Though he was a little surprised by their numbers, the sight of so many hods stoked his courage. Because where there were hods, there must also be an open path between the ringdoms. Which meant there was a way into Pelphia. Which meant there was hope.
Still, Senlin thought it wise not to presume they would be given a warm welcome. Despite their guide’s apparent inability with the language, Senlin did not entirely trust their privacy, and so when he spoke to Edith as they walked across the queer lawn he was purposefully oblique. “We are two lonesome travelers come to beg for our supper and some direction. We will accept whatever hospitality is offered; we will present our modest gift without condition; and we will forgo any discussion of our dependents until we are certain we aren’t bound for trouble.”
Edith gave a diplomatic smile to show she understood: they would not mention the crew.
They followed their guide past a pair of sentries and through a tunnel that was walled in gold tiles with a ceiling of hazy quartz, which let them see, though foggily, the figures passing overhead.
“I doubt the architect ever wore a skirt,” Edith said dryly.
The atrium inside the Golden Zoo was as big as a town square. Walkways of pale crystal ringed each of the floors above them. Elevators, pulled by steam engines on the roofs of the cars, transited the levels. Interspersed across the floor of the atrium and inside the cells he could see stood the remnants of numerous mechanical animals. Many had been stripped to their skeletal gears, rendering their original form unrecognizable. Even in their state of disassembly, they were wonderful.
Senlin had never seen anything so fantastic, though the glowing spectacle of gold and crystal was made strange by the trooping about of men and women in rags.
There were cots everywhere. They stood in ranks in the open court and in every cell. About half of the hods were busy with some domestic work: they cooked, and sewed, and braided rope. The other half of the population sat stooped in study, books open on their laps. They made feverish notations with nib and ink.
Now that he was looking for them, Senlin saw that there were books everywhere. They stood in stacks under beds and up against the walls of cages. He had never seen so many books outside of a college library, and it made him a little hopeful.
After their soggy introduction beside the well, Senlin had concluded that their guide suffered from a defect of birth or was perhaps the victim of some traumatic accident, and it was to this that his gibbering could be attributed. But Senlin now discovered that his guide’s infirmity was not unique. The babbling was endemic. When Senlin tested the name “Marat” with the hods they passed, he got only nonsense in reply. The hods who labored over books didn’t even pay him the courtesy of looking up when he spoke to them, and he couldn’t help feeling a little foolish, like a latecomer to an exam.
Their guide led them to an elevator. From inside, the car seemed as delicate as a champagne flute. The hod closed the accordion door and worked the ornate throttle. The engine above them chugged and shook condensation onto their shoulders. The car began to rise. Senlin had never ridden in an elevator before, and he found the sensation a little unsettling. Then he looked down, and his disquiet turned to nausea. The floor was made of a thin pane of quartz through which the ground was distinctly visible. Startled, Senlin instinctively reached out for something to hold and grasped Edith’s clockwork hand. She gave him a consternated look, as if he had called her by the wrong name, and he dropped her hand as speedily as he’d taken it up.
They debarked on the top floor of the zoo where long curtains blocked their view of every cell they passed. Their journey came to an end inside an open cell with thick stage curtains drawn over the adjacent rooms.
In addition to the ubiquitous stacks of books, the room held two small beds and a table set with chairs. The atmosphere was quite cozy, yet still insufficient to make them forget that they stood inside of a barred cell.
Edith gave Senlin a pointed look and set her hand upon the hilt of her sword. Her unloaded pistol had been lost in the well, but it hardly mattered. She wasn’t making a hollow threat; there was no bluster to her bearing. She would not let their babbling guide close the door to the cage no matter the result. Knowing what had happened the last time she’d been imprisoned, Senlin could hardly blame her.
The hod must have sensed her unease because he held up both hands like a man surrendering and said, “Marat, Marat.”
For a moment, Senlin thought the hod was announcing that he was Marat, and Senlin despaired at ever communicating their need to their babbling host. Then they heard an approaching squeak, which brought a smile to the hod’s face. The squeak played a phrase of three ascending notes that repeated again and again like a lovesick bird.
Then the source of the squeak came into view on the skywalk outside the cell. It was a man in a wheelchair. His head was shaved, his shirt was plain, and in this way, he resembled any other hod. His smile radiated surety and good humor. Though middle aged, his pale skin glowed with vitality, an impression that was not diminished by the presence of the wheelchair or the afghan that covered his legs. His face possessed those perfectly symmetrical features that are often reflected in art but seldom found in nature.
“Welcome,” he said warmly. “I believe you are looking for me. My name is Luc Marat.”
That brave impulse could be followed so quickly by cowardly regret came as a surprise to Adam. When he’d first called the monster back by drumming upon the hull of the wreck, he’d felt suffused with courage. But the moment that the beast reared about and began loping back to him, his heroic spirit evaporated, and he was left with a strong desire to run and hide.
He retreated to the breach in the wreck. His lantern swung before him as he slid back down the little dune into the upside down cabin. The skeletons that had seemed a macabre artifact before now seemed like sinister observers.
He cast about for something large and heavy to throw over the entrance.
Why had he not run into the woods?
