“To what gain?” al-Wazir asked quietly.
“Have you yet met a Chinese who would trust us?”
“N-no,” he replied. “And nae without reason.”
“Whatever they hope to draw out, it will come with a swift sword.” Childress turned to the sailors. “Find the captain and tell him we will be receiving no more supplies from our friends in the town for the foreseeable future.”
She had a cold, sick feeling that the order of the world had come to an end in this bombing. “I shall be the Mask,” she told no one in particular. “The Mask shall set this foolish game to rights.”
“Good luck, ma’am,” al-Wazir growled. “All of us, we’ll need it.”
SEVEN
And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand; and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer’s inkhorn by his side: and they went in, and stood beside the brasen altar. —Ezekiel 9:2
BOAZ
HIMS Erinyes approached the drilling camp at the base of the Wall at dead slow, through a thick, blood-warm fog off the Bight of Benin. Lieutenant Ostrander stood by the helmsman, his eyes fever-bright. The vessel’s lone midshipman was forward with a small party of sharpshooters, while the bosun waited in the waist with a handful of men prepared to descend to scout.
Dusk would be soon upon them, though at the moment the world was a uniform, impenetrable gray. The bow watch murmured a warning. Ostrander adjusted the engine telegraph. Their propellers feathered, then reversed, halting the nearly imperceptible progress of Erinyes.
Moments later the engines coughed to silence. They hung still, listening to the wet, dead air of the world.
“There,” McCurdy whispered, pointing downward.
Boaz leaned over the rail to follow the line of his arm. A thinning of the fog revealed a darker surface below—amorphous, textured, vaguely brown.
“It is the field of fire that they cleared before the stockade,” the Brass said with a sudden recognition. “We are almost exactly over the encampment, within a few hundred yards.”
“I recall it,” the bosun said shortly.
They listened harder, straining to hear sounds of fighting, work, men at bivouac—whatever might be gleaned from below. The world remained obstinately silent. Strangely so.
::they have been struck down:: the voice of the Sixth Seal whispered in his head. ::As men who raise themselves too high before God will be.::
He placed a hand on his closed belly and wondered if he might burn this thing out. The Seal was too important to lose, especially after the destruction of the ancient book. But the Seal spoke without reason or compassion or even good sense.
Except that they had been struck down in this place. Boaz had fought in that battle against his own kind.
“Ariadne come here, not long after the big fight.” McCurdy’s voice was quiet and thoughtful. “She said they was building their camp within the Wall itself. Outside was only sentries and hunters and traps for John Brass.”
“My city and its Sealed armies. We Brass are not so many, and prefer to fight with weapons in the hands of others.”
“Everyone stands against England now. Ariadne, she was kilt by the Chinee this week past. If you was up on the coast where they fought, reckon you saw her die.”
“I suppose I did, Bosun McCurdy.” Boaz stared down at the turned soil, willing the fog to lift before the day faded. “But I am no Chinese airman bent on your destruction. Even in my own city of Brass, I am accounted a rebel and traitor. I will not pretend to a love of England or your queen, but we share our enemies.”
Besides which, he thought, al-Wazir and Paolina stand closer to England’s banner than any other.
Ostrander shouted out, “Can you make your way down to the soil of Hell, oh chief of dreams?”
The bosun shook his head very slightly before calling out, “Aye aye, sir. Party can go over the side if you’ll give me another fifty feet less of altitude.”
“I’ll not be venting our laughing gas this merry night!” Ostrander giggled. He then rang for the engines, intending to force them lower.
“What will happen when he unravels completely?” Boaz asked.
“Middie Longoria will assume command.” McCurdy’s tone was unconvinced.
The deck pitched too steeply as Ostrander shouted at the helmsman. HIMS Erinyes clawed her way downward.
Boaz followed McCurdy and four of the ship’s men down the ropes and into the ruins of the encampment. Little had changed within. Battle wrack was still spread in mounds about the compound. Boaz had received his chrism and his name within one of those smashed tents. That thought moved him to sadness, but not so much as the shattered Brass staring blindly up from the mud. Their faces were already covered with verdigris and a rapidly advancing mold. Boaz turned away from their accusing gazes. So many Seals lost on this field of battle. Elsewhere, skeletal, rotting winged savages lay with their breastbone keels sticking up in the air.
There was no pretense of order, except for the path winding inward from the gate area.
“This is what Ariadne found?” Boaz asked McCurdy. “And she reported the camp still at work?”
“Don’t see no English dead, do you, John Brass? The good doctor strike you as the kind of man to care for his enemies?”
“I should not think he would be.”
Even through the fog, Boaz could see the great broken hulk of a tunneling machine. Work sheds had been repaired. A coal tip spilled free, where they must come back up the tunnel for resupply.
Finally they came to an enormous metal door, riveted from armor plate obviously scavenged from the ravaged machine. View ports and gun slits had been crudely cut into its face. McCurdy approached nose-to-nose with a hatch sized for a small man to pass through. He banged on the door with the butt of his pistol. “Open up, in the name of the Queen!”
