“Of course he’s up there. He’s still sending your vials, obviously. Your engine hasn’t run down.”
“That’s true,” Haste said, sticking out her bottom lip. “A crate comes every month. Thirty ampules of the red stuff that keeps my gears whirring.”
“It’s a beautiful engine,” Edith said.
Georgine straightened so she could affect a little bow. “Thank you. That actually means something coming from a fellow Wakeman. When the natives here say it, I know they think of it like jewelry—like something I put on in the morning and take off at night.”
“I wish I could take it off at night!” Edith said.
“Before this, I slept on my stomach. Ever since I was a baby—always on my stomach. If I tried that now, I’d smother.”
“I used to sleep on my side. Though I guess I still could. I can remove my arm with a spanner and a little help. The Sphinx showed me that much …”
“There’s a story there,” Haste said, pointing with one finger while still holding her glass with the others.
“There is,” Edith said. She was amazed how lithe Georgine’s digits were. She only held glassware in her human hand anymore.
“See, if I could peel this shell off for a night, I’d take a bath. Oh, what I’d give for a real bath! Just a long, uncomplicated soak. But the days of baths are gone, gone.”
“It’s like that with a lot of little things, isn’t it? Losing my arm and getting this engine is like this … meridian running through my life. There’s everything that came before, and that was one life, and then everything that came after, and that’s this life.”
“How did you lose it?”
“Infection. How about you?”
“Boiler explosion. My father was an engineer on a cargo airship. I spent half my youth in an engine room. Used to love engines, funnily enough. Now I’ve kind of had my fill of them.” She smiled good-naturedly and drank.
“Were you born in the Tower?”
“No, I’m one hundred percent unadulterated mudbug. From the west originally, though I hardly remember it now. That was before—what did you call it?—my meridian. How about you? Are you a citizen of the spire?” she said, affecting a posh accent.
“From the muddy south. I come from a family of farmers.” Edith realized she was enjoying herself—which was the absolute last thing she had expected of her day. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might find her counterpart easy to talk to or feel the urge to talk about herself, as she seldom did. And yet here she was, feeling—for the first time in many, many months—very nearly normal.
Then the sun went out.
She could still see it when she looked up. The streetlights and the other stars cast enough light to illuminate the sun, but the great bronze platter was frozen in place, its jets of flame extinguished. “What’s happened?” she asked.
“Sun’s stuck. It’s been stuck for a half hour or so, I think,” the bartender said.
Haste scowled. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I thought you’d noticed,” the bartender said with a shrug.
“The sun goes out when it gets stuck?” Edith asked.
“No, they shut off the gas so they can poke it with a stick to get it going again,” Harold said.
“Poke it with a stick? How do they poke it with a stick?” Edith asked, realizing that Haste had stopped speaking because she was charging through the rest of her pint.
Beneath the sun and half a city away, a red balloon was beginning to plump up on a rooftop.
Haste finished her beer with a gasp, slapped several shekels on the bar, and said, “Come on. Duty calls.”
Haste descended the stairs with all the subtlety of a cannonball. She bellowed as she bounded from landing to landing for the children to get out of her way. And they did. They dove into doorways and pressed into corners. Edith managed to keep up, but only just.
They burst upon the street, nearly knocking a nobleman off his sedan chair as they did. His footmen had to swing and pitch about to keep him on his chair. Haste didn’t stop to apologize. She charged down the street in the direction of the stymied sun and the red balloon rising to it. Haste clanged as she ran, her engine shell ringing like a fire brigade.
Edith found the immediacy of their sprint, the unsubtlety of it and the clear sense of purpose, exhilarating. Though she still didn’t understand exactly why they were running. Haste gasped out a few words about a warped track and rusted spots that caught the sun’s gears, which, while odd, didn’t quite seem a disaster. It wasn’t until the balloon’s cargo rose above the roofline that Edith understood the urgency, and all sense of delight evaporated.
A person dangled from a harness under the balloon. The unlucky soul clutched a long, bowing pole, like something a tightrope walker might use to keep their balance. The dangler seemed to struggle with the awkward weight of the thing. It certainly wasn’t a very big person who’d been sent up to nudge the sun.
Then Edith realized it was a child.
Haste ran faster as the balloon swam nearer the gloomy sun, the rays of which stood out like scimitars. When they arrived at the apartment building that the balloon had launched from, they bolted past an ineffectual doorman and sprang up the stairs, which were much nicer than the ones they had recently descended. They broke onto the roof, startling the two soldiers who occupied it. The young man holding the tether nearly let go of the line from surprise.
Both wore the black-and-gold uniforms of the ringdom’s guard. The man in charge of this inhuman exercise, as far as Edith could tell, was the one with a slightly taller cap, a sergeant perhaps. Haste began shouting at him at once.
“I told you never again, Larson!”
“Do you think I like this?” Larson said, his voice squeaking with indignation. He held a short spyglass, which he began to wag at her like a finger. “You think this is the day I had in mind for myself? The sun stalled, and the city manager ordered me to send someone up. I don’t have the authority to disagree.” The sergeant had several chins, none of them particularly strong.
