Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  The lines of her broad, smooth brow turned down, pointing toward a deep and frightening scowl. With practiced deliberation, she unlatched the chain about her waist. The links clanked as they straightened at her side. Senlin regarded all of this with a small, implacable smile. Iren adopted a fighting stance, the leather of her apron creaking about her trunk-like thighs, her feet nearly connecting the walls of the room. Senlin refused to flinch, even as she began to swing the chain over her head. The whoosh of the chain filled the narrow space. She let it out, link by link until the hook at the end whizzed within inches of his bookcases. The tree of rubber stamps on his desk trembled. The beads of his abacus chattered; his papers fluttered. It was as if a storm had been born inside his office.

  Through it all, Senlin regarded her with level-eyed patience. He said, “I’ve gotten used to having my life threatened, Iren. I’m bored with it. Knock my head off or sit down.”

  Her face reddening, Iren turned the chain’s propeller nearer the top of his head. Senlin felt his hair begin to part from the gust. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the wail of the chain. “You can’t punch the sense out of a book. You can’t torture a letter into talking. You can’t strangle a sign into giving you directions. Everywhere you look there are secrets standing out in the open. You are vulnerable because of it. But I can help you if you’ll let me.”

  Gradually, her anger dwindled and her chain slowed, until with a final jerk of her arm, she snapped the hook back to her hand. Breathing heavily, she wrapped the chain about her waist again. “What do you want from me?” she asked in her mournful baritone.

  “See this?” Senlin turned up his chin to show the garish bruise collaring his throat. “I need you to teach me how to keep this from happening. I’ve written a letter to Goll, asking him to let you train me to defend myself. I think he’ll want to keep his investment, that is, me, from getting strangled in his sleep. I’m sure you’ve heard about last night.” Iren inspected the bruise with the vague interest of a connoisseur. She didn’t seem overly impressed. “An hour a day,” Senlin continued crisply. “We’ll spend the first half hour sparring and the second reading. What do you say?”

  “Mr. Goll won’t like me wasting time on books.”

  “Then don’t tell him,” Senlin said, holding out the letter he’d prepared. “He’s the least of our worries. I’m going to feel very weak and you’re going to feel very dumb. But that’s how it always is in the beginning. Learning starts with failure.”

  Iren scrutinized the face of the clear-eyed stickman sitting before her, searching for signs of shrewdness or pity, any trace of which would have brought her down on him like a guillotine. Making up her mind, she nodded and said, “Okay.” She grabbed the letter, and pounded from the room. It was the longest conversation he’d ever held with her.

  Chapter Eleven

  “The Double Fond is a pot-bellied galleon, with an s-shaped hull, eight long guns, three fat envelopes, a grappling cannon, a glorious deckhouse, a great cabin complete with teardrop chandelier, and a crew of sixty-two armed marauders… All dreaming aside, a ship is only as good as her course. I must find a new wind.”

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

  He had ulterior motives for tutoring Iren. Senlin knew she was capable of doing the work of two men, and he wanted her on his crew. But buying her loyalties would require more, much more, than he could afford. Since he could not hope to buy her loyalty, he meant to earn it.

  So, her lessons began. Midafternoon, behind the closed door of his office, stooped over the primer he’d written out for her, Senlin treated her exactly as he had the illiterate bullies of his past school days: with patient and firm encouragement. At first, she held the pen like a knife and attacked the paper. She bent and snapped nib after nib, and shot black spiders of ink across the page. It was days before she could even close the loops of her letters, though every day she destroyed fewer pages and pens. Every day she improved.

  And he learned that she was not entirely illiterate. Her education was sped along by her familiarity with a few essential words. She could read the common labels of crates and the regular verbs that appeared on broadside advertisements. She proved to be a quick study, and took her lessons in earnest. She practiced on her own, and within a week she could read rudimentary sentences. Senlin found her determination inspiring.

