Escapement

by Jay Lake

“What?” Childress asked.

  “Be thankful this is not a festival day,” he repeated. “The street becomes too crowded.”

  All Childress could do was laugh and follow him into the life of Tainan. The crowds’ crackling energy buoyed her in a way she had not felt since before leaving New Haven. Long before leaving New Haven.

  This was what she was born to do—push through sunlight and color on a foreign street while plotting to save the world from its foolish masters. It might be a short life ahead of her, but Childress found herself more pleased than ever she could remember being.

  A few days later, Captain Leung caught up to Childress as she walked down by the harbor. He was forced to push through the crowd of children and beggars who followed her about. She had not minded, not at all.

  Neither his uniform nor the pistol he wore today seemed to have any discouraging effect on her mob of admirers.

  He glanced about. “Five Lucky Winds is almost ready to sail.”

  “Then it is good that I am ready as well.”

  He smiled. “Indeed. I could hardly hold back a vessel for the sake of an errant woman.”

  Childress followed him, still pressed about by a throng of murmuring Chinese, mostly the very young and the very old. There were no walls or gates to separate the naval base from the city. They simply passed down to the military docks where a pair of armed sailors allowed Leung and Childress onto the pier. They stopped the rest of the crowd with glowering threats.

  She looked out across the water. Five Lucky Winds was tied up at the next pier. A very shallow chop slapped against the curving hull as the submarine rode low in the water. Full, then, of fuel, provisions, ballast, whatever one packed into a such a vessel. Birds swooped, turning and screaming, to follow some shoal of garbage floating across the bay. The sun sparkled on the low ridges of the waves, a bright, cryptic script written and rewritten in every breath of the wind. Out here the tide-and-sea smell competed with the overwhelming human riot of Tainan along the shore. That scent had become almost familiar to her now.

  They cast off before dawn, moving slowly out into the straits. Though she was still not allowed in the bridge or engine room, there was otherwise little pretense of Childress being a prisoner. Some of the crew had changed, recruits or replacements stepping in, but most knew her well enough to have greeted her with a certain proprietary affection at the final muster the evening before.

  Even the new political officer seemed to defer to her. Feng was a thin, nervous man who appeared to be afraid of Childress. She suspected that Admiral Shang had exercised some informal influence on Feng’s final briefings before he came aboard.

  Now she sat in the little wardroom and studied a Chinese chart of the Asian coastline. Though she’d learned some of the tongue sailing from the Atlantic, Childress knew she’d never understand the written language. The thousands of little word-houses just didn’t cross-reference to their spoken equivalents in her head.

  Unlike the charts of the previous voyage, here she had little familiarity to help interpret what she saw. The Atlantic and even Arctic coasts had been at the edge of her awareness all her life—maps in the newspapers, charts posted in restaurants, broadsheets discussing this expedition or that battle. The Pacific might as well have been the moon for all she knew about it.

  Still, a map was a map. Leung had shown her roughly their intended course. Being aboard a submarine necessarily limited her opportunities for sightseeing—there was no rail to stand and gaze over—but she could still imagine. Without known enemies in these waters, Five Lucky Winds would often as not run surfaced through the South China Sea. She could spend time in the tower.

  I am alive, Childress told herself, tracing routes upon the map and wondering what each island and shoreline might offer her. I live.

  The guilt and fears of the past, even—or especially—the death of Mute Swan, seemed to have faded into just another pattern in her thoughts. There was much to sorrow for. Still, to be voyaging here instead of dying in some European dungeon at the whim of the Silent Order was a great gift, not to be denied.

  FOURTEEN

  PAOLINA

  Star of Gambia steamed out of Marseilles bound for Messina, Kalamata, Tyre, and then the Suez Canal and points beyond. Ilona Bartholomew, who still thought of herself as Paolina Barthes, was aboard as a paying second-class passenger—forty-seven pounds passage, plus five pounds the purser demanded for “expediting fees.” Unworldly as she was, even Paolina knew a bribe when she saw one. There was little enough she could do about it save smile, pay, and be very grateful for the modest amount of the graft.

