Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  The Tower had seemed as thin as a crack in a mirror from their train car weeks ago. Now, it seemed as broad as the horizon. The edge of the Tower was like the curving limb of a moon. He felt as if they were in orbit about it, felt its immensity and gravity. They flew so near the blond sandstone that Senlin began to wonder what happened when a gas envelope scraped the Tower. Did it pop? Did it burst into flames? Did it just snag open and bleed slowly until the whole kit dropped from the sky? Looking up at the balloon above, he marveled at the fragility of the venture. They dangled from something that looked about as flimsy as a silk camisole.

  No one else looked concerned, so Senlin supposed it was all very normal, and so he settled back again into the peace and the respite from terror. The immense blocks of the Tower’s edifice were each as large as a room. They were carved with decorative sinuous knots and spattered with ancient flecks of paint. This surface reminded Senlin of an antique rug: a well-made, well-worn artifact. All this splendor was wasted on his fellow passengers who seemed to find it as dull as an unlit train tunnel.

  The ship whooshed along, fast as a frigate, on a coiling course around and up the Tower. They rose like a ribbon around a maypole. It was exhilarating. It was like riding a kite.

  The port appeared in the distance, rolling up over the Tower’s limb, and the lookout who clung to the jungle of ropes dangling from the gas envelope cried down to the captain: “Port ahead!”

  It was coming up fast. In the short time the port was visible before the ship’s balloon eclipsed it, Senlin saw that their approach was too low. They would fly far under the platform. He wondered if the captain meant to circle all the way around the Tower again. He wondered how long that would take.

  Just as Senlin began to entertain serious doubts about the man at the wheel, the unhurried captain adjusted the furnace, and they shot upward. It felt as if they had stepped out of a raging river. The jet stream became a breeze that puffed them gently away from the Tower. The port reappeared under the horizon of the balloon, and Senlin saw that the breeze had pushed them too far out. They would miss even the tip of the jutting skyport altogether! It was such a dodgy business, this flying of airships.

  They were nearly level with the platform when a large kite leapt up from the arms of several dockworkers. It resembled a ship’s sail, it was so large, and it carried along a drooping tail of jute rope. The port was sending out a towline.

  It was a fascinating process to watch. The kite swooped toward them while the ship’s lookout reached for it with a boathook. After a few failed attempts, the lookout managed to snag the towline. He drew it in and cut the little leash that connected the jute tether to the kite’s silk line, and the kite leapt away from the ship.

  Looping the towline about the rigging to keep from being snatched overboard by its awkward, swinging weight, the lookout slid down to the deck. He wrapped the line about a cleat while the captain unspooled a red flag on a short stick and waved it at the port. The dockworkers began to work a winch, drawing the ship out of the thermal vent and into a slip.

  The platform sat on a triangle of rusting trestlework, and was perhaps a hundred yards long and a quarter as wide. Yardarms stood like naked trees on a mall. Dockworkers unloaded sacks from the only other ship that was currently docked. The entrance to the Tower, unlike the bandshell of the Baths’ port, was a humble, undecorated arch.

  Two mooring arms stretched under the slip they were being reeled into, and dockhands slid out onto these prongs, legs dangling over the naked abyss. They caught and secured the ship’s anchors. The crew of the ferry threw lines to waiting stevedores, who coiled them about iron bollards, each one substantial as a forty-two pound cannonball.

  The women stood and filed off. Their silence was almost funereal. All were under the trance of a private despair. Not knowing what else to do, Senlin fell into line with them. A stevedore in leather overalls waved at them to follow him, and they began to wind through a maze of pallets and crates toward the Tower and the entrance of New Babel, which, admittedly, held all the charm of a cave.

  The impression of this skyport was much different than the Commissioner’s ports, which were clean, regimented and lovely in their way. Here, open crates of produce attracted pillars of flies, coal dust crunched underfoot, and the lanes were cluttered with empty pallets, cracked kegs, and the legs of drowsing lazy men. The customs gate was a crooked post with a board nailed atop it. An oafish man leaned on the cobbled pulpit, a menacing sneer hooking his lip. Senlin saw no tourists, no gentry, only a mass of hard-worn men. He wondered who could possibly be in charge of such a shambles.

