What had the Wall looked like? Impossibly high, a stone border to Heaven, but she could not recall details. Even the particular path they’d set out upon wasn’t coming to mind, though it must not have been especially strange or she would recollect. They’d pushed through the trees a while, until they located a game trail leading up to the top of the crumbling knee.
She vividly remembered the view from up there, looking north toward distant islands dotting the bottle-green waters. The beach had seemed much prettier from above than up close among the algae stink and the rotting bits of broken crabs.
“I can see it well enough, I think,” Paolina said. “Though I cannot know if our boat is still there for Ming to make use of.” How had she come here, when they’d left the dangerous feast at the mountaintop behind? What if an angel stood now on the streets of London, or the mountains of the moon? Could she step from one place to the other so easily?
“We walk the Silent World,” Gashansunu said, “in order to know where we are going. I could return home between one breath and the next, for I know my city and especially the rooms of Westfacing House as well as I know my own hands and feet. So it is with you, if you know the place well.”
“What if I go wrong? Will I be close?”
“The Silent World is larger than the Shadow World. You could go to a place that has no shadow-side, and be forlorn within the quiet darkness.”
Paolina knew where she was going, though. She could recall many places very well. Her little cabin aboard Star of Guinea. The cathedral square in Strasbourg. The deck of Notus. Praia Nova, madre deus; but pity the doms if she ever returned to them with her power in hand.
Paolina turned away that thought and the rush of anger that came with it. She wished she knew where Boaz was so she could head straight to him.
It was not that the Brass was made of wisdom. Rather, they had come to understand one another in a quiet way. She wished mightily she had not left him behind at the work camp along the Wall. That was where she would begin her search, once she had seen Ming safely on his way. She could find Ophir from there, if he was no longer among the railroad men and tunnel rats. The Brass would not care about her gleam; their powers were their own, and mysterious besides.
From Ophir, if Boaz was not there on the streets or in those horrid halls of correction from which Paolina had rescued him once before, she would follow her heart.
“I know my course,” she announced. “Ming, we shall take you to the boat. Then I will go where my desires dictate.”
“Then do as we did last night,” Gashansunu said. “Wrap his wrist close by yours. Take your gleam and set it as you did when you stepped into the tree house. Then simply walk to the place of your memories. So long as you know where you are going, you will arrive.”
“If I push backward far enough and hard enough, I will not leave ruins or a shaking earth behind me.”
Gashansunu handed her the braided silver cord. Paolina looped it from her wrist to Ming’s, then grasped his hand. With her other, she cupped the stemwinder, using thumb and forefinger to adjust the stem until she’d identified the correct resonance.
She remembered a beach, towering clouds, the Wall bigger than any country could encompass, the ocean warm and wide, piers in the water, the plash of little waves, sunlight, warmth, and a small boat pitching up onto the land.
They stepped, pushing off carefully to set the force of the journey harmlessly far away.
KITCHENS
He’d thought the chamber of the encampment to be dusty, but in here the dust was an element all its own. It was the air, as if the rock had grown just thin enough to pass through without giving up its essential nature. Kitchens covered his mouth with his handkerchief.
His nose told him this was ground-up Wall, but also coal and other things.
Shapes of men and equipment moved by lantern light and electrick glow, looming silhouettes defined by the blurring dust. The noise had not yet died away from his ears, and it seemed to wrap all of those around him with a mailed fist, even in its absence.
The settling, heavy silence was already taking the dust to the floor. The boring machine had ceased its labors, though a chuffing signified continued readiness. Without that dread tip slashing into the fabric of the Wall, the air had a chance to reclaim itself.
“. . . a side tunnel,” Ottweill said, shouting.
His hearing had returned! Kitchens nodded as if he’d understood all along.
“Come down the main passage and I will show you.”
They took a lantern from one of the waiting men—the crew in here wore goggles and masks, Kitchens noted.
Ottweill was right. Another cavern had been opened, and the tracks ran straight across the floor with a branching switch to the left. Lights in the settling dust showed where the borer had stopped in its work to drive a lateral tunnel.
Why?
They stepped along the rails for another hundred feet or so. Ottweill stopped partway along the shaft. “Look here you will,” he said, and directed the lantern’s lens high on the wall.
A series of metal rods protruded just slightly from the stone, sheared off with the extraction of their surrounding rock. The lantern light swung to the far side of the tunnel, where a matching series was visible.
“This was not seen at first,” Ottweill said. “Until our dig we were forced to discontinue, and backward we looked.”
The doctor seemed as calm and collected as Kitchens had ever known him to be. In England, he had been positively rabid, spitting and howling. Here at the Wall, the project focused his obsession and his energy. Everything Ottweill cared about was concentrated into one point at the face of this tunnel.
They walked another hundred feet. Electrick lights had been strung here on spikes driven into the tunnel wall, but they were dark now. Kitchens glanced backward to see the small, fitful constellation of lanterns by the door where the digging crew and the door guards were taking an unexpected break.
