Senlin Ascends

Thomas Senlin and his new wife, Marya Senlin, arrive at the Tower of Babel full of anxious hope. Senlin trusts The Everyman’s Guide and believes the Tower to be orderly, while Marya delights in its crowds and spectacle. In the chaotic Market outside the Tower, Marya shops while Senlin watches their luggage, but her trunk is stolen. Soon afterward, the couple are separated, and Senlin spends two frantic days searching the shifting bazaar. When he realizes he still has Marya’s return ticket, he understands she cannot easily go home. A streetwise youth, Adam Boreas, explains the danger of the Skirts, where debris falls from the Tower, and leads Senlin to the Lost and Found. Surrounded by messages from the missing, Senlin concludes that Marya, seeking safety and their intended destination, likely entered the Tower toward the Baths.

Adam guides Senlin into the Tower through a suffocating tunnel to the Basement, where Senlin is robbed. He later recovers his empty satchel and Marya’s silks from Finn Goll, a flamboyant local who warns him that the Tower exploits the trusting. Senlin presses upward into the Parlor, a theatrical ringdom where visitors become actors in an immersive play. Assigned the role of Isaac the Butler, he is drawn into a staged domestic drama that turns horrifyingly real when Kerrick Mayfair murders Edsel Pining. Edith Winters, playing Mrs. Mayfair, breaks character and helps Senlin flee through the false mansion. After Mayfair is killed by attendants, Senlin and Edith expect justice, but Parlor officials betray them and lock them in a cage on the Tower’s exterior.

In the cage, Edith tells Senlin of her former life, failed marriage, and reasons for fleeing to the Tower. Anen Ceph, a Parlor functionary, rules that Senlin will be sent upward to the Baths while Edith will be expelled for violating Parlor rules. Senlin stays with her through the ordeal as she is branded, but he is forced to leave her behind. Ceph then reveals that he, too, is an actor, underscoring the Parlor’s cruel performance of law and consequence. Shaken and guilty, Senlin continues to the Baths, still intent on finding Marya.

The Baths initially seem dazzling and civilized, but Senlin soon sees their brutality. Customs agents tax and police entrants, debtors are publicly sentenced to years as hods, and the Red Hand, Commissioner Emmanuel Pound’s executioner, performs a gruesome public killing. Senlin befriends John Tarrou, a genial but broken man who has lingered in the Tower for sixteen years after losing his own wife. A hunchbacked painter calling himself Philip Ogier provides the first real lead: he has painted Marya at the Fountain. Ogier explains that Marya survived alone, reached the Baths, was robbed, modeled for him, and then fell under the influence of Horace Fossor, who brought her to elite soirees. There she attracted a powerful aristocrat known as Count W. H. Pell, who promised to find Senlin but instead claimed Marya and seized Ogier’s portrait. Ogier will help only if Senlin steals back his confiscated masterpiece from Commissioner Pound.

With Tarrou’s reluctant aid, Senlin infiltrates Pound’s gala by posing as an art critic and pretending Ogier’s painting is perfumed. The ruse gains him supervised access to the painting in the Commissioner’s solarium. There, under guard Kristof’s watch, Senlin swaps the original for a poor copy and smuggles it out wrapped around a bottle. Kristof catches enough of the deception to extort him but gives him a brief head start. As Senlin tries to escape the Baths, Tarrou is publicly condemned as a hod for debt and theatrically rejects Senlin to protect him. Ogier retrieves the painting and helps Senlin flee toward New Babel, identifying Pelphia, seat of the Pells, as Marya’s likely destination.

In New Babel, Senlin is recognized by Iren, an amazon enforcer in Finn Goll’s service. After a desperate chase and a drugged hallucination in the House of White Chrom, Senlin is captured by Goll, who reveals that he has been testing candidates and offers Senlin the post of Port Master. Senlin accepts because the job provides money, access, and time to pursue Marya. At Goll’s failing port, he imposes order, fires thieves, reads to workers, resists White Chrom, and begins planning to steal a ship. He reconciles with Adam Boreas, now a port worker, and learns that Adam’s sister, Voleta Boreas, is trapped as a performer at Rodion’s Steam Pipe.

Senlin discovers an aerorod engraved with Tower destinations, including Pelphia, confirming his next goal. He also learns Adam and Voleta’s history: they came to the Tower seeking life beyond Sumer, only to be trapped by Parlor debt and Goll’s system. Voleta bonded herself to save Adam, and Rodion keeps her onstage only because Adam bribes him. After seeing Voleta perform as the Flying Girl, Senlin commits to freeing her. His position grows more dangerous when the Red Hand attacks him for the missing painting. Senlin wounds him with Ogier’s concealed key-gun and discovers a hidden second painting and note describing it as a key to the Tower, happiness, and death. He keeps this secret, even from allies.

Senlin strengthens his future crew by trading reading lessons to Iren for combat training and by studying the winds with kites until he finds a perilous current that could carry a stolen ship away from the port. He unexpectedly reunites with Edith, now first mate of the airship Stone Cloud and equipped with a mechanical arm. Senlin plans to use a decoy crate, rumors of the painting, and the rivalry between Rodion and Goll to create chaos while Adam brings Voleta to the docks. Edith agrees to help, and Captain Billy Lee unknowingly accepts the smuggling job that sets the plan in motion.

The escape collapses into battle. Rodion boards the Stone Cloud, kills Billy Lee, and duels Edith; when a mooring is cut, Edith falls into the abyss. Adam confesses that he alerted Commissioner Pound about the painting, hoping to bargain, and Goll prepares to punish him. Senlin kills Rodion with the key-gun, but Pound’s fortress airship, the Ararat, arrives and attacks. Iren fights the invading agents and the Red Hand, while Senlin’s booby-trapped crate releases White Chrom, sending the Red Hand into a hallucinatory massacre. Edith returns alive, helps fight him off, and aids the launch. Senlin’s struggle with Pound severs the Ararat’s moorings, forcing the warship away into the storm. Senlin, Edith, Adam, Voleta, and the unconscious Iren escape aboard the Stone Cloud, catching the current Senlin had mapped. Taking the name Tom Mudd, Senlin sets course for Pelphia, still determined to find Marya.