Escapement (27 page)

“Davies?” Al-Wazir had to think that through. “Small lad, pretty sort of face? Never too sure of himself, bit of a bully? He went over the rail, oh, let me see . . . two months before the ship was lost.” Memory stirred. “He did have a parachute, as I recall. Where did you say you was from?”

“Praia Nova.” She smiled sweetly. “A little port, hundreds of miles west of here, far beyond the western extents of the Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir.”

“Long way from the Bight of Benin, then.” Al-Wazir tugged at his
beard, suddenly conscious that he was a great unwashed bear next to this woman-child. She seemed barely old enough for her skirts, though she carried herself with poise. “Why is it you think a wizard might help you, assuming I would have had one to hand?”

“ ’Wizard’ might not be the right word for what I intend,” she said slowly. “Someone learned in the movements and timings which drive the world. Someone who has discerned the hidden cycles behind God’s handiwork. Someone who can show me where to look next.” She stopped a moment; then her next words came in a rush—a rehearsed plea, if he’d ever heard one from an air sailor brought up on charges. “I have calculated the motions of the planets and the tides. I have found the diameter of the earth, and I believe I know her weight. I can find the timing that counts the heartbeat of Creation. I just don’t know what it all
means
, or how to make more of it.”

“Ah, missy. Most people never even find the sense in the world’s turning, let alone more. You talk like a navigator. Who taught you these things, then? What teacher or wizard was in Praia Nova to open your eyes to that view of the world? Was it perchance a man named Simeon Malgus, lost from
Bassett
as well? Perhaps you are protecting him.”

“No one.” Paolina glanced at her metal man as if for support. He was strangely beautiful, and all too real looking, like a man who’d been dipped in gold. “No one. I figured it out for myself, even when they told me to stop.”

That gave al-Wazir pause. He’d beaten and cajoled and led enough boys to their manhood on decks asea and aloft to have a sense when a young thing was spinning tales. This girl was not. Or at the least, she believed her words, whether they held any truth outside of her own experience.

But what she said made no sense at all. It was the work of years to teach a navigator what he must know, or a cartographer or horomancer or any of the other disciplines that sat in quiet rooms to give the orders that moved men and ships alike. A certain talent or inborn skill was certainly required, but so was a great pass of learning. Al-Wazir himself could read a manifest or a crew list well enough, and he knew how to check a paymaster’s book or a quartermaster’s receipts, but he’d never been one for the long, deep abstractions that made men like Malgus or Lloyd George.

He’d never heard of a man who raised himself from a pup to the understanding of the world. He’d
certainly
never known of a woman to do any such thing.

“What is the noise that comes at midnight, girl?” he asked gently. This was something that boy Hethor used to be on about.

“The earth touching her track as she turns to go about the sun,” Paolina replied promptly.

“And how wide is that track?”

“I believe it to be twenty miles.”

That was more than al-Wazir knew, truth be told, but the prompt confidence in her answers would have pleased an officer. Not to mention her direct honesty.

“How do you know that, girl?”

“Over time I measured the angle of the track in the sky at all hours of the day. I then compared my observations, calculating from the differences in size and apparent brightness.”

“If you’re lying,” he said after a moment, “you couldn’t prove it by me. Dr. Ottweill might know better, but I don’t wish to disturb him with your presence. You’re a creature of the Wall, Miss Barthes. Your fate is my decision. As it happens, I don’t expect that the good doctor professor will be able to see the sense that lurks in a woman’s head, no matter how right she might actually be.”

“What does that mean?” she asked suspiciously.

“It means I can’t prove you’re not another Newton, girlie. It means I don’t know what to do with you here. It means that I think you should go to England and talk to a man I know there, to steer you where you might need to be. Most of all, it means that I think your cleverness is probably wasted here upon the Wall.”

“The Wall is no wasteland,” said the brass man.

Boaz,
al-Wazir recalled. “No. It’s no wasteland at all. But it
is
a wildland. This girl was born to be a creature of civilization. I seen your lot down here, throwing lightning with spears and burning the life out of honest men. How’s your civilization faring, Johnnie Brass?”

“The Solomnic Kingdom of Ophir is an ancient and honorab—,” he began, but al-Wazir put up his hand.

“Stop right there, friend Boaz. Have you come to kill me and mine?”

“No. I follow her.”

“You’re from Ophir. Them as has been attacking us these past months.”

“I am a Brass of Ophir.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I follow
her.
” Boaz’ anger and passion seemed to flee him as quick as they had come upon him.

“And would you follow her to England?”

Boaz and Paolina exchanged a long look. Al-Wazir tugged his collar and cursed the heat with a silent inner voice. The silence between them finally broke off.

“He will not go,” said Paolina. “We are not so close as you might think.”

“I am more of the Wall than she,” Boaz added. “I do not concern myself with the doings of some flatwater kingdom. No matter how many ships your queen may have.”

“Then will you give me your parole?” al-Wazir asked Boaz. “To remain among us without working against our efforts and our safety, and to raise no hand against England or English forces.”

“Am I free to walk away?”

“Not without my permission. If you will not place yourself under my oversight, I cannot allow you to stay here.”

Boaz stiffened. Then: “I accept your terms. For her sake only.”

“What about me?” Paolina asked. “Am I under parole as well?”

“My girl, I think a truly prudent man would most likely place you in irons.” He smiled. Oh, to have had such a girl as a daughter. “Thankfully I am not a truly prudent man. Besides which, if you are half the woman you claim, irons will be of little use in tempering you. You may consider yourself under parole so long as you are willing to give your word on the same terms as friend Boaz here. As you wish to go to England and meet with the great minds of the age, I am not so concerned about your behavior.”

