Authors: Kin Law
Blair led them around and under, using a utility stair. There was a moment of panic; the steps dead-ended in empty air,
Wi
th the raw bedrock of Red Square hanging over their heads, hope seemed lost. Then, without any warning, an entirely separate section of gantry rose out of the clouds below, clamping against the rock face with violently impacting bolts. Now the Square was securely sandwiched between two webs of metal. The steps led along a new path.
“This way!” Blair said, after he had recovered from nearly having his toes clipped. They hurried along, and discovered a control section boxed off from the exposed catwalks. It laid under the bulk of the Square, with thick, wire-enclosed glass at all sides and floor. It was positioned very near the center hub of the
Nidhogg
. From this cabin, they could see the center spire extend down far below, where it was exuding the mist to produce the ship’s protective cloud.
“Like an airship bridge,” Rosa Marija remarked at the little booth. There were even rudimentary controls. It was relatively easy to figure out the separation sequence, not in the least because Cid had written them on the schematics as if for buffoons. A sample:
“Here is the release lever. If you don’t want to fall hundreds of feet and splatter like treacle tart, save it for last.”
Following his sarcastic notations, Elric Blair began to set the apparatus for ten minutes, on a flip-tab timer with a dial. The seconds immediately began ticking over with little clicks.
“Gorgeous. That should be enough time for us to get to the other control cabins,” Rosa said.
“How will we get down from here?” Cezette asked, peering over the side where she had been set down on a bank of gauges. Her thighs showed from beneath Hargreaves’ coat, and the porcelain caps over her knees shone around the duller contact points in the middle.
“We have a Morse lantern,” Hargreaves comforted her. She gestured to a pocket in her coat, where Cezette found a small tube with a folding crank. She toyed with it, producing a series of short and long flashes from the end. “Our ship will pick us up once we are done here.”
“Is there anything you need from the Gray Man?” Rosa asked. The two women exchanged a look; they seemed to have bonded over this hapless girl, casting their differences aside. It was funny how maternal instinct worked, even over a hardened lawwoman and a cutthroat pirate.
“I feel… all right,” Cezette said. “I do not remember much, but I do not recall receiving anything more than plain food and water from the Gray Man.”
“You’re a very perceptive child,” Blair commented as he checked over his work.
“I spend much of my time watching,” Cezette admitted.
Once Blair was done, he instructed the others on how to set the timer on the other cabins and retrieved Cezette. Then Rosa took off to the right, while Blair and Hargreaves headed left. They would handle the Tower and Vatican apparatus, while Rosa, being the fastest and unburdened by Cezette’s weight, would tackle the Gate and Westminster. They would meet on the opposite side, and take the Core together. The gantries beneath each monument were stable, and easy to dash along.
She tried not to think of Albion, all alone up top with the specter of his past.
12: Kowloon Walled City
Deep in the dark, narrow passageways of Kowloon Walled City, the tiny, dripping nook of his home and his faceless family were all a Chinese boy could recall, and everything that mattered. The boy who would become Albion Clemens could hardly argue with his elders, who had contrived for him to live with food taken out of their own mouths. Even if they had to live like cockroaches, scurrying up and down and in between the lawless, continental plates of the Walled City, feeding off the scraps and offal of the outside world, they would survive.
The Kowloon Walled City was located on the mainland, but never did the Republic, Imperial Canton or the Pax Britania ever have the run of the place. The ancient seaside fort had been occupied turn by turn by invaders more numerous than the stars. Refugees, criminals and characters of ill repute had besieged the old fort for centuries. When the last occupation returned to Nippon after the last Great War, syndicates and triads had taken over, instilling their own brand of bloody order. No single plot of land could hold all those Chinese, so the Chinese did what they did best: they improvised, building around the existing structures, filling in the alleys and cracks with their lives. Any space able to hold a living body did, and when those ran out, they simply built on top of one another, until the dwellings fused and became a towering monstrosity, a stinking shantytown like a giant black plateau in sight of the prosperous, fragrant port of Hong Kong.
The boy who would grow to be Albion Clemens had never known a life different from the place where he was born. It had begun in one of the best hospices of the Walled City, namely, a one-room brothel in the northern block, five levels over the Big Fortune meat bun shop.
An old midwife had seen to his mother. The aged herbal healer doubled as Auntie for the five ‘chickens,’ or prostitutes, who worked out of the room.
He was the last of eight children, born to parents who had run from the occupation in Shanghai. To hear his ancestral history, they were the last descendants of Han dynasty royalty, but practically every Chinese could lay claim to something of the like. The boy’s given name had been an auspicious one, made to avoid the ire of celestial bodies loving nothing more than to strike down those with aspirations. It literally meant ‘small, unimportant dog.’
