Pinion (56 page)

She was afraid they could see the uncertainty plain upon her face. This council was not like she’d ever thought—a thing of theater and dreams, rather than something resembling a faculty senate meeting back at Yale.

Even more strangely, they began to file through one of the side doors of this vast, empty cathedral. One by one the Masks and Feathered Masks slipped away from her, each carrying their totem. Childress followed, Wang in her wake, the damnable monk walking alongside as if this were all happy coincidence.

Yet the woman had cemented her all-too-flimsy claim to authority here.

What lay beyond was not some closet or meeting room, but a stairway descending into the chipped, pale foundation rock.

They spilled out into a limestone cave. Torches guttered, and the space reeked of old damp and aggressive slime. A crude statue loomed in the center—no, not crude, Childress realized. Just a style so foreign to her that it was almost unrecognizable as art.

Whoever had carved this had seen the world through very different eyes. A woman with a wide, heavy-lipped face stared blankly at Childress, but her body was much too big. As if a sow had borne a human head, or a woman had carried a hundred children at once as in primitive myths. Her belly rose like a hillock, then fell away again to her feet. Pendulous breasts were rendered faithfully in the stone.

An earth goddess of the most chthonic sort. Doubtless of great interest to the Comparative Theology fellows back at Yale, but now the focus of a circle of chattering Masks. Except here where she might have expected cloaked identities and ritualistic language, they behaved more like the faculty senate she had thought to see before.

“Janklow worked the Istanbul people for two years. . . .”

“. . . we saw the reports on the first battles along the African coast.”

“If the British had paid more attention to that Tesla fellow, they might now be . . .”

“. . . don’t know. Nothing from Shanghai since well before the fighting.”

“. . . was buried secretly because better his death go unreported and let them all wonder.”

“Besides, we might just bring him back . . .”

The interlocutor turned to her. “It is like prayer, you see. We respect the word of God here amid His Creation, but Rational Humanism does not come naturally to many. Simply setting aside the storms of the soul is difficult. This goddess is very old, more ancient than most of what now stands on Malta. She is part of the catacombs passing every which way beneath. Our focus on her is not hierarchical, but she serves to draw in what we say and reflect it back to us.”

“Literally?” Childress was incredulous. Somehow the
avebianco
had always seemed to her to be an order of bureaucrats and clerks, building their networks of information to more properly model the happenings of the world and thus advance the case of Rational Humanism. Not a bunch of costumed gabblers in an ancient cave.

But she continued to listen.

“Admiralty did not want to confirm the arrests . . .”

“. . . that unfortunate tunneling project will breach . . .”

“. . . we don’t know where the girl went after that, but the Listeners have been disturbed.”

“Here is the final summation of Chinese casualties off the coast . . .”

They were not gabblers. Masks moved from one knot to another, so that the composition of each group changed and changed again. Each shared with the next, and then with their newest neighbor, until understanding was everywhere, like a stain in water.

A very strange arrangement, yet oddly effective.

Beside her, Wang shifted uneasily. She squeezed his arm again, whispering, “Wait, this will soon be done.”

“I do not fear it be done, Mask,” he replied in Chinese. “I fear it not be done well.”

Eventually their voices died. Everyone but the interlocutor had found a knot in which to stand, their shuffling back and forth at an end. They all faced the goddess.

“We support the Mask Childress,” said someone from the first knot. Her fellows nodded.

“Our support is provisional, but affirmative,” announced a man in the second knot.

“We cannot support her,” the third knot’s spokeswoman said, but two of hers shook their heads in disagreement.

Thus it went around, eleven groups of four or five Masks each. Eight stood with her, two against, one in an undecided draw.

The interlocutor turned to Childress. She shook, chilled by the stone and the waiting and the strange, swift efficiency of these people who were her own.

“We accept your report. Our agents will take their word as swiftly as possible to London and Beijing, and to the field commanders wherever they may be reached. In certain places we will not be heeded, but in many others your words will find sympathetic ears. An ambassador will be named to both the Silent Order and to the Dragon Throne, plenipotentiary with the power to loose and to bind, in order to make formal agreement with the intent of setting aside attempts to breach the Wall. We will also see to the girl Paolina, for we believe she may be back on this Northern Earth.”

“Of that last I am confident you are in error,” Childress said, struggling to hold her voice firm. “As for the rest, I welcome your voice in these matters. We may yet stop this madness.” She felt in the moment the tumblers of history shifting, as if the logic of some profound and painful decision had finally made itself apparent to her heart.

“You will carry our word back to the East.” The interlocutor seemed almost grim. “Go to the Silent Order first, and instruct them to leave off their plotting at the Wall. If we must cross over, then we may consider such an effort together, for there is little point in exporting our struggle to those virgin, unchurched shores. It can surely hold no significance there except what we carry with ourselves.”

“No—,” Childress began, then broke off as the Feathered Mask continued.