There was nothing he could use as a barricade. There was nothing here but a dead man’s confetti.
A heavy thud reverberated through the timbers of the cabin. He climbed onto the lintel of the door that led to the deck and tried to wrench it open, but it had been crushed shut by the reversal of the ship and wouldn’t budge.
Why had he killed himself to save Iren, a woman whose death, only a few months earlier, he would have thought unremarkable and, given her violent profession, inevitable?
He smelled it before he saw it— a putrid, earthy stink. The black snout, pointed as a finger, appeared around the ragged edge of the breach. A tremor ran up Adam’s legs and out his arms. The glass shade of the lantern chattered against its collar.
The fright at seeing the thing so close gave him an unexpected moment of lucidity. He knew why he had called the beast away from Iren. The old amazon, gruff as she was, loved Voleta. And though he didn’t understand her affection, he had seen the force of it more than once. If he had to choose, he knew his sister would be safer with Iren than she’d ever be with him. He had to confront the uncomfortable fact that every older brother must one day face: his sister didn’t need him, not anymore.
It was a grim revelation to have just moments before death, but it brought with it a firm resolve. If he somehow managed to escape, he would not waste the rest of his life chasing after Voleta. He would change. He would chase something new.
The spider-eater was quite unimpressed by Adam’s epiphanies. It ducked its head and lumbered down into the cabin.
Chapter Seven
“When the gilded birds of the Zoo trilled their fantastic song, women swooned, fops moaned like doves, and old men mopped their rheumy eyes.
“This is the trouble with the man of the masses: show him the sublime, and he is reminded of himself.”
- Inaugurations of the Silk Gardens, Salo
It was hard not to be charmed by their charismatic host. He listened attentively to the account of thei
r stranding (which was largely true except for the glaring omission of a crew and the pursuant Commissioner), and he gasped as if on cue when Senlin related their ordeal with the swarming spiders and the deep well. Marat’s shapely brows were as expressive as a pantomime, and they rolled and stretched in sympathy with the details of Senlin’s tale. If he was at all suspicious of them or their intrusion upon his mission, he showed no sign of it. When Senlin presented his offering of stolen books, a somewhat awkward gesture considering the profusion of literature around them, Marat received the tribute with perfect grace, saying, “We are always in need of new material. My friends have an insatiable appetite for meditating upon the written word.”
Their original guide, who Marat called Koro, returned with sweetened barley tea and hardtack biscuits. After serving them, Koro pointed to their feet and then pulled at his sandals, until they got his meaning and gave him their soaked boots. Koro stuffed these with straw to help them dry and then set about the business of brushing them clean. It was the most hospitality Senlin had been paid in months, and he could not help but feel it was a promising sign. Perhaps at last they had found someone who would help them.
Yet, what softened his defenses, only seemed to harden Edith’s. She didn’t like any of this: not the living in cages, or the insensible babbling, or the conspicuous number of armed hods standing in doorways and stalking the halls. In her experience, a mission was a roadside lean-to where one could find water for their horse, a pit for their fire, and perhaps a little direction from the local hermit. This was no mission, and their host was no hermit.
She liked him least of all. He looked like the sort of man who was unaccustomed to being told “no.” The more he flashed his glamorous smile, the more she scowled at Luc Marat.
Though not even she could resist the offer of food.
While they tried their best not to gulp their tea and gobble their biscuits, nor to feel terribly guilty for eating and drinking while their crew waited with empty stomachs, Marat talked about his mission.
“We’ve been here nine years,” he said. “There were only a handful of us in the beginning. Koro was one of those brave few.”
The hod looked up from his work at the sound of his name. Marat spoke a few words of gibberish to him, and the hod laughed at the inscrutable joke. “I asked him if he missed the good old days when we first arrived. You should have seen the Zoo then. The spiders had moved in. You’ve never seen such cobwebs. It was like cutting through a mattress.” He shook his head, knitting his perfect brow. Koro moved on to another boot. The shushing of his brush accompanied Marat’s dulcet voice. “There’s always that point when you undertake something new, that moment when everything is tentative and fragile. In our case, that period lasted for years. You might not suspect it to look at us now, but we came very close to extinction.”
“There certainly are a lot of you,” Senlin said and ate another biscuit. He thought they were quite nice, though they undoubtedly benefited from the seasoning of hunger.
“There are. There are. And we still turn thousands away every month. The black trail is never empty.”
“The black trail?”
“That’s what we call the tunnels we were imprisoned in. The black trail snakes for miles and miles through the walls of the Tower. I’m sure the architects thought they were being clever by building such a gradual slope, but it feels endless when you’re on it. And bleak. I’ve seen old men with ruined lungs carrying open buckets of stinking pitch. I’ve seen a girl dragging a sack of gunpowder that exploded when a spark fell from her headlamp. I’ve seen men broken in half under blocks of stone. What a life— to live as a footman to a rock!”
Marat paused to speak to Koro, and whatever he said made the hod look terribly grave. “They die, Captain Mudd. They die in droves from exhaustion, injury, illness, thirst…” Speaking of these injustices soured their host’s mood. A moment before, he had been enjoying his tea. Now, he seemed embarrassed by even this humble luxury. He pushed the cup away.
