by Jay Lake
He considered that a moment. “And where would you have had this coming out?”
She wanted to dodge the question, desperately, but it was a most logical and simple one. Where are you from? Blanchard was well traveled. What answer could she make that he would not immediately see through?
“Strasbourg,” Paolina blurted.
“Ah.” Blanchard smiled. “Nous sommes tous les fils de Charlemagne.”
“I must think on this slowing of our vessel, sir,” she said stiffly, avoiding the strange look in his eye. “I cannot be sure it is to do with me, but many things are possible.”
Paolina turned away from the rail, trying not to flee in her foolish panic. She had handled that very poorly.
Later, when Mrs. Blanchard rapped on the door of her stateroom, Paolina feigned sleep. She could not hide for more than a few hours, but she would have to emerge bearing a tale that was not quite so foolish.
No, I am not really from Strasbourg, but if I told you the truth, we would both be in peril. That had the advantage of a certain species of veracity, but wouldn’t serve for other, more obvious reasons.
My father brought me there in his service for the railways. A plausible explanation for her ignorance of the language, but it simply begged the original question all over again.
I was born and raised beyond the borders of the Empire, and all of this is strange to me. True in both word and intent, but such an explanation would betray her to even more questions she could not answer honestly.
Instead she rested until her limbs began to tingle from inaction, while her imagination continued to fail her. Paolina finally rose and stepped outside to a Mediterranean sunset. All the colors of the fire’s paintbox bloomed off the starboard rail.
Which meant that the ship was steaming nearly due south rather than the south of east heading required to make Tyre. Star of Gambia had turned without any mention to the passengers. She also seemed to be making headway at full speed.
Paolina looked back toward the Anatolian shore. Could she swim that? Not now, not with miles of water between her and her destination.
Instead she scanned for fishing boats or other vessels, someone she could plausibly hope to be picked up by if she dropped over the rail. This evening the Mediterranean, one of the heaviest traveled seas in the world, was as quiet and empty as a teacup.
Where were they going and why?
AL - WAZIR
As evening descended, Al-Wazir and Boaz marched up the road in company with the bright-armored men. At close range, their impersonation of the Brass was far more obvious. Even the weapons these soldiers bore were copies—fat-headed spears with metal collars in imitation of Ophir’s might.
Half a dozen Royal Marines would have pushed this formation to bloody hash, he thought.
They were not exactly prisoners. It was something more akin traveling under escort. The squad had made no effort to relieve al-Wazir and Boaz of their possessions, most especially not the lightning spear. They kept a respectful distance, leading before and following behind, but not forcing any compliance to orders.
His greatest wish was for food and rest as they marched into the darkness of evening. A glow ahead promised at least settlement. If the current goodwill held up, al-Wazir could find what he wanted there.
Boaz was more of a worry. The metal man walked with a pace that was excruciatingly slow for him, limping and clattering. Al-Wazir would have offered to help, but he could not fathom what assistance would be useful.
“Are you capable of self-repair?” he asked quietly.
“It is not within my abilities to restore parts with severe torsional damage.” Boaz clanked onward a few steps. “My seal is possessed of great power, but some injuries even the Solomnic magics cannot touch. I am in need of the attentions of a smith of good training and steady hand.”
“Aye. I figure it would be like having some bugger reach inside me flesh to set a bone.”
The Brass gave a rattling snort. “An apt comparison, Chief.”
They approached the distant glow with rising hope, at least on al-Wazir’s part. These strange, silent men had fashioned elaborate armor in imitation of the Brass. Surely their smiths were capable with a hammer, and bore a steady hand.
There was nothing for it but to walk onward and trust to hope and Divine Providence.
_______
The road bent around a towering pillar of rock under brilliant starshine tinged with the sheen of brasslight. The original architects had carved a near-tunnel here, so that dank rock swept over al-Wazir’s head to obscure the glow before them. He could still see the miles of Africa scattered to his left. Here, deep within the continent, there were no fires nor lights to mark the night. He saw only the shadowed texture of trees and open grasslands. Even here, several miles up the Wall, a scent of distant redrock hills cut through the water-and-stone smell of the road.
Somewhere nearby a larger fall rushed. It was bigger and bolder than what had tumbled behind the gate house. He could see a glittering mist hanging in the open air. The sound had been rising for a while, a distant susurrus that grew to an urgent whisper, now building to wet thunder.
The little column passed the outer edge of the curve. Al-Wazir drifted to a stop. The waterfall was easily the largest he’d seen in his life. Their roadway broke off not far ahead—this had not been so great a cataract when Ophir had built this road, he realized—though a bridge of chains and ropes and wood extended out across the water to a rocky outcropping surrounded by ever more tumbling water.
Even in the dim light of night, Al-Wazir could see that knees and columns and shelves stretched through the middle of the fall. These vertical islands interrupted the cascade at irregular intervals. Some were not much larger than tree stumps; others could have hosted a cathedral. Each exposed rock supported a structure, but the buildings themselves were a mix of architectures that dazzled al-Wazir’s eye even by the starlight.
