by Jay Lake
“We’re safe,” she lied. “Safe for now in this place.”
“They’ll not take ye to Phu Ket?”
“No, Chief, not to Phu Ket.” She took his remaining hand in hers. “We’re going to the Wall, soon as we bring on supplies.”
“Aye, the Wall.” He looked at her with some strain of desperation in his eyes. Is he drugged? These sailors had risked all to save her and al-Wazir. Surely they would not trouble to kill him now.
“We’re safe.” She squeezed his hand.
“Come above, girl,” the old woman told her. “Come above.”
Paolina stumbled back to the door.
“Lassie,” he said as she was about to step out.
“Yes?” She stared back, still wondering how truly ill he was.
“You brought this ship from far away. Could you send us to the Bight of Benin? Or all the way to Lanarkshire?”
“Perhaps I could.”
She climbed the ladder with tears stinging her eyes. It was very different when the storm and threat of tons of water were not hanging over her head. Still damp and stinking of the sea, but at the top there was sunlight and the scent of shore—green and deep, soil crossed with perfume and old fruit. Birds circled overhead.
Five Lucky Winds was anchored a quarter mile offshore. A launch pulled from the beach with oars flashing. A small group of men were on land with a pile of barrels next to a stream. Some were in blue pajamas; others were dark-skinned with pale brown skirts. Sailors and locals. Fuzzy wuzzies, al-Wazir would call them.
People, Paolina would call them.
The land was beautiful, lined with a dense jungle that put her in mind of the western African shore. The color here was brighter, more emerald, and the scent was different. Mountains rose behind, with clouds wreathing the peaks. She turned the other way and tilted her head back to face the rising immensity of a Muralha. The Wall was so close, she thought she could have reached out to touch it.
Why did they need to take on supplies for such a brief trip?
The launch tied up. Shouting men wrestled the heavy barrels aboard. The water was no lie, that was certain—there was too much effort in those to be anything else here so far from oil or wine. Paolina heard a long conversation in Chinese at the base of the ladder as she stood quietly with Childress and another sailor in the tower. “There’s peace up here,” she finally said, talking over the discussion below.
“Yes.” Childress touched her arm. “It’s why I asked to bring you up. You went from airship to storm-tossed sea to these iron decks. You needed a measure of peace.”
“I am sorry if I have been rude.”
“You have faced great pressures, young lady. And you carry a strange burden in your hands and in your heart.”
A burden which threatens the very order of the world, Paolina thought. “Yes. Even if I destroyed this one, I could make another. This is the second. The people who want it . . . me . . . know this.”
“The Wall is endless. Lose yourself upon the face of it. No one will find you, especially if you carry the gleam for your protection.”
“Why . . . why do your White Birds not seek to grasp this?”
Childress look a long, slow breath. “Perhaps some among the avebianco do. But I am the Mask here, and for me it is enough to let the world turn as God intended it, without attempting to remake Creation wholesale.”
“You work to preserve balance and order in the world.”
“Yes. At least the best of us do.”
That explains Lachance, Paolina thought. And the purser aboard of Star of Gambia. That there might yet be good people in the world, some of them men, seemed a distant surprise. Still welcome, though.
Footsteps echoed up the ladder. Paolina and Childress edged back from the open hole in the floor of the tower’s top. It would be crowded with four up here.
Leung came up.
“Captain,” said Childress, with a smile and nod.
“Captain,” Paolina added grudgingly.
“Mask,” he replied. “Good day. You as well, Miss Barthes.” He glanced toward shore. “I have news of serious import.”
“What sort of news?” Paolina asked, a new stab of fear in her heart. She was so close. It was almost as if she could swim to the Wall.
“Last night, during the Wall storm at about the time you, ah . . . translocated . . . Five Lucky Winds, there was an earthquake in the Strait of Malacca. Somewhere near our prior position.”
“They know that?”
Childress touched her arm. “Hush, girl. The Chinese have wireless stations in many places.”
