“Where is that light coming from?” Voleta asked.
“I think it’s the gloamine,” Senlin said. “Salo wrote about it. Gloamine is a kind of lichen that glows in the dark. It grows on the trees and the ground covering. They used it as an alternative to gas lamps, which were too dangerous to burn in a forest.”
“It’s beautiful,” Voleta said.
They crowded onto the ruined prow and peered into this mounting light. Then the colonnade ended, the Silk Gardens opened before them, and they discovered that despite all they had seen, they hadn’t yet exhausted their awe.
In his Inaugurations, Salo described this place of disembarkment as a sugar-white beach embraced by a glowing forest. Lively crowds cheered the arrival of stately ships. Musicians and dancers filled lily-white gazebos. Flower girls cried, “Carnations for your collar; roses for your posy!” and shook bouquets over their heads, filling the air with petals and perfume. Weddings were so common in those first days after the park was opened that Salo said he could if he felt the urge traverse the entire beach by leaping from one bridal train to the next without ever touching the sand.
Most remarkable of all— indeed the main attraction for many— were the host of fantastic clockwork animals that populated the forest, ornamented the paths, and served as whimsical landmarks to visitors. Some of these mechanical beasts resembled ibexes with hinged mouths that seemed to graze. Others resembled giraffes with long plated necks that turned and reached. Copper zebras leapt on rails, silver peacocks trumpeted and fanned aluminum tails, and gold-bellied elephants raised their trunks in welcome. The Silk Gardens were, as Salo put it, the toy chest of a genius.
But that was the world that was.
The beach before them was littered with shipwrecks. There were dozens of them, ships of all cuts and sizes. The wrecks lay amid the devastated bleachers and caved-in gazebos. They were shrouded in their deflated silks like corpses in a morgue. The derelicts and debris had been pushed to the edge of the beach by the force of storms that howled through the tunnel a few times a year. Behind this reef of wreckage, the spiny forest seemed an impenetrable bramble that rose nearly a hundred feet to the grand dome of the cavern. The trees glowed like an alcohol stove with an otherworldly light.
“I don’t like it,” Iren said, noting all the opportunities for ambush.
“What do you think all those wrecks mean?” Voleta asked.
“They mean parts. Salvage. We can repair the Cloud,” Adam said.
“Well, that’s one good turn, at least,” Senlin nodded, trying to shake the feeling that their ship bore a striking resemblance to the derelicts before them.
“None of them look very fresh. The wind has had time to bury them,” Adam said.
“What about the people aboard?” Voleta asked. “Do you think they were rescued?”
Iren snorted.
“It doesn’t matter what happened to them. What matters is what will happen to us,” Senlin said, trying for confidence.
He pressed past his crew, descended the forecastle, and retreated to his cabin. When he returned, he carried the two sacks of books, one over either shoulder. He sat these down by the edge of the ship where the rope ladder lay rolled in its box. He made a second trip to his stateroom, and returned in the process of buckling a sword belt, a rapier that had been surrendered by one of the Commissioner’s agents. His aerorod, which he’d all too often swung as a club, would stay aboard.
“I don’t need to tell you what sort of trouble we’re in,” he said, donning his tricorne. “We have little water, no food, and a limping ship. We must divide and conquer. I am going to trek to the Golden Zoo. Hopefully, I can talk Marat into parting with some information about the hod trail and some of his stores.”
“Asking for directions is one thing. Asking for a handout is mmm…” Edith bit down on the word “madness” before it escaped. “It seems a little optimistic, Captain.”
“‘Optimistic’ is the word for it, Mr. Winters. Optimistically, Marat will make me tea, fill our pantry, and throw open the doors to Pelphia. I hope that is the case. But I have a pessimistic solution as well. If it comes to it, I’m going to facilitate his generosity in our favor.”
“You’re going to rob a missionary?” Voleta interjected with a zest that dismayed Senlin.
