Escapement (10 page)

All of which would mean nothing if a scaled cat or a band of enkidu raiders should drop from above.

Paolina took refuge in her stemwinder.

She never removed the device from its little sack unless she was camped securely. She didn’t trust herself not to drop it on a trail, or even worse, over some edge as she crossed a precipice. It came out only when the moments were quiet and she had time to consider what the hands told her, what the device meant.

The hand that measured the time that beat at the heart of everything ran true. That was useful, because she had no way to hear such a thing with her own ears or measure with it her own eyes, as she did the next two hands. Any fool could observe the turning of the earth, and any fool could lay a finger on her own pulse to measure the beating of her heart.

The last hand, though—the one she’d built a gear train for and arranged separate springs for—it was taking a measure, too. And she did not know what this hand was measuring.

Paolina decided that was far more interesting than frightening. She spent much of her evenings huddled with the stemwinder in her hand, trying to see further into the world.

Sometimes she succeeded.

A month on the trail, she came down with an ague. Perhaps it was something she ate despite her care with strange berries and pallid roots. Paolina was afraid to simply curl up and sleep out her chills and cramps. She kept moving, stumbling through days that lasted moments, and hours that crawled at the speed of seasons.

The stemwinder was like a compass to her in that time. She would reach, hand grabbing and clawing weakly, until she found the canvas sack within her dress pocket, and clutch it close.

When the path came to a gate, Paolina was surprised. Short men—no, women—with stumpy bodies armor-clad and wearing tusked helmets, surrounded her. They stared. Their spears coursed with a pale green fire so faint as to seem illusory.

One of the weapons nosed close to Paolina’s fingers where she clutched the stemwinder. She jerked her right hand up and away from the crackling point before slumping to the stones. A circle of faces closed over her; then she was lifted and carried through a gate. She could see only the arch,
decorated high above her head with blue and orange gemstones, intermixed with chunks of quartz and glass. She imagined that was how a jewel box might look from within.

Clearly, the stemwinder was her passport here.

Were these people sorcerers, like the English?

A building, then, the entrance another high bejeweled arch, followed by hallways lined with bulging golden columns beneath clerestory roofs where sunlight glowed through colored panes.

These people loved color.

Paolina tried to focus her thoughts. The gate guards had been so dispassionate, they might well have speared her where she lay but for the stemwinder’s presence in her hand. Still, a child could have wrested it from her.

They deposited her in a smaller room with a closer ceiling painted in abstract designs that seemed intended to signify flowers. Another toothy, snouted face pushed through her bearers and leaned over her.

“Are you dying?” the strange woman asked in English.

Paolina chose to lie, for the sake of valor. “I do not believe so.” She wanted to ask,
Why English, who are you, where am I?
but the words were too hard. She might not understand the answers anyway.

The woman looked her over. “You carry a gleam.”

A gleam. Somehow Paolina knew this woman meant the stemwinder. And the word fit, like glove to hand. “When I am well . . .” She stopped to breathe. “Then I will show you . . . what you wish to know.”

That seemed to satisfy the woman, who turned and growled. More ugly little women took her away. She was stripped and bathed, though they kept a wary distance from the stemwinder clutched in her hand.

What had she made?

“Gleam,” the ugly woman had said.

Paolina wished she had an English wizard to guide her in the moment, some descendant of Newton or Dee or one of the other wise men of the court of St. James.

She fell asleep while they were spooning a thin vegetable broth into her mouth.

Herr Doctor Professor Lothar Ottweill was the sort of man for whom any self-respecting crew in Her Imperial Majesty’s Royal Navy would have found a convenient accident shortly after sailing. As a division chief, al-Wazir would have spent half his time protecting the fool from himself, and
the other half beating his men into line so that when the inevitable discipline parade was held, it wasn’t
his
division before captain’s mast.

For one thing, Ottweill was madder than a St. James hatter. He might as well have been swigging mercury, or one of those strange alchemical mixes the powdersmiths were always on about. Bald as a church pew, the engineer stood about five foot four and didn’t weigh upwards of eight stone. He seemed to think he outsized everyone around him. He thought it so thoroughly that almost everyone else was fooled. Even al-Wazir, pushing twenty stone at six foot four, felt an eerie and sickening magic.

That was not the whole of the thing. There had been officers in his career, some martinets, others sensible characters, who’d overcome disadvantages of size with sheer bravado. As much as anything, the problem was the angry, spitting shout in which Ottweill constantly spoke. The tone presumed you were a purblind fool in need of constant oversight.

All the man had on the other side of his balance sheet was sheer, walleyed genius. That and a clear vision of what it would take to tunnel through a hundred miles and more of basal rock to penetrate the Equatorial Wall.

Bloody-mindedness struck al-Wazir as the first requirement for this project of the Prime Minister’s. Ottweill had bloody-mindedness woven into the fabric of his body and soul.

Al-Wazir had to admire the man’s strength of purpose, in the same way he admired a spectacular storm or an especially wild mad dog. Such respect seemed safer from a distance.

He was beginning to see the essence of Lloyd George’s plan in pairing him with Ottweill. The chief realized that he and Kitchens might be the only two men anywhere in the quarry who were not cowed by the good doctor. And al-Wazir was probably the only man on the expedition with enough experience of chain of command combined with sufficient disregard of the same to wrestle with Ottweill.

Literally, if need be.

He wondered how Ottweill had survived long enough in life to achieve a position of this magnitude and responsibility. Of course, officers did it all the time, buffoons and monsters rising to flag rank without ever seeming to be noticed by Admiralty or their fellows.

By fighting dirty, of course.

