Pinion (18 page)

“Hmm.” Sayeed looked decidedly unimpressed. “Mr. Kitchens, perhaps you are familiar with the circumstances of my birth?”

“Beirut, 1869,” the dark clerk responded promptly. “Of Arab parents, under Ottoman rule, taken to England as a small boy after the Battle of Acre and raised in fosterage.”

“My skin is an unfortunate hue, and my name condemns me as a wog.” Bitterness laced the captain’s voice. “I have never been redeemed from suspicion before this, Mr. Pale Man with the Very English Name. No more so will I be now.”

“If you have labored under suspicion all your life,” Kitchens asked,
leaving his scripted words behind in pursuit of this opening, “why did you become involved in the Silent Order?”

“I rather imagine for the same reason you wear that dark suit and little round hat, and carry those papers under your arm.” Sayeed quirked a secretive smile. “Because I believe the world can be a better place for all men. This path seemed wisest to me.”

“Does it still seem wise to you?”

The captain had no answer for that as his face hardened and he turned away.

Kitchens stood with Simpkins the navigator as the charts were laid out. “Should we meet no adverse weather, twelve days and nights under three-quarter power to make our port,” the officer said.

“With a stop for fuel and ballast in Marseilles or Algiers?”

Simpkins met his gaze. Only one of the navigator’s green eyes was visible—the other was swollen shut beneath a crusted purple bruise. “We can make the whole run without tendering, but there are no facilities at Ayacalong. If we arrive low we should be forced to beat back up the coast to the new station at Cotonou. And sir . . . no sane airman will be over the deep desert without as much gas, fuel and water aboard as he can possibly manage.”

“Would full power trim our air time?”

“Certainly. But we’ll use her fuel twice as fast. Oil is heavy stuff, and
Notus
does not carry so much of it as you might like to think. You could be walking back from the Bight of Benin.”

“Not many men have made that trip unassisted,” Kitchens said, thinking of al-Wazir.

Later, in his own small cabin, Kitchens considered Ottweill’s mission, and what
Notus
would likely find amid the savage wonders of the wall. It was not so difficult to build a case that any country wishing to spread its dominion across the Northern Earth was ruled by men as mad as hatters. The awful majesty of Queen Victoria in her sad decline was enough to convince Kitchens that the Wall held no monopoly on the breaking of the human mind and the shattering of the human spirit.

With that thought, he reached for the little case in which the Queen’s bloody paper had been deposited.

It is not about imagination
, Kitchens thought. All of this—empires, the Wall, England’s endless bickering with China—all of it was about fear.

The paper had long since dried. He should have unfolded it before the bloody goo had set up to a stiffening dye. Since then, there had been no appropriate moment. Kitchens had not been ready.

He feared whatever message the Queen had given him. He feared what she would ask him to do. He feared turning back to England’s shore and setting his neck before the blade for a command from a madwoman floating in a tank. He feared refusing the lawful order of his sovereign. He feared declining the dying hope of a monarch beloved across half of the Northern Earth.

Kitchens indulged himself sufficiently to wish that the paper had never come into his hand. A choice not presented could not be refused.

He placed it now on the tiny table unlatched from the cabin wall. A folded scrap, about the size of a postage stamp. The original had been kraft paper rather than the fine stationery of a royal palace, or even the decent writing paper of a gentleman in a hurry. Something a servant might use to keep a laundry list. Something a woman might secret away, whose every movement was constrained by mechanism and close observation.

At a practiced flick of the wrist, the razor fell out of his sleeve into his hand. Kitchens thumbed open the blade without looking at it. It would be hair-sharp and silver-bright. His blades always were. The note was stained a cranberry color, mottled with blood and fluid, crusted into a papier-mâché square.

He used the tip of the razor to lift the free edge of the small, folded piece. Little purpose in tugging with blunt, clumsy fingers. The paper made a popping noise, then flopped into a rectangle.

To his surprise, it did not break at the spine of the little joint now revealed.

A bit more work with the blade tip split the crust on the next set of open edges. He was patient as a man mixing explosives.

The ship rocked with some shift in the winds. Kitchens set the open razor down on the table, one finger pressed to the handle to keep it from sliding away in the event the deck canted. The engines growled more loudly for a brief moment, then settled down to their usual thrum.

After a few minutes of quiet, he resumed his surgeries.

The monk led him back down the long steps, through the darkness. “You have yourself a thoroughly modern quest,” she called to Wang over her shoulder.

“I am relieved to know that I have not fallen into some ancient
xiákè
epic.”

“Not to be so lucky. I am afraid your epic is likely to be short and brutal. Are you familiar with any weapons?”

His breath came so much easier on the way down, though his knees complained. “Only personnel and requisition forms, ma’am.”

That drew a laugh. “With which one may lay waste to armies from the comfort of one’s own desk, to be certain. Surely you have cut your own brushes?”

“Any man knows how to use a small blade,” Wang said defensively.

“A small blade is all that most men have,” she replied. “No matter.”

After a moment, he asked, “That is everything?”

“You were expecting mystic revelations?”

“I was expecting . . . more . . .”

She laughed again. “You hunt a Mask of great power and ferocious reputation. Your only weapons are your words.”

