Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Perhaps it did a little.

  Adam was relieved to see the Captain defending his name against “the spurious accusations of a featureless paranoid” that he was presently intoxicated. He was not. He was as straight as the Tower. But, the Sphinx wasn’t satisfied by Senlin’s protests. He brought Senlin’s attention to page fourteen, section three of their pact, which stipulated that he “dispatch all contractual obligations with absolute and uncontested sobriety.” The Captain immediately agreed to any test of his clear-headedness.

  “Wonderful,” the Sphinx said. “I would appreciate it if you would fetch a book from my library.”

  “Certainly. I always enjoy perusing another man’s books. They say so much about him.”

  Edith groaned a second time, and couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming, “It’s bottomless, Tom! It’s a bottomless library.”

  “Bottomless, eh? Well, be that as it may, I have agreed to fetch the book, and by my word, I will fetch the book,” Senlin said, turning his face back to the Sphinx. “But we never resolved the question of Mister Winters’ contract. Since I am doing you a favor, perhaps you could do one for me in return and release Edith from the exploitive contract you coerced her into signing while she was struggling for her very life.”

  The Sphinx tapped the pages of their contract square on the mantel and said, “No.”

  Chapter Six

  “It is by studying the Sphinx that we realize all wonder is seasoned with dread; all courage is tinctured with fear; all wisdom is the fermentation of folly.”

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

  The fact that the librarian was a cat came as something of a surprise. The orange and white tabby was not an amalgam of animal and engine like Byron; he was entirely feline, from whisker to paw. He neither spoke nor was he arrayed in any finery. The pattern of his fur suggested a map, though not of any particular nation. He seemed, as many of his kin do, to embody a self-contained dignity that could neither be questioned nor explained.

  Though at first, Senlin wondered if he wasn’t stuffed.

  The librarian lay in the valley of an open dictionary with all the vigor of a bookmark. It was several moments before the cat turned his head and resolved once and for all the question of whether it was alive.

  Senlin thought it ridiculous. What possible qualifications in the archival arts could a cat hold? Perhaps this was some sort of joke. Perhaps it was a test of his patience or his sense. He wondered whether he should say something.

  They had ridden the elevating hallway deep into the canyon of hotel doors to reach the library, and each member of his crew had sunk into their own thoughts along the way. Senlin spent the silent journey watching Marya stand before him as if she were the subject and he the painter. She winked at him and he at her until the Sphinx took notice and asked if he had something in his eye.

  He could not admit that he did, and quite a stubborn mote at that.

  When they first entered the Bottomless Library through an unremarkable white door, Senlin was pleasantly surprised by the absence of a pit ringed around in books. He had half-expected to be set upon a narrow, spiraling path that plunged downward into a provocative gloom, but here was a cheery atrium with shelves rising on either side and stacks branching off to other well-lit sections. It was a vision that hardly commanded the terror implied by the term “bottomless.” Senlin found the smell of the books as enthralling as a woman’s perfume. Bradded leather chairs capped the aisles, and there were sofas, reading lamps, and gurgling fountains beside. It seemed the absolute antithesis of an abyss.

  Senlin realized late that Byron was speaking to him while he had been busy gawking. Senlin had to squint to beam his attention at the quarrelsome stag. “…has been the librarian for over fifteen years. In that time, how many books do you suppose he has failed to locate? Not one. All I have to do is tell the librarian the title I’d like to retrieve, and then follow him to the spot,” Byron explained.

  “Wouldn’t he be a more practical librarian if he could carry a book?” Senlin said.

  “Now you’ve hurt his feelings!” Byron said, lifting his brass hand to his lip in a coy gesture of shock. “Maybe he’ll decide to lead you through the traps. I wouldn’t blame him.”

  “Traps? In a library? Whatever for?”

  “Books are traps,” the Sphinx said in a private, musing way.

  “I suppose,” Senlin said without much enthusiasm. The Sphinx had turned aloof as soon as the documents were signed. Senlin wished he would just go away and let him deal with Byron, who was not at all mysterious, having an absolute inability to hold his tongue.