Some were little more than piles of stone, gnarled structures that might have grown up out of the rocks of the falls on some mystical night long ago. Others looked as if they’d been brought from distant parts of the Wall—blocky buildings oddly melded to a pair of close-set outcroppings; a graceful tower with a outward curve like half an arch; a crystal shell that hummed, audible even over the roar of the falls.
All were lit by fire, lamps, torches—the glow he had seen earlier, magnified by reflection among the mists. Shadows moved within and among them as people followed rope bridges or iron stairs or stone pathways that slipped behind the rushing waters. The city, grafted from the debris of half a dozen empires, thronged with life.
This was a place that admitted no mistakes. Slip once and you would end your life tumbling downward amid tons of water. No one could err twice.
Al-Wazir wondered what these people saw in Ophir that they felt the need to imitate. This was a place of power and beauty almost beyond imagining.
A respectful hand gently tugged him into motion once more. The soldier’s face was averted. The chief followed his escorts onto the first of the bridges. Walking out over the falls, he realized that the air immediately above the water was much colder, with a sharp, chill mineral smell. He also saw these people had arranged a whole web or array of bridges, lines, and cables that spread back and forth across their waterborne city like the web of some mechanical spider of Dr. Ottweill’s deepest dreaming.
He hoped fervently not to have to cross one of those cables by hand. It smacked of the worst of Bassett’s landings, such as the vertical city where they had lost so much.
They crossed two more bridges, with short walks around rock walls and a narrow-porched building with windows the proportion of church tapers. Finally they came to a larger apron of stone. A metal hut sat there, with windows glowing. The soldiers marched within. Al-Wazir followed.
Inside was lit by electricks. It seemed little more than a small railway carriage, but lacking wheels or rails to run upon. After all had entered, the last slammed the do
or shut. The car swayed and creaked and made an alarming twanging noise for a moment before settling into a herky-jerky motion. Funicular, al-Wazir realized. This was a cable car to take them farther up the Wall, judging from the motion. He could not see outside from within the well-lit press of bodies. His stomach lurched at the thought of the maintenance in this place—how would they fight rust with the whole city soaked worse than a ship at sea?
He looked to Boaz. The Brass swayed slightly, upright but seemingly dazed. Whatever degree of motion and focus lent him illusion of life was fading once more.
The car finally clanged to a halt. They stepped out into a great hall lit by fitful electricks. A hole in the floor behind them had admitted the funicular car, while a gigantic iron wheel turned on a tower above to wind the cable in and out. An engine hissed and chugged nearby, lending motive force to the transport. The falls were more muted here. He wondered if they had gone into the face of the Wall itself.
Except for the machinery, this could almost have been one of the great cathedrals of Europe. Pillars supported a high vaulted ceiling. The floor was a pattern of stones and tiles with symbols painted or glazed into place. Between the pillars were niches with statuary of long, narrow-bodied fish leaping upward in endless pilgrimage.
There were carvings on the pillars, too. Al-Wazir quickly realized they were twisted, violent images, difficult to focus on in the wet shadows of this place. Which might be for the best, given that some of them featured tentacles and worse.
Another misappropriated building? How did they do that?
More muddling of soldiers, then they swept across the great space to a doorway that lay in shadow. The escorts stood aside there. It was clear enough where the newcomers were to go next.
Boaz was utterly silent, though he still walked when al-Wazir did. Whatever might be done for the Brass man would be done here. They approached the doorway. It was fifteen feet high, with double doors each four feet across. The carvings on the door were both fascinating and repulsive—images of squids and snakes and men locked in bitter battle and passionate embrace at the same time. They almost squirmed. Not a cathedral at all, but a temple of a different race.
Reluctantly, al-Wazir set his hand upon the door and tugged it open.
The space beyond was larger even than the funicular landing. They must have passed within the living rock. Anything was possible in the immensity of the Wall.
It was darker, too, lacking the electricks of the outer chamber, though a few rushlights guttered. A great, rank smell forced al-Wazir to open his mouth to breathe, lest his nose be overwhelmed.
“Be glad you are Brass,” he whispered to Boaz.
Something splashed with the sound of a pond’s worth of water slopping. It was big, it was in the center of the room, and it was above al-Wazir.
He advanced slowly. There was a vague sheen, though he could not at first discern what it was. Al-Wazir got an impression of mass, the reverse of the sense of emptiness that he might have expected in a vast unlit space.
Another splash, then a voice that boomed so low, it was almost impossible to hear, echoed in a tongue he did not ken. Al-Wazir’s bones vibrated with the sound.
“Begging your pardon,” al-Wazir said, “but I am not understanding you.”
There was a silence that seemed ready to burst, then: “A seal has been brought before me.”
For a single, manic moment al-Wazir was distracted by the sailor’s meaning of the word, before he realized what this creature was speaking of. “He is damaged and does not function well.”
Another long pause. “The seal is too powerful to be broken.”
“Nae,” al-Wazir said. “ ’Tis his body. He has need of a righteous good armorer.”
His eyes were adjusting to the darkness. Al-Wazir saw a giant tank of water, glass-walled above him. Something substantial shifted back and forth within it.
“He could be torn down and his seal taken for other use.”
“I do not think this will be the case,” al-Wazir said calmly.
