Pinion (51 page)

That the Earth loomed large was a truism, simple as saying water was wet, or that stones fell downward. But the city,
her
city, was profoundly focused on the terrain of the Silent World, and thus indifferent to the Shadow World. What went on beyond the city walls had no great relevance. Even the Bone People, in their power and their horror, had pressed their way in.

She began to wonder if the comfortable limits of her people’s existence constituted a trap.

They were
all
possessed of the elusive spark that marked a gleam. “Sorcerers” was a term of pride among the adepts and house priests and circle callers. It had always been so easy for the sorcerers to account themselves
as towering above the world. That the churning sea of lesser souls on occasion turned out a wild sorcerer was seen as little more than an evolutionary process. William of Ghent had been mighty when he held the fortress at Zimbabwe, but once he had been swept away by the tides of unreason, no one stood to take his place.

When a sorcerer of the city fell, her power was never lost.

Gashansunu realized she had fallen. She’d left the comfort of Westfacing House behind, for the sake of pursuing omens. She’d thought this to be a campfire errand, something to pursue of an eve ning, then come back and spend a month being glad of her place in the city. Instead it had blossomed into a holocaust that threatened to consume her, cut her off from her past, and remake her future beyond recognition.

All because she had followed the spark of a girl who had, in truth, just been passing by.

If Gashansunu had fallen, who would take up her power? Baassiia, of course, the circle caller, would ensure that her duties were apportioned. Others might grasp the strands of her spirit and its purpose. Her
wa
, well . . .

That was the crux of it for Gashansunu. She quite literally could not envision living without her
wa
, yet it had slipped away from her—so far away that she could not even see its spark in her head—and had departed amid a mumble of words about how she had swallowed it down.

But one did not swallow a
wa
. The opposite, even, if one was both especially unfortunate and notably foolish in the Silent World.

Was she becoming Paolina’s
wa
? Northerners did not possess a
wa
, even if they had opened a path to power as the girl had.

Yet she was fading, cut off so far from home and all the purposeful intents of her life.

Gashansunu cast away the mordant imaginings and looked back toward Boaz. The girl had not yet reappeared, while the Brass man seemed fixed at the helm, as if
Stolen
had climbed so high that they’d been transfixed in an eternal moment, frost-rimed and clad in the pale light at the top of the sky.

She clambered up the bamboo ladder amidships. This vessel was nearly a twin to
Heaven’s Deer
, which had carried her and al-Wazir from Mogadishu to a hard landing on the storm-wracked sea not so far from Sumatra. Paolina’s time aboard that airship loomed large in her memory—she’d snatched the vessel from the hands of its own crew through mad-eyed recklessness.

Right now, she was not even sure she could touch a grenado. Yet that
day not so long ago, she’d killed with them, and nearly brought an entire ship out of the sky.

On deck, the air was cold and thin and very disturbed. Engines labored, rumbling nearly to a stalling cough. Boaz could not drive
Stolen
much higher. She stopped and took a deep breath from the oxygen pot she’d crafted—air, its vital essences concentrated so that she could remain alert and in the company of Boaz as he brought them above all interception.

Except for the sorceress, they would be alone.

Her muscles stopped shaking. She felt warmer for the several breaths of purified air. Paolina made her way to her beloved’s side.

That word.

Beloved
.

It had popped into her head just before she’d circled her arm in his, just as his neck turned with a faint creak so their eyes could meet, just after the set of his face and body had changed oh-so-imperceptibly so that she knew he too was smiling, in the moments and minutes that followed.

“How high are we?” she finally asked.

He glanced over the rail. “I estimate four miles.” A long slow pause followed, then he said, “These vessels rarely rise over two miles, outside the strange vertical atmosphere of the Wall. You can hear the engines labor terribly. Our headway is poor relative to our fuel consumption, but we have a powerful following wind. Moreover, a man cannot breathe decently here.”

That reminded Paolina to sip again from her oxygen pot. Gashansunu approached as she pinched the valve and let the blessed, pure spirit of the air rush into her mouth.

The sorceress maintained the almost peculiar calm that had taken her lately. Something in the blankness of the woman’s eyes made Paolina step closer to Boaz.

Gashansunu was not a friend, but at least an ally. Until now, too far from home, on a voyage none of them had meant to undertake.

“I have fallen.” The Southern woman seemed to be resuming some conversation set down in the press of the moment.

Boaz glanced at her. “Did you harm yourself?”

“Too late. The air has taken me.”

“You still walk among us, hale,” said Paolina.

“Then where is my
wa
?” The sorceress glared. “I only meant to settle the worries of the day, not to come into chaos. I have outwalked my power and it has been taken up.”

“I have no
wa
,” Paolina said starkly. “I do not expect I ever shall. Yet I am in the world whole and unharmed.”

Gashansunu looked as alien to Paolina in that moment as she had at
their very first meeting at Hethor’s village. Whatever words were on her tongue escaped without sound, and she turned away.

“You should sleep,” Paolina called. “This thin air has robbed you of some portion of your heart.”

She stopped and sucked again on the oxygen pot, then wrapped herself close to Boaz. Never mind that he was cold as anything she’d ever felt—like a midwinter night in Dickens’
Mystery of Edwin Drood
. Winter was one of those seasons she’d always marveled to see and likely never would.

Much later Boaz woke her.

“You must go below.”

“Why?” she asked, querulous.

“Because you have used your air. You cannot break more water now with the ship’s sparks; you will hurt yourself or cause a fire in the hull.”

Paolina sat up, unaware she’d been rolled up tight in a length of rubberized canvas, propped close to the stern rail.

Had he tucked me in
? she thought.

