Escapement (13 page)

“I will be along my way as soon as I may,” Paolina said politely.

“When you are well,” Karindira said, “I will show you a thing.” She sat
on the edge of Paolina’s bed. “In the meantime, will you tell me more of men?”

Nine days later Karindira led Paolina down a dank stair in the heart of her palace. “This is a thing of men I will show you. Choose what it will mean to you. I make no urging.”

Paolina followed her down a squared-off series of landings around an empty shaft that might have been built for some other purpose, before these wooden steps had been set into place on iron frames. Some of the individual risers were rotten, and the frames creaked beneath her weight, so that her heart raced as she descended. The molder made her eyes and nose run thick.

She did not look forward to making her way back up again.

At the bottom of a long series of flights there was a larger room. A great brass altar or tomb was set in the middle of it, like a metal coffin with a crystal top. There were brass ribbons inset into the floor running east and west from the coffin. Columns loomed around them, broken-off stubs protruding in many places.

“There are weights within the Wall,” Karindira said. “Pieces that turn to keep the balance of the world.” She patted the brass altar. “This is a cart which moves among the weights. It will take you all around the world and back in a day, should you desire.”

Paolina was amazed that such a thing was possible. That the world was filled with the grand mechanisms of God’s design was self-evident from any examination of the heavens. That a person might set foot within the mechanism was not so clearly the case.

“How would you control it? How would you know where to stop and exit?”

“These things are not known to me.” Karindira shrugged, a remarkable ordinary gesture. “I told you I would show you a thing. I cannot account for it. When the men departed, they took the keys which had been given to us, so they might easily return.”

Paolina was sorely tempted. She was clever, more than clever, but this was something she had no basis to understand. She could imagine being trapped in the car, circling beneath the Wall forever, unable to break free or exit until she starved to cobwebbed bones flashing forever in a forest of whirling brass. Still, the possibility of passing so quickly beneath the skin of the world amazed her.

“I would if I could,” she told Karindira. “But I cannot see how to control this thing.”

Karindira seemed sad a moment. “Then fare well on the trail, Paolina-who-seeks-the-English. I will walk you upward and to the gates. After that, your path is your own.”

Traveling to the east gate, Paolina got her first good view of Karindira’s city. She’d never seen one before, though certainly Dickens had described London well enough.

This place was no London, but the streets were
stone
. Buildings seemed arranged on top of one another to loom high enough for three and four rows of windows. All of Praia Nova would have fit in one street. Even the walls were overwhelming, blocking out the world outside while hemming the people and their places in close as any fist.

It was so large. She realized that there must be a thousand people there, perhaps two thousand. An almost inconceivable number. Paolina could see the virtue of a place as small as Praia Nova.

She walked some miles from the east gate of Karindira’s city before stopping for the night. Paolina pulled herself into a hollow among the ferns and reeds in a wider bamboo forest that dripped even as the sun glinted in the west. It smelled watery, a rich, spongy stink that spoke of life. Monkeys howled nearby, thrashing in the upper reaches of the great stalks, while great moths larger than her face whirred as they displayed the colors of blood and bone.

Had she been given to spiritual fears, this might have been a frightening place. Instead she made a warm and comfortable nest in the underbrush and lay down to sleep again, wondering how it might have gone with her had she boarded Karindira’s brass cart. Would she even now be among the English, eating their puddings and drinking their beers and glimpsing the true secrets of the world?

The image of her grinning skull orbiting endlessly in the tunnels beneath the earth was sufficient to discourage that fantasy. Paolina sighed and snugged lower, hiding from the moths that seemed bent on brushing her in their moonlight dances.

And so the trail went for weeks on weeks. She began to understand how Clarence Davies had walked for two years. Every day was the same, though the path might be different and the weather might change and the creatures that roared upon the slopes varied in size and frightening array.

Her confidence grew in her device as the gleam continued to be a passport. Perhaps Clarence’s Dent stemwinder had served the same
purpose in its way—she did not know. Creatures avoided her when given the chance.

She tried again and again to make the gleam do
something,
anything. Should she be asked again, as Karindira had, Paolina did not intend to be caught out. But she could no more force a flower to grow to fruit, nor a creek to stop running, than she could have halted the progress of the sun in the sky.

In time she found a country of walls, ornate and winding little knee-high labyrinths that seemed to have been built to the scale of marmots or hedgehogs. There was no evidence of structure, really, just miles of the little walls in an endless maze, which Paolina stepped over.

There were bones, too, some so massive as to be beyond improbable. A curve of rib that ran nearly a hundred yards had to be a jest of God, left to tempt the gullible. That, at least, was what Paolina told herself, especially when, crossing a flower meadow filled with glossy broad-leafed plants displaying bright purple blooms, she passed a jaw fragment with embedded teeth that stood taller than she did.

One morning Paolina was camped on the head of a rock knee that gave her a glimpse of the glinting brass at the top of
a Muralha
. She watched it twist and sparkle in the coming sunlight, a warm glint in the predawn gloom that shone briefly bright as a second sun just before the daystar finally appeared.

Onward she walked, losing all consciousness of the time of the journey and immersing herself in the complex nature of
a Muralha
. She developed a theory that the Wall was the true purpose of Creation, while earth and sun existed merely to make the thing possible. God had made a great vertical canvas on which to draw His experiments in broad brushstrokes and fine. How different was she from Karindira’s people, really? As alike as cats and dogs, perhaps.

