The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  MM: Marya.

  OR: Well, this is a banner day! Have you arranged a date? What will the theme be? Have you selected your flower? Your color? Your—

  WHP: No, no, that will all be in the formal announcement next week. I just couldn’t wait. The news has been puffing me up all night.

  OR: I can’t imagine the pressure you’ve been under, keeping something like that under your hat! Madam Marya, tell me, how did you say yes?

  MM: In the usual way, I suppose.

  WHP: We really must conclude it there, Oren. It’s been an absolute joy talking to you. Come to the club sometime. I’ll give you the royal treatment.

  OR: Oh, thank you, Your Grace. I will take you up on that. And thank you, Madam Mermaid, for your time and your wonderful performance. You stirred my very soul.

  MM: I am your humble spoon.

  Needless to say, my faithful readers, this is the news of the week, brought to you by Oren Robinson, who found the Mermaid, named her, and made you love her.

  Though he had read it before, the announcement made Senlin’s heart feel as tight and beaten as a drumhead. He again skimmed the subsequent articles that described their elaborate wedding plans, which included a specially commissioned orchestral piece, abysmally entitled “The Twain Become the Twixt.” He read all about the spectacle of the marriage ceremony, including the parade, which spanned the ringdom, and the release of one hundred floating luminaries, which caught fire when they bumped against the ringdom’s stars and fell in flaming ruins about the city, much to everyone’s alarm. Their honeymoon was no less opulent. The duke chartered a pleasure cruiser, called the Astra Titanica, which was emptied so the newlyweds could indulge in a moment of privacy, a moment that reporters frankly begrudged them. The honeymoon ship circled the Tower for ten days, a voyage that Robinson cheekily described as “a hundred laps spent upon one.”

  Through the balcony glass, Senlin heard the city laugh.

  Chapter Three

  The Tower is a pestle grinding upon the mortar of the earth. It pulverizes bones, fortunes, kings, love, youth, and beauty. That is its purpose—to crush.

  So, no, I will not retract my one-star review of Café Sotto’s shortbread. I’m sorry the baker is despondent to the point of suicide, but at least he knows now how I felt after eating his wretched biscuits.

  —Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie

  Reading about Marya’s new life had an uncomfortable way of bringing Edith to mind. The fact that those two emotional threads were now braided together in his heart was a source of extreme guilt. He still couldn’t say if it was hope or hopelessness that had driven him to Edith’s room that night. Marya had become such a confused specter—a cause, an ideal that was easy to adore but difficult to love. Edith was, at the very least, a real and devoted friend.

  As he lay atop the brocaded duvet, staring at his three gray coats hanging vigil on the wall, the sleeves of one now torn and dangling, he recalled his final hour in the Sphinx’s home. He had spent it tying knots.

  After his fitting, he and Byron had carried his new luggage to what the stag referred to as “the stables,” despite a conspicuous lack of horses. There were, however, piles of straw on the floor and leather reins on the rough lumber walls. Senlin dragged his portmanteau past stall after stall, all of them empty, and found himself wondering, not for the first time, if the Brick Layer hadn’t been a little mad. What in the world did a man atop a Tower need with horses?

  But when they arrived at the end of the long aisle, breathless and a little wheezy from the stirred-up straw, he saw that the stables had been built for a different sort of beast. Inside the pen, a machine that was as large as a wagon hunkered upon six legs. The legs curled at the end like the claws of a sloth. The machine’s headlamps, presumably mounted on the front, glowed palely.

  “Our noble steed!” Byron said with an enthusiasm Senlin did not share. “Why fly when you can crawl?”

  “You can’t be serious.” The means of passage dawned upon him with a shiver. “You’ll kill us both.”

  “I assure you, it’s perfectly safe.” Byron reached into the footwell and switched the engine on. The walker began to hum, roughly at first. Its joints seethed a little steam. “This,” Byron said a bit too grandly, “is the last wall-walker.”

  “What happened to the rest of them?” Senlin asked, looking back at all the empty stalls. “Don’t tell me they fell off?”

