Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air (33 page)

“Now,” Robinson called.

Lewis tipped the Potez onto its port wing, arrowing over and down, one finger flicking off the safety. He could feel the struts shaking, close to their tolerances already, and filed that information for later, counting the heartbeats. He wasn’t going to shoot until he was at point-blank range, going for all the surprise he could manage. Someone shouted on the radio, and the stutter of machine guns sounded behind him. He saw the tail-end Fiat’s pilot spot him, saw him tip the little fighter down and away, scrambling to get inside his turning radius.  Wrong move, he thought, watching the observer fire blindly, tracers flicking away into the distance. He pressed his own trigger, fired a quick burst that stitched the Fiat’s tail. The Fiat spun, pulling up and away, and Lewis brought Potez Five around on its tail, his engine screaming under the strain. He was finding his limits all too fast.

The Fiat’s observer fired again, but Lewis had the range, pressed his finger on the trigger, aiming for the Fiat’s belly as the pilot tried to turn and climb away. He saw the tracers flash across, saw the holes appear along the undercarriage, and the observer jerked in his cockpit.

“On your tail, Five,” Mitch called, and Lewis flung Potez Five to the right, barrel-rolling away from the first Fiat, now showing a satisfying trail of smoke. Tracers flickered past, mostly off the port wing. Lewis pulled up as steeply as he dared — slower than he would have liked, but the Italian was slower still to respond.  At the top of the climb he rolled, and found the Fiat still behind and below.  He hit the trigger again, once, twice, two short bursts at the engine cowling, and saw smoke appear from the exhausts. The Fiat rolled away, and for an instant he strained to follow, ride his kill into the ground, but this was not that kind of fight. He was here to drive off the Italians, not to kill them, and he rolled Potez Five back toward the melee.

Mitch had another Fiat on the run, dropping low and fleeing toward the north — presumably damaged, though it wasn’t trailing smoke. The student pilots had ganged up on one of the Fiats and the three spun in circles as they tried to get a decent shot. Robinson had engaged another Fiat, and the Breda and von Rosen were exchanging shots with three more Fiats.

“Five! Help Two and Three!” Robinson called, and in the same moment Lewis saw Mitch turn toward von Rosen and Asha, scrambling for height. Two more Fiats homed in on the students, who were on the ragged edge of control as they turned and twisted, trying to escape.

“Roger.” Lewis turned toward them, diving to pick up more speed, and saw Potez Two break away, tail surfaces visibly chewed up by the Fiats’ machine guns, fighting toward the field. Lewis ignored him, bringing Potez Five up to dive out of the sun onto the tail of the fighter chasing Potez Three.  He got in a good shot as he passed, saw the Fiat jump and waver, then pulled up again, feeling the strain in his wings. This was the moment he was most vulnerable, if the Fiats could see it, but they seemed so startled by the attack that he was able to climb past them, airspeed dropping toward a stall. He applied full rudder, the Potez seeming for a moment to stand on its wingtip, and then came rushing down again on the nearest Fiat.  It yawed wildly, the observer firing blind, and Lewis grinned as he saw the line of tracers march across the unprotected belly.  Potez Three had managed a credible roll of his own, and got some decent hits on his erstwhile pursuer; it made a split-S and fled to the north, following its fellows.

Lewis banked into another climbing turn, automatically reaching for height and sun, and realized that the fighters had disengaged. The bombers were past, turning back to the north, and on the ground he could see the dusty clouds thrown up by the bombs. No, he realized, not dust, and not ordinary bombs; he’d seen gas before, on the Western Front, and there was no mistaking that lingering haze. But it was in the wrong place, not by the field but over the village, drifting slowly south and east as it faded, and he jammed the throttle forward. No one used gas, that was forbidden by the League of Nations, and no one in their right mind used it against civilians, against a church and a Red Cross hospital — against Alma. She’d been down there, somewhere, and he shoved that thought from his mind. He was going to destroy those bombers, going to give them what they deserved for breaking all the laws of civilization, everything they’d fought for in the last war —

“— bombed the hospital,” von Rosen shouted. “We have to do something —”

Lewis closed his mind to that, too, shoving his throttle forward. Full power, and the bombers were still pulling away.

“Potez Five, Breda,” Robinson said, his voice sharp in the headphones. “Break off and return to base. You can’t catch them.”

