Behemoth l-2

by Scott Westerfeld

  Alek had no idea what it was for, but could see why Lilit had called it the Spider. A dark mass of machinery rested at its center, from which eight long jointed arms thrust out. A snarl of conveyor belts led into the core, like on a harvesting combine.

  “Is that some sort of walking contraption?” Dylan asked in English.

  “They called it ‘the Spider,’” Alek translated, then shook his head. “But it doesn’t look as though it can walk.”

  “This is no mere war machine,” Zaven proclaimed. “But a far more powerful engine of progress. Lilit, show our guests!”

  Lilit stepped through the doorway, almost disappearing in the shadows beneath the machine’s bulk. A panel of dials and levers flickered to life, showing her in silhouette. She worked the controls, and a moment later the paving stones of the courtyard were rumbling beneath Alek’s feet.

  The eight arms began to move, stirring the air like the hands of an orchestra conductor, their manipulator claws making fine adjustments to the conveyor belts and other parts of the machine.

  “It does look a bit like a spideresque,” Dylan said. “One of the big ones that weaves parachutes.”

  Zaven nodded vigorously, answering her in his flawless English. “The Spider has woven the threads that hold our revolution together. Did you know, lad, that the word ‘text’ comes from the Latin word for weaving?”

  “Text?” Alek said. “What does that have to do with … ?”

  His voice faded as he saw a flicker of white within the gloom. A roll of paper was unspooling along one of the belts, disappearing into the machine’s dark center. The arms began to whirl through the air, carrying about trays of metal pieces, pouring buckets of black liquid, then cutting and folding the paper with long, nimble fingers.

  “Barking spiders,” Dylan snorted. “It’s a printing press.”

  “A Spider with a bark, indeed,” Zaven said. “Far mightier than any sword!”

  The machine whirred and spun for another minute, then slowed and darkened again. When Lilit emerged from the shadows, she was carrying a stack of neatly folded leaflets covered with inscrutable symbols.

  Zaven lifted one up. “Ah, yes, my article on the subject of women being allowed to vote. Can you read Armenian?”

  Alek raised an eyebrow. “Alas, no.”

  “How unfortunate. But the real message is just here.” Zaven pointed at a row of symbols across the bottom of the page—stars, crescents, and crosses that looked like mere decoration.

  “A secret code,” Alek murmured, recalling the markings on the alley walls. With the profusion of newspapers sold on the streets of Istanbul, one more in a hodgepodge of languages wouldn’t attract much notice. But for those who knew the code …

  He felt Bovril tugging on his trouser leg. The beast was stepping from one foot to the other.

  Alek closed his eyes, and felt the slightest tremor through his boots.

  “What’s that rumbling?”

  “It feels like walkers, sir,” Bauer said. “Big ones.”

  “Have they found us?” Alek asked.

  “Fah. It’s just the sultan’s parade, for the end of Ramazan.” Zaven swept one hand toward the stairs. “Perhaps you would all join my family on the roof. Our balcony has an excellent view.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Ottoman war elephants paraded down the distant tree-lined avenue, leaving footprints of shattered cobblestones. Their crescent flags snapped in the wind, and their trunks—tipped with machine guns—swayed between long, barbed tusks. They turned in formation, as precise as marching soldiers, heading away toward the docks.

  Deryn breathed a sigh of relief, handing the field glasses back to Alek.

  “Mr. Zaven’s right. They’re not coming this way.”

  “This must be the parade they were getting ready for,” Alek said, then handed the glasses to Klopp. “Was denken Sie, Klopp? Hundert Tonnen je?”

  “Hundert und fünfzig?,” the master of mechaniks said.

  Deryn nodded in agreement. If she understood him rightly, Klopp was guessing the metal elephants weighed a hundred and fifty tons each. Clanker tons were a bit larger than British ones, she recalled, but the point was clear enough.

  Those elephants were barking big.

  “Mit achtzig-Millimeter-Kanone auf dem Türmchen,” Bauer added, which was beyond Deryn’s Clanker. But she nodded again, pretending to understand.

  “Kanone,” repeated Bovril, who was sitting on Alek’s shoulder.

