Kalker shook his head. “Do you imagine you are the first to unleash a force upon the world? God Himself put the snake in the Garden, at the beginning of all things. Men have built fires that could burn cities.”
“You live in a jungle.” Her voice was too loud again. “What do you know of cities!?”
“I know that I am a simple person who thinks on things,” the old Correct Person replied. “I know that my own children have gone far away into the world, with only one of them returning. I know that a prophet lives among us who is terrified that we will notice he is only a frightened boy not finished sidling into manhood. I know many things beyond the bounds of my village. Is it not the same for you?”
“The bounds of my village were scribed by small, frightened minds,” Paolina muttered. “They made walls higher than a Murado itself to hide behind, and boxed their women ever smaller to enlarge themselves within their cage.”
“Then perhaps it is your work in this life to reduce the cages and open the boxes.”
“It is my work in this life to kill people with the things I make of my hands.” The excellent meat had turned to paste in Paolina’s mouth, and the wine seemed sour in its bowl.
Kalker stroked the side of her face. “You are already finding a way, one you cannot yet see.”
She began to weep in the firelight, hating herself for the shameful weakness but unable to stop. In that moment, Paolina realized she’d known her path all along. It was time for her to find her way back to Boaz.
GASHANSUNU
Wrapped in power stolen from the lives of the animals of the jungle, she followed her wa along spirit paths through the Silent World. This was rarely done within the city, for fear of the ghosts crowding the shadows like teeth in the mouth of a needlefish. In any case, the Silent World was so dense inside the circles that the distance was almost always greater from one point to another than simple walking could manage. Hours to pass from one house to the next, for example.
Outside the walls, the Silent World was largely attenuated, so that a few steps might cover a mile. Knots and snarls and tangles existed, of course—sites of old battle, or the working of great magics in the past, or some irruption of the earth and its chthonic streams of power. With alertness and a clever wa, one could avoid such distractions. Gashansunu’s wa was very clever indeed. To her mind, one of the very best.
Also, away from the glittering abyss of the city, the spark of a gleam was much more visible.
She walked the miles of jungle with as much effect as the passing of a breeze. Snakes stirred in their humid sleep deep within the hollow boles of fat-bellied trees, their slim, silver-threaded minds intruding in the Silent World more strongly than most meat animals could manage. Bright birds fled shrieking like scattered jewels from the passing chill of Gashansunu’s wa. Great crocodiles louche and hungry in their river bottoms stirred mud as they dug deeper.
The outer world spun beneath her feet. The Silent World stayed stable as always.
In time, her wa told Gashansunu to stay her journey. She stepped from the Silent World onto a crumbling black knob of rock rising above a rich, damp swampland. Buffalo cropped amid grasses shoulder-high on their great bodies. A young bull watching for predators looked up to meet Gashansunu’s eye. She sent her wa to bid him rest easy, and so he did.
She swept a small ledge clear and sat upon it, her gaze to the west as required by the practices of her house. This was not foolishness or suicide—they could look any direction prudence, safety or convenience demanded—but when at rest the Westfacing House lived up to their name.
West was where the sun went as he fled the precincts of the heavens. West was where the boundless ocean rose up to meet the shore. West was the home of the leviathans of the deep, birthing-source of the savages of the air.
Gashansunu’s people knew better, of course. The sun fled nowhere, for in truth the Southern Earth turned its face away. Likewise the ocean was just as bounded as the land, its borders reversed as a tunic pulled inside out. As for the leviathans, they lived in all the waters of the world.
But just because a thing was true in the outer world it did not change other truths of the Silent World. The Silent World prospered on a diet of symbols and a dialect of journeying shadows. In the Silent World, the sun did flee, to die and be reborn each day. The ocean was boundless as the waters of the amnion that cradled each new baby on its journey from the infinite possibility of the egg to the fatal limitations of the human.
It was not difficult to argue that the Bone People were more practical than the sorcerers of the city. While they lived in an isolation of the mind and spirit that made her own kinsmen seem like fish in a school, the Bone People also built devices for measuring the heavens and the Earth, and machines for transporting those devices according to their purposes. Some of their constructions were mysterious to the point of nonsense. Certain houses of the city averred that even their great walls here had originally been raised by the Bone People.
Yet here, atop her knoll, her head full of notions of the world, Gashansunu wondered far more at their kindred nature than at their differences. Would the Bone People have sent someone after this gleam? Or did they do so already, in seeking to have her dispatched?
She did not call her wa back for questioning just then. It had wandered since the matter of the buffalo. Gashansunu knew from long experience that if her wa foresaw danger, she was best advised to listen to its words and not delay it in its purposes. Whatever had pushed them out of the Silent World was nearby.
That thought in turn drew her eyes skyward. She had expected perhaps an airship of the Bone People, but only a solitary flier speckled the deepening blue. It was strangely shaped, either one of those treacherous Northern angels or one of the good, honest winged savages of her own Southern Earth.
It circled over her once. Gashansunu flexed her spirit to reach up toward it, until her hands could almost brush the flier’s leathery wings. It stared, eyes like hooded lamps, and moved on. She pulled her body back down to the rock far below. Such an exercise of power was profligate, even transgressive, but outside the city she could flex herself without fear of censure.
