Pinion (3 page)

A bronze blade stabbed into the rock next to her. It barely missed her cheek, would have laid her open to the bone. Paolina turned to see one of winged savages—those flying horrors of which al-Wazir had babbled in his fever dreams aboard
Heaven’s Deer
.

It leered at her. The expression contrasted with the empty black eyes and the reek of slaughter. The sword pulled back as wings beat to hold the creature in place, eighty miles above the churning oceans of Southern Earth.

She could let go. She could fall. She could twist in the air, tug the gleam from its leather pouch, set the hands and find some use that would banish this monster and save herself.
And Ming
, Paolina added with hasty guilt. Save herself and Ming.

While perhaps shaking this entire face of the Wall loose with her.

“You are nothing,” she told the winged savage, and loosened her grip.

The stone that struck it in the side of the head surprised them both. Paolina fell free, screaming, lost already to unreason before her hand ever found her salvation even as the winged savage spiraled away.

The rope held, slamming her into the rock forty feet below the tied-off knots. Paolina slumped there, lodged against a vertical cleft in the Wall.

Just below her, standing on an undercut pathway, was a man in yellow leather with a tall, narrow cap rounded as a thumb. A sling drooped from his right hand. His left held a feathered staff topped by bright jewels.

Her safety rope tugged. Paolina scrambled for a grip, trying to help Ming pull her up. She nodded at the stranger as he slid away from her view, hidden once more by the overhang.

Finally, palms bloody, feet torn in her ragged shoes, she lay gasping on the flat apron of ground.

“We . . . can go below . . . ,” she managed to bite out. “A road . . . near the end . . . of our rope.”

Ming smiled, though she did not think he meant it. “Who down there?” he asked in the careful, simple Chinese he used with her.

Paolina tried to shrug. “A man in . . . yellow. He had a sling. He stared at me.”

“Maybe not so good to meet down, ah?” Ming tried in En glish.

She stared up the worthless trail that had led them to this impasse. “

Up where we were, you think?”

“Up,” he answered in his language. She didn’t need a translation to hear his emphasis, his worry, his fear.

I can lay waste to cities and transport ships across oceans
, she told herself, limping behind Ming’s heels up their backtrail.
Surely I can carry myself down the Wall
. She had to find a way to shed her power, to live for herself. And for Boaz, Paolina admitted.

Cataloger Wang busied himself among the most recent scrolls to come out of the pit of the library at Chersonesus Aurea, that lost city of the ancients hidden within scattered islands of the Kepulauan Riau near to Singapore. A history almost long enough to rival the Celestial Empire was drowned in swamp water and ancient ghosts. Something of that spoke to his librarian’s soul, whispering in the secret language of archivists.

All were loyal to the Son of Heaven; all were loyal to their name and place in the great wheel of society. He could do no less than practice the same loyalty.

There had been a sick, tempting fascination in the foreigner whom the damnable Captain Leung had brought into the heart of Wang’s demesne. She was doubly offensive in being both En glish and female. The dev ils from the deepest West wore their deceit plain upon their ghost-pale faces.

If only the Han armies had pursued the Romans after the Battle of Sogdiana, the world would be a much more orderly place today.

Wang smiled; it took a librarian to regret something two millennia past while misremembering what he had eaten for breakfast.

The Romans begat their fractious broods of irrelevant barbarians for many centuries, and China forgot what it had barely understood to begin with. Later, the Khans were a greater difficulty, and then the Manchu in their time, before each accepted the eightfold path and became entrapped in golden chains under the banner of heaven. When the En glish returned, great-grandchildren of the Romans, China had not remembered enough of the old lessons.

Now sorcerers and temptresses stalked like hungry ghosts through the Middle Kingdom, building their nests of lies and taking up residence amid the palace-islands of Phu Ket. Bringing women here under the wing of the nearly rebel Beiyang Navy.

All came back to that Childress.

“Wang.”

