The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  "We've known that," said Flalangers. "We've known it could come."

  Freemantle sighed. There'd been theories for generations; about a darkness to come, a fading of the world's light. "We have."

  "The sun's been slow before. It's been tardy."

  "It has."

  "And now there's little to be done. I'd advise you to warn what few people that you lead, and lead them well. And then, dear Mons, I'd say, go to be with your family, and await the end of all things. If you can, keep them away from any violence that will and shall erupt."

  "And you and yours?"

  "Mine are all here," said Flalangers, spreading his arms. "These men and these pits are my offspring. I am allowed nothing further by the city's law."

  Freemantle nodded, and stood. "Then I'll leave you to their care," he said.

  Flalangers rose. "It's been a pleasure, Mons, working with you."

  "We'll yet see," said Freemantle.

  "We shall yet," said Flalangers.

  * * *

  Freemantle approached the door of his clockwork shop in the Boondocks quarter. The street around him was silent and dark, with revelatory gas lamps hissing soft puddles of light onto the empty cobbles. There was no one in sight; Freemantle had passed them all in huge numbers as he skirted the Haversham and Grammaton square, rallying and shouting and beginning to brawl.

  He let himself in through the front door, then locked and bolted it behind him. He passed through his silent workshop, all of the myriad clocks fallen still, and ascended the stairway at the back to the second floor apartments. At the top he rapped softly on the door, and called his own name through the wood.

  The door soon unbolted, opened, and there in a revelatory glow stood Freemantle's wife, Kelly Montagne the Orioc. Her long silver hair hung down low, accentuating the black circles that stood proud on her pure white skin. At her heels their two cross-caste boys, part-Orioc and part Lantern Jaw, goggled up at him.

  "Heart's breath, at last," Kelly whispered, pulling him in and wrapping her willowy white arms tight about his back.

  When she finally let go, the tears were gone from her eyes, and she led him in, dragging the boys limpeted to her heels with her. They made babbling noises up at their father.

  "Now boys," Freemantle said, as he locked and bolted the door. In the room, he saw their old wood axe laid out on the kitchen table.

  "I was worried," said Kelly.

  They sat down in the living room. Freemantle dandled a boy on each knee, encouraging them in a game of tugging at each other's noses.

  "Every second more I worry more," Kelly said. Her eyes flashed to the axe. "There were people fighting in the street earlier.'"

  "They're gathering at the Grammaton," Freemantle said. "Backing up into the alleys and on the rooftops. The King's Dragoons will be out in force soon, but I don't know how long even they can keep things in check."

  "There were people yelling about the end," said Kelly, "the Rot." She reached over and coddled the foot of one of the boys. He stopped tugging at his brother's nose for a moment, slowly registering that his foot was being toyed with. When he fathomed it well enough to look down, Kelly had ceased her tugging, and the boy was left confused and gawping.

  Freemantle chuckled.

  "Big lads," he said, wobbling them so they looked up at him. "Made out of sterner stuff than lard."

  Kelly chuckled too.

  "They were asking for you," she said.

  "Really?" asked Freemantle, "they spoke?'"

  "They were crawling up the side of the bed. They know when you're not here."

  Freemantle smiled. "The big clock's down," he said. "That's not the Rot, is it?"

  "It's not," Kelly said, "at least not in any of the ways we've heard it called. I've been watching the skies, and it's getting darker still. The gas lamps are getting dimmer. It's the dwindling."

  Freemantle breathed heavy. Few people spoke of 'the dwindling' any more, and that from old wives' tails nattered at the night markets, whispered to put the chill into misbehaving children; an oral tradition carried down countless generations. Kelly had made a study of it at the Tiptanic School, before she fell pregnant with the boys. In some versions she'd dated it back to the Fates of Aradabar, when Saint Ignifer first rose to repel the Rot, but the legends of the two never seemed to cross.

  "I went by Flalangers," said Freemantle, moving to a subject he could better understand. "Remember, the ex-navvy? He's boss of the Sunsmelt pits these days."

  "He's having no luck either?" asked Kelly.