In time, her wa returned. It bore no message save that of its presence.
We carry on, she said.
Without answering, her wa took her into the Silent World once more. Something flared in the distance, closer to the base of the Wall.
The gleam? She honed in on the beacon and quickened her pace.
KITCHENS
The maneuvering that unfolded struck him as very strange. Had he been the captain of the fast-packet airship, he would have closed in on Notus seeking protection under the larger ship’s guns. While the two Chinese ships could almost certainly defeat Notus and the Cumaean-class vessel together, their fight would have gone from a long chase followed by an easy kill to a short, hard contest. The enemy were far from their own supply lines here and could probably not chance the need for serious repair.
Instead the little English airship clawed for more altitude, fleeing both the Chinese pursuers and the possibility of intervention from Notus. Sayeed, meanwhile, closed on the Chinese airships while his bosun and the deck idlers shifted signal banners with the avid intensity of cardsharps just before the closing bell.
The Chinese were signaling back.
Either a Silent Order game was afoot, or every bit of treachery suspected in Notus and her crew was turning out to be doubly true. Kitchens wondered which was more frightening. Then he wondered how soon it would be before he was cast over the rail.
Executions aboard an airship would be brutally simple to effect.
The Chinese vessels broke off their pursuit to begin a slow pass around Notus. Not a circle of trust, Kitchens realized, for the manouevre kept their guns trained on the British; but definitely a discussion. The smaller airship continued to make good its escape. He watched in silence as Sayeed conferred with his signals officer, checking through a small leather-bound volume, then squinti
ng at the Chinese flags.
Somehow they had gone from the blood scent of battle to the aerial equivalent of a bureaucratic conference.
To Kitchens’ surprise, Sayeed turned to him. “Mr. Kitchens, might we have a word, sir?”
The two men weren’t fifteen feet apart, but this was as if he’d been invited to pass through a gate that had earlier been slammed shut. “I await your pleasure, Captain.”
Sayeed stepped close, the leather book still in his hand. “Your fellow clerks did not search this ship so well.” He tilted it toward Kitchens. “This is a code book. I am confessing treason to even admit this, but the matter at hand is greater than even the question of my guilt or innocence.”
Kitchens kept his voice measured. “Which would be what, Captain?”
“This is no frontier skirmish of the air. We chase one another about the borders of the Wall quite regularly.” Sayeed grimaced, the expression strange on his elegant face and quite at odds with his cultured voice. “A sport, you might well say, with certain understandings passing between captains on both sides.”
“This would not be a surprise to Admiralty.” Though so far as Kitchens was aware, the high command did not suspect the full degree of complicity implied by Sayeed. Was the entire West African station corrupted? That the captain was even telling him this now strongly suggested Kitchens would not survive to make a report to London.
“Most of these . . . understandings . . . happen in the smaller ports, where ships may call side by side without engaging in hostilities. Some few of us take a more active role.” The navigator slipped Sayeed a paper that the captain read without showing it to Kitchens. He continued. “Suffice to say your fears of secret societies are well enough grounded. The senior captain yonder is a member of the Silent Order, as you know I am. He judged it more urgent to communicate with me in that capacity than to engage us.”
Kitchens chose his words with care. “It is not so often that you come to open warfare here anyway, as I recall.”
“No, not so often. But it is so now.” Sayeed tapped the book in his hand. “The British Empire is at war with the Middle Kingdom, though London may not yet be fully informed. Thanks to the girl Paolina, Notus brought down Shi Hsi-Chi during our last journey north from the Wall. I am told by Captain Huang there that our forces destroyed another airship on routine reconnaissance over the middle of the African extents of the Wall. That was in turn followed by a Chinese raid at Mogadishu resulting in the loss of vessels on both sides. This has escalated to full-scale fighting involving the East and West African stations as well as the Indian Ocean station. Their orders are to destroy all British assets.”
“Why do they talk to us? And why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I believe the world can be a better place,” Sayeed said bluntly. “The Silent Order works for many things, but our objectives do not include warfare between the two greatest empires on the Northern Earth. Such a contest could not be won, and would only cost far more lives and treasure than any man could stomach, for scant return. If London were properly apprised of the full situation rather than reacting to attacks piecemeal, wiser heads might prevail.”
The last round of open fighting between the two empires had led to the Chinese conquest of Singapore, and the dramatic unseating of British influence in Asia east of the Irrawaddy River. Calcutta was a city permanently on the edge of siege, everything between it and the Irrawaddy in dispute.
“Does Captain Huang speak for the Chinese throne?” Kitchens asked icily.
“No more than I speak for Whitehall, sir.” Sayeed returned his tone. “Would you prefer we commence hostilities? They have the advantage of us in numbers.”
Kitchens bit off the first replies that leapt to mind. “My part in this is presumably to guarantee your safe conduct should we return to England posthaste with this news. Is this not so?”
“Yes.”