  Byron presented him with a canvas pack that was bulging and lumpy and, Senlin discovered, quite heavy.

  “What is this?”

  “Your pack, and here is the title of the book the librarian will guide you to.” The stag handed Senlin a little scroll of paper, like something his students had once passed between rows during class.

  Senlin unrolled it and read the neatly written title aloud. “Zoetropes and Magic Lanterns: An Introduction to Moving Stills.” Senlin turned to the Sphinx, and using his best beseeching and reasonable tone, said, “I can’t help but notice this title begins with a ‘Z.’ I sincerely hope you haven’t just chosen an inconvenient book to test my patience.” The Sphinx made no reply. Senlin wished that the man would remove his mask so that he might see whether the Sphinx was smiling, glaring, or falling asleep.

  Byron patted the top of the pack in Senlin’s arms to bring the captain’s attention back around. “Just follow the librarian, and you’ll get there soon enough. Now, I am saddened to have to say this to a grown man, but I feel it is quite necessary given your history of crippling intoxication. You must not eat the cat food.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No matter how chafed you get while wriggling down from your noxious high, you mustn’t eat the cat food. There are plenty of biscuits for you. The fish is for the librarian. Every twelve hours.”

  The cat hissed.

  “Every twelve hours,” Byron reiterated. “Here’s a pocket watch so you don’t lose track of time. I’d very much like to see it returned.”

  “This pack is quite heavy,” Senlin said. “How many tins of fish are in here?”

  “Yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to be able to count so high. There are twenty-eight tins. That’s two weeks worth.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “It’s a bit like talking to a parrot, isn’t it Edith?” Byron said.

  “Ignore him.” Edith said to Senlin as she helped feed his shock-stiffened arms through the straps of his pack. She turned him about and adjusted the buckles at his shoulders. “You should always take more than you need. Captain Lee told me about how he fetched a book once. He was gone no longer than a few days, a week at most.” She straightened his shirtfront, her touch soothing him. “You’re sure you want to keep your coat on? There’ll be no one to see you. You could even leave your shirttail out, if you like.”

  “Madness.” Senlin smiled.

  “Would you please empty your pockets?” The Sphinx said, gliding across the polished marble. “You should keep ‘The Brick Layer’s Granddaughter’ with you, but give everything else to me.”

  Even without seeing the man’s face, Senlin understood the insinuation well enough. “You think I’m carrying crumb?”

  The Sphinx seemed taller now. Senlin had to look up to see his own face boiling and twisting back at him. Other than a button in one pocket and a bit of string in another, the only things on him at the moment were the two paintings. “I have a memento I would very much like to carry with me.”

  “Show me,” the Sphinx said. Senlin slipped the painted board from his coat pocket. The Sphinx’s gloved hands snatched it away before he could properly present it.

  “It’s of my wife.” Once, Senlin would’ve felt the need to justify her appearance, but no longer.

  The Sphinx turned the nude all about
inside the focal of his sunken mirror, scrutinizing the painting like a banker might a suspicious note. His face beamed the sacred image back at Senlin, the curved reflection perverting it, making it ugly and unfamiliar.

  “This board is tainted,” the Sphinx announced. “White Chrom has seeped into the grain and bonded to the paint. Did you pack it in crumb and then expose it to water?”

  “Snow,” Senlin said.

  “You called it a memento. I imagine you handled it regularly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, and every time you did, every time you caressed this totem of your wife, you stirred a little crumb into the air and then breathed it in. You dosed yourself. To look at you, I imagine it was a daily affair.”

  Turning to his crew, Senlin was met by a uniform expression of shock: wide eyes and rounded mouths. The friends who had followed him with such reckless devotion, who had faced spidereaters, warships, and even the banality of starvation without blanching, gaped at him now as if he were an imposter. It was heartbreaking.

  And, he had to admit, it was also a great relief. Because at least it meant he wasn’t insane. He was only poisoned.

