Pinion (12 page)

Kitchens thought of the sheaf of death warrants in the locked attaché case he carried. Traveling to Dover with Amberson, he’d still not been able to examine the Queen’s token. Kitchens pushed the reflections aside and mounted the stairs leading upward to his future home.

He had always harbored a horror of flight. Being so far from safe, safe ground made his gut twitch. While training as a special clerk, he’d barely passed the roof-running and bridge-diving exercises. Here, so far above the soil on a tower that only swayed and creaked a bit, he felt a touch of the panic that pursued him in dreams.

Notus
hung stolidly, sufficiently large to provide the illusion of stability. The platform at the top of the tower was mounted on a turntable, ensuring
the airship stayed facing into the wind at all times. Pumps kept her gasbag at neutral buoyancy, but she still appeared a bit sad and wrinkled. He crossed a wooden bridge to her deck, for the first time in his life aboard an airship. A completely deserted one at that.

The vessel seemed empty even of rats, though he seriously doubted that could be true. Deck gear sat in place, but not square and polished. The air of abandonment was peculiar.

“Ain’t been nobody aboard but the maintenance detail,” Penstock announced from behind Kitchens. “Out here on the third line, no one can get close without half the aerodrome knowing.”

“The crew is in for a long, slow march, I should think,” Kitchens said absently. He mounted to the poop, where the helm stood.

These ships were relics, he knew, built in a fashion that had been obsolete on the water these fifty years and more. Everything crossing the waves under a naval ensign these days was iron-built with great turbine engines and long, smooth guns that could bark a shell to the horizon. In the sky, where weight efficiency was paramount, they invested metal only in the engines, while using the experience of older times to build a light, sturdy hull out of a mix of woods. The result was as if Admiral Nelson’s fleet had taken to the air, slung beneath the long, gray sausages of balloons.

He touched the polished brass of her wheel. Chains through the spokes locked it down. The engine telegraph and the binnacle stood adjacent. The captain conned his ship from an open deck, much as they had a hundred years earlier.

Only now they flew, dying in the air instead of on the water. Taking a deep breath, Kitchens looked to the rail. His knees almost gave way at the sight of the ground two hundred perilous feet below.

How would he manage at cruising altitude? These vessels passed two miles in the air and more, depending on wind and weather and the needs of their mission.

He dragged himself step by step to the rail. Penstock trailed behind, silent now. Kitchens did not care for what the man thought, but he did care what the man might say in some written report to Admiralty.

Gripping the rail so tight his fingernails ached, Kitchens leaned forward and looked at the next rows of masts, the neatly mowed green below, the hills beyond where the town spilled toward the aerodrome. A knot of figures at the rail of another airship along the distant row of masts stared back at him.

Well
, Kitchens thought, Notus
probably has something of a reputation as a ghost ship by now
.

He wondered if he would soon become a ghost clerk.

A bowl of cliffs rose to surround them as they walked down off the Wall. The path descended into a snowy mountaintop crater that held a strange building, though it resembled a gargantuan termite mound more than any of the buildings of Europe. How the builders had buttressed its rising masses, Paolina could not say. She caught glimpses of long, tawny vistas of grassland leading away south and east and west from the foot of this mountain.

Soon enough those distant, open plains were blocked by crumbling, rotten rock. Banners began to sprout alongside the path. Tall poles bent slightly with their own weight bore the bundled tails of animals, wrapped strips of bright-printed cloth, or sprays of colored ropes knotted in particular fashions.

In front of the termite palace they were met by a tall, dark-skinned man dressed in linens and a spotted animal skin. He carried a drum and favored Paolina with a bright smile before speaking with vigorous intent in some language she did not know.

She strained for comprehension, then answered in English: “I do not understand you.” Would she have to use the gleam for speech? The stemwinder was so dangerous. She’d seen the bodies in the water just before she and Ming had fled to the Wall.

She wished mightily for Boaz to be with her on this adventure. Ming was cheerful enough, and quite capable, but also strangely deferential. Boaz would have been thoughtful and wise. The Brass had always known what to do.

Paolina took the stemwinder in hand before she tried greeting the man in Portuguese, then Chinese.

At the last, he launched into a rapid patter of speech in that language. Ming answered. Paolina caught perhaps two words in ten as the two exchanged first courtesies, then introductions, then expressions of mutual goodwill. She shivered in the wind.

“Wait,” said their guide in Chinese. He put up a hand. “Let us go within.” He spoke much more slowly now, for Ming had explained that Paolina had only a little of the language. “Feast, then talk.”

She slipped the gleam back into its pouch among her skirts. Paolina was both relieved and disappointed not to use it. Surely one woman’s ability to talk did not weigh so much on the mechanisms of the world as did tons of submarine trapped amid of a Wall storm.

As they mounted a winding, irregular flight of stairs, she turned to face the Wall. She had a moment of illusion, as if the soaring mass before her were in fact the surface of the Earth, and she an insect crawling up a wall of some other Creation, ready to tumble into the cliffs below.

The corridors within were just as organically shaped as the exterior. The dried-mud walls were covered with white and ochre and golden paintings that ran for dozens of feet, spiraling in on themselves and opening to star-bursts. The patterns were beautiful, though they plucked at her eye in a manner that Paolina found both curious and fascinating.

