“One girl said we should use a magnet to find the needles, but then Gideon said magnets don’t work on sun- steel.”
Taziri nodded. “Right. There have been a lot of articles in the journals over the last year. Half the universities in Marrakesh are researching aetherium right now. I remember reading something about magnetism just the other day.” She frowned. “One moment.”
She got up and left the room, leaving Bastet to fiddle with the little mechanical menagerie lying on the coffee table. She picked up the shiny brass figures one by one, admiring their little feet and expressive eyes, and then she began arranging them in a winding line.
When Taziri walked back in holding a small magazine, Bastet had finished arranging all of the toys on the table. She pointed to the design she had made and said, “See? It’s a cat.”
“Right.” Taziri sat down beside her. “I remember how much you like cats.”
“No, I told you before. I don’t like cats. They like me. They follow me around, just like this one,” she said, pointing to the feline outline on the coffee table with a grin.
“Riiight.” Taziri nodded. “Anyway, I found that article. Can you read Mazigh?”
“Nope.”
“All right, well, it says here that a team of graduate students in Arafez succeeded in creating an electromagnetic field around an aetherium core using a copper coil,” she explained, pointing at the text of the article. “And this allowed the core to exert a magnetic pull on a second piece of aetherium.”
“So…” Bastet looked at all the tiny black letters on the page of the magazine.
No pictures at all?
“So, they made one piece of sun-steel work like a magnet on another piece?” the girl asked.
“Exactly.” Taziri turned the page and scanned to the end of the article. “Oh, here are the specs from the experiment. It looks like the aetherium core they used was about the size of pea, and the resulting magnetic field was a little more than one-tenth estla of magnetic force. Hm.”
“Is that strong?” Bastet asked.
“No, not really. Why? How strong does your sun-steel magnet need to be?”
“I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be best if the magnet could just yank the needle out really fast?” Bastet picked up a toy sabertoothed cat and stared at its tiny brass fangs. “You see, the slave people who have the needles inside them are pretty vicious, and it could be really dangerous if we have to catch them and hold them down while we look for the needles. So I was thinking…” She shrugged.
“You were thinking, what if the magnet was strong enough to yank the needles out from far away?” Taziri raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. The magnet would need to be very strong, and the field would also need to be tuned so you could direct it at the person. You wouldn’t want the magnetic field to just expand outward in a giant sphere, it would waste energy and it could pull in all sorts of aetherium bits from all around you… if there were aetherium bits around you.”
“So, can you do it?” Bastet asked. “Can you build something like that?”
“An electromagnet? Sure. It’s pretty simple, really.” Taziri leaned back into the sofa and picked at her lip as she peered at the far wall in thought. “We’d need a generator, or a big battery, and a large copper coil. That’s all easy to get. The tricky part is the aetherium core. We’d need a really big chunk of aetherium to do this, and we’d probably want to shape the core to help tune the shape of the magnetic field.”
“Don’t you have any more sun-steel here?”
Taziri shook her head. “There are only a handful of pellets in the whole country right now. That government job I mentioned? They want me on the team to bring up the skyfire stone from the bottom of the Tarifa Strait. That huge ball of aetherium has been down there for years now, and we’ve had a steady stream of boiled fish washing up all over the shoreline ever since.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right,” Taziri said. “The salvage engineers finally have a plan, but they need help building the special equipment. When we get the skyfire stone out of the water, then we’ll have more aetherium than we know what to do with, but until then, it’s all just pellets, and those are all kept in laboratory vaults. Sorry.”
Bastet pouted.
Figures! We finally get rid of the stupid Temple of Osiris, and the first thing that happens is we need them back again to get us more sun-steel. It’s not fair. Why’d all those idiots have to go and get killed-
“I can get the sun-steel!” Bastet beamed.
“How?”
“I know someone,” the girl nodded. “He’ll know where we can get all the sun-steel we need, by the ingot!”
“Well, that’s great,” Taziri said. “I can get the rest of the gear together and meet you in Alexandria, I guess. We’ll need a workshop to put the magnet together, and then you should be all set.”
“Great!” Bastet leaned over and hugged Taziri. “It’ll be just like old times. Speaking of which, can you make another torch thing, like before? When we’re all done saving Grandfather, I think we’re going to want to get rid of a lot of sun-steel. And I mean a lot. And some of it’s going to be really, really hot.”
“Another plasma torch?” The Mazigh woman frowned. “Sure, I have a friend who can loan me one. But this one’s going to be made out of proper materials. Not like last time.” She shuddered.
“Okay.” Bastet set the little brass cat back on the table. “Can you come soon?”
Taziri pushed her hair back and tapped the top of her head for a moment. “I don’t know. I need to talk to my husband and cancel my classes, and figure out what to do with the repair shop and the store. I should be able to get the gear easily enough, though. Nothing special about copper wires, and who better to get a big battery than the person who holds four patents on batteries, right?”
Bastet looked at her blankly. “I guess so.”
Taziri tilted her head. “Didn’t we ever talk about that? I have the patents on the… You know, I invented the… never mind.”
Bastet shrugged. “So how soon can you come?”
“Tomorrow night,” Taziri said. “I don’t know when, exactly, but it should be before midnight. I’ll fly in on the Halcyon, and land on one of the western railways, just like before, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll be watching for you!” Bastet said.
Chapter 10
Asha followed Gideon through the winding tunnel beneath the dusty fountain, down into the cold and the dark. They carried two tiny pinpricks of light, one blazing white from the exposed tip of his sword and one burning dark red from the tip of her single ruby claw. Gideon’s light threw the contours of the tunnel walls into sharp relief, silvery white stones streaked with infinitely black shadows. And behind him, Asha let her own small light paint a tiny patch of wall and floor in faint crimson smears of rust and blood.
“You’ve been down here before?” she whispered.
“Many times,” he said over his shoulder. “In the old days I would visit the family down here. Not by this path, though. This is just a back door. Back then I came in through the main gates, a grand entrance onto the boulevard of the buried palaces where the retired deities of Death and War and Love and Cats all lived and played together.”
“What about this place where Lilith is?”
“Lilith’s retreat.” He paused, but didn’t turn to look at her. “I’ve been there twice. Both times to kill her creatures. Once with Horus. Once with Anubis.” He lingered a moment longer in silence, as though he had more to say, but he only shook his head and continued on down the tunnel.
The floor was rough but flat and the walls were stacked blocks and bricks, though Asha saw no mortar between them. The farther they went, the staler the air became, but it reached a certain coolness and grew no colder. And after half an hour of quietly pacing down the dark corridor, straining to hear or see some sign of life or