In the meantime, he listened to the doctor rant about the steam borer, mark four. Watt and Doulton had built the boilers, while most of the construction had been done at Chapman and Furneaux, locomotive builders. Three had been completed, two shipped out for the Wall some months ago by slow boat under heavy escort. The third remained here for final testing
and design improvements, with the appropriate parts and amendments to be sent south to the other two units.

All would be an indefinite work in progress, al-Wazir saw.

“Why we are not permitted to weld the operators into their cabins I am not understanding,” Ottweill was saying at his usual shout. “Enormous are the efficiencies to be gained. No wastage on egress and support systems. From their bucket they can eat, then shit back into. Three buckets, three days, then—
foo!
—open we cut the cabin and them we replace. Two men, three buckets each, we run three more days. What problem is there here, by damn? Stupid soft
Englanders
. Good Prussian peasant give me. On black bread and beatings they live, in the name of the mother of God.”

Al-Wazir looked around. Nine men listened to this briefing. A pair of Fleet Street reporters with their own quiet man to watch them—some counterpart who had exchanged nods of recognition with Kitchens. Two more men in Overseas Civil Service uniform. A pair of Royal Marine sergeants who kept exchanging eye-rolling glances. And of course, himself and Kitchens.

All of them, even the marines, were completely overwhelmed by Ottweill. No one was questioning the man. Yet somehow, the engineer ranted onward through stupidity and thickheadedness to something that actually worked on a rational basis. It was an amazing display.

The chief began to develop a second theory, that Ottweill was in full control of himself and had adopted this approach as the best way to force compliance from the men around him.

Either way, he decided he was amused. Al-Wazir began to chuckle. This earned him first a glance from Kitchens, who smiled another of his elusive smiles, then stares from some of the other attendees, then finally a sputtering and amazed silence from Ottweill.

“No, really,” al-Wazir said. “Please, do carry on.”

“Do I
entertain
you, you great red jungle ape?”

“Quite a bit, sir.” Al-Wazir bit back more.

“Well.” Ottweill folded his arms, standing before the unrolled chart of the steam borer. “I am glad to be seeing that my education and credentials and experience have come to serve a useful purpose for Her Imperial Majesty’s government.”

Kitchens stirred slightly at that, but al-Wazir rose to his feet. With both of them standing, Ottweill came to the second button down on his chest. The little man lost much of his physical authority just standing with the big chief. “I’m told you do,” al-Wazir said. He let his voice rumble, as he might talking to a new chum with big ideas about deck discipline. “I am here to help.” He added slowly and deliberately,
“Sir.”

“Who is this man?” Ottweill demanded of the rest of the room. “Have him discharged immediately, or no tunnel will there be.” He crossed his arms and glared triumphantly.

Kitchens cleared his throat. “Chief Petty Officer Threadgill Angus al-Wazir is in charge of preserving your life on the Wall, Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill, as well as the hundreds of lives of, ah, lesser value. By
direct
appointment of Her Imperial Majesty.” Kitchens let it rest a beat, then added, “Sir.”

Ottweill visibly swallowed, then stared back up at al-Wazir. “I see,” he said. “Your job is the beating of your fellow apes. By brains I shall survive, as I always have. Survive you will by being a bigger savage than the monkeys and the
Schwarzers
. Very well. You may sit down now.”

To his own surprise, al-Wazir sat.

Afterward, they took carriages down to the steam borer. Ottweill asked al-Wazir to ride with him in the lead on a little self-propelled vehicle much like a sulky save that it sat two. It was the first time other than visits to the head that al-Wazir been away from Kitchens since leaving Admiralty.

The sulky clattered through the town at the bottom of the quarry. Al-Wazir took the moment to examine his surroundings. The town itself was unremarkable—cheap buildings hastily erected to last a few seasons. In a handful of years, this place would have degraded to a dreadful slum.

He turned his attention to the excavation ahead. In a sense, the quarry was vaguely like the Wall, in that stone towered toward the sky. It was such a
short
towering, though. If he’d never seen the Wall, he might have thought the sides of the quarry high, especially at the deep end where the steam borer was deployed. And of course these walls were fractured, split away by blasting and steam shovels and pickaxes to be hauled to London for foundation and building stone.

The floor of the quarry rose behind him, so that the end that pointed just south of east formed a ramp. This was how the quarrymen had originally dug it down, keeping always an exit behind them. The steam borer had to have come in that way, too, though the great rails did not now extend to the top.

He wondered how they’d gotten it here from the locomotive works. That would have been something to see.

Ottweill slapped the reins and turned to him. “So, you are being Her Imperial’s man to watch me. When you would arrive was I wondering.”

“Not me,” said al-Wazir. “I’m the Wall Johnnie, not the spy.”

“Tch.” Ottweill shook his head. “With one of those little eels who belong to Lloyd George you come. A political you are, big man.”

“As you like it. No one’s asked me for reports, and I won’t be a rat.” Al-Wazir chuckled again. “Seen too many rats in the Navy. They have a way of going overboard in storms.”

“Not so many direct appointments of the Queen do we get,” muttered Ottweill.

There is money here,
al-Wazir thought. All the treasure it took to build the doctor’s great machines, ship them to Africa, move a thousand men across half of Northern Earth. Money that flowed to and from Ottweill’s word, regardless of who might be playing the purser.

So many dangers. And here he was, thinking like an officer again. Al-Wazir hated that.

The sulky followed a road that cut diagonally back and forth across the downward slope of the quarry to reach the flat at the west end where the steam borer had gone back into its tunnel. A small crowd of men there bent to their tasks. With Ottweill coming, he could understand why they might want to appear busy, though he suspected that with the borer working inside, their purpose was mostly to stand and wait.