Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  The brute reeled back, and spit a mass of blood, that included half a tooth, onto the deck. He pulled the white-blond wig from his bald head and used it to wipe his mouth. When he reseated the wig, it was disheveled and shocked with gore. He looked up, no longer focused on Senlin’s knees. The bull-chested man charged the stairs, his sword aimed at Senlin’s nose.

  Senlin managed to turn the blade aside, but he could not deflect the man. The brute bowled into him, and he was thrown against Voleta. She half leapt and was half hurled over the cannon on the bowsprit. She caught the barrel with hooped arms, leaving her feet dangling over the abyss. Senlin could not help her. He was trapped beneath his attacker. The wigged man was slobbering blood on him, and struggling to bring his sword to a useful angle. Before he could shift his blade, Senlin chopped at the man’s throat with the heel of his hand and pulled his legs under him. He kicked the gasping brute back down the stairs where he collided with another man and fell to the ground in a tangle.

  When Senlin got to his knees and then his feet, he turned to find Voleta standing perfectly balanced on the cannon barrel, holding the taut rigging that bound the ship to her balloon. Her shawl was gone, lost over the edge, which left her wearing only the blue leotard she performed in. He knew she must’ve been freezing, but she smiled even still and said, “Aren’t you the scrapper. They must’ve teased you in the schoolyard!”

  “You have no idea,” Senlin said dryly. He quickly moved the jailor’s key from his coat to his pants’ pocket and then pulled his arms from the coat. He helped her put it on; the coat hung on her shoulders, loose as a shroud.

  “Why are you carrying bricks around in your pockets?” she asked.

  “They’re books. Drop them if you have to. You should climb into the rigging and stay there until the ship is clear. Soon as it’s safe to come down, start undoing the portside lines. Leave the crib anchors for last.” He gripped her shoulder, and said, “Don’t lose the coat, whatever you do. It is very important that you keep it safe.”

  “Don’t worry, whatever happens to me, your coat will survive. Long live fashion!” she said, and Senlin could only roll his eyes. She climbed the rigging toward the belly of the balloon, quickly, quietly, like a billowing black flag.

  On the main deck, Adam had waited Bobbit out. The skull-capped crewman, increasingly exhausted from hauling the fire iron back and forth, now swung with more enthusiasm than he had strength to control. When the iron clipped a balustrade and snagged there, Adam drove his sword between the man’s ribs. Bobbit collapsed into a writhing ball and hissed in agony.

  Adam searched for Senlin, and found the Port Master coming down from the forecastle. Anxiously, Adam asked after his sister, and Senlin said where he’d sent her. They were interrupted by a stagehand in a bowler attempting to broadside them, but Adam deftly parried the man’s thrust, and Senlin used his aerorod to bat the man into the riser of the forecastle.

  “It’s turned into a slaughterhouse,” Senlin said. “If Goll doesn’t arrive soon, we’ll be lost.” He’d been taken by surprise when Rodion dispatched Captain Lee, and could only hope now that Goll would restore some measure of sanity to the scene.

  The wind and the agitation of bodies made the moored vessel swing and twist on its anchors. The water that had spilled on the deck was rapidly turning to ice. Between crossed swords and the flail of limbs, Senlin spied Edith, still sparring with Rodion. She executed a well-timed advance: a sudden leap forward followed by a rapid lunge, and Rodion was driven back against the starboard rail. His sword wagged weakly as he fumbled to steady himself. Edith pursued the advantage and grabbed the whoremonger’s blade with her mechanical hand. With an effortless flick of the wrist, she snapped the blade near the hilt.

  But just as it seemed she had disarmed the villain, Rodion twisted about, and using the stump of his blade, severed the line to one of the starboard anchors.

  The ship bucked wildly as the remaining moorings and the balloon fought for a new equilibrium. Raiders and crew alike were sent skidding down the tilted deck toward the gap between ship and port. Half a dozen corpses and three live men were thrown overboard in an instant, their passage made more hopeless and swift by the ice on the deck. Thrown to his back, Senlin was fortunate enough to slide against the stairs of the quarterdeck. Adam also had caught a foothold on the lip of a hatch. But Edith was not so lucky. Senlin watched in mute horror as she skated on her side, arms grasping after some handle. Helplessly, fluidly, she passed through a gap in the railing and vanished into the breach with a choked scream.

