Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  A flash of silver snaked through the spokes of the carriage’s rear wheel. The fluid metal turned abruptly rigid, as the grappling chain was pulled taut. The effect on the wagon was like a leg breaking on a galloping horse. The hook stripped out a half dozen spokes, and the wagon careening at him buckled on the broken wheel. The other end of the chain, looped about the corner lamppost, uprooted the pole. The coach lurched violently into the curb, throwing the goggled driver from his high seat. The lamppost crashed onto the yawing carriage, batting the engine to a stop just at Senlin’s feet. A volcano of steam erupted to one side of him, as a piston snapped loose of its arm and hammered at the ground with dumb fury. He had just enough time to close his eyes and picture Marya before the boiler exploded. The brass dome flew out like it had been launched from a cannon. It skipped upon the street once, twice, three times, gouging the road like it was nothing but wet sand as it went, before finally cratering the corner of a building a full block away.

  When Senlin tuned about, his limbs petrified by the cramps of terror, he found the amazon staring at him from behind the wreckage. She tugged her chain free of the devastation. How she had managed to hook a running carriage to a lamppost was almost as mystifying as why she had done it. She had saved him, which could only mean one thing: she was trying to catch him alive. Someone had plans for him. He couldn’t imagine what those plans were, but he had a strong suspicion that he didn’t want to find out.

  Recovering his wits, Senlin scrambled through the traffic that had begun to snarl about the wreck. He scanned the surrounding blocks for some refuge. All he saw were rows of buildings that were set as close as tombstones in a potter’s field. He couldn’t tell which were offices, or factories, or shops, or homes, because all were a uniform, windowless cement box.

  Except one.

  Through the fog, at the end of the street a few blocks away, a round disc of colorful light glowed like a beacon. Running toward it, he soon realized it was a rose window set high in the gable of a building that was slathered in pretty white stucco. Its broad doors were open and welcoming. Perhaps it was a mission. In a fit of optimism, Senlin wondered if he might be offered sanctuary. By the time he reached the doors, breathless and cramping, he was drunk with hope. The block letters painted over the broad lintel read, House of White Chrom. It even sounded like a mission.

  He looked over his shoulder at the street, full of clangorous engines. There was no sign of the amazon among the pedestrians, who were dressed in the dark clothes of factory workers. He shivered in the cold damp and peered through the doors. A breath of warm air stroked his face. The air inside seemed to swim with chalk dust, as if someone had been beating out erasers. He couldn’t imagine a more welcoming sight. He ducked his head and went inside.

  By the time he realized he had walked into a drug den, it was too late.

  Chapter Three

  “There is a narcotic, unique to the Tower and in particular New Babel, called White Chrom or Crumb, among other things. The porters call it Crumb because it makes the real world seem like the sort of thing a mouse could eat in one bite and still be hungry.”

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

  At first, he didn’t notice what it was because it looked so familiar. It looked like a friendly pub stuffed inside a meetinghouse. There was no bar, but the ceiling was high and the edges of the tables were round with age and lustrous with hand oil. He wasn’t alone; other men sat at the tables, calmly, serenely, with their heads bowed under little white blankets. Which was odd. The light was odd, too. It poured from the streetlamp outside, through the rose window, which cut it into all sorts of magnificent colors and shapes. It was like peering into a kaleidoscope. Everything was shattered and beautiful.

  Except for the woman who greeted him. She was an age-blanched matron. Her white hair was done up in a snowball of a bun. Her immaculate pinafore was starched to crispness and, he was sure, studiously protected from stains. She was the spitting image of a proper tea lady.

  The matron escorted him to an empty table, and he let himself go with her because he had begun to confuse the pub, that was not a pub, with a tearoom he had frequented during his time at university. She sat him on the end of a long bench, and he looked down at the men who were pretending to be little white mountains. There was something in the air, a dust that wafted about overhead, thin as the glow of the moon.

  In front of each man, sat a basin, and they all had their faces buried in these basins like men with head colds. A white linen napkin was draped over the back of their heads, shrouding their profiles.

