“A catastrophic what?”
“An explosion, Edith—an eruption of volcanic proportions.”
Even through the dampening helmet and with the Sphinx’s disembodied voice filling her ear, Edith still heard the mounting roar that had begun to fill the car. It sounded like breathless thunder. A primeval sort of terror stirred in the pit of her stomach. It seemed to climb her throat like a rope, squeezing off the flow of blood and air as it rose.
“Here, take this,” the Sphinx said. A drawer in the gold cradle beneath his bubble opened, revealing a strange instrument inside. Dazedly, Edith removed the tool. It looked like a compass, but with horns on one end and a handle on the other. “It’s an ammeter.”
Edith was formulating a question when their ascent came to a clanging halt. The car continued to rattle and quail like a cabin in a hurricane. The Sphinx said, “Walk to the handrail. Hold the ammeter out. Squeeze the grip for ten seconds to take a reading. Then come back to the elevator. And don’t dally.”
The doors opened, and a hellish glare poured in.
Outside, a blood-red sea boiled.
Waves rose and clapped together, their froth flaring bright as guncotton. There seemed to be no wind, and yet the intensity of the spray made the air roil and shimmer. The sea glowed bright enough to illuminate the cavern it filled. In the distance, Edith saw the surf break upon a rocky bluff that rose and curved in toward the peak of the dome.
She stood atop a silvery needle—a lighthouse stationed in the middle of a furious sea. A gold guardrail banded the narrow observatory deck. Other than the elevator housing behind her, the platform was empty.
Through the rubber armor, she felt something like the pelting of frozen rain on her skin, though it came from every direction, and the feeling seemed to burrow into her until it pecked at her bones. It took all her concentration to shuffle forward. Even shielded by the smoked glass and the visor, her eyes teared and seemed to fizz in their sockets. She reached for the railing, still two steps away, and saw that her gloved hand was covered in round, rolling flames. The queer fire wavered and dispersed like blood spilled into a stream.
Grasping the guardrail with her engine, she held the ammeter out into the sparkling air. She realized that the surface of the sea was closer than it had appeared from inside the elevator. The caps of the tallest waves leapt high enough to lap the underside of the decking. She felt the slapping impact through her boot soles. The tines of the ammeter were haloed in electric pink light. She tried to focus on the instrument’s dial, but her gaze went past it, down to the raging sea.
Lightning sparked up from the dim red depths, igniting the abyss with jagged lances as it broke toward the surface. While still submerged, the electricity forked and turned at a dreamy pace, progressing like a crack through oceanic ice. But when the lightning broke the surface, it shattered into seething white static that leapt between the tops of waves.
Edith’s transfixion was broken by the Sphinx’s voice in her ear. “I said, don’t dally!”
Spurred by a large bolt from the deep, a wave leapt higher than the rest. When it struck the plate Edith was standing on, it threw her into the air. Her deathly grip on the guardrail carried her forward, and she swung clear over the railing with a shout. The ammeter flew from her grip as she crashed bodily against the side of the rail and decking, bounced outward, and crashed back again. The rubber padding absorbed the brunt of the shock, but the pain was still enough to make her gasp. She looked down in time to see the ammeter hit the surface of the reservoir and incinerate with a flash of light.
Sped by fear, she pulled herself up. The plate that had thrown her had landed out of alignment, and she stepped over the gap it left behind. She staggered back to the waiting elevator, finding the interior dressed in the same eerie fire that had clung to her outside. The pink plasma licked along the crystal face of the Sphinx’s carriage. Edith slapped the button to return to the attic. The doors closed, and as the car sank again, the roar began to diminish. As she knelt on one knee, panting to catch her breath, the electric sprites sputtered out in little pops of light.
“You owe me an ammeter,” the Sphinx said.
“What was that hell? What are we going to do?” Edith’s voice shook with dread and adrenaline.
“Ah, it worked!”
“What do you mean, it worked?” Edith glared up at the Sphinx, dark and slender as the pupil of a cat.
