That reminded Paolina to sip again from her oxygen pot. Gashansunu approached as she pinched the valve and let the blessed, pure spirit of the air rush into her mouth.
The sorceress maintained the almost peculiar calm that had taken her lately. Something in the blankness of the woman’s eyes made Paolina step closer to Boaz.
Gashansunu was not a friend, but at least an ally. Until now, too far from home, on a voyage none of them had meant to undertake.
“I have fallen.” The Southern woman seemed to be resuming some conversation set down in the press of the moment.
Boaz glanced at her. “Did you harm yourself?”
“Too late. The air has taken me.”
“You still walk among us, hale,” said Paolina.
“Then where is my wa?” The sorceress glared. “I only meant to settle the worries of the day, not to come into chaos. I have outwalked my power and it has been taken up.”
“I have no wa,” Paolina said starkly. “I do not expect I ever shall. Yet I am in the world whole and unharmed.”
Gashansunu looked as alien to Paolina in that moment as she had at their very first meeting at Hethor’s village. Whatever words were on her tongue escaped without sound, and she turned away.
“You should sleep,” Paolina called. “This thin air has robbed you of some portion of your heart.”
She stopped and sucked again on the oxygen pot, then wrapped herself close to Boaz. Never mind that he was cold as anything she’d ever felt—like a midwinter night in Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood. Winter was one of those seasons she’d always marveled to see and likely never would.
Much later Boaz woke her.
“You must go below.”
“Why?” she asked, querulous.
“Because you have used your air. You cannot break more water now with the ship’s sparks; you will hurt yourself or cause a fire in the hull.”
Paolina sat up, unaware she’d been rolled up tight in a length of rubberized canvas, propped close to the stern rail.
Had he tucked me in? she thought.
Boaz went back to the wheel and loosened the chocks. He looked over his shoulder at her. “We are along the westward belly of Africa, if I understand the map Mr. Kitchens sketched. I should think to see Spain at some point.”
She heard the rattling engines, uncomprehending. The gasbag groaned, straining at this altitude it was never meant to reach. She felt the creaking of the hull, every board shrinking just a bit too far, as if the termites and woodworms themselves would drop away and tumble to their freedom far below.
Ice, my brain turns to ice.
“I will not go below,” Paolina mumbled.
He beckoned her. She slipped once more within the chilled circle of his arm and tried to lay her cheek close against his chest.
“I love you,” she told him.
“You do not know the meaning of that word,” he replied gently. “Neither do I, for I have no heart. Intellect, yes, and courage when at need, but if I only had a heart . . .”
“Then we are made for one another.” Her voice was a whisper now. “A witticism of God the Creator. You were made to be alone among a thousand of your fellows. I was made to be alone among any of my own kind. We can b-b-b-b-be alone t-t-together.”
His arm circled her tighter.
Paolina tried to kiss his cheek, but her lips stuck to him, and she had to pull free with a small, tearing pain. She sucked one last time on the empty oxygen pot, then stumbled back to the ladder to lie below amid the warm, breathing mass of men.
She wondered where the sorceress was.
The rough thrumming of the air-starved engines lulled her all too fast to sleep.
CHILDRESS
The monk seemed almost gleeful at their bafflement. She dropped the ash of her pipe into the Mediterranean waters and set to tamping more weed. Her maddening grin flicked like a scissortail at dusk.
“Though no one seems to recall this any longer, I am still in command of this vessel,” Captain Leung said in his mildest, most dangerous voice.
“You have charts to steer by.” The monk glanced at the afternoon sky. “You will be safe at night, but right now there may be jolly tars close overhead in some nearby cloud.”
“I will con my vessel as I see fit. Neither you nor this Jade Abbot have a say in the direction of Five Lucky Winds.”
“Not I,” said the monk. “The Jade Abbot directs nothing. Many days he is lucky that someone brings him tea. We all serve.”
Leung’s voice slowed even more. “What are you doing here?”
The monk was serious now, with the suddenness of a cloud masking the sun. “Seeing the Mask to her destination. Without the charts, you would risk too much.”
Childress was stung by this. “I have found my way thus far well enough.”
“Of course you have. Else you would not be the Mask.” A puff on the pipe, a return to insolence. “But even the greatest thief must have someone to hold the ladder.”
“I am no thief!”
The monk laughed. “What else are you? You stole your title from a dead woman. You stole the girl from those who would have her. You stole the lives of an entire fleet. You stole this submarine and the heart of its captain from the Beiyang Navy. Now you would steal power from the secret councils of the avebianco much as the Monkey King would steal Heaven’s peaches.”
More embarrassed than stung, Childress drew breath to fling a riposte. What stopped her was the realization that this woman knew far too much about her. How?
Leung stepped in. “I should despise you, monk. I should have you thrown over the side with iron bars chained to your hands and feet. But even if I did that, I am certain I would find you on my bridge an hour later, dry as the desert and smirking.”
“I should not think it worth your trouble, no,” the monk replied.
“But this is because I have worked out who you are.” The captain bowed. “Welcome to my ship, Lan Ts’ai-ho.”
