“Look, there’s one of the spiders. Gnarly things, aren’t they.” Senlin said.
Edith was still glaring at the forest. “The woods are going dark,” she said.
Senlin saw she was right. The glow of the forest was being snuffed out. The edge of the eclipse rose high into the bowers, and the darkness moved quickly toward them. A few more inky spiders trickled from the forest and scrambled across the sand.
A shrill cry broke over the droning rustle. It sounded like the squeal of a boar, but more resonant and chilling. Senlin shortened his hold on Edith.
The awful note blared again, seeming now to rise up from another side of them. Then the darkness poured into the glen.
The mass of spiders was so dense it obscured everything beneath it. The trees vanished, then the clearing, then the sand at their feet disappeared under the curdling black swarm.
“Into the water!” Senlin said.
They took a breath together, and still locked in an embrace, leapt into the deep, dead pool.
Chapter Four
“I admit, your lordship, to having had my doubts about boarding spiders and spider-eaters in a public park. It seemed to my admittedly meager imagination a bit like inviting rats into your home and then adopting tigers to keep them in check.”
- Inaugurations of the Silk Gardens, Salo
In the cove of shipwrecks, a terrible squeal echoed across the domed ceiling and bounced through the alleys of wrapped ships. It sounded like the desperate complaint of a wounded animal, Adam thought, and in many ways, it was.
Down on one knee, Iren pried nails from broken boards with a crowbar. The spikes emerged slowly and with a piercing squeal. She dropped the nails into a zinc bucket, so each scream concluded with the rat-tat of a snare drum. It was slow going because she was trying not to bend them. They would need straight nails to rebuild the ship.
Adam cringed at the noise and tried to focus on the sled he was building. When he realized that they needed a fair amount of salvage, he had decided that a sled was only practical. The forward hatch formed the base and the captain’s bedposts formed the runners.
“Done with your list?” Iren asked, palming sweat from her brow. The work had invigorated old scars on her arms and face. She looked nearly as battered as the ship.
“Just. We lost a quarter of our tethers. It’s a miracle we didn’t fall from the sky. So, we need rope, a lot of it. There’s the umbilical, of course, and we could use some gas. Ballast should be easy enough. If we can find sacks, we can fill them with sand right here.” Adam stood up from his work and gave the sled a soft kick. “That’ll do. Where’s Voleta?”
“In the galley,” Iren said.
“Still counting crumbs, hmm? I’ll tell her she’s in charge of the ship while we’re on our raid. She’ll like that.”
Adam went below to find his sister. Left alone, Iren’s thoughts turned to questions of violence, as they often did in moments of quiet. She thought about the likelihood of an attack, which seemed middling, and the defensibility of their position, which was poor. They were surrounded by open beach. If the Ararat cruised in behind them, there would be nothing to do but jump ship and run for cover. If an attack came from the forest, she’d see them coming, but without any gunpowder, there’d be nothing she could do to discourage them. The ship’s keel hung about six feet off the ground, which was high enough to keep an enemy from swarming the ship, but low enough to be scaled or, if their attackers were sufficiently numerous, pulled down.
She imagined the ship’s deck swarming with armed brutes. This was usually her favorite part of the daydream because now she could watch as she dealt out mortal blows, dismembering the horde one soul at a time. She reveled in the vision because it was always immaculate: every one of her parries was successful and every attack was true.
But an odd thing happened on this occasion when she imagined herself sparring on the deck of the ship. She saw herself stumble, and a brigand’s rapier pierced her between the ribs. Then she didn’t see the man lurking behind her, and when he kicked her in the back, she staggered and nearly lost her feet. Then a big brute with arms as thick as roof beams grabbed her, pinning her arms to her side. This vision of herself being methodically beaten confused her, and she tried to reset it or overcome it, but the tactician in her head refused to cheat. Her defenses had been slow, her attacks incomplete. She had been drubbed, fair and square. Her pitiless imagination played out her grappling, panicked death in gory detail.
Her usual frown deepened.
A distant squeal interrupted her thoughts. It came from the forest. She squinted at the trees expectantly, but the cry did not repeat. It could not have been an echo of the pulled nails. It was far too late.
She was still trying to identify what she had heard when Adam pounded up the stairs from the hold and popped out of the hatch in a panic.
“I can’t believe she’d be so stupid at a time like this!” He snatched up the scabbard of his rapier and began buckling it on with trembling hands.
“Where are you going?” Iren said, stepping in front of him.
Adam hardly seemed to see her. He tried to slip past her, but she pulled him back. His eye was fixed on the gloomy forest. Why had he imagined, even for a second, that Voleta would resist the call of such a playground? These were the first trees she’d seen in years; of course she’d have to climb them. All the world was her trapeze!
“She’s gone,” he said.
“You have to fix the ship.”
“I’m not going to sit here tinkering while my sister’s lost in the woods.”
“You have to fix the ship,” Iren said again. Her broad face was as set as a casting mold. “We’ve no food and little water. We are stranded. Voleta is stranded, too.”