“The passing of the curse, of course,” said the Sphinx.
Chapter Four
I distrust sweet cocktails and cheerful men for the same reason: It’s hard to tell how dangerous they are until they’ve knocked you on your ear.
—Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie
In the days since she’d dangled above the lightning sea, Edith had spent many hours contemplating the Sphinx’s curse. The Sphinx had gone to some pains to elaborate upon the exact proportion of their despair, assuring Edith that should the medium in the reservoir degrade, the resulting explosion would be enough to fill the entire valley with a fireball so intense it would liquefy the ground down to the bedrock. The Tower would simply cease to be, along with every man, woman, and child inside it. The sky would go black. An impenetrable winter would settle upon the land. The nation of Ur would be ravaged by famine. And in the span of a generation, the epilogue of human history would be written on the wall of a cave.
But this grim knowledge was only one aspect of the curse. Another was the need for absolute secrecy. If word of the looming catastrophe were to get out, there would be panic, and hoarding, pillaging, and war. And that was assuming everyone believed her. Surely, some ringdoms would decry the warnings as a ruse to disrupt their prosperity, and rather than evacuate, they would sequester themselves. And any loss of population in the Tower would doubtlessly be replaced by the destitute and despairing hordes of the Market. As the Sphinx put it: “A drowning man will still scramble aboard a sinking ship.”
No, this curse was not a burden that sharing would make any lighter.
But perhaps the worst part of the curse was the feeling of futility that accompanied it. Edith had been right to call the Sphinx desperate, but now that she had been infected by that frantic feeling, she was eager for him to offer some qualification, to tell her that there was time enough to throttle back the lightning, and enough reasonable men and women left in the Tower to make such a thing possible. Rather than encouragement, the Sphinx had offered her a contingency: “I’ll monitor the reservoir. If I think it’s at a tipping point, then I’ll have you sabotage the lightning mill. I think we’d both rather the Tower become a mausoleum than a crater. Certainly, it’s preferable to murder a few hundred thousand than to preside over the end of the species.”
Edith had not been much consoled by the Sphinx’s fallback plan.
She sat brooding in her captain’s chair aboard the State of Art. It had been mere hours since the excitement of the failed boarding party, but already she longed for another distraction. She had already toured every inch of her spectacular ship, exploring everything from the sheet music in the harpsichord bench in the conservatory to the crawl space beneath the gun deck, where rails full of cannonballs snaked to the base of each gun, and down to the uncomfortably cramped orlop where the water tanks sloshed and the ship’s reservoir of the Sphinx’s medium, stored in a long crystalline vat, bathed everything in vermillion light. She had inspected all but the engine room, which Byron said was locked to discourage meddling. He described the mechanisms inside the vault as being so finely tuned that even an errant hair might snarl them and cripple the ship.
And yet upon passing the sealed hatch soon after, an inexpressible instinct had brought Edith to a halt before the imposing door. She placed her iron palm upon the plaque, bolted like a grave plate to the steel, and instantly she felt a thrumming so profound it reverberated inside her skull. That trembling made her thoughts seem first to quiver, then peal like a ringing bell, echoing outward, stretching beyond the boundary of her skin.
The experience had been uncomfortable enough to convince her that not all of the Sphinx’s veils needed pulling back.
Now she stared at a dark spot on the white cuff of her blouse. The Red Hand’s blood, splashed there by the pirate’s bullet, had glowed like a lamp wick at first. Now it was dull and gray as ash. She wondered why in the world the Sphinx had made so much of the stuff, enough to fill a sea, enough to burn the earth down to the bone.
Byron appeared in the open door to the main passageway, and said, “Captain, could I speak to you in the hall for a moment?”
Leaving the ship under Iren’s command, Edith followed the stag out. Something about the ship’s decor in its passages, cabins, and great rooms reminded her of a bank lobby. The fixtures on the bulkheads were stately, well polished, and absolutely devoid of human charm. She wondered if she would ever get accustomed to it, or if she would just go on growing more and more nostalgic for the Stone Cloud, that flying splinter factory presently moldering in a corner of the Sphinx’s shipyard. He had promised to repair it. Edith wondered if he ever would.
