A maze of curved partitions emerged from the motionless dark beneath her. No, not partitions—they were the tops of shelves. Hundreds of them, set narrowly as the ridges of a fingerprint, retreated farther than the light of her lamp could reach.
She was rappelling into an enormous library.
When her heels hit the ground, she called that she was safely down. As she waited for the general and Georgine to descend, she examined her surroundings. A layer of dust as thick as flour coated the floor, the long reading tables, the sturdy high-backed chairs, and the library carts, abandoned with books still on them. And yet for all the evidence of long disuse, there were signs of recent activity. The floor had been scuffed clean around the end of one long table, and the chairs moved. Edith ducked to inspect the underside and found a store of bedrolls, water jugs, and crates of provisions. She pulled the cloth back from one box to find several stale loaves of bread, and under those, a white paper box full of moldering éclairs.
She was still rummaging through the cache when Eigengrau came up behind her, startling her. As she caught her breath, she told him what she’d found. “I think someone was living down here. By the look of it, several someones.”
“So that’s what the Coattails were up to: They were bringing someone food and water. I wonder who?” The general raised his lantern. The light glinted off of a battery of brass plaques set into a cabinet that was as long as a garden wall. They could see where the card catalog’s drawers had been swept clean by searching hands. “They sealed this area up decades ago, even before the university closed.” When Edith asked why a university would shutter its library, Eigengrau shrugged. “Why is anything abandoned? A lack of use, I suppose.”
The general had just begun to study the trails of footprints on the floor when Haste landed with a heavy clomp behind him. Georgine glanced at Edith’s discovered provisions, then addressed Eigengrau. “Probably just some bored brawlers stretching their legs. I mean, where would they go from here?”
“That is the question. Let’s see where the trail leads, shall we?” Eigengrau said, nodding at the floor. The footprints seemed to funnel and converge upon a single aisle between shelves, which curled into the subterranean dark.
It was strange that a library should call to mind the depths of a forest, but that was precisely what Edith thought of. The darkness, the smell of pulp and decay, the meandering trail, the vaulted shelves, which had a way of making her feel as if she were shrinking the deeper they went, it all brought to mind the wildwood outside her father’s land—a place that seemed at once empty and also full of watching eyes.
After a few minutes of tracking the prints and wending between rows, they came upon another open area, larger than the last. It seemed a space made for symposiums. Long tables and benches stood in rows, eight or nine deep, facing a blackboard that was tall enough to require a ladder to reach the top of, and twice as long.
They turned the lamp beams upon it. From edge to edge, top to bottom, the blackboard was filled with numbers, symbols, and letters, all laid as compactly as one of the Sphinx’s contracts and drawn in skeletal white. The work showed evidence of many hands, many erasures. For a moment, there seemed to be nothing else in the library but this dense and monolithic code.
Then Haste shouted, “Look out!” and a shadowy lump that had been lying on one of the benches sat up with a startled cry.
Shrouded in a blanket, the hod looked to have been roused from his slumber, though his grogginess was quickly cured by the sight of Eigengrau’s pistol. The hod rolled from the bench a moment before the general fired his cannon. The muzzle flash was bright as a meteor cracking open upon the sky. The shot cleaved the table in half and made splinters of the bench behind it.
Through the cloud of kicked-up dust and smoke, the hod appeared again several paces away. He was fumbling with something as he ran, something small and delicate, something that seemed to break, then break again. The general cracked his pistol open to pull out the cinder-hot shell. Edith clambered onto the nearest tabletop, leaping to be next in pursuit of the hod, who’d dropped his blanket and was now naked to the waist. When he reached the main aisle between tables, he stopped, crouched, and finally struck the shortened match he’d whittled nearly to the head with his attempts to strike it. He glanced back at Edith, bounding onto the table nearest him, and dropped the flame into a furrow of gunpowder on the floor.
The sparking powder ran away from him, quick as a mouse, searing a route toward the blackboard.
