by Jay Lake
The sea. The Indian Ocean.
She realized she’d been alone all day, without taking mess or encountering any of the other passengers. Even the few crew she’d seen had kept their distance.
Everyone aboard Star of Gambia knew who she was now. Not by name, but as the object of the British searches. The focus of the ship’s diversion. Paolina hugged herself briefly. It did not matter. There were few betrayals left. She merely had to stay aboard as the ship steamed west of south toward Mogadishu; then she would be almost back to a Muralha. Far, far from home, but it was her native place.
The British and their dogs in the Silent Order would never find her there.
As she retreated to her cabin, Paolina wondered what her life would have been like if she’d followed the music ashore back in Alexandria and cast away her name. She had no notion, none at all. That thought brought tears to her eyes.
AL - WAZIR
Midday passed without any sign of Boaz or the smiths. Al-Wazir continued to study the walkways and trams of this waterfall city, letting himself get soaked to the skin as he paced the ledge.
There was no point in leaving. He wouldn’t know where to go, wouldn’t know where to look.
He searched the hut three times. Perhaps he’d missed a trapdoor or secret exit to a workroom somewhere within the living rock of the Wall. There was nothing that he could find. So he walked the ledge some more and stared up and down.
Once again he was struck by the impressive beauty and bizarre engineering of the city. Water foamed and roared and fell like a sea upon the move. Cables stretched between the larger buildings and major islands, sometimes braced on great towers to hold up the midpoint of their spans. The metal trams trundled along irregularly. He realized after a while that they must not be a service, like the omnibuses of English cities, but rather transport that ran at someone’s whim. People walked the bridges, climbed stairs and ladders, moved about on balconies. Few wore the brass armor he’d seen the day before. This was not a city of soldiers.
No one came to his ledge. No one bore Boaz amid their number. No one even stopped to look at him.
He wondered, too, what he had met splashing the night before. It was big, with vasty, pale eyes—a thing that wanted to live in darkness.
As afternoon passed, al-Wazir realized that he could not remain idle. He and Boaz needed to be eastward bound. He stepped onto the bridge they crossed last night. The treadway was slick, the guide cables crusted with moss, but it was not much worse than working the ropes of an airship in heavy weather.
Still, somehow this was different, crawling across the stone face of the Wall.
Halfway over the bridge, he turned and looked back at the beehive hut. Almost directly below the small building was a cave mouth visible only from out here. Something flashed within.
“Devil take me,” he shouted. “And all of you as well.” Al-Wazir realized he must have been above Boaz’ head all morning.
He walked carefully back, scanning the cliff face for a downward path or ladder. It wasn’t hard to see from out here, behind a boulder he had passed a dozen times in his morning’s pacing.
Off the bridge, on surer footing, he scrambled behind the boulder and downward.
The cave was indeed a smithy. There were a pair of forges, bellows, racks of tools, anvils, benches, pigs of iron, copper, brass, and bronze—everything that someone with the right skills might need.
Boaz lay on one of the benches, torn down like an engine under repair. His arms and legs had been removed. His chest gaped open. Two of the smiths worked on a leg at a nearby table. The third examined small parts through a lens bolted into a frame.
None of them looked at al-Wazir as he entered their kingdom. Torn between worry and fear, he approached Boaz.
The open chest revealed not a hollow, as he almost expected, but rather a compacted arrangement of clockwork—gears, wheels, escapements. The mechanisms drew the eye into a web of brass built as tightly and closely as any engine. It was a forest of parts, as obscenely compelling as the torn-open chest of a man of flesh. Al-Wazir had seen enough casualties to know the look of liver and lights when they came spilling out. This had the same eerie fascination, though without the blood.
He reached forward to touch a large wheel with detents along its face.
Boaz’ eyes popped open.
Al-Wazir jerked his hand back, startled. He felt more than a little embarrassed as well. There was a half-heard hiss as the Brass man tried to speak, his head twitching and clicking.
