Pinion (42 page)

“You are a painful burden, my ancient friend,” he gasped.

It is not so unlike us
, said the Paolina–al-Wazir voice inside him, audible now that the noise of battle had died.

With that thought, a round of Chinese cannonfire battered
Erinyes
, and they were back at war. How long had he rested? Thirty seconds, possibly a minute.

Boaz leapt to the poop in three bounds to stare aft, where the larger airships were gaining.

All people hear the voices in their heads. They just understand them as thoughts
.

::
the Lord is in all our thoughts, and His deeds cannot be disavowed
::

“ ’Tis the hydrogen,” gasped the surviving petty officer, joining Boaz, Kitchens and the helmsman. It was the first time he’d spoken to Kitchens. Two other sailors readied the stern chasers—a pair of almost comically tiny breech-loading cannon. “We have lost too much, and the tension is out of the bag. We lift slowly, and we wallow.”

“What can be cut loose?” Boaz asked.

::
all may be cast aside when the Holy Fire comes, save that the Temple itself be ringed by twice ten men blessed with wine and oil
::

Kitchens shouted for rifles aft as a rocket blazed from their pursuers and churned through the air. Everyone on the poop watched in fascination. The missile passed just beneath the hull.

“A little higher and we’d have been a ball of flame,” the sullen petty officer said. “We are done for.”

“Your name, man!” the clerk demanded.

“Martins, sir.” He was breathing hard.

“This is your ship, Mr. Martins. I have just been minding it for you. I know nothing of aerial tactics.” Kitchens’ voice dropped to a growl. “What do we
do
?”

“Savages ho,” shouted a tired sailor, and they were back at the fight without any response to Kitchens’ question.

What we do
, Boaz thought,
is what all life does. We struggle until we die
.

::
death is but a hallway in the house of God
::

That had been one of the Seal’s more sensible observations.

They fought more. Night, moonlight, blood black as oil on the wooden deck, the Chinese ships following with the patience of sharks. Their battle lanterns were an uncertain constellation, always in the corner of Boaz’ eye, always reminding him of where the Wall lay.

He fought. He killed. Men dropped around him from the blows of crude bronze swords, from the swipes of claws and teeth, from sheer fatigue.

They were
losing
. Kitchens continued to shout from the poop, screaming orders, curses, random nonsense. A sailor who had taken a clawed kick to the gut leaned against the mainmast trying to keep something long and damp clutched within his body.

Boaz was once more very glad he could not smell.

He would die with
Erinyes
. They were much too far above the ground for him to survive the fall, as he had done so long ago when traveling with al-Wazir. “Chief, I have failed you,” Boaz whispered. “You as well, Paolina. Most of all.”

There she was. Paolina stared at him in wide-eyed wonder for just a moment before the air beneath her feet claimed her and she fell screaming into the African night. Someone else tumbled with her. A flight of winged savages peeled away to follow them down.

Boaz nearly leapt over the rail to save his lady love, but Kitchens was shouting again about the Chinese and a respite from the deck fighting and there was still more battle to be joined, and still he prepared to dive overboard, hoping to think of something deeply clever to do as he plunged thousands of feet to the jungles below.

Good Change
steamed slowly through the Bab el Mandeb waterway. The Royal Navy apparently were far too excited about their submarine to bother with a motor yacht. That huge British warship shepherded
Five Lucky Winds
from the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea, and then north toward Suez. All they could do was trail along.

“You have lost her, I think,” Wu told him. “You will soon lose us. We have no charts beyond the Gulf of Aden.”

“How hard can it be to follow another ship?”

“Not difficult here. If Childress somehow talks them into the Mediterranean, well . . . Do you fancy seeing how well
Good Change
can slide beneath the waves and pursue them underwater? In any case, without charts of the bars and reefs and rocks, we will soon be done for.”

“I am not interested in returning,” Wang said shortly. He didn’t look forward to the fate in store for him. Being under British guns seemed less terrible.

Where
was
she bound?

He watched the shore slide by on each side. Rocks tumbled down from the plains of sand that rose to both east and west here. This place was a dry ocean bottom, as if the water had drained away except for the trickle of the Red Sea. A man could lose his soul staring at those expanses of dun and ochre and rippled brown.

Wang realized that much to his surprise he missed Chersonesus Aurea. The green intensity of the island had always seemed overwhelming to him, maniacal even. The endless hooting of the birds, the nodding of the trees, the sweet heaviness of the flowers: It had been so much more like his home of Chiang Hsi than this desert-on-the-ocean ever could be.

The sun was pitiless, like a shovel opening a grave. On the islands there had been shade and fruit and occasionally cool water. When the light in the sky grew too much like a fiery lamp, one could go to ground.
Even the flooded library, with its stinking well of lost knowledge, was better than this boat. He could either stay below and bake in a stuffy cabin, or he could remain on deck to be broiled by the sun.

At least up top Wang could keep an eye on his quarry.
Five Lucky Winds
remained occasionally visible despite the huge ship in the way.

Even stranger, he realized he missed the monk.

“I am going to go sleep,” said Wu, jarring Wang from his reverie. “Nothing will change for several days, at this speed.”

The cataloger scratched at a pool of sweat on his back, beneath the rough white uniform they all now wore. “It is too hot to sleep.”

“Hell is also warm, I hear.”

They sailed on for two days and two nights. Wang ate little, and dozed on deck in the evenings, eschewing even the limited accommodations afforded to him. He was far more interested in whatever might be taking place ahead.

Which was nothing, so far as he could see.

