Pinion (26 page)

“Because this is the place,” Wu said, his patience obviously strained.

“Do you
see
a submarine tied up there?”

“It could be hiding.”

Wang snorted, not bothering to conceal his amused contempt. “In which case these British will not know either.”

“Our task is to bring you to this place so you can rein in the English demoness. Your task is to determine how this should be done.”

The Silent Order are idiots
, the cataloger thought. To send him here on so thin a thread. The more he knew of them, the less worthy they seemed of his loyalty. He wanted to go home, wherever that might be now. “I expect we’ll all be dead within the hour.”

Wu shrugged. “Then we’ll sleep easier tonight.”

Where
was
that damned monk? He had a vision of her sprinting light-footed across the ocean waves to perform some damnable trickery under the noses of the English to ferret out the missing submarine and her mutineers.

Everything about this mission stank.

The boat slid to the dock. A line of English soldiers stared down at Wang. Their weapons were unslung, but not quite aimed.

“Greetings!” he shouted as cheerfully and artlessly as he could manage.

An English officer glared at him. “My good sir. You either have more gall than Julius Caesar himself, or you are the most foolish man alive.”

“We sail for Prince Jallah of Serendip.” Wang tried to smile. “I am his confidential secretary. We have put in for news of battles, and to report sighting of submarine vessel surely belonging to enemy navy.” He was rather proud of that last touch.

The officer frowned. “Have you an Englishman aboard with whom I might speak?”

“To my sorrow, no. Prince Jallah trusts only his Chinese servants with his moneys and his papers. English are for laws, Chinese are for counting, we say in shadow of his throne.” Somewhat to his own surprise, Wang was enjoying this conversation.

“Hmm.” The officer frowned, craned his neck to look at the crew of
Good Change
. “You have any weapons aboard that vessel, lad? We’re at war with the Chinese, you know.”

Wang bowed again, allowed some of his true nervousness to seep into his voice. “War between thrones is not war between every white man and every yellow man. No weapons, good sir. No contraband. Just papers for commerce, heading to Bombay. We call in here, to see what news of war!”

“Your airships are a bloody nuisance, that’s what news of the war. What of this submarine you’ve reported?”

“Offshore, twenty knots south,” Wang replied promptly. He was hoping for some confirmation of the presence of
Five Lucky Winds
in these waters.

The crowd of local fishermen and wharf coolies split with a mutter as another group of British soldiers pushed through, led by an Englishwoman and a flame-haired giant. Not
an
Englishwoman, Wang realized.
The
Englishwoman.

Five Lucky Winds
was here somewhere, for even now he faced the demoness Mask Childress. For her part she looked at him once, twice, then
opened her mouth before shutting it quite firmly with a quick shake of her head.

The stemwinder was warm in her hand. She could not recall the last time she had used the device with calculated intent rather than a rush of panic. Never for this one, she realized.

Head still aching from the wine, she sat on one of the benches of the amphitheater. Ming was up and about this morning. Three rocks lay on the wood beside her—one the size of a small toad, one the size of her fist, and one flat and jagged piece that could have served for a dinner plate.

She caressed the stemwinder. Her old one had been built into a case of Enkidu metal, filled with English clockwork, salvaged parts and bits of her own making—all that work performed from inside an impromptu prison while in the depths of a desperate fugue. It had possessed a certain elegance. This one looked like something brazed together under threat of violence.

It had the four hands and the multipurpose stem of the old stemwinder. One hand measured the time that beat at the heart of everything, one measured the beating of her own heart, one measured the turning of the earth, and one measured whatever she set it to.

She was concerned with that final hand now, though all four were connected in ways she might never understand.

Paolina carefully tugged the stem out to the last setting. Something within the gleam resisted a bit too much—it had been knocked about terribly in her journey since the crash of
Heaven’s Deer
—but did not snap free. A frisson of dread overcame her. In this position, the device was as dangerous as any grenado or smoking pistol.

She began to adjust the fourth hand, watching it swing blindly across the blank dial. Paolina closed her eyes and visualized the smallest of her rocks, letting the hand home in on the gleaming speckles of mica, the bird’s egg shape, the comfortable hand-conforming size of the thing.

A familiar state of attunement overtook Paolina in a subtle change. Like an ocean with no shore, it rose. She could feel the rock, sense all the tiny resonances deep within it as God’s clockwork structure of the universe was replicated at so tiny a scale the human eye would never witness it.

Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius
.

As above, so below.

Everything rested on everything else, clouds moving within clouds, a mesh of gearing and bearings that stretched the width of creation. She studied the bit of the world that the stemwinder was tuned to now, saw
how it knew its position, changed the stone’s motion so that the position became uncertain, then set it back into place
elsewhere
.

Something sizzled and stung at her right hand. Paolina was jolted back into wakefulness. She shook her arm, hoping to drive off whatever insect had landed there, before realizing that a dozen splinters were embedded in the skin of her hand and wrist, more caught in the sleeve of her ragged dress.

A smoldering little dish-shaped crater was scalloped into the wooden bench where the smallest rock had been. The rock sat serenely in the middle of the beaten-down clay that served this amphitheater as a stage.

Paolina was both impressed and disappointed. Impressed because she had no idea whether she could summon so much precision again. Disappointed because even the very small task of moving such a modest rock a modest distance had produced a modest disaster. Paolina sighed and studied the next rock, wondering how far away she should position herself to attempt the experiment once more.

Further efforts with the three rocks of varying weight, and distance of projection, proved that the sending was not harmful to the rocks themselves. Of course, under uncontrolled circumstances she’d pulled
Five Lucky Winds
several hundred nautical miles without apparent incident to vessel or crew. Likewise when she had sent Ming and herself into this jungle from the mountaintop fortress at the base of the Wall.