  “Aye, cannon,” Deryn murmured, watching the shimmer from the steel turrets on the elephants’ backs. The cannon were the important bit, after all.

  Klopp and Alek went on talking in indecipherable Clanker, so Deryn strolled to the far corner of the balcony to stretch her legs. Her bum was still sore from the wild ride in the taxi, which had been worse than any galloping horse. She didn’t understand how Clankers could ride about in machines all day—they way they moved was just dead wrong.

  “Are you injured?” came Lilit’s voice from just behind her, making Deryn jump a bit. The girl was always sneaking up on her.

  “I’m fine,” Deryn said, then pointed down at the war elephants. “I was just wondering, do they often parade about like that, smashing up the streets?”

  The girl shook her head. “They usually stay out of the city. The sultan is showing his strength.”

  “That’s for certain. Pardon me for saying so, miss, but you can’t beat them. Those walkers carry cannon, and yours have only got claws and fists. It’d be like taking boxing gloves to a pistol duel!”

  “The world is built on elephants, my grandmother always says.” Lilit let out a sigh. “It is an old law—our walkers can’t be armed, not like the sultan’s. But at least we’ve scared him. His army wouldn’t be tearing up the streets if he weren’t nervous!”

  “Aye, he might be nervous, but that also means he’s ready for you.”

  “The last revolution was only six years ago,” Lilit said. “He is always ready.”

  Deryn was about to say how cheery a thought that was, but an odd buzzing sound had filled the air. She turned to see a bizarre contraption headed across the balcony. It waddled along on pudgy legs, a cross between a reptile and a four-poster bed, buzzing like a windup toy.

  “What in blazes is that?”

  “That,” Lilit said with a smile, “is my grandmother.”

  As they walked back toward the others, Deryn saw a mass of gray hair sprouting from the white sheets. It was an old woman, no doubt the fearsome Nene that Alek had talked about.

  Bovril seemed pleased to see her. It scampered down from Alek’s shoulder and across the balcony, then crawled up to the footboard of the bed. The beastie stood there with its fur ruffling in the breeze, as happy as an admiral at sea.

  Alek bowed to the old woman, introducing Master Klopp and Corporal Bauer in a stream of polite Clanker.

  Nene nodded, then turned her steely gaze on Deryn.

  “And you must be the boy from the Leviathan,” she said, her English accent as posh as Zaven’s. “My granddaughter’s told me about you.”

  Deryn clicked her heels. “Midshipman Dylan Sharp, at your service, ma’am.”

  “From your accent, you were raised in Glasgow.”

  “Aye, ma’am. You have a good ear.”

  “Two of them, in fact,” Nene said. “And you have an odd voice. Your hands, please?”

  Deryn hesitated, but when the old woman snapped her fingers, she found herself obeying.

  “Lots of calluses,” Nene said, feeling carefully. “You’re a hardworking lad, unlike your friend the prince of Hohenberg. You draw a bit, and you do a lot of sewing, for a boy.”

  Deryn cleared her throat, remembering her aunties teaching her to quilt. “In the Air Service we middies darn our own uniforms.”

  “How industrious of you. My granddaughter tells me you don’t trust us.”

  “Aye … well, it is a bit awkward, ma’am. I’m under orders to keep my mission here a se
cret.”

  “Under orders?” Nene looked Deryn up and down. “You don’t appear to be in uniform.”

  “I may be undercover, ma’am,” Deryn said, “but I’m still a soldier.”

  “Undercover,” Bovril said, chuckling. “Mr. Sharp!”

  Deryn glared at the beastie, wishing it would stop saying that.

  “Well, boy, at least you’re honest about your doubts,” Nene said, dropping her hands and turning to Alek. “So, what do your men think of our walkers?”

  Alek answered in Clanker, and soon Klopp and Bauer were peppering Nene and Zaven with questions.

  Deryn couldn’t follow half of it, but it hardly mattered what language you said it in—this revolution was well and truly stuffed without cannon. Zaven was barking mad to think otherwise.

  Even Alek couldn’t see the truth. He was always on about how it was his destiny to help the revolution, to get revenge on the Germans and end the war. That was a load of yackum, Deryn reckoned. Providence wouldn’t stop the sultan’s walkers from chewing up the Committee’s antiques, as easy as a box of chocolates.

