Escapement (41 page)

The visitor was shown in moments later. He was a tall man, with hair even whiter than Shang’s, but pale eyes that belied albinism. His skin was faintly flushed with the effort of his recent walk. A brass-tipped cane of some dark wood dangled in one hand.

This man was unmistakably European. Not some sport like Shang, nor a member of a strange race.

Shang spoke in Chinese, from which Childress caught only the interrogative. The tall man nodded, answering likewise.

“She has come in the place of the Mask Poinsard,” Leung said into the stretching silence.

“The world is strange, and brings stranger gifts to us all.” This time the tall European nodded to Childress. “I am William of Ghent.”

The sorcerer! She was found out! There was nothing for it but to play her hand bold as brass, as would a student caught after curfew. She could
hope her forwardness would be rewarded. Childress was confident that meek humility never could be.

“I am Emily McHenry Childress, Mask of the
avebianco,
come in place of the Mask Poinsard to speak against the project at the Wall.” Something plucked at her memory. “You are dead, I have been told. On good authority.” The highest, in fact, as it was this man’s supposed death for which her own sacrifice to the Silent Order was penance.

“I would like to say those reports have been exaggerated, but like so many rumors, there is in fact a sad kernel of truth.” His expression was almost mournful. “If my passing has given you difficulty, I am at a loss for suitable apologies. I cannot say that I recall our ever meeting before.”

“We have not,” Childress said. “Though perhaps there are indirect connections.” She could not hide the trivial or the historic from this man, not if she hoped to cloak her purposes now.
Please, God,
she prayed,
let one lie be sufficient.

“Indeed,” said William. “Fascinating.” He gave her a long stare, piercing her eyes, her thoughts, her heart. “You met him, didn’t you?”

“Who?” she asked, though Childress was certain she knew what he meant.

“The boy Hethor.”

“Yes. I sent him to you. Perhaps one of my great mistakes. My greatest.”

“Madam, if you have lived the sort of life where only one great mistake was possible, I sorrow for you. But in the case of young Hethor, I believe your judgment was proven in the end.”

“The world yet turns.”

A nod. “And with no thanks to me, I might add. That boy caused many changes before he passed onward.”

“He is dead, then?” She felt a surge of sadness for this boy whom she’d met once for an hour.

“Not . . . precisely. No more dead than I am. Suffice it to say he is beyond any concerns of this Northern Earth.”

So Hethor had found a life south of the Wall after his great work with the mainspring. That was perhaps not the end she would have prayed for him to find, had she known to hope for his life at all.

“Wherever he is,” she said, “I wish him well.”

“As do I, madam, as do I.” William twisted his cane in his hand. “We each touched something beyond ourselves.”

“It is my hope, sir, to find the opportunity to continue to reach beyond myself.”

“Indeed.” Another long, slow stare. “And with that reach, how is your grasp,
Mask
?”

“Sufficient unto the needs of the day, sir.”

With a laugh, William turned to Admiral Shang and began a torrent of Chinese. He nodded occasionally toward Childress.

She could not tell if this was a blessing or a death warrant. Both men kept their faces impassive, even as the two of them argued back and forth, tall men in white carrying on like ghosts of barristers brought back to argue one final case.

When they were done, William turned to her once more and bowed low, sweeping wide with his cane. “By strong words and stout heart you have earned whatever freedom of action remains to you, madam. Build from it as you see fit, with my own goodwill.” He favored Leung with a nod, then left.

In the silence that followed, Childress kept glancing down at the street. William of Ghent emerged shortly from the Beiyang Admiralty, then began walking away. For all his height and the color of his clothes, he was quickly lost in the crowd. The swirl of bright noise swallowed him as a heron might swallow a frog.

When she turned back again, Shang was watching her speculatively. Leung began to speak. “I am to tell you that the admiral does not agree with your assessment of the Golden Bridge. However, the foreign sorcerer’s endorsement of you carries great weight here in Tainan. It will even provide an echo of favor in the Imperial Court. As you have failed to bring the Great Relic promised by Poinsard, your role in the project can proceed no further.”

She had a quick flash of thought that if Poinsard had possessed a Great Relic, it was now in the cold depths of the Atlantic, thanks to Leung’s attack.

“To salvage some of what has been lost, the admiral will dispatch you to Chersonesus Aurea to meet with the priests and academicians gathered there. You may present your own case. They will judge the worth of what you bring and balance it against the loss of Poinsard’s mission.”

“And thus,” she said, not caring if she interrupted, “the admiral is free of responsibility for my fate. William of Ghent is not angered, the Imperial Court will not be required to take notice, the Golden Bridge will be advanced in some fashion, if only in the aversion of negative result. I am once more pawn in someone else’s game.”

“You understand the stakes for which all are playing, Mask Childress,” Leung said seriously. She realized he was speaking for himself now. “Your life is the only chitty you have with which to buy the seat you have already claimed at this table. Do not bemoan your pawnhood, any more than I bemoan my service to Admiral Shang, or he decries his own subordination to the Celestial Empire.”

“I understand.” She suppressed a sigh, instead standing tall and proud. “Believe me, this is not easy. I was never born or bred to the politics of power.”

“You are a mask,” said Shang unexpectedly. “Wear your power like skin.”

She bowed to him, much as William of Ghent had bowed to her. “My thanks, Admiral. I will not betray your trust.”

Leung began to speak, but Shang waved him off, laughing. “No trust, devil woman,” he said in English. “Only curiosity. Now go.”

The captain escorted her out. Childress did not trust herself to exchange a final word with the admiral.

