The next day, hills of tortured brown stone rolled by beneath the keel. Kitchens and Petty Officer Martins met with Boaz on the poop. The Brass had the helm a while.
“We got the old girl running properly,” Martins said. “She’s a strange one, being Chinee and all, but a gasbag is still a gasbag. An engine is still an engine.”
::a man can pluck up the sword of his enemy, an he know the blade from the guard::
A thought occurred to Boaz: Not all swords were created equal, nor were all sword arms. “I believe that we are still concerned with reaching England undetected.”
“Yes,” replied Martins, “and with this monstrous gasbag every jack-anapes with a spare eye will spot us long before. We’d best set down in Algeria or Portugal and make our way by boat from there.”
“That will take too long,” Kitchens said. “We should keep to the air while we may.”
Boaz spoke again. “Then I have a proposal.”
All eyes were upon him.
“We will rise to an altitude as high as possible without endangering lives aboard.”
The petty officer shook his head. “You’ll have men passing out. Ain’t no one going to do their work right, you get very high up there. Not enough air in the air up there.”
::a flame may be borne from the lowest cave to the highest mountain, but withal it will still be a flame::
“The ship runs now,” Boaz said. “We’ll push upward until either the men or the engines bid us go no higher, and I shall pilot her alone.”
They still stared.
“I do not breathe,” he explained patiently. “Thin air is merely thin air to me. So long as the engines fire and the crew can rest peacefully. Up so high in the sky we will be merely a speck to men on the ground, and possibly escape even the observation of aerial pickets.”
“What is the highest this vessel can fly?” Kitchens asked.
No one knew the answer to that.
As the crew prepared for their uneasy rest in the thin, frosty heights of the sky, there was one more bit of business to attend to. Boaz was surprised that the English had not come to this themselves already, given how fixed they all seemed to be upon the forms of their society.
::they built her strong and true to ply the shores of the west wind’s home, and the king brake a jar of wine upon her prow and christened her Hope of the Day::
He waited until Paolina mounted the poop to raise his question.
“What is the name of this vessel?”
“Something Chinese, I am sure,” she said. “Ming taught me a fair bit of their language, but I have no skill at reading it. The words are little houses of meaning built from unknown timbers.”
“I am of the opinion that we should give this airship a name of our own.”
She laughed, her voice pealing in the cool morning air of this altitude. “Do Brass name their vessels?”
“Brass do not have vessels. We are a people of the Wall. Our last ship broke on the rocks of Abyssinia three thousand years ago.”
“You are becoming an Englishman; I would swear to that.” She laughed again, and this time the rush left a smile upon her face as it retreated. “What shall we christen this airship?”
“I do not know,” he said. “Something meet and fitting. You and I have turned away from our own destinies. Our world is the Wall, but we head into the heart of Northern Earth.”
“That is hardly the stuff of naming.” She frowned, serious now, though he could still see the humor in her eyes. “I shall ask Mr. Kitchens and the crew.”
::the goatherds do not rise as an army, neither do the maids march from their duties around the fire::
“You may receive a regrettable suggestion.”
The regrettable suggestion came back on the lips of Kitchens, actually, as he came to Boaz an hour later.
“Paolina is below, seeking materials for an oxygen concentrator.”
“I suppose she wishes to stay with me at the wheel when we climb.” Something inside Boaz thrilled.
Good lad.
“We have a name,” Kitchens said diffidently.
::a staff he struck into the ground, which flowered then and there as a bush heavy with golden fruit, and there was an epithet upon his lips::
Boaz suspected the Sixth Seal of developing a sense of humor. At the very least, it had been far less frantic of late. “What is this wondrous name?”
The clerk snorted, holding back deeper laughter. “Stolen.”
“Stolen.” Boaz had to admit, he liked the name. He’d feared far worse. “Have they discovered wine aboard?”
“Sailors? If so, it has been drunk in secret convocation. And what does a Brass need with wine?”
