Voleta watched the retreating ship for any change in course. Though she had recently baited and eluded a mob, she showed no sign that anything very remarkable had occurred. She balanced atop a rail and leaned over the vast drop, casually gripping a tether in a manner that made her brother Adam quite nervous. A grackle flew into view, and she marked the subtle turn of its wings. “The current's shifted due west now,” Voleta said.
“It'll do,” Edith said. She turned to Captain Mudd. He stood, straight as a stovepipe, staring at the Tower that dominated the sky. She called him Captain twice, the second time more sharply, but neither disrupted the intensity of his trance.
“Tom,” she said with a little softness. Concern had turned her dark eyebrows into a single, severe line. Thomas Senlin refocused on her face and smiled. “Where to, Captain?”
He was still uncomfortable with the formalities that Edith insisted upon. She would only call him “Tom” in private and asked that he call her “Mister Winters” in front of the crew. “Mister” was the title that first mates were due, and was only reasonable, but “Winters” was the name of her estranged husband who had edged her out of managing her family’s farm and then refused to give her a divorce when she asked for one. Senlin couldn’t imagine why she would want to be constantly reminded of such a man.
In quiet moments, Senlin recalled the hours they'd once shared in a cage that was bolted to the face of the Tower. They had been frightened by the unexpected cruelty of the Parlor and a confused by the abrupt camaraderie the ordeal inspired. But they had also been only “Tom” and “Edith” to one another.
It seemed a long time ago. That was before she had lost her arm and joined a pirate crew, before he had missed a reunion with his wife by a matter of hours and stolen first a painting and then a ship.
Standing before Edith now, Senlin couldn’t help but marvel at how, despite it all, their friendship had survived.
“I think we shall make for the Windsock, Mister Winters,” he said. “We have some rum to sell.” Really, they had little choice of where to go. The Windsock was the only cove that hadn't turned them away.
“Ayesir.” She nearly turned to spread the order, but stopped short. She drew in close to keep her voice from carrying in the serene silence. Unlike the sea, with its crashes, howls, and tattooing waves, the air seemed quite a tranquil medium. “You were doing it again, Tom. You were staring off at the distance.” When his only response was a pinched frown, she went on: “If I can see that you’re distracted, the crew can see it, too. That worries me. Are you sure you’re all right?” Her clockwork arm, beautifully doused in sun, illuminated her face with a golden light.
“Yes, yes, of course.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “I was only—”
“Man overboard!” Voleta called from the balustrade. They turned in time to see a flailing figure in a white sheet plummet from the Cairo Hound. They were too distant to hear a cry if one was uttered, but the silence of the spectacle only made it grimmer.
No one doubted who it was.
Iren broke the moment of quiet reflection. “He was a bad captain.”
“But a worse bird,” Voleta said.
Chapter Two
“With his ship, I have also taken possession of the late Captain Billy Lee’s log. Reading his diary has provided me with two insights. First, penmanship is not a priority in the elementary institutions of the Tower. And second, I have signed us on for a rough life.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
The Tower of Babel frayed and turned the wind in elaborate ways. Currents broke and rolled upon its rough expanse like waves upon a sandbar. Some ports could only be approached during certain hours and with cooperative weather. Others had been desolated by a subtle shift in an airstream that rendered them inaccessible. Navigating the air about the Tower required the endless revision of charts, a close watch of the telltales, and boundless courage.
Most essentially, though, surviving the gusts of the Tower required a happy crew, and to be happy, a crew needed a few planks in a row to call their own. Without it, they would feel restless and trapped. They would bicker; they would grumble. So, the crew of the Stone Cloud each claimed a corner of the ship and retreated there when circumstances allowed.
Adam bunked in the main cargo hold, though he spent little time there. It was dark and low-ceilinged and gave him the feeling that he'd been swallowed by a whale. He preferred the dazzling view from the elevated quarterdeck, preferred being near the helm. A born engineer, Adam dreamed of one day dismantling and rebuilding the ship and its controls in superior form. As it was, they had to rely on the wind to do most of the steering. He could only move the ship up and down by throttling the heating element and releasing the ballast in the forward tank, though this was a last resort because the tank was tedious to refill and also served as the crew's bath.