One of the Kô’s clerks stood in the doorway. They did not like to come down to the library, which reeked of mold and the rotting of a thousand tons of paper trapped in the brackish water below, but stayed instead in the partially restored palace up on the ridge of the city, composing poems about the sublime beauty of plum blossoms, or fighting with willow wands, or doing what ever courtiers in an exile such as this found to occupy their time.

“Yes?” Since politeness had been dispensed with, Wang saw no need to observe the proper forms of address. This bright-silked fool might be able to have Wang’s head back in Beijing, but here it was the cataloger and his researchers who did what was needful.

“You have been summoned before the Kô; he will speak to you now.”

Wang made a show of leisure as he slowly rolled the scroll, securing it with the pale blue ribbon signifying this piece of work had passed his review. He stood, searching idly for the shoes in plain sight by the door.

Shiao, that was the clerk’s name. A sorry little climber with a keen instinct for following the shiniest turd. The man’s irritation at being made to wait was manifest.

Wang spotted his shoes with exaggerated delight, slipped them on,
then bowed to Clerk Shiao. “Would that you had not delayed me so. I shall be merciful and not inform your master of your dilatory ways.”

Shiao returned the bow. “We will proceed now, and pray that the Kô has not taken offense at your heedless tardiness.”

They walked out single file, soft leather shoes squeaking against the grimy floor. Only a few of the researchers even looked up at the noise. Almost all of them were that very intelligent sort of simpleton who could perform a single task to perfection and otherwise barely walk upright.

Cataloger Wang hated everyone and everything about his sunken island kingdom, except the books themselves. He had a sick premonition that even that plea sure was about to be stricken from him by noble fiat.

It was not so long a walk, for all the knife-edged lack of courtesies between Cataloger Wang and Clerk Shiao. Soon the two of them were at the steps of the Kô’s palace, which were being swept clean by a toothless coolie armed with a straw-bundle broom. Doubtless the old man and his implement had been imported all the way from China for the purpose.

Shiao paid no more attention to the coolie than he would have to a broken cart by the side of the road. Out of sheer spite, Wang smiled at the old man. He then followed the clerk up through a set of red lacquer doors also imported from China, and into a darkened hall that smelled of incense, damp silk and ice.

Ice?
Wang thought.

Then he was surrounded by the court Mandarins whom he ordinarily avoided. They wore formal robes, layers of red and black and gold and scarlet, each with his flat hat and colored stone of rank. Silent servants replaced Wang’s shoes with silk slippers, turned back his cuffs, pressed a strong tea into his hand to clear potential offense from his breath.

This was familiar enough. The Kô took his guests as if he were still in the sacred precincts. Of course, at the Summer Palace, Wang would not have been fit to beg scraps from a kitchen gate. Here at the very edge of the empire he was accorded nearly the dignity of a lesser servant from a foreign court.

With the striking of small bells and a low sweep of incense, he passed through a brocade curtain into the presence of the Kô. Even Clerk Shiao remained behind.

For a man bound by so much ceremony and tradition, the Kô seemed very plain. He had an open, round face, apparently guileless as any single-minded beekeeper. He was short and pudgy, and at least here at Chersonesus
Aurea favored plain-sewn changshans that would not have been out of place in a rural tea house.

He was also a man with a power to deal both life and death at the slightest whim, personal representative of the Son of Heaven here at this most critical footing of the Golden Bridge, that road across the Wall toward China’s future. Judging from the languid expression on the Kô’s face, something was very wrong.

Though it exceeded protocol, Wang dropped to his knees and kowtowed. His forehead knocked three times against the cracked marble floor, his ample belly pressed against the cold stone. On the third tap, the cataloger closed his eyes a moment in a silent, unseen plea for mercy, then stared cross-eyed at the textured stone beneath his nose.

“Do not be a fool,” the Kô said. “You know better.”

Cataloger Wang pulled himself to his feet. “Lord,” he began, then stopped himself.

