Sagas & Sass began covering The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft in January 2022; this is our summary of book 3 – The Hod King – as it was written to introduce Episode 38 (covering parts 1 and 2 of The Hod King) and Episode 39 (covering part 3 of The Hod King).
As we know, Arm of the Sphinx ended with one heck of a cliffhanger! So when we meet back up with Senlin in The Hod King, it’s a bit of a let-down. He’s basically just living his life in Pelphia as a really boring Boskopeian named Cyril Pinfield, sending his reports to the Sphinx…though to be fair, he’s ignoring the whole “don’t do anything involving Marya” thing as he INSISTS on ya know, doing the opposite of that. Even if WE ignore him attending the awful play about her, HE is so blatantly ignoring orders that you just KNOW something is gonna go wrong.
And then Senlin comes across two Pelphians attacking a hod, because of COURSE that would happen! He intervenes, but then the hod straight up MURDERS the two men, so Senlin peaces out…only to eventually admit what happened anyway! He did take the book the hod left behind, and hides it when the authorities – a man named General Eigengrau and a Wakeman named Georgine Haste – come calling to question him. He is ‘saved’ – if you can call it that – when in the midst of the questioning, an invitation from the Duke arrives. Now, the Duke is currently married to Marya, and this invitation is in response to Senlin, posing as Cyril Pinfield, contacting him about monetizing Marya’s Mermaid persona.
Now, when Senlin meets Duke Pell, he actually LIKES him! So it seems as if he might need or want to back off…especially when he finally gets a one-on-one with Marya and she tells him to GTFO! Unfortunately, though, Senlin’s first impression was wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG! (I mean really are any of us shocked about that, though? Bueller? Bueller?)
The TL;DR is that Senlin meets with Pell at the Colosseum again, Pell is immediately a huge asshole, the whole thing is a trick anyway, and Senlin ends up with a metal bucket locked over his head and is shoved unceremoniously into the Black Trail along with his old friend Tarrou…because oh yeah by the way, Tarrou was a fighter in the Colosseum and Senlin was going to try to free him and…yeah listen it all just turned into a big ol’ mess in which Tarrou gets screwed because he’s friends with Senlin and it’s the Black Trail for them!
Thankfully – if we can even use that word – Senlin and Tarrou find some of Marat’s people, who remove Senlin’s awful metal helmet, accept his and Tarrou’s professions of their faith in Marat and his goals – whatever they are – and are sent off with none other than Finn Goll to prove their worth. Or something.
In far more exciting news, Iren and Voleta stroll into Pelphia like they own the place. There’s fanfare, they meet the KING, Voleta convinces them to let Squit free when they try to cage her, and then Voleta is simply Voteta, prancing around on rooftops in her nightgown, and is dubbed “The Leaping Lady”. This leads to her getting invited to a lot of special parties and events, which her hostess Xenia absolutely LOVES, even when Voleta has caught the attention of the sleezy Pelphian prince whose name we don’t even care to note because he’s a sleezy POS.
Meanwhile, Iren is constantly worried about Voleta, though Xenia’s governess Ann does everything she can to help Iren handle things, which is really sweet and Ann is great and we all love her and there shalt be no argument about how awesome she is, ever.
AAAAnyway, unfortunately Voleta and Xenia are invited by Sleezeball Number One to see Marya’s show, and he tricks Voleta with a backstage pass and Iren with a story that Voleta has passed out. While Voleta does get to talk to Marya AND meet the child that is VERY obviously Senlin’s, Iren gets locked in the fur coat closet and Sleezeball McGee traps Voleta in Marya’s dressing room and tries to assault her. Voleta is able to fight back, but in the scuffle she is shot!
Back to Ann being the best, she figures out something is wrong and goes in search of Iren. She is able to help Iren escape from the closet, Iren runs off after Voleta, finds her fatally wounded in Marya’s dressing room, kills Sleezeball Fucknuts, realizes Voleta still has a heartbeat, and scoops up her charge to rush her to the State of the Art and hopefully save her life…UNTIL she arrives at the port to see the ship shot down by the Ararat!
And on to part 3! Now, if you hoped we’d jump right into what’s going on with poor Iren and Voleta, well, you’ll just have to wait to find out about all that – because first we have to find out what Edith has been up to!
….and this means going back in time a bit! Edith’s part of this story begins before they even board the State of the Art, when she meets with the Sphinx, is told Reddleman – aka the former Red Hand – will be her pilot, the rest of her friends and Byron are the only crew she needs, and oh yeah her goal is to ASAP COLLECT ALL THE BRICKLAYER’S GRANDDAUGHTER PAINTINGS BECAUSE THE TOWER IS BASICALLY A GIANT BOMB JUST WAITING TO EXPLODE ANY MINUTE NOW AND THEY PROBABLY HOLD THE KEY TO STOPPING IT.
