Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  “Quit fussing and run,” Edith said, knocking his hand away as soon as she was upright. “Why are you taking off your belt?”

  Without answering, Senlin cocked her engine arm up to her breast and hooped his belt around the articulated joint of the wrist. “Turn around,” he said, and she did with a huff. He reached around her shoulders to grasp the belt. She moved her hair for him. She suffered a brief, pleasant shiver when his breath touched her nape. He buckled the ends of his belt together. With the simple sling complete, he turned her around again and said, “There. All done. I couldn’t have you diving into the brambles at every turn.”

  “Thank you,” she said, though he couldn’t tell if she meant it.

  Since they were already stopped, Senlin took a moment to check his compass. They were still on course, but their progress was slow without a trail. They couldn’t go fifty feet without clambering up an artificial knoll or over an ornamental wall. The Silk Gardens had been built for dalliances, and so the going was like leaping between the back gardens of a crowded city block.

  “Look, it’s our old friend the emu,” Senlin said, coming upon the rusted machine from the wooded side.

  “Won’t the paths be full of hods? I think we’re better off here in the thick of it,” Edith said, rolling her neck against the new weight that hung from it.

  “I disagree. They’re going to pass us, if they haven’t already, and then they’ll be standing between the ship and us. We haven’t any choice but to take the trail. You lead. I’ll fend off whatever runs up behind us.” He struggled to draw his rapier in the cramped space between trees. He managed it, but inelegantly.

  Senlin knew she would want to be the one to bring up the rear, the one to defend him, her Captain. But the exhaustion of her engine had unbalanced her in more than one way, and they both knew it. Of course, this shared knowledge only made her more frustrated, more determined to prove she was capable.

  She opened her mouth to argue, but Senlin cut her off. “It’s an order, Mister Winters. If I have to give every order twice, it’s going to take us forever to get anywhere. You can scowl at me on the boat. Now, off we go.”

  Edith drew her blade with a grace that seemed to make a point: even one-armed, she was the superior swordsman.

  The trail was so twisted and clouded with the diffuse blue light they could see only a short distance in either direction. For the moment the way was empty. Perhaps the hods were still embroiled with the spider-eaters; perhaps the fight had broken them. Senlin and Edith didn’t care which it was. With every blind turn and every revelation of safety, their pace quickened and their hearts leapt. They were nearly home.

  The trail opened onto the beach and the voluminous theater of shipwrecks. The sight of sunlight beaming through the port tunnel made them almost giddy with relief. There was a bright smell in the air; it was crisp and nothing like the cold, loamy odor of moss and stale water.

  It was almost like the sharp perfume of cracked pepper. It was, Senlin finally identified, the smell of gunpowder.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Despite the evidence of my chosen profession, I am far from comfortable with violence. Unfortunately, the consequence of practice is mastery.”

  - The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd

  Creeping ahead of Edith through the deep shadow of a derelict, Senlin heard a tumult of breathing, creaking leather thongs, and the grating slide of ramrods inside of gun barrels. He peered around the edge of the silk-wrapped hull and saw a platoon standing at the start of the tunnel. Beyond them and down the long channel, the Stone Cloud floated at the sunny mouth of the port.

  He counted thirty hods. They looked a little haggard: some of their robes were singed, probably from the explosion Voleta had touched off, and they were winded from running. Some looked half dead on their feet, victims of smoke poisoning. They leaned on their swords staked in the sand, and panted until they wheezed. Still, there were a lot of them.

  “I think they’re going to charge the ship,” Senlin whispered over his shoulder to Edith. “They have to. There’s hardly any cover. When they start, we’ll follow and pick them off one by one from behind. If they drop a gun, take it. As soon as they start shooting at the Cloud, we’ll start firing at them.”

  “Two against thirty,” Edith said. “Those are terrible odds.”

  “No, it’s two fronts against thirty backs.”

  “How honorable.” She reseated the engine that hung in a frozen salute at her breast.

  “Look at this beach. Look at all these doomed ships, and look how organized and ready the hods are to plunder us and murder our crew. I suspect they’ve made a habit of victimizing castaways for years.” Senlin said, buttoning his coat up to the neck to keep his collar from flapping.

  “That does assuage my conscience. Thank you.”

  “Not at all.” He put his hand on her shoulder to stop her from breaking cover just yet. “Wait a moment, Edith. I want to say something.”

  “Oh, don’t start making your peace, Tom. The last thing we need right now is peace. A little disquiet is good for your courage.”

  “Perhaps so, but I must speak. I never said how much I regret having lied to you about my illness. It was wrong of me, and I handled your confrontation of my error poorly. I am sorry. You have been exceedingly patient and wonderful.”

  Edith didn’t think she’d ever been described as patient before, and certainly never wonderful. She looked up to find him beaming with sincerity and appreciation, and she could not help but smile. “If I forgive you are you just going to run out there and get shot?”

  “If you’re worried about me being too at peace, believe me, I have quite a ways to go.”