Senlin thought of his friend, Tarrou, who had been ripped from his lounge chair beside the shining reservoir and thrown onto the black trail after a brief, bloody baptism. Perhaps Tarrou had succumbed to his wounds and was already dead. And perhaps death was preferable to the alternative Marat described.
“We haven’t the resources to free them all. We save the weakest, the most frail. The rest we encourage with the hope that they will one day be free.”
Though Senlin was trying his best to be agreeable, he didn’t believe this for an instant. The hods he’d seen marching around the perimeter and the workers in the zoo appeared generally vital and energetic. This was no field hospital.
“Free to get your tea, you mean?” Edith said, revealing her own doubts.
“Perhaps the concept of hospitality confuses you. These little rituals of service are how we show respect and admiration for one another and for our guests,” Marat said, bristling. Senlin thought he glimpsed in his flared expression a carefully concealed reserve of anger.
Senlin had been discouraged by Marat’s dire description of the black trail, but he wasn’t ready to give up on the idea yet. Pelphia was just underfoot, and he imagined that they could endure a miserable but brief march through the walls. It was still a viable plan, but only if Marat liked them well enough to show them the trail. The prospect of this seemed to shrivel the more Edith talked.
He changed the subject. “I’ve encountered a few novelties in my travels, but I must admit, a new language is something quite extraordinary. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard. I have to ask, who was the author of this curious warbling?”
Marat relaxed a bit at the diversion. “I don’t think anyone would claim to have authored it.”
“Are you saying the language arrived spontaneously?”
“It evolved over years,” Marat said. “Hods discovered they could speak more openly if slavers and constables didn’t know what they were saying. It began, I suspect, as a few coded phrases shared by friends, and grew from there. This ‘curious warbling,’ as you call it, has given us a reputation for raving, but you must admit: it is an elegant solution.”
“What do you call it?”
“Hoddish. The powers that be call it a blight upon the Tower. So much the better.”
“You’re a mystic,” Edith said, an accusatory note in her voice. Senlin tried to dissuade her from saying more by a subtle cinching of his eyelids that was entirely wasted on her. She was determined to speak and oblivious to his cues. “You think the Tower is to blame for all of your troubles and all the injustice in the world.”
This time, Marat’s smile was not chased off by her frankness, though it did turn a little, like a candle flame moved by a draft. “The Tower is a straw that draws blood from the Earth. And who sucks upon this straw? All those happy souls sitting in the clouds— the Sphinx and the like. I realize you are obligated to defend the Tower even though it took your arm. You are a friend of the Sphinx.”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend,” Edith said.
“No, he doesn’t have friends, does he? He has enemies and he has machines. Everyone he meets he turns into one or the other,” Marat said, rubbing the arms of his wheelchair. “I’m sure you like to think you’re living some sort of autonomous life, Edith Winters, a life of possibility and consideration. But we both know you are not in charge of that terrible machine hanging at your side. It is in charge of you.”
An expression swept over Edith’s face that Senlin had never seen before. He had seen anger, fear, even disgust cross the stage of her face. But this was an entirely new actor. This was the look of hate. It made him very nervous.
When she finally spoke, her voice was as dry and sharp as flint. “I know what I gave up when I accepted this arm,” she said, rapping the shoulder plate with a knuckle. Her arm gave a shallow gong. “I know I am indebted to a man who isn’t safe or sane, a man who preys upon the desperate. I will spend the rest of my life dreading the moment when I am called
to heel to him. But I wouldn’t be alive it weren’t for the Sphinx, if it weren’t for this machine. Believe me, I understand what I am, Luc Marat. What I don’t understand is why you think you have the right to judge me.”
“You’re not like the other Wakemen, are you? I can see you’re right on the verge, teetering between loyalty and revolt. Wonderful. That’s such an exciting place to be. Let me show you something,” Marat said with a delicate expression of arrogance that a less attractive face would’ve turned into a sneer. He spoke to Koro, who had finished with their boots. The hod smiled like a bulldog, then scuttled from the room.
“You’ve probably figured out by now that there were never any animals here. The Golden Zoo was a collection of the Sphinx’s windups. They once filled these cages.”
“But why put bolted-down machines in cages?”
“That’s a very good question, Captain. Perhaps it was because, even then, even among the aristocratic elite, there was a niggling distrust of the Sphinx’s engines.” Marat gave Edith’s arm a little further scrutiny. She crossed her arms to disrupt his staring, and he broke it off with a wistful smile. “We spent years dismantling and removing the monstrosities, though we spared one to remind us of the genius and lunacy we face.”
The curtain that blocked the adjoining cell parted, revealing Koro at work on a pulley line. What lay behind the curtain was perhaps the most elaborate machine Senlin had ever seen.
It was an aviary, a gold ladder filled with dozens of clockwork birds. They perched in tiers, the largest birds on the bottom rung, the smallest on the top. Their precious metal shells were engraved with feathers and crests. Inlays of opal decorated their beaks and filled their eyes. A bank of cogs and rods backed the menagerie. Koro laid his hands to the crank handle at the base of the machine and awaited his master’s signal.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 15
