Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [100]
Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, still immersed in a discussion as lively as it was incomprehensible, settled next to me, by the fire and the bubbling kettle. The pine and spruce branches glowed a menacing red in the fire pit, and our host tossed in a few more, needles still green and attached, to liven up the flames. The spruce needles hissed and caught fire, crackling, exhaling great clouds of resinous smoke that smelled like Christmas. It occurred to me that I had missed Christmas, probably asleep on the train somewhere. It was so hard to keep track of days in a place so vast and so distant.
The host, apparently in no hurry to inquire about our business, poured tea into tin mugs, covered in an elaborate filigree of smudged soot. The tea was boiling hot, and devoid of flavor other than butter that left an unpleasant film on my lips. But the liquid made my head swim and gave my nerves a bit of a jolt.
“Drink carefully,” Volzhenko whispered. “It’ll keep you up all night—this brew is strong; they boil it for hours, you know.”
“I didn’t,” I hissed back. “You could’ve told me earlier.”
“Then you wouldn’t have drunk it.” Volzhenko laughed softly.
“Probably not.”
“You see my point.”
I was about to suggest a glaring flaw in his argument, when the small shaman held up his hand. “What do you want?” he spoke to me directly, and under his piercing black eyes I stammered and burned my lips on the edge of the tin mug.
“I’m looking for the Chinese engineers,” I said. “And possibly an Englishman who was looking for them yesterday.”
He nodded a few times. “There are Chinese here,” he said.
Kuan Yu elbowed Liu Zhi and grinned, the two of them apparently apprised of everything the shaman knew.
The shaman continued, “Yes, there are a few Chinese here, but fur traders, mostly. Did you say you wanted engineers?”
“Yes,” I said. “Inventors, tinkers, anyone who works with mechanical things.”
His face stretched in a sly, wide smile. “Oh. I think I know what you want. You want a factory.”
Now, one thing I wasn’t quite expecting here was a factory. It seemed too distant from everything, too remote—what could they possibly be making here? I supposed whatever materials were needed could be brought in by the freight trains, but still . . . I realized my face betrayed my doubt because the shaman laughed, leaning back, his elbows almost touching the floor behind him. “There are places between empires where they cannot reach, which are too distant or unimportant to pay attention to. And this is where hidden life thrives, concealed from the powerful eyes but known to those who are curious enough to notice such things.”
“What is built at the factory?” I asked. My only familiarity with such establishments was limited to that distant day in Tosno, where we saw that awkward flying machine go up lopsidedly. Belatedly, I felt a pang of guilt that I had never bothered to find out whether the freedmen we saw that day lived, after the contraption crashed somewhere in the peat fields.
It came like an echo from the past, an answer to some question I asked what felt like many years ago, in a different place, a different life, back when I was a proper girl. “Airships,” Kuan Yu answered. “For Taiping Tianguo. Just don’t tell anyone.”
I looked over at Volzhenko, who clearly was a greater danger to secrecy than my modest person. He grinned back, and I remembered his attitude about accumulating experiences and decided that he was not very likely to tattle. “May we see the factory?” I asked politely.
The shaman nodded. “Just finish your tea,” he said.
Somewhere between the disgusting tea and the piling back into the sleigh it occurred to me that none of us had asked the shaman about our supposed mission: the whereabouts of the horses or the Englishman who had disrupted the soldiers’ lives at the fort. I wondered, though, if agents of Nightingale were still pursuing me . . . or Jack. If they were following Jack, they would find the factory . . . unless, of course, Jack had