by Jay Lake
Leung asked Wang something. There was another short, fast exchange.
“I am to tell you,” Leung said, “that women are not permitted among the books. You will please stay above the rails here, and not move about the premises unescorted.”
“Am I soiled?” she asked pleasantly. “Unclean? Or do they fear my wicked English wizardry?”
“These are the rules here. I cannot say.”
“Ask Cataloger Wang how long those rules have stood. Were women forbidden before I passed through his doorway? Or is it the case that he has created this rule now, then endowed it with the appearance of authority by claiming some canon of conduct?”
The captain visibly swallowed a grin. There was another exchange in Chinese, which ended with Leung nodding. “He says you are a bothersome woman and are to stay behind the rail.”
“I may be a bothersome woman, but I am also the Mask Childress. Cataloger Wang is free to attempt a restriction of my movements, should he wish.” She didn’t feel nearly so brave or powerful as that statement, but she didn’t know what else to do. If she bowed to Wang’s foolish hatreds, she would not readily recover any authority here.
The Mask Poinsard would have skinned this foolish little popinjay. That was not her way, but it was a good thought to strengthen her resolve.
“I believe he takes your point,” said Leung.
She did stay behind the rail that ran about the top of the pit. The area had perhaps served as a reading room once, though there was now scant evidence one way or the other. The Chinese had set up a number of wooden tables with stools spread between them. Material brought up from below was stacked across these like drifts from a paper store. More of Wang’s fellows carefully examined the finds. They made notes on small sheaves of paper each carried in his arms.
They were all men; that was certainly true. There was indeed no place for women here.
She moved quietly, looking at what was spread here.
None of the material visible to her was in Chinese. She saw Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Roman lettering, and several scripts she did not recognize. A cold, tense excitement stole across her heart. This had once been a repository of books from across the ancient world. Anything might be here, from the lost classics of Homer to the greatest alchemical treatises of the Middle Ages.
Childress had never been one to blindly believe in ancient wisdom. The world demonstrably grew better educated and more clever with time. But so much had been lost along the way, buried in the grave of years. Here was a chance to exhume some of that missing knowledge.
All of it in Chinese hands, all of it somehow in service of the Golden Bridge.
She finally stopped next to an old man studying a scroll. The script was vertical squiggles that meant nothing to her. Nothing she had ever seen, that much was certain. There were several illuminated ornaments on the section he held open, seemingly random abstractions that might be stars or flowers or bonfires.
“Ni hao ma?” Are you well?—a polite greeting among strangers.
He looked at her and smiled, gap-toothed, the lines around his eyes drawing tight as any net. “Wo hen hao. Ni ma?” I am well. And you?
“Wo hen hao, hseih hseih.” I am also well, thank you.
He said something she didn’t quite follow. When Childress looked at him blankly, he tried again.
She realized he was asking her a question in her language. “Your words are English?”
“Ah, yes. I am English.” The accent was thick.
A nod this time. The gapped smile grew wider. He tapped his finger above the scroll, not quite touching it. “Taelsaem. Magic from Africa.”
Now that she had the trick of his accent, she could follow him. “Yes.”
His hands slipped into the sign of the avebianco. “You the Mask we promised?”
“Yes.” She made the lie true by telling it over and over. “I am the Mask you were promised.”
SEVENTEEN
PAOLINA
She found an abandoned hut. The roof leaked with the rain that drove Mogadishu into the evening, and goats had apparently used it last before her, but much of Paolina’s childhood had been spent among leaking roofs and goats. Neither water nor the caprine stench held much concern for her now. Paolina made a place for herself amid rotten straw. Wrapped in her stolen robe, she slept far more soundly than she might have thought possible.
Waking before dawn, she stepped back outside. This city slept at night, without the electricks of a Marseilles or even an Alexandria. There was no harbor light, nor even torches in the streets. It could have been Praia Nova writ just a bit larger.
Perhaps, she realized, the world was not the bigger and better place she’d hoped. Just little villages of men piled one upon the other in ever-larger arrays. That Mogadishu was a small place didn’t bode well for her chances to find aid. Seeking out the Chinese in an effort to balance England’s mighty and barbaric reach would be pointless. She would just be a different kind of prisoner. It was the Wall for her.
She followed a dirt trail until she found a railroad track. The line led south and west toward the Wall. It connected Mogadishu and Kismaayo, then. She wondered what might be traded up from a nothing town so close to the Wall. Precious metals from the African interior, perhaps.
Paolina began following the line. She walked on the wooden sleepers to keep the worst of the muck out of her shoes, and avoid the slippery, wet clinkers.
She’d been picking her steps for less than ten minutes when something huge wailed in the darkness ahead. The noise startled her for a heart-hammering moment, until Paolina realized that it must be the train heading north on a night run from Kismaayo.
Scrambling down the bank, she huddled beneath a dripping thorn tree and waited for it to go by.
The locomotive moved slowly past her at little more than a walking speed. Paolina wondered if it had traveled at that pace all night for fear of animals on the track or washouts in the right of way. It looked smaller than the locomotives she’d glimpsed in al-Wazir’s camp at the Wall, back where she’d first found the English.
