Escapement (66 page)

Al-Wazir had to laugh. “Too far west and you will be hunted for a Chinee invader. I trow the bottom of the Indian Ocean is little more pleasant than the bottom of some Asian strait.”

“I have two English passengers to discharge. Perhaps an arrangement can be made.”

“Oh, you
are
an optimist, Captain. But as it happens, I have the ear of the Prime Minister, if we can find a way to send a message without immediate fatal consequence. I owe him a report at the least and should like to hear his thoughts. In that same duty, there must be a rescue for some men I left along the Wall on the eastern edge of Africa. This is something else the PM will want very much to hear of. Most importantly, I’ve unfinished business in Mogadishu. I left a friend behind.”

“In a British port? Surely this is not a problem.”

“A friend of Miss Barthes’. A man from off the Wall.”

“Ah.” Leung added something in Chinese.

“You’ll need to be teaching me that cat’s yowl, I think, if I’m to ship aboard your vessel.”

The captain seemed surprised. “How’s that?”

“Your just put one of your best petty officers asea in a boat, Captain. And yon heathens did for nigh half your men.
Five Lucky Winds
sails shorthanded, with no friendly port in the Northern Earth, not as things stand today. I’ll stand watch if you’ll have me.”

Leung laughed, short and bitter. “Let us go below,” he said, “and speak to the Mask Childress. I believe she is with the cooks, doing what can be done for the wounded and the dead.”

Al-Wazir took one last look south. The launch was lost to him, invisible in the complex texture of the water and the looming mass of the Wall beyond.

“Farewell, lassie. I’m off to find your Brass man, and see that’s he’s free and hale.”

Then he went to look for the Englishwoman.

She looked up to see there was no one left to wash. The dead deserved to go into the sea clean. She had put their faces in her
ars memoriae,
to honor them in the privacy of her heart.

The passageway was filled with bodies, fourteen of them like giant cocoons. Two more in her cabin, Yao and Sweet Lu. She thought them unlikely to live to see another dawn.

Childress realized that
Five Lucky Winds
had gotten under way sometime back as well. One of the cooks, Ping, gave her a crooked smile and a hot cloth with which to clean herself.

“She’s away, Mask,” said al-Wazir, surprising Childress. It amazed her that a man so large and loud could make a quiet entrance, especially in a place as cramped as the interior of this submarine.

“Emily,” she said, who had not offered her given name to a man in over thirty years. “You may refer to me as Emily.”

He smiled and squatted down on the bloody deck. “Aye, and I’m Threadgill to me ma and me first and last priest back home. I’ll not know who ’tis you’re talking to if you say the name. In any case . . . Emily . . . the lassie’s on her way. No calling her back nor stopping her now.”

“Where are we bound?” she asked. The question should have meant everything, but right now all she could feel was relief for Paolina and exhaustion for herself. There was still the matter of Phu Ket, but with Paolina away from the clutches of the Silent Order, they could take the time to plan their action.

“Africa, to help a friend. Then wherever we can find a peaceable port.”

Childress considered that. “The captain is confident.”

“The captain is no such thing,” Leung said from behind al-Wazir. “But he is still the captain, and so must set a course.”

“I’ve never been to Africa.” Childress wondered if that benighted land were any closer to God.

Al-Wazir growled. “Well, ’tis a pit of Wall monsters and Englishmen in my experience.”

“Peace be with us all,” Childress said.

“Peace, indeed,” said the chief.

Over his shoulder, Leung nodded. “Everything in the order of the world has a name, Mask Childress. To name someone is to become them.”

“Then I name you friend,” she told him softly. “You and Ming and the cooks and everyone aboard this ship.”

They turned west toward the sunset, preparing for a mass funeral as
Five Lucky Winds
slipped beneath the waves.

Paolina walked slowly through the freezing mists. There was a huge drop ahead, one she didn’t mean to find the hard way. This area had been formal gardens once—that much was clear from the broken stones and sweeping paths. Ming had found some fruit, too, remnants of an orchard, but they’d steered clear of the sagging building covered with frost-burned vines and the thorny canes of bushes. It smelled like old stone and little else up here now. Whoever had built and lived in this place was long, long gone.

At least they were on the south side of
a Muralha
. Beyond even the most distant clutches of the Silent Order, the Feathered Masks, or the competing empires through which both intertwined.

She wasn’t sure where Ming was at the moment. Exploring a little to the west, she thought. Paolina couldn’t imagine what he was finding—she could barely see from one tree trunk to the next herself.

When she came upon the angel, she nearly shrieked with surprise until she realized it was a statue.

When the angel turned its brass head and nodded, she was too surprised to shriek.

“Welcome to the Southern Earth,”
it said in Portuguese, the language at the bottom of her thoughts.
“Fetch your friend. There is someone you should meet.”