“Whatever you did with that gleam. It killed many to move us.” His eyes narrowed as he stared hard at her. “This device is dangerous.”
“I know that,” she almost shouted. “Dangerous to everyone, most of all me. It makes of me a weapon. I will not be so used!”
“No one will use you,” said Childress.
“We killed people to move you a hundred miles. Al-Wazir wants to go to Scotland aboard your vessel. How many would die for us to leap ten thousand miles?”
Captain Leung gave her a long, steady stare. “I pray we never find out.”
“No.” Paolina nodded. “You are right. I will not do such a thing, even though he asks it.”
“You and the Mask Childress owe me an answer soon,” Leung reminded them.
Paolina glanced between the pair. “About what?”
Childress tightened her grip on Paolina’s arm. “We have not spoken yet.”
“I go back to my crew.” Leung nodded at them both. “I suggest you consider the costs we incur here, simply with every minute we do nothing while such power is loose in the world.”
“We are,” said Childress.
“What do you think I am running from?” Paolina asked.
Leung did not answer, but climbed down quickly to rejoin his launch before it pulled for shore once more.
Paolina turned to Childress. “Of what are we speaking?”
Childress met her gaze, the old woman’s brown eyes glittering. “How to put you ashore with surety that the danger will not again walk the Northern Earth.”
“Indeed.” Paolina stared at the glinting water. The sea here was so clear, she could see the submarine’s hull and the pale sand below it. Fish moved across the bottom, flickering in shoals, larger ones stalking in predatory solitude. The jungle beyond was quiet. Birds continued to circle overhead.
If she could fly away with them, she would, but the gleam’s powers didn’t seem to extend to transformation.
“I . . . I thought to learn from the wizards when I left a Muralha. The English were to be my guides. So I believed. Instead I have found myself both too strong and too foolish for them. I wanted a purpose, to meet the future with full knowledge.”
“No one but God has full knowledge,” Childress told her. “That is more than any person can expect, child.”
“No, no one can. But I have already learned too much on my own. Surely there are greater philosophers in Europe or China? If so, I do not know where to find them. All have betrayed me.”
“The world stands against you because you hold power over it in your hands. Your mechanism is too great. It is as if the hand of God had come among us once more. We cannot live in the direct presence of the Divine, not when the world can be unmade and remade at the stroke of one person’s will. This is the power too many have pursued of late. The danger is that they might succeed through you.”
Paolina stared at Childress a moment. “You do not serve China or England, do you?”
“I am a Mask. I serve the avebianco, and through the avebianco, the interests of humanity in the world.”
“I know nothing of Masks,” Paolina said. “All I know are people who find power within service, greed within sacrifice, and see me as the key to more of what they desire.”
“You do not need to know of Masks. You merely need to know of your own heart.”
“My heart is silent,” Paolina said
, miserable.
The Mask Childress seemed sincere. Still, she’d had enough of the British, the Chinese, their machinations. She owed nothing to anyone in Northern Earth. Only to keep herself separate from whatever poisonous intrigue they took up among themselves. The world was never so simple, even when it seemed little more than a giant version of Praia Nova with the pettiness and power of the fidalgos writ large across the hemisphere.
“You go to the Wall, but how? The captain’s question is an excellent one. How shall we put you ashore in safety? Should it be enough to cast the thing into the sea?”
“I . . . I would still know how to make another.”
“You cannot undo that knowledge,” Childress said sadly.
“Perhaps,” Paolina told her. “Perhaps.” An idea stirred in the back of her mind.
AL - WAZIR
When he finally woke with a clear head, his lungs ached. Fiercely. He was also surrounded by Chinese sailors. This seemed like a problem.
Al-Wazir sat up on his hands. The cascade of blinding red pain reminded him he was missing one. An even bigger problem.
He fell back to the deck, swallowing curses and renewing a headache he’d managed to forget. Two of the sailors helped him up again, bracing his elbows and chattering at him in Chinese. Someone else stroked his hair. The compartment smelled strongly of machine oil and the Chinese as well as salt-logged al-Wazir.
