by Jay Lake
“They came to an end because an angel found a boy named Hethor in New England, and set him to repairing the mainspring of the world.”
He chuckled. “I think that explanation would be difficult to tender in the gardens of Soochow.”
The next day Leung warned Childress that Five Lucky Winds was going beneath the ice. “We may have difficulty with our air. All persons not about urgent business are enjoined to remain in their bunk, breathing quietly.”
“What will happen to your boilers?” she asked.
“Their fires are already banked. We run on electricks until we can find a hole to surface. There we will refresh our breathing air and restart the boilers to charge the batteries.”
“And so like seals we breathe out the air we have, hoping for a hole in the ice?”
“You have divined the very essence of the Iron Bamboo.”
She could swear the captain’s voice had a wry tone, though somehow that seemed un-Chinese. “It would appear to be a time for prayer.”
“If that is your path. I must warn you that there may be considerable noise, some of it quite odd. The cold and the currents stress the ship unusually.”
“I will remain as calm as is given to me to be,” Childress said. “And pray for us to find air and light among the ice.”
Leung nodded. “You may wish additional blankets.”
“Not if they must come from those used by the men.”
“Very well.” He took his leave of her.
Over the next few days the ship ran deeper, while the noise of the propellers grumbled ever slower. She might have expected them to make quicker time beneath the ice, the faster to reach the other side of the Arctic, but perhaps it was too dangerous to move quickly in these waters. Five Lucky Winds ran more quietly, too, the electricks not transmitting the same vibrations through the hull that the boilers did.
So they ran silent and they ran deep. The water on the walls grew colder and her breath began to fog. Childress reduced herself to one meal a day. Those were simpler as well, cold rice that grew increasingly tough with each passing day, and stringy pickled meats. The soup vanished and the tea had become tepid.
She did not see the political officer anywhere.
The rest of the time she lay in her bunk. She prayed, though God’s deliverance seemed more remote than ever beneath the frozen seawater. It seemed more likely that the divine lurked in sunlight and color and the touch of the breeze, not in chilled metal and deep booming noises that might have come from the mouths of continents.
The transit continued cold, damp, and difficult. Childress breathed shallow and close to the thin pillow to husband the warmth of her breath. She had a chart given to her by a grinning sailor. It showed the coasts of the Arctic Ocean, which she could recognize, though all the notations were in Chinese, which meant nothing to her.
Still, the shapes of the land were some small comfort as the hull groaned and popped.
After three days under the ice, bells rang throughout the ship. She could feel the hull moving upward. Her breath seemed shorter, though Childress told herself sternly that was her imagination. She turned in the chart in her hand, looking at Greenland and Baffin Island and the gold circle marking the north pole, with its dotted black warning not to stray too close.
There was a knock on her door. Hatch, she corrected herself. “Come in.” Childress was quite surprised to see Leung when he stepped through. He was dressed in a strange quilted suit.
“Would you care to see the ice?” He offered another quilted suit about her size. She realized that it must serve as armor against the polar cold.
Childress rose stiffly. Leung helped her climb into the suit, right over her clothing. This is much like setting out in the winters of my childhood, she thought, strapped into insulating layers in hopes of fending off frostbite. The Chinese tailors seemed to have more skill than her late mother had possessed at keeping the folds and layers of their snowsuits tight. She wondered why they didn’t use them for sleeping while traveling beneath the cold Arctic sea.
Childress followed the captain forward, past the wardroom and into a little round chamber. There were lights beyond, in a room full of dials and gauges and great valve wheels, but he shook his head. “Please, do not look.”
They climbed a narrow ladder she couldn’t recall having come down before. In a small iron room on an upper deck, bright, low light flooded through an open hatch above them.
She climbed out onto a little metal balcony with Captain Leung to behold a world of ice and sky.
And air! So pure, it was like wine from an iced bottle. Childress felt her mind racing as her eyes drank in what lay before her.
It was a frozen sea, but not of swelling waves. More like a landscape—cliffs and crevices and little mountains, all sculpted with the transience of ice. The sun was low on the horizon, in a direction logic told her had to be quite southerly. The pole must lie the other way. She turned and looked across a scape of long shadows and purple darknesses and skyborne brass.
“You cannot see it from here,” Leung said. “If we were a hundred miles closer, and the air stayed clear, yes, but we are still too far south.” He shrugged, and sounded apologetic. “Our course minimizes transit time.”
A whoop interrupted her thirsty view. She turned again to see three crewmen throwing snowballs as they raced across the ice. Captain Leung cleared his throat, but when she glanced at him, he was taking a great interest in the frost on the metal of the submarine’s tower.
“It’s only a moment in the sun,” she told him softly.
“The Beiyang Navy has standards.” He looked thoughtful a moment. “Which I do not meet, in truth. I never passed the Eight Legs examination. My poetry fails miserably in any effort to follow classical forms.”
“Are those essential to being a ship’s captain?”
“Of course.” He seemed surprised. “The British have some very peculiar means by which to ascertain if one is a gentleman. We in the Celestial Empire are somewhat more forthright regarding our prejudices. And we have formal evaluations for them.”