Haste took another step toward him, raising a hand. “It’s not authority you need. It’s a beating!”
The floor of the rooftop showed the evidence of a recent party. Several cane chairs lay on their sides among empty bottles and unsavory puddles. A wadded orange dress had been abandoned in a corner of the parapet. To this mess, the soldiers had apparently added a pair of black knapsacks, a wooden toolbox, and a small steel keg.
A thin whimper drifted down from above. The four of them looked up as one at the bare feet of the hanging boy. The crown of his balloon had nearly reached the limit of the ringdom. Edith took the spyglass from the sergeant, ignoring his blustering protest, and trained it on the boy. He looked eleven, perhaps twelve years old, or at least part of his face still had its youth. The other half was marred by a long scar that pointed toward an absent ear.
The private holding the tether, which was connected to the boy’s harness as well as the balloon, suddenly strained at the line, his feet slipping on the champagne-slickened marble floor. “There’s a draft,” the private said, trying to walk back against the current.
“Of course there’s a draft. There’s always a draft in the afternoon! Reel him in, you idiot, before he drifts into a star!” Haste shouted, marching at the young man.
Before she could reach him, the private suddenly rushed across the roof, scattering a pair of chairs as he went. He slid on his heels, dragged by the balloon that had been caught by a gust. Before Haste could catch him or the line, the balloon crashed into the sun.
The metal rays gashed the silk, and the gas inside rushed out in a single hard breath. The boy screamed, the sound cupped and amplified by the bowl of blue sky. Edith waited for him to fall, waited for the flash of limbs as he plunged by, and the sickening sound of his body striking the street below …
But to her surprise, the boy did not fall. The deflated envelope had snagged upon the same rays that had torn it. The
boy hung from the tatters, some fifty feet above the rooftop.
“Don’t! Don’t pull!” Haste shouted at the private who was still holding the tether, though it was now slack. “You’ll drag him off.”
“What do we do?” The private’s voice shook.
“Do you have another balloon?” Edith asked, and the private dumbly nodded. “And enough gas to fill it?” Again, he nodded. He looked hardly older than a boy himself. “How much can it lift?”
“A hundred and thirty, a hundred and thirty-five pounds, maybe,” the private said. Edith told him to get it filled as quick as he could. The private opened one of the rucksacks and began pulling out the silks of a second balloon.
“We’ll need another boy,” the sergeant said.
“My eye!” Haste barked. “I’ll cut off your arms and legs and send your useless stump up there first!” Haste was staring up at the boy as if she might hold him there with her gaze. “Don’t move! We’re going to get you down! Stay calm!” she shouted through cupped hands.
“Where are your tools?” Edith asked the private, who was busily connecting the balloon’s collar to the valve of the gas keg. He nodded to a lump under the spread silks, and Edith excavated the toolbox. She rummaged through until she found a large spanner. “Georgine, come here. I need your help.” Edith pressed the tool into Haste’s hand. Then she stood up a chair and sat down on it. “There are four bolts in the shoulder, I think. They’re under this plate here.” She tapped a panel in her shoulder that was held in place by several heavy twist locks.
Haste stared at the spanner in her hand. “What are you talking about? You want me to take your arm off?”
“I’ll be light enough without it.”
“But … are you sure you want to do this?”
Edith smiled up at Haste thinly. “Maybe I just want to sleep on my side for a night.” She looked straight ahead. “Now, get the plate off. Look for the bolts.”
Haste unlocked and then unhinged the plate that covered Edith’s shoulder. Four large hexagonal bolts stood out from the intricate machinery. The glow of the Sphinx’s battery painted the coils and rods in a bloody light. “I see them,” Haste said at last.
“Then do it. Come on!”
Haste clamped the first bolt and began to turn.
The sergeant seemed to realize that he was the last man under his own command. So he took it upon himself to encourage the stranded youth. He called up, “Stay calm, young man! We’re sending someone right up to get you. Everything will be fine so long as you don’t struggle. Just pretend you’re an apple hanging from a branch!”
The youth, silent a moment before, shouted something unkind about Sergeant Larson’s parentage, then threw the pole down at him. The pole waggled in the air like a javelin, missed the roof entirely, and broke upon an empty terrace below.
Edith felt the friction and pressure of Haste’s wrenching in her bones. It was like the deep, rattling sensation of striking an anvil with a hammer. It seemed to her that everything was happening very slowly: the turning of the bolts, the filling of the balloon. “Where’s the boy’s mother?” Edith asked the sergeant, trying not to watch Haste’s progress on her screws.
“He’s a hod. I haven’t the faintest idea where his mother is,” the sergeant said. “Whoever the woman is, she might’ve taught him not to throw sticks at people who are only doing their job.”
Edith saw why Georgine loathed the man, but she was also glad the Gold Watch was concentrating too hard at the moment to snap at him.
