Not enough.
With a damaged engine, the Chinese airship could not maneuver through her turn. The British closed fast, decks bristling with screaming riflemen who fired in ragged volleys. Boaz raced for the site where his erstwhile captors must once again come to ground.
Enemy ordnance caught up with the fleeing Chinese long before Boaz did. Her other engine flared and she loafed into a short, sharp dive. The vessel recovered, but several men fell from her decks in the process. She was dead in the air. In seconds she would be slain there.
Not the hydrogen, Boaz thought with something between a summoning and a prayer. Whatever angels were listening failed to heed him, for another round of missiles opened rents in the aft section of the gasbag.
Closing in to the kill, the British poured their fire into the stricken airship. When the flames came, they moved very quickly indeed.
He finally stopped running and watched the history and future of his people fall burning to the ground.
Somewhere in that moment Boaz was surprised to find that he still carried the Sixth Seal.
Already the British were quartering for survivors, shooting downward indiscriminately. He moved off as quickly as he dared, though not in the enraged rush of before, keeping to the cover of the thin thornwoods until he could escape the threat of murder and the death of hope.
CHILDRESS
They cruised offshore, waiting for the afternoon’s low tide. Leung had explained that there was no point in making an approach to shore in anything but the slackest water—the vessel bore far too much risk of grounding if they mistook the depth.
When the captain judged the moment right, he and Childress climbed to the conning tower. Al-Wazir turned his team out on the foredeck, ready with greased rifles, grapnels and pry bars. In their motley of uniforms and gear and duck fat smeared across exposed skin, she thought they looked more like train robbers than sailors preparing to assault a port.
The key still hung around her neck, for none of them were certain of the priest’s intent. The task might be as simple as opening a door, in which case al-Wazir would send a man for it.
Or they might face something more obscure, that would call upon Childress’ knowledge of divine tradition and her assumed powers as a Mask. In which case, al-Wazir would come back for her.
They closed on the shore. A man at the bow took soundings with a lead line. Childress reviewed the map—a dogleg approach waited past the haystack rocks just ahead, if the symbols were to be believed.
It didn’t look like an accessible port. It didn’t look like anything but rocks rising out of the water. She wondered if Father Francis had sent them to their deaths, Five Lucky Winds trapped aground until a British patrol happened upon them and shelled or bombed them into bloody shards.
The man on the lead line called out excitedly. Childress followed the line of his finger. What had seemed like a solid wall was really two rocks close together, a narrow passage opening between them.
“I wish I still had a boat,” Leung said. Paolina had taken theirs, off the coast of Sumatra. “I’d have the men row her in.”
“Tow the vessel?” Childress asked, surprised.
“It can be done.” He smiled. “Slowly. Very slowly.” He called directions down the speaking tube, shouting adjustments moment by moment. The hull ground against rock once—a slow scrape, not a rending tear—as they made the turn. Tight, so very tight, Childress thought. Though Leung winced, no one seemed too alarmed. Then they slid into shadow, a narrow cave opening up beneath the headland, walls slimed white with guano, the sea sloshing lazily among the shadows beyond.
Al-Wazir shouted and dove overboard. His men followed him, swimming into darkness as Leung shouted for all stop.
They had located a port, perhaps. If they were lucky and strong. She looked back behind them, but saw only rock hemming them in. Like life itself, gates shut as they were passed. The only way was forward.
Ahead of them, a voice shouted, indistinctly at first, then al-Wazir roaring. A shot rang. Leung’s face flushed, but they held their ground. The submarine could not advance until the landing party cleared the way.
One of the sailors emerged from shadows, head bobbing in the water. He gave the signal for Five Lucky Winds to proceed. As the submarine eased forward into darkness, Childress thought she heard laughter from the cave.
Passing into shadow, a man with a lantern could be dimly spied in the glow of his flame. A few shapes clustered alongside, someone arguing in Chinese, al-Wazir grumbling like a railroad train in a very deep tunnel.
With much shouting and casting of lines, Five Lucky Winds warped into a berth alongside a stone quay. The cave was far bigger than it had seemed from outside, the hidden inlet large enough for the submarine to have made a complete turn.
Safe enough for the hull, past the bottleneck of the entrance.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw that there were three berths within the cavern, arrayed in a semicircle along the eastern boundary. Roofless buildings stood beyond. Everything was covered with rime and dust and guano.
Father Francis had not lied. This place had been left untended for some time. She touched the key around her neck and wondered what portal or spell or lock it was intended to open.
Al-Wazir clomped onto the foredeck and approached the conning tower. “All clear,” he growled.
“What was the shot?” Leung asked.
More laughter from the shore.
“Just opening the way.” He stared up, eyes gleaming in the deep shadow of the cave. “Sir.”
Leung looked at the dripping sailors now standing with fixed grins on the dock. In Chinese, he asked, “What took place?”
“He shot a . . .”
Childress didn’t catch the word. “What?”
The captain began laughing. He tried English. “He shot a, the word is . . .”
“Seal, Mask,” al-Wazir said from below. “I shot a seal.”
“Why?”
Muttering: “Because I thought it was attacking me.”