“Followed by some watcher in force, I am certain,” he grumbled, then paused his descent in dawning horror as he realized just who his watcher would be.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

It took Wang a moment to realize the monk had spoken to him in Latin. He did not take her meaning, but she seemed quite pleased.

“I believe you have a boat waiting for you down below,” she added.

Following their guide, she and Ming descended into the village. The settlement was scattered along the riverbank as far as Paolina could see in both directions before the dark, overhanging shadows of the jungle obscured her view.

Open walls were formed by pillars and posts that leaned at odd angles. Roofs were a haphazard mass of reeds, flowers and dangling leaves. No doorway was particularly square.

Familiar habits of thought reasserted themselves. She noted that the architecture conformed to the demands of this junglescape. Rain would not fall directly on most of these houses, but rather filter through the upper layers of the trees. This place was so warm that the inhabitants should never need sealed windows. The materials were harvested by gathering, rather than by gangs of men with axes, so the surrounding tropical forest remained almost unchanged.

“The home of the Correct People,” their guide said with a shy smile.

Her folk were everywhere. Many lounged, but somehow even then they had a quality of coiled motion. Many more carried fruit, speared fish, splashed in the river, whittled—all the business of a tropical settlement, but with a curious and refreshing quality of
play
about it.

Ming nodded to the right. Paolina looked up to see a much larger structure lodged in the trees. This one resembled a European building. Gabled roofs overhung balconies and porches. A Correct Person in a wrap of pale cloth gazed solemnly down at the travelers. She seemed the only sober-mannered individual in the whole village.

Paolina raised a hand in greeting. Her gesture was returned with a quiet, patient nod before the Correct Person stepped back into the shadows of the enormous house.

“Who lives up there?” she asked their guide.

Without even glancing toward the house, the woman said, “Kalker will explain all.”

Who is Kalker?
Paolina held her tongue.

They descended into an amphitheater set along the riverbank. A net of vines overhung the space. Rows of seats had been made from stones or split logs.

“Kalker will meet you here,” the guide said. “This is a special place, built up to honor our . . . Well, that is his story.”

Paolina smiled. “What is your name, that I might be more properly grateful later?”

“Arawu,” the Correct Person said shyly. She added something in a sibilant, hissing tongue. Then: “I go.”

Ming bowed from the waist. Arawu giggled and trotted back up to the top of the amphitheater before vanishing into the jungle.

“What now?” the sailor asked in Chinese.

“We wait,” she said in the same language. Switching to English: “I think this is the place the angel meant for us to come.”

Enjoying a sense of accomplishment—whatever she had been pursuing since crossing the Wall was at hand—Paolina examined the feather. The pinion was ragged from their passage through the jungle. As she walked through their village, the Correct People had stared at that feather even more than they had stared at her.

She tried to imagine a bird-mad jungle monster cruising low above the treetops. These folk did not live as though they feared death from the air. They did not live as though they feared much.

Paolina wondered what Boaz would have made of this place. Ming was a fine traveling companion—respectful, protective, thoughtful—but even
though they’d been together for the better part of a month, Paolina could not call it friendship.

Nothing like what she and Boaz had developed upon
a Murado
. The Brass man was by turns intriguing, infuriating, disrespectful, even strange; but always there had been an innocence about him.

Even Ming with his endless Oriental patience and calm politesse was a man. A man to step in front of her, to pick up a weapon at need, to make an urgent decision and issue peremptory demands.

Her inner self-honesty interrupted that thought:
Had Boaz not done so, in carrying you down the Wall against your will?

That had been different. Paolina knew this, surely as she knew the span of her own hands. Different because it was Boaz, and he was special to her, lovely in her eyes? Or different because he was not human?

Could she love a Correct Person?

Ming tapped her arm again. She followed his gaze.

An elderly man of the Correct People hobbled down the bowl of the amphitheater toward them. His fur was silvered, his face deeply lined, and he walked with a short, twisted cane. A few heads bobbed briefly behind him, others taking a look, but they withdrew as soon as her eyes lit upon them. This one had to be Kalker.

Paolina stood. “Welcome, sir.”

Shuffling, Kalker peered up at her. His eyes were crusted with rheum, though a strong spirit glowed within them. He then examined Ming, tapping the Chinese sailor’s knee once, very gently, with the stick. Finally he turned his attention back to Paolina.

“You have a feather.” His English carried the strange, sibilant accent of these people’s speech, which made Paolina wonder how Arawu had come to speak the language so well.

She held the angel’s feather out. Kalker took it, turned it over in his hand once, then handed it back. “Messengers from the Northern Earth,” he said, his voice freighted with authority. “We have our own Creation here. The Wall keeps the Garden safe, as your people would explain it.”

“How do your people explain it?” she asked, intrigued.

He smiled, an easy grin filled with age-blunted teeth. “The Correct People do not explain. We experience. Every day is the morning of the world; every night is its ending. Only you Northerners require time to flow like a river from a hidden spring to a dark and distant ocean.”

She sat. It felt rude, but so did towering over him. This way they could speak eye-to-eye. “Is it you whom I was sent to meet?”