Escapement

by Jay Lake

  “But,” Childress said, “I would have gone willingly, had you only asked.” She was mildly surprised to realize that truth. “All that would ever have been required was the statement of need. For I am loyal, even now. Not to you, or even to the Feathered Masks. You have shown yourselves as miserable and venal. No, I am loyal to our brotherhood’s ideal, that man can make a place among the works of God on his own terms. We are the middle way, neither extreme Spiritualists demanding blind obedience to God’s writ, nor Rationalists seeking to expel Him from His creation.

  “You, I am afraid, have been driven by your cowardice. You have betrayed me. I will not betray you in turn.”

  Childress turned and walked toward the door. She had no power here but her dignity. She was secretly pleased to see the startled expression on Anneke’s face as the other woman moved to the hatch, looking past Childress for some direction from her mistress.

  “Librarian Childress—,” the Mask Poinsard began.

  Childress smiled, a petty, nasty smile she knew, but Anneke stopped and let her pass. She’d won, not the struggle for life or freedom, but the moral struggle. When Poinsard had spoken, she’d conceded that Childress had stripped away her rationales.

  Truth is not for the weak of heart.

  Out in the corridor beyond, she made for the open deck. She had no thought of flinging herself into the sea, or embarking on some other Brontë-esque expression of romantic failure. Just a desire rather to stand in open air, embrace the honest wind, and look to her own future without the foolishness of the Mask Poinsard echoing in her ears.

  A few moments later Anneke caught up to Childress at the rail. Her broad, strong hand touched the librarian’s shaking old one for a moment. Anneke then pressed a warm pastry into Childress’ palm. “I am sorry.”

  “I don’t suppose you were meant to hear that. The Mask had a rather different piece of theater in mind.”

  “Yes . . . well . . .” Anneke’s hand brushed Childress’ forearm again, more deliberately this time. “I shan’t be bolting your door anymore.”

  “Thank you,” Childress said distantly. She realized she was on the starboard rail, looking out into the Atlantic rather than at North America. Not that it mattered now. There was no going back, figuratively or literally. And she’d meant what she said, about loyalty to the ideal of the white birds.

  A small moral victory was little comfort, but it was far better than miserable surrender. She smiled again into the wind, listening to Anneke’s slow footfalls and wondering how long she’d live once the Mask Poinsard had conveyed her to the waiting hands of the Silent Order.

  THREE

  PAOLINA

  A Muralha was a beast, Paolina soon realized. A great stone beast taller than the sky, with one mighty paw raised to strike down anyone so foolish as to crawl along its face.

  Still, it was beautiful. She kept to paths hundreds of yards above the sea to avoid being pressed onto the eroding faces near the water. In this area a Muralha still had the same stepped shelves that hosted Praia Nova back to the west. Whatever geology or Divine plan that had made this portion of the Wall had worked with a principle of consistency.

  The sea was always below to her left, rarely out of sight in good weather. At night it murmured to her, much as it had at home, simple polysyllabic lullabies in the tongue of wave and water. That eased her mind.

  To her right rose the bulk of the Wall. It climbed, rising and sloping away, but still vaulting past her line of sight to create a horizon almost straight above her head. The ledges up there held whole countries of their own—logic alone told her that, but every now and then the thought was reinforced by a glint of metal, or the sight of a streamer of smoke, or some broken piece of wrought stonework fallen from high above to smash at her level.

  Clouds, too, up there. She saw layers on layers like stacked wreaths, clinging close to the face of a Muralha but never completely obscuring it. Sometimes they would part to show a vision of ever more fields of stone and air. At night, she would watch lightning walk sideways across the face and listen to the rumble of storms so distant, their water never reached her, though it fell for hours at some faraway height.

  She had lived with the sheer monstrous size of the thing all her life, but in Praia Nova it had somehow faded into the background. Out here, a Muralha filled the sky to overlook the sea like a scaled cat watching a rabbit burrow.

