Craley turned and started out onto the rope bridge. It was one strand of rope underfoot with two at either side. She was as agile as a Gomorrah fly, and the bridge flexed and shifted with her weight.
"Heart's balls," Alam muttered again, then started after her.
The wind hit him hard at once, almost plucking him away. He seized the ropes so tightly it hurt. The bridge swayed. It was even narrower than the buttress he and Sen had once crawled along, but now the drop below was immense. He risked a look down, to the last few battles between the Saint's weird new armies and the King's forces, squabbling like ants. It was so far.
"Awa fired it, it's called a boarding bridge," Craley called over her shoulder. Already she was halfway across and Alam could barely hear her. "The Mjolnirs used to use them to bring down other ships, or take them over mid-flight."
Alam focused on putting one foot after another, his eyes locked on the tower ahead. There were three Aigle ships hovering around it, in fiery battle with the Rot's falling tongues. They looked like ships at sea, floating on the sky. From their flanks myriad explosions bloomed and projectiles ejected, tearing into the black.
He focused back on the tower top. Craley was almost there and waving to him. It was surely a dream. "Come on!" the Appomatox shouted.
He pressed on faster. He'd entered the Aigle palace with his world in chaos, and this was just chaos of a greater dimension.
Halfway across another strong wind smacked him, driven by a falling tongue of black, and he held tight and rode it like a wave. When he looked again Craley was already at the tower. Alam took a deep breath and started to run, thinking of graves only a short distance below, and Sen waiting for him up ahead.
Toward the tower's edge the bridge sagged and he had to climb up the cords to reach the lip, where giant grapnels at the end had bitten into the tower's stones. He climbed through the open wall, and saw such a spread of people that he could scarcely believe it.
First there was Mare, lying on the floor beside the body of a muscular half-naked dead man with two misericorde spikes jutting from his head. This had to be King Aberainythy. Mare was wrapped up in bandages and smiling at him weakly, surrounded by the strange half-Molemen who were tending to her wounds. Beside her was Feyon, on her knees and helping with Daveron, whose furry chest was peppered with red-stained bandages too. Gellick lay behind them all, his body a glinting scale of rockblood turning to crystal.
"By the Saint," Alam whispered. It felt like the air had been sucked out of him. The Appomatox Craley gestured for him to go ahead.
"They're all right, we have time for this, see for yourself."
Feyon looked up and smiled faintly, then nodded toward Gellick before turning back to her work on Daveron's chest. Alam strode over and dropped at his friend's side.
"Gellick, it's me," he said, looking the Balast up and down. Not an inch of him was un-wounded; everywhere were weals scabbed over with a beautiful, glossy purple sheen of rocksblood.
Gellick's eyes cracked open, and he gave the shadow of a grin.
"Alam," he whispered. "I'm not like my father, am I?"
A tear sprang unbidden down Alam's cheek. "Gods no, Gellick, you're not. I'm not like my father either."
"We're winning," the Balast whispered, then closed his eyes again. "Loser tidies all this up."
A hand rested on his shoulder. "He'll be all right." Alam turned and looked into the glowing blue eyes of Feyon. "He's exhausted," she went on, "we all are, but we'll be all right." She let a moment pass, then gestured around her. "These creatures, they call themselves Gnomics. They have better skills than even the best Bodyswells. I don't understand how they got here, but they tell me Sen somehow did it all."
More than anything Alam wanted to kiss her in that moment. She was more beautiful than ever before, so bright and caring and full of compassion for him, for them all. They truly were a family; Sen had been right.
He embraced her instead. A kiss was not for him to take.
"Mare killed the King," Feyon said into his ear. He could feel she was shaking. "There are things out on the street I've never seen before, brown monsters fighting for us and turning to fire, and all these machines in the air, and a vast web they say Sharachus spun, and Sen's on the horizon fighting the Rot right now, and I don't really understand how to help him." She laughed. "I don't know how any of this is happening, Alam, or what to do. They just grabbed Gellick and I minutes ago, and now we're here."
