The Sphinx could never reveal himself without losing his essential mystique. To be the Sphinx is to be unknown. If, however, he were a myth, he would be just as unknowable. We can only hope that one day he will emerge and prove once and for all that he does not exist.
—The Myth of the Sphinx: A Historical Analysis by Saavedra
Butterflies colored the air with bodies bright as a woman’s brooch and wings as fine as vellum. Separately, they ticked like a pocket watch; together, the fluttering kaleidoscope raised a mechanical drone.
Their wings were painted to mimic domestic scenes: the blue-and-white pattern of a china plate; the gleaming grain of polished burl; the creamy porcelain of a sink; and the yellow blooms of a bouquet. The swarm gamboled inside the burnished-copper dome overhead, dazzling Senlin and his crew with their quaint camouflage.
A bolt of lightning shot up and, in an instant, transformed the butterflies into smoking, tumbling ash.
Voleta tried to catch one of the larger wafers, but the moment the black flake lighted upon her hand, it crumbled into soot. “What a waste! They were so pretty. Why did you do that?”
The Sphinx’s voice sounded as if it were being blown through an old trumpet. “To keep their secrets, my dear,” he said.
He was tall to the point of gauntness and showed not an inch of skin. His hood started in a crooked point at his crown and ran to the floor, where it formed a puddle of black velvet. He still held the device that had thrown the lightning; it resembled a tuning fork, but it seemed far too innocuous to be capable of striking such a spark. Under his cowl, he wore a concave mirror as a mask.
“I see the resemblance,” Iren whispered to Edith, though the first mate was too on edge to respond. Iren had never seen Edith look so pale. She wished she hadn’t given up her chain so quickly.
Senlin was not oblivious to the strain his friends were under. First, the essential bond of the ship had been taken from them, and now they stood in the presence of a myth. It was all a little much to digest at once. He knew they would look to him for composure. Whatever came, he had to hold himself together.
The room recalled a gentleman’s study, albeit an opulent one. A vast desk dominated much of the lacquered floor, its top bearing the trappings of industry. Books and papers were stacked and strewn amid a variety of tools and equipment, from a jeweler’s tweezers to a sewing machine, from a rack of test tubes to a ball-peen hammer. Engines lay in states of assembly or disassembly; it was impossible to tell which. Some of the machines resembled an animal’s limb, and one, alarmingly, a humanoid head.
The shelves behind the desk banked enough books, artifacts, and pottery to stock a museum. The miscellany encompassed the room, rising up to the lip of the copper dome. Senlin noted the absence of a ladder or stairs, leaving him to wonder whether the display was for show, or if the Sphinx, when no one was looking, climbed his shelves like a spider monkey.
Marya waved to him from a high alcove where she sat swinging her legs. She plucked an emu’s egg from a gold eggcup and began to bobble it playfully, pretending that she might drop it. Senlin winked at her.
Whatever came, he had to hold himself together.
“What have you done to my arm?” the Sphinx said.
Edith stiffened. It was all she could do to formulate a reply, though the Sphinx had crossed the room before she could finish. He moved strangely, gliding as easily as a dust mop across the glossy floor.
“Nothing. It’s run out of fuel, and my stock was lost. The engine is fine.” She had just gotten the arm out of its sling when the Sphinx glommed to it.
“Fine? Fine?” The Sphinx’s gloved hands ran all about the arm, caressing it, peeling back its many panels like the petals of an artichoke. “Where did this dent come from? Is this rust? You’ve soaked it. And you haven’t been oiling it, have you? Look at this: The radius is sheared. What have you done?”
The chastisement was so rapid and fierce Edith hadn’t time to reply.
“Now, see here …” Senlin began valiantly.
“Ferdinand, if he speaks again, tighten his lips for me, please,” the Sphinx said without interrupting his inspection of Edith’s arm. “Where’s Captain Lee?”
“Dead,” Edith said.
“Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“No, I’m sure the thought never crossed your mind.” The Sphinx stepped back from the limb and emitted an unnerving, reverberating tsk-tsk. He produced an eggbeater drill from some recess of his robe and began unscrewing bolts in Edith’s shoulder. “It’ll take a few days to repair, and then maybe a few days more to decide whether you deserve to have it back or not. Now, tell me who you’ve brought me.”
Though jostled and disturbed by it, Edith tried not to look as the Sphinx worked upon her arm. “These aren’t recruits, sir. These are my captain and crew.”
