Voleta rarely looked away from a spectacle, but she did now.
When it was over, the hods rolled the strip of moss back over the dead man, already half submerged in the soft loam underneath. They took turns pacing over the uneven spot until it was level with the rest of the radiant lawn.
Chapter Nine
“After the initial shock receded, I quickly forgot Edith’s arm was at all unnatural. Much as spectacles flatter an intelligent face, the powerful engine compliments her quite well. It is difficult to fathom that such an essential and vital part of her could one day run down like a pocket watch.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
The ship’s umbilical lay across the Stone Cloud’s deck like an overgrown tubeworm. Adam sat dissecting one end of the salvaged duct, cutting through layers of silk, cotton insulation, and wire. The collar was too large for the mouth of the chimney and had to be cinched in. It was fiddly work, and he hadn’t the right tools for it, but he felt no urge to complain. The work made him feel capable, and it distracted him from his hunger and his worry.
The tang of smoke from the burning derelict was still detectable in the air. The lack of wind and the gaps between shipwrecks had kept the fire from spreading, and once the hull gave way, the beach spilled in and smothered the blaze. They could only hope that the fire hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention. At least they had some fresh guns if it did.
“There,” Adam said. “That should do it. Can you help me get this fitted onto the stack?”
Iren helped lift the cumbersome, delicate duct over the furnace. Adam’s modified collar fit well, and she held it in place as he bolted it down. The work required them to stand in a tangle of arms and elbows which, even a day earlier, would’ve made Iren gruff and Adam nervous. But since their encounter with the spider-eater, the tenor of their interactions had improved. It seemed to Adam that they had become friends.
He took advantage of their newfound camaraderie to satisfy a point of curiosity. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful because I really do appreciate you always keeping an eye out for her, but I can’t help wondering, why do you like Voleta so much?”
The amazon grunted, and for a moment, Adam thought that was all he would get out of her. But then she said, “I saw her on stage at the Steampipe. I was there with Goll. I didn’t like going there, seeing those poor girls. It made me feel guilty.” Iren paused so Adam could shift to the other side of the chimney to continue turning bolts around the collar. She had her arms hooped over him when she resumed. “When I saw her up there, up on her bar, she looked different. Most of the girls looked drunk or like they had a mask on. Not her.”
“Move your arm a little,” Adam said, and she did, making room for his wrench. “How did she look?”
“Brave. She looked me right in the eye. She wasn’t scared. She looked at me as if she knew me. Goll’s children looked at me that way, like I was somebody they knew, somebody they liked. It felt good.”
“All right. Let’s see if this holds,” Adam said, and they stepped back together. “It’s not falling off. I guess that’s a good sign.”
Adam rubbed the oil from his hands with the attentiveness of one who is stalling for time. He had to say something in response to Iren’s confession, but he didn’t possess the Captain’s vocabulary or Mister Winters’ authority. He was afraid that one wrong word would snuff the little candle of their friendship.
At last he said, “You’re a lot like her, you know. People misjudge her all the time because of how she looks and acts— a pretty, silly girl. But she’s smart and fearless, and she can be very kind. I misjudged you, too. I’m sorry I did.”
The heavy folds of Iren’s eyelids were so narrow he couldn’t see her eyes to read them. Her breath whistled dryly from her battered nose. He was beginning to suspect that he had indeed snuffed the candle when she said, “Are you calling me pretty?”
Adam snickered. “I wouldn’t dare,” he said and ducked when she swatted at him.
*
Muffled voices reverberated through the atrium outside; the crystal elevators chugged between floors. Though their block of cells was quiet, the rest of the Golden Zoo thrummed with the daily goings on of life.
Senlin marveled at how adept the human race was at injecting a sense of routine into peculiar environments; it seemed a certainty that once people were added, the mundane was sure to follow. He could sense the harmony of the place. Their host seemed touched with megalomania, but he had at least provided a home for these few and fortunate hods.
Edith stood in the open doorway of the cage. Something either in her posture or the dazzle of the gold bars that framed her reminded him of the girl in Ogier’s painting. Edith looked similarly serene, and like the girl who stared so resolutely away from the shore, she seemed focused on something invisible, something internal. She looked unabashed and lovely and…
Well, it didn’t matter how she looked. He pushed the troublesome thought away.
“I’m sorry we had to come all this way to learn what common sense might’ve told me: the hod trail is only fit for hods. Don’t you think Marat was being devious by suggesting that we could just dress the part? I can’t think of a more dangerous disguise. Once you put the vestment on, how would you ever get it off?”
“You wouldn’t. Once a hod… Why did he leave the door open?” she asked, swinging around to face him.
Senlin cleared his throat. “To discourage us from leaving, I suppose.” He retreated to the opposite end of the cell where stacks of books stood like a wainscoting against the bars. He idly picked up a clothbound volume with the ambitious though not particularly scintillating title Bogs and Marshes: A Complete Survey. Opening the book, he was surprised to discover that its entire contents had been, word by word, blacked out.
