Escapement

by Jay Lake

  Boaz shook his head. “That is not for me to say.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  In the course of the day, the jungles of Africa thinned to endless pale grasslands, sometimes covered with beasts in herds that stretched for miles. Al-Wazir wondered how many millions of sheep could graze there.

  Eventually his attention returned to Boaz. “Surely even you tire of driving this cart?”

  “Of course. But I wish to follow Miss Barthes. We have gained two months of walking already, though I fear we will lose our road soon. Have you not felt more and more of the roughness over which we travel?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are at or past the reach of civilized repair. We shall be compelled to dismount shortly.”

  Al-Wazir patted the rim of the cab. “This cart has made better time than even an airship would. Like a railroad across Africa. Certainly Ottweill’s men could lay track all down the Ophir road well enough.”

  “Indeed. I should hope that never comes to pass.”

  The chief fell silent. He was unwilling to speak against the Queen’s interests, but at the same time unable to disagree with the Brass man.

  He studied the distance ahead instead. There was a sullen gray glower at the edge of the world, under fast, ragged clouds.

  “I believe we approach our goal, laddie,” al-Wazir said.

  “Was there ever doubt?”

  The end to their swift passage came soon enough. The road was increasingly rubbled. There was a landslide visible a few miles ahead that spilled over to block the trackway completely. A man could climb the rock well enough, but the cart would be battered to destruction in moments.

  “Seems a shame to just leave it in the road,” al-Wazir said.

  Boaz slowed them, studying what lay ahead. “There is no going forward.”

  “Aye, I see that. Yet . . .” He could get used to the convenience of this mad conveyance.

  Still ticking, they rumbled to a slow walking pace. Al-Wazir looked ahead to spy more details. A trail led across the rubbled fall on the downhill side of the blocked roadbed. That meant that people passed this way reasonably often. As he’d assumed, the cart would never fit.

  They came to a shuddering halt with an increase in the ticking noise from below.

  Al-Wazir hoisted himself over the side. It was a good seven feet to the ground, perhaps more. He slipped over and dropped to the stones as the cart rolled back about a foot. Boaz adjusted the tiller then followed.

  “That tears it,” al-Wazir said. “I do not think we can so easy find our way back into that beastie.”

  “Sad to abandon such a machine, but we have no capacity to rewind the flywheel in any case.”

  They turned and surveyed the road ahead, looking for trails that might lead downward toward the coast. The Wall had a sharp downhill slope, rather than the round-shouldered cliffs they’d passed earlier. It was spotted with tufts of some sedged grass and the odd clump of dark, wiry bushes, all growing out of a field of rocks somewhere between scree and boulders.

  Not inviting terrain, but certainly passable.

  “ ’Tis a rail line,” al-Wazir hissed.

  They crouched amid a stand of thornbushes just north of a miserable little port town huddled against the base of the Wall, enduring a driving rain that had come on at dusk. He was wet and miserable.

  No time for that. There was work to be done. He and Boaz stared at the gleaming tracks.

  Boaz leaned close. “Should you not go down and locate the Royal Navy officer in command here?”

  “Maybe.” Al-Wazir was distinctly unsure. “If that is Mogadishu.” They’d caught glimpses of a larger city on their way down the Wall. “But I see no airship masts here.”

  In any case, he’d much rather get the lay of things first. If Ottweill had somehow managed to contact London since al-Wazir’s departure, he could well be under a charge for desertion.

  Better to find a few other old tars in a dockside bar and sniff out the rumors. With luck, he’d meet someone he’d served with who could inquire for him. This dreadful little town—Kismaayo?—was too small to wander into safely without being the instant center of attention.

  “How far up the coast do you reckon ’tis to Mogadishu?”

  “Fifty miles, perhaps?” Al-Wazir could hear the shrug in the Brass man’s voice. “At the other end of these tracks, in any case.”

  A steam whistle wailed down in the town, audible even over the hiss of the rain.

