Pinion (23 page)

Kitchens swallowed a smile. “I shouldn’t know the superstitions of line officers.”

“What about the superstitions of clerks? You place an uncommon faith in paper.”

For a brief, panicked moment, Kitchens thought that Sayeed somehow knew of the note from the Queen that remained below in his quarters. Had the captain been snooping? Then he realized Sayeed could not mean something so specific, so personal and secret.

“It is not faith we have in papers,” Kitchens said. “Papers are just the lifeblood circulating from one vital organ to another. Everything else vital to the interest of the Crown—funds, directives, reports—travels by the medium of those papers.”

“Yes, yes, I know. Every war ever fought was won on paper long before the trumpets faded over the empty, bloody fields. But consider this.” Sayeed actually
poked
Kitchens in the side with a finger. “One may walk away from paper, at a high enough cost. One cannot walk away from the point of a sword. Sometimes a man has to stand and fight.”

“Is this a declaration of mutiny?”

“Far from such.” Sayeed matched Kitchens’ quiet tone. “I swore my oath twenty-six years ago. I will be loyal until the moment you have me hanged.”

Which was demonstrably untrue, Kitchens knew, for the man had taken the destructive female genius to his secret masters in Strasbourg rather than bringing her to London as he was duty-bound to have done.

Sayeed continued. “Who in Admiralty knows you to be aboard
Notus
? Who there understands why? You are being used as much as I and my crew and this poor vessel.” He patted the rail as if it were a dog. “Papers have been drawn up to end your life as surely as mine. They are spending you along with us to see what may be gained by one last, wild throw.”

The same thoughts had occurred to Kitchens. The countervailing argument, one that he would never voice to Captain Sayeed, was the fact of the Queen’s personal interest. She had summoned him to her royal presence. Surely she had also set him on this path.

“Since we are being so boldly direct with one another,” Kitchens said, “why did you take the girl to Strasbourg? I fail to see how you could not recognize that act as fatal to your service in the Royal Navy. You say you are the Queen’s man to the gallows, yet you abandoned your oath to her in that single act.”

“Why is it that you imagine an act in the service of the Silent Order is not an act in service of the Queen?”

By the next day the Wall was much clearer. He could spot cliffs and bays and plateaus; spy the weather moving across on the plane of the vertical. Soon half the sky would be blocked.

Below them, the dense jungle was riven with watercourses. The rough, endless green of the roof of the forest was speckled with the flight of birds over the treetops. The Bight of Benin loomed to the south, separating West Africa from the foot of the Wall like a moat.

“Airship ho!” shouted the bow watch.

Every sailor not immediately engaged in some vital task rushed to the rail. In moments Harrow was haranguing them back to their posts. “Don’t you be gagging away from me now, you little bastards! If that ship is an enemy, we’re already dead. To stations, to stations, damn all your eyes.”

Kitchens made his way forward. Captain Sayeed joined him there a moment later, along with two other officers and the chief of the gunnery division.

“There,” said Grantland, the gunner. “Five points off the starboard bow. She’s got several thousand feet on us.”

They all looked east and south in the indicated direction, eyes above
Notus
’ current altitude. A small airship, one of the Cumaean-class couriers, Kitchens thought. He looked past her, toward the Wall. “There’s two more chasing her,” he exclaimed.

“Chinese,” Sayeed confirmed. “Beta-class cruisers. We would overmatch one of them in a straight fight. But not two working in formation.”

Kitchens thought the odds plainly unfavorable. The little airship could presumably climb higher and fly faster, but she wasn’t built to circle and fight alongside
Notus
. “What, then?”

“Break out the signal flags in the red chest,” Sayeed ordered. “I shall be at the helm.”

The little knot of men vanished with sudden purpose, all but Harrow, who stayed a moment longer to look at Kitchens with sad eyes. The chief shook his head once, then went off to harangue the deck division.

The Wall was so close, but Kitchens realized he had just lost what little control he might have held over
Notus
.

Good Change
sailed the west coast of India flying a large British ensign. Wang understood that should the Royal Navy happen on the truth of the matter, the boat and all aboard her would be summarily dealt with.

Captain Shen had adopted a white coat and cap that appeared more English in style and stayed at the wheel almost constantly. Wang was unsure when the man slept. The rest of the crew were silent and sullen as ever, only the mate Wu talking to Wang beyond the most perfunctory remarks. He had not seen the monk since they had reboarded.

Wang finally found a quiet moment with Wu in the galley. Privacy was rare enough aboard
Good Change
. The mate was brewing tea and did not seem overwhelmed with responsibility. “I must ask you some questions,” the cataloger said. “I should hope for some clear answers, as my mission from our masters depends on this.”

“My master is the Kô,” Wu said, but his voice was not combative. “Your service is unclear to me.”

“I am loyal to the Dragon Throne.” Wang wondered how he had been put on the defensive so rapidly. “As are you, in that you serve the Kô while he serves the Emperor.”

Wu grunted, pouring out his tea.

“Who is this monk?”

The mate looked over the rim of his teacup. “What monk?”

“The woman from the rowboat. Who took me in to the fortress of the Silent Order, and rode back out to the boat with us.”

