by Jay Lake
One of the women glanced at the paper. “Everyone is speaking of that,” she said, not unkindly. “There was a terrible explosion at Strasbourg Cathedral this afternoon. Sabotage by Chinese irregulars, the newspaper is reporting. It caused a great fire in the town.”
“Oh . . .” Paolina felt ill.
“Have you relatives there?” asked the other woman. “Here, let me help you to this bench.”
“My, my . . . cousin,” she stammered. The bishop would be dead, and the priest, and all those men. They’d done something stupidly improvident with the gleam. Lachance was dead too, if he had gone back to the square to watch for the gleam as she’d asked him to.
How much worse could it have been? That thought froze her blood.
The women fussed over Paolina as she sat, introducing themselves as Bonnie and Grace Jones, sisters traveling on a small income from their grandfather’s estate, and how was she, and what else might she need?
When the Marseilles train began boarding, the sisters Jones helped her to the conductor, explaining in hushed tones that Paolina had been stricken with grief for a relative. Eventually the train pulled away through the endless miles of shadowed houses and narrow, grimy yards that seemed to comprise Lyon, but she was no longer so enchanted with cities.
Arriving the next day, she found Marseilles no cause for rejoicing either. The railway station, la Gare St. Charles, let her out into a morning square filled with rushing Frenchmen. She didn’t know the language, the people were indifferent, the city overwhelming. These flatwater lands were ever so much stranger than the Wall.
Paolina set out to find streets that sloped away from her, until she could catch a view of the Mediterranean and make her way to the docks. She tried not to wonder about agents of the British Crown on her trail. There must be, of course, but would they have pursued her here?
At waterfront, she found a quiet place to sit and watch awhile, to understand the profound busyness that seemed to overwhelm everyone around her. They swirled and ran and shouted and carried burdens much as they had outside the train station. There were more languages spoken by the water, with sailors and women of loose virtue mixed among the suited English bureaucrats and the gray-trousered French errand boys.
The maps had suggested Suez to her, and a trip down to the port at Mogadishu, near the Wall. The dockside was complicated and confusing. She could scarcely wander the docks, asking at gangplanks where each ship might be bound. Paolina was most reluctant to commit her name and face to anyone here, lest the British learn where she had gone next—she would need to find a tout to help her book passage.
She finally hailed one of the errand boys. He was a dark-eyed lad with curls the color of old honey. He wore a bloused white shirt that had been drenched in some nose-wrinkling perfume.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle, ce qui serait que désirez-vous aujourd’hui?”
“English, please,” Paolina stammered.
“You gots.” He grinned, showing brown stained teeth. “What you want?”
Paolina handed him a ten-centime coin. “I will pay you a livre to find me three ships bound for Suez and the Indian Ocean.”
“One livre for each ship, yes?”
“One livre for all,” she said. Hold firm, Paolina told herself, or this boy will take you all too easily.
He shrugged, flipped her coin, and slipped away.
She waited perched on a rain barrel for several hours, but the honey-haired boy did not return. Disappointed, Paolina went to buy meat from a seller with a cart, then retreated to her spot once more. Should she try another boy, or begin walking and trust to luck?
It was too hard to say. If she could just be on her way, that would be one thing. The trains were little help—the agent in Mul house had only had tickets as far as Dubrovnik when she inquired about crossing Europe by rail. And while she would contemplate walking a quarter way around the world along the Wall, Paolina was hardly likely to walk from France to the equator. Not with both the British Empire and the Sahara in the way.
It would have to be a ship.
And luck would not do it in this sprawling place.
Finally she flagged another boy and asked him the same thing. This time she promised two livres. She was smarter now, tearing both bills in half and giving him the same end of each of the two. His English was not so good, and he looked at her strangely, but he nodded and scuttled off.
In less than an hour, this second boy—not half so cute but twice as honest as the first—was back. “I have found the ship, yes.”
“Three ships,” Paolina told him. The day was growing late, and she wasn’t willing to take up residence in Marseilles. Having passage out would let her take leave of France, so close to treacherous England.
“Ship. Leave tomorrow, she is.”
Paolina gave up and followed him into the crowds of late afternoon.
The vessel was an iron monster, with two smokestacks, four deck cranes, and a rusting white superstructure over her riveted black hull. The name on the hull was Star of Gambia, out of Liverpool.
“Aboard,” said the boy. “See mate, Monsieur Johsen.” He stuck out his hand.
It was not the sort of ship Paolina had hoped for, but there were at least sixty ships along this dock. She could hardly go wandering in hopes of finding a solution.
“Where is Johsen?”
“Aboard. Money, please.”
Paolina handed the boy her torn bills. She grabbed the frayed rope that served as a rail and trudged up the steep, creaking gangplank to the ship itself.
She must hope and pray that Star of Gambia was more lucky for her than Notus had been, and that she could stay well away from the clutches of the Silent Order and the treacherous British Crown they served. Spitting over the rail into the stinking tidewater below, Paolina cursed Newton and all his descendants, wishing that England had never found the key to the world’s power.
