Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  The Skirts were as barren as a saltpan, flat as an iron and almost as hot. The sun seemed to shine from both the sky and the earth at once.

  When he’d first spotted the Tower through the shaking frame of their cabin window, many miles removed, it had appeared like a dark scratch on the blue lens of the sky. Now it seemed like a shear corner in the Earth, as if the ground and gravity and every natural thing had been folded upward. The Market experienced two nights: the natural night of the Earth, and the strange gloom of the Tower’s shadow. They were fortunate now to be approaching the Tower while it was still sun-lit, though the Tower’s umbra crept nearer like the hand of a monstrous sundial. In a few minutes, the Tower’s night would fall on them.

  Boreas led him to one side of the gate where the flow of traffic naturally thinned. All along the curved length of the Tower’s base, figures leaned and kneeled against the wall, their faces pressed close. They seemed like pilgrims praying to a shrine. The facade was papered with sheets and scraps of paper as far up as Senlin’s arm could reach. These weathered, discolored tatters were layers deep, wrapping the enormous blocks of granite in a shell of papier mâché.

  “Aren’t they afraid of being hit by falling rocks?” Senlin asked, indicating the readers to either side of them.

  “Some urges are more immediate than fear,” Boreas replied.

  It was a moment more before it dawned on Senlin that this endless tatter of paper was the Lost and Found. He suspected Boreas was watching him for a response, so even as he felt hope leave him, he formed his shoulders and chin into the posture he used for lecturing. “It only makes sense that there would be so many. I suppose it is like this all the way around?”

  “I haven’t walked it myself, but I imagine so,” Adam said.

  “Of course. And these people risking death from above are searching for notes from lost loved ones.” Senlin leaned in and read one of the fresher scraps of paper. The fine cursive suggested that the author was well educated. It read, “Robert, I will find my way home. Come after me. Love, Mrs. K. Proffet.” This note led him to the next, more crudely drawn and in pencil: “My Dear Lizzy. I wait for you every day at noon at Owl’s Gate. I’m under your yellow umbrella. Your loving husband, Abraham Weiss.” The neighboring note simply read, “Hu Lo, I give you up to your new life. Don’t look for me. Jie Lo.”

  He read another and another, sliding his nose from one announcement of heartbreak or hope to the next. He felt the beginning of a compulsion growing within him, felt the urge to read just one letter more. The next might be in her handwriting. Or the next.

  But he quickly realized that he could fritter the rest of his life reading his way around the Tower, and still never find a note from Marya. One might not even exist, or might have existed, but have been buried under another’s desperate post.

  The contents of the notes he’d read brought on a more unsettling revelation. It occurred to him for the first time that their parting might be more than an inconvenience. He might never find her. Marya might be lost for good, might perish from exposure or illness or violence. She might be absorbed into another’s life, become another man’s love, a younger man… a man who wouldn’t lose her so quickly. “Useless,” he said.

  Assuming that he referred to the overwhelming breadth of the Lost and Found, Boreas said, “I’ve spent my fair share of hours crossing my eyes at this wall.”

  “You’ve lost someone?”

  “My sister, Voleta.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Two years and a month.”

  “O, my word.” Senlin felt faint. His knees gave without warning, and he dropped into an awkward crouch with his back to the Tower. “What about the local authorities, the magistrates? Who polices the bazaar?”

  “There are a few roaming constables. You’ll occasionally see a man in a khaki uniform. But half of the time they aren’t really officials of any kind. They’re thugs who stole the uniform or bought it. Even the real constables can be treacherous. I’ve known more than a few men who’ve been beaten and robbed by them.” Adam rubbed his neck, exposing a circular scar on his forearm. The wound was so perfectly round it could’ve been drawn with a compass.

  “Is the Tower entirely ungoverned?”

  “It’s a little better inside, and even better higher up. There are many ringdoms where one power or another has taken up the law.”

