Pinion (21 page)

“It is only metaphor. In any case, the debate is irresolvable. If all is foreordained, then the argument is as well, and likewise its outcome. If we are blessed with free will, then the argument has no outcome because we would never come to true agreement.”

Arellya brought three steaming mugs: crude and slightly misshapen bits of ceramic. “Forgive me,” she said, “but we have never found a tea that Hethor craves. This is a brew of roots and flowers that you may enjoy.”

Paolina took the offered mug and clutched it beneath her nose. Though the day outside was jungle-hot, and even the shadows here within Hethor’s
house almost blood-warm, the heat seemed like a gift to her hands. The scent was oddly musty, like leaves left in a puddle too long, with a cloying undertone. Flowers? She sipped cautiously.

Definitely not tea, which she had come to enjoy while sailing aboard
Star of Gambia
. But not so bad.

Beside her, Ming slurped, then glanced sidelong. In Chinese, “It is better than no tea at all.”

“I apologize that we do not possess the finer things of English life here,” Hethor said. “Or, for that matter, of the Chinese court. What we do have is fruit in tragic abundance, a wonderful assortment of curious meats, and an endless supply of overwarm days and pleasant nights.”

Arellya stood beside him now. She clasped Hethor’s free hand. The way they leaned into one another just ever so slightly told Paolina that these two were lovers. Hethor, not a large man by English standards, was still twice the size of this woman of the Correct People. Paolina wondered how strange this might be for them.

Yet you long for Brass Boaz, who is far stranger to you than these two are to one another
.

After taking a long sip at his mug, Hethor stared solemnly at Paolina. His eyes glinted in the shadows of the room. “What do you seek here in the Southern Earth?”

“Safety.” Her answer surprised Paolina.
Purpose. What of Boaz?

“This is a safe enough place,” Hethor replied. “If you are careful of spiders and don’t mind snakes and crocodiles, and avoid bad water, and don’t sleep on the ground at night, and remember which fungus will kill you just by your breathing too close. Do you hope for a place of refuge?”

Paolina glanced at Ming. His face was bland, impassive.

“I seek a place where my own . . .”
Power
seemed like a wrong word. “. . . wisdom, I suppose, will not bring me more trouble.”

Hethor set down his mug. “May I inquire as to the nature of this wisdom?” He put up a hand. “Only what you wish to tell me.”

“The angel seemed to believe I should seek you out.” That sounded weak, even to Paolina.

“Do not place too much faith in the counsel of angels. They do their best in the absence of God.”

“That is a very odd thing to say.”

He did not answer, instead just staring mildly at her until Paolina realized she should respond somehow. She stared down at the draggled feather in her hand. “I—I do not consort with angels.”

“Of course you do,” Hethor said. “If one sent you here to visit me.”

“Only the once!” She could feel herself blushing and was grateful for
the shadows in this room. “I will tell you what befell me, but first I will show you.” She was so very tired of the burden of her knowledge. Paolina plucked the stemwinder from its pouch within her skirts and handed it to Hethor. This one had none of the elegance of her first effort. It was crude, battered, cracked, worn, and never so beautiful to begin with—a brass roundel like a short, fat pipe section, the necessary movements stuffed within. She wished she still had the finer one destroyed by the Silent Order, but this clockmaker would know her work even from the crude approximations she’d been forced to aboard
Heaven’s Deer
.

He turned the bulky thing over in his hands a few times, then set to examining the face. After a few minutes he asked, “May I open the casing?”

“P-please.” Paolina was surprised to be so nervous.

Hethor turned to his worktable and selected a slender tool. Very carefully he prised her stemwinder apart. He spent a long time studying the interior without touching anything, his eyesight apparently untroubled by the dim light of this workroom. Eventually he began probing within with a deft touch. Finally he looked back her.

“You built this.” A statement, not a question.

“Yes.” Paolina was oddly afraid of what Hethor might say next.

“Can others make use of it?”

“Yes. My first one was . . . captured and misused. The Silent Order destroyed part of a city and killed many people in doing so.”

“Hmm.” Carefully, he shut the casing again. “You have done something very important.”

That was not what she had expected to hear. Questions. Castigation, almost certainly. Even bafflement, if this young man was not everything he appeared to be. But not praise. “How so?”

“I have certain abilities. They were given to me, or perhaps awoken, through divine agency. The world was running down. Gabriel needed a key to rewind it. He chose me.”

“Why?”

“He never told me.” Hethor sounded wistful. “Even now I would be a journeyman at Master Bodean’s clockworks in New Haven if the angel had not come to me in need. Instead I am here, with hard-won wisdom and a few strange powers.
But
. . .” A warning finger. “I can speak to you of how this world works, and you might even understand me. What I cannot do is grant you the least iota of my powers. That would be like giving you the color of my eyes or the timbre of my voice. It cannot be done.

“On the other hand,
you
have built a mechanism that draws on the hidden order of the world to express similar power. Much as a clockmaker might sell a watch to a man who would never otherwise recall the time,
you can build this, give it to someone else, then build another. There will only ever be one of my powers, but there can be as many of your powers as you care to expend the time and effort to create.”

“This is the safety I search for,” she said earnestly. “Freedom from the men who would have me build more of these, who would have me teach them how to build more, so that each person could have the might of a sorcerer.”

“I have known a sorcerer or two,” Hethor told her. “Their might comes with the wisdom of years. You are the only young sorcerer I have ever met.”

“I am not a sorcerer!”

He turned the stemwinder in his hands. “With this, you are.” Hethor reached out to give the device back to Paolina. “The people here would call this a gleam.”

“I am familiar with the term,” she replied, very glad to have the stemwinder’s solid weight once more in her hand. “I was told of another gleam that passed two years ago. Was that your crossing to the Southern Earth?”

