Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (43 page)

"So would I," Stasi said. Her voice sounded a little choked. She lifted her face, dashing the tears away with a swipe. "Crying again. I've cried more over these children than I have in ten years."

"I hear children have that effect," Mitch said. "But you want to do this, right? Even if it's hard? Even if it breaks our hearts?"

"What's a broken heart, darling?" she said, smiling through her tears. "I've had lots of broken hearts, but it seems to heal right up." She put her hand on his chest, against his heart. "But we can do anything together."

"Saving the world?"

"Oh yes." Her eyes were serious. "This is saving the world too."

"Can I have my dame back?" Mitch asked.

At that she laughed. "You sound exactly like Douglas asking for more dumplings."

"Maybe so."

"Yes, darling."

J
erry settled himself wincing on his side of the bed, dragging the pillow up between his back and the knobbed bedstead. His leg ached, the stump raw and red, and the ointment seemed to make it worse instead of better. That would change in the morning, he hoped, and reached for the aspirin he’d brought from the bathroom. He chased the tablets with a swallow of bourbon — he’d brought a very generous glass upstairs with him, in case the aspirin didn’t work — and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes. It had been a long day, and he was very nearly dead on his feet. But not dead in fact, he reminded himself, despite Pelley’s best efforts. At least he hoped those were Pelley’s best efforts. If that was a casual attack, or less than Pelley’s full strength — he didn’t want to think too hard about it.

A car crunched to a stop on the gravel outside, and his body tightened. He’d hoped he might have more time before Willi turned up, had been thinking he might pretend to be asleep, but it was too late for that. Willi would have seen the light from the yard. He tucked his stump under the sheet and took another swallow of bourbon, listening for Willi’s step on the stair. There it was, light and quick, and the doorknob turned. Jerry braced himself, unable to muster a smile, and Willi gave him a tired nod.

“How was your flight?”

Jerry had to swallow an entirely inappropriate laugh. How indeed? And it wasn’t as though he could explain what had gone wrong; that hadn’t gone over well the last time… He pulled himself up sharply. “All right. We had a mechanical problem, had to put down on the open ocean south of the Big Island, but Al got it fixed.”

“Are you all right?” Willi shed his jacket and tie, and came to perch cautiously on the edge of the bed. He smelled of cigarettes and, more faintly, of reefer: Johnny Chen’s, Jerry guessed. “You are looking a little worn.”

“I’m feeling it.” Jerry reached for his bourbon again.

“Look, last night…” Willi shook his head. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have reacted so.”

“It’s ok.” Jerry held out the glass, and Willi took it with a nod of thanks. “Bad day?”

“Not as good as I’d hoped.” Willi took a long drink and handed it back. “A problem with one of the trenches — yes, 12B, as you predicted —“

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Call it sympathy,” Jerry suggested. “Gray giving you trouble?”

“No more than usual.” Willi accepted the glass again. “Ah, that’s good — better than the kerosene they serve at Chen’s.”

“If you drink it all, you can go get more,” Jerry said.

“A fair deal.” Willi handed the glass back and began to undress. Jerry sipped idly, watching the bronze skin appear and disappear again beneath the thin pajamas. “Did you find anything?”

“Not — I had an idea,” Jerry said. “I told you, we had to put down in open water south of Hawai’i, which put us south of Mauna Loa, of one of the recent lava flows.”

“That can’t have been very nice if you had engine trouble,” Willi said. He settled himself at Jerry’s side, not quite touching, and Jerry held out the glass.

“Al and Mitch handled it. But it took a while, and I had a thought.”

“Go on.” Willi returned the glass, and Jerry took another drink.

“The
Wind Raker
was looking for the Navel of the World,” Jerry said. “The place where the world began. Or maybe — the place where the world was made? Where the land was made? Where you could see the lava flowing to the sea and turning into rock, where Pele built up the island around her fire pit —“

Willi froze, his breath catching in his chest. “Yes,” he said, “you could see it that way —“

“The
Wind Raker
leaves the fleet and sails east,” Jerry said. “As they travel, they hear about Hawai’i, the ancestral home, where the gates of the underworld are open and new land is born from Pele’s fire. They follow that story, and they come — here.”

