Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Breakfast, being an unredeemable ruin, had to be begun again. It took them nearly an hour to make pancakes, a process that at times seemed like alchemy rather than the preparation of a staple since the adding of flour required the adding of milk, and then of eggs, and then flour again. In the end, they produced a baker’s legion of lumpy, leaden pancakes.

  They spoke little throughout the ordeal, Voleta for wondering whether Iren would stay silent on her explorations, and Iren because she was steadfastly refusing to interrogate the girl. Let them be friends, at least until Iren had a chance to decide whether she would tie the girl to bed at night.

  It was only after they sat down to the table that either of them noticed they were apparently alone in the apartment. They checked Adam and Mister Winters’ rooms to be certain, but found no trace of either of them.

  “Here I was feeling guilty for nipping out!” Voleta said, her hands on her hips. “I wonder if they decided to take a holiday.” She hummed to herself as she returned to the table and began shifting pancakes from the common plate into a private stack. “I know exactly what happened. Adam got bored. Isn’t that fantastic? My reliable, dependable, brooding brother went stir crazy without the ship to work on or the Captain to follow, and he went looking for some excitement of his own. You know what this means, Iren?” She poured syrup on her pancakes, whistling as the amber stream stretched and then broke. “There is hope for us all!”

  Meanwhile, Iren had lost the ability to sit still. She paced around the furniture and between rooms. She wished she had her chains, or a sword, or a pistol. She went to the kitchen and tested the carving knife on her thumb. It was as dull as a doorknob.

  She was furious with herself. What had caused this utter collapse of vigilance and judgment? Edith and Adam might have been whisked away in the middle of the night, right out from under her nose. At that very moment, the Sphinx might be torturing them, or wheedling an eye into Adam’s head, or who knew what else.

  But somehow, it was Voleta’s alternative that seemed the more frightening. They had not been kidnapped, but had crept off in the night. They had left her to look after Voleta and Senlin and the missing ship all on her own. Iren snapped the knife in two and threw the pieces into an open drawer.

  “You seem upset,” Voleta said around a mouth full of food.

  The front door flew open, and Mister Winters entered the apartment backward, calling into the hall, “Leave it, Ferdinand. Leave it! No, you’re making it worse. Put the carpet down.” The mate closed the door, obviously exhausted, and was still leaning there when the amazon stormed across the room and turned her roughly around.

  She smelled like fresh air. Iren knew it the moment she put her hands on the mate’s shoulder and felt the cold on her clothes. She had been outside.

  “You cannot leave me alone with this mess!” Iren said, gripping the mate, her arms shivering with her barely constrained frustration. Iren resisted the powerful urge to shake the mate when she couldn’t even bring herself to look her in the eye.

  Voleta leapt up from the table, emitting a little symphony of soothing sounds, and flew to Iren’s side. She stroked and patted the amazon’s trembling arms as firmly as she would a horse. And by degrees, Iren released the mate and took a halting step back.

  “Sir,” the amazon said. That was as much of an apology as she could manage at the moment.

  Edith seemed unaffected by the confrontation, which was itself a worrying sign. She looked on the verge of collapse, but there was something else, something heavier hanging over her, something that was keeping her from meeting their eyes.

  Voleta frowned at the shut door and asked, “Where’s Adam?”

  Relaying the ordeal took some time, long enough for them to work their way through the doughy plateau of pancakes, which they devoured as a crew, united, and with a solemnity appropriate to the subject at hand. For the rest of her life, Edith would associate pancakes with grief and sadness, and would endeavor never to eat them again.

  Once it became apparent to Iren that the mate’s story was not going to have a happy ending, she carried a bottle of rum to the table.

  “I don’t understand,” Iren said, late into Edith’s account. “How did they know him?”

  “They didn’t of course. How could they? The question is: why were they pretending to know him?” Voleta said.

  “That’s what I wonder, too,” Edith said.

  “But it’s hopeful, I think, that these sparkling men—”

  “Sparking men,” Edith corrected.

