SENLIN ASCENDS by Josiah Bancroft

Read a sample from SENLIN ASCENDS by Josiah Bancroft

Chapter 4

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The camaraderie between travelers becomes more palpable the closer one draws to the Tower. Do not be surprised if you find yourself swept up in a spontaneous parade.

—Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, II. XIV

The cloud of red dust surged at them so rapidly it was as if they were falling into it. Senlin shielded his face a split second before splinters and pebbles began to pelt him. A piece of shrapnel passed through his splayed fingers and stung his cheek. He clapped his hand over the flash of pain. The debris pinged and ricocheted everywhere, needling his skin and crackling against the Tower. A series of hollow whumps reverberated through the ground, drumming the earth like meteors.

When he dared to squint again into the billowing, blotting storm of red grit, he couldn’t see any farther than his hand. He watched the blood on his fingers quickly turn to mud. A moment later, the hail changed direction. Instead of coming in sideways, the ejecta began to rain dryly on their shoulders and the tops of their heads.

Adam, coughing into the crook of his arm, emerged from the dusky haze at Senlin’s side, looking unsteady but uninjured. Senlin pulled the lapel of his corduroy jacket over his mouth and nose and tried to draw a clear breath amid the scattering fog. The initial screams of shock, briefly silenced by the crash, now began to rise again. The tone of the cries had changed. The fear and surprise were gone, replaced by excitement, eagerness… delight. A breeze swept the red cloud away, unveiling the wreckage, hardly a stone’s throw distant from them.

Much of the wreck was draped and snagged with tattered silk that billowed like cobwebs in the wind. As the air cleared further, he began to make out the tangled limbs of bodies amid the wreckage: a limp hand dangling from a broken wrist, a knee bent unnaturally under a turned foot, a man cracked like a broken book with the back of his head between his heels. The separate whumps he’d heard had not been falling stars, but tumbling, doomed aeronauts.

Senlin loved nothing more in the world than a warm hearth to set his feet upon and a good book to pour his whole mind into. While an evening storm rattled the shutters and a glass of port wine warmed in his hand, Senlin would read into the wee hours of the night. He especially delighted in the old tales, the epics in which heroes set out on some impossible and noble errand, confronting the dangers in their path with fatalistic bravery. Men often died along the way, killed in brutal and unnatural ways; they were gored by war machines, trampled by steeds, and dismembered by their heartless enemies. Their deaths were boastful and lyrical and always, always more romantic than real. Death was not an end. It was an ellipsis.

There was no romance in the scene before him. There were no ellipses here. The bodies lay upon the ground like broken exclamation points.

It had been an airship. The enmeshed corpses had been her crew. What or who had brought it down, Senlin couldn’t guess, but he knew with absolute certainty that just minutes before it had been a graceful machine of flight bobbing in the blue sky.

Even as this morbid realization dawned on him, the wreck was swamped by Market-goers. Corpulent merchants and stiff-legged soldiers scrabbled through the cracked ribs of the hull, turning through the shambles of crates and cargo. Well-dressed men in brushed bowlers and women in holiday bonnets followed near behind, lured into the Skirts by the promise of loot. The cries Senlin heard were not of rescue or of mourning, but of laying claim: “Mine! I saw it first! I had it in my hand before you!” They scoured the ship’s wreckage with the efficiency of crabs cleaning the bones of a beached fish. Some ran off clutching armfuls of silk, the bottom half of a keg of grain, a coil of rope, an iron cannonball, a bent brass monkey, a pair of cuffed boots. Then men with crowbars came and salvaged planks, rails, hatches, and even one miraculously preserved pane of stained glass.

Senlin couldn’t look away, though the sight sickened him. He was shocked to see such barbarism at the foot of the Tower of Babel. Such desperation! He wanted to gather all the looters up, sit them in rows, face them forward, and remind them of their civility. Desperate times were never improved by the surrendering of ideals!

In a very few minutes, the only thing that remained of the disaster was a crater, a fine confetti of debris, and the nearly stripped bodies of the crew.

And then, as if a curtain had been drawn over the whole shameful scene, the shadow of the Tower passed over them.

The semigloom of the Tower’s nightfall made Senlin shiver. He cleared his throat and turned toward Adam, silhouetted by the rapidly fleeing line of sunlight. “Who will bury them?” Senlin rubbed tenderly at the dust-clotted gash in his cheek.

“The vultures,” Adam said grimly. “We should go. The passage into the Basement is a little long.” He loosed his leather belt from his canvas trousers, forming a loop with the buckle on one end. He pulled the loop around his wrist and offered the other end to Senlin. Though a little chagrined, Senlin took the leash. “Hold to it. The passage gets a little pinched.”

He followed after Adamos like a sleepy dog walker, or, conversely, like a sleepy dog. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the woman with darkly ringed eyes pull a candle stub from her dress pocket. She struck a match, set it to the wick, and continued reading the letters of the lost by the candle’s jaundiced light.

Three months earlier Senlin had stood at the head of his classroom, pinching a diamond of chalk and sketching the last angle in a diagram of the Tower of Babel.

A windowless house with large gables, the school sat on blocks at the end of Isaugh’s main avenue. Each spring, the schoolhouse was painted white as a bride, and every year the oceanic elements slowly undressed it. Senlin loved every knot in every board of that leaky, drafty house.