“After that you will go to Beijing and carry the same message to the Emperor on his Dragon Throne. Tell him no one will win at this game of war. The English have found themselves in error due to a rogue magician with whom he should no longer be concerned.”

“What will you do to Paolina?” she asked, worried by that threat.

“We will aid her in finding a way to be less of a danger to herself or the seats of power,” the interlocutor replied. “Your business is in the East.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are a woman who can bend the very ships of war to her will, and have the friendship of half a hundred others who may help.”

It would not be safe for Leung and
Five Lucky Winds
to return to Chinese waters, but that choice was not hers to make. Not right now. “I will need to speak to the crew of my ship,” she said. “I must sort out what is best for them.”

“I can take you home.” Wang’s speaking up surprised her. “I am here with the yacht
Good Change
. My vessel may pass under British guns and their watchful eyes without creating alarm.”

“What of
Five Lucky Winds
?”

Beside Wang, the monk smiled and blew a cloud of smoke. “Go speak
to that nice Captain Leung. He threw over a lifetime of loyalty and discipline for the sake of you. I am sure he will agree to be sent home.”

The interlocutor handed Childress something. She took it, briefly uncomprehending. His feathers, rising above a hidden domino as seen from the back, longer pinions trailing below.

“You are a Feathered Mask now,” he told her. “You have proven beyond question your loyalty and capability, and will rise high in our councils upon your return from the East.”

She looked at the monk, then at Wang. “I should return to
Five Lucky Winds
, I think.”

“Go,” said the interlocutor. “We will come with seals and documents to delight the Mandarins of the Eastern courts, but you already know what this is and what must be done.”

“Yes,” the monk said. “What must be done.”

She seemed pleased, which in turn pleased Childress. The librarian turned to climb the stairs, trailed by Wang and the monk.

None of the
avebianco
followed them upward, so once they had regained the street, they were alone except for the usual traffic.

“Do you know the way?” Childress asked Wang.

“Follow me,” the monk said, then strode off in a cloud of smoke.

The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble.          
—Job 41:28

He stumbled through a country of black lands and bloody rivers. The sky flashed in stuttering arcs of lightning and memory. A voice shouted.

::
rising from the grave trench with wisdom in one hand and justice in the other
::

No
, Boaz thought.
Not that
.

::
each step made as a carving, so that the statue walks beneath the noon sun
::

Fire? Heat, at any rate.

::
burnt offerings placed at the points of the compass, until the Kohanim is done propitiating
::

He didn’t feel pain. Not as monkey men did. But something was badly, badly wrong.

::
rising from his ragged bed, the dead man walked through the temple doors and cried havoc upon the enemies of the king
::

One arm seemed to be stirring of its own accord. The other would not move. Boaz envisioned himself in chains.

::
and so the spirit of the Lord came into his body and seized him with a violence
::

Boaz realized his legs flexed without his command. The Sixth Seal . . . ?

::
spake he in a voice of unreason that shouted from the far side of the law
::

He rose, unseeing, unhearing, skies boiling in inner vision, locked within the metal arches of his own head. Only the movements of his body transmitted themselves to his sensorium, though he had no volition.

::
striking them down in anger, he walked past the gateposts and drowned himself in the bloody river
::

Everything felt stiff and strange, as well, beyond the sense of wrongness in his motion.

::
breath of the Lord like rain in the desert
::

YHWH
, Boaz thought, addressing the absent God of his first creation,
if this is Your hand, please release me. If this is the hand of another, please strike them down that I might fall away free
.

Something hit him hard, but he did not fall.

The Seal screamed.

::
faithless and foolish both, you will give up your soul and sense alike for the sake of duty gone wrong
::

“I have given up nothing,” he said, his voice box hissing and crackling. Paolina, al-Wazir—for their sake and the sake of the people from whom they sprang, not for his own, he had moved across the face of the Northern Earth. He gave everything, but he had not given up.

::
now brace the left wall, that it not tumble
::

Boaz realized his left hand stretched out. Something was there, unyielding, durable. A wall.

::
drop the scales from your eyes and see the light before you
::

He looked, and saw a cluster of men with rifles peering through a doorway, shouting silently. Carpet before him smoldered and guttered with flame. Furniture was shattered to polished splinters.

::
stand firm before them, that they may not pass
::

“Boaz,” Paolina shouted from behind him.

He wanted to turn and answer her, look to her safety, ensure that she would be well and whole and hale, even when these men burst into the room and struck them all down in a hail of bullets.

::
that he threw himself across the fire
::

His mouth opened and words stormed out, not his own, but the Sixth Seal’s, in full control of Boaz’ body.

BY THE HAND OF THE LORD AND THE WILL OF MY MAKER, I ABJURE THEE, ABSTAIN FROM VIOLENCE AND STAND BACK BEFORE YOU INTERFERE WITH THE HOLY WORK—ELSE YOU WILL BE STRUCK DOWN AND BROKEN ON THE ALTAR OF THE LORD
.