by Jay Lake
So it was here, the belowdecks of a great iron ship turned inside out to form the tendons and muscles of the Empire. Steam engines stood naked on wheeled trucks to ride the rails, rather than lurking decently below, where they could be tended by a black gang. The blue sky and green world were hidden behind walls everted to remake the world. Instead of the unpeopled sea and the broad green lands passing below and beside him, here there were crowds everywhere, heads bobbing and nodding, shoulders pressed together tight as any assembly of the deck, faces every color of the Empire, though mostly the honest beefy pink of the home islands.
He walked up two iron steps and into the railroad car. Kitchens followed, reaching forward to direct al-Wazir to a private compart ment.
Soon enough they were rumbling through slums filthier and more crowded than the meanest Caribbean port town, along clattering rails where grubby children scavenged for clinkers and metal scrap. “The Battersea Tangle,” said Kitchens absently as they rattled past an endless, confusing expanse of rails knotted together worse than any seaweed mat on the Sargasso.
Then it was open lands and village greens and standing lines of oaks and the rolling country of southeast England as they bore on into Kent.
He finally asked the question he’d been wondering about for a while. “Why Maidstone?”
“Where else to find Africa in England?”
Once again, al-Wazir suspected Kitchens of humor.
The Maidstone railway station was so much smaller than the brick caverns of London that it felt almost normal to al-Wazir. Like a dockside without longshoremen or a flint-eyed wharfinger, though there were idlers and strumpets in evidence, even here. Kitchens steered him directly past the porters and the touts to meet a pair of Royal Marines in green woolens. They opened the hatch of an armored steam-powered omnibus.
Inside the light was dim, filled with shifting shadows, much as belowdecks on an iron-hulled steamer.
“Quiet and easy, this monster is,” al-Wazir said, poking Kitchens in the side. “No one will notice what you’re about, for certain.”
Kitchens sniffed. “I am not responsible for security provisions here.”
One of the marines up front glanced back, grinning. “Kent ain’t exactly brimming with hostiles. We take this’n out twice a day to fetch the mail, truth be told. Gives the old girl a whirl. No one knows the difference.”
The difference to al-Wazir was that he saw nothing from inside the omnibus except bits of treetops and sky through the gun slits.
They drove for the better part of an hour, with a slow lurch that spoke of country lanes too narrow for the chuffing, screeching bulk of the vehicle. When they eventually ground to a halt, even Kitchens was sweating despite the cooling weather. The marines threw open the hatch and helped al-Wazir and Kitchens out.
Whatever he had expected from the Kentish countryside, it was not this.
They stood at the edge of an enormous pit that extended an enormous mile or more to the other side. It was a quarry, al-Wazir realized, and a bloody huge one. One end had been expanded, dug deeper into layers of varying colors. Tailings spread across the bed of the excavation. A great quantity of machines and equipment had been erected in the newly opened section.
Al-Wazir tried to sort out what he was seeing. A scaffold covered much of the wall at that end of the quarry. There were rails laid on the floor, in two gauges—one seemed to be a standard English railroading gauge, the other was much wider, with massive sleepers. A huge machine sat at the end of the broad-gauge spur, up against the cliff face. Just beyond it was a tunnel into the rock. Men swarmed over the machine, making repairs or adjustments.
“We calls it the boner,” said one of the marines.
“Shut your biscuit hole,” the other said.
“Boner” was a good word for it, al-Wazir thought. The machine was perhaps seventy feet long, about fifteen feet in diameter, bearing a bulbous head crisscrossed with studded members. It was basically a giant drill with a rotating nose meant to cut the tunnel before it. The thing rammed into the stone and flayed open a path.
“Her Imperial Majesty’s iron dick would be more like it,” al-Wazir said with a laugh. He swallowed his humor at the look Kitchens gave him.
