Pinion (36 page)

Not just fast, he realized. Complex.

“What is it?”

Ottweill opened the lantern shutter again.

The cutting face
gleamed
. Rock had been peeled away in a widening cone from a wall of brass that itself had been shaved down at the contact point of the borer’s great drill. Metal parings and iron fragments were scattered around the stubbed end of the rails.

“Here the drill shattered,” Ottweill said. “We have many replacements, for we expect damage from even normal operations. But this is not geology.” He spat. “This is something else.”

Kitchens could barely speak. “The scaffolding of Creation.” The tunnel would not go through the Wall; that much was obvious. Whatever else might become true here, the project had ended. Southern Earth would remain mysterious and inaccessible for another generation. If the Chinese and their Golden Bridge project crossed over first, the British Empire was lost.

Awe, and defeat. He felt punctured. His entire errand from Lloyd George
and the Queen had come to naught. What remained, but Her Imperial Majesty’s fateful letter?

“We drive a lateral shaft now,” Ottweill said. “We will turn south again at a distance and see if this structure continues. Good news I do not expect.”

“Will you open up this brass?” Kitchens asked.

“That I have been considering. You hear the noise. Behind there something moves. Something very large. It is without doubt that we have touched part of the machinery of the Earth. What God made when our world He built. I am a proud man, Mr. Kitchens. This is my virtue, not my flaw, for without pride, I would have accomplished far less. But I do not think even my pride is sufficient to overturn the handiwork of God.”

“We don’t want to overturn it; we just want to pass through it.”

“Attend,” Ottweill hissed. “Great masses move beyond that brass. Counterweights to balance the rotation of the world, perhaps. Shall we cut into a machine that has been running for six thousand years and weighs a thousand billion tons? Sooner the mice in the Frauenkirke would bring down the towers, and all the rest of Dresden besides.”

Kitchens cast about for ideas. This could not be the end of the project. If the Chinese reached the Southern Earth first, they would have all the resources of that alleged paradise at their disposal. There would be no front in the ongoing little wars. It would be the world, with England’s mortal enemy backed by the riches of an entire second world.

“How do we get through?” he asked. “Surely there are maintenance accesses?”

Ottweill’s voice turned bitter. “Does God do maintenance? Is He not perfect, that His Creation should also be perfect? I think you know that I am not a man whom to anything surrenders. I will not cease trying to break through the Wall. Even so, confronted by this brass and whatever lies behind it, no hope of success I can promise.”

“What is next?”

The doctor shrugged. “A railroad to the top, with a tunnel to be cut through the footings of the gear, perhaps. Or a sky full of airships to pass over in well-escorted safety. An elevator. The Wall defends itself. Any of those will cost far more than even my ridiculous tunnel. What is the will of the Queen?”

That question struck a cold blade into the doubt already flooding Kitchens’ heart. He
knew
the will of the Queen.

Remake what has been undone.
Break my throne.
Help me finish dying
.

Had she somehow been undone by this cutting? Her life could not be hostage to something as mundane as a tunnel.

“Doctor,” Kitchens said slowly. “I would ask you a thing you will not wish to answer. For the sake of the Queen, and indeed, the future of all of Europe and her discontents, I would beg you to think through this.”

“What, a fortune teller you are now?”

“No. Just a man who pursues his monarch’s will. Loyal and foolish both, no doubt.” He paused, gathering both his courage and his thoughts. “Here are my questions: Are you a member of one of the secret societies? Is this digging at the behest of the white birds or the Silent Order, either one?”

His head continued to ache. He was sure it would do so for days. Wang’s ribs were dreadfully painful, and he did not move so well. Whatever loyalty he’d held to his mission had melted in the face of Wu’s betrayals.

The cataloger did enjoy a quiet morning in the little galley with charts spread out across the table.
Good Change
rode with her sea anchor, the Goan coast barely more than a dark line on the eastern horizon.
Five Lucky Winds
could pass submerged within a hundred
bù
and they would never know.

The mate had been kind enough to mark their current position. Wang noted that he’d latched the galley door from the outside.

“Where would I go?” he asked the Indian Ocean.

Leung had few choices. His life and ship were forfeit after the murders of the Nanyang Fleet’s task force off the Sumatran coast. Heading south and east around Cape Comorin toward the eastern Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea was right out. Airship patrols would be frequent. Fliers were quite good at spotting submarines. Even Wang knew this.

From Goa,
Five Lucky Winds
might sail south and west to the Maldives, but Wang could not imagine any purpose to that. What would they do there?

Due west toward the Arabian Sea would force them south to Mogadishu, or up into the Gulf of Aden. If the Mask Childress had simply meant to reach the Wall, she could have done so from Chersonesus Aurea or anywhere in the islands of the Kepulauan Riau, or the site of the massacre off the south coast of Sumatra.

Childress was English. She was also a Mask of the
avebianco
. Self-made, and powerful. Wang found himself ever more fascinated with the woman.
She
had thrown off the ties that had bound her within the world of the English. Now, in command of a ship, carrying secrets and power, her ability
to find friends, money or aid would grow as she approached the heart of the British Empire.

