“This carillon was once the pride of the Golden Zoo,” Marat said. “The Sphinx built it to demonstrate the beauty of his machines. Here, listen to its rapturous song.”
Marat nodded at Koro who began to turn the crank.
The noise was abrupt and unbearable. A lurching, uneven knelling of soup pots rang out, and then a metallic shriek joined in with a voice like twisting steel. Deep, detuned bells clanged like a forge. The birds flapped and convulsed in a tortured routine propelled by Koro’s mad turning of the wheel. Wings sheered as they flapped, heads popped free as they twisted, and bolts and screws fell from the flock in a jangling rain.
Senlin and Edith shuddered in their chairs, cringing as if it might seal their ears. All the while their host beamed at them with a sadism not even his beauty could conceal.
At last, he signaled Koro to stop.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Marat said. “What a cheap trick to let a windup rust away and then deride it for not running properly. But that is the point. Machines do not serve us; we serve them. If they all vanished from the earth tomorrow, our race would carry on. But when we remove our hand from the machine, it dies.” Marat seemed to relish those two words. “The Sphinx builds us masters we don’t need. The very heart of the Tower is a machine, a dynamo that leeches energy from men and women, turns it to lightning, and funnels it to his workshop to make more masters, more machines. How could anyone serve such a man?”
Edith was holding her temper in check, though Senlin could sense her straining. Marat was clearly waiting for her to speak, and at last she formed a few clipped words: “It’s easy to judge a life not led.”
“It is,” he said. His chair played three descending notes as he wheeled back from the table. He pulled the afghan from his lap. His legs gleamed golden in the lamp light, illuminating his face like a reflection pool. Elaborate gears and rods showed between the thigh plates and the round shields at his knees. The armor was etched in fine arabesque scrawls, like those that decorated Edith’s arm. But unlike her arm, Luc Marat’s legs were silent and still.
“The Sphinx has seduced many, many men and women with his pretty machines that are full of terrible screams. He is convinced that his work is the fruit of progress, and that it must be protected from anyone who disagrees. Nine years ago, I chose this chair over taking orders from that ruthless tinkerer, and I have never regretted it.”
Though Senlin felt the utmost sympathy for Edith and would, were he able, erase the Sphinx from her life, he felt a terrible sinking feeling that was not at all empathetic. It was entirely selfish. He realized that he was, once again, being pulled into a dispute that did not concern him. Ogier’s obsession with the painting had resulted in Tarrou’s ruin and nearly his own death. When he had been drawn into the politics of the Port of Goll, he had made such an enemy of Rodion, he was ultimately compelled to kill him.
Senlin had become a thief and a murderer because of the ambitions and disputes of other men, none of which had brought him any closer to reuniting with Marya. Senlin had to stop this before Marat insinuated them into his struggle.
“I assure you,” Senlin said in a candid tone, surprising his host who seemed to have forgotten him. “I are not here to argue over the Sphinx’s influence, or his designs, nefarious or just. I don’t know the first thing about the man, and that arrangement suits me just fine. Frankly, we are too insignificant to make any difference to your cause or his.” At this, their host gave Edith an incredulous smirk. “I only came because I need to get into Pelphia, and the ports are closed to me. All I ask is that you point the way to the black trail, and we will be on our way.”
Marat threw the afghan back over his dead mechanical legs with a laugh. “Captain Mudd, this may be the first time in history that someone has asked to be shown the black trail.” He turned again to Edith. “Do you mean to accompany him, Wakeman?”
“I do,” she said and obviously enjoyed his surprised expression.
“Interesting,” he said.
“So, you will help us?” Senlin said.
“Absolutely. I live to serve my fellow hod.”
“Fellow hod?”
“You don’t seriously believe that you can walk the trail as you are? You wouldn’t survive the night. Not all hods are as magnanimous as I am. Some of them hold grudges against free men in general and Wakemen in particular. Even if you survived the walk to Pelphia, the moment you popped out, the local constabulary would arrest you and conscript you into hoddery.”