A gun barrel poked out of one of the slits. “We’ve already sent for the doctor. I’ll thank you to be quiet afore he arrives.” More gun barrels appeared as the metal door sprouted violence in steel bristles.
Boaz realized he’d been feeling something through his feet for a while. Somewhere deep inside this tunnel before him, the mad Dr. Ottweill’s great machine was still chewing its way ever deeper into the Wall. When he reached the spinning brass at the Wall’s heart, the good doctor was going to be quite surprised.
Boaz smiled. Ophir was close—he was almost home—but the fate of this expedition was worth learning.
::they violate Creation:: said the Seal.
They follow their curiosity, proclaimed the human voices within.
Silence, Boaz told them all. I want to know what happens next.
WANG
When the cataloger and the monk descended the one thousand, two hundred and seven steps to bring them farther from Heaven, Fortunate Conjunction awaited them out on the water in the earliest glimmering of dawn.
“I thought she had sailed away,” Wang said.
“No one anchors here,” the monk replied. “They only pass through, then wait at sea for further signals.”
“Surely there is a better anchorage, an easier landing.”
“Of course.” The monk sounded surprised. “But not for the likes of you.”
Wu rowed to meet them. He obviously knew the way. Wang waited, fascinated to see if the monk would now behave as if she were a person of substance in the Silent Order.
She simply dropped to the bench behind Wu, then waited for Wang to scramble down. The mate nodded at Wang, ignored the monk, and began rowing them back toward the yacht.
The cataloger studied Wu, who projected a practiced indifference. “Are you carrying me west to India?”
“We will carry you wherever the need bears. You travel under their mandate.” Wu pointed with his chin toward the temple-fortress.
“Surely the Kô would like his boat back.”
“That may be the case. But Captain Shen ha
s his orders, and I have mine.”
“What about—,” Wang began. A sharp look from the monk cut him off. She smiled at his confused silence.
“We are a ship of ghosts,” Wu said. “Who counts ghosts?”
Other ghosts. Wang did not put that thought to voice.
Fortunate Conjunction was different. Her pennants had changed to complement the European lines of her hull. So had her sailors, who now wore canvas and dungarees instead of rough-spun cotton and padded silk. One of them painted English words across the facing of her pilothouse, large enough to be read from a distance.
Good Change, it read.
“Perhaps you mean Good Chance?” he asked in that language, but the sailor ignored him.
“There are Chinese all around the Indian Ocean,” Wu said. The monk had once again disappeared. Wang had been watching the crew carefully, but had failed to catch her eye beneath one of their stubbled scalps.
“Chinese are everywhere on the Northern Earth,” he answered.
“I do not know. I have never seen the Atlantic or the barbarous lands that line its shores.” Wu was expansive this morning.
As he probably should be, Wang realized. This onward journey meant farther distance from the threats of the Kô.
Wu explained. “We are the boat of a wealthy merchant out of Serendip. You are his man, sent to carry precious documents. With a British flag on our staff and the lines of this hull, no one will question us.”
“An excellent stroke of luck for us that I speak English.” Even so, the flaw in that plan was obvious to Wang. “Unless an airship of the Emperor’s should happen upon us and take practice at his targeting.”
“They are busy with one another in the sky of late, and take little interest in a small civilian vessel.”
“Who fights?” Wang asked, suddenly concerned. The Middle Kingdom had already lost one fleet to sorcery.
“The Nanyang Navy and the British, over the African and Indian coasts.”
“How did this foolishness begin?”
“I do not know.”
Wang let it drop. This mission called for a cleverness that he did not possess and was unsure how to bring to bear. He wished once more, mightily, that he was back in his library. The Golden Bridge he understood. These sailors, not so much.
KITCHENS
The bloody note broke on the third unfolding, but cleanly. It now lay flat on the desk. He set the snapped pieces close together. The staining was visible in squares of varying intensity of carmine, a quilt of red and pink patches. The Queen’s script—Kitchens was certain this was Her Imperial Majesty’s own hand—was in pencil. Her letters were rushed, crabbed, and difficult to read, though he could see evidence of the graceful copperplate script she must have once employed.
Had she written it while floating in the dark? Her hands at least must have been out of the tank, Kitchens realized, with access to someplace flat enough to press a pencil against. That wretched lady-in-waiting, Daphne, would have brought the Queen anything, certainly.
Reluctantly he focused on the subject of the note. His eyes scanned the drunkard-walk handwriting, both reading the words and searching for hidden meanings.
Nothing Kitchens saw in the Queen’s message lessened his fears.
The problem presented by the Queen’s words was twofold. If they were false, then a conspiracy was afoot that aimed to make Kitchens its patsy in a monstrous crime. If the words were true, then he held a terrible order from his sovereign that aimed to make Kitchens her accomplice in a monstrous crime.
He could see no answer that made sense. No action, no deed, no report to which a wise man would want to have his name appended.
He looked at the carmine-stained rectangle once more. Spidery, quavering handwriting. Bloody residue crusting the paper. The memory of Daphne, the Queen’s maid, with her eyes sewn shut.
The words accused:
Remake what has been undone.
Break my throne.
Help me finish dying.