  The weather was a bit more troublesome on the trail—the storm that had broken the night she left Praia Nova had been a harbinger of a series of rains. The days were hot, the nights had an edge, there was always wind, and she was wet more often than not.

  For a while Paolina amused herself conceiving of possible methods of rainproofing. Simplest would have been some of the coated canvas with which the mushroom sheds had been covered. She could have trimmed it into a cape or jacket and traveled well enough.

  There were certainly more fanciful solutions. Tar could be boiled and distillated to elastic components, but that would require far more glassware than she could imagine finding out here. She could conceive of using tree sap, or the skin of marine animals, or some great system of fans to create a bubble of air pressure.

  All the speculation was pointless, but it continued her long habits of thought. Paolina wondered how so many people managed to live in the world without any need to understand its workings. God had laid everything before man, a banquet of knowledge. All one had to do was step to the table and sup! Yet so many people sought sleep or wine or foolishness instead of simply opening their eyes.

  Not to mention their ears and their minds.

  So, soaking wet much of the time, she walked. She camped in darkness, making fire with the little sulfur sticks she’d fabricated the summer before. Those had been laughed at in Praia Nova. Here on an open trail, their value was immeasurable.

  The one thing her thoughts shied away from was the sheer distance. The diameter of the earth was obvious enough. It was readily measured from the period of a single day, with elementary analysis of the rotation as measured against the brasswork in the heavens. The track itself rotated around the sun, which introduced subtleties in the mathematics of time, but still it was simple enough.

  She assumed at least three thousand miles from Praia Nova to the African coast. There she might hope to find the English at their works. The chances of running into Bassett or one of its sister wizard-ships seemed remote, but still she kept her eyes sharply on the sky.

  Clarence Davies had walked a good portion of that distance. It had taken him two years, but he’d done it alone. A boy. Dr. Minor had left to follow it farther, though his fate was unknown.

  She was a girl, but she was fifteen and nearly a woman. Her legs were long, her arms were strong, and she had no illusions about the sharpness of her wit.

  All of which would mean nothing if a scaled cat or a band of enkidu raiders should drop from above.

  Paolina took refuge in her stemwinder.

  She never removed the device from its little sack unless she was camped securely. She didn’t trust herself not to drop it on a trail, or even worse, over some edge as she crossed a precipice. It came out only when the moments were quiet and she had time to consider what the hands told her, what the device meant.

  The hand that measured the time that beat at the heart of everything ran true. That was useful, because she had no way to hear such a thing with her own ears or measure with it her own eyes, as she did the next two hands. Any fool could observe the turning of the earth, and any fool could lay a finger on her own pulse to measure the beating of her heart.

  The last hand, though—the one she’d built a gear train for and arranged separate springs for—it was taking a measure, too. And she did not know what this hand was measuring.

  Paolina decided that was far more interesting than frightening. She spent much of her evenings huddled with the stemwinder in her hand, trying to see further into the world.

  Sometimes she succeeded.

  A mon
th on the trail, she came down with an ague. Perhaps it was something she ate despite her care with strange berries and pallid roots. Paolina was afraid to simply curl up and sleep out her chills and cramps. She kept moving, stumbling through days that lasted moments, and hours that crawled at the speed of seasons.

  The stemwinder was like a compass to her in that time. She would reach, hand grabbing and clawing weakly, until she found the canvas sack within her dress pocket, and clutch it close.

  When the path came to a gate, Paolina was surprised. Short men—no, women—with stumpy bodies armor-clad and wearing tusked helmets, surrounded her. They stared. Their spears coursed with a pale green fire so faint as to seem illusory.

  One of the weapons nosed close to Paolina’s fingers where she clutched the stemwinder. She jerked her right hand up and away from the crackling point before slumping to the stones. A circle of faces closed over her; then she was lifted and carried through a gate. She could see only the arch, decorated high above her head with blue and orange gemstones, intermixed with chunks of quartz and glass. She imagined that was how a jewel box might look from within.

  Clearly, the stemwinder was her passport here.

