Then she drew a breath. Her back bowed and her chest swelled with the resurgence of her life. Iren pushed Reddleman out of her way. She cupped Voleta’s face in her hands and called down to the young woman to wake up. To open her eyes. To come back to her.
Though Voleta continued to breathe and blush with life, she did not wake. She did not stir a second time.
And so, Iren’s vigil began.
Chapter Seventeen
Some men spend their days pretending to be distinct, assured, or enigmatic. But in death, they are all as guileless as infants. In death, we are ourselves at last.
—I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet
No one slept that night. As the fires of the port burned themselves out, the crew of the State of Art lined the bodies of the fallen soldiers before the ringdom steps. They handled them with as much care as they could, using bedsheets to cover their pale faces.
Edith was at a loss for what to do with Georgine. She kept recalling her words about the ringdom’s fondness for pretty corpses. She had no intention of exposing Haste as a zealot—there was nothing to be gained from tarnishing her name now—but even so, she scarcely believed she could trust the ringdom to pay their Wakeman the respect she deserved. Though how could she bury or cremate Georgine without inadvertently turning her into treasure? The thought of grave robbers digging Haste up to shake her bones from her breastplate or panning through her ashes for gold filled Edith with rage. The problem of Haste’s final resting place occupied her thoughts through the night.
Three of the men whose brains Reddleman had needled had not yet perished, though they were capable only of moaning and drooling and very little else. Reddleman wished to keep them for what he called “harmless experimentation,” but Edith would not hear of it. Since the mindless men could still walk on their own, albeit in a loose, wandering gait, Edith released them into the train tunnel. She did not stay to observe them shuffle numbly back to their city. She did not want to see the expressions on the faces of their families when they reunited with the ambling ghosts of their sons, brothers, husbands.
If the Sphinx hoped to reform his reputation for being a boogeyman, Reddleman seemed determined to claim the label for himself.
Edith detested her pilot almost as much as she needed him.
Byron attacked the gore on the floors, walls, and ceiling of the bridge with a mop, bucket, and a string of oaths, all of them directed at Reddleman, who surely could’ve conducted a tidier slaughter. Any gratitude the stag felt toward the pilot for saving the ship and all aboard was depleted by the time he had to change the mop water for the tenth rinse.
The first thing Byron did after Reddleman injected the medium into Voleta was to send a message to the Sphinx. He reported the attack, Haste’s betrayal, and Voleta’s terrible ordeal. This, in spite of not hearing anything from his master in nearly thirty-six hours. Something was definitely wrong. But then, many things were wrong. It had been a mistake, surely, to send the Red Hand with them, a mistake to leave the homestead so empty, a mistake to visit such a hateful port under the rule of such an anemic king.
At the moment, the only thing holding back the tide of panic inside Byron was the near infinite mess and his determination to make things sparkle again.
When Byron saw the utter devastation of the captain’s stateroom—the shattered glass, gouged paintings, and spurts of oil and blood on the carpet—he threw down his mop in protest and briefly considered locking himself in his room. But there was too much work to be done, and no time to pout about it.
In the wee hours of the morning, Byron called everyone to the gun deck to help him shift the fallen Ferdinand. Iren took a break from her watch at Voleta’s bedside long enough to help sit the automaton upright. The revelation that the Sphinx’s doorman was piloted by an old hound disturbed and saddened them all—everyone except Reddleman. The maudlin pilot found the manner in which the dog had been tethered to the engine a point of fascination and said that he wished he could’ve performed a vivisection on the augmented beast. Byron told the pilot he would happily trade ten of him for one Ferdinand.
And yet, Byron could not give Ferdinand the respect he deserved without the pilot’s help. As Reddleman assisted, Byron uncoupled the hound from the engine, separating tendon from cable, bone from piston. After an hour’s work, they at last laid the gray-muzzled hound upon a quilt on the gun deck floor. Even with the blood on his jowls and mechanical mounts bulging from his fur, Ferdinand looked almost serene, almost ordinary. Somehow, that made the loss all the more unbearable.
