Escapement (32 page)

Bucknell, one of the ship’s boys, had been told to stay close to Paolina. The initial thrill of soaring had quickly soured with the realization that Captain Sayeed was not going to relent in his opposition to her presence simply because she’d actually boarded the ship. His men had been in no better mood, growing downright angry since the Chinese had dove into view. Only Bucknell, too young and woolly-minded to share the sailor’s fears, seemed to be willing to tolerate her.

He
was certainly no wizard. He wasn’t even pretty like Davies had been—broad-faced, with lopsided eyes and a scar on the left end of his lips. He looked to have been beaten quite a bit in his young life.

“See, ma’am,” he told her now. “We can’t not come about, for as we’ll present our broadside, he shall have the speed of us and overfly like a pigeon on the wing. Then we’ll be a-waddling whilst he turns and turns again and catches the side of us. Ain’t long, battles in the air. Someone gets a bag, she’s flaming toast a mile high up.”

That had been obvious enough. “So we run toward what? I am in no rush to feel the heat of battle, but this seems a long way from British air.”

Bucknell’s head bobbed. “I’ll not have the knowing of that, ma’am. But Captain Sayeed is canny, for all he’s a foreign gentleman.
Notus
can outsail the best of them, given the weather and the moment.”

“Bound for England, to die in Africa. Not what I’d planned for my epitaph,” she mused.

“Chinese never been fighting over Africa before. That’s new, ma’am.”

“You can keep your new, Mr. Bucknell. I’ve had quite enough of it myself.”

“Ma’am.” He smiled vacantly. “Leastwise we don’t have a Wall storm coming on.”

Paolina knew those well enough. The weather would sometimes get trapped against
a Muralha,
storm violence piling high into that strange
zone of air that followed the Equatorial Wall upward into the heavens. Those storms would rage as far up as the wind had strength to blow, and crawl along the Wall until they finally spent themselves.

They were greatly feared in Praia Nova. She did not want to imagine the effect of such weather on an airship. “Surely this far north a Wall storm would not bring us down?”

“They gots arms, ma’am, long as an ocean, where they spreads out and hooks whatever travels in the sky.” His head bobbed farther as he fell silent.

She stared after, looking past the rail at the pursuing Chinese to wonder what she might do to bring the enemy airship down. After a time, Paolina’s hand strayed to the gleam.

It had engines, after all. Engines beat time surely as clocks or the human heart did.

But the ship had people, too. Men who hunted
Notus,
to be sure, but people all the same.

Paolina wondered if Boaz might have cared to make this trip. She was certain that the Brass would have been indifferent to the Chinese pursuit. He was perfectly capable of standing to fight, but he seemed to lack whatever portion of the heart that drove men to both dread and crave their battles.

Boaz wouldn’t have been impressed with flight, either. He was from higher up along
a Muralha
than she—Praia Nova was essentially at sea level. To Boaz, looking down upon the flatwater world was a part of everyday life, not the visceral thrill it seemed to be to the English sailors. And even to her.

She wished she’d been able to better take her leave of him. Al-Wazir would be fair, she knew, but that didn’t mean the men in the camp were likely to do the same. There was something sweet and terrible about Boaz.

Even if he’d taken no thrill from the dash through African skies, she would have liked to have had the Brass along.

Paolina waited until the evening. She had not been confined belowdecks, but night’s shadows helped her maintain a veil of privacy over what she was attempting with the gleam.

Dark also meant quiet. While there was little to be done about the chuffing of the boilers and the droning of the propellers, conversations on
deck were limited by order to command necessary. Sailors moved with a slow, shuffling walk and kept their heads down.

Fear, of course,
she thought, staring down at a nighttime Africa. A river braided through the jungle in a dozen or more channels gleaming in starlight. The trees were opening up more now, wider expanses of grassland and clay and sometimes even sand between them. She could see the spark of a few fires dotting the distance. It wasn’t hard to imagine herdsmen surrounded by their goats, or a circle of huts about a pit where a fresh kill was cooking. Dark-skinned men living out their lives in the their own world, much as the
fidalgos
and the women of Praia Nova lived out theirs at the foot of
a Muralha
between sea and sky.

Paolina wondered if the people on the ground looked up at the airships and told themselves stories about the people in the sky.

The English wizards were being canny. They must be hiding in the rearcastle, in officer’s country. Not showing themselves yet.

She knew a test when she saw it. Paolina was determined to meet the challenge. The gleam lay cool and heavy in her hand. It seemed to have grown weightier with time, though she knew that wasn’t possible. It was metal, a made thing.

Even so, standing in the darkness of the deck with the wind of
Notus
’ passage tugging at her hair, the gleam was something more.

The hands were barely visible. Their sweep across the blank face plucked at her vision like a bat in the evening sky. She could most easily follow the one that matched her own heartbeat. It seemed to be synchronous with her respiration, as well—six beats for every breath. The other two matched their reference points, insofar as she could tell.

How would I know if I were wrong?

Paolina put that disloyal thought from her mind. It was time to work with the fourth hand again, as she had done with Boaz.

She was just aft of the midmast, near the boom that supported the port engine nacelle. That engine ran with a slight stuttering whine, which bespoke attention required rather soon. Paolina tugged the stem to the fourth position and began to slowly turn it, seeking a setting that matched the beat of the engine.

This was much easier than some of her other efforts had been. Of course, engines were crude and simple compared with brass men, or the labyrinthine ways of breathing, thinking life. She caught the rhythm of the mechanism. Now it was a matter of twisting the stem, and through the gleam the device as a whole, to her will.

