“Oh, come, now, Honorine,” Nautilus said as if lightly scolding her. “Surely by now you’ve seen what the Mapmaker can do.”
“He can show you how to get anything you want,” Honorine said.
“Exactly,” said Nautilus. “He can show me how to, for instance, find an island where your mother waits right at this very moment, unable to leave and come home to us.”
“What do you mean?” Honorine asked. “Because of the gates? Because she can’t leave them or the Bellua might escape?”
Nautilus stared at her very keenly.
“You are a clever girl, aren’t you?” he said. “Yes. She cannot leave now, because she has taken on the responsibility of guarding the Gates of Hades. But it doesn’t have to be her. We can get her back, Honorine, if we can catch the Mapmaker. He can show us where she is, and more important, he can show us exactly what we must do to bring her home.”
Honorine put down her fork, unsure of what exactly to say. He was right. The Mapmaker could show them how to get Andromeda back. He had already shown Honorine one vision of how it could be done—the one that somehow involved throwing the Mapmaker into Hades to be swallowed up by the Bellua. But just as she had pushed back against the Mapmaker when he insisted that he had to sink Nautilus’s ship to free the Mordant, she pushed back against the thought that the only way to get her mother back was to destroy the Mapmaker.
“That’s what all this is for,” Nautilus continued, waving a hand dismissively at the ship around them. “All this work going on around us doesn’t mean a thing to me if we can’t find Andromeda.”
“But you don’t need all the other Mordant, then,” Honorine said. “You could let them go.”
“That is out of the question,” Nautilus said. “The work we are doing on this ship—the advancements my crew are making every day in medicine, communication, navigation, agriculture are immeasurable. It would be irresponsible to abandon our research now. We’re making far more efficient use of the Mordant talents than anyone has in all of recorded history. Not only that, but the Mordant who have been on this ship now know far too much about what we’re doing here. We can’t have the Mapmaker learning our secrets, or we lose a major advantage over him.”
Anger flared in Honorine’s cheeks, but she took a breath and tried to push it aside. She wondered if it was supposed to be this difficult, talking with one’s parents. Surely it was easier for other children.
“But you could learn all that without keeping them as prisoners,” she said.
“Perhaps. But there is one other thing you have to consider.” Nautilus folded his hands and leaned onto his elbows. “The Mapmaker truly is dangerous. Without a defense, there’s nothing to stop him from causing destruction to anyone who displeases him anywhere in the world.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Honorine said quietly, not entirely sure of her own claim.
“Oh, he already has,” Nautilus replied. “Why, in this day and age, should we be helpless against him and his incredible power?”
Honorine had no answer.
“You help me catch the Mapmaker, you help the world. And you get your mother back,” said Nautilus. “Seems like a good deal all the way around. Now, are we in agreement?”
Honorine’s head screamed no! but she nodded obediently. In her experience, obedient children—or at least those who appeared to be—were given freedoms and allowed to wander unsupervised. Disobedient ones were put under strict watch.
“But I don’t know if I can help you,” Honorine protested. “The only Mordant I’ve met are on the Carina, and from what I’ve seen, they’re protected from your machine. So even if you knew the Mapmaker’s constellation, you wouldn’t be able to… get him.”
“Ah,” said Nautilus with a growing smile. “You’re correct, almost. We’ve made some improvements since last we met. Our Sidus Apparatus is much more powerful than it was when we met in the jungle. Tonight, we shall try it on Sagittarius.”
Honorine’s heart went cold.
The archer had pledged to defend the Gaslight from the Mapmaker, which he likely couldn’t do if he was trapped in an amber prison. Honorine felt the worry like ice against her cheeks, but Nautilus didn’t seem to notice her pale expression.
“I have a few things to tend to before this evening’s work begins,” he said. “You probably want to get a bit of rest. The whole suite is yours, of course.”
He made his way to the door of the solarium, then turned back.
“If you do want to be out on the rest of the ship, I ask that you be escorted. For your own safety, of course. We start work one hour before sundown.”
Then he left. The moment the suite door closed behind him, Honorine leaped from her chair and paced the room.
She had until sundown to find a way to stop Nautilus from using his machine on the archer. If she failed, none of the people on the ship would live to see another sunrise.
The Gaslight was very quiet in the afternoon. Honorine spent a few hours retooling her Mordant watch with things she found in the well-appointed suite, adding more indicators from the constellations she could remember from Lord Vidalia’s books. Then, when the ship seemed to grow quiet around her, she slipped out and started exploring.
She wanted to find the laboratory she had seen in the Mapmaker’s vision and the machine that captured the Mordant. The only thing keeping the Mapmaker from sinking the Gaslight was her agreement with the archer. But once Nautilus captured him, it would be swift and brutal revenge for the entire Gaslight crew. She had to find the machine before sundown and make sure it was not working when Nautilus tried to capture the archer.
Honorine found the ship nearly deserted and most of the doors unattended and unlocked. A spare few deckhands wandered about, but most of the scientific crew was not yet awake, and Honorine was reminded of the empty halls and parlors of the Vidalia Estate after supper had been cleared and the house went still.