  A woman with bruised, hooded eyes who had been scrutinizing the wall beside Senlin now began to read over his head as if he was not there. He had to crawl around her to return to his feet. The woman’s blank expression could’ve been the work of a hypnotist. But what began as pity for her quickly turned to private resolve. He had to shake himself free of the stupor that had claimed him since Marya had vanished. He’d spent the last days running around with an uncharacteristic lack of consideration. He hadn’t taken the situation seriously enough at first, and then he’d allowed panic to direct him. If he expected to find Marya, he would have to rely on his reasoning, his ability to observe and analyze. He was not as helpless as this poor wretch, inching her life away, perusing the scroll of the doomed. He had his wits. The courage would come. For now, he had to think.

  After her initial shock had faded, how would Marya have reacted? Without a ticket to take her home, she would have to navigate the common mire of vendors and thieves on her own. She would naturally seek a safer refuge. She was not without resources: she had some money of her own secreted in her waistband—not an extravagant amount, but enough to keep her in room and board for a while. There were no permanent accommodations in the Market, and he doubted that she would hire a tent to sleep in. It made sense, then, that she would enter the Tower, knowing of course that they had intended to lodge on the third level in the Baths. They had not settled on a particular hotel because it was impossible to make reservations from such a distant town as Isaugh, but she would have no problem securing a room. What had she said just before they parted? We’ll meet again at the top of the Tower. Wasn’t the Baths their pinnacle? Wasn’t that the limit of their resources? Adam’s promise of improved law and order gave him further confidence in the idea.

  There was really only one thing to do: go after his wife who had gone on ahead.

  “Mr. Boreas, you seem familiar with the Market. How familiar are you with the ringdoms of the Tower?”

  “I know the lower four very well.”

  “That’s all I need. Would you be willing to share your experience for a day or two? I would compensate you for your time.”

  “I could use the work, I must admit.”

  “Can you begin at once?”

  “Give me one moment,” Boreas said and unfolded a brilliantly white piece of stationery.

  As he tacked it to the wall, Senlin could not help but read the clearly blocked words which read, “Voleta: A rescue is coming. Adam.” Boreas caught him looking and responded with an ironic smirk. “A superstitious habit.”

  Senlin tried to keep his smile from seeming condescending, but he couldn’t help but to think of it as an indulgence, a compulsion that Boreas had mistaken for hope. Senlin was preparing to make some remarks on the virtues of pragmatism when they were interrupted by a smattering of distant screams. The cries, as if contagious, quickly spread to a chorus. Senlin turned just in time to see the blur of something plunging down, something that was as big as a barn. It crashed against the packed earth with a thunderous boom.

  Chapter Four

  “The camaraderie between travelers becomes more palpable the closer one draws to the Tower. Do not be surprised if you find yourself swept up in a spontaneous parade.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, II. XIV

  The cloud of red dust surged at them so rapidly it was as if they were falling into it. Senlin shielded his face a split second before splinters and pebbles began to pelt him. A piece of shrapnel passed through his splayed fingers and stung his cheek. He clapped his hand over the flash of pain. The debris pinged and ricocheted everywh
ere, needling his skin and crackling against the Tower. A series of hollow whumps reverberated through the ground, drumming the Earth like meteors.

  When he dared to squint again into the billowing, blotting storm of red grit, he couldn’t see any further than his hand. He watched the blood on his fingers quickly turn to mud. A moment later, the hail changed direction. Instead of coming in sideways, the ejecta began to rain dryly on their shoulders and the tops of their heads.

  Adam, coughing into the crook of his arm, emerged from the dusky haze at Senlin’s side, looking unsteady but uninjured. Senlin pulled the lapel of his corduroy jacket over his mouth and nose, and tried to draw a clear breath amidst the scattering fog. The initial screams of shock, briefly silenced by the crash, now began to rise again. The tone of the cries had changed. The fear and surprise was gone, replaced by excitement, eagerness…delight. A breeze swept the red cloud away, unveiling the wreckage, hardly a stone’s throw distant from them.

