“What does it matter?”
“Look, if gritting your teeth was going to cure you, you’d be well by now. We might as well try something different.”
Senlin relaxed enough to give her an exasperated look. “I’ve tried everything! I’ve ignored her. I’ve pleaded with her. I’ve meditated every day upon Marya’s portrait, hoping to refresh the memories of the woman which this ghost only mocks.”
“What is she saying?”
“She is incapable of speech. She says nothing because she is nothing!” This last phrase was plainly not directed at her.
“Tell me anyway.”
Senlin cleared his throat and fidgeted with the rumpled, dirty cuffs of his shirt. He seemed to be reverting into the skittish, priggish man she’d first met. “If you must know, she’s not saying anything at the moment. She is just sitting beside you and— she’s getting paint in your hair. Stop it! Oh, that’s enough. Now you’ve gotten it everywhere.”
“Paint in my hair? Why is she doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, ask her.”
“I would be conversing with myself!”
“Just ask!”
Senlin leaned forward, and looked sharply at the empty air at Edith’s side. “You! Yes, you. Stop touching her hair. It’s rude and she doesn’t like it.”
“That wasn’t a question. Is that really how you’d speak to your wife?”
“That is not my wife!” Senlin pointed angrily at the unseen specter. “Will you please put on some clothes!”
“Oh,” Edith said, a little shocked, which was itself a surprise: she’d thought her time with Captain Billy Lee had cured her of such sensibilities. It came as something of a relief to know she wasn’t entirely debauched.
Rallying her composure, she said, “All right, let’s pass over the fact that she’s undressed and getting paint in my hair. Just calm down and ask her what she wants.”
Senlin sawed back on the mattress. The blush that had stormed up his throat began to recede. He breathed himself steady, and when at last he spoke, his voice was almost level. “Madam apparition, why are you here? What do you want?”
And then he listened.
Edith watched the answer register in his expression. It seemed to untie some longstanding knot in the muscles of his face.
After a moment, she asked. “What did she say?”
“She—” He had to stop to clear his throat. “She said, I needn’t hurry. I needn’t try so hard because she doesn’t need to be found. She’s not lost anymore. She said she hopes I can accept that.” His head followed as the unseen vision moved across the room and to the door of their cell. “She’s leaving. She’s gone.”
“Do you think that’s the end of it?”
“I doubt it. She has a flair for the dramatic, my ghost.”
Edith took a long breath, nodding her head with a rhythmic persistence. “What do you think she meant?”
“Well, she meant nothing, of course. I am conversing with my own insecurities. So, in many ways, the meaning is purely associative—”
“Tom,” Edith said and rolled her hand in the air to speed his prologue along.
“But I imagine that she expresses my private anxiety that I will never find my wife, and that perhaps she would prefer it if I don’t. It has been a year since we parted, and the likelihood is that she has found, or perhaps has been coerced into a new life. A woman of her talents and appearance would have no difficulty finding one. She was carried off by a nobleman, after all…
“I know the Tower has been cruel to us,” he continued, glancing at Edith’s engine arm and then quickly down at his clasped hands. “But I have read accounts of urbane ringdoms filled with polite societies and immodest wealth. Surely not everyone is a thief, a rogue, or a tyrant… Maybe she basks in a better life. Ours spent together was so brief, it may have slipped her mind.”
“You don’t really believe that. You just feel guilty. But guilt is not a duty, Tom, no matter how devoted you are to it,” she said. “Do you know why I insist you call me Mister Winters in front of the crew?”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s silly, honestly. You hate that man. You never speak of him. You want to divorce him, yet you make us call you by his name.”
“My husband is a confirmed weasel who married me for my father’s farm, and I will divorce him the minute I’m able. But until then, I keep his name to remind me of my commitments, not just to him, but to myself, and to you, and to the crew. I admire your devotion to your wife.”
“But how long do I torment you and everyone else with that devotion?”
