“You will be silent!”
Jean-Claude’s pulse raced with anger born of pain. He wanted to take that dagger away from the little bush tit and carve his initials on his liver, but he had no right to take such a risk, not while Isabelle was still in peril. He hadn’t any right to turn away from her, even for a second. That was the responsibility he’d taken when he had given Isabelle her name. He needed to unbalance Felix, not unhinge him.
He shrugged, inspiring the guards to tighten their grips. Good. Let them tire their fingers. It would make their grip clumsy if he could arrange an opportunity for escape.
When the coach arrived at the Naval Orrery, it was met by a small squad of outriders who had forged ahead to scout the place and make sure Jean-Claude had not somehow arranged an ambush to receive them. Only when Felix was satisfied that no enemies lurked in the wainscoting did he allow Jean-Claude to debark.
With his hands bound behind him, a poniard aimed at his ribs, and a smear of blood down his left cheek, Jean-Claude suffered himself to be led, limping theatrically, up the steps to the orrery building. It was an enormous, six-sided structure, four stories tall, faced with marble, and adorned with double-sized statues of famous admirals, explorers, philosophers, and, of course, kings. What else was nobility for, if not to provide fodder for artists?
The building’s tall ironbound doors were propped open, revealing a broad barrel-vaulted corridor paved with glossy, caramel-colored stone and decorated top to bottom with intricate mosaics depicting famous voyages both recent and ancient.
Toward Jean-Claude’s expeditionary party strode a tall, thin man in a frock coat. “Greetings, se?ors. I am given to understand you are on the queen’s business. I am Don Amerigo, the Naval Orrery’s curator.”
The don’s wiry frame seemed to be under siege by a small army of eyepieces. A pair of half-moon spectacles bestrode his nose while another set of glasses with thick dark lenses surmounted his forehead, two pairs of square-rimmed glasses hung from the pockets of his coat, and another set hung from a cord about his neck. A monocle bravely clung to its fob chain like a soldier scaling a wall on a grappling line, and Amerigo waved a jeweler’s loupe in one hand. His expression was pleasantly bland, except for his eyes—clayborn brown, not Glasswalker silver—which were creased with the sort of nervous exasperation typical of a man who had been dragged away from doing something important to deal with someone important.
“We are,” Felix said. “We require you to find for us a ship.”
“Of course,” Amerigo said. “Which ship?”
Felix glowered at Jean-Claude.
Jean-Claude made a respectful bow to Amerigo, a gesture that surely emphasized the fact that his arms were tied behind his back. “We are looking for a smuggler.”
Amerigo looked Jean-Claude up and down, apparently unsure what to make of him. “Can you be more specific?”
Jean-Claude prevaricated. “Yes, we are looking for the smuggler with the queen’s personal enemies on it. I understand that the Naval Orrery keeps records of every ship with an Aragothic flag. Does that include accounts of their movement through your aerial domain?”
“Oh, yes. It’s one of our most important tasks. It keeps an entire regiment of clerks occupied around the clock.”
“What exactly do you track? Just the ships that come into port?”
“Oh, no. We would miss too much that way. We have divided our aerial demesnes into precincts. Whenever a ship enters a precinct or leaves it, its passage is noted in the daily list and subsequently entered in the weekly ledger, which is then compiled in the monthly codex for long-term storage.”
Builder bless the detail obsessive. “I need a map of these precincts. And I’ll need to look at the lists going back five days.” That would encompass the day Kantelvar had kidnapped Isabelle.
“All of the records?” Amerigo asked. “There will be thousands of listings.”
“In that case, I will also need someone who knows how to read them.”
“Ah.” Amerigo looked to Felix for confirmation.
“Get him what he asks for,” Felix said gruffly.
“It would be easier to bring him to the records than to bring the records to him.”
“We will all go,” Felix said.
Two guards frog-marched Jean-Claude along behind Felix and Amerigo. “No need to be so rough, lads,” he said, being as cooperative as their rude handling allowed. They couldn’t have detached him from this opportunity with block and tackle.
The Naval Orrery was said to be a miracle of modern philosophical engineering. It was an enormously sophisticated aetheric mechanism that kept track of every skyship with an Aragothic chartstone, anywhere in the great sky. It was to the average ship’s orrery what the Solar was to a candle. As such, it was a point of pilgrimage for empirical philosophers, cartographers, merchants, ship captains, and anyone else who made their living from the deep sky. To Jean-Claude it was a hope. Here there might be—had to be—a thread that led to Isabelle, if only he could find it before a twitchy guard jabbed something pointy into his vital bits.
From the end of the hallway came a glow that limned the people in front of Jean-Claude with a green-bluish light, as if from an alchemical lamp burning underwater, and he became aware of a noise. It was not precisely a sound, but a vibration picked up by the hairs on the nape of his neck that settled into his mind as high-pitched humming.
Up ahead, Don Amerigo was providing commentary. “This is the Observatory.” And the way he said it, Jean-Claude could hear the capital “O.”
The curator turned aside, guiding Felix with him, and Jean-Claude stepped into the place of the curator’s reverence. Only fierce national pride kept Jean-Claude from gawping like a stunned bullfrog; l’Empire Céleste had nothing like this.
He walked onto a balcony that girded a spherical room at least twenty meters across. The floor, if there was a floor down there, was obscured by swirling black clouds shot through with snaps of lightning, just like the Galvanosphere. The ceiling was a sprawling dome made up of hundreds of huge glass panes in a metal lattice that spiraled in, like the armor of some reef-dwelling mollusk, toward its apex. The light streaming in through those windows seemed to slick and slither through air, giving the whole space a glister of wetness.