They moved in a convoy, six ships in total. Two civilian freighters followed
Good Change
as they followed the British warship and her submarine charge. A smaller warship led the parade.

Twice British airships overflew, heading toward the war. Once a southbound convoy passed, a series of troop ships and escort vessels carrying what seemed to be thousands of soldiers.

They go to fight my emperor
, Wang thought, but he could not summon outrage. Not when he traveled under a false flag. Waiting to be discovered as a spy seemed almost the least of his worries, but at the same time his most likely outcome.

He would find Childress; he would find the words to call her back to the east, to China and the Silent Order. In bringing her along, the net of warfare that had been cast across these oceans would be gathered, too, so that all could return to their rightful pursuits.

She walked to the foremost point of the grating, where the hull sloped away. Water rushed past, foaming and busy and gurgling to itself. Oceans by night were very different creatures, she realized. They reflected no burning sun, did not seem to birth storms so readily, and absorbed the effluvia of a million dreams from the cities along their coasts.

Something sharp tugged at her nostrils. Cigarette smoke? Leung allowed no tobacco aboard
Five Lucky Winds
, any more than he allowed opium or hemp. The fire danger alone was too great.

Childress turned, thinking to see Lao Mu with a cupped flame in his hands—the old man was a great trickster among the crew, she knew. Instead someone stood right behind her, jauntily smoking a small pipe.

“You—,” Childress began in Chinese, then stopped. This was no sailor. A monk, in fact, of the Oriental tradition; in robes of color uncertain by moonlight. Bright, gleaming eyes peered at her from a grinning Asian face, beneath a head shaved bald.

A woman, she realized.

One she’d seen before, on Wang’s yacht
.

Finger to lips, the monk shook her head slightly. “Do not wake them,” she whispered in English. “It is hard enough to keep myself unnoticed here without loud converse to attract their minds.”

“Who
are
you?” Childress kept her voice low but urgent. All she need do was shout and sailors would leap to her aid. “What are you doing aboard my ship?”

“Your ship?” The monk seemed to find this a very amusing statement. “That would surprise Captain Leung.”

Childress felt a twinge of guilt that she immediately dismissed. This monk was accomplished at the art of verbal sparring. She would not fall victim to rhetoric.

“It is certainly not
your
ship.”

“No, but this is my journey.” The monk tapped the ashes of her pipe overboard. Sparks flashed before vanishing into the waters of the Red Sea. “Every ship sails toward a multitude of destinies.”

“Don’t double-talk me. I toiled among theologians for forty years. I know better.”

“Do you know that I am your friend?” the monk asked. “I have worked very hard to join you here.”

The Mask reached out to touch the other woman’s robes. They were dry, and soft. As opposed to, say, crusted with salt from the sea. She had not literally crawled out of the water and onto the deck, at least not in the past few hours.

“You have been with us for a while.”
As you were before
.

A grin now. “I am always with you.”

“No,” Childress said, letting determination into her voice. “You most definitely are not.”

“There are seventeen buttons on your black dress,” the monk said, her voice hardening. “There should be eighteen, but one is missing, the third from the bottom. Captain Leung keeps a tintype of his parents and his sister in your cabin. The ship’s wheel on the bridge is made of brass-bound teak from the forests of Siam, while the ship’s wheel in the conning tower
is polished steel that the captain has a man work over every day that you run upon the surface of the waters.”

“Who
are
you?”

Another flash of a grin. “My name does not matter, even to me. But think you this: If the Silent Order and the
avebianco
pursue the interests of two factions of men in matters of importance to the Northern Earth, who is it that pursues the interests of the Earth itself?”

“God,” she blurted.

“Your God is just your way of understanding the world,” the monk said. “Can you point to him? I can point to the earth.”

“More riddles.” Childress looked up at the sweep of the sky. “There is far too—”

She stopped speaking when she realized the monk was no longer there. Nor was the other woman walking back across the deck among the sleeping sailors. Only a whiff of pipe smoke hung in the air, swiftly snatched away by the wind.

Childress went below. No point in raising an alarm. Still she bolted dogs on the hatch of her cabin, shutting herself firmly in for the night.

She fell.

Air plucked at her with the hands of a mad thing. The night-dark ground spun below. Far below. Someone was screaming.

The screamer was using
her
voice.

That offended Paolina.

Above her, an airship receded. Gashansunu tumbled as well, but the sorceress was concentrating, not spending her energy in terror. Winged savages circled, plunged, following them down with mighty strokes through the air.

They will tear my throat out
.

I shall strike the ground so hard there will be no bounce
.

Fear will suck the air from my lungs and I will die on the way down
.

Her left hand still clutched the stemwinder. The fingers of her right stroked the knurled stem. The body knew what the mind was too distracted to remember.

“Just because I am falling does not mean I am dead,” she told the un-caring air. Talking took away the screaming.

Gashansunu opened her eyes and twisted in the fall, reaching for Paolina with an outstretched hand. Paolina released the stem and grasped for the sorceress. She had her calibration now, truly had not lost it before.

Even as they clasped together, hand to wrist and vice-versa, the winged
savages caught up with them. Shadowed eyes gleamed. Bronze swords glittered by moonlight. Great leather sails on ribs of bone creaked.

She would die in three, two, one . . . and Paolina
stepped
on air, taking the sorceress with her even as the blades flashed.

A series of wet explosions echoed from below. Paolina and Gashansunu bounced up, slamming into the underside of something heavy and firm; then bounced down, slamming into wood that might as well have been rock.