The train clanking along behind consisted of a series of short, almost square cars riding high on large wheels, with one axle at each end. The cars were wood, nothing so much as large crates. Metal bumpers kept them from smashing together if the couplings flexed too far.
What they were carrying she couldn’t imagine.
Something that glittered clung to the back of the last car. Paolina stared as it passed away from her, trying to sort precisely what she had seen.
A Brass man, she was sure of it.
What Brass would be down here among the English?
Boaz, she thought. I have just seen Boaz pass me by!
Never mind that such a chance meeting bordered on the impossible. It was him. Paolina scrambled up the bank, slipping and sliding and bashing her knees against the cinders, then began to run behind the train back toward Mogadishu.
It moved faster than she had realized, for she could not catch up as Boaz’ faint glimmer faded ahead of her.
Still, Paolina trotted toward Mogadishu. She would follow the train into its station and find him there. With Boaz at her side, she could go home.
She reached the station as dawn was breaking. The train stood there, locomotive chuffing in the last of night’s cool air. There was no sign of Boaz nor anything else she might have mistaken for him. Which made sense. He wasn’t going to cling to the goods wagons on the chance she might happen along. So far as the Brass man knew, Paolina was in England.
She stood next to the shack that served as Mogadishu’s depot and looked around. Where would he have gone? That depended on why he came here, of course. He must have left the company of the English back at Ottweill’s camp. He wasn’t looking for her, or he would have gone up Africa’s west coast.
Paolina found herself disappointed at that realization.
Still, he wouldn’t have come to Mogadishu clinging to the back of a railroad car if he were traveling ope
nly. And Boaz was far more difficult to conceal than she was.
So he would be looking for a native robe to wrap himself in, just as she had. Then he might stand a chance of passing unnoticed. He would also likely be seeking passage away from here. She couldn’t guess where he might beg or steal clothing, but the only place to find a ship was down at the waterfront.
Tugging her robe close, Paolina headed the short distance to the docks. She tried to walk with the same slow, deferential pace the women here did, though it pained her spirit to make the effort.
Star of Gambia still rode at anchor, a barge lightering cargo. Perhaps the train is here to haul the goods south to Kismaayo, she thought. Two other ships were in port, both far smaller than Star—coastal traders, maybe. The fishing fleet was already out under the ragged red sky.
There seemed to be no Royal Navy vessels in the harbor this morning, though she was very conscious of the British officer who’d tried to arrest her the day before.
Paolina shuffled with her head down, her grip bag tucked beneath her robe. Just another woman on her way to buy the morning’s first catch. Boaz would be trying for Star of Gambia, so she headed for the jetty where the launch had tied up the day before.
A few laborers in their loincloths and head scarves shivered as they waited for work. They whistled and chattered to one another in a high-pitched tongue that seemed filled with laughter. She saw no Europeans yet, though another cluster of locals stood where the jetty met the shore, consulting a sheaf of papers. They were robed, men of higher status and purpose than their cousins lounging nearby. Customs officers?
Or a Brass man asking a broker for passage.
Paolina walked slowly toward them, keeping the same woman’s shuffle she’d been practicing. It was not so different from the way the women of Praia Nova never met a man’s eye. She would be invisible unless she spoke to them.
Wandering past, she could hear English. Not all locals, or they would be speaking the local language. There was a burred response in a familiar accent. Despite herself, Paolina looked up to meet the pale gray eyes of the giant Scotsman, Threadgill Angus al-Wazir.
The damnable English have brought him here to catch me!
Paolina shivered as she tried to stop herself from running away. Keep walking, don’t recognize him, she told herself. Shuffle.
“Girl.” His voice followed her softly as a scaled cat after a coney.
Shaking, she kept walking, trying to not even twitch at the sound of him.
“Paolina?”
She couldn’t help herself. Once more, she ran.
Mogadishu was not a large town. This time they did give chase, shouting for her to stop, to wait, to talk. She raced along the waterfront, turned at a crumbling plaster facade of some trading office, and sprinted up the muddy alley beside it, pushing through a flock of sheep just shaking off their night’s sleep. A woman stepped out of a door in a mud-brick wall, carrying a shallow metal pan of water to toss away. She nearly caught Paolina with it, mouth open to say something. A moment later Paolina heard the pan clatter against the ground. The woman shouted something.
The chief was considerably taller and longer of leg than Paolina, but fear lent her speed. She would not go back to the Silent Order, to the Queen’s minions, to have them use her like another tool to keep their clock. She would not kill again.
Running, Paolina hated her fear, hated her panic, hated that the world forced her to those thoughts.
She turned onto another street, this one leading past the railroad depot. More people were out here than before—men in their white robes, women shuffling along in their dark cloths. No one was running but her. No one was fleeing but her. All around men turned to look. The women kept moving.
The worst happened. Hands reached for her beneath dark faces filled with concern. This was not a place where women ran. Property did not flee its master, after all. She turned, dodged, heard a whistle, then was tripped to fall headlong on the muddy street. Her grip bag skittering away even as people grabbed her arms and legs and shouted at her in their no-longer laughing language, the threats and demands and fear audible in the tone of their words.
