Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

  "Buy the collection," Jerry said. "The ushabtis are worth it, and I would have recommended it anyway. Then bury the medallion until you can raise the money." For a moment, he wondered if he should say he suspected that Friday's prank was somehow connected, but decided against it. It would involve too much explanation, and all of it was the stuff of pulps, the sort of thing Mitch delighted in, not serious scholarship. Even if it was true.

  "I can try," Hutcheson said. "Our budget isn't what it used to be." He turned the medallion over, frowning at the images of Alexandria's monuments. "I wrote to Herr Rosenthal last week to ask permission to photograph the collection for research purposes even if we weren't able to buy it. I haven't heard back, of course."

  "Perhaps you could photograph this one," Jerry said. "Test the process."

  Hutcheson gave a wry grin. "Not a bad idea."

  "At least we'd have a record."

  Hutcheson nodded. "You know I can't promise anything. But I'll do everything I can."

  "I trust you," Jerry said, and held out his hand for the medallion.

  He made his way back to his own office, closing the door carefully behind him. There was one more thing he could do, though he'd need Iskinder's help for it: cast a glamour on the medallion itself, so that it would be entirely inconspicuous, one more ordinary object among thousands of more interesting things. He wished there were more he could do — wished he believed that Hutcheson could do as much to help him as Hutcheson would like — but this was how the dice had fallen. He'd do what he could, and move on.

  Lewis dreamed, and in his dream a white hound stood beside him. She was long and lean, keen nosed and blue eyed, and when he knelt beside her, she leaned against his side and he felt his heart swell with love.

  "What is it you want from me?" he asked quietly. "I will do what I can."

  She stood up, walked a few paces, and waited for him.

  "I'll come with you," Lewis said, and stepped to her side, one hand just touching the back of her neck as she stood at his knee, hunter and dog together as they stepped out into the night.

  It seemed to Lewis that they walked for a few minutes through impenetrable darkness, though he was not afraid, her fur warm beneath his fingers, her pace steady and unflagging. Then the light began to change. It was not pitch black, but simply night. No, night waning toward morning, as though they walked eastward toward some place where it was nearly dawn. It was a cemetery. Shapes began to emerge out of the mist, marble slabs and obelisks, old-fashioned grave stones and mausoleums. It was a very elaborate cemetery.

  The white hound threaded her way among the stones, past a statue of a warrior angel spearing a serpent, around a tall obelisk. She stopped, her nose pointing, quivering. Lewis knew, as clearly as if she'd said it: look.

  Three men in workman's clothes were furtively approaching a grave before him, an elaborate one with a semi-circle of marble, with columns and carving and full Victorian frou-frou. From their dress and the tool boxes they carried one might have thought they were laborers on their way to work, but their way of moving betrayed them. They did not walk like workmen. They walked like the lords of the universe. It made their battered clothes seem nothing but bad costumes.

  One of them set down his toolbox, and looked about one last time while the other two took up positions behind him, well placed to see if anyone approached. Anyone corporeal. They looked straight through Lewis and the hound.

  We are safe, he thought. He knew it. Of course he was safe with her, and of course they could not touch her. He was here to see, and what she taught, he would learn.

  The leader opened his toolbox and drew out a dagger, black handled, steel blade gleaming, some sort of device worked into the guard. Holding it high he began a series of invocations. Latin? Greek? Lewis wasn't certain, but he understood the clockwise tracing of a circle about the central grave, the pauses at each of the quarters.

  The hound did not move. She waited, attentive.

  "What are they doing?" Lewis asked her. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. "They shouldn't be doing that!"

  Wine poured out in libation over the grave, and then the leader held the dagger high again, slicing his own left ring finger so that his living blood spattered out over the marble stone.

  Lewis felt a chill run through him. "Are they doing what I think they're doing? Trying to summon the dead?"

  The words were cold, commanding. The leader brought his hands together, dagger and blood at once, and it seemed to Lewis that a net rose up, a net of light reaching for the sky, pouring westward in a fine-spun column, rising like smoke, a net to catch a soul.

  And then it dissipated. It collapsed into nothing.

