age.
He might have been forty or fifty, and his hands were heavily veined, his fingers criss-crossed with countless tiny white scars, and his bare feet showed bright calluses around the edges. Over his lean frame he wore a light brown shirt with wide, loose sleeves and matching trousers that all shuddered and rippled in the breeze blowing off the harbor.
“Yes?” he said. His eyes darted over Asha, but lingered on Anubis.
“I am Asha of Kathmandu,” the herbalist said. “Are you Master Jiro, formerly of the Temple of Osiris?”
He leaned out the doorway just a bit to look up and down the empty street. “I was.”
He stepped out into the road and crossed his arms over his chest, slipping his right hand into his left sleeve and his left hand into his right sleeve, out of sight.
Asha wondered what might be hidden in those sleeves. “We’re trying to find someone who was taken from us last night. We think his life is in danger,” she said. “We have already learned a good deal about the people who took him, but there is a piece of the puzzle missing, and we were told you might be able to help us.”
Jiro continued to peer down at them both with a very calm yet stern expression. “I am no longer with the temple. I do not know what happens there now.”
“Nothing happens there now,” Anubis said. “The temple was destroyed last night, and many Osirians were killed, by the very woman standing before you.”
“Truly?” Jiro narrowed his eyes a bit. He whipped his right hand from his sleeve and Asha saw the blazing white line of a small sun-steel knife. Jiro held the knife not tightly in his fist but loosely between two fingers, and he lunged at Asha’s throat with a deft and graceful flick of his blinding white blade.
We don’t have time for this!
Asha lashed out and grabbed the man’s wrist, wrapped her golden-scaled fingers around the small bones behind his hand, and she squeezed. The sun-steel knife clattered to the ground and the man gasped. Asha let her claws extend from her fingertips, bright flashing shards of ruby that sliced gently into his sleeve and pressed down against his skin.
Jiro winced, but made no sound. He grimaced for a moment, and then Asha felt his arm go slack in her grip. She released him and he stepped back to rub his injured arm.
“You’re one of them,” he said. “One of her monsters?”
“No,” Asha said. “I’m something else.”
She bent down and picked up the sun-steel knife with her armored hand, holding it up for the easterner to see. And then she crushed the blade between her golden fingers, letting her blazing red claws melt and shred the metal into twisted scraps that dripped on the street. She dropped the remains of the knife, its blade dark and deformed. A thin cloud of aether drifted up from the ruined sun-steel and Asha said a silent prayer for the souls that were now tasting their first moments of freedom since the day they died.
“I’ve come to stop her,” Asha said. “I’ve come to free the people she has taken. I’ve also come to free all the souls that the Osirians have taken. But I have no quarrel with you, Master Jiro. I need your help to stop Lilith and to rescue my friend, a man called Omar Bakhoum.”
He looked at her sharply. “Master Omar has returned?”
“Yes,” Asha said. “He returned, apparently to destroy the Temple of Osiris, only I arrived a little before him and did the deed myself. Now I need your help to save him, and to continue his work.”
“So, he wishes to destroy the temple? If I was any other man of the temple, I would not believe you. But I understand his wishes. I myself left the temple for many reasons. Lilith was one of them.” Jiro nodded thoughtfully. “Regardless, it does not appear that it is within my power to refuse you, Asha of Kathmandu. Therefore, I ask that you overlook my actions a moment ago, and allow me to welcome you into my home.”
Asha shook her hand and let the anger wash out of her, and felt her skin become her own again. She and Anubis followed Jiro inside, and he closed the door behind them. The interior of the stone building was much the same as the exterior, and the entire home was a single room with a rear door in addition to the front one. Thin rectangular mats lay on the floor at perfect right angles to the walls, and circular cushions sat along the edges of the mats beside a low table. There were no chairs. A fragile-looking screen divided the front of the space from the back, and behind it she glimpsed a bed of thin blankets and several small shelves and jars in the corner. The light in the room fell through a single window, not in a wall, but in the ceiling.
Jiro sat on one of his round cushions and gestured to them to sit beside him, which they did. “How can I help you?”
Asha said, “Last night, Omar was taken by two strange creatures. The woman had feathered wings for arms, and the man had the head of a dog.”
“An aardvark,” Anubis corrected.
“Nethys and Set,” Jiro said. “I did not think they would be so bold, or so reckless, as to be seen by strangers in the streets. I suppose the destruction of the temple caused them some alarm.” He turned to the black youth. “And you, sir? Who are you?”
“My name is Anapa, and I live here in the city,” Anubis said. “I saw the abduction as well, and I wish to help this lady to find her friend, and to learn more about these creatures we saw.”
Jiro nodded. “I understand your curiosity, but I know these two, Nethys and Set. The people they take do not come back. I doubt even Master Omar could escape this fate. He is gone. You must accept that.”
“I don’t,” Asha said. “And I’m going to find him. But first we need to know what you were making for Lilith.”
Jiro looked at her sharply. “How do you know of that?”
“I have well-informed friends,” she answered. “I know you made her something, something forged from sun- steel ingots, something you delivered in wooden boxes.”
“Zahra!” Jiro frowned. “You heard this from that woman, didn’t you?”
“Does it matter?” Anubis asked.
Jiro gave him a long, flat look. “No, it does not.”
“Then please, can you tell us what you made for Lilith?” Asha asked.
The man frowned for a long silent moment before he said, “Each box contained three hundred needles, each the length of my finger, sharpened at one end and blunted at the other.”
“Sun-steel needles?” Anubis asked. “For what?”
Asha opened her medicine bag and sorted carefully through her small jars, paper envelopes, mirrors, lenses, vials, and tools until she found what she needed, and held it up for the men to see. The golden needle in her hand was long and slender, with three faint notches scored into its side near the pointed end. “Were they like this?”
Jiro leaned forward to look at the needle in her hand. “Similar, but smaller. Where did you get that?”
“Ming.” She put the needle away carefully. “It’s an aether siphon, a doctor’s tool. It’s used to draw aether out of a patient’s body, usually from the blood. But it must be used very carefully and very briefly, or it will kill the patient.”
“I doubt Lilith is using hers in such a delicate manner,” Anubis said.
“No.” Jiro shook his head. “However she used them, consumed them. She never returned them to me to be reforged or repaired. When she came, it was to purchase a new ingot and order the needles. Always the needles.”
Asha looked down again at the needle in her bag, gleaming darkly against her mortar and pestle and a pale yellow rag.
An aether siphon will draw out the aether in the blood, but if left in for too long it will draw out the soul as well, leaving the patient dead and cold. Is Lilith using needles to steal souls? Is there a shelf in her citadel covered in sun-steel needles, each one trapping the soul of some poor innocent, waiting for her to use them in her horrific experiments?
But then what? You can’t remove the soul from the needle without destroying the needle, and then the soul is gone. How is she using these needles to make her monsters?
Asha looked down at her own hand.
I become a monster when the dragon soul within me is set free. But the dragon soul is always inside me. Inside me… Lilith must be putting animal souls inside her victims. Inside them…
She looked up at Anubis.
Wren’s ears! The fox soul is contained, limited, focused inside her.