“Few things exercise my poor humors more than dealing with fools,” the Kô went on. “Perhaps you would care to hazard a guess as to what disturbs my qi this day?”

Wang would rather chop off his thumbs. Still, such a question must be answered. “It is beyond my poor imagining, lord.”

“Pity.” The Kô turned a porcelain cup within the circle of his fingers. The delicate piece glowed in the pale light filtering from high above. Blue brush strokes peeked around the edges of his grip, each with the fragility of a dying bird. The cup carried the look of centuries about it. “As this concerns your actions of late, I thought you might care to enlighten me, your lord and master, as to why the Dragon Throne has taken an interest in you.” Into the heart-freezing pause that followed, the Kô added, “By name.”

“My lord,” Wang muttered through a tongue thick with portents of disaster.

“Indeed. Your presence has been requested in Phu Ket, by the fastest available means.” The Kô leaned forward. “Since the crippling of the Nanyang Fleet by those running dogs whom you aided, this means my own ship must take you from this island with all due speed.”

Phu Ket!
The island fortresses of the Silent Order stood offshore from that harbor, lording over the secrets of Asia as surely as any palace eunuch with his poisons and his secret whispers. “. . . ” Wang could not speak.

“I thought you might tell me why, my friend.” The Kô shattered the ancient cup with a clench of his fist. Shards glistening with scarlet drops
spun to the floor amid a shower of steaming tea. “No matter, then. I shall not allow myself to be disturbed that a lowly servant has business with the Forbidden City that has been hidden from me.”

Wang dropped to his knees again and crawled backward. Splinters of porcelain stung his hands. The Kô’s breath was as a dragon’s rising from a river bottom.

No more words were said. No more blood was spilled. Cataloger Wang fled, wondering what would be left behind and who would arrange the affairs of the library and the Golden Bridge in his absence and whether he would survive even an hour aboard the Kô’s personal yacht.

He was stopped twice before reaching the great doors of Blenheim Palace. In front of those ugly, pale stone facings he was questioned at length by a man in a dark suit whom no one would mistake for a clerk. Two burly fellows in unmarked British Army kit stood by with pistols in hand, not quite pointing at Kitchens, not quite pointing away from him.

As his umbrella was being carefully disassembled, Kitchens reflected on the stories that just after New Year’s of 1901 while in residence at Osborne House, Her Imperial Majesty had suffered a fever of the brain. The details varied, but all of the potentially reliable rumors dated from that winter. The “other Mrs. Brown” had already been playing the role in Buckingham Palace and elsewhere for several years by then.

The suited man started in on Kitchens’ shoes. One heel was hollow, though the picks within were not so much dangerous as useful. This man was certainly aware of every trick Kitchens knew.

The Queen, since the winter of 1901, had rarely been seen. Her standins had aged visibly, through the magic of theatre and doubtless a certain amount of brutal coaching. But the quiet whispers in the break rooms of Ripley Building where Admiralty was housed said there was far more afoot.

Kitchens had thought he might be forced to strip, but he was given a handshake instead, which pro cess relieved him of both the razor and the piano wire in his sleeves. It was as smoothly done as any Newgate pick-pocket slipping a copper’s badge for a lark.

“They’ll be returned when you leave,” he was told.

If
hung in the air. No one Kitchens knew admitted to seeing the Queen since her illness. Surely Lloyd George had done so, but this trip to Blenheim Palace had no recent pre ce dent among the special clerks or the officers whom they served.

“Thank you,” Kitchens replied.

A quiet, angry-eyed man in MacGregor tartan appeared at the entrance
of the palace. “Come on, then.” His voice was a deep burr of sheep and rocky hills.

Kitchens walked with mea sured pace toward the great, carved doors, aware with every step of the pistols tracking him. No bustle of servants, no hurrying army of maids and men-at-arms—just a palace quiet enough to be a mausoleum, surrounded by force sufficient to hold off an entire jacquerie.