Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 Read online

  THE ORDER OF THE AIR OMNIBUS

  By Melissa Scott & Jo Graham

  LOST THINGS

  STEEL BLUES

  SILVER BULLET

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 / Melissa Scott & Jo Graham

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by: Bob Eggleton

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Authors

  Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She can be found online at mescott.livejournal.com.

  Jo Graham worked in politics for fifteen years before leaving to write full time. She is the author of the Locus Award nominated Black Ships and the Spectrum Award nominated Stealing Fire, as well as several other novels, including the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series and The General’s Mistress. She lives in North Carolina with her partner and their daughter. She can be found online at jo_graham.livejournal.com.

  OTHER BOOKS

  BY MELISSA SCOTT & JO GRAHAM & CROSSROAD PRESS

  The Order of the Air:

  Lost Things

  Steel Blues

  Silver Bullet

  Wind Raker

  Melissa Scott Novels:

  Five Twelfths of Heaven

  Silence in Solitude

  The Kindly Ones

  The Armor of Light

  SG1-22 Moebius Squared

  SGA-16 Homecoming - Book I of the Legacy Series

  SGA-18 Allegiance – Book III of the Legacy Series

  Unabridged Audiobooks – Melissa Scott

  Five-Twelfths of Heaven

  Jo Graham Novels:

  The Emperor's Agent

  SGA-14 Death Game

  SGA-16 Homecoming - Book I of the Legacy Series

  SGA-17 The Lost - Book II of the Legacy Series

  Jo Graham Collections

  The Ravens of Falkenau

  Unabridged Audiobooks – Jo Graham

  The Ravens of Falkenau / The Hand of Isis / Stealing Fire

  These novels are volumes 1-3 of The Order of the Air, which ties in with the Crossroad Press original series O.C.L.T. – featuring the novels The Parting by David Niall Wilson & Incursion by Aaron Rosenberg, as well as the novellas Brought to Light & The Temple of Camazotz. The Order of the Air occurs in the past, but O.C.L.T. members were there…

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  CONTENTS:

  LOST THINGS

  STEEL BLUES

  SILVER BULLET

  PREVIEW of WIND RAKER – Book IV of the Order of the Air

  PREVIEW of THE PARTING – Book I of the O.C.L.T.

  The world is full of lost treasures. Some of them are better off not found.

  In 1929 archaeologists began draining Lake Nemi looking for a fabulous treasure. What they awakened had been buried for two thousand years. For a very good reason.

  DEDICATIONS

  For my grandparents

  Elma Shoffner Wyrick Edwards (1900-1988)

  Lt. Granville Glenn Wyrick Sr. (1895-1940)

  Col. Raymond F. Edwards (1890-1982)

  with love from Jo, your “angel”

  For Great-great-aunt Marion (Lt. Marion L. MacNab)

  &

  Great-great-uncle Alex (Col. Alexander J. MacNab)

  Veterans of both World Wars

  With thanks for the books, the sword, and the inspiration

  Melissa

  LOST THINGS

  Prologue – May, 1929

  The bowl of the lake reflected nothing. On bright nights the full moon seemed magnified by the water, as though it had come to rest in the dark pool. That was why the Romans had called Lake Nemi Diana’s Mirror.

  The sounds of the massive pumps covered any noise it might make, working night and day to drain the lake. It was the most significant archaeological site in a generation – two Roman ships from the reign of Caligula, resting beneath the waters of Lake Nemi in almost pristine condition. But then It knew all about the ships. It had known them for a very long time.

  They were ruins in the mud, a few beams exposed as the lake drained. They were gone like the Sanctuary of Diana that had once graced the shore. But She was still here. Far away in the woods the man heard it and stiffened – the faint baying of hounds.

  It inhabited this man. It wore him, frail thing though he was, already weakening in Its grasp. They were running, he and the man, his sedentary feet made fleet by fear. They were running through the woods while briars grabbed at them, while moonlight mistook their path before them. The hounds were louder. They were coming. The hunters were behind. They could see the flashes of their strange torches, incandescent in the darkness, silver against the trees. A white hound led the pack, sharp nosed and keen, the others following her. It was She who led.

  The man’s breathing was harsh. They were being driven. Out of the trees, out of the wild wood. Now there were shouts behind, calls from one hunter to another in strange, bastard Latin. The hunters had seen them. The ground was muddy and they slipped. This man was no hunter, no soldier, and he had been run hard. He slipped and slid down the bank, one leg catching beneath him, knee twisting. He was down. The white hound crested the bank, beautiful and implacable.