They took a lift cage down the cliff face to the quarry floor. There was a village spread about the base of the lift: equipment barns and dormitories and cottages for officers and engineers, along with a dining hall, a gymnasium, and dozens more outbuildings. Descending, al-Wazir got an excellent view of the rooftops.
He hated what he saw. Admiralty’s quarters at Ripley Building had at least been blessed with some echo of the majesty of state. Even the Bricklayers’ Arms train station had a purpose around which its form had been built. This was just another factory, another mill, at the bottom of a hole.
What he’d gone to sea to avoid.
As they reached the base of the lift, the tunneling machine erupted into a series of loud steam whistle blasts. Moments later a clattering, churning racket echoed through the quarry, though it was soon muted. Now out of his line of sight, al-Wazir presumed that the machine had moved into the tunnel.
“I believe that Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill will be joining us shortly,” said Kitchens.
They stood in the stone street at the bottom of the quarry amid tarred shacks in a sun that had become far too hot. Al-Wazir found himself wondering if he should have stayed aboard the little dhow, sailed back to Africa, and made his living among the fuzzy wuzzies.
But he’d taken the Queen’s shilling. Her Imperial Majesty had kept him in the air all these years. If she wanted to send him beneath the stones of the Wall, it should be all the same to him.
CHILDRESS
Librarian Childress put to sea aboard SS Mute Swan under steam with the late tide from New Haven harbor the night of Wednesday, September 17, 1902. She made a note of it in her ars memoriae, as if her departure from everything she’d ever known was little more than a citation in a work of distant history.
Things cataloged, marked down, recorded, didn’t have the same edge as what a person felt in her skin. She’d always known this. It was what being a librarian meant to her, and to so many others. Few would choose a life among quiet books and dusty shelves unless they sufficiently abhorred the company of others.
The ship moved smoothly through the gentle swells of Long Island Sound. She stared out the tiny barred porthole. Childress might have been able to toss a coin into the sea, if she’d worked at it a bit. Still, her eyes were free. So she used them.
The full moon painted the Sound silver, while the shoreline bulked blue black. Wooded headlands lent the shadows a darker texture. The towns and waterfronts flickered with light. She’d lived in Connecticut all her life, never going farther than New York City or Providence. Now the avebianco was taking her away, quite possibly for the rest of her life.
At least she’d see more of the world.
Later, after Childress had lain down to sleep still dressed in the clothing of her day, the bolt on the outside of her cabin’s slid open. The muscled woman looked in. She was once more decently attired, rough clothes for traveling but unmistakably female. Childress knew better than to be fooled by her dress.
“Do you have needs?”
“Civilized discourse, personal freedom, and a decent wardrobe.”
“The Mask Poinsard will speak to you of those things tomorrow.”
“And for tonight? . . .”
“Sleep,” said the muscled woman. “You will be bettered for the time spent.”
“And meanwhile we steam into the Atlantic.” She hadn’t meant to say more, but she did. “Away from my home.”
“Your home is the avebianco.” The muscled woman nodded sharply. “I am Anneke. I will see you in the morning.”
The hatch shut. The bolt outside shot home with a click.
Childress settled down, but sleep did not come. Instead she walked through her locus awhile, recalling how she’d come to this pass. Somewhere deep
inside her house of memory, sleep claimed her.
Morning brought a shoreline she had no way to identify—more wooded headlands, some water meadows, old piers gone to rotting posts topped with the dying remnants of a crown of summer growth. Logic told her it ought be the coast of Massachusetts, but she had not yet sorted out the speed of the vessel. Nonetheless she dutifully noted the arrangements of the low-hilled peaks lest by some strange chance she ever passed this way by ship again.
Despite Anneke’s promise, dawn had come and gone several hours with neither breakfast nor a walk to see the Mask Poinsard. And there would be the crux of this whole business.
To say that the white birds, the avebianco, were loosely organized was something of an understatement. They had their signs and symbols, but there was no real arrangement of cells or commanders or revolutionaries. Not such as the Loggers’ Rebellion had maintained under Lincoln and Lee. The two farmer-generals had managed to control portions of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania until General Arbuthnot had put them down with the help of the Sikh divisions.