“You believe she is in Pelphia?”
“Yes, I do, though I have very little reason to.”
“Then we must look. We must. That is all we need to decide for now.”
He clapped his knees and turned up a brave face. “You’re quite right, Mister Winters. Quite right. I’m letting my disappointment spoil my perspective. This is a setback. But it’s not the first we’ve had. We will overcome it. We’ll find another way into Pelphia.”
“Here, here,” she said, fluffing the small pillow at the head of her bed. “Now, if we are not going to escape this instant, I’d like to close my eyes. I just need a half hour’s sleep.”
“Of course. You rest, and I’ll try to figure out whether we can talk our way out of this open-door prison, or if we have a bloody getaway to look forward to.”
“You’re not going to faint again?”
“I have never fainted in my life,” he said, stretching his legs over the blankets on his bed.
“Well, you’ve taken some abrupt naps,” Edith said through a yawn. “At least this cage is cozier than our last one.”
He laughed dryly. “If it keeps going this way, eventually we’ll land in a cage on a grassy hill somewhere in the country. We’ll have four rooms and a pantry.”
“I think that’s just called a cottage, Tom,” Edith said from under the blanket.
“A little jail on a hill,” he said, his smile softening. “Edith.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
She yawned again. “You’re welcome.”
He crossed his ankles and folded his arms under his head. The light of the forest shone silvery through the golden bars. In the distance, a hammer struck upon an anvil, the sound rhythmic and incessant as the clacking of a train.
He awoke to the panicked realization that he had fallen asleep, and worse, they were no longer alone in the room.
A hunchbacked hod in a heavy cloak sat at the foot of his bed, his bald head backlit by the lamps of the atrium. Senlin bolted upright and prepared to throw himself at the intruder. His lunge was arrested by a familiar, goofy chuckle.
Voleta’s wide eyes stared back at him. Her hair, her beautiful rolling hair, was shaved now as short as corduroy.
“Captain,” she said while he was still marveling.
“Voleta?” Edith said, sitting up in her bed. Her clothes and hair held the dishevelment of sleep, but her eyes were quick to clear. “What are you doing here? What— what did you do to your hair?”
“I cut it. I’m a hod,” she said.
“Not really?” Senlin asked, aghast.
“Of course not really. These people are insane. It’s just a disguise.”
“How did you find us?” Senlin asked.
“I’ve been exploring for, I don’t know, an hour or two. This place is enormous. There are a lot of interesting things to look at. I saw a room full of guns.”
“Yes, we saw it, too,” Edith said, nodding at the adjacent cell.
“There’s another one on the third floor. It was right next to a cell full of open vats and drying trays. It smelled awful, like an old latrine.”
“They’re making saltpeter,” Edith said and smiled a little when Senlin gave her a surprised look. “You learn a lot working on a farm. Urine reduces to potassium nitrate, which you need to make fertilizer. It’s also one of the main ingredie
nts of gunpowder.”
With her cloak removed, they saw why Voleta had appeared hunchbacked at first: great coils of rope hung about her neck and shoulders over her clothes. Senlin and Edith helped untangle her from the mass of rope. “They let you keep your swords? I’m surprised,” Voleta said.
“I don’t think they considered us much of a threat,” Edith said.
“They never do. Captain, I found their pantry, too, it’s enormous. I filled a sack with as much as I could carry and socked it away downstairs.”
“Just for that, Voleta, I’ll forgive you for leaving the ship,” Senlin said.
“I was only following orders, sir. You told me to keep an eye on everyone. I was keeping an eye on you and Mr. Winters.”
“This is not a game,” Edith said.
“I know it’s not a game,” she said, scrubbing a hand back and forth over the side of her shaved head. Her expression clouded at an ugly memory. “I saw the local guards kill a man. He didn’t do anything to them. He was just a hod who wanted to go on. They told him that if he joined them, he’d be free. Then they killed him.”