  “Not all of them,” Byron said, patting the engine’s fender. “Some of them exploded.”

  “Wonderful,” Senlin said drolly.

  “You’ve already tried flying into Pelphia. Perhaps it’s time you tried a different tack.”

  Before leaving, Byron gave Senlin the chore of lashing his luggage to the wall-walker. The stag suggested he do his best to preserve the machine’s equilibrium. “The ride can get a little dodgy if she’s too front heavy. Or rear heavy. Or heavy in general. Do your best. Fingers crossed!” Byron said.

  Senlin was completely absorbed with the work of tying down his luggage and considering his chances of seeing another day when someone touched him lightly on the shoulder. He turned to find Edith standing alone in the aisle. She was smiling but not happily. Her dark hair had been recently brushed but not vanquished and was tucked behind her ears. Seeing her standing with the barn wood behind her made Senlin think of her former life. She was not so far removed from riding a horse about the countryside. Though he was not so distant from his blackboards and books. It was strange to think how they never would’ve met if the Tower had not driven them together.

  “What are you doing here?” Senlin said, pulling a knot tight.

  “I came to say goodbye.”

  “I’m glad you did. I would’ve come, but the Sphinx … forbade it.”

  “He does like forbidding things, doesn’t he? He didn’t want me to see you either. Byron came and found me and told me where you were.”

  “That’s surprising.”

  Edith laughed softly. “I think we’re friends now.”

  “Very surprising. Well, we could always use more friends.” Senlin rubbed his rope-sore hands together. He was trying to decide whether he should shake her hand, or embrace her, or stand away and salute. He couldn’t think of what to say, so he said, “How are you?”

  She laughed again, perhaps at the awkwardness. “I’m fine. Good. Fine. It is a lot to take in all at once. A big new ship, a new arm, a new command. You, leaving …”

  “Yes,” he said, looking down. “That is an awful lot. And there’s a little more. It appears my wife has gotten remarried.”

  “She has?”

  “Yes, to the count, who’s in fact a duke.”

  “Did she want to marry him?”

  Senlin’s mouth opened and shut twice before he could force an answer out. “I don’t know. The Sphinx has forbidden me from looking for her. But I …” he began without knowing how to finish. They stood in the heavy silence for longer than either would’ve liked.

  At last, he cleared his throat and said with all the dignity he had left: “I don’t know what to wish for anymore, Edith. I don’t know what I want or what I should want or if I have the right to want anything anymore. I blame myself for all of this and expect she will, too. All I know is before I can wish or want again, I have to be certain she is happy. I have to know what she wants of me, if she wants anything at all.”

  “I understand. And I think—we all think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t want you to suffer on my account, or wait, or worry. If I don’t come back, don’t waste a minute looking for me. We both know where that road leads.”

  “Do we? I don’t have any idea what will happen. Every time I’ve felt sure about what the morning will be like, I’ve been wrong. There aren’t any seasons here; there isn’t an almanac to tell us what to plant or when to sow it, when to expect rain, when to brace for drought. Some days I wake up with a different arm at my side. Some days I wake up and feel like a different
person.”

  She took his hands in hers, the one soft and warm, the other hard and cool. “All I know is that, at the end of the day, dreams don’t matter, but neither does regret. We aren’t what we want or wish for. We are only what we do.”

  Because he smiled at the thought, and because every farewell in the Tower could be forever, she leaned in and kissed him goodbye.

  They crawled backward down the Tower. Byron piloted the wall-walker across the treacherous expanse of stone and crumbling mortar with the aid of a silver hand mirror pointed over his shoulder. They could’ve descended nose first, but only with the addition of many straps and belts, and Byron assured Senlin the experience was both uncomfortable and unnerving. It was more pleasant to back away from the heavens than to walk toward the grave.

  Their journey, which had begun at sunset, was necessarily meandering. They had to circumvent jutting statues, friezes, air vents, skyports, pirate dens, solariums, and observatories. If anyone spotted one of the Sphinx’s ancient grappling machines being driven by a stag-headed footman, it certainly would’ve elicited further investigation. Byron delayed turning on the wagon’s lamps for as long as he could, but when clouds passed over the moon, he had no choice but to light the way.

