came here. It’s so awful. Lorenzo was a good man. Handsome, charming, kind.”
“You liked him.” Bastet smiled.
“Yes, I did. He was easy to talk to. Things felt so much easier and simpler around him. He and his wife seemed to have nothing in common, but they were happy together. I could see that, and I envied that. Their marriage. It was strange, but it worked.”
“Not like yours?”
Taziri shrugged. “My marriage is more complicated. I think there’s more arguing in my house than in half of Espana. Everything has to be difficult. I mean, Yuba is a good man and a great father. He’s a talented artist. He’s tall and strong. I love him. I do. And things were easy back when we first got married. But then my career started to take off, and his career stalled, and we had Menna, so his career ended, basically. We had money troubles for a while. Menna had some trouble with her hearing, so there were doctors, and I was always away working. You know, it was just never easy. And I would come home and he would be angry about something. And the thing is, he was usually right about whatever it was, but there was never anything I could do about it. I couldn’t fix his job. I couldn’t change my job. I couldn’t make more money.” She sighed. “It’s been easier this last year. It really has. Since I resigned from the Air Corps, I mean. I’m home more, and we have more money, and he’s working again, and Menna is fine, thank God. Everything is better now. But it’s still never really easy.”
Bastet nodded as she curled up on the nearest passenger seat. “I can’t really tell whether most marriages work well or not. They’re all different. The people are different, the problems are different. Some seem happy, but aren’t. Some seem miserable, but aren’t.” The girl took her cat mask off her head and fiddled with it in both hands. “My family used to be happy, but everyone got older and grouchier and touchier. They fought a lot, for a while anyway. Things are quiet now, but not as happy. Not like they used to be.”
Taziri nodded back. “Sorry to hear it.”
“So your friend was killed with a seireiken? That’s rough. His wife must want to get his soul back, I guess.”
Taziri blinked. She hadn’t thought of that. In all the rush, all the planning, all the talk of revenge and killing, there hadn’t been a single mention of Lorenzo’s soul.
But of course, if the sword was made of aetherium, then it would have absorbed his soul. Stupid. I should have realized that.
She nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“That’s nice. For her, I mean. And for him, I suppose. I didn’t know that people in the west knew how to release a soul from a seireiken,” Bastet said.
Taziri shook her head. “I don’t. I don’t know of anyone who does. We only discovered aetherium two years ago.”
The girl looked up, incredulous. “Two years?! But it’s been…oh, right, the Sons of Osiris have been collecting it all this time. I suppose they got all the sun-steel in the west then a long time ago.”
“I guess so, maybe. We haven’t found any in Marrakesh that I know of.” Taziri leaned forward. “So, you know how to release a soul from a seireiken?”
“Oh, sure.” The girl nodded. “I mean, it’s very hard to do, but you can certainly do it.”
“How?”
“You just need to melt the steel. When it’s melted, it releases the aether and the souls with it.”
Taziri felt a dull weight of disappointment in her chest. “But when the aetherium is charged with souls, it’s already blazing hot. We had a lump of it two years ago that was so hot it burned straight through an entire ironclad warship in just a few seconds. Aetherium can withstand unbelievably high temperatures. How on earth are we supposed to melt it down?”
“I said it was very hard to do. Obviously, it’s easier to forge aetherium when it’s cold, when there are no souls in it. I don’t know how you would melt it once it’s already hot, but that’s what you have to do. Maybe you can drop it in a volcano or something.”
Taziri shook her head and waved the suggestion away. “No, wait, let me think. Regular steel melts around two or three thousand degrees, depending on impurities. Charged aetherium is much hotter, say five thousand. So we need to create a controlled heat source that can generate over five thousand degrees of heat. Focused, controlled heat.” She picked at her lip as she slowly turned to look at the darkened instrument panel of the cockpit.
So what do I have? An engine with five minutes of fuel left. A propeller. A fully charged battery. And some wire.
“You know, back in Marrakesh, in the factories, they sometimes weld regular steel using electricity. It’s called arc welding.”
“Can you do that to a seireiken?”
“I don’t know. But I was thinking of trying something a little different. Over the last year, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles coming out of the university about new kinds of energy and new kinds of matter. There is a theory that after you heat ice into water, and then heat water into steam, you can heat steam into something else even hotter.” Taziri smiled. “How would you like to help me with a little science experiment?”
“Right now?” The girl’s face lit up. But then just as quickly she frowned and turned toward the hatch. “Someone’s here. A tall one and a short one.”
Taziri slipped out of her seat. “It must be Mirari and Qhora!” She peeked out the little window in the hatch and saw Mirari’s masked face near the glass, so she unlocked the door and stepped back to let them enter.
The Espani woman stepped inside and stopped short when she saw Bastet. “Who is that?”
But Taziri was frowning at the little man behind Mirari and she switched into Espani to ask, “Who is that?”
The young man managed a weary smile. “Tycho of Constantia. Good evening to you, captain.”
Taziri grabbed Mirari’s sleeve. “Where is Dona Qhora? Where is the Italian?”
Mirari didn’t move. “Who is the girl? Why is she here?”
Taziri glanced at the end of the cabin where the Aegyptian girl was sulking in the shadows. “That’s Bastet. She lives near here. She helped me get rid of some people snooping around the Halcyon, and she brought me food, which is more than you’ve done, thank you very much. Now where is Dona Qhora?”
Mirari’s shoulders relaxed and she sat down in the nearest passenger seat. The young man hauled himself up the steps into the hatch and plopped down on the floor. The masked woman sighed. “We were separated. We tracked the killer to the home of his lover, and learned that his name is Aker El Deeb. But it was a trap and we barely escaped with our lives. My lady was hurt and chose to hide herself while Tycho and I ran away to divert the men chasing us. But then, after we had gone, Dona Qhora surrendered to them. She just stepped out into the middle of the street and gave herself up.”
“What? Why?”
“To get inside, of course,” Tycho said. “She let herself be taken so she could get inside the Temple of Osiris. Quite a gamble, but it seems to have worked. We followed their carriage across half the city, right to the Temple itself. She’s inside now. No way to help her.”
Taziri blinked. “The temple…of the Sons of Osiris?”
“That’s right,” he said.
She blinked at the dwarf. “I’m sorry, who are you again?”
“Tycho of Constantia. I ran into your friends in the market this morning. They were looking for a seireiken, the same as me and my master, Philo.” He grimaced and swallowed, but then managed another tired smile. “We lost him today. Philo. Killed in the Hellan Quarter. I’m not even sure who killed him, or why. Probably just thieves. Or maybe someone hired by the Temple because we’d been asking the wrong questions. I don’t know. I may never know.” He shrugged.
Taziri glanced at the other two women, who both looked back with tired and helpless eyes that had nothing to offer her or him. The pilot looked down at the young man again with a sudden swell of pity for him, in part for his story but also in part for his imperfect body. It wounded something inside her, the part of her that loved to fix things, to see a person she could not fix. “I’m sorry to hear that. But now you’re helping Dona Qhora?”
“We’re helping each other. I mean to help her find the sword that took her husband’s life, and in turn she is helping me to obtain a seireiken sword for myself. It is my mission to find such a blade and return it to the prince of Vlachia as a gift from my Lady Nerissa.” There was something artlessly kind and hopeful in his bright eyes and