  Iren’s patience was not inexhaustible. She suffered fits of frustration. At the peak of her frustrations, she would accuse Senlin of making up rules, of contradicting himself, of mocking her attempts at sounding out words. More than once, she grabbed whatever was at hand, an ink pot or paper weight, and raised it menacingly over her tutor’s head. But he carried on explaining the logic of the grammar in the same calm, lilting tone: “See, the ‘J’ jumps back while the ‘L’ lays the way. Try again. ‘John likes to beat the drum. Liza likes to ring the bell.’” Eventually, Iren would lower her makeshift weapon and her halting efforts would resume.

  And she always got her revenge. At least, Senlin suspected that their sparring lessons in the station yard were colored by her irritation with her education. Her preferred method of teaching Senlin to defend himself was by attacking him relentlessly, until, inevitably, he ended up flat on his back, winded and bruised. Then, as she watched him struggle to his feet, she would explain with the fewest words possible what he had done wrong. When they sparred with staffs and she swept his legs from under him, she said, “Your feet are too close together.” When they boxed and Senlin was left doubled-over from three quick jabs to the stomach, she said, “You wind up your punches.” When they practiced with wooden swords and she clipped him on the ear, she said, “Don’t attack my sword. Attack me.”

  It was a humiliating process made more so by the crowd their practice attracted. The men of the yard gathered about the sparring ring they’d cleared between crates of olives and kegs of vinegar. At first, the porters observed the lessons casually, afraid to gawk at their Port Master and Finn Goll’s enforcer scrapping in the yard. But soon their observations grew more focused and vocal. There were exclamations, which became volleys, which became cheers of the sort one might hear around a professional ring. By the end of the first week of their afternoon bouts, wagers were being made. An enterprising stevedore found a cracked slate and began chalking up the odds.

  Senlin tried to ignore the nature of the bets. They presumed he would be overwhelmed by Iren’s size and ability. It was a given that he would end up on his back. The bets regarded how long he would stay on his feet and whether he would ever land a successful parry or punch. Even those odds were bad.

  But he was learning. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was developing his reflexes. He began to sense the rhythms and patterns of her assaults. Strength, he discovered, was not as important as balance, and balance was not as important as anticipation. He began to predict some of her attacks by the slight shifts in her stance or the tightening of her shoulders. He could sometimes anticipate the trajectory of her foot or staff, even if he couldn’t always get out of the way of the blow. Occasionally, he’d enjoy a little success, a dodge or parry, and immediately afterward would begin to analyze his success. He’d ponder how fighting had a grammar all its own, and war had its syntax. His mind wandered. These flights of fancy always resulted in him being laid out.

  “Don’t think about it so much,” Iren said after one of Senlin’s daydreams had been punctuated by her delivery of an unexpected uppercut. “Better not think at all.”

  So it was they developed camaraderie out of necessity.

  The whole arrangement made Adam nervous. He tried to convince his friend that Iren was a monster playing the pet. “Don’t believe for a moment that you are friends,” Adam said one afternoon while washing out a large abrasion on Senlin’s shoulder blade. The Port Master had earned it while attempting to strike his teacher with a graceless riposte. Instead of landing the blow with his wooden dowel, he’d thrown himself off balance and had sl
id painfully across the gravel yard. Though injured, Senlin felt pride in the attempt, which Iren deemed “gutsy.”

  “She can be swayed,” Senlin told Adam, and believed it.

  Air currents, Senlin had learned from his readings on the subject, were similar to sea currents. They were invisible but persistent conveyer belts of varying widths and strengths. They braided the sky in intricate systems of energy. Airships, at least those that came to the Port of Goll, had no means of self-propulsion and, much like a sail, were entirely reliant on the wind for speed and direction. Ships could be moved vertically by warming the trapped gas or releasing ballast, allowing them to leap from one current to another. Captains, at least capable ones, had some measure of control over their course.

  The locations of the ports that jutted from the Tower had been chosen for their proximity to relatively calm, stable currents. Well-placed ports were reliably accessible, but the trade-off was that many could only be entered and exited along a single course. This posed no inconvenience to righteous traders, but it made hijacking docked ships a risky business. Running away was easy enough but getting away would be hard.