There was a long, slow burbling noise, which he finally interpreted as laughter. “You will not allow it?”
“No. I will not allow it.”
In the silence that followed, he realized that a pale patch in the darkness before and above him was an eye the size of his chest. He was being studied.
Al-Wazir stared back, seeing almost nothing, but pretending to be unafraid.
“That spear is empty,” the voice said. “Something my servants did not understand.”
“You don’t know that,” al-Wazir told him. “You only believe.” This was like talking to some big brute of a recruit, freshly taken into service, who thought he didn’t have to take orders from any man he could thrash bare-knuckled. The point wasn’t to thrash them back, because no one could beat all comers. The point was to think past their thrashing. Then, if needed, take two or three friends, find the cocky bastard in a quiet corner, and stomp him shiteless, of course. “If you have an armorer with the training and tools to help him, please send us there. Otherwise we shall head onward and eastward.”
Another slow, glass-bending chuckle. “Into the house of the sun?”
“Into the house of our desires. Following no one’s hearts but our own.”
“You are not of the Wall. Why do you traverse it like an insect on a mirror?”
“Why do you hang here in a vat of water suspended amid a fall which should carry you down off these slopes and eventually home to the sea?”
Another splash, followed by a long groan. “Take him out. Tell the peltast he is to see the smiths on Gullie Isle.”
“And then we will be free to go.” He stated it rather than asking it, pretending to confidence he did not feel.
“And then you will see me once more.”
Al-Wazir bowed. He then tugged at Boaz so that the Brass man would follow him out.
Gullie Isle was two funicular rides and another series of bridges away from the cathedral. The peltast, who never did say a word, left them there with a nod. Three sleepy men in linen gowns emerged from a beehive-shaped hut covered with slime and mold. One carried a torch, which gusted in the thundering wind of the waterfall.
“Are you the smiths?” al-Wazir asked.
The torch-holder stared incuriously at him while the other two approached Boaz. They circled, fingers sliding over the dented decorative work upon his chest, brushing his fingertips, flickering over his face.
Al-Wazir couldn’t think what to say. He was here for these men to help Boaz. He could hardly object to their examining him, even if the methods were strange.
Instead he settled for studying the smiths. They were cut from much the same mold as the peltast and his troops. Not twins, but they could all have been brothers. Short, bandy-legged, with silver eyes and pale hair. Also like the peltast, not much given to words, though the peltast had certainly seemed to understand what it was al-Wazir had told him back at the cathedral.
Their silence was strange, as was their lack of protest at being called out in middle of the night. He’d never met an expert who wanted to leave a warm bed to help anyone in need. Yet here they were, their nightshirts soaking in the spray, working in the light of their fellow’s torch.
Eventually he wandered into the hut and stretched out on a pallet. There was little enough point trying to oversee a process he didn’t understand, and he was long past the point of trust.
Morning brought a flood of rainbows, sunrise filtered through the mists hanging in the air outside. The colors danced on al-Wazir’s face as he awoke. He stepped out onto the ledge into a flood of light and hue.
There was a beauty by day completely different from the lambent glow of the previous night. The ragged array of buildings, all the more visible and stranger in the sunlight, was wrapped in colored mist. Everything about him gleamed.
There was no sign of Boaz or the smiths.
Turning his back on beauty, al-Wazir went inside to find something to eat. There was
not much—a sack of dried beans, a bowl of lichen, which he wasn’t sure had been intended for food, and a string of dried, salted fish. He ate several fish whole. They tasted terrible, but then, most food did at sea. This city was little more than a giant ship tied to the face of the Wall.
Al-Wazir was unwilling to casually set out across the byways of this place. There was too much he didn’t understand about the paths, and he feared becoming irreparably lost. So he idled awhile, figuring that the smiths would return to their hive-home eventually, with or without Boaz. The rainbows faded with the rising sun. He was treated to a magnificent view northward when the wind shifted and moved the mists away.
No one came. He remained alone, looking down on hawks and cranes in the air far below, wondering what had become of Boaz.
CHILDRESS
They made a brief landing in the Qun Dao islands. These were an unremarkable assortment of low, scrubby sandbars and coral reefs in the middle of the South China Sea. There was a small base there, and even an airship mast, though only a pair of aging sailing craft seemed to be on hand, along with a bored and weathered detachment of sailors.
For the first time in her life, Childress could see the Wall. It was little more than a dark line on the horizon, but it was definitely there, a ridge cutting off the southward edge of the circle of sea around the islands. The Wall was everything, in a sense—brace to hold the world’s ring gear, and the most direct evidence of the planned nature of divine Creation. The Wall marked the edge of the world and beginning of Heaven. She stared at it awhile, willing detail to come into focus. It was a thousand miles or more south of their position, and resolutely remained nothing more than a stroke on the horizon—a glowering storm of stone destined never to break into rain.
Childress turned away from the pull of the Wall to watch from the submarine’s tower as Leung went ashore accompanied only by Feng. The captain forced the political officer to row. On the short, rough beach, Leung conferred with a slouching sailor, then walked to a small collection of buildings. Feng was led off in another direction, presumably to a briefing.
