Pinion (35 page)

“If he had not been present?”

“Someone else would have gone down.” The woman shrugged. “Or the earth would have shaken ever harder until we all fell away like fleas from a flying fox. There was no single moment when the world would have ended as a result of either his presence or his absence.”

Paolina understood the argument, but it bothered her. “Choice must enter into the matter.”

“What is there to choose? We are born into the world; we live a while; we pass on. What matter if one chooses the left path or the right, the red flower or the blue? The world remains the same.”

“If one chose to dam a river, and a great lake grew while the lands below thirsted, that would be a choice that changed the world.”

Arellya smiled. “Remember who I abide with. He is the world’s worst tease for such conundrums. I should answer you thusly: In time the rains will swell the lake so badly that the dam will break. The breaking will destroy the stream for many miles and days, but half a generation later the land will have reclaimed its own, the dam builder will be long drowned, and the world will once more be the same.”

“Would everything have been the same if no one had gone down where Hethor did, and repaired the mainspring of the world?”

“Maybe not.” Her smile broadened to a grin. “But I do not worry about consistency of argument.”

Paolina returned her smile with a laugh. “You would make a terrible priest. They are obsessed with consistency.”

“Why thank you.” Arellya gestured to the fruit staining Paolina’s hand. “Now you should eat, so that your head might be clear. I have the idea that you are traveling a great distance today.”

“I would go around the world,” Paolina said, “to find Boaz. He is the only man I truly trust.”

“Then he is there, waiting for you, somewhere on the measure of the Earth.”

Ming pulled Paolina aside as she returned to the shaded darkness of the house. “Are you going to take us back over the Wall?” he asked in Chinese. Fear darted across his face.

“In one large step,” she replied. “Would you walk instead?”

“I am no . . . , but I fear that.”

She lost his word, but the context was clear enough. “It is a lengthy journey. I can send you home more quickly.”

“Where?
Five Lucky Winds?
I do not know how you would find her.”

“Not the ship. Unless that is your desire. Do you have a wife awaiting you somewhere?”

Ming stared at his feet for a moment, then back at her. “A wife, no. But I have someone. In Oluanpi.”

“Would you like to go to her? I think I can send you.”

The sailor blushed violently and turned away.

What did I say?
Paolina wondered.

The strange sorceress Gashansunu stood with Hethor. They shared the uncomfortable expression of people who would rather be doing something else. Paolina addressed the woman.

“I thank you for the time you spent teaching me. You showed me things I had not understood about the stemwinder. I plan to go now, walk north and pass across the Wall.”

“You will take me with you.” Something in Gashansunu’s voice was different today. Had Hethor altered his spell? “You are not safe for yourself or those around you. Not until you understand the Silent World far better.”

Hethor cleared his throat. “She has the right of it, Miss Barthes. There is much to understand, especially if you will be stepping across the Wall in one go. Not a guide, as you know the way, but surely an advisor.”

Paolina continued. “So I would go. I would send Ming to the true home of his heart as my thanks for his guidance all this time. At Boaz’ side, I would think what to do next. It will not include giving the stemwinder to the English or their lackeys in the secret societies.”

“Do not judge so harshly.” Hethor’s voice was gentle, sad. “Even the worst of villains are generally trying to do right by their own lights. That has been a hard lesson for me. Pause before you take action, accept Gashansunu’s direction on how best to set your feet upon your own path, and you may succeed.”

“I shall.” First she must know
how
, of course.

Once more they stood in sunlight. Paolina was very aware of her
place
—the firmness of the pounded clay beneath her too-worn boots; the heavy, moist air wrapping her like the breath of the river; the heat so strong it seemed to be a physical presence; the tropical brightness of the day that flooded her eyes red even with lids shut tight. Every insect drone, every distant splash, every scent of green and growing and water and muck called out to her.

She held the ragged remains of the angel’s feather in one hand and the stemwinder in the other.

This is where I begin
, Paolina thought.
I have once before gone where I have not been, but I was being called by the angel
.

Opening her eyes, she spoke. “I do not know the place where Ming’s heart dwells. The closest I have seen is a beach on the Sumatran coast.” Then, to him in Chinese, “Would you go back to the island where we first met?”

“No,” he said. “I would go to Oluanpi, or anywhere in Taiwan.”

Paolina looked to Gashansunu. “Is it possible for me to send him someplace I have never been?”

The sorceress glanced at Ming. “Difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. Can you begin by going someplace you have visited before?”

Where she wanted to be was at Boaz’ side, but she had no idea where the Brass man was. Or in truth, if he even still lived. “I could take us to Mogadishu,” she said. “The British and the Chinese were fighting when last I was there. It would not be safe for Ming.”

“We left a boat along the foot of the Wall,” Ming said in Chinese again, having followed her English. “If we must go back to where we have landed together, I can begin from there.”

“Then I could pass on to Africa, and the question of Boaz,” she answered.

“What did he say?” asked Gashansunu.

“We will go to the Northern Earth, to the point along the Wall where Ming and I left our boat when we first journeyed south.”

The sorceress frowned. “How well do you recall that place?”

Paolina considered the question. They had drawn up in a shallow bay, bounded at the west by a great knee of rock that had weathered into crumbling fragments but still loomed high. The east end of the bay had been a mudflat with scattered trees. Some pilings in the water recalled a time when men—or someone, as this
was
the Wall, after all—had made a settlement, but Paolina had seen no other evidence of habitation. The beach was mud and sand. She had helped Ming draw the boat up and conceal it in a thick stand of bushes bearing pale, waxy berries. There they had startled a colony of pale blue butterflies each the size of her hand.