  “Here comes transport,” al-Wazir said.

  The locomotive finally rattled past with its short string of goods wagons clanking and swaying. The two of them sprinted along the clinkers bedding the track and grabbed on to the ladders of a boxcar. Crouched above the couplings of the rolling stock, the rain was no kinder than it had been down in the thornbushes. At least they was heading for a town big enough to hide in.

  And al-Wazir was off the Wall.

  Even his smile ached.

  CHILDRESS

  Five Lucky Winds cruised slowly on the surface amid the narrow channels and protruding reefs of the Kepualuan Riau. A number of the crew were assembled on the flat deck—there would be no submerging in these shallow, uncertain waters, and Leung had wanted his men readily available. The Kepualuan Riau were an array of tiny islands crowded with dark, vine-wrapped jungle for which the sea seemed little more than random bordering. The Wall towered just south, rising up right out of the midst of the chain.

  There was nothing around them that could be mistaken for human settlement, either contemporary or out of antiquity.

  “Chersonesus Aurea is here?” Childress was atop the tower with Leung and his navigator. The captain was dressed very formally in a Western-style naval uniform, his buttons polished bright as little fires. She continued, “I should think they might have kept it where it could be found again.”

  “It was lost for twice a thousand years,” Leung told her. “This is not a simple matter, even now.”

  “Surely their own supply convoys can find them.”

  “We are not their own supply convoys.”

  The submarine moved along at a fraction of her normal speed. She eased between green shadows while great, flat fish disturbed the sand as they fled from the vessel’s passing. Childress stared upward for the most part. This close to the Wall, it had grown to an immensity that defied her ability to take in the view.

  The thing had been easier to see even from Singapore, not too many miles northward. This was like studying the architecture of a church by pressing one’s nose against a pillar.

  The navigator consulted a little green-bound book and muttered quietly in Chinese. Leung relayed an order down a speaking tube. Five Lucky Winds slowed to a controlled drift. A desultory wind plucked at them, carrying the mixed scents of salt and jungle, while birds called in an endless oratory of feeding and mating. They might as well have sailed off the edge of the map.

  She tore her regard from the Wall and cupped a hand over her eyes to sweep the nearby islands. They were close to their destination. They had to be or the ship would not have slowed, but Leung did not need more questions from her.

  Childress finally realized she was looking at the tip of a mast rather than at a treetop. It rose over the emerald fold of a low hill on a largish islet. She plucked at Leung’s sleeve and pointed. He grinned and called down new orders.

  Even then, they might not have found the harbor without knowing exactly where to look. It was a narrow channel between two outcrops of jungle standing like green fortresses, so that the harbor mouth seemed little more than an outlet of a creek. Five Lucky Winds moved dead slow through a fluttering, screaming riot of birds the color of every flower Childress had ever seen. They took off in cloud dense as the smoke of a coal fire to circle in the air above the vessel.

  The trees around them echoed with the calls of something larger and slower that seemed intent on tracking their progress. The channel churned from the action of their screws, bubbling behind them
with a dank eruption that belied the sunlit sea just beyond.

  A curve to the left, a curve to the right, and then they were in the harbor proper. It was a long oval surrounded by a jungled ridge broken only by the narrow cleft through which they’d just steamed. She imagined that if seen from a height, the bay would resemble a great comma. The city rose at the back of the harbor, extending in both directions. It was mostly pale stone wrapped in vines or crumbled to flower-covered rubble. She could make out buildings amid the greenery, rising like old memories not quite yet faded to nothingness.

  An area the equivalent of several city blocks had been cleared close to the water, and a stone jetty restored. There a large steamer and two small junks were tied up. Wooden buildings had been placed among the ruins—they were plain and cheap looking, not at all like the adorned architecture of Singapore and Tainan, and even less like the overgrown structures surrounding them.

  Leung brought the submarine to a halt in the middle of the harbor. He ordered his men to open a deck hatch and tug out their launch. Childress actually followed most of what was being said.

