Chapter 3
Looking for the first chapter? Read it HERE.
The happy traveler will look for the broadest, most beaten path, will look to his fellow traveler for behavioral cues, will be an echo but will not raise his voice. It is dangerous to blaze a trail when one is already so clearly cut.
—Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. V
The berth in their sleeper car had hardly been wide enough for the two of them to occupy at once. They had to lie, shoulder to shoulder, with the ceiling not an arm’s length away. The mountain pines made the moon flicker through their window like a stroboscope, and the car swayed as tenderly as a cradle.
Senlin was unprepared for marriage in every way. He possessed neither the imagination nor emotional warmth that intimacy required. So he lay there on his back like a fish stranded by the tide, a sturgeon gasping out of water. Here was the moon and the rocking crib and the far from prying eyes and every romantic thing a man could request, and what did he do with it? He was drowning in opportunity.
Marya lay propped on her elbow watching him appear to sleep with his eyes open. She pressed the flat of her finger against his cheek, lifting up a smile like a fishhook, trying to tease some life from him. She tugged at his earlobe, bit lightly at his shoulder, and blew on his neck. Still he lay, sometimes flinching but not responding.
“Tell me, Tom, how deep is the well beneath the Tower?”
Senlin swallowed, his throat ribbiting like a frog. “Six thousand feet, as I recall.”
“Six thousand feet! If the well was wide enough to drop the Tower into—”
Senlin interrupted, stuttering. “Impossible. The well would collapse if it—”
Marya pressed on in a voice hardly above a whisper, “If it were wide enough, would the Tower be tall enough to fill the well?”
He considered it. “It’s possible, I suppose, if there are sixty levels at a hundred feet apiece…”
“It’s possible?” she said, her mouth nearer his blushing ear.
“Possible,” he confirmed. And the moon flickered through the aspens, and the car sawed from side to side, carrying them further from familiar things.
The dark-haired youth dipped his head out of respect or abashment at Senlin’s obvious straining. The headmaster’s neck was stretched so drastically that the ribs of his throat showed. “If it makes you feel any better, you aren’t the first to lose someone.”
Senlin took Adam for a local, or perhaps a visitor of such long standing that he’d become an émigré. He knew too much to be a tourist. “I was hoping she would pass by here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a woman wearing a red sun helmet?”
“That’s not much of a description.”
This was the first time he’d been encouraged to say more about his lost wife. All his other inquiries had been met with dismissive gestures: a waved hand or a shallow shrug. Though he felt a little uneasy, hope overrode his preference for discretion. He forced himself to describe her more fully. “She’s about your height. Slender with auburn hair and pale skin. Pretty.”
“No luggage?” Adam asked, and Senlin shook his head. “About your age?”
Senlin hesitated. “More youthful.” A small bird with a dark tail swooped between them and began picking, unperturbed by their presence, at the spilled pistachios. “That is a blackstart,” Senlin said, identifying the bird. He was relieved to have a momentary distraction. “They’re a determined species, from what I’ve read. Aren’t afraid of much.”
As if to test the bird, Adam moved his toe nearer it. The bird hopped pertly on the top of his boot and rebounded into the red sand. Adam snorted his amusement. “You a bird-watcher?”
Senlin shook his head. “Just an armchair naturalist. I’d never seen one in person before today.” Senlin had the distinct impression that the young man was looking him up and down, measuring him in some way.
“I suppose you’ve already visited our little Lost and Found,” Adam Boreas said, and taking Senlin’s blank expression as answer, offered an explanation. “Where the lost post notes.”
Senlin brightened. Of course! Surely hundreds of people had wandered away from their companions before. He wasn’t the first to lose someone in the Market. It made perfect sense that there existed a forum for reuniting people. “Would you take me to it?”
“I will,” Adam said. “But it won’t help.”
“Let me be the judge. Please,” Senlin said, stowing the guidebook in his satchel. “Lead the way.”
Following Boreas toward the base of the mountainous Tower, Senlin felt momentarily hopeful. The willingness with which Adam had responded to his direction reminded him of how his commands were received in his classroom. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely incapable after all.
The Skirts were as barren as a salt pan, flat as an iron, and almost as hot. The sun seemed to shine from both the sky and the earth at once.
When he’d first spotted the Tower through the shaking frame of their cabin window, many miles removed, it had appeared like a dark scratch on the blue lens of the sky. Now it seemed like a sheer corner in the earth, as if the ground and gravity and every natural thing had been folded upward. The Market experienced two nights: the natural night of the earth and the strange gloom of the Tower’s shadow. They were fortunate now to be approaching the Tower while it was still sunlit, though the Tower’s umbra crept nearer like the hand of a monstrous sundial. In a few minutes, the Tower’s night would fall on them.
Boreas led him to one side of the gate where the flow of traffic naturally thinned. All along the curved length of the Tower’s base, figures leaned and kneeled against the wall, their faces pressed close. They seemed like pilgrims praying to a shrine. The facade was papered with sheets and scraps of paper as far up as Senlin’s arm could reach. These weathered, discolored tatters were layers deep, wrapping the enormous blocks of granite in a shell of papier-mâché.
“Aren’t they afraid of being hit by falling rocks?” Senlin asked, indicating the readers to either side of them.