  The leader swayed, faint, and fell to his knees. One of the others rushed up, steadying him.

  It was gone. Whatever it was, it was entirely gone, and nothing remained of its menace and malice except three men in dingy clothes in a cemetery in the hour before dawn.

  The hound stepped back.

  "What happened?" Lewis asked her. "I don't understand."

  Her blue eyes looked into his, and he knew as if she'd spoken that he would. He must remember, and he must understand.

  "I'll do my best," Lewis said, and bending to her he followed her home.

  Lewis was still asleep when Alma woke up at six thirty, unusual, but he'd flown them back from Albuquerque the day before, so she let him rest and put on her old velvet bathrobe and went downstairs to make coffee.

  Mitch rolled in while it was perking, so she left the eggs to him and got the paper in. She was halfway through the first section and the eggs were cooking when Stasi came down, silent and bleary from being up ahead of the sun, and sat grimly smoking a cigarette.

  Lewis pushed the door open just before she would have gone to get him. He hadn't shaved, and it looked like he'd just tumbled out of bed. "I need to talk to all of you," he said.

  Alma put the paper down at the urgency in his voice.

  "Can we talk over breakfast?" Mitch asked, gesturing with the cast iron pan full of eggs. "I've got to fly to Salt Lake this morning."

  "Sure," Lewis said and slid into his chair. Stasi handed him a cup of coffee wordlessly. "You stay too," he said to her. "You might know something about this."

  "I wasn't leaving," Stasi said. "Not before the eggs."

  "Is this Lodge business?" Alma said, folding the paper beside her plate.

  "Yes, but she's the medium," Lewis said. "I'd like to know what she thinks of this."

  He told them over eggs and toast, a dream of the white hound and what she showed him. "The last time she showed me something like this," Lewis concluded, "it was Davenport possessed by the demon, and that turned out to be really important."

  "Just a bit," Mitch said.

  Alma put her elbows on the table, coffee cup between her hands. "You think they were trying to raise the dead."

  Lewis nodded. "Maybe. Does that work?"

  "Not that I know of," Alma said. "I've never heard of anything that could actually do that. As far as I know, that's one of the things that's truly impossible." There was a long silence around the table, and she knew Lewis and Mitch were thinking of the same thing she was, of the demon that had possessed Henry Kershaw offering to bring Gil back to them. But that had been different, a false hope, and in any event had not promised the resurrection of Gil's physical body, but rather the summoning of his spirit into another body.

  Stasi hadn't been there, but she drew the same conclusions. "But you can summon the dead," Stasi said.

  Alma looked at her levelly. "Have you done it?"

  She shrugged. "Once or twice. When there was a ghost that was wreaking havoc. But that was more telling someone who was already there to sit down and shut up so that their family could talk to them. He didn't realize he was dead, you see, and he'd been a drunken ass in life, so when his family ignored him, he ran all over the house breaking things and screaming at people." She shrugged again. "I locked him in the dining room until
he calmed down and his daughter could get him to behave. Then he cried a lot."

  "This wasn't like that," Lewis said.

  "I've certainly never done a ritual like that." Stasi took another forkful of eggs. "And it's not particularly easy to summon the dead."

  "But you did it," Alma said.

  "Under the best circumstances." Stasi ticked them off on her fingers. "He'd only been dead for a few months. He was already in the house. I was surrounded by his family and by his material possessions. And he wanted someone to talk to him. He was having a temper tantrum because he couldn't be heard. This is completely different."

  "I think whoever they tried to summon had been dead a long time," Lewis said slowly, his eyes defocusing in that way Alma was getting used to, as if he looked through the things around him. "The gravestones looked old."

  "How old?" Alma asked.

  "Maybe a hundred years." Lewis shook his head. "I didn't look at the dates. I should have."

  "And the names, darling," Stasi said.

  Alma glanced at Stasi. "Is it possible to summon someone who's been dead that long? Best guess," she added, seeing Stasi hesitate.

  "Theoretically," Stasi said. "But you'd need exactly the right things, and I wouldn't recommend it."

  "Why's that?" Mitch asked.