  Even now in October the memory of summer lay over the Mediterranean. The wind off the coast was warm and quiet, and the water was a lazy, peaceful blue. Paolina had never experienced winter, but she’d read about it in Dickens, and heard tales of snow and ice passed down from various of Praia Nova’s settlers. While she had a strong sense of intellectual curiosity about the sky opening up with frozen water, she had no real desire to experience that intersection of chilled air and precipitation.

  As far as she was concerned, God had meant the days to be equal the whole year round, and nights always warm. That was how it was upon a Muralha. All the way down to her bones, that was how Paolina expected it to be.

  The freighter had to have been built to be dilapidated from the first. The crew was a mix of Africans, Arabs, and southern Europeans—much darker skinned than Sayeed’s crew, where the captain himself had been the swarthiest man. They didn’t seem so horrified of having her aboard, either. There were three other female passengers, while two of the officers had wives, or at least women, traveling with them.

  She was the only woman voyaging alone. Somehow that hadn’t mattered up on the Wall, where her worries revolved far more around finding food, or not becoming food in her turn. Out in the countries of Northern Earth, propriety seemed to count for more than any measure of sense. It was as if the fidalgos ran the world.

  Paolina was beginning to appreciate that the old men who controlled Praia Nova had come by their attitudes honestly. Which only deepened her bitterness at them.

  Her efforts to reach England had ended in miserable failure. She never did meet the English wizards she’d believed to be there. At this point she was fairly certain they no longer walked the Northern Earth. Certainly those agents of the Queen in Strasbourg were custodians of the Schwilgué Clock, neither its masters nor even its honest servants.

  Worse, she had lost the gleam. She wondered over and over whether she was responsible for the disaster in Strasbourg. She told herself that the Silent Order had taken the gleam from her by force. They had misused it.

  Yet the logic of that felt cheap and self-serving. Had she not built the thing, brought it into the world, it would never have been available to the bishop and his men.

  What if they had set their ambitions even larger? How many would have died? How much of the Northern Earth would have perished?

  Shying away from that thought, she also very much hoped that Lachance had not been struck down in the disaster.

  In no wise was this an outcome worthy of the trouble and pain she’d experienced to get here. Paolina watched the ship’s wake and wondered what she should have done differently. The English were afraid of the Chinese, but if she somehow went to them instead, they would see only a European girl and likely treat her no better than the English had.

  It was a Muralha for her. With some indecent luck, that would mean a chance to locate Boaz. Maybe she would just climb until she found a friendly country, away from the flatwater world of English and men alike.

  Star of Gambia was seven days from Marseilles to Messina, then on to Kalamata. Paolina took her meals at the passengers’ mess. She spoke little. That seemed to suit her fellow travelers, though the women glanced at her from time to time. The men ignored her in preference for a game of cards that had begun before leaving Marseilles and never really seemed to end.

  She wasn’t sure what stakes the
y gambled for, and didn’t feel a need to find out. Paolina spent as much time as possible out upon the deck taking the weather. She’d liked the open air aboard Notus, and had grown up outside at Praia Nova besides. The crew ignored her, chattering of their own pursuits in strange languages.

  Every time she walked the deck, she saw a dozen repairs or improvements she could make if she had time and leave to do the work. From poor rigging in the deck cranes to balky hinges on certain hatches, the ship spoke to her. Cried, even. Mindful of what would be said if she so much as ventured a suggestion, Paolina shoved the thoughts away as best she could.

  Heading for Tyre, the ship encountered what the mess steward said was the first bad storm of the season. The passengers were seated for dinner amid clattering plates and sliding silverware when he came from the galley with a sorrowful expression upon his face.

  “Friends,” the steward said—he always called the passengers friends, as if delighted to see them—“regretting the cook cannot finish service for you. Biscuits and wine you may take to your staterooms. My sorrow is vain and blushing great.”