  “I like my name better. Perhaps they are pretending. Which means they need him for something,” Voleta said, pouring the mate another teacup of rum.

  Edith downed half the pour in one gulp. “The worst part is, I don’t know how we’ll ever rescue him. I’ve never seen such terrifying weapons, and they all have spyglasses that can see through the fog. And I have no idea where they took him, or what those fortifications look like, but judging by how they talked, I imagine there are a considerable number of them.” She skewered the last pieces of pancake onto her fork and before stuffing the unwanted morsel into her mouth, said, “We will of course still try.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Voleta said quickly. “Is there any reason to throw our lives away just to prove to my brother, who might never find out, exactly how much we all liked him?” Voleta looked to Iren for answer, and the amazon shook her head minutely. “Whose idea was it that he go with them?”

  “His. I was ready to make a fight of it.”

  “Then it’s a good thing he was there.” Voleta had begun to balance her chair on the edge of the back legs. She sawed on the edge absentmindedly. Still, this was as serious as any of them had ever seen her, and it made Edith uneasy, or rather it made her fully conscious of how terribly she had failed her friends.

  The mate wiped her mouth and looked Voleta dead in the eye. “I just want to be clear. I realize that your brother traded his freedom for my life, and I will do everything in my power to be worthy of his sacrifice.”

  “Please don’t torture yourself over it. He’s old enough to make his own decisions. And think of us, Mister Winters. We don’t want a first mate who’s all martyred up. You said you had to get him away from the Sphinx. I don’t think that was a bad idea. The rest is just the unforeseen consequence of doing the prudent thing.” Privately, Voleta was thinking what a gift it was that though they had not had a chance to say goodbye, the last words she heard her brother speak were kindly and full of praise for her. Still, she suspected that he had said something more, something in those final minutes, something that Edith was omitting out of embarrassment or oversight. “Did he say anything else?” She tried to present the question as casually as she could.

  “Yes. He did. He said…” Edith cleared her throat, and recited the words she’d decided on during the long ride back without him.

  The feet of Voleta’s chair came down with a bang. “He said he loved me?” She stared so incredulously that Edith had to look away. “Mister Winters, I believe you. But I want you to know that you’re not going to hurt my feelings. Did he say anything else, anything at all?”

  Edith looked unhappy, though she was very appreciative of Voleta’s diplomacy. “He said, ‘Tell the little owl not to forget my birthday.’”

  Voleta rolled her eyes in relief. “Oh, he’s fine.”

  The Steam Pipe had all but gagged them. Rodion, the rogue organist and unabashed pimp of the Pipe, seldom missed an opportunity to gloat over their debt. He especially enjoyed leering at Voleta in front of Adam, knowing there was nothing the boy could do to stop it. Adam had no illusions that this lecherous display was done to bait him, but knowing this did little to lessen his rage. Voleta grew quite accustomed to seeing her brother red-faced and shaking with the exercise of self-control.

  If ever Adam were foolish enough to plead for a moment of privacy with his sister, Rodion would straight away reply: “Privacy is available at an hourly rate.”

  Compli
cating matters further, the backstage was constantly congested with stagehands, porters, and the troupe of unfortunate women in Rodion’s employ. Voleta had once made the mistake of referring to Adam as ‘big brother’ in front of one of the girls in the chorus line, and before the day was out, all the girls were calling their johns ‘big brother.’ The fad lasted for weeks.

  In this way, they were trained to always be on guard and to never exchange anything more than the blandest of pleasantries.

  Except for the night of the fire.

  It was wholly coincidence that Adam was at the Steam Pipe the night it happened. Finn Goll had sent him to deliver sixty bottles of sparkling wine to Rodion’s cellar, and it was only by chance that Adam arrived with the cargo between performances when Voleta wasn’t up on her swing.

  Adam had just finished moving the crates of wine, and was in the process of offering his sister some stiff salutation, when a boy sweeping the trodden on bills and peanut shells from the bleachers spoke the magic word, “fire,” and a panic was born.