  She pulled out her sketch pad and stared down at the parade again. The elephants were lining up beside a long pier, their guns elevating, readying to salute a warship.…

  “The Goeben,” Deryn murmured. The ironclad’s new Ottoman flags fluttered bright crimson, her Tesla cannon glittering like a steel spiderweb in the sun.

  Lilit had been right—the sultan was flaunting his power today. Even if the Committee could beat those elephants somehow, they’d still have to face the big guns of the Goeben and the Breslau.

  Or perhaps not. Less than a month from now the Leviathan would be headed up the Dardanelles, guiding a beastie hungry for German ironclads. Admiral Souchon might have fought kraken before, but nothing like the behemoth. The creature was supposedly powerful enough to sink the sultan’s two new warships in half an hour.

  Now, that would be a barking good night for a revolution to start.

  The problem was, Deryn couldn’t tell the Committee what was coming. If just one of them was a Clanker spy, letting the plan slip could spell doom for the Leviathan. She was duty bound to keep quiet.

  A torrent of smoke poured from the war elephants’ cannon, rippling into a vast dark cloud on the sea breeze. The sound arrived long seconds later, as tardy as distant thunder. Then the Goeben’s guns returned the salute, ten times louder and more fiery.

  Deryn sighed as she began to sketch the scene—there were too many barking pieces to this puzzle. The behemoth might sink the German ironclads, but it couldn’t slither onto land and fight the sultan’s elephants as well.

  Behind her the discussion had grown heated. Zaven was proclaiming in Clanker while Klopp shook his head, arms crossed.

  “Nein, nein, nein,” the old man kept repeating.

  If only there were a simple way to handle a hundred and fifty tons of steel …

  Then, all in a flash, it came to her.

  “Hold on, Mr. Zaven,” she broke in. “It doesn’t matter that your walkers haven’t got cannon. We can fix that!”

  Alek shook his head tiredly. “There’s nothing we can do. He says the army has strict control over cannon and ammunition.”

  “Aye, but you don’t need anything so fancy,” Deryn said. “When the Dauntless was hijacked, the attackers had nothing but a few bits of rope.”

  “Hijacked?” Nene asked. “I thought the Dauntless’s rampage was due to sloppy piloting.”

  Deryn snorted. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, ma’am.” She pointed down at the armored elephants. “See how there’s a pilot for each leg? The hijackers lassoed our men and yanked them off, then climbed up to take their place. That’s how you stop those metal beasties. Knock out a couple of pilots, and you stop them completely!”

  “Perhaps on the Dauntless, where the pilots ride out in the open,” Zaven said. “But the men down there are well shielded.”

  Deryn had thought of this already. “Shielded from ropes and bullets, maybe. But they must have vision slits, like Alek’s Stormwalker did. What if something spicy got through them?”

  “Something spicy?” Nene asked.

  “Aye.” Deryn grinned, turning to Alek. “I never told you about how I rescued the Dauntless, did I?”

  Alek shook his head.

  Deryn took a moment to compose her thoughts, knowing she had their full attention now. “It was my idea, in fact. The barking diplomats had no proper weapons aboard, so I snatched up a big bag of spice powder and hurled it at one of the hijackers. The smell of it knocked that bum-rag right off his saddle! And armor will only make things worse—imagine being stuck inside a wee metal cabin with a snootful of spices!”

  “Spices,” Bovril repeated quietly.

  “That hijacker could hardly breathe,” Deryn said. “And my uniform was pure dead ruined!”

  “The army doesn’t control hot peppers,” Nene murmured, and Alek began to translate for Klopp and Bauer.

  Lilit turned to her father. “Do you think it could work?”

  “Even a foot soldier can fight a walker that way,” Zaven said. “The Committee can flood the streets with spice-wielding revolutionaries!”

  “Aye, but think bigger than that,” Deryn said. “Unlike the German walkers, yours have all got hands. I reckon that Minotaur beastie could throw a spice bomb half a mile!”

  “Farther than that,” Lilit said, then smiled. “If Alek can manage not to crush it first, that is.”

