Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2)
Page 3
The lieutenant surveyed the day, seated a white cap upon his head, straightened the gold braid on his breast, and began an unhurried approach. He made a great show of inspecting a hundred details along the way: the unfinished coil of a line, the half-tucked shirt of a porter, a wayward palm frond. By the time the official arrived beneath their rail, Senlin had nearly ground his teeth to meal.
“What's your business here?” The lieutenant's eyebrows and moustache were pared to sharp points, lending his face a thorny quality.
“I'm Captain Tom Mudd. I've come to improve a nobleman with the addition of a wife,” Senlin said, and to bolster his claim, he swept an arm toward Voleta standing at his hip, sullen in her yellow frock.
“Which nobleman?”
“The one with the sincerest interest, of course.”
“No, no, that won't do,” the officer replied with a laugh so dry it sounded like a cough. “Have you a letter of introduction or an invitation?”
“No.” Senlin broke into a cavalier smile. “The wind introduces me and fortune invites me.”
“That is unfortunate,” the lieutenant said, and the word seemed some sort of code because the stevedores dropped the Stone Cloud's lines and began an eerily ordered retreat. They didn't stop until they were behind the line of hulking lead soldiers.
Senlin took this as a bad sign. The lieutenant made a show of inspecting the ship's decoration. “Coming from a parade, are we?” The barbs of his brow lifted in amusement.
“Just making an impression,” Senlin said.
The lieutenant's examination now strayed up Voleta's broad skirts, over her pinched waist, and her bare golden shoulders. “Of course, if you wish to commit your charge to my care, I'm sure we can make a favorable impression on your behalf.”
Senlin sniffed. “I don't know what sort of custom you're used to in this rustic ringdom, but where I come from, business men aren’t expected to make a gift of their wares. I go where my charge goes.”
“Where are you from? It must be a very imaginative country. The ring beyond the Collar of Heaven, perhaps? A lunar colony?” All trace of amusement fled from the officer’s face. “Leave the girl, and I'll let you keep your ship.”
Before Senlin could form a retort, Voleta leapt onto the balustrade, hiked up her skirts, and began to dance. She balanced on one foot and swung her other leg at the knee. Her petticoats, thick and pale as cut cabbage, flapped wildly. “Kiss my foot, you pocky twit!” she crowed.
The lieutenant looked as if he'd been slapped.
Edith, who'd been watching the situation devolve from the periphery, marked the lead soldiers as they swiveled their guns toward the Stone Cloud. She gave Adam a discreet throat cutting signal, and casually as she could, took a fist full of Voleta's wagging skirts.
At the helm, Adam straight-armed the throttles. The ballast tank burst open, releasing a torrent of water that swamped the port and nearly swept the lieutenant over the edge. The furnace whooped as the coil valve opened, and the ship bucked like a startled horse. Voleta would have been thrown overboard if Edith hadn't yanked her back, ripping her skirt in the doing.
Senlin was driven to his knees by the surge. The ship breached a new current that shoved them to one side. The rigging squealed. Iren, who'd been on the forecastle stair, tumbled against the starboard rail, which cracked but miraculously didn't fail. The sound of gunfire reverberated off the Tower a scant second before a cannonball burst through a corner of the deck, rattling their teeth and pecking their skin with splinters. The silk envelope began to deform at the base, a sure sign they were bleeding gas.
Senlin saw the hole in the balloon and experienced a moment of terror so intense it felt like euphoria. They were going to drop from the sky like a shot bird.
But even as he watched, the gash sealed itself as some second skin, some internal membrane, pressed against the tear.
A moment later, they were out of the range of the lead soldiers, and the barrage abruptly stopped.
They rose upon a gentle vent of air. The ship felt almost motionless. The sky was serene. They stood up and patted themselves for signs of blood or protruding bones, but discovered neither.
“Well, that was lucky,” Senlin said, straightening his cuffs with shaking hands. “Balloons don't usually patch themselves, do they?”
