The Dragon and the Lotus (Chimera #1) (18 page)

“Good. They’re all needed. That’s a clever trick of yours with the steam and the bellows. Who taught it to you?”

“No one. It was my idea.”

Sebek nodded. “I’d be willing to pay you a decent wage to stay here as our camp physician. I need someone like you to keep the men on their feet.”

Asha shook her head. “Thank you, but no. My friend and I need to be moving on when the train leaves for Herat.”

“Ah. Pity.” He began walking slowly back toward his office.

Asha followed. “May I ask about your sword? I saw you use it yesterday. The wound was so small and there was no blood, but that man died instantly. Why?”

Sebek smiled briefly and patted the blade on his hip. “Magic.”

“No, really. What is it?”

He stopped abruptly to frown down at her. “It’s something deadly. Something dangerous. Something you should ignore, lest I draw it out for another demonstration of its properties.”

Asha nodded slowly.

“You kept your end of the bargain,” Sebek said. “The injured men will be fed until they can work again. And you are welcome to ride the train back to Herat tomorrow. It will leave at noon. Be on time. It will not wait for you.”

“I understand. Thank you.” Asha watched the man in green return to his office and then she paced slowly back to sit beside Priya in the shade of their tent near the injured men.

“What’s wrong?” the nun asked.

“How do you know something is wrong?” Asha said.

“You breathe slower when something is wrong.”

“Oh.” Asha sighed. “Well, I’ll tell you. In my bag, there is a special needle—”

“The one with the three notches?”

Asha looked at her sharply. “How do you know that?”

“I went through your bag once and handled all of your tools.” Priya smiled.

“Why?”

“In case you were ever in trouble and needed me to hand you something. I thought it best to be prepared if there was such an emergency. And because I was curious.”

Asha shrugged. “Well, yes, the needle with the three notches. It’s an aether siphon. I insert it under the skin to draw out excess aether in the blood. When I was taught to use it, I was told that if I ever drove the needle in too deep, or left it in for more than a few seconds at a time, it would kill the patient.”

“Is the needle poisonous?”

“No. But it is made of a strange metal that looks like copper, or gold.” Asha reached into her bag for a sliver of ginger, which she poked into the corner of her mouth. “But now I’m beginning to wonder. What if the siphon can draw out more than just aether? After all, aether can move with or cling to a soul. So what if the needle could draw out a person’s soul? That would kill them instantly.”

Priya nodded.

“Sebek’s sword.” Asha frowned. “It gives off a strange light. And it kills instantly without making a fatal wound. What if his sword is one giant aether siphon? What if it’s made of the same metal?”

“That would be terrible. No one should have such a weapon. You should speak to him about it right away. He may not understand what he has.”

“No. He didn’t appreciate my curiosity just now. And I got the impression he understood just fine. So it might be better if I take a look on my own. Tonight.”

6

After a long afternoon of adjusting splints and changing bandages, and after a bland supper of flat bread and some sort of flavorless paste, Asha sat in her tent and waited for darkness. Priya stretched out on her blanket with little Jagdish on her stomach, and soon both the nun and mongoose were fast asleep. When the sky was black and the camp was silent, Asha stepped out into the pale starlight.

She made a wide circle around the camp, quietly hiking up the southern hillside to come around behind the wooden houses and offices. Sebek’s office had no windows, but the light of his lantern shone through the cracks in the walls. So Asha waited.

Eventually the lantern in the office dimmed and Asha saw Sebek emerge on the far side of the little buildings and make his way down the row to another identical house. Once inside, his lantern again shone through the cracks where the boards were warped and no longer fit together, but after only a few moments the light was extinguished and the house was dark.

Asha crept down the hillside, moving with excruciating care to prevent the loose dusty pebbles from rolling down the slope and revealing her presence. Her poisoned ear brought her the low hums of the souls of men scattered throughout the camp, but she focused on the one right in front of her. Sebek was alone.