  The image of Edith tumbling through the emptiness overran every other thought. Senlin smashed his hands to his ears to cover the echo of her strangled cry, but the scream did not diminish. Suddenly, his plan seemed worse than foolhardy; it was murderous. He alone was responsible for this bloodshed; he was the arrogant engineer of all this confusion and death. It was not fair that she, who’d already suffered so much, be punished a second time for keeping his company. It was not fair, but neither was it a surprise. Not if he was honest. Obsession made him dangerous to his friends. They fell so he could climb.

  He knew action was required. He must do something! But there wasn’t a ploy left in his head.

  Rodion, who had held onto the high rail when the ship pitched, knew exactly how to respond. He gave quick orders for his men to disarm the crew of the Stone Cloud. Leaderless and few, they put up little resistance. Senlin felt the aerorod yanked from his hand. He was hauled roughly to his feet. A new gangplank was set to the listing ship, and he and Adam were escorted across. He rolled his head back to keep from looking down at the terrible chasm Edith had just fallen into, and by chance caught a glimpse of Voleta, hiding at the limit of the lamplight, high in the rigging. At least she had escaped detection. Perhaps Rodion would presume she had fallen overboard amid the chaos. Perhaps someone would survive this folly.

  The sight of Voleta stirred him from his shock. He could not give up just because he had failed Edith. There were other lives at stake, and there was hope yet.

  Rodion salvaged Senlin’s crate from a pile of debris at the port railing and carried it onto the pier with an air of triumph. Senlin and Adam were forced to their knees before Rodion. Senlin watched as his aerorod was handed to the whoremonger. He bandied it about experimentally.

  “I think it’s funny that a bookworm like you should carry about such a crude club. At least that monstrous woman could swing a sword. She was fun.” He tossed the rod over his shoulder, and it went clanking across the timbers of the port. Rodion began the process of reloading his pistols, feeding a pinch of black powder into the pan of one. “Where’s the girl? Where’s Voleta?” Rodion asked a stagehand with a bent nose and a feather boa looped about his neck. The man gave a doubtful shrug and shook his head. “Thank you, Harold.” Rodion looked down at Adam, who craned up, a bloom of rage reddening his eyes. “I hereby release your sister from her contract. Consider it a bereavement gift.”

  A gunshot startled Senlin. He cast his head toward the sound in time to see one of Rodion’s man shoot a second of the Stone Cloud’s crew in the back. The shot man tumbled forward over the edge of the port, and the executioner moved on to the next in a row of four remaining men. In the Skirts, the dead were raining. Senlin quickly looked away.

  Rodion was speaking again, though he was regularly interrupted by another shot. “Now, where were we?” He packed a square of wadding and a ball into the barrel of his pistol. “Ah, yes. What’s in the box, Thomas?”

  “Why don’t you open it and find out?”

  “I must have misphrased the question.” Rodion pulled back the hammer and lowered the pistol to Senlin’s head. “What’s in the box?”

  “What have we here?” A voice called from behind. Goll emerged from the port tunnel with Iren towering at his side, forty armed men at their back. “Some heady conspiracy, I’m sure.”

  Surprised, Rodion raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness and welcome, the pistol lolling from one
finger. “Goll, you’re just in time to see the execution of a pitiful mastermind. He meant to smuggle...”

  “Did you do that?” Goll interrupted, pointing at the horribly listing Stone Cloud. Surprised, Rodion was too slow to form an elegant answer, which was just as good as a confession to Goll. “So, you’ve ransacked my port, wrecked a ship which, according to every law of safe harbor, was under our protection, and apparently executed Tom, Dick and Harry between here and Thursday, to punish this man for passing a little contraband?”

  Rodion found his smile. “Well, of course, that makes it all sound a little rash.” The whoremonger was keeping one eye on Iren, who stood with a bland, almost bored expression on her broad face. “But, Finn, this man…”

  “Get up, Thomas. I can’t talk with you crouching there like a scolded dog. You too, Adamos.” Goll again interrupted the whoremonger.

