Pinion (10 page)

She turned and gave him a long look.

He was grinning full now, as if this were his last, best joke. “Before I took the black flag and rode the high seas, I was one of God’s sworn men. The Archbishop was kind enough to let me come home again at the last.”

“Bless you, Father, for you have sinned,” she replied, and walked away through the searing tropical morning to the sound of his thinning laughter.

Baassiia came to her in the Hour of the Pod. Gashansunu meditated in the house of her second spirit, a small room near the top of a tower in the Spider Wheel of the city. Being Baassiia, he flew to see her.

As if raw power could impress anyone who had spent time in the Silent World.

She let her
wa
speak for her, in the Silent tongue: YOU DISTURB.

“It is not needless,” Baassiia said, answering with his mouth.

ALL IS NEEDLESS WHEN NOTHING IS NEEDFUL
.

The big man knew better than to argue circularities with another sorcerer’s
wa
. He stepped from air to stone and settled next to her, so they both faced out across the Great Sunset Water.

Gashansunu ignored him a while. This was her right, in meditation, and also her spite at him for coming unbidden into this place. He might have the body of a god, and the bed manners to match, but this man had no claim on her outside the working circle. He was not even a hierarch in her branch of the Westfacing House.

He was just a big, beautiful and worried man.

In time the Hour of the Pod passed. The blood flowers in the plaza below sighed as they released their holds into the air. A dog barked thrice before subsiding into the bubbling whimper of sacrifice. The air changed as the Silent World passed from one state to another, much as water might become mist.

“What brings you here?” she finally asked.

He had been sitting still as an idol, master of his fear, but her words
awoke him as if they were a sacrifice of their own. “This disharmony in the order of the world.”

“We performed a working,” Gashansunu said mildly.

“In which we learned precisely nothing.” His voice was thick, freighted.

So like a man
, she thought.
Craving certainty when the only thing to do is wait to see what time brings to your hearth as it passes by
. “There was nothing to learn. Yet.”

“The city has had a message from the Bone People.”

Those words fell heavy. Two years earlier, a sky-kite of the Bone People had been stolen from the city’s docks by a party of animals led by a suet-skinned stranger, kin to another pale man chained to the Pillar of Restitution for his crimes. There had been much more to that episode—there always was—but the Nightslaying House had held the axle that moon, and the later troubles had largely stayed within their towers.

She never heard the good gossip. The rest of the Earth, both Southern and Northern, was filled with people who were little more than talking animals, speaking words like sharp barks without the nuance or subtlety of a sorcerer of the city. Their doings were ordinarily beneath notice.

“What message?” she asked.

His reply was too prompt. “They fear a return of the prior madness. Another gleam has passed across the Wall.” A pause, though from the stillness in Baassiia’s breath, he was not done. “Your name has been sent up from the Bone Coast.”

“They do not know me,” she said, shocked.

Now grim amusement tinged his voice. “Tell that to their eyeless oracles.”

“Whose regrets are driving the signs and portents?”

Baassiia looked out across the circles of the city at the sullen waters beyond. He did not meet her eye, or speak directly to her, though Gashansunu could feel his
wa
circling, whispering, crying. “The world, we think, speaking through the city. All turns—all is round—but a fragment has been plucked as a man might snatch a hair from the hide of a lion. The lion weeps for the tuft in its tail.”

“This gleam comes for me.” Intuition, yes, but also common sense. The Bone People were not so free with words, for they understood all too well the binding power in the naming of a thing. They would not have called her out without good cause.

“Borne on yellow wings,” Baassiia replied. “Hence the nature of our portents.”

“I shall arm myself, lest the gods smile.”

He turned to face her now, the spirits of the moment sloughing away
to leave only naked longing and the private regrets of the body. “I fear for you. Lie with me, that I might remember you better if you do not return.”

Gashansunu slipped her hand under his kirtle and was comforted by the lengthy firmness she encountered there. “It would be disrespectful to do so in this house,” she answered with a sly lilt in her voice. “Let us go to a place of your choosing, that you may dissuade me from my own regrets.”

He stood and stepped out into the air, smiling as he fell. Wasteful of power but filled with lust, she followed.

Besides, Baassiia was always a great one for speaking softly when at the breast, once he’d spent himself. She might learn more there than ever from sitting with him in the quiet of a holy house.

Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy.          
—Isaiah 54:16

Wind rustled within the newly exposed cave. Dust stirred as if someone invisible walked through. His fingers—strong, precise brass pincers that could safely pluck an ant from a pane of glass, or just as easily crush a man’s throat—picked at the lip of the leather wrapped tight about its contents.

Nothing should persist so long
, Boaz thought.
Everything passes from dust to dust, stopping at life along the way
. The leather obeyed his misgivings, cracking to pieces as he unfolded it. Flakes fluttered to the sand floor.

He tugged further, peeling the skin back in a vanishing layer until he was forced to turn the packet over in his hand. Additional leather was exposed beneath, this a bit more robust. The back came off in chunks much as the front had; then he turned it again.

The next round of wrapping broke off in larger sheets, sloughing away at his gentlest tug. Thus it went, seven times around, each turn a bit less brittle, more pliable than the one before, until finally he reached leather that was almost supple. Boaz wondered what it smelled of, for he could feel oils against his fingertips.