Then all at once the second balloon was plump enough to show its seams. The private had anchored it to the steel keg, and the balloon had enough lift now to hold the barrel suspended on one edge. “That’s all it can hold.”
Edith felt a sudden lightness in her arm, as if the engine had been tied to the balloon.
Edith turned to see Haste holding her arm away from her side. The sight made her head swim. “There are cords running between the arm and your body. Can you see them?” Taking a deep breath, Edith pressed her chin into the iron collar that capped her empty shoulder. When she strained, she could just see the cables, wound in cloth, that crossed the gulf between her body and the limb. She could still feel her arm, could still make the fingers curl. She knew this was madness. They could wait for someone to fetch another balloon, another keg, another person to do the job. If the boy fell, it would not be her fault, not entirely, not only. There would be so much blame and guilt to go around that she might not feel it at all.
She knew that was a lie.
She grasped the cables and pulled like a child yanking out a loose tooth.
Her engine arm seemed to vanish. It just disappeared from her sense of the world. Though of course she could still see it, hanging motionless in Haste’s hands. She watched Georgine turn and set the silent engine on the ground.
“Help me with the harness,” Edith asked in a voice not quite as commanding as it had been a moment before. Haste helped her into the harness. The leather belts ran about her waist, around either leg, up her back, and between her shoulders.
As Haste buckled her in, Edith told her and the private what she intended to do. She would follow the boy’s tether up and get as close as she safely could to the sun. Then she would yank his line, and when he came free, she would hold him by the reins while they descended.
“That’s insane,” the sergeant said.
“No, it’s not,” Haste said to him, and then to Edith, “Here, take his glove. You’ll have a better grip.”
Edith took the private’s glove when he offered it and pulled it on with her teeth. “Haste, you’ll be my brakeman,” she said while the private lashed her to the fresh balloon.
“Of course.” Haste attached a second tether to Edith’s harness, the effort bringing her head close to Edith’s ear, so she could say without the soldiers overhearing, “First honesty, now bravery. You’re going to make me look bad.”
“Must be the mud in me. Always something to prove. Keep an eye on my arm for me. I’m going to want it back.”
“Who’s your second-in-command?” the sergeant asked. “In case something happens to you.”
“Larson, you’re a coward and an idiot,” Haste said sharply. She patted Edith on the chest. “This is going to work,” she said, then let the line out.
Edith felt the sudden pressure of the harness as it hiked her from her feet. The city grew a little smaller and wider beneath her.
The stars in the ceiling lost their splendor the nearer she drew to them. They looked like little more than naked streetlights, the tile about them stained with soot. She had a funny thought that perhaps that was all the black sky at night was: centuries and centuries of soot thrown off by the stars.
The clamor of metal on metal reverberated through the ringdom. The sun had come unstuck and lurched back to life. The boy’s tether went slack in her hand.
Haste began to shout something. Edith tightened her grip on the line as the boy fell past her in a blur.
In the street below, the afternoon mob finally felt obliged to look up. The boy’s scream was so pure and authentic, so full of awe that for one second, it stole all the attention from the world. A moment before, they had all been studiously ignoring the afternoon eclipse, which really wasn’t that rare. Even after the boy had begun to dangle and yelp, they were not impressed. Why should they let a hod on a string steal their spotlights?
But then the boy screamed, and it really was sublime.
Chapter Nine
An earnest failure is superior to immaculate potential.
—I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet
When the boy reached the end of his tether, the sudden jerk nearly pulled Edith’s arm from its socket. But her grip held. Unfortunately, the balloon’s grip on the air did not. The addition of the boy’s weight was too much, and before the balloon had reached its zenith, it began to sink, and quickly.
All of her reflexes seemed unconvinced that she had only one arm to work with. The urge to
shore up her grip with her absent engine was as powerful as it was useless. All she could do was grit her teeth and hang on, even as they fell.
She hoped to shorten their plummet by landing on a rooftop, if not the one she had launched from, then an adjacent one, but the draft that had caught the boy’s balloon now caught hers. They drifted from the rooftop and dropped into the canyon between city blocks. A class of dancers in leotards and tutus reached out from the studio balcony trying to grab the boy who was thrashing like a trout at the end of a line. But he plunged through their arms.
Their descent was not quite as quick as a free fall, but it was rapid enough that when the boy struck the canvas canopy over a street café, he tore through the fabric at once and crashed into the tables beneath to a chorus of shattering glasses and startled screams.
The same moment the boy landed, Edith’s grip gave out. She dropped his tether, and with it the anchor that had overwhelmed her buoyancy. She bounced inside her harness and began to rise again. In the narrow space between buildings, the gas envelope bunched against the windows of a penthouse, frightening a practicing quartet inside, then snagged upon a prominent gargoyle. The beast’s sharp snout slit the balloon open. Just as quickly as she’d been yanked up, Edith now felt her weight return. She fell amid a snarl of rope, tangled like a marionette. She saw the granite tile of a second-floor patio rush at her and wondered if she would survive the impact.
The Hod King Page 44
