Escapement

by Jay Lake

  A Chinese airship.

  Sirens wailed across Mogadishu from the British base upon the hill.

  “Run!” he shouted as he grabbed at Paolina’s shoulder, but three Chinamen dropped from the sky like silk-clad stones to take him down, even as gunfire began to pop above him.

  He fought like a dog, with more of his heart in it than even a drunken marine, but there were so many of the Chinee, and the fuzzy wuzzies soon fled the scene. Large guns boomed as the town rose to battle. They didn’t help al-Wazir as more and more of the screaming blue-clad men dropped on him.

  Even Boaz struggled beneath the wave of their assault. The Brass crushed a man’s skull, shouting at al-Wazir just as a rifle butt caught the chief in the nadgers. His vision turned the color of blood while his gut dropped like a runaway cargo hoist. The butt reversed to a bayonet, which he somehow blocked with one hand even as he vomited against the pain, trying to choke it back and rise for another swing of his fist, but someone lashed a rope around his ankles and he was lifted away.

  His left hand hurt like fire where he’d blocked the knife. He couldn’t close his fist for one last shot, because it didn’t seem to be there anymore.

  Upside down, in the air, swinging dead weight on a line, he vomited again. Al-Wazir grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, squeezing tight as he could to stop the spray of bleeding. He spun above Mogadishu, above a knot of blue-clad men still fighting Boaz, above the scattered thorn trees and kraals and huts at the edge, his view expanding as they rose to include the harbor and two airships casting off from masts on the hill while the third began to burn and he thought, My God, the hydrogen will blow and she’s still at the mast, then he was spinning in the air over the ocean and where had the time gone, chopped away with his hand and something burned bright and loud on the brow of the land beyond and there was the Wall and his body was being dragged screaming across the water until hard faces and pinching hands pulled him over a railing and slapped, slapped, slapped him.

  He woke to a splash of warm water—no, piss—across his face. Al-Wazir coughed and spat and tried to curse, but he hurt too damned much. Mostly all he could do was draw breath and try to ignore the taste in his mouth.

  He blinked away the sting of the urine. A short Chinese man bent over him, frowning seriously. Officer. Something in the look of the man, even wearing blue pajamas.

  “You wish the girl, yes?”

  He tried to sort through that sentence. “The girl?” al-Wazir finally managed. “Aye. She’s wi’ me.” He wasn’t tied down, just flat on a deck with a gasbag bellying low above him. Familiar territory, this, albeit with the details rather different. The freedom of being untied was meaningless given that he could barely move.

  There was something wrong with his hands, too. That thought, and the memories of pain it brought flooding back, distracted al-Wazir so badly, he missed his interrogator’s next words.

  His lapse was corrected with a swift boot to the ribs.

  Al-Wazir let out a wordless cry of agony. Something was broken there.

  “Chinese airships are bad for my health,” he muttered.

  “Tell me,” the officer said quietly.

  “Tell you what, you flat-faced bast—?”

  Another kick cut him off. “We talk later.”

  He found himself staring up at the gasbag, wondering how he would survive this. Boaz was lost to him. Paolina was imprisoned somewhere aboard this vessel. They were . . . where?

  Over the Indian Ocean, surely. He couldn’t imagine a Chinese captain heading into British territory with prisoners on his deck.

  Hand, whispered a voice inside his head. Look to your hand.

  Politics and tactics fled as al-Wazir tilted his gaze to the right. His hand lay flat on the deck, at the end of an arm that might as well have been flaccid, it seemed so limp and powerless. Four fingers and a thumb, skin scraped to potted meat but still attached.

  He was forced to rock his head back and forth before he could flip his gaze to the left. Another flat, useless arm. Another swollen wrist, this one bound in rags that had been smeared with some dark, greasy oil. Nothing but a messy stain upon the deck where fingers and thumb and palm should be.

