Escapement - 9780765317094

Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria still rules New England and her American Possessions; The Royal Navy rules the skies with their mighty Airships; and Earth still turns on God's great brass gears of Heaven as it makes its orderly passage around the Lamp of the Sun from Midnight to Midnight and Year to Year.
Paolina Barthes has grown up in a tiny village on Wall, inhabited by the descendants of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, isolated from the rest of the world. But she is a genius, another Newton, a natural sorcerer in this Universe of God's Clockwork. Given the tiniest encouragement by the shipwrecked loblolly boy from the lost airship Bassett, she builds a device that she barely understands, but which can change or rebuild the entire world.
Emily Childress is a librarian at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. A spinster, she is devoted to her Library and to the Order of the White Birds, a world-spanning secret society that works to preserve and share knowledge. It was she who set Hethor on his path to rewind Earth's Mainspring. And it is she who is being blamed for the death of William of Gaunt, a sorcerer of the Hidden Order.
Threadgill Angus Al-Wazir was the Chief Petty Officer on Bassett, lost on the Wall while attempting to relieve General Gordon's expedition. Al-Wazir made his way back to England, only to be court-martialed and sent back to Scotland. But now his knowledge of the Wall is crucial to England's latest project: Prime Minister Lloyd George and Her Imperial Majesty Victoria intend to drive a tunnel through the Wall to open Southern Earth.
These three will journey far, separately and together, until they meet at the end of all plots and imperial schemes.