blocks, avenues, and alleyways. Near the back of the warehouse she could hear voices echoing softly, and she hurried back through the maze of crates, emerging a moment later into a wide open space where three people turned to look at her.
The first two people were Asha and Gideon, who were sitting on a pair of crates off to the left, sitting side by side, and they broke off their conversation abruptly when the Aegyptian girl walked in. The third person was hanging by her wrists from a pair of chains wrapped around an overhead beam, with her feet dangling above the floor. Her hoofed feet.
Isis.
Bastet walked out into the open space and curved around the hanging prisoner, giving her a wide berth as she came over to her friends. “You caught her.”
“We did,” Gideon said. “Thanks to Wren, mostly.” He nodded to the floor beside him, and Bastet leaned forward to see the flame-haired girl snoring on an old blanket on the ground. Gideon sniffed. “She was something else. She held Isis down with the aether while Asha sedated her, and then Wren carried the poor thing here using the aether. I’d hate to think how hard it would have been, dragging Isis halfway across the city and then stringing her up by hand.”
Bastet sat down between Asha and Gideon, and looked up at her steer-horned aunt. The immortal woman stared down at her with blank white eyes, and a faint sneer on her lip. “Can she speak?” the girl asked.
“A little,” Asha said. “Nothing very coherent. Mostly angry shouts. She wants to get back to the undercity, that much we’re sure of. But she’s all right for the moment. With those legs of hers off the ground, she can’t hurt us, or escape.”
“Oh. Good.” Bastet nodded. “Taziri’s here. She came in last night. We had a bit of trouble with Nethys, but everything’s all right now. Taziri is with Jiro.”
“Taziri?” Asha frowned. “Who?”
“She’s an inventor from Marrakesh,” Bastet said. “She’s building the magnet to take the needles out of Isis and the others. In just a little while, it’ll all be over.”
“Maybe for Isis,” Gideon said. “But I don’t suppose you managed to capture Nethys last night.”
“No. She got away,” Bastet said. “And I don’t know where Anubis is, or Horus, for that matter.”
“Maybe Anubis caught him.”
“Maybe.” Bastet hesitated. “So Nethys and Horus are still missing. Maybe I should go back to Jiro’s place. Just in case.”
“I’ll come too.” Asha stood up.
“I’ll go,” Gideon said, rising to his feet.
“No, you’re too slow, and besides, that sword of your is only good for killing, and we don’t want to kill anyone if we don’t have to,” Asha said. “You stay here with Wren and help her keep an eye on Isis. All right?”
Gideon hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
Bastet followed Asha through the meandering paths of the warehouse out to the front doors where they could see the late morning sunlight glancing off the Middle Sea. “Do you remember the way back to Jiro’s place?” Bastet asked.
“I do. Go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you,” Asha said. “Dragons are very fast when they wish to be.”
Chapter 20
Asha ran through the arrow-straight streets of Alexandria, her long black hair streaming out behind her as her golden scaled legs flashed beneath her, her sharp ruby claws scratching the pavement with every step. The city dissolved into soft brown blurs of walls, faces, animals, and machines all dimmed at the edges as she streaked down the street, leaving a sea of confused and frightened expressions in her wake.
She stumbled to a stop outside Jiro’s home and knocked at the door, and when there was no answer she let herself in. Following the sounds of voices and the clangor of metal on metal, she went through the back of the smith’s home and found the door to the adjoining workshop where the tall Nipponese smith was working alongside a shorter woman with thick brown hair tied back with a blue scarf. The two of them were wearing leather aprons and armored goggles, and were bent over a wooden table with a small tangle of wires and metal strips between them.
Bastet sat on a stool in the corner, swinging her legs. She waved.
“Hello?” Asha said cautiously.
The woman looked up. “Hello. You must be Asha. Bastet told me all about you. Well, she mentioned your name, at least. I’m Taziri Ohana, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” She spoke Eranian in a slow and fumbling manner that sounded awkward yet was easy for Asha to understand.
They shook hands.
“You’re building a machine to help the victims? To remove the needles?” Asha asked.
“Yes, and we’re making excellent progress.” Taziri nodded at Jiro and pointed to the golden rod on the table. “It’s fairly straightforward. We just need to bolt a highly charged wire coil around this rod of aetherium, and rig some sort of switch connecting it to the battery I brought, and we’ll be in business. Should be done in the next hour, I think.”
Asha nodded and went to sit by Bastet in the corner. “So, it’s truly that simple? In an hour, we’ll have a tool that can restore all of Lilith’s victims with the press of a switch?”
“Probably.” Bastet bobbed her head. “You should have seen the thing that Taziri built the last time she was here. A flame so hot it melted clean through a seireiken in half a heart beat!”
“Impressive.” Asha leaned back against the wall and looked blankly at the floor, chewing her lip.
The sooner this business is finished, the better. Then I can leave and go someplace far away from everyone. Someplace where the dragon can’t hurt anyone else.
Where I can’t hurt anyone else.
Over the next half hour, she sat and watched the device take form. It looked like a thin golden arm wearing a loose copper sleeve, and at the back end there was an untidy mess of wires and a small black bucket with its lid welded shut. Taziri and Jiro worked quietly, occasionally making some small commotion when the soldering iron went astray or a tool rolled off the table.
“We’re almost done,” Taziri said over her shoulder.
Asha nodded absently.
Maybe we can finish this business today. Maybe I can leave this city tonight.
The two engineers slid the sun-steel rod out of the device and set it aside as they flipped the copper coil over to fiddle with its base. And then the ceiling collapsed.
There was no groan, no crackle of breaking stone or keening of bending beams. The ceiling simply collapsed in one massive avalanche of bricks and dust that began in the center of the room and quickly expanded out toward the walls.
Asha woke the dragon and shielded her head with armored arms while Bastet vanished in a swirl of white aether and the two engineers dove under their work table, Taziri cradling her wire coil to her chest. In a moment the cascade of stone and mortar was over and Asha stood up, knocked the chips from her hair and arms, and pulled her feet free of the blocks around her legs. She scrambled over the debris to the far side of the room, sank her ruby claws into the fallen bricks, and hauled them away from the work table, where she found Taziri and Jiro huddled in a dusty, dark hole under the table, unharmed. Asha reached down to help them out when she heard a strange cry from overhead and she looked up at the midday sky.
A wall of white feathers crashed down into the ruined house, flapping and beating on the cracked stones and raising a storm of gray dust. Asha covered her mouth and nose with one arm while clawing her way to the side of the room with the other. The huge wings smacked her in the back and arms several times, but never hard enough to knock her off her feet, and she huddled against the wall, squinting through the swirling clouds of dust. But the wings kept beating the broken room with powerful strokes, and the dust didn’t settle and the feathers kept their
