Escapement (50 page)

“Father,” Childress said politely.

“Madam,” he said. She noted his English seemed to have no accent.

The priest continued: “Are you of the Roman rite?”

“No, no.” She dropped her chin. “I am a communicant of the Church of England. But I have not had the opportunity to pray in the house of God for some months.”

She could hear the smile in his voice, though the priest’s face remained serious enough. “Everyone arrives in Singapore via a long sea voyage. And there are sadly few chaplains aboard the ships which call here in these days of Chinese hegemony.” He bowed his head, a chin bob that matched hers. “Welcome, and return to this house of God as it suits you. All Christians are brothers here.”

“Thank you, Father.” Childress regretted that she had no offering to leave.

“Go with God, my child.”

This, from a man less than half her age. “And you.”

Outside, another dark-skinned man clothed only in a soiled length of cloth wrapped about his privates waved her toward a waiting cart—one of those runners she’d seen earlier, drawing passengers about Singapore.

“No, no,” she began. Someone stepped close behind her, grabbed her arm tightly, and whispered, “Get in the rickshaw.”

Her heart felt cold and heavy. There was no one nearby from
Five Lucky Winds.
The priest would remember her, and surely some of the passersby could say they’d seen the European woman.

She stepped into the seat. The runner grabbed the handles as the other man slid in beside her. He was brown, too, and nondescript—middle-aged, wearing the same silk clothes cut Chinese-style as half the people on the street. But not Chinese himself. Some other Asian race, one among the thousands on thousands of people in this city. Only his eyes betrayed more. They were bright, gleaming like knives, and showed her no mercy.

He made the sign of the
avebianco.
“You are the Mask come among us, yes?”

The house of her lies had just caught fire, Childress realized. She could not deny herself now.

“Yes,” she said. “I am the Mask Childress.” That could hardly be kept a secret. “I am unaccustomed to being abducted on the street.”

The knife-sharp eyes flashed, somewhere between anger and amusement. “I could not come to your ship, no.”

“I suppose not.”
Poinsard, be Poinsard,
she told herself. Childress tried to borrow some of that woman’s brittle fearsomeness.
Let him approach you with whatever his petition is.
The Mask Poinsard would definitely have seen it as such, she knew.

They rolled through the streets. Their driver trotted and sang in some language that didn’t seem to include the concept of key in its musical tradition. Childress watched the buildings go by, waiting for whatever would come next.

She was not disappointed.

He made the bird sign again. He was nervous.
Good, let him be.
This man had taken a woman alone for a ride in a strange city—he could share her fear.

“Malaya Chinthé,” he finally said, almost muttering the words.

“Indeed.” She had no idea what he was talking about, but Childress would not give him the satisfaction of asking. In this moment her power lay most in silence and the presumption of authority.

“The red folder, yes?”

This time Childress just stared him down with her best speaking-to-idiots expression.

He sighed and looked away a moment. They were passing a grove of tall trees with long, dangling branches, something like a willow crossbred with a watersnake. When he turned back, the knives were in his eyes once more.

“We hear new word. Fire is higher now.”

“I have been at sea,” she told him.

“Yes. Silent Order is in a state of panic. Ships come and go from Phu Ket, airships also. Even wireless is not quiet.”

“Have we moved against them in my absence?”

“No, no. There is a weapon afoot. A shaman attacked them in their European heart.”

She digested that a moment. “Who?”

“I not know. Your people not say. Only to watch for something called the Gleam, yes. Also that the Silent Order are looking for a European girl. Great many reward offered, even.”

Interesting,
Childress thought.
Very interesting.
“Girl, not a woman? Young?”

His smile cracked into being a moment. “Not the Mask, no.”

“And you?” She asked the same way the dean might have.

“Red folder, red folder. All same. But today I must find you, tell you
about girl.” He leaned closer. “Like Golden Bridge, on two legs. London worries.”

“That project is its own problem.” She looked at him carefully. “Is the girl coming here?”

“Why? How? European problem, white man make, white man fix.”

“Fair enough.” She realized the rickshaw was approaching the docks.
Five Lucky Winds
was somewhere near, though in the jumble of vessels it was difficult to discern.

“You go. I go. Never see, yes?” He smiled again, this time without the slightest shred of humor. “Watch for girl. She come this way, I think we all hear the fires.”

The rickshaw creaked to a halt as someone behind yelled. She slipped over the side. When she looked back, he was already gone, out the other side and into the crowd. Only the grubby, nearly nude driver remained. He grinned at Childress briefly before running again, keeping his rickshaw just ahead of a straining oxcart.

She looked up and down the docks as traffic flowed around her. Three sailors from
Five Lucky Winds
were approaching as well—Ming, who was something like a petty officer, along with Little Chen and Gray Chen. The Chens each carried a pair of roasted ducks.

Childress hailed them, surprising the sailors considerably. She felt better heading back to the ship in their company. Any further untoward surprises would be witnessed, at the least.

The news given by the man from the Malaya Chinthé had been interesting, but she had no way of knowing who he really was. Another Chinese political officer, an agent of the Silent Order, or someone else entirely. She glanced up at the Wall. Did people there come down and mix on the streets here, sending their agents and spies?

She didn’t miss New Haven, but life certainly was simpler there.

Childress found herself grinning as she reboarded the submarine.

The voyage south of the Suez Canal was pleasant by Paolina’s recent standards. Spending her days staring at glass-green water, and taking mess with the few passengers still aboard, was a simple pleasure.

