Escapement (9 page)

Childress buttoned herself back into her slip and dress, taking care that the high collar sat properly. She felt shoddy, dusty, and rumpled, but it was the best she had available to her in this moment. She opened the hatch.

Anneke held a mug of tea and two rough slices of coarse brown bread. Childress reflected that if she had ever chanced to learn the arts of men, she might contrive an escape in that moment, tossing the steaming tea in her captor’s face and running toward—what? The stern of a ship she didn’t know, steaming off an unfamiliar coast?

Instead she took the mug and sipped cautiously. It was a strong dark tea such as the coolies drank in the restaurants in East Haven, where a woman alone might safely dine on exotic foods from the Indian subcontinent. Still, the drink was warm and good and she could taste the stiff infusion, which would set her blood to pumping harder. Childress braced herself against
the door and drained the mug as quickly as her tolerance for the heat within would allow. She pocketed one slice of bread as she handed the mug back to Anneke. She gnawed on the other.

Childress felt like a beggar boy going before the truancy bench. This was idiotic. She was an educated woman of spacious intellect and strong will. A single grubby night of confinement and poor nutrition was insufficient to break her spirit.

She gave Anneke a broad smile, letting her eyes twinkle—a look she’d never yet offered to a student, not in thirty-six years at the Divinity School.

“It is now convenient for me to pay a call upon the Mask Poinsard,” she said in her most pleasant voice.

Anneke snorted, but led her down the passage, the empty earthenware mug clutched like a club, perhaps in case weapons should suddenly be needed.

The Mask Poinsard waited in a forward cabin above decks. The room was spacious, eight or ten times larger than Childress’ tiny lockup, with large windows that overlooked the sea. Chairs that might have come from a faculty club were bolted into place, the deck hidden under maroon carpet.

It looked like a saloon, perhaps, a place intended for gentlemen to meet over cigars and port to discuss finance, horses, and females. In this case, it contained only an ordinary-looking woman. Her dark hair was flecked with gray, over brown eyes in an oval face that might have blended in any English crowd. Where Anneke’s dress was much the same as last night, a sort of female compromise to the necessities of labor aboard ship, the Mask Poinsard wore a smart lavender jacket with a flowing skirt to match, a ruffled white blouse, and small black bow. A matching hat waited on a stand beside her chair. Remarkably impractical for shipboard wear. The Mask Poinsard was making a point. Childress wondered to whom the point was addressed.

Somehow she had expected the Mask Poinsard to be a man.

“May I present myself as the Librarian Childress.” She stepped through her uncertainty. “Late of the Day Missions Library at Berkeley Divinity School and lifetime resident of New Haven, Connecticut.”

“You may address me as the Mask Poinsard. My given name is not of consequence for your purposes.” Where Anneke had a broader Continental accent, the Mask Poinsard’s accent was pure Received Pronunciation, the English of the court and the bench and all things prestigious.

The clothes, up close, were very finely tailored, with a stitch count too high for Childress to estimate by eye. This woman was very wealthy. But then, she controlled this vessel, for all practical purposes. Possibly through outright ownership.

“Mask Poinsard,” Childress said quietly. “I am at your service.”

“Indeed.” Poinsard settled a bit more deeply into her chair.

Uncomfortable,
Childress thought. There was something afoot this woman would prefer not to address. Years in faculty committee meetings had taught her the value of extended silence. She practiced that wisdom.

Eventually the Mask Poinsard stepped into the gap. “We of the
avebianco
do not . . . require oaths.” She was picking her words with care. “The vast majority of our members are at best loosely associated with one another or the brotherhood as a whole.”

Another pause. Childress smiled brightly and attentively.

“Much as yourself,” Poinsard finally said, filling in Childress’ line of the playlet in her head.

Childress allowed herself a polite but indistinct murmur.

“Sometimes a member, an affiliate, puts herself forward, inserting herself in the higher business of the brotherhood. Knowingly or otherwise.”

This time the pause was accompanied by a sharpened stare. Childress continued to smile in silence, though she was certain her expression was transiting rapidly from attentive to vacuous.

Poinsard took a large shuddering sigh. “You, Librarian Childress, through your actions, began a chain of events which directly brought about the disappearance and presumed death of two individuals critical to the success of our brotherhood’s purposes. One, Simeon Malgus, was a key agent in our long-term contests with the Rationalists and their so-called Silent Order of the Second Winding. The other, William of Ghent, stood in the highest councils of the Silent Order.” She leaned forward, pointing a finger at Librarian Childress, talking faster now.

Nerves,
Childress realized. She steeled herself for what must come next.

Poinsard rushed on. “Through your actions, they were both lost. The Silent Order even now goes to war against the Feathered Masks that sit in our order’s high councils. The
avebianco
have made overtures of peace to them—we have, after all, coexisted in compromise for centuries. The price the Silent Order has demanded is that you be bound over for trial by their star chamber.”

Ah.
This was worse than anything she might have expected. To be brought before the hierarchy of the white birds was one thing. To be cast as a sacrifice to the Rationalists was entirely another.

Childress thought quickly. “Let us have no pretense, Mask. Relying on
my loyalty and obedience, you summoned me aboard your ship so you could betray me for the sake of the Feathered Masks and their peace of mind. I am not here to answer for my actions, or as a reward for my steadfastness. I am here to be sacrificed as a pawn to the Rationalists. You waited until we were under way rather than bringing your case on shore in order to ensure that your mission prevailed. The cowardice you have shown in approaching me is despicable. Worse so those who stand above you in condemning me to ease their own fears.

