Escapement

by Jay Lake

  He jerked to life with a sigh, moving again much as he had in the Palace of Authority.

  “Silence,” she told him. “Do not cry out. We must go soon.”

  Boaz rose and followed her to the edge of the ledge. At the eastern end it narrowed to be a part to the long fall of rock and scree dropping to the edge of the jungle that lined the bottommost reaches of a Muralha.

  Picking her way by the light of the indifferent stars, Paolina led Boaz into the night. They walked slowly and warily above the sealed army rustling in the bed of its camp.

  Some hours later, when she was so tired, every step had become a stumble, Paolina began looking for a place to rest. Africa gleamed in the moonlight ahead, though she was not certain of the distance—one mile or five, in either case it was very close. She would reach her goal in the light of the coming day. Somehow she did not think it would be difficult to find the English once she got there.

  She stared into a cleft, wondering if it was safe, when Boaz finally spoke again. “Please refrain from once more undertaking that against me.” His voice was very soft.

  “You carried me down a Muralha without my permission,” Paolina snapped. Instantly she felt foolish. It was hardly the same.

  “That was not death. What you did to me . . . was . . .”

  “Different from how you were treated in the Palace of Authority? From where I rescued you?” The whine in her voice was making her angry, but Paolina could not seem to stop herself.

  “That was a Brass matter,” he said. “You stopped me completely.”

  “And here you are again.” Defiance, now. It was as if she had become a man. Paolina tried to break through the fog of her emotions. “I am sorry, Boaz. I thought I could do right . . . no. I knew it was not right. That I thought I could do this thing at all is wrong.

  “Listen, this might be the key to your word, that you asked me to say. The word that releases you from the bond of your seal, that makes you your own machine.”

  “When humans seek to deceive themselves, they are stricken with nerves.” He squatted down next to her. “I am Brass. You are flesh. Were I to stop you as you stopped me, you would not restart. Do not mistake what can be done with me for what should be done with me.”

  “Even if I find your word that way?” She was genuinely convinced that would be possible.

  “Even then. Not unless I ask it of you.”

  Paolina nodded, then curled in a ball around her hunger and tried to find sleep. Distant thunder woke her repeatedly. She finally realized she was hearing the sounds of gunfire.

  AL - WAZIR

  He had not been prepared for the horrendous shriek of shattering stone when the steam borer cut into the Wall. It was the howling of every dog he’d ever heard, and it got inside his bones the same way the snap of breaking timbers did at sea.

  A cloud of dust immediately obscured al-Wazir’s view of the steam borer. It did nothing to dampen the obscene, chattering roar. The men cheered the beginning of the effort to drill through the Wall. All al-Wazir could see now was a looming shadow, a trundling, elongated badger with steam relief valves wailing as the cutter bored on into the stone.

  It was a reduced vision of Hell, like peeking at damnation through a keyhole.

  As everyone around him continued to cheer, al-Wazir turned toward the jungle. Hornsby’s men had cleared a two-hundred-yard field of fire. He and Hornsby had personally whitewashed rocks every ten yards, to provide range for the small-bore artillery and firearms with which the next defense would be mounted. He’d also had the men build wooden platforms in the trees at the edge of the clearing, where scouts or snipers could be positioned. Volunteer squads of Royal Marines and army enlisted ranged the jungle beyond already. Some were on brief patrols, others on long reconnaissance.

  It was as much as he knew to defend the diggings. The tactics of weapons and battle were Hornsby’s problem. The strategy of what the Wall might bring was his.

  Al-Wazir only wished he understood more about the brass men they’d been fighting. The Wall was vast, an entire vertical continent in its own right, but his experience had been that it was sparsely populated. Most denizens fought to defend, not to attack. These brass men had come from somewhere to find the English diggings.

  In this moment Bassett would have been excellently useful. They could have cruised the Wall, safe from the brass men at least, though he did not want to contemplate the winged savages.

