The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  Edith found the great empty plate of Ferdinand’s face disconcerting. Yet even without eyes or a mouth, she sensed an undeniable awareness there, a presence that the lumbering engines in the Sphinx’s dock lacked. Though Ferdinand’s clumsy antics unnerved her, she was no longer afraid of him.

  Ferdinand had spotted her exiting the stables, caught her while the warmth of Senlin’s kiss still lingered on her lips. Tom’s duty to his wife had brought to mind her own distant spouse, Mr. Franklin Winters. Franklin had had the irritating habit of interpreting her stoicism, her earnestness, and her unwillingness to defer to his authority as a sign of insensitivity. Because she was not emotionally demonstrative, at least not in the way he preferred, she was frigid. The more Franklin complained of her lack of the right sort of affection, the more Edith came to resent their union, and, if she were honest, the entire institution of marriage.

  Though she had long carried her suspicions of the practice. Once, as an independent-minded twelve-year-old, she had declared to her father that she would never marry. She would be like the hawk that circled the field. Hawks didn’t have husbands. They didn’t need them.

  And her father had replied in his diplomatic way, “Most of those hawks have husbands, Edith. They just lead separate lives. They circle different fields. You don’t have to be in love to share a nest.”

  But her marriage to Franklin had dispelled that pretty fairy tale. Two hawks who could barely stand each other couldn’t share a four-bedroom house, much less a nest.

  The experience had left her jaded. If love existed, she had not felt its effect.

  Then she had been caged with a priggish country headmaster, and it proved to be, to her great annoyance, the most intimate experience of her life.

  Though she had not loved him then. That foreign feeling only declared itself after their reunion, when he saw her arm, experienced her changed demeanor, and liked her still. Perhaps liked her more. It seemed a miracle. An inconvenient miracle. He had come to her bedroom in a moment of weakness or of pity, and she had taken advantage of it. What a desperate, foolish thing. Perhaps it was for the best that he had left.

  When the Sphinx’s moon-faced locomotive turned and charged at her, she felt almost grateful for the distraction. She’d take a dose of adrenaline over introspection at the moment.

  She knew Ferdinand did not intend to run her down, but he did a lot of things he didn’t intend to do. She raised her iron arm, bracing for impact, and it was well that she did. Ferdinand skidded into her, ramming his hip against her engine’s pauldron. The collision knocked her clear off her feet, and she landed with a bump on the tattered carpets.

  Immediately remorseful, Ferdinand opened his chest and changed the drum in the music box of his heart. A mournful tune began to play.

  Edith stood and slapped the dust from her clothes. It felt wrong somehow to rebuke a machine whose greatest flaw was a shortage of coordination, a condition with which she could sympathize. The Sphinx’s gifts were great but unwieldy. Edith insisted she was fine, swore she was not cross, and asked him what he wanted. Ferdinand waved at her to follow him. As they marched to the dirge of his music box, the corridor began to rise.

  When the vast hall concluded its ascent and Ferdinand pointed to one door in the valley of doors, Edith had the strange sense that she had not been there before. The last time she had been summoned to an unfamiliar room, the Sphinx had shown her the dreadful—and very much still alive—Red Hand. She wondered what fresh terror the Sphinx had in store for her.

  The door opened upon a chamber that was as large as a ballroom. The air smelled of sulfur, wet pelts, sour milk, and other things she could not identify. The walls, high ceiling, and floor were all doused in black paint that seemed to drink the light of the lamps. A glass cistern, large as one of her father’s grain silos, presided over the room. The vat appeared to hold a whirling, cement cloud. All about the immense urn, wheeled carts held racks containing hundreds and hundreds of glass vials. She recognized them at once: They were batteries like the ones she regularly pulled from her arm.

  The Sphinx looked like a rearing cobra. His black robes sawed beneath him as he moved in front of the bottled storm. To Edith’s surprise, Iren was there, too. The amazon held her thick arms crossed over her chest and her feet spread apart as if she intended to square off with the Sphinx. It seemed quite a dominant pose for someone wearing a fluffy white robe.

  Edith greeted Iren and asked if this was to be her new uniform. “It would definitely make an impression in a fight. If anyone charged at me in a bathrobe, I’d run the other way.”

