Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Tickle or no, the mate’s words doused the laughter in Voleta’s expression.

  “So, go ahead and take credit. You have a lot to take credit for.” Edith cupped the back of Voleta’s shorn head, pulling the young woman’s pretty, heart-shaped face nearer her own. “But there is only room for crew aboard this ship. And the crew follows orders without question, without exception. If you would rather not be part of our crew, the Captain will pay you the wages you are due, and we will drop you off on the nearest convenient ledge.”

  When the first mate stepped back, Voleta’s mouth seemed to have come unhinged.

  She turned her shocked expression toward her brother, expecting him to come blustering to her defense, or at least to look as if he were marshaling his anger at this rough handling of his sister. But what she saw was indifference. He only shrugged at her as if to say, Don’t look at me.

  Voleta found his response very interesting. Something had changed between them; something was different.

  She swallowed and said to the waiting first mate, “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Senlin returned to the fore. “Mister Winters emphasizes an important point. We are flying into dangerous currents. Captain Lee had a standing arrangement with the Sphinx which included the delivery of wayward souls.” A melancholy smirk lifted a corner of his mouth. “A cargo we are never wanting.” He quickly sobered. “Lee’s work is not ours, of course, but the Sphinx may try to take advantage of our circumstance. He may try to separate us, seduce us, appeal to our insecurities. It is essential, therefore, that we stick together.”

  “May I ask a question?” Iren said.

  “Of course.”

  “What is the Sphinx like?”

  “Dangerous,” Edith said, quick as a spring. “Determined. Soon as he decides he wants something, he takes it. Manipulative. Unpredictable.”

  “I mean, what does he look like?” Iren said.

  Edith frowned at the amazon. She understood what Iren was really asking. Iren was unconvinced the Sphinx existed. So Edith offered a most contrary answer: “He looks like a spoon.”

  “Like a spoon?”

  “A spoon,” Edith said with utter conviction.

  Voleta laughed and immediately apologized.

  Gesturing like a conductor trying to quiet his players, Senlin said, “It doesn’t matter what he looks like. You won’t see him. You’ll be on the boat. Now, I’ve spent the morning reviewing Captain Lee’s notes for navigating to the Sphinx’s lair. It lies just beneath the summit, under the Collar of Heaven on the southern face of the Tower. We haven’t the ballast, the gas, or the coal to fly out and return at altitude, which is the only sensible course. We have no choice but to take the direct, insensible route. I’ve identified a suitable current that will deliver us in about an hour’s time to the Sphinx’s stoop.

  “Unfortunately, the route will take us past quite a few ringdoms which are heavily fortified and, it’s safe to assume, leery of strangers. I doubt any one of them would have much trouble swatting us from the sky.”

  Edith watched the courage drain from the faces of her crew. Considering her recent reprimand of Voleta and the announcement that they would be rendezvousing with a dangerous myth, morale seemed to be taking quite a beating this morning. Now seemed a time for aspiration and reassurance. She interjected before Senlin could itemize the dangers any further. “But I’m sure you have a plan, Captain, that will deliver us safe and sound.”

  “Of course I have a plan,” he said, clapping his hands. “We are going to die.”

  Chapter Two

  “The origin of a myth is like that of a river. It begins in obscurity as a collection of tentative, unassociated flows. It streams downhill along the path of least resistance, seeking consensus. Other fables join it, and the myth broadens and sets. We build cities on the banks of myth.”

  - The Myth of the Sphinx: A Historical Analysis by Saavedra

  Edith lay on the quarterdeck, a rapier jutting from her bloody back, her arms thrown out in an attitude of mortal surprise. Black smoke streamed and scattered in the wind.

  Tricorne askew on his head, Senlin slouched against the ship’s console with his hands in his lap as if he were begging. Blood pooled in his cupped palms.

  A rifle slug gouged the board by Edith’s hip.

  The wind stroked her hair against her turned cheek.

  She did not stir.

