The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  When they rose to the stone ramparts, with the sun shading the dark skies blue, they abruptly turned to Sen and welcomed him with a startling cheer. Those nearest slapped him on the armor. The big Gawk he'd fought came over and punched him on the breastplate.

  "Not a bad fit," he commented, tugging on the chest plate with its ample padding underneath. Sen had had to wear three thick cloaks to stop it bouncing wildly as he moved. "You're about the same size Fat Kal was."

  Sen gave a cold grin. "How are your teeth?"

  The Gawk laughed and stroked his chin. "I'll grant you, that was a good move. I never saw the misericordes used so creatively."

  Sen shrugged. "It's a two thousand-year-old maneuver."

  "Well, it moves well for its age. Now had I been sober you never would have got that close."

  Sen spun the misericorde in his hand, reversed it, spun it back. "Let's hope we don't need to test that theory."

  The Gawk smiled appreciatively. "I like you, Fat Kal."

  "My name's Sen."

  "Your name's Fat Kal until you earn that armor off him. Understood?"

  "Understood."

  "So it is."

  Moments later the Drazi came, and there was no more time for talking. They surged over the walls endlessly. Sen's body was still drained, but fighting them didn't demand great agility or strength, just stamina and concentration. He met them economically, with the simplest of spikes through the brain, conserving his energy.

  The killing became rote, as ever. The Drazi all fought in the same way, reacting the same to his offences. They could parry some of his more typical lunges, maneuvers similar to those of a rapierist or caulkist, but they countered with the same simple moves every time; wide slashing arcs, simple thrusts with no grace or elegance at all.

  Sen slew a lot of them. It was mind-numbing, and his body moved in a repetitive trance. At times like this it seemed the biggest threat was boredom, that he might get skewered while drifting along. A Drazi might slip on a bloody patch of stonework, its lunge morph into something unpredictable, and Sen would be left lying broken on the inner siege plain amongst the Drazi corpses, wishing he'd been paying closer attention.

  At the end of each such fantasy he'd come back to himself with a chill, realize he'd slain numerous Drazi, then continue for a time before his attention again began to wander.

  It wasn't so easy for all the Decatate. Those wielding heavy battle caulks, axes, and maces, even those lunging constantly with thin rapiers seemed to tire faster and have a harder time keeping up with the pace of the Drazi. The true threat was their sheer numbers.

  Sen began to move up and down the line, as he had the day before. It had worked then, earning him a strange conversation with Lord Quill that was full of half-truths. The next time he would be more direct. Most men did not even notice as he stepped in to help, so embroiled were they in their own battles, but a few nodded their thanks before plunging back into the melee.

  At times the horror of killing would crystalize, like a leviathan Wyvern rising briefly from the deeps. The noise of killing was a tumult; the clash of metal on metal, metal on stone, metal cleaving flesh and bone. Shouts beat the air like falling tongues, shrinking his world down to the immediate surroundings. Cutting through that was the Decatate wall of focus, honed in battle, leaving no room for emotion.

  Moments of clarity came and went like glimpses of blue sky through storm clouds; a clear view across the battlements back to the black-sooted glass of the Grammaton's southern face, Quill's flaming sword arcing three battalions over, the Ogric corpse-carters down below calling to each other and laughing at the latest strange Drazi splay.

  He slew a Drazi with a clean backhand into its left ear. Beneath his feet dismembered fingers squelched and he compensated with a roll in his balance. He slew a Drazi with an eviscerating scrape across its bulging abdominal sac. By his side the big Gawk was singing a wild drinking song about damask whores and their daughters. He slew a Drazi by shattering its cranium with a reverse haft blow. The man Black spun amongst the invaders with his stubby gladius blade almost invisibly fast, his eyes picking out Sen again and again.

  It was chaotic, but there were patterns and order to the work of the Decatate. This wasn't like his earlier battles, where he'd only ever felt like he was failing and alone. Here he belonged, and strangely, despite the moments spent half-conscious and fighting in a daze, he found he was enjoying himself. This was the kind of camaraderie he'd always longed for in the Abbey; so many long years spent alone. He wished he could bring Alam here and share it with him, where caste didn't matter.

