Pinion (13 page)

He turned his attention upward. His thighs shivered. Tight bands clutched his chest. He turned to sit upon a landing and was surprised to find his breathing harsh and loud.

The monk called down from two turns above him. “The climb will only grow more difficult if you let your body take too long a rest.”

“I cannot go on.” Was this stupid island a mile high? Could no one build their secret headquarters amid a simple meadow?

“The upward road always leads to Heaven.”

“Enough with your monkish blather,” shouted Wang.

Laughter echoed, accompanied by the continued tap of footsteps.

Wang realized if he let her get too far ahead, she’d be long gone when
he reached the top. Strange as she was, the monk was Wang’s only friend in this mess.

His only friend at all. He might have liked that dangerous English-woman who’d come to his library not so long ago, but for the fact that she was English and a woman. She’d had sense, and a good eye.

The cataloger heaved himself to his aching feet. The monk had been correct. His first few steps were leaden. His body did not want to go on. Yet what choice did he have? The future lay above him, the past below. He had been called, not sent.

The upward road might lead to Heaven, but right now it led to a jelly in his legs and a burning in his mouth.

Wang did not at first understand that he had reached the top. The night was not so dark, even with the Wall looming black-line on the southern horizon. Stars quarreled high above. The moon would soon rise. The world seemed strangely filled with light. Or maybe that was just his head.

When he arrived at a landing much larger than normal, he set about looking for more steps. What he encountered instead was a row of hibiscus redolent with night-blooming scent. Turning, nearly stumbling with the motion, Wang saw another row nearby. He turned again, consumed with the inertia of the movement, to face a very large doorway gleaming with dark lacquer and studded with brass nubs. This entrance was set within a very traditional gate much as he might expect to find in any palace of the Imperial Court.

The monk waited on the stone step before the gateway, puffing on her little pipe.

“I could have climbed up and down twice in the time it took you, fat man.” She extended her hand, offering him a smoke.

“No,” Wang gasped. “Am . . . am I expected?”

“Do you think the eyes of this fortress miss any of what takes place in their own waters?”

He sprawled beside her on the step. “I think there are more eyes in Heaven and Earth than ever I’d dreamt of.”

“You are one thousand, two hundred and seven steps closer to Heaven now.” She smiled through the wreath of her smoke.

“I was called, not sent.” That was fast becoming his mantra.

“I came because I am curious,” the monk replied.

Wang sat breathing very hard for a few minutes. His head hung between his knees, his back bent and lungs tired. Finally he looked up.

Her smoke still trailed in the air, but the monk had vanished. The hibiscus shivered, possibly with the wind.

The cataloger had not heard the gate creak open. He turned anyway to look. No gaping darkness. No inviting lantern light. No rush of incense.

Everything under Heaven has a name
, he thought.
But how to describe this monk, who disappears like morning mist yet is solid as Grass Mountain?

His abused legs nearly buckled as he stood. Wang found no bell pull, no gong, no waiting servant. He raised his fingers to knock, but the door swung open as if at his thought.

A pale man dressed in patterned gray, strangely featured like a Mongolian, stood within. He stared at Wang with speculation. “You have come. I would bid you welcome, but that would be a lie.” His Chinese had a very northern accent, as if he’d learn from a Manchurian. “You may call me Dunkerjav.”

The librarian. “I am Cataloger Wang. I was called for.”

“Of course you were.” The pale man continued to block the doorway. “Beware your idle tongue while here, and shut your ears against those words not meant for you. This is a Silent house, but it is not a quiet house.”

Bowing again, Wang murmured a polite acknowledgment. Then he followed the Mongolian inside, passing from star-bright night into musty shadow.

The island house of the Silent Order was as much of a warren as any Imperial Palace. Hallways opened onto more hallways; high walks crossed over lower chambers filled with grunting, shouting monks or copy desks vacant in night’s dimness. Some areas were illuminated by flickering elec-trick lamps; others shone with the warm, buttery glow of kerosene. Still more lay dark—fallow fields awaiting the plow of light.

After passing through a vestibule crowded with wicker armor and ancient, useless swords, they arrived at a great room. Three levels of balconies were visible below them. The floor held a great, round map of the Northern Earth, atop which three lithe men walked in black slippers.

The map-walkers positioned small markers, then moved others about, in response to instructions pointed or shouted by men standing at the bottom of the deep room. A whole crowd surrounded the map—men and women of many races.

Wang felt a freezing stab of fear. He’d always understood the Silent Order to be beyond the boundaries of nationhood, but its aspiration of an orderly, controlled world had seemed so Chinese. Here he saw a project even the Dragon Throne might not have dared.

The Englishwoman Childress had been something else entirely—a Mask of the white birds, wicked and foreign and dedicated to chaos and disorder. But these people . . . They did not honor rank or precedence—he could tell by the way they stood admixed and unthinking. How did each of them know who he
was
, where he
belonged
?

The Mongolian watched from close by. “This is our best approximation of the order of the world. Oracles and difference engines both work alongside, considering word that is brought from half a thousand spies and harbor masters and simple folk who value what we do.”

“I am a librarian, in service of the Imperial Court,” Wang began.

“No. You are the man who has unearthed the Golden Bridge. You are also the man who has let the most dangerous Feathered Mask in generations slip our nets and walk free.”