  If Senlin and his as-yet imaginary crew on their as-yet imaginary ship hoped to get very far, a novel escape route was essential.

  So, to the amusement of the aeronauts and dockworkers, Senlin took up a new morning hobby. As the rising sun sparkled upon the frost-slicked port, Senlin paced behind the white, wax-paper kite that he had built. The pinch of the autumnal air had given way to the bite of winter. The sky was as cold and flat as a frozen sea. He flew his kite between the enormous balloons that tugged at moored ships. The kite dove like a sparrow along the curving face of the Tower, battering its corners against pink sandstone. It tangled about the yardarms of cranes, and he’d have to climb to free it. He lost his hold on many kites while stumbling over crates and bales of cargo, and could only watch helplessly as the plain diamonds fled into the distance. The men laughed. The bitter wind stung. And always, his kites flew eastward on the same persistent current of wind: the trade wind, the only wind.

  After a couple of days of lost kites and stubbed toes, Senlin found what he was looking for. It happened one morning when the dock was unusually empty. Senlin had given the dockworkers the previous evening off after a two-day lull in traffic, and most of the men were sleeping off their drunken liberty. Above, a long, shallow depression in the facade of the Tower seemed to attract the kite. The dip in the Tower face would’ve seemed little more than a dimple from a distance, but locally, it was large enough to generate a little vacuum. The kite tugged intermittently at the spool in the Senlin’s hand, reminding him of how a fishing line would dip and jerk with the explorative bumps of a cautious fish.

  Then, all at once, the kite took off, flying straight up the face of the Tower for fifty feet before pulling sharply west. His line exhausted, Senlin held the last foot of silk, watching the kite fight to follow the newly discovered current. Then he let it go.

  Watching the kite escape on that untapped current charmed a smile to his face. It would be a little difficult to reach, and missing the edge of the current would probably result in the ship being dashed against the stone face, but he had found his course. Hazardous as it was, he had found his exit.

  *

  Adam did not receive the news of the miraculous discovery with the enthusiasm Senlin had hoped for.

  Senlin found his friend in the gloomy damp of the dockyard, under the skating bats and egg-yolk lights, trying to pry the lid from a stubbornly shut crate. When his crowbar slipped out and nearly caught him in the chin, Adam, in an unusual display of anger, began beating the crate furiously. “Why?” Adam asked, once he had exhausted himself, “Why seal up a box of pears like it was a coffin?”

  Senlin laid a hand on his friend’s heaving shoulder, “It’s just fruit. What’s got you so mad?”

  The crowbar clanged out three notes as it bounced on the ground. “Rodion,” he said with concerted calm. “He’s squeezing the last pence out of me. In the past three weeks, he’s come to me with three marriage contracts for Voleta. Each time, I give him a mina to delay the agreement, and he goes away to find a new husband-in-waiting with a fatter wallet. I’m out of money.” He picked up the crowbar and reset its claw under the lip of the lid. “Voleta says she should break a leg or set her hair on fire. She thinks that no one would want to marry a gimpy, bald girl. But that’s the trouble. The only thing keeping her out of the bedroom is the stage. But it’s her act that attracts the lechers. I’m afraid that I’ll just wake up one morning and she’ll be gone for good.” The lid finally came open with a squeal of nails. Adam shook the soreness out of his arms and plucked a blushing pear from the bed of straw. “So, I’m glad you found your wind, Tom, but I don’t see how we’re any closer to getting out of this place.”

  “I will talk to Rodion,” Senlin said.

  “And say what?”

  Before Senlin could answer, their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a familiar autowagon. The ebony panels of the coach were like black mirrors, fluted with gold leaf. The windows were lidded with blood-colored shades, and the brass copper stack of the machine spilled wads of steam over the gaunt driver. Finn Goll’s autowagon cleared a path through the porters in the yard as effortlessly as a shark through a school of sardines.

