The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  "I'll take you to more."

  Sen took her by the hand, and Craley let herself be led. They walked from the cathedral and through the mist together, barely speaking. There were no farewells to the Butterfly Abbess or the other Sisters, but Craley did not mind. She'd always known they were a temporary place for her only, and that Sen would come back for her one day.

  It was her first time to walk freely through the Hallows, and she reveled in the streets and squares of that ruined place, remembering the ancient heroes and leaders they were named after.

  "Where are we going?" she asked, as they passed down a narrow cobbled street with the name Hickory Passing carved into tarnished Hasp stone at the corner. Hickory had been a district of an ancient, pre-Aradabar village, accidentally destroyed when the tide of the Absalom Dusts was disturbed by the death of the Mjolnir armies.

  "A new place Craley," was all that Sen would say.

  "Am I still hunting the army?" she asked, eager to contribute, happy to have this shining young man's eyes on her. "Can I still help you defeat the Darkness?"

  Sen said nothing, but ruffled her hair. This made Craley proud.

  They walked from the Hallows and out onto the crunching Fallowlands. Emerging from the mists felt like opening a new book on a new world full of wonders. The Fallows stretched into the distance, rife with humps and troughs. Of course Craley knew that these were the salt-encrusted bodies of the dead, left by old King Berick after the first cleansing of castes, four hundred years ago. She knew all about Berick and his laws on caste, because the Sisters said those laws came directly from the Rot.

  "We board here," Sen said, pointing to the struts of Carmarthy station.

  They climbed up the worn wooden structure and stood on the scrappy platform. Everything there was new to Craley; the rails, the spread of the salty Fallowlands, but there was something she'd been waiting years to ask, and now she couldn't hold herself back.

  "Am I the only one searching for your army, Sen? Are there others like me, reading through your books?"

  Sen only looked away.

  They rode the train up to the Gutrock obtrusion in silence. At Andesite station Sen took Craley's hand again and led her from the carriage, joining a line of men of many castes. Their varying shapes and sizes delighted Craley, and it took all her effort to not squeal with happiness. She cataloged them as the line shuffled forward; where their caste had originated, what their neck-ruffles or their back plating said about their culture, what ancient feuds would erupt between them if only they knew their own history. Imagining those battles amused her no end, and only Sen's regular touch on her shoulder kept her from bursting out laughing.

  Hours later they entered a swinging gondola for the wastes, and she told herself stories about King Seem and the Rot and the streets of Aradabar that lay underneath as they passed. She woke from a nap on the open Gutrock. Sen stood before her wearing a white ghasting suit with the balaclava down, shielding his face.

  "Wear this," he said, and held another ghasting suit to Craley. She put it on and together they passed through the pitboss' turnstile and walked out into the wastes. Oftentimes Sen had to carry her, as her legs were so weak after years of sitting in her crypt. The first night they camped in a gulley. Sen made a fire and roasted meat from a silver can. It was much tastier than the root soups she'd lived on with the Sisters.

  "This is my training," Craley said, lying back on a roll mat, careful not to touch the craggy, hungry Gutrock. "I understand that. We can talk about it."

  Sen gave that shallow smile again. "You're an intelligent girl, Craley. I know we can talk. But it isn't easy, the things we have to do."

  "So try. I'm here. I know all about your life, anyway, but you haven't even asked me about mine."

  Now the smile shifted, becoming a chuckle that made Craley proud. She'd broken through. "Of course, you've read our copies of The Saint, haven't you? They won't even be written for another," Sen thought, "fourteen years. But tell me. Talk to me about life in the Gloam Hallows."

  Craley did. There wasn't much to it, but she spun it out. She had no friends like Sen had had, but there were the Sisters and they were all funny in their own ways, even the ones who'd tried to beat her at first. One was Derindra, a raven-feathered Bract with mange who couldn't fly. She'd complained about how Craley was being spoiled, to have so many books to read and no other chores to do.

  Craley had outwitted her once by hiding inside a pile of books, while old Derindra was prowling the Esqury library stacks looking to beat her with a wooden spoon. When she leapt out right in front of the old Bract, screaming at the top of her lungs, she'd gone white and fainted flat away to the floor.