  Rodion’s cape was heroically enlivened by his dash for the exit. He was the first out, but chorus and crew followed close behind. Only Adam and Voleta lingered, pressing into the stage curtains for cover and peering about for any sign of the fire’s progress. For the moment, there was only a little smoke.

  Taking his sister by her arms, Adam wasted no time telling her what he had learned from his pickpocket expeditions. “If I don’t make it back, you have to know when to look for me. It isn’t enough to have a place; we have to have a time as well. Otherwise one of us might end up sitting around for the rest of our lives, waiting for the other.”

  “You’re not coming back?” Her stage makeup embellished the widening of her eyes.

  “I will. I will, of course,” he quickly reassured her, sawing their arms between them. Men shouted in the auditorium beyond the curtain, calling for water and sand and all able hands. “But if I can’t come back, if I’m waylaid or stopped at the border, look for me on my birthday, April 23rd. You remember where?”

  “Owl Gate,” she said, the place they had long ago agreed to meet should they ever be separated. She realized what this meant. “You think I’ll escape?”

  “If anyone can, it’s you. It may take a few years, a few tries; you might even have to change address—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I have a plan,” he said, and was about to say more when they heard a soft chime behind them.

  Neither of them had heard the anvil-faced amazon sneak up on them, but she had, and she stood now very close indeed, a pail of sand hanging from either hand. Voleta bleated with surprise, and the giantess, girded with her piles of chains, sucked in a great gust of air, and bellowed in their faces: “Fire!”

  Voleta and Adam ran for the door like a pair of startled cats.

  “It’s funny,” Voleta said as Iren rose and began to clear the dishes to the galley. “It was easier to get along when we couldn’t talk to each other.”

  “Was there a fire?” Edith asked and valiantly stifled a yawn. Her lack of sleep was catching up with her at last. She dosed her cold coffee with a spot of rum.

  “Smoke mostly.” Iren said, dropping the plates heavily into the sink. “Someone dropped a cigar on a rug.”

  “What was his plan?” Edith asked.

  “He never had a chance to tell me, but it wasn’t long after that that he came home wearing the patch. I told him I didn’t want to hear any more plans after that. He got a little more conservative then.”

  Scouring the dishes, Iren could not stop picturing herself as Voleta had described her. She had been an ogre. A terror. Not a person, but a presence. But look at her now: she was washing dishes like a regular person. With hands warming in the sudsy water, she marveled at her new life. It was a miracle they had brought her, a miracle they had forgiven her, a miracle that they liked her. She mustn’t forget how fortunate she was.

  She turned around, her arms covered in bubbles to the elbows, and said to the table, “I’m sorry for all of that. And for this last time, and for the next time I get angry.” Then she went back to the wash. Edith and Voleta shared a shrug, both confused but not unpleasantly so.

  Voleta carried the last evidence of breakfast to the kitchen, her feet splashing in the puddle of soapy water Iren had driven from the sink. “My point is, I think him talking about birthdays again means he has something in mind for those Tower sitters. Maybe he means to rob them. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him on his birthday.”

  “So, you think he will escape?”

  “If anyone can,” Voleta said.

  Edith was amazed by Voleta’s calm acceptance, and the pragmatic part of her wanted to argue for what an unlikely scenario that was. Did Voleta really expect her brother to slip away from his captors, somehow descend the entire length of the Tower, and appear at Owl Gate in time for his birthday? While not impossible, it seemed a slender chance. But then, what good were clear eyes in the face of bad odds? And who was she to throw cold water on a young woman’s hope?

  “Voleta, as long as we’re together, I promise we’ll spend Adam’s birthday at the gate. And I’m very sure he will do everything in his power to keep the appointment.” Edith stood, her exhaustion making the simple act laborious. “Now, if no one minds, I need a nap.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock. Don’t you remember?” Voleta said with an expression of surprise.