“A cyclops, an addict, a hod, and an old woman who seems to have lost her belt. Quite the crew.”
Iren pulled and twisted the waist of her pants, wringing their hem rather than the Sphinx’s neck. Voleta petted the amazon’s arm to calm her.
“The boy seems like a fine candidate for an eye. I have just such a thing, a perfectly good ocular engine that was ejected by its last host.”
“Ejected?” Adam said, surprised that the conversation had wheeled so quickly around to him.
“An infection pushed it from her head, but don’t fret, my boy—the eye is in perfect condition.”
“He’s an inveterate coward and a thief,” Edith said in a near bark. “He’d take your wonderful engine and pawn it without a second thought.”
Adam looked as if he’d been skewered by the first mate’s words. He understood what she was trying to do, but he wished she might’ve invented a flaw that was a little further from the truth.
“And yet you have him on your crew?”
“He’s working off a debt,” Edith said.
“What about the hod girl? Is she ill at all?”
“Absolutely healthy, except for her conscience, which was stillborn, I’m afraid. We nearly left her on a ledge this morning.”
“Truly,” the Sphinx said, amused.
“It’s true.” Voleta craned out her chin proudly. “But if you’re giving out engines, I’d like an extra set of arms.”
“Oh, you would? Whatever for?”
“So I could waltz with a man and punch him in the kidneys at the same time.” She put a manic smirk on. “That’d be grand. He’d say, ‘Oh, darling, someone is pummeling my guts!’ And I’d say, ‘I can’t imagine who!’”
“See, she’s ruthless,” Edith said.
“Why are you being so defensive?” the Sphinx said, churning his drill into her arm. “You’re obviously fond of them, Edith; you needn’t pretend. You act as if my gifts would be a punishment. But you know I am nothing if not fair in my terms and explicit in my expectations.”
Having loosened the final bolt, the Sphinx pulled the engine from her shoulder and handed it to Byron, whose demeanor had turned quite servile.
Pale faced and with brightened eyes, Edith touched her shoulder where the scarred and purpled skin puckered about four empty bores. She had not believed, had not wanted to believe, that her arm would be so summarily removed. It was too essential a thing to be just unscrewed and walked away with. There wasn’t even blood to mark the loss, just a sense of unbalance and a terrible lightness.
Byron carried her crooked, lifeless arm to the Sphinx’s desk and laid it down as reverently as a mourner sets flowers on a grave.
“You are very disappointing.” Senlin’s voice, clear and loud, startled them all. Remembering his charge, Ferdinand clomped over to Senlin, who was barreling on. “I’ve walked through your Tower and seen your mighty works. But I never dreamed that their fruits would be squandered upon such vanity!” He shouted the final word into the milky glass of Ferdinand’s face. The walking locomotive’s hands parted on either side of Senlin’s head as it prepared to applaud the man’s brains out.
Only after Ferdinand had begun to drive its hands together did the Sphinx intervene with a small signal. The palms of the machine, each broad as a washboard, stopped within a whisper of Senlin’s ears. “It is not my Tower. But, please, do go on,” the Sphinx said.
“The Tower is an electrical generator. The Basement pulls the water, the Parlor fires it, the Baths move the steam, and the turbine of New Babel turns out the current. I’m sure other ringdoms contribute to the process. Your machines make this possible, but much of the work is done by men and women, some of them slaves, some of them free but throwing all their health and wealth at this useless industry. Because what becomes of the electric current? Why, it drains out upon your doorstep. All those lamps burning away in your corridor, burning away in empty rooms—is that how you spend their sacrifice? How noble. How worthwhile.”
“I agree,” the Sphinx said.
“With what part?” Senlin asked.
“The agreeable part.”
Ducking past the looming engine, Senlin approached the Sphinx. Byron raised huffing objections, but Senlin was undeterred. “You have these machines, these powerful, autonomous locomotives capable, I’m sure, of incredible feats of strength.” Narrowing the gap, his own upside-down reflection grew in the Sphinx’s mocking bowl of a face. “Take that colossus in your port, for example. I bet he and a few more like him could replace all the hods in the Tower. You could free men from their drudgery if you just released your valets.”
“Oh, please, let’s not pretend,” the Sphinx said and leaned down, drawing so close that Senlin observed his upside-down face swell, twist into ribbons, and then coalesce again, enlarged and right-side up. It was strange to be menaced by his reflection. “You don’t care. Not about the hods or the masses pedaling for beer and stoking for a show. You don’t care about anyone really, not even this supposed crew of yours.”
