Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  “I don’t feel comfortable releasing my property to strangers.”

  “I would not ask to, Commissioner. In fact, the process I have in mind requires only sunlight. Direct exposure to sun, I’ve learned, neutralizes almost any pollutant, though with paintings the exposure must be managed to avoid bleaching and craquelure.” Craquelure was one of the more obscure painting terms he had gleaned from his studies. He used it now to establish his credentials, and it seemed to have the desired effect: the Commissioner smiled. “Perhaps, you could rope off a little corner at one of your skyports...”

  The smile vanished, replaced by a scowl, straight as a mail slot. “The port? Out of the question. It’s impossible to secure. Beside the professional sinners, the pirates and smugglers, there is a whole host of amateur cretins: imbeciles, drunks, henchmen, lapdogs, whores, spoon-snatchers...” The Commissioner did not so much conclude his list as douse it with the tipping back of a champagne flute he snatched from a tray. This paranoid litany reminded Senlin of the charges he’d heard read before the boy was wrenched in two by the Red Hand.

  Despair welled within Senlin. His whole plan depended on this point; he had to separate the Commissioner from Ogier’s painting, had to get it out in the open and away from the agents and their cannons and vigilant dogs. Failing this, the rest of his plot was a useless ravel.

  Tarrou gave Senlin a discrete smirk, which he took to say, See how the plot collapses, Headmaster! Look at your three-legged, two-headed horse try to run!

  “Commissioner, if I may.” Tarrou swept his hat, which resembled a poisonous mushroom cap, from his head and genuflected. “There are many ways to cook an egg. As I recall, you own a little portion of the sun. Your solarium! Good for entertaining, yes, but also very secure. You once told me it was accessible only through the Bureau Building. Don’t your men have barracks there? What could be more secure? The professor can take his notes and watch the sun do its work.” Tarrou seemed very pleased with the suggestion, though Senlin hardly shared his enthusiasm. He wasn’t familiar with the Customs Bureau Building, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

  “It’s not an idiotic suggestion,” the Commissioner said, and Tarrou continued to charm him: the professor could act as their canary in the gold mine: when he no longer felt the tickle of perfume, the painting would be declared fit for the Commissioner’s air.

  The Commissioner was soon persuaded. He invited Senlin to his Solarium in the morning. “I’ll tell my men to expect you. I will desire a copy of your book, once it’s published,” the Commissioner said in parting, sliding now towards other guests inside his mansion. “I trust I’ll get a mention in the credits.”

  “I will dedicate it to your generosity,” Senlin said, smiling as he bowed.

  Chapter Eight

  “Often the simplest way to unlock a door is to knock upon it.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, IV. I

  Overnight, the champagne bubbles turned to sand, and Senlin woke to a heavy head.

  He rolled from the rut in the hotel mattress and turned up the gaslight by his bedside. The light pinched his eyes, and he grimaced. His coat, trousers, shirt, socks and boots lay in a trail across the floor.

  Foggily, he recalled celebrating with Tarrou after leaving the Commissioner’s gala. His friend had begun the revelry by kicking his ridiculous hat into the reservoir and hiking a jeroboam of champagne onto his thick shoulder. Senlin had no idea where he’d gotten the huge bottle. Tarrou insisted that they go carousing. Before Senlin could protest, Tarrou tipped the jeroboam toward him, dousing Senlin’s face, compelling him to gulp defensively. Oh, he wished he could pretend he had been coerced! But when Tarrou said, “Go to bed if you must, Tom. I am a fly who lives for a day! I must buzz until I die,” Senlin had gone off buzzing willingly.

  He poured water into the chipped ceramic basin atop the hotel vanity and splashed his face. He shaved slowly in the mirror without looking himself in the eye. He couldn’t fathom why the evening deserved celebrating. His plan, ill conceived as it had been from the beginning, was spoiled. What was there to celebrate?