  "There's no sun," said Freemantle. One of the boys lost his balance and flopped head first. Freemantle caught him easily and guided him back up. "There's just no movement."

  Kelly said nothing for a time.

  The clocks in the living room, filling up the walls with cuckoos and rotaries and pendulums, all held silent at four fifty-nine.

  "What will we do?" asked Kelly.

  "I don't know," said Freemantle. "Flalangers thinks it could be the end."

  "The real end? A dimming into nothing?"

  Freemantle nodded. "He's an idiot, but he's not stupid. He may be right."

  Kelly breathed in deep, let it out.

  "I'll have to go back," said Freemantle.

  "I know. Back to the Grammaton."

  "It might be nothing," he said. "It might be a squall. It could be that the skies got tired. They may just need a break or a windalong."

  Kelly frowned, setting sweet dimples into the black patches that circled her eyes. "You think winding the big clock'll help along the sun?"

  "No," said Freemantle. "I don't. But it won't hurt me to try."

  "Lots of people see them as one and the same."

  "It's the same with the Smelt. Time, life, the clock, the Smelters. All part of the same thing; our resistance against the dark."

  Kelly nodded; business-like now, practical.

  "There's cake. Coconut ice."

  Freemantle smiled. "Did the boys eat?"

  "More than I should have let them, yes. The dark is making them crazy. You'll have a slice, before you head out?" There was so much unsaid in her eyes.

  "I'd love one," said Freemantle.

  So they ate cake. Sitting at the table, in the yellowy revelatory light with the axe alongside, while the boys rolled around on the living room floor.

  "Be careful," said Kelly, as Freemantle stood at the door readying to leave.

  "I will," he said, tugging his leather boots back on. "Lock this behind me."

  "I will," said Kelly, her voice faltering.

  They kissed briefly, then he was out the door.

  * * *

  He walked down empty, silent side streets with his footfalls ringing off the cobblestones. It was still dark, and growing darker. Revelatory street lamps were blinking out even though their gas supply should last a few hours yet. He passed a small park, only a small spit of grass with a few trees, where the shadows seemed too dark. The thinness was there in the air, stealing in with each breath that didn't satisfy.

  Within a brunifer grove in the darkness he saw movement. There came the squall of pain and excitement. For a moment only he hesitated, then stepped over the small ditch and approached the shadows.

  In the darkness he saw three boys circled around a terrified fourth kneeling in the dirt. The three were older, but none of them were men. The boy's shirt had been torn, and there was blood on his face.

  ”Go on then," said one of the boys, the largest, a bark-skinned Febrile with his shoulder-tufts just beginning to show. "I've done my share, take his teeth!"

  The other two, an Oyster-eyes and a ragged-looking Ratfer, were laughing.

  "What are you doing here?" asked Freemantle.

  The laughter stopped, as they all turned to face Freemantle, stood in the shadows.

  "Walk on, old man," said the Febrile, his tufts rustling. "Turn around and walk on."

  "You best let the boy walk with me," said Freemantle. "I can't abide this."
>
  The Febrile snorted. "Or what? What are you going to do?"

  Freemantle let the long iron pendulum slide out of his coat sleeve, down his forearm and into his hand, grateful that he'd thought to pick it up from his worktable on the way out of the clockworking shop. It felt good, the weight steady in his thick clocksman's hand.

  The Oyster-eyes blanched at the weapon. "He's got a club," he said.

  "We've all got clubs," said the Febrile, grabbing his crotch. "Only difference is, we're going to use ours."

  "There's no chance of that," said Freemantle, his voice steady and calm, though he felt a tumult inside. He was a man of gears and precision, not violence. "Now let the boy go."

  "He's bluffing," said the Ratfer. "He's alone."

  "He's not bluffing," said the Oyster-eyes, his clamshell eyelids blinking quickly, weeping a panicky brine. "I'm leaving. This was a bad idea anyway."

  He turned and hurried out of the copse of trees.

  "Go with him," said Freemantle to the two remaining.

  "Go with him," mocked the Febrile. "You think we're afraid of you because you've got a stick? I've got a knife. You know what my knife will do to your guts when I twist it up in them? You know what it'll do when I pop out your eyes one by one?"