For a heartbeat, Lewis ignored him, figuring power and angles. But Robinson was right, none of their planes had the speed to catch the Italians; on top of that, he had no idea how much fuel he had left.  “Roger, Colonel,” he said, and turned reluctantly back toward the airfield.

“We can’t just leave them,” von Rosen protested. “We must go after them.”

“Colonel’s right,” Mitch said. “They’re too fast, and I’m damn near out of fuel. Check your gauges, von Rosen.”

There was a pause, and then a sigh from von Rosen. “Very well.”

The airfield was barely touched, as though it hadn’t been the target at all, just a couple of potholes on the apron in front of the hangar. “Bastards,” Lewis muttered, and took his place in line behind the Breda.

It took all his patience to taxi Potez Five to the hangar entrance, and he abandoned it there, flinging himself out of the cockpit. The air smelled of cordite and garlic and his eyes filled instantly with tears.

“Alma!”

Mitch caught his arm. “Wait.”

Lewis jerked himself free. “Alma!”

There was no one in the hangar, no one in the office. The village…

The clouds of mustard gas had dissipated, blown away by the freshening wind, but columns of smoke rose here and there. White tents flapped in the wind still marked with the red cross. She was an ambulance medic first. Alma would be with the wounded.

Lewis wasn’t sure how he got down the hill, Mitch close behind him. People moving through the clearing smoke, and others not moving…

“Morphine! I need morphine!” He heard her shout, saw the golden flag of her hair, Alma kneeling beside a man who twisted in agony, blood and bile and the bright red of his own lungs streaming from his nose and mouth. A bomb splinter had gone through his chest, a splinter of ribs showing at the edge of the wound. “Morphine!” Alma shouted again, holding him across her body, trying to keep him from aspirating his own blood, though he had nothing left to breathe in with. It was too late. His eyes rolled up, limbs stiffening in one long tremor before he collapsed in a rush.

Beside her on the ground lay her jacket. For a moment Lewis thought she’d just taken it off, and then he saw the pair of small feet sticking out beneath it, paler on the soles of the feet, no bigger than Dora’s.

Alma laid the man back gently, her arms soaked to the elbows with his scarlet blood. She looked up and saw him and got to her feet. Her eyes were bright not with tears but with fury. “Hear me, Sekhmet!” she snarled. “Hear me, Lion Headed Lady, Mother of Ethiopia! I will bring them down. I will bring them down into dust!”

Behind her a woman cast herself on the ground with a scream that should have split open the sky, throwing the jacket aside and snatching up the tiny, bloodied corpse, the little boy’s head lolling back.

Alma’s voice shook. “I will destroy them! Lady of the Desert, hear my oath! I will destroy them.”

“I know,” Lewis said.

She took one long breath. Then her eyes focused on something behind him and he turned to see a young man sitting outside one of the tents, eyes unfocused with shock, blood pouring down his leg from a bullet that had passed through the calf. “Lewis, give me your tie for a tourniquet.” Alma scrambled over the dead man and Lewis followed. “Let me see your leg. Come now.” She went to her knees beside him, searching for the bullet hole with her fingers.

“Show me what to do,” Lewis said.

The war began now.

January 4, 1936

J
erry wasn’t sure how long they traveled in darkness. Sometimes they crawled through sewer tunnels long dry. Sometimes they walked through galleries of stone, through wonderlands of pillars and columns carved fantastically and beautifully, a garden beneath the city frozen in attitudes of wonder, catacombs and cisterns, tombs and temples. Once they had to climb through precariously balanced slabs where an earthquake had brought down part of the ceiling, Jerry crawling between marble facings carved like the Rosetta stone in hieroglyphics and Greek letters both.

“If we get stuck this will be our tomb too,” Willi muttered behind him, and Jerry could only think it was fitting. What better tomb could a man want?

At last they came to a junction of ways, the ceiling high enough to stand erect, as if they stood at the crossings of some underground street, the cobbles smooth beneath their feet. Hussein flashed the light around the walls. “I have no idea where we are,” he said.

“We know the direction but not the path,” Jerry said. A hundred rooms, a thousand passages, all beneath the earth… Finding a way out, much less finding the Soma, seemed almost impossible.

“Check the compass again,” Willi said.