  It had been hilarious, one of the highlights of her quiet life. Sen laughed too.

  She talked about the two other Sisters and their habits at prayer. She talked about the ones who had come and then died, and how there were only a few left now.

  "The Abbess told me many others used to come and join them, but not anymore," Craley said. "She's mad, of course. She's always telling me to read things she's written, but she never wrote them anywhere."

  Sen chuckled. "She did the same with me."

  Craley warmed to that. They were quite similar, really. It was the happiest she'd ever been, lying there with Sen and just talking. She didn't remember falling asleep.

  The next day they walked. They didn't talk much again, and Sen's face became set. He didn't answer when Craley spoke to him. Sen led them on a winding path, over crevasses and past cave-ins of past exhumations, under natural bridges in the rock. At one point Craley thought she saw a behemoth set of cast copper hands emerging greenly from the rock, clutching great curved swords in their fists. Soon they dropped over a rise, a fold in the rumpled rock-blanket, and were forever hidden from view.

  They walked until twilight fell, the last rays of sun peaking over the apex of the snow-capped mountain in the distance, looming overhead. They walked until Craley felt dizzy and her feet bled in her boots, until on the evening of the third day they arrived.

  Before them stood a trapezoidal building of rich dark wood that admitted no light, afforded no view inside, and had no door.

  At once Craley began to walk around the black structure. She ran her fingers along it, the wood planed smooth under her fingers. She placed her eye to the cracks but they were too tightly jambed to see inside. She continued her circuit but saw no sign of any kind of entrance. At last she stepped back and scrambled up a jut of rock to survey the building from above.

  It was twice as tall as Sen, spread in a squat rectangle with the walls tilting inward to support a flat black wooden roof, from which no stovepipe or ladderway emerged. Against the bleached white stone of the boundless Gutrock it stood in stark opposition, black and smooth and perfectly enclosed.

  Craley felt her excitement build. She recognized it.

  "It's Seem's tabernacle!" she called down to the Sen, excitement rushing through her as she recalled the details from the Book of Airs and Graces, the hand-lengths and the degrees of apposition, the sheen and dark hue. "You made it out of wood."

  "That's right," replied Sen. "I made it for you."

  Craley halted her excited descent as a fresh curiosity welled up. "But there's no door."

  "No door you can see."

  "So is it a cell? You seal me in after I enter?"

  Sen shook his head. When he spoke there was a catch of emotion in his voice. "It's only a cell if you want it to be."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I mean you're free to stay or go. It's your choice."

  Craley looked around at the Gutrock spreading in every direction. It was a false choice. "I couldn't leave on my own now. There's no way."

  "You could if you really wanted to."

  Craley laughed. This was the story Sen had to tell himself, to make it all right. She understood more of the role she had to play than Sen perhaps expected, and it didn't upset her. If there were books and important work for her to
do, how could she complain? It was better than dying in a cage by the Levi side.

  "There's something underneath it, isn't there?" she asked, feeling the excitement build. She'd lost track of their position in the long days of travel over the rock, but she knew that this was Aradabar, a trove of outlandish treasures. "Something hidden in the Gutrock."

  Sen smiled. "I think you're going to like it."

  CELL IV

  They entered together, pressing the hidden knot in the wood that released a catch inside, and Sen led them in. The tabernacle was a cozy space, with a neat bed in the corner, a broad desk against the wall with stocks of papers, quills and inkstones, while in the center lay stacks of ancient brown books.

  Craley gasped at the sight of them, and rushed over to touch the tracery on their worn gilt edges, letting her fingers dance over their titles, written in languages she'd never seen, with symbols and words she could not even begin to describe.

  Tears welled down her cheeks silently. She turned to Sen, then back to the pile of books. She began to speak but her mouth clogged with thick emotion, causing her chest-lips to take over.

  "This is mine?" they asked roughly.

  Sen gave a light laugh. "This and a whole lot more."

  He tugged on a black metal ring set in the floor and a wooden trapdoor opened, revealing a ladder leading down into the rock. Sen lifted a revelatory lantern from the wall and tuned the gas then twisted the striker, spreading yellow light spread around the shack interior.

