A ghost, indeed. At least as ghostly as the rest of this strange crew.
Fortunate Conjunction reached a set of islands just as the day was failing. These were the most unusual formations Wang had ever seen, jutting like limestone thumbs. They resembled the most fanciful scrolls of Guilin. The lower edges overhung the water, as if their bases were being stolen away by the sea.
A rambling building covered the top of the nearest island. Wang realized it was a palace—wings and towers and jutting balconies, shi after shi of stonework and bamboo stretching farther than the largest Gan River rice farms of his youth in Chiang Hsi Province.
Not a building, a city.
Lights flickered within hundreds of windows. Gongs rang the watches of the evening. But no banners flew, no sigils depended. This fortress ruled itself, answered to no court or emperor, solitary above the porcelain-blue waters of the ocean.
“We are at Phu Ket?” he asked quietly of no one in particular.
One of the sailors glanced up at him, then answered in a thick Annamese accent. “Phu Ket lies east.”
He turned that way. Land loomed on the horizon. “But that was my destination.”
“Phu Ket is the port of entry, not the destination,” said Wu, behind him. “Very few come straight to Phi Phi Leh. Most who do never return.” The mate glanced into the waters of the night-darkening sea.
Wang followed his line of sight. Something ominous lay on the pale sand. A ship, the cataloger realized. His eyes roamed across other shadows, reefs of broken hulls and dead men. Captain Shen still stood at the wheel, eyes riveted on the fortress looming in the sky above.
“I am to row you to the dock,” Wu added.
“Of course.” Wang followed the mate to the rail, where a dinghy waited, a sailor already at the oars.
Wu climbed down the rope ladder. Wang followed. Another sailor tossed a bundle after them that nearly bounced into the ocean. Wang’s meager belongings. A second bundle followed; then they pushed off.
Wu sat in the stern of the tiny boat, Wang in the bow. The other sailor rowed amidships, his back to Wang. No one spoke as they pulled across the waters. Dusk vanished in a blaze of stars before they reached a tiny dock at the foot of the overhanging cliffs.
The cataloger stepped cautiously from the dinghy to the ladder, then up to the dock. The sailor shipped the oars and followed Wang. Wu tossed up one bundle, then the other, which the sailor caught. He turned, looked at Wu, and winked.
The monk.
Of course, Wang thought, struck with amazement. Where else to hide but among the crew?
“Good luck,” Wu said, then rowed away as if the woman had never existed.
She shucked out of her roughspun uniform. Wang turned away, embarrassed, once he realized what he was seeing. Moments later, she tapped him on the shoulder. The saffron robes were back, taken from the second bundle.
“I believe you are expected,” the monk told him.
“Above?” Wang peered up at the rickety wooden stairs affixed to the side of the island cliffs. Hundreds of steps. Impossibly high. They made his head ache.
“The journey of a thousand steps begins with a single climb.”
Wang couldn’t think of a suitable response, so he picked up his bundle and began the endless trudge.
KITCHENS
Amberson, another of the special clerks, met Kitchens on his return to Paddington Station that evening. Quiet sympathy rode in the other man’s eyes.
The two of them exchanged no words as they boarded a private carriage for the trip back to the Ripley Building. The enclosure reeked of someone else’s cologne, and the smell of polished boots. Amberson handed Kitchens a blue leather folder. Most confidential, Crown privilege.
Kitchens ignored the rush of London outside the glass of his conveyance as he slit the pair of black ribbons binding shut the folder and looked within.
The typed note was unsigned. Kitchens didn’t recognize the face from any particular typing machine. He didn’t need to. The hand of Lloyd George touched everything he’d seen and felt this day.
You now understand the deepest secrets of the Empire. She has spoken. Go to Africa and find al-Wazir. Make the future ours.
Nothing more. No instructions, no vouchers, no orders. No plan. Kitchens had always been trained to work within a plan.
Worse, he had never before left England’s shores. Rarely ventured beyond London, in truth. Africa! A mix of thrill and terror surged within him, and he ruthlessly suppressed it.
Turning to face his colleague, the clerk asked, “Were you briefed on any details? This is remarkably laconic.”
Amberson frowned. “Not such as you’d find useful. HIMS Notus awaits you at the Dover towers.”
“Notus?” Kitchens stared at Amberson. “I thought her captain and crew were being debriefed.” He paused. “At length.”
That was a polite way of saying that Captain Sayeed of HIMS Notus had been in a special interrogation unit at Pentonville prison these past weeks, his men held in isolation at Gosport’s brigs. All for their involvement with Ottweill, and the girl-wizard from the Wall.
“Notus.” Amberson looked haunted. “She’s to be used, and her captain and crew. You’ll have warrants for their necks, Kitchens. Admiral’s Mast has been held in secret. There’ll never be a question asked if they don’t come back.”
Kitchens shivered despite himself. “And if I fail to return?”
“You will return.”
“Of course.” He still had the Queen’s soggy gift concealed close about his person, untouched so far out of a mix of awe and fear. Her Imperial Majesty taking an interest in him personally had not been anything like he might have hoped. “I am ready whenever Admiralty wishes me to depart.”
