmandu,” the herbalist said. “Are you Master Jiro, formerly of the Temple of Osiris?”
He leaned out the doorway just a bit to look up and down the empty street. “I was.”
He stepped out into the road and crossed his arms over his chest, slipping his right hand into his left sleeve and his left hand into his right sleeve, out of sight.
Asha wondered what might be hidden in those sleeves. “We’re trying to find someone who was taken from us last night. We think his life is in danger,” she said. “We have already learned a good deal about the people who took him, but there is a piece of the puzzle missing, and we were told you might be able to help us.”
Jiro continued to peer down at them both with a very calm yet stern expression. “I am no longer with the temple. I do not know what happens there now.”
“Nothing happens there now,” Anubis said. “The temple was destroyed last night, and many Osirians were killed, by the very woman standing before you.”
“Truly?” Jiro narrowed his eyes a bit. He whipped his right hand from his sleeve and Asha saw the blazing white line of a small sun-steel knife. Jiro held the knife not tightly in his fist but loosely between two fingers, and he lunged at Asha’s throat with a deft and graceful flick of his blinding white blade.
We don’t have time for this!
Asha lashed out and grabbed the man’s wrist, wrapped her golden-scaled fingers around the small bones behind his hand, and she squeezed. The sun-steel knife clattered to the ground and the man gasped. Asha let her claws extend from her fingertips, bright flashing shards of ruby that sliced gently into his sleeve and pressed down against his skin.
Jiro winced, but made no sound. He grimaced for a moment, and then Asha felt his arm go slack in her grip. She released him and he stepped back to rub his injured arm.
“You’re one of them,” he said. “One of her monsters?”
“No,” Asha said. “I’m something else.”
She bent down and picked up the sun-steel knife with her armored hand, holding it up for the easterner to see. And then she crushed the blade between her golden fingers, letting her blazing red claws melt and shred the metal into twisted scraps that dripped on the street. She dropped the remains of the knife, its blade dark and deformed. A thin cloud of aether drifted up from the ruined sun-steel and Asha said a silent prayer for the souls that were now tasting their first moments of freedom since the day they died.
“I’ve come to stop her,” Asha said. “I’ve come to free the people she has taken. I’ve also come to free all the souls that the Osirians have taken. But I have no quarrel with you, Master Jiro. I need your help to stop Lilith and to rescue my friend, a man called Omar Bakhoum.”
He looked at her sharply. “Master Omar has returned?”
“Yes,” Asha said. “He returned, apparently to destroy the Temple of Osiris, only I arrived a little before him and did the deed myself. Now I need your help to save him, and to continue his work.”
“So, he wishes to destroy the temple? If I was any other man of the temple, I would not believe you. But I understand his wishes. I myself left the temple for many reasons. Lilith was one of them.” Jiro nodded thoughtfully. “Regardless, it does not appear that it is within my power to refuse you, Asha of Kathmandu. Therefore, I ask that you overlook my actions a moment ago, and allow me to welcome you into my home.”
Asha shook her hand and let the anger wash out of her, and felt her skin become her own again. She and Anubis followed Jiro inside, and he closed the door behind them. The interior of the stone building was much the same as the exterior, and the entire home was a single room with a rear door in addition to the front one. Thin rectangular mats lay on the floor at perfect right angles to the walls, and circular cushions sat along the edges of the mats beside a low table. There were no chairs. A fragile-looking screen divided the front of the space from the back, and behind it she glimpsed a bed of thin blankets and several small shelves and jars in the corner. The light in the room fell through a single window, not in a wall, but in the ceiling.
Jiro sat on one of his round cushions and gestured to them to sit beside him, which they did. “How can I help you?”
Asha said, “Last night, Omar was taken by two strange creatures. The woman had feathered wings for arms, and the man had the head of a dog.”
“An aardvark,” Anubis corrected.
“Nethys and Set,” Jiro said. “I did not think they would be so bold, or so reckless, as to be seen by strangers in the streets. I suppose the destruction of the temple caused them some alarm.” He turned to the black youth. “And you, sir? Who are you?”
“My name is Anapa, and I live here in the city,” Anubis said. “I saw the abduction as well, and I wish to help this lady to find her friend, and to learn more about these creatures we saw.”
Jiro nodded. “I understand your curiosity, but I know these two, Nethys and Set. The people they take do not come back. I doubt even Master Omar could escape this fate. He is gone. You must accept that.”
“I don’t,” Asha said. “And I’m going to find him. But first we need to know what you were making for Lilith.”
Jiro looked at her sharply. “How do you know of that?”
“I have well-informed friends,” she answered. “I know you made her something, something forged from sun-steel ingots, something you delivered in wooden boxes.”
“Zahra!” Jiro frowned. “You heard this from that woman, didn’t you?”
“Does it matter?” Anubis asked.
Jiro gave him a long, flat look. “No, it does not.”
“Then please, can you tell us what you made for Lilith?” Asha asked.
The man frowned for a long silent moment before he said, “Each box contained three hundred needles, each the length of my finger, sharpened at one end and blunted at the other.”
“Sun-steel needles?” Anubis asked. “For what?”
Asha opened her medicine bag and sorted carefully through her small jars, paper envelopes, mirrors, lenses, vials, and tools until she found what she needed, and held it up for the men to see. The golden needle in her hand was long and slender, with three faint notches scored into its side near the pointed end. “Were they like this?”
Jiro leaned forward to look at the needle in her hand. “Similar, but smaller. Where did you get that?”