Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (10 page)

Gracefully, they carried the barge toward the pool’s edge, toward the broad steps that gleamed pale beneath the water. For a moment Alma wondered if the girls were going to wade in. The water would surely render their thin white silk entirely transparent. But no. They stopped at the top of the steps, theatrically arranged two by two, while the priests carried the barge down between them until they were knee deep and the barge rested on the smooth surface of the water.

The unseen musicians stopped and the girls began a pretty a cappella number, something Alma was entirely missing since she didn’t speak the language.

Lewis frowned and leaned in. “What’s that?”

“Greek,” Alma whispered back. And probably inappropriate, but Hellenistic syncreticism was very forgiving, as traditions went. You could mangle it in a lot of directions and still have the core hold firm.

As they finished, a fifth priest stepped forward, a tall, saturnine older man with a green bough in his hand to use as an aspergillum. He lifted it toward the barge, beginning a long invocation of Isis’ titles. “Hear us, oh Lady of the Living and the Dead, Mistress of Magic….”

Beside her Lewis stiffened suddenly, his face paling beneath his deep tan. “That’s him.”

Alma put her hand on his arm and felt it shake. “Who?

“The man in my dream,” Lewis said. His eyes didn’t leave the rite before them. “That’s him. The one who tried to kill me.”

Alma swallowed, a chill running up her spine. Around them all went on as it should, the ritual flowing beautifully and smoothly. The girls took up another song, more up tempo this time, sistrums raised, and the priest stepped back, letting the barge go so that it floated freely on the surface of the pool.

“Do you know him?” Lewis’ voice was deliberate.

Alma nodded. “That’s William Davenport.”

She saw him look up suddenly, his back rigid, and her eyes flew to Lewis, but Lewis seemed fine, watching him intently but with no distress. And Davenport wasn’t looking in their direction. He was facing across the pool, his chin rising, power snapping in the air around him like an unseen wind.

Across the pool one person stood out amid the white robed dancers preparing to begin, dark suit and gold rimmed glasses. Jerry looked straight back. They looked like duelists caught in the moment before the passage of blades, and Alma felt the deep tremor, like subsonics or the faintest rumble of a barely perceivable earthquake. She felt it rush outward, flying at Jerry like a punch. No, like a speeding automobile careening into a man standing unwittingly in the middle of the street, transfixed by the onrushing headlights.

She had no finesse, no care. But what she had was power. Power lay in the ground beneath her, in the earth beneath her feet, through marble and concrete to dirt and sandstone, to the bones of the hills. She ripped it up, feeling it pour through her, rushing upward from her feet, through her body and down her arms, fire from earth, fire from the deep wells beneath California. It burned in the palms of her hands, flowing through her like a spark through a circuit, and she flung it outward.

Aegis
, she thought. One word. Athena’s shield, bronze and unbearably bright, the snakes on the gorgon’s head twisting viciously, glittering before Jerry, sheltering him behind its solidity. Nothing might pass the aegis, not while power remained to hold it. And she had all the power of earth at her command, deep and inexorable. The power would hold far longer than she would.

In some other place, where people moved slowly as a film at half speed, a few heads were turning, the truly sensitive looking around like those who have felt the earthquake when others have not. Mitch raised his head unerringly, seeking. Henry jerked around at his side, searching for the source of the thunder.

Behind the aegis, Jerry spoke a word. It broke in dazzling shards of invisible light, attack and shield and all, shimmering into nothing at the word of banishment.

And then all was silent. Davenport turned, following the other priests back toward the tent, and Jerry stood shaking, his hand trembling on his cane in the middle of the crowd. Alma saw Mitch hurrying toward him purposefully, Henry at his side.

“What the hell was that?” Lewis said quietly.

Her hands cramped. She was a little lightheaded, momentarily drained, the current cut too fast. But Lewis’ arm was steady. “Magic,” she said.

Chapter Seven

L
ewis waited until they were back at the hotel, waited through the end of the party with its explanations and awkwardness, through Mitch taking charge and calling them a cab, through the long ride back to the Roosevelt. Lewis waited until they’d let themselves into Alma’s room, all four of them crowding into the circle of light cast by the lamp. Lewis looked around at the three of them, suddenly seeming like strangers rather than people he’d known for five months. “What just happened?” he said.