She was torn between the general hilarity and a rush of sympathy for the poor beast. “Well, don’t do it again.”
“No, ma’am. Permission to patrol the shoreline?”
Leung was now studying his speaking tube, trying very hard to remake his face with the proper aura of command seriousness.
“Go forth, Chief,” Childress said.
As evening dimmed the entrance, al-Wazir and his men explored seven buildings, a series of caches and a tunnel blocked by an ironwork gate wide enough to admit a cart.
The mystery of the key was solved, at least.
Not much in the way of expendable supplies was present, but the cave boasted a fair stock of those things sufficiently durable to have withstood a decade of neglect—cables, scrap steel, deck plating. They located two freshwater seeps, each leading to a slimed pool that in turn drained into the little hidden bay. Water barrels were dry or foul, ropes rotted nests of rat-gnawed straw, food lockers long since reduced to dust.
They had a secure tie-up, some basic materials and, most miraculous of all, a small machine shop with a forge. The belts transmitting motive power from the little steam engine to the lathes and drills were rotting in place, but that would not be so difficult to repair.
What they needed was coal for the forge and steam engine, diesel fuel for the submarine, and whatever copper wiring and electrickal valves might be required to repair the ongoing trouble with the batteries.
Childress, al-Wazir and Leung studied the gate, along with Sun-Wei the engineer. They had an electrick torch taken from the submarine’s equipment lockers. Its flickering yellow light swept back and forth across the wrought iron.
“This does not discourage spies,” Childress observed, turning to look back into the cave. Running lights glowed on the mast and forestaff of Five Lucky Winds, while the men had lit a fire on the small shingle beach that sent shadows capering across the dome of the roof. “One can see much of th
e cavern from this point.”
Childress slipped her key into the lock. She turned it, forcing the iron against the weight of rust and years, until it squealed. Something clicked loudly and the gate popped loose.
“Who’s first up the passage?” she asked.
“Not you,” said Leung and al-Wazir in unison. The two men eyed one another as Childress laughed.
Al-Wazir was back in twenty minutes, grinning. “It comes out in a shambling go-down filled with festival carts and huge monstrous heads of toothy red gods.”
“Did you look outside?” Childress asked.
“Of course.” His grin grew wider. “A stand of them palm trees, and some fields beyond. A town down the road a bit, I think from the glow. Likely that proper port we knew was north of Goa Velha.”
“Panjim,” Childress said. “In the morning you and I shall go into town to bargain for fuel and supplies, and see if there are any electrickal mechanics to be found.”
Leung opened his mouth and closed it again. She took his arm. “You and your men are too conspicuous, dear. I am afraid I shall be forced to wear my dress once more.”
“Don’t get caught,” Leung said.
“You will need to ensure that I am in funds,” Childress replied. “I will need to seed my entrance into Panjim. No one will take me for a great English lady, so money must needs do.”
The words were braver than she felt. Whatever trouble she fell into, only she could get herself out of it. On her own, as she had been that morning in Velha Goa, marching into the heart of the enemy.
When did the Queen’s dominions become that seat of darkness for me? Childress was surprised at her own thought.
KITCHENS
He stared up at HIMS Notus berthed at her tower, where three ranks of masts rose on this side of the harbor. The disgraced vessel rode in splendid isolation. The airship was in quarantine, well separated from the others at the massive Dover aerodrome.
A bored sergeant attended Kitchens. Thin and dark like a Welshman, with eyes the liquid brown of a roach’s wing, the sergeant was dressed in the blue woolens of the aerial service, but his rank was British army.
“Sergeant Penstock, I’d care to see aboard her before the crew is returned here.”
“Field commander says that lot won’t be let back out of the stockade until they’re all transferred in.” A dire glee at the fate of Imperial malefactors filled the sergeant’s voice. “Fine thing you’re doing, sir, giving them such a chance to make amends.”
Kitchens thought of the sheaf of death warrants in the locked attaché case he carried. Traveling to Dover with Amberson, he’d still not been able to examine the Queen’s token. Kitchens pushed the reflections aside and mounted the stairs leading upward to his future home.
He had always harbored a horror of flight. Being so far from safe, safe ground made his gut twitch. While training as a special clerk, he’d barely passed the roof-running and bridge-diving exercises. Here, so far above the soil on a tower that only swayed and creaked a bit, he felt a touch of the panic that pursued him in dreams.
Notus hung stolidly, sufficiently large to provide the illusion of stability. The platform at the top of the tower was mounted on a turntable, ensuring the airship stayed facing into the wind at all times. Pumps kept her gasbag at neutral buoyancy, but she still appeared a bit sad and wrinkled. He crossed a wooden bridge to her deck, for the first time in his life aboard an airship. A completely deserted one at that.
The vessel seemed empty even of rats, though he seriously doubted that could be true. Deck gear sat in place, but not square and polished. The air of abandonment was peculiar.
“Ain’t been nobody aboard but the maintenance detail,” Penstock announced from behind Kitchens. “Out here on the third line, no one can get close without half the aerodrome knowing.”
“The crew is in for a long, slow march, I should think,” Kitchens said absently. He mounted to the poop, where the helm stood.
