“It’s true,” the woman slurred through her labored breathing. She teetered slightly on her feet as though drunk or on the edge of exhaustion. She held her long serpentine arms away from her body, and whenever one of her tentacles gently brushed her leg, she shivered and looked ill. “She was far away, but she pushed us with the wind.”
Omar shrugged. “It sounds to me that your lovelies, as you call them, have a bit of a balance problem, if they can be knocked down by the wind. Of course, if this one here is anything to judge by, I’d say they have more than a few problems. Maybe one day you’ll have your technique perfected, but not yet. Not nearly. I wish you’d put them back the way you found them, and let the poor things go.”
“What are you saying?” Lilith pouted and said in a mockingly childish tone, “There’s nothing wrong with my darlings. They’re each exactly what I created them to be. You didn’t think I would be foolish enough to create some sort of master race of perfect children, did you? Poor old Bashir! You should know better. They’re not meant to be perfect people. Only perfect servants.”
“Oh, I see.” Omar gave up pulling on the chains and trying to lie comfortably on the shackles. “So that’s what you’ve been doing for the past two thousand years? Designing the perfect handmaiden, with scales and feathers?”
Lilith’s expression hardened from petulant child to cruel mistress. “For the past two thousand years, I have been doing precisely what you asked me to do. Studying the art of soul-breaking. That was the agreement, the price of my immortality. Or have you forgotten?”
“Oh no, I haven’t forgotten,” Omar said. “I just wish you had. Nadira and Gideon walked away, you know. You should have as well. There’s nothing to find at the end of these paths. Sun-steel, aether, and soul-breaking. It doesn’t lead to revelations or salvation. Just pain and suffering, and regrets. So many regrets.”
“No regrets,” Lilith said. “Just look around. I’m a queen here, the mistress of hundreds of lives and fates, a shaper of flesh as well as spirit.”
“You live in a cave,” he observed. “A very big cave, I’ll grant you, but a cave nonetheless. Why are you down here in the dark? The Aegyptians came down here to escape from public life, and frankly I thought they went about it the wrong way, but it was their choice. But now you’re here too. Underground. In the dark.”
“Don’t be thick,” she said. “I don’t care about palaces and treasures anymore. I care about my work, something you taught me, as I recall. And this is the ideal place for me to carry on. Plenty of aether, a source of unrefined sun-steel, and an endless supply of live raw materials.” She cast a cruel smile at the young woman with the tentacle-arms.
“To what end?” Omar closed his eyes and rested his head back on the hard edges of the straps and buckles around his neck. “I mean, what’s the point? In a hundred years, or a thousand, what are you hoping to accomplish with all this? Where is it all going?”
“I don’t know,” Lilith said. She sat down sideways in a large wooden chair beside him and draped her legs over the arm. “I really don’t. Knowledge for its own sake, I suppose. What is possible? What’s waiting for us? It’s a mystery, and I enjoy mysteries.”
“Knowledge is all well and good, but using it to torture these people is not at all well or good,” Omar said. “If you can’t learn without hurting people, then you shouldn’t be learning.”
Lilith sighed. “Is there really any difference whether this girl lives fifty years up there or five days down here, with arms or with tentacles? Is there really? She’ll die either way and history will forget she ever existed. At least this way, her life contributes to something larger. To knowledge. To the future.”
Omar rolled his eyes.
Was this really me? Did I put these thoughts in her head and these words in her mouth?
“When I first set out to learn about souls, and to invent immortality, as it were,” Omar said slowly. “I didn’t experiment on people. I didn’t even experiment on animals.”
“No, you experimented on yourself,” Lilith said. “And a noble effort it was, too. Fortunately, you managed to stumble upon exactly what you were looking for before you killed yourself, or devolved into some sort of hairy little beastie.”
Omar sighed. “You’re not listening.”
“I am listening. You’re just not saying anything I haven’t heard before, or thought of before. I’m not stupid, Bashir,” she said. “I’m not blinded by ambition or twisted by my immortal pride, or whatever it is you’re thinking right now.”
“I’m thinking that being physically tortured was less tortuous than listening to you justify torturing others,” he said. “Yes, you’re very clever, and yes, you’ve done remarkable things, and no, I don’t care about any of that. You’re a monster, living in a cave, making monsters.”
She stood up and leaned over him, her lovely face hovering just above his. “You made me first,” she whispered.
“I know,” he whispered back. “And I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m not.” She pushed away from him and crossed the room to a table covered in mismatched plates and glasses of mostly fresh fruits and breads, and she began to pick and nibble at the stolen feast. “So tell me, old man, when exactly did you have this little change of heart? I know you were still making immortals up in Rus five hundred years ago, so it must have been later than that.”
“Actually,” Omar said, “it was only a few weeks ago. Those two immortals in Rus were… a mistake. A terrible mistake. I found them in Constantia this past winter, and they were, just, well, out of control. Koschei had become a butcher, and Yaga had some sort of breakdown. He just wanted to kill, and she just wanted to die.”
“So what happened to them?”
“I killed Koschei,” Omar said softly. “And Yaga killed herself.”
Lilith sighed. “So you made a mistake. Who hasn’t? We may be immortal, but we are still only human. I make mistakes all the time. It’s called learning. It’s also called science.”
“No, this isn’t science.” Omar stared up at the blank stone ceiling. “This isn’t even philosophy. This is just a handful of people who can’t die, making the world worse instead of better. Hurting people instead of helping people. I never wanted it to turn out this way. I never imagined it would turn out this way. But here we are.”
“I see. And since you’ve had this little crisis of faith, all of a month ago, the rest of us have to pay the price for your guilty conscience?” She paced back toward him with a crust of brown bread in her hand, and she broke off small pieces to nibble one by one. “Is that why you came back to Alexandria? To kill off your little cult of Osiris, and then to kill the immortal Aegyptians, too? Tell me. Were you planning to stab little Bastet in the chest or in the back?”
“Shut up.”
“Oh? So you weren’t planning to kill her? Who exactly were you planning to kill? Me, obviously. What about Gideon and Nadira?”
Omar tried to move his hand to rub his eyes, but the shackles kept his hand up above his head. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I just want to undo what I’ve done. Yes, I came to dismantle the temple and destroy the sun-steel. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to kill anyone in the process. Yes, I knew it might be necessary, but I still hoped otherwise.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now?” Omar shrugged. “Now I’m chained to a table, and you have my seireiken, and unless you plan to kill me with it, I expect I’m going to be here for a very long time.”
Lilith glanced over at the sheathed sword leaning in the corner. Then she pranced gracefully over to it and swept it up in her arms and danced back to the table to present it to Omar. “Your sword, sir.”