Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

  “Yeah.” Mitch grimaced.

  We’re screwed, Lewis thought. He unfolded his napkin, set it carefully on his lap. Really and truly fucked. No way out, no way off until they got to Paris…. A familiar cold settled on him, his hands steady on the silverware. He could kill Henry, of course. It wouldn’t be easy, he didn’t know what the thing, the demon, could do to stop them, but on balance, he guessed he could kill Henry, Henry’s body. There were lots of nooks and crannies on the ship, dark places to lie in wait; it could be done. The problem was, that wouldn’t get them very far. If they were caught, or even suspected, they’d be in serious trouble. No one was going to believe some crazy story about demons and possession. And, more importantly, the thing might jump again. Kill Henry, and it would need another host; it might not be able to take any of the four of them, but there were forty more bodies aboard the airship, too many choices. Too big a risk to take the easy way out.

  Alma’s eyes widened, and Lewis looked sideways to see Henry making his way through the dining room. He was playing the gracious host, stopping at every table with a word and a grin, accepting the compliments as his due. He looked unchanged, at least on the surface, still the same tall, distinguished businessman. But on a closer look, darkness trailed him, fumed from him like strands of smoke. He was making his way toward their table, as inexorable as a snake, and Alma pressed her foot against Lewis’s beneath the table. She managed a cool smile as Henry loomed over them, resting one hand on Jerry’s shoulder. Lewis looked up, meeting the creature’s eyes, and felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. How could anyone not see the darkness there, a gap opened into something dark and dank and terrible, smelling of dead ground and old bones….

  “Alma,” Henry said, the creature said. “I’m sorry I haven’t had much of a chance to see you this trip.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right,” Alma said. We know you have other commitments.”

  “It’s a pleasure to have you on board,” it said. It was entirely sincere, Lewis realized; it was enjoying every moment of this game, secure in the knowledge that it would win. It tightened its grip, and Lewis saw Jerry wince. “Did Jerry tell you about our earlier conversation?”

  “He certainly did,” Mitch said.

  “I don’t know if I made it clear,” the creature continued, “but the offer I made him was really for all of you.”

  “Offer?” Alma said, with just the right note of curiosity.

  “Hasn’t he told you?”

  There were two spots of color high on Jerry’s cheeks. “I hadn’t really had the chance.”

  “Oh, well, then.” Henry smiled. “I’ll let Jerry tell you, and you can talk it over. In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.”

  “Immensely,” Alma said, and dredged a smile from somewhere. “It’s an amazing ship, Henry. You should be proud of it.”

  She was speaking past the demon, Lewis realized, to the man trapped in his own body, and the demon couldn’t quite hide its frown. It mastered itself in an instant, managed a parody of Henry’s easy grin.

  “Thank you. She’s a beauty — the best in the world, even if it’s me who says so.” It paused. “And, please, don’t wait too long to decide. I can’t hold my offer open forever.”

  “Of course not,” Alma said, stiff-lipped, and Henry turned away. Lewis watched him go, pausing at one table and then another, exchanging an intimate smile with Mary Holliday.

  “If you were a dog, you’d be growling,” Alma said. “Stop it. Look — friendly. As though we were having a good time.”

  She was right, of course, and Lewis made himself relax, smile. Alma pressed her foot against his again, and looked at the others. “Ok —”

  The waiter interrupted her, bringing the soup course, and he was followed by the wine steward, offering a Montrachet. Mitch accepted it with a smile, and the steward filled their glasses, leaving the bottle in ice as though they were in an earthbound restaurant. Lewis sipped at his soup. It was rich and creamy, but he barely noticed the taste.

  Alma swallowed a spoonful. “What was the offer, Jerry?”

  Lewis looked at his plate. He didn’t really want to hear, didn’t want to see Jerry have to explain himself, abase himself — and that was exactly what the thing wanted, he realized. It was keeping track of Jerry’s humiliation, just as it was sowing malice and discord throughout the dining room. Celena Moore was blushing, her expression surprisingly insecure; two of the reporters were glaring at each other as though they were contemplating a fistfight. Palmer looked like a scolded puppy as he trailed after Henry.