Unsettled, he took up another volume entitled A Cobbler’s Encyclopedia of Skins and Leathers. Every character, down to the last page number, had been inked over. He quickly surveyed several more books, his anxiety growing. They were all ruined.
He had seen this sort of methodical defacement before in the Baths. At the time, he had assumed it was just the work of a local imbecile. But this wasn’t casual vandalism; this was a campaign.
Then it dawned on him: the hods he’d seen scribbling away downstairs weren’t illuminating the manuscripts. They were destroying them. Senlin had assumed Marat was teaching these poor wretches to read, but that wasn’t the case at all. He was using them to obliterate these books.
And Senlin had stolen a man’s library to contribute to the effort. The thought made him sick.
But what possible reason could Marat have for such senseless waste, not just of the knowledge and experience that the books embodied but of the effort it took to strike them out? If he loathed books so intensely, why not just burn them? Why meditate upon their destruction? Senlin couldn’t fathom it. But then, he had no idea what the point of this mission was. It didn’t seem humanitarian; it was too militant for that. What was the purpose of recruiting all these hods? Reformation? Criminal enterprise? Revolution? What?
He felt a tinge of mania creep into his thoughts, and he made a concerted effort to swallow it as one might an upwelling of bile. “Madness,” he muttered, and then more loudly so Edith could hear: “They’ve ruined these books.”
But she wasn’t very interested in his discovery, and instead returned to his previous point. “What do you mean he left the door open to keep us in?”
“If he locked us in, he knows we would try to escape.”
“Perhaps, but we could just walk out the open door,” Edith said.
“That’s an excellent point.” Senlin rebalanced the stack of muted books. He found the task difficult because his hands had begun to shake. “But would happen if we tried to leave?”
“Someone would stop us,” she said, frowning at the thought. “This place is swarmed with hods.”
“I agree,” He clenched his hands to stop their trembling. Perhaps he’d cau
ght a cold from his recent soaking, or perhaps he was just malnourished. The biscuits had hardly blunted his hunger. “What do you make of this place? It’s not what I’d pictured.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like this. He’s kept it a secret, and that’s not an easy thing to do in the Tower. It isn’t a mission. That much is obvious.” Edith probed the heavy curtain that hung behind the bars of the adjacent cell. With a windup aviary on one side of them, she was curious to see what was on the other. “Once word gets out what Marat is doing here, there’s going to be trouble.”
“I can think of a few librarians who’d like to see him spanked.”
Edith shook her head. “It’s no joke. Those guards downstairs had rifles on their shoulders. He’s arming the hods. I’m sure you can see the problem some of the ringdoms would have with that.”
“Why did Marat call you a Wakeman? A Wakeman is a guard, isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” she murmured in distraction. At last she found a seam in the curtain and parted the drapery a little. “If the point is to keep us from leaving, why not just lock the cage. That’s what it’s for! What’s the point of leaving us with a choice?”
“Because we are uncertain, and he knows it. If we chose to walk out that door, they might stop us, put us in shackles, and post guards outside. And then we’d be well and truly imprisoned,” Senlin said. “But with the door open, they permit us at least the illusion of freedom. And it’s quite difficult to escape an illusion. They think we will prefer imaginary freedom to certain imprisonment.”
She peered through the gap in the curtain. “But if we don’t have any choice but to stay, then it’s already a prison,” she said.
“Not until we try to leave.”
“And around we go.” She craned about to get a better view of the adjoining room, then stopped and frowned. “Tom, look at this.”
Senlin crossed the room, pinched the curtain where she held it for him, and gazed through. The cell was crowded with racks of rifles that stood as thick as wheat in a field.
“My word. How did a fraternity of hods manage to amass such an arsenal?”
“There’s something else,” Edith said.
A glass case stood against the far wall. Inside it, five identical picture frames hung in a row. The paintings in the frames were also apparently identical. Each was of a girl in a white bathing dress standing in a shimmering body of water. They were copies of the Ogier inside Senlin’s pocket.
“How is that possible?” Senlin asked in agitation. “Are they forgeries? They must be. But why would anyone collect fakes?” With each successive question, his frustration mounted, and he felt a strange swinging sensation as if the floor were teetering under him. “Why does it keep coming back to this confounded picture? Don’t you feel as if we are always striving to understand, on a most rudimentary level, what is happening to us? Why must everything be such a battle?”
He lurched about to face the room, almost panting with distress. His hands shook at his sides. He suddenly felt very unwell.
And there was Marya, sitting on the table, holding his tricorne hat in her lap. She was as she appeared in Ogier’s painting of her: unclothed.
His wife smiled at him as if his panic was just an act, as if he was clowning for her. “It’s only a battle if you put up a fight,” she said.
Senlin fainted dead on the floor.
Voleta had no doubt that the Captain was in trouble. He might not know it yet, but he and Mister Winters had fallen in with some bad characters. Who knew how many bodies they’d stuffed under the sod? She had to find her friends and warn them, or if they were already caught, she would have to get them out. It was her turn to come to the rescue. And maybe find some food along the way. Surely the Captain wouldn’t have a conscience against borrowing some dinner from a clan of murderers.
