Pinion Read Free Page A

into the Wall so the ancient, cruel magic of gravity would not pluck her down untimely. The stone was damp and gritty, far too soft to be trusted. The pain rose quickly in her arms as an acidic burn that gave no quarter. She worked her way along, always gripping with three points while moving the fourth.
    Again Ming shouted. Paolina’s section of the Wall was tilted forward like a dog trying to shed a troublesome insect.
    A bronze blade stabbed into the rock next to her. It barely missed her cheek, would have laid her open to the bone. Paolina turned to see one of winged savages—those flying horrors of which al-Wazir had babbled in his fever dreams aboard
Heaven’s Deer
.
    It leered at her. The expression contrasted with the empty black eyes and the reek of slaughter. The sword pulled back as wings beat to hold the creature in place, eighty miles above the churning oceans of Southern Earth.
    She could let go. She could fall. She could twist in the air, tug the gleam from its leather pouch, set the hands and find some use that would banish this monster and save herself.
And Ming
, Paolina added with hasty guilt. Save herself and Ming.
    While perhaps shaking this entire face of the Wall loose with her.
    “You are nothing,” she told the winged savage, and loosened her grip.
    The stone that struck it in the side of the head surprised them both. Paolina fell free, screaming, lost already to unreason before her hand ever found her salvation even as the winged savage spiraled away.
    The rope held, slamming her into the rock forty feet below the tied-off knots. Paolina slumped there, lodged against a vertical cleft in the Wall.
    Just below her, standing on an undercut pathway, was a man in yellow leather with a tall, narrow cap rounded as a thumb. A sling drooped from his right hand. His left held a feathered staff topped by bright jewels.
    Her safety rope tugged. Paolina scrambled for a grip, trying to help Ming pull her up. She nodded at the stranger as he slid away from her view, hidden once more by the overhang.
    Finally, palms bloody, feet torn in her ragged shoes, she lay gasping on the flat apron of ground.
    “We . . . can go below . . . ,” she managed to bite out. “A road . . . near the end . . . of our rope.”
    Ming smiled, though she did not think he meant it. “Who down there?” he asked in the careful, simple Chinese he used with her.
    Paolina tried to shrug. “A man in . . . yellow. He had a sling. He stared at me.”
    “Maybe not so good to meet down, ah?” Ming tried in En glish.
    She stared up the worthless trail that had led them to this impasse. “
    Up where we were, you think?”
    “Up,” he answered in his language. She didn’t need a translation to hear his emphasis, his worry, his fear.
    I can lay waste to cities and transport ships across oceans
, she told herself, limping behind Ming’s heels up their backtrail.
Surely I can carry myself down the Wall
. She had to find a way to shed her power, to live for herself. And for Boaz, Paolina admitted.
WANG
    Cataloger Wang busied himself among the most recent scrolls to come out of the pit of the library at Chersonesus Aurea, that lost city of the ancients hidden within scattered islands of the Kepulauan Riau near to Singapore. A history almost long enough to rival the Celestial Empire was drowned in swamp water and ancient ghosts. Something of that spoke to his librarian’s soul, whispering in the secret language of archivists.
    All were loyal to the Son of Heaven; all were loyal to their name and place in the great wheel of society. He could do no less than practice the same loyalty.
    There had been a sick, tempting fascination in the foreigner whom the damnable Captain Leung had brought into the heart of Wang’s demesne. She was doubly offensive in being both En glish and female. The dev ils from the deepest West wore their deceit plain upon their ghost-pale faces.
    If only the Han armies had pursued the Romans after the Battle of Sogdiana,