Their guide, whom Ming whispered was named Seven Trees, led them unerringly to a large, rounded chamber. A feast was being spread there by a quiet group of men and women coming and going from a series of other passageways. All were tall and dark as Seven Trees.

Eight mats were arrayed in a circle. Each was a different color—one a maroon so dark as to be almost brown, another a gray-green, a third dusty tan, and so on.

Bowls and gourds stood on each mat. They were different from place to place, one presenting mashed fruits and vegetables, their smells mixing together in a medley of salt and starch. Another mat was covered with rich, dark stews that were almost bloody in their scent. A third held leafy greens and long, narrow slices of glistening roots.

The mix of odors made her stomach growl. She and Ming had eaten well enough while passing along the Wall, but their diet would never have been confused with plenty, or even variety.

Seven Trees spread his hands. “Eat,” he said in Chinese. “And we will know.”

Ming stepped into the center of the circle of mats, then paused to look back at Paolina. “What is your care?” he asked in English. His brown eyes darted to one side, indicating their host.

“I am not certain,” she admitted in the same language. “Ask him what he means by ‘we will know.’ ”

Ming looked to Seven Trees. His Chinese was more slow and careful now, so that Paolina could follow some of the conversation.

“What is it you will know when we eat?”

Seven Trees bowed slightly. “What the . . . signifies.” She’d missed several words there.

Apparently so had Ming. “Who is this which signifies?”

“Those who come,” Seven Trees said. “The Wall sends ambassadors at times. You. Furthermore, you do not always understand your own purposes. This feast is intended to . . .” Again she lost the sense of the words.

The Chinese glanced back at Paolina again. “They tell fortunes by the foods we choose,” he said in English.

She glanced down at the mats. Were some of these dishes drugged? Poisonous? A ritual meal was a far different thing from a welcoming banquet.

The tall man smiled. “All the ambassadors of the Wall have been welcomed here. Including the . . . when they come down from the heavens.”

A missing word.

“Where are they now?” Ming asked.

Seven Trees shrugged. “Some have moved on. Some stay to join us. Some leave their bodies behind.”

Paolina froze at that last. “The food is a test,” she said, also in Chinese.

“Of course.” Seven Trees looked surprised. “How else would we know you were bearing rectitude?”

“We will not choose from among
poisons
.” That last word was in English, for she did not know the Chinese.

Their guide drew his fur close around him and frowned. Paolina’s hand once more reached for the stemwinder. The sailor dropped his shoulders and let his feet slide a bit farther apart.

“You will eat.” A stillness hung in Seven Trees’ voice, low and threatening. “You will eat, and we will know you by your choices.”

She pulled the winding knurl out to the fourth detent. Paolina had become something of an expert on focusing her will.

Bringing down the ceiling was not an option. For one thing, an entire building rose skyward above them. Everyone would be crushed. Nor did she want to stop Seven Trees’ heart. Yet if she simply moved herself and Ming away from here, she risked another earthquake like the catastrophe she had caused back in Sumatra by calling
Five Lucky Winds
to her aid.

“We are not ambassadors,” she told Seven Trees. “We are travelers who would be upon our way now, without delay.”

“You will choose, then eat; then we will see who you are.”

Men stepped from the various passageways. At least a dozen, wrapped in cloths of various patterns and colors, each carrying a long spear with a diamond-shaped black iron blade.

Ming gave Paolina a hard, wordless look. His meaning was clear enough.
Do something. I cannot fight them all
. She had defeated an entire navy. Stepping out of this danger was well within her means.

She had sworn not to use this power. She had been willing to accept oblivion of the spirit to send it away from the world. She had fled here to the Southern Earth to escape the threats of venal, grasping men who would take it from her.

Now she was to be made a pawn again by her own fear.

Paolina felt her anger rising.
Men
, it always came to
men
. Boaz had been
different, Ming was quite decent, but these people in their termite palace atop their frozen mountain were no better than the
doms
of Praia Nova who had made her childhood such a lengthy misery.

With anger grew resolve. With resolve grew intent. The warriors stepped closer, their spears at the ready.

“Ming,” she said. He took her arm. She closed her eyes and thought hard on the angel who had met them atop
a Murado
.

Where had he meant to send us?

She opened her mouth to say something else, but the breath was snatched from her in a whirl of dust and the long, terrified scream of a grown man in pain.

He followed the monk upward. Clearly the woman had been hiding among the sailors aboard
Fortunate Conjunction
, had worn their cotton blue uniform, head shaven as most of the crew kept themselves.

Wu, the mate, must have known. Perhaps not Captain Shen, who seemed lost in his own head. It had been obvious to Wang that Wu ran the boat. As for the monk, she was . . . what? A ghost in truth?

Perhaps all the Kô’s crew were madmen.

Wang certainly felt like such an unfortunate. The stairs were slippery with dewfall. Tiny, secretive plants grew in the gaps between treads and frame, the places where the rails twisted. Mosses flowed from the side of the cliff.

Below him,
Fortunate Conjunction
was already a pale blur in the deepening gloom as it steamed away. Wang had never thought he would miss Chersonesus Aurea—it had been worse even than Hainan—but he was sorry to see the boat depart without him. The waters so clear and glassy by day now seemed a dark curdle ready to swallow the vessel whole.