Pinion by Jay Lake
Baassiia nodded with a slow, brutal power. It was like watching a rock acknowledge a tree. “Did they show you aught of the city’s distress?”
“They show another passage of power across the Wall. The impure North sends again what it cannot keep cleanly within its craw.”
The center looked around. Eight faces looked back, three and three and three the number of a working. Gashansunu knew Ninsunu to be a terrible little liar, but there was something like truth in her words, even if her tale was concocted.
“Who among us has read the colors?”
This time Gashansunu answered. “The greens are for what grows toward us surely as poisonweed in a usurer’s garden ditch. The yellows are the sign of angels, that some foreign god has sent her minions.”
“We will not dance again to those tune-callers,” Baassiia replied.
They spoke around the circle a while, each mouth adding a word, until the wisdom of the city came from their three threes of lips like song from a pod of merfolk. Though Gashansunu listened until her ears ached, she always heard the individual voices, not their union.
THREE
And it came to pass at the time of the going down of the sun, that Joshua commanded, and they took them down off the trees, and cast them into the cave wherein they had been hid, and laid great stones in the cave’s mouth, which remain until this very day. —Joshua 10:27
BOAZ
Chin Yuen’s beach fire remained a fitful glow in the sky, though Boaz quickly lost sight of the sailors on their dune top. He wished them well of whatever they hoped to call down with their beacon.
If he’d been human, Boaz knew he’d be tired. Brass didn’t have muscles, blood, the little furnaces of flesh and bone that drove animals and people forward. The Solomonic Seal in his head was sufficient to power him through a dozen human lifetimes. But even his kind needed to stop for metal to cool, joints to ease, tiny caches of lubricant to seep forth.
Perhaps most importantly, to settle thoughts.
Brass debated why King Solomon had gifted them with a need to rest. Some said it was so their kind could follow the clocks of men and pursue their daily affairs in a conjoined rhythm. Others claimed it was a necessity not to challenge YHWH’s plan for the world by creating an unsleeping intelligence, as the Divine had placed no speaking, thinking creature who did not daily retreat to the fields of dream. Even the monsters from high along the wall had their dens and nesting places.
Boaz favored the theory that King Solomon had intended Brass to share in the dreaming of men, that their minds might fall idle and drift across the landscapes of consciousness bereft of direction and intent. From dreams came prophecy, understanding, the very physiognomy of the soul.
Sand was both slick and sharp beneath his feet. Boaz had been formed, as all Brass, with the likeness of muscles in his outer shell, along with the necessary cannulae and outlets for such cables and braces as were required for full articulation. His sense of touch was exquisite, so each step brought a thousand thousand grains into rough contact with his soles. The wind worried at him, such that if he were to be stopped completely for a long while in this place as once before far to the west along the Wall, he would awaken to a dull-scarred casing. Enough sand within his joints without eventual maintenance from the Palace of Authority in Ophir, and in time he would fail.
Without a moon, the night sky was a riot of glory, shedding sufficient light for Boaz to pick his way. The dunes looming around him were darker. These were waves slowed almost to freezing, progressing through their dusty sea over months and years. His sense of imminent recollection was failing again. Those memories so sharp by day had become a kind of dream. The soul he imagined for himself, awoken in him by Paolina, fed by her, sustained by her, seemed a dream as well.
With her now gone to a Chinese prison, that soul was lost to him.
He scuffed at a scattering of gravel. Something of the true shape of the land was visible here, the sea floor atop which the dune waves passed. More gravel wound ahead between two of the sand hills, into a deeper vale of shadow.
The Brass followed.
Air grew colder as he stepped into the shadows. Something electrick crackled on the wind. He felt a slickness of his casing, like dewfall descending. The dune sides seemed steeper here, almost impossibly so.
A cliff rose ahead, a rock face emerging from beneath the sand. His memories stirred once more. Even in the shadows, he could see this was of the same pale stone as they’d passed during the afternoon. The bones of this land, laid down in the six working days of Creation and bared as the world aged into itself in the millennia since.
He approached slowly, uncertain what to expect. Carved lions, perhaps, or the chiseled sigils of a temple. Magical gates gleaming with a deep inner light of their own. What he saw instead was steep rock with a tumbled pile at the bottom, as if a fall had taken place in some earlier era.
But the pile was too well laid. Living on the Wall these past centuries, Boaz was quite familiar with rock falls. They spread out like river deltas, a mix of stones from dust grains to whatever monstrous boulders had been loosed.
These rocks were mostly of a size, and while not close-fitted as a temple wall, they were well stacked. As if built by someone who meant them to stay where they were. A Brass, lifting the heaviest alongside dozens of sweating men stripped to their ragged trousers as they too labored under a merciless sun. A man shouting in the bright light of recall, words half-heard and quarter-familiar. A priest—a Kohanim such as they had not seen upon the Wall in at least a thousand years—chanting from a book. His ancient blessing in memory was so strong that for a moment Boaz thought he heard a voice in the present day.
He blinked away the sight and stared thoughtfully at the boulders.
A Brass can easily move four or five times the weight a very strong man can shift. Though they need to rest, they do not tire in the human sense. Monkey bodies lose vigor over the hours of a day until they are finally claimed by sleep. Not Brass, who can run just as swiftly and lift just as much in the last watch of the night as under the burgeoning light of dawn.
Boaz shook off the dream-phantoms that had dogged him and set to unstacking the boulders. He knew without consideration which to take first and which to take later, for the ordering of this pile was still in his memory. Even the largest were within his ability to lift, further confirming what he already knew about this place.
Laboring, Boaz wondered how often the rocks had been buried beneath sand. Had he come in another season of the wind, he might never have found this.
