Escapement (8 page)

“Including my presence, I’m afraid.” Kitchens seemed relieved. Something in his stance shifted. So, al-Wazir had asked the right question. “Then as you have asked, I shall transfer you to the Engineering section for their briefings.”

“This is another of them formalities for the Parliamentary Questions, ain’t it?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir. Have your bags ready in half an hour. We can place you on the next train to Maidstone, as you have requested.”

“Indeed,” said al-Wazir. He tucked into the last of his kippers. There didn’t seem much point in rushing. Kitchens wouldn’t leave without him. His entire kit consisted of a canvas satchel not much larger than a ditty bag. That was mostly secondhand gear given him in Bristol by other sailors to offset his complete destitution debarking from the dhow from Dahomey.

Twenty-five minutes later al-Wazir stepped out of Admiralty into a cool September morning, then boarded a waiting carriage. Somewhat to his surprise, Kitchens climbed in after him to tug the door shut on the first honest sunlight the chief had seen in days.

They boarded a train at Bricklayers’ Arms, though to al-Wazir all the stations of London could have been one vast brick-and-glass hall. He’d always been a ropes-and-sails man, first on the water, then in the air. The gasbag division and the engine gang had their own ways, dark and dingy to al-Wazir’s thinking.

So it was here, the belowdecks of a great iron ship turned inside out to form the tendons and muscles of the Empire. Steam engines stood naked on wheeled trucks to ride the rails, rather than lurking decently below, where they could be tended by a black gang. The blue sky and green world were hidden behind walls everted to remake the world. Instead of the unpeopled sea and the broad green lands passing below and beside him, here there were crowds everywhere, heads bobbing and nodding, shoulders pressed together tight as any assembly of the deck, faces every color of the Empire, though mostly the honest beefy pink of the home islands.

He walked up two iron steps and into the railroad car. Kitchens followed, reaching forward to direct al-Wazir to a private compart ment.

Soon enough they were rumbling through slums filthier and more
crowded than the meanest Caribbean port town, along clattering rails where grubby children scavenged for clinkers and metal scrap. “The Battersea Tangle,” said Kitchens absently as they rattled past an endless, confusing expanse of rails knotted together worse than any seaweed mat on the Sargasso.

Then it was open lands and village greens and standing lines of oaks and the rolling country of southeast England as they bore on into Kent.

He finally asked the question he’d been wondering about for a while. “Why Maidstone?”

“Where else to find Africa in England?”

Once again, al-Wazir suspected Kitchens of humor.

The Maidstone railway station was so much smaller than the brick caverns of London that it felt almost normal to al-Wazir. Like a dockside without longshoremen or a flint-eyed wharfinger, though there were idlers and strumpets in evidence, even here. Kitchens steered him directly past the porters and the touts to meet a pair of Royal Marines in green woolens. They opened the hatch of an armored steam-powered omnibus.

Inside the light was dim, filled with shifting shadows, much as belowdecks on an iron-hulled steamer.

“Quiet and easy, this monster is,” al-Wazir said, poking Kitchens in the side. “No one will notice what you’re about, for certain.”

Kitchens sniffed. “I am not responsible for security provisions here.”

One of the marines up front glanced back, grinning. “Kent ain’t exactly brimming with hostiles. We take this’n out twice a day to fetch the mail, truth be told. Gives the old girl a whirl. No one knows the difference.”

The difference to al-Wazir was that he saw nothing from inside the omnibus except bits of treetops and sky through the gun slits.

They drove for the better part of an hour, with a slow lurch that spoke of country lanes too narrow for the chuffing, screeching bulk of the vehicle. When they eventually ground to a halt, even Kitchens was sweating despite the cooling weather. The marines threw open the hatch and helped al-Wazir and Kitchens out.

Whatever he had expected from the Kentish countryside, it was not this.

They stood at the edge of an enormous pit that extended an enormous mile or more to the other side. It was a quarry, al-Wazir realized, and a bloody huge one. One end had been expanded, dug deeper into layers of varying colors. Tailings spread across the bed of the excavation. A great quantity of machines and equipment had been erected in the newly opened section.

Al-Wazir tried to sort out what he was seeing. A scaffold covered much of the wall at that end of the quarry. There were rails laid on the floor, in two gauges—one seemed to be a standard English railroading gauge, the other was much wider, with massive sleepers. A huge machine sat at the end of the broad-gauge spur, up against the cliff face. Just beyond it was a tunnel into the rock. Men swarmed over the machine, making repairs or adjustments.

“We calls it the boner,” said one of the marines.

“Shut your biscuit hole,” the other said.

“Boner” was a good word for it,
al-Wazir thought. The machine was perhaps seventy feet long, about fifteen feet in diameter, bearing a bulbous head crisscrossed with studded members. It was basically a giant drill with a rotating nose meant to cut the tunnel before it. The thing rammed into the stone and flayed open a path.

“Her Imperial Majesty’s iron dick would be more like it,” al-Wazir said with a laugh. He swallowed his humor at the look Kitchens gave him.

They took a lift cage down the cliff face to the quarry floor. There was a village spread about the base of the lift: equipment barns and dormitories and cottages for officers and engineers, along with a dining hall, a gymnasium, and dozens more outbuildings. Descending, al-Wazir got an excellent view of the rooftops.

He hated what he saw. Admiralty’s quarters at Ripley Building had at least been blessed with some echo of the majesty of state. Even the Bricklayers’ Arms train station had a purpose around which its form had been built. This was just another factory, another mill, at the bottom of a hole.

What he’d gone to sea to avoid.

