He turned back to the city. Seen from such a short range the place was more ornate than he had originally thought. Ladders and stairs led up, galleries and bridges leapt across, while a whole nation of men could be hidden behind wooden walls and reed-mat screens, living like chimney swifts in this upsweep of wood.
“Bamboo.” Captain Smallwood stared at the immensity of the city, lost in thought. “The Chinaman’s steel.”
Hethor bit back a question. The captain had not been talking to him. But then Smallwood turned and stared at Hethor as if he were some ape hauled aboard by a foraging party. “You’re no Malgus,” Smallwood said, “nor even de Troyes, God rest his soul, but you’re who we have. Are you able to come ashore with the party?”
A captain asking a crewman for his preferences. Hethor would have been no more surprised had Smallwood grown wings and leapt from the deck to join the flying savages. “I … sir … ,” he began, then stopped. Did he want to leave Bassett? He was afraid of those bronze weapons and the long, sinewy arms of the winged savages, but something in this place stirred both his inner artistry and his sense of the mission entrusted to him by the archangel Gabriel.
“It is a matter of the safety of the ship,” Smallwood said. “If you are lost, then one of my officers will need to perform your duties. I am already rather understrength there. But I expect to find maps, logs from Gordon’s expedition, somewhere in that city. There may possibly be specialized instruments for navigating the Wall as well. Your aid may prove invaluable.”
“Permission, sir,” Hethor said, then gulped. “Permission to accompany the shore party, please?”
“Granted.” Smallwood turned away to the logistics of safely tethering his ship in this environment and subsequently landing the party.
Apparently forgotten, Hethor stood at the stern rail and craned his neck, trying to stare up past the gasbag. This close in to the aerial harbor it blocked most of his view, but he saw great legs of dark wood—teak, perhaps?—supporting some of the buildings above them. The legs looked to be milled from single logs. If so, the trees from which they had been cut would have been giants almost beyond Hethor’s imaginings.
He looked onward, at the balconies and battlements and buildings. They were as ornately layered as any German clock, hinting at architectures within architectures like Christmas crackers. He wondered if each building could be shredded to reveal a smaller one within. After a while, two facts came to his attention.
There was no glass, anywhere.
And there were no clock towers.
A people with clement weather and no commitment to time, perhaps. Or primitives, savants of bamboo and wood, with no metallurgy. Though the winged savages had wielded bronze weapons to deadly effectiveness.
ONCE THEY reached the altitude of the fire scars Hethor had spotted, al-Wazir got Bassett warped to a reasonable anchorage by an expedient Hethor had never before witnessed. The ropes chief harnessed two volunteers to what looked like oversized parachutes coated with gum-elastic. These he stretched over the rail. He then had the gas division inflate them with hydrogen via a hose dropped down from the gasbag.
The faux-parachutes quickly rose to become mediumsized copies of the great cells that crowded the bag overhead. Each was close to twenty feet across its fat belly, already crowding hard against the ropes restraining them. The sailors were put overboard, secured by narrow ropes wound on winches. With much shouting and encouragement, they bobbed out into the open air to fly upward as though driven by springs.
Al-Wazir winched them back down close to the ship. The ropes chief then had deckhands toss out a secondary line that was used to pass weights to the flying sailors until, while they still strained at their tethers, they no longer sought to rocket heavenward. The flyers then each deployed two canvas sweeps, handheld sails—oars of the air—with which they each slowly made way, beating across the wind toward the structures of the city.
Hethor could not decide whether to be fascinated or appalled. Both sensations warred within him. He longed to soar as those sailors did, yet their lives were bound so close in hand by the strength of their harnesses and the integrity of their little gas cells.
The two made it to shore, perhaps a hundred yards apart. Each secured himself to a pillar. Heavier lines were passed across to be secured in turn. Finally Bassett was warped in toward the cliff. She turned her stern to the land as she went so her steam-driven propellers could push her toward the bay’s mouth at need.
