The plan came to Senlin fully finished in a flash. Rodion was suspicious; Finn Goll was suspicious. Both expected conspiracy, and given one, would believe it. All that remained was to set the two against each other in his favor, to his own ends.
Senlin smiled at the yellow-haired woman in a manner that he hoped appeared sufficiently nervous. “Look, I don’t want my past bobbing to the surface again. I certainly don’t want Rodion to know about it.”
“And there’s the plum, love. Quiet don’t come cheap!”
“Ah. Money, yes. I have a lot of money coming to me, I’m sure, but I don’t have it yet.” He swallowed with affected anxiousness. “I have to move a thing of great value first. It’s worth a fortune… and I’m smuggling it out tomorrow night.”
She squinted at him and formed her lips into a perfect red raisin. “How dumb do you think I am? You’re just going to run off with your treasure as soon as I turn around.”
“No! Please don’t tell Rodion. I’ll give you what I have now, and then more later.” Senlin opened a desk drawer, drew out a little change purse and tipped it onto his blotter. Six pitiful shekels spilled out. It would be taken as an insult, he was sure, but he looked at her with sham hopefulness. “Take it. I’ll have more after tomorrow. Just not a word to Rodion. Please.”
The yellow-haired woman chewed at her lower lip, regarding him with a mean, deadened gaze. “Yeah, okay.” She swept the coins into her hand, and turned to leave.
“Not a word,” Senlin repeated.
“Oh, you’ll get what you paid for. Don’t you worry. You’ll get exactly what you paid for.” She gave another tart purse of her lips. Sweeping from the room, she did not see Senlin roll his eyes.
Adam passed the blond woman in the hall and came into Senlin’s office with a thumb pointed over his shoulder and a perplexed expression on his face. “Entertaining guests?”
Senlin motioned for him to close the door; he was having trouble containing a grin. When Adam was seated and settled, with the brow over his active eye raised in question, Senlin explained: “She is going to tell Rodion that I am up to something.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
“No, it is very good. She recognized me from the Baths. And I just told her that I’m smuggling something very valuable out of the port tomorrow night. Rodion is not one to run off half-cocked on a rumor, so he’ll need a little extra goading if he’s going to empty our ship for us. And that’s where you come in.”
“Our ship? Wait, you found a ship?” Adam said, craning forward. “A good ship; a realistic conquest?”
“Yes. The Stone Cloud,” Senlin said, lacing his hands behind his head. “It’s a beautiful, rustic sloop, and I know the First Mate, as it turns out…”
“What do you mean you know the First Mate?”
“I know her. We shared a prison cell for a few days.”
“Of course you did,” Adam said, blinking through a daze. “Wait, what do you want me to do with Rodion?”
“You’re going to rat me out to him.” Senlin said it as if it were the most sensible thing in the world. “You’re going to lend credence to the rumoring of floozies.”
Adam’s confusion contorted his expression; he looked as if he’d been caught mid-sneeze. “Ah, Thomas, I don’t think this is a very good…”
“No, it is. Everyone here expects everyone else to be treacherous. So let’s give them treachery. You will tell Rodion that in exchange for the immediate liberation of your sister, you will reveal my whole conspiracy. Well, not all of it, of course. The main thing he needs to believe is that I have something of great value— you don’t need to say what; he’ll know— which I am frantically trying to smuggle out of the port, and that the whole debacle is taking place tomorrow night. Then you…”
Adam interrupted, “Why would he know what you’re smuggling?”
“Because I am certain that he is the one who first contacted the Commissioner and brought the Red Hand down upon me. He knows all about the painting, and I’m sure he’s just waiting for it to come into the open. Tell him I am smuggling out something worth a fortune, and let him travel to the conclusion himself. The less you seem to know, the safer you’ll be. What matters most is that you come with him to the port and you insist that Voleta come, too. Don’t let him dissuade you from that point. Talk Rodion into letting you both come. I think he’ll want to do it; he’ll want to confront me with your betrayal. He’ll enjoy that.”
