Escapement

by Jay Lake

  She stopped in front of him. He was a marvelous work of engineering. Not only was his form nearly perfected, but the joins and solders and borders of his construction had been exquisitely performed.

  “You are beautiful,” she said in English, tapping his breastplate. “A shame to have made you of metal.”

  Lately, she’d been more interested in the occasional ordinary human men she met on the trail. The boys who had seemed so dreadful back in Praia Nova were becoming more tantalizing in ways she did not want to analyze too closely.

  The banded eyelids slid open. An oiled brass orb with a tiny crystal opening flexed and turned.

  “As are you, fair lady.”

  The voice was pleasant but hollow, as if there were nothing within the armor save dark shadows and empty air. No breathy bellows of lungs, or the clattering echo of clockwork.

  “With the manners of a courtier.” Paolina was proud of that phrase. It had been in the Spanish letters. She’d never had cause to use it before, in any language.

  “Here is where the border lies,” he told her. “None may pass beyond without they have a seal.”

  She looked around. The path ran through a field of low tumbled rocks between which grass sprouted in profusion. There was nothing to mark any one foot of land from another. “Border of what, sir man?”

  “The western marches of the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”

  Paolina had never heard of that. “I seek England,” she told him. “I would pass your kingdom in peaceful quiet, looking onward.”

  He made a hollow ringing noise that might have been laughter. “England is a flatwater pretender to the honest estate of nationhood. You shall not find that demesne of mice and shopmen anywhere within or upon the bounds of the Solomnic Kingdom.”

  “As may be. If I pass you, what action will you take?”

  “I shall perforce detain you until Authority arrives to effect your release.”

  Paolina considered that. This was a creature of logic, in a self-evident way. She wondered if that logic could be trumped from outside.

  “When did Authority last come here?”

  There was a long pause. “That is a time most uncertain. Certes, it has been years . . . a century or more.”

  “So you would seize me and hold me until I starve and crumble to dust, while you shut down once more until someone else comes along?”

  Another long pause. “That would seem to be the intent of my direction.”

  “I have a much better plan,” she said brightly. “Convey me to Authority yourself. You will be shut of this dreadful lonely place, and I will be farther along my way to England.”

  “Authority has instructed me to stand fast.”

  “To what purpose, if Authority does not return to renew your instructions?” She let her voice grow sly. “Besides, if you take me to them, you can show them your valor and perspicacity in retrieving from the wild a gleam.”

  “Authority has tendered most specific instructions concerning the matter of gleams.”

  “Which are?”

  Now he sounded very uncertain indeed. “I am to kill any gleams upon first encounter.”

  AL - WAZIR

  The steam borer was even more complex than al-Wazir might have imagined. There was an arrangement beneath the body of the machine to lay the rails on which it rode, advancing them with the cutting face. The standard-gauge rails were also laid in that same process.

  A small scar-faced man in a greasy cap, one shoulder higher than the other, explained. He’d mumbled his name so fast, al-Wazir hadn’t caught it.

  “ ’Tis what we calls a soft ride then, sir. She wouldn’t stand on ’em for long ere they slipped or gave. No way to set them spikes while the cutter’s running. So if the rock’s easy, she moves forward fast enough. If the rock’s hard, she cuts some, then backs up a wee bit so we can slip for’d and secure the rails by hand.”

  Not quite the smooth progress Ottweill had outlined in his lecture, but it made sense. “How do you get forward? She fills the tunnel, don’t she?”

  The scar-faced man grinned, his lips little more than another slash across his face. “Cutter opens up a hole a bit wider’n the body. You sidles along them decks you see down each side, slips around the cab, steps through the blades, and you’re in.”

  “Not much room.” He shuddered. “A man would have to be able to abide dark, tight spots with joy in his heart, I’d think.”

  “Them’s as loves the ground loves the ground, over and under. Most of us is miners, sir, out of the Welsh country. The rest is railroad men.” He paused, then added darkly, “The first railroads was in the mines, sir. I reckon the last ones will be, too.”

