Escapement (16 page)

The brass man swiveled almost in place, his feet clattering slightly. “Authority lies to the east.”

“By happy chance, I am walking east.”

“I shall be forced to slay you in time.”

“Of course,” she said brightly.

He strode forward, marching at a pace that was almost a trot for her.

Paolina didn’t mind. She’d walk as she pleased. Either he’d pursue his purpose and draw ahead of her soon enough, or he’d stop and wait. She would not run at his heels like a dog after a boy.

As evening descended and she looked for a suitable place to bed down off the path, she found the brass man standing next to a jumble of rocks.

“I have cozened the great cats from their den and prepared us a place to abide the night.” He pointed the way.

“All this,” she asked, “and not even the word from me yet? You are infused with purpose.”

“I am infused with Authority.” His voice was heavy with dignity. “But Authority is not all things.”

“Oh, really?” She stepped into the cleft in the rocks. It stank of scaled cat, to be sure, but he seemed to have torn down several trees to build a nest in there. “What lies beyond Authority?”

His response was chillingly simple. “You do.”

“I cannot think so,” she murmured, crawling into the leaves.

It wasn’t much more than she would have done for herself, save for his comforting bulk between her and whatever might prowl the darkness. Since leaving Karindira’s city, Paolina had been less than careful about her risks on the slopes of
a Muralha
. Sleeping in a cat’s den guarded by the brass man reminded her once more of what could easily have been her fate.

As the evening went by, she veered between waking and dreamful sleep. The brass man stood still as he had on the path when she first met him, only a shape now where he had been almost real in daylight. She could hear a faint ticking and clicking from within that magnificently armored body.

Pulling the gleam from its case, Paolina hoped for enough starlight to see the hands by. Where the timing that beat at the heart of life was very subtle, wrapped within layers of skin and bone and moving meat, the timing of this metal man was not much different from the stemwinder itself.

Paolina found herself unwilling to experiment. Not without his assent, and even enthusiasm. There was something strangely charming about the brass man. He was more than deadly, to be sure, but he was a person.

She would not be like a man and see others as less than people. If there was one gift to being a woman—well, girl, yet—it was to see others from the bottom looking up, rather than from some high and lordly place.

Still, she studied his shape awhile, wondering what the word was that lay at the heart of him. Also what word it might be that lay at her own heart.

The next morning he walked beside her. This section of
a Muralha
was craggy, tall broken columns of rock hosting isolated, crumbling ledges destined for the sea far below. Someone, presumably the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir, had built a roadway. In places the inconstant columns had been carved inward to allow the trail to pass. In other places bridges or berms had been built to aid the traveler in crossing the gaps and ravines that punctuated the cliff faces.

The Wall was beautiful in this weather. A floor of clouds swept not far below them, clinging to the ocean’s surface to making a sea of variegated white textured with light and shadow. Though the day was sunny, water clung to the cliff face along which she walked, so that Paolina could trail her fingers on the nubbly, mossy texture and lift them away wet with chilly dew that tasted like a midnight storm.

Posts marked the little bridges. Each of those had the device of a six-petaled flower incised upon its top face. She knew that blossom as Solomon’s seal.

“Tell me of the kingdom,” she finally asked the brass man, who was just then a few paces ahead of her on the narrow track.

“The Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir was established by King Solomon in the light of the days of the First Temple.” The brass man’s voice seemed to slow, fall into a rhythm. Paolina realized he wasn’t explaining, he was reciting. “The mighty king had espied brass in the sky, coruscating from atop the Wall. He did not know the world for what it was, and so he bethought he glimpsed the rivers of gold which had been promised him by the Lord God. At his command a great fleet set forth from the high port at Asiongaber in the lands of the Holy Hour, bound southward where they held that gold must flow because the light of the sun was so much brighter.

“Solomon placed his Admiral Alzabar in command of the fleet, but gave unto him an adjutant who was the first of my kind. This man was hight Brass. Brass had been wrought by Solomon as a teacher and plaything for Rehoboam and others among the best of Solomon’s sons. When Rehoboam was grown to his manhood, Solomon had no further need for Brass, and so dispatched him south with the admiral.

“When they came hard upon the coast of Abyssinia, there rose a great storm and a full portion of the fleet was driven ashore. Admiral Alzabar surrendered his life in the catastrophe, as did several of the greatest captains of the fleet. Brass took command and brought them to the Wall. There he played the mercer well, filling the remaining vessels with gold, silver, thyine wood, precious stones, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Brass sent the laden bottoms home to his master and betook his own way into the jungles that lie at the foot of the Wall.

“There Brass rose in might and power, walking among the tribes as a fearsome creature who dispensed justice and death in equal measures, according to how he was met. From him, our kingdom was forged. All who walk in metal are his children.”

Paolina waited until it was clear his silence would continue. “What shall I call you, then?”

“Brass. We are all hight Brass.”

“Made of metal, do you have a soul?”

He stopped so abruptly, she nearly ran into him. Turning, his strange mechanical eyes met her gaze. “We are children of the holy King Solomon the Wise.”

Which did not, she realized, answer the question. But Paolina smiled.
“Of course.” She continued, “And Authority. Is that the council of elders among you Brass?”

“Authority is . . . Authority.”

The question caused him such obvious distress that she let it lapse.

Eventually the trail brought them to a higher, wider ledge out of the country of the crumbling cliffs. The clouds below were thinning as well. The trail ran through a broad meadow.

