Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air

Book Five of The Order of the Air

By Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

A Mystique Press Production

Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

Cover artwork by Jack Moik

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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.

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December 25, 1935

T
he Night Market was in full bloom. Lanterns hung on ropes across the narrow alleys of the Souk el-Attarine, and he stood, uncertain, in the shadows. Behind him a winding street led to the archaeological dig, now locked behind a board fence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had an excavation in progress, and he was well acquainted with that institution. He paused. The dig, or into the bazaar?

Even with his heavy cloak drawn up over his head, he was a striking man. Broad-shouldered and strongly built, he looked even taller than his six foot three inches, but he did not move clumsily at all, as so many big men did. He moved like a hunter, or a man who is used to being prey in a far more dangerous game. His skin was dark, his face clean shaven, his hair cut close against his scalp. Perhaps he was in his mid-forties, but there was no heaviness or complacence to his face. At least not anymore. That belonged behind, in another world.

The dig or the bazaar? Music floated down the streets of the souk, emerging from restaurants left and right where crowds broke their fast, dining with friends and family at nearly midnight, keeping Ramadan or if they were Copts, keeping the feast of Christmas. Enticing odors wafted out too, chicken roasted with dates, couscous with pumpkin and honey… His stomach growled, but he could not be distracted, and sitting down to dinner in a conspicuous public place was a good way to ensure this meal would be his last.

They had followed him as far as Cairo. He knew that. Two men lay dead in an alley there, and he had bandaged the long cut along his ribs, hoping that in Alexandria there would be sulfa. He hoped there were no more pursuers. Of course there were. Of course there would be. But at least he’d bought breathing room at the price of two corpses left in an alley, two mysteries for the government and the British military.

He was running out of time. Thousands of years, and now there was no time. He carried a secret that could not wait, and there was only one man who could help him. At this time of day that man was most likely to be in the souk. He winced as the cut along his ribs pulled. A doctor, yes, but not until his mission was accomplished. For this he had killed and for this he had seen his friend die. For this he had left the battle behind, sneaking like a criminal through Egypt at his king’s command, a coward’s act were it not that he preserved something even more precious than their own blood.

“You carry the future,” the emperor had said, “when you carry the past. Our ancient treasures define us as a people, and they must survive if we are to triumph in the end. I trust that you will succeed, Ras Iskinder.”

He would, or die trying.

Yes, to go into the souk would be dangerous, but there he would find Dr. Jerry Ballard.

December 27, 1935

“A
lexandria,” Dr. Jerry Ballard said. He stood at the balustrade looking west over the harbor from its easternmost point, the perfect half circle of the corniche golden against the blue-green water of the Mediterranean. The Silsilah Peninsula jutted out, and from this point he could see the entire expanse of the Eastern Harbor, its docks busy with fishing boats that might have plied these waters for thousands of years. Most of the steamships used the Western Harbor these days because of the silting. Across on the barrier island a stubby Ottoman fort marked where the great Lighthouse had once stood, its beams visible far out to sea. The sea breeze tugged at his linen suit, cooling even through the tight weave, and Jerry lifted his face into the wind. “Alexandria,” he said. “City of dreams.”

“City of bad traffic, you mean.” His colleague – and lover – Dr. Willi Radke said at his side. Not ten feet behind them an autobus was honking furiously as the traffic along the corniche snarled.

“It’s always been that way,” Jerry said. “I expect they had traffic jams here in the first century BC.”

“Camel jams?” Willi raised an eyebrow beneath his impeccable Panama hat.

“Possibly,” Jerry said, a twist of his mouth the only sign of his amusement. “Though when the city was founded there weren’t any camels. It’s a common mistake to believe that the camel is indigenous to Egypt. In fact, when a Bactrian camel was given to Ptolemy Soter as a gift, it was regarded as a great oddity, and when it died…”

Willi held up his hands, laughing. “Peace! Peace! I am on your ground fairly, and I shall accept all correction as to camels or camel-less-ness!”

“Well, since you’re not a Classicist…” Though Dr. Wilhelm Radke was a noted archaeologist, his area of expertise was East Asia rather than the Mediterranean world. He would not have been on this dig at all, and certainly not in a coveted position, if not for the merest happenstance. Dr. Justin, who had been contracted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to oversee the photography and to handle the still crucial job of draftsman, had fallen in Mesopotamia and broken his leg, putting him out of the field for months of this season. Since Dr. Radke had been on the same steamer for Europe as Dr. Ballard — Radke returning to Berlin after delivering a series of guest lectures at Yale, and Ballard on his way to assume his job of excavation director on this dig — the search for a qualified substitute for Justin had been made considerably easier. Some might wonder why Radke would take a job so far out of his field, but perhaps he had no desire to return to a German winter when he might spend it pleasantly in warm Alexandria. And of course a job is a job. The Great Depression had not loosened its hold.

But this was a remarkable job. After three years of angling and preparation, the Met was digging in Alexandria in search of the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, and Jerry was the dig’s excavation director. It was the culmination of a lifetime of dreams.

Jerry looked out across the harbor again. It was so easy, with a little archaeological imagination, to see it as it had been. The fishing boats didn’t need to change much, nor the shape of the corniche. The stubby fort transformed itself in his mind into the towering shape of the Lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the World. He did not even need to close his eyes to see it — the Silsilah Peninsula longer and crowded with the palaces of the Royal Quarter, colonnades and terraces rising in gleaming white marble, laden with flowering plants and statues.

“Just there,” Jerry said, pointing to a place among the docks of the fishing boats, “is where they found the Lochias Kouros, in eight feet of water, if you can believe that! I did some work on that statue a few years ago.” He smiled at Willi, at the miracle of such a find. “He was completely intact except for his feet and dated to the upper third century BC, an extraordinary example of Hellenistic syncretism.” He pointed to the harbor as he spoke. “The coastline has changed since the Classical period. This harbor is both wider and shallower than it was then, and Silsilah was once a larger peninsula that extended much farther, even with the tip of the barrier island. Most of what would have been the Royal Quarter and the surrounding buildings is now underwater. Which is probably why the statue was there. Perhaps it originally stood in an interior courtyard of the palace of the Ptolemies. Or it might have been one of the statues along the exterior terraces.”

Willi frowned. “It can’t be underwater, can it?” Even here he did not name the Soma, the lost tomb. The Met’s dig was to find the Pylon of Isis rather than the tomb of Alexander, and they both knew that the Met’s permit would never have been approved if they had breathed a word about the Soma. That permit would have been reserved for others – for the British Museum or for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo itself.