  Breath shuddered in his chest. Some fool was keening in pain and panic, using his voice, the sound rolling in his chest. Al-Wazir tried to flex the missing fingers, closing a fist that wasn’t there, as if by some sympathetic magic he could restore what had been taken from him. Though he could swear he felt the grain of the deck under the back of his hand, it wasn’t there.

  The chill that had been pressing at the edge of his consciousness for a while began to take him over. It was snowing in his soul now. His thoughts were slowing as well. The sharp taste of Chinese piss on his lips not even a distraction. The feeling of his left hand on the deck was nothing more than an illusion. He tried to focus on the gasbag above his head, but it was foreign, distant, different. Not him or his.

  Where had Bassett got to, anyway? It wasn’t like Captain Smallwood to leave an injured man on the deck, exposed to the elements, the victim of ridicule from his crew.

  He had to summon the Ropes Division, call the men to attention and work to save the ship from neglect. Al-Wazir struggled to sit up on his elbows. The ship needed him. The captain needed him. England needed him.

  A woman’s face swam overhead. The Queen? No, no, a girl he’d met. Who had brought a port whore aboard his ship? Al-Wazir snarled at her, or tried to. His lips had become little more than canvas rolls.

  She turned and yelled. Hands plucked at him awhile. He sank deeper into the country of dreams, lowered by a net from a ship that sailed the sky.

  Al-Wazir found himself in Lanarkshire, except that it was Lanarkshire-in-Africa. The hills were coated with broad-leaved plants through which monkeys scampered. Instead of sheep there were miniature elephants grazing in what openscape remained. Rocks the size of houses and houses the size of rocks mixed together, as if God had muddled two sets of playthings and left both behind on the carpet of His Caledonian nursery floor.

  He wandered clad only in his grandfather’s last threadbare burnoose, the one the old man had been buried in. Araby or no, Granda Faisal had spent all of young Threadgill’s life wearing canvas trousers and swearing at the Inland Revenue. Al-Wazir wondered how he’d come by the garment. It was a white faded to the color of wound stains on linen. He didn’t know whose sword had cut the bloody rents in the thing through which the light was leaking.

  The sun was rising inside him, he realized. That explained the warmth in his belly, and why the day was dying outside as the parrots of Lanarkshire rose screeching into the evening sky like so many faded orchids dropping toward the absent moon.

  “No,” said his mother, rest her soul.

  No, he was dead, not her. Or at least Granda Faisal, that everyone hereabouts called Frazzle, was dead. Everyone?

  “No,” she said again, but in the voice of someone else he thought he knew.

  “Know what?” Al-Wazir opened his eyes to see Paolina Barthes crouched close above him. She seemed to be weeping.

  “No, don’t leave me alone here,” she whispered.

  “You’re not alone, lassie.” He shook off the last vision of screaming parrots. “Not while me or the Brass fool walks this Northern Earth.”

  Piss-soaked shirt and all, she leaned over and hugged him like a child might do. Awkwardly, al-Wazir closed his arms over her shoulder, patting her with one hand while fearing the other.

  CHILDRESS

  Tan the Archivist was happy enough to have her sit at his table awhile. He seemed to be pleased at a chance to practice his English. “Cataloger Wang look for Great Relic.” He cackled. “You great surprise, not so much Great Relic, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said with a smile.

  Sitting in this sunken library at the bottom of the Northern Earth was not so bad, Childress decided. The wealth of the world’s knowledge might be half-drowned beneath her feet, but the other half bulked comf
ortingly close. She felt the pull of it.

  They didn’t need a Great Relic here. This place was almost a Great Relic of its own.

  She tried for a polite sally. “Are you expert in African scrolls?”

  “Africa?” Another cackle. “Much wisdom there, different kind, yes? Names not so much matching.”

  Names? Childress had to work through that a moment. She tried Leung’s Confucian term, in her poor Chinese. “Zheng ming.” Rectification of Names.

  Tan grinned. “Well spoken.”

  “So what are you searching for within African scrolls?” It wasn’t a subtle line of questioning, but their mutual language barrier did not admit much delicacy.

