The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  "Like who?"

  A fire lit in Sen's chest. It had been done to him; the loneliness, the cruelty, the great weight of responsibility, and look what he'd achieved. Results were what mattered. Now he would do it to another.

  "Like a child."

  BOOK 3. CRALEY SHARK

  CRALEY SHARK I

  The veil opened and closed like a flickering iris, depositing Sen on a riverbank at night. Soft loam sucked and settled beneath his feet, while white after-images of the veil flashed before his eyes. He blinked them away and looked up at the sky to see stars. There was no sign of the Rot or the Darkness here. There was no ash in the air and no eruption on the horizon, no muffled cries of the Balast Hax ringing out across the water. There was only the long, slow flow of the Levi River rolling by.

  He'd passed beyond the end of the world.

  For long moments he stood there, ignoring the screams coming from behind him, watching the water flow by and breathing in the familiar stench of rotting kelp, Afric soot and Sheckledown brine. It was good to be home. He didn't try to slow the tears that followed. Rather he watched a coracle bobbing along on a clinking chain across the river's great gray expanse, barely lit by its meager revelatory light, hunting fish at night.

  Home.

  He reached out and felt the familiar buzzing tide of the city's minds; countless castes living out their lives. Here at the edge of Afric their thoughts were filled with various worries and hurts, angers and addictions, interspersed with hopes and dreams of something better. The Saint was barely there within them, only a mote of old lullabies and childhood myth. The Darkness was barely perceptible, though it undergirded everything with its thinning touch.

  When the tears stopped, he felt ready. The screams from behind confirmed he'd arrived at the right place and time, four years before the end. At this moment another Sen had barely begun hand-printing The Saint. Somewhere out there across the river he was working in the Slumswelters, completely alone. Alam would still be at the Abbey, Feyon was a suicidal prisoner in her room, and the others?

  He didn't remember the others. Gellick and Mare. The thought crossed his mind that he could go see them now. Maybe he could warn them, but what would he say? What could they do in this time other than fight with their Sen against the Rot? None of them even knew the Darkness was the real enemy.

  No.

  He turned and looked at the dark riverside shantytown behind him; a tumbledown ribbon of reedgrass wattle and tarpaper hovels that ran the waste-strewn flood plain of the Levi river. There were few lights amongst it at this hour; revelatory gas was too expensive for the lowest castes who lived here, the Bellyheads and Caracts, the Wimples and Dogsbodies, who worked at the meatpacking jaws of the Dirondack cannery, who spent their days cracking Gutrock in the wastes or stamping out leather in the Manticore pools of urine and guano.

  No revelatory tubing even ran here. There were no street lamps for the AllsWellMen to light, no sewers but the camber of the loam bank down to the Levi, no beautiful green grounds like he'd had at the Abbey. It was worse in some ways than Indura, because at least in Indura there was a sense of community. The people in these shacks didn't even have that; gathered here only for the dock and factory work, renting shacks that ate up most of their pay, leaving the dregs to be consumed by ale, cheap damask and the scarab.

  He could smell the hint of scarab smoke on the air; pungent and sweet, not unlike the ceremonial incense Topaz that the Sisters had used on fated occasions to celebrate the Heart. He tried to imagine what living here, what growing up in this transient, hopeless, scarab-addicted place would be like, and failed.

  Perhaps that thought helped steel him to what he had to do. The fate he had in mind for the child was better in so many ways than this.

  He strode up the bank, toward the thuds and the screams. They were dimming now, the work mostly done. Nobody in the neighboring shacks came out in surprise, nor was there any sense of alarm. Such violence was certainly a part of their daily life.

  Sen wended his way through narrow alleys of rusted tin and driftwood, between many bodies dreaming behind skin-thin walls; of the few hours of pleasure their long week of hard graft would procure.