Unlike those poor doomed rebels, the white birds had never aimed for overt political or economic dominance. Influence, instead. As through the spread and reach of libraries.
But they did have Masks—senior members of the avebianco, tapped for advancement within the brotherhood to assume more public roles, in places and times where a direct influence would be important. Masks were such commanders as the white birds had.
Childress was not enough of a fool to believe it ended there. Surely the Masks looked up to other Masks, persons of rank and title invisible to her. People could not be otherwise. Every tribe had a chief, every gang had a boss, every little pack had a leader.
The drawing of the bolt startled Childress from her reverie. The coast outside had become long dunes and a sandspit. Houses dotted the rise above the storm tide line. Near Boston, perhaps?
She turned to meet Anneke.
“The Mask Poinsard will see you now.”
“No.” Childress might as well make what little point was hers to make. “I require a bath, clean clothing, and a decent meal before I can present myself to a senior member of our brotherhood.”
Anneke snorted. “I see you have not spent much time aboard ship.” She shrugged. “I can escort you to a lavatory. Do what you will there, but be quick about it.”
“And breakfast?”
“Tea and crackers, if you’re lucky.”
Anneke’s patience had limits, then, something that came as no surprise to Childress. Still, she’d won a small battle, simply by standing on propriety. She had no illusions of power—a lifetime as a woman and a librarian had ensured that—but she could show that she, at least, valued herself.
The lav was dreadful small, and reeked of rust and the natural uses to which it was put. The water that dropped from the little pipe overhead was bone-cold. Childress didn’t even consider washing her hair. She did undress to her chemise so she could wet her face and hands and dab elsewhere that fear and stress had left their scent. She resolutely pushed aside her feelings of humiliation at being forced to clean herself this way, like a prisoner in a cell.
She was not a prisoner. She was a white bird, under transport now, following a guide she’d agreed to decades before. This was not a sentence. She was not being punished.
Childress didn’t believe that for a minute, of course. But it was what she told herself to feel better. Not that it worked, but still she forced the thought. To think on a thing was the first step to creating it.
Anneke banged on the hatch all too soon. “You’re late already,” she called, voice muffled through the metal.
Childress buttoned herself back into her slip and dress, taking care that the high collar sat properly. She felt shoddy, dusty, and rumpled, but it was the best she had available to her in this moment. She opened the hatch.
Anneke held a mug of tea and two rough slices of coarse brown bread. Childress reflected that if she had ever chanced to learn the arts of men, she might contrive an escape in that moment, tossing the steaming tea in her captor’s face and running toward—what? The stern of a ship she didn’t know, steaming off an unfamiliar coast?
Instead she took the mug and sipped cautiously. It was a strong dark tea such as the coolies drank in the restaurants in East Haven, where a woman alone might safely dine on exotic foods from the Indian subcontinent. Still, the drink was warm and good and she could taste the stiff infusion, which would set her blood to pumping harder. Childress braced herself against the door and drained the mug as quickly as her tolerance for the heat within would allow. She pocketed one slice of bread as she handed the mug back to Anneke. She gnawed on the other.
Childress felt like a beggar boy going before the truancy bench. This was idiotic. She was an educated woman of spacious intellect and strong will. A single grubby night of confinement and poor nutrition was insufficient to break her spirit.
She gave Anneke a broad smile, letting her eyes twinkle—a look she’d never yet offered to a student, not in thirty-six years at the Divinity School.
“It is now convenient for me to pay a call upon the Mask Poinsard,” she said in her most pleasant voice.
Anneke snorted, but led her down the passage, the empty earthenware mug clutched like a club, perhaps in case weapons should suddenly be needed.
The Mask Poinsard waited in a forward cabin above decks. The room was spacious, eight or ten times larger than Childress’ tiny lockup, with large windows that overlooked the sea. Chairs that might have come from a faculty club were bolted into place, the deck hidden under maroon carpet.