“Yes, Voleta, but only as a last resort. And if it comes to that, I may be returning in a hurry,” Senlin said, turning to Adam. “The ship must be ready to fly. It doesn’t have to be handsome, but it needs to hang in the air. Do you think it’s possible?”
“Ayesir,” Adam said.
“You’re not suggesting that you go on your own?” Edith said, shaking her head. “No, I’m coming with you. Permission to come with you.”
She knew it was not a good idea. For one thing, it was against procedure, which held that while ashore, either the captain or the mate should remain aboard, partly because a crew needed leadership, and partly because nothing prevented them from sailing off on their own.
But the fact that Senlin was delusional trumped any protocol. She couldn’t send a man who was seeing things into a forest that was probably infested with beasts and spiders. Edith pictured him wandering about in circles, turning his map this way and that, and ranting to his lost wife while the rest of them starved on the boat. If Iren went with him, she’d have to be told what, exactly, he needed protection from, and Edith wasn’t ready to tell the crew their captain was haunted just yet. Once that news was out, there would be no going back.
Senlin saw in Edith’s expression a determination that he had no hope of discouraging. And, truth be told, he didn’t relish the idea of going into the woods alone. He surprised her with a smile. “All right, Mister Winters. Don’t forget your sidearm.”
“We haven’t any powder,” she said.
“But it makes a good impression, don’t you think?” he said, and turned to Adam while Edith went to fetch her pistol. “Adam, I leave the Stone Cloud in your capable hands. Fix her for me, would you? Iren, I dare say you have some heavy lifting ahead of you. Voleta, you’re my little owl. If trouble comes, and I may bring it with me, I’m counting on you to see it a long way off. Keep an eye on everyone, please.”
The crew made their promises to do all they could while Senlin uncrated and unfurled the ladder. Edith returned with a sword on one hip and a pistol on the other. She’d also tied a yellow scarf about her neck, her version of dressing for a social call.
“Mr. Winters and I will be back tomorrow morning with breakfast,” he announced with a little more confidence than the circumstance probably deserved. Yet Voleta was not one to pass up an opportunity to raise a cheer, which she did while prodding her brother in the ribs until he finally gave in and helped finish the hurrah.
Senlin gestured for Edith to lead the way down to the dusky beach below. Before following, he leaned into Iren and spoke with a neutral expression to keep from stirring Adam or Voleta’s suspicion. If the Commissioner finds you, and I pray he doesn’t, betray me at once. Tell him I have his painting,” Senlin said, patting the breast of his coat. “Tell him you are saboteurs left behind for your crimes. Say whatever you have to to survive. And if we aren’t back in a day, take the ship as soon as it will fly and go. Sell it for scrap if you have to. Don’t let them starve.”
“Ayesir,” Iren said, her broad face tight as a drum.
Chapter Three
“Gentle reader, do not make yourself an arbor under which other pedestrians must pass. Move your embraces and glad reunions to the shoulder. Even a great romance is but a stumbling block when it happens upon the road.”
- Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
If there were forests on the moon, Senlin imagined they might well resemble the eerie landscape of the Silk Gardens.
The trees were hard, barkless, and pale as mushrooms. Glowing moss bearded the sandy ground between the disheveled cobblestones of the winding trails. Everything seemed to be pressing up and crowding in at them.
Spider silk laced between branches and swooped over their heads, growing so dense in the high bowers that the fine threads merged into a single, unbroken canopy. The air was parched and cold, and it tickled their nostrils with minerals as pungent as potpourri. Very quickly, the ship and crew seemed far behind them, and they felt quite alone.
It was strange to think that such a wilderness had been allowed to grow inside the vital Tower. The dissolving relics of the abandoned park only made the scene more surreal. They passed smashed bowers, empty signposts, and booths that had once been filled with edibles and mementoes that now bowed under mats of shining lichen.
“Did we take another wrong turn? I don’t see a bird anywhere.” Edith said, setting down her sack of books alongside Senlin’s. The forest was chilly, and still she’d begun to sweat from the exercise. She tied up her hair with her yellow scarf, and relished the cool air on her neck. “Are you sure it’s a bird?”