  She looked uncomfortable, Alma thought, and not just because it was always a little awkward at first to talk about things that sounded crazy in decent company.

  Stasi took a deep breath. "Most souls don't stay disincarnate for very long. Some do. There are ghosts who haunt places for years, but that's actually very rare. Most souls only wait around for a few months or a few years and then they're gone."

  "To heaven?" Lewis asked.

  She shrugged. "I'm not a priest, darling. Not in any conventional sense. I don't know where they go. But at least some of them return in other bodies."

  "Transmigration of souls," Alma said, nodding. "It's a basic tenant of Theosophy. Go on."

  "Summoning someone who's been dead a long time and who's not a ghost stands the significant risk of calling a soul out of a body they currently inhabit," Stasi said. "And that could injure or kill some perfectly innocent person." She picked up her coffee cup restlessly.

  "So if I wanted to find Blackbeard's pirate treasure or something like that, and I summoned Blackbeard," Mitch said, "what would happen?"

  "If you succeeded, you might kill an old lady in Minnesota who used to be Blackbeard in a past life," Stasi said. "Or you might hurt her very badly. But you probably couldn't do it. You'd need something of Blackbeard's to use as a correspondence to summon his spirit, and unless you had something that was an infallible correspondence it might not have enough attachment to do the trick." She took a quick sip. "Let's say I wanted to summon Alma. Using this coffee cup wouldn't work. Yes, it belongs to Alma, but she's not deeply emotionally attached to it. It's not of symbolic value to her. So having Blackbeard's shoe or something wouldn't do it. It's just not unique or important enough."

  "What about his bones?" Lewis asked.

  Alma caught her breath. "Of course," she said. "That's what they were doing. That's why a graveyard. Bones are an infallible correspondence, like hair or blood."

  Lewis nodded slowly. "So why didn't it work?"

  Alma shook her head. "I have no idea," she said. She wished Jerry were there. He was the best theoretical magician of them, the best she'd ever seen. Jerry would be able to take this apart on a dynamic level in ways she couldn't. Thankfully he'd be home soon, taking the train back to Colorado for Christmas. This wasn't exactly a conversation they could have on the phone from the Harvard Club.

  Stasi shifted restlessly in her seat.

  "Yes?" Alma asked.

  "There was a man who wanted to hire me for this kind of work recently," Stasi said. "He's a spiritualist. He wanted me to summon a guy who died in 1815. He thinks this guy is some kind of Wandering Jew, a soul who's bound to the earth because of past transgressions or oaths or something. I told him I couldn't do it without an infallible correspondence." She lifted her eyes to Alma's. "I figured there was no way he'd get one for someone who died that long ago."

  "And you think this might be connected?" Alma asked.

  "It's a hell of a coincidence," Mitch said. "How recently?"

  "Last winter," Stasi said. "And…." She glanced over at Mitch. "He sent someone to ask me about it two weeks ago. I said no."

  "Two weeks ago," Mitch said flatly.

  "I said no. I said exactly what I said before, that I couldn't do it."

  "You didn't mention it."

  "Why should I?" Stasi demanded. "I was offered a job and I said no. Why would I tell you about that? Would you tell me if someone offered you a job?"

  Mitch flinched.

  "I told the guy he sent to tell Pelley that I couldn't do it."

  "Wait," Lewis said. "Pelley?"

  "Bill Pelley?" Mitch demanded. "Bill Pelley in LA?"

  "Who's Bill Pelley?" Alma asked. She hated being left in the dark.

  "We met him when we were in LA with Henry last month," Lewis said. He looked contrite. "I'm sorry. I didn't mention him because it didn't seem important."

  "He's an ass," Mitch said flatly. "He's a second-rate horror script writer who runs some kind of Theosophist spin-off with Ascended Masters and the whole thing. He's so full of BS that Henry won't put up with him. He made a half-assed bid for me to join his club and I told him to get off."

  "And you didn't mention it to me?" Stasi asked sweetly, daggers in her voice.

  "Why would I do that?" He looked back squarely.

  "Kids," Alma said. "Can we stay on the subject here? This Bill Pelley -- what did he want?"