  Soon he stood before the Appomatox's shack. It was just as he remembered it, glimpsed in Daveron's earliest memories of usury butchery. Then it had been only a detail; a way to corrupt Daveron's hollow experience of pain, as he'd beaten himself in the millinery with one hand on the little Moleman's brow. He'd injected his own agony into this very moment; the first trip Daveron had taken with his father to a gut-busting, and that in turn had made Daveron into a different kind of man, the kind of man willing to betray his own race for a higher calling.

  Sen pushed aside the guilt and peered through the open doorway, canted sideways like everything in that decrepit place, and glimpsed a light within and the motion of violence, and in a darkened corner, the child.

  It had been an instant only in Daveron's memory. Seen on the way in, hidden in a cage and forgotten in the rush of the gut-busting. But Sen had remembered. That tiny child in its cage had hung in his mind for years, until this moment came around.

  His fists tightened around the misericordes in their thigh holsters; returned as if he'd ever lost them on the mountaintop. Power burned through his scars, urging him to act. He could stop the cruelty now, if he wanted to. He could save the Appomatox and leave him with his child, could even set them up with money for the rest of their short lives, but that wasn't why he had come. He needed the father dead. He needed the child broken, and there was no time to grieve for that. There was only necessity.

  He turned away into the white. The veil flashed briefly, extracting only the smallest part of his power, and then he was in the Gloam Hallows. There was scarcely any dizziness, only the slightest afterimage of a figure calling out to him, perhaps one of the Sisters, judging by her dark cassock, but he couldn't be sure. He was going to lose them all, in the end, and they all looked alike when they were at prayer.

  There were things he had to prepare.

  The mists of the Gloam Hallows rolled around him, revealing in waves the bright rainbow glow of the stained glass window. It was no longer shattered in this time and place, twenty years before the end. In his hands he held a book; the leather tome from the Abbess' office.

  AVIA'S REVELS

  He smiled. The veil had provided what he needed. He started up the broken cloisters to the cathedral's hollow body, where he would find the Butterfly Abbess and her brethren; the same ones he'd seen in the Abbess' memory, the Scarab-shell and the Cowface, Sisters who followed the whimsical, mysterious wiles of the Heart. With the glow in his scars it wouldn't take much to convince them of his cause.

  It was his first preparation of many.

  * * *

  Craley Shark was three years old when the Molemen came to kill her father. Her father was a scarab-addicted Appomatox, once an ostler at the court of King Aberainythy, now a provener living beneath the tide-line in the deep warrens of the Afric Levi banks. The dirt floor of their basement shack was silted with scarab guts, and scarab shells hung cawked and disemboweled on long lines of dog-gut string.

  Craley lived in a cage-cot in the corner, and grew up listening to the scarabs scream. In the earliest days when her father first fell from his position in the Roy, she'd cried and cried. Her father had made the cot into a cage and found her a muzzle to match, so she'd learned not to cry. That was long ago, so distant that she couldn't remember a time she didn't hear the screams of the tiny scarabs every day.

  The fermenting process meant they had to be slit and cooked alive. She watched her father at the work endlessly; slitting open the live scarabs, searing their guts with hot iron, mulching their innards in his chest-mouth, then spitting the mix back into their clicking shells and hanging them out to ferment.

  After the work was done her father would shiver, groan, and collapse on the filthy bedding in the corner. All day long Craley would watch the scarab shells drip th
eir contents to the floor. She played games in her mind watching them. Rats came and went, and at times Craley could catch them; beating them over the head to make them sleepy so she could hold their hot little mangy bodies close to her chest until it was time to eat.

  At times her father hoisted her from her cage and whispered hot apologies into her hair. Other times he ignored her for days and nights at a time. Sometimes he gave her food; loaf rinds or gristly joints or crumbs of piecrust.

  Craley knew nothing about the world. She'd never been out of the basement, and could not speak. She heard the sounds her father made, but any time she tried to repeat them he just laughed.

