The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  "An all-knowing one," boomed the Emeritus. "A jealous one. I guard what wisdom I've accrued. Join me, cede your empire, and you shall share in it."

  Seem shook his head. "I have nothing to offer you. My people are not mine to give, no matter what you offer. I told you this."

  "Then why have you come?"

  "To see you," said Seem. "To learn what I could. And to ask you, if we are brothers as you say, why can we not be brothers in peace?"

  The voice laughed. "As the Heart was brother to itself? What fantasies have you taught your people, Seem? Do they even know of the Heart, and how its murder of its own self began this world of ours? Do they know yet of the Rot and the Darkness and all the horrors to come?"

  Seem stared at the silver orb. These were words and terms he had never heard before, and they excited a hunger in his breast. "Teach me what you know of such things. I have not seen this Heart, and my people would trade dearly for such knowledge. Can that not suffice?"

  "Can you trade with the landsharks, Seem? Do you barter with the Hoplite ants for the honey they bring you?"

  "They are beasts," Seem declaimed. "They do not think as you and I."

  "Nor do your people think as you and I!" boomed the voice. "Lesser creatures must be yoked. Is this not the lesson of your life?"

  "The lesson of my life is the study of sentient peoples," Seem argued. "My people can learn. They refine my ideas, they wisely question my judgments, they are an infinite benefit to the work that I do. I will show you how it can be, only cease your preparations for war."

  "We are not preparing for war."

  "I have seen your cities," Seem called across the gap between them. "I have seen your scouts. I may not recognize the machines they are building, but I can intimate their purpose. You live in a perpetual state of war, brother."

  "It is existence," said the Emeritus. "Expansion, perhaps, but to exist is to expand. It is not war."

  "I have no doubt it is war to the people you conquer."

  "I bring them ease," argued the Emeritus, "and a role in the furtherance of the Federacy."

  "What role? I see only a single caste across the entirety of your lands, and those are mindless automatons."

  "I did not say it was a living role. From their flesh I build my own. From their cities I craft the Federacy."

  Seem glared. "As it would be with the tribes of Absalom?"

  "As it would be with all but you and I," echoed the orb. "You too will be a god, Seem, if subservient to me. Perhaps, one day, we would achieve the balance that escaped the Heart, and rule the Corpse in equality. I dream of that era every night. It has driven me for so long. Brother."

  Seem looked around the pyramid a final time. The Gnomics were everywhere; more of them now than before, spreading across the interior on multiple levels, some manning mangonels, others holding glinting metal crossbows, all trained in on him.

  "You seek to take away my choice."

  "I seek to open your eyes," said the Emeritus. "See what tethers your tiny creatures have worked into your mind. They are ants before us."

  From above came the grinding sound of stone on stone. The doorway through the apex was closing.

  "This is madness," Seem said.

  "It is order," said the Emeritus. "Make your choice, brother."

  Seem flung himself into the air. Instants later the pyramid hissed thickly with arrows and bolts. A single large bolt shot through his left wing as he flapped upward. Smaller bolts spiked into his thigh, his chest, and ricocheted off his hard skull.

  He beat his wings harder and ascended in a continuing hail of projectiles. More hit him, his dark blood spurted out, and now the light was dimming. The portholes of stunning light were closing off, and the crystal vault at the apex was sealing over. Perhaps this was where he would die, host and Morphic both.

  Then the rush of bolts and arrows around him halted abruptly, replaced by the boom of the Emeritus' choral voice.

  "Farewell, my brother. When next we meet it will be at the edge of the sword."

  In the reprieve Seem burst through the pyramid's crystal apex in a shower of glassy light. He dragged his wounded body into the sky and began the long journey back to the Dusts. Now the golden line in the sky was gone.

  BATTLE IV

  The Mjolnir Federacy followed, crossing over the Hasp mountains and into the outer Dusts of Absalom within three months.

