Pinion (29 page)

“You’re ’aving me on, right?” Setting down his rifle, the man on the stockade began to laugh—helpless, hysterical,
angry
. “You walks out of a burning h’airship, you looks to be the dog’s breakfast, and you comes here where we been hiding h’inside the Wall like mice in a rectory, and you h’asks if we needs ’elp.”

“Must be government,” said one of the other men darkly. “No one else could be so stupid.”

“I shall speak to Dr. Ottweill now,” Kitchens said sternly.

“Oh . . .” More giggling. “I h’expect you shall.”

A rope slithered over the side. Unlike most clerks in the city of London, Kitchens knew how to climb it, even with an attaché case under his arm.

He was escorted rapidly through the wreckage of the compound in the afternoon’s failing light. Shattered Brass, corpses of the winged savages, an entire supply train’s worth of quartermaster gear and provisions—all lay strewn about fields of clutter. The only order was in the large piles of tailings that stood close by the face of the Wall—rock spoil, sand and other material from the tunneling.

A substantial metal barrier glowered over the tunnel entrance. It had been bolted together from bits of hull plating, boiler shells and other less obvious components. Someone watched from inside, for a postern door creaked open as they approached. Kitchens allowed himself to be hustled into the darkness beyond.

An oil lamp flickered, casting buttery shadows against the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel beyond. Two sets of tracks lay at his feet. A standard gauge ran within the embrace of the wider, special gauge of the boring machines. He hadn’t seen the rails outside. Either they’d been torn up by the attackers, or salvaged by the defenders.

Two dozen men faced him packed wall-to-wall, pistols and knives in hand. They shared the heavy breathing and glittering eyes of a pack. Hunted, not hunting. His interviewer from outside waved off the other guards.

“Too much to tell ’ere, but there’s a big passel of tars ’iding in the woods h’out there what should draw h’off h’any h’interest what comes h’our way tonight. Reg’lar guard, h’I should think.”

“I got duty,” muttered a large man black as a clinker. He was not African, Kitchens saw, merely grubby beyond measure with coal dust. “Who’s the fish?”

“Fellow from London, come to see the doctor about h’our little problems.”

That provoked another round of desperate laughter.

“The doctor is in,” muttered someone else.

Flicking another lamp into life, the entire outside party and most of the door wards headed deeper into the tunnel. They swirled Kitchens into their midst, not quite taking him prisoner, yet giving him no choice but to move along under their control. A pack of dark demons returning to their labors somewhere in the depths of hell.

Where else would I go?

Cataloger Wang! The Golden Bridge had come to her!

What on the Northern Earth was the man doing
here
, in Goa? She’d last seen him ensconced in frustrated arrogance amid the flooded library of Chersonesus Aurea. It seemed no more likely that he’d leave his books than it would for al-Wazir to walk to the moon.

The lieutenant—Roche?—turned to her. “You are acquainted with this man?”

“Yes.” Childress could feel al-Wazir close by at her shoulder, knew the big man was straining to ask something of his own.

Lieutenant Roche’s voice grew cold. “Why should that be?”

“She works for my master,” Wang said.

“You said you was a librarian,” the squad leader muttered.

“I am.” Childress drew up to her full five feet, one inch.

Wang smiled. “My master employs librarians and archivists.”

“You were both on your way to Bombay?” The lieutenant sounded more incredulous than suspicious.

Maybe we shall find our way out of here after all
, Childress thought. But what was Wang
doing
here?

Following her, of course
. That latter idea had frightening but unsurprising implications.

“My journey would be eased by this man’s aid,” she announced.

“I would be pleased to take her aboard
Good Change
,” Wang said with a broad smile. “We shall convey her to Bombay.”

“Bloody great coincidence, if you ask me,” muttered Lieutenant Roche.

“Gentlemen, I am distressed, and travel-weary, and much separated from my belongings. If Mr. Wang and his master’s boat are free to carry
me to Bombay, then I would be just as pleased to leave with him. Your fine soldiers may return to their bounden duty of defending this poor town.”

She took a calculated risk here, using Wang and his purposes to escape the attentions of the British Army. Childress looked up over her shoulder at al-Wazir. The chief would follow her lead until they had time to confer.

Lieutenant Roche chewed on her statement a bit. “Madam, I find that you are free to go.” The lieutenant turned to Wang. “It is your great luck that this good Englishwoman knows you, and can attest to your character and purposes.”

Wang bowed, his smile a rictus now. “She is always a friend to my master.”

“Come, Angus,” Childress said to al-Wazir. “Let us be aboard. Wang, my good man, please have your fellows take my launch in tow.”

A shaven coolie on the docks pushed out of the crowd to help with the small boat before Wang could even order his men off of
Good Change
. The Chinese librarian started visibly at the sight, then focused his attention once more on Childress. “Please to come this way,” he said.

Almost breathing in her ear, and surely he had to bend down to do so, al-Wazir growled, “Are you sure about what you’re doing, Mask?”

“Of course not,” she whispered. “But boarding a boat with a man I know has to be better than being interrogated here. Our story will not stand in a light breeze.”

They climbed down the slime-covered wooden ladder onto the deck of the trim white yacht. The entire crew seemed to be Chinese, Childress noted.

“Welcome aboard,” Wang said. There was something both genuine and sad about his smile.

The woman who stepped out of the jungle along one of the Correct People’s paths was very strange in appearance. Over six feet tall, thin as a boy, with skin the color of burnished teak, and her long face was regal, almost mannish. She wore swirling robes of deep burgundy, brown and maroon, layered so that Paolina’s eye slid from any real sense of the lines of the clothing. The newcomer’s wrists were covered in copper bracelets almost to the point of being armored by them. Her neck was crowded with similar decoration. White dots spread across her face, and a cowrie shell had been affixed to the outside corner of each eye, so she appeared to see in several directions at once.

