Not when she had a chance to stop this war.
“I would leave with you,” she said to Boaz. “To a place where we might find calm, and consider the times to come. I am afraid we will not find that place.”
“No one will find that place,” Gashansunu said. “It is lost.”
Boaz answered them both. “We will. In time. Right now, I owe these men their lives. Mr. Kitchens has convinced me of the worth of his purpose.”
“I cannot say if he is right or wrong.” Paolina examined her conscience carefully before she chose her next words. She was letting go of something she barely understood: freedom, companionship, her life lived her way. “I can only know that the price of walking away is higher even than the price of staying. If we can stop a war with his mad idea to behead a government, then we will stop a war. But . . .” She looked at them both. “I will comprehend what storm it is we sail into. In every detail that clerk can squeeze out of himself.”
Paolina drew the stemwinder from its pouch and stared down the Chinese airships sailing after them. She had disabled the last two such that pursued them, and caused a fire in the process. Now that she had moved men just as she’d once moved Five Lucky Winds, she wondered if she might more profitably remove the crews from their ships and let the altitude take the vessels.
Otherwise the men would simply effect repairs and continue their war.
Paolina focused in on the pursuing airships, finding their images in the Silent World. The gasbags glowed with the restless energy of the hydrogen within. The motes of souls swarmed below aboard both vessels, men at their oh-so-serious business of pursuit and destruction. Very briefly she was tempted to send them all to Praia Nova. Let the doms with their precious male wisdom deal with almost a hundred angry Chinese sailors.
But she could not do that. Such a gesture was too cruel, and the cost to the women of Praia Nova would be unbearable.
Ming would be disappointed besides. All those men over there were versions of him, just as all these men here were versions of al-Wazir. Similars, brothers, reflections.
Real to her. In a way that she had never been real to the doms.
Sumatra it was.
She could visualize that fatal stretch of shoreline very well indeed. The boat had been about half a mile offshore. Sufficiently close for these men to swim if she put them in that exact spot, though the beach would be safer.
Had she seen enough of the beach?
Paolina set the fourth hand to the rhythms of the first airship. That one closed slightly faster than its fellow. The men swarmed, each golden light, each heartbeat, each soul and mind.
They will know I am here, she thought. But they already did. Everyone seemed to. Even Gashansunu had come looking for her. Hethor was right—she could not hide. All that was left to her was to use her power as best she could.
“No more waiting,” Paolina announced, and sent forty-seven very startled men halfway around the world.
A huge spray of saltwater spewed away from the airship. Something large fell with it, wriggling.
The now-abandoned airship veered off course almost immediately. Her helm had been fighting the same crosswind that bedeviled their own ship. Paolina swiftly turned her focus to the other vessel. Forty-nine men there. They already reacted to the change in the other vessel, moving toward the rail. She could imagine men calling out to their cousins or old friends on the other deck.
Maybe they would find Ming, and he would help them understand.
She simply could not kill more of these Chinese.
This crew vanished as well, traded for several more tons of seawater and a flashing silver rain of fish that glittered as they fell. The second vessel veered away from its course, nose pitching downward.
“I will let them wander,” Paolina said. “I suppose the remaining airship could conduct a recovery operation, but they will be a long time about it.”
“Erinyes will distract them, miss.” That was Kitchens.
She hadn’t realized he’d left the helm. “I am very tired,” Paolina said, then sat down on the deck so quickly it was nearly a collapse.
Boaz bent close as Kitchens stared from the helm. “Do you need to rest below?” the clerk asked.
She peered up at him. His face seemed to almost glow in the orange light of morning, erasing the grime and pallor and half-starved gauntness. Privation, transformed into something edging on serenity.
“I will sit a moment,” Paolina said, “and you will sit with me, and you will tell me exactly what it is you hope to accomplish on your return to England. If I am going to give up everything to aid you, I would like to know what I am buying at such cost.”
Beside her, Gashansunu stared aft toward the drifting airships. “You are already buying many things at great cost, air priestess.” Her voice was distant.
CHILDRESS
A great ruckus erupted ashore. An alarm bell shrilled in a building beyond the moored British gunboats. Most of the sailors visible on their decks vanished with some urgency. Even the attentions of HIMS Inerrancy shifted away from Five Lucky Winds.
She could have laughed. The monk has done some grave mischief. If she does not bring al-Wazir out of this unharmed, I will do her a grave mischief.
“Captain Leung,” Childress called out in Chinese, “I should have the men strike the awning and stand by.”
Orders were barked, and the crew hustled to their work. Ashore, a pillar of smoke rose from the building that bulked behind the gunboats.
Fire? The monk had set a fire?
If nothing else, Childress had to admire the woman’s brazenness. The Mask Poinsard could have taken lessons from this one.
Another alarm joined the first. Her shore party emerged from astern the endmost gunboat, rowing with all diligence.
Something was different.
Childress counted.
Five men, not four, in that launch. Though he was hunched over an oar, the fifth was far too large.