“No,” al-Wazir said. “Quiet. They will repair you.”
He glanced once more at the cavity, wondering where the seal might be—in Boaz’ head? In that laid-open chest? It didn’t seem that the magic had yet been stolen away. Otherwise Boaz would be nothing more than silent metal already, rather than a man straining without breath to speak.
Al-Wazir went to watch the smiths. They continued to ignore him. The two with the leg were repairing Boaz’ knee, extending and tightening the joint while adjusting a complex of springs and guys within. The third worked on some small mechanism that must have come from within the laid-open gut.
Al-Wazir knew he should stay away. This was dangerous, delicate effort. So he climbed back up to the hut. There he laid a fire and cooked a pot of beans. When that was done he filled a clay bowl and carried it back down to the cave.
This time Boaz had his legs reattached, though his chest still lay open. Now his arms remained separated. Al-Wazir put the steaming food down on a bench. These people were silent, eerily so, but he was willing to presume that their noses were in working order.
Soon enough they came one by one to eat. The shy smiles and quick glances he received by way of thanks were the first acknowledgments he’d had from the people of this city.
“Does no one here talk save your king?” he asked aloud. There was no response.
He had purchased some goodwill for his efforts, and perhaps earned a place at Boaz’ side. With that thought, al-Wazir found his way back to the metal man.
“How are you?”
Boaz blinked at him but did not try to speak this time.
“We must go soon. This place is being kind to us, but it is more than passing strange.”
Another blink.
“I will not take you until these smiths are done, or they prove hostile.”
Boaz managed to turn his head, his neck clicking and whirring, to look toward where one of the smiths was eating the last of the beans.
“Exactly.” Al-Wazir touched the Brass man’s forehead. “I’ll watch out. We’ll leave soon. East, my friend, we must head east.”
That evening they closed Boaz’ chest. One smith tapped him gently on the forehead. The metal man sat up with a swift jerk. The Brass opened his mouth and began to speak in a tongue al-Wazir did not recognize, babbling for several minutes. Eventually Boaz stopped, then stared at his hands.
“I am better than I might have thought possible,” he said in English. He carefully climbed off the bench to stand, then addressed the smiths in the other, strange language.
They nodded. One answered in a slow, soft voice. Boaz glanced at al-Wazir, whose hackles were beginning to rise, then back at the smiths.
“I owe a debt,” he explained to al-Wazir. “This city is held in dire thrall. They would have me set them free.”
“In thrall to what?” Al-Wazir thought he already knew the answer.
“They are under the aegis of the Inhlanzi King.”
“We met him.”
“I do not remember. I recall little of what has transpired since I was taken aboard the Chinese airship.”
“As when Ophir erased your memory crystals?”
“Yes.”
“You do not remember what you are about, but now we will seek out the Inhlanzi King and do exactly what, laddie?”
“We shall cast him down from his high seat.”
“Ah. Fair enough.” Deranged, actually. Crazed, cracked, and doomed. Now was the ti
me to depart. But he couldn’t leave Boaz. He took a deep, shuddering sigh. He’d been a dead man since departing Ottweill’s camp, properly speaking. Why find concern now? “We owe them your life.”
Boaz gave him a long look. “I do. Your debt is different.”
Al-Wazir refused to consider it further. “How do we do this thing?”
“We will find a way.”
Without a word to the smiths, they climbed back up top. Al-Wazir shouldered his empty spear and followed Boaz as they headed out across the slick bridge.
Twenty minutes later, clinging to a rope, al-Wazir said, “For a lad who don’t know where he’s been, you surely do seem to know where you’re going.”
“The smith gave me a path.”
Eventually they were in a true byway. This was a dank stairwell, rotten with moss and mold, water flowing in a little rill down the center of the steps through a soft-walled channel it had cut for itself. Al-Wazir trudged behind Boaz, thinking on their errand. There were dozens of ways to kill a man, but this king was no man.
