Pinion (6 page)

A narrow-bodied man in a black coat and maroon watered silk vest barred Kitchens’ way. His monocle gleamed with a faint concentration of light. The man held a top hat in his hand, as if just alighting from a carriage.

“Are you expected?”

“Yes,” Kitchens said simply. He wondered how many unexpected visitors anyone in Blenheim Palace received, passing through so many layers of sharp-eyed men and their conceits of secrecy.

“The clerk. From London.”

Kitchens touched the brim of his bowler, comforted by the weight of the sharpened pennies sewn within. This man was the first person in Blenheim who’d frightened him. All the others were just duty-in-boots, not much different from Kitchens himself. This fellow had the frightening intensity of someone who truly believed.

“I am Dr. Stewart. Step this way.”

He turned, top hat still in hand, and threaded between a pair of massive bellows that creaked in time to the thumping. Past them was a small pool of light where an elderly woman in a fine dress sat picking at a framed cloth with a needle and thread before another great, hulking machine.

Her Imperial Majesty!
Kitchens thought with an excited leap of his heart,
but he quickly settled. This woman was years too young, for all the gray in her hair, and of a different build.

She rose to her feet at the sound of footsteps, her eyes screwed shut against the glare of the lamp. “I am afraid the Queen is indisposed.”

One of the maids of the Queen’s chambers, then. That she was here in this strange, reeking place bore frightening implications.

“All is well, Daphne,” said Dr. Stewart. “It is only I, and a man from London to see Her Imperial Majesty.”

That was when Kitchens realized the maid’s eyes were not screwed shut against the glare. Rather, her lids were sewn together, with thick, dark sutures that bristled like a hedgehog’s quills.

Then why the lamp?
he wondered.

Daphne dropped her chin, folded her hands and stepped aside. Kitchens noted she kept the needle in her fist. A good blow with that between her fingers could be troublesome.

Dr. Stewart stepped into the pool of light, slid aside the sewing frame and addressed himself to a small, gleaming black quadrangle set into the curving bulk next to which Daphne had been seated. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he whispered with exaggerated care, enunciating slowly, “the Admiralty clerk is here to see you.”

Something low and raspy rumbled in the darkness. The sound carried the crackling hum of a loudspeaker. Stewart cocked his head, listened a moment, and nodded. “Of course, Your Highness.”

He stepped back from the little porthole. “The Queen will see you now, Clerk.”

Kitchens was afraid again—afraid of the blind maid with the needle in her hand, afraid of this doctor who smelled like a slaughterhouse, afraid of whatever relic of England’s monarch rested in the gigantic coffin with the little window.

Nonetheless, fear had been part of his training. He stepped forward with a reflexive bow toward the doctor, fought the urge to kneel, and peered into the gleaming, dark window.

Imagine a woman left to float in saltwater the temperature and composition of the amniotic fluid through which all fetuses swim. Imagine a woman fed through tubes in her throat, tight sewn to leave her mouth free for bubbling speech. Imagine a woman grown large, metamorphosing into a cetacean goddess of bitter vengeance against the land walkers with their hard-toothed splinters and their water-cutting hulls. Imagine a woman
alone in the dark with her damaged thoughts, her mentation assisted by a clever array of difference engines feeding their outputs through copper wires drilled carefully into the phrenologically correct places on her shaved and tattooed scalp. Imagine her spirit, fighting the old, old loss of her beloved and the mounting burdens of Empire and the sense that a body can be kept far beyond its time; yet as life always seeks life, so the body seeks to live, even here, even now.

Like the queens of old when ice lay upon all the land and the sun had grown small and forgotten its benison upon the world, she was oracle for her people. Sacrificed in the dark to float on rivers of blood and think the strange thoughts of brass machines.

All of this was apparent to Kitchens as he peered through the little window at the pale, bloated face washed with oily, dark fluid. Eyes vacant as polished opals stared back at him from amid an encircling nest of wires. Fluid bubbled on the pallid lips.

There was no mistaking the lines of that raddled visage: She was still and always Alexandrina Victoria.

“Your Highness,” he whispered. “What have they done to you?”

More fluid bubbled from the dead-fleshed lips as a voice boomed and screeched from the loudspeakers. “You are the clerk.”

The words, Kitchens noted, did not seem to match the popping of her lips. “I am,” he replied. “Unworthy of your attentions.”

“War brews,” the speakers announced. Again, her lips moved, but not in time to the words. “The Oriental steals a march upon us.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Kitchens watched closely, for he was by no means certain what he saw in the tank had anything to do with what he heard.

She rolled slightly in her fluid bed, like a log caught on the tide, until the famous profile came into view—chin, nose, and cheeks. Nothing was familiar about the horror of her scalp.

“You readied the Scotsman we sent before.” The one rot-pale eye he could see flickered back and forth. “Follow him and the German. They have become lost to us at this worst of times. Bring our will to them, and their word home.”

Kitchens did not ask why he should be the one, for that was the one question no special clerk ever asked. He did not ask why Africa and the Wall, for that was a question to which he already knew the answer. The question he would have voiced, had he possessed the nerve, was to wonder for what purpose the Queen—or the people of her household—had called him here to her bedside. Vatside. His mind failed on the word.

A memorandum would have done this job, without the horror.

“I will go, Your Highness.” His words were a whisper, almost a caress.

