Sagas & Sass began covering The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft in January 2022; this is our summary of book 2 – Arm of the Sphinx – as it was written to introduce Episode 36 (covering parts 1 and 2 of Arm of the Sphinx) and Episode 37 (covering part 3 of Arm of the Sphinx).
AHOY! SPOILERS AHEAD!
When we say we’re back with Senlin and crew in Arm of the Sphinx, we mean that more literally than you’d think – because as it turns out, after absconding with the Stone Cloud at the end of Senlin Ascends, they quickly turned to piracy themselves after failing to immediately gain access to Pelphia.
But they’re pretty half-assed pirates, considering they only take what they need to survive, and it doesn’t help that Senlin is still having visions of his missing wife Marya and trying to keep it from everyone else while, uh, also using the ship log as a diary in which he details these visions. So of course Edith finds out when she goes to update the ship log, and this happens in conjunction with them getting blacklisted from the pirate port, Windsock, because Voleta steals a flying squirrel from a merchant and then Iren doesn’t think twice about throwing said merchant to his death when he threatens Voleta.
Granted, this last visit of theirs to Windsock at least gives Senlin some information about how he might get into Pelphia – he meets with Madame Bhata, who receives information and records everything that goes on in the Tower and tells him about a man named Luc Marat. Marat lives in the Silk Reef, the ringdom above Pelphia, and apparently one can use the hods’ Black Trail to enter Pelphia from the Gardens. Senlin deduces that he can steal some books to bring to Marat as a gift in return for his help getting into Pelphia, but things go awry – yet again – soon after they have gathered the books they need.
Seriously, between Edith being more than a little annoyed with Senlin for keeping his Marya visions from her, and the fact that they now don’t really have anywhere to go except the mysterious Silk Reef, you’d hope things won’t get worse…buuuut of course they do. Voleta gets distracted by her squirrel, who she’s named Squit, and fails at being the lookout. They almost fall to the Commissioner AGAIN, and only escape him and his ship by basically destroying their own.
Big oops. BIG.
With the Stone Cloud sail-worthiness almost completely compromised, they limp into the Silk Reef. Adam, Iren, and Voleta are supposed to remain with the ship and try to fix it while Senlin and Edith take the books to Marat and ask for his help…not that Voleta obeys, though that turns out to be for the best. While Adam and Iren piece the ship back together, Voleta follows her Captain and first mate through the Silk Reef’s forest to Marat’s headquarters at the Golden Zoo, where they meet with Marat but don’t really like what they see or hear.
Marat is handsome and eloquent, but wheelchair-bound as his legs were replaced by the Sphinx, who he refuses to work for, which means he can no longer get the vials needed to power them. Meanwhile, the hods he is “rescuing” seem to be doing well, but Senlin doesn’t care for the fact that he will have to BECOME a hod – and agree to help Marat’s cause – in order to use the Black Trail to get into Pelphia. On top of that, the books Marat is collecting are being destroyed, as the hods work back to front and black out every single line.
Thankfully Voleta is able to help Senlin and Edith escape, though their visit is not without its consequences. Edith lost all of the vials that power her arm in the fight against the Commissioner, and she uses the last of its power during their flight from Marat and the hods.
In an uncharacteristic stroke of good luck, though, Iren and Adam have made the Stone Cloud airworthy once again – at least enough to escape from the Silk Reef – but they know they won’t last long, and poor Edith is a mess over her now-useless arm. So Senlin dons his captain hat and decides that they will pay a visit to the legendary Sphinx.
Part three of Arm of the Sphinx – “The Bottomless Library” – is OH SO REVELATORY! When last we left our intrepid crew, Senlin was insisting that they needed to face their bullies…which in their case means basically playing dead to get up to Sphinx’s lair and then flashing what they hope is the appropriate signal, that being showing off Edith’s arm, to gain entrance.
The first part of their plan works, but the second part – which involves Adam, Iren, and Voleta remaining with the Stone Cloud while Senlin and Edith confront the Sphinx – doesn’t turn out quite so well. Sure, they land in the Sphinx’s docking bay…but then a mechanical titan dumps them out of the Stone Cloud and absconds with the ship!