  Alek hmphed a bit. “Klopp says he can rig something up—some sort of magazine to hold the spice bombs. We’re standing above a mechanikal factory, after all.”

  “Parts aren’t a problem,” Zaven said. “But the hottest spices are sold by the pinch. We’re talking about buying tons!”

  “If I can provide the money, are you willing to try?” Alek asked.

  Zaven and Lilit both looked at Nene. She raised an eyebrow, staring at Alek.

  “We’re talking about a lot of money, Your Serene Highness.”

  Alek didn’t answer, but knelt to open his satchel—the small one he’d been lugging about all day. He slid out what looked like a brick wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “Junge Meister!” Klopp said softly. “Nicht das Gold!”

  Alek ignored him, unwrapping the handkerchief to reveal a metal bar. When sunlight struck it, a pale yellow fire burned across its surface.

  Deryn swallowed. Barking spiders, but princes were rich!

  “You really are him, aren’t you?” Nene murmured. A thin few slices had been shaved from the bar’s edges, but the Hapsburg crest was still plain.

  “Of course, madam,” Alek said. “I am a very poor liar.”

  The conversation started up again, shifting back to Clanker as Nene, Zaven, and Klopp began to plan.

  Lilit turned to face Deryn, her eyes glittering.

  “Spices! You’re brilliant. Just perfectly brilliant.” Lilit gathered her into a hug. “Thank you!”

  “Aye, I’m dead clever … sometimes,” Deryn said, pulling herself quickly away. “It’s just lucky Alek brought that slab of gold along.”

  Alek nodded, but a pained look crossed his face. “That was my father’s idea. He and Volger planned for anything.”

  “Aye, but it’s barking lucky you brought it today,” Deryn said. “Otherwise you’d have lost it.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Stop being a Dummkopf,” Deryn said, shaking her head. “The taxi pilot knows what hotel we came from. And the way we’re dressed, it’s dead certain the management will remember us if the police come asking. So we’ll have to stay here. We’ve lost the wireless set, but we’ve got Klopp’s tools, Bovril, and your gold.” Deryn shrugged. “That’s everything important, right?”

  Alek squeezed his eyes shut, his voice falling to a whisper. “Almost everything.”

  “Blisters! You didn’t have two slabs of gold, did you?”

  “No. But I left a letter behind.”


  “Does it say who you are?” Lilit asked softly.

  “All too clearly.” Alek turned to stare at Deryn, his gaze suddenly intense. “It’s well hidden. If no one finds it, we can sneak back and fetch it!”

  “Aye, I suppose so.”

  “In a week, once things have settled down. Please say you’ll help me!”

  “You know me, always happy to lend a hand,” Deryn said, punching Alek on the shoulder. Though, frankly, it sounded a bit pointless to her. The Germans already knew that Alek was in Istanbul, so why risk getting caught?

  It was only a barking letter, after all.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “You bum-rag!” Deryn cried. “I was having a dead good dream!”

  “It’s time to go,” Alek said.

  Deryn groaned. She’d been helping Lilit with the Spider all day, carrying parts and trays of type, and every muscle in her body ached. It was no wonder that Clankers were grumpy all the time—metal was barking heavy.

  In her dream she’d been flying. Not on an airship or a Huxley, but with wings of her own, as light as gossamer. It had been brilliant.

  “Can we not leave it for another night? I’m knackered.”

  “It’s a week since we left the hotel, Dylan. That’s what we agreed.”

  Deryn sighed. She could see the desperate gleam in the boy’s eye again. He got it every time he talked about his lost letter, though he wouldn’t say why it was so barking important.

  Alek threw her blanket aside, and Deryn jumped to cover herself. But she’d slept in her mechanic’s slops, as she always did now. She’d had to watch her step here. The pilots who came to train in Zaven’s warehouse were all curious about the strange boy in the background, who knew none of the languages of the Ottoman Empire. So Deryn stuck with Lilit, working on the Spider, and helped Zaven with the cooking, learning the names of new spices, and slicing garlic and onions until her fingers stung.

  “Leave off!” she cried. “I’m getting up.”

  “Hush. I don’t want any questions from the others about where we’re going.”

  “Aye, right. Just wait outside a minute.”