When she reached the bottom of the slope, Asha sat down in the shadows against the back side of Sebek’s bunkhouse. She sat in the cold and the dark, listening to the man behind her as he undressed, moved about the room, lay down on the creaking bed, and then slowly, very slowly, fell asleep. Then Asha knelt and peered through the narrow cracks in the walls, willing her tired eyes to focus on the dim shapes inside the room. A bed, a trunk, a chair. She shifted to another crack and studied the room again, but she could not see the sword.

Easing down to the ground, her eye passed over a smaller crack and a black shape caught her attention. Peering through the tiny gap, she saw the outline of the sheathed sword lying on the floor beneath the bed.

The little house stood on four thick wooden blocks, leaving a narrow gap between the floor and the ground. Moving slowly and quietly, Asha crawled under the bunkhouse, squeezing through the small space between the freezing earth and the warped boards. Peering up through the dark cracks she saw the sword above her lying diagonally across the boards. With a pair of plain steel needles, she reached up through the gap and pushed the sword over until she could see the point where the scabbard ended and the hilt began. Then she pressed the tips of her needles into the gap and pulled them apart. The sword edged out from its scabbard by a hair, and then a hair more. And suddenly a warm golden light was shining down into her eyes.

Asha grabbed the hem of her sari and pressed it up over the gap in the boards to smother the light pouring down onto her face. Through the cloth in her hand, she felt a dry heat radiating from above.

With her sari in one hand and a needle in the other, she exposed a tiny section of the sword and carefully touched the bright blade. Instantly the needle grew hot in her fingers and her hand shook. The tip of the needle scratched her other thumb as she pushed the slender steel tool back up against blade.

Suddenly, a chorus of voices rose in her mind. She heard men and women muttering and whispering, perhaps to each other or perhaps to themselves. They spoke Eranian as well as two or three other languages that Asha did not know, but as she lay still trying to understand what she was hearing, an image appeared in her mind. She saw a city, an ancient city of huge stone fortresses and shining marble temples, wide avenues teeming with people and animals and carts, a long harbor full of sailing ships and heavy barges that belched steam just like the black train engine, and in the center of the harbor an enormous lighthouse towered above the sea, its powerful lantern sweeping the horizons with a blue-white light.

A voice rose up from the crowd, an old man’s voice speaking in Eranian, and he said, “…but when Master Omar returns with more sun-steel, then surely we will unravel the last riddle of the aether…”

Asha shuddered as the voice faded back into the crowd.

Her hand holding her sari up to smother the light felt cold. Very cold. Asha blinked and could barely open her eyes again. She felt herself sinking down, down, down into the cool black depths of her mind. Asha bit her lip, trying to shock herself back awake, but still she felt herself slipping away. Dimly she became aware of other people all around her. No one was moving. Everyone was standing very still and gazing up through the darkness at a small sliver of light overhead. Asha looked up at the light and saw two fingers holding a needle, and behind that a face. A woman’s face. Her own face, her eyes closed, her skin pale and ashen.

“No!” she screamed.

The hot needle’s tip softened into a rounded bulb, and the entire shaft began to curve and fold, breaking contact with the blade. Instantly the black space with its silent watchers vanished and Asha blinked up at her own hands and the floorboards and the shining sword.

Asha dropped the melted needle and looked at her left hand. A thin trail of blood was escaping the scratch on her thumb, but the blood wasn’t running down. It was running
up
. The blood had trickled up her finger and along the melted needle toward the glowing sliver of steel.

She shivered, staring at the blood.

After a moment’s pause, she picked up her other needle and scratched at the scabbard instead of the blade and was rewarded with a few thin scrapings of a rough material that felt like broken pottery.

Then she used her needle to push the exposed sword blade away from the crack in the floor, and with the light hidden she crawled back out from under the bunkhouse and carefully made her way back to her own tent. She crept into her blankets and lay very still, listening to the murmurs of the sleeping woman beside her.

The old man’s voice echoed in her mind as she replayed his words over and over again.

Master Omar.

Sun-steel.

Aether.

