Ah, but the sweet respite of routine! Routine provided an authoritative, if temporary, answer to that most troubling of questions: what shall we do now?
Voleta and Iren were in charge of breakfast, which, depending on their mood, ranged from burned toast to buckwheat pancakes, also burned. Blackened or not, they ate everything that crossed the table, gorging themselves like camels at a desert oasis.
After breakfast, they pushed the sitting room furniture to the walls and Edith led them in morning calisthenics: push ups, sit ups, lunges and jacks. She had learned these “athletic forms” as a young woman by watching schoolboys exercise in the county schoolyard. At fifteen years of age, she had lain on her stomach in the grassy ditch across the lane from the school pitch and watched the boys jump as one, bend as one, and hike themselves uniformly into the air under the critical eye of the Master of Athletics, a stocky man with the voice and manner of a timber wolf.
Edith practiced what she’d learned in the privacy of her room at home until her jumping jacks rattled the ceiling of the study below and brought her father to her door. When she confessed where she had learned the aerobic forms, he jumped to the apparently uncontestable conclusion that she had gone to gawk at the boys.
Which meant it was high time they started planning her future.
If she was old enough to be curious, then she was old enough to wed, and quickly, before someone caught her lying in a ditch and ogling the county’s sons.
Her father had always known she would marry young and then, straight away, begin to fill a house with children. So convinced was he of her family aspirations, he spent the ensuing weeks making mortifying statements like, “Oh, how quickly nature calls forth the mother from the maid!”
Of course, her father was wrong on every count.
But then he had not seen those rows of young men, close and exact as paper dolls, militantly shattering the morning dew, too frightened of the Master of Athletics to stop. Even past the point of physical exhaustion, they leapt to his bark.
If her father had seen the spectacle himself, he might’ve understood what she found so compelling. It was not the red-faced boys, gritting and sweating their way through the morning flagellation. It was the command, the presence of the Master of Athletics that had seized her imagination.
Adam found the tempo of her morning calisthenics and her enthusiasm for them exasperating. But when she fell to the floor and began to do pushups upon her only arm, what could he do but join her?
Adam cooked the midday meal, and they were surprised to discover he had a talent for it. He could make a pudding from scratch; he could stuff, truss and carve a bird; and he could make lima beans that were so silky and sweet even Iren ate them without complaint.
After lunch, Edith took them for what she called “the daily outing,” though it was more of a short shuffle. First, they shuffled three doors down the elevating corridor to the game room, and then three hours later, they shuffled four doors back again to the reading room, which offered a hodgepodge of outdated popular books, all of which seemed better suited to fledgling socialites and children than a troupe of marooned pirates.
They couldn’t roam freely because Ferdinand was always in the hall. No sooner did they emerge from their apartment than he would thunder down after them, volcanic steam piling against the pink walls, the floor quivering and the carpets shredding under his titanic feet. It was terrifying. Ferdinand was never overtly hostile toward them, but they were under no illusions about why he was there.
Whether out of boredom or genuine contrition, Voleta had been uncharacteristically docile all week. She seemed to prefer nothing so much as napping in her bathrobe, which she had adopted from her room’s wardrobe. She dozed on the chaise lounges of the game room while Adam and Edith shot billiards and Iren threw darts; she nodded off in the reading room while Edith scowled at etiquette manuals, Adam thumbed through cook books, and Iren toiled through the patronizing lessons of primers written and illustrated for children. And it seemed every time Adam turned around, Voleta had found a new surface to sleep upon. He wondered if she weren’t suffering from a late growth spurt.
Edith cooked dinner, and it was easily the nadir of her day. Something always seemed to go wrong with her meals. Not obviously wrong, as it did when Voleta and Iren smelted breakfast, but subtly bad. There would be lumps in the sauce or bones in the fish. It made her furious, but she had to hide her agitation to preserve the peace. It was exhausting. There were just so many ways to ruin a meal.
She would’ve liked to blame this inability on her missing limb, but the irritating truth was that enduring one glaring lack had not cured her of a hundred unrelated inabilities. Her lost arm was not the cause of all her shortcomings. Which was comforting in a way. Not blaming everything upon her arm lessened the sense of loss, and that seemed especially important given the impoundment of her engine.
That night, after Edith had reconciled herself to the fact that the pork was undoubtedly overcooked, prompting her to ask Iren to saw her cutlet into manageable morsels, Byron burst into their suite like a figurine from a clock, come to hammer the bell.
“Any word on the Captain?” Edith said without looking up from her plate. She asked the question procedurally and with scant anticipation. She had admitted to the crew soon after they had locked Senlin in the library that his errand could conceivably take longer than a few days. She had not been so blunt with him because he had already been confronted with a number of shocks, and telling him that he might need all of his rations seemed a cruel piling on.
“Must you ask that every time?” the stag said, pulling his white gloves off by the fingers. “Can’t you just presume that I will bring you news if there is any? Better yet, why not assume that the moment the library coughs out that clog of a man, I will bring him to you, that you may pester him for the sake of variety and leave me in peace.”