What had the Wall looked like? Impossibly high, a stone border to Heaven, but she could not recall details. Even the particular path they’d set out upon wasn’t coming to mind, though it must not have been especially strange or she would recollect. They’d pushed through the trees a while, until they located a game trail leading up to the top of the crumbling knee.

She vividly remembered the view from up there, looking north toward distant islands dotting the bottle-green waters. The beach had seemed
much prettier from above than up close among the algae stink and the rotting bits of broken crabs.

“I can see it well enough, I think,” Paolina said. “Though I cannot know if our boat is still there for Ming to make use of.” How
had
she come here, when they’d left the dangerous feast at the mountaintop behind? What if an angel stood now on the streets of London, or the mountains of the moon? Could she step from one place to the other so easily?

“We walk the Silent World,” Gashansunu said, “in order to know where we are going. I could return home between one breath and the next, for I know my city and especially the rooms of Westfacing House as well as I know my own hands and feet. So it is with you, if you know the place well.”

“What if I go wrong? Will I be close?”

“The Silent World is larger than the Shadow World. You could go to a place that has no shadow-side, and be forlorn within the quiet darkness.”

Paolina knew where she was going, though. She could recall many places very well. Her little cabin aboard
Star of Guinea
. The cathedral square in Strasbourg. The deck of
Notus
. Praia Nova,
madre deus
; but pity the
doms
if she ever returned to them with her power in hand.

Paolina turned away that thought and the rush of anger that came with it. She wished she knew where Boaz was so she could head straight to him.

It was not that the Brass was made of wisdom. Rather, they had come to understand one another in a quiet way. She wished mightily she had not left him behind at the work camp along the Wall. That was where she would begin her search, once she had seen Ming safely on his way. She could find Ophir from there, if he was no longer among the railroad men and tunnel rats. The Brass would not care about her gleam; their powers were their own, and mysterious besides.

From Ophir, if Boaz was not there on the streets or in those horrid halls of correction from which Paolina had rescued him once before, she would follow her heart.

“I know my course,” she announced. “Ming, we shall take you to the boat. Then I will go where my desires dictate.”

“Then do as we did last night,” Gashansunu said. “Wrap his wrist close by yours. Take your gleam and set it as you did when you stepped into the tree house. Then simply walk to the place of your memories. So long as you know where you are going, you will arrive.”

“If I push backward far enough and hard enough, I will not leave ruins or a shaking earth behind me.”

Gashansunu handed her the braided silver cord. Paolina looped it from
her wrist to Ming’s, then grasped his hand. With her other, she cupped the stemwinder, using thumb and forefinger to adjust the stem until she’d identified the correct resonance.

She remembered a beach, towering clouds, the Wall bigger than any country could encompass, the ocean warm and wide, piers in the water, the plash of little waves, sunlight, warmth, and a small boat pitching up onto the land.

They stepped, pushing off carefully to set the force of the journey harmlessly far away.

He’d thought the chamber of the encampment to be dusty, but in here the dust was an element all its own. It
was
the air, as if the rock had grown just thin enough to pass through without giving up its essential nature. Kitchens covered his mouth with his handkerchief.

His nose told him this was ground-up Wall, but also coal and other things.

Shapes of men and equipment moved by lantern light and electrick glow, looming silhouettes defined by the blurring dust. The noise had not yet died away from his ears, and it seemed to wrap all of those around him with a mailed fist, even in its absence.

The settling, heavy silence was already taking the dust to the floor. The boring machine had ceased its labors, though a chuffing signified continued readiness. Without that dread tip slashing into the fabric of the Wall, the air had a chance to reclaim itself.

“. . . a side tunnel,” Ottweill said, shouting.

His hearing had returned! Kitchens nodded as if he’d understood all along.

“Come down the main passage and I will show you.”

They took a lantern from one of the waiting men—the crew in here wore goggles and masks, Kitchens noted.

Ottweill was right. Another cavern had been opened, and the tracks ran straight across the floor with a branching switch to the left. Lights in the settling dust showed where the borer had stopped in its work to drive a lateral tunnel.

Why?

They stepped along the rails for another hundred feet or so. Ottweill stopped partway along the shaft. “Look here you will,” he said, and directed the lantern’s lens high on the wall.

A series of metal rods protruded just slightly from the stone, sheared
off with the extraction of their surrounding rock. The lantern light swung to the far side of the tunnel, where a matching series was visible.

“This was not seen at first,” Ottweill said. “Until our dig we were forced to discontinue, and backward we looked.”

The doctor seemed as calm and collected as Kitchens had ever known him to be. In England, he had been positively rabid, spitting and howling. Here at the Wall, the project focused his obsession and his energy. Everything Ottweill cared about was concentrated into one point at the face of this tunnel.

They walked another hundred feet. Electrick lights had been strung here on spikes driven into the tunnel wall, but they were dark now. Kitchens glanced backward to see the small, fitful constellation of lanterns by the door where the digging crew and the door guards were taking an unexpected break.

No one had made a move to follow their leader down this tunnel.

He fingered his ragged sleeve, where the razor still lurked.

“Listen now,” Ottweill said, shuttering his lantern.

Kitchens’ ears still rang as if they had been boxed, but he closed his eyes, opened his mouth and tried to take in what sound he could from the surrounds. It took him a moment to realize what the doctor was speaking of. Not so much a sound as a vibration, as from the largest pipe in a cathedral organ. Something the bones knew more than the ears did, that stirred the hair on his neck and arms. Deep, rhythmic, and very fast.