“So what would you of me here?”

A snort. The Mongolian appeared almost sympathetic. “We will descend, and you will be told everything there is to tell you. Then you will sail into the world and find this Feathered Mask and the traitors with her aboard
Five Lucky Winds
.”

“Why me? I am needed on the Golden Bridge, as you said yourself.”

“You are the only one of us to whom she has spoken. You will be able to approach her in trust, far more than any of our other operatives can hope to do.”

“Then what? Strike her down in anger?”

“Bring her home.” A fever lay upon the Mongolian’s eyes. He seemed as if he would spring to wild action at any moment.

Wang wondered at this madness and why anyone would think him part of it.

The Mask Childress strode into the town of Panjim with her hulking servant trailing behind her. She wore a tattered, high-necked black dress like armor beneath a helm of tightly wound pepper-gray hair. Not even bullets could pierce such dignity.

The servant was a one-handed brute of a man, with thinning orange hair and skin that had seen far too many seasons in the sun. He carried a strongbox of Eastern design underneath each arm.

The Mask was dangerous in that subtle way that prompted dogs and beggars to turn aside. All one had to do was look to her confidence to see that she was a projection of a far greater power. The street people of Panjim, like street people everywhere, understood the implicit threat.

At least that was what Childress hoped. She walked with purpose. She
had al-Wazir—a man who would literally fight tigers. The beggars scuttled away, but in truth more likely from his looming glare than anything in her.

They were intent on finding a chandler if possible, otherwise a hardware store. She knew nothing of Indian towns, but any place that had been run by the Portuguese, then the British, should have a sensible mercantile district.

The town was designed in a European manner. Stone and brick facades lined the central streets, a cathedral square at the middle. A small, fractious palace glowered on a hill behind the church, as if resenting the imposition of the soaring cross that speared the sky between it and the ocean. As she walked Childress noted the profusion of Portuguese names on the storefronts, but also a mix of British and Indian names.

She had expected more people, somehow, but then they had chosen an out-of-the-way port with purpose.

Children dark as soaking walnut shells ran screeching in the streets. Like children everywhere, they played cock-a-hoop, kick the can, kitten-in-a-bag.

Laborers clad only in pale, grubby loincloths bent beneath great baskets of fluttering chickens or bundled greens. Servants and younger daughters of households walked with jars, bags, packages; each wore bright wraps drawn over one shoulder. Some had a red dot placed on their foreheads. Men, too, in a variety of fashions from a pair who could have been Boston bankers to hurrying fellows in long, straight robes fronted by lines of buttons.

Finally, her eyes roved across a scattering of British soldiers under a banyan tree. The lads rested, cupping cigarettes and looking at nothing in particular, but Childress noted that al-Wazir kept his eyes averted. Despite her fantasy of walking cloaked in the power of her stolen office, Childress knew that none of these people would pay her any mind.

“I am doubly glad we did not bring Captain Leung,” she said quietly to al-Wazir. “Those men would have taken note.”

“And I doubt that,” the big Scotsman growled. “Not so long as he dressed the part. Did you not note the Chinee businesses down these side streets? I marked an herbalist, two apothecaries and a tailor just now. If we brought him some of the local linens and a pair of them sandals all these wogs wear, he would look as if he were born here.”

Childress was unaccountably delighted at the thought. “You may have just solved our delivery problem, my friend.”

The day, though young, was already as hot as she had ever experienced back in New Haven. She halted at a pushcart where a man hawked
chilled fruit and shaved ice. “How much?” she asked, pointing to some fresh mango.

He leered up at her, his mouth twisted from some punch thrown fifty or sixty years earlier. “Ten annas for the pretty lady.”

“Angus,” Childress said in her speaking-to-students voice.

This was an important test.
Five Lucky Winds
carried Chinese Imperial scrip, of course, that would be dangerous here. Gold as well, for emergencies. This they had brought some of in al-Wazir’s strongboxes. But of local money they’d had none, until Bai had stumbled over a sack of loose base metal coins in the ship cave. Quite clearly those had been struck in the Portuguese days of Goa.

They needed to know if the coins would cause comment. No one aboard the submarine had the least idea how long ago the currency might have changed, or if the British had bothered to take the old specie out of circulation.

Gold was fine if you wanted to buy two thousand barrels of diesel fuel, but it would hardly purchase eggplant in the market.

Al-Wazir shifted both strongboxes to his handless arm, then dug into a pocket to produce a handful of small-denomination
réis
. He offered them to the vendor, who raised his eyebrows in disdain, then picked out four of the coins. “Sell the family silver,” he muttered as he handed her a small paper cone with mango over ice chips.

Childress turned away without thanking him—
for that is how the Mask Poinsard would behave
, she thought, with a small regret from the dead woman whose role she had taken on—and sampled the fruit as she walked. The pale flesh had a pleasant tang.

“Hope you’re enjoying it, milady,” al-Wazir grumbled behind her.

She laughed, morbid memories fleeing in the face of a sunlit tropical morning. A tinge of confidence seeped in. “Let us try these Chinese streets. If any businesses there speak the language of our friends, they can perhaps hide in plain sight, and all of this effort will be eased.”