“To bless the naming of the ship,” Boaz explained patiently.
“Of course.” Kitchens snorted again. “We shall make do.”
Within the hour, everything was ready.
::never walk strange paths without the armor of the Lord or the weapon of prayer::
The surviving crew gathered around. Levine produced a beaker of brown fluid. “From the galley,” he said, “for to spill across her rail in the naming.”
Boaz continued to hold the helm, and so all eyes were upon him. Kitchens nodded slightly.
::he led the Haramites out of their enslavement, then in later years took up banners with the horse-people of the long valleys::
Wondering who the Haramites might have been, the Brass began to speak. “This ship we have taken for our own will soon hold you as you rest. We climb to where the air is almost ice, and make our way up high safely to England’s shores. There we will fulfill a mission of utmost delicacy, and release you all to your native soil. Our brave hull, taken from the enemy to suit our purposes, we name Stolen. A gift we will make of her to your queen.”
The crew cheered as the petty officer dumped the brown fluid over the rail. Most of it sprayed back onto him. To general laughter, they returned to their duty stations until only Kitchens and Gashansunu remained with Boaz.
“Where is Paolina?” Boaz asked.
::though bruised beyond measure, the King paced by the wrack of his palace, fearing for the Queen and praying to the Lord for her deliverance::
“Below yet,” Gashansunu answered. “Do not worry after her.”
Boaz adjusted the attitude controls. Ballast and gas balance had already been configured as best they could. The vanes and elevators had been holding Stolen at altitude until now, but she fairly leapt to rise into the sky. He would climb until the engines threatened to starve, then lose just a small amount of altitude. A rope had been rigged down to the poop so he could vent some hydrogen to bring the airship lower at need, lest an unexpected development occur, or the air grow too thin for the vanes to bite effectively.
Already he seemed colder, though Boaz was certain this was little more than his imagination. If they could overfly England’s defenses, Kitchens might yet reach his mad, dying queen.
Everything Boaz wanted was still belowdecks, in the form of a young woman cooking up oxygen to pack away like weapons in an armory.
::the Lord put brass in the skies that we might always mark His intentions, and the moment of the day of His return::
Indeed, Boaz told the Sixth Seal. Indeed.
If the Paolina–al-Wazir voice within him had any comment, this day they kept their opinions to themselves.
WANG
Good Change fled the harbor at Port Said amid a rush of vessels. The fire hardly seemed a threat to the entire city, but it definitely menaced the docks while sowing confusion. British gunboats were casting off. Dozens of narrow-hulled fishing boats scrambled for the Mediterranean. The Kô’s yacht moved amid a flight of similar pleasure ships and small traders.
The cataloger stood in his usual place in the prow and watched the mess unfold. The monk had been here in Port Said, though he had not seen her aboard Good Change since they’d discharged Childress off the Goan coast.
What had she been about?
If
nothing else, she had shoved a pair of charts into his hand. He tugged these out of his jacket now and uncrumpled them. The sheets were awkwardly large. Whatever the maps represented had almost certainly been too valuable to abandon.
Definitely maritime navigation. Shorelines he didn’t recognize. While the mysterious monk had something of the Monkey King to her character, Wang could not see why she would have tricked him over this.
Wu would want to know what had happened ashore. Wang would give the charts to the first mate, then, and let the other man work out their significance.
“I am the hunter of spies,” he told the water, “not the navigator.”
The water had no answer, except for the distant tolling of fire bells.
Wu, Wang and Captain Shen gathered around the table in the wardroom. One of the sailors had the helm for a rare change. The sun played golden light across the wine-dark sea outside. If this had been Chersonesus Aurea, Wang would have thought a storm was coming. Here, who knew?
The two charts were spread out. One was a view of the entire Mediterranean. Useless, as Wang understood it, for any sort of real navigation, but it helped them plot their course. The boat’s own chart drawer had nothing beyond the Gulf of Aden.
