The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  At the gear chamber he found Alam in the midst, lying long and still in a circle of Molemen and Mogs. The walls of machinery all about were silent; a vast clockwork mechanism frozen, like the Grammaton workings in Freemantle's story.

  Sen knelt by Alam, and smiled at the bloody gear ratchet in his hand. "I like to see it kept within the ilk," he said, then sucked out the twist of fire in his friend's heart. "Goodbye, Alam."

  There was time.

  The Darkness stormed in over the wastes as Sen pushed the palace a second time. The grinding made him laugh harder. He wondered if he could have done this at any time. They'd had the belief of the city for so long. It had taken the coming of the Rot to unleash the fire.

  The Aigle opened on the turret to the chamber of skins. At the dark bottom lay a large smashed wooden carriage, spilling over with bodies. Each of these had a scar of some description; more fuel for the King's mad hunt.

  "I'm here," Sen whispered, and triggered the Saint, shooting him straight up on a geyser of blue fire. The Darkness drew in, but he wasn't afraid any more, clothed once more in the Saint. What came after this hardly mattered. What mattered was seeing off his friends. Thanking them for what they'd done. Losing them hurt, losing his world hurt, but it would hurt more not to try. What they'd done was good. They could be proud of what they'd sacrificed.

  The geyser ended at an open space with only the ragged suggestion of stone walls at the edges. Sen clapped and the Saint's fire sucked back into him. Ash fell here too, working into carvings on the floor, dappled with fallen skin slip patches. From here he could see the Darkness sloshing toward the base of the Aigle below, like a hungry tide.

  He walked to the twin corpses at the chamber's edge, overlooking the great drop down to blackness. Mare lay on her side with her hands on her cheeks, as if stroking her own tattoos, her face turned to where the volcano had been. She'd seen him rise, at the end, and that filled Sen with a sense of pride. One of the King's awls remained in her chest, another in her thigh, though the blood was all smoothed away now by the smothering touch of the Dark.

  The King lay behind her, his large and muscular body already withering from the Darkness' inner pull. Two black spikes jutted from his skull like King Seem's horns, and Sen smiled. Some justice had been done, at least. His generals had made it possible.

  He knelt by Mare and stroked a strand of hair from her face, then scooped the fire from her chest. The Darkness surged up from below. How many more times, now? As many as it took.

  "Well done," he whispered, "thank you." He closed his eyes and opened the veil.

  SEASHAM

  Back in Grammaton Square the ash was falling again.

  Sen looked up. Grammaton tower itself swayed with the unseen movements of the Darkness, gouging into its foundations deep down below. He could feel the Dark more clearly now, the sense of its spreading absence.

  The bell tolled. Shouts rang out. Tongues fell.

  Already this strange loop seemed familiar, as if it was the habit of his life. He looked at his hands and saw thicker pulses of blue power running through his scars; power taken from his friends as they died.

  It still wasn't enough; not to escape the Darkness, not to fight it. The veil hadn't opened on Freemantle, or Avia, but here again, and there had to be a reason.

  He reached out to the city once more, searching for strength. The kernels of his generals were gone, and the vast expanse of thousands of rebel minds was already quieting, the wisps of blue haze rising off them like Dirondack vapors.

  But there was something new.

  He snorted as he felt it, simmering out there in the broken depths of the city like a remote lighthouse across a vast ocean. Of course. It had always been there, right where he should have known to look, but he'd been too blinded by the brightness of the others. It wasn't the same as the Saint, burning a vital green-blue, but it was power still.

  He didn't wait for the horse to come to him. He ran to meet it halfway across the square, already gentled by a stretched-out thread of the Saint, and vaulted smoothly into the saddle. Together they flew as if born to this; out of Grammaton Square and galloping up the ruins of the Haversham, through the familiar thickness of falling dust, until Sen tugged a hard right turn onto Aspelair.

  The Abbey lay ahead.

  Its outline grew clearer as they clattered up the cobblestones; blue green power rising in a neat, regimented weave that flapped as if in a slow breeze.

  Racing past the intersect of Aspelair and Reveille, a sudden chill washed over them, and the horse skittered with fright. Sen turned and saw the ancient revenant arch on the corner. Its hand-carved gray basalt hung like a hood, as it always had, cracked now in places and lilting, leaking dust through the shapes and figures engraved across it.

  Sen urged the horse toward it, and reached up to run his fingers over the creatures of the air, of the land, of the deep, as they fought for the ancient city of Aradabar. King Seem's army that never came, and left him to die alone.

  It was sad. It was history repeating itself. Even here these carvings were being thinned away, obscured by ash, just like Ignifer's city. His mother had built these arches, part of her plan to build a hero out of nothing but faith, and what good were they now?

  "Yah," he called, and the horse whipped ahead, glad to be away from the revenant's strange chill. In moments they emerged through the ash to see the Abbey gates hanging open, one half-torn from its hinge and swinging slowly in the fuzzy quiet. The horse galloped up the white chalk path that was now blackened by ash. To either side the grounds were furrowed with deep gouges in the soil and scattered over rubble. The Rot's tongues had landed here too. Hoof beats thudded up plumes of gray as the Darkness tightened at the edges of the world, readying for the long, final squeeze.

  At the top of the path Sen leapt off the horse and ran along the ravaged cloisters. Here a deep weal lay across path, the stone columns shattered and lying in deep shadows. Sen sped up and leaped, headed for the grand double doors of the ghostly cathedral, where the perfect lattice of blue-green power swayed like kelp in the sea. Through the ash he saw its walls were battered and cracked, with dark ragged holes chewed into the roof and its buttresses torn away. The cathedral tower swayed in time with a strange lilting sound in the air.

  Sen stopped dead as he recognized it; struck numb by the beauty of the tremulous singing of the Sisters at chorister. A tear leapt to his eye as he recognized the hymn, a requiem for the Heart, now tolling across the grounds. This was what their power was made of. Even now the Sisters kept their faith, though they must have seen the Saint fall, even though Sen had abandoned them too. It made him proud and ashamed at the same time.

  Then the Darkness struck. Rooting in from underneath, pressing down from above on a structure already shredded, the cathedral tower abruptly fell. Sen stared as it collapsed inward through the cathedral roof with a terrible grinding crunch, uprooting centuries of masonry and pulling the surrounding walls down into a cloud of smoking, crashing rubble.

  The requiem of the Sisters halted. Sudden tears stung Sen's eyes in the silence, amidst the whuff of exhaling dust. The blue-green light of their power condensed and flitted away, leaving Sen gazing open-mouthed.

  Every one of the Sisters had just died.

  He spat out grit and wiped away the stinging tears. They'd already died countless times, he just hadn't been here to see it. Instead he followed the path their power had taken.

  Through the heavy doors of the chancel he burst, flying up the stairs in the thinning air with only the remotest of hopes in his heart. At the end of the corridor he slammed through the door to her office, and saw her.

  The Abbess. She sat poised at her desk, her leathery wingstack furled and alert at her back, her stubs of antenna crackling with the blue-green power, and her compound eyes shining with a precious inner light. A single leather-bound book lay on the desk before her, beside a revelatory lantern which cast a flickering orange glow. Fine plaster-dust filtered down from ab
ove, as the very stones of the Abbey ground one against the other with the veering earth.

  Sen staggered as the floor lurched, caught himself on the chair before the desk, and looked at the Abbess.

  "Sen," she said.

  "Mother Abbess," he gasped. He didn't know what else to say. There was no surprise on her face to see him, as if she'd expected this all along. All his instincts said she would have been with her Sisters at chorister; nothing could have torn her away from them at the end, but instead she was here. He wasn't prepared for this. "You knew I would come. How?"

  She stood and spread her wings. Despite the Darkness that pulsed beneath the world, thinning every person and thing, she was glorious and proud at once. Fresh tears sprang into his eyes as she held out her arms.

  "I had faith."

  Sen strode into her arms and she crushed him close to her Sectile shell, squeezing until he felt his ribs might crack. She was taller than him still, and strong. He welcomed it. He'd seen each of his friends dead and mined them for their strength, so this was more forgiveness than he'd dreamed of.

  When they separated he saw she was weeping too; trails working down from her compound eyes which. Her mouth widened in a Sectile smile, revealing the net inside her lipless mouth.

  "I always knew you were marked for greatness."

  Sen shook his head. "This isn't great, Abbess." He spread his arms to gesture to the dust and the ash of the destroyed cathedral, still pluming against the window. "This is the end."

  The Abbess watched him. "Yet here you are, where you cannot possibly be. I saw you moments ago above the mountain, fighting the Rot. The world has become very strange, hasn't it?"

  A shiver passed through Sen, and he began to speak quickly, fuelled by the charge of the Darkness. "I'm trying to change it. I've been to the others already; they're dead. I thought I might be able to fight if I took their power, but it's not enough. I thought-" He cut himself short, aware he was babbling. The Abbess wouldn't understand any of it.

  "I came here for the power of the Sisters. It was their hymn. It was so beautiful. I'm sorry."

  The Abbess' smile turned sad. "I'm sorry too, Sen. We brought it on ourselves. Faith without deeds is not enough, and that was my failing, not yours."

  He wanted to ask for the power. He wanted to take it, but he held himself back. Something was happening here that he didn't understand, and perhaps that was important. "What do you mean?"

  The Abbess shook her head. "We didn't do enough, Sen. My faith was a shield, never a sword, and I see now that the Heart needs us to be both. I believed once it would come to save us, if only we had patience and faith, but I see now that I was wrong." She turned to look through the window. "The Heart will not intervene in our lives. Only the Saint is strong enough to save us, a vision built out of those willing to fight." She turned back to him. "We should have done more than raise our voices to him."

  Shivers ran down Sen's spine. It felt bizarre to talk about this now, in this wreckage of a dying a world. "Abbess. We have to do more now. Can you help me?"

  The Abbess looked at him expectantly; that familiar way she'd always had, trying to tease out a deeper understanding. "These are not only the last regrets of an old woman, Sen. Let this be a lesson. We could have built such wonders in this city, but instead we kept ourselves hidden within our walls. We allowed generations of Kings to take hold of our legends and stamp out their fire. We relied upon our holiness to save us, when we should have built the Saint with our own blood. Perhaps then it might have been enough. In truth, we were afraid."

  Sen shook his head. It seemed like she was cracking apart before him, and he couldn't bear it. "Abbess. Please. Help me."

  The Abbess' gaze seemed to dig right into him, just the same as when he'd been a child. "The young are always impatient. Tell me then, Sen, whose memory did you use to arrive?"

  Now Sen blinked. Memory? There was no way she could know about that. He'd only heard it from Freemantle himself. "What?"

  "Who did you use to open the veil?" she went on, as if nothing she'd said was strange. "It must not have been your mother, nor Feyon. I think not Alam, and clearly not me, as you know me now. Perhaps Daveron, or Mare?"

  "I don't," Sen began, then stopped himself. There was no time to waste. "How do you know about the veil?"

  "I know many things; things I wish I didn't. The Darkness is coming, Sen. Who was it?"

  She was right; he could feel the black tides spilling again across the Sump and drawing up to the caldera. There was no time for disbelief. If the Abbess knew, she knew. "I remember Daveron. Already I've lost Gellick. But how do you-"

  "Then Mare," the Abbess interrupted. "That is the price you have paid to come this far. Obviously it was not enough to reach your destination."

  Mare? He thought back to the Aigle, of course he remembered Mare, he'd just been with her. He'd seen Gellick and Feyon, and then there was the chamber of skins and somebody at the edge, not the King, but who?

  The name was dancing already. The vision of a woman's sunken face receded, eaten by the Dark.

  "You're right," he said, feeling the absence sinking into him. "How did you know?"

  The sad cast strengthened in the Abbess' glassy eyes. "There are things you still don't know about your mother, Sen. She wrote far more than your scars. She saw more of the Heart than she ever understood, and pieces of those visions spilled out of her like a leaking coracle. At nights she would walk in the grounds and dip her fingers in the surface of the pond, skimming them over the surface to write out her secrets."

  Sen took a step forward, edging against the desk and setting the revelatory lantern rocking. He couldn't help but think of the Butterfly Abbess in the Gloam Hallows, writing in the air. "She wrote in the water?"

  The Abbess continued. "She would lie on the grass and scratch letters atop each other in the chalk of the pathway. It terrified the Sisters. In candle fire she told entire stories with a knife as a nib. In the air she painted with her finger." The Abbess grew pale, as if the effort of recall was exhausting her, though Sen knew it had to be the Darkness. "It grew worse the longer she stayed with us. In her third year, just before we feigned her death by Adjunc, she was more mad than sane. When she spoke it was in riddles with no end. This was not her world, Sen. She jumped three thousand years to come here, from Aradabar, and that took a terrible toll."

  Sen circled around the desk.

  "She wrote so many things, Sen," the Abbess went on, her eyes turning gray. "Were they for me, or for you, or for anyone at all? Ravings about the deep future or the distant past, about a time of steam power contained within a grain of sand, intelligence trapped within a seed, about races that lived off each other's exhalations and whole civilizations that blinked in and out of existence in the glimmering of an eye." She took a labored breath. "Were these things real? Had the Heart touched her so firmly that she could never root herself in one place, one time again? I didn't know then and I don't know now. Reading her words staggered me, and for my own sanity I had to stop."

  Sen shook his head. The Darkness was so close but this revelation superseded even that. "You should have told me."

  "Should I?" she asked starkly. "A week ago you came to me to tell me of your revolution; should I have told you then? That you would return at the very end, burning memories of your friends as fuel, terrified about a circling Darkness that had already destroyed the world multiple times? Would that have helped you fight the Rot, Sen? Should I have told you the other things too, the things to come, about the child you will imprison and torture, about the monsters you will yoke to your service, about the nothingness you alone will face? How could I say those things to you as you went to war? There was so much chaos in her writing, Sen; how could I know which parts to tell?"

  His jaw worked at the air, striving for something to say, but no answers came. Now he pictured his mother sketching desperately into the surface of a pond, drawing spirals in the heat of a flame, just like the Butterfly Abbess. T
he end of the world seemed like a small thing.

  "You transcribed it," he said numbly. "You watched what she wrote and copied it down, just like King Seem did."

  The Abbess drew herself to her full height, but that height was now crooked. "Not only I. Also Sister Henderson and a select group of others; in this at least we acted, and in this we lied to you again. Much of what she wrote was lost to us, written in languages we couldn't recognize, in alphabets we couldn't reproduce, filling numerous tomes with her writing. Here," she waved to the shelves of leather-bound books lining the wall behind her. "I keep them all. Whenever I could bear it, in the years after she had gone, I read them and made my own notes," she touched the single book on the table, "but it always addled my thinking. Every time I emerged I felt that the Darkness had already come for me. I saw the end times everywhere. I saw worlds born and killed in a hawkenberry blossom. In one of many possible futures, I saw this moment."

  She rested one clawed finger on the book.

  Sen looked at it; there was nothing unusual about it, bearing only a title in gilt letters.

  Avia's Revels

  His mind raced ahead. "If you've read her prophecies, Abbess, then tell me what happens next? How do I stop the Darkness?"

  The Abbess smiled again. "You have to go back, