The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  They were led under the siege engine. It hunkered some ten or twelve feet off the ground. The belly of the machine was not braced by iron bands. Rather, the undercarriage was covered in something like scale armor, though the individual scales were quite irregular. It took Senlin a moment of looking up and squinting to discern there were recognizable artifacts amid the makeshift plates. There were shovel heads and sewer covers, skillets and plowshares, bed warmers and pot lids, and a hundred other domestic things, all riveted together to form a protective shield. The machine was silent at the moment, but Senlin could only imagine how much it would roar when its furnaces were lit.

  Each leg of the machine tapered to a spearpoint that was sharp enough to pock the stone. The legs were so numerous Senlin felt as if he were walking down an allée of trees, an odd impression that was likely owed to the unexpected presence of sunlight.

  He’d not noticed it while they’d been standing awestruck above the pit, but now he saw how the siege engine was illuminated. Ahead of them, a borehole as large as the monstrous engine pierced a hundred feet of Tower stone and broke upon open air. The black trail had stolen all sense of the hour. He was a little surprised to discover that outside it was morning.

  As they emerged from the undercarriage, Senlin peered up at the jutting trident. An immense, oily driveshaft connected the tines to the wide head of the machine. The edges of the prongs were lined with square teeth. Only then did he understand: It wasn’t only a siege engine. It was an excavator as well, a drilling machine that could bore through rock as readily as a mole through garden soil. The evidence of it lay before him.

  Luc Marat had built an engine that could chew through the Tower itself.

  The implications were chilling. Could he drive the thing into the heart of a ringdom, circumventing the navies and the port defenses in the process? Could he climb the Tower and crack the Sphinx’s lair open and steal her marvels? What would Marat do with a wand that shot lightning or a doorman like Ferdinand? Could he carve through enough of the base of the Tower to threaten its very foundation?

  Until that moment, Senlin had remained unconvinced of the Sphinx’s assessment of Luc Marat. Yes, the man was an opportunist. Yes, he was a hooligan who had no compunction about pretending to run a charity while building and arming a gang. And certainly, he was a bully who liked to tell people what to think and who used juvenile tactics like scribbling in books to illustrate his idiotic ideals. And while all of that was reprehensible and foolish, Senlin had not been certain that it was as dangerous as the Sphinx believed. Marat seemed a threat to no one but the hods who were unfortunate enough to fall under his spell or get in his way.

  Now, Senlin realized Marat was something much, much worse. He was an aspiring tyrant, a man actively creating a new reality in which ignorance was holy and his consolidated knowledge divine. The evidence of it lay in his acts. Marat fetishized the destruction of books and all that they contained, and then stole from libraries when his designs required it. Marat had banged on about how they were all enslaved to the machinery of the Tower, even as he built a monstrous engine of his own. But then, Marat didn’t truly wish to return to the romanticized past when small tribes lived upon the simple bounties of the earth, untroubled by the evils of society or the uncertainty that came with study, discovery, and growth. He wished to promote a new sort of barbarism, wished to rob people of their intellectual resources and then present himself as the only reliable, sane, and righteous fount of wisdom. He didn’t wish to fell the Tower, he wished to become it!

  But Senlin knew that while tyrants had many strengths, their weakness was generally the same. They were gullible. For the tyrant, there were no reigning facts, no universal systems of inquiry, no demonstrable truths. Because they preferred their own rationalization to reason, their dogma to discourse, the main means a tyrant had for testing another man’s integrity and loyalty were oaths and intuition. But since the tyrants had no choice but to teach everyone exactly what they wished to hear, they were simple to pander to and easy to fool.

  At least, such was Senlin’s hope.

  Luc Marat sat upright in his wheelchair at the sunny brink of the borehole. An entourage of hods, each of whom was as big as John, stood about looking alert and suspicious of the approaching strangers. Marat faced the morning and did not turn around even after Senlin’s chaperone announced their arrival. The leader of the hods seemed reluctant to surrender his contemplation of the sky. When Senlin looked out, he saw in the distance a smoldering airship. The thread of smoke quickly grew into a fat black ribbon as the ship’s envelopes caught fire. The vessel began to twist and plunge. From so far away, the descent looked almost leisurely, almost serene. When the aircraft crashed in the desert, it raised the slightest puff of dust.