Boaz went back to the wheel and loosened the chocks. He looked over his shoulder at her. “We are along the westward belly of Africa, if I understand the map Mr. Kitchens sketched. I should think to see Spain at some point.”

She heard the rattling engines, uncomprehending. The gasbag groaned, straining at this altitude it was never meant to reach. She felt the creaking of the hull, every board shrinking just a bit too far, as if the termites and woodworms themselves would drop away and tumble to their freedom far below.

Ice, my brain turns to ice
.

“I will not go below,” Paolina mumbled.

He beckoned her. She slipped once more within the chilled circle of his arm and tried to lay her cheek close against his chest.

“I love you,” she told him.

“You do not know the meaning of that word,” he replied gently. “Neither do I, for I have no heart. Intellect, yes, and courage when at need, but if I only had a heart . . .”

“Then we are made for one another.” Her voice was a whisper now. “A witticism of God the Creator. You were made to be alone among a thousand of your fellows. I was made to be alone among any of my own kind. We can b-b-b-b-be alone t-t-together.”

His arm circled her tighter.

Paolina tried to kiss his cheek, but her lips stuck to him, and she had to pull free with a small, tearing pain. She sucked one last time on the empty oxygen pot, then stumbled back to the ladder to lie below amid the warm, breathing mass of men.

She wondered where the sorceress was.

The rough thrumming of the air-starved engines lulled her all too fast to sleep.

The monk seemed almost gleeful at their bafflement. She dropped the ash of her pipe into the Mediterranean waters and set to tamping more weed. Her maddening grin flicked like a scissortail at dusk.

“Though no one seems to recall this any longer, I am still in command of this vessel,” Captain Leung said in his mildest, most dangerous voice.

“You have charts to steer by.” The monk glanced at the afternoon sky. “You will be safe at night, but right now there may be jolly tars close overhead in some nearby cloud.”

“I will con my vessel as I see fit. Neither you nor this Jade Abbot have a say in the direction of
Five Lucky Winds
.”

“Not I,” said the monk. “The Jade Abbot directs nothing. Many days he is lucky that someone brings him tea. We all serve.”

Leung’s voice slowed even more. “What are you doing here?”

The monk was serious now, with the suddenness of a cloud masking the sun. “Seeing the Mask to her destination. Without the charts, you would risk too much.”

Childress was stung by this. “I have found my way thus far well enough.”

“Of course you have. Else you would not be the Mask.” A puff on the pipe, a return to insolence. “But even the greatest thief must have someone to hold the ladder.”

“I am no thief!”

The monk laughed. “What else are you? You stole your title from a dead woman. You stole the girl from those who would have her. You stole the lives of an entire fleet. You stole this submarine and the heart of its captain from the Beiyang Navy. Now you would steal power from the secret councils of the
avebianco
much as the Monkey King would steal Heaven’s peaches.”

More embarrassed than stung, Childress drew breath to fling a riposte. What stopped her was the realization that this woman knew far too much about her.
How
?

Leung stepped in. “I should despise you, monk. I should have you thrown over the side with iron bars chained to your hands and feet. But even if I did that, I am certain I would find you on my bridge an hour later, dry as the desert and smirking.”

“I should not think it worth your trouble, no,” the monk replied.

“But this is because I have worked out who you are.” The captain bowed. “Welcome to my ship, Lan Ts’ai-ho.”

Baffled, Childress asked, “Who is Lan Ts’ai-ho?”

The monk was laughing so hard now that she nearly swallowed her little pipe. The captain looked ahead, sweeping the horizon with his glasses as if this were all perfectly normal.

When she’d recovered her breath, the monk answered. “He believes me to be one of the Eight Immortals of Taoist legend.”

That was no more illuminating than before. “Who?”

“Sages, purveyors of wisdom, priests who were especially good at shearing the wealthy temple-goers. I do not know
who
. And it does not matter. No woman walks the Earth for a thousand years. Heaven would not stand for it, and Hell would swallow her up!” The monk’s eyes sparkled with an untold joke. “Perhaps the name is passed on, like a patent of nobility from father to son. Maybe the Immortals are reborn anew in every generation. Perhaps they are an idea so powerful that someone rises to fill each place without ever knowing what drew them forth.” She leaned close. “Or it could be that I am just an annoying monk who has feasted her eyes on far too many
xiákè
epics in the temple library.”

“It does not matter.” Leung continued to scan the ocean. “You might be any of those things. Or all of them. Or even none. You are still Lan Ts’ai-ho, and you carry the banner of the Monkey King in these years of the world.”

“You do not care if I am a peasant girl born beneath a harnessed ox in the fields of Fu-chien?”

“I do not care if you were born in the Forbidden City, of the body of an angel on a couch of ivory.” He put down the glasses. “You are aboard my ship without permission, behaving dreadfully. If you are a divinity, then I will bid you welcome and make the best of my hospitality. If you are an insolent peasant girl from Fu-chien, then I will throw you into the sea and tell you to swim for that distant shore.”

“In that case,” the monk said happily, “I am most definitely Divine. I also hunger. I have not eaten a decent meal in . . .” She paused, counting on her fingers. “Weeks!”

With a sharp look at Childress, the captain escorted his guest below. That pained her heart in an unexpected fashion. She wondered what game he was playing at—surely this was payback for her brushing him
aside before the British. Just as surely the monk’s remarks about theft had stung Leung as they had stung her.

She did note that Leung had taken the maps.

How had the monk known so much of her affairs? Who had she been listening to?
Where had she come from
?

Fruitless speculation, at least for now. They were Malta-bound; that was enough.
I could have made much with this man
, Childress thought,
but I wish the journey to be at an end
. With a start, she realized she’d come nearly all the way around the world. From here she could almost go home.