He wore the long black coat and slender black trousers that were his uniform and preference. His voice filled the room to the high, bare rafters. The tufts of a bird’s nest showed on the central beam. “At its base, the Tower of Babel’s wall is a quarter mile thick,” Senlin said. “Which means the entrances to the Tower—there are eight—must carry visitors through a quarter mile of solid stone.” He turned on his boot heel, square coattails flaring at his hip, and regarded the four rows of ancient cedar desks. His current students were the usual crop: straight-backed, sleepy-eyed boys and girls, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. He tapped the chalk diamond to his temple. “Imagine that. You go home and open the front door to your house, and then have to walk five hundred paces before you’re even inside the mudroom. That’s quite a threshold! And then you’ll have only arrived in the first ringdom of the Tower.”

When they didn’t respond with the astonished looks he thought the subject deserved, he called upon the lad in the back row, Colin Weeks, who had gone nearly walleyed from daydreaming. “Mr. Weeks, remind the class what a ringdom is?”

Startled out of his reverie, Mr. Weeks lurched forward in his seat, pegging his stomach on the lip of the desk and inducing a little grunt. “Oof,” he said. Seats creaked as the heads of other students turned toward him. The barn swallow in the rafters let out a poorly timed warble.

“Miss Stubbs, I trust that you completed the assigned reading. Can you come to Mr. Weeks’s assistance?” Senlin said, turning to a sharp-nosed girl who occupied the front row like the proud figurehead of a ship.

“Yes, Headmaster. The levels of the Tower are called ringdoms because they are like little round kingdoms,” she said in a piercing but intelligent tone. “They’re like the thirty-six states of Ur, each unique in their way, but instead of being spread out across the map, the ringdoms are stacked up like a birthday cake.” The class tittered at her spontaneous analogy, amused to think of the great Tower of Babel as a layered cake.

“Quite so. And does the Tower of Babel have a king?” Senlin curtly clapped chalk from his palms.

“It has many monarchies and democracies and bureaucracies, too,” she said. “It’s like a mincemeat pie. It’s full of all sorts of exotic ingredients.” The class laughed again, and this time Senlin smiled a little, which made the eager Ms. Stubbs blush.

“Very good, though your analogies make me wonder if you aren’t a little hungry.” Squaring his mouth, Senlin marched along the length of the board, canvased with equations and corrected lines of doggerel, to the bisected sketch of the Tower’s lower levels: the Basement, Parlor, and Baths. “Of course, we don’t know how many ringdoms there are in all because they have not been reliably documented. The permanent clouds about its pinnacle make ground observations impossible.”

“Why not just fly an airship to the top of it and stake a flag for Isaugh?” a voice from the middle row asked.

“A good question”—Senlin craned about to see who had asked the question, and found him—“Mr. Gregor. But think of it this way… I know you have a little rowboat. I’ve seen you oaring it around the cove all weekend. Now, what would happen if you pulled your boat into the best slip in the marina? You know the one, right front and center and wide as the schoolyard.”

“Old Captain Cuthbert would drop his anchor on it.”

“Why?”

“It’s his slip!” the boy cried, with an exasperated flourish of his hands.

“Exactly so. And if you rowed your boat across the Niro Ocean, to some exotic port that was guarded by forts and long guns and a fleet of warships, how well would you be received? What if they didn’t like the look of a young scamper like yourself plowing along in your dingy?” Mr. Gregor smiled and snorted at this, folding his arms. “It’s just so with the Tower, I suspect, Mr. Gregor. You can’t expect every port to welcome you with open arms.”

He dismissed the class for the day. In the coatroom, they pulled on their boots, their voices giddy. It was raining outside, as it often did throughout the spring. The water gurgled under the floorboards of the schoolhouse, filling the classroom with the aroma of earth. His students knew well enough not to bang the door on their way out, but their escape was boisterous in every other way. Not even the cold drizzle could dull their relief at being freed for the day.

Little did they know, he enjoyed the momentary liberty, too.

Drawing the chalk duster dreamily across the blackboard, carving away at the diagram of the Tower, Senlin imagined himself on the deck of an airship, circling the Tower, a spyglass to his eye…

He couldn’t help but scowl at the image. No, the Sturgeon would never turn into a bird.

The hard leather of Adam’s belt blistered his hand, and still he gripped it tighter.

The passage was indeed a quarter mile long, but otherwise, it bore no resemblance to Senlin’s fantasy. He’d expected graceful surfaces and an orderly thoroughfare. Instead he found a tunnel like a mineshaft. There were no lanes or rails. Inbound traffic battered against the outbound traffic like rams on a bridge.

Tourists, merchants, rogues, and wanderers buffeted him on every side. His toes were stamped, his heels shaved, and his elbows knocked numb. Smoke and soot from infrequent oil sconces burned his eyes like black pepper. He couldn’t catch a solid breath. The smoke undulated like an upside-down river along the iron rafters above them. The distressed bray of pack animals, the stubborn barking of the man that drove them, and the rattling sob of an overcome young woman were all amplified by the horn of the tunnel walls until Senlin felt he might scream and break into a run.

But there was no room to run and no good air to scream with.

The experience was so terrible and so at odds with his impression of the Tower that, even amid that chaotic slog, he convinced himself that it must be some anomaly, a fluke. Perhaps he was caught in the rush of an annual festival, or it might be that some regular mechanical device, a fan or regulator, had temporarily failed. For all he knew, he had blundered upon the servants’ entrance.

After two days of sleepless panic, the march and the bad air quickly exhausted him. When the press of bodies abruptly relaxed and the air sweetened a little, Senlin knew they were at last inside the first cavernous ringdom of the Tower, though he could not see it for the smoke in his eyes. He stumbled on tear-blurred cobblestones, half-blind, and landed on one trembling knee. Still, he gripped the lifeline of Adam’s belt like a mountaineer who, having crested the final summit, could not believe he had arrived at the top.

But of course, he hadn’t reached the top. He had only groped his way to the foot of the Tower. And here, the trail began.

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