Pinion (16 page)

The emperor had commanded a bridge be made over the Wall in the manner of the ancients. Even the rudest savage may discover some useful thing not known before. His job had been to coordinate the savants who studied the chaos salvaged from the flooded library, to find those pieces of lost wisdom and assemble them into the hermetic structure that was the true Golden Bridge. Not a thing of stone or altitude, but a pathway of knowledge.

Any good Confucian could understand this. Not so much the disorderly English with their engineer-god and their obsession over the workings of the world.

Now this Mongolian, speaking for the Silent Order, wanted him to walk into the heart of the lion’s empire and fetch home a woman of power and the warship on which she traveled. An officer had been brought to command Wang to volunteer.

“Cataloger Wang?” he asked. Lieutenant Hsu was a serious man in a Nanyang Navy uniform. Wang did not believe the rank pips for a moment. Hsu was far too forceful and articulate to be a junior staffer. “Surely your mother did not name you Cataloger?”

The librarian felt chastened in the face of authority. “Wang Bao Wu.”

“Hmm. Well,
Cataloger
, the English devils killed over four thousand officers and men.”

They were in a large room with slate walls that slid back and forth on tracks. A water tank occupied the center of the floor. Color-coded ship models floated in a desultory array.

Wang had been led through a detailed description of the pursuit of
Five Lucky Winds
after it left Chersonesus Aurea. He was pleased to see that these people recognized the responsibility of the Kô and his Mandarins in allowing the vessel first to dock, then later depart.

That meant Wang’s head was perhaps a bit safer. After all, the sum total of his crimes was the mere revelation of state secrets concerning the Golden Bridge to the English Mask.

Hsu wrote out a ship list on one of the slate boards, name after name, while narrating their types and fate. “Three airships, all hands lost, and
two of the vessels unrecoverable due to their eventual unguided landings. One heavy cruiser, all hands lost, vessel recovered. Four destroyers, all hands lost, two vessels sank due to mutual collision. Three troop transports, all hands lost, one vessel run aground. The imperial yacht
Divine Jade
, two princes of the imperial family lost, five senior Mandarins of the Imperial Court lost, all hands lost, vessel lost at sea.” His chalk piece scratched on a while after he fell silent. Then he said, “We may also add the airship
Heaven’s Deer
, lost with all hands during a Wall storm, and the Iron Bamboo submarine
Five Lucky Winds
, suborned and lost to mutiny.”

Wang was appalled. “Did they even take casualties?”

“They murdered approximately fifteen of their own crew,” Hsu said, so quickly and smoothly that Wang wondered what the officer was concealing—he could not imagine Childress ordering the deaths of men in her service. Or, indeed, her pursuers.

“H-how did our men die?” Wang asked.
Your men
.

“With no mark upon them,” Dunkerjav said before Hsu could answer.

Wang nodded. Childress had warned about terrors from across the Wall. “I can see why there has been no effort to send another force after
Five Lucky Winds
.”

“We would just lose more men and ships,” Hsu said.

Besides
, thought Wang,
you are the Silent Order, and navies of China do not belong to you. Not directly
.

Dunkerjav spoke again. “This is why you are here. You have had more dealings with this English Mask than anyone else. One man, aware of the dangers, can be smarter than a thousand guns.”

“I take your point,” Wang said. “But I do not see where it leads us. Presume I somehow find this woman and her submarine. Imagine they welcome me to their table without striking me down. How should I hope to convince her and
Five Lucky Winds
to return to these waters?”

“The crew are Chinese,” Hsu replied. “They will heed the will of their emperor. Find this Captain Leung, and convince him that a pardon awaits if he and his men can return with the English Mask. Alive, for preference, but at least her corpse that we might know she is dead.” He paced close to Wang. “This woman threatens China’s very existence.”

“She is a white bird, as well.” Wang’s voice was as thoughtful as his racing mind. “It could be the death of your Silent Order.”

The faux lieutenant exchanged glances with Dunkerjav. The Mongolian nodded slightly, then spoke to Wang’s question. “We ensure the order of Heaven is reflected here on Earth. The plan of the spirit world for the physical world is as real as the brasswork in the sky. If the Masks, with
their individual heresies, should gain ascendance, there will be chaos. The reign of Heaven could be threatened.”

Wang stirred at that. He burned incense in the temples much as anyone did, but as a thinking man he had never taken the celestial hierarchies literally. Or even seriously. “Are you saying they are demons out of Hell?”

“They could be. How would you set about slaying four thousand men without leaving a mark on them?”

If the white birds were demons, the Silent Order would have realized that centuries earlier. A weapon was feared here, not some pyrotechnic magic out of a gong-clashing opera. “Captain Leung will not likely heed my appeal to his loyalties.”

Hsu smiled. “You will find a way.”

“How will I locate her?”

Hsu’s smile broadened into a grin. “
Five Lucky Winds
has laid in for repairs. The Silent Order has word of precisely where.”

Perversely, Wang wished the ship and crew well, hoping for their escape from wherever the dire magics of the Mask Childress and the vengeance of the Silent Order led them.

Everything seemed take several times longer than she thought it possibly could. No matter what they did, three other things were required to happen first. This effect was recursive, so each of these begat in turn another handful of needed tasks.

She was no closer to dealing with the Golden Bridge, as they sat here.

“Aye, and it is the way of ships,” al-Wazir told her. “All the more so a submarine such as our vessel, for she is made like a puzzle box that must leak neither water nor air.”

