“No! I’m begging you, don’t do it!” Omar pulled on his chains. “Lilith! Please!”
She smiled and dropped the pendant onto the blazing sword, and the little heart vanished in a flash of light and hiss of aether.
Bastet shook his shoulders. “Anubis?”
She glanced down at the wound and saw that it was no longer closing, no longer knitting itself shut, no longer shrinking away. And the steady trickle of blood at the edge of the torn flesh had stopped trickling, stopped pulsing with the faint beating of the young man’s heart.
“Anubis?”
She touched his cheek and gasped. It was cold. And as she peered down at him in the twilight gloom, she saw the change in his skin and hair, no longer shining black but dull gray like old stone.
“No, no, no…”
Bastet shook his shoulders again, and patted his cheek, and held her ear over his dry lips. But there was no warm, no breath, no life at all.
“Anubis?” She felt the tears running down her cheeks as her own breath caught in her throat.
No, not him, not now, no, no…
“Anubis?” She lay down beside him in the bloody grass, put her arm across his cold body, and closed her eyes, clutching his bloody tunic tightly in her little hands, praying for sleep, and praying to wake from this nightmare soon.
Chapter 22
Taziri glanced over her shoulder for the tenth time at the quiet man sitting in the first passenger seat. Jiro had only given the Halcyon III one quick distrustful look as they climbed on board, and over the following half hour, while she started the engine and backed the Mazigh locomotive out onto the main rail lines and struck out southward from the station, he had merely folded his arms over his chest and bowed his head, eyes closed.
Either he’s sleeping, or he’s trying not to be motion-sick.
Now as they clacked along through the poorer neighborhoods on the west side of Alexandria, Taziri found herself wishing that she wasn’t alone with this man. Both of them struggled to speak Eranian clearly enough for the other to understand them, and their brief moment of bonding over the aetherium magnet had been shattered along with the man’s workshop. He withdrew from her the moment that they emerged from under his work table, and he remained quiet and distant now.
The pieces of the magnet sat on the seat next to him. The battery, the wires, the switches. They were a bit dusty and dented, but all still intact.
The sun continued westward and the day’s heat began to fade, though the heat and noise inside the Halcyon made it difficult to enjoy the view. While the mechanical camouflage made the Halcyon appear to be a common steam-powered locomotive, it was in fact still driven by the same diesel engine that spun the propeller when the craft took to the air, and that engine, for all its marvels, was loud and dirty and hot.
“Are you all right back there?” she asked.
He grunted, arms still folded, head still bowed.
I’ll take that as a yes.
Taziri increased their speed as they left the small homes of Alexandria behind them and struck out southward from the city, speeding along the rails across the lush green plains. The railroad ran parallel to a wide dusty highway and to either side of them she could see vast tracts of farmland, huge fields of green growing things in carefully plowed lines, with dozens of women and children out among them, checking their crops and pulling weeds and fending off birds.
“It should only take another half hour or so to find this place,” she said over her shoulder. “Bastet’s directions were pretty clear, so I’m not worried about getting lost.”
Jiro grunted.
“So I take it that you’ve never been to this House of Geb before?”
Jiro sighed and rubbed his eyes. “No.”
“No.” Taziri nodded. “I got the impression from Bastet that it was one of her grandfather’s secrets. Someplace old that no one uses anymore. Does that sound right to you?”
Jiro did not answer.
Taziri shrugged.
We’ll find out when we get there.
They chuffed on down the line, beyond the softly rolling hills of the farmland and into a sparse forest of short trees and thick shrubs where Taziri saw all manners of flowers on the ground and in the bushes, and she wondered what sorts of berries they might grow in the weeks to come. Eventually, they reached the branch line that Bastet had described and Taziri turned off the main track to head east, and they rolled on through the woods, slower now, and more quietly.
Half an hour later than she had hoped, they arrived. Taziri let the Halcyon coast to a stop and she shut down the engine so she could peer out the windows in silence. “Now that is interesting.”
The branch line emerged from the woods into a clearing where the tracks ended at a pile of leftover ties that lay rotting on the ground, covered in mushrooms. And beside the tracks stood the house. It was a stone house, ancient and cracked, but well-scrubbed by the rain and wind, and the stone was bright gray. The house itself was round, shaped like a huge cheese wheel, and from its center rose a short roofed tower, just barely large enough for a single person to stand inside, and someone was standing inside it now. Taziri only had a moment to focus on the pale dots of the eyes staring back at her before they disappeared, and she heard the muffled sounds of movement inside the building.
“Someone’s in there, and they’ve seen us.” Taziri unlocked her safety harness and climbed out of her pilot’s seat. “Bastet didn’t say anything about there being people here. Do you suppose they’re friends of hers, or her grandfather’s, or maybe…”
Jiro stood up sharply, but paused to place one hand against the metal wall of the cabin to steady himself as he rubbed his eyes one last time and swallowed loudly. Then he slipped past her and opened the hatch, saying, “Wait here.”
Taziri watched him step out into the grass and dash across the overgrown lawn to the door of the house. “Wait here? It’s a house, not a war zone.” Shaking her head, she climbed down from the hatch and closed it behind her, and then walked softly across the lawn to stand beside the tall smith.
He frowned at her. Then he pointed back at the house and held up two fingers.
“Two of them, huh?” Taziri nodded.
He glared and placed his hand over her mouth.
She shook him off, and gave him a tired look. “Listen, I came here to do a job for a friend, not to play games in the woods. We’re all civilized people.” She stepped away from the wall to stand in front of the door and called out, “Hello? Is anyone home? We were sent to collect some materials here. Hello?”
The front door swung open and banged lightly against the frame. Taziri peered into the darkness within the house, and two angry orange lights sprang to life. The burning swords hummed softly in the shadows, and cast a faint gleam on the faces of the men holding them.
Seireikens! The Sons of Osiris. But are they here to guard the house, or to loot it?
Taziri took several steps back from the doorway and saw Jiro, still flattened against the wall where the two men couldn’t see him, drawing a steel knife from his sleeve.
Taziri held out her empty hands. “I’m not here to fight you gentlemen. I was sent here to pick up some supplies. It’s very simple. I was sent for a bar of aetherium. I mean, sun-steel. Sun-steel, you have some here, yes?”
The blazing orange swords seemed to float in the darkness and they emerged slowly onto the lawn with the grim Sons of Osiris robed in dark green. Jiro now stood behind them, his knife ready. The two men raised their swords, still exchanging curious looks with each other and studying Taziri’s knee-high boots, buff trousers, and leather flight jacket. The men whispered something, and one of them nodded as he raised his sword.
Taziri grabbed the cuff of her left jacket sleeve and shoved the warm leather to her elbow. “You gentlemen should know, before you do something that you might regret, that I have a friend, well, he used to be a co-worker and now he’s more of an acquaintance, really. Anyway, he taught me something once that seems very, very appropriate to this situation.”