  The oaf was dressed mostly in old leather and heavy denim. His gray-brown beard blended into his collar of rabbit fur. He looked like a trapper from some remote mountainside. It might’ve seemed comical in another setting, but here in the open air, in the beating sun, in this friendless place, the man was every inch a terror.

  The oaf processed the line of women as if they were livestock in a market. He felt their necks for plague lumps, checked their arms for the telltale brand of the Parlor, and rubbed his grimy finger along their teeth. The woman had to confess their name and sign his registry. They were then swatted unkindly on the posterior, and the oaf moved on to manhandle the next in line.

  Once cleared, the women were loaded onto the open bed of an unusual wagon. Where one would expect to see horses or mules or oxen, there was instead an engine, shaped and sized roughly like a buggy, which burped steam and jittered on its two axles. Its rear wheels were broad and treaded with steel chevrons, while the front wheels were small and apparently made of rubber. It was a liberated train. A rail-less car. An autowagon! Despite everything, Senlin wanted to run over and inspect its ticking gauges and valves, its blustering pistons…

  “You’re an ugly woman,” the oaf said. Senlin looked around with a start, surprised to find himself at the head of the line.

  Before Senlin’s brain had a chance to censor it, his mouth ejected the reply, “Whatever you say, sister.”

  The only person more surprised by this blurt than Senlin was the oaf, who gave a startled snort, “Just what the Boudoir needs. Another comedian!” The oaf snatched Senlin’s bag from him before he could react. His stirred the satchel with his hairy arm and pulled out the Everyman’s Guide. Snorting again, he held up the book to show a taller, grimmer sentry who stood behind him with arms folded. Senlin looked again at the second guard, or agent, or gatekeeper, or whatever, who he’d at first mistaken for a man. She was, in fact, a square-shouldered amazon, who was every bit as broad as Tarrou, and half a hand taller. Much older than the women who’d lately filed off the barge, she had the smooth eyelids and wide forehead common among the natives of the grim arctic ring. Her short hair appeared to have been cut by a blind man wielding a sickle, and was the color of ashes. She wore a thick chain wrapped about her waist three times as if it were a perfectly acceptable belt. Senlin couldn’t look away.

  “Look, Iren! I found his jokebook,” the oaf said. The amazon’s wide brow showed no wrinkling hint of amusement. The oaf cocked his arm and threw the guide over Senlin’s head in one deft gesture. The book fluttered open like a bird and dropped over the port edge into the blue.

  Though surprised, Senlin was not particularly sad to see the guide go. He had clung to it once, and desperately, for all the good it had done him. “Old jokes,” he said.

  The oaf showed no interest in Senlin’s leather bound book of notes or the jailor’s key, which he mercifully mistook for its apparent function, but he honed in on Ogier’s painting. Turning the frame toward the light, he whistled horribly. As Senlin watched, he ran his thumb over the image. “You filthy beggar! Smuggling in a nudie.” The oaf moved to drop the painting into a barrel that overflowed with pocket watches, lockets, ivory combs and other valuables. It was a trove of mementos.

  A tiny explosion went off in Senlin’s head, like a popping kernel of corn.

  He grabbed the oaf’s wrist with one hand and the painti
ng with the other. The oaf clutched Senlin’s throat, the skin of his hand rough as coral. His smirk was gone. There was nothing so hot as murder in the oaf’s eyes. His gaze was indifferent. He might just as well be untying a difficult knot as strangling a man.

  Though starved for breath, Senlin refused to slacken his grip on the painting. He feared the frame might wishbone apart in their hands, but he would sooner be thrown by the neck over the precipice than let go of her image. This came as something of a surprise to him; he had reached the limit of his cowardice. So, they stood like two warring crabs, claws locked.

  The oaf, surprised by Senlin’s determination, slowly let his yellow dam of teeth show. “I can respect a man who loves his nudies more than his life.” He released Senlin’s throat and dropped the painting back into his satchel. Then, even while Senlin gasped the color back into his cheeks, the oaf asked, “Name?”

  “Mud,” Senlin said hoarsely.