The whole operation took perhaps three hours. Hethor stayed on the poop, hanging back by the stern rail in order to remain unnoticed. Or perhaps Captain Smallwood was merely keeping a convenient eye on him there.
Once the ship was brought to rest, al-Wazir had his division run additional ropes across from the aft anchor point until a three-rope bridge was made. He then piled a number of parachutes on deck next to the stepping-off point, saluted the poop, and shouted, “All’s ready for shore detail, Captain sir!”
Smallwood returned al-Wazir’s salute, then ordered the marines across. Their lieutenant split his force in half. One squad remained stationed on the ship’s rails, carbines locked and loaded, while the other squad shouldered the parachute harnesses and crossed to secure the landward side.
Or cliffward side, Hethor thought, depending on how one chose to view the deployment.
The marines took up positions in the galleries and walkways opposite Bassett with much kicking of wicker doors and poking of carbines through windows. Eventually the all-clear was shouted.
“Seaman Jacques,” Smallwood said. “Stay close to Lieutenant Wollers. If I need you, you will be called upon. You are specifically not permitted within areas the marines or I myself have not yet checked.”
“Aye, sir.” Hethor glanced at Wollers, who favored him with a sympathetic grin.
He followed the second mate down to the waist to gather a leather water bottle from Cook and strap on a parachute—which despite Hethor’s experience in Bermuda he had never done since of his own sober will. Once prepared, they stood on line for the rope bridge.
It was then, waiting on deck behind Wollers and in front of the loblolly boy, that Hethor became afraid.
THE ROPE bridge was about a hundred feet from the braces at the ship’s rail to its endpoint against a teak-pillared galleria that could have come straight out of Venice or Constantinople. The two lines Hethor grasped were no thicker than his thumb, each bristly with hand-scarring hemp.
He wished he’d brought gloves.
Hethor glanced down at his feet. That line was the same insufficient diameter as the other two, curled under his leather shoes just before the heel, bending and swaying with his weight. All of that was alarming enough. Worse, he was nearly paralyzed by a gut-wrenching view of thousands of feet of wooden city and stone cliffs below, vanishing into a very distant perspective of mists and shadows.
It was as if he stood atop a shaft leading straight downward to a cold, dark hell.
“You knew this,” Hethor said to the air around him. “You worked the charts; you knew the altitude.” His hands wanted to let go, his arms to spread so that he could fly like a bird, soar into the misty depths with all the freedom of a falling leaf. He could feel the pull of the distance. The depths almost had a voice of their own.
“Hey,” said the loblolly boy, coming up behind Hethor. “Move it along, Clocks.”
After the marines had crossed individually, al-Wazir had ordered tighter spacing in the interests of time. Hethor glanced back at the ship’s doctor’s assistant—what was his name? The loblolly boy was literally a boy, perhaps eleven years of age, sent on this mission because Dr. Firkin would not cross. Up in the fo’c’sle the common sailors said Firkin had no head for heights. That seemed to Hethor an odd thing in an airship officer, even the ship’s surgeon, who might be excused some failings due to the nature of his appointment.
“I’m moving,” Hethor grumbled. He was glad for the interruption from his contemplation of the awful depths below. He narrowed his e
yes, looking only at the ropes in his hand, and continued crab walking toward the anchoring galleria. Behind him, the loblolly boy cursed and grumbled out his own fear, using Hethor as a target.
For once Hethor didn’t mind such treatment.
Then he was being helped onto the galleria. The wooden affair seemed much less solid as he set his weight upon it, creaking beneath the bulk of so many beefy Royal Navy tars. Wollers, who had stepped off the rope bridge well before Hethor, grasped his shoulder with a firm hand as they stood at the arches that opened out toward Bassett floating at anchor in the empty air.
Hethor had never before experienced a level view of the airship. From below, approaching a mooring mast for example, she was just a large, dark shape in the sky, resembling the outline of a snail or slug. From the top of a mast, she was too close to be anything but an immensity of gasbag and wooden hull.
