Escapement

by Jay Lake

  “Solomon placed his Admiral Alzabar in command of the fleet, but gave unto him an adjutant who was the first of my kind. This man was hight Brass. Brass had been wrought by Solomon as a teacher and plaything for Rehoboam and others among the best of Solomon’s sons. When Rehoboam was grown to his manhood, Solomon had no further need for Brass, and so dispatched him south with the admiral.

  “When they came hard upon the coast of Abyssinia, there rose a great storm and a full portion of the fleet was driven ashore. Admiral Alzabar surrendered his life in the catastrophe, as did several of the greatest captains of the fleet. Brass took command and brought them to the Wall. There he played the mercer well, filling the remaining vessels with gold, silver, thyine wood, precious stones, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Brass sent the laden bottoms home to his master and betook his own way into the jungles that lie at the foot of the Wall.

  “There Brass rose in might and power, walking among the tribes as a fearsome creature who dispensed justice and death in equal measures, according to how he was met. From him, our kingdom was forged. All who walk in metal are his children.”

  Paolina waited until it was clear his silence would continue. “What shall I call you, then?”

  “Brass. We are all hight Brass.”

  “Made of metal, do you have a soul?”

  He stopped so abruptly, she nearly ran into him. Turning, his strange mechanical eyes met her gaze. “We are children of the holy King Solomon the Wise.”

  Which did not, she realized, answer the question. But Paolina smiled. “Of course.” She continued, “And Authority. Is that the council of elders among you Brass?”

  “Authority is . . . Authority.”

  The question caused him such obvious distress that she let it lapse.

  Eventually the trail brought them to a higher, wider ledge out of the country of the crumbling cliffs. The clouds below were thinning as well. The trail ran through a broad meadow.

  The area was wide enough for all the extents of Praia Nova to have been set down within it. It was overlooked by a building, hollow-roofed with gaping windows, stone blackened by fire. The immense structure might have looked at home in Karindira’s city, though it was hard to know for certain among the tumbled columns and broken lintels. A great bay in a Muralha rose behind it, a place where the Wall had retreated farther from the sea in some ancient catastrophe, leaving rank upon rank of forest and meadow and waterfall and crag. Or perhaps it was just a ravine writ on the scale of all Creation. She could not tell.

  Paolina simply stood and stared.

  Brass seemed anxious. “Here stands the Armory of Westmost Repose. Beneath the glory of the Wall it wards the paths into the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”

  Paolina stepped past Brass. Weeds grew among the stones of the plaza before the building, some of them entire bushes larger than she. Whatever had swept the Armory had done so in times long past. “Not in generations,” she told him. “How long have you been at the border?”

  “I do not know. What is the year?”

  She turned to study his handsome, frozen face. “1902 of the Christian Era.”

  “That is not possible.” Now he sounded truly stricken. “I set forth to the armory in Tishrei 5663. I have served here since . . . since . . .” He stopped. “I do not know.”

  So this place was called Tishrei, but what was 5663? That made no sense as a year, at all. “How can your kind forget?”

  “We cannot.” Brass began to walk in small circles, one leg jerking with each step. “We are incapable of forgetting. Every memory is recorded in the tiny gears and valves deep within my head. Then that memory is scribed within crystals that are nigh indestructible. When a Brass becomes very aged, he might perchance have his crystals exchanged. This deposits some of his remembrance in the libraries within the Palace of Authority. Still they are his thoughts and deeds and memories.” He almost stuttered. “I—I cannot forget.”

  It was clear that Brass was set to sink into a mechanical equivalent of despair. She pitied him for that, but she also needed his strength and knowledge of affairs along a Muralha.

  “But you have.” Paolina kept her voice reasonable, trying to reach him. “Time beats at your heart, yet you have forgotten it. Your knowledge of the system of the years is wrong. You remember the Armory of Westmost Repose as a great defense, yet it is an old ruin. You do not remember being sent to the border where I found you.”

  “True,” he admitted, stopping his manic pace. His limbs shivered. He was settling into the inanimate object he’d been when she first encountered him.

  Paolina had to inspire him. “Then you have forgotten. It is mere reason to accept that. Perhaps your crystals or valves were tampered with. Perhaps your memories were stolen, or removed by Authority for its own purposes. Your thoughts might lie even now in those libraries you speak of, ranked in elegiac array with the mighty deeds of the ancients.” She dropped her voice, urging him to believe. “All you can do is go to the Palace of Authority and demand that the theft of your memory be redressed. You are bound there by duty, now, to carry me. You will serve both yourself and your orders if you take us both there.”

  High overhead some wide-winged bird screamed as Brass stared at her. He remained silent, locked into immobility for seconds that stretched into minutes. She looked back at him, but whatever light had made him Brass, and not simply brass, had faded.

  She had failed.

  “At least this is a prettier place for you to stand,” Paolina told him. If only she could find his word, what he was missing, the inconceivable thought that could not be formed by him. She wondered what that would be. Like a riddle from God. Or in his case, from the first Brass and King Solomon before.

  She went to have a closer look at the Armory of Westmost Repose. Layers of stone and forest and meadow rose above the building into the infinite grace of the sky.