Edith didn’t know where the line of gunpowder led, only that nothing good waited at the end of a fuse. She leapt over the hod’s head, staggering as she landed, but she kept herself from going down and raced after the seething spark on the floor, which dawdled one moment only to surge the next. The aisle ended, and the flame was near enough then to light up its destination: a wooden keg tucked under the chalkboard’s lip.
With little room left to run and no time to deliberate, Edith dove forward, reaching with her engine for the spark. It flashed at the edge of the keg.
Her palm clapped down upon the light, dousing it so violently, the stone beneath it cracked.
“Stop him! Stop him!” Eigengrau yelled from behind her. Edith rolled onto her back and watched as Georgine and the general reached after the hod. The hod drank greedily from a small glass vial. Haste grasped his wrist and shook the tube loose. It shattered, already empty, upon the flagstone floor. Eigengrau grasped the hod under the arms and threw him onto the top of a table.
Returning to her feet, Edith rushed back to where the general pinned the writhing hod.
He was a diminutive person—certainly small enough to navigate the tunnel through the Colosseum wall. Though his bones were hardly larger than a child’s, they were wrapped in an older man’s sinews. The thick lenses of his spectacles were shattered, apparently in the scuffle. The remaining wedges of glass exaggerated his small, deep-set eyes. The evidence of the poison he’d drank already showed on his face. His lips were blue and the blood vessels in his cheeks budded and burst.
“Are there others?” Eigengrau demanded, his voice full of energy though his expression was not.
“All gone,” the hod said, smiling at the thought, though he just as quickly grimaced and coughed. “I can’t believe I fell asleep. Days and days of vigilance, all for nothing.”
“What is all this?” the general asked, shaking the man to gather his dwindling attention. “Why are you here?”
“If you wish to ax a tree, you must use a little wood for the haft,” the hod said, his voice growing rougher as he spoke.
“What are you talking about? What are you planning?”
“To see heaven’s collar pulled into a noose. To see the Hod King pluck the black worm out of his hole. To see the kings erased, and the men who remember them forgotten. To see the rubble of the Tower spread across the earth. To swallow our tongues and grow new ones.” The hod’s vein-shattered gaze seemed to stare through those who leaned over him. He spoke words they did not understand, his voice thinning and weakening into a hoarse whisper as he babbled. Then he said with abrupt clarity, “Come the Hod King!”
His last breath came out in a hiss.
While the hod cooled on the table, the general sat on the bench nearest the blackboard and looked up at the unintelligible code with his hands on his knees.
“Maybe it means nothing,” Haste said. “They babble with letters; perhaps they babble with numbers, too.”
“Perhaps,” the general said. “I know a few men around town who studied maths in their youth. They might be able to make some sense of it—at least enough to say whether it’s intelligible.”
“And here I thought the zealots were a bunch of illiterate Luddites,” Edith said, squinting at the formula. “Marat is full of surprises.”
“Luc Marat?” Eigengrau said. Edith asked how the general knew the name. “He has a small gang of zealots who pop up now and again to make a nuisance of themselves. They even took a run at the
gatehouse a few years back. We repelled them easily enough, but I was impressed by their determination, if not their stratagem.”
“It’s more than ‘a small gang,’ General,” Edith said with a tilt of her head. “Marat has grand plans, I think—ambitions that would affect every house and ringdom in the Tower. The Sphinx thought Marat was hiding something here; though he didn’t know what it was. This must be it. Whatever this is.”
“The zealots liked to ruin books, not read them,” Haste said.
“War is for defending ideals, not exercising them.” Unrolling his sleeves, Eigengrau stood. “If Marat thought he could gain an advantage from these shelves, I have no doubt he would pursue it.”
Edith’s lamplight flared upon something under the bottom lip of the blackboard. “Wait a minute,” she said, and pulled up on the edge of the board. The blackboard rose with a groan, climbing on rails, aided by weighted pulleys. The metal chalk rail of a second board peeked out from beneath the first. With a firm shove, she sent the outer blackboard sailing upward.