  In months past, they had been careful to keep to the big, open theater of blue sky over the valley of Babel. The traffic was thinner there, the visibility wider, and the winds more tame. It was not safe to sail close to the Tower, and it only grew more treacherous the higher one climbed. Frigates flying under the colors of powerful ringdoms patrolled the shipping lanes. Suspected pirates were not boarded and arrested; they were shot down. Airpower aside, the upper ports were so stoutly fortified, they resembled citadels, their guns so numerous, they stood together like the teeth of a comb.

  And yet it was through these contentious lanes and past these menacing forts that the Stone Cloud now rose, unpiloted, undefended, turning like a cinder rising from a fire. The envelope was a whiffling malformation of rags. The hull was so ravaged it resembled a carved bird.

  A shadow slipped across the deck. The passing galleon stirred the air with long, tapered wings that moved as languidly as oars. The handsome, three-decked warship was enrobed in gold leaf and green silk. Half of the thirty gun ports stood open. The noses of cannons protruded from the dark of the gun deck. A rifleman, bored by his commander’s decision not to waste a barrage on a harmless ghost ship, reloaded his gun and took aim again at a corpse on the quarterdeck.

  His second shot thudded into the wood by Edith’s hand.

  “Steady,” Senlin murmured.

  Edith opened one eye. The sword, which seemed to skewer her back, only pierced her shirt and the deck near her ribs. The black smoke came from oily rags burning in kitchen pots that they had placed surreptitiously about the ship. The blood had been Voleta’s idea: juice from the beet jar. The smell of it was driving Edith mad. She’d been lying in pickle juice for half an hour, and still they weren’t out of the woods.

  They had passed a dozen forts and twice as many gunships, but this was the first that had bothered to fire on them. She wondered what sort of rogue shot at corpses. It took all of her self-restraint not to jump up and return fire.

  At first, she hadn’t particularly liked the idea of lying out in the open, but Senlin had made a good argument for it. A military mind might see an empty deck and imagine a galley full of armed brutes, waiting to leap out and take advantage of a careless commander. A battered derelict littered with corpses, however, would inspire little concern.

  Iren, Voleta and Adam finished off the tableau of corpses on the main deck. Voleta had taken particular delight in choosing her pose, and after experimenting with several positions, she had decided that dangling from the rigging like a tangled marionette would be the most dramatic. Adam, lacking any talent for the game, just sprawled out like a starfish.

  “Is Iren snoring?” Voleta asked without lifting her chin from her chest.

  Adam only shushed her, but he wanted to say that the old amazon could sleep for a week if she felt like it after the work she’d put in yesterday. And where had Voleta been during all that wearisome lifting and towing? Out swinging from the trees.

  A moment more, and the shadow of the passing galleon slipped from the deck, and the bored rifleman lost his line of sight. The crew of the Stone Cloud shared a sigh, except for Iren who snorted and rolled onto her side.

  A new exotic view spooled by as the ship’s lazing ascent continued. Senlin thought it a shame he could not savor these sights, but the pitch of the hull and his slanted view afforded him only tantalizing glances. He saw an onion dome tiled in lapis and turquoise that caught the sun like a gem; he saw a pillared coliseum, with tier upon tier of empty stands and cheery banners. He glimpsed the statue of a rearing horse that must’ve been a hundred feet tall. The
top of the horse’s head accommodated an observation deck. If it had been raised anywhere else, the monument would’ve been considered a wonder of the world, but here on the Tower of Babel, it was just another embellishment.

  It never ceased to amaze him how densely built and varied the Tower was at these heights. Balconies and friezes, galleys and porticos pressed together so tightly they became one great glittering mottle.

  The view reminded him of a favorite classroom experiment. Once a school year, he took his students down to the beach for the purpose of collecting a little sand. It was always a struggle to keep them undistracted by the wonders the ocean spilled upon the land, but what a delightful problem to have! Back at their desks, they would spend some minutes studying and documenting their pocket dunes: the texture, color, and shape. When they were convinced there was nothing more to see or say, he had them come one by one to his desk to peer at their sand through his microscope. He showed each student how to turn the mirror until it illuminated the world under the lens. What had seemed dull grit a moment before was transformed into a beautiful collection of tiny shells, stones, and crystals— a trove of unrepeatable miracles.