It seemed so much further away than nine weeks. Every single part of her life had changed since then, except for maybe Francis.
The bridge was manned by a pair of blue coats busily engaged in conversation at the far end of the room. Honorine easily slipped from the hatch at the top of the stairs to the open doorway beside it on the wall. Her bare feet made no sound at all as she padded along the hallway, moving in the direction of the laboratory.
The first door she encountered opened onto a narrow balcony of pipes and grates, surrounded by a helpful fog of steam. The balcony ended in stairways on both sides, one leading down into the hold and one leading up into the crystal dome capping the whole of the laboratory.
Honorine grasped the railing and leaned out, searching for a view of the room below. She got brief glimpses, but the steam quickly saturated her clothes and dripped from her hair. Better go down, she thought, and took a step toward a staircase, when the entire, delicate pipe balcony began to rattle and shake. Gruff voices on the stairs rose up with the steam. Someone was up and about in the laboratory.
Honorine turned and ran the other way, past a wide pipe vent funneling the steam outside, until she had climbed up into the crystal dome itself.
The light was blinding, shining straight in from the heavy red sun burning low in the sky above the ocean. It was already nearing sundown. She might have waited too long to leave the suite. She climbed a bit higher, the stairway contorting into a narrow ladder that continued up into the dome, toward a network of slender pipes and pendulous glass globes suspended dozens of feet off the ground. Far below, a handful of crew members tended and cleaned the machine, providing a good amount of noise to cover up the sound of Honorine shimmying about on the catwalks and ladders above.
She started up the length of the adjustable ladder, studying the intricate twists of the pipes leading to each globe. They all ended in a valve, presumably there to shut the gas off while the globes were being fixed or replaced. With a few turns of the gears at the top of the ladder to shift its position, Honorine maneuvered toward the nearest
globe, the one closest to the copper rim of the dome. It was precarious, but if she rested her chest and stomach against the rungs of the ladder, she could get her hands on the valve, which she turned until it appeared to be closed. Then she swung the ladder toward the next globe and repeated the procedure.
By the time she had done this for several dozen of the hundreds of globes scattered through the dome, the sun had dipped lower outside, and the work below was beginning to pick up. Hoping she had done enough to at least postpone the night’s hunt, she reeled the ladder back in and started to climb down.
More crew members began to gather below. She had to be extremely cautious, creeping along the wall, moving softly across the metal balconies, until she had snuck back out into the hallway.
She intended to slip back down to the suite, but just as she reached the door to the bridge, Nautilus stepped through it and nearly walked right into her.
“Oh!” she said. “There you are.”
“What are you doing all the way up here?” Nautilus asked.
“I… was hungry,” she said. “Just looking for the galley.”
Nautilus frowned. “Well, we can’t have you wandering around.” He looked about, as if searching for a place to store her. “I’m on my way down to see Professor du Ciel. Come along. We’ll have to have something sent up for you.”
He led her back through the bridge, down the spiral staircase, and into the research hall, which was still mostly empty and silent.
“Good afternoon, Captain Olyphant,” said Professor du Ciel as she emerged from a curtained alcove, dressed in her work clothes, but clearly having just woken from a hard slumber.
“Professor du Ciel,” Nautilus replied. They retreated to a corner of the room to study a gigantic chart.
Francis was already up in his little study. He waved Honorine over when Nautilus’s back was turned.
“What are you going to do?” he asked. “You talked to Nautilus? What did he say?”
Honorine shook her head. “He was no help at all. We’ll have to do this on our own.”
“Do what on our own?” Francis asked, looking alarmed.
“First, I need to find the Mordant,” Honorine said, ignoring his concern. “Where does he keep the rest of them?”
“Secured,” Francis replied. “It was a massive undertaking just to get Nautilus to let us keep Pyxis out here so Professor du Ciel could work whenever she liked.”
“We have to try,” Honorine said. “And I need your help.”
Francis looked very uncertain. “You’re going to try to let them go, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Of course,” Honorine said. “We get them off this ship, and then maybe I can persuade the Mapmaker not to kill anyone.”
“But what if we just help Nautilus find that island first?” Francis asked. “Then I’m sure we could get him to let them go.”
Honorine had no more patience for explaining herself. She had expected more from Francis. She had thought he of all people would understand her.
“Did you ever think about what these machines are doing?” she asked suddenly. “What happens when you take a Mordant out of the world? Did you ever think about whether Nautilus should be doing this?”
“No, not at first,” Francis admitted quietly. “Until after I brought you to the Nighthawk. When I realized what you… are… I was afraid to bring you back to this ship. I was afraid of what Nautilus would do if he found you.”
Honorine frowned at him. “You were afraid he would lock me up, just like the rest of them,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Well…” Francis said. “It’s really not that bad.”
Honorine narrowed her eyes. “That’s exactly the kind of thing someone says when they’ve done something terrible and they want to confess.”
“Maybe,” Francis said. “But the confession part is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? What if you realize you did a bad thing, but you were doing it for the right reasons?”
“It’s a start,” Honorine said. “But there’s another step. You have to make up for the thing you did, too. Not just admit it.”
