Escapement

by Jay Lake

  “Anneke’s dead.” Childress pointed uselessly at the body beside her.

  “My thousand pardons.” His English was perfectly good. “If I had been informed you valued her, she would have been spared.”

  Not from a splinter, Childress thought. Such a strange way to die. Further down inside her head, another voice cried and raged and screamed, but a quiet, sickening peace seemed to have taken hold of her mouth.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Calm somehow continued to prevail. “Of course I am,” she lied.

  “Good. We must go soon.” The Chinese captain rocked slightly on his heels. “Do you require anything irretrievable to be taken off this ship?”

  “Irretrievable? Surely you mean irreplaceable.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Ah. Yes, la. Irreplacable.”

  “No . . .” Childress still wondered what this killer Chinese wanted with her. “Nothing not already broken beyond retrieval.”

  “Replacement, not retrieval.”

  “Yes.”

  He rose and offered her his hand. She took it and stood. He walked her down to a point on the rail where they’d slung a rope. There was a drop to the heaving, foaming sea, where a small boat bobbed, tended by two sailors even now staring upward with round blank-eyed expressions on their golden faces.

  “If the Mask would care to go first,” the captain said softly.

  “The Mask—,” she began, then stopped with a flash of clear, bitter insight.

  It was too much. Laughter bubbled up within. She had not been spared for a purpose at all. Her life in this moment was nothing but error. And when they found Poinsard, the Chinese would put a bullet through her head just as they had with each of Eckhuysen’s crew.

  Rain and tears and pain and fear mixed together, so that the laughter emerged as a violent upheaval of her gut, disguising all her thoughts and feelings in a sudden vile spew that soaked the captain.

  He said something calmly in Chinese, then helped her over the rail and down the rain-slick rope ladder.

  The boat below tossed and heaved as the sailors pulled at their oars. The swells rose steadily as the weather worsened. Despite herself, Childress found that she was once more seeing the details around her.

  The world had not yet ended. Not for her.

  She looked at the captain opposite her in the stern of the little craft. He calmly picked her spew off of his uniform. He was clad in silk in a deeper blue than the roughspun cotton of the ordinary sailors, with tiny fabric closures where she might have expected brass buttons on an English officer’s coat. Though it was hard to tell with the mess upon his chest, the silk appeared to be damasked with some complex shape or image. His hat was strange, too, a little round pillbox of a stiffened version of the same silk as his jacket. A small paper scroll, now waterlogged, was tied to the front with red silk thread. Even his shoes seemed to be silk, more like blue gloves for his feet than anything she might ever have expected a man to wear.

  A man rough and vile enough to kill an entire ship’s company, yet gentle enough to stay both his hand and his words when she embarrassed him in front of his crew. Childress wondered who he was, and what he did here.

  Beyond murdering subjects of the English crown, of course.

  Her interest vanished with the slap of cold seawater. The ocean was trying to come over the side of the boat now. All she could see was lifting slopes of boiling, chilly gray around her, and a pall of smoke from Mute Swan that even the increasing rain had not fully dispelled.

  Anneke dead. Eckhuysen dead. The smiling Swede and all the others. That she could begin to smile upon this man who had killed them all revolted her. When they found the Mask Poinsard, Childress, too, would go into the ocean, the accidental deception uncovered.

  What if the Mask had died? a dry and logical voice asked. Anneke died by accident. Could Childress, as a Christian and a white bird, hope the woman had met such a fate?

  Her resolve crumbled once more into despair. Childress tried to take shelter in prayer, but the water was growing so violent, she could not form the words. Then she was jerked upward by grasping hands. Short unsmiling men lashed to the deck behind them tugged her toward the tower of the submarine. They would push her into the hatches there and take her below, where the guns were kept and all these men must live as they traveled beneath the sea.

  She was heartsick enough to ignore her curiosity about what kept the vessel beneath the waves but above the sea floor. They hustled her down a narrow ladder through a tiny hole while the captain shouted over the rising storm.

