She got her sleeve up to her elbow, revealing the brass and aluminum medical brace that covered her forearm, protecting her old burns. Two sturdy rods connected the brace to the glove on her left hand, providing the strength and support that her wrist could no longer offer. She reached over and pulled back a small switch and the top half of the brace swung open, allowing the modified revolver to rise and click into place, and a small metal arm swung up into her left hand, placing the gun’s trigger against her finger.
“He taught me to always bring a gun to a knife fight.” She pointed the revolver strapped to her arm at one of the swordsmen, and then the other. “Now I’ll ask you one last time. I would like one rod of sun-steel. Please.”
The Osirian with the raised sword grimaced, and charged at her.
Taziri fired twice and both men fell to the ground, groaning and wailing. The seireikens tumbled into the grass, which began to smoke and crackle with fire. She circled around them and walked up to the doorway where Jiro was looking at the fallen men as he slipped his knife away.
“I thought the Mazigh people disapproved of killing,” he said.
“We do, generally,” she said. “Which is why I shot them both in the knee.”
Jiro frowned.
“Fine, you watch them while I find the aetherium. Sun-steel. Whatever.” Taziri ducked inside the house and found it a rather pleasant and airy place with wide open windows and a tidy arrangement of small tables and chairs and beds. Spartan as it was, everything appeared to be in good order, right down to the spoons and knives laid out beside the wash basin to dry.
A wooden ladder in the center of the room led up into the little watch tower, and near the base of this ladder was a door in the floor. She flipped the door up and found a wooden staircase leading down into the cellar. From the bottom of her medical brace, Taziri pulled out a small flashlight, turned it on, and set it between her teeth as she started down the steps with both hands on the rails to guide her.
In the cellar she found a single dirt room, also just as neat and tidy as the room above, with two long crates stacked against the wall. She opened the top crate and found a half dozen rods of golden aetherium nestled in a bed of straw. After taking a moment to fold up and lock away the revolver into her brace, she picked up two of the rods and went back upstairs.
Never hurts to have a spare.
Outside she saw Jiro standing over the grim-faced Osirians clutching their bleeding knees. The smith held both of the sheathed seireikens in his hands.
“We’re all set,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“And them?” Jiro pointed at the men on the ground.
“Leave them.” Taziri shrugged.
“Master Omar wanted the temple destroyed,” Jiro said. “We should honor his wishes and kill these men as well.”
“I don’t know who Master Omar is, and I don’t care. We’re not executing two wounded, helpless men. They’re in the middle of nowhere, unarmed, in possession of a metal that no one except you knows how to forge properly,” Taziri said, continuing over to the Halcyon. “So leave them, and let’s get going. We have a machine to build and people to save. And the faster, the better. I have a family, two businesses, and hundreds of students to get back to, and I don’t like wasting time.”
Jiro hesitated, and then followed her on board the Halcyon.
With no switches or turntable on the tracks, Taziri was forced to drive the locomotive backward along the line, minding the rails ahead through the mirrors on either side of her cockpit. Confident of where she was going, but not quite as confident that the Aegyptian rail authority might have another train on the line, she left the branch line in the woods and rejoined the main track heading north back to Alexandria, and all the way home she kept a close eye on the rails ahead, dreading the thought of seeing some ramshackle excuse for an Eranian engine huffing toward her. She didn’t try to talk to Jiro this time.
I think he really was motion-sick. Best to leave him alone for now.
Only once on the long ride home did she see another train on the line, and she saw it with ten minutes to spare, giving her plenty of time to stop and back up onto a siding to let the Eranian freight train pass before she set out again, and they reached the rail yard without incident shortly after sunset. Taziri pulled the Halcyon into a shed and hopped out to close the doors and hide her machine from prying eyes. When she came back, Jiro was stepping out of the hatch with their sun-steel magnet in his arm.
“You finished it?” she asked with a smile.
“I bolted it back together, like we had it before,” he said. “But you’ll have to finish these wires.”
“She took the device from him and set it down on a bench near the door of the shed. “Nice work. I thought you didn’t feel well in there. I didn’t think you were working on this.”
“Working kept my mind occupied,” he said.
“Oh. Good.” She reached into her jacket for her tools. “Let’s go ahead and finish this up right now, before another building falls on us.”
He nodded and sat beside her on the bench, holding the device up to the light so she could see the loose wires and switches.
“So, who is this Omar person you were talking about?” she asked as she set to winding wires around screws and tightening connections.
“Omar Bakhoum is one of the high masters of the Sons of Osiris.”
“You don’t say. And he wants to wipe them all out now? Why the change of heart?”
“It’s not my place to say,” Jiro said. “He is a complex man. Although it occurs to me that you may also know him as Bastet’s grandfather.”
Taziri paused. “Her grandfather is an Osirian? I thought he was an ancient immortal, like her.”
“He is both.”
“And how do you know this? Are you immortal too?”
“No,” Jiro said. “Long ago, a man named Thoth came to my homeland and established the Temple of Amaterasu, where the first seireikens were forged and the study of aether and sun-steel truly began. It was centuries later when this man Thoth created the Temple of Osiris here in Alexandria to serve the same purpose. Here, he is known by many names, the most recent of which is Omar Bakhoum. But in Nippon, we know his true identity, as well as the secret to forging sun-steel into weapons.”
“So you came from the temple in Nippon to work at the temple here?”
“Yes. The Tigers of Amaterasu do not share the secret of forging sun-steel with the Sons of Osiris.” Jiro smiled. “It is a very old rivalry.”
“I see.” Taziri turned her attention to attaching her battery to the magnet. “So who else knows all this about the immortals and sun-steel and Omar?”
“Here? No one. Only the immortals themselves, and the Tigers from the east, know this secret. And now you, of course.”
Taziri shrugged. “It’s a funny world.”
Jiro frowned. “You seem unimpressed.”
Taziri smiled as she worked. “A girl who can walk through walls asked me here to build a machine that can pull aetherium needles out of immortal monster-people. And she asked me because I’ve done this sort of thing before. Sort of. Just another day at the office for me, I guess. But if it will make you feel better, I can try to act more surprised the next time something like this comes up.”
Jiro sighed.
Chapter 23
Asha sat on the wooden crate beside Wren all afternoon, watching the shadows slide across the floor of the warehouse and listening to the soft tinkling and jangling of the chains that held Isis suspended above the floor.
For a time, Asha had stared up at Isis purely as a healer, trying to understand what was happening to this person’s body, what she was feeling, what she was thinking. The physical changes were like nothing she had ever seen on another living creature. Hairy steer flesh, toes fused into hoofs, horns erupting from the skull.