“Perhaps. But even if I am a gleam, I am a gleam like the seven Great Relics of Christ. I am a distinct thing, not repeatable. Each gleam in history has been unique. Like the difference between a rug woven by the hands of children and a cheap throw woven on a power loom. You have created a way to repeat the miracle.” His voice dropped, hurried toward the next words in his excitement. “Think what this means for the possibility of true free will.”

“That every man would rewrite the world to suit his purposes?” Paolina was horrified. “This would be chaos. Precisely what I fled the Northern Earth to avoid.”

“Have you avoided it here?” Hethor’s voice was shrewd now, thoughtful. “Did you progress across the Southern Earth to my jungle village without the aid of this gleam?”

“N-no . . . ,” Paolina admitted slowly. “We were forced to use the stemwinder to escape imprisonment, or possibly a worse fate, atop a great mountain to the east of here.”

“What have you gained by coming here? You could not put the thing down. Believe me, there are those in the Southern Earth who will know its use, just as there are those upon the Wall who knew of my passing.”

She felt a shuddering wave of desperation. Ming touched her shoulder softly. Paolina glanced into his eyes to see a sad warmth there. She looked back at Hethor. “I wanted to stop running. I had hoped to erase the knowledge from me, tear it from my mind and heart, and go back to being a simple girl.”

“Were you ever a simple girl? Besides, you cannot erase knowledge from the world. In time, it might be forgotten or overlooked, but once men know a thing can be done, they will find a way to do it again.” His voice thickened with passion. “You have taken the magic of Creation out of the realm of the divine and placed it into the realm of the mechanical. In doing that, you have stolen free will from the dreaming mind of God and brought it to the hands of man.”

“I do not want this power!”

“You cannot set it aside. The Southern Earth is no more safe than the Northern Earth. You will just be used by different powers here, if you do not assert yourself.”

“Show me how to control it.” Paolina hated the desperation in her voice.

“Would that I could.” Hethor seemed sad. “William of Ghent might have been able to, but he is lost to us now.” He paused. “I slew him. Twice.”

“You do not seem a killer.”

“You do not seem a destroyer of cities. Neither of us travels on a chariot of skulls or wields a flaming sword. Those are symbols of another age. We are of the age of steam and iron, progress stamped out in metal and sold by the pence in the marketplace. We are of the time when man’s ability to remake the world around him has risen to intersect with God’s original craftsmanship. Hence your stemwinder.”

“Then what will I do with it?” she whispered. “How will I control this demon I have unleashed?”

“You will do as everyone confronted with overwhelming fate has done since the beginning of history.” He shifted again, then reached for Arellya’s hand. From behind his shoulder, she took it. Paolina could see the love that passed between them like an electrick current. “I cannot help you, but I know some who may. There is a city along the ocean shore south of the mouth of this river. They practice strange and terrible sorceries there, and I once stole something of value from them after they murdered a friend of mine. They are capricious and dangerous. But they have immerse experience and understanding, and I think it may be true that several of the Great Relics have lain safely in their hands since Joseph of Arimethea crossed the Wall nineteen centuries ago.

“These people honor no passports, nor letters of safe conduct. But if you carry your power openly, they will take note of you.” His voice was soft, sad. “This is the best I can offer you. My place here is safe and quiet, but the world will find you in time. Possibly these same sorcerers, for they cannot have failed to notice your use of the gleam here in the Southern Earth. Or those who would pursue you across the Wall will make their own way here.”

Paolina had wild thoughts of throwing the stemwinder in the river, smashing it to bits and hurling the shards into a bonfire, feeding the thing still ticking to a crocodile. But unless she smashed herself in the process, the problem would still exist. That was the choice she had tried—and failed—to make off the coast of Sumatra aboard
Five Lucky Winds
.

“Life always seeks life,” she said. “I will go to this city, because I would rather control this than be controlled by it.”

His voice was solemn. “If you succeed, and this power comes more widely and peacefully into the hands of men, you will have been the first since the Brass Christ to revise the bargain of God’s Creation. My advice to you now is to heed the counsel of your own heart over the honeyed words of angels or men.”

“Thank you.” Paolina sipped at her musky tea, which had grown cool as they talked. “I have but one request of you and your house.”

“Ask it,” Hethor said. Humor was returning to his voice and to the set of his eyes.

“I would have something to eat before I set out.”

He laughed at her then, and she laughed with him. Even Ming could not help snorting.

Arellya went out on the balcony and called down in the hissing speech of her kind. A great cheer arose from below where before there had only been the noisy, fractured silence of the jungle. She turned back. “At sundown, we will feast. For now, would you like some fruit?”

Leung’s crew labored around the clock to finish the repairs to
Five Lucky Winds
. Panjim burned fitfully from the bombings, but the Chinese were long gone. The British, however, were not.

She and al-Wazir took the submarine’s new launch—a reconditioned dory salvaged from the cavern—out of the hidden harbor and rowed down the coast. “I do not want to appear from the landward side,” she’d told the chief and the captain. “They will wonder all the more where I came from along that road of fields, where no Englishwoman has business being.”

“We can tell some tale of a vessel overset on the high seas if need be,” al-Wazir grumbled. “Wear that black dress of yours that looks like you’ve been swimming in it.”

Childress was glad she’d been able to find more clothes in Panjim before such things became impossible. The black dress had been on her back when she left New Haven so long ago, and was good now for little more than disguise.

He rowed them south, well outside the surf line, heading for the town’s
little harbor. The left-hand oar was strapped to his forearm in a rig that appeared hideously uncomfortable, and he shipped the oars and rested far more often than he obviously would have preferred, but they made progress.