  And then She was not there. It was two brown ones, bloodhounds, the man thought, and they stopped and set up a cry. It was only a moment before the hunters came up. Silver lights played over their face, and they cringed, It and this man, hiding from the brightness.

  “Poor soul,” one of the hunters said, sliding down the bank. �
�It’s Signore Gadda all right.”

  They wore blue uniforms, all the hunters. A second one climbed down, lifted this man’s hands from his face. “Signore Gadda? Can you understand me, sir? Do you know what has happened?”

  This man would reply, but It would not let him. It could see the white hound behind the hunter, and It screamed.

  The first hunter spoke again. “I thought we’d never find him. His wife is frantic. God help him.” He moved his hand across his chest, as though making some sign of warding.

  Another man climbed down, a tall man in middle age, wearing black rather than the blue uniforms, and the second hunter spoke to him. “Signore Davenport, it is definitely your man. But I do not think he understands a word.”

  “It is a terrible tragedy,” Davenport said, and he leaned over them. This man knew him. This was his leader, his patron. He was afraid he would lose his job. But he could not speak. “Vittorio? Can you hear me?”

  It screamed. There was the smell of incense on this one. He reeked of Her.

  “We should take him to the hospital in Rome,” one of the hunters said. “I will send a man to tell his wife that we have found him but that he is very ill.”

  “Yes, definitely the hospital,” Davenport said. “Vittorio….”

  The hunters hauled them to their feet, dragging them from the wood, from the ships, from the wild, but It did not resist. To Rome. That had potential.

  One of the hunters shook his head to the other. “What makes a man do this? Suddenly go mad and dash into the woods to live like an animal?”

  “Perhaps they can help him at the hospital,” Davenport said. “Some kind of seizure or stroke, I do not know.” He looked at this man again, his face a study in concern. “Perhaps he will know his wife when she comes.”

  “To Rome,” they whispered. “To Rome.”

  Chapter One

  Five thousand miles away, Lewis Segura jerked awake. Not a dream of barbed wire and trenches this time, or even the sickening lurch a plane makes when it stalls, the nose beginning to dip down. It had been worse than that, weirder than that. There had been a lake, and things like snakes, like giant eels, moving through the depths, screams underwater that wakened echoes where there couldn’t be any; a dark wood, and shapes within it, and at the last a white hound appeared between trees, waiting for him, her head raised, her eyes as blue as the summer sky. His heart rang with familiar certainty: this was coming, this was true.

  He sat up, craning his neck to see the clock on the table. Not even midnight. Alma slept next to him, burrowed into her nest of blankets, the pale sheen of her blond hair against the darkness. Her breathing was even and steady. Whatever had wakened him hadn’t bothered her, and heaven knew Alma had her own ghosts.

  He hugged his knees to his chest, hoping Alma would wake. He’d always dreamed like this, even before the war, but since then — since then there had been more nightmares, tinged with smoke and the sound of guns, but the true dreams had remained, clear and distinct. If this was one of them — well, it was a warning, surely?

  He closed his eyes, trying to make sense of the sequence of images, of the struggle under the water, the serpent twining around a drowning man, rings of flesh and scale like a hundred clutching hands. And then there had been the screams, silent and mindless and horrible, bubbling with icy water. He’d run toward the woods like a man pursued until he’d checked, seeing the white dog. And behind her…. Behind her stood three women, caught in moonlight, one with a bow strung and ready in her hand, another with a poppy as scarlet as fresh blood, the thin petals resting gently against her white-robed shoulder. Between them stood a third woman, hands upturned, a veil covering her hair. They were all the same, he realized, the same fine-boned face, serene and stern at the same time; their eyes were blue, implacable. In the water behind him something roiled beneath the surface, and the dog bared teeth in a silent snarl.

  He crossed himself like a child, but the images were still vivid, the silent women, the snarling dog, the thing beneath the water and the thrashing terror.

  Lewis took a deep breath, trying to put the emotion behind him. If it was a true dream, a warning, what did it actually mean? Stay away from water? The closest lake was a good five miles away, and he didn’t swim anyway. Beware a white dog? No, the dog had been hunting the thing in the water, the same as the women. They hadn’t been interested in him, just the lake and its secret. Bow and poppy and veil, three identical women, or one woman seen three times…. He couldn’t make sense of it, and the fear was still heavy in his gut.

