Pinion by Jay Lake Page A

virtually identical to all of his fellows.
    He wished she could be here now. Perhaps there was something she could see in this place, some hint he might miss for carelessness or excitement or distraction or sheer lack of understanding.
    With only the glittering gaze of his enemies for witness, Boaz unfolded the leather to discover what secrets might lie within.
WANG
    The mate Wu, who had hustled Wang aboard the night before, leaned on the prow. There had been no evidence of the monk this morning, and the cataloger wondered where she was.
Fortunate Conjunction
was small, a dozen
bù
from stem to stern, twenty paces for a man not in a hurry. She rode low as well, the pilothouse her tallest point. She was much tidier and faster than any vessel Wang had ever traveled on.
    “Sir,” Wang said, offering himself.
    Wu spat downwind. Then he turned to face Wang.
    The cataloger knew he was pudgy, pale, a man who spent far too muchtime on a stool. The mate was a man carved to sail the seas. The infelicitious shade of sun-darkened skin that would have branded Wang as a peasant somehow became heroic on Wu, hinting at manly deeds and blood spilled in the righteous service of the Emperor.
    Wang did not like blood.
    “You were called, not sent,” Wu said after a while.
    The echo of the monk’s words surprised Wang. “So I have been told,” he answered cautiously.
    “
Fortunate Conjunction
is not a lucky ship.”
    Those two statements did not converge happily in Wang’s mind. He remained silent to see what the mate might offer next.
    Wu surrendered first in the staring match, speaking with care. “You are no prisoner to be guarded or beaten or fed on water and rotten rice. Yet you are not free to go—not until you have answered the call.”
    “This is true.” Wang tried to listen past this man’s cautious words.
    Then, in a rush of speech that reversed Wu’s care to nervous rattle, Wu said, “You are also almost like a priest, yes?”
    “I am a cataloger, which is a kind of librarian.”
    “A cataloger?”
    “We practice the Rectification of Names among the words of men long dead. If you would seek advice on the best way to thresh millet, one of my kind will have made a list of those scrolls and books that discuss millet and other grains, the practices of agronomy, and the tools by which farmers pursue their daily tasks.”
    “So you know the proper order of things in the world.” The mate leaned close. “Do you understand the hierarchies of Heaven and the Imperial Court and the small places of the Earth?”
    “Who does not?” Wang blurted.
    “We have a ghost aboard,” Wu said, his voice now tinged with bitterness. “This ghost most certainly does not understand what is needful.”
    “Why not ask the monk?”
    The look Wu gave the cataloger scorched him to silence.
    An hour later, they climbed up from the bilge hatch. Wu shrugged. “The Kô holds the power of life and death. But even he cannot slay what cannot be brought before him.”
    Wang was grubby, bruised, bleeding from several small cuts, and now knew more about boats than he had ever intended. The mate had taken him through every
cun
of the boat, handspan by handspan, from the cables controlling the rudder to the little chain locker at the bow.
    The only space they had not visited was the Kô’s private cabin. The door was sealed with a blob of red wax binding a long red ribbon, and according to Wu it had been shut just so for months.
    There was no monk. There was not even any sign of the monk. On a vessel this small, with eleven crew plus Wang, there was little possibility she could have slipped ahead or to the other side of the deck.
    “She has been a ghost for how long?” Wang asked.
    “Since we last sailed from Hainan to bring the Kô south to Chersonesus Aurea.”
    Wang puzzled at those words for a moment. “He was aboard with the ghost?”
    “Yes, though we never knew him to see it.”
    “Did you ask?”
    Wu gave him another smoldering glare.