Wu shook his head. “You are mistaken. Women are unlucky aboard a ship.”

“I do not understand this game,” growled Wang. “She appears and disappears like the wind. She is nowhere when I search. I know she must be hiding among the crew, but there are only eleven of you, and none of you have her face above your collar.”

“Some ghosts are transient,” Wu offered.

“Not aboard a vessel this small!”

“Perhaps you should dwell on the nature of death a while. A speculation that can hardly fail to profit you.”

The mate pushed past Wang, leaving him alone in the galley with his frustrations and the rock-solid certainty that Wu knew perfectly well what was going on. The Golden Bridge slipped ever farther away, and with it eroded his habits of obedience. He was unsure what would replace that in his heart.

The boat cruised slowly past a ragged coast. They’d twice spotted airships in the distance. Few settlements were visible along this stretch, and those they did espy were tumbledown shacks with ragged docks kneeling into the water.

The monk stepped up beside him at the rail.

“How do you do that?” he asked listlessly.

“It is not so difficult to disappear,” she told him. “Being able to reappear without being noticed first is a more challenging art.”

“I can fall overboard and disappear. Reappearing would be another matter.”

“You can see patterns of meaning in ancient texts that are no more than the walking of ants across a leaf to me. Is that miraculous?”

“No. Just training and practice. It is my place to know how to do this.”

“So it is with me. Just training and practice. It is
my
place to know how to do this.”

Wang was frustrated. “But what of your
methods
?”

“What of your methods for reading ancient Indonesian scrolls?” She fumbled some leaves into her pipe, then lit it.

“There is no purpose in arguing with you,” he grumbled.

“You preserve me from boredom.”

That wasn’t worthy of a response, Wang decided, trying to think like this very difficult woman. He took another conversational tack. “I assume your mystical reappearance indicates we are about to experience something of significance.”

“Of course. Why would I wish to stand at the rail and watch a thousand
li
of empty sea slide by?”

“I have wondered much the same thing,” Wang admitted.

“Then you have already set foot on the path of wisdom.” She sounded delighted. “Now, however, we are nearly at the Goan port of Panjim. The Englishwoman hides there, or did so as recently as a week past. There has been much trouble in the skies, so the situation may have changed.”

“I am to walk among the angry dogs of their foreign queen and ask questions about the whereabouts of one of their own kind? A man of the Middle Kingdom will not be so welcome within the walls of Panjim.”

“The British do not wall their cities so much,” she replied absently, then took a long, slow drag on her pipe.

“I am not British.”

“Neither am I.” Smoke curled from her nostrils, giving her an uncomfortable resemblance to classical paintings of the
lung
dragons. “Being invisible is a great asset when one walks among one’s enemies.”

“I am no more invisible than I am English,” said Wang.

“We’ll have to see what may be done about that.” Another long drag. “Pity you didn’t join me in the
guang
as a child. There is much we could
have learned together.” This time she grinned, somehow disarming and maddening in the same moment.

Much like women everywhere, Wang reflected. One reason he had never taken a wife, and likely never would.

She embraced her regrets as evening folded itself into night. Though she was barely come to her womanhood, life had already overwhelmed Paolina with experience, so that those things that most pained her seemed also to be her oldest friends.

At least that’s how it looked from the bottom of a wooden bowl of papaya wine. Sweet, sticky, yellow as a bee’s back, the drink tickled her throat and set her mind wandering in ways she did not usually indulge.

Is this liberation of thought what the
fidalgos
of Praia Nova craved so about
bagaceira? She could see the attraction, but also the difficulty.

Kalker came to sit beside them. Paolina could not remember if she had spoken to him earlier this evening. The whirling insects and the dancing fire seemed to have taken her outside time. Boats on the river guarded the edge of events from her sense of passage, so she was secure in this circle, alone endlessly, always talking to Kalker, always listening to Ming, no difference between one moment and the infinity of the next.

“. . . will go by boat,” the old Correct Person was saying. “Safe on the river, most likely.”

Paolina focused on that. “What about the crocodiles?”

“They are great monsters with teeth to drag you under, but they are as much children of the water road as the eels and fishes and waterbirds. In any case, I believe the world wants you to pass on. That is a powerful force to keep you safe and propel you forward.”

“Gleam. The crocodiles can see my gleam.” She wondered in that moment where Karindira of the troglodyte women was. Did her kind have cities on this side of the Wall?

“The world wants.
He
is sending you where you are needed. Your way will be sped.”

In Paolina’s experience, her way was never sped. Quite the opposite. “The world does not want me,” she announced. “I have proven myself evil beyond measure.”

“The world does not judge, woman of the Northern people. It merely exists. What we do within the world is our business, between us and the Creator. You bear a gleam.”

“That excuses nothing,” she shouted, throwing her board of food aside.

Ming touched her arm, seeking perhaps to calm her, but Paolina would have none of it. She took a deep draught from her wine bowl and tried to gather her thoughts in a more seemly array.

Kalker spoke in a low, soft voice. “There is no excuse. There is only responsibility. Do not think your soul is freed from accounting for your deeds. At the same time, this poor accounting does not release you from your obligations to the world, to life itself. You may do evil one day and still serve the order of the Creation the next.”