But then she discovered a drawer full of several fancy cakes wrapped up in thick cloth napkins. One of the crew must have set them aside and then forgotten them.
Deryn sat on the floor and began to gobble the cakes. Stale or not, they tasted better than anything she’d eaten since joining the Service. She washed them down with water from the bottom of a silver ice bucket, then had a few swigs from an open bottle of brandy.
“Not bad at all,” she said, then burped.
Now that her head had stopped spinning with hunger, Deryn found herself wondering what exactly was going on here. Where were the Clankers taking all this cargo? According to the labels, it had all come from Germany. So why put it on the Express, which would be headed back to Munich?
Deryn peeked out a window again—no sign of the search remained. Her pursuers were probably at the shore, having guessed that she’d snuck in from the water.
The mechanical arms were finishing up the last few pieces of cargo—huge glass jar batteries and insulators —and the train’s engines were rumbling back to life.
What if it was headed to a place close by, somewhere it could return from before dawn? No one would notice it had slipped out of the city, or suspect the luxurious Orient-Express of carrying industrial cargo.
The train jolted into motion, and Deryn reminded herself that she wasn’t here to spy on the Clankers. She was here to help Alek, not uncover the secrets of the Ottoman Empire.
The barbed wire fence was already sliding past on either side—she could jump off anytime now with no one the wiser.
Deryn went back to the bar and selected the fanciest bottle of brandy she could find. It was stealing, plain and simple, but she needed something to trade for money and a proper meal. This dusty old brandy was the best thing she could find.
The Express crept slowly through Istanbul, not calling much attention to itself. The tracks traveled near the water’s edge, past darkened warehouses and closed factory gates. Deryn opened the door and stood between the cars, waiting for the right moment to jump.
As the train slowed for a turn, she stepped off as smoothly as some tourist arriving on holiday. She skidded down the embankment and crouched there until the steaming dragon had passed, then made her way into the unlit streets.
Even this late, the bright lights of the city still glowed on the horizon, but Deryn reckoned she needed rest more than food now. So she picked the darkest, shabbiest alley she could find and curled up for a few hours of fitful sleep.
TWENTY-NINE
She awoke before dawn to someone prodding her with a broom.
It was a young man in coveralls, who went about the task without particular enthusiasm. When Deryn scrambled to her feet, he turned back to sweeping the alley, never saying a word. Of course, the man would hardly expect her to speak Turkish. The port of Istanbul was probably full of foreign sailors lugging about bottles of brandy.
Drums were sounding in the distance, along with a vigorous chanting. It seemed a bit early for anyone to be making such a racket. The trio of cats she’d shared the alley with hardly seemed to notice, though, and went back to sleep after the sweeping man had passed on.
Deryn walked at random until she spied the forest of minarets near the sultan’s palace. Surely there were restaurants for sightseers thereabouts. The fancy cakes in her stomach had been replaced by gnawing hunger, and she needed to be thinking clearly if she was to find Alek in this giant city.
Touring Istanbul on foot wasn’t like looking down from an airship or the howdah of a giant elephant. The smells were sharper down here—unfamiliar spices and walker exhaust snarled in the air, and pushcarts full of strawberries passed, leaving a sweet haze in their wake, along with a few hungry-looking dogs. A dozen languages mixed in Deryn’s ears; a jumble of alphabets decorated every news kiosk. Luckily, there were also simple hand gestures among all the babel. Making herself understood would be simple enough.
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
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