“The crew will be in place within two days.” Amberson drew a deep breath. “Your funds and the supporting papers can be drawn tomorrow. There is one other order, given to me verbally.”
“That order would be?” Kitchens asked carefully.
“You are to communicate with no one, speak no words, write no letters, save to me. Not until Notus departs with you safely aboard.” He looked very uncomfortable. “I have been advised to place you in a quiet room in the cellars of the Ripley Building. This was not an order itself, merely a suggestion.”
Kitchens could see the clutch of the Queen’s dead hand in this matter. “Where does the Prime Minister stand in all this?”
“As far away as possible,” Amberson replied, staring out the rippled glass of the carriage’s window.
PAOLINA
By the time the two of them passed down out of the heights of the world and over a broadening coast that could not in truth be too far south of Mogadishu, weeks had passed. They had ridden with caravans twice, stopped for a brief while in a city made entirely of glass and silk, and once slept in a field of nodding purple flowers tall as a ship mast that gave Paolina strange dreams of teeth for days after.
Now she stood above a rising stretch of hills, backed by jungle and, farther west, a mountain that rose up almost to her current level of the Wall. Africa lay once more beneath her feet. The distant mountain spilled away from a Murado as if part of the fabric of Creation had rent. She’d never seen such a thing.
Her conviction that they had passed onward in the direction intended by the angel atop the Wall was beginning to flag. She’d run so hard, but she was starting to realize she did not understand her destination. “Where do we go now?” she asked Ming.
The Chinese had taken advantage of the halt to scout for mushrooms in the damp shadows of the boulder field that dropped away to their immediate left. He looked up from behind a lichenous rock. “Down, ah?”
“But where? We were supposed to meet someone.”
“Long time back.” He shrugged, his face suddenly expressive. “Long time forward. Who to say?”
She answered him in Chinese. “Time to walk some more.”
Paolina intended to set her course for the top of the curious mounta
in, the point where its slope met the vastness of the wall. Surely some agency watched the Southern Earth from that vantage point.
As they walked she continued to puzzle over what she saw and what it meant for the making of the world. In cross-section a Murado was much wider at the base than at the top. Otherwise they would have climbed up and down like flies on a brick course. Each little ledge, each boulder field and waterfall and forest and narrow clinging city added to the extent of the Wall’s base until eventually it merged into the land and sea below.
It had also become clear to Paolina, walking at such great heights, that the Wall was in some fundamental sense an insult to the shape of the Earth. Though it was right and natural that the world be divided into Northern and Southern halves—clearly that was God’s design—why did the African coast on each side seem to line up? As if the Wall had been set down atop the shape of the land. Likewise the oceans were aligned on each side.
Did the landforms pass beneath? Did the seas flow from one side to the other? The air did not, except for the bit at the top. She could not see that weather in the Northern Earth could have a connection to weather in the Southern Earth.
It was as if a draughtsman had prepared a chart, then slashed a great line across the middle. God could not possibly have been mistaken when He had created the world six thousand years earlier. His plan must mean something she had not yet managed to discern.
That the system of the world could be discerned was never a doubt to Paolina. That she was the one to discern it was no more of a question. The how of the thing was a challenge, meat to the gnawing teeth of her mind.
As for the why, who could comprehend the mind of God? Such priests as she had known did not encourage any trust to be placed in them. Ming’s people clearly had a different view altogether of the arrangements of Heaven and Earth, though Ming was difficult to draw forth on the matter.
The Southern Earth, with its absence of any evidence of man, at least as seen from these rocky, difficult heights, did make her doubt whether Adam had in fact been the true purpose of Creation, or just another animal in the Garden.
A heretic thought encroached: What would the world be if some great cat, or an ambling bear, had taken the Forbidden Fruit?
CHILDRESS
Up close the priest appeared even more uncomfortable than from a distance. He was not so fat as Childress had first thought, but rather wore vestments billowing about him as if he had once been grossly overweight and somehow since managed to forget the existence of tailors. The skin of his face hung down his neck like the jowls of a bulldog, testament to what he had lost. He was burnt red by the sun, his thinning hair orange to match, but even through it all there was a gentle humor in his pale eyes.
The priest’s mule was as wretched as he. The man pulled his mount to a halt, then asked in English, “Who is this come calling?” His soft voice contained a trace of some European accent Childress could not place.
“My clothes belie my path in life, Father,” Childress answered in measured tones. She pulled the spirit of the Mask Poinsard around her, shedding the dead woman’s duchess-arrogance but keeping close grip on the confidence, the power, the purpose.
“No one would doubt that, Mistress . . . ?”
The question hung in the air as if the fate of nations depended on her answering it. Which in a sense was true. “You may call me Mask.” Her right hand flickered in a birdlike gesture.
His eyes widened in recognition, but he returned no signal, instead saying, “I am Father Francis, of the Archdiocese of Goa. Please allow me to tender my apologies for our poor welcome, but we were not expecting an invasion of the fleet of Erehwon, peopled by charming villainesses such as yourself.”
“I charm no one.” Childress admitted some of the talking-to-students tartness back into her voice. “I merely speak of what I see before me.”
“A far too uncommon failing,” observed Father Francis.
