Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  They hauled themselves ashore, too exhausted to appreciate the absence of spiders and spider-eaters. At that moment, Senlin would’ve been happy to roll around on a bed of broken glass: anything so long as it was dry.

  Both felt pressed beyond exhaustion. They hadn’t slept in days. They had been beaten, starved, and now nearly drowned. It was too much. Their panting slowed. The sand felt as soft as goose down. Lying at arm’s length from one another, they closed their eyes just for a moment, just to catch their breath, and without meaning to, they fell quite asleep.

  At a distance the shipwrecks reminded Iren of presents waiting to be unwrapped. Inspired by visions of full pantries, kegs of rum, and powder to load their guns, she enjoyed a little burst of energy while dragging Adam’s cobbled sled across the beach.

  But it didn’t take long to realize they were not the first to unwrap these gifts. The silk of every wreck was slit open like a tent. Because many of the vessels lay on their decks or sides, crude entries had been chopped in the hulls. Adam lit lanterns for them, and they began to search the wrecked, crazily turned cabins for salvage and supplies.

  Amid the detritus of shattered lockers and kitchen cupboards, they found no sign of food, liquor, or black powder. They did find rope, lumber, a tank of hydrogen, and most miraculously an undamaged umbilical duct tied up neatly in one corner of an engine room. These much needed materials gave them hope they would be able to repair their ship, but it did not make them feel any better about breakfast, which seemed again to retreat from them like a desert mirage.

  They scoured the places that months of piracy had taught them not to overlook, and discovered under the stairs of one cargo hold a chest that had been boarded up inside the hollow. They cracked the feeble lock and found six ornate pistols lying on a bed of straw. They were the sort of weapons more suited to formal duels than battles, with butts of carved horn and pearl-pointed ramrods, but they appeared quite functional. Included in the chest were two horns of powder, bundles of wadding, and cases of shot. It was a thrilling discovery, but the only one of its kind.

  After another hour’s work, they were at the end of their list of supplies, and the sled was full. They had what they needed to repair the Cloud.

  But uncovering the pistols had whetted Adam’s appetite for treasure. He still had a mind to return to Senlin’s good graces, and what surer way was there to recover a man’s faith than with treasure? He had his eye on a particular round-bottomed schooner that lay mostly submerged in the sand. He hoped that its state of interment would’ve discouraged foragers. Iren was keen to get back to the Stone Cloud. Lingering between open beach and a strand of trees made her nervous. But she had just begun to load the pretty guns, and the activity was so pleasant, she wanted to finish. She agreed to give Adam five minutes (not one minute more) to search this one final wreck.

  The wrapped ship lay almost perfectly upside down. He entered through a breach in the side of the forecastle. The craft had sunk so deep, a little dune had poured into the great cabin below. In another decade or two, the beach would probably fill the ship.

  Inside, he raised his lantern against the darkness and felt a swerving sense of disorientation. All of the furniture in the room was above him, clinging to the ceiling that had once been the floor. A four-post bed, a chest of drawers, two bookshelves and a nightstand stood perfectly squared overhead. It was not unusual for airmen to fix their furniture to the deck, especially in the captain’s quarters where the furnishings had some value, but these pieces had been so ruthlessly bolted that even a violent tumble and an era of rotting hadn’t uprooted them.

  The room beneath the furniture was another matter. Broken crockery, navigational instruments, and linens lay in a great haystack. The whole space was sprayed with playing cards, cutlery, papers, books and maps that had spilled out of the open chart house at the rear of the room. Amid this domestic rubble, skeletons were strewn in undignified poses: head between legs, or tailbone in the air, or nosed into a corner like a naughty child.

  Adam forced himself to look past the ghastliness. He hadn’t any time to waste.

  Searching the other wrecks had taught him he’d find nothing of value in the open, so he began tapping on the walls and feeling for misplaced seams in the paneling. After a little hunting, he found what he was looking for: a secret stow behind the shelf of a suspended bookcase. The back plate opened when he pressed it. Inside he found what he took to be the Captain’s private cache. And what a pitiful Captain he must’ve been. Two thin gold chains with painted tin charms, eight shekels, and a few coppers made up the entirety of the Captain’s fortune. Adam swept all into his palm and pocketed the woeful prize.