Mitch sat down in the chair, his hat in his hand, looking suddenly old and tired. “Davenport attacked Jerry. He was using some kind of projection of elemental force, and if Alma hadn’t countered it….” He glanced up at Jerry. “It would have been bad.”

“A stroke, a heart attack…” Jerry smiled thinly. “The strain, you know. Not good for someone in poor health.”

Alma stalked around the bed and sat down, unbuckling her shoes. “Well, it didn’t happen that way,” she began.

“I still don’t understand,” Lewis interrupted. “You’re saying that these things, this magic, can kill somebody and make it look natural! That’s….” He scrambled for words. Wrong? Impossible?

“It would be natural,” Jerry said quietly. “I would die from a heart attack. It’s the most natural thing in the world. The question is what precipitated it.”

“I think killing somebody with a curse is pretty much supernatural,” Lewis said.

“There isn’t anything supernatural about it,” Mitch said from the chair. “Magic obeys natural laws. Look, everybody knows that being shocked with an electrical current can make your heart stop. All this is doing is delivering the shock without the wires.” He shrugged. “Current moves through air all the time by ionizing the atmosphere. That’s what lightning is.”

“You’re saying this man can control lightning.” Lewis twisted his hat brim in his hands.

“Not as much current as lightning,” Alma said, dropping her shoe on the floor. “A much smaller amount of energy, but one that can still do harm. I couldn’t have grounded it if it had been much more current.”

“Grounded it.”

Alma nodded. “That’s what I did. I ran the current to ground, absorbing it back into the earth so it wouldn’t hurt anybody, the same thing that happens when lightning hits a lightning rod. It grounds.”

Lewis frowned. “How?”

Alma opened her mouth and shut it again. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know it works.”

“That’s what our tradition is about,” Jerry said ponderously. “Hermetics is about the experiential discovery of effective esoterica through empirical study. Based upon the philosophy of the Hellenistic sage Hermes Trismegistus….”

Mitch got to his feet. “Come on, Jerry.”

“What?”

“Let Alma explain.”

For a moment Lewis thought Jerry would protest, but instead he shrugged, his eyes on Alma, a look passing between them that Lewis couldn’t interpret.

“It’s her place,” Mitch said, and Lewis wondered if he meant because they were sharing a bed, or because of something else.

“Goodnight, then,” Jerry said. He opened the door and waited for Mitch to precede him out. “See you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Jerry,” Alma said. “Mitch.” She twisted around on the bed, crossing her stockinged feet beneath her. Mitch gave her a two fingered salute and pulled the door closed.

Lewis came around and sat down in the chair, still hunting for words. “I don’t understand how these things can be real,” he said quietly. “It flies in the face of science.”

Alma shook her head. “No, it doesn’t.” She took a deep breath, as if considering. “Do you understand how an aircraft works?”

Lewis nodded. “Yes. I mean, I understand about lift and thrust, about airspeed and wind direction and all of that. That’s science.”

“And it’s new,” Alma said. “People forty years ago didn’t understand it, much less people five hundred years ago. The principles of flight were always there, but we didn’t understand how to use them yet.” She sat up straighter, her bare feet in their silk casings tucked under her legs. “But people could observe birds. Probably people have done that since the dawn of time! They could see how birds flew and they could imagine flying. They could observe how baby birds learn to fly, how they glide first and how they tilt their wings to provide lift. Leonardo da Vinci designed a glider that works. He just didn’t have an engine to give him sufficient airspeed to actually build a plane.” Alma smiled. “He didn’t understand the principles, but he knew what he saw and he could experiment based on what worked.”

“Ok,” Lewis said slowly. “So what does that have to do with magic?”