  "Claiph," said the Ratfer, taking a step back. "Steady on. This was only supposed to be a bit of fun."

  "It just got more fun," said Claiph. "He knows my name, now, and that means he's not going anywhere."

  "I wasn't in this for guts and eyes though," said the Ratfer uneasily. "You said we were just going to fool around with him, and look, he's been well fooled around with." He pointed at the boy's tear-stained face. "Learnt his lesson well."

  "Maybe I ought teach you a lesson then," said Claiph, turning to the Ratfer. "Maybe I ought to teach you how to-"

  The pendulum struck him hard in the ribs. There was a crack, and he bent double. Freemantle pushed him over and he curled up around his chest, sucking for breath.

  Freemantle looked up at the Ratfer. "Don't do this again," he said.

  "No," said the boy, his eyes suddenly very wide on the pendulum. "I'm sorry."

  "Say sorry to him," said Freemantle, pointing down at the terrified boy.

  The Ratfer mumbled something, barely able to get his tongue moving smoothly in his shallow snout, then ran off into the darkness.

  Freemantle helped the boy up. "Are you all right?"

  He nodded; a Spindle of the some breed. He wouldn't meet Freemantle's eyes.

  "Do you have a home to go to? Is there someone to look after you?"

  The boy turned and ran away.

  Freemantle felt the pendulum go slack in his hand. He looked down on the one boy who remained, the Febrile, writhing now on the floor. "Give me the knife," he said.

  "I don't have a knife," he said, gasping at breaths now. "Honestly, I don't."

  Freemantle walked away.

  * * *

  Grammaton square was chaotic with sound, motion and fire, but none of it felt right. There were bonfires on the broad flagstones set up from commandeered hawker tables and hewed-down notices boards, benches and broken window shutters and whatever lay to hand, but the fires were not bright. There were ale-house carts filling out the streets, on rotation across the Levi bridges, hauling kegs and hop barrels direct from the quays to serve the rowdy populace, but the yeasty smell wasn't strong enough. There were drunks who'd been drinking straight through the long night; shouting, laughing, and arguing with each other, but they were not loud enough.

  The world felt like an echo, and Freemantle pushed amongst the masses, all looking up at the sky. At the Grammaton base he saw that the door had been chopped at, but even that effort had been half-hearted, with the axe now lying in a pile of splinters on the floor.

  Inside it was narrow, shadowy and quiet; the hubbub muted by thick stone. Looking up the spiral staircase circling the walls, he thought of his wife and children huddled together above the clock-shop, of the disquiet without and Flalangers words about how all that could change. Then he locked the door, wedged the ancient old check-in lectern against it, and started up the stairs for the silent clock.

  There was a woman sitting in the middle of the topmost belfry.

  The great bronze ball hung beside her, with its four spindles reaching out to the glowing cardinal clock faces. Each of them hung motionless, their purity smeared a faded yellow. The woman was a caste Freemantle didn't recognize; segmented through the middle, rising up with the upper body, arms and head of some kind of mogrified green Sectile, perhaps a Mantis, but with the legs of a woman. She sat calmly in a white robe, as if she'd been waiting quite comfortably. Fresh revelatory lamps played around her, setting her angular face and chiseled green features in sharp relief.

  "Hello, Freemantle," she said, as Freemantle breasted the top of the stairs. "Welcome."

  Freemantle let the pendulum he'd brought from his clock shop slide into his palm. He'd never seen this woman before. He took a step forward.

  "You won't be needing that," said the figure, nodding at the pendulum. Her Sectile face betrayed its tarnished age, and there seemed to be a length of silver metal, like a spar from inside the ball's clockwork mechanism, jutting from her chest.

  Freemantle walked out of the shadows. "You've got a spar in your chest," he said, pointing.

  "I know." The old woman smiled a tight Sectile smile. "It's been there for some time."

  Freemantle stood blankly, looking down at her smiling old face. With that metal in her chest she shouldn't be alive, or should at least be bleeding, but she was calm, as if nothing was wrong. Freemantle tried another tack.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "It's what you suspect. Waiting for you."

