Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) by Bancroft Josiah

Author:Bancroft, Josiah [Bancroft, Josiah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

The crew stared at their empty plates with a mixture of drowsy pleasure and amazement. Senlin knew it wouldn’t do any good to try to squeeze any more wakefulness out of them. They had to sleep.

He announced the suspension of watches for the day, and at that, the crew lurched to their feet and filed out the door, carrying dishes, cups and cutlery in precarious stacks. It didn’t matter that the evening was hours off. Iren, Voleta and Adam were in their hammocks and asleep before Senlin had finished shaking out his tablecloth.

Senlin found Edith tying telltales to the rigging. Replacing the simple ribbons that helped them track the wind was not an especially pressing chore, but it had given the rest of the crew an excuse to go below without engaging the first mate, and more importantly, it had saved Edith from having to discuss her dead engine.

With only one hand and her teeth to help her, she struggled to knot the ribbons. Senlin offered his assistance, but she refused with a forced politeness that told him she would take any further insistence as an insult.

He wanted to broach the subject of where she would sleep since her room had been demolished. He had come with every intention of offering his bed. He could bunk with Adam, and she could have the great cabin to herself. But he thought better of the idea now. Sympathy, he suspected, would only make her feel pitiful, and that would make her angry. She would bunk with Iren and Voleta and probably feel better for being nearer her crew.

Senlin informed her of the suspended watch and left her gritting a red ribbon between her teeth.

In all honesty, he was relieved to keep his room and bed. He didn’t feel well and hadn’t since collapsing in the Golden Zoo, though he had a difficult time articulating, even to himself, what pained him. The closest he could come to describing the malady was to say it was like an itch that shifted between organs. One moment, it was in his brain, then his heart, and then his liver. The itch caused an anxiety so intense it made him nauseous. He’d assumed this was all a symptom of malnutrition, but the gluttonous meal he’d just indulged in, his first real meal in days, had not cured him.

Perhaps he was really ill.

The thought made him laugh. He’d been seeing ghosts for weeks, and only now did it occur to him that he might be genuinely unwell.

As soon as he was alone in his cabin he felt an intense desire to meditate upon Ogier’s portrait of Marya, to refresh his memory of his wife.

He put on a nightshirt and climbed into his cockeyed bed. He withdrew the painting from the cavity behind the headboard and pressed it to his forehead as if it were a holy relic. The faint odor of linseed and varnish had, over the months, begun to replace his memory of Marya’s natural fragrance. The brushwork of the painting had a tactile fingerprint that he took great comfort in tracing.

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