The woman’s hand flashed up in a swift movement. Paolina shouted a
protest. Hethor said something soft in the same instant, lost to her under the sound of her own voice. Whatever the stranger was expecting did not happen, for she looked baffled a moment, then very disappointed.

“Step easy,” Hethor told her. “We are among friends.” He followed that with words in a hissing language very unlike the speech of the Correct People.

The woman replied in the same language, her black eyes flashing, then approached Paolina. Hethor said something else in that hissing speech. The stranger looked quite surprised, her attention turning to him. Her next words were in English: “What is your House?”

“I do not hold to a House as you do,” Hethor responded, “nor do the others of my people.”

“I am of no House but my own,” Paolina added.

“I am Gashansunu of Westfacing House, in the city,” she told them. “We compass all the wisdoms of the Southern Earth, from the ways of the Great Sunset Water to the colors of the morning sky. You are come among the Silent World as something new.”

Clearly her people fancied themselves great magicians.

Hethor answered for them both. “We are from the Northern Earth, where the wisdoms are different. If you come as a friend, we are friends. If you come as an unfriend, then we beg you in all goodwill to swiftly take your leave of us.”

Gashansunu considered Hethor’s words before replying. “The Shadow World is tinged with regret. There are flares in the Silent World. You bear a bright treasure that should either be cloaked or laid to rest. I am sent to be neither friend nor unfriend, but to settle the worlds back to their accustomed balance.”

“Then we have no conflict here,” Paolina said. “This man has abided in the Southern Earth these last two years without bringing trouble. I only pass through this place as I return northward. Soon your worlds will reclaim their balance.”

“May I inspect your gleam?” Gashansunu asked.

The stemwinder was still clutched in Paolina’s hand. This was not a request she had any inclination to grant. “I am sorry, but the gleam stays with me. It must be so.”

“There are those artifacts I would not share even with my closest lovers,” Gashansunu said, in an obvious effort to be polite.

In English
, Paolina thought. She looked at Hethor with speculation. What transformation had he laid upon this alien woman? Hethor appeared pleased, in point of fact, rather than threatened by this woman’s presence.

This was not her place, the safety of the Correct People not her responsibility. She wished to apply Hethor’s thought about displacing the force of travel. Using the stemwinder under Gashansunu’s unblinking gaze did not appeal.

“I would have time alone with my pursuits,” Paolina announced.

Hethor smiled. “Then I shall invite our guest to my house to sip at the freshest juices and speak of the Southern Earth.”

Paolina glanced up at Ming, tilting her chin to indicate that he should go with Hethor. Ming would tell her later what he could of the woman’s behavior, and warn Paolina if Gashansunu were to seek to quietly return to the amphitheater.

Watching Hethor slowly ascend even the shallow slope of this place was painful. Arellya walked close by his side, but all the other Correct People watched Gashansunu as a flock of birds might study a snake.

The foreign sorceress calmly stared back at them, then followed to the top in less than a dozen swift, easy strides.

Moments later Paolina was alone with her rocks, and the endless cycling whir of the jungle.

The action suggested by Hethor involved sending her target in one direction, while displacing a ghost of it, in effect, in the other. The simplest way she could think to explain this to herself was as if a thing could be heading in two directions at once, and only resolve its location upon arrival.

The wooden benches were still disturbed when she sent rocks across the river, but now instead of splinters and smoke she was rewarded with a hollow thump followed by a burst of dust.

Everything that turned, turned against something else. Every wheel had an axle. Every gear had a mate. The world moved in
pairs
, in
sets
. Nothing spun or rolled or shifted on its own. A human being walking set a foot against the ground to push off again. The attraction and repulsion between the two—twinned forces of gravity and musculature—combined to produce a motion in which all was balanced.

This she’d understood for years. That the same principles should apply to actions taken in the hidden worlds too small, or too large, to be comprehended through normal means, well, that was obvious now that Hethor had shown her the way. The stemwinder was truly only a tool for reaching into those other places where the reflections of the everyday world grew small, and decomposed into their respective parts.

Like taking a lever to a rock.

This was translocation. Or perhaps erasure and re-creation. Which led
her to wonder if the rocks, once moved, were the same rocks they had been before.

The question was meaningless. All aboard
Five Lucky Winds
had moved without becoming different people. Likewise she and Ming, fleeing that mountaintop to these jungles at the waist of the world. If she had been erased and re-created, the copy was sufficiently perfect as to be identical to the original.

This was good enough for her purposes.

The stemwinder still clutched close, she put herself to the greatest test of all. She set the fourth hand to the rhythms of her own body, looked at the collection of spinning, whirling bits that made her up, and visualized herself in the shadowed workroom where she’d first met the young English sage.

What if it did not work?

“Better that I know now,” Paolina said to the uncaring insects and the thoughtless river.

Push
here
; push
there
; leave the centerpoint without stress or undue force applied against it. The concept was not so hard to understand.

Paolina took a deep breath and sent herself forth.

Captain Shen shouted for the boat to cast off. The Englishwoman and her giant servant stood by the rail. The man had only one hand, the left arm ending in a stump covered by a leather brace.

The cataloger was very doubtful of exerting any of his will upon that formidable woman.

The monk scrambled over the aft rail, still dressed as a dockside coolie. She slid close, speaking out of the corner of her mouth around her little jade pipe. “Tread lightly in these waters. We will be watched.”