Baffled, Childress asked, “Who is Lan Ts’ai-ho?”
The monk was laughing so hard now that she nearly swallowed her little pipe. The captain looked ahead, sweeping the horizon with his glasses as if this were all perfectly normal.
When she’d recovered her breath, the monk answered. “He believes me to be one of the Eight Immortals of Taoist legend.”
That was no more illuminating than before. “Who?”
“Sages, purveyors of wisdom, priests who were especially good at shearing the wealthy temple-goers. I do not know who. And it does not matter. No woman walks the Earth for a thousand years. Heaven would not stand for it, and Hell would swallow her up!” The monk’s eyes sparkled with an untold joke. “Perhaps the name is passed on, like a patent of nobility from father to son. Maybe the Immortals are reborn anew in every generation. Perhaps they are an idea so powerful that someone rises to fill each place without ever knowing what drew them forth.” She leaned close. “Or it could be that I am just an annoying monk who has feasted her eyes on far too many xiákè epics in the temple library.”
“It does not matter.” Leung continued to scan the ocean. “You might be any of those things. Or all of them. Or even none. You are still Lan Ts’ai-ho, and you carry the banner of the Monkey King in these years of the world.”
“You do not care if I am a peasant girl born beneath a harnessed ox in the fields of Fu-chien?”
“I do not care if you were born in the Forbidden City, of the body of an angel on a couch of ivory.” He put down the glasses. “You are aboard my ship without permission, behaving dreadfully. If you are a divinity, then I will bid you welcome and make the best of my hospitality. If you are an insolent peasant girl from Fu-chien, then I will throw you into the sea and tell you to swim for that distant shore.”
“In that case,” the monk said happily, “I am most definitely Divine. I also hunger. I have not eaten a decent meal in . . .” She paused, counting on her fingers. “Weeks!”
With a sharp look at Childress,
the captain escorted his guest below. That pained her heart in an unexpected fashion. She wondered what game he was playing at—surely this was payback for her brushing him aside before the British. Just as surely the monk’s remarks about theft had stung Leung as they had stung her.
She did note that Leung had taken the maps.
How had the monk known so much of her affairs? Who had she been listening to? Where had she come from?
Fruitless speculation, at least for now. They were Malta-bound; that was enough. I could have made much with this man, Childress thought, but I wish the journey to be at an end. With a start, she realized she’d come nearly all the way around the world. From here she could almost go home.
Except somewhere along this voyage, she’d lost the notion that New Haven was home. She could not decide if that was a tragedy, or a liberation. The west beckoned, the island of her reckoning rising pale-cliffed from sun-drenched waters somewhere ahead.
Childress spoke quietly with the chief. Her guilt drove her to the conversation as much as her fondness for the great Scotsman.
“How was it aboard Bork’s ship?” she asked.
He turned briefly away, pain flitting across his face. “A man should never swear too many oaths, Mask. In time, his word will come to break itself.”
“Were you . . .” She was afraid of the word.
“Tortured?” He laughed, though it came out more as a retching. “Nae, unless you call a ration of rum and some good Royal Navy slop in a tin tray torture. They treated me far worse than that. They were reasonable.”
Childress whispered, “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nae. I did not speak of this vessel or her crew. I did not tell them of the Mask Childress, who I’ve come to call a friend.” He paused, then said, “I did not ask help for the mad doctor at the Wall. That would hae betrayed too much of our intents. As well as Boaz.”
At the misery in his voice, Childress stepped close, wrapped her arms as far as she could reach around al-Wazir’s massive shoulders, and held on to him while he wept.
WANG
Much to his surprise, they sailed the North African coast unmolested. He’d expected airships to come droning out of the sky, a fleet from Port Said or Cairo or some Italian port to be hunting Good Change. Even just simple bad luck should have overtaken them.
Instead there was water, shoreline and a quiet sea. Weather threatened but did not appear. Dolphins followed the boat a while. The crew was surly and silent as normal. Wu muttered at him from time to time, but Wang even discovered some shrimp left in the pot when he went below after the crew’s dinner mess.
He could not remember being at peace since before leaving the library at Chersonesus Aurea. Fear of one kind or another had driven him forward, darkened his soul, clouded his thinking, robbed him of too much of who and what he was.
Now, trapped in a boat amid angry men too far from their own waters, he was just Wang again. The son of farmers, a cataloger and an archivist, a subject of the Son of Heaven, a denizen of Northern Earth.
Wang wondered where this unexpected sense of peace had come from.
Wherever the war was right now, it did not follow them across the Mediterranean. He could well imagine the bombings, the shelling, the duels on the waves and amid the clouds, all raging from Singapore to the African coast of the Wall.
If the war stayed there and did not come into the South China Sea or the British Atlantic, then, well, this was the game of nations.
But the Golden Bridge project, fed by his work in the sunken library, would tip that balance. The fires, the killing, the dying would spread all around the world. Childress had the right of it when she argued against the Middle Kingdom building a broad path across the wall. Ancient magic or modern engineering, it would not matter once they’d opened that wound in the fabric of the world.