From the galleria of the vertical city, though, she was beautiful. The hull was narrow and graceful in proportion. The lines seemed too sharp for an oceangoing vessel, though Hethor supposed she could land on water at need—at least until the pitch-sealed traps and hatches along her keel line flooded.
From the side, the gasbag took on a more imposing appearance as well. The catwalk he had seen from the navigator’s cupola ranged almost level from fore to aft with just the gentlest of curves until the nose dropped sharply like a beak. Aft, the gasbag ended in a more rounded arc, with a sort of fold at the top.
Bassett was beautiful indeed, a veritable raptor hunting the airways of the Empire for Chinese intruders. And now, chasing down the ghosts of history.
Wollers said, “Come on, we’ve got to start looking in these rooms. The marines found trash in there. It’s up to us to determine if that’s good English trash or something left behind by wogs or those damned flying horrors.”
Hethor would have wagered on good English trash. The vertical city gave an impression of absolute desertion. Who would be here to make such a mess, now that the original inhabitants had fled, or died, or whatever had become of them?
So they stepped into wooden-floored rooms with wicker walls. Clever shafts let the sun in from above, though the light wells seemed to be baffled against glare and rain. As a result the illumination was indistinct, filling the rooms with a gentle, shadowless glow. The floors popped and creaked as Hethor and Wollers walked, but not with the noises of decay and collapse. It was almost like music.
Hethor had a vision of dancing in a room like this, the rhythms rising from the very feet of the partners. The buildings seemed tuned to the movements of those who dwelled within. Perhaps this is what the builders had intended as well.
But the true glory of the inner rooms was the weaving of the wicker walls. Many shades and textures of the narrow laths had been used, so that the walls were each a work of art, depicting landscapes, people at their work, great festivals, the brassy gearing of the heavens, and so forth. Hethor could have simply stared at the woven panels for some time, but Wollers tugged him on.
“The rooms are darker and cooler along the cliff face,” the second mate said, stepping through a door with a knee-high threshold beam that rose from the floor. “One of General Gordon’s scouting parties would be more likely to bivouac back here. They would feel they had a more defensible position.”
Sure enough, Hethor noticed crumpled in one corner a waxed sheet of paper, the sort that the marines unwrapped to get at their carbine bullets. Another high threshold beam, and they were in a much darker room. This one showed evidence of a fire on the floor. The ornate walls had been defaced, which made Hethor wince. More rubbish, as well—bones from some dinner piled in a corner, scraps of paper, a loose button.
He picked the button up. It was brass, with the lion insignia of the British Army embossed on it. “This isn’t from Bassett, sir,” he said to Wollers.
Wollers took the button. “Good. So they were here. Well, if they left us a message back at the Sepulchrum Caii, they probably left one here as well. Let’s work our way along the cliff face.”
The wall leading east had been torn open, the beautiful wickerwork bayoneted to provide easy access to the next room. These buildings had stood here for a length of time Hethor couldn’t even imagine. Now brief occupation by English troops had savaged their beauty. Oh well, he thought. At least they didn’t set fire to the city with their cooking.
Hethor followed Wollers through a line of rooms. Wollers kept looking left and occasionally called to make sure they weren’t passing beyond the line of Bassett’s marines outside along the railing. Though they disturbed very little dust, Hethor got a clear impression that no one but Gordon’s soldiers had been inside here for quite some time. Perhaps decades, or more.
It was like going into one of the old storerooms at New Haven Latin, where not even the janitor had been in years—that same sense of desertion, yet with watchful emptiness.
They stepped into a larger room. This space took advantage of an apparently natural depression in the cliff wall to extend farther back. This had obviously been a sort of headquarters, for there were still a few sheets of paper tacked to the walls. A pair of campstools leaned forgotten at the back of the depression.
No good foot soldier would use a campstool. Even Hethor knew that.
Wollers cried out, a shout of discovery, and moved the folded stools aside. “A dispatch case,” he shouted, and pulled open the leather flaps. It still held papers within. Wollers glanced at Hethor. “Letters, not maps. I think we’ve found what we came for. I’ll be taking these across.” He thought for a moment. “You should wait at the rope bridge, attending the captain’s pleasure.”
