control, thralls to their passions and their instincts. And it is all on display, all on parade for anyone with eyes to see it.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” he continued. “That woman is Aegyptian. She knows who I am. Perhaps she doesn’t believe it yet, but the doubt is gnawing at her heart. She’s afraid I may be exactly who I appear to be. If I told her my name, she might faint from the shock of it. It has happened before.”
“Why?” Asha frowned.
“Because here I am a god.” He looked at her, a calm and steady gaze of deep green eyes peering out of the shadows. “Once, long ago, my family was revered here as a pantheon of living gods. And we played the role fate gave us, for a time. Eventually we bored of it, and retired from public life. But our memory lives on. Our images are still carved into the walls of this city and many others, reminding the people. Terrifying them.”
“A god?” Asha asked. “What were you the god of? Mind-reading?”
“Death. I was Death given form and voice, the Death that walked among the living, judging the souls of the quick and the dying, and shepherding the departing shades into the netherworld, to rest for all eternity.”
Asha smiled a little. “Is that all?”
He shrugged. “It helped to pass the time.”
She started to pace across the little room, then looked back and said, “What was the weapon she had? The one I broke?”
“It’s called a gun,” he said. “They’re made in the west by the Mazighs.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“For most people, very,” he said calmly. “Don’t let anyone shoot you with one, at least not without your armor on. And even then, it will probably hurt.”
Footsteps shuffled and clumped about overhead, and a moment later booted feet descended a flight of stairs. The curtains covering the doorway parted and a woman strode inside. She was still young though middle age was on the horizon for her. She was also slender, her face thin and drawn, a face that had once probably been pretty but now seemed a bit abused by time, worry, and fear. She wore a dark blue dress with a black shawl around her shoulders and she moved with great precision, though little grace. She slumped into a chair on the far side of the table, jerked the chair closer to the table, and folded her hands artlessly in front of her. Her eyes carried dark bags beneath them, and her lips were dry and colorless.
Two grim and unpleasant men followed her into the room, both with belts clinking with knives and much larger guns than the one Asha had destroyed. They also went behind the table and stood to either side of their mistress. Asha noticed that the servant woman who let them inside remained back in the doorway, peering nervously through the curtains.
“I am Zahra El Ayat,” said the tired woman sitting behind the table. “I’m told you wish to speak with me. I’m also told that you’re demons or jinn come from hell to torment me.” She glared at the woman hiding behind the curtains.
“We are neither. We are human,” Anubis said.
“Probably,” Zahra said. “What do you want?”
“Last night, a friend of ours was abducted near the Temple of Osiris,” Asha said. “He was taken by two very strange people.”
“Was this before or after the temple was smashed into rubble by the golden demon?” Zahra asked dryly. “There’s been a lot of talk of demons lately.”
“After,” Asha said. “We think our friend was taken into the undercity. That he was taken to a woman called Lilith. Do you know that name?”
Zahra’s eyes flicked up sharply at the name, but otherwise she remained quite still and quiet. “Lilith is a story,” she said slowly. “Two stories, actually. In the streets, Lilith is a demon who rises up from the land of the dead to ravage the world of the living with her beasts, to drag naughty children down into the depths where she eats their bones and drinks their blood. But the Sons of Osiris have another story, a story about a woman who buys sun-steel by the ingot and keeps the Masters and First Knights shaking in their little green robes at night with threats that dare not be repeated, lest they come to pass.”
“I did not think the Sons of Osiris ever sold their precious sun-steel,” Anubis said.
“Not willingly, they don’t,” Zahra said. “Apparently, this Lilith is a very special exception.”
“And she took it by the ingot?” Asha said. “Raw bricks and bars? Not the seireiken swords?”
“She bought ingots, but she didn’t take them as such. I know because I saw the accounts, the ledgers, the real records inside the temple, down in old Jiro’s forge. She would buy an ingot, but leave with a box. About this big.” She held out her hands about the width of her shoulders.
“So what was in these boxes?” Asha asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen two of them, and never seen inside them,” Zahra said. “The person to ask would be Master Rashaken, but I hear someone dropped a temple on his head, so he may not be very forthcoming.”
Asha frowned.
I can’t believe I was so reckless! That one mistake just keeps coming back to hurt us.
“And there isn’t anyone else we can ask?”
“You could ask Master Jiro,” Zahra said. “He retired from the temple last year after they had a little… internal turmoil. He’s living in the lighthouse district now, trying to get others from Nippon to establish their own little enclave here. Assuming he wasn’t visiting any friends at the temple yesterday, he’s probably still alive, and he would know what’s in Lilith’s little boxes. Whatever it was, he was the one making it, at least until last year.”
Asha glanced at Anubis, and he nodded back. “All right then. Thank you for your help. We’ll see ourselves out.”
Zahra nodded. “You might want to watch yourself around Jiro. His seireiken is smaller than most, which makes it harder to see it coming.”
“I will keep that in mind,” Asha said as she left.
Chapter 7
Bastet skipped along the boulevard, humming an old lullaby and dragging Wren by the hand. The taller girl with the red hair seemed to want to stop every few steps to look at some market stall or temple gate or even just to stare at the zebras and steam carriages, but Bastet was determined to keep going.
“Can we slow down please?” Wren asked in her halting Eranian.
“We can go shopping later,” Bastet said. “Gideon is waiting for us! Don’t you want to meet him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve met a lot of immortals in the last year,” the tall girl said. “They can be pretty strange, and dangerous too.”
“A lot of immortals? Besides my grandfather and me?”
Wren nodded. “Omar and I passed through Constantia a few weeks ago. We saw Nadira there, and the two Rus immortals, too. Did you ever meet them?”
“The Rus? No. What are they like?”
“Strange. Dangerous.” Wren hesitated. “They’re dead now. Not Nadira, I don’t think. Just the Rus. Both of them. Koschei and his mother.”
“What?” Bastet stopped short and spun to look at the other girl. “Dead immortals? That’s impossible! You’d have to destroy their hearts.” She reached into the neck of her dress and pulled out a little gold chain with a little golden pendant. It was a lumpy effigy of a human heart.
Not Grandfather’s finest work, but then he never was as good with his hands as he was at dreaming up big ideas. Still, it’s pretty in its own way.
“Yes, I know. And we did. Or he did, I mean. Omar,” Wren said. “Omar said that Koschei used to be a good man, but over time he became this wretched, brutish killer. So Omar killed Koschei, killed him with his seireiken and