“These people are all tea and biscuits until you tell them, ‘No, thank you,’ and then the knives come out,” Edith grumbled.
“At least we know we won’t be talking our way out of here,” Senlin said.
“I think they’re getting worked up over something,” Voleta said. “I can’t understand a word they’re saying, but it looks like they’re forming an expedition. There’s a line of empty wagons waiting at the gate.”
“The ship,” Senlin said. “That’s why he’s left us here. Marat knows we came on a ship. They’re going to pick it clean. Adam, Iren— they don’t know what they’re in for.”
“We have to get to the ship before them,” Edith said. She began pulling up the bedding. “We’ll disguise ourselves with these sheets.”
“They’ll spot you straight away.” Voleta said. “That’s why I brought the rope.”
“What do you expect us to do with rope?”
“Squeeze through the bars and climb down.”
“Don’t be mad, Voleta. We’re five, six stories up. Even if we climbed down, there’d be nothing but bars on one side of us and an open field on the other,” Senlin said. “We’d be spotted in an instant.”
“That’s why I planned a diversion,” Voleta said, shimmying back into her cloak. “You two will slip out the bars, and I’ll meet you back at the ship.”
“We’re not going to leave you to bait a zoo full of armed hods. You’ll come with us. We’ll just have to be discreet.”
“It won’t work, Captain. Besides, if you’re really worried about me, I’ll be safer on my own. I’ll be in the trees and halfway home before the fuse runs out.”
Senlin blinked. “The fuse?”
Chapter Eleven
“If living on a coast taught me anything it was that every ship in the sea wants to sink. It is only the frenzy of the crew and the grit of the command that keeps a ship from foundering. The Stone Cloud is no different. If it soars, it is by dint of our will. It sinks as a matter of course.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
The Stone Cloud rose like an elephant coming up from its knees. Adam and Iren hurried to reposition sandbags of ballast about the deck to balance the ship. The new rigging bawled as it stretched. The umbilical crackled like burning sap as the heat from the furnace filled it for the first time. For all the complaints, nothing snapped, nothing caught fire. The ship was a shapeless, unsafe, scrap of her former self, but Adam was confident she would fly. All they needed now was the Captain, Mr. Winters, and Voleta to return.
As soon as the ship was level, they both collapsed. Iren, battered in sand and coal dust and sitting on her haunches, looked like a big toad. Adam lay sprawled across the forecastle steps, a delirious smile frozen on his face. The hard work of raising the umbilical and shoehorning the collar had distracted them from their hunger and exhaustion, but now as they relished their success, their discomfort returned.
Neither of them had mentioned the possibility that the crew might be delayed, or that they might come with no provisions, or that they might not come back at all. There was no point to speculating, though the temptation was strong.
“How are we going to get the ship out?” Iren asked. “The wind blew us in, but it’s not going to blow us out again.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Adam said, rubbing the socket of his good eye, which only looked blearier when he was through. “I bet they used teams of horses to pull the ships out of port.”
“Or autowagons,” Iren said.
“Maybe.” Really, it didn’t matter how the airmen of the past had maneuvered their ships. He and Iren had no choice but to tow the ship down the long entryway themselves. He pictured them with bridles and blinders on. The thought made him laugh, though he wasn’t sure it was particularly funny. “I think we’re the horses.”
“Quit talking about horses. I’m starving.”
Adam had never really associated horses with dinner before, but he supposed another day of starvation might turn the entire world into a menu. “I wonder what spider-eater tastes like. I bet it—”
A deep whump like a door being slammed in the far distance interrupted him.
His exhaustion forgotten, Adam ran to the recently cobbled rail that faced the murky forest. “That was an explosion,” he said and then listened for more. More explosions would suggest resistance, retaliation, a battle, but what would one mean? A short struggle? An accident? An execution? The stillness of the skeletal woods seemed as menacing as the boom. “She’s like a moth,” he murmured. “Always flying into the fire.”