  “Jerry,” Mitch said.

  Jerry put his spoon down carefully, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “It’s not possible, you know. What he offered.” He looked at Alma then. “He said he could give us Gil.”

  Mitch sat up a little straighter, blinking as though someone had hit him.

  Alma said, “Oh.”

  “It’s not possible,” Jerry said again, and Mitch shook his head.

  “Then why offer?”

  “Because it likes misery,” Jerry answered.

  Alma said, “It cannot raise the dead. We know that, and it knows we know that. What was it proposing?”

  “That we choose another host,” Jerry said. His voice was tight, remote. “And it would bind Gil’s soul to that new body. After we had done it good service, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mitch said. “Could this thing really do that?”

  “Probably,” Jerry said.

  Lewis looked at Alma. She was sitting very still, as composed as a statue, nothing at all alive except her wide eyes.

  “This is — this has to be tempting,” he began, groping for words, and her calm shattered into movement, reaching across the tablecloth to close her fingers tightly over his.

  “Of course it’s tempting,” she said. “It was meant to be, that’s what it does. But we can’t, and that’s an end to it.”

  Lewis returned the crushing grip. He didn’t dare look at Jerry, didn’t want to see what he was feeling….

  “Gil would murder us,” Mitch said, and Jerry laughed.

  “We’d deserve it, too.”

  “Yeah.” Mitch reached for the wine, topped up glasses that had barely been touched. “Ok, what do we do now?”

  Alma squeezed Lewis’s hand a final time and leaned back to smile at the waiter approaching with the fish course. “We finish our lovely dinner,” she said. “And then we’ll talk.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  After dinner they assembled in Mitch and Jerry’s cabin. Alma perched on one end of the lower berth while Jerry sat on the other. Mitch leaned against the wall beside the dressing table and Lewis stood with his back to the door. Alma crossed her legs, looking from one to the other, but everyone was silent. Lewis thought this was one of those moments when nobody knew what to say, not even Mitch, who usually had the right words. It was Gil’s ghost, Gil’s ghost and the creature’s offer, and Lewis took a breath. It was the last thing he wanted, Gil back, but the man had been their leader, and they needed him desperately right now. Hell, Lewis needed him, and they’d never met. Just loved the same woman, a mocking voice whispered in the back of his mind. If you can call it love. He shoved the thought away, and straightened a little.

  “I know I don’t know anything about this,” he said, slowly, “But if the thing out there can do it — can we, I don’t know, call up Gil’s spirit, ask for his help? At least he knew what he was doing, and I sure the hell don’t.”

  Jerry gave a bark of laughter, but Alma looked at him with a startled smile.

  “We sure as hell can’t call his spirit into some stranger,” Mitch said, scowling.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Lewis said. “Not what that thing was offering. I know that’s bad. But — I don’t know what you can do. What’s possible here.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” Jerry said, and tilted his head back against the wall of the berth.

  “We can’t raise the dead,” A
lma said, still smiling, her voice gentle. “And while we might be able to reach Gil’s spirit if we could find a competent medium, I don’t know what good it would do us even if there was one on the ship. No, we’re the lodge. This is for the living to handle.”

  Lewis couldn’t help feeling a sort of unworthy relief — Gil was a hard act to follow — and Mitch shook his head.

  “Ok. We know what we’re not doing. Anybody got any ideas about what we should do?”

  “I think we need to go to Italy,” Jerry said.

  It was to everyone’s credit that nobody swore.

  “Why would we go to Italy?” Alma asked, frowning.

  “We’re chasing the demon,” Mitch said. “Which isn’t in Italy.”

  Jerry drew himself up, something of his old confidence returning. “That’s the problem. We’re chasing it. And it can jump into literally anybody, as we’ve just seen. So we make it chase us.”

  There was a moment of silence. Lewis wondered if he were the only one to whom that seemed a bad idea. “Why would it do that?”

  “Because it’s going to need time to find the right person to take over,” Jerry said. “I mean, I can think of three or four candidates off the top of my head, men who have the kind of power it’s looking for — Stalin, for a start, or maybe Ataturk —”

  “Mussolini?” Alma said.

