Pinion (30 page)

“Thank you,” Wang said. “I should never have thought of that.”

“You push back instead of bending away.” She sounded delighted. “You are transforming from bamboo into a tiger, my friend. Bamboo merely survives. Tigers rule.”

“I rule nothing, except the inside of a library that I will almost certainly never see again.”

The Kô’s yacht steamed slowly out of Panjim’s harbor. Wang called up to Shen, “Set a course to the north.”

The Englishwoman turned at that and added, “Stay close to the coast.”

By all the demons of Hell, he had forgotten she spoke Chinese. “What am I to do with the Mask?”

“Take lessons?” the monk asked impishly.

Wang slapped his right hand against his left palm and made to answer, but once more she was gone, leaving him with only his irritation and a cloud of foul-smelling smoke.

He stepped forward to greet his guests.

“Cataloger Wang,” Childress said in English, “this is my man Angus.” She added in Chinese, “He does not speak your language, and so will be very suspicious at all times. This is his duty. Do not be alarmed.”

“Welcome aboard
Good Change
, madam.” In English. Wang bowed. “As well to you, Angus.” He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar name.

She nodded. “My thanks. We nearly experienced an unfortunate situation just now in Panjim.”

“The world is in an unfortunate situation. Our empires seem to have found themselves at war.”

“Ain’t no finding to it,” al-Wazir rumbled. “Your lot brought the fight to us in East Africa.”

Wang realized the servant was far larger than anyone else on the boat. Childress might seize
Good Change
on the strength of this man alone.

“I should not pretend to know how the war came about,” Wang said carefully. “Only that we seek to avoid making it worse.”

“By flying a false flag?” Childress’ tone was gentle, even curious. “Here you are sailing under a British ensign and speaking much better English than you pretended when you received me back at Chersonesus Aurea.”

“You were a woman.” Wang realized as soon as the words left his mouth that he had stated himself poorly.

“I still
am
a woman.”

He had already lost what little face he had. Directness in the European manner was all that remained. “You are a woman who overmastered a submarine of the Beiyang Navy, then unleashed a terrible fate upon an entire fleet of the Nanyang Navy to the death of thousands. You are no longer simply a woman, you are a power to be reckoned with.”

Her expression grew very pained. These British were weak, their lies written in the set of their eyes and the flush of their cheeks. “It may all be true, Cataloger Wang, though certainly not so simple as you seem to believe. Yet I am still a Mask of the
avebianco
. I am a power to be reckoned with, even here among your men.” She leaned close. “If you truly believe I suborned
Five Lucky Winds
, why do you risk me aboard your vessel now?”

“Because he is a fool,” said the monk, now in her saffron robes.

Wang was quite surprised she spoke English. Angus was quite surprised
at her appearance next to the Mask. His remaining fist clenched as his face flushed.

Only Childress did not seem to notice anything unusual. She turned to the monk and said with exaggerated politeness, “All men are born fools. A lucky few are unmade.”

“Ah.” The monk scooped another bowl of smoking herbs from her pouch. “But I am no man, any more than you are, Mask.”

The words burst out of Wang without him even realizing they were coming. “Why did they bother to send me here if you can do everything and speak all tongues!”

Instead of answering, she struck a match against the deck, lit her pipe, then flipped the smoldering stick overboard. “That should be simple enough to understand.” Smoke streamed from the monk’s nostrils. “Even you must know by now how few people can see me. Being invisible is difficult. One is never served in roadside inns; rude fellows on ox-carts are always running one down; none grant me the respect of my station and calling.”

“You are hardly invisible to me,” Childress told the monk. Her man Angus reached out and fingered a trailing edge of the monk’s robe, as if testing it.

“You are a Mask. Less is hidden from you with each moment that passes. Someday you will be able to see into the heart of the world without hindrance.” She laughed. “Should you be lucky enough to live so long.”

“You’re a clown,” Angus said in that thick, slow voice. “A mountebank. Some Chinee thief set here by this man Wang to confuse us until we make a mistake we cannot undo.”

“I believe you passed that point long ago, devil man.” The monk tapped out her pipe. “Would you spar with me, that I might prove how real I am?”

“Nae, I’ll not hit such as a one as you.”

“Religious? I can be a sailor. Female? I can appear as a man. Chinese? Well, some things sustain no further perfection.”

Wang was glad to see the monk talking someone else in circles for a change, instead of harassing him.

“No matter,” Angus said, his voice trailing off. He looked helplessly to the Mask Childress.

She gave Wang a long slow stare, then briefly returned her attention to the monk, who now shifted from foot to foot as if she intended to dance. “I believe we have learned enough. I’ll thank you to put us both over the side in our boat now.”

“I cannot do that,” Wang said, while the monk replied, “Certainly!”

A rough fellow sidled up to him during the slow walk down the tunnel. Kitchens noted the shifty cast of his eyes, the scar on his neck, the edges of some sailor’s tattoo swirling above the grubby, frayed line of his collar.

“Lizer Williams,” the man mumbled. “Been to Singapore three times, once were a snake agent on the Indian Ocean station.”

“Bernard Kitchens, of London, special clerk to the Admiralty. Never left England before this voyage.”

