The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  He ran over the slanting slates more by memory than sight, constantly rubbing his ash-reddened eyes. At the intersection where the incensiers had once set up their stalls he swung a revelatory line down to the tongue-scarred wreckage of the Haversham tradeway and sprinted north.

  Every step through the ember-laden air revealed new tableaux of the Rot's devastation; dust-coughing craters where dinning bars had stood, the slagged bi-rail tracks of the Ambertham line, a street-wide chasm laying bare the sulfurous stink of the sewers below. A constant scree of brick and rock debris spread over every part of the road, making the footing treacherous.

  He heard a child crying from a heap of rags and ran on, vaulting felled trees in a spit of park on the Seasham outskirts. No more tongues fell now, but still the earth rumbled underfoot as the Darkness thickened throughout the city, making the cobblestones themselves less substantial. At a crossing on the route to the Levi he raced through the wreck of a Moleman bastion fort, leaping over mangled cannon and bodies of Indurans and Molemen entwined in death, their strange embrace part-obscured by the dulling blanket of ash. Already the shadows around their corpses were darkening, erasing the details of their faces in death. So the Darkness would bring an end to suffering too.

  The earth shook and ceramic tiles slid from a terraced rooftop under his feet, thudding mutely into thick cinder drifts beneath the eaves. He dropped down in a bank of gritty black and coughed for half of the Haversall approach to Gilungel Bridge.

  The destruction that awaited him at the Levi's banks was numbing. All that remained of the Moleman bastion fort were fragments of kindling and a frame at the edges where it bolted to the bridge's grindstone. He raced through and stamped onto a gruesome patchwork carpet of Molemen leather tubing suits. His gorge rose but he tamped it down. Every living thing on this bridge had been pounded flat by the thousands of massive Balast feet.

  Sen ran on with the sickness welling up inside; he'd ordered this charge, he'd sent Gellick and Mare and Feyon to perpetrate it, and now he'd come to desecrate it. Flintlock muskets lay snapped like delicate twigs across the bridge's expanse, wooden cannon mounts were shattered, cannon themselves had been impossibly bent in the stampede. The air hung with the pain of moments passing; he could feel all of them, the hundreds underfoot and those in the water too, where they fell and drowned after Daveron betrayed them.

  He ran on, skirting a section where a tongue had torn away half of the bridge, even as the Levi wind died around him as the Darkness stole its breath, until he sensed the blue spark of the little Moleman ahead.

  At the end of the bridge he flung himself into the piles of debris that had been forced to either side by the Balast battering ram; rummaging through trampled bodies and thatches of pounded sticks and ashy tubing suits toward the blue crackle of power down by the river side.

  "Daveron!" he shouted, and bounded down the heaps, throwing himself to the shale at the water's edge. Daveron lay still, falling ash resting on his dull eyes. Sen put his hands on the little Moleman's chest as if he could stop a flow of blood that had already ceased. Even in the dim light he could see the five holes punched through his red tubing suit, well worn by blood and rain.

  Tears welled in Sen's eyes. His friend had worn the red to his greatest betrayal. What kind of twisted pride had he forced upon him?

  "Daveron," he called again, weaker now, but the Moleman did not shift in response. His lips didn't move, his eyes didn't stir. He was dead.

  What could he do? Tears ran down his cheeks, and he marshaled the light in his scars to pour through his hands, trying to resurrect his friend, but the blue fire only fed into the kernel at Daveron's heart. This too was fading as the Darkness bit in.

  Sen seized it all and turned it around with the focus of a Bodyswell, trying to stop up the bullet holes and urge the little Moleman's heart back to beating, his lungs back to breathing, but still nothing happened. Too long had passed, and the Darkness had already stolen so much. Soon his hands fell slack at his sides, basted with a thick paste of blood and ash.

  Daveron was dead, and the Darkness was working on him still, so fast Sen could feel the contours of his friend's fur shrinking, could sense the contents of his mind bleaching away.