  “Thank you.” Al-Wazir stepped along the side of the steam borer, glad to leave the man’s company. He’d take an honest sailor, drunk and stupid, over a tunnel rat any day of his life.

  He touched the plated side of the steam borer, just below the walkway supports. It was hot, which surprised him a bit. Much like the gasbag of an airship, the thing got bigger the closer one came to it, until it passed a point of reasonableness and became something like landscape. This was a beast, a land leviathan worthy of some biblical army marching to lay waste to a patriarch’s city. Al-Wazir could imagine the Jew-soldiers storming Jericho with one of these machines under their command.

  The iron sides seemed to shrug off the concerns of sunlight and open air and the world of men.

  “Into the cab would you care to step?” Ottweill asked from just behind al-Wazir’s left ear.

  The chief jumped. He would have sworn that no one had gotten such a drop on him, man nor boy, since he was old enough to cock a fist. “What, ye wee—” He caught himself and his temper. “No, I don’t believe I’d be fittin’ in there.” A deep, shuddering breath, then.

  “That you are afraid, I am sorry.” Ottweill shrugged.

  Al-Wazir got his voice under control. “I am nae—not afraid. Do not trip me with your words, Doctor. I’ve been tried by worse than you. In any event, ’tis no matter to me. I don’t ever plan to pilot one of them things, and the hatch is a tad small for me.”

  “Ten thousand, four hundred horse power, Chief.” Ottweill’s voice fell. “The largest vehicle ever built to move on land she is, and would put most ships to shame. Do you not long to put your hand on the tiller of such a mighty beast?”

  Odd, thought al-Wazir, that word had come so easily to both of them. “A fair monster she is, sir, and I admire the work what made her be. I believe in her. But what goes under the Wall is your province, not mine.” He tapped his temple. “These eyes will be turned elsewhere while you dig.”

  “Still, my cutters you will now see.” Ottweill clutched his hands in excitement. “They are the greatest expression of my own design skills. There were helpers. Railroad men and fabricators, even marine architects, they were all needed to bring the steam borer to life. The cutting process is mine. Only mine.”

  Al-Wazir fell in beside Ottweill as they walked to the front of the machine. He noted how the men turned away from the doctor, finding quick business or falling into random, serious talk. “Are you a miner by trade, sir? What are you a doctor professor of?”

  “You offend.” Ottweill muttered something in German. As they reached the rock shield near the front of the steam borer, he added, “Soil myself with such work would I never. Beneath the dignity of a gentleman this is. Besides, something might happen to my hands. No, good men with good brains must use them. This is as God intended for the order of the world.”

  Al-Wazir had his own opinion about hard work and clean hands, but he said nothing. Instead he studied the rock shield. There was a little door in the flange, bolted in four places, where the railmen could pass forward to set the spikes as needed.

  They stepped around it, close to the cutters.

  Nothing served to change his initial impression. There were three main arms, traversing an entwined spiral. The effect was a massive skeletal shape much like the tip of a man’s
penis. Each was set with alternating large and small teeth, cutting elements in shallow cone shapes that gleamed. The arms were cross-braced and attached to a central rotating shaft that also had a cutting edge at its forefront.

  A cock, surely, to tear into the stone of the Wall.

  “At six revolutions per minute she rotates,” Ottweill said softly. He reached up and touched one of the large teeth. “For the harder rock at the slower speed she runs. Like coring a hole in a board this is not, you know, for all that those fools in the Privy Council can be made to understand anything else. As if a manservant with a hand drill I were.”

  “Indeed,” murmured al-Wazir. Clearly the doctor was his own audience at this point.

  “Without driving the borer forward we can still cut,” he added. “Forty-four inches of depth standing in place, if the surface is truly difficult and all the power on this shaft we must keep.”

  Al-Wazir studied the distances between the cutting members and the cross-braces. “Men go in there to spike the rails?”