Iren and Voleta claimed the main cabin. Having lately been the barracks for a dozen crewmen, the room had reeked of boots and feet before they moved in. They tore down most of the hammocks, aired the room, and scrubbed every inch of planking with sweet-smelling pine soap. They stuffed the old clothes out a porthole, though Voleta kept (and mercilessly boiled) a few small articles that could be tailored to fit her. She'd come to the ship with nothing but a shawl and her blue leotard, the costume she'd worn during her captivity in the Steampipe. She pinned the leotard to the cabin wall, where it hung like a headless shadow: a reminder of the life that lay behind her.
Edith's bedroom, technically the chart house, was little more than a drafty closet. Old signal flags of faded bunting and roach-chewed maps decorated the walls. She had assumed the quarters while under Billy Lee’s command because it was the only room on the ship that could be reliably locked. In her early days aboard the Stone Cloud, she had been feverish and weak from the infection that eventually consumed her arm. She refused to elaborate on the ordeal, and Senlin learned not to press the point. All that mattered was that the chart house had kept her safe when she was most vulnerable, and she had grown quite attached to it.
The fact that Edith’s room could only be accessed through the Great Cabin, which was the captain’s quarters, had been inconvenient but manageable during Billy Lee’s command. In their private environments, Edith had been all but invisible to Lee. Lee was attracted to a different sort of woman: a waifish, insensible sort. He considered her too “brawny,” and besides she was positively ancient at thirty-five. This liberated him, at least to his satisfaction, from the usual expectations of decorum. His casual modesty and crude habits were bothersome, but it was better than being the focus of his ardor.
Senlin found the arrangement much more concerning. For the sake of privacy and propriety, he offered to take a hammock in the hold alongside Adam, but Edith insisted that the captain slept in the Great Cabin. A crew, she explained, needed unsupervised hours to complain, cavort, and plot their mutinies. It was good for morale.
This justification had amused Senlin, but he understood her earnest point: a crew could never be at rest if their captain was always about.
So, agreeing to share the space, they worked out a system of knocks. Two raps meant, “Coming through,” as in: “I’m only using your room as a corridor. There’s no need to look up from what you’re doing, but it would be convenient if you were dressed.” Three quick knocks meant “I’m paying you a visit,” and a single rap signaled, “I am going to sleep. Goodnight.”
To be more accurate, they had not created this percussive vocabulary. Senlin had, much to Edith’s consternation. Not only was the knocking an unnecessarily elaborate solution to a simple problem (they could just speak through the doors, after all), it was also irritatingly genteel. It harkened back to the moment, at least in Edith's mind, when they were fleeing through the Parlor and Senlin refused to help loosen her gown. His sensibilities had nearly gotten her killed.
But he could not be reasoned with, and it was a small request. Edith conceded, and they had been counting knocks ever
since.
The evening after they poached a few kegs of rum from the Cairo Hound, Senlin was sitting at the table in his cabin, poring over a chart of the Tower's lower levels when three knocks sounded on the outer door. Edith came in, shooed by the wind, with a tin pitcher in one hand.
“The little owl is on watch,” she said, meaning Voleta. Voleta’s penchant for climbing all about the ship's rigging, though nerve-wracking, made her an effective lookout. “I gave Adam and Iren a ration of rum.”
“I suppose there’ll be no lessons again tonight,” Senlin said with a cluck of his tongue. After escaping the port, he and Iren had been free to resume her tutelage, and they had done so at first. But as the days piled discouragements and distractions upon them, the lessons had grown infrequent. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before they were entirely abandoned.
She pulled two pewter goblets from a rack. “Well, look at it from her point of view. Before she met us, she had steady pay, reliable meals, and her morning noon and night scheduled for her. We haven’t seen the same day twice since we shoved off from Goll. We’re scrabbling to survive, to keep ourselves fed. And she’s got to go along with your bizarre plots. Can you blame her for not having the patience for books right now?”