  “The stag is sewing me a new wardrobe for Pelphia,” Iren said glumly. “He’d better give me some trousers, or I’m going to take his.”

  “That would be entertaining,” Edith said.

  “All right, enough of that!” Though the Sphinx’s expression was hidden by his mask, the shrill note in his crackling voice communicated his impatience. “I didn’t bring you two here to natter about clothes.” Taking a vial from a rack, the Sphinx opened the copper tap at the base of the urn and filled the tube with the muddy ooze. “Do you recognize this, Edith?”

  “I do. I had no idea there was so much of it.”

  “This? This is just a drop in the bucket! Here, take a whiff.” The Sphinx passed the open vial to the amazon.

  Iren gave the vial a casual sniff. It seemed to make no impression, and she passed it to Edith, who inhaled deeply. Edith snatched her head away, snorting and coughing. The Sphinx’s mechanical laughter sounded like rain on a windowpane. As Edith wiped the tears from her eyes, she asked Iren, “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  Iren shrugged. “Would you have smelled it if I had?”

  “It’s like rotten teeth and burning hair. What’s in this?”

  “Gloamine spores, bull snail mucus, chimney cat dander, the silk of the drove spider, and many, many more of the Tower’s bounties. Now observe what happens when I put a spark to it.” The Sphinx drew the wand from his inky sleeve and touched its tip to the vial. The cylinder lit up like a candle flame. The red light folded upon itself, writhing like a living thing.

  Edith had never thought much about the batteries she put into her arm. It was easier not to, and daily exposure to the miraculous things had made them seem almost mundane. But seeing the way the bland medium gobbled up and transformed the lightning filled her with wonder.

  “In my more dramatic youth I called it the Blood of Time.” The Sphinx sounded wistful. “But it’s more accurate to call it a distillation of history, which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, I admit. The medium can hold an electric charge, but it is capable of bearing much, much more. It can suspend a moment, trap a memory, or even slow the advance of time.”

  A sudden revelation shattered Edith’s awe. “The Red Hand,” she said. “Why in the world did you put this in his veins?”

  “To save his life,” the Sphinx said without pause. “He was found floating and blue-faced in the reservoir of the Baths, a nameless tourist in a bathing suit. The local doctors were able to restart his heart and get him breathing again, but he was left a mindless husk, a mute shell of a man. One of the captains who used to recruit Wakemen for me brought him in. I tried everything I could to revive his mind, but all my efforts failed. As a last resort, I decided to try something radical. I put the charged medium into his bloodstream. To my surprise, he woke up.

  “He lived, but his former life and understanding were all gone. Since he could not recall his name, I named him Reddleman because the medium turned his fingers red as reddle dye.” The Sphinx seemed to shrink as he set the vial he’d lit back into its cradle. There, it glowed dimly like a dying coal.

  “He had the mind of a child, and a child’s curiosity, too. He had an insatiable appetite for facts and information. So I loaded him with primers and encyclopedias, and sent him back to the Baths to live and work as a Wakeman. I thought it would be a quiet place for him to convalesce and continue his education. I nearly convin
ced myself that repairing a mind was not so different from refitting an appendage. I did not realize how susceptible his state of mind made him. Reddleman was quick to understand how the world worked, but none of it rekindled his conscience. He was intelligent but without a single scruple. Commissioner Pound filled that ethical void with his own poisonous ideas.”

  “I saw him tear half a dozen men limb from limb,” Iren said darkly. “He nearly killed me, too. If you knew he was so dangerous, why didn’t you do anything to stop him?”

  The Sphinx sighed and pressed another stopper into a freshly filled vial. “Optimism, I suppose. Denial, perhaps? I’m not sure. But I could just as well ask you why you spent so many years serving a man who made a fortune off of desperate women being turned into novelty acts and unwilling brides. Yes, I know all about your time in New Babel.”

  Edith watched Iren’s brow curdle with pain and rushed to her friend’s defense. “The difference is Iren didn’t have the resources and alternatives that you do.”

  “No, the difference is my choice served a purpose. A war is coming, and like it or not, we’ll need the Red Hand to win.”