  Senlin turned to see a white bowl sitting before him. The water was so clear and immaculate, he wouldn’t have been able to see it if the woman hadn’t tapped the rim with a white envelope, no larger than a teabag. She tore it, tipped it, and white sand rolled out. When it struck the water, a vapor climbed up his shirtfront and the great length of his nose. He felt it come. The woman helped him over. A white curtain fell around the world. And then…

  It was a spectacular dawn, and he was standing in a basket high above the arid hardpan of the valley of Babel.

  Above him, long sections of a balloon glistened like a freshly peeled orange. His fingers ached with cold from the thin frost on the wicker rail. The floor of the gondola dimpled gently beneath him when he turned away from the sanguine sunrise, toward the mountainous column of the Tower. He could just make out the shadow of the balloon sliding across the edifice like a tick across the face of a boulder.

  Stooping a little, he glimpsed thick clouds swaddling the higher rings of the Tower. He was overcome by a sudden urge to break through those clouds, to see what was being hidden from the ground dwellers and the poorer tourists. It must be splendid and sacred, the throne of philosophers and engineers.

  He feverishly hoisted the sandbags at his feet, heaving them overboard, then wrestled with the knots of the ballast sacks that bumped against the outside, until every last ready ounce of weight had been shed. The skirts of the envelope luffed as the balloon rose into a new current. He had no idea how fast he was rising until the clouds collapsed about him, milky and dense as cataracts, and the Tower vanished from view.

  The clouds swelled and flowed about him like a mob of ghosts. He floated endlessly, lost in the quilted mist, lost among bulbous, spectral bodies. Faces formed in the corners of his vision and then deformed and fled when he tried to focus on them. He began to feel as if the basket he rode in was nothing but a shell, a skin from which he was coming loose. He was not flying; he was ascending from the earth. He was turning into a ghost.

  Feeling madness swell in him like a deathbed panic, he prepared to scramble up the ropes. There was nothing else to do. He would sabotage the balloon. He cast about for something sharp to hack at the silken envelope with, sure now that he would rather plummet to his death than to rise any further into the cloudy abyss.

  The gondola broke through the cap of the clouds, and he quit thrashing about. The sun was there, and a vast bowl of azure sky, and the Tower was there beside him, too, but it was not the Tower he knew.

  It looked like an immense burnt match: blacked, still smoldering, and curling into a fragile, unstable shard at the distant pinnacle. It was a total ruin. Inside its shattered walls, he could see the jagged debris of collapsed buildings, the parapets and buttresses of devastated ports, the torn tissues of flags and airships, the black statuary of burned corpses, splayed beneath funnels of vultures that numbered in the thousands. Rubble spilled down from the upper echelons like sand in an hourglass as the Tower continued to fall and sag.

  He realized with a start that he was being blown toward the ruin.

  Instinctively, he took a step backward, and found himself bumping against something taller and more solid than himself. He turned to find Marya, dear, sweet Marya, bending over him, her cheeks red as apples. At first it seemed entirely natural that it was her, but then he doubted that it could be because she had almost doubled in size. Or perhaps he ha
d shrunk.

  He tried to embrace her, but his arms were as useless as empty sleeves. He swatted them about haplessly as his eyes began to flood with tears. Hoarse from all the smoke that billowed from the devastated Tower, he could only accept her when she reached down, hooked him in her arms and hoisted him up like a child. His head rolled against her chest. She smelled like a forge, but he found the smell oddly comforting.

  He bounced in her arms for a while, and then she dipped again and stood him up on his feet. Behind her, his balloon drifted away; he did not remember climbing from it. Looking down, he found he stood atop a charred outcrop of stone. Above, the black peak of the Tower, frozen mid-collapse, seemed to lean in. Marya placed her unnaturally large hands on either side of his head. He said in a thick, croaking voice, “I love you.”

  She withdrew one hand, keeping the other cupped about his cheek, her expression as bland as a sphinx, and then slapped stars into his head.