The mess steward was kind to her. The rest of the crew continued to avoid her. She was still on the run, and the British certainly had ample Naval forces here along the Horn of Africa that they could search
Star of Gambia
if they so wished. Still, being out of the Mediterranean and away from the long shadow cast by Europe and that sad continent’s British masters did much to ease her mind.

The ship passed south through the Red Sea. Amid those shallow, gleaming waters, thick with salt and touched with sand, Paolina got a glimpse of the Wall. Nearing her goal was heartening. She stood at the rail and stared at the thickening horizon even as the African shoreline slipped by. She fancied she could see the gleam of the gearing, and even some sense of texture from the countries and kingdoms in their vertical array.

Star of Gambia
called at Port Sudan, where Paolina once more remained aboard. She walked along the rail and looked out at hills brown as toast, covered with modest whitewashed buildings. Paolina saw a city much like Praia Nova might have become if it had ever found a chance to grow beyond a refugee settlement at the edge of the world.

There were two airship masts here, but no Royal Navy vessels were in port. She saw soldiers marching along the dock, but they did not appear to be a serious effort at, well, anything.

Men like the
fidalgos
doubtless dwelt in those pale little buildings. There they waited for boiled grapes or stewed lamb or whatever they ate in a place like this, raising their sons to expect the attentions of women, and
their daughters to bow in fear to God and the hard hands of their fathers and husbands. As in Alexandria, Paolina once more felt tempted to cast off her name and go among the people of the city. She would tell those women what they could be, show them that there was a world outside the walls of the houses of their men.

It was a pleasant and pointless fantasy. Even if she were foolish enough to try, she would not last. The only question was whether the British would find her before the locals killed her.

Living as these women did, as women did anywhere in Northern Earth, had passed beyond her tolerance. The wild lands and strange creatures and mechanical men of
a Muralha
were far more to her taste than a life mandated by tradition.

That was when Paolina realized she would not be returning to Praia Nova. Ophir, possibly, to find Boaz, if no other plan presented itself along the way, but she had no need to take up the chains of her childhood once more.

Just after dawn they passed a narrow strait that the mess steward informed her was the Bab el Mandeb Sound. There was a large island to the portside, and a group of smaller islands to the starboard. Two British warships rode at anchor to watch over the traffic sailing from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. Paolina returned to her cabin once she saw them.

When they called at Djibouti to discharge cargo, she saw little that was different from Port Sudan. More sand and fewer hills, and a landscape painted ocher and gold instead of brown and tan. The wind came up while they were in port, and the one airship at mast cast off and lifted away even while the sky tinged from pale blue to pale tan to a deepening brown.

The wind began worrying at the ship’s superstructure, a low moaning whistle combined with the hiss of dust like someone running sandpaper across the paint. Paolina had never seen such weather—they had nothing like it in Praia Nova. A storm of dust. It was already seeping in around the hatch coaming and settling in corners of her cabin.

She wondered if there was some further shelter she should take.

Star of Gambia
cast off in the afternoon, about the time she lost sight of the city from her porthole. The air outside was whipping and screaming now, sand pouring along the walls and decks of the ship like a rough, hot rain. Paolina was fairly certain that going outside now would be risky if not fatal.

At least the British wouldn’t be looking for her or anyone else in this mess.

_______

The ship’s progress seemed retarded by the storm. Paolina could feel how the vessel rode heavy and low in the water. The wind was out of one of the aft quarters. Perhaps the captain had them moving underspeed for safety. Even away from Djibouti and out in open water, the air was thick and violent with sand. Lightning crackled in the orange-brown sky amid a sourceless, featureless daylight that felt as if God had pulled a caul over the mouth of the world.

Star of Gambia
rocked, too, rolling in the water as she advanced eastward through the Gulf of Aden. Paolina decided there was no point in worrying. She lay on her bunk and tried to calculate how much sand could be carried on the wind, what weight of the world’s surface was even now borne aloft in this crippling grind.

They steamed on.

The storm finally died as the sun went down. Somewhere close to midnight Paolina ventured out of her cabin.

The rails were scarred by gleaming silver streaks visible in the moonlight where the sand had abraded the white paint. Likewise the decks. A torn awning flapped the wind of their passage, though she could not see where. The engines muttered, the boilers gurgled, but otherwise the ship could have been carrying the dead.

She headed to the passenger’s mess, hoping for something cold to have been left out—roast bird or bread and dates, at the least. They’d always had plain fare that varied in tempo with their travels. Apples and olives in the Mediterranean, now dates and figs and flatter breads, with less and less cheese as the ship had steamed south and east.

Paolina was not disappointed. A tray had been bolted into a framework. It still held a few round, flat breads and a cracked jar of something that smelled like liver.

She didn’t care. Paolina smeared two of the breads with the pasty spread and went back out on deck to eat and watch the night pass by.

In the wake of the storm, everything seemed visible. Not even the moon was sufficient to drown out the brasslight. Paolina thought she could see the flicker in the distant lamps of the stars. Paolina turned her gaze southward and stared toward the Wall.

Out in darkness, the stars didn’t quite touch the horizon. The storm was gone, and nothing rose in the air between her and
a Muralha
save a bit of Africa close by.

She swallowed her liver paste, then raised a hand with the other bread still clutched to honor history. “I come,” Paolina told the Wall. “Returning, never to leave you again.”

The purser failed to materialize this night.