The area was wide enough for all the extents of Praia Nova to have been set down within it. It was overlooked by a building, hollow-roofed with gaping windows, stone blackened by fire. The immense structure might have looked at home in Karindira’s city, though it was hard to know for certain among the tumbled columns and broken lintels. A great bay in
a Muralha
rose behind it, a place where the Wall had retreated farther from the sea in some ancient catastrophe, leaving rank upon rank of forest and meadow and waterfall and crag. Or perhaps it was just a ravine writ on the scale of all Creation. She could not tell.

Paolina simply stood and stared.

Brass seemed anxious. “Here stands the Armory of Westmost Repose. Beneath the glory of the Wall it wards the paths into the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”

Paolina stepped past Brass. Weeds grew among the stones of the plaza before the building, some of them entire bushes larger than she. Whatever had swept the Armory had done so in times long past. “Not in generations,” she told him. “How long have you been at the border?”

“I do not know. What is the year?”

She turned to study his handsome, frozen face. “1902 of the Christian Era.”

“That is not possible.” Now he sounded truly stricken. “I set forth to the armory in Tishrei 5663. I have served here since . . . since . . .” He stopped. “I do not know.”

So this place was called Tishrei, but what was 5663?
That made no sense as a year, at all. “How can your kind forget?”

“We cannot.” Brass began to walk in small circles, one leg jerking with each step. “We are incapable of forgetting. Every memory is recorded in the tiny gears and valves deep within my head. Then that memory is scribed within crystals that are nigh indestructible. When a Brass becomes very aged, he might perchance have his crystals exchanged. This deposits some of his remembrance in the libraries within the Palace of Authority. Still they
are his thoughts and deeds and memories.” He almost stuttered. “I—I cannot forget.”

It was clear that Brass was set to sink into a mechanical equivalent of despair. She pitied him for that, but she also needed his strength and knowledge of affairs along
a Muralha
.

“But you have.” Paolina kept her voice reasonable, trying to reach him. “Time beats at your heart, yet you have forgotten it. Your knowledge of the system of the years is wrong. You remember the Armory of Westmost Repose as a great defense, yet it is an old ruin. You do not remember being sent to the border where I found you.”

“True,” he admitted, stopping his manic pace. His limbs shivered. He was settling into the inanimate object he’d been when she first encountered him.

Paolina had to inspire him. “Then you have forgotten. It is mere reason to accept that. Perhaps your crystals or valves were tampered with. Perhaps your memories were stolen, or removed by Authority for its own purposes. Your thoughts might lie even now in those libraries you speak of, ranked in elegiac array with the mighty deeds of the ancients.” She dropped her voice, urging him to believe. “All you can do is go to the Palace of Authority and demand that the theft of your memory be redressed. You are bound there by duty, now, to carry me. You will serve both yourself and your orders if you take us both there.”

High overhead some wide-winged bird screamed as Brass stared at her. He remained silent, locked into immobility for seconds that stretched into minutes. She looked back at him, but whatever light had made him Brass, and not simply brass, had faded.

She had failed.

“At least this is a prettier place for you to stand,” Paolina told him. If only she could find his word, what he was missing, the inconceivable thought that could not be formed by him. She wondered what that would be. Like a riddle from God. Or in his case, from the first Brass and King Solomon before.

She went to have a closer look at the Armory of Westmost Repose. Layers of stone and forest and meadow rose above the building into the infinite grace of the sky.

In places of beauty like this, she could remember that God had a benevolent purpose for His Creation.

The Armory of Westmost Repose was certainly at rest now. Up close she could see how dark-leafed vines had overtaken the foundations and
the rubble of its collapse, so that they clung like a wiry shadow to the building.

This had not been built by whoever had erected the fat-bellied pillars farther east in Karindira’s city. Judging from their stubs, these pillars had been wide, squat, and squared off. The building, though quite massive, had been designed with a different sense of how such things should be done—it had been almost crude.

Not precisely an architecture of defense, though. The armory lacked an outer wall. The men of Praia Nova had gone on about a city wall from time to time, agreeing sagely that such a construction made a place a place. Which would have made sense to Paolina if they’d had ten times the manpower available to build it, and possibly any real enemies with which to concern themselves.

Here, though, a wall might have made sense.

Paolina climbed the foundation stones to peer within the broken windows. The roof had collapsed in a number of places, leaving pillars of dusty light to carve the shadows within. There wasn’t much to see, only that whatever had lain within was long ago looted or salvaged. Which was to be expected. She’d long ago reasoned that there must be thousands of villages along
a Muralha
, populated by hundreds of races and kinds of thinking beings.

She scrambled back down off the stones to set her face eastward. She was startled to find Brass standing there.

“I have reasoned that you are correct,” he said.

Paolina smiled. “About going to the Palace of Authority?”

“Yes. It is a substantial journey from here.”

“I know. A boy of my acquaintance took two years to walk from Africa to Praia Nova.”

“There may be another method for us to expedite our progress.”

“Do the brass cars run here beneath the Armory of Westmost Repose?”

He seemed startled, his eyes clicking. “You know of them?”

“I have seen them in another place. The woman who showed one to me did not know the secret of their direction. I feared to climb in and ride lest I starve along the way, not knowing the proper command to exit.”

“This I understand,” Brass said. “That was most probably wise of you. But we should pass within, to ascertain if the downward ways are blocked. If they are not, we will discover if the car harbor remains intact. It would turn a journey of months into hours.”

Paolina wasn’t certain she wanted to come to Authority so quickly. Still, she wanted to get to England with her gleam, and that path lay through
Authority. “I will come. But before we go look, will you accept something from me?”