Pinion (57 page)

Their faces were shocked. Their guns wavered. Somebody behind him shouted. Footsteps echoed as they ran.

Only Paolina cried out for him, before shrieking as someone unseen forced her away.

The bullets began again.

::
never will you know
::

Their passage through the streets of Valetta was quieter this time. Almost as if they were invisible. The Maltese simply turned their faces away. Even the British soldiers they passed did not seem to take note of the three of them.

He had to ask the monk. “Are you doing this?”

She shrugged. “No more than you are.”

“Consider from where we emerged,” Childress said. “The
avebianco
clearly have a curious relationship with the society here. They are much more present than I would ever have thought. I suspect the Masks—the other Masks, I should say—walk the streets unnoticed until they choose to draw attention to themselves.”

“That is all I ever do,” the monk told them. “People see not what is before them, but what gathers in their attention.”

They crossed a plaza, passing by whirring flights of pigeons and a fountain smelling of old pipes. The buildings were a bit smaller than the imposing windowed cliffs of limestone and granite lining the waterfront. The monk took another turn, surefooted and swift, that Wang had no notion of. The docks could not be so hard to find.

Soon they approached
Five Lucky Winds
. The crowd watching the submarine had not noticeably dispersed. Wang and Childress were forced to push people aside. The monk simply threaded, as if she were smoke moving through trees. Maltese and British stepped aside, murmuring.

The monk strode the gangplank. Childress followed. Wang trailed behind.

As they reached the deck, al-Wazir leapt forward to sweep the old Englishwoman into a bearish embrace. “We didna know when you’d be returning!”

Leung stepped forward with a sidelong glance at Wang. “Mask, how did you fare?”

“We must go up to discuss this,” she said.

The captain nodded. They climbed the iron ladder inside the tower, Wang trailing behind in the smoky wake of the monk.

Her body was dying.

She knew this the way she knew her own heartbeat. She knew this the way she knew that a bloom of flame and pressure had washed overhead. She knew this the way she knew her place in the city—instinctive, unquestioning,
right
.

That was fitting enough. She had been dead for a while, with the loss of her
wa
and the distancing from everything in her world. The Wall was not just an artifact of the world’s working, it was a barrier that kept the soulless violence of the Northern Earth well away from the verdant, quiet Southern Earth.

People died all the time there, too, but they died of things one could
understand: fevers from the rivers; accidents on the streets of the city; an argument between Houses raised too high, beyond the distance of reason. When they died, their spirits moved to the Silent World and transformed into
wa
, to come back again and again among the hearts and minds of the sorcerers.

Gashansunu had never imagined death to be such an orderly process. Someone called out numbers. Rattles, thumps and sharp reports echoed, as if building were being done with tools of iron and lead. Voices chimed; people groaned. She lay flat on the ground, facing down, and saw nothing but a bit of messy carpet that smelled like death.

The antechamber of disaster, struck down in the middle of all the business of the world.

Her back was numb, and so were her legs. She was far too warm, except where she was far too cold, and the slick heat on much of her body suggested significant exsanguination.

She tried for the Silent World one last time. Though it had been barred to her since the loss of her
wa
, Gashansunu still wished she could go back and spend her ultimate moments in that place.

Much to her surprise, it opened at her will. The noises and the pain faded as she found herself in a quiet hallway that stretched beyond the bounds of vision in both directions. She could see the other souls of
Stolen
’s company around her. Bright knots of wrath burned more distantly.

Her
wa
cried.

YOU ARE HERE
!

HELP
.

She whirled, casting her gaze from point to point, place to place, desperate to see where her poor
wa
had gotten to. That was not apparent to her, so Gashansunu called out again.

Where
?

HERE
.

Something flickered to her left. She rose, defying the impossibility of torn muscle and broken bone, and followed the crying.

KITCHENS

Everything was a disaster. They had attacked Blenheim Palace, seat of the Queen, and failed. He could only pray for a swift death.

Their little band had retreated around another corner. Clothes still smoldered from the hydrogen explosion. That they had been a pair of rooms away saved them, but still two more of the men were dying. So was Boaz, apparently, until he rose to walk into the fire of their opponents.

“Back, back again!” Kitchens shouted to his handful of survivors.

The Brass was distracting the palace defenders, so the intruders dragged themselves and their wounded around another corner. This branch of the corridor had been unharmed by the explosion. It appeared strangely normal, in the way of an English great house shuttered for a season. He spent the briefest moment basking in the scents of furniture oil and carpet dust before focusing on what would happen next.

Kitchens could not imagine how to reach the Queen now. He’d hoped to have some time to move through the halls of Blenheim Palace—it had been virtually empty on his last visit—but the defenders had responded too swiftly and effectively.

Those defenders did not
know
what was wrong, what was at stake; they had not heard the Queen’s wishes. Even if there was not an open battle raging right now, Kitchens could not imagine these men paying any heed to his explanation.

Martins had been right that they should approach well armed. Now they were down to a few shots, nothing more, with no time, no direction, and their lives at an end.

He would not be allowed to walk away from this.

Then Gashansunu stood, her body creaking oddly, dark blood seeping from the gunshot wound to her back.

“What the blazes are you doing?” Kitchens shouted, then realized it did not matter. He turned to Paolina, who was crying.

“It is wrong, it is all wrong,” she told him. “You’ve killed everyone.”

