Escapement

by Jay Lake

  “Our airships are crewed by men,” he said, not unkindly. “The sort who break wind at inopportune moments and don their trousers one leg before the other.”

  “I thought something else,” she muttered.

  “We all did, in our way.” He added, “That airship burned until we passed over the horizon.”

  Paolina winced. “I killed them.”

  “This is what ships do to one another.” His voice was gentle counterpoint to the harsh words, yet still strangely distant. “Kill, or be killed. The men who man them are fleas on a dying dog. What interests me far more than the fact that they died is the mechanism of their dying.”

  She stared silently along Notus’ sternway and wondered if there was a pall of smoke somewhere to the south that she could see.

  “Sometimes an airship dies because of phosphorous shot to the gasbag. Sometimes ordinary shells will pound her stays and rigging until she comes apart. Sometimes small-arms fire will sweep her decks. I think you perhaps see the pattern here, yes?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Good.” Sayeed pushed on, still polite, still relentless. “Then you see how a prudent and canny airship captain might wonder, in full consideration and gratitude for his good fortune, how another airship came to explode and fall burning to earth. Especially shortly after his own port engine experienced unusual variations in performance.”

  “It will not happen to your ship.”

  He leaned close. “What will not happen to my ship, Miss Barthes?”

  “Me.” She was surprised to find herself shivering with unshed tears.

  “Perhaps you should explain. In detail, preferably.”

  Paolina glanced around. The deck was wide open, helmsman and master standing nearby, sailors scrambling about their business a few dozen feet away. “Here?”

  “It is a small vessel, Miss Barthes. We could go below, but words carry through the walls.”

  So she told him about the stemwinder, how she had come to build it, and how she had grown to understand the gleam in her travels in pursuit of English wizards to whom she might be apprenticed.

  When Paolina was done, Sayeed nodded gravely. “May I see it?”

  She stiffened, then opened her mouth to frame some reply when Sayeed raised a hand. “My apologies. I did not mean that as a euphemism for taking the thing in hand. I simply would like to lay my eyes upon your device.”

  Paolina drew the leather pouch from within the pocket of her dress, then tugged the mechanism out. “Here, sir.” She presented it for his inspection while retaining a firm grasp.

  Sayeed leaned forward, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. He stared a moment, then looked at her closely. “You have made a thing which measures so closely that its measuring is indistinguishable from what it measures.”

  It took her a moment to unravel what Sayeed was saying. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Have you always been interested in measurements?”

  She thought back on Davies’ original stemwinder, the marine chronograph she’d thought to be copying. “Yes, always, though until I met an Englishman, I had no idea of the extent of your wizardry.”

  “That is not an English monopoly,” Sayeed said dryly. “You may have noted that neither you nor I is English.”

  “Yet here we are on an English ship, speaking the Queen’s tongue.”

  “One lives in the world one finds.” He fell quiet a moment, contemplating something. “There are great and greater clocks, you know. Far more than instruments to measure time. As you have here, but wrought into the architecture of cities.”

  “How great?” Paolina’s heart surged. Clocks were . . . Creation. God had built all the universe as a clock, after all.

  “I am thinking of the Schwilgué Clock, in Strasbourg.”

  “Is that in England?”

  “No.” Sayeed laughed. “Though the city is ruled well enough from London. No, no, that is in the Germanies.”

  “What does it measure?”

  “Everything. The days, the months, the years, the centuries, sun, moon, tides, all the affairs of God’s earth.”

  She was in love. That was the only word for the warmth that flooded her heart. “That is the sort of genius I came to see, and learn from. True mastery of the magics of Creation.”

  “I cannot speak of true mastery. Some people say that there are Clockmakers, who came before God, or followed him.” Sayeed shrugged. “I follow a different prophet, a man of my people who has given us a different truth. But I know that the Schwilgué Clock is the pinnacle of this road.”