These ships were relics, he knew, built in a fashion that had been obsolete on the water these fifty years and more. Everything crossing the waves under a naval ensign these days was iron-built with great turbine engines and long, smooth guns that could bark a shell to the horizon. In the sky, where weight efficiency was paramount, they invested metal only in the engines, while using the experience of older times to build a light, sturdy hull out of a mix of woods. The result was as if Admiral Nelson’s fleet had taken to the air, slung beneath the long, gray sausages of balloons.
He touched the polished brass of her wheel. Chains through the spokes locked it down. The engine telegraph and the binnacle stood adjacent. The captain conned his ship from an open deck, much as they had a hundred years earlier.
Only now they flew, dying in the air instead of on the water. Taking a deep breath, Kitchens looked to the rail. His knees almost gave way at the sight of the ground two hundred perilous feet below.
How would he manage at cruising altitude? These vessels passed two miles in the air and more, depending on wind and weather and the needs of their mission.
He dragged himself step by step to the rail. Penstock trailed behind, silent now. Kitchens did not care for what the man thought, but he did care what the man might say in some written report to Admiralty.
Gripping the rail so tight his fingernails ached, Kitchens leaned forward and looked at the next rows of masts, the neatly mowed green below, the hills beyond where the town spilled toward the aerodrome. A knot of figures at the rail of another airship along the distant row of masts stared back at him.
Well, Kitchens thought, Notus probably has something of a reputation as a ghost ship by now.
He wondered if he would soon become a ghost clerk.
PAOLINAA
A bowl of cliffs rose to surround them as they walked down off the Wall. The path descended into a snowy mountaintop crater that held a strange building, though it resembled a gargantuan termite mound more than any of the buildings of Europe. How the builders had buttressed its rising masses, Paolina could not say. She caught glimpses of long, tawny vistas of grassland leading away south and east and west from the foot of this mountain.
Soon enough those distant, open plains were blocked by crumbling, rotten rock. Banners began to sprout alongside the path. Tall poles bent slightly with their own weight bore the bundled tails of animals, wrapped strips of bright-printed cloth, or sprays of colored ropes knotted in particular fashions.
In front of the termite palace they were met by a tall, dark-skinned man dressed in linens and a spotted animal skin. He carried a drum and favored Paolina with a bright smile before speaking with vigorous intent in some language she did not know.
She strained for comprehension, then answered in English: “I do not understand you.” Would she have to use the gleam for speech? The stemwinder was so dangerous. She’d seen the bodies in the water just before she and Ming had fled to the Wall.
She wished mightily for Boaz to be with her on this adventure. Ming was cheerful enough, and quite capable, but also strangely deferential. Boaz would have been thoughtful and wise. The Brass had always known what to do.
Paolina took the stemwinder in hand before she tried greeting the man in Portuguese, then Chinese.
At the last, he launched into a rapid patter of speech in that language. Ming answered. Paolina caught perhaps two words in ten as the two exchanged first courtesies, then introductions, then expressions of mutual goodwill. She shivered in the wind.
“Wait,” said their guide in Chinese. He put up a hand. “Let us go within.” He spoke much more slowly now, for Ming had explained that Paolina had only a little of the language. “Feast, then talk.”
She slipped the gleam back into its pouch among her skirts. Paolina was both relieved and disappointed not to use it. Surely one woman’s ability to talk did not weigh so much on the mechanisms of the world as did tons of submarine trapped amid of a Wall storm.
As they mounted a winding, irregular flight of stairs, she tu
rned to face the Wall. She had a moment of illusion, as if the soaring mass before her were in fact the surface of the Earth, and she an insect crawling up a wall of some other Creation, ready to tumble into the cliffs below.
The corridors within were just as organically shaped as the exterior. The dried-mud walls were covered with white and ochre and golden paintings that ran for dozens of feet, spiraling in on themselves and opening to star-bursts. The patterns were beautiful, though they plucked at her eye in a manner that Paolina found both curious and fascinating.
Their guide, whom Ming whispered was named Seven Trees, led them unerringly to a large, rounded chamber. A feast was being spread there by a quiet group of men and women coming and going from a series of other passageways. All were tall and dark as Seven Trees.
Eight mats were arrayed in a circle. Each was a different color—one a maroon so dark as to be almost brown, another a gray-green, a third dusty tan, and so on.
Bowls and gourds stood on each mat. They were different from place to place, one presenting mashed fruits and vegetables, their smells mixing together in a medley of salt and starch. Another mat was covered with rich, dark stews that were almost bloody in their scent. A third held leafy greens and long, narrow slices of glistening roots.
The mix of odors made her stomach growl. She and Ming had eaten well enough while passing along the Wall, but their diet would never have been confused with plenty, or even variety.
Seven Trees spread his hands. “Eat,” he said in Chinese. “And we will know.”
Ming stepped into the center of the circle of mats, then paused to look back at Paolina. “What is your care?” he asked in English. His brown eyes darted to one side, indicating their host.
“I am not certain,” she admitted in the same language. “Ask him what he means by ‘we will know.’ ”
Ming looked to Seven Trees. His Chinese was more slow and careful now, so that Paolina could follow some of the conversation.