Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  But before he could develop any confidence in his approach, before any semblance of rhythm could soften his puppet-like and jerking limbs, Marya walked out from behind the Commissioner as if she had walked around a corner in their old cottage. She wore a long white nightgown with a crocheted hem. Her feet were bare. She was drinking tea from one of her beloved and chipped china cups. Her expression was soft and unaware; it was a look that could not outlast the first hour of the morning, an expression only her lover would see.

  Senlin paid a painful price for his lapse in concentration: a lancing pressure shocked the nerves in his arm. He looked down to find the Commissioner had skewered his shoulder. The sword was withdrawn, and the burst of pain became a thrumming ache.

  “That was so rewarding,” the Commissioner said. “You can’t imagine how I have been chided for letting you get away.” He attacked again, but Senlin was quick to deflect the stroke. “Where is my painting?”

  Trying now to ignore the upright piano that had appeared behind the Commissioner, Senlin said, “Safe.”

  “There is no such word,” the Commissioner quipped.

  Marya seemed unaware that her husband was embroiled in a swordfight. She set her teacup on the sidearm of her piano. She fanned her nightgown like a concert pianist on stage before sitting on the bench. She looked over her shoulder at Senlin. “What should I play?” she asked, brushing the hair from her face. The familiar gaiety of her smile made Senlin’s heart ache.

  “Play what you like,” Senlin said. The Commissioner, briefly confused by the non sequitur, soon took it as an invitation to advance.

  As their battling resumed, Marya commenced playing in her characteristic bombastic style. She played an old, frenetic reel— a popular clap-along in the pub back home. He could almost hear the clapping now. No, he could in fact hear it, and the tankards clanking on the tables, and the chair legs dragging on the pub floor. As Senlin listened, he felt his muscles loosen. His movements became more fluid. Then he was struck again, a glancing blow on the back of the hand, but it felt indistinct and painless, as if someone had only caressed the hair. Pound seemed distant, like a man standing at the end of a tunnel, waving his arms. The lid of Marya’s piano burst open and sunlight streamed out like a golden diadem. The light flickered in time with the song. A school of kites joined the light, flying out of the piano case on piano wires, each cord vibrating madly with color and sound.

  Senlin stumbled over one of the harpooned lines that held the Ararat to the port. Marya and her piano vanished. He had to twist and skid in the snow to keep from losing his feet, and he flailed perilously near the port edge. The Commissioner, overeager and misjudging the distance, slashed at Senlin, but struck only the rope that had tripped him, severing it. The winds pulled fiercely at the Commissioner’s flying fortress, trying to draw it out from the Tower into the churning storm. The loss of this one anchor started a chain reaction. The nearest harpoon line twanged under the additional pressure, then promptly snapped. The Ararat cantilevered from the port, and its drawbridge, once level, now stood at a sharp incline.

  The Commissioner, realizing that his ship was about to be blown off its moorings, ran for the drawbridge as it scraped wildly along the end of the pier. Behind him, one of the anchoring harpoons ripped loose, then another, and another, until one tenuous line remained. Pound leapt at the bridge just as a vertical shear of wind drove the Ararat down. The last line snapped. The Commissioner hung in the open air for a moment: his limbs gyrated like a falling cat’s, and the drawbridge clapped loosely at the end of its chains. Then the wind shifted again, and the portal seemed to swallow him up. He tumbled into the bowels of his ship. The Ararat reared back from the port and was engulfed by the snow.

  Clearheaded for the moment, Senlin cast about for signs of Edith, and found her standing dangerously near the precipice of the platform. She held the Red Hand at arm’s length by the back of his neck as one might hold a venomous snake. The assassin flailed, but she had his feet off the ground and his arms could not bend back far enough to reach her. Her clockwork arm, engraved with ringlets and darts like vines about a trunk, glowed in the red light of her prisoner. She dangled him over the precipice. It was miraculous that she had caught the man, and Senlin couldn’t understand why she hesitated, why she didn’t just release the Red Hand to his fate.

  Still some strides away, Senlin heard the Red Hand speaking in a gargling, mangled voice. He said, “Wait, sister, wait! What will you say to the Sphinx? You cannot!”

  The bizarre nature of his appeal, this allusion to some familial connection, made Senlin shudder. Surely she wasn’t considering this monstrosity’s plea! Edith hadn’t a jot in common with this murderer.

  And still, impossible as it was, she hesitated. Senlin could not see her face in that stretched second in which she considered the Red Hand’s fate. Then her hand opened, and her arm dropped, and he was gone.

  Senlin reached her side feeling a burst of relief. Surely, he thought, it was only natural to hesitate before killing a fellow human being, no matter how vile and perverse. She had only deliberated a moment, allowing her conscience time to catch up with the conclusions of common sense and justice. She would never have let him live.

  Then Senlin saw that the little drawer in her shoulder plate was jutting out, offering its exhausted battery of red glowing serum for replacement. Her mighty brass arm hung dead at her side.

  She gave him a look that was both rueful and relieved. “And sometimes it runs out of steam at the exact right moment,” she said, echoing the conversation they’d had the night before. Senlin could think of nothing to say.

  Thunder sounded in the thick clouds of snow, then the thunder developed a whistle, and the whistle became an explosion against the face of the Tower. “They’re firing their cannons blind!” Senlin said, feeling almost glad; he’d rather be shot at than continue this unsettling moment. “We have to go before they get off a lucky shot. But first we have to get Iren.”