  “I didn’t know,” he told them with soft conviction. He cleared his throat, and said it again, more resolutely. “I didn’t know.”

  “You mean you suffered no symptoms of mood or of vision?”

  “I—” he began, and then turned to Edith for strength, but she was looking inward in bewilderment. “I just though I was… insane,” he said, though he immediately saw how this confession would not improve his crew’s impression. He had not thought himself an addict, only a lunatic, and he had hidden it from them. In one stroke, he had revealed his narcotic dependence, his own doubts about his mental rectitude, and his willingness to deceive his friends for the sake of his command, his search, and his pride.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were sick?” Adam said. The young man’s thoughts had not cleared enough for disappointment or anger to set in, but the sense of betrayal was immediate.

  The question was so simple it jogged an unguarded answer from Senlin. “Because I wanted you to trust me.”

  “Ah, the inverse logic of the addled mind,” the Sphinx said, secreting the crumb-tainted painting into the folds of his robes. “But not to worry. Nothing clears a man’s head so well as perusing a library.”

  Byron had begun to shoo Senlin’s crew ahead of him as he worked his way back out the door. Adam, Iren, and Voleta were too confused to resist. They left without looking back. The Sphinx followed at their heels.

  Byron held the door, his long muzzle raised in smug salute. Only Edith lingered, though with her back to him. Amid the vault of books, the weight of knowledge, Senlin seemed as thin and inconsequential as a periodical. A moment before, she had been fussing intimately with his collar; now she stood off like a stranger.

  “I’m so sorry, Edith,” Senlin said.

  She began to reply, stopped, and then left in a rush. Byron slammed the door behind them, the muffled sound echoing through the library like a pail dropped down a well.

  Alarmed by his abrupt severance from his friends, Senlin ran to the door. His boots slid under him, and he bounced against a jamb, which was crypt-like in its fixedness. He wrenched the knob, found it completely resistant, and before he could stop himself, began to thump upon the door with the heels of his fists.

  They couldn’t really mean to lock him in here, to leave him alone with his ghosts and his guilt for days and days on end. What if he fell ill? What if he was afflicted by the delirium tremens? What if the cat held a grudge and there really were traps? What if he never found the bottom of the library, or himself, or the Tower, and just went tumbling down forever?

  Hands stinging, he broke off his useless flailing, and set his head upon the door. Had his ear not been resting so close, he might’ve missed the sound, a noise that the thick, impassive wood blunted. And yet he heard it: three distinct knocks. Hard, soft, hard.

  He returned Edith’s knock, and it came back again, so he played it once more. He rolled his cheek upon the cool door feeling a surge of gratitude. Though this was just their way of saying nothing, of admitting the existence of things unsaid, it told him at least that their friendship could survive this test as it had survived so many others before it.

  And so he had no choice but to survive it, too.

  Mister Edith Winters

  & Master Adamos Boreas

  Chapter Seven

  “Routine is rather like the egg-whites in a batter: it imparts little flavor, but it holds everything together.”

  - The Wifely Way by the Duchess K. A. Pell

  Adam was trying hard not to be bored. Boredom was his sister’s weakness, and he thought himself above it. As long as he had work to do, he had never been discontent.

  Yet, one week after they’d shut the door on the Captain, Adam had become intimately acquainted with the tedious phenomenon of leisure.

  Part of the problem was the Sphinx’s refusal to let him work on the Stone Cloud. Somewhere beyond the frowzy wallpaper and the incongruous rooms, inside a cavernous dock full of windup porters, their ship was being repaired without him. The fact was quite galling, but since the materials, the tools, and the slip all belonged to the Sphinx, Adam wasn’t in much of a position to argue. Who would oversee the work and who would carry it out, the Sphinx had refused to say.

  Not that the Sphinx had divulged much of anything to them. After all the bickering over a contract that guaranteed him unrestricted access to the crew of the Stone Cloud, the Sphinx had proved to be in no hurry to interview them. In fact, since showing them to their accommodations the evening after the Captain’s cloistering, the Sphinx had not returned, though he sent his stag-headed lackey to look in on them from time to time.