…Yes, all of that REALLY IS happening. And poor Edith, because the Sphinx insists that the whole possibly impending end of the world has to remain a secret and then ya know, sends her off on a ship with HER FRIENDS…aaand one not-entirely-sane former dead man.
So they go on a little tour of the airspace around the tower to show off their fancy ship and set off the cannons to let people know they mean business. A few hijinks ensue, including a neverending alarm that forces Reddleman to peruse the huge volume of ship instructions, pirates attempting to board the ship, and Edith receiving a special (and very sweet!) message from Senlin.
But eventually it’s time for them to make their first stop in Pelphia, where Edith immediately splits off from the others – and from her ship – to bug the Pelphians for their copy of the Bricklayer’s Granddaughter painting. She is happy to accept the help – and, she hopes, the friendship – of her fellow Wakeman Georgine Haste, *especially* when the king claims they are having trouble finding the painting and continuously delays her receiving it.
Along the way, Edith investigates Senlin’s whereabouts, saves a hod boy who is about to fall to his death after being sent up by balloon to fix Pelphia’s faux stalled sun, and eventually ends up visiting the colosseum, where we get one heck of a major development! There’s a secret entrance from the fighter’s dormitory to the Ostraka University library – because as we know, the colosseum used to BE the university – and in it Edith, Haste, and Eigengrau discover a hod working on blueprints for the titular Hod King!
And what IS the Hod King, you ask? Why, it resembles the trilobites from the book Senlin discovered and is basically a giant arsenal that can bore through the Tower. After discovering the blueprints, and knowing that their copy of the Bricklayer’s Granddaughter is painting non grata, the king and his cronies are worried about what seems to be a war developing between the hods and the Sphinx, and decide to steal the State of the Art. But we’ll get back to that in a minute…because first, it’s time for dinner!
Edith and Haste’s dinner, that is, on the ship itself. Edith had decided to take Haste into her confidence and invite her to be part of the crew, but sadly – for Edith, and for those of us who were really starting to like Haste – it turns out that she’s one of Marat’s zealots. Haste even admits to being the one who came up with the plan to train the magpies to steal shiny things so that they would constantly be flying off with the Sphinx’s spies! Needless to say, a fight ensues, which Edith barely – but thankfully – wins.
Meanwhile Eigengrau is attempting to board the State of the Art, but he severely underestimated the ship’s crew, and he and his forces are decimated by a combination of Byron – yes, Byron! – Reddleman, and, as it turns out, FERDINAND! Who by the way we had no idea was on board at all, and is sadly killed in the scuffle. Moment of silence for poor loyal Ferdinand 🙁
Eigengrau does in fact escape, but stumbles into Iren’s waiting, err, foot (seriously, she kicks him down and bashes his head in with her boot). And despite the fact that the Pelphians destroyed the State of the Art’s envelopes, the ship doesn’t plummet to its destruction because – get this – it has thrusters! So Iren is finally able to return to the ship with Voleta, and implores Reddleman to do whatever he can to save her.
Before they take off, though, Edith has one more errand to run – she hies off to save Marya! Edith maims the Duke and then threatens him with additional physical destruction should he ever try to come after Marya…who of course gathers up baby Olivet – a real surprise for Edith, that – and finally escapes from her prison.
They are about to FINALLY take off when one more person shows up to join their crew – our beloved ANN! This is super great for Iren, who very much needs a shoulder to cry on before returning to Voleta’s bedside to remain there until, at the very end of THIS part of the tale, Voleta sits bolt upright and shouts, “Adam!”
….That would be a great cliffhanger for the book as a whole, but instead we meet up with Senlin again. He, Tarrou, and Finn Goll have been clambering up through the Tower by way of the air vents, on their way to meet Marat. It hasn’t been a good time for any of them, as they have very little light, no good places to lay down and sleep, and have to eat these things called beetle cakes that are exactly what they sound like. (Ew.)
The TL;DR is that they BARELY make it. They finally find what they THINK is a safe space to relax for a hot minute, when they are attacked by a chimney cat! They work together to survive, but they lose most of their food and light and are kind of at wit’s end. However, they do persevere, and when they reach Marat’s current camp, they find the Hod King, monstrous weapon that it is, basically completed. They convince Marat that they have become the zealots they need to be to survive (despite Senlin worrying right up until the end that Finn Goll will betray him) and The Hod King concludes with Marat sitting Senlin down and shaving his head, making him a hod for true…or rather, for now…
QUOTES WE LOVED:
“He had been poisoned by hope once already and was determined not to let it happen again.”
“There is nothing in the world so inspiring of trust as regret.”