  Within, the passageways were tiny. As the ship rolled, she simply shifted from shouldering one side to shouldering the other. Two sailors clad in the same roughspun blue as their fellows who had assaulted Mute Swan led her through three knee-barking hatches before showing her to a tiny cabin. It was only slightly larger than the lav aboard the other ship had been.

  Her escorts bowed several times, backing out carefully before swinging the hatch shut. It clicked into place with a hollow, sepulchral clang. The locking lever was on her side.

  Not a prison cell, then. Not exactly. Except that this underwater ship was a prison from which she could not escape. Filled with jailors to whom she could not speak, but for the oddly gallant captain.

  To stay alive in this undersea prison she must be prepared to play the part of the Mask Poinsard.

  “I shall live,” she whispered, “and set every inch and noise of this place in my memory, so that someday when I return to honest soil I can tell my story to . . . to . . .”

  She was unsure to whom she wished to return. New Haven as she had known it was lost to her. A woman missing even a day of work could expect to never see that employment again. There was always a deserving man with a family to feed. She had no great circle of friends there to welcome her home. The congregation at St. John Horofabricus would see no difference in her going. She was just another aging woman who’d lost her way without ever finding husband and family.

  As for Queen and country, living in New Haven, Childress found her loyalty as a British subject a natural position, like breathing. She’d rather return than not, but she did not feel a great pull of patriotism as some claimed.

  Which left her with the avebianco, who had lately been set to bind her over to the Silent Order.

  Tears took Childress in a rush that shocked her. What had she lived for? What had she made her life’s purpose? She lay on the narrow bunk and pressed her face into the rough blanket to sob for the first time in decades.

  Later Childress arose as if from a tempestuous dream. The submarine had ceased rolling to and fro. She wondered what that might signify. Her head was full of the angry pressure of the recent tears, but her mind seemed clear.

  That she was alive was a miracle. No sign from God, for Childress did not credit the Creator with reaching finger by finger into His world, but at least a blessing delivered by the machineries of fate.

  She found a tiny metal mirror and looked to see what had become of her face. Even limited by the gleaming disc, the view was not encouraging. The recent battle had left her bruised from blows of which she had no recollection. Several lines of scabs were traced across her forehead. Had one of the splinters that claimed Anneke’s life so very nearly missed stealing hers as well?

  Childress knew she owed these Chinese nothing but her life. Even that debt was a thing they’d made, a trap for her conscience. But without the cloak of her dignity, she could not face them. They would never believe her the Mask Poinsard unless she had the poise and strength of the Mask. He would never believe.

  This was not about any captain, Childress told herself sternly.

  She set to cleaning as best she could, though that was sadly limited. There were jars on a shelf below the mirror that on examination contained liniments and powders. Not the paint pots of an actress, nor the urns of an apothecary, but something that seemed to somehow split the difference.

  So she experimented until she found
the right compound of cool smoothness and analgesic tingle. It was a pale green stuff that left a strange tint to her skin, but the balm eased the pain of the cuts and bruises and smoothed the wounded strangeness of her face.

  After judicious application of the salve, Childress explored the rest of the tiny cabin. It must be the captain’s, she realized. There were two silk jackets clipped behind the door that matched what he had worn out on the ocean. She fingered them. Fine stuff, as good as or better than any bolt she’d seen for sale in New Haven. Not that she’d ever been able to afford such a vainglorious cloth.

  The silk was damasked with a pattern of cranes flying under moonlight, recurring roundels with that image repeated across the man so that when he wore it, he would walk in beauty. A subtle, tiny grace amid the humming metal death of this submarine vessel, but one that spoke volumes for what must be behind those black eyes.

  Continuing her inspection, Childress found a pair of leather boots beneath the bunk, perhaps for going ashore. There was a modest chest of pale clothing, which she quickly shoved away. What a man wore beneath his trousers was no affair of hers. Three little calotypes, of an elderly couple who must have been his parents, and a girl poised in that cusp of age between childish joy and the serious business of womanhood.

