She soothed the mechanical joint of her elbow as if it pained her, as if it could pain her, and only stopped when she caught Senlin looking. “Do we have any choices, or are we just picking our spot on the ground?”
Senlin had his answer ready. “We make for the Silk Gardens. We still have our peace offering. It’s time to find out whether Luc Marat is willing to extend his charity for the hods to a few wayward souls.”
“I’m not sure I can put us on the Reef. All the reliable charts were in the charthouse. We’ll have to fly by feel.” She looked to Adam who looked
Senlin mistook her flat tone of voice for fortitude, and so unintentionally goaded her on the sensitive subject of her destroyed room. “The charts weren’t half the resource you are, Mister Winters.”
She gritted her teeth. “We’re out of ballast. Once this scrap is gone, we’ll be pulling up boards.”
“If it comes to that, start with my cabin,” Senlin said with a little too much munificence. “I’m going to see if the good doctor’s library has anything useful to say about the Silk Gardens.”
He was feeling encouraged, and so was blind to Edith’s frustration as she began pulling apart the boards of her bedroom wall.
Edith was not at all enthusiastic about visiting the Silk Reef, which she refused to call a “garden.” She had spent enough time with experienced airmen to know the Reef was an inhospitable, uninhabited wasteland. Superficially, it was a demilitarize zone between unfriendly ringdoms, but Edith considered its true purpose to be as a cap to foot-traffic, because no tourist, no matter how intrepid, could pass through the Reef. The Reef kept the riffraff out of the upper ringdoms.
And everyone knew it was infested with spiders.
The Silk Garden lay squeezed between the rival ringdoms of Pelphia and Algez and had served as the trophy and theater of their war-making for centuries. As their guns grew more titanic and the two armies swelled their ranks, the east portal of the Reef had to be expanded by pick and chisel to accommodate the growth. Eventually, the tunnel was wide enough for an airship to pass through it. And that was the moment when the old feud turned into a mutual suicide. The two enemies stuffed their armadas inside the Reef’s little pocket of sky and soon discovered that sacks of hydrogen and great volumes of gunpowder, when tamped inside the Tower, make a bloody rain.
Then, a hundred years ago, Pelphia and Algez signed an armistice, which included transforming the sixth ringdom into a shared park, symbolizing a final end to generations of animosity. The historic peace lasted all of five years, but it effectively shifted the war to the open sky since neither side wished to destroy the park they’d built together but considered their own. So the neglected gardens eventually became the overgrown and ungoverned Reef. A place whispered of and avoided; a port of last resort for the haggard and the hopeless.
Reading had always been a reliable retreat for Senlin. He was blessed with a constitution that allowed him to read on trains and in carriages. He had spent many evenings reading essays in the Blue Tattoo while sailors and fishwives sang in perfect cacophony to Marya’s piano. Once, he had missed the entire passage of a hurricane because he’d been so absorbed by a typographer’s history of the tittle. He only realized a storm had passed when he rose the next morning to discover his fence, hedge, and flowers had been shaved from the hill face as if by a straightedge.
But for the first time in his life, he felt thwarted by the books before him. He wondered if he wasn’t just distracted by his devastated cabin. His sloping bed had lost two of its posts. There was nothing left of his tin chandelier but a few lengths of chain, and Captain Lee’s collection of flamboyant robes had been tossed into every corner where they lay turning in the unmitigated wind like restless cats.
No, these distractions weren’t the real source of his unease. If he was honest with himself, he was having difficulty overcoming his revulsion at reading more of the same twaddle that had misled him in the past.
Still, it had to be done.
He sorted through the books, marshaling them into stacks according to their potential. The fiction and volumes of verse were, for all their efforts at profundity, useless to him. Nearly as impractical were the natural philosophies, which included some very fine illustrations. The gold-leafed histories, which after his recent audience with Madam Bhata seemed conspicuously preoccupied with wealthy men and their wars, might contain a chestnut. Outside the usual selection of malignant guides, there were only two books in the doctor’s collection which were entirely devoted to the subject of the Silk Gardens.
