Pinion (22 page)

She was unhappy at leaving their hidden safety, but even more unhappy at a lack of information. The Chinese living in Panjim would either be hiding behind the walls of their houses, or shot for spies and traitors. If the British discovered that some of the Chinatown merchants possessed Middle Kingdom scrip from
Five Lucky Winds’
strongbox, that would only make matters worse.

They needed to know. Who was hunting whom, and why. As the only Europeans aboard the submarine, it fell to Childress and al-Wazir to do the scouting.

“My greatest fear here,” she told al-Wazir as he pulled again at the oars, “is that some well-intentioned officer or bureaucrat will attempt to remove us for our own good.”

“You try telling our story to any Queen’s officer,” he growled. “See what response you’ll be getting.”

He rowed on, while Childress wished she knew some way to ease his fears—and her own, for that matter, for her concern was with what they would find in Panjim.

“The Bone People have sent a message,” Baassiia told her.

They met now in the Plaza of Inordinate Desire. A wizened tasseomancer with teeth black as his brew served them coffee in shallow bowls of silver beaten over the upper curve of a child’s skull. Gashansunu stirred cardamom and honey into hers, seeking the comfort of the inner sight that combination was said to bring.

Not that she had great need for revelation from a shallow cup. Her
wa
was clear enough on the meaning of the disturbances in the Silent World. The very sky above the city had shouted its distress.

She tapped her spoon dry and set it on the tiled tabletop. A pattern of flowers was glazed into the ceramics, the trumpet of each vine in turn consuming the stem of the next, so they were an endless circle of blossoming and devouring.

The tasseomancer was a member of the Many Petals House. Many Petals had not had serious dispute with Westfacing House in at least a generation. Though if someone
had
wanted to poison her, the oily, bitter brew would have been an excellent mask for any number of herbal assaults.

Not this moon, luckily. That would have been one more complication. Death was a marked inconvenience at its best.

“What message?” Gashansunu finally asked.

“They inquire if we will trap the gleam that has come across the Wall.”

Persons from across the Wall had been a difficult subject since the theft of the Bone People’s airship two years ago.

“Trap? We know nothing of the gleam yet, save that the city regrets its coming, and that the Southern Earth will probably regret its passage.”

Baassiia looked at his bowl for a time. His brown eyes were filled with an air of destiny. Gashansunu knew this only meant that the circle caller was stalling.

“You are lost in this matter, are you not?” she asked him.

He pursed his lips, then glanced down into his coffee. “I am afraid that counsel has not come to me yet from the Silent World.”

“Well it has come to
me
.” She leaned forward. “I dreamt of a great crocodile, calling me east as it swam in ever smaller circles, dragging the waters down with it.”

“Is that your dreaming, or your ambition?”

“I am not Ninsunu to wriggle my oiled body before the circle callers in a ploy for advancement.”

“I thank you for that,” he said. “But if you follow the monster into the depths of dreaming and leave the walls of the city, who will come back?”

NO ONE
, whispered her
wa
.
OR THE ENTIRE WORLD
.

“I follow what the signs tell me,” Gashansunu said primly. “The Bone People know the gleam is near. The world tells us its regrets through the dreaming of the city. My own inner sight sees the journey under way. I would not be of the city if I did not follow this.”

Later she walked the circled ways of the city by silvered moonlight. The
wa
of the dead roamed in darkness, dangerous to anyone not warded by their own
wa
, but even cloaked in safety Gashansunu could see the shadows full of teeth, smell the stale blood.

They were a violent lot, those left behind when the greater spirit moved on. They were also the wardens of the city, invisible and invincible, at least until a certain gleam had walked among them two years ago.

Each ring was laid outside the ring before it to make an ever-widening circle around the beating heart at the center beneath the Pillar of Restitution. In time the city would birth another ring. The houses of the sorcerers would sing praises to this happening, then cautiously move into the still-glistening streets to rip the drying cauls from the buildings and find what spirit gifts might lie within. Someday the city might circle the Southern Earth, given an uninterrupted span of years.

The city preyed on the unwary, but no one preyed upon it. Gashansunu and her kind knew themselves as fish on a reef or fleas on a dog. Their power was as a swimmer before the ocean wave that was the city.

She walked the smooth streets, passed darkened doorways hosting a thousand glistening eyes with no mouths. Gashansunu tolerated the murmuring worry of her
wa
and wondered what or who in the Northern Earth was sending such gleams across the Wall. Twice in a pair of years. Her people had not seen the like since the days of simony and miracles nearly two millennia earlier.

Soon enough she reached the gate, massive and brutal like the legs of the strongest slave, and stepped from the true world of the city into the illusions of jungle and water and bitter scent blown from the ocean.

My name is Legion, for we are Many.          —
Mark 5:9

Eventually the doorway groaned open. Dr. Ottweill stepped out. The man’s white coat was stained gray-black. His hair streamed wild as any eremite prophet’s. His face was seamed and pocked and blistered. Fever flickered in his eyes.

“You I am before knowing, Brass traitor man.” Ottweill glared at McCurdy and his handful of crew. “Here is the miserable relief that wretched al-Wazir sends?”

“Sir, I don’t know al-Wazir,” the bosun replied. “I am Bosun McCurdy of HIMS
Erinyes
, here to find how you is doing and bring dire news.”