“No,” Edith said, kneeling to examine the ragged divot that had been blown into the ship's starboard edge. “Voleta, Iren, get these ridiculous sheets off our ship.”
Senlin inspected the drab-colored balloon overhead with a fresh eye. “A self-sealing envelope. It seems a remarkable fixture for a barge like this.”
“One of the Sphinx’s inventions. Billy Lee traded for it.” Edith stood and kicked a portion of the broken deck into the abyss.
“Traded what?”
“An arm,” she said.
They’d had little choice after that. There was no honest work for a small crew on such a lowly vessel. Every port they approached shooed them off like a fly from a table. They turned to piracy to keep from starving.
Senlin sipped his rum and squinted at the memory. “We have gotten quite good at running away,” he said.
“We've gotten very good at having to,” Edith corrected. “You know we could take a new ship, one with real guns and maybe a thicker hull,” she said, turning the cup in her hand. “If we weren't such conscientious pirates, we could—”
“Edith, I don't want to argue about this again. We can't ruin some innocent aeronaut just to solve our problems. If we were equipped to take on one of the Pell's warships or another pirate ship, I might do it. But we aren’t equipped, and we won’t make victims of honest men. That’s not who we are.”
“It's exactly who we are. Like it or not, we are pirates. Saying please and thank you doesn’t change that. There are no devils by degree, no gentlemen thieves. There’s just strong and weak, the willing and the dead. You heard that boozer captain. Word’s out about us, Tom! How long before some honest man decides that we're not so clever or dreadful as we seem? How long before they push back?”
“I am not taking the higher ground to be smug, Edith. These are decisions that change one's nature. Irrevocably. Look at Voleta. We don’t talk about it, but I’m sure you’ve noticed. She’s hardening. She’s becoming ruthless and reckless.”
“She’s young.”
“A man is thrown to his death, and she makes a joke about him being a bad bird.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“We can tut-tut all we want, but the fact is I have applied the friction that has raised the callus. I accept the responsibility. I am Captain, which is why I refuse to take an iron file to what remains of her conscience by signing us on for murder! If by some fabulous miracle I find my wife, I still hold out hope that she will not receive me as a stranger.” A passionate quaver had crept into his speech, and he clipped it now by clearing his throat. “I am sorry. That was a little overwrought.”
Edith, who had begun to lean away, settled her elbows again on the table. “At least you're not brooding,” she said. “Arguing I can stand; it’s the staring off I hate.”
She felt along the side of her mechanical arm, tracing the engraved arabesque patterns in search of a discreet release latch. This she caught with her fingernail, and a little drawer slid open, ejecting a glass vial into her hand. Her arm wheezed steam and slumped heavily onto the table. She brought the vial to her face and saw that it was still half-full of the glowing red serum. Satisfied, she refitted the battery.
Senlin had observed this evening ritual many times, but knew better than to comment upon it. Any reference to her arm, to its fuel or the mysterious Sphinx who made it, was always met with a bristling silence.
She drained her rum and gave Senlin a frank smile. “Tom, don’t you wonder if we’re even knocking on the right door? Are we sure your wife is in Pelphia?”
“I’m not sure at all,” he said. “I’m chasing after hearsay and conjecture, but it’s all I have.”
“Goodnight, Mister Winters,” Senlin said with a thin smile.
When the door to the chart house clicked shut, he turned finally to the woman in a white nightgown who'd been sitting on his bed for the past hour. She made a childish face at him, like a guppy in a bowl, then raised a brush to her auburn hair. She hummed as she worked out the tangles.
Senlin clenched his eyes shut.
He had set a trap for the Commissioner as part of his plan for escaping the Port of Goll. He had packed a crate with White Chrom, expecting Pound and his men to be thrown into fits when they opened it. But Senlin had been caught up in the springing of his own trap. He had inhaled a monstrous dose of the drug, and when he did, she had appeared.
