Behemoth
Page 29

When men in seamen's slops called out to Deryn, she answered them in Clanker. She'd learned a handful of greetings from Bauer and Hoffman, and a few choice curses as well. It never hurt to practice.
She found a shop window filled with fancy liquor bottles, dusted off her brandy, and went inside. At first the proprietor looked askance at her disheveled slops, and almost tossed her out when he discovered that she was there to sell, not buy. But when he glimpsed the bottle's label, his attitude changed. He offered her a pile of coins, which grew by half when she gave him a hard look.
Most of the restaurants were closed, but Deryn soon found a hotel. A few minutes later she was sitting down to a breakfast of cheese, olives, cucumbers, black coffee, and a small bowl of a gloppy substance called yogurt, which was halfway between cheese and milk.
As she ate, Deryn wondered how she would find Alek. In his message to Volger he'd said that his hotel had a name like his mother's. That sounded simple enough, except that Alek had never told Deryn his mother's name. She knew his granduncle the emperor, of course - Franz Joseph - and remembered that his father's name was also Franz something-or-other. But wives were seldom as famous as their husbands.
She watched a group of sailors walk past, and wondered if any of them were Austrian. Surely they would know the murdered archduchess's name, if Deryn could only make her question understood.
But then she remembered the other half of Alek's message, that the Germans were looking for him. Questions about a fugitive prince from an English-speaking sailor in a Clanker uniform would only attract suspicion.
She had to find the answer herself. Luckily, Alek's family was famous. Wouldn't they be in history books?
All she needed was some sort of family tree....
An hour later Deryn was standing on a broad marble stair, a brand-new sketchbook in her hand. Before her stood, according to her half dozen conversations in sign language and halting Clanker, the newest and largest library in Istanbul.
Its huge brass columns gleamed in the sun, and its steam-powered revolving doors gathered and disgorged people without pausing. As she passed through them, Deryn had the same jitters she'd felt in the saloon car of the Orient-Express. She didn't belong in any place so fancy, and the bustle of so many machines made her dizzy.
The ceiling was a tangle of glass tubes, full of small cylinders zooming through them, almost too fast to see. The clicking fingers of calculation engines covered the walls, fluttering like the cilia of the great airbeast when it was nervous. Clockwork walkers the size of hatboxes scrabbled along the marble floor, stacks of books weighing them down.
A small army of clerks waited behind a row of desks, but Deryn made her way through the vast lobby, headed toward the towering stacks of books. There looked to be millions of them, surely a few were in English.
But she found herself halted by a fancy iron fence that stretched all the way across the room. Every few feet there was a sign that repeated the same message in two dozen languages:
CLOSED STACKS - ASK AT INFORMATION DESK.
Deryn returned to the desks, screwed up her courage, and went to the one with the nicest-looking clerk behind it. He wore a long gray beard, a fez, and pince-nez glasses, and gave her a slightly puzzled smile as she approached. Deryn guessed that most sailors didn't spend their shore leave in the library.
She bowed to him, then tore two pages from her sketch pad and set them down on the desk. On one she'd drawn the Hapsburg crest that had decorated the breastplate of Alek's Stormwalker. On the other she had sketched a branching tree, like the genealogies of the great airbeasts that Mr. Rigby was always making them memorize. No doubt the Clankers drew their family trees in a different manner, but surely a librarian would understand the concept.
The man adjusted his glasses, stared at the sketches for a moment, then gave Deryn a quizzical look.
"You are Austrian?" he asked in careful Clanker.
"No, sir. America." She spoke in German as well, but tried to mimic Eddie Malone's accent. "But I want ..." - her brain raced - "to understand the war."
The man slowly nodded. "Very well, young man. A moment, please."
He turned to face what looked like a piano set into the desk, and clacked away at its keys. No music emerged, but as he typed a punch card emerged from a slot in the desk. He handed it to her and pointed.
"Good luck."
Deryn bowed and thanked him, then followed his gesture to a kiosk in the center of the room. She watched another patron use it first. The woman fed her punch card into what looked like a miniature loom. The card slid beneath a fine-tooth comb, whose tiny metal teeth jabbed up and down, as if scrutinizing the holes in the card.
After a moment's spinning and clattering, the card was spat back out. From the top of the kiosk, a clockwork machine climbed up and out, then went skittering away into the stacks of books.
Deryn felt queasy from following the Clanker logic of it all, but stepped forward to repeat the process with her own card. When the card popped back out, she discovered that it was stamped with a number. After a minute's wandering about the lobby, Deryn found a row of small tables labeled with numbers of their own. She sat down at the one that matched her card and pulled out her sketchbook.
As she drew, the whirr and clatter of the machines echoed around her, the sounds blending like the crash of distant waves. Deryn wondered how the Clankers managed it, translating questions into scatterings of holes in paper. Did every wee sliver of knowledge have its own number? The system was probably quicker than wandering through the ceiling-high shelves, but what other books might she have found, doing it herself?
She looked up at the calculating engines that covered the walls, and wondered what they were up to. Did they record every question that the librarians had been asked? And if so, who looked at the results? Deryn remembered the eyes peering at her through the slats of the throne room wall, and began to drum her fingers.
Surely in all this tumult of information, no one would notice a few questions about the tragedy that had started this whole barking war.
