Pinion (49 page)

Something exploded onshore, roofing tiles and timber fragments spinning into the air.

“That is our invitation to depart,” Childress said.

“A magazine explosion. Bad business.” Leung called down, “Deck party fall in. Salute our hosts.” He lifted the speaking tube and asked for quarter power, then began directing the pilot out of the harbor.

Once on the open water, Leung ordered the crew below and the vessel secured to submerge. He and Childress and the pilot remained above, watching the sky for airships and the waters abaft for pursuit. Ships were setting out from Port Said in numbers, but thus far HIMS
Inerrancy
did not seem to be among them.

“I am concerned about those gunboats,” Leung told her. “They move considerably faster than we can sail.”

“This I would not know.”

“It is your ship.” Something mild but dangerous hovered in his voice.

Though it pained her to argue with this man who’d grown so into her heart, Childress knew she must face the problem squarely. Still a part of her held back. “No, Captain, this is your ship. I am at best a kind of admiral, saying what must be done. But when we are face-to-face with the enemies of your people, I will do anything I can to keep us all alive. Including seeming to throw you over as just another crewman.” She paused to let her words sink in, thinking,
I am still a woman and you are still a man
. “Would you prefer that I yield authority in all things? Even in the face of an angry British officer?”

“This was not rightly done.”

“No,” she agreed. “But we have prevailed.”

“There are new difficulties,” Leung said, retreating from his stubbornness. “My chart of this sea is very limited, for reference only. A rational man could not navigate a vessel by its use.”

“Malta is north of west of here. The Mediterranean is not overfull of reefs and sudden rocks. Avoid islands and the shore.”

“You truly know nothing of naval navigation, do you, Mask?”

“No, I do not.”

“Neither do I,” said the monk from behind them.

The unflappable Leung started. Childress just shook her head.

“Who are you—?” the captain began, but Childress cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Welcome back. Your talents amaze me.”

The monk grinned broadly. “Then be amazed.” She reached into her robes and pulled out a very large sheaf of paper. “I trust you can read British.”

Childress took the bundle. It was a set of charts, hastily folded and somewhat crumpled. “Captain, I believe we have our answer.”

“Not all the answers we need.” His voice was hard. “Your machinations are troublesome enough, Mask, for all that I have encouraged them and understand them. But this . . . woman . . . is aboard my vessel without my leave or knowledge. I would know who and what she is. And why.”

The monk fished out a little leather sack and began tamping a jade pipe. Her eyes twinkled as she kept her gaze on the captain. “You, sir, are speaking to the miracle worker who drew British attention from your hull back in Port Said. I freed the huge man while I was about my business. If that is not ample evidence that our interests converge, then you are a greater fool than even the man who breaks his oaths and flees his nation in time of conflict, taking with him a valuable war machine.”

“Please,” Childress said. “I know a little of this woman.”

“That you know
any
of this woman only proves my point about command authority,” Leung snapped, finally losing his temper. He shouted into the speaking tube. “Bai! Dog all hatches tight. No one crosses into or out of the hull until I call down again.”

A long, awkward moment passed. “Rumor will fill my ship from stem to stern before the hour has turned,” Leung said quietly. Anger had already receded like a tide. “Discipline has long since been compromised, but the notion that I have lost all control of who comes and goes aboard
Five Lucky Winds
will be more damaging.”

The monk was blatantly unrepentant. “It is time for a new order in the
world,” she announced cheerfully. “Surely the deck of one rogue submarine is not so bad a place to start.”

“What
are
you doing here?”

She stabbed the smoldering pipe toward Childress. “Following her.”

“You are a white bird?”

“Not in the least.”

“A member of the Silent Order, then?”

Another insouciant grin. “They seem to think so.”

Leung would not release the point. “Then whom do you serve?”

“The interests of the world.” She took a long drag. “In the person of a quarrelsome old man of poor digestion who answers to the name of the Jade Abbot.”

“Who?” Childress asked simultaneously with Leung.

He could not squat on his heels next to the girl Paolina. His entire body was too tired, aching in every joint. Sitting on the deck as she was doing seemed simply undignified. There were no other options, though.

“Mister Levine,” he called down to the main deck. “Find the galley and see who can manage a Chinese stove. We will need to eat soon, all of us.”

“Mess it is, sir,” the old sailor replied.

Something more for them to do, at the least.

Kitchens turned back to Paolina. “What would you of me, then, Miss Barthes?”

“Where are we bound?”

“England,” he said. “To be specific, a place called Blenheim Palace.”

She closed her eyes and sighed a moment. “What is at Blenheim Palace?”

“The Queen herself.”

“I presume she lies in state.” Paolina opened her eyes again. “Or some mischance is at stake to draw you there.”

“A great mischance that has paralyzed Government, or drawn it into the hands of unscrupulous men. I cannot say which.”

“We abandon all to flee into the angry heart of the Empire pursuing this mischance.”

Kitchens sighed. He couldn’t recall where his worthless writs had gotten too, in the attaché saved at the last moment from
Notus
. Three airships and a descent into Ottweill’s private hell had left him with too little accounting even in his own memory. With the writs, or perhaps
Notus
herself, was lost his little set of words from the Queen, along with whatever testimony Captain Sayeed had tucked away in that forgotten envelope.