“So, you do have the painting.”
“It doesn’t matter if I have the painting…”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Nothing matters more than that fact. Either you have it, and we can bargain for our lives, or you don’t, and we will be strung up from the yard arms. What are you going to do when Rodion doesn’t find the bait we used to draw him out?”
“A very good point, which brings me to the next chore on your list. After you’ve gone to betray me to Rodion, you will send a message to Finn Goll and tell him that Rodion is going to conduct an unauthorized seizure of goods in the Port of Goll tomorrow night. Tell Goll that Rodion is using his hold on Voleta to force you into scouting for treasure ships.”
“For treasure ships? Are you mad?”
“Well, whatever. Tell him that Rodion is using you to find a vulnerable, valuable ship to plunder. Whatever you do, don’t mention the Commissioner or the painting.”
Adam shook his head like a man who’d just suffered a blow to it. “This is your plan?”
“Calm down, calm down” Senlin said, easing his friend back from his rising mania with a softened tone. “I know it sounds a little ragged. But our best chance of escape is to set the egos against one other.” He brought his fists together in demonstration. “If Rodion and Goll are fighting, they will be weakened and distracted. They won’t think of us. We can slip away. Trust me, Adam. This could work. An empty ship, your sister at the port, all of us ready to go.”
Adam brooded over this for a moment and then said, “But you do have the painting?”
“I have, at least, a very compelling painting-sized crate,” Senlin said with a wink.
The chair feet squealed upon the floor as Adam stood. He pulled his shirt straight. His face reflected the grim resolve of one who has been asked to walk to his own execution. He nodded once, said, “Aye, aye, Captain,” then strode from the room.
Chapter Thirteen
“Mirrors are not so honest as one might think. They can be mugged at, bargained with, and one can always ferret out a flattering angle. Really, there is nothing like the expression of a long-lost friend to reflect the honest state of your affairs.”
- Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin
He resisted the urge to change his clothes, or polish his boots, or oil his hair, or otherwise preen himself before calling on Edith at her ship. The buttons on his coat had long since been torn loose and lost. His lapels were frayed, and his hair was long and unmanaged. Worse, his face was a rainbow of bruises. Other than the daily ritual of shaving, which seemed like the useless bailing of a sinking ship, his old fastidiousness had vanished. But now, for the first time in months, he felt acutely aware of the fact. He had let himself go. There had been good reason, of course, but now he felt the old compulsion to present himself as a gentleman.
But, no, this was no time for gentlemen. And if he was very honest with himself, there was something else keeping him from primping now. If he polished his boots, and oiled his hair, it would imply a social visit. And he was not a man calling on a woman for tea. Certainly not. He was a married man, for one thing. If he’d once had an uncomfortable or unbecoming thought about Edith, it had been only in passing and during the most extreme circumstances. There was nothing between them but friendly admiration.
It was night, and the port was deserted. The Sally Quick and the Cornelius had departed, and the remaining crews of the Gold Finch and the Stone Cloud were either asleep below decks or reveling in the Boudoir. The stars lo
oked timid behind the intense moonlight. Senlin paused amid the cranes and bollards of the skyport to admire the natural gloom of the cosmos. His heart swelled at the thought of being finally free of the stench of smokestacks and the jangle of autowagons. Before him lay the promise of no more Eight O’Clock Reports, no more dickering with captains over every last shekel, no more irascible Finn Goll…
“Hi-ho, Port Master,” Edith called at his approach. He found her leaning over the clumsy rail of her sloop. “The captain and half the crew are out whoring. The rest are sleeping below. You can come aboard if you promise not to beat your cane on my deck. If you wake Antsy Jack or Bobbit or Keller, you have to rock them back to sleep yourself.” She extended her mechanical arm over the narrow, bowed gangplank.