  “Small men,” Ottweill said after a moment.

  “Everything here is designed for small men.” Al-Wazir could not conceal the laughter that rumbled forth. “As if you have a fear of big apes like me.”

  “Cutting tunnels we are. This is a tight business.”

  “Tight? Tunnels big enough for railroad trains? Mayhaps. I would not know a coal seam from an inseam, but still . . . sometimes the world has call for a big man.”

  “And sometimes big men there are.” Ottweill’s voice was tight. “These men who work the steam borer, a tough gang they are, are they not?”

  Al-Wazir stepped away from the cutting members and looked back past the shield. The various crews were standing in little knots, some talking to the other visitors, the others smoking and fiddling away the time until they could get to either serious work or serious loafing.

  No different from sailors, really. Pack of puppies. And though they ran small, to fit so many small-man jobs, he didn’t doubt for a minute these were men with blades for teeth and boilers for hearts. You didn’t work a black job like mining or railroading without being tough. Al-Wazir loved the Royal Navy and Her Imperial Majesty’s sailors, air and sea alike, more than he’d ever loved a woman, but he knew it took a special kind of dark soul to do work like this.

  “A durable and hardy crew, yes,” he said.

  “So, any one of them in a standup fight could you take?”

  Al-Wazir smiled. “I’m a division chief.” His smile faded. “Well, I was, aboard Bassett. Ropes I had, and we kept a tight deck. Fifteen years in the air, from the earliest days, twenty on the waves before that. Every time you lift air or raise anchor, there’s a new chum or three aboard. More if you’ve been in home port.

  “Some of them have come off another command, some off the merchant service, some dragged out of a dockside crib with whore’s drippings still sticky on their thighs. It don’t matter. One of them will always want to show he’s smarter, stronger, faster, meaner. I wouldn’t be a chief, not a good one, if I couldn’t take every man who ever came after me.” His smile was back now, to fond memories of bare-knuckled fights and midnight tussles. “Didn’t always beat them down, because there’s other ways to take a man that the captain don’t need to have any notice of. But they always knew I could, by the time I was done with them.”

  “How they account each other let me tell you.” Ottweill pointed at a boy. He carried man’s height with the thin build and forward-curved shoulders of someone raised on a backcountry farm with too many harvests. “Alrod that is. Her Imperial Majesty’s service he joined to escape an oat field in Jutland, I am believing. With the oil crew he now works. He is said to be the toughest man in the gang.”

  “I could break him.” Al-Wazir flexed his fists. “But I wouldn’t. Boy who grows up like that probably got beat with a board. He’ll not hear anything even if a hand is laid on him, just bend into the blow, then find a way later. Him, you throw over a different way if he makes trouble.”

  “He’s not laid a fist on anyone else, man or boy.”

  Ah, thought al-Wazir, there was a purpose to the doctor’s rambling. “What then, what is their test? I’ve seen jumping and dunking and branding, all manner of rough sport, but you’ve nothing here but stone and iron.”

  “Inside the cutters he climbed and rode them for almost ten minutes. When out they pulled him, Alrod desired to ride them into a rock face. No man has ever asked that.”

  Al-Wazir turned and stared at the front of the steam borer. Despite himself, he was impressed. “Six revolutions per minute? If you clung to the central shaft and had a stomach for it, I could see the thing being done, but that’s a lot more kidney than most would have. To want to ride it into a cutting face . . . there’s another matter entire. Not enough kidney inside a right whale for any sane man to do that. Alrod’s a boy who will get people hurt.”

  “He’s the boy they most respect.”

  “They’ll have to find my respect another way.”

  Ottweill shook his head, then turned and began walking back along the length of the steam borer. Al-Wazir followed him for a moment before reaching out to touch the doctor’s elbow. “Have you ridden the cutters?”

  “Of course.” Ottweill seemed surprised that al-Wazir even bothered with the question.

  Kitchens bade him farewell that evening. “I’m for London again. I believe the Member from Caernarfon Boroughs would prefer you remain attached to the doctor from here on.”