“I know! I just need a minute to find her and drag her—”
Grabbing him under the arms, Iren lifted Adam into the air. She brought him in until their noses touched, then smashed, then rolled together. She smelled like iron chains and sweat. When she spoke, her foul breath warmed his face. “You want to be trusted? You want to save your sister? You want me to set you down on your feet and not your head? Do what you promised the Captain you’d do. Fix the ship.”
Though his devotion to his sister bucked against the reasoning, he knew Iren was right. Voleta had been impulsive, leaving him again to be the prudent one. He recalled the pragmatism of his days in the port, and remembered that rescue sometimes demands preparation rather than action. No matter what happened next, they would need the ship.
Adam nodded, grinding their noses together, but Iren did not loosen her hold. He understood the moment required more than a tacit agreement; he knew what she was waiting for, and so he delivered the words in as firm a tone as he could muster: “I will fix the ship.”
Voleta moved through the high branches of the porcelmores under a cloud of webs. The forking, glowing trunks below resembled lightning, frozen mid-strike. It was an astonishing view. She was glad not to have missed it. She leapt to a new limb then walked out to another on tiptoe, crossing with a swiftness impossible on the ground where the undergrowth was as thick as a bramble.
She had tried to be good. But the ship had become such a depressing place. She didn’t feel like she could’ve stayed aboard another minute, even though she knew her disappearance would test her brother’s nerves.
Before she left, she had been scouring the deep cabinets of the pantry for anything edible. She found an old soup bone tucked in a corner, found a rusty pot of hardened molasses, which she at first mistook for some sort of patching tar, and she swept from the cupboard shelves enough loose tea to color a cup of hot water.
It was boring work.
In her boredom, she had begun to hum a stupid, sticky melody. The tune just popped into her head and refused to leave. She hummed and hummed it, until slowly, the song teased a memory to the fore of her thoughts, and she saw the specter of an organist, dramatically caped and leering over his shoulder as his hands ran up and
down the keyboard with automatic grace. The beard on his chin stood out like a spearhead.
In a flash, she recognized the song coming out of her own throat. It had been her musical accompaniment on the stage of the Steam Pipe for many, many nights. It was a tune written and named just for her: “Voleta the Flying Girl.”
She struck out from the ship shortly thereafter.
There was nothing better for clearing the head than a little adventure.
Squit went with her, of course, though she kept her tucked in her sleeve because she was afraid the squirrel might get bitten by one of the black spiders that were everywhere in the treetops. They were compact like crabs, and they darted around the trunks and through the cloud of silk above her. They generally tried to avoid her, but it was hard not to step on them or accidentally clutch one when she gripped a branch. Despite her heavy gloves and leather boots, one of the spiders had gotten onto her neck and bitten her. It smarted like a bee sting, but the venom didn’t feel fatal.
She had gone in the same direction as the Captain with half a mind to keep an eye on him and half a mind to leap out and surprise him for the sport of it. He and Mr. Winters made so much noise talking and arguing, they were easy to keep track of.
She hadn’t quite caught up with them when she heard something new. It sounded like a rustling wind, then a spattering of rain falling through leaves. The noise swelled all about her, and for a moment she thought a storm was breaking. But of course that was absurd. She was inside the Tower.
But it wasn’t rain that was falling.
The spiders no longer scattered before her or wandered aimlessly in and out of the web cloud. They changed direction all at once like iron shavings in the presence of a magnet. First the spiders ran in singles and then in streams. Then they poured from the cobwebs in a great black cascade, tumbling, falling through the branches and over her.
She hadn’t time to get out of the way. She clung to a willowy treetop and tried to make herself very small. The swarming spiders crested over her.
She expected to be stung to death. But the spiders were apparently not in a biting mood. This fact might have consoled her more, if the exposed skin of her neck and face did not tingle so terribly under the pricking of thousands of legs. She clenched her eyes shut and held her breath.
Something of the sensation called up a memory, and since she was in need of a distraction, she indulged the nostalgic fancy that carried her back to her old home.
In the Depot of Sumer, where she had been born and grown intrepid, there was a narrow beam that crossed a particularly active portion of track. Adults would never think to cross the beam, and if they had suspected that it tempted children, they would have surely taken it down. The beam had once been part of a grain chute that filled open hopper cars, though it was all that remained of the dismantled machine.
The depot children, the rough ones at least, bragged about crossing the beam, though of course no one had seen anyone do it. The bar was forty feet across, about as broad as a boot heel and rusted orange. Even if the beam held, the steam of a passing train might cook you or blow you off.
Voleta, who often took pains to prove her fearlessness to the condescending depot boys, began to think of this unremarkable rusty beam as the single greatest test of courage in all of Sumer and perhaps the world.
So, one afternoon she marched up and down the neighborhood boardwalks, collecting a mob of jeering, teasing children, who would bear witness to her transit of the beam. Since it was the steam that frightened the boys most, Voleta decided to wait until a train approached to begin her crossing. That way, no one could say she had been lucky. When an engine began to chug up the track, belching great piles of sooty smoke, she left the surety of the boardwalk, and sidled out onto the beam.