  “Mud it is,” the guard said, and turned his ledger toward Senlin. A spike of a pencil lead lay in the margin. “Make your mark, Mud.” The ledger was filled with scrawled X’s and hieroglyphic jots. There wasn’t an honest signature in the book. Senlin wetted the tip of the nubbin of lead on his tongue and drew out the most glamorous, flourished signature he could muster: Thomas Senlin Mudd, Doctor of Letters. He dropped the pencil back in the book with a daring wink. He felt a little mad.

  The guard wrinkled his lip at Senlin’s efforts. “Oh, a gentleman’s come up on the whore barge. Make way for Doctor Thomas Senlin Mudd!” he hollered through a cupped hand.

  Senlin was feeling bold and a little pleased with himself right up until the moment that the amazon’s head swiveled toward him like a stone gargoyle that had sprung to life, her formerly unfocused eyes now clear as a hawk’s. She said in a clear and chilling baritone, “You are Tom Senlin.” It wasn’t a question.

  Something told him that he should recover his old cowardice and run.

  Chapter Two

  “The simplest way to make the world mysterious and terrifying to a man is to chase him through it.”

  - Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin

  The tunnel was so rough and uneven that it appeared to have been chewed out by a monstrous worm. There were no brass rails, or arabesque carpets, or white wainscoting here. The passage was as unglamorous as a mineshaft. Engine steam clung to the stone like fog upon glass, so every step forward ended in a reckless, unsteady skid. A chain of electric bulbs, yellow as egg yolks and hardly more illuminating, hung from the ceiling. Through the gloom, Senlin saw no alcoves to hide in and no intersections to dart down. The only way to escape the amazon at his heels, her chains jangling like a tambourine, was to outrun her.

  A dark, rocking mass blocked and scattered the light ahead. It was the autowagon. As it passed under a bulb, the elaborate shadows of a dozen women animated the walls. Plodding at a wounded pace, the autowagon was as good as a dead end. Any attempt at going around it would almost certainly end in Senlin being crushed against the rock wall. He had no choice but to go over it. He leapt onto the wagon’s bumper, crying “Coming through! Aside! Aside!” as he threw his leg over the gate.

  Already packed to the bedrails like refugees on an ocean raft, the women’s frustration suddenly erupted. Those who could find room to raise their arms swung at him, catching him under the ear, in the ribs, between his shoulder blades; others cursed shrilly into his ear. He wedged between their hips, offering a string of apologies. Their anger had one positive effect, at least: the frenzy made it impossible for the amazon to mount the cart. She was being rebuffed by a slew of kicks and stomps. She seemed hesitant to throw these women aside, though Senlin had no doubt that she could part them as easily as a lion parts the grass.

  Senlin took that instant of confusion to scramble up the back of the driver’s box. He set his toe on the transom, gripped the seat irons, and hoisted himself up. The driver, whose white fringe of hair whiffled in the steam of the engine, was startled by Senlin’s appearance on the seat beside him. He gave a phlegmy caw and cowered to the corner of the bench like a kicked dog. Senlin apologized again, though the clamor of the pistons swallowed up his words. The engine was awkwardly placed in a yammering stack before them, obscuring much of the tunnel floor and the string of lights with great mushrooms of steam.

  Realizing the only escape lay over the engine, Senlin hunted about for a foothold among the spearing rods and racing belts. He put his boot forward tentatively and had it knocked away by the arm of a piston. His cuff snagged upon something at his hip. Craning about, he saw what his cuff was hung upon. A powerful hand reached over the heads of the incensed passengers. The amazon bolted him with a pitiless stare, tightened her grip and seemed about to yank him down, when one of the women dug her teeth into the crook of the amazon’s arm.

  Her grip flinched just long enough for Senlin to hike himself free. There was no time to hesitate now. He drew his legs up beneath him and laid a hand on the lime-scaled dome of the boiler. A tremendous shock ran up his arm as the boiler scorched his skin, but he did not recoil. He threw himself forward, vaulting the front block of the dynamo like a boy leaping a fence.

  It was a miracle he didn’t snap both ankles when he landed or fall under the wheels of the plodding autowagon. Somehow, he kept his feet under him. He bunched his seared hand into a fist, as if he might squeeze the throbbing pain smaller, and ran on.