  “…this man,” Rodion resumed, “is wanted by Commissioner Pound of the Baths. And I’m very certain it has something to do with this box, which he was trying to sneak out on that ship. I only found all this out yesterday, and I wanted to confirm it before I involved you, Finn.”

  “Look, here’s the flat of it, Rodion. You shouldn’t be here,” Goll said. “I know all about this idiot’s troubled past. But if the Commissioner wants him, he can come collect him. No one’s stopping him. The fact that Tom is still alive suggests that either he’s paid his debts or they weren’t very grand to begin with.”

  All were surprised when Adam spoke up. “No, he was waiting for the painting to come out in the open.”

  “What?” Goll said, expressing everyone’s puzzlement. “What painting?”

  “He didn’t know what happened to the painting Senlin stole from him, but he wanted it back very badly. Very badly.”

  Senlin looked at his friend, his expression wrinkled with confusion. “What are you saying?”

  “I brought this on you. When you told me that the Commissioner would pay a fortune to get back what you’d stolen, I wrote him to see how much a fortune was.” Adam’s tone was so flat, his confession seemed to rise from a hypnotic state. “I was supposed to find it. That’s all. I was going to take back what you’d stolen. It never occurred to me that he didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know I was painting a target on you. When he sent that glowing monster, the Red Hand, to torture a confession out of you, I knew I’d made a mistake. I wrote to Pound and told him that he could keep his fortune. I was done.”

  Adam shivered, and once he began he could hardly stop the tremor. “But, Rodion is right, you don’t conspire with the Commissioner. He crushes and he takes. I’d gotten his attention. He knew who I was, and he quickly found out about Voleta.” Adam’s face was as pale as wax. The first glint of snow arrived, the crystals so small they made the air twinkle. “I’d never heard such threats, never imagined such cruelties as what he promised for me and my sister. I had to produce the painting.” Adam looked wounded when he finally met Senlin’s unbelieving gaze. “But you wouldn’t tell me where it was. I searched your room and your office, and I begged you to tell me.”

  “I was trying to protect you,” Senlin murmured. The snow clouds reflected the light of the port lamps, and glowed like orange like smoke from wet firewood. A moment before, he had not thought that he could feel more alone. His wife was lost, perhaps irretrievably so. Edith was dead and Ogier with her. Tarrou was buried in slavery. Adam’s betrayal seemed the crowning defeat. He had no friends.

  Yet, even as he thought it, his heart bucked. He was succumbing to self-pity. True, Adam had made a grave mistake, but it had been a mistake of desperation and naivety. Senlin had made plenty of those since his arrival. And hadn’t Adam rescued him from the Red Hand, at great risk to himself? Hadn’t Adam gone along with Senlin’s plan, though it seemed, and proved to be, the height of folly? Really, was Senlin any better of a friend?

  Perhaps not. But then, could any of these arguments, sanguine as they were, ever restore his trust in Adam? Senlin was unsure, but he decided, with only minutes remaining to his life, that he would try to forgive Adam at least.

  Rodion, smiling like a man vindicated by the ruling of a court, lowered his ivory-stocked cannon at the desolate and shivering Adam. “And there you have it,” he said. “The conspiracy undressed.”

  Finn Goll held up a staying hand. “This boy’s blunders don’t do any service to your own, Rodion. Put the gun up. Adam, what’s the last thing you told the Commissioner?”

  “That the painting was coming into the open. I told him that it would be on the humblest ship in port tonight, and easily picked. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m confessing now because he’s coming. He’s coming here tonight.”

  As suspicious as they’d all been of one another a moment before, they shared a single spasm of fear now. Each one in the uncomfortable, hostile assembly took a silent stock of their chances. Senlin suppressed a morbid urge to laugh: here he thought he’d overloaded the gun, had set too many cocks loose in the yard. The Commissioner would overshadow them all.

  “Where’s the painting?” Goll asked, and it took Senlin a moment to realize he was the object of the question. When he looked, Goll was glaring at him hotly. “No lies, Tom. I’m in no mood.”

  “In the crate,” Senlin said, gesturing at the box that had naturally, inexplicably migrated to the center of their gathering.

  “Open it up, Iren,” Goll directed, and the hulking woman obediently took a knee, stooping close to the small crate.