  His plan had been to get the painting out in the open where there were more escape routes and fewer agents. A bustling skyport had seemed the most opportune place; it was as chaotic as the customs gate but not as heavily patrolled. Shiploads of wealthy tourists arrived almost hourly at the port. Distractions would be plentiful. Senlin would wait until a tourist, some socialite with a birdcage stuffed full of bank notes, caught the agents’ attention. Amidst the furor, he would swap the original of Girl with a Paper Boat for one of Ogier’s inferior copies. The artist said he had many, and hopefully one would be serviceable. Senlin doubted the agents would notice the difference (they weren’t art critics, after all), and he hoped it would be days or weeks before the Commissioner studied the painting closely enough to realize that he had been robbed. By then, Senlin would be halfway home with Marya on his arm.

  Such a pretty delusion!

  Tarrou had been right to call his plan a three-legged, two-headed horse. Tarrou doubted Senlin was capable of the sleight of hand a swap required, doubted that Senlin would be able to remove the painting from its frame in the span of a few moments. And how did he propose to sneak the copy in or the original out? Did he intend to stuff it down his shirtfront?

  It hardly mattered anymore. He had failed to convince the Commissioner to move the painting to the port. Now he would have to brave the headquarters of the Bureau, which Tarrou had described as a hive of offices, barracks, armories, and oubliettes. Perhaps his chances of stealing the painting had been better while it still hung in the Commissioner’s mansion. There was nothing to do now but carry on and hope for an opportunity.

  As soon as he had reassembled himself, Senlin went to the concierge of his hotel and requested a blank sheet of stationary. The concierge, who weeks ago had marked Senlin as a poor guest who tipped accordingly, offered him a thin, musty, slightly crumpled sheet. Too queasy to respond to the slight, Senlin took the paper and penned a note to the artist.

  Dear O,

  I need a good copy of the Girl. Bring it to the café this evening.

  Yours,

  S

  He hoped the artist would interpret it correctly. It seemed prudent to be discreet. He addressed the folded note to Ogier’s perfumery apartment and gave it to the concierge to deliver. The concierge was surprised then to receive a shekel, a reasonable tip. This wasn’t the time to be frugal; Senlin needed to know the note would be delivered. The concierge snapped a young porter over, then graced Senlin with a prim bow.

  Senlin might have been more gratified by the rare expression of respect if it hadn’t reduced him to his last six shekels. He was almost broke. The next time he saw Tarrou, he would have to compound his debt of gratitude by asking for a loan.

  In the narrow back alleys of the Baths, under the flags of drying hotel sheets, an aged peddler sat behind a ratty collection of books, splayed across a threadbare rug. If Senlin hoped to impersonate an art critic, he’d need something to write upon.

  He asked for a journal, and was offered a book bound in rawhide. It was roughly cut but sturdy. The first ten pages were filled with some poor sot’s attempt at romantic verse. Senlin scanned a few lines: “The gleeking hippopotami sprays our paddleboat. Your flaxy hair swamps the prow, as I row your petticoats.”

  He cringed. After paying the seller two pence for the diary, he ripped the poems out.

  The Customs building clung to the chamber wall like an immense mollusk. Its rearmost cornerstones, each twice the height of a man, melded with the limestone superstructure of the Tower. The Bureau, set too far from the dazzling mirror balls, sat in permanent twilight. Tongues of condensation and swarthy lichen darkened its granite masonry. The building reminded him of a mossy castle keep. Arrow loops, crudely paned over with foggy glass, slitted the walls, while high above, men patrolled the ramparts. Agents flowed in and out of the entrance, black shellacked batons gleam
ing at their hips. The raised portcullis inside the archway reminded him of a wolf’s open mouth.

  He reset his satchel’s strap on his shoulder and allowed himself a deep and settling breath. He must do this for Marya. He must pretend to be brave.

  True to his word, the Commissioner had made preparations for Senlin’s visit. The agent stationed at a rosewood podium beneath a now-familiar black banner recognized Senlin’s name immediately and called over a cadet who had been pushing a broom about the lobby. The acned youth, dressed in a pale blue version of the customs uniform, was told to escort Senlin to the solarium. The cadet clicked his heels and saluted with a curt chop of his arm. The young man’s glassy-eyed obedience struck Senlin as tragic; he had seen how much esteem the Customs Bureau had for youth. He had watched, and watched again in his nightmares, a boy’s head pulled from his body like a cork from a bottle.