  The sky, and the balloon, and the burnt match of the Tower all winked out, and Senlin found himself standing under the sulfurous beacon of the street lamp outside the white chapel. Where Marya had stood a moment before, the amazon now loomed. She gripped him by the side of the neck and held her other hand raised at such an extreme distance he mistook the action for a yawn. Working his newly loosened jaw, he prepared to speak, to say something in his own defense, when the hand came down again, broad as an oar, and spun him around by the face.

  He saw his gaping reflection in a carriage window that stood conspicuously near. Even amid his disorientation at the receded hallucinations and the amazon’s blows, he still suffered a dull throb of shock at seeing himself. He looked like a fish, like a white koi peering up through the surface of a pond, all goggling eyes and colorless grimace. He looked deranged.

  The coach was opulently arrayed in panels of black lacquer and gold molding. Like the other wagons of New Babel, this vehicle was horseless, and trembled even as it sat motionless. His sleeves tightened sharply under his arms, alerting him to the fact that he had been gripped by the scruff of his coat from behind. The door of the carriage opened, and his own reflection was replaced by a not entirely unfamiliar face.

  It was a moment more before Senlin identified the swarthy cherub grinning down at him from the red velvet carriage bench.

  “There you are, Tom,” Finn Goll said. “You didn’t die after all. What a treat.”

  Chapter Four

  “Goll’s Port is not an original feature of the Tower. It was dug out eons after the Tower’s erection, and the fact shows in its shoddy form. It has been renamed throughout the centuries by a parade of ambitious men, and yet appears to have stubbornly remained little better, little nobler than a smuggler’s cove.”

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

  In stark contrast to the coal and sulfurous smell of the city, the carriage was scented with camphor and orange oil. It was an opulent little cabin. Between the high-piled red velvet couches, a teardrop lamp swung like a hypnotist’s charm. Crystal decanters chattered in a cubby, inlaid with fine cork bumpers. The drawn shades over the windows swam with minute paisleys. The carriage swayed as gently as a hammock, and Senlin was reminded of his most recent train ride: that sense of encasement and casual speed; that sense of luxury laid over brute mechanical force. Except in this case, he didn’t know where the engine was going or when it would stop.

  How fondly Senlin had once recalled Finn Goll’s advice! The ensuing weeks after their meeting in the Basement were so fraught with treachery and suspicion that Senlin had begun to cling to their brief acquaintance as an example of the Tower’s better nature. If Finn Goll lived here, he’d reasoned on several occasions, then other good souls must live here, too. In a land of few friends, Goll was a man without conspiracy or ulterior motive.

  Senlin could hardly have been more wrong.

  Goll’s prior humble appearance, his camel-train merchant garb, was entirely transformed. His tweed coat and wool trousers were immaculately presented. His thick hair was styled in a black wave that seemed to be forever cresting but never crashing toward one side of his head. Goll sat across from Senlin, pinching his bottom lip, his thick, dark brows animated by some private amusement. The more Senlin’s head cleared, the more disturbed he was by Goll’s appearance. It seemed anachronistic, a cosmic mistake. What was he doing here?

  Senlin might have thought it all a continuation of his hallucination had it not been for the amazon. She sat beside him on the rocking carriage bench. While Senlin studiously maintained eye contact with Finn Goll, she sat glaring at him without subtlety. She leaned into him so intimately, Senlin could feel the breath puffing from her nostrils.

  “You make quite an entrance, Tom. Getting choked in the port, terrorizing the poor tarts on the cart, hurling yourself into traffic, and then getting stoned in a Crumb House. Bravo! I am impressed.” Goll rolled his palms on his knees. “My favorite part was when you told Iren that you loved her.” He barked a laugh in the direction of the immense woman, who absorbed the joke with a single, languid blink. “Between you and me, I don’t think she’s the marrying sort.” He laughed again. “I bet you didn’t learn those tricks from your guidebook!”