  He was about to slam the panel back in disgust when he spied a leather bound book discretely stuffed to one side of the compartment. When he removed the book, something fell out of its spine. He caught it in the air and turned it toward the sallow lantern light. It was a bar of gold: six inches long, narrow as a thumb and no thicker than a coin. But it was pure gold, heavy and lustering.

  Adam opened the book and began reading where the ribbon marker lay. The account was written in an educated hand. The final entry read:

  I have done it. I have scrabbled into heaven. I have broken through the Collar, and touched some of her riches. But the sparking men pursued us, and we had to flee. I must console myself with this taste of my future fortune. I am resolved to return with a fleet. I have seen things I can hardly believe: posts of silver and roads of gold. All the Tower under the Collar now seems little better than a poorhouse.

  The words brought to mind the old airman from the Ugly Rug and his apocryphal description of the fortune that lay beyond the Collar of Heaven: “Trees of silver and rivers of gold. All you have to do is run up, stick our your arm, and pull treasure in by the handful.” Here in his hand was some proof of that impossible promise.

  Iren’s muffled voice interrupted his excitement.

  Assuming his five minutes were up, he stuffed the gold file back into the book’s spine and secured the volume in his waistband under his shirt. He’d just begun to scale the slope of sand at the entry when the crack of a pistol froze him in his tracks. A second shot quickly followed, and then a third, each progressively further away.

  Hurrying up the unstable slope, he found the sled abandoned. A confusion of tracks pitted the sand. One of the ceremonial pistols lay on the ground. He picked it up, and a wisp of acrid smoke twisted from the barrel.

  The angle of the wreck obscured his line of sight of the Stone Cloud. He rounded the silk-wrapped aft of the ship just in time to hear a fourth pistol report. A split second later, the shot thudded into the wood by his head. Someone was shooting at him.

  Then he saw the beast, charging away. From the back, it looked like a stretched out bear striped with swaths of gray. It nearly galloped. Iren ran ahead of the beast, dodging left and right. Her feints did not seem to confuse the animal in the least. It charged at her headlong, narrowing the gap. She threw a pistol at it, the very one that she’d blindly fired over her shoulder and nearly struck Adam with. The beast wagged its long neck and snorted when the butt of the gun bounced off its head.

  She was running for the refuge of the ship.

  Adam knew at once she would never reach it in time.

  Chapter Six

  “Without military experience to shape and temper them, young men turn into idlers, my lord; they turn into bards. The Gardens are full of them, lounging on elbows with their shirts open, spewing poetry at plain-faced girls. I shudder at the waste of it. We will owe this generation a war.”

  - Inaugurations of the Silk Gardens, Salo

  Senlin woke feeling like the teabag at the bottom of an empty pot: wet, heavy, and used up.

  The forest shone on him lying on his back in the sand. He had the strange inclination to gather up a pile of the glowing branches to build an absurd campfire, one that glowed blue rather than orange and cooled rather than warmed. He and Edith could sit about it and sing so
ngs and roast ice cubes.

  He tried shifting his arms, but they seemed reluctant, and he didn’t see why he should insist. He recalled his near-drowning with the same dreamy apathy. He still tasted the mineral-rich water. At least he knew it was potable now.

  He closed his eyes for a moment to gather his wits and when he opened them again, a pale face was hovering very close to his own.

  It took Senlin a long moment to realize that this pasty face belonged to no one he knew, and that he, a stranger to these woods, should be alarmed by this fact.

  The face retracted from view, and Senlin sat up quick enough to make his head swim. He found Edith sprawled at his side, wet hair curtained about her sleeping face. He shook her shoulder until her eyes opened and she too popped up, coughing to clear her lungs.