AL - WAZIR
In two days they climbed, slow, aching, and painful, to a sort of highway that ran several miles above the African jungle, still on the lower reaches of the Wall. It was a true road, al-Wazir realized, with bridges and embankments, even if much of the right-of-way had decayed or been neglected.
He let Boaz lead. That bothered al-Wazir at first, but he soon realized that allowing himself to be upset by the metal man’s help was foolish. The pall of smoke still visible in the west told him all he needed to know about how Ottweill was faring. The recent unpleasantness with the Chinese airship told him all he needed to know about how he would fare without Boaz’ help.
The lightning spear was dead now, too, though they took turns carrying it.
“Some creatures of this wild may be sufficiently intelligent to be frightened by it,” said Boaz. “Should we hap upon a cache of supplies to replenish it, we shall, but many will recognize a weapon of Ophir no matter whose hands carry it.”
The second night they camped in a wider place, which had once been a way station. A cliff towered behind them, with some shallow rooms carved into it. There were dry troughs out front, along with several stone tables. All was sere and abandoned, centuries of disuse obvious.
“What was this built for?” al-Wazir asked.
Boaz moved about, setting some gathered wood for a fire. “Ophir was first settled by migration from the eastern coast of this continent. At times within the curtain of our history, there was intercourse across the full expanse, for trade and society. This route extended from Ophir back to the Indian Ocean.”
“What about them brass cars the lassie spoke of?”
“Those run to the Indian Ocean as well,” Boaz told him. “And beyond, around the world and back. But they may be boarded or left only in special places. At this moment I would not care to place myself so close to Ophir’s hand, lest they summon me home by means of the seals which power and control the cars.”
Seals. The proclamations of their king? He was tired and discouraged. “We could travel by foot for months to make our distance. If on
ly we could take to the air.”
“My people have had some commerce with the winged savages,” Boaz said. “But I should not think to travel with them, even under the direst of straits.”
“Indeed.” Al-Wazir shuddered at the thought of treating with the vicious creatures, and wondered at the sanity of the Brass. He spent much of that evening with his back to the fire, looking north into the African night, wondering what had become of, well, everything.
They paced themselves over the next few days, walking enough to make decent progress while not straining al-Wazir’s injuries. The rocky cliffs where they’d joined the highway eventually gave way to long, steeped vine-shrouded slopes wreathed in pale yellow mists. The road there had been hacked into the angle of the Wall, though vines now fell across it. They stank of rotting meat. Al-Wazir could not see why or from what.
“ ‘T’would be far better not to abide here for sleep,” Boaz advised him. “Neither to drink nor sup from what might be found. There should be burn scars ahead, where we might secure safe rest.”
“Aye.” Al-Wazir saw the Brass’ point. Sleeping in this stench would go to his head at the least. There were creatures slithering among the vines above and below the roads. He never saw them as more than a flash of scale or a ripple of dark, muscled skin. That was enough to convince him that he did not want to see more.
When they came to a cleared area, marked by the fall of rocks and gravel and a wide black burn scar, he was relieved. They were clear of the dangerous vines. Boaz declined to hunt, so there was no food that night, but al-Wazir found a trickle of runoff from higher up to slake his thirst. The yellow mists closed in with the dusk, and he never slept easily, but he at least found some rest.
The afternoon of the next day they finally left the country of the vines, passing on to a place where the long stalks petered out to be replaced with a more complex ecology of bushes and grasses and stunted trees. He was hard-pressed to tell which competing set of plants was winning the struggle, but at least here there were little rodents like fat squirrels, which could be caught and cooked.
Africa below them was changing as well. It lifted from flat coastal jungle to higher and higher ridges. The Ophir road was at sufficient altitude to grant a long view. They walked at ten or fifteen thousand feet, al-Wazir realized.
There was a great deal of Africa below him.
Another day brought them to an area where the highway was in repair, albeit more crudely executed than the original construction. Following that awhile, amid signs of occasional traffic here, al-Wazir and Boaz came to a great gate that had been built across the road. The south side was anchored in a rising knee of the Wall. The north side overhung a drop. A rushing noise and water spraying from behind suggested a fall beyond the gate.
Al-Wazir studied the fortification with Boaz. “Excellent place to block an advance.”
It was a square-cornered tower built from a mix of large flat stones and smaller bricks. The gateway itself was arched, and lined with more bricks of finer quality. The gates were timbered and studded with dark metal.
He saw no arrow slits nor murder holes, and nothing except the roof itself that could serve as a firing point. No guards visible to the eye. Just a gate blocking the road.
“Whom does it keep out?” al-Wazir asked. “Besides us.”
“Perhaps better to inquire as to whom it keeps in.”
Al-Wazir stepped forward and used the butt of the lightning spear to bang on the metal-shod wood. A knocker, for an unreasonably large door.
The noise boomed, echoing briefly, but there was no answer beyond that.
After a few moments he knocked again.
More quiet.
Al-Wazir squatted in the narrow shade of the arch. “Now what?”
“We find a way past it,” Boaz said. “The Wall lies steep here, and we would be hard-pressed to climb far, but I believe that if we were to follow back the trail a quarter mile or so and ascend with great care, we might gain the advantage of this rock knee which anchors the gate. We can see what lies beyond.”