“I wish you were better acquainted with the words ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ Byron,” Edith said. “You’re dressed to receive orders, but apparently you’re incapable of answering a simple question with anything less than a paragraph.”
They had all continued to eat in his presence. Like he was some sort of butler. It was outrageous. To show his displeasure, he sidled up next to Edith in her dining chair and loomed over her so narrowly he could’ve spit in her food. “At least I don’t pretend to be a free spirit while walking about on a leash.”
Edith stood up so abruptly she nearly caught the stag under the chin. Even with one sleeve of her blouse tied up, she cut an imposing figure. Byron’s dark eyes glistened with alarm.
“We’re out of coconut oil,” Voleta said, distracting Byron long enough for Iren to reach up, take Edith’s hand, and gently pull her down. Iren did this without pausing the circuit of her fork between the mountain of mashed potatoes on her plate and her closely placed mouth.
Embarrassed, Byron snapped at Voleta to console himself. “If you don’t stop drinking it, or ladling it about, or whatever it is you’re doing with my blasted coconut oil, I shan’t bring you any more,” Byron said.
“We’ll see,” Voleta said.
Byron felt he had taken quite enough abuse. Here he was attempting to be hospitable, and they were ganging up on him.
Twisting his cuff’s gold buttons, which were as plump as blueberries, he said, “The Sphinx wishes to inform you that the interviews commence tomorrow. He begins with Adam. I’ll fetch you at eleven in the morning. Be ready.”
He stamped from the room as if he was trying to knock mud from his heels.
Chapter Eight
“A short list of potent stuffs for sparing use: cloves, especially in mulled wine, but also in baked goods; perfume, which should be undetectable to you and elusive to everyone else; and frank conversation in every instance.”
- The Wifely Way by the Duchess K. A. Pell
Adam lay awake listening to the incessant thrum of the Sphinx’s home.
They had discussed the noise at breakfast as a c
rew, had agreed that the grumble sounded like a subterranean railroad or the deep rasping of a glacier carving out a valley. Though they all heard the same tone, they experienced its effects quite differently. Iren said the sound helped her sleep but gave her funny dreams. Voleta said she found the hum profoundly hypnotic, and perhaps this explained her recent lethargy. As for Adam, he could not stop imagining what sort of machine was behind such a suffusing groan.
Since he could not sleep for it, he turned inward.
He wished he could convince Mister Winters that he didn’t find the Sphinx’s gifts at all tempting. He had come to terms with the loss of his eye long ago, and now considered his monocular vision as essential to his character as his short stature or the patchy, shapeless beard he had no choice but to regularly shave. These were his imperfections, and having mastered them, he would not trade them for the world.
What he did find tempting, however, was the thought of sneaking back to the soaring hangar. He felt certain that the hoard of crawling engines came and went by some more surreptitious means than the big, main gate. If he could see his way back to the port, he could follow an automaton out.
A few provisions would be required for the climb, but even with a minimum of gear, he felt sure, he felt reasonably sure, he could make the ascent under his own steam. In fact, having read Captain Brahe’s harrowing account of attempting to moor the Natchez King to the golden summit, where “sparking men” had violently rebuffed him and turned a number of his crew to piles of ash, climbing seemed a more sensible manner of approach.
He was so preoccupied by the thought of it that he nearly missed the tapping at his door.
Rising from the dressing table, which he had repurposed as his workbench, he went to the door, fully expecting to find Voleta, come at last to admit she was bored. He was mentally preparing to entertain his sister (perhaps he could show her the lamp he was disassembling), only to find a fully dressed Mister Winters standing outside his room.
The disappointment he felt was brief but pointed: it would be a while before he was accustomed to Voleta’s independence. Or his own, for that matter.
“It’s the middle of the night,” he said.
“And you look wide awake.” She shouldered into his room, and he saw she carried a pack with her. She shut the door gently. “I don’t want to wake Iren.”
“Why not?”
“We need to talk.”
Frankly, he was glad for the company, unexpected as it was, but he had no interest in rehashing her recent obsession with his eye. He decided to clear the air and spare them both. “I don’t want a new eye. I wouldn’t take it if the Sphinx wrapped it in a bow and got down on one knee.”
“Well. That’s good. I’m glad to hear it,” she said, trying not to show that he had caught her off guard. She surveyed his room to give herself a moment to revise her speech.
Their rooms were all the same, and like the corridor, were decorated in the tradition of a grand hotel, albeit one long neglected. But, unlike her room, which was littered with clothing, one or two empty teacups, and open books, Adam’s room was impeccably tidy. The ancient doilies, thin as cobwebs and brittle as meringue, lay smoothed and squared upon the tops of the chest of drawers and the nightstands. The bed was made, the sheets tightly cornered about the mattress. Adam was usually neat enough, but this struck her as obsessive.
But then they were all under some strain, and the lavishness of their accommodations, while appreciated, had proved quite ineffective at curing anxiety.
“I’ve always appreciated your level-headedness,” she said at last. “You’re sensible, and you listen to reason.”
