Escapement

by Jay Lake

  The floor of the quarry rose behind him, so that the end that pointed just south of east formed a ramp. This was how the quarrymen had originally dug it down, keeping always an exit behind them. The steam borer had to have come in that way, too, though the great rails did not now extend to the top.

  He wondered how they’d gotten it here from the locomotive works. That would have been something to see.

  Ottweill slapped the reins and turned to him. “So, you are being Her Imperial’s man to watch me. When you would arrive was I wondering.”

  “Not me,” said al-Wazir. “I’m the Wall Johnnie, not the spy.”

  “Tch.” Ottweill shook his head. “With one of those little eels who belong to Lloyd George you come. A political you are, big man.”

  “As you like it. No one’s asked me for reports, and I won’t be a rat.” Al-Wazir chuckled again. “Seen too many rats in the Navy. They have a way of going overboard in storms.”

  “Not so many direct appointments of the Queen do we get,” muttered Ottweill.

  There is money here, al-Wazir thought. All the treasure it took to build the doctor’s great machines, ship them to Africa, move a thousand men across half of Northern Earth. Money that flowed to and from Ottweill’s word, regardless of who might be playing the purser.

  So many dangers. And here he was, thinking like an officer again. Al-Wazir hated that.

  The sulky followed a road that cut diagonally back and forth across the downward slope of the quarry to reach the flat at the west end where the steam borer had gone back into its tunnel. A small crowd of men there bent to their tasks. With Ottweill coming, he could understand why they might want to appear busy, though he suspected that with the borer working inside, their purpose was mostly to stand and wait.

  They clattered up to a carriage park.

  “On the way back we talk,” Ottweill said sharply. “In my work you believe, we are to do well. At my work you laugh, I am not caring what Her Imperial Majesty has said about you.”

  “Oh, I’m Royal Navy.” Al-Wazir laid on his best talking-to-officers smile once more. “I can believe in anything I’m told to.”

  Despite himself, Ottweill snorted.

  The official tour walked through the navvies clustered about, awaiting the return of the steam borer. It was obvious to al-Wazir that Ottweill intended a grand entrance for the machine. All these people were standing to in order to show the visitors how elaborate and necessary the care of the mighty device would be.

  It was all to prove the need for money, al-Wazir realized.

  “The coal gang these are,” Ottweill said, pointing to a group of a grubby men with dusty black covering their faces and clothing. “Thirty-two tons of coal they can move into the borer’s box in less than twenty minutes.”

  A few more steps to four thin men and two boys, standing next to a tangle of large tins and narrow hoses. “The oilers. To lube the gearing and drive-lines.” Ottweill looked around. “Separate from the cutting face this is, ja? A different crew.”

  And on they went, looking at and occasionally talking to metalwrights, watermen, diggers, jackers, electrickmen, chemists, assayers—an Industrial Revolution’s worth of men, al-Wazir realized. It was not so different from the organization of a ship’s company at that, with divisions and chiefs and idlers and the various specialists.

  Al-Wazir traded glances with Kitchens. He didn’t know anything about tunnels or heavy equipment, but he was quite familiar with crewing a complex task. Ottweill, or one of his deputies at least, knew what he was doing.

  The three of them ended up standing next to the rails that emerged from the tunnel. These were twice the size of ordinary rails. Up close, al-Wazir could see that a second set of smaller rails ran between the wider spread. He turned to look. The standard gauge rails curved away from the abbreviated steam borer’s track to a long shed. A service train, then, to reach the borer, carry supplies and workers.

  Of course. Ottweill couldn’t possibly plan to constantly back the great monster in and out of a tunnel that would run a hundred miles or more through the base of the Wall.

  “Two of these shipped to the Wall?” he asked.

  “Yes,” murmured Kitchens.

  “In case of breakage or other problems.” Ottweill seemed almost to vibrate. “For lack of equipment will we not fail.”

  “Hot there,” al-Wazir observed. “Everything rots fast.”

  “Not once we are inside the Wall.”

