Chapter 26
It took most of the morning for Asha to walk back to the warehouse with Bastet, where she found Gideon and Wren sharing a breakfast of steaming hot fuul medames and t’aamiyya, both of which she discovered were full of fava beans and wonderful spices. They ate in the shadows of their chained prisoners and Bastet quietly related the last moments of Anubis to Gideon, who took the news with a strangely grim silence that Asha thought bordered on rage, but quietly subsided and he was soon himself again, though far less boisterous and less inclined to smile.
It was nearing noon when Wren said, “Should one of us go check on the lady with the machines?”
“Taziri.” Bastet looked up, her face still looking pale and haunted. “Her name is Taziri.”
“I’ll go,” Asha said.
“No, this time I’ll go.” Gideon stood up quickly. “I need to stretch my legs anyway.” And he strode out of the warehouse.
“He doesn’t like being sad,” Bastet said. “I don’t think he really knows how to be sad, actually. Like asking a mute to sing, he just doesn’t know how, and I think he’s ashamed of it. Like it’s a flaw, something he’s failing to do.”
Asha frowned and glanced toward the doors, but the soldier was already gone.
For the next hour, the three women talked in low voices about death and monsters. Bastet described some of the horribly deformed people that Lilith had created and released into the city over the last few years. Wren talked about a huge fox demon that had besieged a city at the top of the world, and her friend who had died fighting it. And Asha told them both about the bear she once fought in India, and the basilisk she discovered in Rajasthan, and the golden dragon she faced in the hills above Damascus with the immortal warrior Nadira, and her friend Priya.
Their mood was as gray as the light coming through the narrow warehouse windows when Gideon finally returned with Jiro and Taziri. They carried a long box between them, which they set on the floor and uncovered to reveal the product of their labors.
“That’s it?” Wren asked.
“That’s it,” Taziri said. “An aetherium electromagnet.”
Asha studied the device lying in its bed of straw. The sun-steel core drew her eye first. It was a long reddish gold cylinder the length and width of her arm, and it gleamed even in the weak light inside the warehouse.
Raw sun-steel. Virgin. Not yet forged into a tool or weapon. Not yet charged with the souls of the dead… or the living. It’s almost pretty.
Asha moved on from the cylinder to the looping copper wires and bands that encircled the bottom half of the sun-steel, ringing it without touching it. These wires spiraled inward toward the base of the cylinder where they ended in a block of black-grained wood, and the encircling wires were connected to yet more wires that snaked over the straw to a large black case that had two canvas straps bolted into it.
“How does it work?” the herbalist asked.
“It’s very simple,” the Mazigh woman said. “You press this switch and aim it at whatever you want to attract.”
Asha nodded. “All right. Then I believe we should test it.” She turned and looked up at Isis and Horus. The mother and son hung by their wrists, both very still and quiet, their white eyes barely open. The youth’s falcon head dipped forward, almost touching his beak to his chest. The steer-woman’s head rested on one of her up-stretched arms, her curving horns looking dull and gray in the half-light and her shaggy, hoofed legs dangling just above the floor.
Taziri looked up at Jiro. “Would you care to do the honors?”
“No.” The smith backed away. “I wouldn’t.”
With a shrug and a grin, Taziri lifted the black case and slipped the canvas straps over her shoulders to wear the contraption on her back. Then she hefted the sun-steel cylinder and its wire rings by a pair of black wooden handles and stepped away from the crate. She winced just a little as she took the full weight of her invention on her back and shoulders, but she walked easily across the smooth warehouse floor.
She reached up with one hand to quickly pull her brass-rimmed goggles over her eyes and she glanced over at the others. “You should probably get back, just to be safe.”
The group shuffled over behind her.
“No, no, not behind me,” Taziri said, jerking her head toward the far wall. “Over there. Away from me.”
The group shrugged and shuffled over to the gap between two towers of crates.
“All right. Here we go.”
Asha watched as Taziri flicked the switch on the device and then aimed the red-gold cylinder of sun-steel up at the two prisoners. Instantly, a high-pitched whine unlike anything Asha had ever heard before sliced through her mind, forcing her to cover her ears and narrow her eyes to slits. In that same instant, both of the hanging prisoners swung forward on their chains, swinging toward the Mazigh woman. Both the falcon-man and the steer-woman jerked their heads up, their eyes wide with shock, and the warehouse erupted with avian shrieks and bovine screams as the prisoners shook and writhed between the chains holding them up and the device pulling them down.
“I’m turning it up!” Taziri shouted over the noise.
Asha winced as the high-pitched whine rose even higher and louder, and just as she was about to look away, to shuffle farther back from the hideous sound, she saw the needles. Tiny golden glints of light appeared on Isis’s hairy legs and hoofed feet, and the same metallic gleams appeared on Horus’s feathered head and scaled hands. Both of them screamed and shook against their chains, making the heavy beams overhead groan and crack as trickles of dust fell from the roof, but the rafters held.
And then the needles came free.
Over a dozen of the tiny things burst from the two prisoners, shooting cleanly from tiny holes in the skin and also tearing sideways from ragged rents in the flesh. The needles flew across the room faster than Asha could track them, but she heard them clatter softly against the sun-steel core of the magnet.
Taziri switched the device off and set it down on the ground, and the tiny needles fell to the floor. Gideon stepped out from behind the crates first, his hand straying to his sword-gauntlet as he stared up at the two figures on the chains. Asha and the others followed him out and looked up.
Only a few thin patters and drips of blood fell from the wounds before their bodies healed themselves, the punctures and cuts slipping closed like water to become a seamless whole once more. And as the wounds vanished, so did the monstrosities.
Asha watched in spellbound fascination as the tall horns fell from Isis’s head and thumped on the floor. The thick brown hair on her legs rained down on the ground, quickly revealing two soft brown legs that were slowly shrinking back to their original size. One by one, the woman’s little toes popped free of the fused mass of her hoofs. And then it was over. Isis opened her eyes, her weary dark brown eyes, and she moved her thin, cracked lips to make faint gasping sounds.
“Can’t… breathe…”
“Wren, lift her up!” Asha said. “Lift both of them!”
The northern girl stepped forward and raised her empty hands, making the heavy silver bracelets on her wrists ring out across the warehouse. The swirling white aether rose from the earth in two thick columns and gently lifted Isis and Horus so they were no longer suspended by their chains. Gideon dashed to the side of the room, slipped his blinding white blade out of its sheathe and smashed the ends of the chains. Mother and son dropped their arms to their sides, and Wren lowered her hands, letting the aether pillow beneath them and deposit them softly into Asha’s and Bastet’s arms.
As she eased the young man down to the floor, Asha looked at Horus’s face for the first time. She hadn’t seen the feathers fall out or the beak break off, but they all lay on the ground beside her. And now the groaning,
