“No, it’s fine. Come on, we should get moving before-”
The heavy shed doors banged from the outside.
“Right.” Bastet helped Taziri unhook the boxes and bundles from the floor of the Halcyon and they quickly moved everything outside to the ground. Taziri locked the hatch, saying, “I’ve got a few booby traps on her now, just in case. Electric shocks, mostly. Should be enough to keep the riff-raff away for a couple days, at least.”
Together they slung the little boxes and tubes and bags over their shoulders, and crunched across the gravel of the shed floor away from the doors where Nethys was still pounding and grunting.
“I’m sorry I had to hurt her,” Taziri said as they slipped out the service door and headed quietly into the deserted train station. “I mean, I threw her into a building, and then scraped her off the roof when I drove into the shed. I know you asked me here to help these people but…”
“It’s all right,” Bastet said quietly. “There’s no other way. They’re just too dangerous right now. And besides, no matter how much you hurt them, you can’t kill them, and they’ll always recover completely. At most, they might remember getting hurt, but honestly, when you’ve lived as long as we have, these sorts of things aren’t very memorable.”
“Getting thrown off an aeroplane into a stone wall isn’t memorable?” Taziri laughed, and the sound echoed through the shadowy station. “You’re a hard crowd to please.”
“Not at all. You’re here. I’m very pleased.” Bastet patted the gear on her shoulders. “Is this everything you need to build the magnet?”
“Everything except the aetherium core.”
“Right.” The immortal girl nodded. “And I think I know where we can get your sun-steel. As much as you need.”
They hurried through the empty city streets, keeping close to the walls and shadows, and looking up at the starry sky every few moments, but there was no sight or sound of the winged Nethys. Bastet led the way and they soon reached the old neighborhood near the harbor with the great lighthouse blotting out the stars to the northwest, and they huddled against the door of a certain house, knocking as loudly as they dared until the tall smith from Nippon opened the door. The introductions were brief and breathless, but Jiro recognized the names Asha and Lilith readily enough, and let them speak their piece.
“We’re going to build a machine to take the needles out of the immortals, and all the other slaves that Lilith took,” Bastet explained quietly. “This is Taziri Ohana, from Marrakesh. She’s going to make a magnet machine, but we need your help. We need sun-steel. A lot of it. Can you help us?”
“A machine to heal Lilith’s victims?” the smith asked.
“Yes.”
Jiro gave them a stern glare, but he nodded and stepped back to let them enter. Then he directed them to sleep on the floor, and he went back to bed.
Chapter 19
When she woke up the next morning, Bastet heard a kettle whistling softly and two voices talking, interrupted from time to time by a metallic click or clank. She sat up and yawned, feeling the warmth of the small cooking fire beside her. Taziri and Jiro sat side by side with the Mazigh’s boxes laid out carefully before them on the floor. He would point and ask what something was, and she would hold it up and answer him. Their Eranian accents were so wildly different that Bastet was surprised they could even understand each other.
“Good morning,” Bastet said. “Working already?”
The kettle whistled louder.
Taziri smiled. “Our host had some questions, so I figured the least I could do was answer them. Besides, it’s going to take a bit of effort to make this work.”
Bastet nodded. “Can I help?”
Jiro gestured to the kettle. “Tea, please.”
The girl yawned again as she stood up and saw to the shrilly whistling kettle. She poured out the greenish tea into the little white cups that had no handles and presented them to the others, who took them as they continued to talk about wires, batteries, fields, and other arcane things. After several more minutes, Taziri and Jiro seemed satisfied that they knew what they were doing, and they began bundling up the supplies and tools.
“What now?” Bastet asked.
“Now, we work.” Jiro tucked most of the boxes under his long arms and led the way through the back of the house, through a narrow door, and into the adjoining house.
Bastet followed them both and found herself in a small workshop full of familiar tools for metal working, from whitesmithing to blacksmithing to goldsmithing. There was a furnace, a foot-bellows, an anvil, and a trough of water, as well as tongs of all sizes, bores and drills, hammers and anvils, and leather aprons and gloves all neatly arranged on hooks and shelves around the space. Taziri and Jiro laid out the boxes and began setting out the tools and materials for the magnet.
Bastet watched them for a moment and then said, “I’m going to go check on the others. They were trying to catch Isis when I left them last night. Okay?”
Taziri smiled at her. “Okay. We’ll be fine here. I think we have everything we need.”
The Aegyptian girl went back into the other room, and then let herself out through the aether. At first she went nowhere, and was content to merely drift above the city harbor and watch the little fishing boats sailing out on the sparkling Middle Sea, and to watch the huge steamers chugging in and out of the piers. It was the same as it ever was, people going about their work, moving things from here to there, oblivious to the machinations of gods and princes, and immortal monsters.
No matter how the world changed, no matter who sat in the Imperial throne in Aegyptus or in Eran, no matter which gods were worshipped in the old temples or the new, no matter what language was spoken or what coins ruled the marketplaces, there would always be fish to catch and men who sailed out each day to catch them.
I wonder what it is like, having a world with the same little problems every day. Fix the net, fix the sail, find the fish, catch the fish, sell the fish. It hasn’t changed in four thousand years. I suppose it will never change. And yet there are always princes and war queens and death cults who want to rule them, to tax them, to brand them as citizens or subjects or slaves.
But the fish don’t care, and the boats and nets don’t care. I wonder how much the fishermen care, really.
Eventually Bastet glided down across the city streets and found her own little stone tower nestled in between the two old estates. She drifted in through the window and lay down on her huge pile of blankets and pillows, luxuriating in the softness of her bed compared to the hardness of Jiro’s floor.
A cat meowed and poked its head up from the stairs.
“Go away,” Bastet sighed.
The cat meowed again.
“All right, all right, I’ll go find them.” The girl slipped away into the aether again and turned her thoughts to Asha and Wren, and to Gideon and Anubis. There was no certain way to find them, no simple means to call out to them or to spot them in a crowd, but she often felt that if she tried hard enough she could sense where someone was. Just barely. Just a hint of a whisper in her ghost.
Twice she was almost certain she had felt the familiar tug of Anubis just around the next corner, just across the next street, but each time she stood on the roofs alone without any sign that her cousin might be near. For the next two hours she glided over the city, listening and sniffing and peering into dark windows as a vague cloud of cool, white aether mist until she smelled something strange. Something that reminded her of home.
That oil, it smells like… Gideon’s hair!
She plunged down through the roof of a large warehouse near the waterfront more than a league from Jiro’s house, and found herself in a miniature city made of boxes piled high and stacked in rows that reminded her of
