Pinion (27 page)

“I—I must consider your thinking,” Paolina said. Her heart twisted. “I hold little brief for the machinery of faith, have never met a priest who was not corrupted by his own fleshly desires, whatever his mouth might say. Even so, there is a distress in your words that troubles me.”

“I do not dissent,” he told her quietly. “God is undeniable and everywhere. I simply believe there can be more to a human being than submission to the will of the world.”

“Even here in the Southern Earth you worry about submission?”

“No, no.” Hethor reached for Arellya to pull her close. “I have made my place, my little paradise amid the jungle. But that does not change the world. At most, it changes me. You and your gleam can reweave everything.”

“What the British and the secret societies fear so much,” she replied.

“Precisely.” He seemed exhausted, as if propounding his theories of free will and divine intent had worn too much away. “I came here to tell you something else.”

“Which would be what?”

“That it is possible to relocate without leaving ruin behind.”

“How?” Paolina asked eagerly.

“I do not know for certain. The powers I have were granted as a blessing, a miracle in the technical sense of the term. But the archangel Gabriel took me to the moon, then here to the heart of the forest, without leaving destruction in our wake. I know it can be done. My thought is that the angel sent the energy somewhere else, so the push in one direction was matched by an opposing push in the other.”

That idea corresponded so perfectly with Paolina’s observations on the nature of the physical world that she could almost hear the click as it slid home inside her head.

He crouched in the waist of the ship, clutching a naval carbine. Plainly all the crew from Captain Sayeed down to the rawest cabin boy were terrified of the consequences of the winged savages gaining a foothold on the deck.

These creatures were no Barbary pirates from such ha’penny dreadfuls
as
Airships Ahoy!!!
and
Electrick Adventure Fortnightly
that were the closest thing he had to a vice. He’d read al-Wazir’s reports of fighting them aboard
Bassett
, had seen the accounts of the increasing number of encounters along the Wall in the two years since the failure of the Gordon Expedition of 1900.

Nothing gave a hint to the shrieking terror that was these false, leathery angels sweeping along the deck with their bronze swords glinting. They were bloody-mouthed horrors with tattooed skins and blank eyes, and they rammed time and again into
Notus
.

Harrow had men on both rails, with a small party in the bow. The greatest danger was from the sides, where the winged savages could readily gain purchase. Sayeed and his officers defended themselves on the poop, while a party from the gas division had gone atop the bag to reinforce the navigator’s rest.

The fight was a game of stoop and shriek and wait. The flyers closed, attacked briefly, then circled off high and away like falcons before returning. The waist guns had opened time and again, the ship bucking as they barked roughly into the empty air, but they were almost useless. Their shells and bombards were meant to bring down other ships, not man-size targets on the wing. The volleys of the sailors under Harrow were somewhat better, but right now Kitchens was bitterly regretting the absence of
Notus
’ company of marines.

With every pass, the winged savages took a loss or two. With every pass,
Notus
took three or four. A man down here with his eyes clawed out, another there shrieking as his heart’s blood pulsed from the ragged wound where his arm had been ripped free. The lucky ones died as they were struck. The rest crawled and wailed on the deck, begging an indifferent God or the harried chiurgeon for something, anything to restore them.

Gunsmoke filled the ship until his eyes ran with choking sobs. The stench of blood stole his breath. The attackers had their own special foetor, a reek like all the rotting horses of Hell’s cavalry released to the charge in one shambling herd.

This was not his sort of fight. Kitchens could kill a man two dozen ways in the dark. He could sight in a rifle from a frightful distance with a steady enough hand to choose which eye he might take out. He knew arts of
gong fu
and blade and poison and unsubtle trap.

Even so, the face-to-face brawls of common soldiers and drunken street boys were as foreign to him as the court magics of William of Ghent and his ilk, as alien as the prayers of Christian ecstatics dancing with brass rods through their tendons before the cathedrals at Westminster and Canterbury. He would willingly fight and die for England, for his queen, for his honor.

Just not like
this
.

Over the rail, Africa was much closer than he recalled, as if
Notus
were heading toward a hard landing. Smoke billowed. The Wall loomed ahead at a drunken angle, a second, stone sky that would swallow them all.

Not while he still lived.

Kitchens shook off the moment of vertigo and fired his carbine, a three count after the ragged volley released by the survivors along his rail. Turning to anticipate where the winged savages would reappear, he saw the smaller airship closing in. For a strange, long moment, Kitchens thought the other captain was firing on
Notus
, but he realized the chasers in her bow were aiming at a lower angle.

A volley rose from the ground. Something out of his line of sight squawked in pained surprise. A cheer rose from the other rail.
Notus
’ waist guns spoke one more time.

Then silence.

It was the silence of straining engines, crackling flames, whimpering men passing the door of death, creaking lines, groaning planks, spent cartridges dropping metal-dull to the deck, the sighing of three dozen survivors realizing they might live to see another sunset. It was the silence of whistling pipes, Harrow shouting orders in a voice so hoarse he could have been calling from beyond the grave, a bell tolling from the poop, a signal gun firing, flags flapping as they were dropped overboard on a weighted line to communicate . . . what?

Ottweill’s camp huddled against the Wall, stockade blocking the entrance to a recessed bay. Where he had expected a bustling city of industry below was a ruin, though. The wooden wall stood, but with obvious damage. The tents and equipment behind it were just so much shattered wrack. A small group of men were formed up on the walkway of the stockade, protecting a polished idol—no, a Brass, who was among them. A much larger group was arrayed in a loose rank behind them, rifles at the ready.