The first volume, Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, was a book of manners. The anonymous author had the tedious habit of addressing his audience as “gentle reader,” and his advice often lapsed into metaphysical non-sequiturs, which were further disrupted by amateur drawings of the different features of the Gardens. Senlin made it through the first chapter before concluding the book was an intellectual spittoon overflowing with dribble.
The other promising title, Inaugurations of the Silk Gardens, was authored by a “royal envoy” named Niccolo Salo. Salo had attended the grand opening of the Silk Gardens during the brief truce between Pelphia and Algez. Much of the record was dominated by Salo’s fawning over the Duke, his original audience, in a thinly veiled bid for a knighthood.
Senlin began reading the fourteen-page dedication to the Duke of Pelphia with a sigh that quickly deepened into a groan.
An hour later, Voleta found the Captain beating an open book upon his table. He was so earnest in his punishment of the dead volume that he did not notice Voleta had entered his cabin until she began to cheer him on.
“That’s it, Captain! Teach it some manners!”
Senlin halted mid-thump.
His first impulse was to justify his rough handling of the book, which he’d gone to with the earnest hope that it would give him clear and succinct direction. He wanted irrefutable fact. He wanted an “X” upon a map. He wanted to know where the Golden Zoo was inside the perilous ringdom. Instead, he had gotten a lot of snobbery, some xenophobic philosophy, and endless political “intrigue” that was not at all intriguing.
Even so, what good did it do to abuse a book?
“I’m sorry you saw that, Voleta. That is not how I aspire to conduct myself,” he said, with a show of great calm. “What do you need?”
“All the food is gone,” she said.
His brief beatific smile broke into a frown.
“There’s a hole in the galley about this big.” She made a hoop with her arms. The galley lay under the quarterdeck that the harpoon gun had blown out.
“Nothing’s left?” he asked.
“There’s some mustard.”
“Mustard?”
“About two spoons worth. And a jar of pickled beet juice, but no beets.”
“Well,” he said, steeling himself against this pitiful news. “Put out the nets. We’ll have to catch our dinner.” The bird nets were unlikely to catch much so high from the ground and so late in the afternoon, but what choice did they have but to hope for the best?
“Is this her?” Voleta said, picking up the small painted board that lay on the table among the leather-bound stacks. “Is this your wife?”
He had forgotten that he’d brought out Marya’s portrait to keep him company while he read. Usually, he made a point of keeping it tucked out of sight. “It is.”
Voleta studied it closely, glancing up at her Captain and then back at the portrait as she tried to marry the two of them in her mind. Senlin felt terribly self-conscious, recalling again his old insecurity at having such a young and pretty wife. “Is it a good likeness?”
“It is.”
“She’s very handsome.”
“Yes.”
Voleta grimaced. “But it’s terribly filthy.”
“I’d hardly call it filth. It’s a tasteful nude. You have to understand, she was more than a little desperate when she met the painter, who I really don’t think meant to be exploit
ive. I think he saw her purely as a subject, and not…”
“No, no, I meant it’s got a film all over it. It’s dirty.”
“Oh. Yes. The paint was a little spoilt by the White Chrom and the snow.”
“You should clean it.”
“I can’t just run it under water and put a brush to it. It would scrub off the picture.”
“And it’s very dear to you.”
“It is.” He held out his hand with a stoic smile, and she gave him back his board. “Was there something else, Voleta?”
Now it was her turn to look a little abashed. “Iren says the Silk Reef is full of spiders and bears and that nobody ever goes there.”
“And you’re nervous,” he concluded.
“No! I’ve never seen a bear before,” she said, her excitement making her radiant. “I want to know if we’re going to see bears.”