They are then approached by Byron, a stag/man/mechanical hybrid who knows but clearly does not like Edith. Byron does, at least, lead them to the Sphinx, who hilariously DOES look like Edith described him – that being, like a spoon.
The Sphinx immediately begins berating Edith for not taking care of the arm he gave her, but Senlin interrupts, announcing that he has information about Marat and his hod army. The Sphinx counters with the fact that HE has information about Marya and attempts to convince Senlin to betray his friends.
Senlin refuses, and is actually able to surprise the Sphinx with the information that Marat has five copies of Ogier’s painting – which we find out is called “The Bricklayer’s Granddaughter” – in his possession. This leads to Senlin and the Sphinx haggling out a contract, but as it is being finalized the Sphinx reveals that Senlin is high on crumb and needs to get sober before they can go any farther.
Of course Senlin takes offense to this, but it turns out that the Sphinx is right! All this time Senlin has been handling and gazing on the painting of Marya…which is infused with crumb!
There’s a lot to unpack there, but the important part is that the Sphinx insists that Senlin go looking for a book in his bottomless library and sends Senlin off to do so with a bag full of supplies and the librarian cat at his side in what is an obvious ploy to keep him away long enough to sober up.
While Senlin is following the cat through the library in search of a book on zoetropes, the rest of his crew spend their days hanging out in an apartment provided by the Sphinx. They know that at some point he will insist on interviewing them, and when Byron finally comes to tell them that will happen and that Adam is first in line, Edith immediately uses her knowledge of the Sphinx’s lair to help Adam escape. They board the last wall-walker and ride it to the very top of the tower, where they are confronted by “sparking men” who somehow know all about Adam. Adam chooses to go off with them on the condition that they let Edith go.
Meanwhile, we find out that Voleta has been spending her nights with the Sphinx! Early on she realized she could leave her room through the vents, but immediately ran into the Sphinx. Thankfully this meeting led to an odd sort of friendship, through which it is revealed that behind the mask and under the cloak the Sphinx is a very old woman who is pieced together with mechanical parts herself!
So Byron comes to collect Adam for his interview with the Sphinx, and it’s immediately obvious that Edith helped him get away. She’s marched off to answer for what she’s done, only to have the Sphinx confide that she trusts Edith and wants Edith to be her “right arm”, as it were. This comes on the heels of Byron taking Edith on a little detour to show her that the Red Hand is still alive, but in the end Edith agrees to the Sphinx’s new contract anyway and receives a new – much larger, stronger, and less ornamental – mechanical arm in return.
While Edith is recovering from this procedure, Senlin finally comes to the end of his time in the library. He’d eventually had to crawl on his hands and knees through a book tunnel as he followed the librarian cat in search of the zoetrope book, and just when he is (a) completely sober and (b) thinks he is about to die as the book tunnel collapses around him, he spills out into a little bedroom, where the Sphinx is waiting. Miraculously, the cat also “delivers” the zoetrope book into Senlin’s hands!
It turns out that there is actually a giant zoetrope in the Sphinx’s lair, and that Ogier’s sequence of paintings are installed in it. When all 64 of them have been returned, they will reveal the combination to the “Bridge of Babel”, because, as the Sphinx insists, the Tower was never supposed to be a tower, but a bridge to the heavens.
Okay, deep breath. We know that’s a lot to digest! BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Basically, a man who the Sphinx calls “The Brick Layer” is the person who built the Tower, and the girl in the paintings is supposedly his granddaughter. The Brick Layer got the tower as far as he could in his day, and the combination revealed in the zoetrope of paintings will open the vault that shows how it can all be completed. As we know, unfortunately Marat has five of the paintings, and the rest are supposedly still spread throughout the ringdoms. The Sphinx hasn’t trusted the people in power for a long time – and for good reason. It doesn’t help that her butterflies have been going missing in Pelphia, so she is assigning Senlin as her spy in that ringdom…with the express order that he not try to contact his wife Marya, who is supposedly living there.