  She finally found his books, too. They were in a drawer set into the wall. Two drawers, actually. One had charts and manuals, obviously the documents of the vessel’s purpose and voyage. Were she some wily espion or saboteur, trained in the traitor’s arts and a knowledge of Chinese both, she would have known what to read, what to search through, to ferret out these secrets. It was not difficult to envision the interest that Her Imperial Majesty’s admiralty might have in knowing the accuracy of the Chinese charts of the Atlantic.

  The other drawer held his personal books. They didn’t look much like what lay in her rooms back in New Haven, nor the ones in her library, but she still knew books when they were arrayed before her. Most were bound between thin square boards with silk ties to keep them tight between their covers. Those generally had rice paper over the boards, with some ideogram or other written in a swirling hand. A few others were accordions, folded and pressed tight and kept in place with ribbons. If she were to tug at them, they would pop open and become endlessly long.

  Here, where space was at such a horrid premium, even the captain merited a room unthinkably small, he had filled a drawer with books.

  Poinsard would have burned them for spite.

  A bell clanged distantly, echoing through iron walls. She heard feet pounding. Some new danger was afoot. The thrum of the deck, so pervasive and consistent, she had not truly noticed it before, changed. It deepened, making her feet quiver more.

  Childress closed the drawers and stepped to the hatch. She still looked a wreck, far too shameful to have shown her face on the streets of home.

  This was not New Haven.

  The Mask Poinsard had survived the attack on Mute Swan. Emily McHenry Childress had died that day on the Atlantic Ocean. Things could be no different, not until she returned to her liberty among people who spoke her language and lived under the same flag she did.

  FIVE

  PAOLINA

  “If you were going to kill me,” Paolina said with far more certitude than she felt, “you would have done so already. You have already encountered me. It is too late to kill.”

  The brass man’s eyes flickered. “Authority has not vouchsafed me complete information.”

  “Authority has forsaken you,” she snapped. “Obviously men, the lot of them. You have been left here to rot, except when you wake to kill. Surely whoever built you had intended a higher purpose.”

  Keep him busy, she thought. Confuse him. Do not let him awake to his strength or the brutality of his orders.

  “Authority . . .” His voice trailed off. He popped his neck several times. “Will you say a word unto me?”

  “Of course.” She was relieved to at least have passed beyond the talk of killing. “What word?”

  He worked his head back and forth. “I do not hold this word. It is a word I cannot know.”

  “A word you cannot know . . .” She considered that. “In the numbers that count the beat of the world, there are some things that cannot be counted. I know this is true, but I do not yet know why. Is your word of that nature?”

  “Yes.” There was relief in his hollow voice.

  “So if I say the word to you, what will happen?”

  “I am uncertain. I should be released from my bonds. You are correct. I was not . . . made . . . to stand here through the years as the simple papagallo of Authority. My ilk are created beneath the seal in the image of men.”

  “Like man, made in the image of God,” Paolina said.

  “Indeed.” He cocked his head, staring at her almost sidelong. “There also exists a word to unlock your soul.”

  “Of course,” she told him, though that hadn’t been obvious until he’d stated it. “We are all measured by the beat of world. Therefore we can all be rendered into numbers. Within any system of numbers there are always some things which cannot be counted.”

  “Words which cannot be spoken.”

  “How would I know your word?” She looked at his face, so handsome and strange and frozen in a moment of casting. “I could speak English and Portuguese and Spanish to you all the day long, but I do not think your word is as simple as ‘adumbrate’ or ‘codicil’ or ‘polycrastic.’ I could talk my voice to dust and not find it.” Paolina stretched her finger to the brass man’s lip. “You must show me your word, through sign or deed or logic, then I will say it to you.”

  “But the word is not known to me,” he protested.