As they reached the base of the lift, the tunneling machine erupted into a series of loud steam whistle blasts. Moments later a clattering, churning racket echoed through the quarry, though it was soon muted. Now out of his line of sight, al-Wazir presumed that the machine had moved into the tunnel.

“I believe that Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill will be joining us shortly,” said Kitchens.

They stood in the stone street at the bottom of the quarry amid tarred shacks in a sun that had become far too hot. Al-Wazir found himself wondering if he should have stayed aboard the little dhow, sailed back to Africa, and made his living among the fuzzy wuzzies.

But he’d taken the Queen’s shilling. Her Imperial Majesty had kept him in the air all these years. If she wanted to send him beneath the stones of the Wall, it should be all the same to him.

Librarian Childress put to sea aboard SS
Mute Swan
under steam with the late tide from New Haven harbor the night of Wednesday, September 17, 1902. She made a note of it in her
ars memoriae,
as if her departure from everything she’d ever known was little more than a citation in a work of distant history.

Things cataloged, marked down, recorded, didn’t have the same edge as what a person felt in her skin. She’d always known this. It was what being a librarian meant to her, and to so many others. Few would choose a life among quiet books and dusty shelves unless they sufficiently abhorred the company of others.

The ship moved smoothly through the gentle swells of Long Island Sound. She stared out the tiny barred porthole. Childress might have been able to toss a coin into the sea, if she’d worked at it a bit. Still, her eyes were free. So she used them.

The full moon painted the Sound silver, while the shoreline bulked blue black. Wooded headlands lent the shadows a darker texture. The towns and waterfronts flickered with light. She’d lived in Connecticut all her life, never going farther than New York City or Providence. Now the
avebianco
was taking her away, quite possibly for the rest of her life.

At least she’d see more of the world.

Later, after Childress had lain down to sleep still dressed in the clothing of her day, the bolt on the outside of her cabin’s slid open. The muscled woman looked in. She was once more decently attired, rough clothes for traveling but unmistakably female. Childress knew better than to be fooled by her dress.

“Do you have needs?”

“Civilized discourse, personal freedom, and a decent wardrobe.”

“The Mask Poinsard will speak to you of those things tomorrow.”

“And for tonight? . . .”

“Sleep,” said the muscled woman. “You will be bettered for the time spent.”

“And meanwhile we steam into the Atlantic.” She hadn’t meant to say more, but she did. “Away from my home.”

“Your home is the
avebianco.
” The muscled woman nodded sharply. “I am Anneke. I will see you in the morning.”

The hatch shut. The bolt outside shot home with a click.

Childress settled down, but sleep did not come. Instead she walked
through her locus awhile, recalling how she’d come to this pass. Somewhere deep inside her house of memory, sleep claimed her.

Morning brought a shoreline she had no way to identify—more wooded headlands, some water meadows, old piers gone to rotting posts topped with the dying remnants of a crown of summer growth. Logic told her it ought be the coast of Massachusetts, but she had not yet sorted out the speed of the vessel. Nonetheless she dutifully noted the arrangements of the low-hilled peaks lest by some strange chance she ever passed this way by ship again.

Despite Anneke’s promise, dawn had come and gone several hours with neither breakfast nor a walk to see the Mask Poinsard. And there would be the crux of this whole business.

To say that the white birds, the
avebianco
, were loosely organized was something of an understatement. They had their signs and symbols, but there was no real arrangement of cells or commanders or revolutionaries. Not such as the Loggers’ Rebellion had maintained under Lincoln and Lee. The two farmer-generals had managed to control portions of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania until General Arbuthnot had put them down with the help of the Sikh divisions.

Unlike those poor doomed rebels, the white birds had never aimed for overt political or economic dominance. Influence, instead. As through the spread and reach of libraries.

But they did have Masks—senior members of the
avebianco,
tapped for advancement within the brotherhood to assume more public roles, in places and times where a direct influence would be important. Masks were such commanders as the white birds had.

Childress was not enough of a fool to believe it ended there. Surely the Masks looked up to other Masks, persons of rank and title invisible to her. People could not be otherwise. Every tribe had a chief, every gang had a boss, every little pack had a leader.

The drawing of the bolt startled Childress from her reverie. The coast outside had become long dunes and a sandspit. Houses dotted the rise above the storm tide line. Near Boston, perhaps?

She turned to meet Anneke.

“The Mask Poinsard will see you now.”

“No.” Childress might as well make what little point was hers to make. “I require a bath, clean clothing, and a decent meal before I can present myself to a senior member of our brotherhood.”

Anneke snorted. “I see you have not spent much time aboard ship.” She shrugged. “I can escort you to a lavatory. Do what you will there, but be quick about it.”

“And breakfast?”

“Tea and crackers, if you’re lucky.”

Anneke’s patience had limits, then, something that came as no surprise to Childress. Still, she’d won a small battle, simply by standing on propriety. She had no illusions of power—a lifetime as a woman and a librarian had ensured that—but she could show that she, at least, valued herself.

The lav was dreadful small, and reeked of rust and the natural uses to which it was put. The water that dropped from the little pipe overhead was bone-cold. Childress didn’t even consider washing her hair. She did undress to her chemise so she could wet her face and hands and dab elsewhere that fear and stress had left their scent. She resolutely pushed aside her feelings of humiliation at being forced to clean herself this way, like a prisoner in a cell.

She was not a prisoner. She was a white bird, under transport now, following a guide she’d agreed to decades before. This was not a sentence. She was not being punished.

Childress didn’t believe that for a minute, of course. But it was what she told herself to feel better. Not that it worked, but still she forced the thought. To think on a thing was the first step to creating it.

Anneke banged on the hatch all too soon. “You’re late already,” she called, voice muffled through the metal.