“You make a point,” Senlin said. “I suppose improvisation is its own lesson.”
“You wouldn’t think a headmaster would be so devious.”
“On the contrary. I credit any aptitude for conniving to my old profession,” he said.
“Come again?”
“As headmaster, it was my job to teach children how to think like an adult. It was their job, apparently, to teach me to think like a child, to expect the disruption, to anticipate the thumbtack on the chair or the lizard in the drawer.”
“They played pranks on you?” She poured the rum and settled in, smiling at the thought of Senlin yipping after sitting on a tack.
“Oh, more than pranks. Some of them were dastardly clever. There was one student early in my tenure who gave me such fits—” He couldn’t help but smile at the memory.
“One bitterly cold winter morning,” he began, “I arrived at the schoolhouse early, as I always did, to stoke the banked fire in the stove. But someone had stirred the coals around, and they’d gone out. I suspected a prank, but thought it rather tame. I laid down some fresh kindling, but when I looked to the matchbox, I found only bare sticks. All the match heads were missing. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘there’s the real trick! Someone’s snapped all my matches.’ I went to the closet for a fresh box, and when I stepped into the dark room, I found myself skating on a patch of ice. I nearly took all the shelving down with me as I fell.”
Edith covered her mouth when she laughed.
“At this point, I am impressed,” Senlin continued. “This is a grand prank, and I am trying to decide which of my students is intelligent and devious enough to dream up such a cascade of tricks even as I take my bruised knees and fresh box of matches back to the stove. When I put a match to it, the stove erupts with a flame that singes my eyebrows. It startles me so badly I overturn a row of desks when I jump back.”
“They put the match heads under the ashes?” Edith said.
“She did indeed.”
“You know who did it?”
“Oh, cleverness cannot hide delight. When they all sat at their desks that morning, I only had to look for who had the twinkling eyes.” He neglected to mention that the pretty culprit would one day become his wife.
“I’m glad you learned something useful from your bad seed,” Edith said, lifting her cup. “To the pranksters.”
“To the pranksters,” Senlin toasted.
Through a nearby porthole, they watched the dark shape of the Tower glimmer with the lights of skyports, observatories, and the fortresses of wealthy ringdoms. They shone like stars in the firmament of ancient stone.
“It's strange,” Senlin said, his mood shifting. “I thought that once I had a ship, everything would fall into place. I certainly didn’t think I was giving up bookkeeping to take up piracy. I just pictured this straight line of events. I thought we’d fly to Pelphia, find my wife, carry us all home, and that would be the end of it.”
“I could’ve told you, there’s no such thing as a straight path on an airship.”
“For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get us through the door.” He tapped the cross-section of the Tower labeled Pelphia.
Pelphia was sandwiched between two inhospitable ringdoms. Beneath Pelphia was New Babel, which they’d just escaped and had no intention of ever returning to. Above Pelphia was the Silk Reef, which had once been a great park shared by the Pells below and the Algezians above. Then a century ago, Pelphia and Algez had fallen into a cycle of hot and cold wars, and the internal entrances to the Silk Reef were sealed up by both ringdoms.
So, the only way into Pelphia now was through its skyports. Senlin had learned all of this from Lee's limited collection of aeronautic histories. “At first I felt as if we had escaped a prison. Now, I feel like we've been locked out of our house,” Senlin said, raking his hair in frustration.
“The Tower was built to keep our type out of it, Tom. We’re a couple of foxes circling a coop, trying to get at a hen,” she said. Senlin gave her an uncertain look, and she laughed. “I'm not suggesting your wife is a hen, Tom. It's just the farmer in me peeking through.”
