Escapement (17 page)

“What is that?” He seemed suspicious now, and formal as well.

“A name. I would call you something other than Brass. How else will I know you in a city of your people?”

“But we are all called Brass,” he protested. “It is the natural order of things. Each kens what he means when we speak to one another.”

“Still, I would call you more.”

“What would you name me?”

She couldn’t tell if he was flattered or annoyed. Nonetheless, she pressed on. “Boaz. It means ‘strength.’ Boaz was the name of the northern pillar of Solomon’s Temple. You are strong, and you are descended from Solomon through the eldest Brass. And besides, it is not so different from your old name, is it?”

“In Solomon’s tongue, we are all called
nehosheth,
” he said. “Which does not seem much like Boaz, nor does it precisely mean ‘Brass.’ But I thank you.”

“You are welcome. Boaz.”

“Indeed.” He seemed pleased, though not likely to admit it.

They picked through rubble and the choked canes of old shrubbery to find the passage downward from the heart of the Armory. It was not unlike the shaft beneath Karindira’s city, save that there were chains and guides dangling in the center core, while they crept round an outer stair of metalwork affixed to the wall.

“What was this?” Paolina asked, looking up in the vague light of the smoldering torch she carried. Boaz had seemed surprised she would need such a thing. “It looks like a tackle rig.”

“There is—” Boaz stopped a moment. “There was an ascender here in another age. The device was lifted and lowered by chains along these tracks. A little floor, in truth. The power to raise the lift was borrowed from deep within the earth, through a system of gears that drew off the endless motions therein.”

“Goodness.” Paolina would very much have liked to see such a thing. “Like a parasite, robbing the application of force from a larger system with surplus to spare?”

“Yes.”

“There must have been such a one beneath the city where I last saw the brass cars. The stair wound around a large shaft there that seemed much too vast for its purpose.”

“Precisely.” He kept walking.

So did she.

The descent was longer than the shaft in Karindira’s city. Of course, they’d come higher up to reach the Armory of Westmost Repose. She presumed that the brass cars ran on a track that was at a constant distance from the center of the earth. Paolina didn’t fancy the long walk back up if their efforts proved fruitless.

Boaz pulled ahead of her with his unflagging pace. Where at first he was a pale glint directly in front of her, after a while, he was a corner ahead, then two corners, until he’d gone all the way around. The only reason Paolina knew she was not alone in the shaft was the tapping of Boaz’ feet on the metal stairs below.

In time his footfalls changed from an echoing clang to a more muted tap. Paolina had counted him seven landings ahead of her, four landings to a flight, so she took heart from this. When she reached the stone floor, she stopped.

There was still an empty space to her left, where the chains and frames of the ascender continued down. A hissing, clicking echoed from below, just at the edge of her hearing. She thought it must be the turning of the earth. To hear the very sounds of that movement made her flush—Paolina could feel her cheeks reddening.

She had another problem, though. Her smoldering cane torch had become a very poor handful. Darkness opened up before her, where the shaft let out into a larger chamber, as well as to the left where it continued to descend. If this bore any resemblance to the carway beneath Karindira’s city, somewhere in the middle of a large room would be a brass car like a large metal coffin with a crystal lid.

But she didn’t want to go wandering off into the blackness.

“Boaz,” she called. “Boaz?”

There was no answer, only a series of clanging noises.

She stepped out a bit farther into the darkness. “Boaz?” Fear found her now. A pale light flickered ahead. She could see his silhouette moving before it. Even then, Paolina did not walk faster—she was afraid of holes in the floor, or worse.

She made her way to Boaz’ side. He stood before a brass car. Its lid was raised to expose the coffin within. The light came from little six-pointed seals along the inside and outside of the car. They glowed with a pale blue flicker.

“The seal does seem to be intact,” he said. “We may climb within. I shall then set the carriage to reach one of the carways at Ophir.”

“In the Palace of Authority?” For some reason her gut lurched at the thought.

“No . . . ,” he said slowly. “Let us go first to the main harbor. We can see how the city stands.”

Unlike the Armory of Westmost Repose, hopefully.

He was right. She might have better luck searching for the English if she didn’t commence from somewhere deep within Authority’s halls.

“Here.” He pointed within. “I counsel you to sit to the rear. Lay yourself back on the saddle. I will position myself immediately before you.”

The saddle was more of a bench, covered in old and rotting leather. Three small people or two large could fit within, lying on one another’s laps. It seemed . . . salacious.

It also seemed rapid.

She climbed in. Boaz settled in before her, careful not to pinch or crush her against the bench. He leaned back and tugged on the crystal and brass lid.

“You may still choose elsewise.”

Risk,
she thought.
This is risk.
So was every mile walked under the open sky. Paolina tugged the gleam from her pocket. She had to contort a bit to do it, and had she been larger, it would not have been possible.

“Away,” she told him.

He touched something, and light blossomed like a private sunrise.

After the initial bright eruption that launched them on their way, the submural transit was shadowed. Oppressively so, in fact, except for the blue glow of the seals within the car. There was barely enough light for her to glimpse towering bands of metal sliding past, smooth cliffs in the shadows. Gears towered the height of mountains, or so it seemed to her. Pillars flashed closer by with a swift whickering.

The saddle beneath her transmitted a series of clicks and bumps as the car slid along. Paolina had no way to judge their progress. She wished for more light, would have prayed for it if she had thought that might help.

All too soon the car clattered to a halt. It slid into a dim room lit by pale seal-light with a sigh of tired metal.

“We are arrived,” said Boaz as he opened the canopy.