He pulled away and held her at arms length. She was wounded too, blood running down the side of her head, marring her perfect Blue skin.
"Is it-?" he began reaching for the wound.
"It's nothing. They said we needed you to help Sen."
"We do."
They both turned to Craley Shark, standing unexpectedly close to them both. Neither had noticed her approach.
"Gearmaster," Craley said to Alam. "We need you to run the Saint a little longer. Find the simplest path, Awa Babo told me to say that, and run all this new power to Sen on the mountaintop refined, like you did with your paper. Harness it like energy in a clockwork escapement."
Alam stared at her, this odd Appomatox outlined against the blown open wall and the rushing torrents of blue power without, talking about gears and quoting his own father's words.
"You want me to do what?"
Craley nodded. "I know it's difficult. You want to know why all the heroes from your legends are here, why Awa Babo's here, what King Seem is spinning a big web, why Lord Quill has brought his Drazi army, but I can't tell you all that now." Alam's eyes bugged at mention of Lord Quill. The last Man of Quartz was here too? "You'll have to feel it in the flows, on the veil, and make it part of your paper's hax. Can you do that, Alam? We've gathered all your generals, they're all here, and the whole city is looking to this tower and to that mountain. You just need to connect the power to the drive."
Alam's mouth worked at the air. The Drazi? King Seem? They were names from the stories they'd written, it was true, but-
"They're here?"
"They're all here, and I'm here too, Saint Craley or General Shark, look me up, but right now I need you to focus. Look at Sen out there. Look now."
Alam looked out at the horizon.
"He looks enormous, doesn't he? Unbeatable. But he's doing it all himself now. He's using his scars and everything he's got to harness it, but it's been thrown out of balance by our arrival. The Rot's hitting harder now that we've got it trapped, and he's cracking under the strain alone. He needs your help, all of your help, to get through this alive."
Alam blinked. He hadn't imagined getting through any of this alive; not since the moment they put the whip to his back. He hadn't imagined any scenario in which he'd survive the revolution, not as one of the King's scriveners, not with Sen at their head.
But now? With Feyon by his side, and these strange machines in the air, and if all the heroes of legend were truly there?
"Wait," he said, running back through the conversation. "You said you've got the Rot trapped? Why in the Heart would you do that? Just let it go!"
Craley made a pained expression. "It's complicated. Trust me, we can't do that. We have to kill that thing now, today, or none of us is safe. Can you accept that?"
Alam stared, and looked at Feyon and the others, while in the background more tongues thrashed and skyship projectiles streaked across the sky, ending in explosions.
"Alam, focus on me," Craley snapped, clicking her fingers sharply. "Sen told me you could handle this. When I was just a little girl he told me stories about all of you. You were my heroes, and now I'm here with you, and we're making this happen. Do you understand? I need you to write all of this into a story that Sen can use, and I need you to send it out on the veil like you always did with your paper. I need you to hammer order out of this chaos."
Alam felt tears prick at his eyes. He was a hero to this woman? It was impossible. "I don't know what to do. What does that mean, hammer order? How do I do that, there'
s no press here, no paper. I don't even know who you are."
"I'm Craley Shark, and I'm Sen's daughter. I know he's asked a lot of you Alam, I know it's seemed like he tormented you at times, took advantage of you, misused you, but believe me, he did all the same to me and worse. He neglected me all my life, worse than any scars written in skin, but only because he knew no better way. It's not an excuse, it's just a fact we've both had to face. Now we're about to lose him, and we'll lose the whole world if we can't save him. I don't know about you, but this is my first time in the world, and I quite like it so far. So get up here and help me."
Feyon stepped forward and touched Craley's cheek.
"You're his daughter?"
Craley was momentarily silenced. "He came for me when I was a baby," she went on quietly, "he took me from a cage. It's not by birth."
"It wouldn't matter to me," said Feyon, as tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with blood from her wounded temple. "You're his daughter. Welcome."
She wrapped her arms tightly around Craley. The Appomatox's demeanor wavered in confusion for a moment, exposing a childlike innocence so deep it made Alam want to hug her too.