  "Shall we?" he asked, pointing down at the ladder.

  Craley nodded excitedly.

  Sen led them straight down on a wooden ladder, in a chute that was rough-hewn and braced on all sides with brass stocks.

  "Did you dig this?" she called down to Sen.

  "I had it dug," came the reply.

  "For me?"

  "For you."

  Craley counted their descent; a fathom, two, three, until they hit a rock floor four fathoms down. Here Sen showed her a set of ropes running back along the wall, with a person-sized bucket knotted in.

  "The King had something like this in his tower," Sen explained. "You construct the pulley A-frame at the top, then load books into this bucket. At the top you wind it, and they'll be up there for you to study in no time."

  "It's like a well," said Craley, barely able to contain her excitement, "but for books not water."

  "That's right."

  They moved on, down lilting passageways of cored rock in different brilliant shades.

  "All this rock really came from the volcano?" asked Craley.

  Sen nodded. "And the churn of the earth, when the Rot came."

  Craley knew all about the Rot. She'd read about it in Wreaks' Almanac, in Avia's Revels, Scarfell's Gazette and the Book of Airs and Graces. It was the end of the world, after which the Darkness followed. Seeing its handiwork here made her quest to find the army seem tantalizingly real.

  She said nothing more, only followed closely behind the bobbing lantern. Soon they began to rise, and came to a door of bright red metal dug into the rock. Sen clasped the door's great metal ring-turn, then looked at Craley.

  "Avia fitted this red metal at every door and window years before the Rot came. I suppose she knew we'd be coming." Again that smile. "The seals were strong enough to stop the lava, so all the contents were preserved."

  He twisted the clasp, and ancient bolts disengaged. Craley marveled that it still functioned. The door creaked open and they entered.

  The revelatory light illuminated a vast white portico hall, stretching up and out into voluminous darkness. Paintings lined the walls, marble mosaics covered the floor, and the air was rich with the smell of old vellum, undisturbed for millennia. Craley's head spun with it.

  She knew where they were.

  Thick dust stirred as they moved forward, rising in little billowing clouds and settling in the grooved craters their boots had left. Craley looked to either side, where fallen statues lay broken in recessed alcoves, their heads and arms dislocated by the eruption, lain to rest where they landed nearly three thousand years ago.

  "It's amazing," she breathed.

  "This way," Sen said.

  The portico hall narrowed gradually as they advanced, as though they were approaching two great rounded structures side by side, becoming a corridor at the end of which was a set of tall double doors. Sen leaned his weight against them and they inched open wide enough to slip through.

  On the other side lay the great lost library of Aradabar.

  Both of Craley's jaws dropped. Shelves stretched out in radial arcs in every direction, and beyond those shelves were further shelves splitting the angles and bifurcating, spreading out into darkness and filling the twin domes of the figure-eight-shaped library with books.

  There were thousands of books there, surely, or hundreds of thousands. The nearest had all been stacked neatly back on upright shelves, but in the distance she saw that books littered the floor, and heavy wooden shelves leaned against each other haphazardly, in some cases split and shedding their load of volumes everywhere. In places books were piled like snowdrift as high as Craley's waist, their pages bent backward and crumpled, their words gazing blindly into the dark, with white faces and limp spines.

  Further still, in the deeper piles at the limit of the revelatory's glow, she glimpsed things older than books; capsuled scrolls, vellum pads lined with leather, papyrus tapestries and hessian inked weaves, flat-pressed leaves, conical papyrus rolls, swathes of bolted cotton dyed with symbols she'd never seen before, incised statues, inscribed friezes shattered into pieces, stonework and plaster and paper and all possible forms of recorded information.

  Joy spread through Craley like never before. She'd found her home.

  * * *

  They circled the library together for hours, and Craley planned out her research journey. Every bit of knowledge looked delectable. Sen outlined the library's organizing structure; everything in the left dome focused on the Heart, everything on the right on the Rot. More central was ancient, at the rims was recent, and partitions were laid by continent and ocean.