Knowing he had to say something, and that he of anyone there was in the best position to articulate Ferdinand’s life, Byron gave a brief but sincere eulogy in which he described the hound’s love of frolicking, his loathing of carpets, and his absolute courage in the face of much uglier monsters.
Bryon and Edith carried him out to the port in their joined arms. Using split decking for fuel, they built a small pyre in one of the treeless planters. As the birds began to pipe their bright morning song, a tune Byron thought Ferdinand would’ve enjoyed, they committed his body to the flames.
It was fair to say that Edith was alarmed by what had been done to Voleta in an effort to revive her. It hadn’t been two weeks since Edith had aided in Adam’s escape in an effort to save him from her master’s gifts. With Voleta away from the Sphinx’s side, Edith had thought the young woman finally safe from his influence. How wrong she’d been.
If Edith had been present when the decision was made, she doubted she would’ve allowed Reddleman to inject Voleta with the Sphinx’s medium, and certainly not as many vials as he did. Considering how violent small intravenous doses had made the Red Hand while he served as the Baths’ Wakeman, and how aloof and strange Reddleman had become since his spine was suffused with the stuff, Edith wasn’t at all certain that, even if the treatment were successful, it would be Voleta who returned to them. The Blood of Time warped conscience and personality in unpredictable ways.
When Edith stared down at the young woman tucked like a doll in her bed, her lips and eyelids glowing with a ruby light, she wondered if it might not be for the best if she never woke again.
Edith was certain of one thing: Iren would never have let her stop Reddleman from giving her the injections. No, the amazon would’ve snatched the moon out of the sky, chewed it up, and made a poultice of it if she’d thought it might bring Voleta back. As abhorrent as the result might ultimately be, Edith’s opinion on it was moot, and she was privately grateful that she had not been there to make an impossible decision more difficult.
Edith could’ve used the amazon’s help but knew better than to ask. Voleta’s coma effectively chained Iren to her side. That left Edith with little choice but to put Byron in charge of the bridge and take Reddleman on a brief but necessary excursion into the city. The plan made Byron unhappy, but Edith didn’t think they had anything more to fear from the Pelphians. The State of Art had decimated the ringdom’s greatest warship and proved herself superior to the city’s defenses, and her crew had demonstrated the limit of their patience. Attacking her captain now would be tantamount to suicide.
Edith donned a formal coat, her beloved weathered tricorne, and a new saber and sidearm. Reddleman protested when Byron presented him with a fresh uniform, complaining of the fit, which he insisted did not accommodate his figure. Byron said the pilot couldn’t walk around naked as an apple core, and Reddleman asked if perhaps a bathrobe might not suffice. Then Edith, who was not in a compromising mood, said that he would wear the uniform and a gag along with it if he uttered one more word of complaint.
They disembarked and were nearly through the tunnel to the ringdom when they happened upon one of Reddleman’s mindless victims. The imbecilic soldier sat cross-legged on the tracks. He stared up at the tiled ceiling with his mouth hanging open.
“Why did you do that to them?” Edith asked without breaking stride.
“I was trying to be helpful, Captain. I thought you could do with a
crew of four or five more like me. I wish you hadn’t released them. I could’ve brought them back around.”
Reddleman made the confession breezily enough, though it filled Edith with dread. “Is that what you did to Voleta? Try to bring her around? Make her like you?”
“I didn’t shoot the girl. I only did what your first mate told me to do. And if you wish to undo it, I’m sure you know how,” Reddleman said.
Edith was about to tell him how repugnant he was, how if Voleta recovered, he would never be allowed to poison her spirit or twist her thoughts. Edith wished to tell him that she looked forward to the day when she could be rid of him forever, preferably by dropping him into an active volcano. Then they emerged from the tunnel upon a vacant city, and the rebuke died on her lips.
The streets were utterly deserted. The music halls and theaters were silent, their lamps turned as low as embers. The burlesque barkers had taken in their footstools and barred their doors. The roofs were all as bare as mountaintops. Edith had not known the city had so many curtains, blinds, and shutters until that moment. Above them, the gas jets of the sun guttered amid the quiet—a shushing librarian in an empty archive.