  “Too shallow?” she asked him.

  “We will turn the ship in place,” he replied. “Most easy to make our departure at need. I do not trust that tie-up.”

  She was no sailor, but she’d been aboard Five Lucky Winds long enough to mark on the captain’s unusual caution.

  “Take me ashore.”

  He glanced at her, his eyes narrowing.

  “These are your people,” she said. “What is there to fear? I understand there are political intrigues afoot, but you all serve the Celestial Emperor. We are not walking into the den of your enemies. Take me with you and let me play the Mask Childress. They will not know me from the Mask Poinsard, one way or the other. We will both learn more from presenting the unexpected.”

  Now Leung looked amused. “You do not trust the Golden Bridge. Should you be permitted here?”

  “Oh, no, you misunderstand me.” She covered his hand with hers a moment. “I do trust the Golden Bridge. China does not fail. I have learned this. Though success take a thousand years, China does not fail. When the Golden Bridge is opened once more, I do not trust what lies beyond.”

  He made a small noise, though she could not tell if it was agreement, disagreement, or merely acknowledgement.

  When Leung climbed down to take his launch to shore, he invited her with him. By the time they were on the dark waters of the bay, the birds had finally settled again. The trees were full of whooping, calling color bright as morning.

  There was a delegation on the dock when the sailors rowed them to the ladder. None wore the uniforms of the Beiyang Navy, Childress noted, though she also knew that some Chinese took traditional dress despite their role. Admiral Shang, for example, though he had not been precisely traditional.

  These men were turned out in a finery beyond what she’d encountered on the streets here in Asia. All wore silk cheongsams, most of a rich azure with a surcoat of red belted over and small red hats with several colors of beads upon their crowns.

  Very traditional or very formal, she was not sure which. Both, most likely.

  Leung climbed up onto the dock, then immediately bowed low. Childress followed. She was conscious of being the focus of all their attention. Surely because she was English, but also because she was a woman? Instead of bowing, she dipped her chin, then briefly made the sign of the white bird with her hands.

  Though the welcoming party did not break composure, she could see a stir.

  These men were very well trained, she thought. Perhaps some of them had the fortune to have dealings with the Imperial Court. Or misfortune, judging from the way Leung sometimes spoke of his rulers.

  Instead of launching into a speech as she’d expected, Leung produced a sealed envelope from his tunic. The back was coated with a large glob of green wax. It featured several red stamps, their square imprints filled with some design she couldn’t make out. The captain handed it to the man closest to him, a pudgy young fellow so pale as to barely seem Asian but for the cast of his eyes.

  The man tore open the envelope, studied the paper within, then turned and bowed to a much older man, speaking quietly and at some length. The old man nodded before stepping forward to face Childress.

  “You are the Englishwoman,” he said in Mandarin Chinese—the dialect she’d been learning.

  Childress knew her accent was terrible, but she could give a creditable answer. “Yes, Honored One.”

  “Eh.” He turned and walked away. All his fellow mandarins followed save the pale man who’d received Leung’s missive—he remained, a tall parrot in his cheongsam of yellow over green.

  “Cataloger Wang informs me that he does not speak English,” Leung said after a moment. “He has instructed me to inform you that his fine ears will not hear the coarse accents of a ghost-face from beyond the horizon.”

  Childress smiled sweetly at Wang, leaned forward, and said very quietly, “Boo.”

  Wang’s eyes flickered.

  “I believe we understand each other.” She folded her hands in the sign of the avebianco. As if called by her, a whirring flight of pale birds skimmed out of the trees to pass just over their heads. They skimmed Five Lucky Winds’ tower and circled out across the little bay.

  Behind her, Leung chuckled.

  Wang said something fast. Childress caught the word for “Englishman.”

  “Dwei le,” she murmured. Indeed.

  That seemed to settle the issue. Wang whirled and led them down the dock. Leung saluted his ship, then turned to follow the cataloger. Childress trailed behind them both, wondering precisely what was taking place in this strange, glorious place.