  Senlin collected his aerorod and Ogier’s painting of Marya, now scoured clean of the drug by the blasting snow, and then hurried with Edith to the collapsed crane. They found Iren half buried under a snowdrift and charred wood, unconscious but groaning. “Are you sure she wants to come with us? Did you recruit her or is this a kidnapping?” Edith asked. Senlin deliberated momentarily, then a cannonball struck the edge of the port where they had recently stood, raising a geyser of splinters.

  “Does it matter?” he said. They pulled her from the wreckage, Edith helping as best she could with one arm. They dragged the amazon like a sled to the gangplank of the Stone Cloud. It took everyone to help get her aboard. Adam reported the state of the ship as they worked to pass her over the gap. All was ready for launch.

  The cannon fire was more regular now but no less wild. The Ararat still hung, veiled by the clouds, not far from the port. Senlin had no interest in being swept in that direction. He could only trust that his escape draft had not been disrupted by the storm.

  Edith, naturally taking up the duties of first mate, orchestrated the launch. She stood at the helm, directing Voleta and Adam to release the mooring lines on her word. She cried, “Now!” in a voice that cut through wind and cannon blasts. As soon as the tethers were loose, she threw the lever, and the ballast hatch burst open, dropping its entire burden of salt water in an instant.

  The ship surged upward at a sickening pace. The wind bullied them back nearer the Tower, tail first. It seemed for a moment that they would be dashed against the impervious stone blocks, but then they slid into the current Senlin had discovered, and their deadly careening ceased. In the bat of an eye, the port of Goll fell behind the curtain of the storm. The guns of the Ararat retreated. They had escaped.

  But there was no time for a moment of triumph. They had no ballast and their course was set beyond their control. They were barreling up through the black into the bursting heart of the storm.

  Epilogue

  Taken From: Every Man’s Tower, O
ne Man’s Travails

  My old moniker has spoiled, much like a cracked egg, from exposure to air. “Thomas Senlin” has been too often on the lips of the imperious and the dangerous. Uttering it, even in alien lands, may ring bells that I’d rather leave unrung. So, I require a new name, and I have chosen one that is a ubiquitous curse: I am Tom Mudd, Captain of the Stone Cloud.

  As we set out, a frank assessment is required of our present state and stock. The ship is airworthy but wounded, and her crew is similarly imperfect. My first mate is a woman of infinite character and strength, but Edith, I suspect, is still tortured, despite the elaborate binding of her wounds. Her recent past is a riddle, and I fear she is concealing something vital and perhaps dangerous from all of us.

  I believe Adam, who must become our engineer, will be a loyal friend right until the wellbeing of his sister is in question. I don’t begrudge him this, but his inability to trust makes his devotion to her particularly treacherous. He will not share his deliberations, or divulge his decisions where she is involved. He would betray the world to save her from harm.

  If there is a bright and reliable spark on this ship, it is Voleta. She is braver and more capable than her brother admits. She will live, I think, up in the rigging. Already, she has climbed and shinnied across every surface of the ship like a squirrel; she has dangled from the anchor and surmounted the silk hill of the balloon. She is a born lookout, if ever there was one. Iren, of course, is our master-at-arms. She is the only one I’d trust with the cannon, and I think of her as our primary defender and tactician. I’m not wholly certain if she meant to come with us, or if she was merely swept into our pan by fate. However it was, I am glad to have her along.

  Our immediate problem is one of supplies. The ship was stripped before we wrenched her from the port. We are underequipped for any mission and are poor as paupers to boot. Our fuel is low, and we have had nothing to eat but squab since we left. In many ways, our desperation has increased since our escape, which goes a long way towards explaining why so few attempt it. With subjugation comes certainty. Liberty is full of gambles. But I meant what I said to Edith the evening before our odyssey began: we must share our burdens if we are to survive.

  As soon as we are bandaged and fed and our survival is no longer in doubt, I mean to proceed to the Ringdom of Pelphia, Seat of the Pells. Marya is waiting there, I am sure of it.

  The dose of White Chrom has yet to drain from my system, though I’m hopeful it will subside soon. I must admit that I am writing this in the presence of Marya’s ghost, which appears now with some regularity. She is dressed as she was on the train in her white blouse and red pith helmet. She is sitting with her hand upon mine; her skin is as pristine as a lily. It is terribly distracting and dangerously nostalgic. I must remind myself that Marya will not have gone unchanged by the Tower. I only need to look in the mirror to convince myself of that. She may be posing as another man’s wife, or she may have been ruined, as Voleta was so nearly ruined, or she might be mangled, like poor Edith.

  Whatever Marya’s state, whatever mine, I will find her, and I will carry her home.

  - Tom Mudd, Captain of the Stone Cloud.

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  If you’d like to read more, you can purchase Book II in the Books of Babel series, Arm of the Sphinx, here.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Josiah Bancroft’s poetry has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, such as: the Cimarron Review, the Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, the Pinch, Natural Bridge, Rattle, Passages North, Slice Magazine, The American Literary Review, Third Coast, and Bomb Magazine: Word Choice. He resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  More examples of his work, including updates on upcoming installments in the Books of Babel series, can be found at www.thebooksofbabel.com.