Escapement (60 page)

Lightning danced in the sky before them, a bright bonfire to illuminate their way.

The machine shop tucked within the lower decks of
Heaven’s Deer
was small, even by the cramped standards of an airship. The storm was not making matters easy either. The ship rolled and bucked while the bamboo walls vibrated to the point of thrumming. They sweat stormwater as well, but Paolina decided after brief thought that this was probably a desirable feature rather than a defect in the ship’s construction.

Whoever had designed the shop had anticipated the need for repairs under fire or storm. She was thankful for that. Every flat surface had vises, mounting hooks, or braces. Many of the tools were gimballed. Some were electrick as well, something she’d never seen or really even considered.

It made sense—an electrick cutter could do so much more than a hand with a file, if everything were properly braced.

Her greatest challenge was that the shop had been equipped for engine and weapons repairs. Many of the tools were simply too large a scale to support what she was attempting.

Paolina was building another gleam.

Even now, cutting gears to fit into the crude casing she’d adapted from the base of a large caliber shell, she was having trouble justifying it to herself. The death of Lachance, even of those venal fools back in the Strasbourg Cathedral, had been a very high price for her last such effort. But she was heading for
a Muralha
now, passing beyond the reach of the Silent Order. Their greed for her fabrication would mean nothing once she’d regained safety.

Her largest worry now was that if she built the thing, or at least enough of it, the gleam might fall into Chinese hands. Events in Strasbourg made it perfectly clear that these people were capable of anything once
they got a gleam into their hands. All the more so if it came to Phu Ket and the control of the Silent Order for a second time.

Her second largest worry now was that she might not be able to build another.

The original stemwinder had come to her in the fevered dark, from parts and tools that had traveled down
a Muralha
to her. Her memories of its design and construction were incomplete. On the other hand, her sense of its purpose and function was much better.

The gleam was a miracle waiting to happen, potentiality trapped in the gears and energy of the clockwork. A sort of magic, written in the same clockwork that underlay the order of the world.

Why
she
could build it, and others could not, was a question that begged an answer Paolina was not prepared to think on. Especially at that moment, with
Heaven’s Deer
shuddering at the force of the wind. This was a Wall storm, piled so high, nothing but an angel could fly above the violence of wind and rain. It could only be ridden out, with hopes of not being driven down or forced so far south that the airship impacted
a Muralha
.

Al-Wazir knew his business. The chief’s experience and their reluctant crew should bring the airship through. Her hope was to finish the gleam in time to help them survive, if possible.

The cutter she was using whined and spat as the electricks flickered.
Lightning strike?
Up here away from the earth the power in the bolt would move on harmlessly. She hoped.

Paolina was building an escapement now. It would translate the power of her mainspring to the hands. She had no jewels for the movements, no method to set the hair-fine axles solid and secure in their courses, but she would find a way. For all that the shop was cramped, it was equipped with a multitude of drawers like a giant puzzle box. There seemed to be half a dozen of everything a craftsman might wish to have, if only she knew where to look.

The hardest part was building without a plan. She had done so once before, but she hadn’t understood her own purposes as she did now. Knowing too much was almost as bad as not knowing enough.

Still, she set to her work, bracing her body against the swaying of the little room.

When lightning finally did strike the hull, she understood the difference between weather and a Wall storm, at least from aboard an airship. The electrick over her head flared, died, then sputtered back to fitful orange
life. The bamboo walls crackled as the water rolling down them puffed to steam. Her teeth ached, her skin prickled, and her hair felt just
wrong
.

For a moment, Paolina thought the pick and file in her hand were hot. She nearly dropped them, but held on as she was trying to set a gear train into her case.

The work was so crude that she nearly despaired of it. The storm was growing worse as well, the airship pitching forward more and more. Was the gasbag in trouble?

She wondered how far down the ocean was. Then she wondered how close the ocean was. She set both thoughts aside and kept the task at hand close.

Her mechanism. A way to address the order of the world. It wasn’t just her, either, for the Silent Order had made a horrid mess of things back in Strasbourg with the first gleam.

Paolina prayed that only she could build one. The world didn’t need
more
of these devices—one was enough to rewrite history, in the wrong hands.

With that thought, she felt a renewed surge of guilt at building this one. Was it fair to protect herself with such a creation? This was no different from a man making himself a more powerful gun.

All the while, her hands kept moving, following a plan she didn’t fully understand. Distraction was good, Paolina realized. She prayed for more distraction.

The storm kept shaking the airship, her work progressed, and she tried not to think about the waves surging below them, the rain pouring around them, the wind pounding
Heaven’s Deer
apart while the airship could neither fight nor rise above the weather.

The next time she noticed a strike was when the hull began to smoke. Paolina looked up to see water pouring down the inside wall. Was there flooding in the corridor? That shouldn’t be possible, not on an airship.

Then she remembered the gaping hole she’d blown in the deck above the arms locker.

She looked down at her new gleam. It was larger, cruder, and simpler than the old one, but it was of a type with the first—a mechanical incantation written in springs and gears that moved in sympathetic echo with the hidden order of the world. Creation was nothing more than a complex dance of belief and mechanism, a design worded in the dreaming mind of God. All man could do was attempt to read the Divine intent and apply what could be perceived.

At the moment Divine intent was sluicing an inch or more of water past her ankles.