“So the . . . Eight Legs? What does that mean?”
“A classical test of one’s fitness for Confucian thought. Essential for promotion in any service of the Celestial Empire. Due to my deficiencies, I shall never have a flag in the Beiyang Navy.”
“Yet they let you go sailing about the Atlantic, rescuing Masks?” Even as she marveled, the question reopened pain she had been resolutely ignoring.
Or maybe it was just the sunlight that brought her back to the deck of Mute Swan for a moment.
“It is sometimes surprising how practical admirals can be when awarding independent commands,” Leung admitted. “The very same deficiencies of character which will keep me at sea my entire career seem to also suit me to being at sea my entire career.”
There was something in the way he said it that pleased her.
Everyone aboard Mute Swan had been a conspirator at her death, had they not? She couldn’t quite make herself believe that, but it was true that Leung had rescued her.
“Would you care to set foot upon the ice?” He was all courtly purpose now.
“I would be delighted.”
The captain took her hand and helped her down a short ladder onto the glittering white pack. Up close it was blue and gray and white and clear and all the colors of ice and snow. Also considerably less chilly than she might have believed. Though in shadow or wind, Childress was confident that she would have met an early and difficult end.
They only remained off the ship about ten minutes. She touched it with gloved hands, then with bare fingers, before scraping some ice for a ball of her own. Protruding through the ice beside her, Five Lucky Winds loomed like a creature out of time and place.
Some relief valve chuffed within, catching Leung’s attention. “Below now.”
Childress pointed upward. “Up here, can you deny God?”
“I deny nothing. I merely assert that you are ask
ing the wrong question.”
They crossed under the ice in that fashion, surfacing three more times. Childress gratefully took each opportunity she had to walk in the open air. Beneath the ice, she listened to the hull creak and watched the cold condense on the walls. Each time she had to step back within the confines of the submarine, she felt as if she were descending into her own coffin once more.
Still, she had some small time with Leung, which was a relief. Confinement in a prison of language aboard this cramped ship was beginning to wear at her spirit. There was little here to feed her memory or her imagination, which was the worst prison of all.
And then one day she could tell even from within her cabin that Five Lucky Winds was cruising on the surface.
Childress tugged out her map of the Arctic. She had reached the Pacific Ocean, or nearly so. They had to be somewhere in the Bering Strait.
That such a thing could be possible amazed her. That she had lived to see it amazed her even more.
SEVEN
PAOLINA
She dreamt of women falling like flowers from the sky. They spun, skirts twirling wide to trail sprays of color like pollen. Paolina jerked awake as Boaz put her down, realizing they had been falling. Women, men, Brass—people, tumbling past the endless steps to shatter on the rocks below.
As her spinning head began to clear, she saw they were off the horrible stairs.
“Don’t ever do that to—” Boaz waved her to silence. He crouched to stare over a line of rocks. The cold, hard stone of a Muralha rose above her, but her back was against a solid surface. There was no trail.
Quiet but seething, she hauled herself over next to Boaz. Her body was oddly stiff. He’d carried her like a sack of flour, for hours.
They were on a ledge, though it was more the head of a slope of fallen boulders. The people who’d beetled down from Ophir filed into a clearing among glossy-leaved trees to deposit their burdens before wandering off.
“What is it?” she whispered. She was frightened at the realization of how those people had walked all the miles down the Wall in unending quiet.
“They labor under a seal.” Boaz kept his voice low as well. “That was the greatest power the first Brass brought with him to Ophir. He retained some of Solomon’s seals in reserve when the original expedition returned to Asiongaber. The seals are the ultimate power in the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”
“A spell? A compulsion?”
“Yes.”
She thought about that. “Your word, the thing you cannot say, it must be related to the seals.”
“I . . . I . . . do not know.”
“In other words, you can’t say.”
Boaz cocked his head to stare at her. His face was brassy and impassive as ever, but there was something of a pleading note in his look. “We are away from Ophir. My loyalty to Authority is not broken, but it has been severely strained on account of my treatment. You strain it further by the moment.”
“As may be. It seems to me you strained it yourself more by carrying me down.”
“I . . .” He looked thoughtful. “Authority interrupted me. You brought me back to myself for a second time. I seized the moment to carry you free. Even now you are closer to your goal. We are in balance.”
She took that in, still ill at ease. “In that case, where are the English?”
“At the far end of that.” Boaz nodded toward a trampled trail leading eastward through the jungle that clung to the base of the Wall.
Not far ahead, a flatwater shoreline stretched north and away. This would be the last of the Atlantic Ocean, Paolina realized. “Africa.”
“Yes. That is what they call it.”
She was ready to join the throng below. “I want to go to them.”
He shivered. “An impractical conception. An army gathers here under a seal. Each has brought supplies. Others will come with more.”
“You can’t move a whole army down a stepway like that,” she objected.
“In time, one could. Ophir has other ways down as well. There will be larger things to come, do not fear. This is but one moiety of the effort.”