  “I can see why,” said al-Wazir. They walked in the weedy field that ran along the top of the quarry near the lift cage. A trap with a driver awaited Kitchens’ pleasure, but the goodman was obviously in no hurry to put away his pipe and newspaper in order to take up the reins.

  Somehow al-Wazir didn’t think it would matter if the driver were impatient.

  “Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill’s peculiarities of character are not unknown to Her Imperial Majesty’s government. However, the combination of his engineering qualifications and his singular sense of purpose more than offsets the risk that might represent.”

  “Sir . . .” Al-Wazir stopped. “I don’t rightly know whether to speak as a chief petty officer, or a civilian.”

  “And what would each of those men say?” Kitchens’ voice had grown even softer than usual, slipping into a dangerous place.

  The quiet man was not someone al-Wazir would care to have to take in a fight. He’d be afraid of razors in the sleeve, or acid thrown in his eyes. “The chief petty officer would say, ‘Sir, yes sir,’ and follow his orders to the best of his ability.”

  “I’ve never heard of a chief yet who didn’t know better.”

  “Of course not. A chief’s job is to divine the intent of the order, and make sure the captain gets what he really needs. Which often ain’t what he says he wants.”

  “Of course. And the civilian . . .”

  “Oh, he’s just wondering who will pay the price when the end comes. Because I’ve seen officers like him, and sailed under a few.”

  “Your faith in Her Imperial Majesty’s government is duly noted.” Kitchens stopped and briefly doffed his bowler. “I am afraid I must be going.”

  “Me, too.”

  Kitchens turned to walk through the weeds to the trap, which was now little more than a blocky shadow in the descending darkness, except for the coal of the driver’s pipe.

  Al-Wazir called after him. “The Wall awaits, amid African swamp and fevered dream. I’ll go naewhere else, not now, even with that madman driving the train.”

  “That is the sum of what has been asked of you.”

  “I’ll make sure the captain gets what he needs.”

  Stepping into the little carriage, Kitchens surprised al-Wazir by offering to shake his hand. “Be well, Chief,” the quiet man said. “It would be a shame for England if you did not return.”

  CHILDRESS

  When the smoke settled and the screaming was done, Childress was surprised t
o find herself yet alive. Anneke could be no more dead, of course. Mute Swan listed to the port so steeply that the debris on the deck had rolled to the scuppers on that side. The ship would doubtless be sinking soon. Three Chinese sailors armed with rifles stood watch over her. The others finished their slaughter of Captain Eckhuysen’s company.

  She looked out across the water. The Chinese vessel’s deck gun was already decommissioned and taken below. Armed sailors kept watch there, too.

  The attacking crew moved quickly, as if they expected a threat at any moment. Eckhuysen had sent up rockets, but short of another submarine, there was no ship to be seen between her and the horizon. If any of Her Imperial Majesty’s airships were about, they kept their own counsel behind the gray watercolor sky.

  Childress sat waiting for the blade or bullet that would claim her life. This wasn’t the sacrifice the Mask Poinsard had intended for her, nor their masters. She drew some small, grim satisfaction at the disruption, but that could make no offset to the death of the laughing Scandinavian, Captain Eckhuysen, nor the rest of Mute Swan’s avebianco crew.

  More sailors clambered over the rail, carrying red canisters and lengths of pale gray rope. A squat man bearing nothing but his dignity followed. He turned to approach Childress.

  Like his crew, he was Chinese. He was also unmistakably their captain. Her guards straightened to attention as soon as he appeared, acquiring noble, stoic expressions. More than that, he carried command in his stride, the set of his shoulders, the inquiry on his face.

  Sailors, she’d learned aboard Mute Swan, didn’t ask questions. Officers sometimes did.

  The Chinese captain approached her, dropping to his heels so their eyes met. He had inquiries to make, she could see that even in the unfamiliar flattened features, but he held them as he studied her.