Senlin’s expression darkened as Marat spoke. “So, you propose that we become hods willingly?”
“You said you wanted to travel the black trail. That is the only way to do it. I can even furnish you with shackles and a load.”
Senlin had been straining forward in his chair, but rocked back now in bodily defeat. It was a moment more before his thoughts came to the same conclusion: the plan was spoiled. He could make no progress to Pelphia here.
Marat was unmoved by his guest’s visible disappointment. “Perhaps on the black trail,” he said, turning his statuesque features back to Edith, “you will discover that living with your loss is better than living for another man’s gain.”
Their host wheeled toward the exit. “Consider this a crossroads. You have seen what life is like in the Tower when you are alone. You end up lost, maimed, shipwrecked and— forgive me for saying so— begging. You can go on living at the whim of the wind and the direction of your master, or you can share a life with friends who are fighting to reclaim their dignity and liberty from the institutions that robbed them. Consider it. Sleep on it. Tomorrow, you can join us and be free.”
He went as he had come and left the door of the cage standing open behind him.
Chapter Eight
“Please do not saddle the clockwork beasts. Do not pet or tease the spidereaters. Reserve such familiar activities for other, more receptive subjects.”
- Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
Adam had never thought of himself as a runt. True, he’d always been a little shorter than his peers, but his shoulders were wide enough to push through a crowd, and his bearing was sufficient to discourage bullies from taking an interest in him. He had faced down his share of bigger men. On his best days, he even fancied he possessed a menacing stare, monocular though it was.
But when the spider-eater reared onto its hind legs, its head scraping the furniture riveted to the ceiling, and glared down the barrel of its snout at him, Adam felt every inch a runt.
The beast’s claws were like the horns of a ram. Its breath came in great heaves that turned to dripping slaver. It stood stock-still with its arms stretched wide, waiting it seemed, though Adam couldn’t imagine what for. He had heard of beasts that could be intimidated into retreating, and he wondered if that might be the case with spider-eaters. Of course, he’d heard of other large animals that were antagonized by sudden movements, and could only be repulsed by prey that played dead.
There was no one here to see him, no one to impress in these last moments of his life. Adam could go out flailing and raving, or he could lie down, close his eye, and hope for the best. He only had himself to please. It seemed an easy choice.
He threw out his arms and screamed with all his might. The cry stung his throat. The light of his lantern flashed up and down the walls and over the beast standing with its own arms stretched out like the spars of a mast.
Before Adam could exhaust his breath, the spider-eater swung at him with a laziness that seemed almost playful. Then the blow caught him on the ribs, and the cabin turned sideways as he was propelled through the air.
The lantern leapt from his hand and popped upon the floor. The spilt oil burst into angry flames that spread in every direction at once, fueled by bedclothes and playing cards and the rags that swaddled the skeletons. The fire grew without deliberation, turning what had been a gloomy cabin a moment before into a spotlit stage.
Where Adam had failed to impress, the fire
now succeeded. The spider-eater shied, stamped tentatively at the fringe of the burning spill, and whined at the heat of it. The beast deliberated a moment, swinging its long neck across the fire toward Adam who lay prone and holding his ribs. Then the fire touched upon some ancient pocket of sap in the wood and gave a little explosive snap. The beast startled. It was inside the breach in two strides, then out and gone before Adam could get to his feet.
Any relief Adam felt at having driven the monster off was short lived.
The fire stood between him and the gap in the hull he’d come by. Even as he rallied the courage to dash through the wall of flames, it thickened and forced him further from the exit. The planks were so desiccated, the floor burned like a fuse. He backed into the bookshelf he’d lately scavenged, his face streaming sweat, his skin tingling from the violent heat. Beside the shelf was the shut door of the chart house. A chart house meant windows, and windows meant escape.
The door stood level with his knees in the upside-down room, and he was grateful to find that rot had softened the boards. He quickly broke through a corner of the door and climbed over the lintel into the cramped room.