She
had to be making for the Gulf of Aden, bound for one of the ports there, or planning to pass through Suez and into the Mediterranean. How Leung planned to get a submarine secretly through those waters was beyond Wang’s reckoning, but Childress and her mad servant could easily debark and take passage in the more usual way.

“I have a course,” he called out to the locked door.

And falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmoveable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves.          
— Acts 27:41

Longoria leaned at the bow rail with Bosun McCurdy as Boaz climbed over the side. Their heads were tipped together. Several sailors huddled amidships, beneath the belly of the gasbag. A lone figure stood aft at the wheel.

McCurdy approached Boaz. “Midshipman Longoria tells me the skipper’s been at the helm since putting us over yesterday.”

“H-he was s-singing hymns all the n-night long,” the lad said.

“How did you get him to come back here?” asked Boaz.

“Told him we n-needed the bosun. Finally he ordered the c-course. He hasn’t spoken since. I d-don’t know what to do with him.”

“Relieve him of command.” McCurdy spoke brusquely, as if he had not been agonizing over precisely this question.

“I c-cannot do that.”

“You are the only other officer aboard,” Boaz said. “Lieutenant Ostrander is long since bereft of his senses. It would be a kindness.”

“There’s a war on,
sir
,” McCurdy replied. “You can do this much more easily than I. My testimony and that of John Brass here will back you up.”

Boaz turned and stamped across the deck. McCurdy called after him, while the sailors amidships skittered away. Ostrander seemed to notice nothing.

::
he was bound over in the tent of the King, where the snakes within his head were banished by prayer and the healing touch of the ruler
::

Be careful
.

“I am always careful,” Boaz told no one in particular.

Ostrander gripped the helm so tight his fingers were pale. The expression on his face was unnaturally fixed, his skin wind-reddened and gaunt, eyes blank as those of the Brass dead in the encampment below.

“Sir,” said Boaz. “I am come to take you home.”

A single quivering tear ran down the lieutenant’s face. His chapped lips parted as if he meant to speak. McCurdy and Longoria caught up, stepping to each side of the Brass to support their commander.

The lieutenant struck the midshipman a blow that cracked. Longoria staggered back with a cry. McCurdy grabbed at Ostrander. Another blow flew, this one misaimed.

Boaz bound Ostrander’s arms to his body from behind and lifted him away from the wheel. The lieutenant struggled for a moment of boiling rage, then sagged like a punctured gasbag.

“Enough,” the Brass said. “Bring everyone aboard that this ship will carry. I will stay with the rest until they can be settled in the tunnel. You return with aid, or at least food and ammunition.”

“I’ll do what I can.” McCurdy turned to the midshipman. “Sir, the ship is yours.”

Longoria sobbed.

::
even as they cast them from the walls, the people cried for the deaths of their priests
::

“This business grows ever more devilish,” Boaz whispered to the man now slack in his arms. Monkeys were impossible. What had
YHWH
intended with these fools?

Paolina, where are you? How have I gone so far wrong?

The water changed where the Indian Ocean met the Gulf of Aden. Ever-deepening blue shifted to a greenish brown, as if all the sands of Arabia were trying to flee into the sea. The feel of
Good Change
’s hull in the water also changed.

A low, rocky coast fronting baked highlands rose to their right. This was a place where the desert met the water without any intervening kindness of green, growing things. Something sullen loomed on the horizon to their left, but whether it was the coast of Africa, a last glimpse of the upper reaches of Wall, or just a cloud bank, Wang could not say.

The monk had made no appearance, to his surprise. He kept expecting to smell her pipe, or see a flash of saffron, but ever since her ghost—a ghost of a ghost?—had steered them out to sea along the Goan shore, she had vanished. He wondered if she was even now afflicting
Five Lucky Winds
.

In any case, she was not bothering him. Wang spent the night alone in his bunk and had passed this day alone on the deck watching the ocean slide by.

Wu met him at the rail. “Are you rested?”

“Am I ever rested?” Wang’s voice sounded querulous, even to his ownears. “No one has tied me down and beaten me today, so I must count that to the good.”

“We take what victories we can from life,” Wu said.

“You sound like that silly monk.”

The mate braced his hand against the rail. “I should not talk to monks so much were I you, friend Wang. They are schooled in the arts of confusion.”

“I was confused long before making her acquaintance.”

Wu laughed softly. “Are you confused about our location?”

“No. This is the Gulf of Aden, to our right is Arabia, and somewhere to our left is Africa.”

“Soon we will meet the British at their patrols.”

“Our staff still flies their banner.”

The mate nudged Wang, elbow to elbow. “We will use the same story we used at Panjim.”

“So . . .” The cataloger looked Wu up and down. “Yesterday you beat me senseless for something I did not do. Today you ask me to speak for all our lives and safety. You still have something to learn of the ways of motivating men.”

“Your life and safety depend foremost on your performance.”

“I will speak,” he said. “I have met this Childress twice, and greatly desire to meet her again.”

One of the sailors called down from the wheelhouse. “Warship off the port bow.”

The two of them looked. A white bulk loomed near the horizon.