“I want to go back through these rooms,” Hethor said, “retracing our steps. The panels interested me.”
Wollers stepped to the torn-open doorway where Hethor stood, peered over his shoulder for a moment to sight along their recent line of travel. “No harm, I suppose, since we’ve been there already. Don’t go anywhere we haven’t already passed through.”
Humming to himself, the second mate headed out the door, toward the gallery and a quick trot back to the railing and faster access to the rope bridge.
Hethor stepped away from the room and returned to the little chamber they’d last come through. All the trash and casual vandalism depressed him. It was akin to disturbing a church, or a grave. Had Gordon’s soldiers no sense of the sacred nature of this place?
Or did that feeling only come from within him?
He closed his eyes and listened carefully, separating the sounds.
His own breathing, as always. Distant grumbling conversation from Bassett’s marines. Footfalls echoing from the wooden floors of the vertical city. The gentle creaking of its timbers. One of Bassett’s engines thumping in a slow mechanical heartbeat. Wind whistling through the arches of the galleries and pillars outside. The clicking and clattering of the world’s turning, though it seemed different up here on the Wall, both more distant and more immediate, the way a gunshot at the edge of hearing can grasp the attention.
There was a sudden, close flutter of wings, along with a gust of rank scent. Hethor threw himself to the floor. He cried out as he opened his eyes to see whatever was flying at him with murder in its heart.
Nothing.
Nothing but feathers spinning in the air, three long pinions as great as Gabriel’s.
Or those of the winged savages.
And in the middle of the floor, something new. A little brass plate, like the nameplate that had been screwed to the lintel of Master Bodean’s shop door.
It had not been there before, when Hethor and Wollers had walked through the room. It had not been there just now, when he had stepped back to close his eyes and listen.
Whatever had flown through like an owl unseen beneath a new moon had left that plate behind, though he’d heard no noise but the wings.
Hethor cautiously edged into the room to approach the plate. It was rectangular, perhaps ten inches by fourteen. No screw holes in the corner. And
instead of raised letters, or the usual Roman style of engraving, it looked to have been scribbled upon by someone in a hurry with a pen or stylus capable of cutting brass.
Not brass, he realized as his fingers touched it.
Gold.
He picked up the plate. A tablet, really. It was gold, more wealth than he’d ever held, or even seen, in his life. Not beaten thin, either, but of some thickness. Perhaps a quarter inch. Even if it were leaf, over silver perhaps, it was still quite valuable. Immensely valuable, if it were solid gold. Though it didn’t weigh nearly enough for that mass of pure metal.
Gold leaf, then. Or plating. Over something light, such as aluminium, perhaps.
No matter, he thought. Hethor instead stared at the scribbling. He thought he might recognize some of the characters, but he would have to copy them out, decompose the original maker’s scribblings into rational letters. He refused to think on it further. Hethor knew he should run for Wollers or Smallwood right now—to do anything else was a form of betrayal, almost a mutiny.
But this was what Gabriel had sent him for. His allegiance to the archangel trumped even the claims Her Imperial Majesty’s navy had upon him. He needed to understand, before they took it away from him. As they surely would.
Feeling distinctly unworthy, Hethor slipped the tablet under his shirt, let it slide down behind his rope belt. The thing was cold, but not too big to carry in that manner albeit heavy enough to press uncomfortably against him.
It was not stealing, Hethor reasoned. He would take the tablet to Malgus’ cabin. There he would stow it in the map chest, and work to translate the text. Once he knew what it said, what it meant, found here surrounded by feathers in an inner room, he would tell Wollers and Captain Smallwood.
Then he would tell them immediately, he promised himself.
Hethor found his way back to the rope bridge. He was nervous, though those around him seemed to think he was merely struggling to find his own head for heights. He was grateful for their gentle contempt. It kept them from looking too closely at the way he crouched slightly, hands folded across his waist, protecting the golden tablet.