Pinion by Jay Lake
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.
PAOLINA
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.
Someone screamed. This time it was not her. A wooden beam slid past her face to knock a panicked sailor flat. This was followed by a moment of calm.
“What did you do to them?” shouted a man.
Boaz bent over her. His face was cast, impassive, immobile except for the flicker of the metal eyes, yet somehow she could read his concerned relief.
“Paolina.” His voice stuttered and clicked a bit as it issued from the little grate within his pursed lips. The Brass had seen hard use.
Her heart flooded with light. She must have glowed from within, brightness leaking out of her pores like a bonfire deep inside a forest.
“Boaz.”
“They are not all dead,” said Gashansunu with a brutal practicality.
Paolina sat up. The deck was hard, and her body was a giant bruise. “Who is not all dead?”
The sorceress stood at the rail. Four sailors edged away from her with their rifles wavering. She ignored them as she looked down. “You transferred the force of your fall to most of those flying devils. A handful wing back toward us now.”
“To the rail!” Boaz shouted, urging his crew into action.
Guns boomed in the night. For a moment, Paolina was glad, until she realized the firing had not come from this airship. Where were they?
She stood, staggering, and saw that two airships pursued. She recognized the battle lanterns and the shark shapes swimming through the moonlit air.
Chinese vessels, like Shirley Cheese she’d brought down on her voyage north aboard Notus. Like Heaven’s Deer, which she’d destroyed over the Indian Ocean. Like the three whose crews she’d murdered off the coast of Sumatra.
“I will not kill them again,” she muttered, mindful of the old doctor aboard Heaven’s Deer who’d helped al-Wazir, of the sailors in Five Lucky Winds’ complement who’d been so decent to her.
These were just men.
Boaz was at her side once more. Or had he ever left? “They will kill us,” he told her. “As soon as they tire of this game and resume firing their rockets. Then we will die in a tumbling mass of flames, falling from this sky.”
“I have done enough falling for one day.” Paolina closed her eyes and thought on the matter of airships.
Her calm was a strange thing amid the surrounding violence. Though her heart rattled in her chest like a mongoose in an empty flour barrel, Paolina did not care.
With her eyes closed, the world was magnified. Every whiff of gunpowder and blood and splintered wood and fuel and the great, greasy scent of the gasbag seemed as a shout in a quiet cave. Likewise the noises of battle, the creaking of the hull, the popping from the hydrogen cells above, the individual screams and prayers and curses of the sailors.
Even the feel of the deck beneath her feet was different.
Our engines, she thought, and looked into their red-hot, pounding hearts. Too much heat—they would soon drive themselves to scrap. When they did this the airship would be nothing more than a thing of the wind.
She followed the engines’ hot, pounding thread to find the similars poised in the air hundreds of yards to the south and east. Two pairs drove this airship’s tormentors forward on wings of hydrogen.
Something roared nearby. Men panicked. The deck lurched. Still she stood with eyes closed, tweaking the st
A dull thud. The deck lurched again, in a different way. A whimper for mercy, the answer a silence almost overwhelming in its indifference.
She reached into the first of the Chinese engines. Far simpler to starve its fuel, hastening the aging of the little vessels through which the spirits were drawn by fast mechanical pumps. A bubble in the wall, a breach, a spray—then the engine died hard and fast.
The remaining engine pulled the enemy airship into a tight curve. Paolina reached there and repeated her trick even as the men around her shouted out their luck.
In a moment, that airship was inert, sliding at an angle across the sky, an envelope of souls who had not been destroyed by her actions.
More racket, a series of booms, and she was nearly knocked to her knees. Without consideration she reached out to slow her own airship’s straining engines. That robbed distance between themselves and the remaining pursuer, but she was ready. This time she starved the enemy engines with a simple touch, slipping through them both so quickly that the Chinese ship’s acceleration died without slewing her about.
“Fire aboard the enemy, sir,” someone shouted as Paolina opened her eyes.
“Isn’t that the general idea?” she asked, but then saw what the sailor had meant by that. Across the gulf of air an engine blazed. The ruptured spray of fuel had been ignited and now an entire nacelle was in flames. The Chinese air sailors were growing smaller as her vessel gained distance even on its reduced power. She watched them scramble, silhouettes against the light of flames and moon, until they cut away their damaged engine and it fell like a fitful orange comet toward the soil far below.
Then they were far enough away that the battle lanterns of the pursuit were just lights in the sky. The winged savages had fled—or worse, hidden—in the course of the battle.
“Welcome aboard Her Imperial Majesty’s Ship Erinyes, Miss Barthes,” said a man whose voice she didn’t know.
Paolina opened up her eyes in the Shadow World, abandoning the view of the Silent World to which she had been clinging, to see a man of modest height and build. He wore the tattered remains of some dark, formal clothing now coated in a patina of grease, blood and dust.
“Where am I?” she demanded. “Who are you? Where is Boaz?”
She then sat down heavily, jarring the bruises of her body even harder, and fell immediately asleep.
GASHANSUNU
The sorceress had not been so frightened since being sent into the Cave of Sharks as a girl for her second passage. She had known then that she might well die.
Tonight, falling through the sky like a stricken bird, she had known that she would die. In Gashansunu’s understanding of the Silent World, you had to be someplace to go someplace. One did not simply step off of empty air.
She had been falling, readying her soul for death while opening herself to the possibility of a miracle. A miracle had come, but from the strangest of quarters.
Now she watched Paolina slump on the deck as the Brass man and the strange, dangerous, mad-eyed fellow in tattered black bent over her. Sailors still kept an uneasy, armed distance from Gashansunu, but she had already stolen the spirit of the spark from their weapons, and so they could harm her with nothing more than hard looks. Not that they knew that.
