Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [123]
“I don’t know. Let me talk to the engineer.”
I followed him into the metal passageway, a narrow vaulted tube that connected the engine room to the engineer’s cabin, where the brass levers that operated the airship’s wings and rudder bristled from the walls like quills of some metallic porcupine turned inside out by some great misfortune. The engineer, a stocky Taiping with thick hair all the way down to shoulders nodded at us.
“Tang Wei,” Chiang Tse addressed the engineer. “Do you see the train tracks below? Did you notice a train we passed a while back?”
Tang Wei nodded, and adjusted a knob to his left, making the airship tilt slightly right. “I saw it,” he said. “You want me to follow?”
“You do not have to follow,” Chiang Tse said. “But if we could meet the people on that train just as they disembark, and if we could do it discreetly . . . ”
“We can do that,” Tang Wei said. “I’ll just need a station and a field. And maybe a town—we need more coal anyway. We are running quite low.”
I wondered what the airship looked like from the ground; I wondered if people on the train noticed us, hovering so doggedly above them—or at the very least, saw our shadow on the ground and wondered at its shape. The airship had decreased its speed, and now matched that of the locomotive below us.
The train soon came to a halt at some deserted unnamed station, too inconsequential to stop at unless explicit orders were given or passengers present. Tang Wei made the airship circle above the station as we clung to the windows of the control room, which were both thinner and clearer than the ones in the engine room.
I looked through the windows as a chain of small black figures spilled out onto the snow, and Chiang Tse pointed them to Tang Wei. “Can you get to them?”
“Easy,” Tang Wei said. “Nothing but fields here.”
As the airship tilted toward the ground and descended, swooping lower and lower with every turn, the details of the procession below us resolved and grew clear. I saw Jack first: they had him in stocks, and I am ashamed to admit I felt a small prickling of relief. He was my friend, I reminded myself, there was no reason for me to fear him and certainly no reason to feel happy that his wrists were enclosed in a solid block of wood with his large, knobby fists protruding above it like two ugly growths on a tree trunk. It must have been hard to walk like this in the dead of the winter, when the wind howled and the ice dust in the air stung one’s cheeks and eyes like powdered glass.
His ankles were held together by a similar contraption—he moved very slowly and awkwardly, as the wooden block and the heavy chain winding about his ankles allowed him only a slow shuffle with steps no longer than a couple of inches. I wondered if he could still leap, if he could push the earth away from him with both of his feet, if his strength would be enough to let him soar even with such an awkward start.
Or maybe his legs were strong enough to displace the entire planet from its orbit, and for a moment I imagined Jack getting angry and hurling Earth into the dark cold recesses of dead space, away from the life-giving sun . . . I shook my head at such a foolish fantasy, and went to the passenger area, to wake up Eugenia and to notify her that a small-scale conflict with Britain was upon us and likely unavoidable.
They headed down the snow-covered trail leading away from the station—it was almost like Trubetskoye, like so many small anonymous villages that curled up within a mile of the station, all their roads leading to the nearest depot like the spokes on the wheel. A few more years, and my entire country would be like this—circles of hamlets surrounding the beating hearts of the stations, the rectangular wooden platform by the shining rails signifying progress.
The airship touched the ground lightly, like a butterfly landing on a flower; its wings, still flapping, raised clouds of snow, obscuring for a short while the English. They did not try to run—I didn’t suppose they would, with no other nearby cover than snow-covered