Pinion (8 page)

“What would you have me do?”

“Use your powers to banish her from this boat. Or persuade her ashore. Rectify her name so she has no more hold here.”

Wang shook his head. “I cannot simply bid her to be away. You do not need a librarian; you need a priest. Or a spiritual pulmonist.”

“We had hoped,” Wu said. “Captain Shen will not speak to the problem. I believe he fears even saying the words will lend dread power to this haunting.”

The cataloger had briefly met Captain Shen at the helm. The man had been uninterested in anything but the course before him.

“Your captain is a creature of the Kô,” Wang told the mate. “Freedom of thought is not so well rewarded in his service.”

“We are all bound to him,” Wu replied. “Like peasants in their field, we are sworn to
Fortunate Conjunction
, and through the boat to the Kô.”

“Can you not take another ship should the mood strike you? Form a new crew?”

Wu’s grin was terrible, a tight band of gleaming regret. “Not in this life, or the next. Someday we will sail with the Kô into Hell itself.” He turned up a pale blue sleeve to show Wang a brand scarred onto the underside of his right forearm.
Chiang jian
, the mark of a rapist. “We are every one of us sentenced to death. That we even breathe today is only at his intercession. That we live to breathe tomorrow is only at his mercy.”

“You are all dead men,” Wang said, horrified.

The mate leaned close, eyes blazing. “We fear those we have sent to the next world to open the way before us.”

Wang sat in the prow all day, the Andaman Sea splitting before the knife edge of
Fortunate Conjunction
’s keel. He contemplated the matter of the missing monk. Wu was convinced she had been a ghost, but then the mate himself was little different—a man in the world past the ordained time of his death. This was not
orderly
. Heaven, the Middle Kingdom and Hell all had their own arrangements, each reflecting the methods of the other like three mirrors in a great temple hall.

One could believe in the hierarchies of the other world without crediting superstitious hauntings. He’d spoken to the monk, watched her smoke a pipe, smelled the pungency of her herbs, heard the flap of her robes in the wind. She was no more a ghost than he. Or in truth, Wu.

Yet Wang and the mate had searched the boat stem to stern. Unless the monk had been very swift and stealthy, she could not have remained undetected.

Except for the obvious, of course. She was hiding in the Kô’s cabin. It was the only place they had not searched.

Wang headed below to check the seals on the cabin door. He knew perfectly well how easy it was to forge such a thing. Ribbons were cheap, wax and lead easily worked. A clever man could cut a seal open from the back, with the slit of a knife tip or a quick slip of a razor.

Or a clever woman.

But how had she locked herself in?

With the aid of one of the crew, of course. Those silent, surly men kept secrets the way a cave kept darkness. Someone had slipped the monk in and out of the cabin.

Alone in the small companionway, Wang bent to examine the seal—a large blob of red wax with the impression of a dragon biting its tail, bound to the hatch handle by a twisting wire. He reached behind to explore.

A loop, clipped to a hook. The wire wasn’t even joined at the back.

Wu glanced at the ladderway. Sunlight streamed in, but no shadow lurked close by. The other end of the short passage was a storage locker.

He slipped the seal free and pulled open the door.

The room was startling in its simplicity, much unlike the elaborate chambers of the Forbidden City, or even the Kô’s quarters back on Chersonesus Aurea. A low, flat bed of black wood with pale
die
—tight-woven straw—for a
mattress. Walls lacquered imperial red. A porthole rimmed in brass. A table to match the bed, empty now but clearly intended to host an altar. The smell of old incense, polishing oils, and the musk of damp straw from the
die
.

For the sake of thoroughness, Wang tugged open the closet door. Nothing but dust within, not even spare robes. He bent to look beneath the bed. Only someone folded paper-thin would have hidden there.

Why was the seal broken?
Nothing was here to hide.

Wang backed out, frustrated. Where could the monk be? When he straightened from jiggering the seal back into place, he saw Wu staring from the ladderway. The mate just nodded once, then turned away.