  It was so close already. Already it had taken the Aigle palace, along with Mare, Gellick, Alam and Feyon. Now he could feel it sloshing down the Roy in thick ropey furls, washing over the city and scrubbing all signs of his failed revolution away. Perhaps this would truly be the end.

  He stood at the riverbank and spread his arms to greet it.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered, for Daveron and for Freemantle too. He imagined the madness that awaited that poor solitary prisoner; a lifetime lived in a cell unable to die, unable to leave. Such was the reward of the Heart.

  Then the Darkness reared over the wreckage as a terrible black tide, swallowing everything in its path, and with the last of his strength Sen tried one final time to open the veil.

  THE ROY

  He opened his eyes to ash.

  For a long moment he stood as the grayness fell, blinking and looking around. There was distant fire, and flagstones with mounds of bodies, and the burring toll of the Grammaton clock. There were distant cries, and the far-off boom and tremble of falling tongues, and a blue star in the sky.

  He was back.

  He looked at his hands, where his scars ran pale white, with no sign of the Saint's fire left in them. He'd used it up.

  Around him, the square was just as it had been. He reached out to the city and felt the slipperiness again, but the Darkness was once again far off, gathering at the edges of the Sump and across the Absalom Dusts.

  He rubbed his eyes. He'd stepped through the veil at the last moment, using the last of the Saint's blue fire. He'd taken Daveron's too, and used that as well.

  It had just been enough.

  Now he was back here. He'd thought of Freemantle and the white cell, but this was as far as he had gone. He tried again now, quickly closing his eyes and prying at the veil, but was interrupted by the sound of urgent hoof beats clattering nearer through the gloom.

  His eyes snapped open, and only seconds later the huge horse emerged again through ribbons of ash, this time heading straight for him. He remembered how he'd moved the previous time to investigate one of the body mounds, but there was no time for that now.

  The beast came on and he stepped swiftly to the side and jumped. His left hand snagged the reins and his right hand bounced off the saddle's pommel and caught at the edge, then the horse passed and wrenched him flailing into the air. His right leg missed the angle that would have slid him onto the horse's back, so instead he fell to hang at its side as it tore on, perilously close to being run under the horse's hooves.

  "Whoa!" he yelled, yanking hard on the reins while clutching the saddle desperately with the other. The creature tossed its head to pull him off the reins, but after years of climbing across the city's roofs his grip was too strong to easily shake. "Whoa," he called again, and this time tried to reach into its mind with his own. He had none of the Saint's fire left, but he had always been able to read thoughts, and what he heard in the horse was blind terror.

  "Sssh," he soothed, as it began drawing left, its head pulled that way by his weight on the reins. "Sssh, it's all right girl, ease up, ease up."

  It raced and began to buck, but Sen kept up a steady stream of soothing sounds, all the while trying to caress its thoughts with his own. Soon it was no longer galloping but cantering, then trotting, until Sen was able to walk by its side.

  After three steps he jumped, caught the angle correctly, and landed roughly in the saddle. He'd never ridden a horse before, but how hard could it be? The Darkness was coming, and there was no time to waste.

  "Yah!" he yelled, and the horse bolted into the dark.

  They galloped up the Haversham and onto Gilungel Bridge in a quarter of the time it would have taken Sen alone. The horse ran like a mechanical engine beneath him; soothed by his mind and
harnessed to his thoughts. It leapt crevasses torn by the Rot's tongues, navigated streets strewn with jagged rubble and ignored the dusty crumbling as masonry nearby collapsed. It was a war horse, one of the Dragoon's mounts brought in by the King to fend off the revolution; Sen could tell that from the blue raiment on its bridle, even if he couldn't also feel it in its mind.

  Gilungel Bridge thundered by under its powerful hooves, until they shot off the edge and raced past the wreckage of the Balast charge to either side. There was no blue knot of light where Daveron's body lay in the shadows, no hint of life left. Sen had already used it up. He geed the horse harder and together they flew up the Haversall into Jubilante.