  They were awkward traveling companions. Senlin’s impressions of Byron were both vague and conflicting. On the one hand, the stag had a barbarous wit, little patience, and could be aloof to an almost farcical degree. And yet on the other hand, Byron had defied the Sphinx’s orders just so he and Edith could have a moment alone to say goodbye. Still, what do you say to someone who’s scolded you about eating cat food, typed up your damning contract, and measured your inseam?

  Luckily, they had a topic to discuss: Senlin’s new persona, the Boskop Cyril Pinfield. Over the rattle of machinery and the scrape of grapnels, Byron educated Senlin on the race he would be impersonating. The natives of Boskopeia were the Tower’s accountants. They kept the books for merchants and ringdoms alike. Boskops were considered honest, if not tedious. Renowned for their dislike of comfort and luxury, Boskops loathed flavor, fashion, laughter, rounded numbers, hot drinks, cold drinks, cocktails, and hats, for reasons that were not entirely clear even to Byron.

  Senlin couldn’t imagine a gloomier sort of person. He wondered aloud whether the Sphinx had selected the disguise to punish him, but Byron offered an explanation for the choice: “Most Pelphians would sooner converse with an unhappy goose than a Boskop. And that’s precisely the point. You want to be left alone. You’ll be safer if you are.”

  The rest of the journey, which took most of the night, was occupied by Byron’s detailed account of the Boskop diet (which was painfully bland), their quirks (which were generally antisocial), and their fancies (which were very few and included things like button collecting, the breeding of mealworms, and poetry). “When in doubt,” Byron concluded, “just blurt out the most disagreeable, unnecessary, and incongruous thing you can think of. Here, why don’t we give it a try.” He cleared his throat and said in a more formal tone, “Would you care for a ham sandwich, sir?”

  “I don’t like ham,” Senlin said.

  Byron shook his antlers. “Oh, come on! That’s just garden-variety grousing. You can do better than that. You’re trying to drive me away, not start an argument on the virtues of ham. The Pelphians are a contrarian race; if you give them something to disagree about, they will flock to you like gnats to a nostril. Now, once more.” Byron held the hand mirror out as if it were a tray. “Would you care for a ham sandwich, sir?”

  Senlin recalled an unlikable proctor from college, a man named Blester, who seemed to always have a handkerchief in his hand and who had the loathsome habit of sharing the details of his health, always unprompted. Inspired by the memory, Senlin said in a nasally falsetto, “No ham for me, thank you. I have a roaring case of gout.”

  Returning the mirror to its original angle, Byron made a small adjustment to the tiller to avoid a divot in the masonry. “All right. That’s better. But really dig deep. Repulse me.”

  Their iron chariot rumbled and rocked. Its sallow lamps made little ponds of light upon the barren stone. The darkness seemed immense and their vehicle quite small.

  “I’ve read that people taste like ham,” Senlin said.

  “There you are!” Byron’s laughter reminded Senlin of a whickering horse. “See, now I don’t want to talk to you at all.”

  The wall-walker’s engine began to chug and seemed about to stall. Byron, suddenly very serious, plied the throttle and played with a pull valve on the dashboard. Senlin gripped the arm rail to stave off the wave of vertigo that the shuddering engine inspired in him. After a moment, the shaking subsided and the motor began running smoothly again. The scare reminded Senlin of his first brush with one of the Sphinx’s engines. It had occurred while he was locked up with Edith in a wire coop outside the Parlor. He described the encounter to Byron, who smiled wistfully.

  “That was a brick nymph,” Byron said. “They used to be such a fixture of the Tower. They crawled all about, hunting after cracks and signs of deeper faults, patching and plastering and painting. Oh, so much color! The Tower was once as vibrant as a maypole. But that was years and years ago. And the brick nymphs are quite rare now.” His curiosity aroused, Senlin asked what had happened to the mending machines. “A clever vandal discovered that he could turn the red medium that fired the Sphinx’s engines into a powerful narcotic.”