Sen had a daughter. It didn't matter that it was impossible. Alam strode over to stand by Craley's side and looked out over the city, and Sen fighting in crackling blue fire, and tried to grasp the task before him.
"How do I do it?"
He turned, but Craley was gone; snuck away like a thief. Feyon remained, smiling faintly at him.
"We're going to be all right," she said. "I know it now, Alam."
"How do you know that?"
"I just feel it. Concentrate."
"On what? I don't know how. I'm not Sen, I don't read minds."
She wrapped one arm around his back and leaned her head against his shoulder. The warmth of her touch thrilled him, making him believe he could do anything.
"Just try. We'll do it together. He put us here, and he wouldn't do that if there wasn't a way. Look around us, Alam, there are Aigles in the air! If Sen can do that, then we can do this. Think of planning the revolution on the white wall in the millinery, and just do it the same way, without the wall."
Alam screwed his eyes shut and tried to remember what they'd done. It had been him and Gellick at the whitewashed walls, working the map over and over again, changing the bastion points in line with the King's forces, preparing their barricades to line up with the simplest path.
To this.
A touch came on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes to see Sen.
He gasped. Sen was in the sky fighting the Rot. Sen was also right here?
"I am not Sen," said Sen. "I took his body. I am Awa Babo, and I will be your lens. Focus what you feel through me. Open yourself to me and I will show you the veil."
"I-" said Alam, completely overwhelmed, but Feyon at his side squeezed her arm tightly around his waist. Perhaps he would have fallen if it weren't for her. "I-" he said again, then focused.
This was happening. This was happening now, and he nodded. The not-Sen reached out to his forehead, rested his palm there, and at once Alam saw.
Blue fire erupted all around him. It raced through the air in countless lines, pulsing up from all over the city. The Drazi pools blazed a deep azure, the skyships burned a focused cerulean, the ships on the Levi seared with a tinge of red, while from all throughout the streets below the focused sky-blue strength of the Saint blazed upward in interwoven lines.
Alam understood all this instinctively, as if borrowing clarity from the not-Sen, and at once saw the problem in the flows.
There was immense power here, but it ran without harness, rising in a whirlpool of interconnecting forces; like cogs that had not been tightened properly, like an escapement improperly set and losing seconds. The lines of blue rose to the tower top, where they flared into the others; Feyon, Gellick, Daveron and Mare burned brightly like bonfires.
They were all gears in the clockwork, Craley had said, the generals for Sen's army. He held his own hands out before him, at the end of long and lank Spindle arms that had seen him tormented for years by the boys in his dormitory, and saw the startling blue fire raging there too.
He reached out and touched the flows of the city. He didn't know what he was doing, but he felt something and the lines of power responded. Thoughts rushed in pandemonium through his mind; so many emotions and memories and dreams plucked from different times and places, overwhelming him. Was this what Sen always saw? It was overwhelming, but he was a gearmaster and he'd already mastered the King's Aigle palace below. He just had to find the simplest path.
With Feyon weaving the flows at his side, he saw that he could do this. He took a breath and pulled back from himself to overview the whole from above.
The chaos diminished and whole tides of motion through the city became clear. There were so many of them, tens of thousands of minds all pulling in different directions, coming from different times with different systems of belief, but all straining toward unity.
He understood. Just as Craley said, it was a clockwork escapement, vastly complex with myriad different inputs, and all of it had to be melded into one unified movement. There was always a simplest path, and the trail of it was already clear; Saint Ignifer, the legend they'd built for so long, created by Avia long before most of them were ever born. Now Alam just had to weave them all in.
He reached out and manipulated the blue fire in the air with the blue fire in his hands like it was one giant puzzle, a gear wall out of alignment that needed tuning. He worked the patterns of faith as they rose up in mad fumey clouds from the Albatross captain's armada and from Lord Quill's burning Drazi, from the castes of King Seem's Yoked Empire and the machine minds of the Mjolnir Federacy turning into synchrony with the castes of his city; Balasts and Indurans and Spindles and Ghasts and Ogrics and more. He let their faith wash through him and refined them into the ordered lines of legends they had already laid down in their paper, that he'd read about in books as a child, that Avia had planned so long ago. He aligned them with all the skill of a gearsmith and the precision of a scrivener, until they spun about his body in blazing white hot lines.