  Something within the tunnel shrieked. A whistle, al-Wazir realized, echoing from inside the digging. The ground began to shudder as the steam borer backed out of the tunnel.

  The stern appeared first. It was a wall of black iron, a massive vertical plate emerging so slowly from the tunnel that it seemed to be a moving building—much like standing close to a steel-plated dreadnought just setting out from dock. The butt of the borer was almost vertical, with a large hatch in the center and several smaller hatches. Coal, he figured, and smaller ports for water, lubricant, and possibly a secondary fuel such as bunker oil. Beneath the hatches was a gaping hole where a series of chains or belts could be seen to turn slowly. It was topped by a glass cupola, where an engineer or operator could oversee the monster’s backing up.

  Once the steam borer emerged into the light of the quarry, it seemed smaller, built almost to human scale. In truth, it was still at least twice the size of any locomotive al-Wazir had ever seen. The body was roughly cylindrical, plated with armor to protect it from falling rock. Walkways clung to the side and top. The thing’s great bulk was supported on massive trucks slung beneath, eight-wheeled monsters like those used in shipyards to convey the weight of a fully built hull into the water for the first time.

  The rounded length extended fifty feet before the cab appeared. A collar passed around the diameter of the steam borer, glassed in with heavy framed view ports. There was a small hatch that opened onto the walkway—al-Wazir would have been hard-pressed to fit his body through it. Perhaps they used boys to drive the thing.

  He could see the point of Ottweill’s argument about the welding—space was very constrained, and it would be quite difficult for a boring crew to extract themselves from the machine while it was in the middle of a dig. Which in turn made al-Wazir wonder once more how the tunnel would progress within the Wall.

  Forward of the cab was a flanged bit of heavy armored plate, rising like a scoop to face the direction of travel. It must be to catch debris thrown back from the drilling surfaces. The whistle screamed again, close enough that the chief had to cover his ears, as the working end of the steam borer backed out.

  That was as vile looking a set of blades as al-Wazir had ever laid eyes on in thirty years of sailing Her Imperial Majesty’s air lanes. Three main members spiraled to a point, in a shape like an unopened tulip bud. They were heavily cross-braced, with a great threaded beam at the heart that rotated to propel the members like the blades of a sidewise reaper. Each member was moving slowly enough that al-Wazir could see the bright-edged knobs that lined them, varying from the size of his head to the size of his hands.

  It growled as well, a beast meant to chew through the heart of the world.

  He had been wrong about the size. As the crews swarmed over the steam borer, he realized once more that it was big. A rolling building, a house of cutting designed to rend open the secrets of the Wall.

  Taken as a whole, the steam borer looked wrong to al-Wazir, a violation of nature. Like a device meant for painful torture instead of honest combat. In that moment he badly missed the grace and beauty of Her Imperial Majesty’s airships.

  He looked around. The rest of the inspection party seemed awestruck by the overwhelming power of the machine and the undeniable reality of the tunnel out of which it had backed itself.

  “Hardened steel,” Ottweill shouted as the boilers vented and the steam borer ground to a halt with a shriek of distressed metal. “Every three days in soft rock repaired the cutting head must be, each day in hard rock
. The cutters we change for some rock conditions. Openwork it is so we can extend powder drills and blasting tamps, or men send forward to work a face by hand, without backing out and decommissioning the front end.” His voice dropped as the borer sagged into silence, save for the tapping tools of two men opening the hatch to let the crew out. “A string of specially designed goods wagons to accept waste removal, she can tow. An ordinary locomotive in behind we send to take those cars off and then shunt out for dumping.”

  “You don’t back ’er out of a tunnel as long what as you’re planning to drive into yon Wall,” said one of the marines.

  Ottweill shook his head vigorously. “Every five miles of cutting, with traditional equipment we will follow and open up a larger chamber. Back her up we can for servicing there without retreating the breadth of the Wall. Forward bases that also provides for supplies, equipment, and quarters for the men.”

