Pinion by Jay Lake

priest—a Kohanim such as they had notseen upon the Wall in at least a thousand years—chanting from a book. His ancient blessing in memory was so strong that for a moment Boaz thought he heard a voice in the present day.
    He blinked away the sight and stared thoughtfully at the boulders.
    A Brass can easily move four or five times the weight a very strong man can shift. Though they need to rest, they do not tire in the human sense. Monkey bodies lose vigor over the hours of a day until they are finally claimed by sleep. Not Brass, who can run just as swiftly and lift just as much in the last watch of the night as under the burgeoning light of dawn.
    Boaz shook off the dream-phantoms that had dogged him and set to unstacking the boulders. He knew without consideration which to take first and which to take later, for the ordering of this pile was still in his memory. Even the largest were within his ability to lift, further confirming what he already knew about this place.
    Laboring, Boaz wondered how often the rocks had been buried beneath sand. Had he come in another season of the wind, he might never have found this.
    Very close to dawn he reached a crack in the cliff. Eager to have access, Boaz pushed aside the last of the obscuring rocks.
    Sand slid free. This place had definitely been under the dunes. Behind the sand stood a wooden wall, or possibly a door. It was very old, silvered by moonlight and age both, riddled with the tracks of worms, abraded by the insults of time. Boaz ran his fingers over the surface. Clinkered planks, sawn as a slab to fit in this place.
    A piece of the hull from one of the ships in Asiongaber’s fleet.
    His fingers traced the lines on the wood, feeling the textures of ancient seas. Almost three thousand years had passed since the wreck that had founded the Brass nation. All of Ophir’s history ran through this doorway, back to Asiongaber and Jerusalem in the bright days when YHWH’s people held their kingdom in close-wrought power beneath the hand of their Lord.
    As if at the command of his thought, the ancient wood collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters. Behind Boaz, someone murmured. He turned to see Chin Ping, with half a dozen men and Chin Yuen as well. They all stood in the dark, eyes gleaming, waiting to see what he would do.
    This is my history
, Boaz thought, but he said nothing to the band of armed enemies crowding close behind him as he stooped to pass within the crack in the cliff and step across the gates of history.

    Chin Yuen lit a stick of punk. The sputtering flame lit the cave like a distant artillery bombardment.
    The space was small, barely more than a wide crack in the cliff. An altar stood before Boaz, three ashlars rough-worked from the native rock then stacked in a table. Dusty threads showed the remains of an altar cloth. A brittle ceramic lamp perched at one edge. In the center lay a bundle wrapped in cracked leather positioned at a slight angle, as if the Kohanim priest had dropped the thing and stepped away too quickly to see that it was properly square.
    Another whisper of Chinese behind him, then Chin Ping: “This is place of Brass people?”
    “Not precisely,” Boaz said absently. He was tired again, in that too-human way, but also shaking with a sense of impending time and the collapse of destiny like a moon tumbling loose from the sky. “But our nation was born here.”
    His fingers brushed the lamp, which seemed likely to vanish just as the door had done. Somehow it remained intact beneath Boaz’ gentlest touch. He picked up one of the surviving threads of the altar cloth. Silver, or gold, woven into a textile that had not survived the years.
    Finally, the leather.
    The bundle had heft. Boaz cradled it in his arms the way he might have carried a wounded animal. It fit as if folded for the grip of a Brass. All Brass were from the same mold, after all—Boaz himself was the strangest of his race already, thanks to Paolina and her will, but still