Rescue from the ground, then, sufficient confusion and firepower to drive away the winged savages. Ottweill’s men, but he was unsure who the Brass was. Prisoner? Spy? Decoy?

The smaller airship hovered much closer now, seeming almost to shiver as it kept pace with
Notus
. His vessel was definitely in serious difficulty, with a list to her deck and the unsubtle panic of a shipboard fire seizing the crew.

“Captain’s compliments, sir,” said a vaguely familiar-looking boy at his elbow. “We’re putting everybody over the side who ain’t working the fire or keeping the ship in the air. For your safety. There’s a line aft.”

“No,” Kitchens responded unthinking. “I have government papers below, and I am responsible for this ship.”
The Queen’s note to him
.

“Sir,” the boy insisted. “If the fire gets into the gasbag, there won’t be no more ship, not no more you either upon ’er. Captain says you go over the side, yourself by name.”

Kitchens briefly weighed the possibility that this was a ruse meant to take advantage of the fighting and strip him away from the airship. If Sayeed meant to mutiny, there were far simpler ways to accomplish that end. He looked over at the poop, to catch the captain looking back at him.

Sayeed nodded once, then stabbed his index finger downward. His lips moved, and though the sound did not carry above the din of the deck, Kitchens could read the words well enough. “Go to ground, man. If we live, we shall fight this out.”

Nothing in his cabin mattered if the ship exploded or crashed in flames. It did him no good to die alongside the dispatches and death warrants. In that moment, Kitchens let go of something important about his life’s work, in favor of something important about his life.

He suffered himself to be led to the line.
Notus
was keeping station now, perhaps two hundred feet over the cleared, muddy expanse in front of Ottweill’s stockade. Down below, a dispute was emerging between those who held the ramparts and the far more numerous and better-armed party behind them.

Perhaps he could avert yet another disaster in the making.

“Into the harness, sir,” said the boy earnestly. “You must be going now.”

Far beneath his feet a handful of sailors secured the other end of an arrangement of ropes. Kitchens was strapped to a set of tackle with a brake lever.

“Hold on to this!” An older man tapped the brake, part of his scalp torn and hanging in a flap over one ear. Kitchens was fascinated by the bloody gleam of his skull showing through. “We’ve got a static line,” he shouted, “but if we dip, it will take you right into the soil. Ride the brake!”

Screaming out the last of his fear, Kitchens fell into the African afternoon while bells clanged out the dangers facing the airship he was so rapidly leaving behind.

The Silent World flared. She paused in her walking to hearken with senses that had never touched a sight or sound in the Shadow World. Her
wa
scuttled with nervous energy, something she had not before seen it do.

The gleam was being used. Whoever carried it reached into the Silent World with blind, questing fingers. Brief, sharp irruptions marked where damage was being done to the warp and weft that made up this most real of places.

At least the invader was out where the spirits were thin and the world not so filled with memories. She could all too easily imagine what effect such experimentation would have within the city. Gashansunu sharpened her perceptions.

There could not be two of these in the Southern Earth at this time. Her goal was close. The gleam, whoever carried it, whatever they represented. The regrets of this world and the fears of the Shadowed next.

She resumed her pace and walked quickly into the direction from which the violence had emanated.

Rivers have power, even in the Silent World. They carry such a weight of memory from the soil on their banks and amid their water meadows that while the texture of the world might be thin all around them, a river course serves to concentrate it. They are bright lines on an empty map, veins for the power of the land to run within, barriers and highways both, depending on the intentions of the traveler. Gashansunu came to a river pregnant with the sluggish thoughts of a wide, vacant land. She was close, so very close to the gleam, but it had stopped detonating amid the echoing interstices.

She would have to drop back to the Shadow World where the majority of her life lay and look in the usual, everyday ways. Her
wa
would range wide, scouting for her, but now was the time to lay down the mantle of this place.

The danger of stepping so far and long in the Silent World was the feeling she had now, the sense that there was no need to take up once more the burdens of the body. Ensouled and empowered, right here Gashansunu was everything she would ever need to be, possessed everything she might ever desire. The hollow shell of the Shadow World was so
base
, so mundane, so
imperfected
.

This risk was well known to any adept of the houses of the city. Gashansunu closed off temptation and willed herself back to the Shadow World before the questions could take any deeper root in her spirit. The meat-bellows of her lungs coughed back to life as the coursing of blood in her veins woke her up from the dream of walking.

Waking, she was in a deep jungle, the plants and trees subtly different from those of the coastline around the city.

Waking, she stood on a little bank of mud near a riverside path.

Waking, she was wrapped in heat like chains, subject already to the investigations of a dozen birds, a score of scavengers, hundreds of insects.

Gashansunu took all their tiny soul-fragments in a single sweep of her
will and stepped away from the falling, silent bodies that marked her entry into this place. Voices muttered ahead. She pushed through the path, beneath a broad, glossy-leafed branch, and into the edge of a clearing.

Three of the Correct People stared at her in vivid, comical alarm. Beyond, a pair of pallid folk, by their coloration from the Northern Earth, sat talking with another Correct Person behind them.

Her eyes were drawn to the hand of one of the pale people.

The gleam.

Gashansunu called in her
wa
to take the measure of these folk, their intentions, even their barbaric tongue should converse be necessary.

The male Northerner looked up at her. Crippled or unfinished, he bore no alarm at all, just a curious smile. The female turned, gleam still clasped in her hand, and opened her mouth to shout.

The sorceress raised her fingers to still them. Much to her amazement, she found that she could not. Her
wa
flapped in panic, folding into a mist that sought to swirl hidden behind her.