  Paolina wondered what language lay hidden below the odd contours of his English. She smiled as she stood. “I shall excuse myself before the walk back to my cabin becomes life-threatening.”

  “Here, friend.” The steward shoved a napkin full of hard rolls into her hand. “Staying calm and quiet until the weather is blessing some other land.”

  “Indeed.” She nodded her head. “Thank you.”

  “Do you wish to be walked there, miss?” asked one of the married men—Blanchard, a Scotsman on his way to some engineering project in India. The dangers there seemed to be equally from rebellious sepoy, hungry tiger, and wide-ranging Chinese, at least judging from his tales.

  “No, no thank you, sir.”

  She didn’t have to pass across open deck to reach her cabin, but the walkway was exposed on the port side. Even that brief exposure had become more dangerous than she might have thought. The Mediterranean roiled, the sea’s beautiful eye-blue lost now to a baleful dark color barely removed from black. Waves were high and heavy, thrashing Star of Guinea hard. The wind was horrid, snatching at her like angry hands as it carried a mix of salt spray and horizontal rain to soak Paolina in the few dozen steps she passed.

  She was very grateful for the railing as the ship pitched and rolled on the rough water.

  Back in her cabin, Paolina wrung out her clothes and considered the storm. She’d seen Atlantic storms all her life in Praia Nova—huge, monstrous beasts of weather that spanned the horizon, walking on legs of lightning, making the air so thin, her head ached, threatening to drown the boats and men of her little village. But she’d never been on the ocean when one of those moving walls of water hit. The women of Praia Nova were not allowed on boats save by dire necessity. There had never been a maritime necessity so dire as to require female assistance in her lifetime.

  She pinned her soaked clothes up to one of the pipes that crossed the low ceiling of her cabin, then huddled in the tiny bed, hanging on to the low rail as the vessel continued to roll.

  Would the gleam have somehow been able to calm the storm? She couldn’t envision how. There was no engine, not like an airship. There was no center to disturb. Rather, all the world’s weather was a giant engine the size of the Northern Earth itself, with invisible parts moving and sliding against one another. Paolina would no more know where and how to reach into such complexity than she would know how to touch Venus in her orbit.

  Still, she suspected the gleam could have done something here. Create an artificial calm, or buoy the ship, or serve as a barrier against the worst of the waves.

  This was the Mediterranean, at that. A shallow sea constrained by land on all sides. One of the great Atlantic storms would be many times as fierce as this misery.

  That didn’t matter. She had lost the gleam. Though she’d pushed the thought aside recently with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Haiti, it always hung at the back of her mind like a wounded animal, or an angry child.

  “I built this thing,” she told the swaying cabin. “It killed, then killed again. Chinese, the people of Strasbourg.” It did not matter that the Silent Order had raised their hands against her—she might as well have handed them a primed grenadoe and run away laughing.

  With the power she had give them, the Silent Order could slay the world.

  The electricks illuminating her cabin flickered twice, then cast her into darkness. She was just as glad not to be on deck in a storm by night. Instead Paolina pulled her blankets close and resolved never to build another stemwinder. The burning wreck of the Chinese airship melded in her thoughts with a tower of smoke over the rubble of Strasbourg Cathedral.

  It was too much for her, and far too much for the world.

  That night she dreamt of an army of Brass marching across Europe, driving everyone before them into some cold Northern sea, leaving behind all the towns and cities as empty as old husks. Only she could stop them, armed with a Dent marine chronometer. Even so, Paolina could not find the desire to stand between the subjects of the British Crown and all the massed might of a Muralha.

  Star of Guinea experienced a boiler malfunction during the storm. The captain, addressing the passengers, didn’t seem to feel the need to offer detailed explanations, but the gist of his remarks was that they would be three days overdue into Tyre at less than half steam.