  Soon, the passage opened upon a chamber, large as a city block, into which a chaotic stockyard had been stuffed. Dozens of porters swarmed to unload carts and sleds. Drivers struggled to get wagons turned around in the graveled yard, while other men sat atop ziggurats of crates, drinking from bottles and heckling their friends. What Senlin initially mistook for the start of a riot turned out to be a raucous game of cards being played atop a pickle barrel. An austere two-story building, the only structure in the chamber, stood like a deaf grandfather amid the furor, its white plaster gables and square exposed beams looking every bit as old as the chisel marks in the chamber walls. For a moment he was amused to think that this charmless cave had been flattered with the namesake of ‘New Babel.’ But quickly, he recognized the space for what it was: a minor cavity in the Tower’s immense superstructure. He had not yet come upon the ringdom of New Babel. This was a weigh station. He plunged ahead, satchel gripped to his chest.

  It was not unlike picking one’s way across a cow pasture: he had to pay particular attention to where he set his feet. He stepped over a little avalanche of rotting apples, danced between spatters of wet tar, and shuffled through a spill of iron filings, which seemed ideal for transmitting a fatal infection. While he negotiated the pitfalls of the stockyard, he began to wonder why the amazon was chasing him. She had responded to his name as if she were waiting to hear it. Senlin reviewed his meager list of enemies. It seemed unlikely that she worked for the Commissioner. Even if his influence stretched as far as New Babel, word of Senlin’s burglary could not have traveled faster than he had.

  Perhaps the amazon answered to the mysterious Count. The Count knew of his marriage rival, and might have reasonably concluded that it would be easier to have Senlin killed than to risk an eventual confrontation. But then, the Count had no way of knowing which course Senlin would take. There were dozens of ports and gates, hundreds, perhaps. How could he possibly cover them all? And, more to the point, why would he bother? In the grand scheme, the Count had little to fear from a penniless, powerless cuckold of a lowly fishtown.

  By the time Senlin had arrived at the continuation of the tunnel on the far end of the cavern, he was certain the Count was not behind this present spree of panic. But if not the Count, if not the Commissioner, then who and why?

  He took these questions into the mouth of the dim tunnel where a breadcrumb trail of lights lit the dark trail to New Babel.

  Indigo tendrils of light flashed over the city.

  Senlin’s fear shriveled before the spectacle. He searched for some analog from past
experience, some theory to make sense of it, but history stood empty. What he was seeing was beyond the imagination or study of a poor headmaster. He stood just outside the mouth of the port tunnel, gaping at a distant, domed monolith that was haloed with blue lightning.

  It was difficult to look directly at the ragged thorns of electricity that leapt against the bars of the dome. The cupola towered over the city’s bleak, windowless buildings that, except for an occasional door, seemed as impenetrable as bricks. Bats gyred about the nest of lightning, knifing through clouds of moths that fizzed about the dome. Every second, scores of moths fluttered into the arcs of electricity and were consumed like scraps of flash paper. Even observed from this distance, the lightning cracked and roared with all the volume of a waterfall. Senlin had to turn away before he gawked himself senseless.

  And then all at once, the storm of indigo sparks quit, and the dark that replaced it seemed so awful and total that Senlin wondered momentarily if he had died.

  But it was only the false dark that surrounds a campfire. After a moment his eyes adjusted, and Senlin saw scores of dim, electric streetlights standing vigil over a grid of paved streets. Horseless carriages and all manner of strange steam engines ran in traffic patterns so intricate they verged on entropy. The running lights of vehicles bounced and ran like ghosts in a swamp of steam.

  A tambourine jangled behind him, and his instinctive impulse to run reasserted itself so violently that he leapt from the corner into the street without so much as a precautionary glance.

  Senlin knew almost immediately that the reflex was fatal.

  At the same moment that he was careening forward, a tall steamcoach was running at breakneck speed about the street corner. Its smokestack pushed out steam as thick as wet dough. The goggled man in the driver’s box spotted Senlin and stiffened with alarm, but the angle of his turn and the dense traffic left him with nowhere to swerve. Senlin hardly had time to cringe before the inevitable.