Escapement (20 page)

“Yes,” she said.

“Froming where?”

“The Armory of Westmost Repose.”

“Thanking you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

The two of them fussed at Boaz a minute or two more, then stepped away.

Paolina summoned her courage. “May I have him back now, please?”

The one who’d spoken to her sounded surprised. “He ising not yours.”

“No, no, of course not. He is his own. You are all Brass.” She smiled. “But he committed me to aiding him in scouting the English positions. As I am of their race and speak the language, Brass felt I would serve him well. I am enthused to begin our work, yet here you have turned him away.”

“He is needing of maintenance.” The brass man looked at his colleague. They had a rapid conversation in a burst of clicks and chatters.

“Please,” Paolina added. “I would serve Ophir and the eldest Brass.”

“Not of you.”

“He is.” She grasped for something that would make sense to these rude mechanicals. “He . . . he brought me here from the Armory of Westmost Repose. He is to take me before Authority.”

Her interlocutor stared at her a moment, in a very human way, then adjusted something in Boaz’ neck. “Going then.”

“Thank you.”

Boaz stirred, an indefinable ghost of life reentering him as it had that day on the trail. Paolina grabbed at his arm. “Come on, Brass. Time for us to do our duty.”

She could hear something in him whir, but he turned and walked with her.

“How do we get away from the Palace of Authority,” she whispered once they were alone in the hall. “Back as we came?” Up seemed foolish—there were more Brass that way, and people in general.

He led her downward, still unspeaking. They exited via the Penitents’ Door and into the cool shadows of the rearmost part of the undercity. Boaz seemed content to remain mute as he took a different way this time, along catwalks and stairways that paralleled the face of
a Muralha.
She remained very conscious of the fact that the Palace of Authority lay just behind the stone to her right.

They came to a point where a stair led farther down. It was cut into the face of the Wall, so that the rock formed a half arch. The steps were staggered, sometimes small and close together, sometimes larger and farther apart. A slow procession of people, both Brass and flesh, headed down. There was no room that she could see for someone to come back up.

Each bore a bundle, some great knot of supplies and gear. The loads were wrapped haphazardly. It was as if every porter had conceived of his own burden and sought out stick by stick what to fill it with. Each trudged staring only at his own feet. None watched their fellows; none looked forward or back.

When she stared along the maze of walkways between the wooden cone-buildings of the undercity, Paolina realized that many of the folk she’d seen before must have been laden for this trail.

To her shock, Boaz grasped Paolina by the waist and hefted her to his shoulders. She was torn between beating at him and grabbing for the gleam, lest its pouch slide free of her dress pocket. She settled for silent protest with gleam safe in hand, though she was furious.

Once he started down the trail, she began to understand why he’d grabbed her. Boaz held Paolina so that her head was on the inside, passing near enough to the stone of the Wall to make her flinch over and over. The other side, though, would have had her head hanging over empty space.

She could not have borne that.

And the trail went on and on. There was a sloping country far below her, woodlots and fields barely visible through a layer of fog. They would be walking downward for miles, it seemed.

Paolina closed her eyes, finally, trusting Boaz not to slam her head into the rock passing so very close. She wondered awhile at why the walkers were all so automated, so quiet and slow, but eventually the lull of his steps and the warmth of the sun sent her slipping into sleep.

Acalayong was a disaster. The port wasn’t even a town, just a stinking jungled river mouth with sufficient draft to admit large vessels. Al-Wazir knew as soon as
Wallachian Prince
sailed within sight of the harbor that they were in for some nasty work. One of the specially built freighters that had brought the first two steam borers here to the Wall was in the channel, burnt to the waterline.

As far as he could tell, the borer had been taken off before the burning. He told himself that was a blessing.

The Equatorial Wall loomed south of Acalayong’s river, the Mitémélé. Water lapped at a stone bluff that footed a rising plain, which in turn was backed by soaring ribs of rock where the Wall proper vaulted into the sky, blocking the horizon in an immensity of clouded stone. The area at the base lay in deep shadow, something he assumed to be perpetual with the sun directly overhead.

There was a wooden trestle leading out into the channel. A crane stood at the end. It looked like something out of the Middle Ages.
Ivanhoe,
maybe. But this was what the advance engineers had built, at least until someone sank the ship in the river.

Al-Wazir’s gaze followed a graded roadbed leading from the trestle upward toward the Wall. The track was very wide as it vanished into the jungle. Somewhere up there, a few miles distant, lost in the glossy green chaos of the tropical forest, were one or both of the steam borers and almost a thousand men, waiting for Ottweill to arrive.

Down here on the river there wasn’t an honest English face to be seen. Just a scattering of locals in canoes, and the fire-damaged hulk.

He looked up to the Wall again, realizing the mists he saw were smoke.

Al-Wazir shouted toward the deck from his perch atop the pilothouse. “There’s been fighting here on the water, and there’s fighting now upon the Wall. Tell Captain Hornsby we’ll be going in with Plan Red.”

Plan Red was to land all the uniformed forces under arms—a battalion of Royal Marines with a small army detachment—followed by as many of Ottweill’s men as could be induced to take up weapons. Under Plan Red, al-Wazir himself was to stay behind and secure the unloading of
Wallachian Prince.
He’d objected strenuously to being left out of the action, but had been overruled.

The ship’s crew and a portion of Ottweill’s men would remain with him. They would work under the supercargoes to get the ship unloaded as quickly as possible, and the supplies secured once landed. He’d have to lay the rails, too, and get the three little locomotives currently welded to the foredeck laboring to haul those supplies up to the work site.

