Now they stood amid the textured noises of evening. The screeching of the jungled daylight had subsided, but the insect hum was louder. Frogs gave voice in a rhythmic echo that seemed to reach beyond the horizon. Larger things splashed in the river, moving against the slow, greasy waters. Something of great size boomed a lament in the distance.
“This is not my place,” Gashansunu said. “I do not have the meditations for open jungle. The Silent World is curdled here, gathered around your Hethor as if he were a spindle with which to wind it.”
Something in her tone, even through the magic of Hethor’s speech spell, made it clear that she despised her own words.
“I would use your tongue,” Paolina told her, “if I could. I imagine we might discuss your Silent World much more effectively.”
“It does not matter. I am come to heal the cause of the world’s regrets. You and Hethor have both showed me much of what that may be, and how it should be addressed.”
“Now I am here.” She was conscious of Ming watching from an upper bench of the amphitheater, Hethor’s Arellya beside him. The English boy had pled fatigue hours ago and retired.
“We begin at night because when the sun has turned away from the world, some powers wane while others wax.”
Paolina understood a constraint when she heard one. “You mean to say that there are fewer considerations in your practice of magic.”
“Precisely.” Grudging approval hung in Gashansunu’s voice. “One might sing among a crowd of one’s neighbors; one might sing alone on a rooftop; one might listen to the music of the world. None of those are wrong; none of those are better. But each weighs differently, carries different meanings, makes different demands.”
“What do we sing on this rooftop?” Paolina did not yet see where this was going.
“I will show you the Silent World from within,” Gashansunu answered. “This will almost certainly aid you in understanding how your gleam may be used and misused.”
“When I use the gleam, I see the world as made of, well, levels. Gear trains made of up myriad smaller gear trains. It shows me the inner nature of things.”
“You witness an imperfect image of the Silent World,” Gashansunu replied. “There are layers. As above, so below, all the way down.”
“What lies at the bottom?”
“One can measure a circle beginning from anywhere. What lies at the end?”
“So . . . there is no bottom?”
Gashansunu made a strained noise. “If you were to pursue it deeply enough, you would come back out the top. But not all levels are the same. The Silent World is the true world. People live in the Shadow World, which is a reflection of the Silent World. Or better considered as a projection of it. That which is perfected in the Silent World can been seen here in imperfect copies of the world, of people, of purposes and intents.”
Paolina had to ask the obvious question. “If the Silent World is perfected, why do you abide in this world?”
“Because I am imperfect,” Gashansunu responded promptly. “I have studied decades to enter the Silent World, but I am not welcome there, however much my spirit might cry out for it. Not welcome yet, in any case.”
Paolina was glad to note that pride was not a sin confined to the people of Northern Earth. “How will you show me this Silent World?”
“Watch,” Gashansunu ordered. “Do not leave my side.”
She looped a braided silver cord on Paolina’s wrist, then passed it around her own. They stood facing, close enough to touch had there been a need. Gashansunu closed her eyes and began to hum. Something curled around the foreign sorceress, not quite tangible, not quite visible, but right on the edge of perception.
This is magic, Paolina thought. True magic, before my eyes.
She blinked, and was somewhere else.
The landscape was no different, yet it was.
That thought did not make sense. Even so, it seemed profoundly true.
Ming glowed. So did Arellya. Gashansunu was far brighter, but cloaked at the same time. Paolina looked at her own hands. Light leaked from within, streaming through the pores of her skin.
The presence around Gashansunu was far more distinct now—a twin, but insubstantial even here. A Gashansunu-copy that was as dark as she was light, also cloaked.
Animals stirred the substance of the Silent World with their bright, rapid passing. The slow dreams of trees left far more deliberate ripples, while the memory of the rocks and soil beneath her feet moved at a pace even more leisurely than that of the tide.
Everything lived, here.
She looked skyward. The Earth’s brass track showed as a pinpoint of light drawn out from horizon to horizon. The great, crushing weight of the planet upon the orbital ring must paint it with a smear of all the lives both fast and slow that passed upon the two halves of the Earth.
A sense of thoughtfulness tingled at Paolina, an idea calling for attention. All is metaphor. Her lips moved and bubbled, but no sound issued. The gears and mechanics I see when I dip into the fabric of the world are truly no different than what this Gashansunu sees here.
You are correct, the other woman thought. But some metaphors are more accurate. You see the brass in the sky and think the world must be brass all the way down. Is a tree made of leaves all the way down to its roots?
Paolina objected. You cannot explain metaphor with more metaphor. That is a cheat.
Why?
She was not sure how to answer that.
Try this, Gashansunu urged. Step across the river.
Matching her spirit-guide pace for pace, Paolina found her foot reaching the far bank—fifty yards, at least—without a strain. They looked back at the glowing lights of life on the shore they had just left behind.
Paolina noted that the dark copy of Gashansunu had not come with them. Where is your shadow?
My shadow? Gashansunu seemed surprised. I am the shadow. The wa is my true soul.
That fit with Gashansunu’s view of the world.