“You will send me to England? When?”

“When I can, madam.” He felt the urge to bow, but took himself in hand. “I have no scheduled voyages right now, but there will surely be ships or airships calling soon enough. I can arrange a berth, believe me.”

Boaz nodded. “And when Paolina departs, what becomes of me?”

“You, Johnnie Brass, will then either walk free into the forests around us, or stay here to help me plot an end to these ridiculous attacks.
Until
she leaves, you are the one best suited to watch over her and secure her safety, day and night. I do not control all of the men in this camp. If you are loyal to her, this is your test.”

Boaz nodded. “Thank you, Chief Petty Officer.”

Al-Wazir looked Paolina over again. She nodded, but there was nothing demure in the challenge of that direct gaze.

He wondered what Kitchens and Lloyd George would make of this strange girl who’d come off the Wall. It seemed possible she might indeed be a modern-day Newton. He couldn’t say what that might mean for England and the world, but he knew it would be worse if she found the Chinese first, or simply made her own way into adulthood with no guiding hand at all.

Al-Wazir sought out Ottweill. The doctor would be at the digging face, of course. Though there had not been a plan to provide quarters hard by the
tunnel, al-Wazir had asked a team of men to build Ottweill a little teakwood cabin there. Ready access to the work seemed to stem some of the doctor’s tantrums, and kept him close to his beloved machines.

They’d been cutting for eighteen days, and bored almost four hundred yards within the rock. So far they’d found no hard layers that required a change of cutting surface, or a withdraw for traditional blasting. Ottweill had announced the number one borer would back out on the twentieth day and be replaced with the number two. He wished to analyze any metal stress and mechanical failure that might be occurring.

Not that any such thing was expected, of course.

There was a work gang just outside the tunnel. They loaded a short string of flat cars with the additional rail required for operations within. The progress of the borer was slow enough that the crews had been able to practice their various crafts and drills. If the cutting sped up or things went wrong, they would be fully prepared.

Al-Wazir approved.

He tapped Mercks, the stoop-shouldered railroad man he’d first met back in Kent. “Is himself down the hole?” al-Wazir shouted. The vibrating racket from within the Wall was enough to make a man’s ears ache if he stood near the tunnel. Al-Wazir wondered how the borer’s driving crew withstood it. Even if Ottweill had not meant to hire the deaf, he would soon have them in his employ.

Mercks nodded. “Aye, and shouting about the cutting heads or summat.”

Ottweill was almost always shouting about something.

Al-Wazir knew better than to ask a railroad man about the state of the digging. Each crew was vitally jealous of its function, and practiced an aggressive indifference to the work of others.

“You going down the hole soon?”

Another nod. “Aye.”

“If the good doctor is in a listening mood, tell him I’m wanting him.”

Al-Wazir retired to the little porch of Ottweill’s cabin. There were several corkboards propped there, covered with notes and diagrams and lovely shaded drawings of one of the steam borers. They were not Ottweill’s hand. Some artistic genius lived among the crews. He’d seen sailors turn out work that could have hung in the National Gallery, save they’d never had the schooling nor the patronage. Few ever knew their worth as artisans, carving and drawing between swarming the lines and brawling over rented jennies in the ports they visited.

Likewise here. Whatever quiet talent had done that would end soon enough with some accident or another.

The rest of the boards told the story of Ottweill’s work. Much of it was
beyond al-Wazir—numbers and charts showing force and stress and how the machines might work or break, the death of iron and steel and steam. He wondered if the Barthes girl could have made more of it.

It was al-Wazir’s firmest ambition not to have her and Ottweill meet. He needed to inform the doctor he had prisoners from the Wall, on parole, but he would present them as turncoats now aiding him in the defense of the camp. He simply didn’t want to encounter Ottweill’s reaction to a girl of such gifts.

The doctor would at best ignore her. Worse, he might sabotage her, or worst of all, draw her into his own work.

If she was what she seemed to be, Paolina Barthes deserved far more than the digging of holes. He settled in to wait for the doctor, thinking over ways to mask the truth without actually committing insubordination in the process.

Luckily, the better part of a lifetime’s service in the Royal Navy had given him extensive practice at such creative reporting.

Ottweill finally emerged from the tunnel so coated with dust that he seemed to be a man of sand and stone, save for the pale circles where his goggles had sheltered his eyes. “You on the porch are being, I see,” he said. “No work needing attention there is?”

“Aye, work and more. But sometimes there’s ’at which requires even your attention, sir. A patrol brought in two locals off the Wall. Hornsby’s seen to ’em and so have I, but I figured you ought to have the saying of it, too.”

Ottweill grabbed a rag from a bucket by the porch step and wiped his face. “Of what the saying?”

“I gave ’em a pardon on my parole, in return for they tell us that which we need to be knowing about the Wall, and especially these brass men what march against us.”

“You know best, sure I am.” Then, in German,
“Unwissender Affe.”

“Indeed, sir.” Al-Wazir was just as glad he didn’t speak Ottweill’s native tongue. Otherwise he was fairly certain he would be forced to take offense. “I’ll be seeing to it, then. How goes the tunnel?”

“Deeper, ever deeper.” Ottweill bowed from the waist. “And now going I must be.”

“Going indeed.” Al-Wazir nodded and headed back toward the north end of the camp, where the rows of tents and shacks were that housed everyone but Ottweill.

All he needed now was a ship to get that girl out of here.

That night around the fire they roasted a boar some of the men had shot in the woods. Childress didn’t know whether pigs were indigenous to the islands of the North Pacific, or if the Chinese had previously introduced them by way of providing resupply.

It did not matter. The meat smelled good.