A cat mewed at the far end of the road.
“The Aegyptian immortals.” Asha nodded. “Nadira told me about you. She said I should look for you if I ever needed help with my… condition.”
“Nadira?” Bastet pouted. “Grandfather told me about her, but I’ve never met her. He said she never leaves Damascus. Not that I want to meet her. Nuns are always so boring.”
“She isn’t a nun anymore,” Asha said. “But that isn’t why we’re here now.”
“You mean you’re not looking for help?” Bastet giggled. “So you actually meant to knock down the Temple of Osiris? On purpose?”
“Yes, I did.” Asha wrapped her hands around the woven strap of her shoulder bag. “The Sons of Osiris are evil. They torture and enslave both the living and the souls of the dead.”
“Yes, they certainly do,” the girl said. Then she leaned forward to look around Asha. “And who’s your friend?”
“My name is Wren. Wren Olgasdottir of Denveller.” The northern girl stepped closer, with Jagdish curled up in her arms. “I’m from Ysland.”
“Never heard of it,” Bastet said.
“No one has, apparently,” Wren said. “Omar brought me here to help him stop the Sons of Osiris, and to learn more about aether, but then Asha destroyed the temple all by herself, and those creatures took Omar, and now, I guess, we’re a bit lost.”
“You were at the temple today?” Asha asked the Aegyptian girl. “You saw us there?”
“Yep.” Bastet kicked her legs against the side of the fountain. A second cat joined the first at the end of the road.
“Why were you there?”
She stopped kicking and frowned at her shoes. “I’ve been trying to find my grandfather for a while now, and I thought he might be there, at the temple. I didn’t really think he’d be there, but I just had this feeling today, and I just had to go look. But when we got there we saw you. The gold scales were nice, but I really liked the red claws. The horns, not so much.”
“Oh.” Asha nodded and frowned. “Thank you, I suppose.” She glanced down the deserted street to the dark intersection. No one was about except the cats.
“I’ve never seen anyone like you before,” Bastet said. “Switching back and forth, growing things and then making them disappear. How do you do it? Some sort of amulet? And is it really a dragon, or is it just some sort of lizardy thing?”
Asha leaned against the fountain beside the girl and noticed Wren smiling at her.
She’s enjoying this.
“It is a dragon, one that followed me west from Ming,” Asha said. “And there’s no amulet. Just the dragon’s soul. Inside me.”
Bastet stared at her, eyes wide and mouth agape. “And you can just control it? By yourself? No one can do that!”
Asha blinked. “I can. Mostly. I had help.”
“That’s amazing!”
“I take it that you have seen other people with animal souls inside them,” Asha said. “But those people couldn’t control them?”
“We’ve seen dozens over the centuries,” said Anubis. “All raging out of control. All slaves to their feral instincts. All dangerous. All needing to be hunted and destroyed.”
“I see,” Asha said.
“I’ve killed several,” the youth continued grimly. “So has my cousin Horus, and your friend Gideon. He comes here from time to time. He’s also set fire to the Temple of Osiris on several occasions, but he never tore it down, as you did.”
Asha nodded with a pained expression as she remembered the kind-hearted immortal she had met in the east. “I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
“Uhm, there are other ways to control an animal soul,” Wren said. The girl shuffled Jagdish over onto her left arm and then reached up to pull the black scarf off of her hair, revealing the tall furry fox ears atop her head. “You can use another person’s soul, too.”
Bastet leapt off the fountain and pressed close to Wren, staring up at her head. “That’s amazing! And you can use them and everything?”
Asha saw the northern girl wince, and saw the fox ears twitch backward. “We can talk about such things later, perhaps in a more private place.”
Wren pulled her scarf back up, and the Aegyptian girl skipped back to the fountain, where she leaned over the edge, balancing on the little stone wall on her belly. Bastet said, “So you both came from different countries to attack the Temple of Osiris, all on your own, and showed up on the exact same day? Sounds like fate to me.”
Asha shook her head. “Just a coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” Anubis muttered.
“Of course there are,” Wren said sharply. “Woden knows, the world is a chaotic place. It plays by a complicated set of rules, but there is no plan, there is no fate. So there are bound to be coincidences, lots of them, or at least lots of things that people think are coincidences. Think of all the people who happened to be inside the temple today, and the ones who happened to be out. The ones who died, and the ones who lived. There was no master plan at work there. Some of those people wanted supper, and some didn’t, and some had meetings, and some didn’t. That isn’t fate. It’s just life.”
Anubis frowned at the northern girl, but said nothing.
“You said before that this was the right place for finding immortals. Did you mean the two of you, or someone else?” Asha asked. “Jagdish, the mongoose there, we were following his nose when we came to this fountain. We thought he might be leading us to Wren’s friend, Omar, but he only brought us here for some reason.” She looked around the dead-end street as a soft, cool breeze picked up the bits of trash in the corners and swirled them around in the shadows.
“Oh really?” Bastet smiled mischievously. “Well, your little friend there may have smelled something after all, because this dead-end road isn’t quite what it appears to be. There’s a door.”
Asha looked around again, and saw nothing but solid stone walls and the fountain. “Where is it?”
Bastet pointed at the stone fish in the center of the fountain. “You just shove the whole thing and it swings to the side, and there’s a tunnel. It’s one of the old entrances to the undercity. We used to use it all the time, but not so much these days.”
“You used it? What’s down there?” Asha asked.
“The undercity.” Bastet pouted at her. “I just said that.”
“But what does that mean?” Wren asked. “A sewer, a cellar, a dungeon?”
“No,” Bastet said slowly. “It’s the undercity. It’s a city. Under. The city.”
Asha and Wren exchanged a quick look of confusion, and the herbalist asked, “And you live there?”
“Sure, with the rest of our family. But not here. Not this part. It’s not safe here anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time,” the Aegyptian girl said.
“Not safe for you? But you’re immortal,” Wren said. “What’s made it dangerous?”
This time it was Bastet and Anubis who exchanged the uncomfortable look.
The dour youth sighed. “It’s complicated. Suffice it to say that if your friend was taken by the beasts into the undercity through this door, then he is already dead, or soon will be.”
“I don’t think so,” Wren said. “He’s immortal, too.”
“What?” Bastet slipped off the fountain and deftly caught her cat mask to keep it from slipping off her head. “He’s immortal? What’s his name again?”
“Omar,” Wren said. “Omar Bakhoum.”
Bastet gasped and grabbed Anubis’s arm and began shaking it violently. “That’s it! That’s the name he was using right before he left! Yes, that’s it!”
“Are you sure?” Anubis asked. “It’s been at least ten years now. And he’s used hundreds of names over the years.”
“Yes, I’m sure!” She slapped his arm and turned back to Wren with a wild-eyed smile. “It’s him, he’s back! I
