Pinion Read Free

ocean than storms,” she mused aloud.
    “Chinese, coconuts and sharks,” al-Wazir offered.
    “Chief, your wisdom would challenge even the ancients.”
    He chuckled. She glanced up again to see an unfamiliar gleam in his eyes.
    This man had loved Paolina unreasonably. Childress suspected he mourned the girl more than he mourned his lost left hand.
    Childress turned the map in her hands. She had all but memorized theports of this ocean, the little picture-words of their Chinese names dancing in her head as she placed them in her
ars memoriae
. Al-Wazir had filled in a few for her in En glish: Aden, Mogadishu. Leung had filled in others: Phu Ket, Penang, Colombo.
    A long way from New Haven.
    “Chief,” Childress asked. “What’s this place on the west coast of India? I cannot tell if it’s colored differently, or if that’s just a stain on the map.”
    “On this vessel? They’d have the midshipmen inking a new chart before they’d leave a soiled one in the drawer.” Al-Wazir had acquired a grudging respect for Chinese seamanship that ran deeply against the grain of all his years in the Royal Navy airship ser vice.
    She let another roll of the hull pass, then slid the chart to him. “Look. There.”
    “Aye . . .” He squinted a little while. “And it might be Goa.”
    “Goa?” The word meant nothing to Childress.
    “A city of mad dogs and Portugee.”
    “Literally? I thought the Empire controlled everything in the western part of the ocean.”
    “There’s control and then there’s control,” al-Wazir said. “Some places follow their own law.”
    “Like the Indians in America.”
    “All of ’em wogs,” the big man said, already sliding back toward his depression.
    Finally, a place to stand
, she thought.
And plot our next move
. My
next move
.
PAOLINA
    Fleeing her own power, and the greed of men, she’d listened to the angel tell her of someone she should meet. Paolina had expected to be brought before a jeweled throne. Or introduced to an ancient sage beneath a withered peach tree.
    Not
this
.
    The Southern Earth lay beneath her, the curve of the globe quite visible from her dizzying altitude high up along the Wall. Ming was ahead, trying to find a route around a knob of stone that would force them back several days if they could not pass it. He was roped to a promising nub in the outward-leaning rock face, but if he fell, she didn’t see how to rescue him.
    The gleam was heavy in her pocket: the new stemwinder she’d built aboard the dying Chinese airship, when she’d needed to escape the Wall storm that had threatened their lives. The new one she’d used to take hundreds, possibly thousands of lives. No matter that she’d saved herself,the surviving crew of
Five Lucky Winds
, al-Wazir and that strange En glish librarian Childress. Paolina had sworn off dealing with death after the explosion in Strasbourg, which was as surely her fault as if she’d lit a fuse herself.
    Otherwise she could simply
move
them off the Wall.
    The last time she had used the gleam to do that, hundreds died in the resulting earthquakes. The world went to great trouble to right itself after such an insult. Which ought to be a clue to any thinking man or woman as to how such magic was intended to be used.
    That was to say:
not at all
.
    She desperately needed to shed herself of this power, without being destroyed by it.
    Ming shouted something. She looked up from her reverie to see him wave. He then began making his slow, patient way back to the anchor point of his rope. Paolina watched carefully, marking the handholds and footholds the sailor used. She was longer of leg and arm than he, but his strength overmatched hers.
    Enough
, she thought.
When there are no choices, one simply does what must be done
. If there had been anything to learn from the sad, quiet women of Praia Nova in her youn gest days, it was that.
    Soon enough she was roped and climbing outward. Paolina clung to the rock like a leech, forcing herself