  “I had wondered, was it possible to bring down a military ship with nothing more than a hod and a simple means of sabotage?” Marat said, addressing the barren blue sky. “I had wondered, could something as small as the will of one boy be enough to crack the defenses and discipline and firepower of an old warship? Though, what is more ancient than the instinct to be free? Even the young feel it. Even the unborn.”

  Only then did Marat turn to face them. His gilded legs were uncovered. The wicker-backed chair with ungreased wheels seemed too humble a throne for such magnificence. His kneecaps shone like stage lights. A small, beatific smile stood on his handsome face, an expression that only brightened when he saw Senlin with a rope about his neck.

  “Ah! Captain Mudd!” Marat said, his chair creaking as he rolled a little nearer. “Or should I say, Thomas Senlin? Or perhaps Cyril Pinfield?”

  Knowing he would only get one chance to deliver a perfect performance, Senlin did his best to appear humble. “I prefer Hodder Tom.”

  “Do you? And yet all those former lives still stick to you like tar, don’t they?” Marat turned his chin but not his eyes and said something in hoddish to the guard who held Senlin’s leash. The youth approached an iron eyelet driven into the stone. The ring was already occupied by a rope that ran taut over the edge. The guard hacked at it with his sword until the jute frayed and snapped, and the end ran over the cusp with the urgency of an anchor chain. Clearing the rest of the old rope away, the guard tied the end of Senlin’s tether to the stake.

  A morbid thought flitted through Senlin’s head: So Goll was right. It will be a hanging after all.

  “And you’re the two men who caught the fugitive, yes?” Marat said, glancing between Finn Goll and John Tarrou, both of whom appeared cowed and ashen in the sunlight. “How was the trek up?” The zealot leader’s overbearing version of hospitality, which Senlin had observed in the Golden Zoo, was apparently still very much part of his act.

  “Fine, fine, thank you,” Tarrou said, adding with a dismissive roll of his hand, “We did run into a chimney cat.”

  “Yes, I see that you did.” Marat indicated the welts on Senlin’s chest. “Usually I only see those marks on the dead. How did you survive?” Tarrou answered in hoddish, a choice that made Marat’s forehead wrinkle with pleasure. “Yes, yes. Just as it should be, Hodder John. Hods die alone but thrive as one. I suppose you’ll be ready to collect your reward, then?”

  “Oh, I’ve already received it.” John bowed his head. “My reward was given to me by Sodiq in the form of this second chance to prove myself to the cause.”

  “Truly,” Marat said, his expressive brows curling in Goll’s direction. “But you, Hodder Finn, surely won’t turn down the wages of your labor! After all you’ve been through, a hundred mina would take the sting out of your suffering, not to mention a bite out of your debts.”

  Senlin held his breath, unsure what his bitter and unwilling companion would say.

  Finn Goll cleared his throat and said, “I’ll be honest, the reward I really hoped for was to see Thomas Senlin strangled until his eyes popped out.” The weight of the rope about Senlin’s neck seemed to double. Goll went on: “A few months ago, I was chased into a zealot camp by angry
debtors who blamed their insolvency on my misfortune. Which didn’t seem fair, considering that I had always paid my debts before I met this man and he decided to ruin my life.” Goll spat on the ground near Senlin’s feet. “When I joined your cause, I did my best to forget my past—to erase it, word by word, as Hodder Sodiq taught me. I like to think I was making progress on that front. But then I heard that you were offering a bounty for old Tom, and it put the bellows to my anger. I never wanted the money, I just wanted to see him swing.” Finn Goll pointed at Senlin, who looked as if he had something lodged in his throat. “Look at his face, now! He knows it. I told him so. I threatened to kill him myself and save you the trouble. I held the gun in my hands and him in my sights. I felt the trigger’s pull upon my finger.” Finn Goll punctuated each word with a shake of his fist.