  Freemantle nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. He pulled up a workman's stool, sat on it, and let the heavy pendulum weight rest against the musty timbered floor. Had he always known this day would come? The suspicion had been there since the clock first failed to chime; underlying his conversation with Flalangers, with Kelly, with the fading sense of chaos brewing in the air outside.

  "It's all true then."

  The old woman nodded. "I'm afraid so. This world is not long for the light, and I can't hold back the tide anymore." She gave a sad, open-armed shrug. "I don't have it in me."

  Freemantle took a deep breath. Ever since he'd started working in the Grammaton there'd been a strange, haunted feeling to the topmost belfry. It came in part from all the old stories; the sense that the clock tower was a crossing point, a place where this world met with others across the Corpse. It gave the Grammaton clocksman a special responsibility. Managing the clock's chimes, keeping the balance of a hundred thousand delicate moving parts in the innermost mechanism, was only the beginning of what had drawn him into a deep and meaningful relationship with the place.

  His lips were dry.

  "I don't want it," he said. "Whatever you're offering."

  "And that's really the point," said the woman. "If you wanted it, you would never be the right man."

  "I have a wife. Two baby boys."

  "I had a husband too, and children."

  Freemantle shook his head. "I'll not do it."

  The old woman frowned slightly, her compound eyes crinkling. "You don't even know what it is, though, do you?"

  Freemantle let the pendulum fully drop, too heavy to hold anymore. The sound of it thunking against the dusty boards was muted. When he spoke his voice didn't sound like his own. "I heard the stories. The one before me, Gilerius, he spoke of you. And before him, Robaston. I didn't believe it. How could I?"

  The old woman shrugged. "I'm here. It's real all the same."

  They sat in silence for a time. From outside, through the thin skin of the clock faces, came the crumping sound of a distant explosion.

  "That was the plaster mill," she said, though her gaze didn't flicker from Freemantle's face. "In the depths of Afric. Their setting agent is explosive. A little boy
called Hieronius threw a pocket revelatory rocket through the cooling window and the whole thing went up. It looks like three people are dead, sixteen crippled."

  Freemantle stared at her. The rumors had hinted at it, but to hear such knowledge espoused so casually was stunning.

  "One little boy," said the old woman.

  There was more silence, broken only by the reedy shouts of drunks, none as loud as they should be.

  "I saw you take out that one Febrile," the old woman went on. "In the park. The pendulum was a wise move. I like to see it kept within the ilk."

  Freemantle looked down at the pendulum, resting now forlorn at his feet. There were fibers from the boys clothing clinging to it, in a smear of sticky blood. Seeing that made him feel ill. "It's all I had."

  "And you used it well. I can tell you, they would have abused that boy further had you not stepped in. Not at first, of course. Nothing ever is. It's only been a few hours since the dawn didn't come."

  "They were just boys," said Freemantle, trying to re-set the reality with words. "When I was their age I was playing Cuttlebones or making clocks."

  The Mantis smiled. "Purpose, Freemantle. Let me tell you. It makes a sizable difference."

  Freemantle couldn't keep his eyes from focusing on the pendulum. He hadn't seen the blood on it earlier. It was too dark in the park. "I think I really hurt that one boy."

  "Yes," said the old woman drily. "It's likely he will die. You broke only one rib, but the shattered ends passed into his right lung, which is even now filling up with blood. I give him another half hour. Of course, if it wasn't for the asthma he'd contracted as a child from the logger's soot yards, he might be able to survive with only one lung for a time, and the second would drain eventually, as the rib healed into place."

  Freemantle gulped. "But now he'll die."

  "Yes. There's nothing you can do about it. Even if you ran there yourself, what would you do, pull the rib out with your bare hands? That won't stop the bleeding. You'll never ferry him to the Bodyswell in time, and then what would you pay them with? They are inundated with the injured rich already. I'm afraid you've killed him."

  That struck home like the toll of the clock. Killed him? He'd felt the violence growing in the streets around him, but hadn't noticed it swelling in him. He cast about for something, anything to lessen the burden. "I saved the smaller boy, though."