  Alma was still asleep, her back to him, curled around her pillow. He thought for a second about nudging her awake and pretending he’d done it by mistake, but she’d had a busy day, taking a charter to Grand Junction and back. It wasn’t a long flight, but it meant threading the passes, and for a guy who didn’t like letting a woman fly him even when she did own the company. Lewis didn’t want to wake her.

  Instead he turned over carefully, listening to the faint strains of the radio coming up from downstairs. Jerry was awake, or maybe it was Mitch. Jerry had lived there for years, maybe since the operation that had taken part of his right leg after the war, and Mitch lived over the garage until he could get a place of his own, which Lewis figured would happen about the same time that Jerry went back to teaching, which was to say never. But his bosses’ living arrangements were none of his business, especially since Mitch was part owner in Gilchrist Aviation and he was just a hired pilot. Even if he shared Alma’s bed.

  Lewis turned over. Alma’s soft breathing was slow and soothing. Sometimes the dreams were all right, like the one that had led him to Alma. It had been a good dream, too: a plane that he’d never flown, shaped like one of the Stahltaubes he’d seen before the War, but every bit as maneuverable as the bird it mimicked, so that he had swirled and spun, not in defense but in sheer joy of flight. Below him stretched Long Beach, the airfield and its lines of planes, the crowd with their heads tipped back to see him dance.

  The flare had gone up to call him in, and he’d taken the plane up toward the cloud deck, which made no sense in retrospect, but at the time had seemed the most reasonable thing in the world. He’d risen through the clouds into sunlight and blue sky and a sweet green runway stretching straight and clear before him, the windsock barely twitching on its stake beside a hangar like a young cathedral. He’d brought the bird-plane down, felt wheels kiss the sod, brought it gently to a stop beside the hangar, and a fair woman in a blue dress turned away from a scarlet biplane. It was for him, he thought, his plane, his freedom, and the woman smiled. Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, and he’d awakened with the joy still sounding in his bones.

  At the time he’d been out of work three weeks and was starting to think he knew how a dope fiend felt when he couldn’t get his fix. He still might not have gone to the airshow except that at the Legion meeting Frankie Onslow had said that he’d heard that a guy named Peters, who belonged to a Post up-state, had a crop-dusting service and might be looking for a pilot. The combination of the news and the dream seemed to be telling him something, so he’d taken a couple of dollars from his last pay packet and ridden the trolley out to the show.

  Of course, Peters hadn’t been hiring, but he’d mentioned a man named Stalkey who’d taken Lewis’s name and the phone number of the boarding house, and mentioned another guy named Wiggins. Wiggins was equally non-committal, but said he’d heard that Jeff Forrest had a new mail contract, and wrote the name and hangar number on a scrap of paper.

  “But he’s got a couple of planes in the stunt show,” Wiggins said. “I wouldn’t go over there till after.”

  That made good sense, and anyway Lewis was hungry by then, and his feet were getting sore, so he found himself a spot in the grandstand to unwrap his sandwiches. Bologna wasn’t his favorite, but it was cheap and ok with a lot of mustard. He ate both of them and folded the waxed paper into a triangle, watching the stunt plane swirl and dive. With the right plane he could do pretty mu
ch everything he was seeing. He could do better than most of the pilots — if it were a combat situation, he could take them all.

  That way lay danger. He fished in his pocket for a nickel instead, bought a Coke, and climbed out of the stands to watch the rest of the show. The white Jenny just finishing its loop was Forrest’s, and if that was his best pilot, Lewis figured he stood a chance at any jobs that were going.

  He wouldn’t go over there yet, though, would wait until the crowds cleared out a little. He shaded his eyes, squinting, found the next plane as it dropped down out of the high blue, lining up on the runway. The loudspeaker crackled, the whine of the plane’s engine already swallowing the words.

  “— Al Gilchrist — Cherry —”

  Weird name for a plane, Lewis thought. A girlfriend, maybe? It dropped lower, another Jenny, coming in low and tight. It was cherry red, red as lipstick, red as the plane in his dream — it was the plane in his dream, every detail just as he’d seen it, down to the blue and white roundel on its tail. As it passed the first pylon, it rolled, wings tipping up and over, kept rolling, maintaining height, maintaining a perfect line as it rotated around its own center, around the pilot himself in his cockpit. Lewis’s muscles tensed, feeling in imagination the aileron hard over, the world spinning around him: not the hardest maneuver in the world, but hard to do well. And this was done well. Gilchrist finished the last roll just before the end of the course, snapped level to flash upright past the pylon. The crowd cheered — at least some of them knew what they were seeing — and a stranger in a shabby jacket leaned close to shout something.