“It could be.” Willi took the glass again. “But it is not evidence.”

“No, it’s not,” Jerry agreed. “But it’s suggestive. It’s a reason a Chinese ship might have come here —“

“But not evidence,” Willi repeated. “It is not scientific.”

“I’m not proposing we write it up in a paper,” Jerry said. “It’s one more tool, one more way to shape where we look.”

“Except that you believe in such things.”

“This is not about magic.” Jerry stopped, abruptly aware that Willi’s hands were shaking. “This is nothing more than any archeologist might do. What are you so scared of, anyway?”

“Because I have seen where such speculation leads.” Willi glared at him over the top of the glass. “Among people who believe this.”

Jerry shook his head. “You’re not making sense.”

Willi took a deep breath. “I will tell you, then — and if you repeat it, I will deny every word, understand that! But you cannot tell me this is untrue.”

He tossed back another drink, and Jerry took the glass from him before it spilled. “I won’t say anything.”

“Hah.” Willi shook his head. At some point they had reverted to German, and he went on in that language, more quietly. “This was at Lop Nur, you understand, at the eastern end of the Taklamakan. I told you, I was part of a dig looking for Aryan mummies — indeed we found a few. But also…” He rubbed his chin. “We found a stupa beside a cave complex that was much older, and the writing still left at the stupa said that these caves were a place of power before the Buddhists came and bound the thing that lived there. I translated it, you know. I went through the few texts that were left, and the paintings, and talked to the locals, and I put the story together, how the caves were possessed by a white-haired spirit, a demon who could be tricked into answering questions if it was fed human blood and wine, and how the monks came and called it with the blood of a pig that they had cast a spell on. They asked it a question that confounded it, and it retreated to the depths of the caverns, where they bound it forever, and built the stupa to seal the victory.” He gave Jerry a wincing, sidelong glance. “I thought, you see, that it was an interesting parallel to Western beliefs about ghosts, particularly Greek beliefs, and that it was another thing that pointed to a Hellenistic strain that reached all the way to the eastern end of the Silk Road.”

It did sound like that, Jerry thought, but didn’t interrupt, and Willi closed his eyes.

“So I told my story at the campfire one night — God, I was so pleased with myself! The others told me I was clever, that it had potential, and then the dig director took the truck before dawn, the truck and two men, and drove to the nearest town. He came back at sundown with a Chinese man, a criminal from the town jail weeping with fear. They tied him up in a spare tent, and when I asked what in the world they were doing, Baer laughed and said he was their canary. God help me, I believed him — the air in the caves wasn’t good, I thought they were going to send him ahead of them to be sure the passages were clear. So I ate my dinner by the fire, and —“

He stopped, shaking his head. “To make a long story short, someone put something in my tea that night. I slept like a dead man, and in the morning — the Chinese prisoner was gone. Escaped, they said, though where he could go in the desert I couldn’t imagine. But when I went up to the caves a day later, the ground was disturbed, and when I dug, there was blood, poured out on the ground in sacrifice. There were marks where they had drawn signs and rubbed them out in the dark, not perfectly, and in the dig director’s tent there was a wooden box sealed with wax and bound with tapes that had not been there before and the smell of death around it. It was never out of the sight of one of them after that, and I was very careful to pretend I never saw it.”

He shook himself, managed a bitter smile. “And now you will tell me that I imagined it, that something I ate or drank disagreed with me, and that people who believe in magic would never do such a thing.”

“No.” Jerry knocked back a slug of the bourbon himself. Even in the tropical night, he was chilled, imagining the desert night and a bound man, sacrificed to… something. It was possible, though no one liked to admit it; blood sacrifice was forbidden in nearly every tradition he had encountered, and for good reason, but not because it was ineffective. “Do you know what tradition they were?”

It was a stupid question, Jerry thought, and wasn’t surprised when Willi laughed. “They were SS, Jerry, that’s all I know. And I notice you are not telling me it is impossible.”

“I wish I could.” Jerry took a deep breath, still sickened by the scene Willi had conjured for him. “But I will tell you it’s wrong. Our tradition holds that the universe is just, and your actions come back to you in threefold measure — and that’s just one of a hundred reasons no one I know would perform such a ritual.”