Herr Doctor Professor Lothar Ottweill and his minions were to take ship at Gosport in Hampshire, across the harbor from Portsmouth. Al-Wazir would have been far happier with a berth aboard one of Her Imperial
Majesty’s ships of the air. Their cargo capacity was nominal, due to weight restrictions, and Ottweill wanted to travel with his supply train.

The doctor demanded SS
Great Eastern
carry them to Africa and the Wall, apparently imagining that the largest ship afloat would also be the safest. He and al-Wazir had argued about it several times, both at the quarry near Maidstone and on the rail trip from Maidstone to Gosport.

“I’ll be telling you,” al-Wazir said to Ottweill as the rails clicked by beneath the floor, “a big iron tub like that’ll just pull you down all the faster should a storm come on. If you’ve got to be stuck on the water, let her be a fast and nimble ship with good trim. Not some madman’s great riveted turtle.”

“But the space for our equipage and our complement of men,” Ottweill had protested. “Unshakable, unsinkable, braving Chinese saboteurs and hostile natives alike.”

“Ain’t a fuzzy wuzzy born could sink an English ship.” Al-Wazir was muttering, his pride stung. “And no ship ever built could be unsinkable, save she sat forever on land like one of them coffin ships of the heathen kings of long ago.”

“Neither heathen kings nor English are we, you and I.” Ottweill had a sly gleam.

That
remark would have given Kitchens a rash. “We serve Her Imperial Majesty, body and soul and shilling.”

“Of course we do.” Ottweill leaned forward, knees almost touching al-Wazir in the private compartment. “But know that we serve also the Wall. That’s why we’re both here, my good chief petty officer. Men of vision we both are! We see beyond the lowered eyes of others. If a way we cut through the Wall, our names they shall be teaching to schoolchildren a thousand years from now.”

“
Your
name, belike,” said al-Wazir gruffly, though he could not turn away the secret smile that tugged at this face. “I’m just an old sailor who knows his way about a bit.”

The Wall. It had eaten
Bassett
, Smallwood, and most of the crew. It had broken al-Wazir’s da a generation before.

By God, maybe this madman could best it.

And that was the English way, after all. Show Johnnie foreigner a thing or two, run up the flag, and improve the place.

Every day, al-Wazir found a new reason to be glad he was a Scotsman.

Regardless of Ottweill’s demands concerning SS
Great Eastern,
Her Imperial Majesty’s government had chartered SS
Wallachian Prince
to carry the
expedition from Gosport to Acalayong on the Gaboon coast at the easternmost arm of the Bight of Benin, where Africa and the Wall met.

They met
Wallachian Prince
at the docks of Gosport. She was quite a large ship, some four hundred feet stem to stern, iron-built with three massive boilers and triple screws. She had no masts and so could set no canvas if the coal were to run out or she were to be stranded overlong. A large freighter, built to carry machinery across the Atlantic, she was nothing like the ships of al-Wazir’s naval career.

When he and Ottweill arrived in another steam omnibus, the pier at Priddy’s Hard was crowded with freight, far more than al-Wazir would have expected even that enormous civilian ship to be capable of taking on. Much of it was the sort of heavy dead weight that rendered supercargoes bald and trembling while still in their youth—rails for the narrow-and wide-gauge lines to be laid, metal slugs for fabrication of parts or devices as needed while working at the Wall’s face, three small locomotives.

“Is there another ship?” he asked as they stepped off the vehicle. Sailing with that great lot of junk down inside the hull didn’t appeal at all.

“No.” Ottweill’s voice was sharp, his body trembling as they stood out in the sharp September wind. Al-Wazir could tell that the doctor was working up to another explosion. “The troops have their own quarters. Four hundred and seventeen in our company we will have shipping as civilian passengers, in the event that all the men and boys make the dock on time. No second sailing for latecomers will there be. The rest have gone before.”

“I was thinking of the materials.”

“Oh, that.” Ottweill waved a hand. “Trivial. Aboard we tell them to put it, aboard they put it. Sailors you must under—” He cut himself off with a sidelong look at al-Wazir. “
Civilian sailors,
chief petty officer. It is all for the money, with them. Shillings and pounds and debits.” He spat. “No vision or purpose they have. Besides, coming down from Kent the other steam borer is. They must load that anyway.”

This time al-Wazir exploded instead of the doctor. “Have you gone and lost your bloody mind, you great earwig? Your steam borer weighs ten times what yon locomotives do, and is far too big to be lifted into the hold.” How had he missed that detail?

Because he wasn’t part of Ottweill’s supply train, of course. He merely lived at the end of it. This was like arguing with a purser.

“Look at the ship.” Ottweill was clearly confused. “Fit in it all will.”

“Not without they cut the deck off first to load it. Then, even if they did, how will you get it offloaded at Acalayong?”

“However they load it here, but in reverse. Not my problem is this.”

“We’ll be lucky if they have a pier there,” said al-Wazir. “Your first project will be building a port to accept this.”

“Oh, no,” said Ottweill. “A team was sent two years ago just after the great waves, to dredge the river and build the pier. Good roadbed from the waterfront to the Equatorial Wall we should have, and a crane at the dock.”

“Then I’ll be shutting up. But still, mind you we won’t be carrying any of that off the ship by hand.” Another thought occurred to him. “How will you be getting the steam borer down here from Kent, anyway?”

“It can be broken into pieces for shipment.”

Al-Wazir still did not believe this. “In the two days we have before sailing?”

“If it is late, on another ship we shall have it sent.”

He could estimate the odds of
that
happening.

Still, the doctor was sufficiently persistent, not to mention barking mad enough, to get what he wanted.

SS
Wallachian Prince
was loaded without incident within the pair of days before their scheduled sailing, much to al-Wazir’s amazement. The supercargoes were busy. They didn’t leave room to pack in something the size of the doctor’s third steam borer.