  In places of beauty like this, she could remember that God had a benevolent purpose for His Creation.

  The Armory of Westmost Repose was certainly at rest now. Up close she could see how dark-leafed vines had overtaken the foundations and the rubble of its collapse, so that they clung like a wiry shadow to the building.

  This had not been built by whoever had erected the fat-bellied pillars farther east in Karindira’s city. Judging from their stubs, these pillars had been wide, squat, and squared off. The building, though quite massive, had been designed with a different sense of how such things should be done—it had been almost crude.

  Not precisely an architecture of defense, though. The armory lacked an outer wall. The men of Praia Nova had gone on about a city wall from time to time, agreeing sagely that such a construction made a place a place. Which would have made sense to Paolina if they’d had ten times the manpower available to build it, and possibly any real enemies with which to concern themselves.

  Here, though, a wall might have made sense.

  Paolina climbed the foundation stones to peer within the broken windows. The roof had collapsed in a number of places, leaving pillars of dusty light to carve the shadows within. There wasn’t much to see, only that whatever had lain within was long ago looted or salvaged. Which was to be expected. She’d long ago reasoned that there must be thousands of villages along a Muralha, populated by hundreds of races and kinds of thinking beings.

  She scrambled back down off the stones to set her face eastward. She was startled to find Brass standing there.

  “I have reasoned that you are correct,” he said.

  Paolina smiled. “About going to the Palace of Authority?”

  “Yes. It is a substantial journey from here.”

  “I know. A boy of my acquaintance took two years to walk from Africa to Praia Nova.”

  “There may be another method for us to expedite our progress.”

  “Do the brass cars run here beneath the Armory of Westmost Repose?”

  He seemed startled, his eyes clicking. “You know of them?”

  “I have seen them
in another place. The woman who showed one to me did not know the secret of their direction. I feared to climb in and ride lest I starve along the way, not knowing the proper command to exit.”

  “This I understand,” Brass said. “That was most probably wise of you. But we should pass within, to ascertain if the downward ways are blocked. If they are not, we will discover if the car harbor remains intact. It would turn a journey of months into hours.”

  Paolina wasn’t certain she wanted to come to Authority so quickly. Still, she wanted to get to England with her gleam, and that path lay through Authority. “I will come. But before we go look, will you accept something from me?”

  “What is that?” He seemed suspicious now, and formal as well.

  “A name. I would call you something other than Brass. How else will I know you in a city of your people?”

  “But we are all called Brass,” he protested. “It is the natural order of things. Each kens what he means when we speak to one another.”

  “Still, I would call you more.”

  “What would you name me?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was flattered or annoyed. Nonetheless, she pressed on. “Boaz. It means ‘strength.’ Boaz was the name of the northern pillar of Solomon’s Temple. You are strong, and you are descended from Solomon through the eldest Brass. And besides, it is not so different from your old name, is it?”

  “In Solomon’s tongue, we are all called nehosheth,” he said. “Which does not seem much like Boaz, nor does it precisely mean ‘Brass.’ But I thank you.”

  “You are welcome. Boaz.”

  “Indeed.” He seemed pleased, though not likely to admit it.

  They picked through rubble and the choked canes of old shrubbery to find the passage downward from the heart of the Armory. It was not unlike the shaft beneath Karindira’s city, save that there were chains and guides dangling in the center core, while they crept round an outer stair of metalwork affixed to the wall.

  “What was this?” Paolina asked, looking up in the vague light of the smoldering torch she carried. Boaz had seemed surprised she would need such a thing. “It looks like a tackle rig.”

  “There is—” Boaz stopped a moment. “There was an ascender here in another age. The device was lifted and lowered by chains along these tracks. A little floor, in truth. The power to raise the lift was borrowed from deep within the earth, through a system of gears that drew off the endless motions therein.”

  “Goodness.” Paolina would very much have liked to see such a thing. “Like a parasite, robbing the application of force from a larger system with surplus to spare?”

  “Yes.”

  “There must have been such a one beneath the city where I last saw the brass cars. The stair wound around a large shaft there that seemed much too vast for its purpose.”

  “Precisely.” He kept walking.

  So did she.

  The descent was longer than the shaft in Karindira’s city. Of course, they’d come higher up to reach the Armory of Westmost Repose. She presumed that the brass cars ran on a track that was at a constant distance from the center of the earth. Paolina didn’t fancy the long walk back up if their efforts proved fruitless.

  Boaz pulled ahead of her with his unflagging pace. Where at first he was a pale glint directly in front of her, after a while, he was a corner ahead, then two corners, until he’d gone all the way around. The only reason Paolina knew she was not alone in the shaft was the tapping of Boaz’ feet on the metal stairs below.

  In time his footfalls changed from an echoing clang to a more muted tap. Paolina had counted him seven landings ahead of her, four landings to a flight, so she took heart from this. When she reached the stone floor, she stopped.

  There was still an empty space to her left, where the chains and frames of the ascender continued down. A hissing, clicking echoed from below, just at the edge of her hearing. She thought it must be the turning of the earth. To hear the very sounds of that movement made her flush—Paolina could feel her cheeks reddening.