  Around midday with the Grammaton chiming unevenly, the pace of the Drazi attack increased. The fits of half-sleep faded as he struggled to kill enough to keep them from taking the wall. He worked his way to new sections where the fighting was thickest. Here men around him were falling under the surging brown tide. Most of those who remained carried deep wounds, and fought on more slowly. Some of them he recognized from the street last night, and that felt real.

  Then the Drazi broke through. Sen lifted his head from the fray for a moment to take in the broad strokes of the battle, and saw them infiltrating everywhere, holding pockets of rampart for minutes at a time before errant Decatate were able to rally efforts to drive them off.

  Sen ran. A few too many of those pockets and the Drazi would have them. They would take the wall then the cinderfields, which did not accord with history. Quill might be able to blow the last few bridges to slow them for a time, but they'd soon find a way across the Levi. Then it would be a desperate rearguard retreat into the foothills of the new Roy, up to the Aigle's flank and into the new Pale Chamber of the King himself, where the last of them would die.

  The city would fill up with Drazi. They'd dig a vat in Grammaton Square and fill it with the dead to mogrify. The King would die, Quill would die, Sen would die, and that thought thrilled and terrified him. That was undeniably real. That mattered. After just one night, he felt bonded to the Decatate.

  He channeled the Saint into the Decatate around him; subtly, so no blue threads showed and they wouldn't realize it themselves. With his strength they grew stronger, and together they pummeled back the Drazi onslaught. Sen ran and they followed, calling out incoherent war cries. A Drazi blade spun perilously close to his face and he plunged both spikes through the creature's heart. Another flung itself bodily at him and the big Gawk shouldered it aside, to fall down in the cinderfields.

  "Thanks," Sen panted, and ran on.

  They cleared the wall. He caught sight of Black briefly, staring at him with wonder. Then the fighting thickened and Sen fell back to it. After a few hours that surge faded too, and the battle returned to the steady pace it had been earlier. Sen took advantage of a brief lull to look around and tally the losses.

  The ranks of the Decatate seemed unchanged, moving as silver pinpoints up and down the wall. From the ranks of the regular soldiery though, men and women in slapdash copper and bronze armor who had likely been craftsmen and scriveners before the war, many dozens were missing, fallen to the inner plain and carted away with the Drazi.

  "You're still here," jibed the Gawk from his position at the wall. "I thought you'd have taken the dive around lunchtime."

  Sen grinned. "I wasn't sure how to do it right. I was waiting for you to set an example."

  The Gawk grinned. "Name's Efraius."

  "Sen."

  The Drazi came at them again.

  Around eight by the Grammaton's chimes the fighting wound down, as the last of the Drazi were slain. The defenders lay down where they stood, panting and watching the brown tide retreat.

  Quill walked the battlements exchanging swigs of poorly brewed Amaranth, telling jokes and stories about his exploits the night before, as though the long day had never happened. When he came by Sen's section of wall he first punched the Gawk hard on the shoulder, then clapped his huge flinty palms around Sen's shoulders.

  "You fought well, lad." He nodded toward t
he Gawk who was inspecting the dent in his silver pauldron. "I saw you lead that resurgence. Don't pay any attention to this one."

  "You've put a dint in it," complained the Gawk.

  "I'll put a dint in you, if you give me due cause, Sly Skillock."

  The Gawk drew himself to his full height and squared on to the Man of Quartz. "You wouldn't dare."

  "Oh, I'd dare," countered Quill, then reached up to tap the broken teeth in the Gawk's mouth. "Though it looks like someone else has already done it for me." He winked at Sen.

  The Gawk lunged on Quill and they grappled for a moment, until Quill threw up his big hands in surrender. The Gawk relented, then Quill was on his way to the next group of men.

  The Gawk gave a contented sigh. "Sly Skillock. He still calls me that."

  "The name of the one who had the armor before you?" guessed Sen.

  The Gawk shook his head. "No, that's Efraius. Sly Skillock is my real name."

  Puzzlement spread over Sen's face.