  The Yoked Empire was ready for them. Where before landsharks had been bridled to till the soil, they were now trained to scent out oft trees and the scraggy brunifer bushes in the Dusts, and gather them for fuel. Where Mandray lizards had served as communication mounts, they were now saddled and their wings fitted with sails to battle in the sky. Where bats had been the lookouts for hunting Dielle, they became the scouts at the edge of the Dusts, watching for anything coming over the Hasp mountains.

  The Emeritus came in full force. Dozens of his massive black Aigle and Ator war engines rolled through the various mountain passes, rimed with ice and grease, clanking and wheezing jets of black smoke.

  The Ator landships stood taller than Seem's palace, and moved on a riotous bed of giant metal wheels. Each looked like a moving black mountain; a metal monster of numerous decks clad in thick armor, within which sat bank after bank of long cannon barrels. They picked a path over the rocky Absalom outlands like immense Hoplite ants, plowing valleys into the dust and sending huge plumes upward. From a distance all that could be seen was the dirty brown shroud that encircled them.

  The Aigle skyships flew on toothed screws driven by forged crystal engines, biting at the air. Nearly as large as the Ators, they revolved violently at the slightest sign of movement, unleashing a hellish rain upon the enemy. At times clouds cottoned about them, gathering in large gray balls that mirrored the dust plumes below, so as the Mjolnir army moved it seemed like the whole world was in motion. Studded through their armored decks were hundreds of angled artillery snouts, and in their undercarriage bays naphtha bombs waited. From their bellies a rain of destruction fell upon Seem's outer towns and villages.

  But there was no one for the Mjolnir army to kill. Every town and village they came upon was wholly deserted; with only a trail of footsteps leading deeper into the Dusts. Days passed and the outskirts of the Yoked Empire were taken with ease, but none of the revolving Aigles reported sighting any Yoked citizens, and none of the Ators unearthed a single person. There was only the thickening trail of their escape, always inward.

  The Emeritus skirted the Dusts. He brought the full force of his Federacy flanking down the firmer coasts, until after two weeks his great fleet of war engines stopped at the edge of Aradabar's white wall. The spread of the Mjolnir army dwarfed the capital city, yet there were no people to kill.

  Still they advanced. They smashed Seem's palace into the sand. They dropped revelatory bombs in the streets, starting fires that set the city ablaze. So the young city of Aradabar burned in a zephyr of dust. Yet still there were no citizens to absorb into the Federacy, only dry and desiccated structures left abandoned. No resistance formed and no soldiers of any kind fought back.

  It angered the Emeritus; there was nothing to conquer, and he had come to conquer. Rage drove him deeper into the sink of the Dusts, following the tracks and seeking the brother who had denied him his righteous victory.

  Finally Seem showed himself.

  The Emeritus' army were two weeks into the Dusts' sinklands when Seem came to them, flapping down from an overcast sky dark with heavy clouds, directly onto the control turret of the lead Aigle ship. He touched the first Gnomic he saw and forced the veil connection to the Emeritus open. Through the unfamiliar veil he saw an empire of one, controlled from one mind in his pyramid.

  "Brother," said the Emeritus.

  "Turn back," Seem answered. "There are things here that you do not understand. You will be destroyed."

  "Impossible. I understand everything. The invasion is nearly complete. We have come for you, Seem."

 
Seem's voice turned sad. "It is only just beginning, brother. Turn back or tomorrow I will destroy your army. The day after that I will come for you."

  The Emeritus laughed.

  Seem broke the connection and flew back into the clouds.

  The Mjolnir fleet did not turn around. With dawn the next day it slowly rumbled on, the Ators grinding tracks through the deep dust, the Aigles flying low under the thick black clouds.

  Then it began to rain.

  Rain came to the Absalom Dusts at the tail of the summer, filling the sinklands to the brim with quickmire. Everything that was solid ran and liquefied. Raging torrents weighted down with a hundredweight of dust could form in moments. Storm fronts crackling with static lightning would sweep the plains, trembling the earth and fusing the dust to glass wherever they struck, bringing untold destructive force.

