Escapement (39 page)

There were two masts at the edge of town in the middle of a fenced-off field where sheep grazed. The little base wasn’t much—some small buildings of a bunkered, windowless appearance, two large fuel tanks, and a handful of men in dark hats gawping up at the approaching
Notus.

The group of watchers reminded her of the people of Praia Nova, how the
fidalgos
would stare openmouthed at anything that wasn’t part of their everyday lives.

The Silent Order and the Schwilgué Clock; that was what she was here for. The elusive wizards who’d built an empire spanning half the Northern Earth could show her secrets. They would guide her on the road she’d long since tired of building for herself. It didn’t matter what Sayeed thought he was doing—she was here.

Paolina wrapped her arms tight against the morning chill and smiled as
Notus
’ motors forced the airship downward. The sailors shouted in short, loud codes and cast lines over the rail to secure their arrival.

“I am Karol Lachance,” said a gangly Frenchman in black canvas pants, a white linen shirt, and a black leather vest. He wore a small-billed cap over an apparently bald head, with black eyes and a beak of a nose. Paolina couldn’t tell Lachance’s age, save that he was of middle years.

She and Sayeed had just climbed down the ladder within the mooring mast, and stood in a damp field, which smelled of morning dew and cowpats. The captain shifted uncomfortably. “Where is the Royal Navy station commander?”

Lachance shrugged. “Leftenant Charles was called to Stuttgart two days past. He took his chief with him.” His accent was obvious now, different from anything Paolina had heard before.

Captain Sayeed shook his head. “He left a
civilian
in command?”

This time a slow, sharp smile dawned. “I am the Strasbourg harbormaster. This facility belongs to the city, under my care. Your Royal Navy leases it, but this is my field, Captain. And we had no indication you might be coming.
Notus,
she is not on the lists.”

Sayeed made a complicated hand sign, to which Lachance did not respond. Paolina wondered if this were her opportunity to break away from Sayeed. She then wondered why she would want to do so. Better to stay with him to the Silent Order. Though she supposed she could find the Schwilgué Clock on her own. A cathedral could not be so hard to locate, after all.

“I must go into the city,” the captain said. Paolina assumed he’d considered and rejected several stronger responses.

“Out the gate, to your left,” Lachance replied with that same sharp smile.

After a graceless moment, Sayeed walked across the field along a gravel track and past a cart with two harnessed horses. Paolina trailed behind him until they reached the gate and were out on a wider road.

“Your diplomatic skills do you credit, Captain,” she said.

He ignored the sarcasm. “This is not right.”

“A disaster afoot?”

“No, no. Just poor standards. I might have expected such laxity in some distant port, but not here so close to London.”

“They seemed competent enough to me.”

Sayeed favored her with a glare. “Lachance does not follow protocol. Neither did the absent Leftenant Charles. Absent good Naval discipline, we are nothing.”

“You are men. I am but a woman, and would not know of such things.”

After a while Lachance passed them in his wagon. He tipped his hat to Paolina while ignoring Sayeed.

Once again, she had a sense of choice. She elected to continue following the man who would lead her to the Silent Order.

From the ground, Strasbourg was a city of cobbled streets and tall, narrow buildings. There was not as much traffic as she might have imagined, but the hour was early. Had she not seen Marseilles, Paolina would have found this alien and huge, but the place was almost homelike compared with that great Mediterranean hive.

Some buildings flew flags signifying alliances or professions. Others had
signboards. She quickly realized that the citizens of Strasbourg lived on the upper floors, while their business stood below. Paolina had never seen a real shop, only knew them from reading Dickens. She was quite curious to look at the windows, or even pass within.

Sayeed set a brisk pace, though. He seemed uninterested in checking that she followed. Paolina realized that the captain understood the invisible cord that bound her surely as she did. The clock, he knew all about the clock.

They found their way to the central square facing the cathedral, a towering square edifice with a single turret rising from the left front. The building was covered with a frenzied ornamentation that struck her as a madman’s work, angels and devils and sinners writhing in eye-bending braids of stone. Even the curious buildings of Ophir were far more plain than this cliff of close-carved masonry.

“It is Sunday,” Sayeed said, who did not seem to see the wonder before his eyes. “We must await the morning services.”

Paolina followed him to a building with several tables out front, chairs upturned. He set two down and they sat. After a little while Paolina realized this was a restaurant, a shop that would sell them food once it opened. Or could, had she any money.

They waited.

The city unfolded as morning passed slowly toward midday. It was one of the most fascinating things she had ever seen, like watching a flower open, petal after petal curling to meet the light. Here each color unfurling was a person bustling into view, throwing open shutters, lowering awnings, unlocking doors, setting out racks and bins and little shelves all around the storefronts of the square.

Bells high atop the cathedral called the times of services, and tolled the hours in between. Other churches of the city echoed the rhythms of the morning, but she noted far more people going about their business than entering or leaving the cathedral.

Horses, dogs, boys, men, women, baskets of fresh-baked bread, barrows full of cheeses and cabbages—all passed her in a parade of color and scent and sound, the unrolling of the scrim of civic life.

This
was what had moved Dickens to write of the city and its people. She could only imagine how grand London would be, this small miracle of commerce and society writ large enough to govern an empire.

If she squinted upward, Paolina could even see the track of the earth
rising in the sky, a thread to tie this city and its holy cathedral back to Heaven.

Eventually a dumpy woman in a thick black dress trimmed with black lace came out and took down the other chairs. She worked around them—Sayeed paying no attention at all, while the woman ignored Paolina’s inquiring looks. Linens appeared on the little iron tables (including theirs), then small dishes filled with sugar and salt and cream. After a while forks and knives as well. Finally, unbidden, a pot of coffee and a basket of rolls for them.