The fate of Gordon’s expedition hung heavy on al-Wazir’s mind, but those circumstances had been different. Today they were tackling the Wall on English terms, not following the Wall’s own dangerous ways. The ghosties and bright machines that lurked up high could keep right on lurking up there, so long as it wasn’t them that had come down to make war on the expedition here.

He put that thought out of his head and went to talk to the first mate about what could be done to clear a way to the pier.

Hornsby and his men had vanished into the jungle, heading toward the Wall. None of the promised runners reappeared.

Ottweill was fit to raise hell and all the dead who lay within. “Splashing about in that miserable river you must stop,” he screamed at al-Wazir. Ottweill, the chief,
Prince
’s first mate, and the lead supercargo were meeting in the ward room. It was the fourth day they lay at anchor in the estuary.

Al-Wazir still had blood under his fingernails from Grassi’s death by crocodile that afternoon. He was in no mood to hear it. “If you have a better plan, Professor, please share it with us.” He slapped the tabletop. “Otherwise I’ll drag you down into the river to cut rotten, stinking, fire-hardened wood with the rest of us. Perhaps you’d like to count the leeches? Or carry a rifle and stand chest-deep in the water on crocodile watch.”

“You will regret this conduct,” Ottweill said stiffly.

“I have no doubt. But only if I first succeed in keeping all of us alive.” Al-Wazir knew he should not be bickering with the man who was effectively his captain, not here before their real purpose had even begun to bear fruit. “I regret my conduct, sir,” he said heavily, lying himself blue. “I cannot shift the wreck any faster. We already work from first light to total darkness in heat that would boil a chicken. Men are dying in the water.”

“Work harder,” Ottweill muttered.

“Of course.”

And so it went, for days on end.

On the seventh day, Captain Hornsby sent back a detachment with a message. The short column of wounded was led by one of Hornsby’s lieutenants, a foppish boy from Kent whose name al-Wazir could never get right.

The young officer was smiling, though he seemed to have bandages in place of one ear, and had walked in with a crutch. “Chief al-Wazir. May I present Captain Hornsby’s compliments?”

“Indeed.” Al-Wazir was conscious that he stank of Mitémélé bottom
mud. It was much like being painted with shit. On the other hand, the lieutenant stank of jungle and gunpowder and old blood.

Sometimes he missed the Royal Navy. “How goes it on the Wall?”

The lieutenant swayed slightly. “The earlier expedition was attacked in force.” There was something fixed about his smile. “Almost a hundred dead before they could repel the hostiles. We arrived in time to break a second attack.”

“Who is the enemy?” That question might be meaningless on the Wall, but still he had to ask.

“Brass men, sir. Walking statues with spears that throw fire. They have mixed native troops, of all colors and sizes.”

“We are victorious?” he prompted.

“Yes. With no damage to the steam borers or essential equipment.”

Al-Wazir wondered what constituted nonessential equipment, so far from England and resupply. He was spared the need to ask that question by the arrival of Ottweill from the ship. The chief nodded to the lieutenant, who saluted and turned to tell his tale again while his men stood down to smoke dog-eared butts and stretch out on the planks of the trestle pier.

Back to the river
, he thought. The sky was so much cleaner.

Once they’d cleared
Parsifal
’s wreck,
Wallachian Prince
could stand to and be unloaded. That was another sort of work, which fortunately did not require al-Wazir’s full attention. He occupied himself with several long, thorough showers and a seventeen-hour slumber in his rack. The cramped cabin was larger than any space he’d ever had to call his own in the Navy, though others grumbled at length about the Spartan accommodations.

There was no question that the ship’s crew would be pleased to see the last of Ottweill and his merry band of Wall-drillers.

After that, he watched from the rail as a mountain of gear, supplies, equipment, machinery, rails, and raw material was disgorged from the holds of
Wallachian Prince.
The railroad men had a line laid almost immediately, up and away from the trestle pier before branching into several sidings. They ran one of their locomotives shifting tonnage away from dockside to facilitate continued unloading. Ottweill and his quartermasters worked on the landward side to direct the unloading of that haulage, with an eye toward more efficient reloading and transport to the cutting face later.

It was a masterpiece of coordinated effort. All the slacking layabouts and troublemakers who’d so occupied al-Wazir’s time on the long voyage
south seemed to have unfolded into as hardworking and clever a bunch of seaman’s sons as he’d care to see.

He finally went ashore with the last of the load, eighteen days after landfall in Acalayong. The battle had broken off completely up at the Wall. Hornsby’s runners were getting through. The railroad seemed to creep southward whenever he wasn’t looking, opening new sidings and cargo dumps, but also developing the mainline that would be required to shift all the goods up to the base encampment.

English industry had asserted itself in the teeth of even the Wall. Al-Wazir began to think that perhaps the Prime Minister’s scheme was not so mad as all that.

The cutting face was impressive. The initial teams had surveyed to Ottweill’s specifications, following what few maps existed. They’d claimed a great squared-off bay that led some small distance into the Wall. There was no great profit in cutting off a few score yards of the tunnel. Rather, the value was in the sheltered space where the steam borers had been set, the rails laid to drive them up from the river having been pulled up after for reuse inside the tunnel.

A stout wooden stockade had been constructed that bowed outward from the mouth of the stone bay. There was a gate house, already being rebuilt in stone, and a palisaded wall, which showed signs of recent heavy fighting. Small breech-loading cannon had been mounted on three towers. As an air sailor, al-Wazir was not one of nature’s infantrymen, but he appreciated what he saw.

A trail of wreckage, felled trees, and roughly plowed land led east, marking the direction of the most recent attack by the Wall-dwellers.

The one question no one had answered was the reason for the attack. Not that anyone on the Wall had ever needed a reason, in his experience. Crazed savages and wicked saints, one and all.