He hesitated only a moment. She had brushed out her hair. The moonlight cast her face in the flawless blue light of glacier ice. What a ridiculous thing to notice! Here was a woman with a dynamo for an arm, and he was waxing lyrical about her complexion. He rebuked himself silently, and grasped her clockwork palm. Despite being accustomed to the height, he was still careful to keep his eyes trained on hers and away from the great, hypnotic drop he crossed over.
Being aboard a ship, even a docked one, always filled Senlin with a powerful thrill. The envelope rippled overhead, that silk thinner than skin, while the hull bobbed and shifted in sympathy with the gentle evening currents. As calm as it was at port, Senlin knew that a few hundred feet out, the desert winds ran like river rapids.
“You have an aeronaut’s stance,” she said approvingly, nodding down at the boots he had refused to polish. “You don’t look like you’re going to pitch your dinner.”
“I’m fine. I like ships,” Senlin said, trying not to be offended.
“Well, the ships like you, too. You also look like you’ve been bunking with a cyclone,” she said, making a show of surveying his bruised face. “You are a sight.”
Now he was offended. He brushed at the bruises on his face as if they might be swept off, and pulled at his ratty collar. None of it helped, of course, and his attempts at prettying himself only amused Edith. He dropped his hands and cleared his throat. “What about a tour?”
“As you like. Welcome aboard the Stone Cloud!” she said, with a sweeping, theatrical bow. “The most fearsome aircraft in the immediate vicinity, excluding that one over there and any large birds that might be nesting nearby.” Senlin chuckled, despite himself. “Here’s the burner,” she said, patting the side of the cylindrical tank that stood middeck. “Hot as slag, once it gets going. This heats the coil inside the envelope…”
Senlin interjected here: “…causing the hydrogen to expand, and lift to increase.” Senlin’s eyes followed the flexible duct that ran from the furnace to the base of the balloon, some fifteen or twenty feet overhead. “This is the umbilical.”
“Very good. Maybe you’re not such a hopeless wharfie after all,” Edith said with an approving, one-shouldered shrug. “The heating element can be throttled from the helm, when everything’s firing right.” She led Senlin up the short stairs to the quarter deck where, in place of a traditional captain’s wheel, five rust-encrusted levers jutted from a weathered console. “This one throttles the element; this one injects more hydrogen, if we have a spare tank on hand, which we usually don’t…” Edith said, gripping the two throttles in turn. “This one releases water from the ballast hold. That swell under the bow holds two hundred gallons of water. I can jettison the ballast slowly, for a gentle ascent, or in an emergency, I can dump it all. That’ll make your stomach fall through the deck.”
“And the other two throttles?”
“Are broken.”
“How large is the crew?”
“Thirteen, plus the captain and myself. My cabin is under the poop deck. It was the chart room before I came along. Now it looks like someone tried to stuff a library into a woman’s closet.” She smiled, leaning back against the raised platform of the quarterdeck. “You’ll just have to take my word for it; the tour doesn’t include the lady’s chamber.”
“And the crew, they are capable and… loyal?” Senlin asked, trying to sound light.
Her smile curdled, and a new line appeared on her brow. “That’s a strange question, Tom. Do you mean to ask whether I have my men in hand, or whether they are opportunists at heart whose loyalty can be bought?”
Senlin waved her on, pretending to have no preference for her answer.
“To both questions: yes. Emphatically, yes. Though—” Without warning, her clockwork arm chugged like a stalling engine, heaved a great sigh of steam from every joint, and then dropped heavily to her side.
Slouching awkwardly around the lifeless weight of the arm, Edith swore under her breath. “The mudded thing always runs down at the worst time.” She dug her flesh and blood hand into a vest pocket and pulled out a glowing red vial. Under the blue moonlight, the glass cylinder glowed like a crucible. The image of the Red Hand’s metal cuff, with its tuning pegs and red vials, leapt to Senlin’s mind.
“The damnedest deals…” Edith muttered distractedly. She pressed upon a discreet outline in her shoulder, and a little drawer came open. An empty vial fell into her hand. Inserting the luminous replacement, she pushed the drawer closed, and it sealed with a click. Immediately, the valves down the length of her mechanical arm hissed, and the cogs revved back to life. She flexed it experimentally.