“But it was done. And you could do it.”

“I suppose, if I worked at it.” Jerry shook his head. “But I wouldn’t. No one in my Lodge — my group, the group I practice with — would do such a thing. At bottom, magic is a tool like any other. It can be misused as badly as a gun or a knife or medicines. You can save a man’s life with morphine, or kill him just as easily, it’s all in how you use it.”

“And then there are things like mustard gas,” Willi said, “that have no good use at all.”

Jerry flinched, remembering Gil drawn and sick and dying years after he had breathed the poison, and Willi’s face changed.

“Jerry?”

“Gil died of mustard gas,” Jerry said. “You couldn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Willi said.

“It’s not a bad analogy,” Jerry said, after a moment. “Mustard gas. No one should use it, the laws of war and the laws of peace both forbid it. There’s some magic that is just as wrong. And there are men who will do it all the same.”

“And how can I trust anyone with that?” Willi asked, his voice cracking.

There was no good answer, and Jerry spread his hands, careful not to spill the last of the drink. “You know me. You’ve worked with me, lived with me, slept with me — do you really think I’d do something like that?”

“I didn’t think even they would,” Willi muttered, but something eased in his taut shoulders. “No, I don’t think so, but —“

“All I can do is give you my word.”

“And do you?”

Jerry nodded. “I do.”

“Well.” Willi smiled lopsidedly. “I have drunk all your bourbon.”

“You can get me more,” Jerry said.

Willi reached for the glass. “A little bit for both of us, and then — I am exhausted.”

“So am I.” Jerry let his fingers linger, and Willi smiled again, more naturally.

“Then let me fetch it, and then we’ll see.”

T
hey had pulled the Catalina into the hangar and now the mechanics were swarming over the wing, the cowlings open on both engines. Alma glared at them from the dock, but she couldn’t really complain. They’d put off the routine tear-down as long as she could, but it had to be done. It was part of the trial and couldn’t be avoided, even if it was a perfect day for flying…

She heaved a sigh, and turned her back on the plane to see Lewis smiling at her.

“I know,” she said, and his smile widened.

“You really like the Cat, don’t you?”

“I do,” she admitted. It still surprised her how much she enjoyed flying the big plane, not just the weight and power under her hands, but coordinating the crew, leading the dance. “And you don’t.” She gave him a smile to show there were no hard feelings.

He shook his head, not particularly chastened. “I’ve been talking to George about some of the Army’s new planes —“

He broke off as Lily made her way toward them, her sunglasses hooked in the neck of her blouse and her hair held back in another of her bright printed scarves. They were brighter than they had been, Alma realized, vivid fuchsia and lemon yellow and hot green, just as her mood was lighter than it had ever been before. Even the men had noticed something: there hadn’t been any talk of a Jonah in days.

“How’s it going?” Alma called, and Lily smiled. You could see what had made her a potential movie star, Alma thought, the energy that crackled off her like electricity off one of Tesla’s machines. Pelley had attacked that deliberately, intending to maim rather than to kill, and that was another thing for which she could not forgive him.

“Everything looks good so far,” Lily answered. “We’ve still got to sieve the oil, see what that looks like, but right now, I’d say we were golden.” She glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Listen, I was wondering if you’d — um, if you’d come to any decision about, you know, what almost happened. Because if you were going to do something about it, I meant it when I said I’d like to help.”

Alma considered her for a moment. From everything both Jerry and Lewis had said, Lily was strong and reasonably controlled, even if it had been a while since she’d been a regular participant in any circle. They were already at a disadvantage, given the power Pelley had behind him. If she was as strong as they said, her presence would definitely be a help — and besides, she was right, she did owe Pelley a bad turn. “As a matter of fact,” she said slowly. “What are you doing the night of the full moon?”

Chapter Nineteen

A
lma stopped a moment to take a deep breath, smoothing her hair down into its neat bob even though it was damp. It was time. She'd just bathed and robed, and she stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a long moment. It was the night of the full moon of July, four days after Pelley’s attack on the plane, and it was time to stop him or anyone else from using the medals. This was the biggest ritual she'd ever run as Magister, and certainly the most important. Hundreds of lives might rest on this, the lives of people she didn’t know and would probably never meet.