  Al-Wazir noted the shouting madman had dropped away in the face of the equipment itself. Ottweill was one who needed to be alone with his tools. And the doctor would do anything to protect his mission.

  He turned to Kitchens. “I don’t know nothing about bloody great rock cutters, but I do know something about men. You’ve got a problem with that one. He could kill us all for the sake of another mile of stone.”

  “Consider Ottweill to be one of the hazards of surviving on the Wall.”

  Al-Wazir nodded, then approached the steam borer. It was huge, hot, and stinking. Men were all over it, opening check panels, pumping in water and oil, inspecting the cutting surfaces. Like crabs on a dead whale.

  Save dead whales were not made of black iron and didn’t sport teeth fit to chew through stone.

  CHILDRESS

  She spent the next few days walking the decks, watching America slide by the port rail. Anneke followed at a distance of a few paces. The librarian made no attempt to seek out the Mask Poinsard.

  Of necessity she encountered the crew of Mute Swan about their duties. Them she watched with more care, as she always studied people.

  The Mask Poinsard had taken ship with a polyglot complement; that much was certain. The language of the deck was English, in that the officers made their commands in the Queen’s tongue. There were seamen whose accents and words hailed from the Scandinavian protectorates, from the American colonies, from the Caribbean, from Suez, from farthest India.

  In effect, the crew was a map of the British Empire.

  She’d never taken ship before, and had no standards by which to judge a crew, but living in a port city all her life had led Childress to believe that sailors tended to run together. So while a ship might hail from one port, and her captain and senior officers from another, the crew were all Greek or Arab or Portuguese. Not so here.

  She wondered what that meant. Was everyone aboard a white bird? The name of the ship might imply that. In fact, it was a ridiculous piece of allusion, drawing attention to the nature of the vessel’s mission for anyone with enough understanding to read the clue.

  “Too clever by half,” as she’d said of many students who’d passed her desk over the years.

  Childress finally concluded the sailors were mostly white birds when she realized how carefully they kept a watch over her. Ordinary deckhands wouldn’t have given much thought to her comings and goings so long as she didn’t impede their work. Here, in addition to Anneke trailing her like the ghost of an old affair, there was always a man coiling rope or polishing a rail at the corner of her eye.

  Some smiled, some did not, but they never left her alone. Were they afraid of her, or afraid for her? That probably depended on whether or not they’d yet had the pleasure of meeting the Mask Poinsard. The woman would freeze steam.

  But in the meantime she walked alone. Initially this suited her mood perfectly well. After several days, she tired of the game and began to wish once more for at least minimal company.

  Childress decided to embrace Anneke first.

  She walked along the port rail under a gray sky gravid with rain. The pine-dark forests the past day had given way to open sea on all sides. Mute Swan had bent her course more east than north. The weather promised not so much a storm as a rising of the waters, one of those rains where the air and sea seemed to mix without boundary. She’d loved them on the harborside in New Haven. Here in the North Atlantic, the prospect seemed more grim.

  At least it was no nor’easter to pitch waves taller than the pilot’s cabin of their ship. Those she’d heard talk of in New Haven, the sorts of stories men recounted in low voices that trailed off when they realized a woman was near.

  Grim, to match her mood, and the deckhand trailing her right now was a tall Scandinavian fellow of uncertain English from what she’d overheard thus far. It seemed as good a time as any to turn to her governess.

  Childress reversed step in one motion, swinging on her heel to head back toward Anneke who followed five or six paces behind. The other woman’s green eyes widening a moment.

  “You may be my guard,” Childress said in her most pleasant voice. “But neither of us serves the other.” She extended her arm. “Will you take the air with me?”

  Anneke stepped forward, looped her elbow with Childress’, then they resumed their walk under the grinning gaze of the big Scandinavian boy. Somewhat to Childress’ surprise, Anneke spoke first. “You have upset the Mask Poinsard. She composes messages all day in her cabin and tears them up again, casting the shreds into the sea.”