  She laughed. He was such a boy. “Then take me to Authority and we will see what we learn upon the way.”

  The brass man swiveled almost in place, his feet clattering slightly. “Authority lies to the east.”

  “By happy chance, I am walking east.”

  “I shall be forced to slay you in time.”

  “Of course,” she said brightly.

  He strode forward, marching at a pace that was almost a trot for her.

  Paolina didn’t mind. She’d walk as she pleased. Either he’d pursue his purpose and draw ahead of her soon enough, or he’d stop and wait. She would not run at his heels like a dog after a boy.

  As evening descended and she looked for a suitable place to bed down off the path, she found the brass man standing next to a jumble of rocks.

  “I have cozened the great cats from their den and prepared us a place to abide the night.” He pointed the way.

  “All this,” she asked, “and not even the word from me yet? You are infused with purpose.”

  “I am infused with Authority.” His voice was heavy with dignity. “But Authority is not all things.”

  “Oh, really?” She stepped into the cleft in the rocks. It stank of scaled cat, to be sure, but he seemed to have torn down several trees to build a nest in there. “What lies beyond Authority?”

  His response was chillingly simple. “You do.”

  “I cannot think so,” she murmured, crawling into the leaves.

  It wasn’t much more than she would have done for herself, save for his comforting bulk between her and whatever might prowl the darkness. Since leaving Karindira’s city, Paolina had been less than careful about her risks on the slopes of a Muralha. Sleeping in a cat’s den guarded by the brass man reminded her once more of what could easily have been her fate.

  As the evening went by, she veered between waking and dreamful sleep. The brass man stood still as he had on the path when she first met him, only a shape now where he had been almost real in daylight. She could hear a faint ticking and clicking from within that magnificently armored body.

  Pulling the gleam from its case, Paolina hoped for enough starlight to see the hands by. Where the timing that beat at the heart of life was very subtle, wrapped within layers of skin and bone and moving meat, the timing of this
metal man was not much different from the stemwinder itself.

  Paolina found herself unwilling to experiment. Not without his assent, and even enthusiasm. There was something strangely charming about the brass man. He was more than deadly, to be sure, but he was a person.

  She would not be like a man and see others as less than people. If there was one gift to being a woman—well, girl, yet—it was to see others from the bottom looking up, rather than from some high and lordly place.

  Still, she studied his shape awhile, wondering what the word was that lay at the heart of him. Also what word it might be that lay at her own heart.

  The next morning he walked beside her. This section of a Muralha was craggy, tall broken columns of rock hosting isolated, crumbling ledges destined for the sea far below. Someone, presumably the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir, had built a roadway. In places the inconstant columns had been carved inward to allow the trail to pass. In other places bridges or berms had been built to aid the traveler in crossing the gaps and ravines that punctuated the cliff faces.

  The Wall was beautiful in this weather. A floor of clouds swept not far below them, clinging to the ocean’s surface to making a sea of variegated white textured with light and shadow. Though the day was sunny, water clung to the cliff face along which she walked, so that Paolina could trail her fingers on the nubbly, mossy texture and lift them away wet with chilly dew that tasted like a midnight storm.

  Posts marked the little bridges. Each of those had the device of a six-petaled flower incised upon its top face. She knew that blossom as Solomon’s seal.

  “Tell me of the kingdom,” she finally asked the brass man, who was just then a few paces ahead of her on the narrow track.

  “The Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir was established by King Solomon in the light of the days of the First Temple.” The brass man’s voice seemed to slow, fall into a rhythm. Paolina realized he wasn’t explaining, he was reciting. “The mighty king had espied brass in the sky, coruscating from atop the Wall. He did not know the world for what it was, and so he bethought he glimpsed the rivers of gold which had been promised him by the Lord God. At his command a great fleet set forth from the high port at Asiongaber in the lands of the Holy Hour, bound southward where they held that gold must flow because the light of the sun was so much brighter.