He hoped.
He wondered, too, what this path was that the smith had given Boaz. Secret markers were well and fine, but al-Wazir worried that they had somehow built a new layer into the Brass man’s thoughts. Could Boaz be trusted now? Could Boaz trust himself?
Doctors, at least, only cut into a man and sewed him up again. They didn’t stir his brains like a drunken clockmaker at an admiral’s watch.
When they reached a narrow door on a small landing, Boaz turned to him. “You are not compelled to follow me within.”
“That’s what you think, laddie,” al-Wazir muttered. “Someone’s got to pull your clanking Brass arse out of this foolishness.”
“For that, I am grateful. Still, if you wish to remain here, I—”
“Shut up and keep moving!”
“After this, I am not so certain,” warned Boaz.
“Is anyone ever certain before battle? I dinna think so, but for the foolish and the dead. I am no fool and you are no longer dead.”
Boaz tried to tug the latch, but the door would not budge. He shook it several times to no avail. “We go,” he said, and yanked the door off its hinges.
They dashed into the high chamber where al-Wazir had heard the splashing the day before. It was lit now by shafts of daylight from high above. A giant slab-sided glass tank stood on eight great iron legs in the center of the room. Something huge and silver flashed within as a wall of scales slid by.
“The Inhlanzi King,” said Boaz.
That gave al-Wazir a moment’s pause. He’d certainly been on the Wall enough to realize what could be here. It was a different world from Lanarkshire or the Royal Navy.
Two of the brass-armored soldiers ran toward them, bringing al-Wazir’s brief reverie to an end. The attackers’ spears were braced as they moved in eerie silence. No one here spoke. No one at all.
He raised the Ophir spear and stepped to meet them, trusting Boaz to know what must be done next.
The soldiers closed head on, running side by side. They had raised no alarm that he could see, unless they’d banged on the doors connecting to the outer chamber before charging him.
It was as if they wanted to fail. . . .
He swung the Ophir spear butt-first and stepped around the charge to slam one of the soldiers in the side of the head. The man dropped like a poled ox, his own spear clattering across the damp flagstones of the floor. The other defender turned, but instead of engaging at close quarters, he simply charged again with his spear fixed in his hands.
Al-Wazir tripped him.
The solder went down on his hands and knees with a great whoof of air, falling like a child.
They were definitely fighting to lose.
Just to keep himself out of trouble, al-Wazir gave the second defender a good kick in the ribs. He then raced to catch up to Boaz.
The Brass man stood beneath the wall of the tank and stared upward into the murky waters.
“What are ye going to do, laddie?” al-Wazir gasped.
“I wish to breach the vessel above us. Once spilled upon the floor, the Inhlanzi King should be easier to dispatch.”
“Yon fish is the size of a whale. Not so easy to chop off his head.”
Above them this morning were no rolling eyes or great breathy voices—just that silver body obscured by water and the depth of time that clung to anything grown so huge. They looked around while the fish circled overhead. The room was possessed of the same frenetic eye-bending architecture as the outer chamber, but there was virtually no furniture.
There was, however, a set of pipes leading out one wall to connect to the Inhlanzi King’s vat. They were about eight feet off the ground, supported by narrow columns of iron with wide, flat bases bolted to the floor.
“If we take one of these down,” al-Wazir said, “ ’t’will cause the pipe to buckle. That may give us something stout enough to whack at the glass of the tank.”
Boaz grabbed at the top of the iron column and gave it a hard shake. The support groaned and the pipes above gurgled, but it did not show sign of breaking free.
Al-Wazir grasped it as well, and threw his back into the next tug. Something popped with a shower of rust, but again the column just shook.
The great double doors banged open as a squad of the brass-armored soldiers poured in. Some of them were armed with swords as well as spears.
“I reckon our moment is nigh,” al-Wazir said.