  "It's complicated. Come on, let's go get drunk."

  He seized Sen's arm and dragged him into the flow of men descending from the ramparts.

  Halfway down the rampart steps the Deadface Black fell into step behind them, and gave Sen a nod. Together, with Efraius rabbling and catcalling his way through the ranks of other soldiers, they returned to the Sunken Jib for a long night of drinking and damasks.

  * * *

  Some time late that second night Sen was sitting at an ale-sloshed table with the Deadface Black. Efraius was snoring loudly into the remnants of a mildewed hawkenberry pie.

  He'd drunk a few glasses of rye-cut amaranth, and his head spun with it. He didn't really know what he was doing, now. There was his quest to recruit Quill, and the thinning veil, but neither offered him a path forward.

  Black did, however, offering more liquor. Sen waved a hand, but Black poured it anyway.

  He wasn't good at being drunk. They'd hardly ever drunk in the millinery; only at special celebrations, and even then rarely enough to actually get drunk. It didn't help now that he'd barely eaten, and his body felt like a deadweight lump he had to carry around with him. Even lifting a shot glass to his lips was an effort that had him breathing hard.

  Black laughed as he grimaced.

  "I don't understand it," he said, only slurring a little. "Why all this drinking? This is a war. Why don't they rest?"

  Black sipped at his mossy Ogric mead. "It's good for the men."

  "Good for them to be exhausted?"

  Black shrugged. "It's a trade-off. You know Old Fireballs does it every night, without fail? Bangs his way through a barnyard of damasks, no bother."

  "But he's Quartz," Sen protested. "The soldiers, half of them are merchants, hawkers, farmers; they can't keep up that pace."

  Black eyed him curiously. "You were a scrivener, weren't you, before the war?"

  Sen eyed him back. He must have been talking with Quill. "I was."

  "But here you are with us, fighting by day, drinking by night. You think the men can't keep up with you?"

  "I'm not drinking," Sen protested, "at least not much, not like all these others. And even the seasoned soldiers are fighting half in their sleep because of the pace Lord Quill keeps."

  Black turned his glass around on the table. "Why don't you call him Old Fireballs?"

  Sen shrugged. "No reason. Lord Quill seems more respectful."

  Black pushed the glass away and focused his dead gaze on Sen's eyes. "Listen to me, Sen. This war is not respectful. It's not clean. For example, I know you're not a scrivener. That's a lie, one you'd be punished for in peacetime, but what does it matter to me now? Right now it's us against them, the dirtier the better, and you're with us, or you seem to be. Old Fireballs shows us how to do it, how to be something totally different from the Drazi, how to be alive, and we follow."

  Sen leaned back in his chair. He didn't even bother to dispute that he wasn't a scrivener. "I don't see it. They'd fight better if they slept."

  "Would they? They wouldn't be any different from the Drazi down there. Animals that live only to fight, that are physically replaced from day to day."

  Sen puzzled on that, but said nothing. His head spun lightly, but pleasantly.

  "They need to feel alive, Sen," Black went on. "That they're more than just cogs in a machine. If you can't understand that, then you've got a lot to learn."

  He picked up his glass, downed it, then balanced it gently on Efraius' sleeping head.

  "See?"

  Efraius stirred and batted out with his hand. Black caught the glass and set it back on the table. Sen didn't see what that could mean, but Black didn't stay around to explain. He rose swaying to his feet and wandered over to the bar, where he grabbed the hand of a damask and led her into a back room.

  * * *

  The next day Efraius fell from the wall.

  Both Sen and Black were too late to save him. There were too many Drazi bodies blocking their path. They could only watch as he was lifted from his feet and thrown still cursing into the brown masses below.

  Sen reached the breach point first and killed the Drazi there with unusual savagery, then leaned over the edge to look down at his body far below. The Drazi had lofted it and were passing it from man to man like a pyre boat on the Levi, heading for the central vat. He was still struggling.

  This hurt. He liked Efraius. Becoming part of the Decatate was now who he was, perhaps more so than the Sen of the revolution. That Sen had made his choices, based on what was real for him. This Sen was a different man, and this was what mattered.

