Chapter 27
Asha sat on the low wall that ringed the dusty fountain at the bottom of the dead-end road. Her hands worked steadily, grinding the little marble pestle against the seeds and leaves in the bottom of her little marble mortar. Gideon stood in the center of the fountain peering down into the dark chasm that led into the undercity. Wren and Taziri sat on the wall next to each other, both lost in silent thoughts and staring at the broken tiles at the bottom of the dry fountain.
“What are you thinking about?” Wren asked.
“My family.” Taziri smiled. “It’s funny. I keep going off on these crazy adventures. Getting into trouble in faraway places. Helping strange people with strange problems. And I don’t know why. I like my life back home, and I know I’m very fortunate to have everything that I have. Still, here I am. I guess I like the challenge of it. The excitement. But even now, all I can think about is my little girl. Wanting to see her again. Hear her voice again. I really don’t want to die here, you know, in some cave in Aegyptus.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“So what are you thinking about?” the Mazigh woman asked.
“Sex.” Wren smiled at her. “It’s been a couple weeks.”
Taziri laughed, and Wren laughed with her.
“I don’t know if the good lord Woden would approve,” Wren said. “He’s the sort of god who can be hard to please. He’d probably want me to be thinking about the coming battle, preparing to die gloriously, to honor my family and my homeland, and to take my place beside him in paradise.”
“Where is your homeland?”
“Ysland.”
Taziri shrugged. “Sorry, I haven’t heard of it.”
“No one has,” Wren said. “But that’s all right. I think I like it better here anyway.”
“So you’re really not worried about going down there, into that hole, in the dark, and fighting more of these animal-people and immortals?” Taziri asked.
Wren shook her head, and her thick red hair and tall fox ears shook in the breeze. If the Mazigh engineer had found the ears strange, she hadn’t said so. She hadn’t even given them a second look. Wren said, “Can’t say that I am. I’ve done this sort of thing before. Giant foxes, dead people, witches, nightmares, armies. You get scared for a moment or so, near the beginning. I think it’s because you’re not really ready. You’re still waiting for it to start, or maybe you don’t really think it will start. Or you don’t want it to start. And then it does start, and your heart is pounding and you forget everything you’ve learned and you just want to run. But you don’t run. You take a breath and remember what you’re meant to do. And then when you start in, when you hurl that first stone, and you call up the aether, and you see your friends standing at your side, then everything’s just fine. The fear goes away. You just do what you’re there to do. No matter how long it takes, you just keep going, and eventually it ends, and everything’s all right. Even if there’s screaming and blood, and fire and darkness, you just keep going until you reach the end. That’s all anyone can do, really.”
Taziri hesitated. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Twenty this summer.”
Taziri blinked. “Wow.”
“You don’t see many battles, do you?”
“No, not if I can help it,” the Mazigh woman said. “I see bills and invoices, and schematics and lesson plans. And the few times I’ve been in real trouble, I mostly excelled in running the other way. I’ve only pointed a gun at a person a half dozen times or so, and I could have done without all of them.”
“Oh.” The girl in the lacy, frilly black dress looked up. “I don’t like fighting, or being someplace where I could die. But I guess I don’t mind that much, either. I don’t blame you for not liking it.”
Taziri nodded.
Wren winked at her. “But you do like sex, right?”
They both burst out laughing again.
Asha listened to them with a faint smile on her lips, and she almost laughed out loud with them, but her laughter didn’t quite break through the worries in her heart and the plans racing around her head.
That girl Wren is only half my age, but it sounds as though she’s already seen twice the horrors that I have. And listen to her. Happy as a lark. Thinking of nothing more than a pleasant night with a warm body between her legs.
The other one, Taziri, has faced the Sons of Osiris, and traveled the world in strange machines. Younger than me by a bit, and with a family, and a career, and students…
And here’s me, crushing my seeds and wondering where my dead friend’s soul has wandered off to. Did I do this? Was it done to me?
Does it matter?
No.
Asha frowned and squinted up at the sun, which was easing its way across the western sky beyond thick white clouds.
We get what we get. We choose. We try. It doesn’t matter what Wren has done, or what Taziri has at home. We’re here, and we have a job to do. People are suffering and dying, and I’m going to stop it. That’s all that matters now.
That’s all that ever matters.
She finished grinding her seeds and inspected the fine white powder in her mortar. Satisfied, she poured the powder into a glass vial with a red sandy mixture and shoved the rubber stopper over it.
“Is everyone ready?” Asha asked. She stood up and shouldered her medicine bag.
Gideon looked back at her. “You might want to leave that bag. It’ll only get torn or lost when you change.”
“Let’s hope not,” she replied. “Ready?”
Taziri and Wren hopped off the fountain wall, brushed off their hands, and joined her at the edge of the dark hole. A cool breeze blew up out of the shadows.
“Gideon leads,” Asha said. “Taziri and Wren follow, and I watch our rear. And remember, whatever we see down there, whatever creatures come after us, they’re the people we’re going down there to save. So Gideon, you keep that sword away from them. You’re in charge of lighting the way, and incinerating the needles that Taziri’s magnet collects. Wren, I’m afraid you’re going to be doing more work than any of us. We’ll need your aether both as a shield to keep us safe and as a tool to herd the creatures together.”
“Should be easy enough,” the northern girl said as she adjusted the heavy silver bracelets on her wrists. “Down there in the dark, in the cold? We’ll have plenty of aether. No worries. I’ll just have to be careful not to get carried away.”
Asha paused, watching the girl’s face. “What do you mean? What happens if you get carried away?”
For a moment, the carefree look in Wren’s eyes vanished. “If I lose control, I could tear the souls out of every living person around me, killing everyone instantly.” And then, the girlish smile slipped back into her expression. “But you shouldn’t worry about that. I once dragged a fleet of Turkish ironclads across the sea and onto dry land by pulling on the souls of the crews, and I didn’t kill a single one of them! Really, I checked. Not one.”
“Oh.” Asha exchanged a baffled look with Gideon and Taziri. “All right then. Let’s get started. Gideon, if you would be so kind?”
The soldier smiled and bowed, and then stepped out over the hole and dropped straight down, to land with a thud deep in the shadows. A moment later the shadows vanished and the tunnel was flooded with pure white light shining from Gideon’s sword. The triangular blade blazed like a thousand suns from the gauntlet on his arm, and the air around the sun-steel wavered and rippled like the waves on the sea as the heat billowed upward into the afternoon sky.
One by one, the women sat on the edge of the hole and slipped down to the floor of the tunnel, and then they turned to follow Gideon and his bright seireiken down into the darkness. After just a few paces, the meager light