“My
wa
is with the Queen,” Gashansunu moaned, then shuffled down the hall.

Kitchens’ mind blazed. Maybe there was a chance. “Follow her!”

The surviving sailors moved. Paolina grabbed at Kitchens. “We cannot leave Boaz. He will die, be broken for scrap, pulled apart for study, reduced to nothing but metal and dust.”

“Then
help
him,” Kitchens hissed. “Help us all. We are out of men; we are out of weapons; we are out of time. Use your magic machine and buy us some of all.” He shook her loose. “Help us or leave us to die in peace, woman!”

She stared after Kitchens, who chased his ragged band of men as they followed the lurching sorceress.

Her loyalties were clear. She peered around the corner. Could she save Boaz? If she could just get to him, they could step away, all the way back to the Wall. She would not even push off, send the energy elsewhere.
Better to level this part of the palace, let them wonder what had become of her and her Brass lover, teach these English
men
a lesson in manners.

Boaz stood in front of a group of armed defenders, arms wide, just as the Brass Christ had done when strapped to the wheel-and-gear of the Roman horofix. His voice echoed, though she could not make out his words. Whatever he was saying, the British had stopped shooting for a moment.

Almost forty feet of smoldering, bloody carpet, with three scattered bodies between them, separated her from Boaz. She couldn’t cover that distance and manage the stemwinder, not with the threat of weapons firing at any second.

She could pull him to her, as she had once so disastrously done with
Five Lucky Winds
, but they would still be here, too close to ruin, for her to do more.

Five Lucky Winds
. . .

It was a
submarine
. A ship full of men and weapons; and when last seen, al-Wazir, who was Boaz’ great, good friend. She would buy all the time in the world if she called them
here
.

Much worse to have tons of warship dropped on your head than a single undermanned airship.

The sheer audacity of the idea stole her breath. She only had moments, but it might work. And now she knew how to move things without leaving a trail of destruction behind. All she need do was push off with a sufficient countervailing mass.

How many sailors had there been? Dozens? As well as that Captain Leung, and the chief. They would know what to do, how to hold off these defenders, how to save her and Boaz.

Paolina tugged the stem out to the fourth position. The submarine was the largest thing she had ever called, by a vast margin. But she’d done it before, so she could do it now.

A half-step back from the corner to shelter her work. Closed eyes, remembering, remembering. How to push when pulling something so large. Where could she send the energy?

She focused on the Atlantic Ocean below Praia Nova. That was water she had seen every day of her life until she had walked away from her home. The force of calling the submarine would be like a bomb in the sea. Unless the boats were out, it would harm no one. That was an empty place. The only risk was to the
doms
and the men of the village who served them.

Well, that and the risk of doing this at all. Violating once more her oaths to leave off.

No time, no time, no time
, her thoughts screamed.
He must live
!

Regrets were for later, Paolina realized. Ignoring her qualms, she continued to focus. She had the image of
Five Lucky Winds
, she had the place where the energy would go to dissipate the effort of the translation, and she would put the vessel down in the courtyard where the airship still burned.

Paolina turned the knurled stem and called the submarine to her.

The noise was indescribable. A presence, a force, a shattering of air, of ears, of mind. Paolina raced around the corner as seawater burst through the drawing room doors, flooding the hall between knee-deep. Boaz fell into the swirling foam. The men beyond scattered from their position.

He had fallen, but he would not drown. Her love could wait a moment, though it tore at her heart. She needed al-Wazir, Leung, the old librarian. She needed them
now
.

Paolina raced through the destroyed drawing room, splashing amid water that had already receded to her ankles. A great curving metal wall loomed in the garden beyond—the hull of the submarine.

Shouting in Chinese already echoed.

She burst out the empty doorway, screaming for al-Wazir.

The world slipped.

Valetta vanished.

The deck dropped from beneath her feet.

She fell, trying desperately to catch herself on the metal half-wall of the conning tower.

The tumbling stopped, slamming her into the deck again. She, Leung, al-Wazir and the monk were a tangle of bodies as the tower began to lean hard to the starboard. A great, wretched groaning of metal echoed through the hull.

Above her, Childress saw the gable of a
roof
.

Men yelled in Chinese. She heard al-Wazir begin to curse above the rushing of water. Then a girl’s voice shouted the chief’s name.

Paolina
.

The girl had called the submarine with her gleam, again. Only this time they were not cruising a stormy sea.

A man popped up on the gable, stared at them wide-eyed a moment, then retreated. She heard a gunshot.

Leung climbed up, pushing against the two women to peer over the
side of his little cupola. “We are in a garden,” he said in a strange voice. “With the wreck of an airship.”

Childress struggled to her feet. “Paolina.”

The monk was already shinnying down the ladder.

“Below,” Leung ordered.

If she is one of the Eight Immortals
, Childress thought,
now would be an excellent time for her to show her power
.

The librarian scrambled after the captain and the monk.

Firing erupted from the rooftops. This wasn’t a garden; it was a courtyard enclosed on three sides, in the manner of a great mansion. Childress had no idea where they were.

Sailors under the direction of both Leung and al-Wazir were tossing rifles down as the weapons were passed through a hatch. A party already returned fire, keeping the defenders at bay. They had plentiful cover among the chunks of a shattered wooden hull onto which
Five Lucky Winds
had dropped.