  Jerry nodded. “Il Duce. He’s certainly ambitious enough, and he’s got control of the Parliament. King Zog of Albania. Moving further afield, Chiang Kai-Shek. But to get to them, it needs time to prepare, time to insinuate itself into their circles. And we can make that very difficult. So it needs to get rid of us, and we need to meet it on ground of our choosing.”

  “Which still begs the question of exactly how we’re going to get it to follow us,” Alma said. “I’m not arguing with the premise, Jerry, but I’m not making the connection.”

  “We know how to bind it for another two thousand years, and we will unless it stops us.” Jerry paused, looking around the cabin.

  Mitch looked startled. “We do?”

  “It thinks we do,” Jerry said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t have tried to kill me. Otherwise why lure us on to the Independence at all? It could simply have left us in New York.” He shook his head. “No, it thinks that we’re onto it, and that we have the power to bind it. We’re a threat to it. Otherwise — it’s like Alma said, why not just run? It’s not as though we can prove to any authority what’s going on, and its ability to jump from one host to another negates any ability to tie it to its crimes.”

  Alma let out a long breath. “But do we, Jerry? If we yell ‘can’t catch me!’ and get a demon to chase us, what then? As you saw this afternoon, these amulets aren’t protection against physical harm. They’re not going to do a lick of good if it decides to just shoot us. Or shove you out a window again.”

  “That’s true,” Mitch said. He looked at Jerry keenly. “Do you actually know how to bind this thing?”

  “I know where to bind it,” Jerry said, “And that’s the beginning. We need to go to Lake Nemi, to the Shrine of Diana at Aricia where it was bound before. We need to undo what let it out.”

  Lewis frowned. “I know I don’t know a lot about this stuff, but what if the thing that freed it was unburying the Roman ships? We can’t rebury them. That’s a big project, right? With the Italian government and hundreds of people involved.”

  “It’s not the ships per se,” Jerry said. “It’s something that was buried in connection with the ships. I’m guessing the tablets themselves – the one we have is part of a set. I would guess that the tablets were put aboard the ships and the ships were deliberately sunk.”

  Mitch asked the question Lewis had been thinking. “Why would they do that? Weren’t these big, fancy ships?”

  “Go back to the beginning, Jerry,” Alma directed. “Tell them the whole story the way you told me.”

  Jerry pushed his gold-rimmed glasses back up on his nose, his face animated with his enthusiasm for the subject, and Lewis glanced sideways at him. He was handsome, maybe, in a weathered way, the lines of chronic pain bracketing his mouth, or maybe that was just being forty-two. He wasn’t pretty and didn’t look like he had been, at least not in the way Lewis would have expected. But there was something attractive in his face when he talked about something he cared about. Lewis could see that.

  “Ok, to start with, it was sacrilege to build the ships at all. Diana’s Mirror is a very small lake, and for hundreds of years before the period of Caligula it had been forbidden to boat on the lake. It was ok to fish from the bank, but no boats were allowed. The lake belonged to Diana. For Caligula to build two gigantic pleasure barges on the lake was a desecration.” Jerry shrugged. “Of course, Caligula did a lot of that. If you told him that something was forbidden he’d do it just to prove he could. And he’d already desecrated the Shrine for what might have been political reasons, or might just have been because he wanted to.”

  Mitch frowned. “What was that?”

  “The priest of Diana, the Rex Nemorensis, was selected in a very peculiar way. I know you’ve read Fraser’s account, so….”

  “I don’t remember it,” Mitch said. “How about you recap?”

  He did remember, Lewis thought. This was for his benefit. It was like Mitch to make sure nobody was left behind and nobody was embarrassed about it.

  “The priest had to be a fugitive slave, a wanted man. He had to challenge the current King of the Grove to a trial by combat. The two of them would go into the woods, and whichever came back alive was the winner and would serve as Diana’s priest for the rest of his life.” Jerry glanced around at their faces. “So you see it had to be a desperate man to try it. If he lost he would be killed. And if he won, he’d have an honorable place for a few years, until another challenger killed him. Or he might hold it for quite a while, at the cost of death after death in the wild wood.”