  The interior of the Bureau was whitewashed and lit with electric bulbs that burned bright as crucibles. Racks of rifles and sabers were around every corner. Iron doors rasped open and clanged shut. Boot heels rang against the flagstone floor like hailstones. Senlin couldn’t tell if the distant human sounds he heard were those of men howling with laughter or wailing in pain. He was still waiting to feel brave. He felt as brittle and small as a piece of chalk.

  They passed a map room that was glassed in like a terrarium. Inside, models of the Tower stood on pedestals. Like countries on a map, each ringdom was painted a different color. It was incredible to consider how much of the Tower still lay unexplored above him. A few officers stood about a teacart parked outside the map room, their double-breasted jackets open and showing a red lining. They watched Senlin like cats, their posture relaxed, their eyes active. The cadet hustled on, unfazed. Senlin was glad to have the excuse to hurry past the officers. He was then led through a barracks that was large enough to be measured in acres. A team of laundry women stripped the bedclothes from the rows of bunks. It was obvious the Commissioner had an army of men at his disposal.

  Senlin matched the cadet’s brisk pace for a quarter hour before it occurred to him that the facade of the Customs Bureau had been much too shallow to accommodate such a long walk. But then it only made sense: the entire building had been carved out of the Tower wall like a rabbit warren in a hillside. Every step forward brought him nearer to sunlight.

  They came at last to a spiraling stair that ended at a large, ironbound door. The cadet stopped and swiveled on Senlin, his young, ruddy face straining with the effort of making eye contact with his taller charge. “I beg your pardon, but may I ask a question, sir?”

  Senlin nodded, stiff with surprise.

  “What is spring like?” the cadet asked. He was obviously uncomfortable with addressing Senlin, and so he hurried on. “I’ve read that the ground breaks open and all the flowers leap out at once. Does it make a sound? Does the Earth shake? What does it smell like?”

  Senlin’s concentrated frown lifted at the corners. He recognized it was a genuine question, so he rallied to respond with a sincere answer. “Spring is gray and miserable and rainy for three or four weeks while the snow melts. The ditches turn into creeks and everything you own is clammy as a frog belly. Then one morning, you walk outside and the sun is out and the clover has grown over the ditches and the trees are pointed with leaves, like ten thousand green arrowheads, and the air smells like...” and here he had to fumble for a phrase, “like a roomful of stately ladies and one wet dog.”

  The cadet considered this with smirking wonder, then his face blanked and his back went ramrod straight again. “Thank you, sir,” he said, clicked his heels once and retreated. Senlin watched him go and marveled at the idea: to have lived and never seen springtime. The boy may never have even set foot on the ground. Surely that would be the case with more and more people, the further up one climbed.

  He refocused himself on the door and turned the thick knob.

  Blinded and teary-eyed, Senlin stood blinking in the doorway of the solarium. He felt an unanticipated swelling sense of relief at seeing the sun again. He felt like a drowning man who had come again, at least briefly, to the surface.

  The solarium protruded from the Tower’s facade like a blister. A half-dome of framed glass peaked twenty feet overhead. Light streaked across a meticulously waxed parquet floor, which stood empty except for an easel and a chair. A lone agent with a grandfatherly paunch and a gray drooping mustache presented himself with a similarly droopy salute, his head dipping to meet his raised hand in a halfhearted effort. Despite his languidness, Senlin did not overlook the long flintlock pistol jutting from his belt.

  “I am Kristof,” he said. “You are the critic with mud on his boots.” Kristof regarded him with what seemed paternal suspicion, and Senlin felt like a boy caught rifling through his father’s pockets. “Please present your bag for inspection.” Kristof took Senlin’s satchel, feeling along its seams, first squeezing and then probing its pockets. He glanced over Senlin’s guidebook, wrapped lunch, and empty notebook. While Kristof riffled through his pitiful belongings, Senlin’s eyes adjusted enough to see past the dazzling light and into the landscape. “Pull up your sleeves for me, sir,” the agent asked with a little impatient wave, as if this were obviously routine. Senlin showed Kristof the thin reeds of his forearms, the pale onion bulbs of his elbows.

  In the far distance at the edge of the arid basin, mountains cut upon a cloudless sky, the same mountains their honeymoon train had climbed weeks earlier, the same mountains where they had made use of the privacy of their sleeper car even as it yawed back with the train’s ascent, and their ears popped, and their hearts flew against their ribs like caged birds.