  There were numerous extra halls connected as well, through countless doors leading off. In one lay hundreds if not thousands of bundles of the finest Spider silk, in another there were hundreds of stuffed animals, in yet one more lay great stacks of stamped and cut metal shapes.

  "What are these for?" Craley asked, but Sen only shrugged.

  "Heart knows," he said.

  Back above ground he showed her the storage bins in the floor of the tabernacle, stocked with enough canned and dried food for years. He demonstrated the funnel and hose contraption built into the roof for collecting rainwater, running down to large barrels at the wall. There were all the medicines she might need stored in a white wooden crate. There were plentiful canisters of revelatory gas, a stove for cooking and warmth, with many spare taps, hoses and filaments in case the original broke.

  Craley pointed at the books in the middle. "These are not from the library," she said. "They're not three thousand years old."

  "They're from a dozen libraries," Sen answered. "As well as book mines and vaults hidden throughout the Gutrock. I paid thieves to steal as much as they could. Right here is everything the city knows about the past."

  Craley considered that. The effort Sen had gone to was enormous, building the tabernacle and digging down to the library. How many teams of ghasts had he hired to exhume it? How many supply trains of Afric laborers had he brought out here ferrying wood, food, gas, equipment? How many years had it taken?

  She looked at Sen now. She'd never thought too much about these things before. The Gloam Hallows was a simple place, only a short train ride away from the Levi banks, but this? It was a life's work.

  "What if I can't find the armies you're looking for?" she asked. "I haven't found them yet."

  Sen didn't respond for a time. As he thought it over, Craley watched his face. She didn't know many faces yet, and could only dr
aw on the expressions of the Hallows Sisters for comparison, but Sen's seemed sad.

  "If I'd left you in your father's den, you would have died," he said after a time. "You understand that, don't you?"

  Craley nodded.

  "And if I'd not brought you with me, you would have died when you turned eight anyway. The whole world dies, Craley."

  "Because of the Darkness. I know that, Sen. I know you want to save your friends, and Feyon, and the Sisters of your Abbey. What I want to know is, what if I fail?"

  Sen's eyes took on a faraway look. "Fail? "

  They stood quietly for a little while longer. Craley fingered the nearby books, stroking the shiny patina of centuries. She didn't really think failure was likely. She was certain that one day she'd find all Sen's heroes of legend, and then she'd fly with them for real as the army went to fight the Rot. Still, she wanted to know how he'd react.

  "I was about your age when my mother died," Sen said, side-stepping the question. "She died and fourteen years later the world ended. It puts things in perspective."

  Craley frowned. "The world hasn't ended yet."

  "For me it has."

  "But you're here. You're talking to me."

  "It's more complicated than that, Craley."

  Of course she knew that. She knew all about Gorshalty's theory of time as an ocean. But maybe that didn't matter. She set down the book she'd been holding, a treatise on the earliest laws of Gutrock reclamation, and looked up at Sen. There was one question more than all the others she wanted the answer to.

  "Are you my father, now?"

  Sen's left cheek flickered and his eyebrows pulled together. A moment later they smoothed, and the same shallow smile came back.

  "Yes, I am."

  Craley nodded, taking him at his word. "So is that why you've made this home for us?"

  Sen shook his head. "This home is for you, Craley, not for me. I can't stay."

  "I didn't think so. So answer my question." Craley jutted her chin forward firmly and spoke with her chest mouth. "What if I can't find the armies?"

  "Then the world ends," said Sen, quietly now. "Not just in the future or the past, but everywhere." He gestured to the books. "Everything that happened in these will be stolen by the Darkness. I can feel it now, slicing layers away with every breath. I'm already taking too long in this time, in this place, Craley." Now a hint of something new entered Sen's voice, something like her old father's desperation, an addiction to the Scarab, though this was far more destructive. "I'm wearing through the world with my presence. The world is going to end, and you are the last chance to change it. I've invested too much to start all over again. You asked me if anyone else was reading these books, searching for the army? The answer is no. It's only you." He paused, looking at her. There was warmth there, which she clung to. "You have to find the army. But is that even possible? I don't know. I saw it in a kind of vision. I only remember how it felt to watch my friends die as the Darkness took them. I have to turn that back if I can."