“Liberar-me!” she shrieked in Portuguese.
A great, meaty paw grabbed at her shoulder. “For the fewking love of God, woman,” al-Wazir rasped, “shut your bleeding gob right fewking now.”
AL - WAZIR
Al-Wazir grabbed Paolina Barthes away from the three men who’d pinned her. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he growled in the voice normally reserved for drunken idlers who’d missed a muster. They backed away, smiling and chaffering in their fuzzy wuzzy way.
The bigger problem was the whistles. Two local men in blue uniforms—bobbies, of all things, for the love of fewking God!—were striding forward with purpose. He wouldn’t be able to bluff them down, nor turn and walk away. Once they took notice, coppers never did let a man pass by quiet-like with his own business in hand.
“Go,” said Boaz, interrupting al-Wazir’s panicked thoughts. “I will have intercourse with them.”
Al-Wazir nearly laughed at that, but the moment was slipping badly. “Come on, girl.”
She was shivering, but she’d stopped trying to fight him. He wished he could get her bag and whatever she was carrying in it, but the gear lay in the wrong direction. “Steady,” he said. “Steady on. I hope your magic pocket watch ain’t in yon bag.”
Paolina’s breath shuddered.
Behind him he could hear Boaz’ voice raised, and a widespread gasp. The Brass man had thrown back the hood and veil of his robe, then.
“That’ll keep them,” he said, “but we must go to ground quick before they recover.”
“I know a place,” she whispered. Paolina led him toward the tracks and the little clumps of huts strung along the edge of town.
The two of them sat quietly in a ruined hut. The interior reeked of goat dung and muddy rain, but they were off the street in some measure of safety. Paolina continued to shiver. Holding back tears, he reckoned, though al-Wazir’s experience of women was limited to his mam and various port whores—generally not the crying sort.
He left her alone to gather her dignity and watched the muddy track outside from the shadows of the hut’s doorway.
Part of the depot was visible beyond a low stand of spike-leaved trees. The train stood there, silent now, waiting for its cargo. There was no hue and cry rising from the street where he’d left Boaz, but al-Wazir couldn’t imagine any copper ever born, not even a fuzzy wuzzy, letting someone like the Brass man go without taking him in to the sergeants.
Bobbie sergeants were like Naval petty officers—no one, not the commanders nor the men, so much as took a shit without a petty officer to tell him where to go and what to do when he got there. Even marines had sergeants.
“How long do we wait?” he asked as he turned back to look at the girl. He didn’t think they could stay in the hut much longer.
Paolina sniffed and raised her head from her hands. She really is a pretty girl, al-Wazir thought, for such a little chit with such large ideas. He wondered what had happened to her since leaving Ottweill’s camp aboard Notus.
“What do you care? You do the Queen’s work, just as they do.”
“Aye, and I’m sworn to my commission in the Royal Navy. But I’m no footman for yon fuzzy wuzzy coppers.”
“So take me wherever it is you are supposed to deliver me.” She glared at him. “Was my entire flight no more than an arrangement?”
Al-Wazir felt his temper stirring at her feistiness. “I’ve no notion of what you’re on about, lassie. Boaz and me was coming off the Wall for to head to England and catch up to you. That you should present yourself here is more than passing strange. How ye got to this place at all is a complete mystery to me.”
“Your people have been chasing me since Strasbourg.”
That startled him. “And what were you doing in Strasbourg, lassie? Captain Sayeed was to take you to Bristol, and send you on to London from t
here.”
“Captain Sayeed was one of your Silent Order men,” she said bitterly.
He wasn’t certain what a Silent Order man was. There were secret societies all across the British Empire. The Masons were perhaps the most notorious, and some whispered of Bavarian light bringers and the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. “Lassie, I swear on my mother’s name that I kenned nothing of what Sayeed wanted for you in Strasbourg. It was ever and only my intention to send you home.”
A herd of goats drove by, the clattering of their dull bells and their bleating stopping conversation. Al-Wazir watched the heaving, furred backs and wondered what he should do with the girl now. He’d been looking for someone to give him the true lay of the coast when she’d happened by. Whether or not he was under charges, she was certainly all sorts of trouble on two feet at this point.
“It’s time we get you back on the Wall, girlie,” he said as the last of the goats passed.
“I don’t believe you.” She was stubborn and angry.
“You ought to place your trust in him.” Boaz, cloaked and veiled in native garb, bent to look into the hut. “The chief is a good man, one blessed with more than his measure of nature’s grace. In the event, we should be away ere more trouble dogs our steps.”
“To a Muralha?” she whispered.
The longing in her voice tore at al-Wazir’s heart. “To the Wall, even now.”
The chief crouched and stepped out through the hut’s doorway. Paolina followed him, wiping her arm across her face. He looked up and down the track that passed between these ragged huts.
Women and children moved about, some staring frankly at the three of them, but there was nothing else close by.
Then he realized that some of the children were looking up and pointing. Al-Wazir looked up as well. An airship was descending above them, hard and fast, ropes already dropping.