“She told me a thing,” he said softly. “When I saw her, just before I
came to the Wall. She said, ‘Remake what has been undone. Break my throne. Help me finish dying.’ ”

“So does she now lie in state?” Paolina sounded almost sleepy, but Kitchens knew to be very wary of this girl.

“No, but she should. She floats in a tank of bodily fluid, a bloody oracle for the Empire. Lloyd George has struck me as too decent for such a blasphemy, but whoever has managed this has arranged the Empire to his convenience. Too much goes unquestioned. Her Imperial Majesty wants her country back, and herself to go on past the end of life’s journey.”

Paolina’s eyes fastened on him. Glittering, hard, filled with careful thought. “If we strike down this queen, we shall be regicides. The most hated people in Europe. I have already been hounded from the heart of your empire. This price I will pay again for Boaz’ sake, and Ming’s, and alWazir’s, and that of all these silly, foolish sailors on these very decks. But how do you know our actions will not simply worsen affairs?”

Again, Kitchens chose his words with care. “Prince Edward is no fool. He was never meant by God to be a governing sort of man. But neither does he stand in the sway of his mother’s counselors. Whoever has made this scheme at Blenheim, they have almost certainly cut him out. Keeping Her Imperial Majesty alive at any cost argues they do not want the heir upon the throne.”

The fierceness faded from her eyes. “You did not answer my question, Mr. Kitchens.”

“If I could speak with him, I would, but the Prince of Wales has been a man of his own circle, far away from Admiralty and Whitehall. He prefers the smart set to serious gentlemen who study trade and industry and the affairs of distant nations.”

“Then perhaps he does not so much favor war,” Paolina said.

“He does not so much favor war, and neither does he hold close the advice from those who do. If we can pursue the Queen’s will and somehow alert him to the matter, well, that will be enough to open this rotten business up. Not even the hardest elements in Parliament will pursue open war with China in the shadow of Her Imperial Majesty’s death.”

“Will our deaths even be counted?” she asked.

“Will you not just walk free, as only you can do?”

She could not walk free, not now. Anymore than she could just walk to Kitchens’ queen, in a place she did not know among people she had never met and could not follow.

They stared at one another a while, like two cats contesting a doorstep before dawn. No claws came out, though, and eventually he turned away, feeling vaguely foolish.

The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.          —
Matthew 12:42

Eventually he was able to rest. Paolina slept next to him, curled on a length of rubberized fabric meant for patching the hydrogen cells. Her breathing was deep and regular, with a faint, periodic whistle that Boaz found most endearing.

::
thy breasts are as does at the spring, dipping their brown muzzles daintily to suck at the water
::

Boaz did not even know what to say to that, but the Paolina–al-Wazir voice chuckled inside him. Or at least the al-Wazir voice did.

::
clad in light with a sword of winds, the angel overflew the sleeping camp as secretly as a falling star
::

Right now, England was not his problem. His problem was shutting down far enough to allow his mechanisms to self-maintain, his lubrication stores to reinfuse his joints and relays, and his memories to settle into long-term storage. Boaz shifted a little closer to Paolina.

As for the Sixth Seal, and the voices in his head . . .

You’re fine, laddie. We’re not voices. We’re just you, talking to yourself
.

But I never talked to myself before now
.

You never had a heart before, John Brass
.

He finally settled into the torpor of self-repair, one hand touching his hollow, clockwork chest, the other resting on Paolina’s hip.

The next day, hills of tortured brown stone rolled by beneath the keel. Kitchens and Petty Officer Martins met with Boaz on the poop. The Brass had the helm a while.

“We got the old girl running properly,” Martins said. “She’s a strange
one, being Chinee and all, but a gasbag is still a gasbag. An engine is still an engine.”

::
a man can pluck up the sword of his enemy, an he know the blade from the guard
::

A thought occurred to Boaz: Not all swords were created equal, nor were all sword arms. “I believe that we are still concerned with reaching England undetected.”

“Yes,” replied Martins, “and with this monstrous gasbag every jack-anapes with a spare eye will spot us long before. We’d best set down in Algeria or Portugal and make our way by boat from there.”

“That will take too long,” Kitchens said. “We should keep to the air while we may.”

Boaz spoke again. “Then I have a proposal.”

All eyes were upon him.

“We will rise to an altitude as high as possible without endangering lives aboard.”

The petty officer shook his head. “You’ll have men passing out. Ain’t no one going to do their work right, you get very high up there. Not enough air in the air up there.”

::
a flame may be borne from the lowest cave to the highest mountain, but withal it will still be a flame
::

“The ship runs now,” Boaz said. “We’ll push upward until either the men or the engines bid us go no higher, and I shall pilot her alone.”

They still stared.

“I do not breathe,” he explained patiently. “Thin air is merely thin air to me. So long as the engines fire and the crew can rest peacefully. Up so high in the sky we will be merely a speck to men on the ground, and possibly escape even the observation of aerial pickets.”