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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Josiah Bancroft
Excerpt from The Books of Babel: Book IV copyright © 2019 by Josiah Bancroft
Excerpt from Empire of Sand copyright © 2018 by Tasha Suri
Excerpt from The Gutter Prayer copyright © 2018 by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Author photograph by Kim Bricker
Cover art by Ian Leino
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Map by Josiah Bancroft
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2019
First Edition: January 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-0-316-51798-0 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-51805-5 (ebook)
E3-20181108-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part I: The Mermaid
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
The Black Trail
Part II: The Leaping Lady
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
The Black Trail
Part III: The Gold Watch
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
The Black Trail
Acknowledgments
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of The Books of Babel: Book IV
A Preview of Empire of Sand
A Preview of The Gutter Prayer
By Josiah Bancroft
Praise for The Books of Babel
Orbit Newsletter
For Barber,
who left us with too many stories untold.
Truth does not erode, nor forgive any debt.
A child may recall what her father would forget.
—I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet
Part I
The Mermaid
Chapter One
Some men seem to think that temperance is preservative, that moderation somehow pickles the soul. They would place their beating hearts inside jam jars if they could. Which does beg the question, what on earth are they saving themselves for?
—Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie
The sun clacked along an iron track among the gaslight stars high above the white city of Pelphia. The domed ceiling was a perfect shade of sky blue, except where the paint had flaked away, leaving behind jagged clouds of naked mortar. Gas flames ringed the smiling face of the mechanical sun, which left a trail of soot in its slow circuit over the city. In the evening, the sun set inside a ballroom, built to evoke a great nimbus cloud, called Horizon Hall. In addition to acting as the sun’s stable, Horizon Hall was the site of frequent and often wild galas. It wasn’t uncommon for the sun to rise late, delayed by gears that were clogged with confetti, vomit, and undergarments. And every so often, when repairs to the sun were particularly slow, Pelphia would experience an eclipse that might last two or three days. In more sophisticated ringdoms, such a span of unanticipated darkness could easily have triggered riots, if not a revolution, but in Pelphia, these protracted periods of dark were hardly remarked upon because no one wished to be the yawning party pooper who said, “It seems to have gotten terribly late, hasn’t it? Perhaps we should call it a night?”
The ringdom’s king behaved more like a court jester than a regent, and was beloved for it, much in the same way a permissive father is adored by his unruly brats. The ringdom attracted the occasional tourists from the far-flung coasts and hills of Ur, but Pelphia’s only reliable industry was the production of fabric and its transformation into high fashion. The upper ringdoms of the Tower were loath to admit that they took any cues from such an ancient and ironically juvenile ringdom, but for all their irritating histrionics, Pelphians had a knack for buttons, thread, and taffeta. It was for this reason the fifth ringdom was sometimes called the Closet.
But while the rest of the Tower only recognized the customary four seasons of fashion, the obsessed natives of Pelphia somehow managed to squeeze fifteen or sixteen seasons into a single year. The dressmakers, cobblers, haberdashers, and tailors were in constant competition, hoping to spark the next craze even as they indulged the present one. Wars were waged from the shopwindows of the most famous clothiers, until one neckline or hem or hue rose above the rest, and a new fad overwhelmed the last. Then the population would change color as quickly and uniformly as a forest in fall.
But the natives’ obsession with appearances did not extend to their streets. Pelphians were terrible litterers. The white cobbles of Pelphia were often obscured by trash. Playhouse programs, handkerchiefs, dance cards, love notes, the feeble heels of ambitious shoes, and a thousand tokens of unwanted affection overwhelmed the gutters. Early each morning, while half the city groaned through hangovers and dawning regrets, hundreds of hods emerged from alley shacks with brooms, brushes, and pots of whitewash to paint over the graffiti and lamp soot. The army of indentured cleaners blanched the ringdom from port to piazza, where the spine of the Tower rose from the city’s center like a pole in a circus tent.
Pelphia’s three most ancient institutions stood in the shadow of the ringdom�
��s spine: the Circuit of Court, a sprawling, winding hedge of silk and wire; the Vivant Music Hall, a cathedral that seemed as frail as a bleached reef; and the Colosseum. Once, the Colosseum had been a university, and its fat columns and carved gables still bore the evidence of that former use. Scenes of laureled philosophers and robed poets still decorated its high lintels, though the bottom halves of those women and men had been chiseled away. The remaining legless figures looked like bathers wading into deep water. The colonnade entrance, once as wide as a town square, had been shrunk by the addition of iron bars and a cage door that was never unguarded.