How could any man stand silent in the face of such a plea from his monarch? What could any man do?
He understood none of it, except her plea for death. Regicide was not a path he had ever thought to follow. But her bubbling face would not recede from his mind’s eye, no matter how he tried to banish the Queen from his thoughts.
PAOLINA
“You were sent?” Hethor asked. A patient kindness dwelt in his voice.
He is so young, she thought. And so old at the same time. “I encountered an angel atop the Wall, who told me I should meet you.” And so lent purpose to my flight.
The chiaroscuro interior of Hethor’s house lent an unreality to the conversation, as if they were shadow people in a shadow world. The windows revealed the bright places beyond, but inside was a microcosm of dream.
Hethor nodded, then turned his attention to Ming. “And you, sir?”
Ming shrugged. Paolina answered for him. “A Chinese sailor, from the ship that rescued me when my airship crashed on the Indian Ocean.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.” Hethor turned some intricate wooden part over in his hands, shifting his weight in his chair. Paolina realized with sympathetic horror that this young Englishman had no legs below his knees. He looked up at her, caught her eye. “Yes. I traded my feet for more wisdom than a young man should have. Now I am confined to this place, where that hard-won learning cannot put anyone else in danger.” Even in the shadows of this room, his smile was troubled. “You are the first to come to me.”
“I did not know you,” she replied. “I still do not.”
“Do you recall two years ago, when the world was shaking so hard that waves swept the shores clean in many places?”
Paolina nodded. Her village’s small fishing fleet had been destroyed in those cataclysms, which in a sense was what had led to her departure from Praia Nova. “The mechanisms of the world were out of true. Time was slipping.”
“You know!” Hethor seemed surprised. “No one understood. And I am the one who repaired the order of the world.”
The enormity of the statement took her aback. That a boy—he could not be but a year or three older than she—was able to affect the clockwork of God’s creation should have been unthinkable.
Except for the plain truth. He was an English boy living deep in the jungle south of the Wall, where no Englishman of any age had business being. He was watched by angels, surrounded by a village of worshipful warriors.
More to the point, she was here, improbably so.
“Everything has purpose,” Paolina said quietly.
Hethor seemed to follow the unspoken line of her thoughts. “I have spent much time on exactly that question. My education is reasonable, my experience in matters of the divine extraordinary, but otherwise I am as plain a person as anyone.” He set his carved plaything down with a gentle thunk upon his worktable. “All of Creation is a clock. Each piece turns in its own measure as inexorably as the gear trains of a timepiece, and for much the same reason. Just as clock parts do not strike out on their own, do not seek an independent destiny or freedom of action, how is it that we subjects of God’s creation can imagine ourselves free to do what we will? Our roles and destinies must be as foreordained as that of any mainspring or escapement.”
“That cannot be true.” Her response was reflexive, an impulse born deep within her. “I lift my hand. . . .” She raised her left in a fist. “I drop my hand. That is my volition, and the world turns just the same whether I move or not.”
“A clock advances just the same whether a jeweled movement is in light or shadow,” Hethor replied. “Dust falling from the pendulum does not affect its swing.”
Paolina was drawn deeper into the argument. “We are not dust.”
“Of course we are.” His tone was surprised. “Does the Bible not say so? From dust and ashes we are made, to dust and ashes we return.”
“You have clearly never attended a birthing,” Paolina said, perhaps more sharply than she in
tended. “Dust, yes, but mostly we are made from blood and flesh. I have never seen ashes arrive with a newborn.”
“It is only metaphor. In any case, the debate is irresolvable. If all is foreordained, then the argument is as well, and likewise its outcome. If we are blessed with free will, then the argument has no outcome because we would never come to true agreement.”
Arellya brought three steaming mugs: crude and slightly misshapen bits of ceramic. “Forgive me,” she said, “but we have never found a tea that Hethor craves. This is a brew of roots and flowers that you may enjoy.”
Paolina took the offered mug and clutched it beneath her nose. Though the day outside was jungle-hot, and even the shadows here within Hethor’s house almost blood-warm, the heat seemed like a gift to her hands. The scent was oddly musty, like leaves left in a puddle too long, with a cloying undertone. Flowers? She sipped cautiously.
Definitely not tea, which she had come to enjoy while sailing aboard Star of Gambia. But not so bad.
Beside her, Ming slurped, then glanced sidelong. In Chinese, “It is better than no tea at all.”
“I apologize that we do not possess the finer things of English life here,” Hethor said. “Or, for that matter, of the Chinese court. What we do have is fruit in tragic abundance, a wonderful assortment of curious meats, and an endless supply of overwarm days and pleasant nights.”
Arellya stood beside him now. She clasped Hethor’s free hand. The way they leaned into one another just ever so slightly told Paolina that these two were lovers. Hethor, not a large man by English standards, was still twice the size of this woman of the Correct People. Paolina wondered how strange this might be for them.
Yet you long for Brass Boaz, who is far stranger to you than these two are to one another.
After taking a long sip at his mug, Hethor stared solemnly at Paolina. His eyes glinted in the shadows of the room. “What do you seek here in the Southern Earth?”