Pinion (11 page)

More bullets. This time Boaz felt the shock in the armor of his chest. He looked up to see rifles bristling from the foredeck of the airship. Ahead of him, Chin Yuen had gained the ropes. Chin Ping stood below his superior, guarding the line. The translator stared at Boaz with a stricken expression.

I am sorry
, he seemed to say.
We have stolen the heart of your magic. Your people’s renewal will never come now
.

Boaz reached Chin Ping, fist ready to smash the man’s teeth out through his lower back. The translator’s mouth crinkled into a small smile that gave Boaz pause. Chin Ping grasped the trailing line and was lifted bodily into the air as the Chinese vessel bobbed on the morning breeze.

Boaz looked upward, marking the lean, hawkish shape and mottled colors of his enemy. Three British airships of familiar design closed out of the east, dawn’s glare behind them.

The wind rose from off the water. The Chinese captain would have to run inland before catching enough of the gage to beat back toward his own precincts.

Boaz spun about to race away from the ocean. He had brought down an airship before, with help only from al-Wazir and a single, unreliable weapon. He could do it again.

The Chinese flyer passed overhead, engines straining to gain speed ahead of the wind. The British were visibly closing. They must have maneuvered for hours over the night-dark waters of the Indian Ocean to achieve this precise advantage.

Boaz ran into the valley beyond. The Chinese strained to gain altitude, passing out of his sight line over the lip of the glittering white cliff.

That would defeat him if he did not find a way around.

Something whooshed overhead. He looked up in time to see the trail from a rocket. The Chinese had fired on their enemies.

Guns barked in unison, bow chasers from the pursuers. Boaz raced madly along the cliff to the next rise in the sand, trying to gain sufficient altitude to see rather than merely hear the battle.

The Chinese airship could
not
go down. Not until he had recovered the book!

A pair of rockets were answered immediately by gunfire.

He felt more than heard the explosion that followed. Dust danced on
the sand dunes as a second sun flared in the east. Boaz slipped, sliding on his face several handspans before he could recover. He scrambled up again as a denser barrage passed overhead.

They were in the fight for real now.

He finally topped the cliff to see the Chinese airship wallowing southward. One engine was aflame. Back to the east a column of black smoke marked the crash of the destroyed British airship along the coast. A lucky hit to the gasbag had sent dozens to their graves, but eased the odds a little.

Not enough.

With a damaged engine, the Chinese airship could not maneuver through her turn. The British closed fast, decks bristling with screaming riflemen who fired in ragged volleys. Boaz raced for the site where his erstwhile captors must once again come to ground.

Enemy ordnance caught up with the fleeing Chinese long before Boaz did. Her other engine flared and she loafed into a short, sharp dive. The vessel recovered, but several men fell from her decks in the process. She was dead in the air. In seconds she would be slain there.

Not the hydrogen
, Boaz thought with something between a summoning and a prayer. Whatever angels were listening failed to heed him, for another round of missiles opened rents in the aft section of the gasbag.

Closing in to the kill, the British poured their fire into the stricken airship. When the flames came, they moved very quickly indeed.

He finally stopped running and watched the history and future of his people fall burning to the ground.

Somewhere in that moment Boaz was surprised to find that he still carried the Sixth Seal.

Already the British were quartering for survivors, shooting downward indiscriminately. He moved off as quickly as he dared, though not in the enraged rush of before, keeping to the cover of the thin thornwoods until he could escape the threat of murder and the death of hope.

They cruised offshore, waiting for the afternoon’s low tide. Leung had explained that there was no point in making an approach to shore in anything but the slackest water—the vessel bore far too much risk of grounding if they mistook the depth.

When the captain judged the moment right, he and Childress climbed to the conning tower. Al-Wazir turned his team out on the foredeck, ready with greased rifles, grapnels and pry bars. In their motley of uniforms and gear and duck fat smeared across exposed skin, she thought they looked more like train robbers than sailors preparing to assault a port.

The key still hung around her neck, for none of them were certain of the priest’s intent. The task might be as simple as opening a door, in which case al-Wazir would send a man for it.

Or they might face something more obscure, that would call upon Childress’ knowledge of divine tradition and her assumed powers as a Mask. In which case, al-Wazir would come back for her.

They closed on the shore. A man at the bow took soundings with a lead line. Childress reviewed the map—a dogleg approach waited past the haystack rocks just ahead, if the symbols were to be believed.

It didn’t look like an accessible port. It didn’t look like anything but rocks rising out of the water. She wondered if Father Francis had sent them to their deaths,
Five Lucky Winds
trapped aground until a British patrol happened upon them and shelled or bombed them into bloody shards.

The man on the lead line called out excitedly. Childress followed the line of his finger. What had seemed like a solid wall was really two rocks close together, a narrow passage opening between them.

“I wish I still had a boat,” Leung said. Paolina had taken theirs, off the coast of Sumatra. “I’d have the men row her in.”

“Tow the vessel?” Childress asked, surprised.

“It can be done.” He smiled. “Slowly. Very slowly.” He called directions down the speaking tube, shouting adjustments moment by moment. The hull ground against rock once—a slow scrape, not a rending tear—as they made the turn.
Tight, so very tight
, Childress thought. Though Leung winced, no one seemed too alarmed. Then they slid into shadow, a narrow cave opening up beneath the headland, walls slimed white with guano, the sea sloshing lazily among the shadows beyond.

Al-Wazir shouted and dove overboard. His men followed him, swimming into darkness as Leung shouted for all stop.

They had located a port, perhaps. If they were lucky and strong. She looked back behind them, but saw only rock hemming them in. Like life itself, gates shut as they were passed. The only way was forward.