“Air,” he said, gasping. “Might I have fresh air?”
They led him stumbling down a passageway to a ladder. Pistols appeared in a few fists. These men are not fools, he thought. In his current state, al-Wazir couldn’t take over a rowboat. Still, he was easily twice their size, and not fit at all for this little vessel.
They chivvied him up the ladder. One-handed, exhausted, al-Wazir didn’t think he could make the climb. Only the smell of fresh sea air drew him onward.
He stumbled out onto the deck of the submarine. Clear water the color of blown glass lapped close by. Breeze plucked at him. A green-wrapped coast was close by, with a small crowd of men along the shore.
Al-Wazir shuddered in the sunlight, then collapsed to a sitting position with his back against the cold, damp iron of the submarine’s tower.
Where am I?
The sailors who’d brought him spread out across the deck, leaving him to his thoughts. Two of their number armed with pistols remained crouched close by, grinning at him. Despite the weapons, al-Wazir did not feel threatened. It was like a man showing his fist in a bar . . . a promise of what might come, if things went awry, but no intent of violence in that moment.
“Chief?”
He glanced around. That had been in English.
“Chief al-Wazir!?”
“Paolina?” Al-Wazir looked up. Someone peered over the edge of the top of the tower, but it didn’t look like the girl. He couldn’t easily tell—the person’s head was silhouetted by the sunlight.
Feet on a ladder within the tower echoed behind him; then Paolina burst out onto the deck. She hurled herself at al-Wazir’s chest, hugging him. “You’re better! You’re walking.”
“Aye, and waking, lassie. Ah, lassie, I thought I’d lost you, too. That would be a foul hard blow after leaving John Brass in Africa.” He stroked her hair a moment. “Now get up before yon Chinee gossip about us.”
“I hope Boaz found a way to slip free of the violence.” She sighed a moment. “You remember asking me to take this ship to Lanarkshire?”
He frowned, thinking back into the confusion of recent hours. “Ah . . . no.”
“Your fever was breaking.” Paolina’s expression sagged oddly. “Oh, Chief, I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t like the sound of that at all. “For what, lassie?”
“When we were drowning, in the storm, I used the gleam. To improve our chances of surviving. This ship, Five Lucky Winds, moved a hundred miles in a moment. In your fever, you asked if I could move the ship to Lanarkshire. P-probably I could. But we caused an earthquake here. People d-d-died.”
“Lassie, lassie, never you mind that.” He wished that he hadn’t pushed her away. Her misery was writ large upon her face.
“The Mask Childress w-w-wants to put me ashore on the Wall. I want that as well. But the gleam. It’s too powerful.”
“You’ll know what to do, lassie.” He prayed that was true. Her toy was a terrible invention, one that could make any man a wizard with deadly will.
“I do now.”
“And what is that?” al-Wazir asked softly.
But she wouldn’t tell him. Instead she just shook her head and stared out at the horizon.
_______
An Englishwoman joined them shortly thereafter. Older, slight of build, gray-haired.
“I am the Mask Childress.” Her accent was colonial. She stared down at him.
He tried to get up, but his legs trembled too much. Instead he made a clumsy salute from where he sat. “Chief Petty Officer Threadgill Angus al-Wazir, of Her Imperial Majesty’s Royal Navy airship service.” He wondered what a Mask was, but he was too tired to ask.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Childress nodded. “You brought this girl and her mechanism across the Indian Ocean, I see.”
“No. She brought herself. I merely followed.”
“We were taken,” Paolina said. “In Mogadishu. Where we lost Boaz.”
“It does not matter.” The Mask looked at them both, with something like pity in her eyes. “You are here. You have hard choices now.”
“I have a plan,” Paolina announced. “How to stop the threat of the gleam. It touches people as well as the world.” She took a deep breath. “I w-w-will use it to erase my own knowledge of how to build another one.”