The Schwilgué Clock filled her vision like sunrise after an endless night. The device towered above Paolina, tall in proportion to the front of Strasbourg Cathedral, and ornamented with the same strange frenzy that had possessed the original builders. Where her case for the stemwinder was a simple shell, this was a wooden paean to the joy and skill of the clock’s creator.

Two little balconies at the top held carved and painted figures that were meant to move at some impulse from the works within. Below them was a series of faces, each measuring a different aspect of the work of God’s Creation. One showed the position of the sun, another the position of Luna and the planets, another the hours of the day as reckoned by men. Smaller hands followed other patterns. She was certain one marked the time that beat at the heart of the world, synchronous with the smallest hand on her gleam. The mechanisms inside must be as fascinating as the clockwork that drove the Earth. Paolina could not know the meaning of them all, not without instruction and careful study, but she loved each of them already.

A great face in the middle of the clock’s case was painted with mystic sigils. That had to be the sport, the spare hand that could be set, like the fourth hand of her gleam, to match the will and word of the maker.

This work of wonder and might drowned her poor little gleam in the brilliant light of its presence. “By all the monsters of
a Muralha,
” she whispered, “it must be a perfect model of the world.”

“What do you see?” The priest’s voice was low and urgent.

“What anyone with eyes would see,” she answered slowly. “An image of Creation wrought by a master’s hand. With this clock, one might decipher all secrets, and set all wrongs to right.”

Someone behind her clapped slowly.

Paolina turned to see that a dozen men had filed in behind her. Among them was the onion-seller from the square outside, though Captain Sayeed was not with him. There were others in various elegant costumes she did not recognize.

The clapper left off. He was a man in pale robes trimmed with purple, and a tall hat shaped like an unopened lily. The cut of his clothes was much like the priest who had escorted her in, save far richer. A high priest, then—a bishop?

“We have awaited you down the centuries, Clockmistress,” he said in careful, patient cadence. “Be welcome to this, the heart of the Silent Order of the Second Winding, and to our clock, which marks the measures of the world.”

“But I—,” Paolina began, then stopped. “You are not the builders?”

There was a murmur of polite laughter, though a few exchanged harder looks.

“No, no,” said the bishop. “We are the high council. Guardians of the work and the purpose. Tools are meant for the hands of . . . others . . . such as yourself. See how you found your way to us?”

“Not to
you,
” she replied, “but to this clock. The Schwilgué Clock is a masterwork. I would learn from him who built it.”

“Then you are late in asking,” said a man in a smartly cut burgundy coat. “Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué was laid to rest almost fifty years gone. You are the first since fit to take up his tools and his purposes.”

“
Our
purposes,” the bishop added.

Where were the English sorcerers that Sayeed had promised her? Since leaving Praia Nova, she’d been looking for the ones who could teach her more. These were not learned men—they were
fidalgos,
just like at home, but in the larger world with more power. They saw her as no more than a tool to be set in their service.

By God,
she thought,
if I would not serve the
doms
of my home, why would I serve these English
fidalgos
? They are no better
.

Her hand closed on the gleam, fingers sliding out the stem. The priest beside her grabbed at her arm. Paolina shrieked and flinched. He struck her a hard slap with his free hand and snatched the gleam away, even as the Schwilgué Clock began to ring out the noon hour.

It was a symphony, a cacophony, the figures dancing and clacking, chimes shivering, a trumpet blowing, while the great bells in the tower above commenced their tolling. The bishop and his cronies stepped toward her, walking along the pews, cutting off her avenues of flight.

Paolina elbowed the priest in the gut. He tumbled to the floor, still clutching the gleam. Instead of pummeling him, Paolina stepped backwards
to the face of the master clock and began to set the mystic hand. If she could find the rhythm that it matched, she could control that rhythm. That was her power.

The high council of the Silent Order knew that, too, for they stopped their advance. The bishop spread his arms, shouting over the racket of the hour, “Come, let us not be at odds now.”

Paolina could not concentrate amid cacophony and threat. She shouted, then launched herself toward the bishop. He had not expected so direct an attack. She took him in the chest, knocked him flat, and grabbed up his staff to lay into the man behind him. A moment later she leapt over the pews, stepping from top rail to top rail as they scrambled after her.

The main doors were clear, her pursuers shouting as the bells died. Paolina burst screaming into the light.

Karol Lachance waited at the bottom of the steps, smoking a cigarette as he sat in his wagon. He nodded at her.

Not knowing what else to do, she raced down the steps, hurled the bishop’s staff aside, and leapt over the sidewall of the wagon. Amid the clutter there, Paolina wrapped herself in canvas and began shivering with fright. Karol clucked his team into motion as shouting men erupted somewhere behind her.

She watched the sunlight glow through the sheet across her face as they made their unhurried way along the streets of Strasbourg. There was quickly enough a hue and cry of thief, rioter, mountebank. Bells and whistles carried the message, but Lachance drove on. Twice she heard him speaking in French—to policemen?—but with an easy familiarity and a chuckle that seemed sufficient to whatever was being asked.

Eventually the wagon settled to a steadier pace. There was no noise of people or city, just the quiet susurrus of the countryside, until something big and slow rumbled overhead.

Notus,
she realized.

Paolina continued to lie hidden as Lachance drove them on, away from Strasbourg and the Schwilgué Clock. A cold feeling stole into her then, along with a hard-breathing panic.

They were heading away from the gleam.

The English had betrayed her completely. She’d lost the stemwinder she had worked so hard to build. Paolina began to cry, weeping in great, long shudders, biting her arm to hide her sobs.

Lachance threw off the canvas. “You must come now.”