Inside the Colosseum, a cheering crowd watched two half-naked men fight like dogs.
The battling hods shoved each other about the red clay ring. Their iron collars clanged together as they grappled and strained. In the surrounding bleachers, where students had once sat absorbing the day’s lecture, men now shook their betting slips and shouted themselves crimson.
A lavish balcony haloed the common bleachers. Its railing, sparsely attended a moment before, now grew crowded with noblemen attracted by the uproar. They peered down at the brawl, sipping leaf-green liqueur from crystal glasses and smoking black cigarillos that stank like wet bedclothes. Magpies and doves swooped about the great dome overhead, driven from their nests by the mounting noise.
Trembling from the effort, the old hod lifted the youth over his head and held him on his shoulders like the yoke of an ox. He turned in a slow circle, showing every seat his defeated rival, who had not ten minutes before strutted out of the tunnel, thumping his chest. The mob bayed. The old hod drove the youth to the ground, where he bounced once and settled in a prostrate sprawl.
Every spectator in the arena—save one—made thunder with his hands. The victorious hod paraded with his arms up, his expression as inscrutable as an executioner’s hood.
A team of groomers emerged from the tunnels that ran under the stands. Some raked the clay; others dragged the moaning youth underground. The victor was gathered last, his iron collar hooked to a pair of poles, by which he was escorted from the floor amid a shower of losing betting slips.
In the arena’s lower tier, the man who refused to clap scanned the balcony railing, studying the faces of the noblemen in military and dining jackets. They did not pay him the compliment of acknowledgment.
As a wanted man, Thomas Senlin found the snub amusing. But the same realities that had frustrated his own search for Marya now befuddled the ringdom’s search for him. The Tower overwrote the obsessions and longings of men and women with an indifference so intense it almost seemed purposeful. One did not have to hide long nor change much to disappear inside the churning mass. Thomas Senlin had slipped again into the camouflage of the crowd. It didn’t hurt his anonymity that the published bounty for the pirate Tom Mudd included a sketch of a much fiercer-looking man, with an anvil chin, cannonball cheeks, and a gaze like a crucible full of slag. Perhaps Commissioner Pound had been too embarrassed to describe the man who’d robbed and eluded him honestly as a thin man with kindly eyes and a nose like a rudder.
The crowd funneled from the bleachers to the lobby, a great vaulted room that didn’t so much echo as boom with voices and commotion. A rowdy queue formed at the concessionary, where cloudy beer was being poured and splashed upon the floor. Another line grew about the betting cages, where guards in severe black-and-gold uniforms watched the room for men who were overly drunk or overly distraught. Finding any such show of excess, the guards offered a first warning by rifle butt and a second warning by bayonet.
Caught for the moment in the human vortex, Senlin engaged in some idle eavesdropping. Most of what he heard just concerned the last fight or the next, but one conversation distinguished itself from the rest.
“I heard they’re recalling Commissioner Pound,” a man in a plum-colored vest said.
“It wasn’t in the Reverie this morning,” his companion complained.
“It will be tomorrow, I’d wager. Commissioner Pound: outwitted by a pirate named Mudd!”
“How quick the wind turns!”
Senlin resisted the urge to pull up his collar.
Wedging through, he splashed across a growing lagoon of beer and made his way to the balcony entrance.
A pair of sharp-eyed guards stood at the base of the balcony stairs. They shared a common uniform, which included a gold sash, a saber, a pistol, and, apparently, a mustache. Senlin tried not to look at the swords that hung on their hips as he smiled and said, “Hello!”
One of the guards shifted his forward gaze just long enough to size Senlin up. And seeing nothing deserving further conversation, he looked away.
Senlin reached into his coat pocket, a movement that inspired both men to show him several inches of their swords. With the slow care of a surgeon navigating a wound, Senlin drew out his billfold. He extracted a stiff white card and a five-mina banknote, an amount that once upon a time would’ve been enough to feed his crew for six months. “Perhaps you could give my calling card to the club manager.” The nearest guard, whose mustache had been waxed into two perfect loops, took the money and card. “With my warmest regards,” Senlin said with a wink.
The guard ripped the card and the banknote, turned them, and tore again. He dropped the scraps at Senlin’s feet. Even as Senlin looked down at his destroyed offering, the guard gripped one sleeve of his coat and ripped it half from his shoulder. He repeated the treatment on the other sleeve.