The floor, which once had been the ceiling, was heaped with maps and papers that slid about underfoot. He knew as soon as the fire got in, he would be caught standing atop a perfect pyre.
The panes of the casement window were missing. But where he’d hoped to see the beach outside, there was only a sheet of silk ballooning into the room. He pressed against the silk blister, but it didn’t yield. It took him a moment to comprehend why. This part of the ship was below the surface of the beach. The silks tangled about the hull were all that kept the beach from filling up the chart house. He could cut the silk, but the beach would flow in and bury him. If he was lucky, he might stay on top of the sand, and if there wasn’t much of it, he might find room to climb to daylight.
Looking back into the inferno, he watched as the moorings lost their ancient hold on the bed. The head and footboards fell, cleaving the floor amid a fiery spray. The ship creaked like a tree being blown from its roots. The cabin was poised on the brink of collapse, which would smother the fire and him along with it.
Adam unsheathed his knife and, clinging to the windowsill, lanced the silk blister.
Sand flooded in under a cloud of blinding dust. It coursed around his chest like a river, forcing him back, pulling him down. If his grip on the sill failed, he would be buried alive in an instant. The smoke and sand seized his lungs and gouged at his tearing eye.
He was submerged to the waist before the flow of sand began to ebb. He pushed his arm through the window, hoping to feel the open air, but all he found was a steep, unsteady slope that loosened as soon as he disturbed it. He tried to pull himself through the sill, but he slid back, again and again, toward the oppressive heat. He wondered which would kill him first— the burial or the cooking. He reached up once more into the slow avalanche and felt air. Escape was only an arm’s length away, but the beach was too deep, the fire too quick.
Amid the frozen sand, a warm hand grasped his arm.
He felt himself rising, drawn by a force stronger than the grave. For a moment he was packed on all sides by sand. And then Iren pulled him from the ground.
He was sure he would’ve collapsed if Iren had not held him on his feet. He coughed until he trembled. When he was able to blink the sand from his eye and see her, she looked ready to laugh.
“You’re a funny looking turnip,” she said, and then picked him up and threw him onto her shoulder.
Bouncing against her hard back as she trotted toward the Stone Cloud, Adam did not mind feeling like a runt. If she wanted to carry him to the moon, he’d gladly ride along.
*
Voleta followed and watched from the trees while the hod played the prattling guide to the Captain and Mister Winters.
Despite his babbling, the hod was savvy enough to duck the spider-eaters and to keep from walking in circles. Sometimes the curious little man would pause at the foot of one tree or other and select a mushroom for his basket. He seemed harmless enough, though that didn’t make Voleta trust him. If all evil men only looked evil, there’d be a lot less trouble in the world, but in her experience, looks had nothing to do with character. Take old Iren, for example. Her face was as chopped up as an old butcher’s block, but her heart was soft and big. Voleta wondered if this harmless-looking hod wasn’t leading them all into some horrible trap.
She considered staging a rescue. She could easily leap on the hod from the trees. The idea had its appeal, but if she jumped on the mad babbler, she would never find out where he lived, and she was curious. She contemplated joining the little company— she might just stroll out of the woods with a casual, “Hullo, there Captain!”— but she suspected Mister Winters would not be happy to see she had left the ship, and Voleta didn’t like being scolded. Besides, if she joined them, she wouldn’t get to enjoy the treetops any longer, and they were quite nice. Stalking was so much more exhilarating than walking in a queue.
In the end, she decided to shadow them with a mind to intervene the moment things became more interesting down below.
Then she abruptly ran out of trees.
The clearing that opened before her was no picnic glen. It was as grand as an old estate. The tidy lawn of moss shone like new frost, and the cobbled avenues were lined with iron benches and rusting animals. At the center of it all stood the Golden Zoo. It reminded her of a carousel: it was round and full of poles and overwhelming to the eye. It glowed like a carousel, too, with many lamps that threw many sharp shadows. It was a pretty cage; but she wasn’t fooled. She’d lived in a pretty cage before.