  “You’re talking about Crumb?”

  “Yes, indeed. White Chrom is the Sphinx’s medium, processed and diluted,” Byron said. “Once people figured out that every brick nymph contained a small fortune of raw Crumb, the machines started to vanish in droves. Somewhere, there must be quite a mechanical graveyard.”

  Senlin found it strange to think that he had been addicted to essentially the same substance that fired Edith’s arm. “I suppose that goes a long way toward explaining the Red Hand’s demeanor. He’s constantly smashed.”

  Byron snorted. “The effect of the medium is a little different before it’s processed, but even so, you’re not wrong.” The wall-walker trundled by an enormous sandstone goat head jutting from the Tower wall like a hunter’s trophy. They were close enough to pass under its great curling horns. The scrape of the walker’s feet seemed to startle a colony of bats, which flew from the goat’s open mouth in a noisy stream.

  “But why not take the serum straight? Why cut it at all?” Senlin asked.

  “Some adventuresome souls did just that: They injected the medium straight into their veins. The ones that weren’t killed by the shock, or driven mad by hallucinations, soon discovered that the withdrawal is quite fatal. And before you ask, Edith is perfectly safe; the medium powers her arm but never enters her bloodstream.”

  It was nearly dawn when the wall-walker halted alongside an uninhabited pier. The joists that sank into the Tower had been sistered and repaired many times over the years. The decking was sun-bleached and full of gaps, though the wood had not rotted through quite yet. A crooked, doorless shed and a rusting crane were all that remained of the former outpost. Byron said the station had once been manned by machinists from Pelphia, whose job it was to help repair and refuel the brick nymphs. “That was back when the ringdoms still cared to do their part,” the stag said sourly. “And before a crate of batteries was worth its weight in gold.”

  Byron pointed to a wooden walkway that ran out from the pier, curved along the face of the Tower, and vanished into shadow. The rickety path, which looked primed for collapse, led to Port Virtue, Pelphia’s northern port. When Senlin arrived, he would hide outside the port and wait for the arrival of the airship Half Carter, a gray tub of a boat that would be flying the flag of Boskopeia.

  “What’s the Boskopeian flag look like?” Senlin asked.

  “The crest is meant to resemble a gold seal on white stationery, I believe, but it looks remarkably like a urine stain on a bedsheet,” the stag said. “When the Half Carter’s passengers disembark, yo
u will join them and present to the customs officers the papers of Mr. Cyril Pinfield, an unremarkable tourist from Boskopeia.”

  “And you’re a good forger, aren’t you?” Senlin said.

  “Not at all! This is just part of our elaborate plan to kill you in the most roundabout way.”

  Senlin was not enthusiastic about the prospect of dragging his luggage over such a flimsy pier, and yet, it seemed fitting that his final path to Pelphia would be such a forbidding one.

  Byron helped him untie and unload his suitcase and trunk, plastered in the colorful travel seals of other ringdoms and bearing a dummy Boskop address.

  His luggage unloaded, the two fell into that momentary quiet regard that passes for a farewell between some men. Senlin turned to go, then stopped and came around once more.

  “Byron, the Sphinx said you’ll be intercepting and reviewing my daily reports. I’m sorry you’ll have to listen to me drone on.” The stag’s ears twitched, but he offered no quip. Senlin continued, “If there’s an occasion that calls for the passing of a private message to a certain … captain, do you think you might be able to deliver it to her and not forward it to our employer?”

  “Oh, so the former headmaster wishes to pass notes in class now, does he?” Byron said with a merry snort, but then seeing Senlin’s open, almost mournful expression, the stag turned away. The light of dawn bled over the distant mountains. The dark specks of airships threw whisker-like shadows across the hazy sky. Byron cleared his throat. “Well, of course I can’t sabotage my master’s work, but sometimes a moth does get lost on its way home. Birds can be quite a nuisance.”

  “Well, crowned hornbills are abundant in the valley and they are especially fond of …” Senlin trailed off with a shake of his head and a chuckle. “Sorry, I’m a bit nervous, apparently. I meant to say, ‘thank you.’”