  Senlin hadn’t seen much of the port’s namesake in the three months he’d worked as the man’s Port Master. His unexpected appearance now might be nothing more than a surprise inspection, but Senlin was certain that Goll hadn’t come to the port on a social call. Senlin cataloged the worst-case scenarios: Goll had learned about the raise Senlin had given the workers and had come to squeeze compensation out of the Port Master’s hide; or Goll had deduced the interest behind the midnight attempt on Senlin’s life and was preparing now to turn him over to the Commissioner and collect the ransom; or the Lord of Port had somehow caught wind of Senlin and Adam’s plot and was coming now to mete out the punishment that came to all deserters: the plank.

  Iren preceded Goll out the door of the coach. Her shoulders, usually squared, were now slumped. It was a bad sign. Worse, she didn’t meet Senlin’s eye when he came to meet the carriage. Goll emerged onto the running board where he stayed, standing nearly at eye-level with Senlin. The driver did not shut off the engine, making it clear their business would be brief.

  “Iren has developed some new talents.” Goll put his hand on Iren’s head in the familiar way that a boy might handle his dog. “Imagine my surprise this morning when I find her writing this,” he said, producing a page from his vest pocket. He unfolded it and began to read in the mocking tone of a simpleton: “‘John likes to beat the drum. Liza likes to ring the bell. John and Liza march and sing all around the wooded dell.’”

  Senlin recognized the verse as having come from his primer, and he quickly deduced where this conversation was heading. Goll had correctly identified the lessons as a threat to his authority, and he had come out to reassert that authority.

  “Tom, can you imagine how useful it was to have a secure, reliable, untroubled messenger? Who wants a dog that can read what it fetches? Now I find I am in the uncomfortable position of having to trust my courier.” Goll pulled a second slip of paper from his pocket. This, with a flourish of the wrist, he gave to the amazon. “And since trust requires trials… Iren, dearie, please read the directions I’ve given you.”

  She studied the scrap of paper, her brow furrowing with the effort. The words came in fits and starts. “Make... a fist… with your hand and... put it to Tom’s head… three... tims.”

  “That last word is ‘times,’ dearie. Seems you didn’t enact such a miracle after all, Tom.” Goll drew a whistling breath. Iren stood in a stupor, staring down at the note in her hands. Senlin watched as she grappled with the decision, and he found himself silently willing her to strike him before it was too late. Goll was testing her loyalty. She had to strike before suspicion set in.

  She recovered he
rself in an instant. Stepping forward, she took Senlin by the collar and without ceremony, struck him in the face again and again and again. The only mercy she paid him was to spread her blows evenly across his head, and still it felt like the kick of a mule.

  “Ho, ho, hold there, Iren. That’s good. That’s five! I only asked for three!” Goll was greatly amused by the extra blows.

  Senlin’s face streaked with blood and tears. Iren dropped him, and he fell right through his knees to his tailbone. He bounced against the ground and spilled onto his back. The world was haloed in red, and at the center was Goll’s round face.

  “Tom, you would’ve done well to have taught her to count before you began the alphabet,” Goll said. “At our age, education is a waste. You can’t defend yourself, she can’t count, and I can’t learn to trust. We are too deep in our ruts to turn onto fresh tracks. In the future, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t meddle with the natural order of things.” He disappeared back into the carriage, then through the window he concluded, “And another thing, Tom, I expect that men who make it this far up the Tower will come with a little baggage. But if what I’ve heard is true, and it was the Red Hand who came a’callin’ last month, I want nothing to do with it. The Commissioner and his thug aren’t to be trifled with. Whatever it is, sort it out. I don’t want to lose my bookkeeper because of some grudge, but at the same time, I’m not sticking my neck out for you. If the Commissioner decides to press the point, I’ll hang you out to dry.”

  Goll’s parting words resonated through Senlin’s pain. If Goll didn’t know why the Red Hand had come, he couldn’t know about the painting. Which meant he hadn’t been the one to turn Senlin in. It made sense, of course. Goll had no reason to be subtle; if he had wanted to collect the bounty, he would’ve done it openly and immediately. Finn Goll might be a heartless boss, but he wasn’t the one trying to get Senlin killed. But if not Goll, then who?