  The destruction was no lesser here; up through the Diamante there were whole rows of terraced houses smashed open in wave-like lines where the Rot's tongues had strafed them. Sen peered into the inner chambers of jewelers and silversmiths, their walls lifted away like the front-piece of one of Feyon's dollhouses. The flagstones everywhere were cracked and ruptured where tongues had dragged through them, forcing the horse to skitter sideways to avoid breaking an ankle.

  Onward they climbed, zigzagging up wide boulevards that hours ago had been regal and leafy, now draped with bodies and garlanded with the constant drift of ash. Sen felt the blue dots of his other friends drawing closer, his generals, even as the Darkness washed over the volcano across the Gutrock wastes. The fire flower in the sky winked out as it was swallowed.

  At last the Aigle palace emerged from the ash like a storm-battered cliff, its outline eroded by tongues that had torn away familiar turrets and walkways. Blue knots burned amidst it; Feyon and Gellick on the ground in front, Alam in its midst, Mare at the top in the chamber of skins. Through the ash-strewn boulevard gardens the horse galloped on, leaping over impact-canted fountains and toppled oft trees with their scraggly roots in the air.

  The scene before the palace opened up as he drew near. Bodies lay everywhere like a rich harvest sprung up through the earth, salted with dull embers and undermined by the thinning touch of the Darkness. It was rising everywhere now, up from beneath and down from above, rolling unstoppably across the Gutrock wastes toward the Gloam Hallows and the Fallowlands.

  He ran the horse as far as he could then slowed and vaulted off, continuing on foot over the carpet of the dead until he stood above the huge bulk of Gellick, this man he barely remembered. Smothered in grit he seemed no different from the strange statues in Aradabar; his dull green eyes coated with gray, his heavy frame calcified solid. He was dead like the rest, like everyone, but the Saint's fire still burned within him.

  Sen took that fire and ran on, sparing no time for a grief he couldn't feel. Feyon lay at the ramp to the Aigle, surrounded by the mixed caste brigades who'd followed her to the end. Sen's heart boomed hard as soon as he saw her face, her Blue skin smeared with blood and pasted with ash.

  When her eyes flickered his step faltered.

  "Sen?" she whispered.

  He sped himself closer, staggering over the dead and ready to spend all the fire he had left in an effort to keep her alive, even if only for a moment before the Darkness came, even if it damned everything else. Her beautiful blue eyes pierced him like a pin through a butterfly and changed the balance of everything.

  This was what mattered. "Feyon," he croaked, barely able to get the words out for the sudden rush of feeling. Seconds later he was on his knees by her side squeezing her palm, stroking it desperately and not knowing where to put his hands or what to do. Wounds peppered her body and blood ran down from a gouge in her head, but he could easily feel that these were not the things killing her.

  The Darkness was killing her; draining her away.

  "You came back," she whispered, so faintly that he could only hear her by pushing his ear close to her lips.

  "I'm here," he answered, hands bumbling as he touched her face then her shoulder, tears pouring down his cheeks. He reached in and felt the Darkness already riddled throughout her, chewing into her mind and heart. He poured the Saint in but there was nowhere for it to go; the Darkness had thinned her so much that the channels had dried up and there was nothing left to bring back.

  "Feyon," he urged, pushing his arms around her back and trying to lift her from the heap of bodies entangling her, but he couldn't get any purchase and she only gasped as he failed, her neck toppling backward like a doll's. She was fading from him right now and he couldn't let her go.

  "Wait," he pleaded, shutting his eyes and trying to open the veil for them both; to the white cell, to the Grammaton, to anywhere but here, but none of it changed the rain of ash or the advance of the Darkness through her heart.

  She whispered something more and he held her cheeks as if he could pull the words out, sobbing now, holding her head and hugging it close as the Darkness shaved away the last blush of life.

  Then she was gone.

  He held her head to his shoulder and rocked, too afraid to look at her face and see the forgiveness in her final expression, the love. He didn't deserve any of it.

  "I'm sorry," he repeated over and over again. So the Darkness was coming, but he didn't care. In the white cell the deaths of his friends had felt so distant; hearing Freemantle tell the story hadn't felt real, lost amongst the deaths of thousands glimpsed from the top of the Grammaton. But this?