  The Tower was no different: uniform to the distant eye, unique to the near.

  It seemed a shame that such thoughts should be wasted on a man who had no time for experiments and observations anymore, a man who was playing dead.

  They were as high as the surrounding mountaintops when the character of the construction changed again. The fierce airships and august ports thinned and then disappeared altogether. The walls of the Tower turned barren and smooth as a saltlick. The cloud ceiling shifted from a distant haze into a defined bank, and so they knew the Collar of Heaven was at hand.

  Satisfied that they were safe for the moment, the crew rose and stretched. Adam smothered the smoking pots with their lids. Their ascent having taken them into colder air, they had little choice but to break out their heavy clothing.

  Below deck, Edith removed her pickle-scented shirt with Iren’s help and shortly thereafter, stuffed it into the furnace. Wearing her wool coat over her shoulders like a cape, she found Senlin on the foredeck, holding the captain’s log.

  She blew into her hand to warm it then cinched her coat’s collar to her neck. “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?”

  “I’m being decisive.” He squinted at the book, shuffling between pages.

  “I wish I’d been awake for this part last time,” she said.

  “You were too busy trying to survive. No one blames you for being confined to bed.”

  “Any luck finding the directions?”

  “Lee was such a miser with words, wasn’t he? I keep expecting there to be more. But this is all I could find. Here, see what you make of it,” Senlin said, passing her the log with his thumb in a page. She recognized Lee’s primitive handwriting, but the particular passage was unfamiliar. It read: To find the Sphinx, rise to Collar edge at 210° from NW. Wind 5 to 10 knots. Gate is one thousand hands tall. Flash signal. Run at it hard. Come kissing close to death.

  “Well, that’s… obscure,” she said.

  “What’s this about a signal?”

  “I don’t know. Lee had an open contract with the Sphinx. He just showed up when he had a lost soul to sell. It makes sense that they would have a signal, but he never told me what it was. Maybe the Sphinx will recognize the ship.”

  “Would you?” Senlin asked, swapping the log for the compass in his deep coat pocket. He studied the dial. “I fear we may have ruined her figure.”

  Voleta climbed around the underbelly of the envelope, clinging to the rigging as confidently as her squirrel. As soon as she was in shouting distance she called down, “We’re right under the Collar, Captain. If we climb another fifty feet, we’ll be in the soup.”

  “Thank you, Voleta,” Senlin called back and then turned to Edith. “We’re in the right place, but I don’t see a port. Are we sure Lee’s records are credible?”

  “They’re his personal notes. I can’t imagine why he’d try to deceive himself.”

  “I agree,” he said, closing the cover of his compass. “Which means the port must be there. Do you see that crack?” He drew a vertical line with his finger in the air. “I don’t think it’s part of the mortaring.”

  They were so close she could hardly detect the Tower’s curvature anymore. The sandstone blocks were large and smooth, and amid this barren expanse, Edith could just make out a hair-thin fracture, straight as a beam, perhaps one thousand hands tall. Perhaps. “It might be a flaw.”

  “But a very straight one. It breaks the mason’s pattern. See, it cuts right through those blocks.”

  “You think it’s a door?”

  “I do.” Senlin tilted toward Edith in a friendly, confiding way. “You came down on Voleta rather firmly.” Edith looked ready to argue, but Senlin hurried to reassure her. “It was the thing to do. I was just… surprised. I suppose I’m more comfortable disciplining school children, and even then I never had what you would call a heavy hand.”

  “That was not a heavy hand, Tom. That was as gentle a spank as I know how to give. I’m used to barking at cutthroats. They were easy to command. There was no pretense of loyalty or friendship. I knew they didn’t like me, and half of them would strangle me in my sleep if they had the chance. But I could always speak to their sense of self-preservation and greed. When I did, they’d fall into line. But Voleta doesn’t give a fig about survival or reward. It’s just one big lark to her.” Edith paused, apparently to conclude the topic, but ostensibly to keep from admitting that a part of her understood the girl’s attitude. Theirs was often a tangled trajectory. “Have you had any visitors recently?”