“To Leonardo, flying was magic. If somebody from the fifteenth century saw one of our planes they would think it was supernatural. But it isn’t. It’s just that we know more than they did.” Alma reached for his hand. “But we don’t know everything. We know a tiny little fraction of everything there is to understand about the universe. And a lot of the things we don’t understand seem supernatural to us. Like Leonardo, we can observe and we can theorize and we can use to a limited extent the things our observations teach us, but we can’t explain it all. Not yet. Hermetics is sometimes called scientific magic, and that’s why. We use the empirical knowledge accumulated by different generations and different cultures and we try to understand why it works. Sometimes we can reproduce results and sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we can see why a formula has power, and sometimes we don’t know anything except that it does. And every century, every decade, we understand better. We understand more about the ‘supernatural,’ about the way the world works beyond what science can currently explain. Does that make sense?”

“I suppose,” Lewis said slowly. “But I don’t understand…. How can a person influence electrical energy?”

“We are energy,” Alma said. “We all have electrical energy in our bodies.” She looked down at their interlaced hands, turned hers in his so that their palms were together. “Hold still.” She let go of his hand and moved hers back, three inches between their palms. “Now tell me what you feel.” Slowly she moved her hand closer, quarter inch by quarter inch, until only three quarters of an inch remained between. She looked up at Lewis with a smile that was pure trouble. “What do you feel?”

He stared at their hands, ordinary, not quite touching. “It feels warm,” he said. The warmth was growing between their palms even though they didn’t touch. “Really warm.”

“That’s what happens when your electrical field interacts with mine,” she said. “You can feel it. That’s what energy feels like. That’s the thing we’re manipulating.”

Warm, and stronger than he’d expected, right there against the heart of his palm…. And then stronger, like pressure, like she’d pressed her palm to his, though she hadn’t moved. He looked at Alma, at the faint pleased expression of concentration on her face, the same one she wore when she flew. “What are you doing?”

“Pushing a little,” she said. “That’s all. Just manipulating it a little bit, like pushing with my hand.”

“That’s….” Lewis didn’t have the words for it. His eyes met hers, blue and delighted, as though it were fun. “That’s real.”

“I told you it was,” Alma said.

J
erry hung his suit coat in the room’s narrow closet, pulled off his tie and loosened his collar. Mitch had tossed his jacket onto the back of the chair, and pulled out the bottle of bourbon. He poured himself two fingers, and held up the bottle in silent question, but Jerry shook his head. He went into the bathroom, rolling up his sleeves as he went, and turned on the tap, waiting until the water ran as cold as it was going to get. He washed his face and his hands, ran a damp cloth over the back of his neck and held his wrists under the stream. He hadn’t been that close to dying in a long time, not since the war — well, not since they’d had to amputate his foot, but he wasn’t going to count that — and he didn’t like it.

“You Ok?” Mitch called, and Jerry shut off the water and dried his hands.

“I’m fine,” he said, and limped back into the main room. Mitch had taken the one comfortable chair, so Jerry sat on the bed, stretching his bad leg carefully on the spread. “I hope to hell she doesn’t spook him.”

“I thought you didn’t want to work with him,” Mitch said.

“I never said that.” Jerry dragged the pillow into a more comfortable position. “I said I wasn’t sure. Anyway, it doesn’t look as though we have much choice.”

“It’s her right,” Mitch said again.

“She’s not Magister,” Jerry said. He hadn’t meant to say it so bluntly, hadn’t meant to say it at all, but the words hung in the air between them. Mitch fixed him with a stare.

“Gil’s dead.”

“Yes, I
know
that.”

“We need a leader,” Mitch said.

“We’ve been fine —”

“We have not been fine without one,” Mitch said. “We’ve barely done anything since he died, and what we’ve done — it’s been going through the motions, Jer, you know that. Alma’s the logical choice. I don’t want it, and you —”

“What makes you think I don’t want it?” Jerry asked. He was perversely glad of the argument, anything to take his mind off the moment when he met Davenport’s eyes and knew there was nothing he could do to stop the rush of power.

“You’ve never showed the slightest interest,” Mitch said.

“That was before Gil died,” Jerry said.

“Are you saying you don’t trust Alma? Because after tonight, that would be pretty damned ungrateful.” Mitch glared at him.

“Yes, it would be,” Jerry snapped, “and of course I trust her. She’s damn good, and before you say it, no, it’s not the first time she’s saved my life. Why is it so hard to imagine that I might want to be Magister myself?”