“I’ve seen this before,” Senlin said, managing his nerves well enough to keep them from rattling his voice. “That glowing serum… I’ve seen a man inject it into his veins. It makes him monstrously strong and quick and, I think, more than a little insane. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said without a trace of uncertainty. She closed the subject by crushing the empty vial in her clockwork hand. “I am not my arm.” Shaking the pulverized glass from her palm, she said, “Besides, the real question is, what are you plotting, Tom?”
“P-plotting?” The stutter had given him away, but he pressed on with the charade. “Well, I did have a small point of business I wanted to discuss…”
She interrupted with a flurry of her hand: “I know you well enough. You’re honorable, you’re faithful, and you have just as much reason to hate this two-faced Tower as I do. I like you. But you’re awful at lying. If you’re not going to talk straight, then you can get off my ship right now.” Her breath puffed in the frigid air between them with the calm regularity of an engine.
Senlin stepped away from her and leaned over the starboard rail, facing the nearly full moon. Beneath him, a set of anchors fastened the ship to the iron prongs of the slip. He wondered how difficult it would be to cut all the lines and set the ship adrift right then and there. How far would they float before they were missed, before the rest of the crew woke up and the mutiny commenced? Then he thought of Adam and Voleta, the twins of opposites, and Iren who, despite the brutishness of her business, still held a good measure of conscience. He felt ashamed. “I’m not so honorable,” he said.
Edith sidled up beside him on the rail. He could feel the resting vibrations of her clockwork arm travel through the wood of the balustrade. “Well, I don’t know. But I haven’t met many men who wouldn’t take advantage of a woman they shared a cage with.”
Senlin waved the point away, as if it were underserving of consideration. “I hope it hasn’t come to that. We shouldn’t have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.” Before she could say anything further on the subject, he continued on in a lower tone. “The truth is there are a few of us who want to take a ship and escape.”
“You want to take my ship?” Though whispered, the question was sharp.
“No. I actually had been planning to have a go at the Gold Finch. But then I saw you...”
“Oh, so it’s a rescue?” she said, sniffing cynically.
“A rescue!” Senlin reflected her despairing snicker. “Months ago I had these occasional fancies in
which the parishioners of my old village sent out a search party to find me and Marya and bring us home. I imagined them scrabbling through the mall, picking their way up the Tower, unified by a single goal: to rescue their gawky headmaster and his undeserved wife. But…” he sighed, shaking his head. “…no one came. And no one is coming. There are no rescues, Edith; there are just the collaborations and commiserations of friends.”
Silently, she stewed over this. After a moment, Senlin began to worry that he had just recklessly confided in someone who needed no escape, someone who was quite content with her lot in life, thank you very much. Had he just given the whole game away? He had the urge to swallow but found that he could not move the lump in his throat.
Then she said, “My debts are complicated. They’re not the sort of thing I can just run away from. And it’s not the sort of burden I would want to heap on my friends, if I had any.”
“That’s the point. We’re all burdened with something – a loss, a debt, an enemy, or all three,” he laughed wearily. “It’s too much for anyone. But, if we share each other’s burdens, we may be able to move them, or find a way around them if they’re intractable. Whatever comes, we wouldn’t have to face it alone, at least.”
“And who’s going to be in charge of this crew of friends?” she asked, her voice pitching with curiosity, though she still seemed unconvinced.
“You could be captain. I’m sure you’re more than qualified…”
“You’re joking!” She said in a louder blurt. “Captaining is the worst. Everything’s always your fault. When things go well, it’s to the crew’s credit, and when things go horribly, the captain did it.” She shook her head as if a horsefly had just settled on her nose. “No! I’d rather be a scullery maid than a captain. Well, not really. But being first mate suits me. I like bossing people around. Besides, Headmaster, Port Master, doesn’t it follow that you would be captain?”
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 34