“Do you think it’s a trap?” Reddleman asked.
“No, I think it’s a surrender.”
When they came upon the first Will-o’-the-Wisp, unlit and jutting from the cobblestones of a lane, Edith thought it only a by-product of the empty streets: No one had been out to ride the screw down into the underground. Then they turned onto a wide street that ran like a spoke to the plaza, and she realized it wasn’t just one Will-o’-the-Wisp that had popped up. It appeared to be all of them. As far as the eye could see, the bronzy columns stood out from the ground like prairie dogs.
She thought it unlikely that all of those Will-o’-the-Wisps would have been tripped overnight. She ducked into one of the open booths and sat down. The door did not close behind her. She plunged the switch to reset the circuit and start the downward spiral, but nothing happened. She repeated the process twice. The column remained unlit and motionless. Even the mirror inside seemed dead and ordinary.
“Do you smell smoke?” Reddleman asked. Edith said the fumes of the port fires had probably just wafted inside, but the pilot appeared unconvinced.
The plaza was no less desolate. Here and there, sedan chairs lay abandoned on their sides. Dropped gloves and lost slippers lay amid a muddle of broken glass and cigar ends. The scores of Will-o’-the-Wisps were all exposed here, too, their capitals acting as perches for birds. Indeed, it seemed a colorful flock had alighted on the plaza, taking advantage of the stillness. A big yellow-breasted parrot dominated the stack nearest them. When they passed under it, the bird threw out its turquoise wings and cried, “Come the Hod King! Come the Hod King!” The phrase reverberated across the plaza, increased by the throats of a hundred other macaws all shouting at the uninhabited streets. Though it seemed a petty sort of terrorism, the furor still made Edith’s skin crawl.
“Look!” Reddleman said, pointing to a tendril of smoke rising over the green silk hedge of the Circuit of Court. They found the whorled iron gates hanging open. Inside, the animals of the desert carousel hung frozen in midleap, their parade around the white pyramid at an end. The smoke came from the monument’s darkened door. The gold letters above its lintel were now coated with soot. Reddleman asked, “What does that mean: ‘The Unfinished Birth’?”
Edith didn’t answer, her attention absorbed by the bodies that were gathered about the pyramid’s entrance. There were four of them, gray haired and bald from age, their bodies tangled together in evidence of their attempts to save one another. She recognized Luis Osmore’s narrow frame among them. The Deputy-Wakeman had died clutching his blue kepi over his mouth. The cap was stained black from smoke.
“Some sort of skirmish, I suppose,” Reddleman said, but Edith shook her head and pointed at the holstered sidearms of the dead men. Not a one had drawn his gun.
“No, this was something else,” she said, looking around at the eerie empty court—the lifeless fountains and the false greenery. “This looks like sabotage.”
They were still climbing the two-toned steps of the piebald palace when the massive doors creaked open. King Leonid squeezed through the crack, holding the door open behind him with one hand. With the other, he clutched the front of his housecoat at the neck as if to fend off a chill. He looked like a man who’d been drummed out of bed to deal with an unexpected guest late in the night.
“I don’t have the Sphinx’s painting!” the king snapped. “You must know by now that I don’t! It was lost or stolen, or I don’t know what—but it’s gone.” The king looked past Edith at the Red Hand. Leonid seemed to recognize the former Wakeman of the Baths at once. Reddleman smiled, licking the front edge of his teeth. The king shuddered. “Do you want gold? Is that what all of this has been about? Money? Are we being held hostage?”
“You attacked us, Your Majesty,” Edith said coolly.
“And you killed my brother and my general. You scuttled my warship and bombed my court. The city may never recover.”
“Don’t act like you’re the victim of some injustice here, Leonid. You picked a fight and lost. And we had nothing to do with bombing your court.”
The king lifted his chin, as if he might drive her off with indignation. “You expect me to believe you weren’t working with the zealots?”