The question was how to get across all that open ground and into the Zoo without being spotted by the babblers.
She had to think of something and quickly.
Inspiration never came to her so long as she was sitting still. Adam accused her of wandering off, but what her brother didn’t understand was that her legs pedaled her thoughts. Inactivity made her stupid. People who could sit in a chair, open a book, and just think themselves around the world were magicians as far as she was concerned.
So, she decided to pedal her thoughts a little.
She hadn’t tiptoed between three trees before she heard something interesting: it sounded like the clinking of a hammer. She followed the ringing to a nearby glade where a troop of hods scoured laundry in a sudsy pool. Clothes dried on the rusting antlers of a herd of mechanical deer that encircled the cistern, pretending to drink the very thing that corroded them. The air held the sharp fragrance of detergent. The blacksmith who had attracted her with his hammer song hunched over an anvil. He seemed to be beating the brains out of a kneeling man. Then she realized he was striking the pin from the iron collar around the man’s neck. A moment later, the collar popped off with an exuberant ring. The freed man leapt to his feet, rubbing his neck with great relish. The blacksmith took the collar and clamped it about the neck of another hod, who accepted the irons without complaint. The blacksmith placed the hod’s neck on his anvil, and began hammering in a new pin.
A ratty beard and stringy hair clung to the head of the liberated hod. He was ushered to a stool where a woman shaved and sheared him. Now clean headed, he was given a fresh robe to wear. It was humble hospitality, but the man’s gratitude was profound. He kissed the hands of the women who dressed him and embraced the blacksmith, who hardly slowed his labor. It was a surreal little scene, and all of it occurred under the watchful eye of three armed hods. Voleta was fascinated. She understood why they would take their shackles off, but she couldn’t imagine why they would ever put them back on again.
Squit, who had emerged from her sleeve, burrowed in and out of her thick, dark locks. Squit didn’t seem to like the gloamine, or perhaps the spiders had just put her off. Either way, the squirrel was swimming around in Edith’s tresses quite diligently, which didn’t make it any easier for Voleta to think. When she reached up, she discovered that Squit had gotten her little neck stuck inside a noose of curls. The squirrel began to thrash about in distress.
Without a second thought, Voleta pulled her penknife from her pocket, thumbed it open, and cut the beloved pet loose. Squit darted up her sleeve, leaving Voleta pinching a tangle of hair. She looked at the clump. The hair no longer seemed like her own. The moment it was off her head, the curls became almost grotesque. She patted her head until she found the divot she had cut. It felt strange. But, like the socket left by a lost tooth, it was fascinating to touch.
The solution seemed obvious. She needed a disguise, and she had everything required to make one.
She gave the blade of her folding knife a speculative touch with her thumb. It felt sharp enough.
Really, there was nothing else to be done.
Chapter Ten
“The man or woman who is rarely lost, rarely discovers anything new.”
- Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
Senlin woke up apologizing.
He apologized for collapsing at Edith’s feet without a word of notice. He apologized for being a gangly load, which she’d had to drag across the floor and heave onto a bed. He apologized for the chill he’d probably caught when they’d almost drowned, and he apologized one last time when Edith said the apologies were getting out of hand.
“You’re obviously ill. One moment you’re all smiles and lectures, and the next, you’re raving and flopping onto the floor.”
“I was hardly raving. It was just a little fit. I feel fine now,” he said, which was not entirely true. He still felt lightheaded and queasy, but neither was stronger than his embarrassment. He was eager to put the whole episode behind him. He insisted that Edith let him get up, but no sooner did he rise than he saw her again.
The specter of Marya glanced up from a cor
ner of the cell where she paged through one of the blacked out books. There was something the matter with her skin, not just the preponderance of it, but its appearance, too. It was mottled and unfocused and it glistened like oil. She was covered in paint, he realized. No, she wasn’t covered in it; she was made of it. There were wet footprints everywhere on the floor, each print as colorful as a palette. She smiled and swept back her auburn hair. It smeared and caught the color of her hand.
“She’s here, isn’t she?” Edith asked.
He needn’t answer. He stood like a man at a whipping post, rigid with self-control.
Edith wanted to be sympathetic, but she felt overwhelmed by Marat’s baiting, and this paradoxical prison, and the inevitable decline of her arm. It seemed unfair somehow that Senlin’s impairment would reassert itself now. She felt like all the patience had been wrung out of her. It was not enough for him to be stoic anymore; he had to be well.
But as she watched his expression squirm from a scowl to a grimace, she remembered how he had comforted her when they’d been caged in the Parlor. He had been a stranger, and yet, unaccountably, he had stayed with her. And was he not just as vulnerable now— a man who prided himself on the power of his mind being tormented by that very organ?
Edith drew a calming breath. “She has bad timing, your ghost,” she said.
“It is inconvenient,” Senlin said tightly. “I had bargained for a few hours of peace.” He swatted near his ear as if dashing off a fly, though he only unsettled the air, and sat down heavily on the thin mattress. “Apparently, the grace period is over.”
“Is she talking to you?”
“Yes.”
“What is she saying?”
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 17