“No!” Childress seemed shocked.
“Aye,” al-Wazir said.
The Mask met his eyes. “We cannot do that to her,” she said.
“ ’Tis not we who do aught to her. She kens the danger even if you do not.”
“Neither of you shall do anything to me,” Paolina said. “The gleam is deadly dangerous. I made this thing. It is for me to take it from the world.”
“You cannot.” Childress was gaping and waving for words. “To destroy a known thing, to remove knowledge from the world . . . it is wrong.”
“This knowledge is evil,” al-Wazir said. “There’s them as kills and dies for what this girl knows.”
Paolina nodded. “I have killed for it. I have nearly died for it, over and over. Two empires pursue this. It must be removed.”
Childress seemed to have control of her voice now. “I disagree. A thing done once will be a thing done again. Much like the path the Silent Order seeks to reopen under the guise of the Golden Bridge and their efforts to pass beyond the Wall. This thing of yours is in the world. To damage your mind, your soul, is too high a price to pay for something which cannot be hidden anyway.”
“No, no, ’tis her that does it,” Al-Wazir finally got to his feet, though the horizon swayed as he stood. “If she removed herself and her infernal device from the world, no man would find the manner of doin’ it again.”
“It would be best if I did not know,” said Paolina. “Should the Silent Order ever again take me somehow, they cannot force me to make another. For your Golden Bridge or any other purpose.”
Childress shook her head. “Not my Golden Bridge. Regardless, you owe yourself your best strength, your highest effort. Not cutting off the fingers of your mind.”
Al-Wazir found enough strength to step away from the support of the tower. The two sailors with their pistols waddled back as well, keeping their distance, but they did not seem worried. “Paolina . . .”
She met his eye.
“What would Boaz have you do?”
“Boaz would have me do what was best.” She sighed. “He was not a moral actor, Chief. He was a Brass man of Ophir, a creature of a Muralha.”
“The Wall is neither moral nor immoral, woman. It swallowed me ship, it swallowed me da’s soul, it swa
llowed up the Roman Empire, and it may yet swallow up the British Empire. I do not know whether a man o’ the Wall can be any more than a man o’ the Wall, but he can show you the way.”
“I am a woman of the Wall.”
“And a woman of Northern Earth,” Childress said softly.
The launch returned with the water barrels as they spoke. The deck was suddenly aswarm with Chinese sailors, tuns of water, and two puzzled Sumatrans in straw skirts with painted faces.
Leung rejoined them as the water was pumped into a connection inset in the deck.
“The girl has a plan, Captain.” There was a catch in Childress’ voice.
“Aye, and she has the right of it,” al-Wazir added.
“This is for me to decide,” Paolina snapped.
Leung shook his head. “It is for me to decide. I command here.”
Paolina drew herself up and squared her shoulders. “You do not command me.”
One of the Sumatrans called out, pointing. Al-Wazir looked, following the line of the man’s arm.
A trio of Chinese airships rose over the line of mountains behind the shore.
Leung shouted up to the tower. The lookout shouted back down.
“Ship smoke to the northwest,” he said. “The pursuit out of Singapore has located us.”
“What now?” asked al-Wazir, suddenly very tired of fighting.
The captain looked at the airships a moment. “We bind ourselves over. Five Lucky Winds cannot flee an entire fleet. Not in these waters, in clear weather and broad daylight.”
“Then I must do this thing now,” said Paolina. “Put me to sea in your boat, so that the gleam will not affect the submarine.”
“No,” said Childress.
“Aye,” said al-Wazir.
Leung barked orders in Chinese, then offered Paolina his hand.
CHILDRESS
She watched Paolina step down into the launch. Ming and Fat Cheung went with her to man the oars and lend her aid. Leung had the crew dump the barrels they had not yet pumped and pass the empties back down the hatch.
“They cannot move the full ones down the ladder,” al-Wazir said. “Too heavy.”