  “The Mask Poinsard is welcome to her upset. I am the one being bound over into the hands of our enemies, and for small cause at that.” She paused, groping toward the conversation she’d meant to begin. “I beg your pardon, Anneke. It was not my intent to voice complaints to you.”

  “What then?” Anneke’s voice was almost breathless.

  “I am very lonely here.” Childress knew her voice had dropped into a quiet register where she swallowed her words. “I have lived alone since my mother died, but I have been at the library six days and church the seventh every week for years. I believe the Mask Poinsard meant to lecture me, tutor me even, to bring me to her point of view and show me as a triumph on our arrival in Europe. For the sake of my pride I have cut myself off.”

  They walked a few paces in silence, crossing over to the opposite rail at the bow. The view to the east and south was nearly as watery and dark as the port side had been, interrupted only by a few bright shafts where the sun pushed through the clouds.

  “I do not think you did wrong,” Anneke said. “Like you, I am loyal to an idea. The Feathered Masks look at that idea from a different perch. The Mask Poinsard has ambitions to rise to their level some day.” She smiled, her face crooking. “Women can do that in the avebianco, you know. Rise to the top.

  “When I was a girl in Götheborg, I could fence any man in the city to his knees, but it meant nothing. At first they took the matches for the novelty, crossing blades with a pretty chit. But none would fight me twice, and many claimed it was not worth the trouble. Had I been a man, I could have risen to become arms master to the Viceroy of Uppsala. As a woman, I was only an embarrassing curiosity.”

  “And so the avebianco?”

  “The Feathered Masks, yes.”

  Childress shook her head, stepping around a rope coil. They approached the stern and another walk round the rail. The tall Scandinavian still

  following along. “I had always thought us a loose affiliation of librarians and archivists and common people. Not fighting women and scheming daughters of the quality.”

  “For the most part, I suppose you are correct.” Anneke paused at the taffrail to stare at the churning line of their wake. “People of the book, and people of hope and reason, and people of God, serving a common purpose. But we have our heights and edges, too.” She turned to face Childress, her expression set somewhere between fear and need. “You know that I am a Claw? A Claw can never be a Mask. The Feathered Masks will not have blood on their hands.”

  Childress let the obvious
question slide by her. Instead: “It is more clean to order my death with a word than with a fist.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anneke . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I shall not think of you as a Claw, nor speak of you that way.”

  Anneke’s crooked smile returned. “I thank you. And I . . . I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I . . . never mind.” With that, she fled, leaving Childress in the company of the laughing sailor and a pair of narrow-winged white birds that trailed along just behind the vessel.

  The next morning a crewman knocked on her cabin door. “Services in ten minutes, ma’am, on the foredeck.”

  “Thank you,” she called.

  In the days since her confrontation with the Mask Poinsard, various items of clothing had appeared in her cabin. None had been particularly well fitted or to her taste, but she managed a high-necked velvet dress with a modest bustle.

  When Childress slipped out into the passageway, the Mask Poinsard stood waiting.

  Today the woman was clad in a cream-colored suit of much the same cut as the previous outfit Childress had seen her wear. Her blouse was pale blue, as were her high-buttoned shoes and her wide-brimmed hat. In short, the Mask Poinsard was dressed more for a smart day in town than Sunday morning services in a shipboard drizzle.

  “Ma’am.” Childress was cautiously polite.

  “I was unsure if you’d have the decency to come to services.”

  Childress could play that game again. Decades of faculty infighting had left her amply prepared for the barbed remark. “I find your uncertainty to be of no surprise, given your absolute lack of understanding of simple decency.”

  The Mask Poinsard blinked. “I see we have found the wrong foot with one another again.”

  “Allow me to be blunt,” said Childress, “as time is too short for this dance. If you persist in beginning every mutual encounter with an attempt to put me in my place, I will never bend to you. Sparring is a waste of time for both of us. However, if you wish to engage in the gentle art of conversation, I should find the pastime diverting. In the meantime, I believe I hear the bell ringing to call us to prayer.”