  Senlin could see John tensing out of the corner of his eye. He could only hope he wouldn’t do anything foolish. There was no reason they both had to die today. Goll regathered Senlin’s attention with a yap of laughter. “But then, do you know what this man did? When the chimney cat had me cornered, and it was licking its lips, Tom could’ve grabbed our pack and gotten away. But old Tom didn’t run. No, he stayed and fought.” Goll’s expression softened. His fists broke open, and he held out his palms, surrendering his resentment. “And I realized then that he was different. He was not the same man who burned my life to the ground, just as I’m not the same man who was scorched. He is Hodder Tom now. And I’m Hodder Finn.”

  Senlin wondered if John had been wrong about Goll’s acting ability or if his tale was heartfelt. Goll sounded sincere enough when he said, “My reward is to be here, to be freed of my anger, and to meet the Hod King in person.”

  Marat surprised them all by laughing. “Oh, I’m not the Hod King! No, no, I’m Hodder Luc to my friends and Marat to my enemies. No, the Hod King is there.” He pointed back down the borehole at the dormant siege engine. Seeming to sense the surprise of his guests, Marat explained, “Or I should say, that will be the Hod King once it’s fully crewed.”

  “I don’t understand. Our king is a machine?” Goll said.

  “Not quite. Have you ever heard of a rat king?” When the newcomers shook their heads, Marat continued, “Sometimes when rats are forced to live in too small a space, their tails become entangled, and those tangles become knots. The rats who find they have become entwined with their brothers and sisters are presented then with a choice: They can learn to think, coordinate, and work as one, or they can die as one. That is a rat king.”

  Senlin suppressed a shudder at the picture Marat painted. Senlin was doing his best to project an air of thoughtless devotion, but the delicate, vacuous expression kept slipping off his face. It felt like he was trying to saddle a snake. Mercifully, his host didn’t seem aware of his struggle, as he continued on: “Our great engine requires a hundred and eleven hods to operate. Each leg of the machine, each cannon, each hinge of the head must be steered by a separate hod, all working in perfect unison. We will go forth as one, conquer as one. That is the Hod King.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Goll asked.

  “All in good time, Hodder Finn,” Marat said with a showman-like expansion of his arms. “I must admit, I can understand why you would feel a certain degree of hatred for this man.” Marat turned his chair to face Senlin. “After you flouted my hospitality and attacked my followers, I felt compelled to look into Captain Mudd a little further. When I learned you had passed through the Windsock, I paid it a visit. It was something of a challenge, as you might imagine, for a man of my condition to join her in her web, but I had the most fascinating conversation with Madame Bhata. You were a teacher once upon a time.”

  “I was,” Senlin said, wishing not for the first time that he had been more discreet in the past.

  Marat smiled brightly, his teeth straight and white. Somehow Senlin doubted the man subsisted on a diet of beetles. “Tell me, do you miss it? Teaching?”

  “I do not. I know now that my education was just the amassing of trivia and lies, lies that I’m ashamed to say I passed on to children, lies that revealed themselves to me at the worst possible moment.” Senlin had been holding Marat’s piercing gaze to that point but surrendered it now in a show of humility. “I confess—I sometimes miss that sense of security, false as it was. But I know it was my scholarly arrogance that delivered me here. I feel like the ant lured to the pitcher plant by the scent of nectar. The Tower is a honeyed trap.”

  “Pitcher plants. Fascinating. You haven’t forgotten your education entirely.”

  Senlin winced. “It’s an ongoing effort. It’s hard to forget what took half a lifetime to learn.”

  “That’s the truth for us all. But what of your friends, your crew? What happened to those people who you were so ready to slay my followers for?”

  “I don’t know,” Senlin admitted with a small shrug. “I haven’t seen them in weeks.”

  The sky behind Marat seemed to shrink into a backdrop. And perhaps it was the effect of the round mouth of the bore, but Senlin felt increasingly as if his vision was tunneling around the gold-legged zealot. “What were you doing in Pelphia?”

  “I was looking for someone.”

  “Oh, that’s right! Madame Bhata mentioned you’d lost a—what was it—a young wife? How did she fare in that polite society?”

  “Polite society!” Senlin scoffed. “I’ve learned the true nature of civility. Civility is critiquing how another man pronounces a word or knots his necktie, and then saying nothing about how a ringdom hangs its poor. Civility is having ardent opinions about plays and actors and made-up stories, and no opinion whatsoever about the real tragedies of the black trail. Civility is a crowded execution.”