  At least the Sphinx had furnished them with a proper suite. It was not at all like the flophouse “suites” of New Babel, which were scarcely distinguishable from a dog crate. This was proper, albeit a little tattered, luxury.

  The Sphinx’s apartment was well furnished, with high-flung ceilings. Beside their own private rooms, the crew shared a dining table, a fireside, and a fully stocked kitchen, complete with the miracles of a gas stove and a tap that ran an apparently endless supply of hot and cold water. The open layout and the exotic equipment made cooking something of a spectator sport. If they discovered a deficiency in their pantry stores, they only had to ask Byron to fill the order, though doing so necessitated at least one quarter hour of moaning that was so eloquent it verged upon soliloquy.

  The fireplace and mantel were weathered but stately; the velvet upholstery of the club chairs had gone bald at the arms, but the cushions still held their shape. They had two lavatories to share between the four of them, and each of these tiled shrines of cleanliness included an enamel altar in the shape of a clawfoot tub. Adam’s first soaking had tinted the water so noticeably, he felt like a teabag.

  Meanwhile, the Captain was off chasing a cat in a purportedly bottomless library in an attempt to prove to the Sphinx he was, or at least would soon be, sober.

  They hadn’t really talked much about that, though their silence hadn’t stopped them from churning on the subject privately. For his part, Adam’s desire to win back the Captain’s confidence was a good deal more complicated now. In addition to that riddle, Adam no longer knew what to say to his sister; having relieved himself of the duty to scold and smother her, he now found himself at a general loss for what to say to her.

  But materially, practically, he wanted for nothing.

  Except for excitement or work or the swift passage of time.

  As first mate, Mister Winters was responsible for restocking the tedium whenever it ran in short supply. She established and enforced a routine that Adam found pitilessly dull. Worse, she rarely let him out of her sight because she was convinced the Sphinx had plans for his eye and could whisk him away without a word of notice. Edith took the bedroom adjoining his while Iren and Voleta occupied the two
rooms opposite. Adam suspected that Mister Winters had sat guard outside his door on the occasions when worry kept her from falling asleep.

  The general tedium only nurtured his obsession with the ill-fated Captain Joram Brahe. At night, Adam reread Brahe’s diary, puzzling over the lost Captain’s accounts of “sparking men” and “monstrous nostrils” that never ceased snoring, and “a city under an unbreakable bell jar.” The journal was full of fantastic hints of the riches that waited just overhead. He wondered if there mightn’t be a stairway or an elevator, concealed somewhere in the canyon of doors inside the Sphinx’s lair, which could deliver him directly to the pinnacle. Though it hardly mattered if there wasn’t; he was resolved to scale the Tower by hand if he had to.

  Edith, meanwhile, considered the routine entirely satisfactory. In fact, she found herself clinging to the very thought of it during the dispiriting hours of the night— that aimless, elastic expanse of time that seemed incapable of sustaining a forward march. Like a fog about a ship, the wee hours robbed her of all sense of progress, speed, and direction. She passed the night rolling back and forth across her downy mattress, alternating between fretful dreams and wakeful anxiety. She worried for the safety of her crew and whether she would be able to keep the Sphinx from getting his hooks in them. She wondered whether the Sphinx would make good on his threat to keep her engine, and what it would mean for her independence if he did.

  Then there was Tom. Poor, luckless Tom. He’d spent the past months poisoning himself with a portrait of his wife, terrified that his faculties were degenerating, a fear which he could hardly admit to himself, much less the crew. But the fact that he was just inebriated and in denial seemed so banal! How could they hope to succeed in the face of such towering indifference and pitiful odds if something as petty as powder on a board could come so close to undoing all that they had worked for? Perhaps they had struck against the limitation of hope, which adds nothing to ability and even less to luck. If all went well, he would reemerge in a few days, cured of his habit. But what then? Would he pretend all error lay with the crumb? Would the crew embrace or shun him? Would he make an effort to win back their trust, or would he allow his embarrassment to ice over the corpses of the past?