Pinion (50 page)

“What is the highest this vessel can fly?” Kitchens asked.

No one knew the answer to that.

As the crew prepared for their uneasy rest in the thin, frosty heights of the sky, there was one more bit of business to attend to. Boaz was surprised that the English had not come to this themselves already, given how fixed they all seemed to be upon the forms of their society.

::
they built her strong and true to ply the shores of the west wind’s home, and the king brake a jar of wine upon her prow and christened her Hope of the Day
::

He waited until Paolina mounted the poop to raise his question.

“What is the name of this vessel?”

“Something Chinese, I am sure,” she said. “Ming taught me a fair bit of
their language, but I have no skill at reading it. The words are little houses of meaning built from unknown timbers.”

“I am of the opinion that we should give this airship a name of our own.”

She laughed, her voice pealing in the cool morning air of this altitude. “Do Brass name their vessels?”

“Brass do not have vessels. We are a people of the Wall. Our last ship broke on the rocks of Abyssinia three thousand years ago.”

“You are becoming an Englishman; I would swear to that.” She laughed again, and this time the rush left a smile upon her face as it retreated. “What shall we christen this airship?”

“I do not know,” he said. “Something meet and fitting. You and I have turned away from our own destinies. Our world is the Wall, but we head into the heart of Northern Earth.”

“That is hardly the stuff of naming.” She frowned, serious now, though he could still see the humor in her eyes. “I shall ask Mr. Kitchens and the crew.”

::
the goatherds do not rise as an army, neither do the maids march from their duties around the fire
::

“You may receive a regrettable suggestion.”

The regrettable suggestion came back on the lips of Kitchens, actually, as he came to Boaz an hour later.

“Paolina is below, seeking materials for an oxygen concentrator.”

“I suppose she wishes to stay with me at the wheel when we climb.” Something inside Boaz thrilled.

Good lad
.

“We have a name,” Kitchens said diffidently.

::
a staff he struck into the ground, which flowered then and there as a bush heavy with golden fruit, and there was an epithet upon his lips
::

Boaz suspected the Sixth Seal of developing a sense of humor. At the very least, it had been far less frantic of late. “What is this wondrous name?”

The clerk snorted, holding back deeper laughter. “
Stolen
.”

“
Stolen
.” Boaz had to admit, he liked the name. He’d feared far worse. “Have they discovered wine aboard?”

“Sailors? If so, it has been drunk in secret convocation. And what does a Brass need with wine?”

“To bless the naming of the ship,” Boaz explained patiently.

“Of course.” Kitchens snorted again. “We shall make do.”

Within the hour, everything was ready.

::
never walk strange paths without the armor of the Lord or the weapon of prayer
::

The surviving crew gathered around. Levine produced a beaker of brown fluid. “From the galley,” he said, “for to spill across her rail in the naming.”

Boaz continued to hold the helm, and so all eyes were upon him. Kitchens nodded slightly.

::
he led the Haramites out of their enslavement, then in later years took up banners with the horse-people of the long valleys
::

Wondering who the Haramites might have been, the Brass began to speak. “This ship we have taken for our own will soon hold you as you rest. We climb to where the air is almost ice, and make our way up high safely to England’s shores. There we will fulfill a mission of utmost delicacy, and release you all to your native soil. Our brave hull, taken from the enemy to suit our purposes, we name
Stolen
. A gift we will make of her to your queen.”

The crew cheered as the petty officer dumped the brown fluid over the rail. Most of it sprayed back onto him. To general laughter, they returned to their duty stations until only Kitchens and Gashansunu remained with Boaz.

“Where is Paolina?” Boaz asked.

::
though bruised beyond measure, the King paced by the wrack of his palace, fearing for the Queen and praying to the Lord for her deliverance
::

“Below yet,” Gashansunu answered. “Do not worry after her.”

Boaz adjusted the attitude controls. Ballast and gas balance had already been configured as best they could. The vanes and elevators had been holding
Stolen
at altitude until now, but she fairly leapt to rise into the sky. He would climb until the engines threatened to starve, then lose just a small amount of altitude. A rope had been rigged down to the poop so he could vent some hydrogen to bring the airship lower at need, lest an unexpected development occur, or the air grow too thin for the vanes to bite effectively.

Already he seemed colder, though Boaz was certain this was little more than his imagination. If they could overfly England’s defenses, Kitchens might yet reach his mad, dying queen.

Everything Boaz wanted was still belowdecks, in the form of a young woman cooking up oxygen to pack away like weapons in an armory.

::
the Lord put brass in the skies that we might always mark His intentions, and the moment of the day of His return
::

Indeed
, Boaz told the Sixth Seal.
Indeed
.

If the Paolina–al-Wazir voice within him had any comment, this day they kept their opinions to themselves.

Good Change
fled the harbor at Port Said amid a rush of vessels. The fire hardly seemed a threat to the entire city, but it definitely menaced the docks while sowing confusion. British gunboats were casting off. Dozens of narrow-hulled fishing boats scrambled for the Mediterranean. The Kô’s yacht moved amid a flight of similar pleasure ships and small traders.

The cataloger stood in his usual place in the prow and watched the mess unfold. The monk had been here in Port Said, though he had not seen her aboard
Good Change
since they’d discharged Childress off the Goan coast.