“What I see before me seems to be a man who has been gravely ill.”
The priest nodded, a frown easing onto his sun-drenched face.
Childress continued. “One not sympathetic to the flight of the white bird. A follower of the Silent Order, perhaps.”
She did not mean to twit the man, but there was little point in failing to declare themselves openly at the outset. Not here, not now, where guile counted for little and clarity weighed much in the balance.
Father Francis shifted in the saddle. The mule snuffled mournfully. “Though you and your ship full of vile miscreants see things differently, I say a pox on both your houses. God left us His word and His world. There is no need for further interference from spiritual parvenus.”
“I am a librarian, Father.” She smiled at him. “I have spent my life among priests at their training. I am quite sick of interference from spiritual parvenus myself.”
“Oh, my poor child.” Though his words were heavy-hearted, the smile had returned to the priest’s face. “Did yon vessel of wrath liberate you from such bondage?”
His words brought old regrets to mind. She took hold of those emotions before continuing. “In a manner of speaking, yes. I am here today seeking aid and counsel.”
“You’ve certainly come to the wrong place, then.” He nodded at Five Lucky Winds. “If your crew is not set to storm the beaches in a body, perhaps you would take a morning tea with me?”
“I would be delighted.” Childress turned and gave the agreed-upon signal for her personal safety, then favored the priest with another smile. “Lead onward, Father.”
Childress sat in a wicker chair on a tiled porch, a small rattan table between her and Father Francis. An Indian boy had laid out the tea service, along with slices of fruits she didn’t recognize, glistening wedges of pastel flesh. The ceiling was high above them, and in another place might have hosted a fan. Here they were merely hot.
A cathedral loomed close behind this rectory, its location implied but not explicit from where she sat. No other priests had been visible on her walk upward with Father Francis, but then there were few other people of any calling here. The porch was large but empty, innocent of furniture except for their little setting. An errant breeze carried the scent of distant jungle, and a spice she could not name.
Goa Velha was a pleasant place. She wondered where everyone had gone.
Her host fussed with a pitcher of musky cream that she had already declined. After he had adjusted the color of his tea to his liking, he tipped in a bit of grainy brown sugar. That was followed by a bright smile directed at Childress. She could see the handsome young man he had once been in the gleam of his eyes and the lines of his face beneath the sagging envelope of skin.
“The Portuguese moved the capital to Panjim after the plague of 1843,” Father Francis said. “Your map must be very old.”
Not just a priest, but a thinking man, Childress realized. Even though he was probably an adversary, she found herself delighted. “It was not my map,” she offered, to see what else he might reveal in the vacancies of that truth.
“Next I suppose you will tell me your face did not launch a thousand of those underwater ships, either.” His expression over the rim of his cup was downright mischievous.
“I should hardly think so.” She met him smile for smile. “All faces are masks. All Masks have faces.”
“Mmm.” He set his cup down, speared a slice of dewy pink fruit with a tiny silver fork. “What does a good Anglican heretic such as yourself want in my poor parish? You come armed with a warship, and fly a flag of fictional intent, unless there has been some new empire aborning whose cries have not reached my ears.”
“I come armed with nothing but my wits. That is not my warship down in the harbor.” Even as she said the words, Childress realized they were the closest thing to a lie. Five Lucky Winds did fly her flag, and they sailed the course she had suggested. Their future in all likelihood hung on her ability to play the part of Mask that she had assumed so reluctantly on first being taken violently aboard t
hat vessel.
“What do your wits tell you?”
“That my map is old.”
They both laughed. The priest let silence stretch a while, content to invite Childress to fill it.
Being the supplicant, she did. “We search for a neutral port; seeking fuel, food and fresh water. Access to a foundry or a machine shop would not go amiss, though our troubles there are not too serious.” Yet. There would never again be a warehouse full of parts and ship mechanics awaiting Five Lucky Winds, as in the ship’s former home port of Tainan.
“We come directly to the heart of your matter,” the priest replied. “Few harbors here in the western Indian Ocean would admit a vessel such as yours. You have chosen well, poor map or no.” Another sip of tea. “I am certain the children of God in my parish will be pleased to sell you melons and dried fish and bushels of whatever they have in surplus.”
Childress heard the slap of sandals outside as some unseen listener raced away with the good tidings. “Thank you, Father. That is most welcome news.”
“Mmm. As for fuel and machinery, unless you can burn palm oil and repair your ship with wooden batons, I am afraid we will not do you much good here.”
Something unsaid hung at the edge of his voice. Something she would have to be clever enough to ask.
Some willing treason he cannot simply volunteer, she thought.
“We will deal fairly with the folk of your parish,” Childress said slowly, bargaining by the syllable. “I respect the delicate nature of your position.” A shot into the darkness of this man’s purpose.
Another long, slow sip of tea as his eyes hardened. “I should imagine someone bereft of the protection of any crown might well comprehend such things.”
Crown. This place was a sovereign neverland, if she understood the political arrangements. Childress tried to think like Admiral Shang, like William of Ghent, like all those persons of high purpose and obscure intent she had encountered along this journey. “Loyalties can be stripped away in the passages of power.”