“Thank you very for the compliment, but what are you talking about?”
“You have to understand, the Sphinx doesn’t do anyone any favors. He doesn’t ask. He insists.”
Adam ironed a minor rumple from the bedspread. “Well, then I’ll just remind him what a scoundrel I am, and see if that doesn’t put him off.” The sting of how Edith had described him to the Sphinx was still fresh in his mind.
After a lengthy exhalation, Edith said, “I made a mistake.”
Adam looked a little pleased to hear the first mate make such a grand concession, but he felt no less confused. “A mistake? What do you mean?”
“I should never have brought you here,” she said, and he frowned because he knew she had been against it. If visiting the Sphinx was a mistake, it was not hers. “You can’t say no, Adam. You can say yes quick or you can say it slow, but the Sphinx will have his yes.”
“Then why lose sleep over it?”
“Because he is going to place a powerful and probably unstable machine inside your head,” she punctuated the words with a tap of her temple. “He is going to conscript you into an ill-defined, yet probably endless struggle, and then behave as if you should be grateful to him. Though it hardly matters if you are, because he does not care if you are fulfilled or ruined by his gifts, just so long as you do his work.”
Adam had unconsciously begun to touch the old injury, the leather of his patch soft and nearly as familiar as his own skin. The moment he realized what he was doing, he broke off with a rueful laugh. “That’s quite a pep talk, Mister Winters.”
She said, “I think you should leave.” The shaded lamp at his bedside enlarged her shadow upon the wall, exaggerating her lopsided figure. “Tonight would be best.”
“Are you serious? You know a way out? Why didn’t you tell us? I thought we were prisoners.”
“Because what I’m proposing is dangerous. I was hoping the Captain would find his way back before the Sphinx decided to have a better look at you. This is a desperate act, Adam. I don’t want to misportray it. But our back is against it, and I don’t think we have a better choice. I’ve packed some food and a bedroll. You should probably travel light, but you might want to take something to read.”
“You are serious.” He shifted uncomfortably. This was, of course, exactly the opportunity he’d been hoping for, but now that the moment was upon him, he found the idea a little surreal: he was going to leave.
“It won’t be for long. Just a few days, a week at most,” Edith said. “All we have to do is find a ledge or a hollow in the facade to strand you on.”
“You want me to camp on the Tower?”
“Camping! That’s the perfect word for it. You’re going camping! We’ll pick you up the minute we leave.” Edith set her hand on his shoulder as if she meant to build a bridge between them. “You should go for your sister’s sake, if nothing else.”
The mention of his sister’s name reinvigorated his faded sense of duty, if just for a moment. “Is she in any danger?”
Edith frowned at the carpet. “Honestly, no, Voleta is too immature and undependable. The Sphinx is looking for reliable, improvable souls.”
“Improvable souls.” Adam grimaced at the phrase. “That doesn’t sound like her.” He began pulling on his boots, the process somehow more difficult with an audience. He hopped and quivered on one foot, trying to feed his other foot into the elusive mouth of the boot. He had to sit down on the rug to get his heel in.
He smiled at himself for being so flustered, and was surprised to find tears standing in his eye. He cleared his closing throat. “There’s nothing wrong with Voleta.” Adam got to his feet, brushing off his knees. “She’s reliable enough, and certainly goodhearted, and sometimes helpful. I suppose I’d like some reassurance that you won’t put her out on a ledge somewhere.”
“Of course. Never.”
“Not even when she irks you.”
“She is part of my crew, Adam, and I am responsible for her.” Edith didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken, but she knew he was only being reasonable. Any parting in the Tower, no matter how minor or well planned, came with an element of risk. It was impossible to guarantee a reunion. “You’re just going camping. Everything will be fine. We will see you again. But just in case, perhaps you ought to say goodbye to her.”
“No,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “I would never be able to convince her to let me go while she stayed here. Let’s call it what it is. I’m going on a little adventure, Mister Winters. And my sister is not.”
“No, I agree. If you both went, the Sphinx would suspect a conspiracy, and he might send the engines after you. If it’s just you, I can claim that you snuck away on your own— the hubris of youth, and all that— and hopefully convince him that you’re not worth pursuing.”
“I do have an idea about where I would like to go.”
“Now you’re getting ahead of yourself, airman. First, we have to get past Ferdinand.”
He gathered his personal effects, including the only book he owned, and followed Edith into the sitting room that was dark but for one reading lamp.
Neither wanted to wake Voleta, which would not be hard, or Iren, which would be quite a challenge, so they proceeded through the apartment on tiptoe.
Reaching the front door, Edith pressed the white call button beside the jamb. A distant, almost inaudible rumble began. The elevating hall was coming.
“Won’t that stir Ferdinand up?”
“I don’t think he can tell who calls the elevator,” Edith said. “So long as we slip into the hall without drawing attention to ourselves, we should be all right. He is a little nearsighted.”
“That’s consoling.”
“He does have excellent hearing, though.”
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 27