“Is it dangerous?” Senlin asked.
“Of course it’s dangerous!” The Sphinx laughed. “Most things worth doing are.”
“I don’t know what to wish for anymore, Edith. I don’t know what I want or what I should want or if I have the right to want anything anymore.”
“…at the end of the day, dreams don’t matter, but neither does regret. We aren’t what we wish for. We are only what we do.”
“…there’s nothing that threatens a bully’s delicate virility so much as the honest passions of other men. This world is full of tyrants, full of men who can’t raise themselves up by their own pursuits, and so they spend their lives pulling others down to their low and loathsome level.”
“In my experience, the men that lean hardest on their titles are the ones who did nothing to earn them.”
“She is imperfect, but absolutely peerless.”
“Intimacy was not about maintaining the idealistic charade of courtship; it was about embracing and adoring the flaws.”
“Why do we call a dishonest person two-faced? Is it really so honest to wear the same face day in, day out, regardless of our mood, our condition, or the event? We are not clocks! Have a face for every occasion, I say! Be honest: Wear a mask.”
“The tree of history rotted faster than it grew. The Tower crumbled more quickly than it could be repaired. Any effort to forestall the inevitable collapse was not only futile, it was naive.”
“People who pretend that executions are sensible forms of communication are the same sort of people who believe in articulate bombs and swords that sing. Violence is always incoherent; it only babbles.”
“…he wondered if the dark would ever be so friendly again, or if for the rest of his life, the witching hours would only invite all of his lurking sins.”
“…what was called duty by one generation was considered a charity by the next and, soon enough, a burden.”
“…an honest word did not require italics to be true…no amount of underlining could reform a lie.”
“Customs exist for two reasons: one, to identify insiders; and two, to exclude outsiders.”
“It’s possible, I think, to be so many things at once that you’re practically nothing at all. If you crush a mountain and spread it across a continent, it doesn’t make little mountains; it just vanishes into dust.”
“If someone has absolute control over you, it’s easy to believe they have absolute power over everything and everyone. They can’t be defied or challenged or disobeyed, and every opportunity for escape just feels like a cruel jest.”
“You don’t offer a wounded person assistance once and then strut off, patting yourself on the back for the good deed you almost did. Believe me, desperation makes it hard sometimes to recognize help when it comes, to accept it when it’s offered.”
“I don’t like people who don’t know how to enjoy themselves. The pooping of my parties is simply not allowed.”
“…sometimes it just feels like I’m choking to death. No, it feels like someone is choking me. The trouble is, it’s just a feeling. I can’t hit it, or yell at it, or drive it off. No one can help me because the thing that’s choking me isn’t real. It isn’t here. The only thing that helps at all is running, climbing, moving about, getting my heart in my throat.”
“He could not hate himself and love her at the same time. He had to choose love. Not just once, but again and again for the rest of his life.”
“The rich ‘learn lessons’. The poor commit crimes. ‘Mistakes’ are generally considered a mark of the middle class.”
“The wonderful thing about regrets is that it’s never too late to have them.”
“We aren’t what we hope for, we are only what we do. For better or worse, for well or ill, we are what we do. I’ve spent the better part of a year in denial about what I am, what I have become, insisting that I am somehow above my crimes, my choices, my…feelings. The only thing my denial has done is make me miserable, and I think neurotic. Well, I’m finished with that. I just feel grateful that there is someone in this madhouse who I know and can trust. Someone who is an endless source of encouragement and strength. I can hardly say how much I love your company, your character, your…But I’ll waste no more words. These are sentiments that are better shown than said. I hope to see you soon.”
“Trust wasn’t required where doubt did not exist.”
“I suppose I’m worried how many pieces I can lose, how many parts can be replaced before I lose myself.”
“I believe in love and chance and beauty. But I think it is unkind to pretend that fairness exists in the world.”
“I think most Pelphian men are just leery of women. I really do. They’ll say, “No, no, no, women are weak. They’re foolish. They need looking after and direction.” But I think deep down they can’t forget that they came out of a woman, were nursed by a woman, and had their little minds sculpted by one as well. When they grow up, just the thought of it makes them uneasy. But rather than face their fear, they look for ways to dominate and possess us, to create proof that we are weak,and they are strong. I’ll tell you this: The harder a man brags about his thunderous escapades in the lady’s boudoir, the more frightened he is.”
“There is nothing so dangerous as a coward.”
“You know there was a point, and not so long ago, when i WANTED to see the world…but now I just want to be back home and…Well, it doesn’t matter what I want. That’s the thing about life, isn’t it? You don’t get to say when you’ve had enough.”
“Sometimes a wheel squeaks not because it is faulty, but because it bears the most weight.”