  She learned not to use her face-mouth for anything other than breathing. She learnt to shift her tiny body from time to time so the cold stones underfoot and metal grille above would not dent into her skin and cause pain. She learnt to keep her own shallow stoop of stone as clean as possible, though the only tools she had to do this were her own hands and feet.

  One night the men came. It was night and she was drifting in and out of sleep, hungry and bleary-eyed. She didn't know what they were, simply more things like her father rustling in at the door, coming down the steps. In the darkness they padded silently through the scarab drippings, speaking in mellifluous tones that Craley did not understand.

  One of them produced a spark of light, which was magnified inside a glass box which hissed and spat snickers of tiny flame. The men were furred, with long snouts, and they prodded her father awake with their long, flat clubs.

  His father screamed when he saw them and struggled to rise, but the smaller of the two Molemen held him down with his own filthy blanket. The older Moleman hefted his club over his head and brought it down on her father's stomach.

  There was a thud, and her father screamed. Craley began to cry though she didn't really understand what was happening. The man with the club hit her father again, and again, until he ceased any kind of resistance, any kind of screaming, and there was only the thud of the flat club on his body.

  Craley wanted to scream but she knew she ought not to make any sound. Instead she sat and watched as they finished their work, and nailed a single piece of paper into her father's chest.

  When the men left her father lay still, wheezing and blubbering in ways Craley had never heard before.

  The morning came, and light shifted through the chinks and holes of the rickety shack, illuminating the gory sight of her father, bubbling with every strained breath. He looked like a scarab that had been slit, composted, refilled.

  She watched her father die. It took all that night and most of the next for him to finally stop breathing.

  After that there was nothing. She sat there and in her simple way wondered what she would eat. There were no words as she had no language, but she knew the pattern by which she survived; the provening work, the payment as people came to their shack entrance for their scarabs, the scraps tossed to Craley to eat.

  She waited for her father to rise. She didn't know what death was, though it terrified her. She waited, but still her father did not move.

  At the end of the second day a new man came. He was not like the snouted men or her father or any of the scarab addicts; he had dark hair tied neatly back, and gray eyes, and white lines on his face and arms that glowed with a kind of blue light.

  He moved directly to the cage Craley was trapped in and lifted off the cage lid, hoisting her out and into a warm blanket he had brought. He put a beaker of clean clear milk to Craley's lips and set a chunk of cheese and a piece of bread beside her.

  The man spoke but Craley did not understand, yet in his touch there was a kind of message. Craley glimpsed tantalizing sensations she'd never felt before; warmth, comfort, belonging, friendship. They came with images and sounds she didn't understand, grown directly in her mind like dreams, but they didn't frighten her. Rather they seemed to promise a different way of living, and something in them told Craley her world was about to change for the better, so she didn't cry or resist. She just stared up at this strange figure, wondering.

  The man strode out of the shack, and for the first time Craley saw the sun. It hurt her eyes, so she focused on eating the cheese in little mouthfuls; richer than anything she'd eaten before.

  The man carried her away, speaking softly all the while, though none of it was intelligible to Craley. At times she turned from the glowing lines of the man's skin to the distance, where her enfeebled eyes picked out shapes, colors, and other bodies moving. She had no words for any of them, no names or understanding, but she saw them and cataloged them and wondered what they were.

  Long travels followed in a kind of shack that moved without moving. The skies shifted and light streamed in, she felt the rails clattering by underneath, and she grew scared, but the man spoke to her through touch.

  Safe, he said. Craley saw more pictures in her head; a train carriage running through a city, heading for a cathedral. Craley knew none of the words, train or city or cathedral, had never experienced the concepts before, but the man made them simple.

  Then there was mist. It was cold and clammy, similar to the waves that had once blown sleet and scree into her father's shack off the Levi River. She wrapped her tiny malformed body tightly in the warm blanket and snuggled in to the man's chest. There was no toothy mouth in his chest, not an Appomatox, and Craley found that she liked that. No chest mouth meant that this man could not provener the scarab, like her father.