Paolina turned the knurled knob backwards, aiming to slow the beat of
the engine. The whine dropped away. She turned it forward, pushing the velocity past the current throttle setting. The engine quickly sped up, to the point of shuddering as the airship began to wallow out of her line of travel. She backed it down again.

But her intent was not to disrupt
Notus.
Paolina was merely finding her way. Now for the Chinese, to show the English wizards what she could do.

That will be much harder.

First, she tugged the stem so the fourth hand floated free, disengaging the link between its action and the action of the engines. Even that felt strange to her—even in her thoughts Paolina had skirted the question of how this was possible since making the thing. This was like carrying a tiny sliver of the divine with her, to create and uncreate at will.

What had come upon her in the
fidalgos
’ darkness?

She leaned against the rail and looked aftward. The Chinese airship was running astern ten points to port. Their captain had seen fit to hang lanterns—great glowing red cylinders that lit the bottom of his wide, thin gasbag with an eerie light. It was like looking into the fire-hot mouth of a pursuing dragon.

Paolina stared across the darkness. The Chinese mounted their engines within the hull, propellers churning behind. There was no mounting or nacelle. But the engine was in there, kicking over and turning the shaft to wind out the blades that pushed them forward.

There would be pistons. She’d paid attention, even the few days she’d been in al-Wazir’s camp, and since boarding here. Men talked about engines all the time. It seemed to be what they did when they didn’t have women to push about or wine to drink. Fire and steam and pistons, churning round and about, while mechanics worried over efficiency and insulation and fuel consumption and heat exchange.

He had pistons and boilers inside that hull, the Chinese captain did. They sat there like bezoars in the gut of a goat, gleaming hard and bright, hidden jewels in an unholy maw. She strained to see them inside the fire-mouth of the enemy ship.

She was surprised the find the gleam’s hand turning. Setting it to match an engine she couldn’t see wasn’t so different from setting the hand to match one she couldn’t touch, right here on
Notus.

The reach of the gleam had been improving since her first experiments with the fourth hand, but this was so much more.

Life,
Paolina thought.
I want to live. I have much to do.

These men of a distant empire would not take her existence from her.

She found the rhythm of one of the Chinese engines. She slid the stem
into place. She slowed the hand at first, until the dragon’s mouth shuddered as the enemy airship pitched slightly. Then she sped it up, forcing it to a velocity the Chinese captain had not expected.

The dragon’s mouth veered to its left, turning away from the path of pursuit. One of his propellers was moving faster than the other, of course. It was no different from two people crabbing oars in a rowboat.

She pushed the engine farther forward.

“Miss . . . ,” someone behind her began. There was the horrendous screech of an exploding boiler, clearly audible even from the already widening distance. The lanterns shook, some of them snuffed out in the moment. The Chinese airship pitched badly as her remaining propeller raced, now driving her too hard the opposite way. A fast-spreading fire guttered.

“His oil is alight,” Sayeed said, next to her now. “He will die in moments.”

“The gasbag?” She wondered where the captain had come from.

The gleam was hot in her hand, almost squirming. When the Chinese airship did blossom into full flame, it carried the frightening beauty of a deadly flower to fill the sky with light as the crumpling bag fell toward the silver-braided jungle far below.

Sayeed was very close to her now. “You must tell me how you did that. A skill such as yours could unseat empires.”

“This is why I was meant to go to England,” she told Captain Sayeed over coffee the next morning. Bucknell hovered nearby, bumping elbows with a sour man who Paolina assumed was the captain’s steward.

“Your skills are . . . ah . . . more pressing than I might have understood them to be, judging from that enormous Scotsman’s garbled descriptions.”

They were taking coffee and biscuits on the poop, in the wind of
Notus’
passage. Dawn had brought a rolling brown country of hills interrupted by cliffs and odd little canyons. A country with no memory of the jungle at all.

“Your own wizards . . . ,” she began. She stopped at the expression on his face.

“Wizards? My child, what are you on about?”

“You English. Your airships are—” Paolina’s face heated with embarrassment.
It had never been true,
she realized. There were not Newtons on every vessel. How could there be?

“Our airships are crewed by men,” he said, not unkindly. “The sort who break wind at inopportune moments and don their trousers one leg before the other.”

“I thought something else,” she muttered.

“We all did, in our way.” He added, “That airship burned until we passed over the horizon.”

Paolina winced. “I killed them.”

“This is what ships do to one another.” His voice was gentle counterpoint to the harsh words, yet still strangely distant. “Kill, or be killed. The men who man them are fleas on a dying dog. What interests me far more than the fact that they died is the mechanism of their dying.”

She stared silently along
Notus
’ sternway and wondered if there was a pall of smoke somewhere to the south that she could see.

“Sometimes an airship dies because of phosphorous shot to the gasbag. Sometimes ordinary shells will pound her stays and rigging until she comes apart. Sometimes small-arms fire will sweep her decks. I think you perhaps see the pattern here, yes?”

“Yes,” she mumbled.

“Good.” Sayeed pushed on, still polite, still relentless. “Then you see how a prudent and canny airship captain might wonder, in full consideration and gratitude for his good fortune, how another airship came to explode and fall burning to earth. Especially shortly after his own port engine experienced unusual variations in performance.”

“It will not happen to
your ship.
”

He leaned close. “
What
will not happen to my ship, Miss Barthes?”

“Me.” She was surprised to find herself shivering with unshed tears.

“Perhaps you should explain. In detail, preferably.”

Paolina glanced around. The deck was wide open, helmsman and master standing nearby, sailors scrambling about their business a few dozen feet away. “Here?”