Paolina kept the gleam in her grip. She watched the hands jitter around the face—the heart of the world, the passage of the hours, the measuring of her own blood’s beat. The fourth hand continued to defeat her. What had she meant by it, for it? She couldn’t quite recall now. No matter what she tried, she could not coax its secrets forth. She would need a wizard, some English sorcerer, to show her the true path.

Then one day she met the brass man.

He stood where a higher path met her trail, right in the middle of the track. She might have mistaken him for a statue, but the rock beneath his feet was worn by generations of travel. Either he’d walked there, or he’d been
set long after the trail was made. There was dust and dirt around him to tell the story of his being there awhile, and a scattering of bones alongside the trail.

Had he fought or killed, she wondered? Or were those relics of older combats?

The brass man was slightly over six feet tall. His body was formed of armor—greaves and breastplate and guards, as if he awaited combat with some great and terrible creature. His face was almost the opposite, an eerie beauty oddly marred by its near perfection. His lips were wrought in the ghost of a sneer, though a tiny grate showed where they pursed open. His eyelids were shut.

She stopped in front of him. He was a marvelous work of engineering. Not only was his form nearly perfected, but the joins and solders and borders of his construction had been exquisitely performed.

“You are beautiful,” she said in English, tapping his breastplate. “A shame to have made you of metal.”

Lately, she’d been more interested in the occasional ordinary human men she met on the trail. The boys who had seemed so dreadful back in Praia Nova were becoming more tantalizing in ways she did not want to analyze too closely.

The banded eyelids slid open. An oiled brass orb with a tiny crystal opening flexed and turned.

“As are you, fair lady.”

The voice was pleasant but hollow, as if there were nothing within the armor save dark shadows and empty air. No breathy bellows of lungs, or the clattering echo of clockwork.

“With the manners of a courtier.” Paolina was proud of that phrase. It had been in the Spanish letters. She’d never had cause to use it before, in any language.

“Here is where the border lies,” he told her. “None may pass beyond without they have a seal.”

She looked around. The path ran through a field of low tumbled rocks between which grass sprouted in profusion. There was nothing to mark any one foot of land from another. “Border of what, sir man?”

“The western marches of the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”

Paolina had never heard of that. “I seek England,” she told him. “I would pass your kingdom in peaceful quiet, looking onward.”

He made a hollow ringing noise that might have been laughter. “England is a flatwater pretender to the honest estate of nationhood. You shall not find that demesne of mice and shopmen anywhere within or upon the bounds of the Solomnic Kingdom.”

“As may be. If I pass you, what action will you take?”

“I shall perforce detain you until Authority arrives to effect your release.”

Paolina considered that. This was a creature of logic, in a self-evident way. She wondered if that logic could be trumped from outside.

“When did Authority last come here?”

There was a long pause. “That is a time most uncertain. Certes, it has been years . . . a century or more.”

“So you would seize me and hold me until I starve and crumble to dust, while you shut down once more until someone else comes along?”

Another long pause. “That would seem to be the intent of my direction.”

“I have a much better plan,” she said brightly. “Convey me to Authority yourself. You will be shut of this dreadful lonely place, and I will be farther along my way to England.”

“Authority has instructed me to stand fast.”

“To what purpose, if Authority does not return to renew your instructions?” She let her voice grow sly. “Besides, if you take me to them, you can show them your valor and perspicacity in retrieving from the wild a gleam.”

“Authority has tendered most specific instructions concerning the matter of gleams.”

“Which are?”

Now he sounded very uncertain indeed. “I am to kill any gleams upon first encounter.”

The steam borer was even more complex than al-Wazir might have imagined. There was an arrangement beneath the body of the machine to lay the rails on which it rode, advancing them with the cutting face. The standard-gauge rails were also laid in that same process.

A small scar-faced man in a greasy cap, one shoulder higher than the other, explained. He’d mumbled his name so fast, al-Wazir hadn’t caught it.

“ ’Tis what we calls a soft ride then, sir. She wouldn’t stand on ’em for long ere they slipped or gave. No way to set them spikes while the cutter’s running. So if the rock’s easy, she moves forward fast enough. If the rock’s hard, she cuts some, then backs up a wee bit so we can slip for’d and secure the rails by hand.”

Not quite the smooth progress Ottweill had outlined in his lecture, but it made sense. “How do you get forward? She fills the tunnel, don’t she?”

The scar-faced man grinned, his lips little more than another slash
across his face. “Cutter opens up a hole a bit wider’n the body. You sidles along them decks you see down each side, slips around the cab, steps through the blades, and you’re in.”

“Not much room.” He shuddered. “A man would have to be able to abide dark, tight spots with joy in his heart, I’d think.”

“Them’s as loves the ground loves the ground, over and under. Most of us is miners, sir, out of the Welsh country. The rest is railroad men.” He paused, then added darkly, “The first railroads was in the mines, sir. I reckon the last ones will be, too.”

“Thank you.” Al-Wazir stepped along the side of the steam borer, glad to leave the man’s company. He’d take an honest sailor, drunk and stupid, over a tunnel rat any day of his life.

He touched the plated side of the steam borer, just below the walkway supports. It was hot, which surprised him a bit. Much like the gasbag of an airship, the thing got bigger the closer one came to it, until it passed a point of reasonableness and became something like landscape. This was a beast, a land leviathan worthy of some biblical army marching to lay waste to a patriarch’s city. Al-Wazir could imagine the Jew-soldiers storming Jericho with one of these machines under their command.

The iron sides seemed to shrug off the concerns of sunlight and open air and the world of men.