She couldn’t see any animals, and it didn’t smell like a zoo. The air smelled like a laundry room, in fact. She wasn’t disappointed. She didn’t like to see animals behind bars, not even gold ones.
There were a lot of hods, though, and they were all as busy as ants. They toted pails of water and marched around with rifles on their shoulders. They pulled wagons full of coal, kegs, bolts of silk, baskets of nuts, loaves of bread, potatoes and (she could hardly believe it) apples. It was enough to make her stomach growl. Where had they gotten it all?
She was alarmed to see the Captain and Mister Winters walk into the Golden Zoo like a couple of ticketholders. Was this what the Captain expected: a bunch of armed and well-fed hods holed up in a barred fortress? It certainly made her uneasy. They didn’t know the first thing about these hods. She thought how silly the Captain and first mate would feel if the hods turned out to be cannibals. Of course, she would feel guilty if she were outside swinging from a tree while her friends were boiling in a pot. She knew she had to do something, but it wouldn’t help anyone if she just jumped into the soup pot with them.
Her stomach growled again.
Keeping to the treetops, Voleta skirted the clearing, looking for some way to cross the open ground without being seen. But she found no good cover, and there were too many hods beside. She’d stand out like a caboose among all these baldheads.
She had traveled halfway around the grounds of the Golden Zoo before she noticed her arm was glowing more brightly than the limb she clung to. The luminous lichen had begun to cake upon her sleeves and upon her pants and in the wild piles of her hair, too. It made her stand out from the gloom, and if left alone, would draw attention.
She was quietly brushing and shaking out her clothes when voices in the forest below stopped her. She listened to hear whether she had been discovered. One voice was distinct above the rest, and it was remarkable because it was intelligible: whoever was speaking now, wasn’t babbling like the other hods.
Four hods emerged from the edge of the wood almost directly beneath her. As soon as they were clear of the tree line, one of the hods found himself ringed by the other three. It was the hemmed in one who was complaining loudly.
He said, “I told you, you can’t have it. And stop saying goo-goo, ga-ga to me. Even if I understood what you were saying,
and I don’t, it wouldn’t matter because you can’t have it.” The speaker resolutely clutched a small wooden keg to his stomach.
One of the surrounding three replied with an inscrutable speech, which he animated with encouraging gestures like a man trying to coax an animal into eating from his hand. The babbling concluded with a single recognizable phrase, “Come and be free.”
“See, there. You can talk sense! Don’t pretend you don’t understand me,” the accosted hod replied. “And I don’t need your help to be free. I am about to be free. I have walked the black trail for four months, and in six days, I’ll have paid my debt.” He straightened a little, bolstered by his confidence in his inevitable liberty, and one of the men took the opportunity to lunge for the keg. The surrounded hod was quick enough to jump back, but his evasion threw him into the hod behind him, and he shoved him roughly forward. “Quit it, you idiot! It’s gunpowder.”
The original spokesmen for the detainers repeated his speech but without the warm gestures of before. Voleta thought it sounded grimmer now, a sort of final negotiation, though the tormented hod didn’t seem to recognize the warning that filled the phrase: “Come and be free.”
“I want to go back to the trail. I want to go back.” He took a shuffling step toward the forest. “I thought it be nice to get out for a minute, but I was wrong. I want to go back!”
The retreating hod didn’t see the man behind him raise his club. The blow was singular but effective. The keg popped from the stricken man’s arms and was caught by the hod who, just a moment before, had promised him freedom. The struck man fell, the life apparently driven from him.
The third hod in the group pulled a spade from his belt and set about cutting into the spongy sod. In a moment, he had peeled back a long strip of the glowing lawn that came up as easily as carpet. The others shifted the lifeless hod into the shallow grave. When they dropped him, he let out a moan.
The spokesman of the trio knelt on the groaning man’s chest and wrapped his hands about his throat. He strangled him while the other two watched with bland, unmoved expressions. The process was neither quick nor dignified, but not even the spasms of the dying man stirred any doubt that the chore would be done.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 16