“As far as that goes, do not ever heft me like that again. Not without my permission.”
Now his stare was as blank-eyed as any statue. “You are here, are you not? Where you wish to be?”
“Yes,” she admitted slowly.
“Then accept your good fortune. Had we come stumbling down that walk at our own pace, we would have been espied and dealt with most straitly. Now that we are off the Wall, we can strike east after sunset.”
“Avoiding that sealed army . . .” She peered over the rocks once more.
“They will walk, Brass and flesh, until their feet wear off.”
“Who can release them from the seal?”
“One who knows that seal’s word.”
Paolina thought about that a little bit. “Do you know the words for any of the seals, Boaz?”
“A few,” he admitted. “But it is bad enough that I have turned my back on Ophir. I will not betray our armies.”
She looked down at the people milling among the trees. “That is no army. They are slaves to the Solomnic seals. This is not the magic of your ancestors, Boaz. This is using citizens of your city like animals.”
He was quiet awhile. Then: “You do not know what it means to be Brass. You do not know what has been endured since the oldest Brass came to this place. Do not judge what you do not comprehend.”
“I will judge this.” Her anger rose. “Every one of those people down there, flesh and metal alike, has a spirit. A soul. That is the seal of God’s magic, to make us who we are. Your city has stripped them of the dignity of being themselves and remade them as insects. That is not something King Solomon would have wanted, and it is not holy in the eyes of God. Nor is it right in the eyes of man.”
“When did you become so concerned with the fate of others? You walked halfway across the Atlantic Wall to get here. How many in their need did you pass up?”
“How many did I enslave?” Paolina turned her back. Lacking another purpose in that moment, she tugged the gleam out. She pretended to ignore Boaz, instead concentrating on the stem and the four strange hands.
What would it take, she wondered, to set the fourth to match his seal? That was the secret of his word, after all, the name inside the seal. Otherwise he would be just a clever statue filled with gears and springs and joints.
Just as she was nothing more than clever meat, without her mind and spirit at home in her body.
Paolina tugged the stem out to that position. She twirled the setting, trying to visualize what Karindira had turned away from.
Everything in Creation moved in its own time. This was self-evident, given the fundamental order of the world. Solomon’s seals were no more than a way of harnessing the energy of that timing and movement—much like settling ropes and weights together to take advantage of the pull of the earth. Of course, it took a very special eye to see what the biblical king had seen, to make the seals.
Though Paolina had to admit it was just as likely, or unlikely, that the seals had fallen from his lips as spoken words. How would I know?
“I do not know the Adamic tongue,” she whispered, “nor what wisdom Solomon had in days of yore. But I know the timing of the world.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Boaz. He still crouched, staring down at the sealed army below them. Paolina knew the stairs had to be just to their left and up the Wall. Here, there was quiet.
First he’d carried her; then he berated her. Something in this metal man drew her, but he was a man before he was metal.
Paolina drew on her anger to reach into the same dark place within that had helped her create the stemwinder. The gleam, they called it on a Muralha. That same strange darkness had kept her always apart and alone at Praia Nova.
The timing of her own heart the easiest. That was simple; it echoed in her temples and fingertips. The hour of the day was not difficult either. The ti
me that beat at the core of all things was harder. She’d first set it back in Praia Nova, when she’d been more certain. It could not be so different now.
She twirled the fourth setting on the gleam, staring now at Boaz. He shifted slightly as he peered down at the sealed army. Since meeting on the trail west of the Armory of Western Repose, she’d come to know him, a step and hour at a time, in a way she hadn’t really known anyone before. Boaz had been open to her. He’d told her as much. As he had said, she lay beyond Authority.
The fourth hand clicked into motion. It began to sweep in a fast stutter, even as Boaz fell as still as the rocks.
She’d drawn the vital essence out of him, drawn it into the gleam. She’d put him under her own seal.
Paolina became frightened.
She waited until dark to do more, her anger melting into her fear. Had she stopped Boaz permanently? What was to become of him? What was to become of her?
Whatever the case was, Brass as well as people of all colors and sizes continued to appear from the steps and move into the darkness of evening. She crouched beside his inert mass to watch. Their burdens had begun to assume sensible form as the sealed army regathered from its wanderings and sorted what had been dumped in great mounts. Pavilions appeared, shelter from the elements. Tools were put to use felling trees as the light faded. Fires began, and the sealed army slowly seemed to awaken to something like normalcy.
Perhaps they do not eat or care properly for themselves under the seal, she thought. Like chickens, the army must be let out to scratch a living and wander a bit before being penned again.
Except the metaphor was backwards. These were hunters of the English. Paolina was confident those mighty wizards could hold back the sealed armies of Ophir, but surely such ancient magic would give even them a challenge. Perhaps Bassett was already sailing to meet the attack, carrying the battle to England’s enemies.
When the shadows finally merged to a velvety grayness, and only the stars and the brass shone in the sky, she turned once more to Boaz. Paolina held the gleam in her palm, cradled before her. She set the stem to the fourth position again, and stopped the hand that counted Boaz’ time.