Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  They passed the levels of the Zoo quickly. Most were curtained off. Those that were open stood empty. Voleta’s distraction had worked. No one saw them slide past. Senlin’s relief was tempered by the appearance of paint on the rope under his hands. Wet, colorful globs oozed from between his fingers. And though he was sure that the paint was not real, knowing this did not stop his grip from slipping. He singed his fingers breaking his descent, but no sooner had he stopped his fall than he lost his footing on the gilded bars. His legs swung beneath him, and that set him spinning. The blue light of the forest flashed by once, twice, and a third time, then he bounced against the bars on his shoulder hard enough to knock the rope from his hands.

  He fell, and did not know from what height.

  He struck the soft moss flat on his back. He’d only fallen a short distance, though it was sufficient to drive the wind from him.

  Edith came down a moment later, landing deftly on her feet, one on either side of him. Straddling him, she helped him up. “Taking another abrupt nap, Captain?” she asked.

  He replied in a proud croak: “Do try to keep up, Mr. Winters.” He unwrapped his hands and was relieved to see the paint had disappeared.

  They crossed the clearing at a quick trot. A smaller secondary explosion clapped behind them and was answered by a renewed chorus of shouts. More hods emerged from the porcelain woods ahead, summoned by the blasts.

  The haze of smoke, the dampened glow, and the general commotion helped to distract everyone from the two figures running the wrong way. Senlin’s mind flew ahead to his ship. Would it be ready? Would Voleta be there? If they escaped, how long until they starved?

  But his thoughts had wandered too far ahead of them. They were still a few strides shy of the cover of the woods when a hod, a woman with jowls and wiry eyebrows, pulled up short as they passed her. They did not turn to look even as she began to cry out like an operatic crow. They had been discovered.

  There was no time for subtlety now, no time to look for a trail. They ducked their heads and ran behind the plowshare of Edith’s raised arm. Senlin did his best to read his compass while the needle swung in sympathy to his pitching body. He nudged Edith one way then another until she felt like a rudder in a storm.

  Senlin’s coat tugged at him. He turned expecting to find it snagged on a branch, but instead he found a hod holding him by the coattail. The hod appeared wraith-like in his rags. He drew the barrel of his pistol level with Senlin’s forehead. Senlin kicked like a mule, catching the hod on the knee. The weapon discharged as the hod fell, his shot scattering the brittle timber above Senlin’s head.

  Incoherent shouts echoed behind them. The hods had recovered from their distraction and were coming for them now. They had no hope of escaping so long as they bore a hole through the woods. They had to find a clearing or a trail and try to conceal their progress. But there was nothing, nothing but rising voices, jabbing branches, and fleeing spiders.

  Suddenly, the arachnids were everywhere, darkening the forest to their right, overwhelming the luminous wood with their numbers. Spiders rained from the trees, their fat abdomens pelting Edith and Senlin’s backs like hailstones. With an undulating curtain of spiders before them and a posse of armed hods closing behind them, they were trapped between two terrible fates.

  Edith looked to Senlin for his preference, and he nodded grimly forward, and that was all the consultation she needed. She faced the arachnid host, and they breached the swarm.

  Everything they touched in the enveloping darkness was alive. The branches moved under their hands, the ground crunched and shifted under their feet. Their skin tingled under the wash of ten thousand running legs. It felt as if they ran through a heavy rain. Senlin closed his eyes and, holding onto the laces of Edith’s bodice, let himself believe they were running through the rain. Mercifully, the spiders seemed indifferent to the two giants flailing through their midst, and took no time out of their furious trek to share their venom with them.

  The storm ended abruptly, and the forest glowed again around them like snow under a full moon. They stood at the edge of a flat, sandy clearing. There was no pool, no benches, and no rusting beasts; there was only a haphazard arrangement of boulders that were swaddled in shaggy moss.

  Taking advantage of the momentary respite, Senlin consulted his compass while Edith shook the gloamine dust and a lingering spider from her hair. “The ship’s that way.” He pointed past the boulders to the far side of the clearing. “Maybe a mile off. I’m not sure,” he spoke in a whisper. They could still hear the chattering hods. Their pursuers seemed to have been detoured by the spiders, but they were quickly regrouping.