She turned and scrambled up the conning tower. “We should sail as soon as the launch is aboard,” Childress announced to Leung, who scanned the shore through a set of glasses.
He called down for the engines to be ready and the harbor anchors to be drawn up, then said to Childress, much more quietly and in English, “I see six gunboats moored, another anchored along with that heavy cruiser. Do you propose to leave this harbor in full view of them all?”
“Do you propose to await a better time? Keep the crew paraded on the foredeck, depart waving to the people of Port Said, and play the fool. If they send swift boats after us, we will stand to and claim ignorance. Our chances of accomplishing anything are better on open water.”
“Then we are bound for Malta,” Leung confirmed.
“Yes.” Childress thought quickly, but there were no better answers. “All other routes are closed to us now. The only way to have done with this nonsense between the Middle Kingdom and the British throne is a path drawn straight through the inner corridors of the avebianco.” Though she would dearly love to know what the monk had to say about this.
The launch came aside. Al-Wazir, red faced and huffing, climbed aboard first. “Get it up here now, lads,” he growled, pointing at the boat.
Childress called down to him. “Go below, Chief, before you’re spotted.”
His upturned face met her gaze. “Am I glad to see you.” Al-Wazir stepped inside the base of the tower and grunted as he climbed one-handed down the hatch.
Something exploded onshore, roofing tiles and timber fragments spinning into the air.
“That is our invitation to depart,” Childress said.
“A magazine explosion. Bad business.” Leung called down, “Deck party fall in. Salute our hosts.” He lifted the speaking tube and asked for quarter power, then began directing the pilot out of the harbor.
Once on the open water, Leung ordered the crew below and the vessel secured to submerge. He and Childress and the pilot remained above, watching the sky for airships and the
waters abaft for pursuit. Ships were setting out from Port Said in numbers, but thus far HIMS Inerrancy did not seem to be among them.
“I am concerned about those gunboats,” Leung told her. “They move considerably faster than we can sail.”
“This I would not know.”
“It is your ship.” Something mild but dangerous hovered in his voice.
Though it pained her to argue with this man who’d grown so into her heart, Childress knew she must face the problem squarely. Still a part of her held back. “No, Captain, this is your ship. I am at best a kind of admiral, saying what must be done. But when we are face-to-face with the enemies of your people, I will do anything I can to keep us all alive. Including seeming to throw you over as just another crewman.” She paused to let her words sink in, thinking, I am still a woman and you are still a man. “Would you prefer that I yield authority in all things? Even in the face of an angry British officer?”
“This was not rightly done.”
“No,” she agreed. “But we have prevailed.”
“There are new difficulties,” Leung said, retreating from his stubbornness. “My chart of this sea is very limited, for reference only. A rational man could not navigate a vessel by its use.”
“Malta is north of west of here. The Mediterranean is not overfull of reefs and sudden rocks. Avoid islands and the shore.”
“You truly know nothing of naval navigation, do you, Mask?”
“No, I do not.”
“Neither do I,” said the monk from behind them.
The unflappable Leung started. Childress just shook her head.
“Who are you—?” the captain began, but Childress cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Welcome back. Your talents amaze me.”
The monk grinned broadly. “Then be amazed.” She reached into her robes and pulled out a very large sheaf of paper. “I trust you can read British.”
Childress took the bundle. It was a set of charts, hastily folded and somewhat crumpled. “Captain, I believe we have our answer.”
“Not all the answers we need.” His voice was hard. “Your machinations are troublesome enough, Mask, for all that I have encouraged them and understand them. But this . . . woman . . . is aboard my vessel without my leave or knowledge. I would know who and what she is. And why.”
The monk fished out a little leather sack and began tamping a jade pipe. Her eyes twinkled as she kept her gaze on the captain. “You, sir, are speaking to the miracle worker who drew British attention from your hull back in Port Said. I freed the huge man while I was about my business. If that is not ample evidence that our interests converge, then you are a greater fool than even the man who breaks his oaths and flees his nation in time of conflict, taking with him a valuable war machine.”
“Please,” Childress said. “I know a little of this woman.”
“That you know any of this woman only proves my point about command authority,” Leung snapped, finally losing his temper. He shouted into the speaking tube. “Bai! Dog all hatches tight. No one crosses into or out of the hull until I call down again.”
A long, awkward moment passed. “Rumor will fill my ship from stem to stern before the hour has turned,” Leung said quietly. Anger had already receded like a tide. “Discipline has long since been compromised, but the notion that I have lost all control of who comes and goes aboard Five Lucky Winds will be more damaging.”
The monk was blatantly unrepentant. “It is time for a new order in the world,” she announced cheerfully. “Surely the deck of one rogue submarine is not so bad a place to start.”
“What are you doing here?”
She stabbed the smoldering pipe toward Childress. “Following her.”
“You are a white bird?”
“Not in the least.”
“A member of the Silent Order, then?”
Another insouciant grin. “They seem to think so.”
Leung would not release the point. “Then whom do you serve?”