The climb was difficult. Al-Wazir had one bad, frightening slip that left him dangling over a bulge that would have dropped him hundreds of feet. There was nothing for it but to haul himself up and keep going. When next he achieved a solid resting place, he shivered awhile before carrying on.
They eventually found themselves atop the knee, above the gate house. The roof of the structure was flat, with a wall that looked to be waist-high. There was no obvious way on or off—no stairs or ladders from within, for example.
Behind was a wooden bridge built into the piers of a long-vanished stone bridge. The waterfall tumbled beneath it into the same distance that had threatened to swallow al-Wazir.
There was no way down off the back of the knee that he could see. He turned and gazed up the Wall. The rushing creek ran through a deep channel down a steep slope. That would be hellish to cross, and the higher they might try to climb, the steeper things became.
“We will have to go back down,” he said.
“No.” Boaz walked to the edge of the knee, swaying slightly as he looked at the gate house. “If we climb to the top of the structure, we can secure a passage down the back.”
“It’s a straight drop to yon roof,” al-Wazir protested, “and there’s no way of knowing what’s behind it. I don’t fancy a leap from the top. Thirty feet if it’s an inch. I’m not crafted for such a tumble.”
“Our alternative is go far west along the Wall and climb up or down, trying to pass at a different level.”
Al-Wazir sighed. “Days of walking, with no certainty.” It wasn’t that far down to the roof of the gate house, was it?
They climbed very slowly down the curve of the knee.
When Boaz slipped and fell, al-Wazir froze. He heard a resounding crash but could only angle his head slightly to look down. The metal man was prone on the roof of the gate house. Not sundered into pieces, but not moving either.
Slowly, he told himself. Slow, slow, slow.
It took him half an hour to make the last thirty feet. When his feet reached stone, his fingers were bloody and his arms shook so badly, he had to sit and rest them. He had no idea how he’d kept hold of the lightning spear.
Boaz lay unmoving, staring blankly at the sky.
Al-Wazir remembered how Boaz had recovered from the crash of the Chinee airship. He waited quietly beside his friend.
Darkness brought a chill that was odd this low on the Wall in al-Wazir’s experience. The chief watched the stars emerge from day’s bright cloak, and traced the brass in the sky as if he were a navigator. Boaz began to shiver.
“I’m here, friend,” he said, and laid a hand on the metal man’s chest.
After a few minutes of uncoordinated movement, Boaz sat up. “I fare not well. An armorer would be appropriate to my condition.”
“I have no arms or armorer. All we can do is push onward.”
When the two of them approached the lip of the roof and looked eastward, there was a squad of men upon the wooden bridge. They wore armor in a bright metal color—brass or possibly gold—apparently in imitation of the Brass of Ophir.
“Sweet Jesus and the twelve,” al-Wazir cursed.
Boaz raised a hand, giving a jerky wave.
All fourteen below raised their hands and echoed his wave.
“Have you a ladder?” the Brass man called.
Below, they swarmed into action.
CHILDRESS
The noxious petty officer was gone from both the hallway and the lobby. Apparently they were free. Walking down the front steps, Leung took her arm in his. It was only a sensible escort, she knew, but still the firmness of his touch sent a chill through her.
“You are on parole to me now,” he said. “Answerable on your honor to me, as I am answerable on my honor for any untoward actions you take.”
“I understand.” At least she thought she did.
“I tell you one more thing. Then we find a place
for you while my ship is cared for and my men take their shore leave.”
“What is that?” The two of them pushed now through the same crowds that had swallowed William of Ghent—swarms of small, busy men of yellow and brown complexion, with their animals and their carts and their enormous loads like beetles on the backs of ants.
“The admiral and the foreign sorcerer . . .” His voice trailed off, as if he were searching for other words. “They are feared for many reasons. Power, strength, the ruthless quality of vision each possesses. But understand something else. In China, white is always the color of death. Funerals are masked and garbed in white. Ghosts come white in the darkness. To both be so tall and so white, it would be like wearing horns in an English church. Calling up visions of a demon.”
“Dead men afoot in the world?”
“Yes. Both of them waken fears of dreaming death in most of my people.”
“I see.” In English tradition, white signified purity and possibly strength. William’s clothes had seemed a fashion choice suited to his unusual coloration, nothing more. As for Shang . . . there was a man who acted the part of a ghost, and dressed it. He kept an entire navy full of ships and men in line partly by playing on their fear.
That was either admirable or despicable, she was not sure which. She had to concede the genius of the role.
They pushed through a large set of iron gates into the chaos of a public street outside the docks. What she had before thought a confusing, brawling mess had been parade-ground order compared with the near riot out here. In addition to the ubiquitous loads and their bearers, firecrackers and gongs echoed, children ran screaming, palanquins forced through crowds on the backs of sweating, hairless fat men while servants cried their right of way with whips and knives, a basket of snakes wriggled at her elbow—it went on and on, overwhelming.
She realized Leung was yelling in her ear.