  “These hods are disciplined.” She touched the fresh dent in her arm.

  “Come on,” Senlin said. “We can’t keep beating a path; we need to find a trail.”

  “What happened to your map?” she asked.

  “I made Voleta take it. I have my compass; we’ll be fine.”

  He led her at a sneaking pace across the glade. Both kept a close eye on the tree line for any sign of the hods. The air was thick with the rank odor of carrion, an odor they’d smelled before. It was the warm musk of spider-eaters. Senlin had no doubt the beasts had caused the spiders to swarm, which meant they must be nearby.

  The revelation dawned on them both at once, and they froze amid the dark boulders. The stones about them swelled and shrank and swelled again. They breathed. They stank. What they’d taken for moss was quite clearly long matted fur.

  The spider-eater at Edith’s elbow sighed in its sleep. Its short, muscular trunk stretched out from its bulk, quivered with a yawn, then curled in again. She allowed herself a brief cynical pout. This was the final indignation: to have escaped a zoo only to blunder upon wild animals.

  Senlin put his finger to his lips in an entirely needless signal for quiet. Their only hope was to slip past the drowsing spider-eaters and back into the woods before the hods broke upon the scene and roused the beasts.

  They recognized the hod who burst from the forest. He yelled in a voice that quavered with excitement, “Come and be free!” And then Koro fired his pistol at them.

  The shot struck one of the sleeping boulders with a plunk. The spider-eater unfolded its long neck that winnowed to a small, toothless mouth. A crest of gray fur hung on its chest. Rearing up on its hind legs, the beast spread its shaggy arms to their full length. It raised a cry that was as forceful as a cannon and tuneful as a rusty hinge. Its fetid breath ran down Senlin’s collar and over his curdling skin.

  Edith and Senlin cringed as the four other beasts stood up beside their large brother, who appeared not at all hurt by the bullet that had pricked its hide. At the same moment, the woods began to produce hod after hod, each silent and severe. Their numbers continued to swell until a legion of armed men lurked at the clearing’s edge.

  The spider-eaters held their scarecrow pose, and the hods, seeing what they had stumbled upon, turned to stone.

  Amid this terrible silence, they heard the approach of three distinct ascending squeaks. The notes played again and again like a music box harping upon a wretched song.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I’m suspicious of men who think it better to revise an entire society than to reform their own manner of address. A constructive revolution is as impossible as an architectural fire.”

  - Inaugurations of the Silk Gardens, Salo

  During his old life, Senlin had always enjoyed ringing the sturdy hand bell at the start of recess. At no other point in the day did he feel so absolutely in charge, so entirely the master, as when the students fled the schoolhouse. He stood in the doorway as they spilled under his arms into the yard, and felt as placid as a king.

  It is a fact which students suspect but which teachers are loath to admit: being the tallest in the room contributes more to one’s authority than all the years at college. Why else have the children sit and the teacher stand? To make the small pay attention to the tall!

  But h
ow easily Senlin had forgotten what it was like to be a child: always underfoot, always looking up. How difficult it was to think at all while cowering at the hips of giants. Now, standing in the shadow of the spider-eaters, Senlin felt guilty for having been so insensitive toward his students.

  The sickly fanfare of his rusty chair concluded with Luc Marat’s appearance at the forest’s edge. The king of the hods said nothing, but his beautiful face showed a cruelty that he had carefully concealed during their tea. He regarded them with the antipathy of an executioner.

  Senlin expected a volley of gunfire to pin his organs to the air, but none came. The hod regiment stood ready, waiting for an order now that Marat had arrived. The hod king, sensing that the bloody work would be done just as well by the beasts looming over his wayward guests, gave his men no signal. He bowed his head slightly, first to Senlin then to Edith. And Senlin understood this smug gesture as Marat’s way of saying, See, this is the sort of fate that comes to those who haven’t any friends in the Tower. This is the sort of thing I would have saved you from, if only you had been reasonable and joined me.