What had she been about?

If nothing else, she had shoved a pair of charts into his hand. He tugged these out of his jacket now and uncrumpled them. The sheets were awkwardly large. Whatever the maps represented had almost certainly been too valuable to abandon.

Definitely maritime navigation. Shorelines he didn’t recognize. While the mysterious monk had something of the Monkey King to her character, Wang could not see why she would have tricked him over this.

Wu would want to know what had happened ashore. Wang would give the charts to the first mate, then, and let the other man work out their significance.

“I am the hunter of spies,” he told the water, “not the navigator.”

The water had no answer, except for the distant tolling of fire bells.

Wu, Wang and Captain Shen gathered around the table in the wardroom. One of the sailors had the helm for a rare change. The sun played golden light across the wine-dark sea outside. If this had been Chersonesus Aurea, Wang would have thought a storm was coming. Here, who knew?

The two charts were spread out. One was a view of the entire Mediterranean. Useless, as Wang understood it, for any sort of real navigation, but it helped them plot their course. The boat’s own chart drawer had nothing beyond the Gulf of Aden.

We have sailed too far from the center of the world
, he thought.
Only barbarians and feral dragons dwell here
.

The other chart was of the harbor at Valetta, the chief port of the island of Malta.

“Why Valetta?” asked Shen. “This is some trap.”

“The monk went to a great deal of trouble simply to lay a trap, sir,” said Wang. “
Five Lucky Winds
left Port Said under the cover of the fires she set.” His legs still trembled a bit from the mad dash through the city, but Wang still smiled. “There is too much connection here to pretend away. Besides, I can tell you she searched for these particular charts. If she’d meant to throw us off some trail, she would have grabbed for any map close to hand.”

“This does not discount the possibility of a trap,” grumbled the captain.

Wang noticed he did not avoid the subject of the monk, either. “Is she aboard now, sir?”

“Who?” A strange, almost feral gleam stood in Shen’s eye.

“The monk,” Wang said. A reservoir of angry patience burst. “That madwoman who crewed aboard your boat from Chersonesus Aurea to Phu Ket, then on to Panjim before she moved over to
Five Lucky Winds
.”

“The Kô would never allow a woman to crew his vessel. Therefore it must not have been.”

The cataloger looked to Wu. The first mate was trying to swallow a smile. “You know,” he said. “You rowed us both to the landing at the palace of the Silent Order.”

“I know that some things pass through the world unseen,” Wu replied. “The north wind. Cloud dragons. Certain monks.”

“You are not dead,” Wang insisted. “She is not invisible. All of you are crazed.”

Yet she
was
invisible, he realized. Or could be. She had walked him right into the heart of the Royal Navy in Port Said, past dozens of clerks and guards, unremarked.

Now it was Shen’s turn to smile. “Those are powerful words coming from one whose life hangs in balance.”

“Oh, leave off that silly pretense,” Wang snapped. “We both know that my life was forfeit from the moment the Kô summoned me.” The words surprised him, but he could not call them back, and so pressed onward. “If I live out this voyage, it will be by the favor of Heaven, and the miracle of certain people forgetting to silence me. All I have left is my purpose of finding the Mask Childress!” His eyes stung with incipient tears, but Wang knew better than to allow them to slip free before these men.

“Find her, then bring her back to Phu Ket, yes?” asked Wu.

Wang stared. What did it matter once he had located the English-woman? But he remembered his orders as the anger flooded away from him on a retreating tide. “Even with her aboard, you will need me to return through Suez and the Gulf of Aden.”

“The Indian Ocean awaits you,” the mate told him.

Captain Shen tapped the chart table. “But first, this vile city of Valetta. Ordinarily I would put you ashore down the coast, and have you walk.”

“Why not now? You don’t trust me?”

His hand swept across the emptiness of the oh-so-tiny Mediterranean on the larger map. “I have no charts except for Valetta harbor itself. I should not like to risk my keel on hidden rocks. Bad enough that we transit almost three thousand
li
of open water. Four days in unknown shallows is madness enough. I will not risk some reef to put you over after all this distance.”

“We fly their flag. This hull is European built. No one will question us.” Wang said that with far more confidence than he felt.

“Your story about the Prince of Serendip carried some authority out in the Indian Ocean,” Shen said in an acid tone. “Deep in these British waters, a boat full of Chinese will be much harder to pass off.”

She paced the deck as
Stolen
rose ever higher. Small noises emerged from below as the crew settled to rest, the shallow breathing of sleep their best hope.

Time had not stopped for her again, nor stuttered. She was coming unmoored; she knew that. Her
wa
was gone. Her theory in the moment was that she had died, and this journey of her body was simply force of habit from her earlier life, living out the last memories of people and places.

Who knew, after all? Her
wa
had never spoken directly of such things. No one’s did.

Round she made a circuit, past Boaz silent as the coming night; along the starboard rail to stare northeast across the heart of the desert; to the prow where the late, fading sunlight stood off to her left side and the brass tracks in the sky gleamed with esoteric brightness; then back along the port rail to stare toward the glowering bulk of the Wall already slipping below the horizon of rationality.