“The interests of the world.” She took a long drag. “In the person of a quarrelsome old man of poor digestion who answers to the name of the Jade Abbot.”
“Who?” Childress asked simultaneously with Leung.
KITCHENS
He could not squat on his heels next to the girl Paolina. His entire body was too tired, aching in every joint. Sitting on the deck as she was doing seemed simply undignified. There were no other options, though.
“Mister Levine,” he called down to the main deck. “Find the galley and see who can manage a Chinese stove. We will need to eat soon, all of us.”
“Mess it is, sir,” the old sailor replied.
Something more for them to do, at the least.
Kitchens turned back to Paolina. “What would you of me, then, Miss Barthes?”
“Where are we bound?”
“England,” he said. “To be specific, a place called Blenheim Palace.”
She closed her eyes and sighed a moment. “What is at Blenheim Palace?”
“The Queen herself.”
“I presume she lies in state.” Paolina opened her eyes again. “Or some mischance is at stake to draw you there.”
“A great mischance that has paralyzed Government, or drawn it into the hands of unscrupulous men. I cannot say which.”
“We abandon all to flee into the angry heart of the Empire pursuing this mischance.”
Kitchens sighed. He couldn’t recall where his worthless writs had gotten too, in the attaché saved at the last moment from Notus. Three airships and a descent into Ottweill’s private hell had left him with too little accounting even in his own memory. With the writs, or perhaps Notus herself, was lost his little set of words from the Queen, along with whatever testimony Captain Sayeed had tucked away in that forgotten envelope.
“She told me a thing,” he said softly. “When I saw her, just before I came to the Wall. She said, ‘Remake what has been undone. Break my throne. Help me finish dying.’ ”
“So does she now lie in state?” Paolina sounded almost sleepy, but Kitchens knew to be very wary of this girl.
“No, but she should. She floats in a tank of bodily fluid, a bloody oracle for the Empire. Lloyd George has struck me as too decent for such a blasphemy, but whoever has managed this has arranged the Empire to his convenience. Too much goes unquestioned. Her Imperial Majesty wants her country back, and herself to go on past the end of life’s journey.”
Paolina’s eyes fastened on him. Glittering, hard, filled with careful thought. “If we strike down this queen, we shall be regicides. The most hated people in Europe. I have already been hounded from the heart of your empire. This price I will pay again for Boaz’ sake, and Ming’s, and alWazir’s, and that of all these silly, foolish sailors on these very decks. But how do you know our actions will not simply worsen affairs?”
Again, Kitchens chose his words with care. “Prince Edward is no fool. He was never meant by God to be a governing sort of man. But neither does he stand in the sway of his mother’s counselors. Whoever has made this scheme at Blenheim, they have almost certainly cut him out. Keeping Her Imperial Majesty alive at any cost argues they do not want the heir upon the throne.”
The fierceness faded from her eyes. “You did not answer my question, Mr. Kitchens.”
“If I could speak with him, I would, but the Prince of Wales has been a man of his own circle, far away from Admiralty and Whitehall. He prefers the smart set to serious gentlemen who study trade and industry and the affairs of distant nations.”
“Then perhaps he does not so much favor war,” Paolina said.
“He does not so much favor war, and neither does he hold close the advice from those who do. If we can pursue the Queen’s will and somehow alert him to the matter, well, that will be enough to open this rotten business up. Not even the hardest elements in Parliament will pursue open war with China in the shadow of Her Imperial Majesty’s death.”
“Will our deaths even be counted?” she asked.
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“Will you not just walk free, as only you can do?”
She could not walk free, not now. Anymore than she could just walk to Kitchens’ queen, in a place she did not know among people she had never met and could not follow.
They stared at one another a while, like two cats contesting a doorstep before dawn. No claws came out, though, and eventually he turned away, feeling vaguely foolish.
EIGHTEEN
The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. —Matthew 12:42
BOAZ
Eventually he was able to rest. Paolina slept next to him, curled on a length of rubberized fabric meant for patching the hydrogen cells. Her breathing was deep and regular, with a faint, periodic whistle that Boaz found most endearing.
::thy breasts are as does at the spring, dipping their brown muzzles daintily to suck at the water::
Boaz did not even know what to say to that, but the Paolina–al-Wazir voice chuckled inside him. Or at least the al-Wazir voice did.
::clad in light with a sword of winds, the angel overflew the sleeping camp as secretly as a falling star::
Right now, England was not his problem. His problem was shutting down far enough to allow his mechanisms to self-maintain, his lubrication stores to reinfuse his joints and relays, and his memories to settle into long-term storage. Boaz shifted a little closer to Paolina.
As for the Sixth Seal, and the voices in his head . . .
You’re fine, laddie. We’re not voices. We’re just you, talking to yourself.
But I never talked to myself before now.
You never had a heart before, John Brass.
He finally settled into the torpor of self-repair, one hand touching his hollow, clockwork chest, the other resting on Paolina’s hip.