No one had made a move to follow their leader down this tunnel.
He fingered his ragged sleeve, where the razor still lurked.
“Listen now,” Ottweill said, shuttering his lantern.
Kitchens’ ears still rang as if they had been boxed, but he closed his eyes, opened his mouth and tried to take in what sound he could from the surrounds. It took him a moment to realize what the doctor was speaking of. Not so much a sound as a vibration, as from the largest pipe in a cathedral organ. Something the bones knew more than the ears did, that stirred the hair on his neck and arms. Deep, rhythmic, and very fast.
Not just fast, he realized. Complex.
“What is it?”
Ottweill opened the lantern shutter again.
The cutting face gleamed. Rock had been peeled away in a widening cone from a wall of brass that itself had been shaved down at the contact point of the borer’s great drill. Metal parings and iron fragments were scattered around the stubbed end of the rails.
“Here the drill shattered,” Ottweill said. “We have many replacements, for we expect damage from even normal operations. But this is not geology.” He spat. “This is something else.”
Kitchens could barely speak. “The scaffolding of Creation.” The tunnel would not go through the Wall; that much was obvious. Whatever else might become true here, the project had ended. Southern Earth would remain mysterious and inaccessible for another generation. If the Chinese and their Golden Bridge project crossed over first, the British Empire was lost.
Awe, and defeat. He felt punctured. His entire errand from Lloyd George and the Queen had come to naught. What remained, but Her Imperial Majesty’s fateful letter?
“We drive a lateral shaft now,” Ottweill said. “We will turn south again at a distance and see if this structure continues. Good news I do not expect.”
“Will you open up this brass?” Kitchens asked.
“That I have been considering. You hear the noise. Behind there something moves. Something very large. It is withou
t doubt that we have touched part of the machinery of the Earth. What God made when our world He built. I am a proud man, Mr. Kitchens. This is my virtue, not my flaw, for without pride, I would have accomplished far less. But I do not think even my pride is sufficient to overturn the handiwork of God.”
“We don’t want to overturn it; we just want to pass through it.”
“Attend,” Ottweill hissed. “Great masses move beyond that brass. Counterweights to balance the rotation of the world, perhaps. Shall we cut into a machine that has been running for six thousand years and weighs a thousand billion tons? Sooner the mice in the Frauenkirke would bring down the towers, and all the rest of Dresden besides.”
Kitchens cast about for ideas. This could not be the end of the project. If the Chinese reached the Southern Earth first, they would have all the resources of that alleged paradise at their disposal. There would be no front in the ongoing little wars. It would be the world, with England’s mortal enemy backed by the riches of an entire second world.
“How do we get through?” he asked. “Surely there are maintenance accesses?”
Ottweill’s voice turned bitter. “Does God do maintenance? Is He not perfect, that His Creation should also be perfect? I think you know that I am not a man whom to anything surrenders. I will not cease trying to break through the Wall. Even so, confronted by this brass and whatever lies behind it, no hope of success I can promise.”
“What is next?”
The doctor shrugged. “A railroad to the top, with a tunnel to be cut through the footings of the gear, perhaps. Or a sky full of airships to pass over in well-escorted safety. An elevator. The Wall defends itself. Any of those will cost far more than even my ridiculous tunnel. What is the will of the Queen?”
That question struck a cold blade into the doubt already flooding Kitchens’ heart. He knew the will of the Queen.
Remake what has been undone.
Break my throne.
Help me finish dying.
Had she somehow been undone by this cutting? Her life could not be hostage to something as mundane as a tunnel.
“Doctor,” Kitchens said slowly. “I would ask you a thing you will not wish to answer. For the sake of the Queen, and indeed, the future of all of Europe and her discontents, I would beg you to think through this.”
“What, a fortune teller you are now?”
“No. Just a man who pursues his monarch’s will. Loyal and foolish both, no doubt.” He paused, gathering both his courage and his thoughts. “Here are my questions: Are you a member of one of the secret societies? Is this digging at the behest of the white birds or the Silent Order, either one?”
WANG
His head continued to ache. He was sure it would do so for days. Wang’s ribs were dreadfully painful, and he did not move so well. Whatever loyalty he’d held to his mission had melted in the face of Wu’s betrayals.
The cataloger did enjoy a quiet morning in the little galley with charts spread out across the table. Good Change rode with her sea anchor, the Goan coast barely more than a dark line on the eastern horizon. Five Lucky Winds could pass submerged within a hundred bù and they would never know.
The mate had been kind enough to mark their current position. Wang noted that he’d latched the galley door from the outside.
“Where would I go?” he asked the Indian Ocean.
Leung had few choices. His life and ship were forfeit after the murders of the Nanyang Fleet’s task force off the Sumatran coast. Heading south and east around Cape Comorin toward the eastern Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea was right out. Airship patrols would be frequent. Fliers were quite good at spotting submarines. Even Wang knew this.