  Were these people sorcerers, like the English?

  A building, then, the entrance another high bejeweled arch, followed by hallways lined with bulging golden columns beneath clerestory roofs where sunlight glowed through colored panes.

  These people loved color.

  Paolina tried to focus her thoughts. The gate guards had been so dispassionate, they might well have speared her where she lay but for the stemwinder’s presence in her hand. Still, a child could have wrested it from her.

  They deposited her in a smaller room with a closer ceiling painted in abstract designs that seemed intended to signify flowers. Another toothy, snouted face pushed through her bearers and leaned over her.

  “Are you dying?” the strange woman asked in English.

  Paolina chose to lie, for the sake of valor. “I do not believe so.” She wanted to ask, Why English, who are you, where am I? but the words were too hard. She might not understand the answers anyway.

  The woman looked her over. “You carry a gleam.”

  A gleam. Somehow Paolina knew this woman meant the stemwinder. And the word fit, like glove to hand. “When I am well . . .” She stopped to breathe. “Then I will show you . . . what you wish to know.”

  That seemed to satisfy the woman, who turned and growled. More ugly little women took her away. She was stripped and bathed, though they kept a wary distance from the stemwinder clutched in her hand.

  What had she made?

  “Gleam,” the ugly woman had said.

  Paolina wished she had an English wizard to guide her in the moment, some descendant of Newton or Dee or one of the other wise men of the court of St. James.

  She fell asleep while they were spooning a thin vegetable broth into her mouth.

  AL - WAZIR

  Herr Doctor Professor Lothar Ottweill was the sort of man for whom any self-respecting crew in Her Imperial Majesty’s Royal Navy would have found a convenient accident shortly after sailing. As a division chief, al-Wazir would have spent half his time protecting the fool from himself, and the other half beating his men into line so that when the inevitable discipline parade was held, it wasn’t his division before captain’s mast.

  For one thing, Ottweill was madder than a St. James hatter. He might as well have been swigging mercury, or one of those strange alchemical mixes the powdersmiths were always on about. Bald as a church pew, the engineer stood about five foot four and didn’t weigh upwards of eight stone. He seemed to think he outsized everyone around him. He thought it so thoroughly that almost everyone else was fooled. Even al-Wazir, pushing twenty stone at six foot four, felt an eerie and sickening magic.

  That was not the whole of the thing. There had been officers in his career, some martinets, others sensible characters, who’d overcome disadvantages of size with sheer bravado. As much as anything, the problem was the angry, spitting shout in which Ottweill constantly spoke. The tone presumed you were a purblind fool in need of constant oversight.

  All the man had on the other side of his balance sheet was sheer, walleyed genius. That and a clear vision of what it would take to tunnel through a hundred miles and more of basal rock to penetrate the Equatorial Wall.

  Bloody-mindedness struck al-Wazir as the first requirement for this project of the Prime Minister’s. Ottweill had bloody-mindedness woven into the fabric of his body and soul.

  Al-Wazir had to admire the man’s strength of purpose, in the same way he admired a spectacular storm or an especially wild mad dog. Such respect seemed safer from a distance.

  He was beginning to see the essence of Lloyd George’s plan in pairing him with Ottweill. The chief realized that he and Kitchens might be the only two men anywhere in the quarry who were not cowed by the good doctor. And al-Wazir was probably the only man on the expedition with enough experience of chain of command combined with sufficient disregard of the same to wrestle with Ottweill.

  Literally, if need be.

  He wondered how Ottweill had survived long enough in life to achieve a position of this magnitude and responsibility. Of course, officers did it all the time, buffoons and monsters rising to flag rank without ever seeming to be noticed by Admiralty or their fellows.

  By fighting dirty, of course.

  In the meantime, he listened to the doctor rant about the steam borer, mark four. Watt and Doulton had built the boilers, while most of the construction had been done at Chapman and Furneaux, locomotive builders. Three had been completed, two shipped out for the Wall some months ago by slow boat under heavy escort. The third remained here for final testing and design improvements, with the appropriate parts and amendments to be sent south to the other two units.

