Heart and Soul (2 page)

His look was so like their father’s that she bowed deeply and whispered, “I do not mean to take over your—”

“No,” Wen said, and shook his head. “No, of course not. But let’s not play games, Younger Sister. Not with each other. We both know that the opium interferes with flying the boats. It interferes with all magic. I would not risk my people.” He turned abruptly toward a table that was set at the foot of his bed. Bed and table both were gilded, and inlaid heavily with semi-precious stones. They were very old and had come—centuries ago—from their ancestors’ palace. Now they stood in uneasy contrast with the rest of the furniture, which ranged from heavy, foreign, mahogany furniture scavenged from carpetships to improvised pieces put together from flotsam and tatters.

The boxes, like the table, were made of fragrant woods and covered in gold leaf and jewels. Jade had seen them open before, when her father had searched for something. So she knew what they contained—papers and jewels, most of them magical and bequeathed to them by long-lost generations. Wen rummaged through the boxes as if he knew what he was looking for, and Jade held her tongue while he did so.

“Ah,” he said at last. He held aloft a heavy signet ring, with a bright red stone, upon which were chiseled the characters for Power and Following. Jade, who’d never seen that ring, blinked at Wen.

“Father showed me all these boxes before he died,” Wen said. “And he told me what each jewel and paper did—magically, as well as symbolically. This ring was worn by our father when his own father was incapable of ruling the Dragon Boats, in his final years of life. So our father wore the ring, and with it could command the Dragon Boats with the magic of the emperor and keep the magic of the emperor active so people could keep flying the Dragon Boats—even if the emperor himself was too weak to do it. He could also command all of the Imperial power. And it’s magical, so it will stay on through the change into dragon and back again.”

“But…” Red Jade said, stricken. “I am only a woman. And my mother—”

“Was a foreign devil, yes,” Wen said, with unaccustomed dryness. “But, Jade, you’ve been doing half of Father’s work for years—everything that didn’t require Imperial magic. And now…” He shrugged. “I can be the emperor, or I can dream.” He gestured toward his opium pipe on the small, rickety pine table near the gilded bed. “I’d prefer to dream.”

Their eyes met for a moment. Jade had never truly discussed his addiction with him, because Wen would get defensive and change the subject. So he’d never before admitted the power his dreams held over him, and never so bluntly confessed that he cared for nothing else.

What did he mean to do? Did he mean to leave her in charge of the Dragon Boats while he ignored them? Did he think that the Dragon Boats would accept the rulings of a woman, and a woman with foreign blood in her veins at that?

Zhang would take over. Zhang would…She felt her throat close. She couldn’t tell her brother the disgust she felt for his second-in-command—once their father’s second-in-command. Though he was of an old dragon dynasty, and powerful in magic and might, she didn’t trust him. And she did not wish to be his wife.

But Wen was reclining upon his cushions and looked at her, mildly surprised, as though she had stayed much longer than he expected. He waved his hand. “Go, Sister. I am tired. I’ve had too much reality.”

Jade bowed and walked backward—as she’d once done in their father’s presence—till she was at the doors. These she opened, without turning around, and left, still bowing—making sure that everyone saw her bow, so they knew she respected her brother and valued his authority.

While the guards at the entrance of her brother’s chambers closed the doors, she turned and walked away, linking her hands together as she did so. Her right hand covered her left, and she felt the red jewel on her finger. It felt cold and hard and powerful. The jewel with the power to make the boats fly.

But the jewel only worked if the emperor had power. Had Wen’s opium dreams grounded the boats forever?

THE STRANGE DESTINY OF ENOCH JONES

Nigel Oldhall walked along the carpetship port’s
narrow cobblestoned passageways, between the deeper indentations of the carpetship docks. Above those square indentations, the carpets floated, just inches off the ground, tethered with strong ropes. And above the carpets, buildings of various sizes and shapes—the carpetships themselves—rose.

Nigel counted the various exotic flags—Turkish and Armenian, Russian and French. And he hoped he looked the part of a carpetship magician who’d been doing this for a very long time, and had no other expectations in life.

He was a tall, spare man with such perfectly chiseled features that he might have posed for one of the portraits of the angel with a sword depicted in the old stained-glass windows scattered throughout Europe during the early Middle Ages, the one who was supposed to guard the faithful against invading armies. Except that his features were just a little too spare, a little too strong, to truly look unmanly. As it was, he merely looked refined—an appearance that betrayed his noble origins.

Anywhere else but in a carpetship port, someone would have noted the contrast between his features and his well-worn suit; his heavy, almost military boots and the scarred travel bag on his shoulder. But here, he merely looked like a carpetship magician—that strange breed of men who went from port to port and from ship to ship, rarely lingering more than a few days in one place. More often than not, they were renegade noblemen, fugitives from justice or other such shady characters.