She considered that before replying. “Whereas an oceangoing vessel can be open at the top. An airship is required to be sealed nowhere but the hydrogen cells themselves, and is actively discouraged from carrying armor or pressure plating by the nature of her missions and the situation within her most natural environment.”

“Each of them has their own challenges, ma’am.”

Which, Childress realized, probably did not require removing much of the upper deck one bolt and weld at a time to reach the battery arrays and engine compartment aft. Right now
Five Lucky Winds
resembled a fish gutted from the spine down. She rode oddly high in the water due to blown ballast tanks and a strong desire on the part of Leung and his crew not to have a tidal surge slosh the salt sea into the delicate compartments.

Childress and al-Wazir sat on cut-down barrels in front of a rickety table on which a messy, unending game of mah-jongg was laid out. The players changed in a rotation opaque to her, and the game was only idle during the midwatches of the day when all hands were either sleeping, on guard or working on repairs to their ship.

If the British caught them now, there would be no point in fighting.
Five Lucky Winds
was as vulnerable as an aether-addled boxer laid out on the operating table. Should his opponent enter the room with bare knuckles and bloody intent, the match was over before it began. Likewise their position.

“How progresses the work, Chief?” Leung was tight-lipped, a bit unusually so for him—something that in turn stirred Childress’ fears.

“It depends on that fellow from Bombay. He’s the electrickal johnnie, and he knows what can be purchased here in India and what must be made up to order, or bought at salvage.”

“Does electrickal gear go to salvage?” Childress’ curiosity was piqued.

“Wrecks get stripped.” The big man shrugged. “Equipment gets replaced that can be easily refitted or broken down to useful parts. And theft. Never forget theft, ma’am. The quartermaster’s friend.” Regret seeped into alWazir’s voice. “Her Imperial Majesty’s services are full of it.”

“Chief,” she began. Childress changed her mind, stopped, and tried anew. She would have taken his hand had it been within reach, though the impulse seemed disloyal to Captain Leung. “Threadgill. I cannot say if you have done the right thing here. All I know is that your loyalty to Paolina, and your willingness to aid an old woman in her need, speak very well of the state of your soul and the quality of your intentions.”

“The girl never was more than a river-soaked kitten,” he mused, still sad and distant in his tone, “who could either save the world or destroy it.” He gave Childress a long, slow look. “I only knew her a double handful of days, ever. Six in Ottweill’s camp when she first came to us alongside John Brass, who was the strangest man I ever met. Then five more from Mogadishu to
Heaven’s Deer
to
Five Lucky Winds
, afore she was away up the Wall with that Ming fellow.

“In that time, ma’am, she won more loyalty from me than forty years with the Queen’s shilling in my pocket had bought. Aye, I shall never be proud that she led me to betray my oaths, but the world needed her safe more than it needed me to follow my orders.”

“When did you betray your oaths, Chief?” Childress knew part of the story. “You sent her to England aboard one of Her Imperial Majesty’s airships. That was rightly done. Since you came into the east on wings of storm, you have been scrambling only to survive and to ensure the lives of
those around you. We have fired no shots at a British ensign.”
Yet
, she thought. “Your loyalty to the Crown should not be in question, even now.”

The big man seemed close to tears, a strange expression on his craggy, weatherworn features. Childress saw a gaping need for comfort, but had no way to fill it. “I hae forsworn myself by abandoning Dr. Ottweill’s expedition without ever returning with relief. I hae since taken service with a Chinese vessel, ma’am.” His voice caught in his throat as he sank deeper into the rough, burred Scots of his youth. “I hae sat here four days in an English port and nae whispered a word to any of the wogs nor held a chaffer with one of them sergeants walking the streets of Panjim. I hae made nae attempt to seize command of
Five Lucky Winds
, or escape myself to friendly forces. I hae not rescued you, an English lady, from your vile fate in yon hands. Any of ’at would hae me before a court-martial, or belike an Admiralty board of inquiry.”

What to say? This was like talking to a divinity student at exam week, when the doom of a semester’s worth of unread texts descended on the final hours standing between him and a ruinous mark in a key class.

“Threadgill, I cannot shrive you. I am merely one of Her Imperial Majesty’s subjects, neither an officer of her Royal Navy, nor a judge in her courts. But I am also a Mask of standing.” To her surprise, Childress believed that last. “I am heir to the power and writ of the Mask Poinsard, and someday the Feathered Masks of
avebianco
in their halls at Valetta will answer to me for the crimes they have committed. When I am successful in that, I will in turn address the insults of the Silent Order to the progress of the human spirit and the orderly continuance of the world for both Imperial thrones.”

She leaned forward to touch his shoulder, almost brushing the mahjongg tiles from their careful, scattered towers. “You have done well, making goodly choices that may have literally saved the world. Whatever an admiral says to you at a later moment in your life will be forever outweighed in the eyes of both man and God by the good you did for that poor girl.”

“It is to those admirals that I answer, ma’am, neither to man or to God. I have lain hard by an English port for days, and discharged none of my sworn duties.”

Childress sighed. “I speak from no man, and God does not listen to me. But I will not stop believing that you have done well and good by both England as a whole and by those whom you have met and aided along the way.”

His smile, a rare enough commodity of late, quirked at her. “Thank you, ma’am.”

A Chinese sailor dashed up to them. “An airship is outside,” he shouted in his own language. “I was to tell you.”

“We’ll go look,” growled al-Wazir. Childress quickly followed him to the tunnel mouth. The chief grabbed a carbine from the guards there as he hurried into the rising darkness with her not far behind his heels.