  “Eh . . .” He traced his right index finger over the taelsaem, tip hovering just above the illuminations without quite touching the scroll itself. “Other wisdoms. This library, library of libraries, yes?”

  “Yes . . .” She knew it for a depository library.

  “You Mask, ah, you know this. Truth hide inside truth, inside truth. Like ducks inside eggs inside ducks.”

  “Of course,” she lied.

  “So we open truth one at time.”

  “And a Great Relic would be a . . . shortcut . . . to the truth.”

  “Shortcut? Too small?”

  “No, no.” She tried not to laugh. “A path less distant and more swift.”

  Another cackle. “Truth is winding path. Everyone know that.” He bent back to his taelsaem. After a few minutes of silence, Childress rose and began wandering farther along the gallery.

  It took her only a moment to notice that Cataloger Wang was following her around the rim. Like her, he was unsubtle, merely hanging back far enough that she could not turn to confront him. Childress settled for a big smile and a cheerful wave—very un-Chinese, and very un-Poinsard for that matter, but it made her feel better to twit the man.

  She looked over the shoulders of other archivists as they pursued errands similar to Tan’s. What they were doing with the texts was not obvious. Like Tan, these were skimming rather than reading closely, at a pace that seemed highly unlikely to support significant comprehension of these dead and ancient tongues. They made a few notes as they went.

  This was not a translation project. Far from it.

  Nor, did she think, were they about the business of summarizing the material. Again, the reading went too fast, while the note-taking was too sparse.

  Like boys scavenging a gutter for coins early on a Sunday morning, she realized. They were hunting for something.

  With that notion in mind, she looked more closely at the next reader she came to. This was a young man clad in a cheongsam of the same blue as the crewmen wore aboard Five Lucky Winds. Low status, she presumed. He pored over an unfolding book written in some south Asian script, where the letters depended from a top bar that was periodically interrupted. It had been block printed in orange ink on muslin, which was then lacquered to the boards, which had been sewn together to make the folds of the book.

  As Tan had done, this reader skimmed his text. Again, too fast for comprehension unless he were possessed of a native fluency. She watched him go down one page, then down the next. He stopped and scanned his way back up two or three lines. He scribbled a series of notes in the Chinese script she’d made very little progress in mastering, then tapped his teeth a few times.

  Without ever looking up at her, he went back to scanning his text.

  Cataloger Wang drifted next to her.

  “Have you found wisdom yet?” he asked in Chinese.

  “Wisdom lies in the search, not the finding,” she replied in English.

  “Of course.”

  When she glanced over at him, Wang’s face was a profile in blandness.

  “Most of these readers are idiots savants, aren’t they?” She caught herself, and added in Chinese, “They are persons with skill in only one area.”

  Cataloger Wang was no more subtle in word than deed. “Your skills are in what area?”

  “This,” she said simply. In English: “My skills tell me you are hunting the jungles of the word.”

  Wang leaned over and patted the shoulder of the young man who sat next to them. “Come take tea with me, Mask.” This time, he sounded almost pleasant.

  Watching the tense, round-faced Wang carefully make tea in a little porcelain pot, Childress reflected that she was certain he spoke English. Or at least understood her language. She’d approached the limits of her Chinese with him already, and even outdid herself.

  Yet he’d asked her to tea alone.

  His office was a room off the circular gallery, one of perhaps two dozen. Just as with the gallery outside, it was difficult to tell what this chamber had been originally intended for. Reading room, repository, living quarters, or even an office, but his desk and cabinets and pigeonholed shelving full of scrolls told of its current uses.

  There was a little charcoal fire in a brazier shaped like a sitting dog. Or possibly lion, she couldn’t quite tell. Either way, it had one paw on a large ball, while the fire smoldered within its open jaws and a brass pot steamed and perked upon its flat head. The flanks were painted in bright shades of blue and green, with silver tracings, so it seemed as if the lion-dog might have been intended to come from the sea.

  Either way, its jaws were black with soot or by design, the eyes flickered with the fire within. The pot rattled with more and more intensity until Wang grabbed a silk rag and took it off the fire to pour the water into a more decorative porcelain teapot. This one was round, and somewhat fattened at the center. A pale blue painting of bamboo and clouds circled its waist.

