Escapement (24 page)

“Go,” he said.

“ ’Ware, sir. There’s half an army out here somewhere.”

The other one, Mitz, piped up. “They won’t be here for a few days, but you might find a scout.”

“I’ll be back shortly,” said al-Wazir. “Tell the gate to watch for me within the hour.”

The two of them slipped into the darkness, making less noise than the night itself.
Not like me,
al-Wazir thought. For him it was all crash and stumble.

He had no business being out here, any more than he did riding the steam borer into Ottweill’s tunnel. His place was on or behind the stockade, talking to the patrols, watching the Wall, keeping them all alive. Not risking his life wandering in the dark.

Al-Wazir turned and headed back. If he followed the noise, he’d find his way.

The shriek of the steam borer had tapered off. Which only made sense, if the machine were even now beetling into the Wall. The drilling would take years, but not a lifetime. Even if it seemed so at the moment.

Morning brought a buzzing in al-Wazir’s teeth, and word of an imminent attack. Hornsby had interviewed two more patrols who’d come in after dawn, and promptly sent a boy for al-Wazir. “Come on, sir,” the lad had said. “Captain Hornsby’s on about fuzzy wuzzies and marching statues. Talk some sense into him, will you please?”

He went and found the Marine captain sitting on a camp stool in a little white tent. Hornsby wasn’t a big fellow, but he had the dried-beef toughness that al-Wazir associated with a certain kind of sailor. The sort of man who’d follow orders for years, never raise a hand or a word, then one
day drop out of the rigging with a marlinspike in his hand and murder in his eye.

Al-Wazir would never care to face the wiry officer in a fair fight, either.

“There’s a bloody great lot of those brass men forming up less than ten miles east of here,” Hornsby told him without preamble. “With a goodly mass of foreigners of various colors and sizes. Like a fewking flower garden, it sounds, but they’re tough.”

Hornsby having just recently met the enemy in battle, al-Wazir was inclined to trust his judgment. “Do they bear guns against us?”

“Not this time, nor last. But they’ve some manner of spear which throws lightning. Electricks, Wall magic, it makes me no matter, but it’s an evil which can be just as good as a Lee-Enfield in the proper hands. Which the brass men seem to have a bloody lot of.”

Al-Wazir turned that over in his head. Had the winged savages possessed such weapons, it would have gone far worse with
Bassett.
“Will those weapons fire our stockade?”

Hornsby frowned. “They don’t seem to burn hot, as such. A man which is touched by them is stunned or killed, like someone lightning struck. If there’s burns, they’re small.”

“So the stockade should hold against their fire. Numbers?”

“Perhaps two thousand.” Another frown. “Men counting in the dusk then running away will always multiply the number of the enemy. They don’t want to be such an idiot in their own minds, you see.”

“I know,” al-Wazir told him. “I’ve heard many a sailor tell me of the gang of men that beset him in an alley, only to find later it was two boys and a dog out rolling drunks.”

“Ah, yes, much the same phenomenon.”

“So do we have some cleverness afoot? Or is it line the walls with men and fire upon them until they drop away?”

“That is where your portion of the plan is at issue, Chief.” Hornsby smoothed a crude map he had been developing from the reports of his men. “This is their homeland, these tribes of brass and flesh. No matter how many we drive off, they can lose ten for our one, perhaps a hundred for our one, and return for more of the fight. You are the man charged with seeing us safe upon the Wall. Can you find a way to draw them off, for a long time? If not forever? We did not come armed to go to war, only to fight for what is England’s.”

“To them, we are here for war,” al-Wazir said. “In five years’ time the tunnel will be open, and there will be a city growing here. Airships, armies, factories, nannies with children of the quality, sprats the likes of what I once was running the streets with stolen fruit in hand. It takes no
great vision to see what will follow us. Someone upon yon Wall, some sergeant or captain of the brass, has looked upon us and thought how he did not want England’s foot set so firmly on his porch.”

“Do you believe in the mission that we pursue?” asked Hornsby quietly.

“Aye.” Or at the least, he believed in the Wall, and the sincerity of Lloyd George.

“Then by all means, man, help me pursue it. Else find a ship to carry you north and follow some other path.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll find a way through this mess.”

He went back up to the stockade and stared west, along the Wall where it extended out to border the Atlantic Ocean. Mists swirled over the dark jungles of morning, while the steam borer still chattered in his bones.

“You are out there,” he told the air, already hot though the sun had barely broken over the horizon. “I do not have the guns to stop you. But I am clever, and I have all the treasure of England behind me.”

The Wall did not answer, nor did any of the brass who even now must be passing silently among the trees before him.

“Tell me more of this boy and the angel,” Captain Leung asked her.

She dined with him in the ward room, the old menu restored. The political officer was restored as well, smile and pistol and all.

Childress still wondered what he understood, what he
could
understand. “His name was Hethor,” she said slowly. “Heaven had granted him a token.”

“A token?” Leung laughed. “A coin of Hell money?”

“No, no.” She was almost annoyed. “An angel’s feather. Tiny, in silver. A man took it from him.”

“Your God does not treat His messengers well,” observed Leung.

“That is most certainly not the case. Man mistreats the servants of God. Not the other way about.”

“Indeed. So he took this feather in hand and went looking for the spring of the world?”

“The mainspring.” She traced rice grains with the eating sticks. That had been growing easier with time. “He looked for the mainspring, passing through one and another of our order before leaving my notice altogether.”

“We knew something was wrong,” Leung admitted. “We did not know what. As I said, there have been many stories.”

“I believe this one is true.”

“It still does not make your God true.” His voice was calm, quiet.