  The Dusts after the rains were invigorated. The clumps of smothering scrag brush were blasted away along with the rotting cores of dried-out oft trees, borne to the cliffs of the inland sea just as Seem's motionless body had once been, leaving fresh dust for fresh dune-forests to spring up within. The weakest of the landsharks and Dielle were purged, and the land restored to a state of fertile possibility.

  Seem's people had known the rains all their lives, since their nomadic days long ago hunting the Dielle. They had built their cities on the Dusts' fringe like harbor towns on a coast, using the central plains only for transit and transitory settlements. They understood the mechanism underlying the weather; learning to predict within days when the first rains would fall.

  So as they left their tracks into the sands, with the combined might of the Mjolnir Federacy chasing behind, they knew the rains were not due for another two months. Still they fell now.

  Seem had prepared well. In the past three months his people had laid out a yoke with which to harness the weather itself. Ten thousand heavy bronze cauldrons lined the Dusts' eastern coast, forged with metals repurposed from throughout the Yoked Empire. Beneath them ten thousand fires had burned without end, fuelled by the desiccated weight of countless dead oft trees and brunifer bushes gathered by Seem's army of landsharks.

  His people filled the cauldrons with seawater and burned them ceaselessly. Water vapor poured into the sky, and the sea winds blew it inland over the Dusts. There it repeatedly gathered to form into clouds and fall as rain, but Seem prevented even that.

  His Mandrays flocked in swarms of a hundred, attacking any cloud with their augmented wings before it could fully form. So the sky over the Dusts grew thick and humid with a rain that could not fall. The heat prevented it, the Mandrays prevented it, the yoke of King Seem's knowledge of the world would not allow it.

  Until the Emeritus came. A week into the depths the Mandrays stopped their whipping of the clouds. Steadily the water in the air formed into vast and bruising thunderheads, waiting for the trigger of cooler winds from the south. At the final moment, after his brother had refused to turn back a final time, Seem brought the cool winds to them.

  His bats and his Mandrays carried thousands of chunks of ice carved from the Hasp mountains into the air. Cold pockets spread and grew like crystals of salt in the baking cauldrons, and there the rain was seeded, and there the rains fell, two months before they ever had before.

  The Mjolnir fleet was decimated. Aigle skyships were splintered by charging cloud fronts as surely as the Sheckledown Sea tore ships to shreds. In the chaotic storm currents they collapsed against each other. Their fragments rained down on the boiling bed of dust below.

  The Ators were vanquished even faster. Tsunami dust-waves pulverized them, crumpling their black metal hulls and tipping them over. Wave after wave of dustwater drove their remnants to the west, up to the coastal crags where Seem had first been born into the body of an Autist bat-keeper, where they were cast over the cliff to shatter into pieces in the Sheckledown Sea.

  So the bulk of the Emeritus' army was defeated.

  Seem was last in the air, laden with ice at his back and his belly, when the storms began to rage. He watched from the midst of churning clouds as tens of thousands of the Emeritus' Gnomics died, as the Aigles and the Ators tumbled and tore apart, and knew that still it wasn't enough.

  For a lifetime he had trained animals. He had tamed landsharks and forced them to work with bats and Mandray lizards. He had farmed Hoplite ants in honeycomb castles and learnt to spin silk from the largest of his spiders. Now he had mastered the very seasons of the world.

  Still it would not be enough.

  Yoking the nature of animals had always been a simple balance of punishment and reward, but the Emeritus was no simple animal. He believed himself a god, the greatest thing on the face of the world destined to rule over all, and would never bow to any yoke, nor allow any man to exist that refused to bow to his.

  Seem had hoped, but those hopes were dashed when the Mjolnir army was washed away. He would have to end the war himself.

  A week later, when the rains had ended and the Dusts began to bloom afresh with poppy blossoms and fresh scrag bushes, he gave the order for the entirety of the Yoked Empire, every healthy man, woman, and child, to make for the Hasp mountains, to war.