Iren knew what he was thinking. “When she gets back, I bet she’ll be ready to leave.”
“Mmm.” Adam slowly turned to her, his eyes refocusing upon her grimy face. “Next time, we’re going to make sure that she’s the one who stays behind and worries.”
“That’s fair.” Iren gathered a heavy rope around her arm. “Next time we’ll be the moths.” She held the line out to him. “Now, it’s time to play the horse.”
Waiting for the explosion did little to prepare them for it.
Voleta promised it was just a little keg of gunpowder. The little keg was sitting in a corner of a cell on the third floor, approximately across the atrium from them, but there was no need to worry because the keg was really quite small and the cell was empty, save for some books. Edith argued that Voleta had no experience measuring gunpowder, which was an exact science to anyone who liked having all their fingers. Voleta countered that she had helped Iren load the harpoon on several occasions and still had ten fingers to prove what a good job she’d done. This did nothing to assuage Edith’s concern, and she pressed Voleta on the point of the fuse, which she could not possibly know a thing about. Voleta responded that she’d already lit the candle fuse, which was even then burning down toward an open bung in the barrel. When Senlin asked how much time they had left, Voleta replied with an evasive little shrug, “About an inch?”
Voleta had been gone for a quarter hour when the flash of light threw their shadows across the room.
A warm gust blew in a split second later, chased by a percussive boom. The bars of the cage chimed and rattled, and for a moment, Senlin believed that Voleta had killed them. But then the explosion crested, and the light turned to smoke. The singed pages of devastated books wafted in through the bars of their cell.
Cries rose over the explosion’s echoing coda. They peered through their open door and saw hods on every level of the Zoo rushing about. Those already on the second floor hastened toward the fire that the explosion had ignited. The red curtains on either side of the bombed-out cell had turned to yellow flames. A bucket line quickly formed between the elevator banks and the water tanks below.
Senlin suspected that the hods would stifle the blaze soon enough, and then they would begin to wonder who had set it off.
“Quickly now,
” he said, nodding to the outer wall of their cell where Voleta’s stolen rope lay coiled, one end already knotted to a bar. The poles of the cage were too narrowly spaced for them to slip through. Fortunately, they traveled with a dynamo that could easily bend soft metal.
Under the covering racket of the panic outside, Edith wedged the elbow of her engine between two bars and began to flex.
A gear buried deep inside the machine ground and screeched. The hairs on their necks rose, but the bars did not budge. The only sign that her arm was exerting any force were the appearance of eggshell cracks on the surface of the bars. Then the gold began to flake away.
Dark iron stood beneath the gilt.
The revelation was disastrous. It had not occurred to them that this ancient landmark of affluence might only be lacquered in gold. But perhaps that was the reason it had endured, why it had not been dismantled years ago and carried off by thieves: it was worthless.
Steam hissed from joints that had never vented before. Senlin wanted to tell her to stop, to spare her arm. But the fact was when the smoke of the explosion cleared, they would be the first people Marat looked to, their arrival being too conveniently timed with such an unexpected attack. Senlin did not doubt that Marat would be far less sanguine once he thought they were saboteurs.
But Edith needed no convincing, and she showed no sign of stopping. Either the cage would give, or her arm would. And for a moment, it seemed her arm would bend first. The plates at her elbow began to buckle under the pressure. A sound like cracking glass rang under the armor.
Then one of the bars creaked, giving a little ground, and a gap began to open.
A moment more, and the space was wide enough for them to slip through.
Senlin did not allow himself time to reflect upon the drop. He stepped through the gap, swung to the side, and clung to the face of the cage. He stared resolutely back into their cell rather than the direction they had to go. They wrapped their palms with bits of torn sheet, took the rope in hand and began their descent without discussion. Senlin went first, ostensibly because he was their leader, but really because he was afraid he would lose his grip. He couldn’t tolerate the possibility that his fall might carry Edith down with him.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 18