Asha looked at her thumb and watched the single drop of blood roll down her finger toward the ground. Then she licked her wound and went to sleep.

7

The next morning, Asha made a last round of checks among her patients, trying to give them simple instructions for caring for their own injuries. But soon she had no more patients and no more chores, so she led Priya to the small passenger car of the train directly behind the engine and its huge bin of coal. They stood together on a small platform where the warm sun battled with the cool breeze to create some small comfort for them. The engineer sauntered past, explaining briefly that the train would be returning to Herat backwards, with the engine pushing instead of pulling. And then they were alone.

“You’re very quiet this morning,” Priya said. “Did you find something interesting last night?”

“Something troubling.” Asha squinted eastward across the camp to watch the men breaking and hauling stone away from the collapsed tunnel in front of the train. “There were voices in that sword. And the scabbard was made of this.” She pressed the shavings into the nun’s hand.

“What is it?”

“Fired clay. The blade melted one of my needles when I touched it, so this must be some sort of ceramic that can withstand the heat of the blade.”

“But what does it all mean?”

“That I was right. Sebek’s sword is the same metal as my aether siphon, and it’s full of human souls trapped inside the blade. I scratched my finger on my needle by accident and the sword tried to drink my blood, or more likely the aether in my blood, and my soul along with it. If the needle hadn’t melted away, I might have been trapped in the blade, too.”

The nun froze, her lips parted in a soundless cry.

“I know.” Asha took her hand for a moment.

“We have to take it from him! We have to set those souls free!”

“I’d love to, but I don’t see how. It’s too dangerous. We need to learn more about it, and him. When we know more, then maybe we can do something for those poor souls.”

The train’s whistle blew.
Hooooooot. Hoot-hoot.

Asha glanced up to see the sun approaching its zenith. When she lowered her gaze, she saw Master Sebek striding across the yard toward them. He was not hurrying, but there was a power and purpose in his step. He came up to the train and smiled at the women. “Good day. I see you are on time.”

“Yes,” Asha said. “Thank you again for your help on our journey.”

“My pleasure.” He smiled briefly. “Do you believe that dreams have any real meaning?”

“Rarely.”

“Neither do I. Which is good, I think. I had the strangest dream last night that someone had stolen my sword. My seireiken.” His hand rested on the pommel of the short sword at his side. “The dream was so vivid, so real, that when I awoke I immediately reached for my sword, and I was relieved to find it right where I left it.”

The locomotive’s whistle blew again and the engine shuddered, sending a rumbling vibration throughout the train. They began to roll very slowly, and Sebek began to walk alongside them.

“But it was the strangest thing,” he continued. “My sword had been drawn. Just a fraction, just a hair, but enough to expose the blade. Very strange, don’t you think?”

Asha nodded. “Very strange. You know, your sword reminds me of a story I once heard about a temple on the island of Nippon.”

Sebek frowned.

“The story tells of a brotherhood of warriors with heavenly swords that can split a hair lengthwise, and that shine with the light of the sun even in the deepest darkness. Have you ever heard of such warriors?”

Sebek shook his head.

Asha shrugged. “I heard the story when I received one of my medical tools. A golden needle, also from Nippon. A needle with strange properties.”

The train picked up speed and Sebek strode faster to keep pace. His frown deepened.

“I’ve always wondered about this needle.” Asha patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “Perhaps one day I will go to Nippon and learn more about it. Unless, that is, someone in the west could also tell me about it. Do you know of anyone who might know about it, Master Sebek?”

“No.” He was jogging now, arms pumping and sword bouncing on his hip, and he was slowly falling behind.

The train whistled a third time and the chuffing of its pistons and wheels forced Asha to raise her voice. “Perhaps when I reach the heart of Eran, I will be able to
unravel
these
riddles
.”

Sebek’s eyes widened and he broke into a full sprint as the engine accelerated yet again. He had fallen back behind the passenger car, behind the coal car, and was now alongside the engine itself, and still falling farther behind.

Asha shouted into the wind, “Perhaps Master Omar can tell me more about this sun-steel!”