“Then suggest to Captain Huang that we have an urgent mission not of direct military interest. If we are able to pursue it unmolested over the next few days, I will work to enable your return to England without legal jeopardy.”
Sayeed’s divided loyalties were on the point of the knife now. Kitchens did not imagine that either of the great secret societies—the Silent Order or the avebianco—sought widespread conflict. Fighting at the edges, continued instability, the constant bickering of nation-states: those were the stuff of leverage, expansion and opportunity. If cities burned, no one’s interests would be served.
Sayeed once more barked out flag codes from his secret book. Kitchens would have given much to see the contents of the volume. What one chose to encode was far more significant than how one chose to encode it. A look at the standard signals would speak a great deal about the tactics of the Silent Order.
After a few moments, the Chinese airships broke off and headed toward the African interior.
“I told them I will keep station for thirty minutes,” Sayeed said to Kitchens. “Then we will resume our flight. We are half a day from Ayacalong, and the work camp is a few minutes beyond that. We have twenty-four hours there; then we must head back toward England. Huang cannot divert his own men and ships for longer, and he cannot guarantee that another captain with ambitions may not close-haul down the Wall hunting British prey.”
“Why are the sailors silent on this?” asked Kitchens. “Theirs and ours? Surely the docksides know that enemy captains consort.”
Sayeed gave him a strange look. “You were never under arms. Enemy captains have always consorted. More than one battle has been won in advance by sheer common sense. This open signaling is a more rare thing, as it is usual to meet in some low tavern where few will overhear. In any event, when has anyone ever listened to the tales of common seamen? Except for other common seamen, of course.”
After their thirty minutes had passed, Notus began to beat southward. Fingering the razor in his sleeve, Kitchens could still see the Chinese ships above the eastern horizon, but they had dwindled to textured ovals in the sky. If he simply challenged Sayeed, it would accomplish nothing. The crew would not take his orders in any case. He could not fight them all.
Instead, Kitchens watched abaft, to see if the little airship would swing round once again.
NINE
He tunnels through the rock; his eyes see all its treasures. —Job 28:10
BOAZ
Midday brought a clearing of the fog and no sign of Erinyes. Though he had become eager to depart, especially before the strange and irrational Lieutenant Ostrander made another appearance, Boaz stuck by McCurdy. The Brass recognized enough of al-Wazir in the bosun to stir his own conscience. He was certain that if he left this place without seeing to the bosun and his men, there would be no survivors.
Well played, the mixed voice of Paolina and al-Wazir told him. The Seal just grumbled, a magic-laced cursing below comprehension.
He wondered if this was what humans felt in their heads, with their complex minds and contradictory ideas. Brass were certainty itself. Unwavering, unchanging, confirmed in their thinking. People had too many voices—if you knew them well enough, you could read it in their faces, hear it in their words. The monkey was never far from the surface, but below that were other, darker elements. YHWH had played a cosmic joke on His most beloved children, reproducing all of Creation within their heads.
Very few humans had the singleness of purpose that characterized all Brass. Well, all Brass other than himself. The most focused human he had met yet in his life was Dr. Ottweill, who was manifestly abnormal.
McCurdy certainly exhibited a divided mind now. He and Boaz continued their watch from atop the damaged stockade, though his men had left their defensive position hard by the Wall and spread out through the compound to pick over the wreckage for salvage, or so Boaz presumed. With the fog lifted, their sense of imminent danger had mitigated considerably.
The bosun was far from relieved by that. He tapped his fingers on the splintered wood, stared at the uncaring sk
y, studied the jungle below with the distant glint of the Mitémélé River at the port of Ayacalong.
“Under ordinary circumstances, Ostrander would be relieved of command,” McCurdy announced at one point, apropos of nothing. “Doing so under fire is far more serious.”
“Are you under fire now?”
McCurdy made no answer, but continued to fret at length. A bit later he asked, “Is it the Wall that makes us all mad?”
Boaz could offer no answer to that.
Several hours into the afternoon, he spotted an airship descending. “Chief, look, Erinyes.”
“No,” said McCurdy almost immediately. “That’s not a Cumaean-class gasbag. Looks more like one of the cruisers. Something along the lines of a Boxer-class. Or maybe an Artemis.” He squinted. “One of Her Imperial Majesty’s, to be sure. The Chinee run a different trim entirely.”
Boaz was not keen at the possibility of being taken on the ground by yet another crew. “I believe this is where my involvement should be terminated,” he told McCurdy. “Before they make their landfall.”
The bosun gave Boaz a sidelong look. “You going over the back fence now, John Brass?”
“The front stockade, I should think.”
McCurdy stared upward at the approaching airship. “Do you see Erinyes following behind her, much higher up? My little chicken has flown to the protection of an eagle.”
The appearance of the smaller vessel in no wise changed Boaz’ calculus. “All the same, you and your men will have that eagle to see you safely back to Mogadishu. With luck they may carry an officer who can be spared to properly command your own ship.” He nodded and slipped over the front wall of the stockade. When he hit the ground, Boaz looked up to see McCurdy on the rampart with his pistol drawn, but not pointed downward.
“John Brass,” the bosun said, hardly breathing. “Look you now.”