Senlin laughed, partly at himself, partly at her insatiable appetite for adventure. Only a few hours earlier, they were crossing swords with a raiding party, and already she was thinking of bears. “I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t believe there are any bears in the Silk Gardens. There are spiders, though, cultivated for the silk they produce, and there are spider-eaters—”
“What’s a spider-eater?” Voleta asked, her disappointment about the bears softened by her curiosity in this new creature.
“If this is to be believed,” Senlin said, hiking up the tome he’d recently spanked upon the table, “they’re similar to anteaters. Spider-eaters were bred to graze on the spiders, so they wouldn’t run rampant through the park. But don’t get any ideas, Voleta. You’re going to stay on the ship while I pay Luc Marat a visit.”
“Of course!” Voleta leaned forward on the table and gave him her most sober expression. “That’s why I’m asking you to describe it: because I won’t see it for myself. Only, it’s called a garden. I haven’t seen a garden in…” She trailed off, counting the many long months she’d spent penned up in her old dressing room. Nothing green grew in New Babel. Sometimes men would, at great expense, import roses or some other blossom to bait the girls with. She’d received more than a few bouquets in her time, some quite excessive, sent by wealthy gentlemen who wished to buy her away from Rodion. She had grown to enjoy watching the flowers die because she knew the gentleman’s hope wilted right along with them.
“Are there trees?” she asked, finding her voice again.
“There are many trees. A whole forest worth.”
“Please tell me about them.”
Senlin could not help but be infected by her enthusiasm. “Only one variety grows there: the porcelmore. They’re white as bone, brittle as a teacup, and they haven’t any leaves. They’re a kind of cave tree. Isn’t that interesting? I hadn’t known there was such a thing.” He sorted through the books a moment. “I found a drawing of one. It’s not very good, but it—” He fumbled the copy of Folkways and the book spilled open on the table. When he picked it up, a folded sheet of paper fell out and drifted to the floor.
Voleta retrieved it and unfolded it while Senlin watched. “Looks like you had the right idea to begin with, Captain. Sometimes you have to beat it out of them,” she said, looking up from the page with a smirk. “It’s a map.”
“Don’t be silly, Voleta. Let me see,” he said, sounding not at all convinced.
But it only took a glance to confirm that she was right. There was a compass rose and a legend in the page’s corner; there were snaking paths and small bodies of water filled with delicate little waves. At the center of all the trails was an icon that resembled a bird’s cage. It was minutely labeled, “The Golden Zoo.”
In his trembling hands, he held a map that might lead him to his wife.
Chapter Two
“Civilization first came into being when two of our ancestors knocked together at the mouth of a cave, and one brute or the other uttered the immortal phrase: ‘No, no, I insist— after you.’”
- Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
Port lights appeared upon the Tower’s shaded face like the shining eyes of a swamp. Hundreds of yellow, white, green lamps, some twinkling, some stark, hinted at the beastly forces secluded in the dark. The port lights seemed to watch the Cloud, seemed to calculate whether it was worth the effort to rise from the gloom and snatch the wounded sparrow from the air.
Alone on the quarterdeck, Edith gazed at the monstrous mire of stone and wealth and felt an apology was due. First the Tower had taken the last of her youthful exuberance, then her arm, then her freedom, and now it had circled around to rob her of her ship. No matter how much she gave it, the Tower’s appetite for misery seemed inexhaustible.
She could hear Tom and Voleta in the cabin below talking about the Reef. They sounded excited, giddy, the poor fools. The consensus regarding the Reef was uniform and damning. Pirates shunned it, and that was proof enough for her that only trouble resided there.
But what choice did they have? And what good did it do for her to cast her shadows of doubt over the Captain and the girl’s glimmer of hope? They would see for themselves soon enough.
She had her hands full in the meantime trying to recall from memory the currents that would be active this time of year at this time of day. Wings of orange sunlight broke about the eclipsing spire. She watched a great school of starlings break around the Tower’s edge and turn into sparkling coal dust amid the shadow. She tried to follow them to see what current they clung to, but the murk was too deep and she lost their trail.
