and singing quietly to each other.
“Making a sedative.” Asha glanced over at the struggling creature trapped in the aether flood. “A very strong sedative. Gideon, I could use some light.”
The soldier came and sat beside her, unlocked his seireiken, and slid a fraction of the blade out of the gauntlet, letting its piercing white light illuminate Asha’s supplies.
Then she began taking out her paper envelopes, copper tubes, and clay jars filled with seeds, leaves, bark, and dried animal glands and she arranged them neatly in front of her. She took out her mortar and pestle, and a clean bowl, and a clean needle, and she set to work.
“What is all that?” Wren asked, glancing down out of the corner of her eye.
“This is…” Asha smiled sadly. “This is me. Asha, without the dragon. A little bag of old seeds and leaves.” She began measuring out her ingredients and tapping them lightly into the mortar, and then set to grinding them down together into a powder.
“I used to study herbs, too,” Wren said. “Gudrun taught me when I was younger. And my friend Katja too. But since I left home, I’ve just been studying aether-craft. I really don’t know much about southern plants.”
“If you want to learn, I could teach you.” Asha frowned down at her working hands.
Why did I say that?
“I would, some day. Thank you,” Wren said. “Who was your teacher?”
Asha pressed her lips together tightly for a moment. “Just some people in Ming. Have you been to Ming?”
“I’ve never even heard of Ming,” Wren said. “Is it a nice place?”
“It’s a place.” Asha tapped a few clinging motes of powder from her pestle and set it aside. She uncorked one of her copper tubes and poured out its contents into the mortar.
“Water?” Wren asked.
“Oil,” Asha said. “Eel oil. It’s good for carrying powders into the bloodstream.” She dipped her steel needle in the mixture and held it up. A thick bead of dark reddish amber gleamed on the needle. “See?”
“But you can’t get close to use it,” Wren said, nodding at Isis. “If I stop the aether, she’ll get up, but if I don’t stop, you can’t go over there. Sorry.”
“No, that’s all right,” Asha said, as she studied the sedative curing on her needle. “I don’t need to get close. In fact, I’ve had to do this before.”
“Do what?” Gideon asked.
Asha snapped her wrist and the needle flew across the room, striking Isis squarely in the chest. The immortal moaned softly, but her feet continued to kick feebly at the floor. Asha reached for a second needle and dipped it in her mortar.
“How did you do that?” Gideon stared at Isis. “I mean, that wind should have thrown the needle aside, unless you have some secret… dragon aiming… skill thing.”
“Aether can’t affect solid objects,” Asha and Wren said in unison, and they gave each other a sudden glance.
“Aether can only affect a soul,” Wren said slowly, a curious smile tickling her cheek. “So I can move living creatures, or even ghosts, but not regular objects. I can’t even move sun-steel, even though it drinks aether like a berserker drinks mead.”
“Oh.” Gideon gave her a curious look, and shrugged.
“Now then. Time to sleep.” Asha checked her second needle, and then flung it across the room where it struck Isis in the belly. The immortal woman kicked wearily one last time and slumped to the floor.
Wren lowered her arms and the aether tide vanished as a few last wisps of vapor faded back into the ground. She rubbed her shoulders and blew out a long, loud sigh. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? What’s next?”
Asha began packing up her supplies and looked at Gideon. “We’ll need someplace safe to keep Isis. Then we’ll get some sleep, and in the morning, we’ll go looking for the others.”
Chapter 15
Anubis walked slowly down the dark and deserted streets of Alexandria, listening to the familiar sounds of the ancient city cleaning up after supper, laughing over coffee, and preparing for bed. Here and there he found men smoking in the street and chatting quietly, or he passed some lone fellow still trudging home after a very long day, but mostly, he was alone.
This quarter of the city is quiet. Either the immortals aren’t here, or they’re still hiding, and waiting. Perhaps they’re even sleeping. I wonder if they dream.
The youth walked on, his slender staff marking every other stride on the dusty pavement, the rings at the top of his staff clinking softly as the pole struck the ground. As the hour grew later, he met fewer faces in the street, and the lights in the houses grew dimmer and farther apart, until he was left in pale, naked moonlight under a small date palm in a small park surrounded by homes full of families. The park was one of his familiar haunts where he and Bastet would watch the children play, and occasionally pull them out of the path of a huge sivathera or a rushing steam carriage when the little ones wandered into the road.
Maybe they already found a way back into the undercity. Maybe they doubled back to the fountain. Maybe we should have left someone there to…
He turned sharply and listened. Something was shrieking. Someone was shouting. And the two sounds were coming from the same voice.
Horus.
The falcon-cries of the transformed immortal echoed across the sleeping city, and a moment later Anubis heard other sounds. The crackling of falling stone and masonry. The sharp booms of rifles firing. And the screams of people. Lots of people.
With a weary grimace, Anubis took the black jackal’s mask from his belt and placed it over his face, and then he cracked his staff on the street and burst into a living cloud of aether. He traveled the aetheric currents, stronger and faster than any wind, and when he heard the cries raging all around him, he snapped back into the real world, stepping lightly from nowhere into the middle of a living hell.
It was another neighborhood, just like the one he had left a moment ago, but here there were streetlamps lying in the road, their spilled oil burning in bright puddles of fire. The corners of houses had been smashed and crushed, and chunks of broken bricks lay on the ground, leaving the damaged homes to continue cracking and crumbling around their wounds.
And the people.
The people were pouring out of their houses, shouting and crying, and all running up the lane in the same direction, all looking over their shoulders in terror as they clutched their children or other bundles of precious things. A handful of soldiers were grabbing the people and rushing them away, pushing them and shouting at them. Anubis turned to see what they were all fleeing from.
Horus stood in the middle of the street, a massive and powerful figure, his muscular arms and legs painted gold by the roaring fires in the street. He held above his feathered head another of the broken streetlamps clutched in his scaled talon-hands, and he opened his beaked mouth to shriek at the stars.
Anubis flinched at the high, piercing cry. But then he straightened up and started walking slowly toward his cousin. With a slight nod of his head, Anubis shifted his throat to send his voice out through the aether as well as the air, a trick he had learned ages ago when he played the God of Death for the people of Aegyptus. And so it was with a booming and deified whisper that he called out from behind his mask, “HORUS!”
The single word shook the street and rattled the windows above them and made countless fleeing people stumble as they turned to see what giant could have possibly spoken with such power. The whisper was everywhere, vibrating the very bones of the earth like a titan’s dying breath.
The falcon-creature threw down the streetlamp and stared up with his white-in-white eyes at Anubis. A cruel croaking sound ululated in his throat.