She took one out. It was a flaky half-moon with a fat middle and narrow arms that weighed less than any piece of bread she’d ever touched in her life.

“Crescent roll,” Sayeed told her—his first words since they’d sat down. While she’d watched life around the square, he’d stared unendingly at the doors of the cathedral.

Paolina smiled, too happy in the moment to be angry even at this man. “And coffee.”

“Mmm.” He poured himself a cup of black and sipped at it. “When the next service lets out, we shall approach the cathedral. There will be someone waiting for us. He will take us to the Silent Fathers.”

Paolina hoped it might be Lachance. That would be a small humiliation for Sayeed, who had richly earned it.

An onion-seller found them as they approached the cathedral. He wore a rumpled blue garment cut to fit his whole body, not divided into pants and shirt, and carried a basket that reeked of his produce mixed with the scent of damp loam.

The onion-seller made a hand sign, which Sayeed matched. They stood close and murmured to one another, with sidelong glances at Paolina. She smiled again.

Sayeed tugged at her arm. Paolina followed around to an alley beside the cathedral. A man in a long black dress opened a side door at the onion-seller’s rhythmic knock. He said something to Sayeed in a language Paolina didn’t know, then offered her his hand.

Her last view of Sayeed was the door shutting, the captain’s face flushed with frustration.

“You are the girl here about the clock,” the priest said.

Surely,
she thought,
he has to be a priest
. “How did you know?”

“We are the Silent Order. I could not tell you even if I wished to.”

“You are not so silent,” she pointed out.

The priest laughed. “No, perhaps not so much.”

They stepped from a plain little hall into a great space. The inside of the cathedral was if anything more frenzied and ornamented that the outside. The walls soared toward heaven, supported by a single great pillar. The curious carvings on the face of the building were replicated here, relieved in turn by a riot of colored glass and winged statues and candles and banners, all in dizzying array above a room full of benches that reeked of incense.

It would take hours to sort out everything her eyes could see—much like looking up at
a Muralha
on an exceptionally clear day, where there was more detail than any one person could hope to understand. Paolina felt overwhelmed.

“The clock is this way.” The priest tugged at her hand with a dry grip.

She followed him, the gleam so heavy in her pocket that it felt like a boulder dragging her downward.

By the second day, he insisted on walking. Though his pace was poor and his ankles ached abominably, he had no desire to be carried by Boaz across the bottom of Africa like some great, mewling child.

The Brass did not argue. Instead, he outlined what was to come. “We must transit westwards the distance of fifty or sixty miles through this dense jungle scape,” he said, “before we may set our faces south and cross the Mitémélé in any hope of secrecy. From there we shall essay the lower reaches of the Wall. There we might hope to continue east with more rapidity and safety than ever we shall find in this rusting misery.”

Rusting misery
. Stinking misery was more like it, but he had no desire to argue. “Aye,” he muttered, “Chinee on the water and in the air. The Englishman’s highway is not safe ’til Her Imperial Majesty sends more to sweep them Asiatic leavings off our doorstep. Meanwhile your plan of making for the Horn is better than walking up the fever coast of the Bight of Benin.”

“And so we shall proceed.” Boaz glanced at al-Wazir’s feet. “You shall set our pace, sir.”

The first parts of the journey were a confusion of vines and mud and doublings back around obstacle after obstacle while avoiding open stretches. By the second day they had the water on their right, but jungle followed the river inland. Al-Wazir supposed this was a blessing, as it shielded them from the airships he twice more heard pass overhead.

“I cannot conjecture whether they hunt for us,” Boaz told him that evening. Al-Wazir ate some sour fruit the Brass had found, and tried to ignore his desire for a fire, even in the night’s heat. “But there is a hunt aloft nonetheless. We should not be caught within their wily snares.”

“Where’s the Royal Navy in all this?”

“Neither of us can say.”

So on they walked.

After they crossed the Mitémélé, they angled south and east toward the rising bulk of the Wall. Al-Wazir saw smoke to the west. It might be Ottweill’s camp, but he could not find the desire to investigate. All he could do to rescue the men who remained there was press on. He tried not to think about the distance to Mogadishu. Boaz seemed to have methods to move quickly upon the Wall, perhaps in the brass cars the girl had mentioned.

Anything would be better than this damnable jungle.

A Chinese airship found them the next day as they crossed a meadow of waist-high grasses teeming with snakes. Busy looking down, al-Wazir realized their peril only when a rattling crack of small-arms fire got his attention.

It was about a thousand feet above them, trailing their position by a quarter mile. He’d have had the heads of his men for wasting ammunition at that range. Two on foot were not going to escape the attentions of an airship. They could afford to be patient up there.

“Fools.”

“We must proceed,” Boaz said. “There are larger rocks for shelter ahead.”

“Until they land a shore party to flush us out.”

“If so, we shall take what steps we may. But there is no purpose in standing here and waiting to be struck down.”

“Aye. Ye have the right of that.”

Several more volleys were fired as they crossed the open ground, ignoring the danger in favor of quickly making time. Nothing came close to hitting, though al-Wazir felt the familiar prickle of mixed fear and thrill at being the object of such a hunt. Every time
Bassett
had ever fought, he’d had the same sensation.

He’d just never experienced it in combination with the certainty of defeat.

They crouched behind a pair of boulders that formed a vee-shaped gap, like a stone lean-to. “Do ye suppose the Chinee are in the mood for prisoners?”