  The peering face belonged to a small bald man with a dramatic underbite that had the unfortunate effect of making him appear simpleminded. He looked ready to dart off at the least provocation. Senlin took him for a hod, though he didn’t wear the iron collar or carry the load that generally distinguished them. He wore a white sarong and carried a flat basket piled with perilous looking mushrooms on one arm.

  “Hello,” Senlin said. He pulled at his soggy lapels, releasing streams of water.

  The hod said something slurred and strange in return. It reminded Senlin of the dialect unique to inebriated men. He understood not a word of it.

  “I’m sorry?” Senlin said.

  The hod repeated the drunken sentence exactly as he had before, and still it made no sense.

  “Maybe he’s been in the woods too long,” Edith said. She clapped the water from her ears. The hod maintained the anxious expression he’d come with, and glanced all about even as he repeated for a third time the same babbling mess.

  Undaunted, Senlin extended his hand. “I am Captain Tom Mudd. I am looking for a man named Marat.”

  At soon as the word “Marat” was spoken, the whole aspect of the hod changed. A moment before, he’d seem ready to skitter off, and now he seemed quite self-possessed. He bowed at the waist. When he came up, his expression was almost pious. He said, “Marat, Marat, Marat,” and with a series of sweeping gestures, urged them to follow him down a narrow path into the forest.

  “Oh, I don’t like him,” Edith said. “He’s exactly the sort of lunatic you warn children about following into the woods. Or don’t you have those stories where you come from?”

  “We have them. But for us it was grottos. Never trust a man who sleeps in a grotto.”

  “What’s a grotto?”

  “It’s a sea cave. They’re quite interesting, actually. You can find all sorts of urchins and crabs, and octopuses in them,” Senlin said in an agreeable tone, which the hod smiled at gamely, though he didn’t seem to understand a word. “Look at him though; he’s harmless. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that he knows Marat.”

  “Marat!” the hod said, and swept his arm at the glowing forest.

  “He does like that name,” Edith said.

  “If he makes any trouble, you can bop him on the head.” Senlin collected his coat and sack of books. “Let’s see where this goes.”

  “You’re both mad.” Edith exercised her engine arm. She frowned at the water that drained from it. “Are you sure you’ve never slept in a grotto, Tom?”

  “I may have dozed off once or twice,” Senlin said, smiling.

  Unobserved in the treetops over the little clearing, Voleta watched the trio move into the forest. The fat-cheeked squirrel sat on her shoulder, methodically preening her tail.

  Voleta said, “Look at them, Squit. They’re going with him. It’s like no one ever told them about following strangers into the grass. And they call me reckless.”

  When the beast first emerged from the forest at a gallop, Iren had been loading the last of the six pistols.

  It had been such a happy and absorbing little chore. These arms were nothing like the thick-barreled, graceless pieces she’d used all her life. These guns were like a lady’s fingernails: painted, manicured, and fine. After she prepared each one, she stuck it in her chain belt where it hung like jewelry. For a moment she forgot her hunger and weariness. She felt like strutting around. For the first time in memory, she wished for a mirror.

  Then the animal appeared and the guns were just guns again.

  It looked like a narrow bear with the stump of an elephant’s trunk and shaggy long legs. She guessed it was a spider-eater, which the Captain had told them to expect, though she had been picturing something smaller. Captain said they were like big anteaters, which didn’t help her imagination at all since she’d never seen one of those, either. She had reasoned that since ants were so small, an anteater would be no larger than a hamster. A spider-eater, her logic continued, would therefore be about the size of a guinea pig.

  The behemoth that bolted at her now was very disappointing. She had a pistol in either hand and four more stuffed in her chains, and still felt underprepared for this introduction to the species.

  The beast was fifty paces out when she fired her first shot, which thumped in the sand well short of the mark. The crack of her pistol seemed to only invigorate the beast. It gave a terrible cry and tossed its head in an ecstasy of rage.

  She should not have showed it her back. She knew it even as she did it, knew it even as she began to run. If she had stood her ground, dropped to one knee, and worked through her battery of pistols, she would have almost certainly felled the thing. Instead, she’d let herself be startled into fleeing. She’d allowed herself to become its prey.