  Then there was whiteness. A white space came and went, like a different kind of train carriage, then there were people; a jumble of different voices, all of them chattering and bickering. Another pair of hands took her, and a wealth of glorious colors surrounded her. Hands wiped her clean, and wrapped her snug, and caressed her for the first time in her life.

  Safe, said the man's final touch.

  She felt happy, and a strange kind of warmth flooded through her. She didn't see the man again for six years.

  * * *

  When she was nine the man returned to take her away. By then the women of the Gloam Hallows cathedral; the Butterfly Abbess, Scarab-shelled Gimbleray her nurse, Pecky Sue the Cowface, had raised her to be almost a physically normal Appomatox girl.

  But she wasn't normal. She still dreamt of the days as her father died, watching from her cage. These dreams didn't scare her, if anything she sympathized with the Molemen. Her father was a bad man, she knew that. In dreams she often imagined herself standing with the Molemen holding one of the bats, but those dreams were smooth and fuzzy now, like pebbles well-polished by the mist's tides. The images had glossed over and become generic, replaced by the army.

  That was the vision that occupied her mind night and day; Saint Ignifer's army galloping through the sky, an army of all castes rising against oppression and poverty and squalor. She had a book filled with sketches of it, descriptions of it, and guesses at what it might be. She had another book of stories that might one day come true, but were almost impossible to understand. She had lots of books, and the Sisters taught her to read them, and how to seek hidden wisdom in their pages. They taught her that her purpose in life was to find the army, though she didn't understand how or why.

  She spent her days in the shell of their Esqury crypt underground, reading or being lectured to. She felt comfortable in that dark, dripping space amongst the ancient dead; similar to the shack she'd been born into. There was only what light shed from the odorous whale-fat candles, illuminating the hundreds of leather-bound tomes slowly rotting in the mist.

  She rarely ventured up from the crypt. She spoke infrequently with the Butterfly Abbess, because she was mad and had little to offer. Always she returned to her crypt, where she buried herself in words and books, because they were the real succor. The man who had brought her had laid out a challenging curriculum, beginning with the Book of Airs and Graces and Avia's Revels and moving on to more esoteric volumes on language and history, books that claimed to pre-date King Seem and the Fates of Aradabar, that gave d
etailed accounts of the Silver-Rays and the Arrythian Wars, the Drazi Inception, the drowning of the Mjolnirs.

  Craley read them all, or had the harder ones read to her. Their thick meanings became her explorations, a world of wonders she could delve deeply into. There were bound copies of other stories too, compiled from a newspaper circular called The Saint that retold all the old stories in new and innovative ways, with all the same heroes reimagined.

  Over the six years she read them all. She could read in four languages by then, two of them long-since dead, so her mind became keen to the past. She knew all the accounts of Seem and Avia, all the truths in the many books of Wry and Tullathon Quay, and still she could not find the army.

  One day the man returned. Craley was sitting at her Esqury desk going over old papers, as was one of her great pleasures. She stood when she saw him, standing in the dank cave before her, glowing a faint blue as the Saint's fire ran through his strange scars.

  "Sen," Craley said. The man smiled and advanced.

  "Hello, Craley," he said. His voice seemed warm and familiar, yet he was young; younger than the shadowy figure she remembered from the myth of her infanthood. Back then he had been a towering presence, a giant, but now he was a young man only, barely eighteen years old.

  To Craley he seemed like a child. The Sisters of the cathedral were all wizened and ancient. She spent her days and nights with the dead, and counted herself more amongst them than with the living. Still, Sen had a presence that outshone his meager years. There was something large and overwhelming about him.

  He wore a strange shallow smile. Craley would spend years picking that smile apart, wondering what it meant, though for now she just observed, as she did in everything.

  "The Sisters tell me you've run out of books," Sen said.

  Craley nodded. She rarely spoke.