  She resolved to find her way there. Newton was dead, while the English ships were empty of the wizards she thought she’d been promised. Perhaps she could learn from this great clock instead.

  AL - WAZIR

  The next day the men of the camp scavenged the corpses of the winged savages looking for clues to what might have brought the feral angels to them. As they worked, the steam borer continued to grind ever deeper in its tunnel.

  “Bassett never could kill them worth a tinker’s damn,” al-Wazir told Boaz.

  “A ship of the air, with a small company. That would be difficult.”

  They watched men pile bodies, once the dead had been thoroughly poked and prodded to elicit any lingering response of life. The last few were red-skinned men with needle-filled mouths.

  “Be those of your people?”

  “No,” Boaz said. “They hail from much higher on the Wall. Mutes, of an angry disposition, with little loyalty to any master.”

  “Then why do they fight for the brass men of Ophir?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Aye. Neither do I. Never the important answers, to be sure.” Not even meeting the Prime Minister had changed that.

  The work party had a heap of bronze swords, with several iron ones for good measure. All were bloody. There were a few raw or rotting leather harnesses, some with pouches, and a pile of rags that had served as breechclouts.

  Little more.

  “Ophir is ancient,” Boaz explained. “Nearly half the age of the entire world. When King Solomon set his seals to breathe life into the first Brass, the memories of Creation were yet fresh. Asiongaber is as lost to us as Jerusalem itself, but we still remember. A colony, you English might say, from the countries of the past.”

  “What is the Queen’s ambition to your lot? It’s not as if we’ve come to Ophir with sword in hand, or raised our colors upon your land.”

  “I have not abided in Ophir for well more than a century. I stood senseless upon the western defenses until Paolina found me. I ken not what Authority intends for this age. Still Brass are of the Wall, the Wall is of Brass. We never descend to your flatwater countries, but some of you come to us. Consider that I even speak your tongue, instead of honest Hebrew or the original Adamic. We hear much of English ambition and English pride. You were never ones to grab hold of something and let it go again.”

  “Aye, and we’ve spake on this before. Perhaps the Crown is a grasping mistress. To send armies down the Wall, and recruit those filthy winged savages, that steps far beyond mere argument. Is that not true?”

  Boaz stepped over a shattered log, then paused to pick up a fragment of metal. “I do not know.” He walked onward through the slippery, sticky mud. “Perhaps there are troubles within the city which require distraction. It would not be the first war in history fought to keep the people’s thoughts far from home.”

  Al-Wazir mulled the metal man’s words. There was no lack of sense to them. He’d seen much the same thing back in England, time and again. None of which solved his problem. He sighed with frustration. “And so it comes to this. How do I set a stop to them?”

  “I think you cannot. Neither vengeance nor justice is afoot here. There is no grievance to be addressed, no reparation to be made. It is simply that England wants one thing and Ophir wants another.”

  “Desires in dispute.” He stopped and turned to look up at the immensity of the Equat
orial Wall. Had he been a man given to vertigo, he might have surrendered to it. The height was a magnet, drawing him upward, much as the depths below a ship’s rail might draw an unwary man to fly the morning sky without benefit of wings.

  It wasn’t just a Wall around the waist of the world, he realized. It was a Wall that trapped the world. “God has made us in chains,” he muttered. “This free will is naught more than a promise of sweets to a bairn, while He bindeth us so.”

  Boaz’ voice was gentle. “You English seek to break those sacred bonds, with your tunnels and your airships.”

  “Though I am sworn to the Crown, I am no Englishman,” al-Wazir said darkly. “I will not break my oath, after all these years, but this is what the busy English have always done since Saxons first came to Albion’s shore.” He shook his head, trying to clear the mood that clung to him. “No matter now.” His voice and thoughts almost properly Naval again. “What you say is that we cannot sue Ophir for some peace, nor reach an accommodation.”