Working quickly, Paolina clipped a face to her gleam. This one more resembled a clock than a pocket watch, but it had the same four hands. She’d set them to the same tempi, too—the beat of the hours, the rhythm of her own heart, the time that counted at the heart of the world, and the fourth hand freewheeling to match whatever she could match.

She clutched it close and stepped to the hatch. The door was stiff and would not open at her tug. Paolina put her weight into it, yanking the door harder. It popped open just as the ship flexed with another great groan and a blast of wet wind.

Heaven’s Deer
was coming apart, shaking itself like a wet dog in the face of the storm.

Paolina stumbled into the passageway as the ship rolled violently. She slipped across the floor and collapsed against the far bulkhead. More water flowed across her, soaking her shoulder and side. Wind and rain tore through the passageway from the gaping hatch to the maindeck.

She fought to her feet, holding the gleam above her head to keep it out of the flow of the water. There was no help for the streaming rain. She made it to the ladder before the airship lurched again, and kept her feet this time by grabbing on to the ladderway. Once the ship settled a little more, Paolina climbed one-handed. She kept the gleam close.

There was no question that
Heaven’s Deer
was dying in the air. If the gleam could find the rhythms that drove this storm, she might be able to at least bring them down safely. Otherwise their survival would be up to al-Wazir and his reluctant crew.

The ship yawed again as she made the deck, giving a gaping view of darkness. Cloud banks below them were illuminated by jags of lightning. Paolina’s stomach lurched—it was a more disorienting sight than anything she’d ever seen from
a Muralha
—before
Heaven’s Deer
heeled the other way and the rain closed in again in thick curtains.

A frightened Chinese face loomed out of the storm’s gloom, waving a rope. She jumped away, but he caught her waist.

A safety line
, Paolina thought. She tried to thank him, but her voice was captured by the wind, and her ears were still ringing.

She stepped close and let him knot it around her. The crewman then led her to the poop, walking hand-over-hand along another line strung along the deck. He had to stop twice and reset her safety line, and once more as the airship pitched hard. She realized she could hear something besides the storm’s rage—the gasbag was booming.

That couldn’t be good.

Al-Wazir was lashed to the wheel like some hero out of ancient legend. The Chinese doctor huddled beside him, tied to ropes staked to the deck and stretching to the aft rail, clutching a little storm lantern. Her escort dropped back as she stumbled up the steps to the poop. Her rope caught on something, then popped free.

She finally reached the wheel.

She screamed at al-Wazir, “Are we dying?”

Another lighting strike sizzled, flaring across the lines and midmasts on the deck. It was a wonder that the gasbag had not caught fire.

He stared at her. She could see little more than a silhouette, a shape in the darkness, but the man was practically glowing with effort. His eyes were red, either bloody with effort or glowing in the fitful light of the doctor’s storm lantern.

Al-Wazir opened his mouth and roared. The words were nothing but fragments to her. “. . . ocean . . . nae . . . Almighty . . .”

She turned her hand and showed him the gleam.

This time his eyes practically bulged. “You . . . a clock . . . fewking . . .”

Another swirl of rain blew by, a horizontal flood that choked Paolina so hard, she wondered if she were drowning.

The next lightning strike showed her something far more fearsome—the ocean heaving at a high angle of view.
Heaven’s Deer
was diving for the water.

She was too late, far too late.

Al-Wazir was trying to tell her something more. “. . . nae . . . crew . . . few . . .”

Paolina tucked her head down and focused on the gleam. The three hands beat as they should. She pulled her crude stem—a large brass key, in truth—to the fourth stop and began to set the hand. Could she find the storm’s beat long enough to steal calm from the enormous forces driving them to the waves?

This time she had a better sense of how to set and drive the hand. The problem was the overwhelming fury of the weather. It was like trying to tune in to the key of all life at once, find each of God’s creatures amid a cry or shout or shriek. A Wall storm was an explosion of water and wind, an epic eruption of force fit to rewrite the face of lands.

In that moment, she would have traded all of this for one of the great waves that had ravaged
a Muralha
two years earlier. At least those came, cleared their paths, and moved onward.

Paolina tried to slip inside the rhythms of wind and water, lightning and thunder. The ocean below their keel was nothing but another place, the
clear air high above the storm clouds nothing but another time. Here, now,
Heaven’s Deer
was in the heart of the storm.

How would God have done it? He would not have parted the waters of the air and stilled the winds with His hand; she knew that. The Divine would instead have turned one from the other, as water tumbling from a cliff will fold past a quiet place. Or how a swirl of drainage always had clear air at the middle, pointing down into the depths.

Order from chaos, in keeping with the same laws and movements that generated that chaos in the first place.

The gleam clicked as it found the movement of the storm. She was inside now, but the forces were too complex, the scope and scale of the thing too large. Still, Paolina thought she could deflect the worst, perhaps make a blade of air to shield the last of
Heaven’s Deer
’s fall.

She had one glimpse of al-Wazir, his mouth in a rounded
O
of surprise or shock; then she was lifting the storm like draperies away from a statue. Something swung her gut from hips to teeth and back again, and she choked on her own bile, but she held open the way.

The ocean hit her in all its tons with the slap of the world’s gleam. Someone grabbed her while Paolina clutched the new gleam as close as she could, curling her body into nearly a ball. Water battered her first against a wooden beam, then an enormous soft surface.

The gasbag
, she thought, before she was yanked about again. She rolled over and broke free of the water a moment to find herself at the top of a sliding mountain of ocean, the fabric billowing in a trough below her. Paolina took a deep breath just before she was pulled under once more.