  “Well, just keep him away from me and Voleta, and we won’t have a problem,” Iren said.

  The Sphinx laughed. “I want you to unknot your thoughts. Picture some pleasant place.” Slipping the full battery into an empty cradle, the Sphinx snaked off through the carts full of glassware to a black door they hadn’t noticed before. “Are you at ease?”

  “Hardly ever,” Iren said.

  “Well, please try to pretend.” The Sphinx turned the handle.

  The silhouette of a short man with a potbelly and willowy limbs filled the doorway. Against the gloom, his skin shone with a faint ruby light.

  Iren picked up the nearest cart and raised it over her head, sending a shower of empty vials crashing to the floor like hailstones. Edith shouted at her, but not quickly enough. The amazon hurled the cart at the head of the Red Hand.

  If the Red Hand flinched, Edith did not detect it. In fact, she hardly perceived the movement of his arms when he snatched the cart from the air. He set it down on the black floor and looked confusedly at the Sphinx. “You didn’t say she’d throw furniture at me.”

  “I didn’t know she would,” the Sphinx said.

  Overcoming her surprise at the Red Hand’s quick reflexes, Iren gripped a second cart, but Edith cuffed her arm before she could raise it. “Wait.”

  “He tried to kill us!” Iren said hotly. “What’ll stop him from trying again? What about Voleta?”

  “Hold on. Hold. That’s an order,” Edith said more firmly. “Let go of the cart.” Iren reluctantly did, and once Edith was convinced a second assault wasn’t imminent, she turned to the Sphinx. “I thought he was paralyzed.”

  “I was!” the Red Hand said, large teeth crowding a fulsome smile. “I only regained control of my arms yesterday.” He raised his hands, and the laces on the sleeves of his linen shirt caught his attention. He tugged them like a cat for a moment, then shook his head vigorously, as if to dispel the distraction. “Then this morning, I got my legs back. I’ve been having a lovely walk.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you!” Edith was pointing at the Red Hand but glaring at the Sphinx.

  “Are you the one who killed me?” The Red Hand’s tone was not angry or accusatory. His voice, which was high and a little hoarse, sounded inquisitive, almost amused, but not angry, a fact that confused Edith.

  “She is. But in her defense, you were behaving very poorly at the time.”

  “I was? I’m sorry,” the Red Hand said, surveying Edith from fluffy collar to slippered feet and back again. “She looks quite strong. And angry. I think she wants to kill me.”

  “Very perceptive, Reddleman. Your observational skills are coming along nicely. And I think the answer is probably yes,” the Sphinx said.

  “Because of who I was?” The Red Hand was approaching Edith and Iren now. He was barefoot and walked with a staggering, wandering gait. When the broken vials began to crunch under his heels, he did not seem to feel any pain. Iren puffed out her chest and stood on her toes and did her best to look daunting. The Red Hand smiled up at her, gaping like a tourist before a monument. “Remarkable,” he murmured, and reached up toward her face. Red light glazed his fingertips. “You’d never suspect we were the same species, would you? You’re like a mountain. I’m a foothill.”

  Iren growled at him, and he withdrew his hand. He veered toward Edith, the movement as ungainly as a foal. She made a conscious effort to stand her ground, lest she give him the impression that she was afraid of him—which of course she was. But he seemed too preoccupied with the conspicuous machine hanging at her side to notice her stalwart pose.

  “It’s such a formidble instrument!” Reddleman said, pinching his chin in thought. As he studied its graceless plates and brutal angles, Edith flexed the engine to show its strength and put him off, though her display did not have the intended effect. He applauded in delight, saying, “It’s so nice to see you back in play, master arm!”

  “Never mind that, Reddleman.” The Sphinx turned to Edith. “You see! He’s entirely changed. He’s a doe-eyed naïf.”

  Edith scoffed. “Surely, you can’t expect us to believe he’s harmless. He just snatched a hundred-pound cart from the air as if it were a pillow!”

  “He’s naive, Edith, not weak.” The Sphinx’s robe slithered along under him as he circled the group. “It’s important that you get along. Reddleman is going to be your pilot.”

  “Reporting for duty, Captain!” the Red Hand said, saluting Edith with a lipless, frog-like smile.