Very close to dawn he reached a crack in the cliff. Eager to have access, Boaz pushed aside the last of the obscuring rocks.
Sand slid free. This place had definitely been under the dunes. Behind the sand stood a wooden wall, or possibly a door. It was very old, silvered by moonlight and age both, riddled with the tracks of worms, abraded by the insults of time. Boaz ran his fingers over the surface. Clinkered planks, sawn as a slab to fit in this place.
A piece of the hull from one of the ships in Asiongaber’s fleet.
His fingers traced the lines on the wood, feeling the textures of ancient seas. Almost three thousand years had passed since the wreck that had founded the Brass nation. All of Ophir’s history ran through this doorway, back to Asiongaber and Jerusalem in the bright days when YHWH’s people held their kingdom in close-wrought power beneath the hand of their Lord.
As if at the command of his thought, the ancient wood collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters. Behind Boaz, someone murmured. He turned to see Chin Ping, with half a dozen men and Chin Yuen as well. They all stood in the dark, eyes gleaming, waiting to see what he would do.
This is my history, Boaz thought, but he said nothing to the band of armed enemies crowding close behind him as he stooped to pass within the crack in the cliff and step across the gates of history.
Chin Yuen lit a stick of punk. The sputtering flame lit the cave like a distant artillery bombardment.
Another whisper of Chinese behind him, then Chin Ping: “This is place of Brass people?”
“Not precisely,” Boaz said absently. He was tired again, in that too-human way, but also shaking with a sense of impending time and the collapse of destiny like a moon tumbling loose from the sky. “But our nation was born here.”
His fingers brushed the lamp, which seemed likely to vanish just as the door had done. Somehow it remained intact beneath Boaz’ gentlest touch. He picked up one of the surviving threads of the altar cloth. Silver, or gold, woven into a textile that had not survived the years.
Finally, the leather.
The bundle had heft. Boaz cradled it in his arms the way he might have carried a wounded animal. It fit as if folded for the grip of a Brass. All Brass were from the same mold, after all—Boaz himself was the strangest of his race already, thanks to Paolina and her will, but still virtually identical to all of his fellows.
He wished she could be here now. Perhaps there was something she could see in this place, some hint he might miss for carelessness or excitement or distraction or sheer lack of understanding.
With only the glittering gaze of his enemies for witness, Boaz unfolded the leather to discover what secrets might lie within.
WANG
The mate Wu, who had hustled Wang aboard the night before, leaned on the prow. There had been no evidence of the monk this morning, and the cataloger wondered where she was. Fortunate Conjunction was small, a dozen bù from stem to stern, twenty paces for a man not in a hurry. She rode low as well, the pilothouse her tallest point. She was much tidier and faster than any vessel Wang had ever traveled on.
“Sir,” Wang said, offering himself.
Wu spat downwind. Then he turned to face Wang.
The cataloger knew he was pudgy, pale, a man who spent far too much time on a stool. The mate was a man carved to sail the seas. The infelicitious shade of sun-darkened skin that would have branded Wang as a peasant somehow became heroic on Wu, hinting at manly deeds and blood spilled in the righteous service of the Emperor.
Wang did not like blood.
“You were called, not sent,” Wu said after a while.
The echo of the monk’s words surprised Wang. “So I have been told,” he answered cautiously.
“Fortunate Conjunction is not a lucky ship.”
Those two statements did not converge happily in Wang’s mind. He remained silent to see what the mate might offer next.
Wu surrendered first in the staring match, speaking with care. “You are no prisoner to be guarded or beaten or fed on water and rotten rice. Yet you are not free to go—not until you have answered the call.”
“This is true.” Wang tried to listen past this man’s cautious words.
Then, in a rush of speech that reversed Wu’s care to nervous rattle, Wu said, “You are also almost like a priest, yes?”
“I am a cataloger, which is a kind of librarian.”
“A cataloger?”
“We practice the Rectification of Names among the words of men long dead. If you would seek advice on the best way to thresh millet, one of my kind will have made a list of those scrolls and books that discuss millet and other grains, the practices of agronomy, and the tools by which farmers pursue their daily tasks.”
“So you know the proper order of things in the world.” The mate leaned close. “Do you understand the hierarchies of Heaven and the Imperial Court and the small places of the Earth?”
“Who does not?” Wang blurted.
“We have a ghost aboard,” Wu said, his voice now tinged with bitterness. “This ghost most certainly does not understand what is needful.”
“Why not ask the monk?”
The look Wu gave the cataloger scorched him to silence.
An hour later, they climbed up from the bilge hatch. Wu shrugged. “The Kô holds the power of life and death. But even he cannot slay what cannot be brought before him.”
Wang was grubby, bruised, bleeding from several small cuts, and now knew more about boats than he had ever intended. The mate had taken him through every cun of the boat, handspan by handspan, from the cables controlling the rudder to the little chain locker at the bow.
The only space they had not visited was the Kô’s private cabin. The door was sealed with a blob of red wax binding a long red ribbon, and according to Wu it had been shut just so for months.
There was no monk. There was not even any sign of the monk. On a vessel this small, with eleven crew plus Wang, there was little possibility she could have slipped ahead or to the other side of the deck.
“She has been a ghost for how long?” Wang asked.
“Since we last sailed from Hainan to bring the Kô south to Chersonesus Aurea.”
Wang puzzled at those words for a moment. “He was aboard with the ghost?”
“Yes, though we never knew him to see it.”
“Did you ask?”
Wu gave him another smoldering glare. “Would you ask the Kô if he had seen a ghost?”
Aboard a vessel smaller than his sitting room in Beijing? “No,” Wang admitted.
“A female ghost,” Wu muttered. “Worse even than some distressed ancestor seeking vengeance.”
“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 ve
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.