Byron handed her the wingless body of one of the Sphinx’s messengers. It wasn’t unusual to receive her orders in such a fashion. She was growing accustomed to receiving two, sometimes three missives from her employer a day. The Sphinx had ideas about which ringdoms he wished her to prowl past and which skyports she should test her cannons outside of. Edith dreaded each message, fearing it would be the one when the Sphinx declared the lightning sea too unstable. And what had he meant when he said she might have to “sabotage the lightning mill” one day? Did that mean the destruction of the Lightning Nest in New Babel? Could she even do such a thing without setting off all those stores of hydrogen?
“It’s from our vagabond friend,” Byron said.
“From Senlin?” she said, her heart suddenly squeezing into a fist. It had been about a week since they’d said their goodbyes in the Sphinx’s stables. The Sphinx had given Byron express orders not to play Senlin’s reports for anyone aboard the State of Art, including its captain, and yet the stag had found a way to keep Edith apprised of Senlin’s status, mostly in the passageways, when he paused in her vicinity to muse aloud about a “vagabond friend” suffering through another uneventful day. The last such casual observation had occurred the day before when Byron had said, “Our vagabond friend seems to be getting a little bored, I think. He’s taken to tattling on newsboys and magpies. Though bored is better than endangered, I should think.”
Byron had seemed to find the playful subterfuge comforting. Now that they were speaking directly, he seemed less at ease. “Of course, if you-know-who found out about this, he would be … unhappy. But I did promise our vagabond … I did promise Tom.”
“When? Promised him what?”
“We shared a moment,” Byron said, smiling with ironic wistfulness. “I was in the process of abandoning him on a godforsaken outpost when he asked if I would forward one message to you on one occasion, and I agreed. So I am breaking the rules, defying my master, and likely cementing my legacy as a cad and a turncoat, but after all, it’s just this once, and Senlin was very, very pitiful. I thought he might cry.”
Knowing that Byron was being droll to cover his discomfort, Edith gripped his mechanical hand with her likewise hand and said, “Thank you, Byron.”
If he could’ve blushed, he probably would’ve then. Instead, he blinked and snuffled and twitched as if he’d inhaled a little pepper. When he’d recovered his poise, he said solemnly, “Of course, I didn’t listen to it.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing very interesting.” Edith tried to sound more at ease than she felt.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me, Captain, I have an engagement in the parlor. I’m teaching a jackrabbit how to waltz, and the rabbit does not care for it.” He turned on his heel and marched down the corridor with a slight but unmistakable bounce in his step.
Edith retreated to her quarters on the middeck to listen to Senlin’s message in private.
She did not care for her lodgings. The captain’s quarters were overlarge and overdecorated with portraits of past commanders. Glass cabinets swamped the room, filled with medals and braids and dozens of prominently displayed and seemingly random objects, including a marionette dressed like an admiral, a fan made out of black lace, a model of a sailboat, and a brass bed warmer with a country scene stamped on its bottom. When on the first evening of their voyage she had informed Byron that she would prefer a smaller cabin, he had expressed some puzzlement as to why. She had explained, “Because I can’t stand all these knickknacks. I feel like I’ve wandered into a pawnshop.”
“Knickknacks?” Byron had whickered in horror. “These knickknacks were presented by the Tower’s greatest nobility to all the venerable commanders of the State of Art. These are invaluable symbols of historic reverence. This isn’t a pawnshop. It’s a museum!”
“But that’s just it: I don’t want to sleep in a museum.”
“And yet this is where the captain sleeps. It’s tradition,” Byron had said, and in so saying, he unintentionally summoned the memory of what she had told Senlin when he had balked at the thought of sleeping in Captain Billy Lee’s quarters: A crew needs a little room to cavort and plot their mutinies. It’s good for morale. Funny how different it felt to be on the receiving end of that argument.