  What came over Rodion was not exactly clear. Perhaps he’d calculated his odds of surviving the evening and not liked the results, or perhaps he saw opportunity in this moment of discovery to change the focus of power. And it could just as easily have been a spasm of wrath or terror that made him set his pistol to the back of Iren’s ear.

  Senlin didn’t think. He just moved his arm, his hand bursting from his pocket like a startled bird from a bush. The modest pop of powder sounded like a champagne cork. A red tear stood out under Rodion’s eye, and the fur-lined whoremonger reached up to brush it way. But the tear swelled when he touched it, then like an opened faucet, began raining down his face. Rodion let loose an awful rattling snore and then fell dead amid a fine powder of snow.

  Senlin lowered the jailor’s key when he realized he was being stared at, not least of all by Iren, who raised herself up amid a great creak of leather and rasp of chain.

  “Well, that’s one riddle answered,” Goll said. Senlin appeared to be brimming with disgust, though not regret. When Goll spoke again, there was no malice to his announcement, but neither was there any uncertainty. “While we’re hurrying through the uncomfortable consequences, Iren would you please deliver Adam to the eternal bosom of the earth? Quick as you can.”

  The amazon’s usual iron mask seemed to warp at the corners, and her expression became so anguished that for a moment Senlin thought she might be stifling a violent sneeze. Then she reached, halting more than once, for the chain that encircled her.

  A chorus of gasps from the forty men spared Adam his eulogy. They turned as one and were all transfixed by the vision of three black moons rising over the horizon of the platform’s end. The dawning silhouette was unmistakable: the hull was like an uprooted coliseum. It was the Ararat, the Commissioner’s flying fortress, the most feared airship in his fleet.

  No sooner had the cannon hatches cleared the limb of the port than they began to fire. Their target was immediately apparent: the tethered Gold Finch, the regal merchant’s ship. A dozen holes perforated the hull, delicate where they entered and jagged where they left. The artfully carved flourishes of balustrades and bulwarks burst into puffs of plaster. The Finch’s crew, who’d gone below deck to weather the storm, came pouring from the galley hatch in a frenzy, but before any could get to port, the centermost of the ship’s furnaces was struck by the ricochet of a cannonball. The devastated furnace ignited the umbilical, which fled like a fuse to the mass of hydrogen gas contained above. Ignited, t
he gas inside blossomed into orange flame. The fire devoured the long, silk envelope spreading with the surreal deliberation of a burning page. The ship did not drop so much as rapidly sink, the withering flames glowing and falling as the moorings were torn from the port, and the hull rolled, screeching, from its insufficient cradle.

  A moment later, there was nothing left of the Gold Finch but embers glowing in the dark like the candles of a vigil.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I still recall a line from that feckless Everyman’s guide. It said something like, ‘the Tower’s real trade is in whimsy, adventure, and romance.’ I cannot imagine a less accurate trio. Though, who in their right minds would’ve come if the editors had said, ‘the Tower’s true trade is in tyranny, dismemberment, and heartbreak?”

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

  The snow revealed the shape of the wind. Senlin watched as distinct gusts pulled at the fire that had leapt from the Gold Finch to the port. Feeding on the coal dust that coated the dock, the flames flashed toward the Tower. The blaze soon divided the porters: half flew back to the tunnel before the fire cut them off from escape; the other half, whether out of courage or surprise, remained outside in the pall of the Commissioner’s warship.

  The deck guns of the Ararat fired a volley of harpoons at the platform, and for a moment it looked as if a monstrous nautilus was grasping for the port with its mass of tentacles. Then the grappling spears bit into the wood beams, and the trailing lines were pulled taut.

  A bevy of blue-coated agents zipped down the lines clinging to pulleys that piled at the end of the line like the beads of an abacus. The men drew their sabers the moment their boots hit the ground, and in seconds, the Commissioner had a platoon standing on the Port of Goll. The agents, in stark contrast to the natives of the port, were uniformly arrayed in epaulets and gold braids; they appeared professional and calm in a manner that unnerved Rodion’s remaining stagehands and Goll’s porters. These ragtag defenders would’ve likely broken and run, even into the fire, had it not been for Iren. Swinging her hook and chain at her side, she rallied the men from behind, chasing them into battle.