  This was not the platoon’s first assault on a marooned vessel. The abandoned port attracted a reliable trickle of desperate airmen who coasted in upon coal fumes and glue patches, who chose the deserted Gardens over the Valley, where they were certain to be swarmed by pilgrims and tourists. The hods had learned to wait a while until the vigilance of the stranded airmen had softened. They knew, too, that a long siege just wasted valuable shot and powder. It was better to lunge in quickly and with the advantage of surprise.

  Today, the regiment was without its usual command, which had taken another platoon to pursue the villains who’d set off a bomb in their home. Fortunately, this was not the sort of work that required much supervision. And the ship looked on the verge of leaving the port, which was something Marat had absolutely forbidden. It took only a little consultation to agree that they would charge the ship before it escaped.

  The platoon began an orderly trot into the vaulted tunnel, though the men who had swallowed too much smoke soon bent the formation. It mattered little. This was their terrain, and they knew it well. They regularly conducted drills in the shadow of the colossi, though none of the hods felt any reverence for those giants of the old aristocracy, and they expressed their contempt by using those stately heads as targets for their practice. They had pocked many chins and blunted many noses with the pecking of their rifles.

  Knowing the crew of the ship would spot them soon, they made no attempt to disguise their advance. Experience had taught them the value of unnerving a foe, and so they raised an intimidating shout.

  Their roar had the unintended effect of also covering the strangled cry of one of their own when a lanky pirate in a tricorne hat crowned him from behind. The hods began to fire their guns at two hundred yards out, and so did not notice as two more of their own collapsed after being shot in the back.

  The hods, as a whole, felt very optimistic about the assault. The ship looked pinned and pasted together. There was no cannon on the forward bow, what remained of it. No crew amassed in the shadow of the ship, waiting to rebuff them, save for a lone figure who seemed to be single-handedly trying to launch the ship. The lone airman dropped to the ground and covered his head the moment they started firing. The hods’ battle cry turned into a merry cheer.

  They were a little di
sappointed when two crewmen aboard the ship began to fire pistols at them from the blunted prow. Comrades who’d been jogging happily along a moment before now fell to the sand clutching one bloody limb or another. The front line of their ranks began to fray. But these losses, the hods knew, were surmountable. They returned fire, though the barrage seemed more modest than before.

  One of the hods at the fore looked back amid his stride to see if there was a fresh man with a loaded gun ready to replace him, but instead of being relieved, he was shot in the head. Those around him saw the corporeal eruption, saw him fall, and saw, quite clearly, that he had been shot by someone at the rear. This was disturbing, but sometimes amid the fog of war, a friend shoots a friend. Perhaps they would’ve investigated the error further if they weren’t a mere fifty yards from their dangling prey, which now launched a fresh hail of shot at them. Four more fell.

  They began, as a unit, to sense that they were dwindling. It’s not wise amid a charge to stop and take stock of one’s supporting presence, but out of the corner of their eyes, they recognized a paucity of bodies. Still, they were now under the umbrella of the ship’s envelope, and only twenty paces from leaping at the rope ladder and boarding the ship in a swarm.

  Since they were fewer, and more timid now, their cheers turned into a chugging grunt like the breathing of a horse run nearly to death. Amid this, they heard the unlovely noises of men crying out in pain, crying out despite a lack of gunfire. Then the shooting resumed, again from behind, and each blast seemed doomed to strike friend rather than foe. The fog of war, it seemed, had become a soup.

  The platoon finally came to a halt before the ladder of the ship, and they turned to see how many of them were left to claim their triumph. The breathless platoon was pained to discover that their numbers had been reduced to one.

  The remaining hod looked in bewilderment back down the hall of grim, defaced kings. His brothers, some squirming, some motionless, littered the ground. While this was a terrible sight, worse were the two figures standing immediately before him with pistols leveled at his head.

  Now that the shooting had stopped, Iren got to her feet and stole up behind the last, gawking hod. She hammered him on the head with a closed hand. He fell like a tree and landed on his ear.

  “Iren! Is Voleta aboard?” Senlin asked, sheathing his sword with an arm that shook from use.

  “She is.”

  “Is the ship airworthy?”

  “She is.”

  “Then you have dispatched your duties wonderfully, and I thank you.”

  Iren looked the Captain and first mate up and down, taking in Edith’s split lip, the gory stains on her tattered scarf and the Captain’s shirt, the sling that pinned her mighty arm to her breast, the gash of blood on his forehead, the glowing dust that frosted them from hat to boot, and the strong smell of smoke wafting from their clothes.

  “How was the zoo?” she asked.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “There is little in the world more curative than a picnic. Some call for doctors and tonics when they fall ill. I call for friends and wine. ‘But’ you say, ‘What if you are really dying?’ Of course I am! We all are! The question is, gentle reader, in these uncertain times, would you rather be a patient or a picnicker?”

  - Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.

  They hadn’t far to go before they found a tranquil bit of air near an unremarkable expanse of block. The ship clung to the spot as firmly as to an anchor. The afternoon shadow and the color of the Tower’s masonry were favorable for concealing them from the other ships in the sky. For the moment, the Stone Cloud was as inconspicuous as a moth on a tree.