Jerry felt in his coat pocket for the compass in its case. Instead his hand encountered a handkerchief-wrapped bundle: Iskinder’s pectoral. It was warm, almost hot to the touch. He jerked his fingers away. Then he deliberately reached for it and drew it out.

Hussein turned around, looking at it keenly as Jerry unwrapped the handkerchief. “What’s that?”

“A Ptolemaic pectoral,” Jerry said. “It belongs to the Emperor of Ethiopia. A friend gave it to me for safekeeping.” The last fold fell away. Ruddy gold gleamed, cabochon rubies throwing back the light of the flashlight. Isis bent her protective wings over Pharaoh, Ptolemy Philadelphus enthroned. “The Strong Youth Who His Father Has Raised to the Throne,” Jerry said. “The second Ptolemy, the one who built the original Soma, or at least who presided over its dedication.”

“I thought we didn’t know that,” Hussein said, a faint frown between his brows. “I thought we didn’t know exactly when the Soma was dedicated.”

“At Philadelphus’ coronation,” Jerry said. “That was when they brought Alexander’s body here from Memphis.” He could see the procession in the streets, winding its way between buildings, Alexander’s hearse approaching at last the place prepared for him. He could almost hear the roar of the crowd become respectful silence as the hearse passed…

“The pectoral may commemorate that coronation,” Willi said. “You said that’s what the inscription said. A gift from the young pharaoh to his mother.”

A chill ran down Jerry’s back. “It was the same day,” he said softly. “The same day. The same gold. The same craftsmen. The same hands.” He turned the pectoral over in his own hands thoughtfully. Alma would be able to do this. This was her element. It wasn’t his, but perhaps down here the correspondence was strong enough. And the pectoral was awake, questing, brought once again to its ancient charge by Iskinder’s shed blood. “Blood of the Ptolemies,” he whispered. Iskinder’s blood on the gold, where an assassin’s knife had turned and spared his heart. How long does it take for the genetic markers in blood to change? More than a mere two thousand years…

Jerry looked up. “Do you have any string? Either of you?”

Willi frowned. “What?”

“I have the rope,” Hussein said. “I could cut off a piece of it with my pocket knife and unravel it.”

“Perfect,” Jerry said. “About so long.”

“What are you doing?” Willi said. His voice was neutral, but Jerry winced. He knew how much Willi hated anything that smacked of the occult. It was beyond disbelief to active distrust born of the horrible ways he’d seen it used before.

Jerry met his eyes. “Do you trust me?”

“What are you going to do?” Willi didn’t look away.

“I’m going to dowse for the Soma. I’m going to use the pectoral to home in on the other things that were made by the same hands and dedicated on the same day — Alexander’s grave goods.”

Hussein blew out a long breath. “I’m in,” he said nervously. He looked from one to the other. “This is the Soma!”

Jerry held Willi’s eyes, willing him to agree.

“You give me your word that you will invoke nothing, that you will conjure nothing?”

“Yes,” Jerry said. He didn’t add that if there was conjuring to be done he had already done it, calling upon Agathos Daimon in the cisterns of Alexandria.

“Then do it,” Willi said.

Jerry took the length of fiber that Hussein produced, threading it through the pectoral and suspending it beneath the loop so that it hung freely on the string. It was heavy. He closed his eyes. “Show me,” he whispered.

Like to like. Gold to gold. The work of the hands of craftsmen who had made this, the touch of hands that had hallowed it…

…a woman’s hands, plump and middle aged, decorated with golden rings. She had held this with delight, joy in its beauty and pride in the young man it represented, her son. Her blood, her touch, was not unfamiliar at all, Iskinder’s distant foremother who had first worn this…

“Berenice,” Jerry said quietly. “Berenice.”

It had rested against her chest, rested on a chain against her heart as she cut a lock of her hair with a silvered knife, brown streaked heavily with gray. She had laid it with two others, one brown and one entirely white, laid it on the lid of the sarcophagus, the first mourners of so many. She had thought, placing it there, of the man who lay inside preserved by the embalmer’s art, forever young and beautiful as she remembered him from their mutual youth, not transformed as she was by age and the fruition of dreams.

“Berenice, Egypt’s queen,” Jerry whispered. “She put a lock of her hair in the coffin with that of her husband and her son…”