Then he shot them through Awa Babo and off to Sen at the mountaintop, as a barrage of pure, unadulterated power.
SEN
The Saint was flagging.
Standing twice as tall as the mountain in the sky, Sen could no longer control the city's collective mind as it burned through his scars. It was growing too fast, a torrential flow stronger than he could harness, sprung from sources he didn't understand or recognize. Faith swelled over him like a wave and beneath it he was beginning to drown.
His spikes were dimming, his armor was crumpling under the renewed frenzy of the Rot. Its blows slipped through his guard, punching cracks in his armor, disrupting his concentration and sending flows of power reeling out into the darkness.
His generals were changing in ways he didn't understand, bringing patterns into the flow that didn't run as he expected. The flow skipped a scar-line down his arm, his concentration lapsed, and in an instant the Rot entangled him by the spike.
He watched in horror as its black jaws bit down, crunching through armor, scars, skin and bone in one stroke, cutting his limb from his body.
He screamed. The tide of power bled out of his ruptured scars and gushed down the Rot's side, unfocused and blunt. The Rot swallowed his arm and bared its jaws for more. Sen snatched for control but the pain was overwhelming and the flow was too much. It washed over him bringing glimpses of things he couldn't cling on to: an army of monsters harnessed by a sparking Man of Quartz, a fleet of ships driven by a mad pirate Cray, Gnomic creatures ferrying a lost thinking machine, an army of all the lost of Aradabar led by the dead Seem/Sharachus. He couldn't grasp any of them. They fit into the stories somewhere but they were coming too fast for him to find their places.
The Rot beat him in the chest and he reeled back, battered on the mountain's anvil. At once the stink of brimstone ca
me back to him, burning in his hair, while his heart grew so tight he could hardly breathe. His spikes blinked away, the mirage of the Saint collapsed, and the Rot above opened its mouth to swallow him down.
He fell as Sen, just a boy really, not a hero to any. The blue fire fled as quickly as it had come, and he dropped form the sky. He'd come so far and so close, but there was nothing he could do now.
"Help," he shouted back along the blue lines to the city, to Alam and the others. "Help me!"
His armor dissipated, his severed arm spurted blood into the rarefied air and a scalding heat stung every inch of his exposed skin. His eyes blurred and his body spun, caught on shifting waves of heat. A black chunk of fissile rock struck him on the leg and there was a horrible crack. The blow set him spinning as he fell and he screamed. In revolutions he saw the mouth of the Rot diving after him, its jaws racing him to the ground on every side, eclipsing first the sky, then the Gutrock, then the eruption, until Sen was within the cave of its black mouth and the only light came from the churning fires at its core.
He looked up into its gullet and saw a thousand worlds destroyed across the future and the past, with a thousand more to come. He had failed. This was the end, and he would never see his mother again, or Feyon, or any of his friends, because he hadn't been strong enough. He'd betrayed them all.
The last trails of blue fire left him and he pin-wheeled downward in the Darkness that came before. A hundred black tongues lashed out from within the Rot's throat and slapped into his body, when they sunk hooks into his scarred skin and began to peel.
The pain was worse than anything and he screamed. It was skinning him alive.
"Help me, please!" he cried a final time.
This time Alam answered. "Here."
A shaft of brilliant blue light shot through the side of the Rot's cheek and slammed into Sen, arresting his fall and filling him with an insurgent power that remade him anew.
At once he saw and knew the Drazi, and the Albatross, and the Gnomics and King Seem merged with Sharachus, he knew Lonnigan and Awa Babo and everything it had taken them to reach this point, and everything it had cost him, and most of all, he saw Craley Shark.
The Rot's War Page 42