Spanner’s Zephyr was too high, she knew that much at least, and the Bitter Chappie and the West Monte Ponds descended too sharply to be any good to them. The Northern Steady was a reliable current, but it broke up in the chill of the Tower’s umbra, which was unlucky, because it would’ve been perfect. She believed she had put them in Chaucer’s Crook, which was a reedy little puff of air that wound about the Three Brothers thermals, and snaked about the Tower just at the cusp of the sixth ringdom. At least, it usually did, when the Brothers didn’t squeeze the wind to death.
The truth was, she was only half-sure she had found Chaucer’s Crook, but half sure was as good as she could do. She could recommend that they carve another cabin off and extend their orbit, but that would carry them around to the setting sun where their shadow would make them an obvious target, and there was no guarantee they’d survive long enough to circle around again. If her course was wrong or if the ship fell from the Crook, the guns of Pelphia would soon inform her of the error.
Really, there was nothing to do but wait for the ship to turn.
Which unfortunately left her with a moment to think, something she’d been trying to avoid for days— really, ever since she’d learned that Tom was seeing things. That discovery had left her feeling like the last adult about the ship. Voleta and Adam were hardly more than children, Iren was, well, Iren, and Tom was hiding things like a scolded child.
Though she couldn’t really claim the high ground where secrets were concerned.
No, the real trouble was that none of the others understood the danger they were all in, the danger she put them in. None of them knew, not really, what the Tower was about, and who ran it, and what he was willing to do to get his way. In this knowledge, she was alone, and it weighed upon her, it made her envious of their ignorance.
She felt a sudden thrill of relief when the bow swung to point at a hole in the facade, a deeper shadow amid the shadows. She had found the Crook after all. She called to the others, so they could witness their approach of this, their last haven and hope, black as it was.
They crowded onto the main deck, and leaned out upon the rigging as far as their courage would allow.
Soon, the mouth of the port swelled before them. The once grand entrance of the Silk Gardens was now a ruin, though not the sort brought about by the slow erosion of wind and rain. No, the port had been aged by the abrasions of war. The scorched marble ribs of the archway were cracked and studded with cannonballs. Rust t
railed from these old wounds like dried blood. Of the six pillars that once stood in file about the entrance, only one remained and it resembled a gnawed bone.
The Stone Cloud cruised under the soaring, ragged arch into the darkness.
This was not a thing Senlin had ever expected to do. It felt unnatural— like riding a horse into a house. Yet, here he was: flying an airship into the Tower of Babel.
It was a binding gloom, and the quiet seemed to gag them. Senlin had to clear his throat before he could raise his voice sufficiently to deliver the order to light the lamps. He had known the ringdom was deserted— the Silk Gardens had been abandoned for decades— and still he was unsettled to find such a dead cavity inside the vital Tower.
The Stone Cloud hovered over the sandy floor of the tunnel as narrowly as a dragonfly skims the water. On either side of the ship, their lamps drew long shadows from the legs of immense statues, spaced like columns in a colonnade.
Salo had exhausted several pages of his Inaugurations describing this hall of monuments and cataloging the noblemen embodied herein. The treaty between Pelphia and Algez stipulated that both ringdoms be represented equally in all decorative embellishments, and yet Salo boasted that he had taken great pains to measure the height of the Duke’s effigy and that of his terrible rival, the Marquee of Algez. Salo was pleased to report that the Duke’s tribute was subtly but undeniably taller.
All Senlin and his crew could see of the colossal lords were their knees, shins, and feet. The remainder was hidden by the ship’s envelope, which fairly filled the airway. What Salo called a “fitting tribute to our aristocracy” seemed to Senlin an architectural bungle. The monuments were too large to be observed by passing ships, and from the knees down, all those dukes and marquees were indistinguishable and only as noble as their toes.
A pale blue light shone ahead of them at the tunnel’s end.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 11
