Pinion (19 page)

“No.” Kalker laughed, wheezing. “Like one of your God’s angels, I am
only a messenger. A prophet lives among us, who was sent forth and brought back again. He will never again leave this place, but you are the first to come to him.” The Correct Person grew more thoughtful. “The last as well, I hope.”

He looked at Ming. “What manner of man are you?”

“I am a sailor of the Middle Kingdom,” Ming responded in Chinese.

“Hmm.” Kalker closed his eyes a moment, then said in English, “Welcome to our village.”

“Does this place have a name?” Paolina asked.

“Does it need one?”

She had no real answer for that, so she let the silence unfold. Kalker seemed happy to join in, until his head cocked at a distant hooting. “Ah, we are ready. Please do come.”

He turned and walked slowly up the log steps. Paolina followed, trailed by Ming.

Out on the path, the Correct People had gathered. Many carried fruit or flowers, as if going toward an offertory. Others clutched children, or held hands with their friends. Faces were smiling and proud, not fearful or tense, she noted. Ming walked so close behind her that he almost stepped on her heels.

Paolina was unsurprised to find they approached the almost-European house. Kalker led them to a ladder that had been carved into one of the great tree trunks supporting the structure. He stepped aside as the solemn woman of the Correct People awaited them there.

“I am Arellya,” she said, also in English. “Are you ready to climb?”

“Of course.” Paolina was intensely curious to meet their prophet.

“I will follow last,” Ming told her softly in Chinese.

Paolina clasped the gnarled wood of the rung at her eye level. It was rough and mossy. She felt tiny flowers crushed beneath her grip. She climbed into deepening shadow. The ascent was easy enough, though surrounded as they were by the mass of Correct People, it carried the taste of ritual.

At the top, she pulled herself onto a porch. A wide doorway led inward. Thin curtains stirred in the breeze. A man sat within—no, a thin-shouldered boy of her own people, barely grown to man-height. He was only a silhouette to her.

Not waiting for Ming, she stepped inside. The boy looked up, his face visible now in the shadowed interior. He had been comely enough once, dark haired and pale eyed, but the ravages of pain and ill use had set lines upon him prematurely.

“Welcome.” His voice was accented like an Englishman’s, but with the
trace of another country. “I have been making a clock.” Without getting up, he pointed her to a chair across from his worktable. Ming sidled over with her and took a place at her shoulder.

The prophet leaned forward, still seated. “I am Hethor Jacques. Tell me, what mischief has God set upon the world this time?”

The way of dreaming opened with a pallid crocodile swimming as in deep, rushing water. Its body twitched like an armored eel. The great legs snapped back and forth, propelling the beast forward. She rode along beside it, much as her
wa
rode along beside her, watching in the sun-bright depths of the beast’s gold-flecked eyes.

The waters opened before her like clouds, and Gashansunu understood the crocodile had not been sounding the pelagic depths but the argosy of stars, never sighting land, for its eyes had always been trained on the heavens. This was a hunter of souls, an eater of spirits, and the medium where it pursued its sport was the Silent World.

Using the Precepts of Dreaming, she stepped away. The crocodile grew smaller, then smaller still, then tiny, until it became a pale silverfish swimming against a current, a tiny chip of fire in the eyes. Gashansunu reached out and crushed it between her fingers. The swift searing of her flesh she accepted, for in truth it was only a pinprick.

When she opened her hand to inspect the damage she saw that a tiny tattoo had been placed where the crocodile had died. The mark was a map of the skies, the ring-of-Earth with the ring-of-Moon both encircling the sun. She stared at the markings until they grew to overwhelm her vision; then she stepped through them into the space between the stars where the great beast had swum. Kicking, she found her own momentum, settling into the easy, purposeful rhythm.

After a while, she realized that her
wa
was pacing her, close and nervous. Ahead, the stars parted to reveal a great waterfall. An entire ocean cascaded from beyond the skies, but her
wa
retreated from her, growing smaller and smaller against the gigantic raindrops until two great, ridged pincers came to crush her life.

She awoke sweating.

Her hand ached.

Gashansunu again used the Precepts of Dreaming, this time to determine if she was in fact awake, or somewhere within another layer of the Silent World.

This time she was in fact herself. Outside, a sunrise stippled with the gelid colors of fruit threatened the world with what was to come next.

The meaning of the dream was obvious enough. She was being drawn into a self-consuming circle. Gashansunu and her
wa
would need to see past the traps that were coming and find their way to reconciling the regrets of the world.

She rose, pulled on a kilt of muslin with a tooled belt, and a beaded vest to bind her breasts and cover her back. She gathered her satchels—one for promise, one for fear and one for the practical filth that was the body itself.

Down the long, winding stairs cut into this tower and off to find Baassiia or one of the other circle callers from Westfacing House.

Gashansunu knew from the angle of the dreaming crocodile’s circling that she was being drawn to the inland east. Almost the direction of the hold of the pale wizard, though that one was now thought to have been lost some time ago.

Birds followed overhead as she paced the dawn streets. Though Gashansunu did not take note, the morning mists swirled in her wake with a hot agitation that brought them puddled to the ground behind her.

She would tell Baassiia about her dream. Whatever troubled the world was out there. Gashansunu would find it, and set things to right.