Stepping across the river with the stemwinder would have been just as possible. The process was different. Paolina would have pushed backward as much as she had pushed forward, knowing what Hethor had suggested to her today. She and Gashansunu had done just that, stepping over the river while their heels dug into the opposite bank, just as any footfall on a sunlit path might do.
Perhaps the processes were not so different. Was it all metaphor? Was God a metaphor for the boundary between the worlds, for the tension that drove Creation like a spring in a clock?
She hoped so. Paolina had already more than her fill of the needs and deeds of men. In some ways, God was nothing more than the largest, most selfish man in history. Certainly the God of Fra Bellico had been, back in Praia Nova.
Could the world have created itself, and man then made God by way of explanation?
The stemwinder was heavy in her free hand. Paolina slid it from her skirts to study in the strange lightless shadows. The gleam didn’t actually gleam—the opposite, in fact. Its ordinariness was aggressive. A shout of solidity in this place of vapors.
I should not use that here.
Paolina heard a note of fear in Gashansunu’s voice. Why?
Would you build a fire inside a fire?
Metaphors! I wish to step back, she thought defiantly.
Then we step together.
Ignoring her guide, Paolina tugged the stem to the fourth stop. She tried to find Gashansunu’s heart, the rhythm that drove this woman, but there was nothing. As if she were searching for words in empty air.
Across the river, though, the other Gashansunu was very real. Paolina located her even from this distance, as easy to read as a storm. She set the fourth hand to the rhythm of Gashansunu’s wa.
The woman stiffened. We go now.
Dragged, Paolina was forced to step across the river again. She put her mind to going forward only, not pushing back with her other foot, deliberately re-creating her earlier efforts at translocation with the gleam.
Something flared behind them, and with that they were back in the Shadow World.
“Do not ever do that!” shouted Gashansunu.
Across the river a pair of trees toppled into the water. Mud and clay rained down.
“Impressive,” said Ming from his perch above. “You grow ever more dangerous.”
No one but Paolina understood his Chinese. She grimaced, then turned to Gashansunu, her pride wounded by the woman’s rebuke. That was something a man would have done to her. “Is this how you step across the miles?” The fourth hand swung wildly as Paolina focused on herself. “I will show you an easier way!” She pushed off, sending herself across the river to stand on one of the fallen logs.
“Here!” Paolina shouted across the moonlit river, then sent herself back. Something cracked, and she turned to see the log collapse, split open. “And here,” she told Gashansunu up close. “As well as to the moon, should I desire.”
Arellya and Ming were both on their feet, scrambling the few steps down to the two women.
“We know you have power,” Gashansunu said quietly. “The question is how you use it, and whether that will upset the balance of the world too much.”
Paolina was breathing hard. The world seemed to click around her, Gashansunu’s wa almost visible in the moonlight.
“I would prefer not to be ruled by pride,” she admitted, ashamed of her own actions. “Or foolishness.”
Ming touched her arm as if to pull her back from an edge. Arellya stood at her other side. Gashansunu just stared, the woman’s eyes onyx in the moonlight.
“You must learn, then, like a child who has discovered her strength but not the limits of her temper. If I could have you sit in one of the houses of our city for a score of seasons, that might be a beginning.”
Paolina felt a stab of temptation at that thought, but she needed to return to Northern Earth, to find Boaz, to see al-Wazir again. Even, she realized for the first time since leaving the miserable place, to return to Praia Nova and help the girls and women trapped there under the dead weight of centuries of male privilege.
All of that must be done in a way that protected the stemwinder, kept her whole, and prevented the demise of everything she might hold dear.
“I am not a weapon,” she told Gashansunu, remembering her words before the Chinese fleet off Sumatra.
The sorceress unloosed the cord. “If I knew a method to awaken the wa to which you belong, I would do so.”
“Come sleep,” Ming urged. “We have a good camp on the ridge above.”
Paolina knew she must think on what was to be learned from Gashansunu’s Silent World. It would never be so simple, of course, but some very important things had happened tonight. “Will I be able to learn to make those steps?” she asked.
Impassive, Gashansunu looked pointedly at the stemwinder in Paolina’s hand. “You already know.”
The unspoken words far too much hung between them.
“My thanks.” Paolina suffered herself to be led from the amphitheater.
WANG
His mouth was filled with blood.
He tried to open his eyes and failed. Blinking didn’t seem to help. Blindfold?
The noises of a ship at sea surrounded him. Slap of waves against the hull, creaking of the deck, a murmured order. He was aboard Good Change. As opposed to having passed over to the judges of the dead.
This time he managed to spit. It didn’t go very far, probably down his chest, but he could breathe easier. A bell clanged; someone shouted; then everything fell quiet again.
Eventually Wu brought him light. Of course it had been a blindfold, Wang realized, as the first mate peeled away a length of silk. His head must have been addled earlier.
The other man squatted in front of Wang. The cataloger realized he was tied to a chair. “Traitor.” Wu’s tone was perfunctory, carrying none of the weight the word called for.
“I betrayed nothing.” Is that true?
“Our prize was in hand. You let her go, then commandeered the boat.”