From Goa, Five Lucky Winds might sail south and west to the Maldives, but Wang could not imagine any purpose to that. What would they do there?
Due west toward the Arabian Sea would force them south to Mogadishu, or up into the Gulf of Aden. If the Mask Childress had simply meant to reach the Wall, she could have done so from Chersonesus Aurea or anywhere in the islands of the Kepulauan Riau, or the site of the massacre off the south coast of Sumatra.
Childress was English. She was also a Mask of the avebianco. Self-made, and powerful. Wang found himself ever more fascinated with the woman. She had thrown off the ties that had bound her within the world of the English. Now, in command of a ship, carrying secrets and power, her ability to find friends, money or aid would grow as she approached the heart of the British Empire.
She had to be making for the Gulf of Aden, bound for one of the ports there, or planning to pass through Suez and into the Mediterranean. How Leung planned to get a submarine secretly through those waters was beyond Wang’s reckoning, but Childress and her mad servant could easily debark and take passage in the more usual way.
“I have a course,” he called out to the locked door.
THIRTEEN
And falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmoveable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves. — Acts 27:41
BOAZ
Longoria leaned at the bow rail with Bosun McCurdy as Boaz climbed over the side. Their heads were tipped together. Several sailors huddled amidships, beneath the belly of the gasbag. A lone figure stood aft at the wheel.
McCurdy approached Boaz. “Midshipman Longoria tells me the skipper’s been at the helm since putting us over yesterday.”
“H-he was s-singing hymns all the n-night long,” the lad said.
“How did you get him to come back here?” asked Boaz.
“Told him we n-needed the bosun. Finally he ordered the c-course. He hasn’t spoken since. I d-don’t know what to do with him.”
“Relieve him of command.” McCurdy spoke brusquely, as if he had not been agonizing over precisely this question.
“I c-cannot do that.”
“You are the only other officer aboard,” Boaz said. “Lieutenant Ostrander is long since bereft of his senses. It would be a kindness.”
“There’s a war on, sir,” McCurdy replied. “You can do this much more easily than I. My testimony and that of John Brass here will back you up.”
Boaz turned and stamped across the deck. McCurdy called after him, while the sailors amidships skittered away. Ostrander seemed to notice nothing.
::he was bound over in the tent of the King, where the snakes within his head were banished by prayer and the healing touch of the ruler::
Be careful.
“I am always careful,” Boaz told no one in particular.
Ostrander gripped the helm so tight his fingers were pale. The expression on his face was unnaturally fixed, his skin wind-reddened and gaunt, eyes blank as those of the Brass dead in the encampment below.
“Sir,” said Boaz. “I am come to take you home.”
A single quivering tear ran down the lieutenant’s face. His chapped lips parted as if he meant to speak. McCurdy and Longoria caught up, stepping to each side of the Brass to support their commander.
The lieutenant struck the midshipman a blow that cracked. Longoria staggered back with a cry. McCurdy grabbed at Ostrander. Another blow flew, this one misaimed.
Boaz bound Ostrander’s arms to his body from behind and lifted him away from the wheel. The lieutenant struggled for a moment of boiling rage, then sagged like a punctured gasbag.
“Enough,” the Brass said. “Bring everyone aboard that this ship will carry. I will stay with the rest until they can be settled in the tunnel. You return with aid, or at least food and ammunition.”
“I’ll do what I can.” McCurdy turned to the midshipman. “Sir, the ship is yours.”
Longoria sobbed.
::even as they cast them from the walls, the people cried for the deaths of their priests::
“This business grows ever more devilish,” Boaz whispered to the man now slack in his arms. Monkeys were impossible. What had YHWH intended with these fools?
Paolina, where are you? How
have I gone so far wrong?
WANG
The water changed where the Indian Ocean met the Gulf of Aden. Ever-deepening blue shifted to a greenish brown, as if all the sands of Arabia were trying to flee into the sea. The feel of Good Change’s hull in the water also changed.
A low, rocky coast fronting baked highlands rose to their right. This was a place where the desert met the water without any intervening kindness of green, growing things. Something sullen loomed on the horizon to their left, but whether it was the coast of Africa, a last glimpse of the upper reaches of Wall, or just a cloud bank, Wang could not say.
The monk had made no appearance, to his surprise. He kept expecting to smell her pipe, or see a flash of saffron, but ever since her ghost—a ghost of a ghost?—had steered them out to sea along the Goan shore, she had vanished. He wondered if she was even now afflicting Five Lucky Winds.
In any case, she was not bothering him. Wang spent the night alone in his bunk and had passed this day alone on the deck watching the ocean slide by.
Wu met him at the rail. “Are you rested?”
“Am I ever rested?” Wang’s voice sounded querulous, even to his ownears. “No one has tied me down and beaten me today, so I must count that to the good.”
“We take what victories we can from life,” Wu said.
“You sound like that silly monk.”