  “Yes. That is the truth as I comprehend it.” Their slow, difficult walk had reached the ragged line where the clearing met the forest. Two shattered brass bodies gleamed in the shadows, riven by shells from the guns on the palisades.

  Paolina would have set to examining their interiors, al-Wazir thought. Such a strange little chit, too wise and too weird in the same head.

  Al-Wazir toed a chest plate. “Are all Brass brothers to you?”

  “Are all men brothers to you?”

  “Well . . . no. Not at all. But we are legion, each born of a different woman in a different place. You are fewer, made men of your single city. Stamped from the same mold. Each of these fallen might easily be you.”

  “When you tear two men apart with sword or shot, what remains of each might as easily be the other.”

  A roar echoed from behind them. Al-Wazir and Boaz both turned, staring. One of the palisade guns was firing high into the air. Looking up along the angle of the barrel, he saw a flight of winged savages diving fast toward the camp.

  “By all that’s holy!” he screamed. “I am not with my men!”

  Al-Wazir began running across the muddy, churned field toward the camp. His strides were excruciatingly slow as he shouted orders he knew no one would hear yet, Boaz hard on his heels.

  They poured from the sky like so many hawks stooping on a vast bury of conies.

  Al-Wazir’s feet slipped on mud and roots and bones and the blood of armies, too slow, too late, too far to turn back the tide that overwhelmed his duty.

  There was no ground assault this time. It was only the air that teemed with death. The cannons on the palisade barked shell after shell, until their operators were slain. Small-arms fire rattled and cracked from the ground, but even as he fought through the broken wrack that blocked the gate, al-Wazir knew the men were not massed for firing.

  Boaz shoved past him to shift more of the timber baulks. The gate had not been blocked on their way out.

  “I am too slow,” al-Wazir roared.

  By the time they broke through the other side, the winged tide had shifted away again. It was conducted much as the attacks on Bassett had been—a strike like lightning on a church steeple, then gone before the thunder could touch a man’s ears.

  Many of the tents were down. Workmen and soldiers lay sprawled, limbs and heads severed, guts twining on the ground. Fifty or sixty dead, he thought at a glance. Hundreds more shrieked or milled about in panic.

  Still the steam borer ground on, down inside the Wall.

  “All right, you lot,” al-Wazir screamed, “form up now, on your lines in your divisions.”

  The panic drowned him out.

  Boaz jumped up onto a stack of crates and shouted in a voice that threatened to make al-Wazir’s ears bleed, “Form up, now!”

  The chaos of men swirled into a pattern, but already it was too late. The sky opened up once more with winged savages, silently dropping with feral leers and swinging, bloody swords.

  Al-Wazir ran toward the men. They were scattering again. “Massed fire! Massed fire! Get in line, damn your weeping eyes!”

  Then it was wings and swords and screaming death once more. He swept up a dropped carbine and fired until the magazine was spent. It was easier to move from dropped weapon to dropped weapon than to reload, though most were slick with blood.

  The winged savages flew close. This time they were not so intent on killing the panicked defenders as they were on cutting tents and setting fires.

  The attackers were destroying the camp. A thousand men unsupported would not last a week in these jungles.

  But there was nothing left to rally, no one left to stand and fight. Al-Wazir had even lost sight of Boaz in the confusion. So the chief strode among the smoke and ruin, firing guns until he ran out of them, then clubbing at the winged savages with an empty carbine until it was splintered and he stood alone under a quiet sky.

  It took him a few minutes to understand that the noise of the digging had stopped. The number one steam borer, deep in the Wall already, was silent. The number two was smoldering, damaged but not destroyed.

  And he was alone. Utterly alone, save for corpses.

  Had the winged savages killed them all?

  CHILDRESS

  The cook finally abandoned his efforts at divination to stare at her with a flat incuriosity that was almost disturbing. Childress tried smiling at him, but whatever avuncular good humor normally possessed the man was vanished surely as a daisy in winter.

  Obviously he believed in ghosts.