Nigel felt shady enough to fit the part. The gleaming pale hair he’d once worn tight-clipped to his head had been allowed to grow unkempt, so that he looked as though he’d fallen on hard times. His once-pale skin now sported the reddish tan of someone who lived too much in the sun and wind. His clothes—which once had been carefully tailored and made of the best fabrics money could buy—had been lost in the wilds of Africa. In their place, he’d acquired serviceable, slightly worn, secondhand clothes made of good material. These, too, had once been tailored, but not for him. They molded uneasily to the body his errant life had given him. The coat stretched tight across shoulders that had grown more muscular in the past year. And coat and waistcoat and shirt all hung loosely over a waist that his frequent, intense use of magic had made far slimmer than it ever had been before.

The carpetship port in Venice was built just outside the city, and it was rumored that all of it was balanced on stilts. Until it had been constructed a century ago, there had been no houses around it. Now it seemed impossible to imagine the carpetport without the bustling, busy multinational beehive at its feet.

In assigned docking spaces, over carefully laid cobbles, carpetships from every country fluttered. Bright-fringed, new carpets supported multistory pleasure ships. Frayed carpets supported tramp vessels that carried cut-rate European goods abroad. And there was everything in between, too—merchant ships, troop transports—each of them bustling with activity. And near the docking ramp of almost all, a blackboard stood, listing when the ship would be departing and for where, and what kind of personnel it needed.

Almost all of them, at the very top, advertised their need for a flight magician, because of the very nature of the breed. To begin with, all but a few flight magicians had to be of pure noble blood; lesser men hadn’t the power to make the heavy constructions of wood and glass and metal sail upon the currents of air. This requirement eliminated the half-magicians and quarter-magicians—those by-blows of noblemen—who made the textile factories and the trains of England hum, producing the goods with which England flooded the world and held her empire.

Flight magicians were thus generally poor second sons of noble families that had squandered their fortunes on amusements, or bastard sons whose parents were both noble. Or young men who had committed one of those crimes for which even noblemen got punished. And very few of them flew the same ship on two voyages. Rather, they moved from ship to ship and from continent to continent, crisscrossing the globe like nomads, forever barred from their birthright. Which they were. Which Nigel was, too—if not forever, at least until his mission was done.

His name and everything about him had been arranged to fit with the role he’d chosen—the only role that would allow him to travel haphazardly all over the globe and to not attract attention. For months now, always moving and attracting no attention had been the twin goals of his existence, the only way he knew to stay ahead of those who, doubtlessly, were trying to capture him.

But this time, it was different. This time he had to go as far down into Africa as he could manage.

He knew no carpetship flew where he wanted to go, to the secret village atop a sacred mountain where the first avatar of mankind hid. But if he could just take a ship to a larger African city, he could always rent a small flying rug to make it from there on his own.

Once, the idea would have terrified him. Once, he would not have dreamed of going into Africa without an entourage of carriers, and without the comforts of civilization. Such a time was long past, and it seemed to Nigel that he had been a wholly different man then.

He scanned the tablets with an intent eye, almost not seeing the ships to which they were attached. He read
Cape Town
and a departure date of that day, then he looked up to see that the ship was British and a pleasure ship. Though not quite so upscale as that in which Nigel had traveled on his honeymoon, it was nonetheless three stories tall and newly built, looking like a small palace in wood and glass. Which, he thought to himself with a sigh, was good, since it usually meant that better food could be obtained than on the cargo carpetships, or those that carried penniless immigrants. And because flying the carpetships consumed energy and flesh from the magician’s own body, food had become very important to Nigel.

Nigel bounded up the plank used by personnel and hailed the man at the top—an employee in the blue-and-white uniform of the carpetship: the
Indian Star,
as proclaimed by the letters embroidered on his cap. “I see you are in need of a flight magician.”

The man gave him a quick once-over that seemed to take in both his refinement of features and his shabby clothes, and came to the conclusion that he was typical of his breed. “The captain is this way,” the man said. And, turning without seeing if Nigel followed, he led him up a flight of stairs and through the maze of utilitarian tunnels that defined the carpetship’s flight deck. At the end of one such narrow corridor, faced in unpainted wood, he knocked on a door.

Someone answered from within, and the man opened the door. “It’s a flight magician, sir. Or he says he is.” The words seemed to denote not so much a doubt of Nigel’s words as a suspicion of all flight magicians as a class.

“Ah. Send him in, send him in,” said a hearty voice from within.

The man stepped aside and Nigel entered a surprisingly well-lit and well-appointed room. It was as large as the library at his parents’ estate, back in England, and the furnishings were much the same—well-built bookshelves in dark wood, and vast armchairs in which one could lose onself for hours. Closer at hand, there was a massive desk covered with papers, and at the desk sat a portly man with salt-and-pepper hair and a kindly expression.

He half rose as Nigel came into the room, and extended his hand. “Captain Portsmouth, of the
Indian Star,
from the Blue Yonder line.”

“Enoch Jones,” Nigel said, clasping the hand with a firm grasp. He opened his bag and retrieved his papers, which detailed his last ten jobs and the recommendations from his captains.