“We shall see,” muttered Boaz. They gave the column another concerted pull, al-Wazir grabbing it high up to put his weight into the effort. His ribs stabbed within his chest. There was another popping noise and one of the pipes began shuddering. The king splashed in his tank, while the soldiers were nearly upon them.
He didn’t even have the spear in his hands, just a grip on this stupid iron column.
“Fewk that!” screamed al-Wazir, and jumped upward to grab at the shuddering pipe as Boaz yanked once more on the support.
All gave way with a slow, groaning grace. A stream of water shot out of the rupturing pipe, under much more pressure than al-Wazir had expected. Metal shrieked anew. Column and pipe both bent as Boaz tugged. The monster thrashed. The soldiers surrounded them with blades and spears at the ready just when al-Wazir fell to the ground, clinging to the pipe, which now spat water like shot from a cannon. The stream drove back some of the soldiers, while others danced around it, seeking footing.
“They fight to lose!” al-Wazir hissed at Boaz.
The Brass man ignored him and the soldiers both, instead charging toward the Inhlanzi King’s tank with the seven-foot stub of the iron column. The other pipe had broken now as well. Dark, stinking water erupted from it.
Al-Wazir tugged at his pipe end in an effort to aim the water. It was the only weapon he had. The captain of the squad seemed determined to close on him, but the others were hanging back or milling as if to pursue Boaz. The chief dropped the pipe and launched himself, fists swinging directly at the officer.
He counted on the others continuing their strange, slow mutiny.
The Scotsman and the soldier hit the floor together to slide on wet stone, just as there was an enormous crack loud as if someone had broken open the sky. They both looked up to see a craze spreading across the glass face above them.
Boaz danced back with the column and made another run, leaping to drive it into the smashed glass.
This time the tank ruptured. It spewed a waterfall of filth that completely obscured the Brass man. The soldiers scrambled away as the tide surged toward them, while their captain and al-Wazir both scrabbled to follow.
The Inhlanzi King was coming out of his water bed.
Whatever he is, ’tis more than some fewking great African fish, al-Wazir thought. Eel, perhaps. Or just monster.
The king poured forth, scaly and long, uncoiling to show a mouth taller than al-Wazir, filled with needle teeth the size of a man’s arm. The upper body hit the stones with a jarring wet noise.
He thrashed even as more of his body rode the sluicing water out of his tank.
Boaz rose from the filthy flood and stabbed one baleful eye with the stub of the iron column. At that all the soldiers roared as one and charged their king. Al-Wazir found himself sitting alone in several inches of rank water as his erstwhile enemies set blade to flesh, tearing into the scales and muscle of those long, thrashing flanks.
There was a great deal of killing to be done. The soldiers did it with a great deal of screaming, hacking, and cutting and sometimes dying, even as more and more of their fellows ran in shouting to join in the feast of blades. The water drained away, thickening with gelid silver-blue blood as it vanished.
CHILDRESS
They weathered two storms between the islands and Singapore. As usual, Five Lucky Winds submerged and rode out the worst of the violence beneath the waves. The hull still rocked and the water still boomed, but there was nothing like the violence of a boat upon the water driven by wind and rain. Childress sat in her cabin in those long, noisy hours and refined her arguments against the Golden Bridge. If they made their way to Chersonesus Aurea, which still seemed like a substantial assumption to her, logic would be her greatest and only weapon.
Leung brought them to the surface several hours outside of Singapore. He found Childress in her cabin. “Would you accompany me to the tower?”
She set aside a chart she’d been studying simply for the sake of knowing something about the landforms. “Of course.”
Childress followed Leung up the ladder to the deck hatch. They climbed onward up damp rungs to the little cupola at the top of the tower. He helped her into the light.
It was hot. The air seemed practically liquid, and the sun pressed on Childress like a fist.
Ignoring that, she looked around. A low tropical coast, thick with verdant green and a startling array of colors. The water was a muddy yellow brown, smelling of salt and flood. She turned to look the other way.