  Five Lucky Winds had fallen grave-quiet. Even the usual echoing footsteps and pings in the hull were stilled. Childress thought that if she strained her ears, she might be able to hear Sendai’s harbor lapping against the waterline of the hull, but even that was most likely her imagination. Whatever the so-called spiritual pulmonist that Leung consulted might be about, the business seemed to involve silence.

  When she saw frost patterning the bulkhead above her cabin hatch, Childress began to worry. The cook noticed her staring and turned to look. He grunted, then resumed his casting of auguries.

  Childress lay back on her bunk and prayed, silent and wordless contemplation. If there was magic here, it was not her magic. It did not come from or point back to the Bible or Creation as she understood it.

  Could a Chinese ghost harm her, who stood outside the Chinese cosmology?

  A groaning began. It was a deep metal noise, rather than the sound of a soul in torment. It disturbed Childress from her thoughts of God.

  She realized that the sound came from the chill causing the hull metal to contract. Did ghosts walk the boundary between warm and cool? How different was that from walking the boundary between darkness and dawn? Or the half moon, promise of shadow and potential of light bound together in a bisected silver coin.

  The cook stiffened, then stood with his hand on the haft of his chopping knife.

  Five Lucky Winds groaned again, and began to shiver like a dog. Childress grabbed the edge of her bunk and held on. She was seized by the sudden feeling that she might tip forward and fall downward to the bottom of the harbor. The submarine bucked as a fine shower of rust and dust leaked down from the ceiling and along the joins of the cabin’s construction.

  When rivets started to pop from the walls like slow, fat bullets, she shrieked.

  A moment later, it was done. A distant bell rang, some alarm on the bridge or in the engine room. The frost was gone and the ship rocked slightly, just as it usually did when moored on the surface.

  The cook grinned, bowed, swept up his divinatory aids, and left the cabin.

  Childress fought tears awhile, wondering what she had done to come to this place so alien.

  “We sail soon,” Leung said from the doorway. He did not enter her cabin.

  “Where is Choi?” The political officer’s fate was much on Childress’ conscience.

  “Asleep in his bunk, I believe.”

  “Then what was all . . . that? .
. . Before, when you made me stay here under guard.” She brandished a loose rivet.

  “A ghost does not touch lightly.”

  “Choi is still here.” She had all but condemned the man to death, to save herself, racked with guilt, and now he was sleeping in his bunk?

  Leung nodded. “Patience is the virtue of a gentleman. As well as a woman of valor.”

  She gathered both her courage and her sense of irritation. “Where to next?”

  “Tainan. And Admiral Shang.”

  _______

  The next day, when she saw him again over a breakfast of congealed rice and something she thought might be finely sliced squid, Childress asked once more after Choi.

  “I told you, he is asleep in his bunk.”

  “All the day long?”

  “In fact, yes.”

  “How . . .” She stopped. “The ghosts drew him down into his dreams?”

  “Or theirs.” Leung picked out a long sliver. “So long as he is not part of ours.”

  “I sold him to you,” she said miserably.

  “No, he sold himself, when he chose to work for the Ministry of Correct Thought.”

  “Are all political officers part of that ministry?”

  “Yes.” Leung grimaced. “It is where they hold their commissions.”

  Childress was fascinated. Though Leung talked about the Beiyang Navy, the Celestial Emperor, and the affairs of the Wall, he had said very little about life in the Chinese empire. “This correct thought is the will of your emperor?”

  “It is our way. Not so different from what Confucius would have of us, if you consider it.”

  “In the British Empire, we are at least permitted the luxury of our own thinking.”

  He laughed softly. “Did you never know someone imprisoned for speaking out against your Queen?”

  She turned that over a moment, testing her annoyance. Then: “You understand what I am saying. We do not set spies on ourselves to ferret out what is said and done at every moment in every corner.”

  “Obedience is a cardinal virtue in China. You English seem to view it as an optional behavior.”