The amount of damage created at the origination point of the sending did not vary much. She wasn’t sending any of them far enough to evaluate the effects of distance. Paolina knew all too well what the effect had been of transposing
Five Lucky Winds
.

She wondered what caused the violence of departure. Was it like thunder, an effect that naturally attended the presence of lightning, and just as uncontrollable? Or was there some aspect of the relative motion and position for which she had not yet learned to compensate?

“It can be done.”

Startled, Paolina looked up. Hethor stood at the top of the amphitheater, pegs strapped to his shortened legs and a crutch under each arm. Arellya steadied the young prophet with a hand on his elbow.

“I—,” she began, then stopped. Hethor was no
fidalgo
come to refuse her simply because he didn’t understand what she was about. Nor was he an English stooge wrapped up in their conspiracies. He was the one person in the world who could truly understand both her purposes and her
methods. “I seek to control this better,” she said, apology for the aborted lie hanging heavy in her voice.

“There is much I cannot tell you.” He made his way down the steps. Each rap of the crutches on the ground wrenched a shuddering breath from Hethor. “But I may be able to help you.”

Paolina waited until he reached her level and took a seat on a bench undamaged by her experiments. Hethor laid one crutch aside, but continued to lean against the other. Behind him now, Arellya shook her head sharply at Paolina.

Don’t what?
the girl thought. Don’t talk to him. Don’t tire him out. Don’t ignore him. She was leaving soon, and would likely never come back to this village by the jungle river not so far from the shadow of the Wall. She would hear him out, and say what needed to be said.

“I thank you for the kind offer of the boat,” she told him. “But I think that is not my way. I wish to follow my heart back to the Northern Earth.”

A smile quirked across Hethor’s face. “You do not still think your salvation lies in flight?”

“No.” Paolina looked down at her stemwinder. “You were right in what you said yesterday. This thing is done. The box has been opened, and troubles loosed upon the world. I can follow along through disasters and troubles unnumbered, or I can try to lead, and perhaps direct the energies I have unleashed.”

“You can
choose
.” She heard the urgency in his voice, sensed some intense longing he would not or could not put into words. Hethor continued. “When you reach into the fabric of the world to move that rock, you change fate. You introduce a free decision into the preordained system of the world.”

“But it is no different than if I grasp the rock in my hand and cast it into the river.” Paolina paused. “No, I tell a lie. When I move the rock by hand, I am a part of the world acting on another part of the world. When I use the stemwinder to move the rock, I am changing the position and alignment of gears that turn at all levels inside the world.”

“Precisely.” Hethor seemed pleased with her. “This is where you and I are different. I was sent out to pursue the slipping of the Earth, and aided along my way by angels and other guides. My path was chosen for me, and even paved bright in advance of my steps upon it.
Your
path is being made by you.”

“You were part of the destiny of the world,” Paolina said slowly. “Much as the Brass Christ was. But you say I am stepping outside that destiny to act in my own interests.”

“In the interests of everyone, I think.” Hethor glanced to the north, where the Wall loomed close but hidden from them by the canopy of jungle over the rim of the amphitheater. “I have begun to believe that God meant us to rebel, meant us to step outside His plan and make our own way in the world. That is one way to read the tale of the Garden of Eden. Those ancient Jewish priests who wrote our Bible were afraid of what had been done in Adamic times. They sought the shelter of God’s laws, as a terrier might seek the safety of a kennel when confronted with the opportunity of an endless, open street.”

Hethor’s words grew inside Paolina like a storm tide. “The snake was our savior?” she asked.

“Where is he now? You can read the book of Job, or Isaiah—God had an Adversary. Where did Lucifer, son of the morning, go to when he fell from Heaven?”

“He was punished.” The voice of Fra Bellico echoing from the years of Paolina’s childhood. “Hidden from the grace of God.”

Eagerness infused Hethor’s voice. “If Creation had been formed with an Adversary to Heaven, if man had been given the true choice of contrary action, rather than the muttering dissent we see under a clockwork sky, imagine how different the world might be.”

“You believe the stemwinder opens the door to contrary action?”

“To everything good and evil.” He pointed at the device half-forgotten in her hand. “With that, you can change the order of the world at a thought, in a way that armies of slaves could never do should they shift every stone and brick that makes up the Wall. You can alter Creation.”

Paolina turned it over in her hand, looking at the scratched casing, the scars and dings and stains that had accumulated. The gleam seemed like such a small thing to be a lever to shift the weight of all destiny.

“I . . . have not thought of it this way.”

“Why should you?” he asked. “Some things were not made to be questioned. If God had meant to challenge us to find His path, He would not have autographed the sky in brass. That is as a clear a signpost as any that we are to follow, not to lead.”

Paolina considered that. “Yet He made us with the capacity to question.”

“You have crossed the Wall. You have feasted here among the Correct People. How many thinking races have you met, or seen evidence of? Surely they all have the capacity to question.” Hethor glanced over his shoulder at Arellya, who nodded sadly. He turned back to Paolina. “Consider that every one of those might be a separate Creation, a separate play at the table.”

“What was He looking for?” she asked.

“That.” Hethor pointed to the gleam. “He was looking for someone to stand before Him as an equal. Think on this, if I might be right. Lucifer failed. The men of Adamic times fled from the true meaning of the Garden. The Brass Christ tried to awaken us—read His words with this in mind, you will see what I mean—but the habit of obedience is too strong within all of God’s creatures.”