Arm of the Sphinx concludes with Senlin reuniting with his crew – with the exception of Adam, of course – and sharing one heck of a romantic moment with Edith. It makes things a bit awkward when the Sphinx announces that his reassignment to spy means that Edith is now captain of the new ship – the Sphinx’s flagship, called State of the Art – but he happily relinquishes his command and of course the crew agrees to follow Edith.
So our indomitable crew is splitting up at the Sphinx’s behest, and as maddening as that is, considering the news her butterflies bring her at the very end of the book, it might be for the best…
Sagas & Sass Podcast on Spotify
Quotes we loved:
“The rules of engagement…were invented by men who would benefit most from them.”
“His concentration was so easily dispersed now; he was always chasing the tail of an idea”
“I don’t trust you either,” Iren said. “I’ll tell you why. You’re still making excuses. You won’t own what you did, which means either you’re a coward, and I don’t trust cowards, or you don’t think you did anything wrong. So you’ll do it again.”
“A fortune? Once you have it in your head, you’re done for. It’s riches or rags for you now.”
“Surely, it was better to go forward into ruin than backward into rot.”
“In telling his story, he discovered that he had developed definite ideas about his own motives and decisions. These ideas seemed to have formed in the ether or emotions and dreams, that wooly fog that lay outside the footlights of the conscious mind. They were not large revelations, but were rather like the little epiphanies one suffers and enjoys over a morning cup of tea.”
“He had tried to remain as he was and become only what he must. He had tried to be the gentleman pirate, the scholarly cad, and had failed on both counts.”
“I think you’re confusing hope with stubbornness, Adam.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what hope is. Stubbornness. Refusing to go down.”
“Even a great romance is but a stumbling block when it happens upon the road.”
“There was nothing better for clearing the head than a little adventure.”
“Machines do not serve us; we serve them. If they all vanished from the earth tomorrow, our race would carry on. But when we remove our hand from the machine, it dies.”
“He seemed harmless enough, though that didn’t make Voleta trust him. If all evil men only looked evil, there’d be a lot less trouble in the world, but in her experience, looks had nothing to do with character.”
“Don’t you feel as if we are always striving to understand, on a most rudimentary level, what is happening to us? Why must everything be such a battle?”
“It’s only a battle if you put up a fight.”
“You don’t really believe that. You just feel guilty. But guilt is not duty, Tom, no matter how devoted you are to it.”
“There is little in the world more curative than a picnic. Some call for doctors or tonics when they fall ill. I call for friends and wine. ‘But’ you say, ‘What if you are really dying?’ Of course I am! We all are! The question is, gentle reader, in these uncertain times, would you rather be a patient or a picnicker? – Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
“Why won’t you talk about what happened to you? Why won’t you tell me about the Sphinx?”
She was smiling still, but sadly. “That’s a big knock, Tom. But you’ve been patient. You’ve been very patient. I’ve avoided talking about it because you’d look at me differently if you knew. And I don’t want to feel any less like myself than I already do.”
“Why not face our bullies, Edith? Let’s have no more of these wait-and-sees and wish-I-mays. Let’s get on with it.”
“The trouble with intelligent people is that they always think they could do a better job if they were in charge. But intelligence is not the same thing as vision or shrewdness.”
“The question I keep returning to is this: when does chasing after lost love turn into self-loathing? Can a soul be loved quite sincerely and just as sincerely lost? The disciplinarian in me wants to believe that punishment is redemptive, but if whipping were any good at reforming a man, would I not be a saint by now?”
“Technology tends to degenerate the further it flows from its source. That’s no conspiracy. It’s just the natural process of users modifying a machine to their level of understanding. The wise man’s tool becomes the simpleton’s toy.”
“When humanity ceases to aspire, it begins to decline. Do you know why the status quo is so tyrannical and nauseating? Because it does not exist! There is no stasis in the world, and certainly not where humans are involved. The status quo is just a pleasing synonym for decay.”
“He knew that harmony was not a symptom of plenty, or political climate, or even that crushing stalemate your kings call ‘peace’. Harmony is the result of purpose.”
“We all have weaknesses. Not everyone has strengths.”