  Those creatures had finally brought the airship down. Even now, among the swirling dust and howling of the steam borer, he remembered that day two years past as if he’d just lived through it. Smallwood had brought the vessel high, too high, many of the men had said, until the Atlantic stretched away beneath their feet dotted with clouds the size of Ireland, and the horizon had a visible curve. Up there the sky bordered on the violet, and stars could be seen during the day. The deckhands had hated it.

  Al-Wazir never did understand what the captain was looking for. What they had found was a flight of those damnable winged savages, dark and naked angels without the light of God in their eyes. The beasts had cut at the ropes and savaged the decks and sliced open the gasbag, all the while casting sailors into the air for the long, long fall to distant ground.

  He’d led the ropes division in mounting their resistance, with firearms and sword’s point, and even bare hands and bloody panic.

  It had not been sufficient.

  The saving grace was that the bag did not burn. Had the hydrogen caught the flame, Bassett would have been nothing but a torch high in the evening sky, shedding embers that had once been men. The air sailor’s greatest fear, fire—friend only to the devil and the Chinese. That had been beyond the winged savages’ efforts, apparently, or God had been with the few of them who survived both the battle and the miles-long nightmare plunge into the advancing twilight.

  The smoke and dust now was close to that memory, the shriek of the borer too much like the screams of men.

  Al-Wazir climbed down off his stockade and slipped out into the cleared field of fire. He wanted to be away from the diggings awhile, think his own thoughts in the green light of a jungle evening. He was armed with pistol and machete. Anything big enough to take him on in the face of his weapons wouldn’t care what he carried anyway. He was frightened of nothing this evening except memory.

  The Wall was a fierce mistress—like a woman, it gave life and it took life away. Sometimes a man wanted time off with a quiet drink and a smooth pair of arms to which he owed nothing.

  Al-Wazir had never really had the trick of jungles. The sea in all her moods and mysteries was as familiar as his own bunk. Lanarkshire, for all that it was a distant memory now, had involved open sky, craggy rock, and sheep.

  Al-Wazir distinctly remembered sheep. With little fondness, at that.

  Still, it was a country he knew. And every port was the same. Airship towers, docks, taverns, knocking shops, slaves, dogs, monkeys, boys, hot pies, and cold women. It didn’t manner whether you’d shipped into Nuuk or New Haven or Nouakchott. The weather changed, the skin changed, but the money traps were always the same.

  Jungles, though; every time he’d ever set foot in a jungle, it had been a different sort of confusion. Even while unloading Wallachian Prince at the dock in Acalayong, going ashore had been like entering a different world with each debarkation.

  The ground changed constantly. Where there had been vines, there were moldering leaves, or a bubbling mud pit. Great flowers that stank like rotting meat would be open one day, quivering on the forest floor, and missing the next, as if they’d never been there at all. Stands of trees teeming with barking animals would be quiet as lichyards when he passed them again.

  The world moved, surely as the sea, but trees didn’t have fins and tails to swim. By God, things that lived on land ought to stay put, honest as houses, until a man learned his way around.

  Yet here he was again, walking past the verges of their defense into the glossy-leaved darkness.

>   Someone had once told him that jungles were the lungs of the world. Al-Wazir had never been sure what that meant, some Johnnie Cleverdick thing, to be sure, but walking here in the dark he could feel it. The air stirred wet and warm as the foetor from a dying man’s mouth. Leaves moved both with and against the wind. Things crashed through the branches, many of them from the sound.

  The Northern Earth breathed hard here up against the Wall like a tuppeny whore with her shoulders against the alleyback of some sailor’s tavern. And there was Ottweill, ramming his will into her. Just as every sailor ever born had done to the poor sisters who’d gone to work beneath their skirts once their men hadn’t come home.

  Something grabbed at his ankle. Al-Wazir nearly stumbled. He caught himself and reached for his machete, only to realize he’d found a vine.

  “Sir?” asked a cautious voice ahead.

  “Al-Wazir here,” he snapped. He was embarrassed now.

  “LaMont and Mitz here, sir.” A shape loomed out of the deeper shadow. “Heading in, sir, with your kindness.”