They peered out the window of the festival warehouse. The fields beyond were empty even of cattle. The road to Panjim was deserted. Engines droned close by, but they saw nothing.

Al-Wazir stood by the door, four sailors with him. He had an ear cocked as well.

“Can you tell anything by the sounds, Chief?” she asked in a stage whisper.

He looked pained. “If I were out in the open, ma’am, probably.” His voice was normal, though. “ ’Tis muffled by the walls of this wretched building. I dare not look until I know. No point in showing me remaining hand.”

One of the sailors looked at her. “I can try to reach the top from within,” he said in Chinese.

Childress nodded. “Go, then.”

The chief watched him head back through the warehouse, hunting for a ladder. “Now you order my men around.”

“
Our
men.” She forced a smile.

“Only one captain on a ship, ma’am.”

“He is below in the dark with his vessel.”

Chinese hissed from above, too rapidly for Childress to follow. Fong, one of the other sailors, looked back and forth between her and al-Wazir—one, twice, three times—then gave up and addressed her.

“It is of the Middle Kingdom. Lu does not recognize which fleet, but in these waters that should be the Nanyang Navy.”

A
Chinese
airship? Over Goa? “He says it’s one of theirs,” she told the chief.

“They don’t operate here,” al-Wazir said shortly. “Not in the ordinary run of things. Too damned dangerous for them along the Hindoo coast, pardon my language, ma’am.”

“They operate here now.” Childress returned to peering out the window as the engine noise grew in pitch.

“It turns,” whispered Fong. “Lu says another approaches from the west.”

Far more likely they are both sub hunting in these waters than that they have the temerity to attack British India
, she thought.

Then two ships passed into her line of sight, making for Panjim. Definitely of Chinese lines. They trailed long banners of black silk. Someone out there rode to war on wings of cloud.

The chief eased the door open and watched from shadow. “Damn my eyes, they’re making a bombing run.”

“Who would bomb Panjim?” she asked.

“Someone who wishes to show the Royal Navy how overstretched British forces are.” Al-Wazir almost choked with laughter. “Every ship on the East African station could be here and altogether they would not even begin to cover such a coastline. John Chinaman is calling England’s bluff.”

Childress joined him at the door. Smoke already billowed up from the town. She could hear the crackle of gunfire, but no answering airships rose to the defense.

Death was the same whatever guise it came in. Childress had learned that from Anneke, aboard the
Mute Swan
all those months ago. Part of another woman’s lifetime, some unreal drama for which she had once held a scripted role.

“The British will answer,” she said. “This is war, not a skirmish or test or reconnaissance. It will not be waved away at a table by drunken diplomats.”

“To what gain?” al-Wazir asked quietly.

“Have you yet met a Chinese who would trust us?”

“N-no,” he replied. “And nae without reason.”

“Whatever they hope to draw out, it will come with a swift sword.” Childress turned to the sailors. “Find the captain and tell him we will be
receiving no more supplies from our friends in the town for the foreseeable future.”

She had a cold, sick feeling that the order of the world had come to an end in this bombing. “I shall be the Mask,” she told no one in particular. “The Mask shall set this foolish game to rights.”

“Good luck, ma’am,” al-Wazir growled. “All of us, we’ll need it.”

And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand; and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer’s inkhorn by his side: and they went in, and stood beside the brasen altar.          —
Ezekiel 9:2

HIMS
Erinyes
approached the drilling camp at the base of the Wall at dead slow, through a thick, blood-warm fog off the Bight of Benin. Lieutenant Ostrander stood by the helmsman, his eyes fever-bright. The vessel’s lone midshipman was forward with a small party of sharpshooters, while the bosun waited in the waist with a handful of men prepared to descend to scout.

Dusk would be soon upon them, though at the moment the world was a uniform, impenetrable gray. The bow watch murmured a warning. Ostrander adjusted the engine telegraph. Their propellers feathered, then reversed, halting the nearly imperceptible progress of
Erinyes
.

Moments later the engines coughed to silence. They hung still, listening to the wet, dead air of the world.

“There,” McCurdy whispered, pointing downward.

Boaz leaned over the rail to follow the line of his arm. A thinning of the fog revealed a darker surface below—amorphous, textured, vaguely brown.

“It is the field of fire that they cleared before the stockade,” the Brass said with a sudden recognition. “We are almost exactly over the encampment, within a few hundred yards.”

“I recall it,” the bosun said shortly.

They listened harder, straining to hear sounds of fighting, work, men at bivouac—whatever might be gleaned from below. The world remained obstinately silent. Strangely so.

::
they have been struck down
:: the voice of the Sixth Seal whispered in his head. ::
As men who raise themselves too high before God will be
.::

He placed a hand on his closed belly and wondered if he might burn
this thing out. The Seal was too important to lose, especially after the destruction of the ancient book. But the Seal spoke without reason or compassion or even good sense.

Except that they
had
been struck down in this place. Boaz had fought in that battle against his own kind.

“
Ariadne
come here, not long after the big fight.” McCurdy’s voice was quiet and thoughtful. “She said they was building their camp within the Wall itself. Outside was only sentries and hunters and traps for John Brass.”