  Efraius was cursing still as they carried him away.

  "We have to do something," Sen said.

  "I am," Black said, pulling a smooth black rod of metal from its lodge in his right chausse. He flicked a clasp and two bars unslung from either side, snapping into a T-shape. He spun the reverse end and a cap popped free. From the space within he withdrew two thin metal cords, pulled them until they were taut, then strung them to the two tips of the T.

  Sen watched in fascination as he snapped open a second rod in his left chausse, from which he drew a slender black bolt, laid it atop the compact crossbow, then pulled back on the edge of piping the wires affixed to. The T-arms braced and tautened.

  "Help me," said Black, calm urgency in his voice, pointing to a small catch he'd flicked out.

  It was a lever. While Black held the contraption immobile Sen wound the piping back, flexing the T-arms until they issued a high whine.

  The thing gave a click. Black dropped to his knees, rested the crossbow haft on the battered rampart edge, and sighted down the barrel.

  "Behind you," he muttered as he tightened his grip over the trigger.

  Sen spun, narrowly redirecting a downward shafting Drazi blade from slicing him in two. He turned side on as the blade snicked by, then spiked the Drazi through the back of the neck as it fell. He ducked under a lateral swipe from a second Drazi and thrust a spike through the roof of the creature's open fanged mouth. They both fell slack and he tipped them to the cinderfields.

  He turned in time to see the crossbow deploy. The metal bolt slammed forward as Black depressed the tension trigger, allowing the T-arms to snap back to normalcy, driving the bolt with a thin whush out over the Drazi field.

  Sen leaned out. The bolt was impossible to follow, but he saw Efraius's raised arm drop back onto his body, and his struggles cease.

  Sen found himself staring up close into Black's dead eye.

  "I'd do the same for you," said the Deadface.

  "Why?" asked Sen.

  Black snapped the arms of the crossbow back into place and stowed it again in his chausse. "Not because I like you. Because they learn better when we're alive."

  He rose and strode away.

  BLACK

  That night the Decatate drank harder than ever, as though it were a celebration. Sen sat in their midst, numb. As the other members of the Decatate engaged in feats of brawn, telling tal
l stories and wrestling playfully with damasks, he sat and wondered.

  The world of before seemed very far away. Had he really persuaded the Albatross to join a battle that had already been lost? Had he really met Freemantle in his cell, and come from a world where he'd battled the Rot with a newspaper? Those things seemed like the tales from legend now, not nearly as real as the death of Efraius, and he'd only known the big Gawk for a few days.

  Black laid a hand on his shoulder. "Come with me."

  Sen got up and followed. They left the smoke and noise of the Jib and passed down Slumswelter side alleys, to a small gurgling canal Sen that didn't recognize. It must have re-routed some time in the intervening five hundred years. Beyond it the cinderfields spread out, barren but for mounds of rubble and the odd stand of stubborn masonry.

  They stood for a moment, breathing in the fetid air from the dank canal.

  "You should be ready for tomorrow," Black said abruptly. "It will be different."

  Sen studied him in the moonlight. He was familiar, his dead face reminiscent of someone but he didn't know who. He was young too, only a few years older than Sen, but he was compacted like a Balast, rock-hard with the weight of responsibility and loss.

  "Different how?"

  "You fought Efraius," said Black. "He saw you fight with misericordes all day long. Thus far you've had that advantage; to my knowledge the Drazi have never faced an enemy with the dark spikes. Now they have and they'll learn from it."

  "They've faced me for days," Sen argued. "They've had every chance to learn."

  Black shook his head, staring out over the canal. "That's not how they learn. They're not like you and me."

  "Then how do they learn?"

  Black turned and began to walk along the rough-hewn banks of the canal, away from the faint noise of the Sunken Jib and winding out into the cinderfields. Sen followed.

  "When we first fought them it was a rout, because there were no soldiers in the Sump, only sinewy farmers who didn't know how to fight. The Drazi couldn't learn war from them. They were like pups then, feeble really, their bodies barely holding together. We destroyed them and left their bodies for the gulls."