  Much of the wreck was draped and snagged with tattered silk that billowed like cobwebs in the wind. As the air cleared further, he began to make out the tangled limbs of bodies amidst the wreckage: a limp hand dangling from a broken wrist, a knee bent unnaturally under a turned foot, a man cracked like a broken book with the back of his head between his heels. The separate whumps he’d heard had not been falling stars, but tumbling, doomed aeronauts.

  Senlin loved nothing more in the world than a warm hearth to set his feet upon and a good book to pour his whole mind into. While an evening storm rattled the shutters and a glass of port wine warmed in his hand, Senlin would read into the wee hours of the night. He especially delighted in the old tales, the epics in which heroes set out on some impossible and noble errand, confronting the dangers in their path with fatalistic bravery. Men often died along the way, killed in brutal and unnatural ways; they were gored by war machines, trampled by steeds, and dismembered by their heartless enemies. Their deaths were boastful and lyrical and always, always more romantic than real. Death was not an end. It was an ellipsis.

  There was no romance in the scene before him. There were no ellipses here. The bodies lay upon the ground like broken exclamation points.

  It had been an airship. The enmeshed corpses had been her crew. What or who had brought it down, Senlin couldn’t guess, but he knew with absolute certainty that just minutes before it had been a graceful machine of flight bobbing in the blue sky.

  Even as this morbid realization dawned on him, the wreck was swamped by Market-goers. Corpulent merchants and stiff-legged soldiers scrabbled through the cracked ribs of the hull, turning through the shambles of crates and cargo. Well-dressed men in brushed bowlers and women in holiday bonnets followed near behind, lured into the Skirts by the promise of loot. The cries Senlin heard were not of rescue or of mourning, but of laying claim: Mine! I saw it first! I had it in my hand before you! They scoured the ship’s wreckage with the efficiency of crabs cleaning the bones of a beached fish. Some ran off clutching armfuls of silk, the bottom half of a keg of grain, a coil of rope, an iron cannon ball, a bent brass monkey, a pair of cuffed boots. Then men with crowbars came and salvaged planks, rails, hatches and even one miraculously preserved pane of stained glass.

  Senlin couldn’t look away though the sight sickened him. He was shocked to see such barbarism at the foot of the Tower of Babel. Such desperation! He wanted to gather all the looters up, sit them in rows, face them forward and remind them of their civility. Desperate times were never improved by the surrendering of ideals!

  In a very few minutes the only thing that remained of the disaster was a crater, a fine confetti of debris, and the nearly stripped bodies of the crew.

  And then, as if a curtain had been drawn over the whole shameful scene, the shadow of the Tower passed over them.

  The semi-gloom of the Tower’s nightfall made Senlin shiver. He cleared his throat and turned toward Adam, silhouetted by the rapidly fleeing line of sunlight. “Who will bury them?” Senlin rubbed tenderly at the dust-clotted gash in his cheek.

  “The vultures,” Adam said grimly. “We should go. The passage into the Basement is a little long.” He loosed his leather belt from his canvas trousers, forming a loop with the buckle on one end. He pulled the loop around his wrist and offered the other end to Senlin. Though a little chagrined, Senlin took the leash. “Hold to it. The passage gets a little pinched.”

  He followed after Adamos like a sleepy dog walker, or, conversely, like a sleepy dog. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the woman with darkly ringed eyes pull a candle stub from her dress pocket. She struck a match, set it to the wick, and continued reading the letters of the lost by the candle’s jaundiced light.

  Three months earlier Senlin had stood at the head of his classroom, pinching a diamond of chalk, sketching the last angle in a diagram of the Tower of Babel.

  A windowless house with large gables, the school sat on blocks at the end of Isaugh’s main avenue. Each spring, the schoolhouse was painted white as a bride, and every year the oceanic elements slowly undressed it. Senlin loved every knot in every board of that leaky, drafty house.

  He wore the long black coat and slender black trousers that were his uniform and preference. His voice filled the room to the high, bare rafters. The tufts of a bird’s nest showed on the central beam. “At its base, the Tower of Babel’s wall is a quarter mile thick,” Senlin said. “Which means the entrances to the Tower—there are eight—must carry visitors through a quarter mile of solid stone.” He turned on his boot heel, square coattails flaring at his hip, and regarded the four rows of ancient cedar desks. His current students were the usual crop: straight-backed, sleepy-eyed boys and girls, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. He tapped the chalk diamond to his temple. “Imagine that. You go home and open the front door to your house, and then have to walk five hundred paces before you’re even inside the mudroom. That’s quite a threshold! And then you’ll have only arrived in the first ringdom of the Tower.”

  When they didn’t respond with the astonished looks he thought the subject deserved, he called upon the lad in the back row, Colin Weeks, who had gone nearly walleyed from daydreaming. “Mr. Weeks, remind the class what a ringdom is?”

  Startled out of his reverie, Mr. Weeks lurched forward in his seat, pegging his stomach on the lip of the desk and inducing a little grunt. “Oof,” he said. Seats creaked as the heads of other students turned toward him. The barn swallow in the rafters let out a poorly timed warble.

  “Miss Stubbs, I trust that you completed the assigned reading. Can you come to Mr. Weeks’ assistance?” Senlin said, turning to a sharp-nosed girl who occupied the front row like the proud figurehead of a ship.

  “Yes, Headmaster. The levels of the Tower are called ringdoms because they are like little round kingdoms,” she said in a piercing but intelligent tone. “They’re like the thirty-six states of Ur, each unique in their way, but instead of being spread out across the map, the ringdoms are stacked up like a birthday cake.” The class tittered at her spontaneous analogy, amused to think of the great Tower of Babel as a layered cake.

  “Quite so. And does the Tower of Babel have a king?” Senlin curtly clapped chalk from his palms.

  “It has many monarchies and democracies and bureaucracies, too,” she said. “It’s like a mincemeat pie. It’s full of all sorts of exotic ingredients.” The class laughed again, and this time Senlin smiled a little, which made the eager Ms. Stubbs blush.

  “Very good, though your analogies make me wonder if you aren’t a little hungry.” Squaring his mouth, Senlin marched along the length of the board, canvased with equations and corrected lines of doggerel, to the bisected sketch of the Tower’s lower levels: The Basement, Parlor, and Baths. “Of course, we don’t know how many ringdoms there are in all because they have not been reliably documented. The permanent clouds about its pinnacle make ground observations impossible.”

  “Why not just fly an airship to the top of it and stake a flag for Isaugh?” a voice fr
om the middle row asked.

  “A good question…” Senlin craned about to see who had asked the question, and found him, “…Mr. Gregor. But think of it this way... I know you have a little rowboat. I’ve seen you oaring it around the cove all weekend. Now, what would happen if you pulled your boat into the best slip in the marina? You know the one, right front and center and wide as the schoolyard.”

  “Old Captain Cuthbert would drop his anchor on it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s his slip!” the boy cried, with an exasperated flourish of his hands.

  “Exactly so. And if you rowed your boat across the Niro Ocean, to some exotic port that was guarded by forts and long guns and a fleet of warships, how well would you be received? What if they didn’t like the look of a young scamper like yourself plowing along in your dingy?” Mr. Gregor smiled and snorted at this, folding his arms. “It’s just so with the Tower, I suspect, Mr. Gregor. You can’t expect every port to welcome you with open arms.”

  He dismissed the class for the day. In the coatroom, they pulled on their boots, their voices giddy. It was raining outside, as it often did throughout the spring. The water gurgled under the floorboards of the schoolhouse, filling the classroom with the aroma of earth. His students knew well enough not to bang the door on their way out, but their escape was boisterous in every other way. Not even the cold drizzle could dull their relief at being freed for the day.

  Little did they know, he enjoyed the momentary liberty, too.

  Drawing the chalk duster dreamily across the blackboard, carving away at the diagram of the Tower, Senlin imagined himself on the deck of an airship, circling the Tower, a spyglass to his eye…

  He couldn’t help but scowl at the image. No, the Sturgeon would never turn into a bird.