“Well, I'm glad we haven't entirely beaten the farm out of you.” He rocked back in his chair and hung his hands behind his neck. “This morning I was daydreaming about my old cottage. I wonder if it's horribly overgrown. I imagine the shutters are hanging off, and the chimney is full of birds. Or maybe the town has sold it. Maybe they gave it to the new headmaster they hired to replace me.” The front legs of his chair came down with a concluding thump, and the dreaminess of his expression hardened.
“It’s strange to think of your old life carrying on without you,” Edith said.
“It is indeed,” he agreed, topping off their cups. “I worry that I wasted my one chance to get back to that life. I regret running after her so rashly and so early on. It was not one of my better plans.”
He needn't elaborate. They both recalled their disastrous attempt to enter Pelphia through a public skyport.
In retrospect, it was the day their life as pirates began.
Chapter Three
“Compared to how ably Adam and Voleta adapted to our new life, my own acclimation was painfully slow. If mankind ever attempts to colonize the islands of the stars, we should crew the ships with children and put the youngest at the wheel.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
After their escape from the Port of Goll, the crew had been almost delirious with optimism. They had slipped out from under the thumbs of Finn Goll, Rodion, and Billy Lee. They had reclaimed their liberty. They had escaped the Tower. And so anything seemed possible, even finding a single soul who'd been lost in the Tower for the better part of a year.
Senlin had a few clues to direct his search. He knew that Marya had been sold by a wifemonger to a nobleman from Pelphia named W. H. Pell. “Pell” was the surname of the ruling family of Pelphia, and so, presumably W. H. was a man of influence. He was also associated with some sort of club called the Coterie of Talents. Pelphia was notoriously difficult to get into. One had to be wealthy, gentry, or a trader in luxuries. Muddy tourists and common merchants were rebuffed without ceremony.
The matter of how to approach Pelphia was further complicated by the fact that Senlin was a wanted man. He'd stolen a painting from the Commissioner of the Baths, a pugnacious man named Emmanuel Pound, who collected taxes under the authority of the Pells. It was Pelphia’s black and gold banner that flew over Pound’s warship, the Ararat.
To prevent immediate arrest upon landing in Pelphia, Senlin adopted a pseudonym, Tom Mudd, and concocted a plan for getting past the port guards. He would play a wifemonger. Voleta would play his charge, his wife-for-sale.
In a move
that would later haunt him when they were famished and sick of eating squab, Senlin spent every last pence they had on a dress for Voleta. He bought it from a man who claimed he was a merchant, but looked every inch a pirate. Senlin tried not to think about the fate of the gown's previous owner.
The skirt was plump with petticoats, the neck was low slung, and the whole was colored a pale yellow, which made Voleta's lavender eyes all the more spectacular.
She absolutely loathed it.
But she was willing to play the part if it would help her Captain, whom she liked.
In an attempt to disguise the rough appearance of their ship, they draped Billy Lee's collection of bed linens all about the railing. Lee, a shameless philanderer, had preferred loud colors and bold patterns. After a little lashing and pinning, their drab craft was transformed into a piebald eyesore.
The North Port of Pelphia was both opulent and immaculately kept: the bollards were gold plated; the cranes were white-washed; the guard houses were shingled with pristine slate; and a half dozen palm trees stood in great pots, lining the way to the yawning tunnel that carried on to the city of the Pells.
Stationed at the end of each berth were eight-foot tall iron turrets, which Edith called “lead soldiers.” The lead soldiers looked like standing sarcophagi, and one could see a human face peering through the circular porthole in the bell-shaped head. Instead of arms, the lead soldiers raised a pair of twenty-pound guns.
Senlin began to have second thoughts the moment the smartly uniformed stevedores caught the tethers of his sheet-wrapped ship. A pistol wagged at the hip of each dockworker, and they moved with the practiced poise of an infantry. This was not a port; it was a fortress. If their little charade failed to impress, they'd be captured in a second. But it was too late to bolt now. They had to forge ahead with the gambit.
No gangplank was offered to them, and none of the port workers responded to Senlin's lighthearted hellos. He had begun to feel stranded on his own ship when he spied a man in a lieutenant's uniform emerging from a guardhouse.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 2