“No. Not one way or the other. You can deny His workmanship or not as you choose. That is your free will. Still, there is brass in the sky and the world clatters on.”

After a while, he said, “Some of the Celestial Emperor’s subjects even now search for their own answer.”

“Really?” This was a new thread for her mind to pursue.

“South of Singapore. They have found the ancient city of Chersonesus Aurea.”

“That is not a Chinese name.”

“No,” he admitted. “It is not. Once, in the times of antiquity, the city of Chersonesus Aurea had a Golden Bridge that crossed the Wall.”

“
Over
the wall?” She tried to imagine the altitude.

“Perhaps it was more of a tunnel,” he said with another quick grin. “We work to find or re-create the Golden Bridge.”

Childress was horrified.
“Why?”

Now his voice grew thick, darker, filling with anger as if a rain had come into his heart. “Because of what you British will do to China if we do not. You already box us in from both east and west. Half the Northern Earth acknowledges your suzerainty. You would fly your flags over our cities had you the slightest chance. If you find your way to the lands beyond the Wall, that will be the end of the Celestial Kingdom.”

“And you would do no less to Britain?” she asked quietly. “You, who raid into our North Atlantic and drag ships down to their graves.”

“For you, Mask Poinsard.” His tone was cold. “It was your dealing that brought us here, not mine. The Beiyang Navy gave me orders, but we are not nearly so foolish as to make any habit of savaging British shipping in its home lanes, so very far from a safe port of ours.”

She wanted to back away from that line of thought, quickly. “Still, China pushes everywhere.”

“If we do not, Britain takes everything without let or hindrance.”

They stared at one another awhile. The warmth they’d built between one another slipped too easily away.

She did not want to lose that, did not want to be alone and friendless on this vessel full of men who could kill her at any moment. Childress took a deep shuddering breath. “My apologies, Captain. That is a discussion best left for another time, perhaps never. Still, the Golden Bridge. Do you know what lies beyond the Wall?”

“Of course not. No more than you do.”

“My point exactly. Every traveler’s tale or saint’s myth about the Wall is filled with magic and peril that mounts like waves on the ocean.” She
paused, picking her words with care. “Have you considered what your Golden Bridge might unleash?”

“It is the Celestial Emperor’s Golden Bridge.” Leung drummed his fingers on the little table. “And yes, it has occurred to me to wonder exactly that. Any navy officer who has sailed out of the brownwater has seen the sort of monsters which come down off the Wall. Creatures out of legend and beyond. The priests and eunuchs at court do not credit what actually swims the waves and skims the air, though they are willing to count the demons of the underworld as if they were farmers turned out for census.”

Inasmuch as the captain’s careful English ever did give away the landscape of his thoughts, Childress could hear disgust in his voice. “I am a Spiritualist, sir, as any white toucan is, but I am also an empiricist. Only a blind-eyed Rational Humanist would deny the presence of the divine in our lives. Neither do we concern ourselves overmuch with counting the angelic populations of pinheads. Still, do not discount that which abides in the shadowy realms of belief.”

“White toucan?” he asked. “You are the
avebianco,
are you not?”

Childress recognized her mistake. “A New England regionalism. What they call the white bird in the colonies.”

“I see. I did not mean to turn away from the discussion, but your choice of words engaged my ear, Mask Poinsard.”

She wondered if he’d seen through her deception. There was nothing for it except to carry on. “Call it what you will, we who follow the Feathered Masks do not look to the Wall for salvation. Christ died on the Roman horofix to absolve our sins. Breaching the Wall would release all the unsaved strangeness and magic of the Southern Earth, while also calling down those creatures and races which abide there in the sky. Is the Golden Bridge worth that? Just to steal a march on England?”

Leung seemed glad to return to their sparring. “The executions of your minor prophets are not of concern in the Celestial Kingdom. As it happens, I personally share your concern about the Wall, if only from sheer common sense. There has never been any significant incursion from the Wall into our lands. I would not hope to live to see one arise from our meddling.”

“Who could stop the Golden Bridge? The Emperor?”

“The Emperor’s word is the word of Heaven. If his will was that every man in the Beiyang Navy fall on his sword, we would fall. However, the Emperor is not given to pronouncements on such matters, as a general rule. The Celestial Kingdom is a complex place.”

“Decentralized power,” Childress said. “Your admirals and governors hold their own.”

“Without ever calling it so, yes.” Leung sounded uncomfortable. “We balance the propriety of rank and degree with the reality of distance and the practical application of the mandate of Heaven.”

“Truly, you are not so different from the English.”

The next day
Five Lucky Winds
made anchorage in a little harbor tucked into an island. A larger landmass loomed in the distance, mountains wreathed in cloud and fog, but here there were craggy hills clothed in towering trees larger than anything Childress had ever seen. Eagles circled above the bay, calling down their dismay at the submarine.

The sailors rowed ashore in two little rafts to dispatch hunting parties and make a camp. Captain Leung had given leave, here where there were no pot shops or women of ease. His men were forced to nature for their pastimes.

“We place a great value on poetry,” he told Childress as they stood on the stony beach near the fire a-building. “The worth of a gentleman is often measured in his words, and the calligraphy by which he sets them to the paper.”

“Words about mist-covered mountains?”

“Well, yes.” He nodded then stepped away to walk the perimeter of the beach camp.

The political officer approached her as soon as Leung had passed beyond earshot. Childress had scarcely been able to avoid him on the submarine. He had his pistol again, and his crooked smile.

“Hello.” He showed her the white bird hand sign again.

She couldn’t see a graceful way to turn away from him. Or even a graceless way, truth be told. He was armed and she had nowhere to go. “Hello.”