“The Oriental steals the greatest march upon us. England will fall if we do not stand. You must unlock the secrets. But first . . .” The loudspeakers trailed off in a rumbling hiss. She rolled back to face him, then shrugged. Gelid, pale fat was barely visible rippling beneath the dark fluids. An arm emerged, spastic and slow, slick-sheened as any suet pudding, to touch something below Kitchens’ line of vision.

Bolts slid back with an audible clunk. Pressure equalized with a hiss. A section of the tank popped loose. A hatch, Kitchens realized, with the little window square at its center.

Behind him, Daphne whimpered. Dr. Stewart muttered imprecations.

The hatch opened, and the dripping, ancient arm of Empire reached up. Kitchens took the withered hand within his own. The Queen’s grip tightened until his fingers were threatened. She held him there, close as a lover, deadly as old murder, for a long ten count before releasing her clutch and slithering safely back into the tank.

The hatch shut a moment later. Bolts clicked home. A pump chittered as pressure was restored.

“She rarely does that,” Dr. Stewart said from behind him. “Sometimes we cannot get her to open up even when it is required.”

Kitchens turned, realized he had something damp in the palm of the hand that still ached from the Queen’s grip. “Why!?”

“Because England needs her,” Stewart said.

“The needs of the Empire are the needs of the many,” the loudspeaker squawked. The voice sounded ever more alien to Kitchens. He looked at Daphne, who was stabbing herself in the thigh with her needle, right through her dress. He then glanced at Stewart, whose monocle had fogged over.

Kitchens turned back through the dark, reeking room to the curtains, and through the curtains to the hallway where the angry Scotsman stood. Now the clerk understood the MacGregor’s fury.

“You’ve seen for yourself, man.” His erstwhile guide’s voice was flat steel.

“Yes.” They began to retrace their steps through Blenheim Palace. For all his patient training, Kitchens could not hold the next question inside. “How many know?”

“Only one who matters.” The MacGregor’s words began to tremble. “She knows what they’ve done to her.”

“Stewart? Lloyd George?” The matter of guilt suddenly became of intense interest to him, who had always been far more focused on ends than means.

“Them. And the real masters as well.”

Kitchens was not searched again, though his equipment and belongings
were restored to him. He was just as glad of it, for he would have fought to death to keep the damp, bloody token the Queen had given him.

The circle in which she spent her hours met now, unquiet as any broken stem. Her city, indifferent power of the Southern Earth, navel of the Shadow World, had made its unease known these past days. Citrine and chartreuse had been called from the sunrise—colors rarely seen—while birds dropped exhausted from the sky, their hearts burst within their jewel-feathered chests.

These colors, these sendings, signified regrets. She wondered whose misdeeds had set the tones of the world to disharmony. The music of the circles sustained all. When one or another lapsed, the tones lapsed with them and everything fell to cacophony.

Baassiia stood centerpost to the meeting, his
wa
hovering closer than was usually the case. Even the Silent World was unquiet, Gashansunu knew.

He was a massive man, their circle caller, dark as a wine-soaked betel nut, with the fire of the sun blazing inside the snake of his chest. There was a tender mercy to his long fingers and the insolent curve of his blade, so that when he approached the heartstone even the sacrifice would cease to protest and instead smile into the vacant arches of death.

“We gather,” Baassiia said. His voice echoed with the power of his
wa
, as if he spoke from a well. “We listen. We seek. We find.”

“We find,” the circle answered. This was not a working, just a consultation, so the ritual was abbreviated to lend comfort and sensibility to those who followed.

Gashansunu regarded Baassiia with the patience of obsidian, though inside she roiled more like hot rock. The center’s beauty was not lost on her, for all that the initiates of Westfacing House were supposed to be beyond such worldly concerns. His eyes strayed past her, gaze pausing for the merest moment.

Long enough to meet the flash of her secret smile.

“Who among us has seen testimony from the Silent World?” he asked. His
wa
stirred, moving like spiderwebs on the wind.

No one answered.

“Who among us has read the passing of the birds?”

Ninsunu spoke. A terrible little vixen, that one, Gashansunu thought, and climbing for a sacred seat in the Westfacing House years earlier than was the norm. “I turned three and three of them from inside to out, to read their haruspices.”

Baassiia nodded with a slow, brutal power. It was like watching a rock acknowledge a tree. “Did they show you aught of the city’s distress?”

“They show another passage of power across the Wall. The impure North sends again what it cannot keep cleanly within its craw.”

The center looked around. Eight faces looked back, three and three and three the number of a working. Gashansunu knew Ninsunu to be a terrible little liar, but there was something like truth in her words, even if her tale was concocted.

“Who among us has read the colors?”

This time Gashansunu answered. “The greens are for what grows toward us surely as poisonweed in a usurer’s garden ditch. The yellows are the sign of angels, that some foreign god has sent her minions.”

“We will not dance again to those tune-callers,” Baassiia replied.

They spoke around the circle a while, each mouth adding a word, until the wisdom of the city came from their three threes of lips like song from a pod of merfolk. Though Gashansunu listened until her ears ached, she always heard the individual voices, not their union.

And it came to pass at the time of the going down of the sun, that Joshua commanded, and they took them down off the trees, and cast them into the cave wherein they had been hid, and laid great stones in the cave’s mouth, which remain until this very day.          
—Joshua 10:27