Escapement (23 page)

First he’d carried her; then he berated her. Something in this metal man drew her, but he was a
man
before he was metal.

Paolina drew on her anger to reach into the same dark place within that had helped her create the stemwinder. The gleam, they called it on
a Muralha.
That same strange darkness had kept her always apart and alone at Praia Nova.

The timing of her own heart the easiest. That was simple; it echoed in her temples and fingertips. The hour of the day was not difficult either. The time that beat at the core of all things was harder. She’d first set it back in Praia Nova, when she’d been more certain. It could not be so different now.

She twirled the fourth setting on the gleam, staring now at Boaz. He shifted slightly as he peered down at the sealed army. Since meeting on the trail west of the Armory of Western Repose, she’d come to know him, a step and hour at a time, in a way she hadn’t really known anyone before. Boaz had been open to her. He’d
told
her as much. As he had said,
she
lay beyond Authority.

The fourth hand clicked into motion. It began to sweep in a fast stutter, even as Boaz fell as still as the rocks.

She’d drawn the vital essence out of him, drawn it into the gleam. She’d put him under her own seal.

Paolina became frightened.

She waited until dark to do more, her anger melting into her fear. Had she stopped Boaz permanently? What was to become of him? What was to become of her?

Whatever the case was, Brass as well as people of all colors and sizes continued to appear from the steps and move into the darkness of evening. She crouched beside his inert mass to watch. Their burdens had begun to assume sensible form as the sealed army regathered from its wanderings and sorted what had been dumped in great mounts. Pavilions appeared, shelter from the elements. Tools were put to use felling trees as the light faded. Fires began, and the sealed army slowly seemed to awaken to something like normalcy.

Perhaps they do not eat or care properly for themselves under the seal,
she thought. Like chickens, the army must be let out to scratch a living and wander a bit before being penned again.

Except the metaphor was backwards. These were hunters of the English. Paolina was confident those mighty wizards could hold back the sealed armies of Ophir, but surely such ancient magic would give even them a challenge. Perhaps
Bassett
was already sailing to meet the attack, carrying the battle to England’s enemies.

When the shadows finally merged to a velvety grayness, and only the
stars and the brass shone in the sky, she turned once more to Boaz. Paolina held the gleam in her palm, cradled before her. She set the stem to the fourth position again, and stopped the hand that counted Boaz’ time.

He jerked to life with a sigh, moving again much as he had in the Palace of Authority.

“Silence,” she told him. “Do not cry out. We must go soon.”

Boaz rose and followed her to the edge of the ledge. At the eastern end it narrowed to be a part to the long fall of rock and scree dropping to the edge of the jungle that lined the bottommost reaches of
a Muralha
.

Picking her way by the light of the indifferent stars, Paolina led Boaz into the night. They walked slowly and warily above the sealed army rustling in the bed of its camp.

Some hours later, when she was so tired, every step had become a stumble, Paolina began looking for a place to rest. Africa gleamed in the moonlight ahead, though she was not certain of the distance—one mile or five, in either case it was very close. She would reach her goal in the light of the coming day. Somehow she did not think it would be difficult to find the English once she got there.

She stared into a cleft, wondering if it was safe, when Boaz finally spoke again. “Please refrain from once more undertaking that against me.” His voice was very soft.

“You carried me down
a Muralha
without my permission,” Paolina snapped. Instantly she felt foolish. It was hardly the same.

“That was not death. What you did to me . . . was . . .”

“Different from how you were treated in the Palace of Authority? From where I rescued you?” The whine in her voice was making
her
angry, but Paolina could not seem to stop herself.

“That was a Brass matter,” he said. “You stopped me completely.”

“And here you are again.” Defiance, now. It was as if she had become a man. Paolina tried to break through the fog of her emotions. “I am sorry, Boaz. I thought I could do right . . . no. I knew it was not right. That I thought I could do this thing at all is wrong.

“Listen, this might be the key to your word, that you asked me to say. The word that releases you from the bond of your seal, that makes you your own machine.”

“When humans seek to deceive themselves, they are stricken with nerves.” He squatted down next to her. “I am Brass. You are flesh. Were I to stop you as you stopped me, you would not restart. Do not mistake what
can
be done with me for what
should
be done with me.”

“Even if I find your word that way?” She was genuinely convinced that would be possible.

“Even then. Not unless I ask it of you.”

Paolina nodded, then curled in a ball around her hunger and tried to find sleep. Distant thunder woke her repeatedly. She finally realized she was hearing the sounds of gunfire.

He had not been prepared for the horrendous shriek of shattering stone when the steam borer cut into the Wall. It was the howling of every dog he’d ever heard, and it got inside his bones the same way the snap of breaking timbers did at sea.

A cloud of dust immediately obscured al-Wazir’s view of the steam borer. It did nothing to dampen the obscene, chattering roar. The men cheered the beginning of the effort to drill through the Wall. All al-Wazir could see now was a looming shadow, a trundling, elongated badger with steam relief valves wailing as the cutter bored on into the stone.

It was a reduced vision of Hell, like peeking at damnation through a keyhole.

As everyone around him continued to cheer, al-Wazir turned toward the jungle. Hornsby’s men had cleared a two-hundred-yard field of fire. He and Hornsby had personally whitewashed rocks every ten yards, to provide range for the small-bore artillery and firearms with which the next defense would be mounted. He’d also had the men build wooden platforms in the trees at the edge of the clearing, where scouts or snipers could be positioned. Volunteer squads of Royal Marines and army enlisted ranged the jungle beyond already. Some were on brief patrols, others on long reconnaissance.

It was as much as he knew to defend the diggings. The tactics of weapons and battle were Hornsby’s problem. The strategy of what the Wall might bring was his.