“I know!” Francis grumbled. “I know, you’re right. It’s just—”
“What, scary?” Honorine asked. “Francis, we’re going to do this together. I need your help.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked reluctantly.
“Wait until they’re distracted, and then go find the Mordant,” Honorine said.
“Why would they be distracted?” Francis asked, his eyes going wide as he realized that whatever Honorine was planning had already been set in motion. Before she could answer, Nautilus interrupted.
Du Ciel and Nautilus were busy marking possible island locations on a gigantic map, and then arguing about the probability of any of them being strong-enough candidates to take the entire ship in that direction. Every one of the locations was in vast open water, with nothing around their ship for hundreds of miles but deep black ocean.
“Francis!” Nautilus called from across the study. “Honorine! We are about to begin this evening’s experiments. Time to retire to the laboratory.” Honorine wanted to tell Francis what was about to happen but decided—though she felt a bit terrible about it—that it would be better if he didn’t know. Then he wouldn’t be tempted to warn Nautilus. She kept quiet and followed the procession through the research hall.
The dome above was a cap of darkness, and the polished wood, hammered copper, and smooth brass of the machine all around them reflected the light of many incandescent bulbs, turning the entire laboratory into a glowing golden bowl.
The room was far more crowded in the evening, with pairs of blue-coated crew members manning a dozen stations, each a cacophony of dials and levers and banks of gauges monitoring every system of the massive machine.
“Stand over here, please, and put these on,” Francis requested, handing Honorine a pair of goggles with smoky black lenses and a black leather strap. Francis was already wearing his. “It gets very bright in here once things get moving.”
Honorine was reminded suddenly of watching fireworks on Lady Vidalia’s front lawn many years ago, perhaps for Francis’s birthday. They’d exploded in the sky with such deep, resonating blasts that the sound had echoed inside Honorine’s chest. Now she could feel something like that in the hum of electricity, the vibrations moving through the room like ripples on water.
The electric bulbs illuminating the floor rattled slightly. The pipes whistled and emitted intermittent wisps of steam.
“This machine, the Sidus Apparatus, is my masterpiece,” Nautilus said, with a sweep of his arms, as he stepped up in front of Honorine and Francis. His own black-lensed goggles were rimmed in pearl and had silver scrollwork on the sides. They rested on his forehead as he pulled on a pair of black deerskin gloves. “It took a decade to build, years more to perfect, and now we are only weeks—or perhaps days—away from our final goal.”
He lifted the goggles to lower them over his eyes, pausing to look directly at Honorine.
“And you will be here to see it,” he said. But before she could inquire as to what this final goal was, he had secured his goggles and was striding away, shouting important-sounding orders.
Crew members began turning gears and flipping levers. The whine and whistle of heat and gas moving through pipes escalated as little gauges wriggled and spun all around the room. High overheard, lights began to spark and pop inside the globes, burning in blues and greens, golden yellow and smoldering violet. It was intense and beautiful, the colors reflecting off the crystal panels of the dome above, scattering out in flashes that shot across the room and bounced off every polished surface.
Honorine watched, captivated, as the lights bloomed across the net of pipes, until the gas hit the ones she had tampered with that morning. When the first globe attempted to ignite, it did not do so in a controlled burst of flame as the others had. Instead, the entire globe filled instantly with flame, exploding into a spray of glass shar
ds and sending a spout of blue fire across the ceiling.
“Whoa!” said Francis with a grin as the blue light filled his smoky goggle lenses. But he was less delighted by the second explosion, and downright concerned by the time several dozen globes had exploded into jets of flame, surging together to create a multicolored fireball. It rushed upward, bursting through the crystal dome, which exploded into a cloud of violet smoke and shards of iron and copper.
Honorine dropped to the floor in a heap, shielding her head from the falling glass, as Nautilus’s crew flailed about, shutting down the machine as quickly as they could manage. She stayed in a huddle until the room was filled only with the sounds of boots pounding across the floor and salty language being lobbed through the air.
Honorine peeked under her arm, hoping to see no one engulfed in flame or impaled with a thousand shards of crystal. She breathed a sigh of relief when everyone seemed to be unharmed. The machine was greatly damaged, seeping oil like blood from gashes in metal and broken pipes. The crystal dome was shattered on one side like an eggshell, the pipes bent and useless, the gauges all still and dead.
“Are you all right?” Francis asked as he, too, slowly looked out from under his arms.
“Fine,” Honorine said before actually checking. “You?” She looked him over, finding the hem of his coat singed, but the rest of him untouched.
Nautilus was marching toward them, pulling his goggles off, his face set in a scowl.
Honorine stood up and moved back in one automatic motion, like a startled horse beginning to spook.
“Francis!” Nautilus shouted. “Something is terribly wrong! Get her out of here at once!”
He did not even look at Honorine as he stormed past into a cloud of sulfur steam and errant sparks.
“Well, let’s go, then,” Francis said, holding out his hand to help Honorine down from the platform. He looked shaken, his mouth curled up in a painful expression, his hand gripping Honorine’s uncomfortably tight.
Together, they made their way back to the suite. Inside, with the doors closed, it seemed that they were on another ship entirely, insulated from the noise of the crew members and the damaged ship.
The Star Thief Page 18