  * * *

  Yet there was no war waiting for them. They came upon a Gnomic people undefended and barely functioning. Their mighty Mjolnir war machines were gone, and the Gnomics were listless and lost. They stood in odd little clumps in their towns and cities on the road to the Emeritus' pyramid, staring. Few of them ate, though Seem's people tried to help them. Only a few showed any independent will to live.

  The Yoked Empire moved amongst them, absorbing those few that still showed signs of life. Not a single cannon was fired. They walked the Mjolnir roads in a long line, a many-casted procession, watched by a Gnomic people disinterested and empty.

  At times Seem thought he saw residual Aigles or Ators on the horizon, in waves of smoke and cloud, but no war machines materialized for battle. The Mjolnir Federacy was already dead.

  At last they reached the Emeritus' pyramid, and gazed upon its splendor in awe. Seem alone ascended. The crystalline peak had now been capped with stone, but the great quartz door hung open still.

  Seem descended to the hall of light at the center, where the Emeritus' silver sphere remained. The great space was dim now, with few of the ingenious chutes remaining open, admitting light in only several focused beams.

  The sphere lay open on its ivory plinth, cracked like a decorative egg with the upper half swung to the side on a thick white hinge. In the center rested a large black lump.

  "Emeritus," Seem said.

  "You slew them all," said the lump in his mind. There were no Gnomics choirs to speak for it now.

  Seem approached.

  "The Dusts did the slaughtering for me. I did nothing."

  "Nothing," repeated the lump dully. "You harvested the wind and the rain themselves. How could I ever foresee that? Now you walk my lands and raze my towns, kill every last one of my Aigles, Ators, people, and call it nothing."

  Seem frowned. There had been no razing of towns. "I killed nothing."

  "Nothing," said the lump again, though the voice was choked off. "Oh my brother, how long have I been waiting for you? And here you come, and find me reduced to nothing. I have opened my shell so that the end might be swift."

  Seem began to speak, but a grinding sound abruptly filled the hall, as though great iron cogs were turning within the walls. The tracks and rows of cogs that filled the pyramid's floor were moving, as were the beams of light.

  Seem looked up and saw the chutes were closing. The dim light was fading further.

  "All is dust," said the Emeritus over the tumult, "all is dust, and in dust returns to nothing."

  He began to laugh. The sound filled Seem's mind with madness, growing louder as the interior fell toward total dark, ringing above the grinding of cogs and groaning of metal plates.

  Seem leaped to the air and raced back the way he had come, through the open expan
se toward the dark stairs, and the laughter of the Emeritus flew with him. He furled his wings a second before his feet hit the ground and sprinted into the tunnel. Up the steps he saw the shaft ahead was already closing; he could only just make out the distant light of day shining around the quartz door.

  Now the pyramid was a tomb.

  A stone door crunched shut behind him. He redoubled his pace, his thighs already burning, and at the top flung himself through the narrow gap, into the light. The door closed on his hips and crushed them, spilling his life's blood down the structure's sheer diamante side.

  He was dying, finally. With his last ounce of strength he bade farewell to his Autist host and expulsed the lump that he was.

  * * *

  His new body came.

  His most trusted viziers had prepared for this moment. Extensive searches had been conducted across the full expanse of the Empire; seeking a caste amongst them with a fertile mind but a crippled body. All knew the gifts King Seem's presence would bring.

  Seem accepted his new host's gift, and opened new eyes on the world. Beside him he saw the old Autist's body lying crushed within the pyramid. Its wings were crumpled and sad. He stood in his new body, a three-legged Ontaur, and looked down the flanks of the pyramid. Where it had once glimmered like a great diamante jewel, it was now as murky and black as alabaster.

  The Emeritus had chosen this fate.

  He thanked his viziers and sent them away. The threat was past and they could now lead his people home, with his greatest thanks.

  So the Yoked Empire retreated. They took what they could carry of the Emeritus' strange technology, including a single functioning Aigle skyship, and those of the Gnomics who were able to join them, and started back for Absalom, to rebuild their cities.