Ottweill seemed displeased. “An officer for me they do not dispatch.”

“Lieutenant Ostrander is aboard the airship, sir,” McCurdy said doggedly. “With his compliments, he sent us down to scout out while he kept a sky watch. I am charged to find you, and inform you that the Empire has gone to war with the Chinese. You should be wary of new attacks.”

The doctor laughed. “New attacks? We are not finished being wary of the old attacks! Our dead we have not all yet buried. My men live underground like black moles. Coal we hoard. Ourselves we hide from the sky. Most of all we dig, dig, dig, boring Her Imperial Majesty’s tunnel ever deeper into the Wall. Are you carrying out all your duties, man!?” He finished with his nose inches from McCurdy’s face, spittle running down his chin.

McCurdy gulped. “Sir, I can’t say, sir. I am only here to advise you to send a signal to Mogadishu should the Chinese encroach.”

“Now a telegraph line across to the east from here you have laid?”

The bosun gave up. “Sir, no sir.”

This man, after all, had overmastered even al-Wazir, and McCurdy was no al-Wazir. “Doctor,” Boaz said, interrupting.

Ottweill spat. “You. Machine. Sooner my borer should talk.”

“Perhaps it shall someday. But you will swiftly meet with trouble if you have not already. I sent word before that the Wall is hollow. Beware when you break through the rock into those inner spaces.”

The doctor’s voice almost screeched. “What does a machine know?”

“What does a man who has lived along the Wall for centuries know? I have passed within by secret ways. Can you say the same?”

McCurdy gave Boaz a look that might have been grateful.

“Och,” snarled Ottweill. “You have nothing for me. Come back when that worthless chief sends you at the head of an army.”

“Sir, thank you, sir,” said McCurdy.

The doctor stepped through his little postern gate, then paused to look back at Boaz. “Brass man. When through I break, what will I find?”

“Wonders,” Boaz said. “The machineries of Creation laid bare. Spinning walls of brass that will rip your borer from its wheels with all the force of an entire world in motion. What you will not find is a walkway to the Southern Earth.”

::
he will find the price of his pride
:: echoed the voice of the Sixth Seal. Boaz touched his belly as if to silence it.

“Bah.” Ottweill slammed the door. The gun slits rattled shut.

In moments, Boaz was alone with McCurdy and his men.

“I reckon that could have been worse,” the bosun finally said.

Now was time for him to leave and head for Ophir. He was almost home. “I shall head back to the stockade and see what of the sky can be glimpsed from there.”

“Shaw, de Koonig, make a camp right here before the door,” McCurdy ordered. “A small fire and cook up some of them oats. I’m going with John Brass here to have another look.”

It will not be so easy as walking away
, Boaz thought. He did not want to fight this McCurdy, who reminded him too much of al-Wazir. Men of a type, cast from whatever mold the Royal Navy had for petty officers, much as Ophir cast its Brass sons from molds almost as old as time itself.

They gained the top of the stockade. Africa was nothing more than a few arm spans of swirling gray overlaid with shadows. The Wall loomed behind, massive as another world.

“Where is your airship, Bosun McCurdy?”

“If I knew that, I’d be a happier man,” the bosun replied. “Lieutenant Ostrander might have decided to fly her to the moon.”

“Your midshipman is no force, you said.”

“Not to stand against a commander, he’s not.” McCurdy sounded sad now. Nothing so resolute as al-Wazir would have been. “As for you, John Brass, ’tis now that you’ll climb over the fence and carry your tales home?”

“I am afraid I should be leaving,” Boaz admitted. “Though they will not like to see me there, for Ophir names me traitor. I have a tale to recount that they will not want to hear.” The Sixth Seal stirred within his belly, its desires and anger all too divine, but most unfortunate for the man he had become.

His first glimpse of the Wall came with the dawn of their seventh day of travel. The bow lookout shouted the warning as night still lay firmly on the Northern Earth. Kitchens had stood close forward and stared intently, but his untrained eye took some time to catch the solid line of darkness now marking the southern horizon.

The Wall had consumed the ambitions of more than one empire, spat them out again as bloody bones. Israel at her height under the kings of old tried to conquer it. So had the Romans, once, or so legend ran. Now England would scale the divine precipices and claim this awful place for her very own.

The Wall had devoured men, too; good, bad and indifferent. Kitchens was familiar with the reports concerning the fate of Gordon’s 1900 expedition. HIMS
Bassett
likewise lost in the same efforts, one Angus Threadgill al-Wazir the sole survivor. He had sent al-Wazir back to the Wall in company with the mad and maddening Dr. Lothar Ottweill. Though it had been mere months since that expedition set out, they were already presumed lost by pessimists at Admiralty and Whitehall.

“My job,” Kitchens whispered to the distant, uncaring Wall, “is to be an optimist.”

“Different once you’ve seen it, yes?”

Kitchens started. He was most unaccustomed to being surprised.

Sayeed stood just behind Kitchens’ shoulder. The captain smiled, a lean and predatory expression.

“Yes, Captain, it is a . . . presence, I should think to say.”

“When we draw close, you will feel that presence like a fist wrapped around your heart.” Sayeed stepped to the rail, standing close to Kitchens. “Admiralty is using me and my ship because we are already stained beyond redemption. No captain would have
Notus
now. She is unlucky in a way that few would accept under their command.”