  “Well said, Hodder Tom. It seems you’ve undergone quite a conversion.” Marat leaned his chin upon the pedestal of his fist and squinted. Senlin could sense the tyrant’s internal deliberations about whether or not to believe this enemy who came to him now as a friend. Marat still seemed unconvinced, but Senlin could see he was wearing his doubt down. “I’m grateful that you intervened when Hodder Sodiq was in need of it. I heard you tried to stop the firing squad as well.”

  “Those deaths are on my head,” Senlin said wretchedly. “After Hodder Sodiq defended himself against the two brutes in the alley, some constables paid me a visit. I did my best to undermine their investigation, of course, but they still used me as an excuse to murder those innocent hods.”

  Marat leaned back with a deep sigh, settling his arms upon the humble rests. His face seemed to fall into shadow behind the spangling light of his legs. “Tell me, Hodder Tom, what are your debts?”

  “Here,” Senlin said, and pulled the bondlet out from under the rope about his neck. “Unseal it. Look for yourself. I have no secrets.”

  At Marat’s signal, one of his guards opened the ring that bound the iron tube to Senlin’s throat and presented the small cylinder to his master. “There’s no going back after this, Hodder Tom. You’re certain of your choice?” He paused a moment to see if Senlin would vacillate, but when he remained steadfast, Marat used his thumbnail to break the wax seal. He unscrewed the bondlet’s cap and extracted the rolled-up scrap of paper from inside. He read it, then laughed. “Do you have any idea what this says?”

  “No, though I know who wrote it.”

  “Well, it’s the Pelphian address of some duke and a promise of a two-hundred-and-fifty-mina reward for whoever opens this bondlet and returns it along with your severed head. You are alarmingly good at making enemies.”

  “He married my wife,” Senlin said, knowing this would be a revelation for Tarrou as well. He turned away so that his friend would not see his face when he followed up that truth with a lie. “He made her happier than I ever could. She has riches and fame, a husband who is young and handsome. She turned me away, of course, and when the duke found out … Well, you know what he did: He put a blinder on my head and a ransom around my neck.”

  Marat he
ld up the scrap of paper, pinching it between his fingers. The wind bent and tugged at the little scroll, and after a moment of teasing it in the breeze, Marat let the paper go. The scrap flew into the daylight and was gone. “It seems to me our tails have become entangled. I appreciate your determination, your humility, your courage. I truly do, but …” Marat drummed his long fingers on his thighs, making them chime. “The last time I saw you, you were traveling with a Wakeman. I cannot believe you are not a saboteur and a spy.”

  Senlin did not flinch. “I hadn’t met the Sphinx at that point, though I have since.”

  “You have?” Marat’s perfect composure seemed to waver. Senlin wasn’t sure whether it was a sign of anxiety or excitement. “Tell me, what does he look like?”

  It was obviously a test, and yet something told Senlin that he should not confess the Sphinx’s true face, which she showed to so few, but rather the mask she wore. He described her silver-spoon face and the snaking black robes and her curiously variable height, and when he was finished, Marat eagerly asked if the Sphinx had made him sign a contract.

  “Yes, I signed a contract.”

  Marat looked amused by the baldness of this confession and angry at what it suggested about Senlin’s loyalties. Senlin thought Marat seemed very close to making up his mind about him, one way or the other. “Tell me, Hodder Tom, what was the nature of your agreement?”

  “The Sphinx got control of my ship and my crew—he was particularly keen to have the able-bodied siblings under his charge. In exchange, I was given transport to Pelphia, some forged credentials, pocket money, and a chance to reunite with my wife. Or so I believed.”

  “Seems a rather ruthless bargain.”

  “Especially considering the fact that the Sphinx must’ve known. He knew my wife was never going to run into my arms or call me husband again. The Sphinx knew all about the fabulous new life she was living, and rather than warn me, rather than be honest about my bleak luck, he took advantage of my hopefulness.” Senlin affected the stifling of a sob, then pressed his voice to rise in anger. “Now I have no ship, no crew, no friends, no wife. The last time we met, you told me that the Sphinx turned everyone he met into either an enemy or a machine. Well, I am not a machine!”