  “Your patrol was up at dusk, yes?”

  “Sir, yes sir.” It was LaMont talking, he was pretty sure. Civilians, of all things. A few of them were serving under arms alongside Hornsby’s troops. The men were fairies, he’d figured, volunteering to be alone together in the jungle so often. As long as they had sharp eyes and a desire to live to see another sunrise, he couldn’t care less.

  This wasn’t the Royal Navy, after all.

  In that moment of relief, al-Wazir realized that some part of him had fallen away with Bassett’s long, terrifying tumble down the Wall. He’d asked the Prime Minister for his rank back, and Lloyd George had given it to him, bless the man, but al-Wazir was still in the canvas trousers and cotton shirt of half the laborers in Ottweill’s expedition.

  There were two uniforms in his kit. He hadn’t bothered. Only the Royal Marines would have cared, and them only to the extent of cocking a word, an eye, or maybe even a fist at him. Chief petty officers and Royal Marines were natural enemies, surely as wolves and eagles.

  Somewhere along the way the civvies had become natural to him.

  “We’ll just be getting on then, sir?” LaMont asked, interrupting al-Wazir’s thoughts.

  “Go,” he said.

  “ ’Ware, sir. There’s half an army out here somewhere.”

  The other one, Mitz, piped up. “They won’t be here for a few days, but you might find a scout.”

  “I’ll be back shortly,” said al-Wazir. “Tell the gate to watch for me within the hour.”

  The two of them slipped into the darkness, making less noise than the night itself. Not like me, al-Wazir thought. For him it was all crash and stumble.

  He had no business being out here, any more than he did riding the steam borer into Ottweill’s tunnel. His place was on or behind the stockade, talking to the patrols, watching the Wall, keeping them all alive. Not risking his life wandering in the dark.

  Al-Wazir turned and headed back. If he followed the noise, he’d find his way.

  The shriek of the steam borer had tapered off. Which only made sense, if the machine were even now beetling into the Wall. The drilling would take years, but not a lifetime. Even if it seemed so at the moment.

  Morning brought a buzzing in al-Wazir’s teeth, and word of an imminent attack. Hornsby had interviewed two more patrols who’d come in after dawn, and promptly sent a boy for al-Wazir. “Come on, sir,” the lad had said. “Captain Hornsby’s on about fuzzy wuzzies and marching statues. Talk some sense into him, will you please?”

  He went and found the Marine captain sitting on a camp stool in a little white tent. Hornsby wasn’t a big fellow, but he had the dried-beef toughness that al-Wazir associated with a certain kind of sailor. The sort of man who’d follow orders for years, never raise a hand or a word, then one day drop out of the rigging with a marlinspike in his hand and murder in his eye.

  Al-Wazir would never care to face the wiry officer in a fair fight, either.

  “There’s a bloody great lot of those brass men forming up less than ten miles east of here,” Hornsby told him without preamble. “With a goodly mass of foreigners of various colors and sizes. Like a fewking flower garden, it sounds, but they’re tough.”

  Hornsby having just recently met the enemy in battle, al-Wazir was inclined to trust his judgment. “Do they bear guns against us?”

  “Not this time, nor last. But they’ve some manner of spear which throws lightning. Electricks, Wall magic, it makes me no matter, but it’s an evil which can be just as good as a Lee-Enfield in the proper hands. Which the brass men seem to have a bloody lot of.”

  Al-Wazir turned that over in his head. Had the winged savages possessed such weapons, it would have gone far worse with Bassett. “Will those weapons fire our stockade?”

  Hornsby frowned. “They don’t seem to burn hot, as such. A man which is touched by them is stunned or killed, like someone lightning struck. If there’s burns, they’re small.”

  “So the stockade should hold against their fire. Numbers?”

  “Perhaps two thousand.” Another frown. “Men counting in the dusk then running away will always multiply the number of the enemy. They don’t want to be such an idiot in their own minds, you see.”

  “I know,” al-Wazir told him. “I’ve heard many a sailor tell me of the gang of men that beset him in an alley, only to find later it was two boys and a dog out rolling drunks.”