  Senlin smiled tartly. “Marya was playing jacks by your side through the entire ascent.”

  “Still doesn’t care for me?”

  “Oh, she’s moderated a bit. Just the standard hair pulling and finger bending.”

  “You’d think she’d tire of it,” she said, and Senlin understood what Edith was really saying: when will it end? When would the overdose run its course? How long until they would have to assume his condition was permanent? They studiously avoided voicing the alternative: that his ghost was not a specter of the crumb, but was in reality a native of his subconscious, which only a violent expulsion of brain matter could hope to evict.

  It was such a grim thought, Senlin felt compelled to confess to something lighter, though no less absurd. “I’ve taken to winking at her.”

  “Flirting with your ghost now, are you?”

  “It seems preferable to the alternative. I can acknowledge her without looking like a lunatic. As long as I pay her some mind, she’s relatively cordial.”

  Edith scrutinized his expression. “Do you enjoy her company, Tom?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said with a buck of his head. “But what good does it do to be a martyr about it?”

  “Captain,” Adam called from the quarterdeck. “We’re being blown into the Tower. We need to get out of this current.”

  Straightening his neck, Senlin cupped his hand to his mouth. “Stay the course!” Then in a more intimate tone: “I’ll call it off if you think I’m wrong.”

  Edith pinched her lip. “If it’s just a crack and we dash ourselves to pieces, then Lee will have had his revenge.”

  “Consider the alternative. If we vent any gas, we won’t be able to climb again. This ferry only goes down from here. So, either we flinch and see what the ground makes of us, or we flash the signal, make a run at it, and come kissing close to death.”

  She exhaled a cloud and shook her head at the pitiful choice. “I suppose an uncertain wall is better than the certain ground. But we still don’t know the signal.”

  “I suppose that would have to be you.”

  When the Captain announced they were going to see the Sphinx, who lived just shy of the Collar of Heaven, Adam had felt that fortune was spoiling him. He’d only had a few moments to study t
he journal he’d pulled from the topsy-turvy shipwreck, but already he was utterly convinced that the ingot of gold and the account of its discovery were genuine. A great treasure lay swaddled in the clouds at the Tower’s pinnacle. Before the Captain’s announcement, he had all but despaired of ever reaching something so remote. Now he was spitting distance from his prize.

  The tale told by Joram Brahe, Captain of the Natchez King, was compelling, not least of all because it showed a resilience and determination that Adam suspected he was capable of, though he wondered whether he had squandered too much of his resolve on a sister who did not need or want it.

  The ascent had given him time to think, time to decide. He would slip away when the opportunity arose, and go see for himself what hid behind the fog. He would climb the Tower, hand over hand if he had to, and he would bring the Captain back a fine plum. He would change the course of their fate, and his old betrayals would be forgotten.

  When the order came from the Captain that they would hold their course and let the ship be driven into the Tower, Adam was not overly alarmed. For the moment, hope had anesthetized fear, and besides, it would not do to doubt the very man whose trust he wanted to win back. If the Captain wanted to make a run at the sun, Adam would stoke the furnace.

  Adam and Iren watched from the quarterdeck as the Captain took the first mate’s gauntlet in hand and raised the dead engine above their heads. The two held it as if in victory over what remained of the ship’s prow.

  Iren was not so caviler about running out of sky. But she suspected that even if they opened the vents now, it was too late. Their momentum was too great. They would run afoul of the Tower, and tumble from the roof of the world.

  She felt the same bewildering regret she had while fleeing the spider-eater, and with that regret came a sudden and, she knew, unreasonable resentment of the Captain. But hadn’t he taught her dissatisfaction? He had taught her to read, and that had only revealed how little she knew and how much she had not experienced, and would never experience now. He had taken her away from her home, which though admittedly grim, afforded a few pleasures: she had been feared; she had been certain.