Like it or not, this was her cabin, and she had little choice but to accept it.
She shut her door and took up the bottle of rum from the comfortable jumble of books, maps, dishes, and models she had left on the table, as if to stake her own mess amid the curated clutter. She pulled the stopper out with her teeth and poured a dram into an almost-clean pewter mug. She sipped, slipped off her greatcoat, and sat down to study the brass body of the messenger.
“So, Tom, let’s see what you have to say for yourself.” She twisted the moth’s head, and the machine began to hiss softly with the sounds of a distant and foreign room.
“All right, Byron. I hope you remember my request,” Senlin said. Though his voice was a little faint, she was so surprised to hear it she stood up, rattling the table as she rose. The Sphinx’s miracles were so often unsettling. “I promise this is the one and only time I will impose upon your discretion, but please, please: I’d like to say a few words to Edith … alone. Thank you, Byron. You are a good friend.”
There was a pause in the recording. Edith began to pace.
“Dear Edith,” Senlin said, and then laughed. “That’s a funny way to start. This isn’t exactly a letter, is it? Though it isn’t a conversation either. I’m afraid it will have to be another lecture! I hope you can forgive me,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
“I’ve had a rather strange evening. Actually, it’s been a strange week. I saved a hod from being beaten, only to have him murder two men in front of me. I escaped suspicion for that crime, but at the cost of seeing eleven innocent men, women, and children executed. I watched an old friend fight for my entertainment. I tried to ingratiate myself to the man who married my wife. And then tonight … I saw her. At last. I saw her. And she was … It was like meeting a rumor, if that makes sense. She was familiar and yet very different. I was wearing a mask, and she was with her duke, and then we rode in a coal car together, and …” Here, Edith heard him struggle and stammer, and though he said nothing coherent, the attempt seemed to speak volumes.
He cleared his throat and carried on. “The upshot is, she made it clear that she prefers her life in Pelphia. I don’t blame her. I don’t begrudge her her happiness. She seems to have a spectacular life. Part of the dread I’ve carried around this past year was the thought that once she’d seen a little more of the world, she would think a little less of me. I went to a play where I was a character and … well, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a play. I’m not an actor.
“I think you were right, Edith. We aren’t what we hope for; we are only what we do. For better or worse, for well or ill, we are what we do. I’ve spent
the better part of a year in denial about what I am, what I have become, insisting that I am somehow above my crimes, my choices, my … feelings. The only thing my denial has done is make me miserable, and I think neurotic. Well, I’m finished with that. I just feel grateful that there is someone in this madhouse who I know and can trust. Someone who is an endless source of encouragement and strength. I can hardly say how much I love your company, your character, your … But I’ll waste no more words. These are sentiments that are better shown than said. I hope to see you soon, and I hope to give you what I could not give her: a man deserving of your affection.”
Edith only realized she had begun to pace very quickly when the message ended. She stopped midlap and felt her heart jog on a moment longer.
Sliding back into her chair, she experienced the arrival of her feelings like an approaching rain shower, beginning with a few tentative thrilling drops, then a dozen or so pattering thoughts, then the sudden cloudburst of all the implications and worries and wonders that came along with the possibility of love, all falling more quickly than she could catch.
Then as swiftly as the storm had blown in, it began to recede. Her thoughts thinned into a gauzy, almost sultry sense of longing. She wished she had the time to enjoy the feeling more …
But her obligations would not wait. The vision of the boiling red sea was never far away. And there was a practical aspect to Senlin’s declaration, namely how it affected Voleta’s purpose in Pelphia.
Edith went to the communication horn by her cabin door and spoke at a near shout into the small brass trumpet that connected to the bridge. She hailed Iren, and when the amazon answered, she said, “Would you please locate Voleta and Byron and send them to my quarters? Then find yourself some dinner and get some rest. You’ve more than earned it. I’ll take the third shift.”
The Hod King Page 39