  Though it was not this tender memory that held his attention now because here in the immediate foreground the balloons of an airship rippled grandly in the wind. Not one balloon, but three, each separately larger than any single gas envelope he’d ever seen.

  Senlin had once been to a fair where a hobbyist with a hot air balloon gave tethered rides for a shekel. He’d been too shy of heights to buy a ticket, but had watched the gondola float up and slide down for hours. That balloon had seemed large as the moon at the time, though it only had to lift a small jute basket and a couple of brave souls two hundred feet into the air. The trio of balloons he gaped at now seemed like planets in comparison. Senlin took two steps to see past the horizon of the handrail that encircled the solarium, so that he could see what sort of magnificent vessel required three Jupiters to hold it aloft.

  The vessel dangled from a jungle of cords. It hardly looked like a sea-going ship, as airships often did. Rather, it looked like a coliseum that had been yanked from the earth. He counted three levels of hatches, and saw at the base of it an open drawbridge. The ship was moored to the immense cantilever of the skyport. From one of the ship’s rails the same black and red flag that hung in the Commissioner’s mansion twisted in the wind.

  “She carries seventy-eight guns,” Kristof surprised Senlin by speaking just over his shoulder, his breath stinking like a barman’s rag. Senlin stiffened but did not turn. “Thirty-two pound demi-cannons that could put a dimple in a mountain. Her hull is one-hundred and sixteen feet across, one hundred and eighty-three around. I walked the watch on her for eighteen years, until finally,” he backed away and slapped his gut which bounced against his hand like a drum, “I’d had my fill.”

  “What’s she called?” Senlin asked.

  Kristof’s neck piled under his chin and spilled over his corn-starched collar. He seemed to be sizing Senlin up. “You really do have mud on your shoes. Thick mud. Everyone knows that ship. That is the Commissioner’s flying fortress, the Ararat.”

  Senlin shrugged at his ignorance. “She looks fierce.”

  “Good, because it hangs like a millstone and pitches around like a bat. Once the guns start firing, it’s a victory if you hold on to your breakfast,” Kristof belched and then waved Senlin toward the chair that faced the easel and the center of the room. “Look at the pa
inting. Make your jots. Our talk has made me nostalgic.”

  Kristof began pacing the perimeter of the solarium with a laborious and shuffling step, his blue cap drawn low over his eyes. Sometimes, when he passed behind Senlin’s line of sight, Senlin would hear the gurgle of a tipped bottle.

  Senlin pretended to study Ogier’s painting. With the glass removed and the sun, the real sun, adding to the dazzling spectacle of the little painted scene, it seemed more wonderful than it had on the Commissioner’s wall. Even so, Senlin only pretended to observe it. He made little nonsensical notes and uttered thoughtful exclamations of discovery. Whenever he could, he glanced at Kristof in his slow orbit. He was trying to deduce the man’s intelligence. Kristof seemed a little exhausted by life, a little drunk, but Senlin did not think he was as lackadaisical as he appeared. This was an easy assignment. It was the type of soft work that was given as a reward to a good soldier, a vigilant and perhaps wily one.

  Senlin invited Kristof to share his lunch. He hoped to stir a little more casual conversation between them. They sat, Kristof on the floor, Senlin in the only chair, eating the cold chicken kabobs Senlin had brought. Once they finished, Kristof produced a second lunch from his coat pocket, and ate it without offering Senlin any. He expressed no interest in any of the olive branches of small talk Senlin offered, responding only with long, bovine looks. Kristof chewed, a little cow-mouthed, apparently untroubled by thought, his eyes red at the corners. Senlin wondered if he hadn’t given Kristof too much credit; perhaps he was a simple man who could recite a few technical details. He could be some captain’s daft uncle or the childhood friend of a far-removed duke, for all he knew.

  After another two hours, the sun fell dead even with the little room, and began baking rather than lighting the air. Dabbing the back of his neck with a handkerchief, Senlin proclaimed his work done for the day, though he promised to return the following morning. He directed Kristof to remove the painting to a shadier room in the internal halls, instructions which Kristof received with a poorly stifled yawn. Kristof again examined Senlin’s satchel, saying in parting, “I may ask you a question tomorrow, Mr. Mud.”