  "I don't know," Lewis said. "I guess he wanted Mitch to join his Lodge. He didn't seem very interested in me."

  "Because he's an ass," Mitch said. "One of these native-birthers. He went on about the real America and keeping immigrants out." The color was high in his face. "I said you were as American as I am and I told him to jump in the lake."

  Lewis shrugged. "I figured it was something like that. I've heard it all before. It doesn't bother me."

  "It bothers me," Mitch said. "People don't talk crap about my friends to me. I don't put up with that."

  "Ok," Alma said. "So this guy is an ass. Why does he want to summon the dead?"

  "I told you that I don't know," Stasi said. "Pelley was very vague. He said he wanted to talk to him and persuade him to support his cause. He got mad when I said that there was no telling who this guy might be now -- he might be a little old lady or a guy in China. Pelley said that was impossible because once you're a paladin you're always a paladin. He'd written some long dreary invocation about the bones of heroes sleeping in hollow hills waiting to be called forth so that they can ride the skies and drive their enemies before them. He said it was an incredible source of energy just waiting to be tapped." Stasi shrugged. "I think it's a mess, myself. I told him it couldn't be done."

  "But it might be possible," Alma said.

  She nodded reluctantly. "Maybe. If you had bones. You could call someone by their bones."

  "But it didn't work," Lewis said. "I saw that it didn't. The net rose up and then it fell apart."

  "Maybe they just didn't have enough power," Alma theorized.

  "Or they got it wrong somehow," Mitch said. "They could have just screwed up."

  "I think the bigger question is this," Lewis said. "Why did Diana show me?"

  "To warn us?" Alma said.

  "To set Her hounds against Pelley," Mitch said grimly. He looked at Stasi. "Do you know anything else about him?"

  "Not really, darling." She sighed. "I knew a lot of creeps in LA. He was one creep. He hates President Hoover."

  "Everybody hates Hoover," Lewis said. "That's why he just lost an election in a landslide. He's screwed up the economy."

  "Well, he hates Roosevelt too," Mitch said. He looked at Stasi. "He said he was a Communist."

  "As i
f," Stasi said, examining her painted nails.

  "So who does he like?" Alma asked.

  Stasi shrugged. "Lindbergh?"

  "Everybody likes Lindbergh," Lewis said. "And he's not in politics."

  "He's a hell of a pilot," Mitch said.

  "He's not that great," Lewis replied. "You could have done it. So could I."

  "Can we stick to the topic?" Alma said. "Let's think this through. If Diana saw fit to give Lewis a warning, there's a good reason for it. Stasi, you said that you were contacted two weeks ago and that you refused. Any threats? Any retaliation?"

  "Just a vague sort of someday you'll wish you had Pelley's help kind of thing," Stasi said. She still looked uncomfortable. "Nothing threatening, actually. I really didn't think it was that important." She raised her chin, looking at Mitch defiantly.

  "So probably not a threat to Stasi," Alma mused. "Especially since it looks like Pelley found someone else to do it and it failed entirely independently."

  "There was one other thing," Stasi said. She took a deep breath, still looking at Mitch. "He wanted to hire me to steal something from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wanted me to get Jerry to let me in. I told him no to that too."

  "What was it?" Lewis asked.

  "I thought you were out of the game," Mitch said.

  "I don't know why you thought that," Stasi said. "I never said so."

  "From the Met?" Alma asked. "What is it?"

  "I don't know exactly," Stasi said. "A tablet. A small one. We didn't get any further talking about it because I said I couldn't." She looked back at Mitch. "This time."

  "Oh for the love of…."

  "A tablet," Alma said. "How old?"

  "Ancient, I presume. If Jerry had anything to do with it." Stasi shrugged. "I don't know. I couldn't ask a lot of questions after I'd said no. And I did say no. So quit acting like it's Grand Hotel!"

  "I never said," Mitch began.

  "On topic," Alma said sharply. "You can fight later. Presumably this tablet is expensive?"

  "I don't know," Stasi said. "But I don't think he wanted it because it's expensive."

  Lewis' face was keen. "Could you use a tablet that old for a material correspondence?"