We have sailed too far from the center of the world, he thought. Only barbarians and feral dragons dwell here.
The other chart was of the harbor at Valetta, the chief port of the island of Malta.
“Why Valetta?” asked Shen. “This is some trap.”
“The monk went to a great deal of trouble simply to lay a trap, sir,” said Wang. “Five Lucky Winds left Port Said under the cover of the fires she set.” His legs still trembled a bit from the mad dash through the city, but Wang still smiled. “There is too much connection here to pretend away. Besides, I can tell you she searched for these particular charts. If she’d meant to throw us off some trail, she would have grabbed for any map close to hand.”
“This does not discount the possibility of a trap,” grumbled the captain.
Wang noticed he did not avoid the subject of the monk, either. “Is she aboard now, sir?”
“Who?” A strange, almost feral gleam stood in Shen’s eye.
“The monk,” Wang said. A reservoir of angry patience burst. “That madwoman who crewed aboard your boat from Chersonesus Aurea to Phu Ket, then on to Panjim before she moved over to Five Lucky Winds.”
“The Kô would never allow a woman to crew his vessel. Therefore it must not have been.”
The cataloger looked to Wu. The first mate was trying to swallow a smile. “You know,” he said. “You rowed us both to the landing at the palace of the Silent Order.”
“I know that some things pass through the world unseen,” Wu replied. “The north wind. Cloud dragons. Certain monks.”
“You are not dead,” Wang insisted. “She is not invisible. All of you are crazed.”
Yet she was invisible, he realized. Or could be. She had walked him right into the heart of the Royal Navy in Port Said, past dozens of clerks and guards, unremarked.
Now it was Shen’s turn to smile. “Those are powerful words coming from one whose life hangs in balance.”
“Oh, leave off that silly pretense,” Wang snapped. “We both know that my life was forfeit from the moment the Kô summoned me.” The words surprised him, but he could not call them back, and so pressed onward. “If I live out this voyage, it will be by the favor of Heaven, and the miracle of certain people forgetting to silence me. All I have left is my purpose of finding the Mask Childress!” His eyes stung with incipient tears, but Wang knew better than to allow them to slip free before these men.
“Find her, then bring her back to Phu Ket, yes?” asked Wu.
Wang stared. What did it matter once he had located the English-woman? But he remembered his orders as the anger flooded away from him on a retreating tide. “Even with her aboard, you will need me to return through Suez and the Gulf of Aden.”
“The Indian Ocean awaits you,” the mate told him.
Captain Shen tapped the chart table. “But first, this vile city of Valetta. Ordinarily I would put you ashore down the coast, and have you walk.”
“Why not now? You don’t trust me?”
His hand swept across the emptiness of the oh-so-tiny Mediterranean on the larger map. “I have no charts except for Valetta harbor itself. I should not like to risk my keel on hidden rocks. Bad enough that we transit almost three thousand li of open water. Four days in unknown shallows is madness enough. I will not risk some reef to put you over after all this distance.”
“We fly their flag. This hull is European built. No one will question us.” Wang said that with far more confidence than he felt.
“Your story about the Prince of Serendip carried some authority out in the Indian Ocean,” Shen said in an acid tone. “Deep in these British waters, a boat full of Chinese will be much harder to pass off.”
GASHANSUNU
She paced the deck as Stolen rose ever higher. Small noises emerged from below as the crew settled to rest, the shallow breathing of sleep their best hope.
Time had not stopped for her again, nor stuttered. She was coming unmoored; she knew that. Her wa was gone. Her theory in the moment was that she had died, and this journey of her body was simply force of habit from her earlier life, living out the last memories of people and places.
Who knew, after all? Her wa had never spoken directly of such things. No one’s did.
Round she made a circuit, past Boaz silent as the coming night; along the starboard rail to stare northeast across the heart of the desert; to the prow where the late, fading sunlight stood off to her left side and the brass tracks in the sky gleamed with esoteric brightness; then back along the port rail to stare toward the glowering bulk of the Wall already slipping below the horizon of rationality.