Her fear had been for what might come over from the other side. His fear was for what this side would take across.
Wang still did not know what he would do on catching up to Childress. Bringing her back to Phu Ket seemed unlikely. So far as the crew of Good Change were concerned, he could stand in the middle of Malta and their vengeance would not reach him.
No man was safe from the Silent Order—they were like the tongs of Shanghai and Hong Kong writ large across the world. But this boat full of dead men would trouble him little so long as he stayed away from the water.
Wang watched the sun slip magenta-bright below the horizon and contemplated how he might live through the coming fights, how the Mask Childress would receive him, what he might say to her, persuade her of.
Tell me, do the Masks truly believe they rule the world?
Let us fight the Golden Bridge together!
I have come to capture you, but I will not. Please do not send me home.
The sea held no wisdom, only the ever-closing li between his feet and the stony shores of Malta. There some of his questions might perhaps be answered.
NINETEEN
And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was called Melita. —Acts 28:1
BOAZ
He brought Stolen down out of the upper sky a day later. The engines sounded close to failure, and the crew slept far too long. Boaz had rested at the wheel, staring sightless along their course and holding firm while the voice of the Sixth Seal ranted quietly deep within him. His constant companion had become like a heartbeat, though he was still all too conscious of its power.
Now the airship passed over sparse, brown mountains somewhere in Spain, according to Kitchens’ hand-drawn map. Boaz hadn’t succeeded in following the coastline, for there was too much air and sea traffic, so he’d kept inland except for passing high above a narrow strait busy with military vessels.
None of them had looked high enough up. A speck in the sky was just a speck in the sky, Boaz knew, but when your enemy flew, any such were as dangerous as rust specks on an idled joint.
That was all to his good fortune.
::wings of wax and feathers with which to challenge the very angels of the Host of Heaven::
They cruised low over ragged forests that gave way to long aprons of shattered rock and glum brown outcroppings. The air was crisp, but nothing like the misery of the upper altitudes.
Gashansunu had been among the last to go below, and she was the first to emerge. She seemed far less fey, as if whatever had troubled her before had passed in the unquiet rest below.
“Does the air agree with you now?” Boaz asked.
“Never did I starve for breath.” The edge was gone from her voice, as well.
::crammed with dust you are, and you eat the prayers of men as if they were broken stalks in the meadow::
She would say no more. The rest of the crew began to stumble forth. Within the hour almost all were on the deck.
“We lost two men to the altitude,” Martins said quietly to Boaz and Kitchens. Both the petty officer and the clerk looked worse for the wear. The Brass realized that he had become something of a judge of human beings.
“Whom?” asked Kitchens.
“Schoenhuth of the gas division, what had carried a wound from the killer angels. Also Gallaher from the engineering division.” Martins grimaced. “He was our best mechanic. Only one left with real training. Klaw didn’t make it off Erinyes, and Weiss died in the fighting.”
::the oldest warhorse in the pasture yet has the light of battle in his clouded eyes::
“This will not matter much longer,” Boaz replied. All eyes leapt to the horizon, seeking Chinese airships or winged savages or some new horror.
“Brass bastard,” muttered the petty officer. Then: “We’ll lose several more if we take those heights again.”
Paolina joined them, bleary and stumbling from her time below. She carried another oxygen pot. “A number of the crew are ill.” Waving the little device, she added, “This seems to aid them. I have a second one charging below.”
“M
r. Kitchens,” Boaz said. “This is your errand. We are beyond the boundaries of my purpose.”
The clerk stared at his hands. That was, the Brass realized, an unusual episode of uncertainty for this man. Whatever doubts warred inside him, Kitchens always maintained a focused intent.
::a Godly man, pursuing justice past all cost of reason, as a Godly man should do::
The clerk’s gaze passed slowly from eye to eye. “I must press forward, and not spend time in fighting or fruitless negotiation. If we are stopped, I will never be permitted to approach Blenheim Palace and the presence of the Queen. Her Imperial Majesty asks no less of me. I can ask no less of Stolen and her crew.”
Boaz spoke. “This vessel will not fight again, true?”
Martins shook his head. “Our crew won’t fire on a British ship, and we’re much too far into our own territory for them Chinee to find us now.”
Kitchens muttered agreement, as if it pained him.
::set flame to your banners, cast away your armor, shear your heads and rub your faces with ash, for you are already lost to the living::
The Brass ignored the voice this time. “Our last operation will be the landing at Blenheim Palace.”
“Yes,” the clerk said.
Paolina smiled at Boaz—she saw the line of his reasoning. Her approval thrilled him, sending an unexpected crackle through his crystals.
“We land now, and set to ground all but the few crew we need to keep Stolen operating for another day or two.” He looked up at the tapered bag. “A gas man, whoever is left to manage the engines, and an extra pair of hands. We do not have sufficient company even now to work this ship in full. Let us make a virtue of our failings and travel as lightly as possible.”
The petty officer looked to Kitchens. “Sir?”