“Is that what happened?” Edith asked, refusing the king’s bait. She hadn’t come to entertain his excuses nor defend her actions. They were past such things now.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know! There were witnesses who saw the little hod climb into the Will-o’-the-Wisp with a gunnysack, and not ten minutes later, a bomb goes off, and there’s a fire underground. Before you came, the Hod King was just whispers. Now the birds are shrieking the name in the street!”
“Obviously, Marat’s agents took advantage of your preoccupation with trying to commandeer my ship. But if I was on their side, if I wanted to see an end to your reign, I would finish the job now.”
Whatever hubris the king had managed to bring to his door seemed to drain from him. His neck appeared to shrink into his robe. “What do you want?”
Edith had expected him to invite her in to hear her demands, but she was perfectly content to deliver them on his stoop. “I have three requirements. First, I want your word that the brawlers from the Colosseum will not be harmed. You have a jail; use it. You will close the arena and will stop sending up hods to prod your sun. And no more executions, public or otherwise. You are stoking the fires of a war you are not prepared to fight.”
The king nodded feebly. “All right.”
“Second, you will send a courier to my ship within the hour and deliver every image of the Hod King diagram that your photographer took. Then you will erase the blackboards, seal up the library, and place it under guard.”
“But you must promise to defend my ringdom if the hods bring that engine here. I’ve seen its dimensions. It’s enormous. Some of my scholars think it might be capable of chewing through stone.” The pleading edge in his voice did not recall any of his prior performances. Edith wondered if she was at last speaking to the man behind the act.
“We will protect every ringdom that deserves our protection,” Edith said, which scarcely seemed to placate the king. “And third, I’m entrusting you with the body of Wakeman Georgine Haste. I want her interred in a mausoleum that is guarded around the clock. Put her in your own tomb if you have to. I will return to pay my respects, and if her body or her engine have been interfered with in any way, I will see you buried in an unmarked grave in the desert—preferably while still alive.”
“She will be looked after.” Leonid struggled to look her in the eye.
When he did at last meet her gaze, she gave him an acknowledging if unfriendly smile. “Good. Oh, and one more thing. I need an address.”
The butler who received Edith and Reddleman said they could not see the duke without an app
ointment, and certainly not before lunch. Edith put her hand on the door and pressed her way in without a word of further debate. The servant hurried away to tell his master of the intrusion, even as Edith and Reddleman wandered through to the parlor of Duke Wilhelm Pell’s home.
Unlike many nobles, the duke did not share a ceiling or wall with anyone else. His three-story residence boasted a private courtyard and a fountain and employed a staff of nine. Outside of the king’s palace, it was considered one of the most lavish homes in the ringdom.
Edith had always felt that there was a certain point at which the cleanliness and order of a room veered from tidiness into tyranny. Such was the case here. The velvet sofa had been brushed and the cushions plumped; the bookshelves stood devoid of gaps and gewgaws; the end tables were empty of anything so shameful as a saucer or a newspaper. And even so, the immense grandfather clock that loomed upon the wall between bay windows seemed to tut-tut the imperfections of the room: Was that a hair on the ottoman? Was there a cinder smoldering on the fire grate? Was that a scuff on the molding?
Initially, Edith didn’t even see the maid who was down on her hands and knees combing the tasseled fringe of a rug. The woman’s uniform was immaculately pressed and a cheerful white, but she had the bleak expression of someone accustomed to wartime. The moment the two observed each other, the maid stood, curtsied, and fled.
“What are we doing here, Captain?” Reddleman asked.
“Helping out a friend,” Edith said, and then hearing a commotion approaching from an adjoining room, added, “Be ready with your sidearm.”
The duke burst into the parlor in a housecoat and slippers. Even in his disheveled morning state, Edith could see he was a handsome man. His hair was as tawny as a gosling, and his eyes were as bright as chips of lapis lazuli. His high cheeks above the perfect line of his beard were blushed with anger. “How dare you! How dare you! You can’t barge into my home like this. I am a Lord Duke of Pelphia!”
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