That the Earth loomed large was a truism, simple as saying water was wet, or that stones fell downward. But the city, her city, was profoundly focused on the terrain of the Silent World, and thus indifferent to the Shadow World. What went on beyond the city walls had no great relevance. Even the Bone People, in their power and their horror, had pressed their way in.
She began to wonder if the comfortable limits of her people’s existence constituted a trap.
They were all possessed of the elusive spark that marked a gleam. “Sorcerers” was a term of pride among the adepts and house priests and circle callers. It had always been so easy for the sorcerers to account themselves as towering above the world. That the churning sea of lesser souls on occasion turned out a wild sorcerer was seen as little more than an evolutionary process. William of Ghent had been mighty when he held the fortress at Zimbabwe, but once he had been swept away by the tides of unreason, no one stood to take his place.
When a sorcerer of the city fell, her power was never lost.
Gashansunu realized she had fallen. She’d left the comfort of Westfacing House behind, for the sake of pursuing omens. She’d thought this to be a campfire errand, something to pursue of an eve ning, then come back and spend a month being glad of her place in the city. Instead it had blossomed into a holocaust that threatened to consume her, cut her off from her past, and remake her future beyond recognition.
All because she had followed the spark of a girl who had, in truth, just been passing by.
If Gashansunu had fallen, who would take up her power? Baassiia, of course, the circle caller, would ensure that her duties were apportioned. Others might grasp the strands of her spirit and its purpose. Her wa, well . . .
That was the crux of it for Gashansunu. She quite literally could not envision living without her wa, yet it had slipped away from her—so far away that she could not even see its spark in her head—and had departed amid a mumble of words about how she had swallowed it down.
But one did not swallow a wa. The opposite, even, if one was both especially unfortunate and notably foolish in the Silent World.
Was she becoming Paolina’s wa? Northe
rners did not possess a wa, even if they had opened a path to power as the girl had.
Yet she was fading, cut off so far from home and all the purposeful intents of her life.
Gashansunu cast away the mordant imaginings and looked back toward Boaz. The girl had not yet reappeared, while the Brass man seemed fixed at the helm, as if Stolen had climbed so high that they’d been transfixed in an eternal moment, frost-rimed and clad in the pale light at the top of the sky.
PAOLINA
She clambered up the bamboo ladder amidships. This vessel was nearly a twin to Heaven’s Deer, which had carried her and al-Wazir from Mogadishu to a hard landing on the storm-wracked sea not so far from Sumatra. Paolina’s time aboard that airship loomed large in her memory—she’d snatched the vessel from the hands of its own crew through mad-eyed recklessness.
Right now, she was not even sure she could touch a grenado. Yet that day not so long ago, she’d killed with them, and nearly brought an entire ship out of the sky.
On deck, the air was cold and thin and very disturbed. Engines labored, rumbling nearly to a stalling cough. Boaz could not drive Stolen much higher. She stopped and took a deep breath from the oxygen pot she’d crafted—air, its vital essences concentrated so that she could remain alert and in the company of Boaz as he brought them above all interception.
Except for the sorceress, they would be alone.
Her muscles stopped shaking. She felt warmer for the several breaths of purified air. Paolina made her way to her beloved’s side.
That word.
Beloved.
It had popped into her head just before she’d circled her arm in his, just as his neck turned with a faint creak so their eyes could meet, just after the set of his face and body had changed oh-so-imperceptibly so that she knew he too was smiling, in the moments and minutes that followed.
“How high are we?” she finally asked.
He glanced over the rail. “I estimate four miles.” A long slow pause followed, then he said, “These vessels rarely rise over two miles, outside the strange vertical atmosphere of the Wall. You can hear the engines labor terribly. Our headway is poor relative to our fuel consumption, but we have a powerful following wind. Moreover, a man cannot breathe decently here.”