Ahead of them, a voice shouted, indistinctly at first, then al-Wazir roaring. A shot rang. Leung’s face flushed, but they held their ground. The submarine could not advance until the landing party cleared the way.

One of the sailors emerged from shadows, head bobbing in the water. He gave the signal for
Five Lucky Winds
to proceed. As the submarine eased forward into darkness, Childress thought she heard laughter from the cave.

Passing into shadow, a man with a lantern could be dimly spied in the
glow of his flame. A few shapes clustered alongside, someone arguing in Chinese, al-Wazir grumbling like a railroad train in a very deep tunnel.

With much shouting and casting of lines,
Five Lucky Winds
warped into a berth alongside a stone quay. The cave was far bigger than it had seemed from outside, the hidden inlet large enough for the submarine to have made a complete turn.

Safe enough for the hull, past the bottleneck of the entrance.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw that there were three berths within the cavern, arrayed in a semicircle along the eastern boundary. Roofless buildings stood beyond. Everything was covered with rime and dust and guano.

Father Francis had not lied. This place
had
been left untended for some time. She touched the key around her neck and wondered what portal or spell or lock it was intended to open.

Al-Wazir clomped onto the foredeck and approached the conning tower. “All clear,” he growled.

“What was the shot?” Leung asked.

More laughter from the shore.

“Just opening the way.” He stared up, eyes gleaming in the deep shadow of the cave. “Sir.”

Leung looked at the dripping sailors now standing with fixed grins on the dock. In Chinese, he asked, “What took place?”

“He shot a . . .”

Childress didn’t catch the word. “What?”

The captain began laughing. He tried English. “He shot a, the word is . . .”

“Seal, Mask,” al-Wazir said from below. “I shot a seal.”

“Why?”

Muttering: “Because I thought it was attacking me.”

She was torn between the general hilarity and a rush of sympathy for the poor beast. “Well, don’t do it again.”

“No, ma’am. Permission to patrol the shoreline?”

Leung was now studying his speaking tube, trying very hard to remake his face with the proper aura of command seriousness.

“Go forth, Chief,” Childress said.

As evening dimmed the entrance, al-Wazir and his men explored seven buildings, a series of caches and a tunnel blocked by an ironwork gate wide enough to admit a cart.

The mystery of the key was solved, at least.

Not much in the way of expendable supplies was present, but the cave boasted a fair stock of those things sufficiently durable to have withstood a decade of neglect—cables, scrap steel, deck plating. They located two freshwater seeps, each leading to a slimed pool that in turn drained into the little hidden bay. Water barrels were dry or foul, ropes rotted nests of rat-gnawed straw, food lockers long since reduced to dust.

They had a secure tie-up, some basic materials and, most miraculous of all, a small machine shop with a forge. The belts transmitting motive power from the little steam engine to the lathes and drills were rotting in place, but that would not be so difficult to repair.

What they needed was coal for the forge and steam engine, diesel fuel for the submarine, and whatever copper wiring and electrickal valves might be required to repair the ongoing trouble with the batteries.

Childress, al-Wazir and Leung studied the gate, along with Sun-Wei the engineer. They had an electrick torch taken from the submarine’s equipment lockers. Its flickering yellow light swept back and forth across the wrought iron.

“This does not discourage spies,” Childress observed, turning to look back into the cave. Running lights glowed on the mast and forestaff of
Five Lucky Winds
, while the men had lit a fire on the small shingle beach that sent shadows capering across the dome of the roof. “One can see much of the cavern from this point.”

Childress slipped her key into the lock. She turned it, forcing the iron against the weight of rust and years, until it squealed. Something clicked loudly and the gate popped loose.

“Who’s first up the passage?” she asked.

“Not you,” said Leung and al-Wazir in unison. The two men eyed one another as Childress laughed.

Al-Wazir was back in twenty minutes, grinning. “It comes out in a shambling go-down filled with festival carts and huge monstrous heads of toothy red gods.”

“Did you look outside?” Childress asked.

“Of course.” His grin grew wider. “A stand of them palm trees, and some fields beyond. A town down the road a bit, I think from the glow. Likely that proper port we knew was north of Goa Velha.”

“Panjim,” Childress said. “In the morning you and I shall go into town to bargain for fuel and supplies, and see if there are any electrickal mechanics to be found.”

Leung opened his mouth and closed it again. She took his arm. “You and your men are too conspicuous, dear. I am afraid I shall be forced to wear my dress once more.”

“Don’t get caught,” Leung said.

“You will need to ensure that I am in funds,” Childress replied. “I will need to seed my entrance into Panjim. No one will take me for a great English lady, so money must needs do.”

The words were braver than she felt. Whatever trouble she fell into, only she could get herself out of it. On her own, as she had been that morning in Velha Goa, marching into the heart of the enemy.

When did the Queen’s dominions become that seat of darkness for me?
Childress was surprised at her own thought.

He stared up at HIMS
Notus
berthed at her tower, where three ranks of masts rose on this side of the harbor. The disgraced vessel rode in splendid isolation. The airship was in quarantine, well separated from the others at the massive Dover aerodrome.

A bored sergeant attended Kitchens. Thin and dark like a Welshman, with eyes the liquid brown of a roach’s wing, the sergeant was dressed in the blue woolens of the aerial service, but his rank was British army.

“Sergeant Penstock, I’d care to see aboard her before the crew is returned here.”

“Field commander says that lot won’t be let back out of the stockade until they’re all transferred in.” A dire glee at the fate of Imperial malefactors filled the sergeant’s voice. “Fine thing you’re doing, sir, giving them such a chance to make amends.”