  Wang measured tea leaves out of a small metal container to shake them into the bottom of two small cups, which matched their pot. He poured water over each of them with a delicacy that surprised Childress. The scent steaming up from the cups was rich, dark, and earthy. This was the smell of which ordinary New England tea was just a ghost.

  He handed Childress her tea with a grave smile, then wrapped his hands around his own cup. She found it too hot to the touch for that, and so set the tea down for a moment to cool. Wang sipped and stared at her.

  And so we drink tea, she thought. Some form of the same substance, by much the same name, had its own rituals half a world away in the country of her birth. Here in Wang’s office, it seemed nigh magical.

  She finally picked hers up and sipped. It was as hot and thick as she might have expected, and bitter enough for her to feel her teeth. She drank it slowly as she matched stares with Wang over the rims of their cups.

  This was as deadly serious as any face-off between cats in the alley or lords in the gallery of some royal court. She didn’t understand what stakes they played for, but the game was of great value to Cataloger Wang.

  Childress finally set her cup down in a single graceful motion onto the small table that stood between them. He matched her gesture, then took up her cup to stare within at the bitter leaves pooling amid the brown water in the bottom.

  Childress stilled the reflexive motion of her hand for the other cup. This was his game; she would let him play it.

  Wang stared into her leaves for a time, then looked up at her.

  “So close to the Wall,” he said, “the spirits are strong.”

  In English, she realized. “What do they tell you?” Childress replied in Chinese.

  “You carry power and the burden of time upon your shoulders. Words flow. You have seen the Golden Bridge.”

  Quite good English, at that. She leaned forward. “You are not building any bridge here, are you?”

  “There are bridges and there are bridges.” He set the cup down in a precise motion and sketched an arc in the air. “Bridges of air, bridges of rainfall, bridges of birds. Bridges of thought and deed and obligation.”

  “Bridges of words.”

  That smile again. “Bridges of words.”

  Childress puzzled out the riddle. For it was indeed a riddle, however he phrased his words. “A course of study
is a bridge of words,” she said slowly. “Learning built one text at a time. While gold . . . gold is the highest of metals, emperor among the elements. So the Golden Bridge is perhaps the Imperial Bridge. A course which can be trod only by the most elevated of feet. The path of the wise.”

  “All paths lead to wisdom, for those with eyes to see the way.”

  “Well, certainly.” That sounded like an empty aphorism, but Childress was trying neither to bait the man nor argue with him. “Even so, there’s some specific piece of wisdom for which you are hunting here.” Her conversation with Leung, about the bridge being more of a tunnel, came back to her. “A path that leads through the Wall would be a special kind of wisdom.”

  He tilted his chin slightly toward her.

  “But a path which led through the heart of the world . . .” She stopped, staring at him with speculation roiling in her mind. “It’s not just the Wall, is it? You could fly over it if you wanted to badly enough. So I’m told. And flight is not among the secrets of the ancients.”

  “You are indeed a Mask,” said Wang. “Even if you are not who was appointed to come, and you do not bear what was appointed to be brought.”

  “I am who you have been given,” she said sternly, all Poinsard for a moment. “The Wall is there for a reason. God’s plan, in the European view. Part of the order of Heaven and earth in the Chinese view. That you seek to overpass it is foolishness bordering on suicide. There is more danger and terror in the Southern Earth than you would ever wish to know.”

  “Have you crossed the Wall to see these things for yourself?”

  “No, of course not. But in six millennia of human history, no one has kept open a way across the Wall.”

  “Chersonesus Aurea did,” said Wang. “And we shall again.”

  “Look around you. There is nothing here but parrots and monkeys and salt water. Did the men of this city found or topple empires? Create new sciences for the glory of God and the benefit of man? No, they dug a hole and crawled into it, hiding amid their books until the ocean came to sweep them away. How will this benefit your Celestial Emperor?”