  Of course the hods wouldn’t fire: it would only antagonize the spider-eaters into pouncing upon them rather than the two interlopers who had blundered upon their den. Senlin decided quite abruptly that his and Edith’s only hope was to provoke the hods into shooting at the beasts. He had to draw Marat out.

  The spider-eater at his back gave a second, more guttural bleat of warning. Senlin knew he hadn’t much time. He made his final gamble.

  He reached into his breast pocket, which shivered with the thrash of his heart, and extracted Ogier’s painting. Senlin could only hope that Marat would believe he had been burgled and would fear that his prized forgery would be ruined by the spider-eaters if they were left to dismember the thieves.

  Unfurling the scroll with unsteady fingers, Senlin turned the canvas toward Marat, offering the man an infuriating smirk of his own, an expression which said: See, this is what happens to arrogant men who leave sticky-fingered thieves alone in their houses.

  The effect was immediate and gratifying: Marat flinched. Shock spoiled his pompous expression, and he struggled a moment to regain his composure.

  “Get ready to drop,” Senlin said to Edith from the corner of his mouth.

  The signal Marat gave Koro was almost imperceptible, just a slice of his gaze, but the hod was quick to relay the order. Koro raised his arm high, then chopped the air.

  Edith and Senlin went slack as one and fell to the sand. The crack of guns, the dull whump of shot striking hide, and the infuriated wails of the spider-eaters pierced their ears. Senlin could not lift his arms to shield himself before a dense, furry leg kicked him in the head. He tumbled forward into the scissoring limbs of the beasts and curled into a ball.

  The churned sand befogged the scene, but through the frenzy Senlin watched the spider-eaters scoop up men with their long claws and toss them into the trees. The work of the beasts was quick and savage: they stamped on the fallen, and they cut down many hods before they could drop their pistols and draw their swords.

  Still dazed and tucked against his knees, Senlin looked for Luc Marat amid the fray, but he saw no sign of the hod king or his musical chair. He had withdrawn as soon as the battle had begun, though apparently the esteem he held for his own life was not duplicated in the breasts of his men. They threw themselves at pricked Death with a thoughtless tenacity. The hods seemed never to tire of being gored and dashed and ground into the sand.

  Yet, the powerful spider-eaters were not untouched by the efforts of Marat’s hods. The hods nicked the beasts with their swords, and though the wounds were not mortal separately, together they turned gruesome. Dark blood stood in a sheen upon the spider-eaters’ coats. The smallest of the beasts had been driven from its feet, and now lay on its side, kicking wildly as hod after hod leapt upon it and drove a sword between its ribs. The bleat it raised was of such a terrifying octave, Senlin felt a rush of pity for the dying animal.

  All of this occurred in a span of seconds, and still when Edith grabbed him under his arms and pulled him to his feet, Senlin felt as if he had attended a play: a thing of scenes and acts and many hours. He was relieved and a little surprised to find that he had not lost hold of Ogier’s canvas.

  Edith’s lip was bleeding, and she looked a little wild-eyed, but her voice was clear when she said, “We should run.”

  Before they had time to turn toward the uncongested end of the clearing, the largest spider-eater with the magnificent gray mantel reared back from the fight, marked them as deserving of its wrath, and charged.

  The sand under them leapt with the force of its gallop. The beast was as imposing as a runaway carriage, and Senlin wondered if he’d be spry enough to leap from its path. But even as he crouched to spring away, he felt Edith plant her hand on his shoulder and leapfrog over him, shoving him aside in the act.

  She seemed to hang in the air, her engine arm craned wide. The beast lowered its head to meet her. Brass fingers splayed, she brought the engine around. The blow landed on the side of the spider-eater’s head, deflecting the beast’s charge as effectively as a wall. Its stride broken, the big creature stumbled to the side, but rather than fall, it jogged on until it recovered its step and disappeared into the woods.

  Senlin knew something was wrong when he saw Edith lurch back to the ground with uneven shoulders, her expression so pinched it seemed to have driven all the blood from her face.