“Some urges are more immediate than fear,” Boreas replied.
It was a moment more before it dawned on Senlin that this endless tatter of paper was the Lost and Found. He suspected Boreas was watching him for a response, so even as he felt hope leave him, he formed his shoulders and chin into the posture he used for lecturing. “It only makes sense that there would be so many. I suppose it is like this all the way around?”
“I haven’t walked it myself, but I imagine so,” Adam said.
“Of course. And these people risking death from above are searching for notes from lost loved ones.” Senlin leaned in and read one of the fresher scraps of paper. The fine cursive suggested that the author was well educated. It read, “Robert, I will find my way home. Come after me. Love, Mrs. K. Proffet.” This note led him to the next, more crudely drawn and in pencil: “My Dear Lizzy. I wait for you every day at noon at Owl’s Gate. I’m under your yellow umbrella. Your loving husband, Abraham Weiss.” The neighboring note simply read, “Hu Lo, I give you up to your new life. Don’t look for me. Jie Lo.”
He read another and another, sliding his nose from one announcement of heartbreak or hope to the next. He felt the beginning of a compulsion growing within him, felt the urge to read just one letter more. The next might be in her handwriting. Or the next.
But he quickly realized that he could fritter the rest of his life reading his way around the Tower and still never find a note from Marya. One might not even exist, or might have existed but been buried under another’s desperate post.
The contents of the notes he’d read brought on a more unsettling revelation. It occurred to him for the first time that their parting might be more than an inconvenience. He might never find her. Marya might be lost for good, might perish from exposure or illness or violence. She might be absorbed into another’s life, become another man’s love, a younger man… a man who wouldn’t lose her so quickly. “Useless,” he said.
Assuming that he referred to the overwhelming breadth of the Lost and Found, Boreas said, “I’ve spent my fair share of hours crossing my eyes at this wall.”
“You’ve lost someone?”
“My sister, Voleta.”
“How long ago?”
“Two years and a month.”
“Oh, my word.” Senlin felt faint. His knees gave without warning, and he dropped into an awkward crouch with his back to the Tower. “What about the local authorities, the magistrates? Who polices the bazaar?”
“There are a few roaming constables. You’ll occasionally see a man in a khaki uniform. But half of the time they aren’t really officials of any kind. They’re thugs who stole the uniform or bought it. Even the real constables can be treacherous. I’ve known more than a few men who’ve been beaten and robbed by them.” Adam rubbed his neck, exposing a circular scar on his forearm. The wound was so perfectly round it could’ve been drawn with a compass.
“Is the Tower entirely ungoverned?”
“It’s a little better inside, and even better higher up. There are many ringdoms where one power or another has taken up the law.”
A woman with bruised, hooded eyes who had been scrutinizing the wall beside Senlin now began to read over his head as if he was not there. He had to crawl around her to return to his feet. The woman’s blank expression could’ve been the work of a hypnotist. But what began as pity for her quickly turned to private resolve. He had to shake himself free of the stupor that had claimed him since Marya had vanished. He’d spent the last days running around with an uncharacteristic lack of consideration. He hadn’t taken the situation seriously enough at first, and then he’d allowed panic to direct him. If he expected to find Marya, he would have to rely on his reasoning, his ability to observe and analyze. He was not as helpless as this poor wretch, inching her life away, perusing the scroll of the doomed. He had his wits. The courage would come. For now, he had to think.
After her initial shock had faded, how would Marya have reacted? Without a ticket to take her home, she would have to navigate the common mire of vendors and thieves on her own. She would naturally seek a safer refuge. She was not without resources: She had some money of her own secreted in her waistband—not an extravagant amount, but enough to keep her in room and board for a while. There were no permanent accommodations in the Market, and he doubted that she would hire a tent to sleep in. It made sense, then, that she would enter the Tower, knowing of course that they had intended to lodge on the third level in the Baths. They had not settled on a particular hotel because it was impossible to make reservations from such a distant town as Isaugh, but she would have no problem securing a room. What had she said just before they parted? We’ll meet again at the top of the Tower. Wasn’t the Baths their pinnacle? Wasn’t that the limit of their resources? Adam’s promise of improved law and order gave him further confidence in the idea.
There was really only one thing to do: go after his wife who had gone on ahead.
“Mr. Boreas, you seem familiar with the Market. How familiar are you with the ringdoms of the Tower?”
“I know the lower four very well.”
“That’s all I need. Would you be willing to share your experience for a day or two? I would compensate you for your time.”
“I could use the work, I must admit.”
“Can you begin at once?”
“Give me one moment,” Boreas said, and unfolded a brilliantly white piece of stationery.
As he tacked it to the wall, Senlin could not help but read the clearly blocked words, which read, “Voleta: A rescue is coming. Adam.” Boreas caught him looking and responded with an ironic smirk. “A superstitious habit.”
Senlin tried to keep his smile from seeming condescending, but he couldn’t help thinking of it as an indulgence, a compulsion that Boreas had mistaken for hope. Senlin was preparing to make some remarks on the virtues of pragmatism when they were interrupted by a smattering of distant screams. The cries, as if contagious, quickly spread to a chorus. Senlin turned just in time to see the blur of something plunging down, something that was as big as a barn. It crashed against the packed earth with a thunderous boom.