It might seem odd for a child of eleven to recall such things, but being born in a Chinese family, the boy was lectured five times a day. At first, he heard them on the back of his mother, or his sisters, when they could be spared, but as soon as he could waddle the family made him follow at their skirt hems.
They would climb over sheet
allum awnings, through rusted, cramped holes, and across narrow bridges hanging with other peoples’ laundry. The bare planks often dangled over twenty stories of dark shafts, stories defined only loosely by windows and ledges.
The multitude of square hovels and shacks became an interminable wall, one atop another like shelves in a cabinet. A misstep would take a person through exposed, rusted beams and the awnings of noodle shops below. The boy had often peered down into them, or up at a square piece of sky, wondering if he fell in them whether there was any ground at the bottom at all.
Sunlight was nigh unknown, deep in the Walled City, but sometimes the family would gather on the prime real estate of rooftops crowded with gardens, and have a simple supper in the smog-tinted sunset.
Albion would later recall those moments fondly, of dangling his legs over the edge of the City and flinging bits of blackened leftovers down to the sparrows and monkeys clinging to its cliff-like walls.
His father worked as a seller of delicacies. They caught and raised quails for eggs, used in glutinous rice wraps, or
lo mai gai.
The tiny, grape-sized eggs were sweet and delicious, and far too good for the family to eat themselves, or so his father always claimed. With the money from the eggs they bought hardy rice, and mustard greens, and the occasional bit of fish, when there were a few coins left over. Sometimes the triad collectors felt a little generous.
The boy started delivering the eggs alone at five. His scrawny, emaciated form was perfect for wriggling through the narrow passages, the blind crawlspaces between buildings left by
feng sui
purposes or shoddy construction. Some walls came together in an angle, trapping the odd cat or dog or little boy between their uncaring faces.
After the first time he protested, tears useless in the face of his father’s fists, he dove into those passages willingly.
The climate of Kowloon left black, viscous grime on everything, a product of factory soot and wetness. It wasn’t unheard of for one of the impromptu dwellings to collapse on themselves, or go tumbling end over end into the cavernous shafts of the Walled City.
Sometimes he would stop and peer through the gaps of bricks, or pasteboard walls rotted by the constant drip from the dwellings overhead. What he saw confused his childish mind, at first, but privacy was as nonexistent as the plumbing, in the Walled City. There was always a partition to peer through, or a ledge to cling to, if one wanted to find out what went on behind closed doors.
An adulterer and adulteress coupling, the rats in the pork buns, or the slick red floor of a syndicate execution, nothing was hidden. After the first few times watching, the boy was convinced his family had the right of it.
Survive.
Keep your head down, do your job. Pay back your debts. Survive.
His horror cemented by the evidence of his own eyes, there was no reason to live any other way. The boy listened, and repeated back the legacy of his elders. After all, the word of an elder was law. There might be a dearth of schooling, there in the dark abysses of the Walled City, but some Confucian values remained. They weren’t complete animals.
When the boy, exhausted by days straight of work running up and down the City, slipped and fell on the quail cage, he never questioned what the consequences would be. His trueborn father commanded him to recover the birds, and the boy hastened to comply, scrabbling after every mouse hole and dog shack the quail flapped their way into. There had been one hundred and eighty-four birds in total, and by the end of the day, the boy’s keen nose had sniffed out one hundred and forty-two of them. His blood had scarcely quelled under the herbal poultice on his leg, where the red wire of the cage scratched him.
“What? You want to sleep? Where are the other forty-two?” His father inquired of him. His mother and sisters looked on, their faces buried in sewing, or hanging up greens for drying. His bed was hardly more than a straw mat o
n a hard board, but the boy desperately wanted to climb onto it.
The
boy who would become Albion, eleven years old, turned and made his way under the dripping eaves of their familial nook.
Its dankness and closeness then reminded an older Albion of the stone graves in the hills not far from the Walled City.
Twenty of the birds had found their way into the grain stores of a big row restaurant, down on the fifth level. Thankfully, the owner was large, and slept like a pig. His chickens were trying to kill the quail, pecking at the trespassers to their territory through a wire cage. The boy was able to gather the small birds into his big woven barrel without waking the owner, but his hands came away dotted with blood.
Another five, he found in a smoky opium den. The quail moved sluggishly there, but the dwellers in the smoke grasped for his hands as if they could drag him into their addled dreams.
Yet another six found their way up, onto the rooftop, where a garden of young white carrots furnished them a rich midnight snack.
Though the Walled City offered little schooling, his father had been diligent in teaching him sums. Their family abacus was well worn, much by Albion’s own fingers. By his count, there were eleven birds left. Albion had no clue where they could be.