Finally her clockwork machine scuttled back, like a dog with a fetched bone. It was weighted down with half a dozen books, all of them heavy and bound with cracked old leather.
She picked a few up and leafed through the gilt-edged pages. Some were in Clanker, others in a flowing script she'd seen on many of the signs outside, but one had hardly any words at all, only names, dates, and coats of arms. On its cover was the Hapsburg crest, and a Latin phrase she remembered from the first time Alek and Dr. Barlow had met.
Bella gerant alii, tu Felix Austria, nube.
"Let others wage war," the first part meant.
"Barking spiders," Deryn said softly to herself - there were a lot of Hapsburgs. The book was thick enough to stun a hippoesque, and the entries stretched back eight hundred years. But Alek was only fifteen; he'd have to be at the end.
She turned to the last pages and soon found him: "Aleksandar, Prinz von Hohenberg," along with his birth date and the names of his parents - Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek.
"Sophie," Deryn murmured, leaning back and smiling to herself.
She left the stack of books on the table and headed back toward the revolving doors. After a quick trip down the marble stairs outside, she approached the first of a rank of six-legged taxis, all of them in the shape of giant beetles. Deryn reached into her pocket for the remaining coins.
"Sophie Hotel?" she asked. "Hotel" was the same in English or Clanker.
The pilot frowned, then asked, "Hotel Hagia Sophia?"
Deryn nodded happily. That sounded close enough - it had to be the one.
The taxi pilot inspected her handful of coins, then hooked a thumb toward the back seat. Deryn jumped aboard, for once enjoying the rumble of a Clanker engine beneath her. After tracking Alek down in a city of millions, she deserved to ride instead of walk.
Chapter Thirty
The Hotel Hagia Sophia was pure dead fancy.
Deryn shook her head. She might have expected to find Alek in a place like this. The lobby alone was three stories high and lit by two gas chandeliers and a giant stained-glass skylight. Uniformed bellmen guided their clockwork luggage carriers through the bustling crowd. Marble staircases spiraled their way to the mezzanines and balconies, while steam elevators huffed into the air like sky rockets taking flight.
Even if Alek had chosen this hotel to match his mother's name, Deryn wondered if he might have found another clue to use - one that would have led somewhere a bit less ... princely. The Germans were still looking for him, after all.
Of course, that meant that Alek wouldn't be listed under his own name. So how was she going to get a message to him?
Deryn stood there, hoping to catch a glance of Alek, Bauer, or Master Klopp in the lobby. But the crowd was full of unfamiliar faces, and soon Deryn felt the eyes of a white-gloved bellman on her. Her stolen uniform was rumpled and dirty from sleeping in the alley, and she stuck out like a clump of clart on a fancy china plate. She had only a few coins left, surely not enough to pay for a room, not here.
Perhaps she could buy coffee and some lunch. Judging by what she'd had for breakfast, there were worse places than Istanbul to crawl ashore half starved.
Deryn took a seat at a small table in the hotel dining room, making sure she had a view of the lobby doors. The waiter understood no English, but spoke Clanker no better than she did. He returned with a pot of strong coffee and a menu, and before long Deryn was feasting again, this time on lamb chopped into a hash with nuts and sultanas, covered with a plum jelly as dark as an old bruise.
She ate slowly, keeping her eyes on the hotel's main doors.
People came and went, most of them well-heeled old Clankers. The man at the table next to hers wore a monocle and a handlebar mustache, and was reading a German newspaper. When he left, Deryn reached over and snatched it up. She leafed through the pages to conceal that she was stalling with her food.
The last page was all photographs - the latest fashions, new clockwork house servants, and well-dressed ladies at a roller-skating parlor. Nothing earth-shattering, until Deryn's eyes fell upon three photos across the bottom of the page. One was the Leviathan flying over the city, another was the Dauntless kneeling in the street after its rampage, and the last showed two men under guard....
It was Matthews and Spencer, the survivors of her disastrous first command.
She squinted at the caption, annoyed that Alek hadn't taught her any Clanker spelling. These three pictures together could hardly be good news. The Leviathan would be leaving Istanbul under a dark cloud today.
Unless the Ottomans had been angry enough to order the airship away early.
Deryn frowned. Count Volger had planned to escape last night, hadn't he? After her almost sleepless night, she'd forgotten all about him.
She lowered the newspaper, looking more closely at the stuffy old Clankers in the lobby. None had Volger's tall, lean frame and gray mustache. But the wildcount wouldn't have needed a trip to the library to learn Alek's mother's name. Maybe he and Hoffman were already upstairs, having a cup of tea with Alek and the others!
Just then Deryn noticed a young couple coming in through the lobby doors. They were dressed like locals, and the girl was perhaps eighteen and quite beautiful, with long dark hair in tight braids.
Deryn swallowed - the boy was Alek! She'd hardly recognized him in his tunic and tasseled fez. Not that he could wander about Istanbul in an Austrian piloting uniform, but somehow she hadn't expected him to look so... Ottoman.
Alek drew to a halt, his eyes searching the lobby, but Deryn snapped the newspaper up in front of her face.
Who was this strange girl? One of his new allies? Suddenly that word took on an entirely new meaning in Deryn's head.
A moment later Alek and the girl headed toward the elevators, and Deryn leapt to her feet. Whoever this girl was, Deryn couldn't afford to miss this chance. She slapped her remaining coins onto the table and headed after them.