  “You really expect me to take him on as crew?”

  “I do. Perhaps if you hadn’t helped your last pilot escape, we wouldn’t be in this position,” the Sphinx said, and Edith felt a pang of guilt at the thought of Adam. She wondered how he was faring among the sparking men.

  “A captain has to trust her crew. How in the world do you expect me to trust him?”

  “Would you please turn around, Reddleman?” The Sphinx twirled the air with a black velvet finger. “That’s it. Thank you. Now please unbutton your shirt.”

  Edith and Iren made no effort to conceal their discomfort at the Sphinx’s direction, though their revulsion turned to a morbid sort of fascination when they saw the Red Hand’s bared back. His spine was shielded in a brass shell, which ran from the nape of his neck nearly down to his waist. The case mirrored the ridges of his backbone, but between the polished vertebrae shined the red light of the Sphinx’s powerful medium. “You’ll notice he no longer has his cuff,” the Sphinx said, tapping his own blank wrist as if asking for the time. “That cuff allowed him to change his own batteries, but that’s not the case anymore. No, now he requires some assistance.” The Sphinx pinched the third vertebra from the top of the Red Hand’s spine, and four chambers along the backbone opened, revealing the tops of four vials. “These will need to be changed every forty-eight hours at least.”

  “That’s quite often,” Edith said. Her new arm could run for more than a week on a single battery.

  “It is, but then the medium has essentially replaced the energy his body would otherwise produce. He doesn’t have the capacity to draw any strength from food or sleep anymore. Since he can’t replace the batteries himself, he must rely on you to keep him alive. If he were ever to turn on you, he would only be turning on himself.”

  “So I just have to trust he has a sense of self-preservation?” Edith asked.

  “I certainly do,” Reddleman said, buttoning up his shirt again. He turned to face them, wearing an amiable expression. “Death is an interesting drama, but I’ve seen it once already. I’m not sure I’m prepared to sit through an encore quite yet.”

  “See!” the Sphinx said happily. “You need Reddleman to fly your ship, and he needs you to change his batteries. Mutual need is better than trust.”

  “Still, it’s a lot of ship,” Edith said. “What about the rest of
my crew?”

  “This is the rest of your crew,” the Sphinx said and then laughed at Edith’s exasperated expression. “Don’t worry. The State of Art all but flies itself!”

  Chapter Two

  An unexpected knock on my apartment door is as welcome as the drums of an invading army.

  —Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie

  Inside the bridge of the State of Art, the alarm sounded: a single xylophonic note that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Iren said with mounting annoyance through clenched teeth.

  The alarm had rung once a minute, every minute, for the past six days. In that time, it had gone from an amusement, to a nuisance, to an absolute torment.

  The bridge, which was itself larger than the entire main deck of the Stone Cloud, looked to have been designed by a jeweler: everything was gold, or silver, or some other precious alloy. The ship’s control panels, which consumed three of the bridge’s four walls, were filled with buttons and knobs, each as ornate as a signet ring. A hundred faceted bulbs flashed amid the controls. Their red, white, and green lights were bright enough to make the room sparkle. A bank of crystal-faced dials relayed the wind speed and barometric pressure as well as the ship’s altitude, air speed, envelope density, coil temperature, oil level, and a dozen other essential measurements, only some of which were familiar to the crew.

  In truth, Captain Winters and her bridge crew of two still found most of the ship’s functions mysterious. And in the first moments after their launch at the start of the week, they had learned an important lesson about fiddling with controls they did not understand. The ship had hardly cleared the Sphinx’s hangar when Iren flipped a toggle that she thought would turn off the ship’s running lights—and in her defense the switch was located near the corridor light switch—but which in fact fired several flares from the aft of the ship. The resulting sparking rockets narrowly avoided bouncing through the hangar doors and into the Sphinx’s lair. The Sphinx was quick to dispatch one of his winged messengers, which Byron played for the crew after dinner over a somber pudding. Byron’s crème brûlée was burnt, but worse the Sphinx was obviously irate: “You can’t go about twisting this and mashing that! You’ll blow yourselves up! Read the manuals. That’s why I gave them to you!”