The edges of the iron were so soft they crumbled under her shoes. The metal groaned but did not break.
She had to hurry to reach the middle of the beam before the train passed. The smokestack seemed to be choking. The steam puffed and pinched and puffed again. She turned to face it. She closed her eyes and put our her thin, bare arms.
Under the bellow of the engine, she heard the voices of adults rise in alarm. But they hadn’t time to stop the train, and they were afraid to venture out after her and break the beam with their weight. First they commanded her to come in and then they cursed her because they saw the little tart was smiling.
The indifferent engine passed, loud as a gale, and the smokestack blew at her with such hot violence it made her hair stand straight up and her clothes pull at her like a sail. She was instantly soaked, her skin nearly poached by the blast of boiled air. But when the train passed, she had not been cooked, and she had not been knocked off her beam.
She returned to the boardwalk, still smiling, though she was as pink as a piglet. The crowd of adults who’d gathered were so exasperated, they couldn’t decide whether to throttle her or coddle her, so they just took her home. She survived her mother’s horror and the blisters that formed and the cough that lasted a month with absolute, insufferable smugness. At last she and everybody else had proof that she was brave.
When her mother finally allowed her to go out and play again, she discovered a funny thing. The Depot seemed smaller and safer and dull. The narrow beam that had captured her imagination for months now just looked like an old bar. Soon, she couldn’t remember which beam had been the focus of her obsession. She crossed them all, crossed them all twice, just to be sure, and found them all the same. Then she knew she would have to leave the Depot and go somewhere with higher wires and hotter steam…
When Voleta opened her eyes in the boughs of the Silk Reef, the wave of spiders had passed.
The mass fled before her like the shadow of a fast cloud. To her surprise, she found that she hadn’t been bitten, not even once. Wherever the spiders were going, they hadn’t time to waste on her.
She looked down and saw the cause of the spiders’ agitation at once. A herd of enormous, shaggy beasts were pressing through the undergrowth. These had to be the spider-eaters the Captain had spoken of. They were driving the spiders into a swarm.
One of the beasts raised an earsplitting cry, and the others soon trumpeted back. Voleta counted eight in all. Then one, a big straggler with an impressive gray mane, stopped and turned around as if harkening to some other call. She heard in the faint distance a shrill squeal. The gray-crested beast let the pack go on without it. He sniffed the air and lumbered away.
It was going toward the ship.
Voleta hesitated. She thought of her brother. He had Iren and the ship to protect him against one monster. The Captain and Mister Winters were about to be overrun by a swarm of spiders and the beastly herd that chased them.
She hadn’t any doubt what Adam would do if their positions were reversed and it was she who was waiting on the ship. She loved him dearly, but he could be such a marm sometimes.
Chapter Five
“Should you ever be tempted to dip your toes in the Garden’s aquifers, just remember where the water flows. One man’s bath becomes another man’s broth.”
- Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
The water was as cold as a springhouse. It needled their skin and made their muscles seize. Edith had been right about the pool: there was no tapering of the shore, just a sudden, severe drop.
As they sank, still clinging to one another, Senlin watched the blue glow of the forest ripple overhead. Spiders cascaded across the surface, their fat bodies buoyant as corks. The darkness that followed, quick and complete, stole his sense of direction. It occurred to him that the cistern might be as deep as the Tower; it might flow into the plumbing, which might connect to the subterranean seas. The two of them were sinking to the center of the Earth. There was nothing inside the perfect dark to orient him except for his hold on Edith.
A moment later, his feet touched the rocky bottom, quelling his disorientation. The full weight of the water bore down upon him. He didn’t let go of
Edith though he knew it was her arm that had brought them down so quickly and that held them to the floor so firmly. He knew, too, that even if it meant he would drown, he would not leave her behind.
Then the surface above them was lit again by a great commotion. Legs and long-trunked bodies shattered the water and thrashed across. The passage was so violent and swift, Senlin hadn’t time to really observe the animals, but he was certain he had just seen his first spider-eater. A pack of the beasts had made the spiders swarm.
Senlin peered up at the stormy surface, glowing again with the light of the forest. The chopped water began to calm. There was no sign of the spiders or the eaters, though for all he knew, the beasts might be waiting by the waterside.
It didn’t matter. He was running out of breath. He began to swim toward the light. Only then did he understand the full burden of Edith’s engine. She kicked along with him, but her boots were taller and heavier than his, and these, combined with her armored limb, hampered her terribly. She began to flail. He redoubled his grip on her belt and beat his legs more fiercely. No, not fiercely— fearfully.
It felt like swimming back up a waterfall. He strained until his neck ached, and still they made little progress. When he slowed his frenzied kicking, even for a moment, they sank back down twice as fast as he’d raised them. His legs burned despite the chilly water. Edith nudged him to the wall of the pool where she could use her arm to help pull them up. With her help, they began to ascend more quickly, though still not fast enough. His panicked lungs pushed on his mouth to open; his throat spasmed, swallowing again and again. He wanted so badly to breathe the water in.
They broke the surface with a gasp that hurt when it filled them.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 13