Desperate, tired, and stinking of the runoff of a million families living in the Walled City, the boy grew desperate. He started to think about all the places those stupid, ugly birds could have tumbled into. He had covered every accessible route, every crawlspace he could fit into. He knew where the nooks and crannies all went. The obvious place was, of course a place the boy had never been.
Pulling along his basket of fluttering, rollicking quail, he made his way over the thin planks and ledges, to the farthest edge of the Walled City.
The darkness made the journey easier. In the daytime, it was too hard to put his sandals down on the planks over the deep wells between improvised dwellings. In the dark, he could pretend they were sturdy, celestial bridges leading to some saintly grove.
Even before he arrived, he knew he had guessed rightly.
Quail were swift-born, dumb beasts, and did not respect the rules of man. Their droppings heeded rules even less. The path was dripping with them, and just before the entrance he found one of the birds fluffed up and sleeping on a ledge. He put it inside his barrel, and hung the fluttering barrel from a rusted nail, outside.
“Ten,” he counted quietly.
It was dark, and the plank boards of the window were splintery, yet the suite of rooms occupying a whole level at this corner of the City was unguarded. Who would dare storm the Century Syndicate headquarters at night? Yet the boy had often crossed near, witnessed deeds done and men undone here. He had never set foot in the place, but everyone knew where the society men were.
Silently, carefully, he put a bare foot onto the lush carpet of the Syndicate’s parlor. There was a woman, nude and pale in the moonlight, sweating from the southern Chinese humidity. A man lay beside her, on a sofa wide enough to sleep the boy’s whole family. One of the woman’s feet dangled off the soft cushions, and three of the birds were pecking at something near it.
“Seven,” he whispered, slipping them into his ragged shirt.
The soft sound of snoring could not obscure the scuffle of birds’ claws, and Albion followed them through the rooms, gathering the quail up wherever they were.
“Six.”
“Five. Four.”
He ignored the riches about him, and the cruel men splayed out beside naked ‘chickens,’ with their watermelon knives and jars of vitriol, with ginseng wines for vitality and lines of poison powders. Though the boy had seen them at work, his fear of them was no more than the fear of his father. Trapped between two equally terrifying creatures, the small boy was somehow stripped of fear.
There was a Buddhist monk in one of the many rooms of the Walled City, a bald-headed fellow mostly ignored for his talk of pacifism and vegetarianism in a place where a person’s hard-won meal might very well consist of his ill-fated neighbor. The boy had seen the monk talk once, of something he called ‘present mind,’ where the cares of the world could be seen as if from far away. At that moment, surrounded by knives still browned by old blood, the boy thought he understood a little of what the monk had meant.
“Three. Two.”
His shirt nearly overflowed with feathery warmth, but the seams were good, sewn by his mother. Over the muffled murmur of their calls, he could hear the last of them down a corridor on his left. As he crossed the doorway, something did not seem right to him. Yet, the boy was focused on the last bird, and wasted no time putting his finger on it.
“Come on, stupid bird. Appear, and I can go home and sleep.”
The boards wobbled beneath his feet, then, but the boy did not think it was strange. The Wall
ed City was ill constructed, the floors oft slanted or loose. He simply concentrated on placing each palm and foot down, as if his limbs were padded quiet, like a cat’s.
His last bird was hidden behind some crates, in the back of the wobbly room.
Albion was thin, and scrawny, but even he could not reach between them. Beady eyes taunted him from between splintery planks. He looked, but it seemed the only way was to go around, under some of the smaller crates.
When the hard weight toppled onto him, the boy didn’t even feel it. All he felt was the puff of feathers, as those nine
birds in his shirt tumbled free to join the tenth.
Those loosely stacked crates determined the boy’s destiny. When he awoke, it was to those same crates jostling about, crushing him against the walls. Small, and a relatively flexible tumbler, the boy who would be Albion rolled out from under them, trying not to be too disgusted by all the bird leavings stuck to his clothes.
He had no idea what was happening. Had the Kowloon Walled City fallen around him? The mass of illegitimate, illegal dwellings were tumbledown, but the boy could not imagine them falling, not in a million years.
Crawling out from under the crates, the boy found himself in the wobbly room, now more of a shaking, tipping room. He had never been in a place like this before- none of the thick wooden beams made sense to him, and there were no rotten bolt holes for him to hide in. The walls were strong, and thick, and bolted together with metal plates, unlike the thin plaster of the City.
His sandals beat a hasty pace across the room, and through to another, and another. They were filled with crates and barrels, some of which had burst open. There were bottles and paper packages on the floor, bundles of food and pottery jars of water.