  The engine hung from her, a lifeless plummet.

  Senlin took her hand, squeezed it, and pulled her toward the twilit forest.

  Adam had hoped that towing the airship by foot would be no harder than walking with a balloon on a string. Only after he and Iren had lifted the tow bar and leaned their weight into it did he realize the difficulty of the chore. It was like trying to pull a fifty-foot kite.

  Even against a light breeze, towing the ship required back-straining, toe-digging, blister-raising effort. Momentum helped a little, but when one of them slipped in the sand and brought them to a stop, it took all their strength to get the ship moving again. The tantalizing light at the end of the tunnel winked with the passage of clouds outside. They trudged passed the shins of giants, and felt those kingly pillars snickering at their feeble work. And still they persisted, though the brink of the port seemed determined to shrink from them.

  After an hour of enduring splinters from the tow bar and chafing from the sand, they were finally able to hook the aft anchor on the rocky lip of the port. They knew they would have to run the ship off the edge to get her underway, which would leave them dangling under the hull like two worms on a hook, but for the moment there was nothing else to be done. Until everyone returned, they had time to bask in the brisk air slanting across the mouth of the port and enjoy the sun that made them look vital again after the corpse-tones of the gloamine. They sprawled on the broad stones at the threshold, and enjoyed the inebriation of their fatigue.

  “This is no time for lounging!” The familiar voice called down at them from the quarterdeck of the ship. Adam and Iren sat up in a daze, regarding the bald specter of Voleta leaning over the lashed up rail at the battered rear of the ship. “The Captain and Winters are coming, and I don’t think they’re coming alone.”

  “What happened to your hair?” Adam said, squinting at her stark shadow through the glare of sun. “Where have you been? We heard an explosion.”

  “That was me. Captain found the man he was looking for. Turned out to be the bad sort, and easily offended.”

  This stirred Iren’s old vigilance, and she came to her feet with a stifled groan. “How many are coming?”

  “More than you can handle.” Voleta hoisted up a heavy sack for them to see. “I stole their breakfast!”

  “Adam, take the pistols and defend the bow. Keep low and let them fire first; that’ll tell you their distance.”

  “Can you move the ship on your own?” Adam asked.

  She shook
out her arms, the voluptuous bulbs of her muscles rolling then tightening into place. She wrapped the towline about her forearm and said, “With breakfast waiting, I could scoot the Tower.”

  Edith had never been able to explain, at least not to her brothers’ satisfaction, the pleasure she took from labor. Her brothers, both elder, enjoyed their father’s fortune, but deplored the effort he’d exerted to acquire it. They found the business of agriculture boring and the act of farming tiresome. As far as they were concerned, work was the penalty of poverty, and they were not poor.

  Edith’s interest in the family enterprise was an absolute puzzle to them, especially considering the leisure afforded to her sex. When their father decorated and furnished the parlor, at no small expense, for the sole purpose of giving her a suitable arena for receiving gentleman callers, the brothers had been at first envious of the long days of loafing and flirting that awaited her, and then mystified when she refused to even sit in the room.

  She married late— very late compared to her peers— partly because no suitor could ever catch up with her. She was always tromping through the fields, or checking the corn for wireworms, or mending fences, or learning to harness the draft horses, or a hundred other supposedly tedious things she was not required to do.

  What her brothers failed to understand was that labor was not without reward. Underneath the caked mud and calluses, she had developed muscles and dexterous joints. The more she labored, the more confident she became, and she found this self-reliance deeply comforting. She believed that, unlike fortunes, which could be won and lost, the recompenses of hard work endured.

  But that was before she’d ever laid eyes on the Tower.

  Now, she was unable to even walk a straight line.

  The dead weight of her arm swung from her shoulder, pitching her one way then another. Too stubborn to stop, she blundered along after Senlin for some time before a loss of balance sent her careening into a thicket of young porcelmores that shattered like fireworks around her. The bramble of saplings cut her like saw grass. She was only more infuriated when Senlin came back to pull her out.