Pinion by Jay Lake Page B

“Would you ask the Kô if he had seen a ghost?”
    Aboard a vessel smaller than his sitting room in Beijing?
“No,” Wang admitted.
    “A
female
ghost,” Wu muttered. “Worse even than some distressed ancestor seeking vengeance.”
    “What would you have me do?”
    “Use your powers to banish her from this boat. Or persuade her ashore. Rectify her name so she has no more hold here.”
    Wang shook his head. “I cannot simply bid her to be away. You do not need a librarian; you need a priest. Or a spiritual pulmonist.”
    “We had hoped,” Wu said. “Captain Shen will not speak to the problem. I believe he fears even saying the words will lend dread power to this haunting.”
    The cataloger had briefly met Captain Shen at the helm. The man had been uninterested in anything but the course before him.
    “Your captain is a creature of the Kô,” Wang told the mate. “Freedom of thought is not so well rewarded in his service.”
    “We are all bound to him,” Wu replied. “Like peasants in their field, we are sworn to
Fortunate Conjunction
, and through the boat to the Kô.”
    “Can you not take another ship should the mood strike you? Form a new crew?”
    Wu’s grin was terrible, a tight band of gleaming regret. “Not in this life, or the next. Someday we will sail with the Kô into Hell itself.” He turned up a pale blue sleeve to show Wang a brand scarred onto the underside of his right forearm.
Chiang jian
, the mark of a rapist. “We are every one of us sentenced to death. That we even breathe today is only at his intercession. That we live to breathe tomorrow is only at his mercy.”
    “You are all dead men,” Wang said, horrified.
    The mate leaned close, eyes blazing. “We fear those we have sent to the next world to open the way before us.”
    Wang sat in the prow all day, the Andaman Sea splitting before the knife edge of
Fortunate Conjunction
’s keel. He contemplated the matter of the missing monk. Wu was convinced she had been a ghost, but then the mate himself was little different—a man in the world past the ordained time of his death. This was not
orderly
. Heaven, the Middle Kingdom and Hell all had their own arrangements, each reflecting the methods of the other like three mirrors in a great temple hall.
    One could believe in the hierarchies of the other world without crediting superstitious hauntings. He’d spoken to the monk, watched her smoke a pipe, smelled the pungency of her herbs, heard the flap of her robes in the wind. She was no more a ghost than he. Or in truth, Wu.
    Yet Wang and the mate had searched the boat stem to stern. Unless the monk had been very swift and stealthy, she could not have remained undetected.
    Except for the obvious, of course. She was hiding in the Kô’s cabin. It was the only place they had not searched.
    Wang headed below to check the seals on the cabin door. He knew perfectly well how easy it was to forge such a thing. Ribbons were cheap, wax and lead easily worked. A clever man could cut a seal open from the back, with the slit of a knife tip or a quick slip of a razor.
    Or a clever woman.
    But how had she locked herself in?
    With the aid of one of the crew, of course. Those silent, surly men kept secrets the way a cave kept darkness. Someone had slipped the monk in and out of the cabin.
    Alone in the small companionway, Wang bent to examine the seal—a large blob of red wax with the impression of a dragon biting its tail, bound to the hatch handle by a twisting wire. He reached behind to explore.
    A loop, clipped to a hook. The wire wasn’t even joined at the back.
    Wu glanced at the ladderway. Sunlight streamed in, but no shadow lurked close by. The other end of the short passage was a storage locker.
    He slipped the seal free and pulled open the door.
    The room was startling in its simplicity, much unlike the elaborate chambers of the Forbidden City, or even the Kô’s quarters back on Chersonesus Aurea. A low, flat bed of black wood with