  Taking pot shots over her shoulder, she ran toward the Stone Cloud, dropping the guns as she spent them. One of her shots, she was sure, had struck the spider-eater in the chest, but the creature only jerked a little, then thundered on. It was more sure-footed on the sand than she, and its legs were fresher. Captain had told them that the beasts would probably have claws, which hadn’t seem so awful while they were as big as a guinea pig but was now considerably more troubling. She had no interest in wrestling the thing. She fired her last shot, but her arm shook and the ball flew wide.

  She ran in a serpentine fashion, hoping to juke the beast off her tail, but it wasn’t fooled. She could smell it now; it smelled like foul meat and turned earth. She felt the familiar frisson of adrenalin, but with it came the unfamiliar feeling of grief. It seemed unfair that this would be her final test. Her usual courage competed with a desire to not be there, to not be hurtling toward this lonely end. She would, if she could, try the whole thing again.

  The skulking Stone Cloud was only twenty strides away, but it might as well have been over the horizon. She could hear the beast’s wheezing. She must turn around. She must stand her ground. There was no reason to refuse the confrontation. There was no benefit to being dragged down from behind. And yet, she could not make herself stop.

  Her confusion was interrupted by a sharp crack that rang against the bowl of the cavern ceiling. The crack sounded again and again in quick succession, and she sensed the beast was no longer closing on her. The dangling rope ladder to the hovering, listing ship was nearly in her hands. She lunged for it, caught it, and dragged herself up.

  Safely on deck, she flew to what remained of the ship’s bow. The spider-eater had turned around and was retreating from the Cloud with the same speed that it had come. It ran toward Adam who stood hammering the hull of his lucky wreck with the butt of a pistol.

  He had called the terror back to himself by beating the gavel of an empty gun.

  It was a miserable march. Their small guide seemed determined to take them down the most cramped and overgrown trails. The sacks of books they carried, which had been spared their dunking, seemed to grow heavier by the minute. The trees nipped at them. Grit from breaking branches stuck to their wet clothes, turning their cuffs and collars into sandpaper that sawed them raw. Still, they were happy to have an escort, even a simple one. Anything was preferable to bickering over a flawed map.

 
Occasionally, their guide would discern something in the character of the woods that disturbed him, and he would crouch low, gesturing for them to duck alongside him. Then, before long, a foul stench would waft in, and something large would crunch through the none-too-distant underbrush. They would wait until the commotion passed, and then wait a few moments more to make certain the spider-eater was well and truly gone.

  An hour after their trudge began, the forest abruptly stopped, and they found themselves at the edge of a grand clearing nearly as vast as the beach they’d landed on. The ground here was carpeted in a spongy moss that glowed like a gaslight.

  In the center of the clearing, rising to the very limit of the ringdom, was the Golden Zoo. The vision stopped Senlin and Edith in their tracks, and their guide had to come back and wait for them to digest their amazement.

  The Golden Zoo resembled a birdcage, but to say so was inadequate to the point of being misleading. It was roughly bell-shaped, and round in footprint, and it cast an elegant silhouette, but the resemblance ended there. The Golden Zoo was a lustrous fortress, a gilded citadel whose bars were as numerous and varied as the strings of a harp. The simplicity of the Zoo’s broad shape was not reflected in the intricacies of its interior, which included several floors and numerous cells, some glowing with lamp light, some shrouded by curtain, and many churning with the activity of the people inside. Indeed, the effect reminded Senlin of an industrious beehive.

  The sheer number of hods was startling. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. And they were not idle. They emerged from the forest carrying baskets of wood, great kettles of water, and laundry draped over poles. Sentries stood at the gates of the Zoo, armed with capable-looking rifles. The hods were dressed in an assortment of dishwater sarongs and shabby tabards, none of which were pretty, but all of which seemed practical and warm. The camp was militant in its orderliness, a quality Senlin had not anticipated when Bhata referred to it as a mission.