  She had another problem, though. Her smoldering cane torch had become a very poor handful. Darkness opened up before her, where the shaft let out into a larger chamber, as well as to the left where it continued to descend. If this bore any resemblance to the carway beneath Karindira’s city, somewhere in the middle of a large room would be a brass car like a large metal coffin with a crystal lid.

  But she didn’t want to go wandering off into the blackness.

  “Boaz,” she called. “Boaz?”

  There was no answer, only a series of clanging noises.

  She stepped out a bit farther into the darkness. “Boaz?” Fear found her now. A pale light flickered ahead. She could see his silhouette moving before it. Even then, Paolina did not walk faster—she was afraid of holes in the floor, or worse.

  She made her way to Boaz’ side. He stood before a brass car. Its lid was raised to expose the coffin within. The light came from little six-pointed seals along the inside and outside of the car. They glowed with a pale blue flicker.

  “The seal does seem to be intact,” he said. “We may climb within. I shall then set the carriage to reach one of the carways at Ophir.”

  “In the Palace of Authority?” For some reason her gut lurched at the thought.

  “No . . . ,” he said slowly. “Let us go first to the main harbor. We can see how the city stands.”

  Unlike the Armory of Westmost Repose, hopefully.

  He was right. She might have better luck searching for the English if she didn’t commence from somewhere deep within Authority’s halls.

  “Here.” He pointed within. “I counsel you to sit to the rear. Lay yourself back on the saddle. I will position myself immediately before you.”

  The saddle was more of a bench, covered in old and rotting leather. Three small people or two large could fit within, lying on one another’s laps. It seemed . . . salacious.

  It also seemed rapid.

  She climbed in. Boaz settled in before her, careful not to pinch or crush her against the bench. He leaned back and tugged on the crystal and brass lid.

  “You may still choose elsewise.”

  Risk, she thought. This is risk. So was every mile walked under the open sky. Paolina tugged the gleam from her pocket. She had to contort a bit to do it, and had she been larger, it would not have been possible.

  “Away,” she told him.

  He touched something, and light blossomed like a private sunrise.

  After the initial bright eruption that launched them on their way, the submural transit was shadowed. Oppressively so, in fact, except for the blue glow of the seals within the car. There was barely enough light for her to glimpse towering bands of metal sliding past, smooth cliffs in the shadows. Gears towered the height of mountains, or so it seemed to her. Pillars flashed closer by with a swift whickering.

  The saddle beneath her transmitted a series of clicks and bumps as the car slid along. Paolina had no way to judge their progress. She wished for more light, would have prayed for it if she had thought that might help.

  All too soon the car clattered to a halt. It slid into a dim room lit by pale seal-light with a sigh of tired metal.

  “We are arrived,” said Boaz as he opened the canopy.

  AL - WAZIR

  Herr Doctor Professor Lothar Ottweill and his minions were to take ship at Gosport in Hampshire, across the harbor from Portsmouth. Al-Wazir would have been far happier with a berth aboard one of Her Imperial Majesty’s ships of the air. Their cargo capacity was nominal, due to weight restrictions, and Ottweill wanted to travel with his supply train.

  The doctor demanded SS Great Eastern carry them to Africa and the Wall, apparently imagining that the largest ship afloat would also be the safest. He and al-Wazir had argued about it several times, both at the quarry near Maidstone and on the rail trip from Maidstone to Gosport.

  “I’ll be telling you,” al-Wazir said to Ottweill as the rails clicked by beneath the floor
, “a big iron tub like that’ll just pull you down all the faster should a storm come on. If you’ve got to be stuck on the water, let her be a fast and nimble ship with good trim. Not some madman’s great riveted turtle.”

  “But the space for our equipage and our complement of men,” Ottweill had protested. “Unshakable, unsinkable, braving Chinese saboteurs and hostile natives alike.”

  “Ain’t a fuzzy wuzzy born could sink an English ship.” Al-Wazir was muttering, his pride stung. “And no ship ever built could be unsinkable, save she sat forever on land like one of them coffin ships of the heathen kings of long ago.”

  “Neither heathen kings nor English are we, you and I.” Ottweill had a sly gleam.

  That remark would have given Kitchens a rash. “We serve Her Imperial Majesty, body and soul and shilling.”

  “Of course we do.” Ottweill leaned forward, knees almost touching al-Wazir in the private compartment. “But know that we serve also the Wall. That’s why we’re both here, my good chief petty officer. Men of vision we both are! We see beyond the lowered eyes of others. If a way we cut through the Wall, our names they shall be teaching to schoolchildren a thousand years from now.”

  “Your name, belike,” said al-Wazir gruffly, though he could not turn away the secret smile that tugged at this face. “I’m just an old sailor who knows his way about a bit.”

  The Wall. It had eaten Bassett, Smallwood, and most of the crew. It had broken al-Wazir’s da a generation before.

  By God, maybe this madman could best it.

  And that was the English way, after all. Show Johnnie foreigner a thing or two, run up the flag, and improve the place.

  Every day, al-Wazir found a new reason to be glad he was a Scotsman.