2
As they walked into the shadows of the cleft in the mountain, Asha described to Priya the object before them.
The bulk of the machine towered over them, an elegantly rounded mass of shining steel like an enormous silver melon so large and so high that they were soon walking in its shadow, though it was far too high above them to touch. Ahead, Asha could see the underbelly of the machine sloping down to meet the earth and where the two met another smaller steel object was lodged. Thin trails of black smoke snaked up from this smaller chamber, rising up both sides of the great steel mass above it.
Moments later they stood beside a small steel cabin with long glass windows and many steel rods bolting the chamber to the enormous melon. One of the windows had shattered and the smoke spilled upward from it. There was a metal door in the center of the cabin and Asha reached for the handle.
“I’d wait if I were you.”
Asha spun to see a man sitting back in a sheltered cave just behind her. He was young-faced and smiling with thin black hair hanging in his eyes, and when he stood he towered over Asha by more than a head. He wore dust-streaked tan trousers that plunged into bronze greaves over black leather boots. His brown jacket was open to reveal a wrinkled white shirt, but it was the device on his right arm that caught Asha’s eye. His jacket sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, where the device began and continued down to his wrist, wrapping his arm in bright brass plates and rods and wheels, with a wide flat box on the outside of his forearm. A thick leather glove covered his right hand.
“I saw this machine fall out of the sky,” Asha said. “Is it yours?”
“I don’t own it, but I was riding in it,” he said. “Have you ever seen an airship before?”
“No. My name is Asha, and this is Priya. I’m an herbalist. Are you injured?”
His smile was quickly replaced by a look of earnest concern. “No, but the pilot was. She’s back here. Can you help her?”
Asha nodded and followed him back into the cave, leaving Priya to find her own way with her bamboo rod. In the shadows there was a young woman lying on a level bed of dry earth and small stones with a bundle of cloth under her head. Asha set her bag aside and inspected her patient.
“I’m Gideon, by the way,” the young man said. “And she’s Kahina.”
“Mm.” Asha carefully moved from the woman’s eyes and mouth to her neck and chest and belly. “Bruises. No cuts. Strong pulse, dry breathing. She’s fine. Just unconscious. What happened to you?”
“No idea,” Gideon said. His Eranian was slow and clear, but he had an odd way of clipping his syllables off sharply. “One moment we were flying safely, and then suddenly there was all this noise and smoke. Kahina was too busy with the controls to tell me what was happening. And then we just crashed, and I’ve been waiting for her to wake up all afternoon.”
Priya came to sit beside Asha, and the nun said, “But you weren’t hurt at all?”
He shrugged. “If I was, it wasn’t serious.” A tiny bit of gold glinted on his chest and Asha saw a small egg- shaped pendant hanging from his neck.
“Still, I should take a look at you,” Asha said. “You could be bleeding inside, or have a cracked rib.” She stood up.
Gideon grinned and glanced away. “I doubt it, but you can look if you like.”
Asha did not smile. She pushed his jacket back off his shoulders roughly and examined his chest and belly with a series of sharp jabs and found him unharmed. She passed her right ear quickly over his chest, listening for a warble in the humming of his soul that might tell of some mortal injury that could not be seen. But instead of one hum, she heard two.
Frowning, she picked up the golden pendant on his chest between two fingers and found it quite warm against her skin, and one of the two hums rose half a note in her poisoned ear. “An egg?”
He smiled and gently took the golden bauble from her. “A heart, actually.”
Asha stepped back from him and sat down beside her patient. “And on your arm?”
Gideon glanced at the device on his right arm. “Just a little something I picked up in Marrakesh. Which is where this airship came from, originally. An old friend of mine in Damascus bought it for some ridiculous amount of money. Usually the Mazighs don’t sell such things to foreigners, but they made an exception because this one is so old. Which is probably why it fell out of the sky today.”
“Damascus?” Priya sat up a bit straighter. “Is that a city? Is it close?”
“It is a city, and it is very far away,” he said apologetically. “I spent a month begging my friend for the chance to fly in his airship, and when he finally agreed…” Gideon threw up his hands. “Here we are.”
Asha frowned. “It’s going to be cold tonight. Would you mind building a fire?”
The young man smiled. “My pleasure.” He strode out of the little cave into the last fading gleam of the evening light and his boots crunched on the gravel as he made his way down to the forest. A moment later he began whistling a jaunty little tune.
“He seems very pleasant,” Priya said.
Asha stroked the dark curls away from her patient’s face. “He does seem very pleasant,” she said softly. “Friendly. Helpful. Well-traveled. He also has two souls.”
“What?” Priya turned her covered eyes toward her friend. “Two souls? Do you mean he’s possessed by a ghost?”
“No.” Asha leaned back against a cold stone. “There’s one soul in his body, and there’s another soul in that little golden heart hanging around his neck. And both of the souls are most definitely his.”
An hour later, they shared a meager supper and they all went to sleep around a low fire that filled the cave with enough warmth that they could sleep comfortably. But Asha lay awake, watching the man across the fire. She watched him lie there for an hour, and then a second hour, and all the while she listened to his two souls murmur.
Gideon sat up quietly, his features lost in shadow. He reached across the smoldering coals, lifted Asha’s shoulder bag from the stone floor right in front of her lidded eyes, and silently set it down in his own lap. Asha slipped one hand along under her blanket to grab a sharp stone from the ground, and she held it close to her chest, watching and waiting.
The man picked through her bag, quietly nudging aside the clay jars and glass vials and leather pouches and paper envelopes. There was a soft clink of metal. His hand rose from the bag clutching several tools. The steel scalpels went back into the bag. The steel needles went back. The steel tweezers went back. The steel mirror went back. Only one object remained in his hand.
A small needle that gleamed faintly of gold.
Gideon ran his thumb up and down the needle for a moment and squinted at it.
Asha clutched her sharp stone a little tighter and placed her empty hand on the ground, ready to push herself up, ready to lunge at him, to catch him unaware.
But then Gideon set the needle back in her bag, and reached across the fire pit to deposit the bag where he found it. And then he lay back down, and soon he began to snore.
Asha set her stone on the ground and exhaled.
3
Dawn crept into the mountain cleft slowly, illuminating first the enormous silvery airship and then later the stone cradle in which it lay. Asha woke to find Gideon and Priya missing.
She leapt from her blanket and dashed out of the cave into the pale morning light where she saw the stranger guiding the blind nun into the airship’s glassy cabin. Asha strode over to them. “Good morning,” she said tersely.
“Good morning!” Gideon beamed at her. “I’m so glad you’re up. I was just about to show your friend how the airship works now that the smoke is all cleared and it’s safe again.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Asha followed them into the cabin, a small metal room with one chair bolted to the