The vision of Marya wasn’t dreamy. Her figure was not transparent like a reflection in a mirror that might be dispelled with the dousing of a lamp. Neither did she shine or shimmer or speak in a cavernous voice, nor any other flamboyant habit supposed of ghosts. She looked entirely real, which of course only made the vision worse.
He had expected her to fade once the drug had run its course. He did not tell Edith or his crew about the dosing or the haunting because he didn’t want to worry them, and he hoped his suffering wouldn’t be long. But it had been months now, and she hadn’t tired of tormenting him. She was like a child who could only be consoled by attention, attention he refused to give her because he feared it encouraged her. She sang and flounced and carried on, and he ignored it all as best he could, though it was impossible to be entirely immune to the distraction. Sometimes she disappeared for a few hours or an afternoon, if he was lucky, but just when he began to think he was cured of her, she would reappear and the haunting would resume.
The worst was when she talked to him. He hated it when she spoke because in this respect the vision was nothing like the woman he’d loved and married. The ghost was mean, suspicious, petty, and so quick with the most discouraging advice. He felt wedded to his own shadow of doubt.
Gripping his empty cup of rum, he opened his eyes. The vision was still there, watching him from his bed.
She set her brush aside, and placed her hands on her covered knees like she was preparing to address a child. She said, “O, Tom. Dear, dear Tom. You don't know what you're doing. You haven't the foggiest notion.”
Ignoring the vision, Senlin lay upon the bed and took out the painted study of Marya. In the image, she sat surrounded by orchids on Ogier’s terrace studio. The firefly light of the Baths dappled her bare skin. Her expression seemed gentle and bold all at once. Senlin wished he could sink into the painting, could be drawn into that scene. He brought the icon to his lips and kissed the wrinkles and peaks the artist’s brush had made.
The vision of Marya smirked at him from the foot of the bed. She said, “You're as lost as I am. And when your darling little crew finds out, they're going to see how good a bird you are.”
Chapter Four
“Trust is a muscle that works best in reflex.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
The Windsock was nothing like a traditional port. It wasn’t associated with a ringdom; it wasn’t attached to an entrance; it didn’t lead anywhere. It clung to the Tower face like a moth’s cocoon clings to the trunk of a tree, and much like the moth’s dressing room, the Windsock was not a pretty sight.
Jumet, the roving poet of the Tower, described the Windsock in the third volume of his Homage as resembling “a broken country squeezebox / hung upon a field post / left for years to rot.”
The long, rambling structure encompassed several floors and had enough rooms to fill a city tenement. It was a cobble of salvage and wreckage, a product of a thousand hands and half a-dozen generations. It hadn’t a plum joist or matching beam anywhere in its anatomy. Instead of a solid façade, the Windsock was sleeved in a single, continuous tapestry. This wool wrapper, stretched over the wooden frame, made the whole assemblage appear emaciated and frail.
The pattern of the Windsock’s tapestry was as elaborate as it was disorderly: pictograms, symbols, and hatch marks lay in close proximity and at every angle. It reminded Senlin of an old tattooed sailor.
He had wiled away a few hours on previous visits studying the strange code that filled the tapestry, but had never had much insight into its meaning.
The quaint wrapper sometimes fooled newcomers into thinking the Windsock was a civil place. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a desperate port full of black-marketeers, aging harlots, and mercenaries looking for wicked work. It had practical merits, of course: a man could sell his plunder, fill his larder, get drunk, and find a willing companion, all within a short walk. But the fact remained that with each transaction there was a fair chance one would be swindled or shot.
The cove was too rickety to hold an anchor, so visitors had to moor along a great crack in the cliff-face of the Tower, traverse the gap between ship and shelf, and make the perilous hike to port on foot. The drop was considerable. A tumble from the crack would allow a soul a full seven seconds to reflect upon their life, even as they plunged to the end of it.