  Senlin refused to cringe at any of this, despite a sudden sense of humiliation. He turned and frowned in a shrugging way, and said, “I’m not going to defend that pap. I find it incredible that a guidebook could be so misguided and still see a fourteenth edition.”

  “It’s not so surprising if you know that most of the writers who worked on it never actually set foot in the Tower.”

  “Surely not,” Senlin scoffed.

  “But it explains a lot, doesn’t it?” Goll said, his voice lilting up merrily. “Let me tell you the most useful fact that every one of those bog rolls leaves out: the Tower is a tar pit. Once you put a toe in her, you’re caught forever. No one leaves. No one goes home.”

  “Of course people go home,” Senlin said, suppressing a rueful snort. He was finding it increasingly impossible to be convivial. Who was Goll to patronize and intimidate him like this? “I wouldn’t have taken you for a conspiratorial sort, Mr. Goll.” Senlin pulled himself up. He attempted to tidy his cuffs, though both were soiled with grease, the result of his recent flight. Goll watched his preening with amusement. “People go home,” Senlin insisted. “I and my wife will go home.”

  “Aha!” Finn Goll pointed at the amazon, Iren, and said, “I told you I liked him for the job from the moment I laid eyes on him. He is just so earnest.” Iren gave a little grunt of acknowledgement, and Goll turned his stubby finger toward Senlin. “It was a long interview, Tom, slogging your way up through the plumbing of the Tower. I really didn’t know if you’d survive the Parlor. The fact that you escaped the Baths without getting turned into a hod is a minor miracle. I hoped you’d make it, though.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I came up of my own free will and not for any job.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course you did.” Goll rolled his eyes. “Don’t act like this is somehow obscene. This is a negotiation, Tom; it is business. My port hasn’t had a port master in six months, not since the last one… retired abruptly, and I can’t find a living soul who is willing and fit to do the work. I need a new port master, and you need a job. You didn’t even know it at the time, but you needed a job the minute you stepped off that train in the Market. Everyone in the Tower finds work sooner or later. It’s just a question of whether you get paid for it or not.”

  “I admit this has not exactly been the vacation I’d hoped for, but I do not need a job. I have a job waiting for me back home, “ Senlin said, even as he doubted the truth of it. He felt a pang of grief at the thought: they would’ve had to replace him by now. His students would’ve received no warning, no explanation. The school year had begun, and they had found a stranger waiting for them. Whoever it was, they wouldn’t be a stranger for long. The bond between teacher and student was quick to form and quick to set. Senlin chok
ed off the expanding sense of loss, letting his anger redirect him. “And don’t act like you were somehow essential to my survival. There was no interview; this is not my destination. I do not care about you or your job. And as soon as you decide to stop this carriage and open that door, I will be on my way.”

  Goll continued in his own vein, unperturbed by Senlin’s protest. “But why, I’m sure you’re wondering, why not just recruit a new port master from the comfort of my own port? Why go all the way down to the Basement to scrabble about for talent? All I have to do is sit on my back stoop and quiz the incoming masses. I could just ask every knuckle-dragging mouth-breather through the gate, ‘Are you any good with numbers? Are you loyal? Are you honest? Are you reasonable?’” Goll ticked the virtues off on splayed, thick fingers. “That’s exactly what I did, too, and I ended up with a string of incompetent, unreliable liars who almost robbed me blind. Because, see, by the time they get this deep into the Tower, most of have had the character beaten out of them. They are willing to say anything to get what they want. You can’t reason with them or trust them. To know a person, to understand their character, you must know who they were before the Tower shook them to their roots. If you do not know how they changed, you do not know who they became. The very fact that you are resistant to me now is a sign that you are the man for the job.”

  “Do you give them all the same bad advice you gave me?”

  “What bad advice? To be suspicious; to rely on one’s own eyes? How is that bad?”

  “You told me not to trust anyone,” Senlin said, and he wanted to intimidate the man with some emphatic gesture, but he was nervous about making sudden movements while the amazon glowered at him. He tried to stuff his words full of the passion he felt. “But the only way I escaped the Parlor and the Baths was by trusting my friends.”