Before he could speak, Senlin was brusquely elbowed aside by the arrival of several men in suits that were as black and sleek as hot tar. The guards saluted, and one said, “Good afternoon, Sir Wilhelm.” Ignoring them, the nobleman continued a cheerful conversation with his companions, all of whom seemed oblivious to the man in a torn gray coat.
This was not Senlin’s first glimpse of the handsome duke, but it was the closest he’d come to the man who’d made off with Marya. Senlin pictured himself stealing the guard’s sidearm. Pictured the shot striking the duke, pictured him crying out in surprise, clutching the mortal wound as he fell at Senlin’s feet in a lifeless knot. Doubtlessly, he would be dead a moment after the duke, leaving Marya twice-widowed and half-rescued. And that assumed she wished to be saved. It was a question only she could answer, and he could not ask.
Senlin had the Sphinx to thank for this absurd state of affairs.
Three days prior, the Sphinx had wasted no time introducing Senlin to his role as contracted spy.
Mere hours after the Sphinx had unveiled Edith’s astonishing new command, the State of Art, he led Senlin down the rose-colored canyon of his home, through one of a hundred indistinguishable doors, and into a queer and cramped dressing room.
Sizing charts hung upon the walls. A seamstress’s dummy stood in one corner, wire ribs rusting through cotton skin. Much of the room was dominated by an immense wardrobe. It quivered and rumbled like a boiling pot. Brass tumblers and dials consumed one of the wardrobe’s doors. Byron, the Sphinx’s stag-headed footman, attended these controls, making minute adjustments and muttering to himself. The Sphinx loomed in one corner, his black robes long and tapering. He looked like a leech with a mirror in its mouth.
Senlin hardly glanced at the Sphinx or his curious wardrobe, which seemed part closet and part engine. His sense of wonder had been depleted by his time in the Bottomless Library, where he had been forcibly nursed off the Crumb with the assistance of nightmares, booby traps, and a feline librarian. He hadn’t yet had time to fully absorb the mysterious vault the Sphinx had shown him, the so-called “Bridge,” which the Brick Layer had built to hold an untold something and sealed for reasons also unspoken. And that was to say nothing of the loss of Senlin’s former command, nor his ill-advised visit to Edith’s room and the kiss they’d shared with the sort of starved passion one expects of the young. It all left him feeling out of sorts.
And then Byron told him to strip to his underclothes.
He reluctantly did, and Byron assaulted him—throat, shoulder, w
aist, and inseam—with a tailor’s tape he pulled from his pocket. Every new measurement sent Byron back to the wardrobe to turn one tumbler or another.
Senlin was so distracted by the process that he was slow to absorb the Sphinx’s announcement that he would not be traveling with his old crewmates aboard the State of Art and would instead go on ahead to Pelphia, early and alone.
Senlin’s voice rose with his alarm: “But why? We’re all going to the same place, aren’t we? What possible reason could you have for dividing us?”
“Will you stop fidgeting!” Byron said, cinching his tape about Senlin’s chest.
“You mean breathing? Am I being fitted for a casket?”
“Not yet!” Byron said.
“Stop it, both of you.” The Sphinx’s voice buzzed and crackled over the humming of the wardrobe. “Senlin, please reassure me that you’re not an absolute fool. Tell me, why would it be a mistake for all of you to march, arm in arm, into Pelphia together?”
Ignoring Byron’s probing as best he could, Senlin said, “I suppose it might make us easier to recognize. We are a rather … memorable troop.”
“Ah! It’s good to see the Crumb didn’t cook your brains entirely.”
The stag bleated in frustration. “You’d think your ears were on your hips, the way you twist about!”
Senlin was too distracted to return Byron’s quip. “So I’m to go alone?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Tom! We’ll exchange messages every day,” the Sphinx said, and when Senlin asked how such a thing would be done, the Sphinx described his mechanical moths, which were predecessors to the clockwork butterflies Senlin had already seen. “The moths are more rudimentary; they record sound but not sight. But for the purpose of correspondence, they’re more than sufficient. Byron will intercept your missives from the State of Art, pass on any pertinent information to the crew, then send them on to me. You’ll only be alone in body. In spirit, we’ll be as close as moth and flame.”
“Splendid,” Senlin murmured.
“Now, I know you will be tempted to look for your wife, especially once the inevitable lonesomeness sets in. But listen to me: You will make no effort to contact your wife when you—”
The Hod King Page 1