“It looks like a bird,” Senlin said. “An ostrich, I think. It’s drawn very small.” He squinted at the map. “I suppose it might be a chicken.”
“Here, let me look. I can’t imagine why you thought this map would be reliable.” She had a point. Even after a century, the map had acquired none of the dignity of an antique. It was garishly colored and crowded with animal caricatures. It was the sort of thing that cried out to be folded into a hat and given to a child. “Your giraffe turned out to be a llama, and I’m still not sure what that last landmark was,” she said, referring to the rusty beast they’d passed earlier. “A large dog? A small bear? This map is hopeless.”
“It has gotten us this far,” Senlin said, taking the map back before she could horribly misfold it. He wasn’t blind to its flaws, but he’d already invested too much hope to give up on it now. “If you overlook the general aesthetic, which is admittedly silly, it does have all the marks of a map: there’s a compass rose, a scale, a legend…”
“It’s covered in hearts, Tom.”
“Yes, I see them. The legend identifies those as areas which couples might find—”
“—enabling.”
“I was going to say ‘of scenic interest,’” he said.
“So, which way?”
They had stalled at a fork in the winding path. Senlin peered in one direction, then the other. Both ways were as narrow and tortuous as animal trails. Unlike other ringdoms he’d seen, which were uniformly flat, the ground here rolled and pitched over modest knolls and valleys, all of which were a little too constrained to be convincing. As wild as the Gardens were now, the original landscaping had not been entirely erased.
But the porcelmores grew so tightly and their branches were so tangled, the forest off the footpath was virtually impenetrable. This had been a disappointment to Edith. She had hoped to forgo the meandering lanes outlined on Senlin’s map in favor of a more direct route. If they travelled in a straight line, the Golden Zoo was only a mile and a half away.
When they first entered the woods, after snaking through the abysmal graveyard of airships, she had been able to forge a path with relative ease. The brittle, white branches shattered under her cutlass like fine china. But the work quickly turned difficult. The saplings grew thicker, their growth denser the further they went. Worse, the shattered wood proved to be as sharp as quills, and it wasn’t long before they began to feel like a pair of pincushions. Her efforts also disturbed the gloamine, which fell on them as a fine luminous powder. The silt clung to their clothes and hair as stubbornly as pollen and soon turned them into a pair of glowing ghosts thrashing through the undergrowth.
And that was when she had agreed to give the map a try.
“Look, there it is,” Senlin said, pointing to a half covered form on the side of the path. He cut aside a few saplings with his sword to get a better look at the mechanical beast. Like the others they’d seen, it must’ve been splendid once. But rust had eaten away at the machine’s polish, and many of its plates were corroded through. “It’s an emu.”
“How can you tell?”
Senlin scuffed aside a clump of moss so she could see the machine’s planted feet. “See, it has three toes. An ostrich only has two.”
“How in the world would you know that?”
“I had a student ask me once what the difference was, and so I went home and read everything I could find on emu and ostrich anatomy, which to be fair wasn’t much.”
Edith shook her head in amazement, though her patience quickly thinned. “What are you looking for now? Come on, we don’t have time for this.”
“This one is stamped, too,” he said, reaching around a thorny branch to read the plaque on the bird’s breast. “It says The Emu of the Sphinx.”
“Fascinating.”
“It is. Don’t you see what this means? When I was in the Basement, I rode a machine called something like… like… The Many Handled Pump of the Sphinx.”
“The Beer-Me-Go-Round.”
“You’ve heard of it?” he said.
“You lived with students; I lived with pirates. If beer comes out of it, I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, then you know the pumps and all that plumbing must be very old, as old as the Tower itself, perhaps. And this emu is at least a century old. But, em…” he trailed off when he saw her expression. With her hair pulled up and her neck stretched, she looked quite severe.
“My arm is new,” she said.
“Exactly. Obviously, it can’t be the same man responsible for all these inventions. He’d have to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old.”
