Serpents and Stairways

Chapter IV - Part 4

"What is it?" Dinah asked, "because if it's not as enormous and grotesque as good old Waldorf Astoria, I'm not likely to make it out from such height." She seemed a bit upset to be interrupted—but only a bit. Perhaps, she was getting tired of talking.

"I'll describe, while the others look," Georg promised—suddenly interrupted by an ache, like back when a servant had accidentally pinched his finger, but somewhere within his ribcage.

Dinah extended her cane in a single motion, and the rabbit flashed its devilish eye, darkened with the fading day. Accompanied by Servantes, she stepped out on the deck, where Tamara and Pasha were already passing each other the binoculars, trying to guess what their fortunate friend meant. Georg explained. Dinah looked down, touching the brow over her spilled pupil.

"In that case, we have no other option but to leave her there."

"Do we?"

"Absolutely. Unless one of you is in possession of a mysterious key. Maybe, one you found in unusual circumstances, or inherited from deceased parents—that sort of thing."

Was she joking? Dinah looked at Tamara, as if expecting a response from her specifically, but more likely just following the tinkling of her earrings. Tamara frowned.

"I have a couple of old clockwork keys back at home," the girl said, catching the dishevelled black hair that had escaped from the pulled-up braids, "not any with actual lock bits though."

But the wind was fresh and smelled of early spring, defying the approaching middle of May. Georg felt everything at once: the pain of his heart caught in a door, the squelching wetness in his shoes, and how the world tasted so wonderfully of tea. He wanted to lean over the edge of the deck and scream, scream that panic away, that strange ache of anticipation that he sometimes felt before doing something completely out-there, to be contained within his own body again, for he felt as if his soul was struggling to fit.

"I have lock picks," he said calmly, "so we'll just force that tomb open, and that's it."

"That's not how things work—" Dinah contended.

"That's exactly how they work, miss Gremin. There's no difference between the faint, practically vanishing odds of someone here by some pure chance having the correct key, and the odds of being in the company of someone experienced in lock picking."

"There is a difference!"

"None at all."

"It's as if Hansel and Gretel would've been navigating the forest with a compass and callipers, not breadcrumbs!"

"To each age—its own fairy tales."

"You have to understand—breaking the rule is one of the basic fairy tale tropes! Not looking at the magical bride before midnight, not burning the snake skin, not staying at the ball till midnight, never talking to the unknown... Opening an enchanted lock with an ordinary pick means breaking a rule. No, but there are, there are stories where the point of the trial is to find your way around it, but..."

She gripped the starboard and her knuckles turned white as if ready to cut through the skin like teeth. Tamara looked down at the binoculars in her hands, absentmindedly studying its ivory inlays.

"And what if it hurts her? The one that sleeps under us?" Dinah asked, but quieter, feeling that her last argument fell through the holes in their attention.

"She's not asleep, miss Gremin," Pasha interrupted, "she's dead. Maybe we could find a way to bring her back, but as of right now—that's how she is. And ignoring that is very naïve."

"What is this carnival of materialism?" Dinah snapped, launching forward. Her glasses glared.

"I'm trying to be objective."