  All would be an indefinite work in progress, al-Wazir saw.

  “Why we are not permitted to weld the operators into their cabins I am not understanding,” Ottweill was saying at his usual shout. “Enormous are the efficiencies to be gained. No wastage on egress and support systems. From their bucket they can eat, then shit back into. Three buckets, three days, then—foo!—open we cut the cabin and them we replace. Two men, three buckets each, we run three more days. What problem is there here, by damn? Stupid soft Englanders. Good Prussian peasant give me. On black bread and beatings they live, in the name of the mother of God.”

  Al-Wazir looked around. Nine men listened to this briefing. A pair of Fleet Street reporters with their own quiet man to watch them—some counterpart who had exchanged nods of recognition with Kitchens. Two more men in Overseas Civil Service uniform. A pair of Royal Marine sergeants who kept exchanging eye-rolling glances. And of course, himself and Kitchens.

  All of them, even the marines, were completely overwhelmed by Ottweill. No one was questioning the man. Yet somehow, the engineer ranted onward through stupidity and thickheadedness to something that actually worked on a rational basis. It was an amazing display.

  The chief began to develop a second theory, that Ottweill was in full control of himself and had adopted this approach as the best way to force compliance from the men around him.

  Either way, he decided he was amused. Al-Wazir began to chuckle. This earned him first a glance from Kitchens, who smiled another of his elusive smiles, then stares from some of the other attendees, then finally a sputtering and amazed silence from Ottweill.

  “No, really,” al-Wazir said. “Please, do carry on.”

  “Do I entertain you, you great red jungle ape?”

  “Quite a bit, sir.” Al-Wazir bit back more.

  “Well.” Ottweill folded his arms, standing before the unrolled chart of the steam borer. “I am glad to be seeing that my education and credentials and experience have come to serve a useful purpose for Her Imperial Majesty’s government.”

  Kitchens stirred slightly at that, but al-Wazir rose to his feet. With both of them standing, Ottweill
came to the second button down on his chest. The little man lost much of his physical authority just standing with the big chief. “I’m told you do,” al-Wazir said. He let his voice rumble, as he might talking to a new chum with big ideas about deck discipline. “I am here to help.” He added slowly and deliberately, “Sir.”

  “Who is this man?” Ottweill demanded of the rest of the room. “Have him discharged immediately, or no tunnel will there be.” He crossed his arms and glared triumphantly.

  Kitchens cleared his throat. “Chief Petty Officer Threadgill Angus al-Wazir is in charge of preserving your life on the Wall, Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill, as well as the hundreds of lives of, ah, lesser value. By direct appointment of Her Imperial Majesty.” Kitchens let it rest a beat, then added, “Sir.”

  Ottweill visibly swallowed, then stared back up at al-Wazir. “I see,” he said. “Your job is the beating of your fellow apes. By brains I shall survive, as I always have. Survive you will by being a bigger savage than the monkeys and the Schwarzers. Very well. You may sit down now.”

  To his own surprise, al-Wazir sat.

  Afterward, they took carriages down to the steam borer. Ottweill asked al-Wazir to ride with him in the lead on a little self-propelled vehicle much like a sulky save that it sat two. It was the first time other than visits to the head that al-Wazir been away from Kitchens since leaving Admiralty.

  The sulky clattered through the town at the bottom of the quarry. Al-Wazir took the moment to examine his surroundings. The town itself was unremarkable—cheap buildings hastily erected to last a few seasons. In a handful of years, this place would have degraded to a dreadful slum.

  He turned his attention to the excavation ahead. In a sense, the quarry was vaguely like the Wall, in that stone towered toward the sky. It was such a short towering, though. If he’d never seen the Wall, he might have thought the sides of the quarry high, especially at the deep end where the steam borer was deployed. And of course these walls were fractured, split away by blasting and steam shovels and pickaxes to be hauled to London for foundation and building stone.