“What!?” He was shocked. “I stood at the aft rail and watched the shore as Captain Shen took us out to sea. How is that commandeering anything?” Wang was also amazed that his mouth worked so well. He seemed to have all the teeth he’d woken up with that morning, though his tongue was swollen.
Wu’s eyes slid away, as if something important were happening elsewhere, then back to Wang. “You forced the wheel, and intimidated the captain.”
“Nothing intimidates the captain except the Kô.” Wang could not keep the anger from his voice. “Certainly not a fat little man from the libraries.”
“Nonetheless,” Wu replied, “this is what happened.”
“I . . . I know we are not friends.” The cataloger searched for the words he needed. “But neither are we enemies. You are the only one of the crew who will speak to me beyond the most basic of necessities.”
“Ghosts.”
Was the mate’s tone encouraging? Wang tried to follow Wu’s lead. “You are not ghosts. You are men under a spell of law. Your names have not been rectified, and your place is lost. But your hearts beat, your lungs draw air, and you bleed when cut. I am no different, except that my place is separate from your vessel and your oaths to the Kô’.”
“You are not a ghost,” Wu said with a faint smile.
“No. I am not. Neither are you. There is only one true ghost on this ship—the monk. She passes through like morning mist. I know you have seen her. The monk influenced our captain, and somehow we set out to sea.”
The mate rocked slightly forward on his heels. “Suppose you were captain of a vessel owned by a close relative of the Emperor. Suppose your life was forfeit to the owner’s merest whim, as you were already sentenced to death for a crime beyond forgiveness. Suppose you were sent on a mission of utmost importance, with a foolish little man who cannot be relied upon for decent tea in the mornings, let alone to fulfill the purpose of your voyage. Suppose you were in fact set upon by a ghost, who forced your prize from your hands at the moment of success.
“Now, do you imagine this close relative of the Emperor, a man known for his hard-headed ways and intolerance of failure, will entertain a wild tale of ghosts in the wheelhouse and confusions of navigation that would not be made by the smallest of children? Or do you suppose this close relative of the Emperor would be more receptive to a tale of treachery and foolishness on the part of a certain fat little man from the libraries, already known to be cowardly?
“Consider if you were Captain Shen, which tale you would bear back to your master?”
“If I am so cowardly,” Wang asked quietly, “how is it that I managed to overcome both the captain of this motor yacht and hold off her entire crew sufficiently long for a one-handed man to row himself and our quarry to safety?”
“The tale needs a bit of work,” Wu admitted. “How lucky that we face a long sea voyage. Captain Shen will have a boat full of witnesses when he reports to the Kô.”
“Do we return in defeat now?”
“Of course not.” The mate seemed surprised. “We continue searching for Five Lucky Winds. Should we find the submarine, we will set our fat little man from the libraries to speak to her English mistress. Should we fail to find the submarine, well, we have our culprit in hand already.”
Wang had to admit there was a certain brutal elegance to the situation. In truth, it changed little about his predicament. “How will you find the submarine if she has already slipped our grasp?”
“That is the job of our librarian.” Wu’s smile was predatory. “You are a man of education. You shall determine where Captain Leung is most likely to take his vessel next. We will follow that course as far as we may dare.”
Wang saw his opening now. “I am to determine this while strapped to a chair, bruised and beaten? You cannot make me both the scapegoat prisoner and the expedition’s navigator. Choose one role, and I will fill it.”
“Which would you prefer?”
/> “Show me to your maps.”
KITCHENS
He dug through the papers until he located Ottweill’s logbook. That described the catastrophic events of the earliest days of their presence and the subsequent attack that had broken the encampment.
What he did not find was any mention of Angus Threadgill al-Wazir. As if the big Scotsman had never existed. The reports from Notus had certainly accounted for him here, speaking to Captain Sayeed and organizing the camp’s defenses. Yet sometime in the eight weeks since the unfortunate airship had departed the digging camp and the fatal day of its return, alWazir had vanished not only from the site, but was also seemingly expunged from the records.
Kitchens went back through the expedition’s logs, looking specifically at the time of Notus’ visit. The paper had been scraped in places and overwritten, he realized.
Ottweill had edited both al-Wazir and Boaz right out of his history. Now Kitchens wished he’d spent more time speaking with the Brass.
The door of the little cabin thumped open. Ottweill stood there, covered in gray rock dust except for pale patches where he’d worn a mask and goggles. “The Queen’s auditors have come to my little project, I see,” he announced in his imperious voice. “Please, yourself to make comfortable among my belongings and confidential papers.”
“I believe I already have,” Kitchens said mildly. He knew better than to be drawn into a serious dispute with this man.
“The whiskey you have stolen yet? You would drink me dry, I am sure.”
“No, thank you. I prefer not to partake when I am working.”
Ottweill stared at him a few moments too long. “Always working I am. If I did not partake then, when would I?”
The doctor was combative as usual, but Kitchens swiftly realized this was not directed at him personally. “They are dying, my men,” Ottweill said.
“I reviewed your tally.”
“We are safer here, inside the depths, but one by one madness will take them. Already many I cannot force outside to hunt and raid.”
Kitchens leaned forward. “Where is al-Wazir?”