An immense and detailed diagram crowded the revealed board. Edith had to step back to take it all in. The schematic appeared to include several perspectives of a single machine—a side view, a top view, and a cross section. At a glance, it roughly resembled one of the Sphinx’s wall-walkers, but this engine had dozens of jointed legs. Some of its parts called to mind a millipede. Curved armored plates covered the length of its back. On second thought, Edith decided it called something else to mind. It looked like one of the fossils in the book she’d removed from Senlin’s room, the book that bore the plate of this very library. The engine looked like a trilobite, but with cannons and pikes jutting out from under its shell. The side view, which showed the inside of the engine, contained seated and standing figures, dozens of them all drawn for scale. At a glance, she imagined those chambers might transport a hundred men.
“What is it?” Eigengrau asked, his voice hushed with awe.
“I think … I think it’s some sort of siege engine,” Edith said, her eyes drifting over the spines on its back that spewed flames, the carefully placed slits to accommodate riflemen, and the trident anchors that hung from its belly. At the machine’s fore, a great prong like a serrated tuning fork jutted out, some sort of battering ram, perhaps?
“My god! It would have to be immense,” the general said. “They can’t actually hope to build such a thing, can they?”
“Something tells me they do,” Edith said, pointing to the bottom corner of the board. “Look.”
There, in block letters better suited to a gravestone, were the words: THE HOD KING.
Chapter Thirteen
A man may rot like an egg: His shell does not show it, but all that is within him has gone foul.
—I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet
By the end of the afternoon, the once crypt-like library was bustling with life and light. Dozens of soldiers combed every aisle, shelf, and cubby, hunting for further revelation. Munition experts searched for booby traps and removed the rudimentary bomb the hods had left to destroy the evidence of their work. Dusty gas sconces were cleaned and relit, the Reverie’s photographer and his precious equipment were lowered down amid much nervous squawking, and the ringdom’s brightest minds were summoned to study the two boards.
Constables inspected the secret camp for clues, and after some hours, announced that six hods had been living and working in the library for a year, perhaps longer. Based on the evidence of their footprints and remaining garments, none of the hods had been more than five feet tall. While the identities of the hods were still uncertain, there were hints regarding their individual expertise. The placement of their bedrolls corresponded with stacks of books dedicated to particular topics. Based on this, the constables believed that two of the hods had been mechanical engineers, two physicists, one a biologist, and one a chemist. Several former Coattail boys were brought down and quizzed by the general. The lads quickly admitted to smuggling in provisions in exchange for erotic books and anatomical studies, which had formerly resided on the shelves of the library. The Coattails had learned of the salacious opportunity via rumor, the exact source of which they could not recall.
Edith and Georgine helped as Eigengrau would permit. The similarities between the schematic and the Sphinx’s roving engines that repaired the Tower were not lost upon the general, and he seemed unsure of whether the discovery suggested a conspiracy between the hods and the Sphinx or an uprising against the enigmatic inventor. Edith reminded the general that she had been the one to uncover the footprint that led to the library. If she were a conspirator, she must also be an idiot and a saboteur. She eventually convinced Eigengrau to provide her with a photograph of the schematics so that she could share them with the Sphinx. Eigengrau agreed to deliver the images in the morning.
By the time she and Haste climbed back out of the hole, evening had come. Realizing they were both famished, the two Wakemen left the empty Colosseum amid a chorus of birdcalls befitting an orchard in springtime. The plaza was clogged with rocking sedan chairs and children on stilts selling papers, bouquets, and little flasks of blackberry brandy. They made their way back to the port, where the guns of the lead soldiers had been lowered, and all the harbor flags flew at half-mast in honor of the late Commissioner Pound. The tribute struck Edith as insincere, but it seemed already the dead man was enjoying a resurgence in popularity. The headlines of the evening post, which they’d heard shouted through the streets, had called Pound tragic and unlucky, and made allusion to a complex legacy. Haste attributed the swing in public sentiment to the untimely death of his daughter. “The only thing the Pells love more than a scapegoat is a pretty corpse,” she said.