  Wang and Leung did not head for the wooden buildings as she had expected. Instead they followed a trail that led out of the clearing and up into the ruined city. Pillars lay broken on the ground, overgrown with clinging vines and flowers the color of a dog’s tongue. Sweeping wide flights of stairs rose into stands of glossy-leaved bushes that rustled with movement running contrary to the direction of the wind. Monkeys—she hoped they were monkeys—howled and boomed in the foliage above their heads.

  Some of the pillars had gold banding. Chersonesus Aurea had been quite literally lost, if no one had looted the precious metals in all the years since the place had fallen. She wondered what catastrophe had swept here. Not fire, surely. The pillars and standing walls did not appear to have been blackened, nor shattered by heat. Plague, or some disaster of political economy that cut off the trade routes and flow of goods. This place had never been supported by self-sufficient agriculture.

  The trail crested a rise beyond which some of the trees had been felled to grant a view of the valley. The rest of the city was visible before her. At the shallow bottom, the buildings stood in a dark lake surrounded by waist-high grass. Buildings stood in widening concentric circles from that point, rising with the line of the hills. The structures were taken over by trees where they were increasingly distant from the water’s edge.

  It is a map of a civilization, she thought, rising from the muck and climbing to the heights, only to finally be overcome by the forces of nature. Shattered and broken, the forms of the city were still visible. Statues glinted with gold and jewels where they had fallen in the crossroads.

  The strangest thing was that this place appeared to have been built by Greeks, here so very far from the city-states of the Peloponnesus. She knew there had been colonies distant from the great centers of that ancient world in Sicily and Rhodes and even the Exuin Sea. But here, in an island chain tucked between the Malay Peninsula and the Equatorial Wall?

  God’s world was filled with strange magics indeed.

  Cataloger Wang stopped in front of a marble palace. Much of its facade was intact. He drew himself up and seemed ready to make a declamation. Instead he glared at Childress, stared at Leung, shook his head, and led them inside.

  Within was a library.

  Those words were ina
dequate to the task of describing what she saw.

  A library was a repository for knowledge. A biblotheque. Some of that knowledge was in the form of books, other portions in the minds of the librarians themselves, still more as indices, catalogs, maps, files, displays.

  This place was more than a repository. It was the mother of knowledge, the omphalos of human thought. She could have fallen to her knees and prayed, except for what that would likely mean to Wang. She did not need the cataloger’s affection, but she did require his respect.

  Childress reminded herself that the Mask Poinsard would not have been impressed by mere books.

  The center of the palace was a vast dome with vaulted ribs bearing its weight. Below the dome was a pit with slanting walls that descended into the ground. This was lined with shelves and scrolleries arrayed in shallow spirals.

  This place must have been built by men who understood the ars memoriae. The architecture was perfect for that.

  Those days were long gone. Now stinking water stood about twenty-five feet below the rim of the pit. Ramps and furnishings went on into the depths. What remained above the water was crammed with documents, books, bindings, scrolls, plaques—words on all kinds of paper, leather, and wood, thousands on thousands of individual volumes.

  Below the water . . . She shied away from the thought, but it was undeniable. Below the water, past the depth of visibility, rotted the corpses of many thousands more volumes. Flecks of paper floated on the surface of the hideous pond like so many water lilies.

  She wondered how deep the hole went, why someone would be moved to build such an impractical library, how many books had drowned like hostage children chained to the watergates of some medieval port.

  It even smelled like books—an almost overwhelming itchy scent of leather and paper wafting over the rotten-pond stink.

  Dozens of Wang’s fellows worked among the volumes. Some moved slowly up and down the spiral ramps. Others were seated on stools studying the bindings and shelf tags and scroll ends.

  Wang the Cataloger, indeed, she thought with a smile. This was a life work for a hundred librarians. An entire guild could spend decades here. It was far too easy to mourn what had been lost. Salvaging what remained might assuage those wounds.