“I know you dark clerks.” Lizer’s voice did not improve with further conversation. “Me daddy was on the old Singapore runs out of Calcutta, when the cotton trade was good, afore the Chinee took Admiral Wellesley in the Battle of the Straits. I seen the city oncet as a boy, oncet as a young man on a spice trader, and last afore I shipped back to England.”

“You worked with Admiralty?” Kitchens strained to keep the distaste from his voice.

“Not as such, no . . .” Lizer dissolved into incoherence for a moment before finding his voice again. “There’s them snakes off the Wall, you knows. Come down mostly among the Chinee, but they gots their people in our patch too.”

“Snakes?” He had all but dismissed this man as mad already. Yet in the shadow of the Wall, madness seemed to be not only expected but perhaps requisite.

“What come from the high temples and slide through the world. Like how you can’t see a snake in a field until after too late?”

“Hmm.” Though he suspected he would soon regret asking the question, Kitchens had to try. “In that case, what is a ‘snake agent’?”

“One like yourself, begging your pardon, guv. What walks through the fields unseen until your teeth is planted in a man’s leg and he’s got no time left to live.”

The fascinating conversation was interrupted by a sentry challenge from just ahead. Kitchens was pulled away from Lizer Williams by the fellow who’d brought him through the iron wall at the entrance.

“Don’t you be listening to old Lizer,” the man said. “He’s cracked as a chocolate teapot. Good enough tamper, God knows, and that’s a rare breed what still has all their fingers about them, but too many blasts done bled out what’s left of his wits long since.” After a pause for breath: “You sure and certain you wants to be down here, airship man?”

Kitchens steeled his reserve. “If the good Dr. Ottweill cannot come to me, then perforce I must come to the doctor.”

He was led last through another metal barrier. Beyond was noise. The grinding screech of the boring machine invaded Kitchens’ thoughts with
the inevitability of a terminal disease. The sound seemed to shape his eyes, so he peered as if through water.

This space was much wider than the tunnel, and lit like the waiting rooms of Judgment Day. Spitting candles, oil lamps, electricks glowing in a few places, powered by some distant generator—together, all shed a fitful, moody light.

The ceiling rose higher than Kitchens could see, the narrowing angle of the walls disappearing into shadow. Closer to the floor it had been widened into something resembling a London tube station, including even the pillars. An ordinary steam locomotive sat cold on a siding—a 2–2 switcher from Boulton & Watt. A number of railroad wagons were scattered about in short trains, flatbeds as well as a few pieces of more complex trackage equipment.

All else was supplies and men. If Hieronymus Bosch had painted warehouses, he might have rendered this scene. Supplies were stacked between the railroad wagons—great piles of sleepers and rails, acres of canvas salvaged from the tent city that should have stood outside in the encampment, glistening water barrels ranging from kegs to gigantic tuns that had to come down the rails on wheels of their own, piles of scrap iron, coal, spikes, tools.

And men everywhere. Peering from tents. Sitting on little dosses. Tangled in blankets underneath hulking iron machines. In folded sheaths of canvas affixed to the rising walls. On rough ledges higher above. Perched atop the railroad wagons.

Here the damned awaited a special ironbound eternity, digging their way into a great, endless hole.

The noise punctuated it all, defined the space, hollowed out the ears and minds of men. Kitchens wondered how many of these navvies were already deaf. Those not yet ear-blind would become so far too soon.

He looked back at the barrier. Weapons were stacked and racked there—carbines, rifles, pistols, grenadoes, sharpened iron bars, caltrops—awaiting some attack down the tunnel or an alert to rush to the surface and defend yet again. The fighting must have been awful, Kitchens realized, to make living in this howling, dark den preferable to defending their camp above.

What did they eat?
How was the water brought down? Ottweill’s men surely were forced to sally constantly. Calculating the cost of a meal in lives lost would render any band of brothers grim as Papist saints.

The guide cupped his hands and shouted in Kitchens’ ear. “You will wait for the doctor in his office.”

That turned out to be a shack atop a flatbed railroad wagon. The space
around overflowed with papers sticking out of boxes, dropping from shelves, in loose shoals. Two boys sat idle among the pale drifts, but hopped to attention and a feigned busyness at the approach of Kitchens and his escort.

The man stabbed a finger at the shack. Kitchens nodded, climbed up onto the flatcar, and tugged open the door.

Within was blessedly cool and relatively quiet. The windows had been boarded up, the walls lined with sheaves of paper nailed into place. It cut down the noise, Kitchens realized, making this a place where a man might sit and think with some profit, as opposed to merely having his head constantly ringing like a struck bell.

The most prominent feature of the office was a blackboard on which two tallies were kept. One listed the progress of the tunneling project, indicating that they had penetrated 3,861 yards in the seventy-four days since digging began. The other tally showed what Kitchens quickly realized must be a list of the dead.

He studied it. The hand was obviously Ottweill’s: precise, Germanic, clean as if it had flowed from a printer’s plate.

My men: 142
Other men of the Queen: 97

Brass: 38
Angels:
29
Evil men: 702

Beneath that:

We are losing.

“There stands a tragedy in one act,” Kitchens breathed, “by its presents to be known to all men.”

He laid down his attaché case, pulled up one of the hard, wooden chairs in the office and sat down to wait for the return of the master of this unlikely, self-made hell. There was much in the way of files and notes with which an enterprising clerk of an investigative frame of mind might busy himself.