Yet.
The enemy airships had fallen behind. Gashansunu wondered who they had been. From what she’d learned in Hethor’s village, the Northern Earth was divided between a few impossibly large cities that sent their power around the world on booted feet and soaring wings—unlike the Southern Earth, where the power stayed home and the few cities that existed took only what they needed from the lands around them.
She could easily count the cities in the extents of Africa—her city, of course, navel of the Shadow World; the Bone People and their small, strange empire on the desert coasts far to the south; the tiny men of the deep deserts who kept their magic in wooden sticks of lightning and spoke the elephant to his knees; the crystal mages on their table mountain at the southernmost tip of the land. More cities, as well, across the water of the girding ocean along the Shores of Ice and Fire.
Here there were two: England and China. Yet Gashansunu knew they were not mortal enemies, for Paolina had traveled with the man Ming. The girl had carried him across the Wall and sent him home in an open boat.
Now the girl had carried Gashansunu across the air, saving her from falling through a miracle that had shattered the backs of a dozen fliers. This was the thought that kept circling within the sorceress’ mind, refusing to either take root or flee, until she snatched it with hands of silence. Paolina had pushed off the bodies of those winged savages to make her step.
How much of the girl’s power lay in her gleam, Gashansunu wondered, and how much of it lay within her? Paolina was like no sorceress ever.
“Enough,” she said, dismissing the thoughts. For now, she was alive against all sense and expectation. This airship was in distress, but it was not tumbling from the sky. Paolina was in distress, but she was not dying. Gashansunu walked to the bow, followed by shuffling sailors with their not-quite-aimed weapons, and watched the depths of night for the return of the fliers. Behind her, the Brass man and the madman revived the girl who had saved them all.
She stood for a long while. The deck had grown quiet except for the cries of the wounded. The engines rattled and coughed their distress, aided by the curses of the engineer-sailors. Africa slid by below, water on her left, land on her right. The sky was covered with wispy clouds that curtained the moon.
Gashansunu reached for her wa. It had been distressed by their passage of the Wall. She had not felt her other self since coming to this airship. Stretching out her mind, she called it to her.
Sister of my flesh, twin of my true self, silent self, return to me now.
Perhaps the falling had frightened her wa far away. It had nearly frightened her soul right out of her body. Gashansunu also knew that the wa was afraid of the Northern God. Finally, her people did not so often fly except on the strength of their power. The city built no airships or gliding kites.
Was her wa in truth a creature of stock and stone, becoming only a distant, uneasy spirit in the vaults of the air? That was not what she had been taught at Westfacing House. If true, it ran against much of city lore.
If untrue, then where was her wa?
Already she was lonely for her Silent companion. Gashansunu began to wonder if she should dread its fate. She already dreaded her own.
CHILDRESS
Five Lucky Winds slid into the harbor at Port Said. Her two escorts kept close, as if she were in danger of escaping. While Childress could readily face taking her hostages with her and setting them free later on, she feared mightily for al-Wazir. She would not slip the net now at the cost of leaving him behind.
A familiar boat broke from the back of the convoy, steaming for a set of docks populated mostly by yachts. She stared at it a long moment before realizing she saw Cataloger Wang once again.
What magic had he used to trail the British through Suez undetected? The same that had folded the monk away into thin air, perhaps.
Right now she wished she had some of that magic for her own.
“You will stand to along the naval pier,” shouted Lieutenant Ericks, their British minder, from below. He pointed to six small white-hulled vessels anchored in a long row.
Childress turned to Leung, who nodded. “Captain,” she whispered, “we are in the Mediterranean. Alive, well, unhurt. The cost for this was small.”
They moved at quarter speed, then dead slow, until Five Lucky Winds had settled quietly into position underneath the British guns. Once the anchor dropped, Leung had his entire crew piped on deck for parade. Alone in the conning tower beneath the drooping flag of the two Earths, Childress understood this.
He wanted to be with his crew, waiting to see if their journey, and indeed their entire world, ended here.
Childress knew the feeling. By all the angels in H
A whiff of pipe smoke from nowhere, acrid and hot, made Childress realize she might just have such a thing—secret power if not secret prayer.
Thank you, she thought, and almost heard laughter in return.
SIXTEEN
Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty. —Ezekiel 27:4
BOAZ
Paolina opened her eyes and coughed.
::her beauty was as a dozen lambs newly freshened on the highest meadows of Mount Habba::
“Hello,” she said shyly. Her fingers brushed his hand, and he was lost.
“You live.” Boaz was unaccountably pleased. The human voices inside his head purred. As for his gut, at least it seemed to be making sense.
“I live.” She closed her eyes a moment.
He was losing her!
No, no, she was resting.
::the maiden slept ninety nights and nine, and all the days between, on cloth-of-gold and cedar boughs::
Hold her head up, boy.
The latter was al-Wazir, plainly as if he were speaking from a point just past Boaz’ ear. The Brass lowered himself to a seated position on the deck and took her head in his lap.
People were shouting, Kitchens speaking urgently, the engines straining with an ugly rattle, the late-night air suddenly cold enough to lay condensation on him, but he held Paolina in the circle of his arms.
::they bore her bridal-bright with yew poles beneath her sedan::
She sighed. Her eyes were evening-dark, and full of stars. Or perhaps that was just the oil leaking into his.
“Those men want your attention.” Paolina’s hand closed on his.
Boaz looked up. Kitchens came into focus from somewhere very far away.