It looked like a saloon, perhaps, a place intended for gentlemen to meet over cigars and port to discuss finance, horses, and females. In this case, it contained only an ordinary-looking woman. Her dark hair was flecked with gray, over brown eyes in an oval face that might have blended in any English crowd. Where Anneke’s dress was much the same as last night, a sort of female compromise to the necessities of labor aboard ship, the Mask Poinsard wore a smart lavender jacket with a flowing skirt to match, a ruffled white blouse, and small black bow. A matching hat waited on a stand beside her chair. Remarkably impractical for shipboard wear. The Mask Poinsard was making a point. Childress wondered to whom the point was addressed.
Somehow she had expected the Mask Poinsard to be a man.
“May I present myself as the Librarian Childress.” She stepped through her uncertainty. “Late of the Day Missions Library at Berkeley Divinity School and lifetime resident of New Haven, Connecticut.”
“You may address me as the Mask Poinsard. My given name is not of consequence for your purposes.” Where Anneke had a broader Continental accent, the Mask Poinsard’s accent was pure Received Pronunciation, the English of the court and the bench and all things prestigious.
The clothes, up close, were very finely tailored, with a stitch count too high for Childress to estimate by eye. This woman was very wealthy. But then, she controlled this vessel, for all practical purposes. Possibly through outright ownership.
“Mask Poinsard,” Childress said quietly. “I am at your service.”
“Indeed.” Poinsard settled a bit more deeply into her chair.
Uncomfortable, Childress thought. There was something afoot this woman would prefer not to address. Years in faculty committee meetings had taught her the value of extended silence. She practiced that wisdom.
Eventually the Mask Poinsard stepped into the gap. “We of the avebianco do not . . . require oaths.” She was picking her words with care. “The vast majority of our members are at best loosely associated with one another or the brotherhood as a whole.”
Another pause. Childress smiled brightly and attentively.
“Much as yourself,” Poinsard finally said, filling in Childress’ line of the playlet in her head.
Childress allowed herself a polite but indistinct murmur.
“Sometimes a member, an affiliate, puts herself forward, inserting herself i
n the higher business of the brotherhood. Knowingly or otherwise.”
This time the pause was accompanied by a sharpened stare. Childress continued to smile in silence, though she was certain her expression was transiting rapidly from attentive to vacuous.
Poinsard took a large shuddering sigh. “You, Librarian Childress, through your actions, began a chain of events which directly brought about the disappearance and presumed death of two individuals critical to the success of our brotherhood’s purposes. One, Simeon Malgus, was a key agent in our long-term contests with the Rationalists and their so-called Silent Order of the Second Winding. The other, William of Ghent, stood in the highest councils of the Silent Order.” She leaned forward, pointing a finger at Librarian Childress, talking faster now.
Nerves, Childress realized. She steeled herself for what must come next.
Poinsard rushed on. “Through your actions, they were both lost. The Silent Order even now goes to war against the Feathered Masks that sit in our order’s high councils. The avebianco have made overtures of peace to them—we have, after all, coexisted in compromise for centuries. The price the Silent Order has demanded is that you be bound over for trial by their star chamber.”
Ah. This was worse than anything she might have expected. To be brought before the hierarchy of the white birds was one thing. To be cast as a sacrifice to the Rationalists was entirely another.
Childress thought quickly. “Let us have no pretense, Mask. Relying on my loyalty and obedience, you summoned me aboard your ship so you could betray me for the sake of the Feathered Masks and their peace of mind. I am not here to answer for my actions, or as a reward for my steadfastness. I am here to be sacrificed as a pawn to the Rationalists. You waited until we were under way rather than bringing your case on shore in order to ensure that your mission prevailed. The cowardice you have shown in approaching me is despicable. Worse so those who stand above you in condemning me to ease their own fears.