“Really?” Senlin said, and refused to look away from the shaking saucers of his own eyes.
“Of course not. I’ll prove it to you.” The Sphinx’s buzzing voice lifted with merriment. “But why don’t we continue our conversation in a more comfortable environment?”
The Sphinx led them through a brief vestibule where Senlin found time to whisper in Edith’s ear, “We will get it back.”
Her dazed stare flitted to his and seemed to find a little relief.
They entered what was in many ways a traditional music room, complete with portrait chairs, a cheerful fire in a glazed-brick hearth, and hanging tapestries depicting scenes of musicians playing instruments. But where one might reasonably expect to see a piano, there stood instead a wizened tree.
The hill of soil that held the tree lay upon the floor like the sweepings of a broom. A fishbowl lens in the ceiling cast a pale, orange light. Almond-shaped leaves adorned the bowers and dried upon the tile floor all about the twisted trunk. Most curiously of all, a scattering of piano keys erupted like mushrooms from the soil.
Voleta ventured over to pluck one from the dirt. “It’s a piano tree?”
Byron took the key back with a deft little snatch and returned it to its socket in the earth. “It’s a type of ash. It was given to the Brick Layer by one of his masons.” The stag clapped the dirt from his hands, ringing them like finger cymbals. “Originally, it was just a sprig in a pot that lived upon the Brick Layer’s piano. But after several months, the piano began to lose its tone. When the Brick Layer tried to open the instrument, he found the sapling’s roots had broken through the lid and grown all about the strings. The Brick Layer couldn’t bear to cut them out, so he decided to sacrifice the instrument, which he continued to play until the last note was silenced by the tree.”
“That’s quite enough, Byron,” the Sphinx said. “You make us sound like museum pieces, the way you talk. Please, everyone have a seat.”
Iren sat gingerly upon the lip of her chair, partly because she distrusted the antique with her full weight, but also because she wanted to be ready to spring up should the need for action arise. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the trudging engine since it had demanded her chains and now was forced to crane her neck uncomfortably to one side to keep Ferdinand in view. And all of this was done while still holding on to Voleta’s hand.
Seeing that their host did not intend to sit, Senlin remained standing, though he migrated to the mantel over the fire, a spot he found quite comfortable. The Sphinx tracked his movement but raised no argument.
“Now, I was about to prove to you that you don’t care about the hods, your fellow tourists, or even your crew.”
“Yes, please, enlighten me.”
“Your name is Thomas Senlin.”
“It is,” Senlin said, refusing to give the Sphinx the satisfaction of appearing surprised. “We shared a mutual friend in the Red Hand, I believe. I’m sorry to report he’s passed on.”
“Oh, has he?” The light of the fire threw a fiery eclipse on the edge of the Sphinx’s mask.
A single leaf fell from the ash behind them. It pirouetted in the windless room and landed with an audible tick on the tile.
“I know where Marya is,” the Sphinx said.
Senlin repressed a gasp. Though this was exactly what he’d hoped to discover from the Sphinx’s company, he found a complex, almost fearful sense of doubt well inside him at the announcement. “I don’t believe you.”
“She still has the red sun helmet. She keeps it hidden inside a wardrobe and only pulls it out occasionally at night when she thinks no one is watching. But my eyes are everywhere.”
“Where is she?”
“You could be at her side by this time tomorrow.”
“I know she’s in Pelphia,” Senlin insisted.
“Very good. I will provide you a salary and a ship—a new, superior ship—and you can fly to Marya this very evening. You can hire a crew, find yourself a hardy bunch of airmen, and after your reunion with Marya, you may resume Billy Lee’s work and live quite well by it. Once or twice a year, I require a few new recruits, which you will provide, but the rest of the time, the ship is yours to fly as you please. When you tire of the life, you may return the ship and go about your business.”
Senlin released the mantel he had begun to grip, his knuckles white. Ferdinand’s bulk shifted warily, but Senlin moved away from their enigmatic host. He strode calmly to the leaf that lay upon the polished marble. Pinching it by the stem, he returned with the fragile green eye to the fireside. “What about my crew?” he asked with his back to them.
“They will remain here with me,” the Sphinx said. “You will have Marya, and they will be given all the improvements and opportunities they could ever want. The only thing that will be lost is this charade of an adventure you all seem to have agreed to.”
Senlin held the leaf out to the fire, inspected its tender skeleton. “I’m sorry, Edith,” he said. “I hope you can forgive me.”