  “The hunter’s bargain,” Lewis said, and wasn’t aware he’d spoken until he realized they were all looking at him. “Life for death.”

  “Exactly,” Jerry said. “The Rex Nemorensis embodies that lethal math.”

  Lewis didn’t think any of them were strangers to that. It was what war came down to in the end – kill or die. He could see how it must go, the desperate man going into the woods in misty morning, a knife in his hand, knowing that the king of the grove is waiting. He knows the woods better, and he’s waiting along some game trail, at some place where the path divides in the forest. Perhaps they will stalk one another by day and meet at last by night, while the crescent moon sheds her cool light in benediction over death….

  “Anyway,” Jerry said, “Caligula either had some political problem with the Rex Nemorensis who was serving when he came to the throne, or maybe he just didn’t like the guy. But in any case he bought a famous gladiator and brought him to Nemi. There the gladiator ‘ran away’ and challenged the King of the Grove. It was a set up, and of course he won. It was sacrilege for anyone to interfere in the choosing of Diana’s priest that way, a serious desecration of her shrine. Nobody had ever done it before and as far as we know nobody ever did it again. It was shortly after that when Caligula had the Nemi ships built on the lake. There’s been a lot of speculation that they were the site of some of his most horrific murders, including possibly the murder of his sister Drusilla, though other accounts say she died of a fever.”

  “Nice guy,” Lewis said. His skin crawled.

  “Yeah.” Jerry pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “Anyhow, after Caligula’s murder, his uncle Claudius came to the throne. It appears that Claudius tried to set a lot of things right. The tablet we have definitely dates from the first year of Claudius’ reign based on the consuls serving, and it suggests that Claudius tried to appease the goddess by sinking the pleasure ships in the lake, giving to her all their treasure and getting rid of the offending things at the same time. I’m guessing that the plaques were aboard them and that they bound the animus infernus t
hat had possessed his nephew.”

  Lewis shivered again. He could see it too clearly, the scene conjured by Jerry’s words. Another misty morning, the lake like black glass, the middle aged man standing on the shore, a fold of his toga over the back of his head in a way that Lewis had never seen. He was making a long speech, some of his words slurring together, others enunciated too carefully, but there was power in it. Power and sorrow. He had loved his nephew before the demon claimed him.

  Just like it had now taken Henry.

  “It’s pretty clear that Claudius invoked Diana to bind the creature, and that she did so. We need to figure out what Claudius did and see if we can do the same thing,” Jerry said.

  “She wants us to,” Lewis said. “That’s what I’ve been dreaming,” He blinked, trying to piece it together. “All the dreams about the lake and about things hunting in the dark, even about Davenport the first time, before I met him. There’s a white hunting dog, a white hound.”

  Jerry nodded seriously. “That’s one of Diana’s aspects, yes.”

  His eyes unfocused, Alma’s fingers blurring together. He had been on the verge of something, carried in the flashes of vision, and now it came suddenly clear. “She leads the pack, and they hunt by her will. They wear her mark, and they hunt in her name. Diana’s Hounds.”

  Mitch looked startled, but Alma didn’t. “The amulets,” she said. “We wear her mark. We’re her hounds.”

  Lewis nodded slowly. “She’ll help us. She wants to. I don’t know why she doesn’t just…do something.” He swallowed. He was talking about her like she was real, a pagan goddess, who surely ought to be on the same side as a demon if anything. But it didn’t feel that way in his gut. It felt like she was asking them for help. That was why she showed him things, why these visions came so clear. “I think she needs us,” he said.

  “Of course she does,” Alma said gently. “How else does any spirit work in the world?”

  “Ok,” Mitch said. “Let’s think about going to Italy. But first we have to get off the airship in Paris.” He glanced at Jerry. “Without getting killed along the way. The airship is supposed to arrive in Paris at eight am tomorrow morning. We’ve got ten hours to stay out of that thing’s way. So the first thing is that nobody wanders off alone. We stay in pairs. Jerry, that means you’re with me.”