Iren had a knack for finding receptive patches of sandstone that would catch and hold a harpoon. Today, the spur bit on the first shot, and the ship did not pull it free when Adam dropped ballast to tighten the line. Satisfied it would hold, Iren slid across the gulf on a pulley and hanger. Voleta followed, but without a trolley, dangling instead by her gloved hands. Adam couldn't bear to watch her, convinced the cable would burn through the leather at any moment. But Voleta was light, and she managed her speed by pinching the cable with the heels of her boots. When they were both safely established in the crack, Adam harnessed the two kegs of rum to a pulley and sent the load down after them.
“And you're going to see if your man has any idea about how to get into Pelphia on the sly?” Edith asked Senlin.
“He's hardly my man, but yes. I hinted after it last time, but he didn't volunteer much. Maybe I can needle him with a little money.”
“I wouldn't take anything less than twenty shekels for the rum. It’s not rotgut,” Edith said. “It may be the best the cove has seen all year.”
“Agreed,” Senlin said.
“I volunteer to stay with the ship,” Adam said in a blurt that suggested he'd been working up to speaking for some time. Senlin and Edith were caught off guard by the announcement, and so Adam forged ahead with his reasoning. “If I had just one day on my own, I could break down the console and figure out what’s behind those dead levers.” He opened the grate on the furnace to stir the coals. It didn't need to be done, but he was uncomfortable looking Senlin in the eye.
Edith pursed her lips and watched Senlin for an answer.
Adam's request was reasonable enough, and Senlin was about to say yes.
But then the figment of Marya swung around the doorway of the Great Cabin and chased the thought straight from his head. She wore the red sun helmet that had become so famous in his memory. Her riding boots and white blouse looked ridiculously refined against the pocked deck of the ship.
“Don't be silly, Tom,” Marya said, tucking her auburn hair into the helmet as she marched to him. “You're not going to waste your faith on that boy again.”
Edith cleared her throat.
Senlin realized that he was glaring at apparently nothing. He pinched the bridge of his nose, shielding his eyes. He tried to recover his original train of thought. His concentration was so easily dispersed now; he was always chasing the tail of an idea.
The trouble was, on this occasion Marya had a point. Adam had betrayed him twice already, and though Adam had done so to protect his sister, the fact remained he was unreliable. Left alone, what prevented Adam from calling Voleta back, casting off with her, and stranding the rest of them? If Senlin’s faith in the young man
was betrayed a third time, it would not be Adam that deserved the blame.
But was it a fair suspicion? There was no immediate threat to Voleta. Couldn't the boy be trusted in fair weather at least? It was a sensible risk, really, and it might help reanimate Adam's old confidence. He'd become so timid in the weeks since their escape.
Senlin opened his eyes to deliver his verdict, only to find Marya with her nose pressed to his own. Her eyes were dark with shadow.
He grimaced and flinched before he could stop himself. She vanished in that instant. Edith and Adam stared at him with obvious concern.
“I thought I might sneeze,” he said lamely.
Edith scowled and turned to Adam. “It's not the pilot's place to stay with the ship. That's a joy for the first mate.”
“It doesn't have to be,” Adam said, desperation lifting his voice.
“That's a funny way of saying 'ayesir,' airman,” Edith said.
“Ayesir,” Adam said glumly. He lifted a rubber-rimmed monocle from where it hung about his neck and seated it over his good eye. The cycloptic goggle, his own invention, made him appear a little deranged in combination with his eye patch, but he was proud of it, so it had a restorative effect on his dignity.
As soon as Adam stepped off the ship, Senlin turned to Edith and said, “I'm sorry. I was just considering the question thoroughly.”
“Can you pick up oil for my arm?” She spoke over him.
“I was going to say yes.”
“But you didn't say anything. That’s the problem. What am I supposed to do if you turn into a gargoyle during some actual calamity? Wait for you to thaw out, wait for you to thoroughly consider?” Her frustration began to color her cheeks. “We're all standing by, Captain. But you can’t keep us waiting.”
Senlin began to speak, but she cut him off. “Please don't forget my oil.”