  “We’ll dispense with the calisthenics this morning,” Edith said, leaning upon the open doorway of her bedroom. The rum that had first warmed her limbs now filled them with a pleasant weight. From where she stood, she could see her bed: the too-plump mattress, the tufted headboard, fortified with half a dozen pillows, and the sheets as soft as clover.

  A single, sharp rap at the apartment door heralded the entrance of the red-breasted stag. Byron quick-marched into their living area, his epaulets neatly combed, his gloves in hand, and his nose in the air.

  “All right,” Byron said, surveying the room. “The master is waiting. Where’s Adam?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “F is for fawning, false, and for fake, who lives to be liked by those that he hates.”

  - The Unlikable Alphabet, a Primer for Children by Anon.

  Byron held his gloves lightly, not choked up in a fist, but pinched precisely between thumb and forefinger as a reader might hold a book or a doorman the brim of his cap. He’d learned the mannerism from a powerful man, an admiral from some ambitious ringdom, who’d once visited the Sphinx to beg for a military advantage he would not receive. The admiral punctuated his arguments by slapping his gloves into his palm, and then, in a fit of frustration, the side of his leg. It was quite a display of authority and disdain, which was only a little diminished by his summary expulsion.

  The trouble was, Byron never knew what to do with his hands. Or his feet, for that matter. Or any of it. Especially at first. It had taken him two humiliating months to learn to walk. That was when he could still remember what it was like to bound along on four strong legs. While acclimating to his new man-shaped shell, he’d been so terribly awkward that every visitor felt obliged to point it out. The way he moved, stiffly, lurchingly, swinging his arms too wide or holding them too firmly to his side, was apparently the very pinnacle of comedic entertainment.

  Making a concerted effort to improve, he began to collect a repertoire of mannerisms for an array of occasions.

  This morning, he had hoped to project authority, self-possession, and the sort of fatalistic stoicism unique to men in uniform. Instead, before he’d even had a chance to snap his gloves upon his hand, Edith had announced that Adam was gone.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone?’”

  “Escaped. Run away. Scarpered off,” Edith said. “He has departed the premises.” She realized she was feeling a little punchy.

  Byron squinted at her. She looked terrible, even by her marginal standards. Her slate-colored hair only needed a pair of birds to make it a per
fect nest. Her eyes were raw and underscored with bruises. Her broad lips were chapped; her blouse, knotted at one sleeve, was in desperate need of a launderer at the least, and an arsonist at the most. It seemed a shame to him, because he suspected she could be attractive, even striking, if she would just make a little effort on her appearance.

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked with a delighted expression of aghast.

  “I had stopped, actually, but if you insist.” Edith tilted the stone jug over her teacup. “I can pour you a snort while I’m at it. Or, if you’d rather save time, I can just throw it on the floor for you. You won’t even have to get it on your costume.”

  “You helped him escape,” Byron said, hands now behind his back, an ideal pose for correction and disappointment, though Edith looked resolutely unimpressed. “You took advantage of the master’s hospitality, his trust, to take your sailor out for a little canoodling.”

  Edith rallied her self-restraint and set the teacup down to keep from throwing it at the stag’s head. “I won’t have you slandering my crew.”

  “It’s not slander, Edith. It’s an accusation based on the evidence at hand. Either Adam took advantage of your dalliance to assist his escape, or you willfully abetted the enemy.”

  “The enemy?” Voleta inserted herself into the conversation with a diplomatic laugh. “He’s my brother, Byron. Come now. There’s no need to blow this out of—”

  “Miss Voleta,” Byron said, turning to her with a staid and distant expression, one meant to discourage any memory of having seen him with his suspenders off. “You’re appealing to the wrong person. I’m merely a forecaster. You’ll have to make your case to the Sphinx yourself during your next visit.”

  Forking her hands into her hair, Edith collected the strays and shaped the rest as best she could. “All right, I’m ready,” she said. “Take me to him.”