Free Pinion by Jay Lake Page B

Father.”
    “To be sure. Soon I will take my leave of you, to deposit even more of myself in a stinking hole. I am not so healthy as I look.” He grinned, but quiet despair loomed behind the crooked, brown-stained teeth. “I hold a secret, librarian-who-is-a-Mask. In other times I would have wished a bloody plague on you and the Silent Ones both, but these are my last days. You come asking; I will give you my gift.”
    She felt balanced between potential and horror. “I should thank you for your legacy.”
    “Perhaps.” He ate another slice of fruit, slowly chewing as a trickle of palest green ran down the stubble of his chin. Then: “There is a fort up the coast. I will give you a chart. Pirates once ranged there, not so long ago, for the same reason you have come—Goa is a place with little law and less care than most. Those bandit sailors are departed, impressed aboard Her Imperial Majesty’s ships or returned to their fields and farms, but some of what you need may yet be found.”
    “Pirates?” She almost laughed, but this man was serious as the disease that ate him from within. “Surely their treasures are defended; surely the British keep watch to see who comes looking for more.”
    “Surely enough, but with Chinese submarines cruising these waters, who has time to watch an old cave cluttered with rusting parts and leaking fuel barrels?” He reached into his vestments and pulled out a long, beaded rosary from which hung not a cross but a key. “You will need this.”
    “Will you come?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “Even the ride down to your ship was almost too much for me.”
    “Why do this at all?”
    “Word came.” His voice was growing threadbare. “You were to be stopped. The birds said this; the Silent Ones said this. But the Royal Navy is not rumbling. Anyone who can stir the hidden powers of the world while leaving the lions at the gate asleep is a truly worthy troublemaker.”
    She took the key, and a little leather map he handed her. She stepped around the wicker table and kissed his sweating forehead. “I have no blessing to bestow,” Childress said, “but my thanks are yours.”
    “One world, under the gears of God.” The imp was back in his eyes for a moment. “Make it so?”
    “We shall try.”
    As Childress walked down the steps of the rectory, Father Francis called after her. “I used to be a priest, you know. In truth.”
    She turned and gave him a long look.
    He was grinning full now, as if this were his last, best joke. “Before I took the black flag and rode the high seas, I was one of God’s sworn men. The Archbishop was kind enough to let me come home again at the last.”
    “Bless you, Father, for you have sinned,” she replied, and walked away through the searing tropical morning to the sound of his thinning laughter.
GASHANSUNU
    Baassiia came to her in the Hour of the Pod. Gashansunu meditated in the house of her second spirit, a small room near the top of a tower in the Spider Wheel of the city. Being Baassiia, he flew to see her.
    As if raw power could impress anyone who had spent time in the Silent World.
    She let her
wa
speak for her, in the Silent tongue: YOU DISTURB.
    “It is not needless,” Baassiia said, answering with his mouth.
    ALL IS NEEDLESS WHEN NOTHING IS NEEDFUL .
    The big man knew better than to argue circularities with another sorcerer’s
wa
. He stepped from air to stone and settled next to her, so they both faced out across the Great Sunset Water.
    Gashansunu ignored him a while. This was her right, in meditation, and also her spite at him for coming unbidden into this place. He might have the body of a god, and the bed manners to match, but this man had no claim on her outside the working circle. He was not even a hierarch in her branch of the Westfacing House.
    He was just a big, beautiful and worried man.
    In time the Hour of the Pod passed. The blood flowers in the plaza below sighed as they released their holds into the air. A