The Ararat was now under the temporary command of Crown Prince Pepin Le Mesurier, who in the dwindling daylight was overseeing the replenishment of the ship’s stores. The gourd-shaped prince saluted them over the gulf of open air. As Haste waved back, she said, “I see Pepin is preening the nest. He wants the commissionership for his son, Francis. I think the king will probably give it to Duke Wilhelm Pell, but we’ll see.”
“Who would you prefer?” Edith asked.
“I’d sooner give an ape a loaded pistol than a popgun to either one of them.”
They crossed the gangplank and Edith lifted the heavy handle on the steel door. Before she pushed the hatch of her ship open, she looked at Haste over her shoulder and said, “Byron is a bit sensitive about his appearance. I know it’s been a while since you’ve seen him, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t gawk.” Haste assured her that she wouldn’t make a scene, and Edith welcomed her aboard.
Byron met them in the corridor. He wore a red suit that seemed to fall somewhere between a military uniform and a butler’s waistcoat. His recent exertions had left him a little breathless, but he looked happy enough. On one outstretched palm, he held a silver tray with two flutes of bubbling champagne. Edith was pleased to see he still wore his sidearm under his coat.
“Wakeman Haste, it is a pleasure to see you,” he said, bowing his head.
With a winsome smile, Haste bowed back, accepted the proffered glass, and said, “Byron, it’s good to see you, too. I don’t quite remember the last time we met, but I blame that on the blood loss rather than a weak impression.” She sipped her wine and glanced about the hallway that beamed with light, glass, and polish. Edith wondered what she was making of it all: the funny friction between the steel hull outside, and the frosted glass panes of the cabins inside. “You keep a tidy ship,” Haste said.
“He follows me around with a dustpan,” Edith said, smiling as she took her glass and dashed it off in one swallow.
“That’s how I keep the ship so clean,” Byron said, then seeing the general rumpled state of his captain, added with a fleeting frown, “Long day, sir?”
“And eventful. I’m glad to be home.” She pulled off her greatcoat.
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” Haste asked, craning her head about.
“Come on. I’ll introduce you to them,” Edith said.
Byron excused himself to conclude the dinner preparations, and Edith led Georgine up the forward stairwell to the gun deck. When they passed the overlarge door in the vestibule that bore the label ENGINE ROOM, Haste stopped and said, “I’d love to see what sort of boiler you have in there.”
“It’s more of a storage closet, really,” Edith said with a dismissive swat of her hand. “And I think you’d rather see this first anyway.”
When they came to the edge of the long, wide gun deck, Edith shouted, “Attention! Wakeman on deck!”
Haste gasped at the gleaming rows of ornate cannons. The horses, goats, elephants, and tigers represented in the shape of the cannon barrels seemed to present themselves for inspection. She reached out and petted the silver mane of a lion, then the horns of a bull and the snout of a boar. She brushed off the shoulders of a mechanical cannoneer. Its round head held a painted expression of perfect, if somewhat weathered, calm.
“It’s all automatic?”
“It is,” Edith said.
“Incredible. A warship without a crew.” Georgine shook her head in awe.
Edith thought of Reddleman, and quickly decided not to mention the pilot, saying, “Obviously, it’s not something I advertise. And I wouldn’t mind one or two more hands if I’m honest.”
“Oh, is that what this is—an interview?” A smile hooked the corner of Georgine’s mouth as she ran a golden hand along a cannon barrel, eliciting a rasp like a blade on a honing steel.
“More of an open question, I guess.” Edith folded her coat on her arm. She hadn’t had a chance to think through what she hoped would come of the evening. Byron was right to say they could use the help, but she hadn’t considered what shape that help might take. The thought of facing the next ringdom, the next evasive king or difficult general, with Haste at her side filled Edith with a buoyant hope. She wondered what the Sphinx would think of the addition. Though how could he object? He’d chosen Georgine, after all. And what use was she to anyone in Pelphia? She was tolerated and overlooked, but never appreciated. Edith admired her good humor and candor, prized her intolerance of fools and her willing spirit. And if circumstance required them to scour the black trail for signs of Senlin, at least Edith knew Georgine could stomach the stench. She would need a friend where she was going.
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