Am I about to get her killed too?
And then Wren leaned forward and placed her hands on the ground. A freezing cold whirlwind roared up out of the earth, swirling around the flame-haired girl in a howling vortex that rose higher and higher into the air. Asha shielded her face with her hands, but it did not stop the white storm from leeching the warmth from her skin.
Aether! So much aether!
Asha grabbed Taziri and Gideon by the arms and pulled them back even farther away from the spinning storm in the center of the road. Through the flying white mists, she could still see Lilith’s slaves, now just a few seconds from reaching the aether.
Wren stood up, a tiny figure in black and red surrounded by white. She raised her hands over her head, and then quickly brought them down in front of her, out of sight from where Asha stood behind her. And the blasting whirlwind of aether quickly unraveled, shredding apart as the white wisps flew downward and inward, flying down in front of Wren.
Asha frowned, straining to see what was happening, but the light of Gideon’s sword only illuminated the girl’s back.
Then Wren shifted her feet and turned a bit to the side, revealing her hands cupped around a spinning white orb of pure white light.
She condensed it into that tiny sphere?
“Stay down,” Wren yelled over the whine of the spinning aether and the roar of the beasts. And just as the creatures reached the girl, the girl whipped her arms out to her sides and her orb of aether exploded into a thousand ribbons of white light and shimmering mist.
Asha grabbed Taziri and Gideon again, and yanked them down to their knees.
The ribbons of light flew out around the creatures, wrapping around arms and legs, around chests and throats, slithering like serpents through the cold air over and under and around every living body in that mob of raging beasts and slaves. Wren stood very still, her arms outstretched as though frozen in the gesture of throwing something forward with both hands. And then she began to move, stepping gracefully from side to side, casting her hands left and right, sometimes in unison and sometimes separately. As she wove her hands through the air, the white aether ribbons wove themselves tighter around her prisoners, jerking them back away from her and pulling them all together into a struggling, screeching mass of misshapen bodies.
Asha watched, spellbound, as the beautiful glowing threads danced through the shadows, elegantly weaving and flowing around each other.
At last, Wren lifted her hands above her head, and then slammed them both downward, and the entire bound mob of tigers and eagles and snakes and dogs, and men and women, came crashing down to their knees. The pale girl glanced over her shoulder and nodded. “I have them.”
Asha helped Taziri to her feet as the weight of her device threatened to keep her on one knee, and together they walked up beside Wren. They could feel the chill in the air from the aether, and the stench of animal flesh and sweat assailed their nostrils.
“Keep it away from Wren,” Asha reminded the engineer.
Taziri nodded as she raised the barrel of her sun-steel magnet, which shone bright gold in the white light of the seireiken and the aether, and she switched it on.
Tiny golden needles flew out of the bound creatures with alarming speed and volume, and within a moment they were clattering and ringing and banging on the sun-steel core of the magnet like rain on a metal roof.
Only worse.
The monsters cried out in pain, and flecks of blood mingled with the flying needles. Taziri grabbed her blue scarf and wrapped it across her face as the tiny poisoned missiles continued to hurl themselves in her direction.
Gradually, the bellows and roars and shrieks became wails and moans, and cries for help. Asha saw them changing, one by one, as wings became hands and hoofs became feet, and animals became men and women.
The pinging of metal on metal began to slow, and then it stopped altogether. Asha glanced over and saw that hundreds of needles were clinging to the end of Taziri’s magnetic device, clustered together at various angles to form a nest of gleaming, bloody gold.
That’s it. That’s all of them.
“Gideon?” Asha pointed at the needles on the magnet.
The soldier stepped forward and knelt down in front of Taziri, holding out the blade of his seireiken under the end of the magnet. He nodded up at her.
Taziri switched off the magnet and the needles fell as a single bright mass of gold. They crashed onto the blade of the seireiken with an angry hiss as the sun-steel was instantly reduced to molten slag and smoke. The needles dripped off the sword as a dirty gray puddle, and for a moment a pale cloud of aether hovered around the burning seireiken, and then the cloud was swept down into the blade itself and vanished entirely.
Gideon stood up. “It’s done.”
Wren shook her hands, the bracelets on her arms rang out, and the countless white threads she had wrapped around her prisoners all shattered into a fine white mist of aether, which drifted apart and sank softly back down into the earth.
“It worked,” Taziri said. She straightened up and smiled. “It really worked.”
“You sound surprised,” Gideon said.
Taziri shrugged. “Spend a little more time around me. I’m used to things going wrong.”
Asha and Wren looked down at the fifty-odd men and women sitting on the road before them. The people looked up, shivering and shaking. They were all covered in dozens of cuts, all dribbling dark blood. Some of the needles had come out straight, but many had been ripped out sideways, and some had been pulled through their bodies from the back. Many of them sobbed quietly, and many of them reached out with shaking, bloody fingers, begging for help.
Asha and Wren dashed forward among them and knelt down to examine the injuries. As Asha went through her bag, pulling out powders and droppers full of painkillers and wards against infection, Wren began tearing her lacy dress to pieces to make bandages, which she deftly tied over every wound she could reach. Taziri set down her device and waded into the crowd, offering her scarf and leather jacket to a shivering couple, and she spoke softly to them, trying to answer everyone’s questions and reassure them.
“You’re all safe now,” Asha said. “Do you all remember what happened? You were kidnapped, and brought down here below the city, and changed. But it’s all over now. You’re free, and you’re safe. We’re going to get you all home soon.”
They stayed there in the road for most of an hour, a bubble of light and life in the echoing darkness of the enormous cavern. When they were out of bandages and medicines, and everyone seemed fairly calm and in no danger of bleeding to death, Asha took Gideon aside.
“What should we do with them?” she asked. “I assumed we’d be saving them at the pyramid, that we would deal with all of this together. I wasn’t planning on saving them here alone.”
“If we take them back now, it will take hours,” he said. “Most of them can walk, but they’re in bad shape. And while I want to get them out of here, we’d be giving Lilith time to do… something else.”
“I know.” Asha glanced over at the door of a nearby tower. “Go in there and see if you can find anything that will burn.”
“A fire. Good idea.” He jogged away to the tower, taking the light of his sword with him. For a few minutes, the rest of the group stood and sat in the road, in the darkness, trying to stay calm and quiet while they listened to Gideon banging around inside the tower.
And then he emerged with an armload of broken chair legs and other bits of wood. Asha and Taziri went over and helped him move several large piles of broken furniture from the tower out into the road and when the bonfire was large enough, Gideon poked his seireiken at the corner of a single stick. It instantly caught fire, and soon the flames began to spread across the pile, throwing out bright sparks and belching out dark smoke that smelled of ancient Aegyptian wax and oil. Asha called out over the crowd, assuring them that she would come back and lead them to the surface soon, and that they should just stay and rest by the fire.
As they walked away from the people huddled around the bonfire, Taziri glanced back and said to Asha, “Does anyone else feel like that was the wrong thing to do? Just leaving them there like that?”
“It’s not ideal,” Wren said lightly. “But they are safe for the moment, and we have more work to do. Woden