“What does it matter?”
“What does it matter? Anyone that involved in the design, perhaps even the construction of the Tower, must be unimaginably knowledgeable.”
“But you just said it couldn’t be the same person.”
“It can’t, of course, but he must be someone with access to that knowledge. Your Sphinx, whoever he is, must know the Tower intimately: its secrets and inner-workings. Think of the questions he could answer. Here we are desperately scrounging for a little information. Meanwhile, the Sphinx—”
“Let’s move on.”
“You know, if there’s something you want to tell me, Edith…”
“Come on, Tom. You promised Voleta breakfast.”
After an hour of slow, meandering progress, they came upon a small clearing with a collapsed bench and a perfectly round pond at its center. The pond held the gloomy light like a mirror.
“Those book corners dig into you like a spur,” Senlin said, dropping his sack on the sand. He tried to massage his back, was foiled by his long coat, and so removed it, folded it in half, and set it upon the bag of books. As he kneaded his back he said, “I feel like a monster for having made my students carry their books to school every day.”
“Young backs have short memories,” Edith said and knelt to inspect the water. She stirred, sniffed, and peered into the basin like she was reading tealeaves in a cup.
Senlin cleaned glowing silt from his compass crystal, and consulted it alongside the map. He neglected to mention that they were presently camped upon a heart. “How deep is it?”
“It’s more a cistern than a pond. It drops right off. I can’t say how deep.”
“The real question is, can we drink it?” Senlin asked as Edith craned down to smell the water.
“Be my guest,” she said.
“Don’t be absurd. Testing for poison is a first mate’s job,” Senlin said. Edith gave him a strained look. “I was only joking! What is the matter? Really. This has gone on long enough. You’ve been frowning and huffing all day, and I suspect that I’m at fault, but blast it all, Edith, if I can guess how. You must tell me. What is the matter?”
She stood up and slapped the grit from her palms; that light clapping resounded like applause through the silent grove. “You blew out my room, Tom. I know you had to do it. Perhaps I would’ve done the same thing. But that stupid little chartroom, with all its stupid drafts and splinters meant a lot to me. I lost everything wi
th it.”
Senlin crossed the glade and took her by the shoulders. “Edith. You have every reason to be upset. This is the trouble with running for your life— it’s easy to lose perspective of what accounts for a life.” He gave her a reassuring shake, a sort of telegraphed embrace. “As soon as we’re out of this, we’ll rebuild the chartroom. You can be the foreman, and Adam and I will be your carpenters. I promise.”
“I lost my vials,” she said, shrugging under his hold. “Every last one. They flew out the back with the rest of my things.”
Now Senlin understood. When the Sphinx first fitted her with the engine nearly a year earlier, he had given her a stock of the mysterious batteries for her arm. She had jealously guarded these because there was only one source for replacements. He knew she had no desire to hurry back to the Sphinx. She could hardly stand to hear him mentioned.
“How long will your arm last?” he asked in a thin voice.
“Days. Hours. Depends on how much I press it,” she said. “Then it’ll be a millstone.”
“So, in one fell swoop, I destroyed your sanctuary and robbed you of your arm,” he said soberly. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
“It had to be done. I don’t blame you. I’m just angry. No, that’s not it, I’m… to be honest, Tom, I’m a little…” She wanted to say that she was afraid: afraid of what would happen to her when she returned to the Sphinx, and afraid of what the Sphinx would do to her friends if she brought them with her. She feared the day might soon come when she would have to leave him and the crew. But she couldn’t bring herself to confess any of this now.
“What is that sound?” Senlin said, interrupting her deliberation. He turned sharply and stared into the milky light of the forest.
She heard it, too. It sounded like wind moving through dry leaves, but there was no wind and no leaves to stir in it. They were still studying the rustling when a black spot, no larger than a chestnut, skittered out from the trees. It ran across the sand, passed under the bridge of their arms, and disappeared into the undergrowth on the opposite side of the clearing, all in two blinks of an eye.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 12