  “We are not in any danger,” Captain Dagleish stated, standing before them in the passengers’ mess. His uniform had been pressed, but the whites were stained and one cuff raveled—nothing like the seemingly casual precision to which Paolina had become accustomed aboard Notus. He required a shave, as well.

  Dagleish cleared his throat and continued. “In any case, your bookings are not committed to a particular schedule. Unfortunately, there is no way to send word ahead unless we are overtaken by a vessel moving at full steam. In that eventuality, rest assured we shall exchange all appropriate signals.”

  “So we shall be posted as missing?” asked Blanchard, the Indian-bound engineer.

  “Three days is not sufficient to raise an alarm.” The captain’s voice was confident. “This is one of the most traveled sea lanes in the world. It is far more likely that our word will be passed in advance. We should be only a few days lying in for repairs there as well.”

  There were more questions, largely of the nonsensical variety, which the captain answered with impaired grace. Upon his departure a light luncheon was served—salad made from tired, wilted greens, accompanied by stale bread.

  That did not bode well for whatever might next come their way.

  That afternoon Paolina stood at the stern rail and watched their wake. It looked no different from before—the ship’s screws were working in unison despite the missing boiler. She could detect no change in the rhythms of the noise, while the volume of smoke from the two narrow stacks seemed unchanged.

  Blanchard and his wife, whose name was Winona, approached her at the rail.

  “M-m-my husband,” the wife began, stammering and blushing until her voice trailed off into an incoherent mumble.

  Paolina looked over her shoulder at Blanchard. He blushed as well. “Perhaps your husband wishes to speak to me without impropriety?” It seemed the sort of thing that informed the literature of England.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Blanchard subsided completely, stepping partway behind Mr. Blanchard as if for shelter.

  “You have my attention, sir,” Paolina said into the awkward silence that followed.

  “Ah, indeed.” He cleared his throat. “I have, ah, marked that you are perhaps a more complex young woman than a casual observer might be led to believe.”

  At least Blanchard was approaching her with dignity and politeness, not the usual rough assumption of privilege that every man she’d met seemed to carry. With the possible exception of Lachance, she amended her thought. “It is my experience that most people are more complex than one might believe.”
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  “Indeed. You seem uncommonly observant. I have caught sight of you counting the braces that support the bridge. Something I myself have done, as a practice of my engineer’s curiosity. It is not the sort of thing I might expect of a female.”

  “And you have approached me to discuss my unexpected hobbies?”

  “No, no, miss. My apologies.” He glanced around, strangely wary. “Rather, this: I imagine you have observed there is nothing wrong with this vessel. Besides that, Tyre has no yards. It would be difficult to lay over there for repairs.

  “Some other game is afoot. And when I look about me to see who might be the object of such a game, my eyes inevitably come to rest on you.”

  Behind him, Winona Blanchard was staring at her with a thoughtful expression. Not at all the simpering twit the woman had seemed a moment before.

  Paolina began to wonder which of the Blanchards had in fact thought to approach her. She resolved to speak to Blanchard uxor at an opportune quiet moment. The woman might be a friend, but she might just as well be an agent of the Silent Order. As Captain Sayeed had been.

  Her own secrecy was already compromised simply by the fact of this conversation. Paolina glanced across the open water toward the several miles to shore. Too far to swim should she desire a rapid escape.

  “I am sure I do not know what game might be afoot,” Paolina said. “I travel on an allowance from my father’s estate, to meet my uncle in Mogadishu. He will provide me with suitable sponsorship into society.”

  Blanchard’s eyes narrowed. “A rather mean society they have in such a distant and forsaken city, I should think.”

  “And a rather mean allowance it is that I have.” She spun a tale comprising her recent reading and her observations of the English character. “I could scarcely stay home and live till the money ran out, only to become a drab or worse, toiling in the kitchen of one of my former neighbors. I should not think my meager funds could provide a proper coming out into society, especially in the absence of the guiding hand of a thoughtful man for my protection.”