  Breaking the longstanding tradition of crew and command dining separately, luncheon was served in the great cabin, which was still a rough mess, though Adam and Iren had managed to board up the old chartroom and replace the captain’s door. A leaf was added to the table and barrels were brought to fill out the seats, so they could all enjoy Voleta’s pilfered feast together. There were loaves of millet bread, wild honey, clotted cream, boiled ham, turnips, green apples, limes, pickled cabbage, and jerky that some believed was venison and others most definitely bison. To this bounty, the Captain contributed the last of his private stock of rum and real linen napkins. Iren proclaimed the napkins too fine to use, and so dined with hers draped over her shoulder to keep it from getting soiled.

  They hummed around mouthfuls, clapped their pewter cups of diluted rum together, and scratched so furiously at the Captain’s china with knife and fork it was a wonder the plates didn’t split in half.

  The only person untouched by the high spirits was Edith. She ate as hungrily as the rest, but she seemed to relish neither the rare victuals nor the tart grog. At the start of the meal, she posed her forearm on the table so that it might appear more natural, with the fist standing and the wrist bent. The ruse was unnecessary; everyone knew when she had to be helped up the rope ladder that something was the matter with her arm. But she had said nothing of it, and the crew was too in awe of her to ask.

  They were just beginning their second portions when the wrist of Edith’s engine was jostled by a bump of the table. Her fist rolled against her mug, tipping it over. The resulting spill wetted the tablecloth and the conversation alike. Amid the difficult silence that followed, Edith pushed back her chair, picked up her arm to keep it from swinging against her hip, and exited to the main deck.

  The crew turned to their Captain for some sign of how to react.

  He smiled reassuringly and said, “We all owe our first mate an enormous debt of patience. Let’s see if we can’t pay down our balance a little.”

  The crew stared at their empty plates with a mixture of drowsy pleasure and amazement. Senlin knew it wouldn’t do any good to try to squeeze any more wakefulness out of them. They had to sleep.

  He announced the suspension of watches for the day, and at that, the crew lurched to their feet and filed out the door, carrying dishes, cups and cutlery in precarious stacks. It didn’t matter that the evening was hours off. Iren, Voleta and Adam were in their hammocks and asleep before Senlin had finished shaking out his tablecloth.

  Senlin found Edith tying telltales to the rigging. Replacing the simple ribbons that helped them track the wind was not an especially pressing chore, but it had given the rest of the crew an excuse to go below without engaging the first mate, and more importantly, it had saved Edith from having to discuss her dead engine.

  With only one hand and her teeth to help her, she struggled to knot the ribbons. Senlin offered his assistance, but she refused with a forced politeness that told him she would take any further insistence as an insult.

  He wanted to broach the subject of where she would sleep since her room had been demolished. He had come with every intention of offering his bed. He could bunk with Adam, and she could have the great cabin to herself. But he thought better of the idea now. Sympathy, he suspected, would only make her feel pitiful, and that would make her angry. She would bunk with Iren and Voleta and probably feel better for being nearer her crew.

  Senlin informed her of the suspended watch and left her gritting a red ribbon between her teeth.

  In all honesty, he was relieved to keep his room and bed. He didn’t feel well and hadn’t since collapsing in the Golden Zoo, though he had a difficult time articulating, even to himself, what pained him. The closest he could come to describing the malady was to say it was like an itch that shifted between organs. One moment, it was in his brain, then his heart, and then his liver. The itch caused an anxiety so intense it made him nauseous. He’d assumed this was all a symptom of malnutrition, but the gluttonous meal he’d just indulged in, his first real meal in days, had not cured him.

  Perhaps he was really ill.

  The thought made him laugh. He’d been seeing ghosts for weeks, and only now did it occur to him that he might be genuinely unwell.

  As soon as he was alone in his cabin he felt an intense desire to meditate u
pon Ogier’s portrait of Marya, to refresh his memory of his wife.

  He put on a nightshirt and climbed into his cockeyed bed. He withdrew the painting from the cavity behind the headboard and pressed it to his forehead as if it were a holy relic. The faint odor of linseed and varnish had, over the months, begun to replace his memory of Marya’s natural fragrance. The brushwork of the painting had a tactile fingerprint that he took great comfort in tracing.

  After only a moment’s reflection, he began to feel better. His nausea faded; the itch turned into a warm, gentle pressure.

  And to think, he’d left the portrait behind during his trek to the Zoo, knowing full well that Iren might have been forced to withdraw. How close had he come to losing this last glimpse of his wife? He resolved not to make the same mistake again. From then on, wherever he went, he would carry her portrait with him.

  He was hardly surprised, given the sincere feelings that the painting revived, when the specter of Marya appeared in her nightgown under the quilts at his side.

  “I’m glad we’re talking again, Tom.”

  “I thought you were gone,” he said, glancing to see if she was still made out of wet daubs of paint, but she had returned to her former, flesh and blood self.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “The last time I saw you, you told me to let you go.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I only said that because that horrible woman was there, and you were telling her everything I said.”

  “She isn’t horrible. She’s a faithful friend who has saved my life more than—”