The Kohanim who had wrapped this packet had expected it to stand the test of years. Possibly the test of eternity.

Time stood exposed, three millennia naked in the span of minutes. The sheets of destroyed leather were a blizzard of centuries.

“My people began here,” he said.

“All people begin somewhere,” Chin Ping replied softly.

Taking that as his sign, Boaz stripped open the final layer.

Within was a small book, bound with strips of flat wood secured by blue and white threading. Also a smaller bag of worn cloth, containing something flat and heavy. Boaz dreaded what that might be.

He set the bag down upon the altar stone along with the ruins of the leather wrapping, and turned his attention first to the book. The boards were pressed fiber made solid with glue, bound along the right side. He faintly traced the cover while wondering if this, too, would collapse to raddled dust.

History refused to claim its own, however. The book remained resolutely solid. He teased it open.

Words.

Words in the Hebrew of King Solomon’s court. Written in a crabbed hand with faded, pale ink that spoke of privation and disaster even as the text made golden promises concerning the magnificence of the reader, the poor estate of the writer, and the hidden powers of distant thrones.

“What say?” Chin Ping asked.

“It is a . . .” Boaz reached for the appropriate term. “It is a formula. In the style of heralds of the Temple. A method of introducing a difficult topic while minimizing offense.”

Chin Yuen muttered in low, rapid Chinese. Then, Chin Ping said, “Please to tell what topic of difficulty is.”

“I do not yet know,” Boaz said simply. He turned the pages, skimming. A description of Solomon’s court, written by someone who was
there
. The sailing of the fleet from Asiongaber. Storms upon the ocean. Their casting ashore on the margins of Africa. A council upon the beach, the priest speaking for himself within the text for the first time, the admiral on his deathbed, the first Brass prophesying. An agreement to conceal certain knowledge lest it be lost to savages or misfortune as they journeyed onward.

As well as the knowledge itself . . .

He stopped, hands trembling.
The making of a Seal
.

In all the days of Ophir’s history, there had only been six kinds of the Seals of Solomon. One powered every Brass who had ever lived. Another had raised the buildings of the city and set the bounds of the city’s empire during the centuries of its greatness. A third had coursed fire through the Spears and other Sealed weapons with which Brass had gone conquering. A fourth powered the cars that shuttled deep within the clattering depths of the Wall. A fifth brought weather down from the skies and banished it again. The sixth and last was said to have opened the ways from Earth to the dreaming mind of YHWH, though even with their fabled memories, no Brass today was certain what that had signified.

But no one had ever had the making of a new Seal. Over time, through error and mischance—and once, sheer, raw evil—the making of Seals had been lost, until only one survived: the Third Seal that powered their
weapons and allowed them to craft Spears anew. New Brass could only be made with an existing First Seal taken from one who had been slain or otherwise given up his life. Every century fewer of them remained. Should they ever lose the art of placing the ancient Seals into new forged bodies, their line would dwindle until none were left except as armored scrap.

This book spoke of
creating
a Seal. The purifications, the prayers, the summonings, the meaning of each twist and turn and fleck in the pattern. On and on it went for pages, diagrams and details and lists of materials. Boaz’ eyes passed close over each of the ancient, brittle sheets.

In his hands he held the knowledge to renew the power of Ophir, bring more Brass marching bright-limbed into the sunlight of this world.

Reverently he set the book down and took up the small bag. The fibers of the cloth shed in his hand as he tried to open it, until he held a round, heavy stone limned by a cloud of dust.

He turned it over.

A Seal, recto, in opposition to the blank, bone-smooth verso. Boaz traced it with his fingers, not quite touching the surface. The design was wrong, flawed somehow. Instinct deep as his own construction told him this.

Then he realized it was inverted. This was a master blank from which Seals could be made. As for the design . . .

The Sixth Seal
.

The Seal that carried words from the mortal world to YHWH’s very ear. YHWH, who had been absent from His own Creation these thousands of years, only His killer angels and wretched monkey-priests serving as proxy for His terrible, awful presence.

Overcome, Boaz dropped to his knees just as Chin Yuen snatched the book from the table. With a wordless roar, the Brass jumped once more to his feet. The sailors scattered, a few screaming in fear, as Boaz erupted from the cave mouth in pursuit of his patrimony.

He scrambled up a dune, blood and blue silk rags wrapped around his raging arms. Someone close by was firing a weapon, but wherever the bullets went, they had no effect on Boaz. His vision was narrowed to a single line of focus, pursuing the Chinese petty officer as an arrow pursues a target.

The man ran as if his heels were ablaze. Another sailor stumbled. Boaz snapped his spine with one step, smashed his head with the next, continued racing for the book.

At the crest he lost his footing and began to slide down the other side. Ropes dangled from the lightening sky, sailors already scrambling up them.
Chin Yuen ran toward the Chinese airship that wallowed too close to the earth.

Boaz increased his pace, knowing he was overspending irreplaceable lubricant. He raced to overtake the thief before the man could gain the safety of the ropes and be lifted away from this place bearing
his
book.
Ophir’s
book.