  “Ah, yes, much the same phenomenon.”

  “So do we have some cleverness afoot? Or is it line the walls with men and fire upon them until they drop away?”

  “That is where your portion of the plan is at issue, Chief.” Hornsby smoothed a crude map he had been developing from the reports of his men. “This is their homeland, these tribes of brass and flesh. No matter how many we drive off, they can lose ten for our one, perhaps a hundred for our one, and return for more of the fight. You are the man charged with seeing us safe upon the Wall. Can you find a way to draw them off, for a long time? If not forever? We did not come armed to go to war, only to fight for what is England’s.”

  “To them, we are here for war,” al-Wazir said. “In five years’ time the tunnel will be open, and there will be a city growing here. Airships, armies, factories, nannies with children of the quality, sprats the likes of what I once was running the streets with stolen fruit in hand. It takes no great vision to see what will follow us. Someone upon yon Wall, some sergeant or captain of the brass, has looked upon us and thought how he did not want England’s foot set so firmly on his porch.”

  “Do you believe in the mission that we pursue?” asked Hornsby quietly.

  “Aye.” Or at the least, he believed in the Wall, and the sincerity of Lloyd George.

  “Then by all means, man, help me pursue it. Else find a ship to carry you north and follow some other path.”

  “Of course, sir. I’ll find a way through this mess.”

  He went back up to the stockade and stared west, along the Wall where it extended out to border the Atlantic Ocean. Mists swirled over the dark jungles of morning, while the steam borer still chattered in his bones.

  “You are out there,” he told the air, already hot though the sun had barely broken over the horizon. “I do not have the guns to stop you. But I am clever, and I have all the treasure of England behind me.”

  The Wall did not answer, nor did any of the brass who even now must be passing silently among the trees before him.

  CHILDRESS

  “Tell me more of this boy and the angel,” Captain Leung asked her.

  She dined with him in the ward room, the old menu restored. The political officer was restored as well, smile and pistol and all.

  Childress still wondered what he understood, what he could understand. “His name was Hethor,” she said slowly. “Heaven had granted him a token.”

  “A token?” Leung laughed. “A coin of Hell money?”

  “No, no.” She w
as almost annoyed. “An angel’s feather. Tiny, in silver. A man took it from him.”

  “Your God does not treat His messengers well,” observed Leung.

  “That is most certainly not the case. Man mistreats the servants of God. Not the other way about.”

  “Indeed. So he took this feather in hand and went looking for the spring of the world?”

  “The mainspring.” She traced rice grains with the eating sticks. That had been growing easier with time. “He looked for the mainspring, passing through one and another of our order before leaving my notice altogether.”

  “We knew something was wrong,” Leung admitted. “We did not know what. As I said, there have been many stories.”

  “I believe this one is true.”

  “It still does not make your God true.” His voice was calm, quiet.

  “No. Not one way or the other. You can deny His workmanship or not as you choose. That is your free will. Still, there is brass in the sky and the world clatters on.”

  After a while, he said, “Some of the Celestial Emperor’s subjects even now search for their own answer.”

  “Really?” This was a new thread for her mind to pursue.

  “South of Singapore. They have found the ancient city of Chersonesus Aurea.”

  “That is not a Chinese name.”

  “No,” he admitted. “It is not. Once, in the times of antiquity, the city of Chersonesus Aurea had a Golden Bridge that crossed the Wall.”

  “Over the wall?” She tried to imagine the altitude.

  “Perhaps it was more of a tunnel,” he said with another quick grin. “We work to find or re-create the Golden Bridge.”

  Childress was horrified. “Why?”

  Now his voice grew thick, darker, filling with anger as if a rain had come into his heart. “Because of what you British will do to China if we do not. You already box us in from both east and west. Half the Northern Earth acknowledges your suzerainty. You would fly your flags over our cities had you the slightest chance. If you find your way to the lands beyond the Wall, that will be the end of the Celestial Kingdom.”