Al-Wazir only wished he understood more about the brass men they’d been fighting. The Wall was vast, an entire vertical continent in its own right, but his experience had been that it was sparsely populated. Most denizens fought to defend, not to attack. These brass men had come from
somewhere
to find the English diggings.

In this moment
Bassett
would have been excellently useful. They could have cruised the Wall, safe from the brass men at least, though he did not want to contemplate the winged savages.

Those creatures had finally brought the airship down. Even now, among the swirling dust and howling of the steam borer, he remembered
that day two years past as if he’d just lived through it. Smallwood had brought the vessel high, too high, many of the men had said, until the Atlantic stretched away beneath their feet dotted with clouds the size of Ireland, and the horizon had a visible curve. Up there the sky bordered on the violet, and stars could be seen during the day. The deckhands had hated it.

Al-Wazir never did understand what the captain was looking for. What they had
found
was a flight of those damnable winged savages, dark and naked angels without the light of God in their eyes. The beasts had cut at the ropes and savaged the decks and sliced open the gasbag, all the while casting sailors into the air for the long, long fall to distant ground.

He’d led the ropes division in mounting their resistance, with firearms and sword’s point, and even bare hands and bloody panic.

It had not been sufficient.

The saving grace was that the bag did not burn. Had the hydrogen caught the flame,
Bassett
would have been nothing but a torch high in the evening sky, shedding embers that had once been men. The air sailor’s greatest fear, fire—friend only to the devil and the Chinese. That had been beyond the winged savages’ efforts, apparently, or God had been with the few of them who survived both the battle and the miles-long nightmare plunge into the advancing twilight.

The smoke and dust now was close to that memory, the shriek of the borer too much like the screams of men.

Al-Wazir climbed down off his stockade and slipped out into the cleared field of fire. He wanted to be away from the diggings awhile, think his own thoughts in the green light of a jungle evening. He was armed with pistol and machete. Anything big enough to take him on in the face of his weapons wouldn’t care what he carried anyway. He was frightened of nothing this evening except memory.

The Wall was a fierce mistress—like a woman, it gave life and it took life away. Sometimes a man wanted time off with a quiet drink and a smooth pair of arms to which he owed nothing.

Al-Wazir had never really had the trick of jungles. The sea in all her moods and mysteries was as familiar as his own bunk. Lanarkshire, for all that it was a distant memory now, had involved open sky, craggy rock, and sheep.

Al-Wazir distinctly remembered sheep. With little fondness, at that.

Still, it was a country he knew. And every port was the same. Airship towers, docks, taverns, knocking shops, slaves, dogs, monkeys, boys, hot pies, and cold women. It didn’t manner whether you’d shipped into Nuuk
or New Haven or Nouakchott. The weather changed, the skin changed, but the money traps were always the same.

Jungles, though; every time he’d ever set foot in a jungle, it had been a different sort of confusion. Even while unloading
Wallachian Prince
at the dock in Acalayong, going ashore had been like entering a different world with each debarkation.

The ground changed constantly. Where there had been vines, there were moldering leaves, or a bubbling mud pit. Great flowers that stank like rotting meat would be open one day, quivering on the forest floor, and missing the next, as if they’d never been there at all. Stands of trees teeming with barking animals would be quiet as lichyards when he passed them again.

The world moved, surely as the sea, but trees didn’t have fins and tails to swim. By God, things that lived on land ought to stay put, honest as houses, until a man learned his way around.

Yet here he was again, walking past the verges of their defense into the glossy-leaved darkness.

Someone had once told him that jungles were the lungs of the world. Al-Wazir had never been sure what that meant, some Johnnie Cleverdick thing, to be sure, but walking here in the dark he could feel it. The air stirred wet and warm as the foetor from a dying man’s mouth. Leaves moved both with and against the wind. Things crashed through the branches, many of them from the sound.

The Northern Earth breathed hard here up against the Wall like a tuppeny whore with her shoulders against the alleyback of some sailor’s tavern. And there was Ottweill, ramming his will into her. Just as every sailor ever born had done to the poor sisters who’d gone to work beneath their skirts once their men hadn’t come home.

Something grabbed at his ankle. Al-Wazir nearly stumbled. He caught himself and reached for his machete, only to realize he’d found a vine.

“Sir?” asked a cautious voice ahead.

“Al-Wazir here,” he snapped. He was embarrassed now.

“LaMont and Mitz here, sir.” A shape loomed out of the deeper shadow. “Heading in, sir, with your kindness.”

“Your patrol was up at dusk, yes?”

“Sir, yes sir.” It was LaMont talking, he was pretty sure. Civilians, of all things. A few of them were serving under arms alongside Hornsby’s troops. The men were fairies, he’d figured, volunteering to be alone together in the jungle so often. As long as they had sharp eyes and a desire to live to see another sunrise, he couldn’t care less.

This wasn’t the Royal Navy, after all.

In that moment of relief, al-Wazir realized that some part of him had fallen away with
Bassett
’s long, terrifying tumble down the Wall. He’d asked the Prime Minister for his rank back, and Lloyd George had given it to him, bless the man, but al-Wazir was still in the canvas trousers and cotton shirt of half the laborers in Ottweill’s expedition.

There were two uniforms in his kit. He hadn’t bothered. Only the Royal Marines would have cared, and them only to the extent of cocking a word, an eye, or maybe even a fist at him. Chief petty officers and Royal Marines were natural enemies, surely as wolves and eagles.

Somewhere along the way the civvies had become natural to him.

“We’ll just be getting on then, sir?” LaMont asked, interrupting al-Wazir’s thoughts.