“But,” Childress said, “I would have gone willingly, had you only asked.” She was mildly surprised to realize that truth. “All that would ever have been required was the statement of need. For I
am
loyal, even now. Not to you, or even to the Feathered Masks. You have shown yourselves as miserable and venal. No, I am loyal to our brotherhood’s ideal, that man can make a place among the works of God on his own terms. We are the middle way, neither extreme Spiritualists demanding blind obedience to God’s writ, nor Rationalists seeking to expel Him from His creation.

“You, I am afraid, have been driven by your cowardice. You have betrayed me. I will not betray you in turn.”

Childress turned and walked toward the door. She had no power here but her dignity. She was secretly pleased to see the startled expression on Anneke’s face as the other woman moved to the hatch, looking past Childress for some direction from her mistress.

“Librarian Childress—,” the Mask Poinsard began.

Childress smiled, a petty, nasty smile she knew, but Anneke stopped and let her pass. She’d won, not the struggle for life or freedom, but the moral struggle. When Poinsard had spoken, she’d conceded that Childress had stripped away her rationales.

Truth is not for the weak of heart.

Out in the corridor beyond, she made for the open deck. She had no thought of flinging herself into the sea, or embarking on some other Brontë-esque expression of romantic failure. Just a desire rather to stand in open air, embrace the honest wind, and look to her own future without the foolishness of the Mask Poinsard echoing in her ears.

A few moments later Anneke caught up to Childress at the rail. Her broad, strong hand touched the librarian’s shaking old one for a moment. Anneke then pressed a warm pastry into Childress’ palm. “I am sorry.”

“I don’t suppose you were meant to hear that. The Mask had a rather different piece of theater in mind.”

“Yes . . . well . . .” Anneke’s hand brushed Childress’ forearm again, more deliberately this time. “I shan’t be bolting your door anymore.”

“Thank you,” Childress said distantly. She realized she was on the
starboard rail, looking out into the Atlantic rather than at North America. Not that it mattered now. There was no going back, figuratively or literally. And she’d meant what she said, about loyalty to the ideal of the white birds.

A small moral victory was little comfort, but it was far better than miserable surrender. She smiled again into the wind, listening to Anneke’s slow footfalls and wondering how long she’d live once the Mask Poinsard had conveyed her to the waiting hands of the Silent Order.

A Muralha
was a beast, Paolina soon realized. A great stone beast taller than the sky, with one mighty paw raised to strike down anyone so foolish as to crawl along its face.

Still, it was beautiful. She kept to paths hundreds of yards above the sea to avoid being pressed onto the eroding faces near the water. In this area
a Muralha
still had the same stepped shelves that hosted Praia Nova back to the west. Whatever geology or Divine plan that had made this portion of the Wall had worked with a principle of consistency.

The sea was always below to her left, rarely out of sight in good weather. At night it murmured to her, much as it had at home, simple polysyllabic lullabies in the tongue of wave and water. That eased her mind.

To her right rose the bulk of the Wall. It climbed, rising and sloping away, but still vaulting past her line of sight to create a horizon almost straight above her head. The ledges up there held whole countries of their own—logic alone told her that, but every now and then the thought was reinforced by a glint of metal, or the sight of a streamer of smoke, or some broken piece of wrought stonework fallen from high above to smash at her level.

Clouds, too, up there. She saw layers on layers like stacked wreaths, clinging close to the face of
a Muralha
but never completely obscuring it. Sometimes they would part to show a vision of ever more fields of stone and air. At night, she would watch lightning walk sideways across the face and listen to the rumble of storms so distant, their water never reached her, though it fell for hours at some faraway height.

She had lived with the sheer monstrous size of the thing all her life, but
in Praia Nova it had somehow faded into the background. Out here,
a Muralha
filled the sky to overlook the sea like a scaled cat watching a rabbit burrow.

The weather was a bit more troublesome on the trail—the storm that had broken the night she left Praia Nova had been a harbinger of a series of rains. The days were hot, the nights had an edge, there was always wind, and she was wet more often than not.

For a while Paolina amused herself conceiving of possible methods of rainproofing. Simplest would have been some of the coated canvas with which the mushroom sheds had been covered. She could have trimmed it into a cape or jacket and traveled well enough.

There were certainly more fanciful solutions. Tar could be boiled and distillated to elastic components, but that would require far more glassware than she could imagine finding out here. She could conceive of using tree sap, or the skin of marine animals, or some great system of fans to create a bubble of air pressure.

All the speculation was pointless, but it continued her long habits of thought. Paolina wondered how so many people managed to live in the world without any need to understand its workings. God had laid everything before man, a banquet of knowledge. All one had to do was step to the table and sup! Yet so many people sought sleep or wine or foolishness instead of simply opening their eyes.

Not to mention their ears and their minds.

So, soaking wet much of the time, she walked. She camped in darkness, making fire with the little sulfur sticks she’d fabricated the summer before. Those had been laughed at in Praia Nova. Here on an open trail, their value was immeasurable.

The one thing her thoughts shied away from was the sheer distance. The diameter of the earth was obvious enough. It was readily measured from the period of a single day, with elementary analysis of the rotation as measured against the brasswork in the heavens. The track itself rotated around the sun, which introduced subtleties in the mathematics of time, but still it was simple enough.

She assumed at least three thousand miles from Praia Nova to the African coast. There she might hope to find the English at their works. The chances of running into
Bassett
or one of its sister wizard-ships seemed remote, but still she kept her eyes sharply on the sky.

Clarence Davies had walked a good portion of that distance. It had taken him two years, but he’d done it alone. A boy. Dr. Minor had left to follow it farther, though his fate was unknown.

She was a girl, but she was fifteen and nearly a woman. Her legs were
long, her arms were strong, and she had no illusions about the sharpness of her wit.