  This was a hole scooped out from inside him. He couldn't think. The Darkness rolled in and he welcomed it, cascading over the Groan debtor's prison and extinguishing the last fires of Afric, gushing down the Gutrock cliffs above the palace and surging toward him. He looked up into its drowning black mass, and saw the truth of what nothingness really meant.

  Feyon gone, Gellick gone, Alam and Mare and Daveron and the Abbess and Sister Henderson and the dream of the Saint and all the castes and all the possibilities his city offered gone, Freemantle and his cell gone, and everything gone, and how could he allow that? Death had to mean something or nothing had ever been worth a thing. It was better to die believing that than giving in.

  He sucked the fire from Feyon's chest, shut his eyes as the floodtides fell and opened the veil.

  * * *

  Grammaton square dawned around him.

  His eyes felt dull and heavy from crying, though there were no tears on his cheeks now. Ash fell endlessly. Was this all he'd see, he wondered; using up all of his strength just running around the city's imminent ruin, like King Seem through the exhumed hallways of Aradabar. He needed to break free, to find a way to turn back the tide and save Feyon, but how?

  The Darkness was everywhere, in everything, burning through lives like the Red Ague. He had to know where it came from and what was causing it, or he'd never be able to stop it.

  The clock tower chimed fitfully, and Sen turned his hands before him; Feyon's blue fire burned down the lines of his scars. Gellick's had been used up.

  How many more times could he do this?

  He felt the vibrations of the horse through the stone flags before he heard its mad canter. The veil had put him here. Have faith in the Heart, he'd said to Freemantle. It didn't matter that the work was hopeless. Hopeless was nothing next to Freemantle's three hundred years alone. Duty was lonely, but it had to be done.

  The horse burst out of the ash clouds in a riot of hoof beats, and Sen lifted one hand, sending a thin filament of the Saint's power to still it instantly. Its panic fell away, its gallop halted, and it nosed up to Sen completely calm but for the jets of hot breath steaming from its ash-caked nostrils.

  Sen touched its velvety nose. "You've had a hard time of it too, haven't you, girl?"

  The horse gave a little whinny, and Sen glimpsed the chaos of memories warring in the creature's head; the violence, the booming of cannon, the charge of strange castes rushing past.

  "Shhh," said Sen, and climbed gently atop its back. He patted its trembling neck, rough with the clotted grazes of battle. "Shhh."

  They ran.

  Up the Haversham they went, over the bridge and back to the Aigle
palace, where Gellick and Feyon lay still and silent as stones at the bottom of the pond, part of the landscape now. The only signs of life came from Alam and Mare; twin pulses of light in the darkness.

  Sen dismounted the horse and ran up the ramp to the Aigle's revolving entrance. He'd made a study of it for months, creeping up through the Roy in sewers and shadowed gardens at night, taking up a vantage point two fathoms distant atop an artisanal bakery's roof. Using a lensed scope he'd learned the patterns of the rotation, learning when the scrivenry block was in position, when the turret to the chamber of skins was aligned.

  The Aigle was dead and still now, with the Darkness biting into it too.

  Sen grinned. He hadn't tried this before, but when else would he get the chance? With the power of the Saint fizzling in his scars, he reached out with one hand and pushed against the entrance.

  At first there was nothing, but Sen fed more power, and the gears of the palace screamed. The axis it sat upon roared as broken axles within attempted to work the rotation. Sen laughed and pushed harder, reveling in the grinding of metal on metal as the mechanism ran backward. Several times it caught, knocked off its axis by the Rot's assaults, but the Saint forced it through.

  When it opened on the scrivener's block entrance Sen ran in. It was dark inside but the light of the Saint lit the way, and he navigated half by feel, half by memory. Alam had described this route to him. They'd mapped it out a dozen times to plan for the worst; entrance or flight under attack by Molemen.

  Now it was silent and still but for the clang of his feet on the metal floors. The Darkness was coming around already, rolling up to the volcano's caldera, but he didn't care. This was his final duty, if he did nothing else. He would see each of his friends out of this world, and take what lessons he could from the power in their chests.