A ghost, indeed. At least as ghostly as the rest of this strange crew.

Fortunate Conjunction
reached a set of islands just as the day was failing. These were the most unusual formations Wang had ever seen, jutting like limestone thumbs. They resembled the most fanciful scrolls of Guilin. The lower edges overhung the water, as if their bases were being stolen away by the sea.

A rambling building covered the top of the nearest island. Wang realized it was a palace—wings and towers and jutting balconies,
shi
after
shi
of stonework and bamboo stretching farther than the largest Gan River rice farms of his youth in Chiang Hsi Province.

Not a building, a city.

Lights flickered within hundreds of windows. Gongs rang the watches of the evening. But no banners flew, no sigils depended. This fortress ruled itself, answered to no court or emperor, solitary above the porcelain-blue waters of the ocean.

“We are at Phu Ket?” he asked quietly of no one in particular.

One of the sailors glanced up at him, then answered in a thick Annamese accent. “Phu Ket lies east.”

He turned that way. Land loomed on the horizon. “But that was my destination.”

“Phu Ket is the port of entry, not the destination,” said Wu, behind him. “Very few come straight to Phi Phi Leh. Most who do never return.” The mate glanced into the waters of the night-darkening sea.

Wang followed his line of sight. Something ominous lay on the pale sand. A ship, the cataloger realized. His eyes roamed across other shadows, reefs of broken hulls and dead men. Captain Shen still stood at the wheel, eyes riveted on the fortress looming in the sky above.

“I am to row you to the dock,” Wu added.

“Of course.” Wang followed the mate to the rail, where a dinghy waited, a sailor already at the oars.

Wu climbed down the rope ladder. Wang followed. Another sailor tossed a bundle after them that nearly bounced into the ocean. Wang’s meager belongings. A second bundle followed; then they pushed off.

Wu sat in the stern of the tiny boat, Wang in the bow. The other sailor rowed amidships, his back to Wang. No one spoke as they pulled across the waters. Dusk vanished in a blaze of stars before they reached a tiny dock at the foot of the overhanging cliffs.

The cataloger stepped cautiously from the dinghy to the ladder, then up to the dock. The sailor shipped the oars and followed Wang. Wu tossed up one bundle, then the other, which the sailor caught. He turned, looked at Wu, and winked.

The monk
.

Of course, Wang thought, struck with amazement. Where else to hide but among the crew?

“Good luck,” Wu said, then rowed away as if the woman had never existed.

She shucked out of her roughspun uniform. Wang turned away, embarrassed, once he realized what he was seeing. Moments later, she tapped him on the shoulder. The saffron robes were back, taken from the second bundle.

“I believe you are expected,” the monk told him.

“Above?” Wang peered up at the rickety wooden stairs affixed to the side of the island cliffs. Hundreds of steps. Impossibly high. They made his head ache.

“The journey of a thousand steps begins with a single climb.”

Wang couldn’t think of a suitable response, so he picked up his bundle and began the endless trudge.

Amberson, another of the special clerks, met Kitchens on his return to Paddington Station that evening. Quiet sympathy rode in the other man’s eyes.

The two of them exchanged no words as they boarded a private carriage for the trip back to the Ripley Building. The enclosure reeked of someone else’s cologne, and the smell of polished boots. Amberson handed Kitchens a blue leather folder. Most confidential, Crown privilege.

Kitchens ignored the rush of London outside the glass of his conveyance as he slit the pair of black ribbons binding shut the folder and looked within.

The typed note was unsigned. Kitchens didn’t recognize the face from
any particular typing machine. He didn’t need to. The hand of Lloyd George touched everything he’d seen and felt this day.

You now understand the deepest secrets of the Empire. She has spoken. Go to Africa and find al-Wazir. Make the future ours.

Nothing more. No instructions, no vouchers, no orders. No plan. Kitchens had always been trained to work within a plan.

Worse, he had never before left England’s shores. Rarely ventured beyond London, in truth. Africa! A mix of thrill and terror surged within him, and he ruthlessly suppressed it.

Turning to face his colleague, the clerk asked, “Were you briefed on any details? This is remarkably laconic.”

Amberson frowned. “Not such as you’d find useful. HIMS
Notus
awaits you at the Dover towers.”

“Notus?”
Kitchens stared at Amberson. “I thought her captain and crew were being debriefed.” He paused. “At length.”

That was a polite way of saying that Captain Sayeed of HIMS
Notus
had been in a special interrogation unit at Pentonville prison these past weeks, his men held in isolation at Gosport’s brigs. All for their involvement with Ottweill, and the girl-wizard from the Wall.

“
Notus
.” Amberson looked haunted. “She’s to be used, and her captain and crew. You’ll have warrants for their necks, Kitchens. Admiral’s Mast has been held in secret. There’ll never be a question asked if they don’t come back.”

Kitchens shivered despite himself. “And if I fail to return?”

“You will return.”

“Of course.” He still had the Queen’s soggy gift concealed close about his person, untouched so far out of a mix of awe and fear. Her Imperial Majesty taking an interest in him personally had not been anything like he might have hoped. “I am ready whenever Admiralty wishes me to depart.”

“The crew will be in place within two days.” Amberson drew a deep breath. “Your funds and the supporting papers can be drawn tomorrow. There is one other order, given to me verbally.”

“That order would be?” Kitchens asked carefully.

“You are to communicate with no one, speak no words, write no letters, save to me. Not until
Notus
departs with you safely aboard.” He looked very uncomfortable. “I have been advised to place you in a quiet room in the cellars of the Ripley Building. This was not an order itself, merely a suggestion.”

Kitchens could see the clutch of the Queen’s dead hand in this matter. “Where does the Prime Minister stand in all this?”

“As far away as possible,” Amberson replied, staring out the rippled glass of the carriage’s window.

By the time the two of them passed down out of the heights of the world and over a broadening coast that could not in truth be too far south of Mogadishu, weeks had passed. They had ridden with caravans twice, stopped for a brief while in a city made entirely of glass and silk, and once slept in a field of nodding purple flowers tall as a ship mast that gave Paolina strange dreams of teeth for days after.

Now she stood above a rising stretch of hills, backed by jungle and, farther west, a mountain that rose up almost to her current level of the Wall. Africa lay once more beneath her feet. The distant mountain spilled away from
a Murado
as if part of the fabric of Creation had rent. She’d never seen such a thing.

Her conviction that they had passed onward in the direction intended by the angel atop the Wall was beginning to flag. She’d run so hard, but she was starting to realize she did not understand her destination. “Where do we go now?” she asked Ming.

The Chinese had taken advantage of the halt to scout for mushrooms in the damp shadows of the boulder field that dropped away to their immediate left. He looked up from behind a lichenous rock. “Down, ah?”

“But where? We were supposed to meet someone.”

“Long time back.” He shrugged, his face suddenly expressive. “Long time forward. Who to say?”

She answered him in Chinese. “Time to walk some more.”

Paolina intended to set her course for the top of the curious mountain, the point where its slope met the vastness of the wall. Surely some agency watched the Southern Earth from that vantage point.

As they walked she continued to puzzle over what she saw and what it meant for the making of the world. In cross-section
a Murado
was much wider at the base than at the top. Otherwise they would have climbed up and down like flies on a brick course. Each little ledge, each boulder field and waterfall and forest and narrow clinging city added to the extent of the Wall’s base until eventually it merged into the land and sea below.

It had also become clear to Paolina, walking at such great heights, that the Wall was in some fundamental sense an insult to the shape of the
Earth. Though it was right and natural that the world be divided into Northern and Southern halves—clearly that was God’s design—why did the African coast on each side seem to line up? As if the Wall had been set down atop the shape of the land. Likewise the oceans were aligned on each side.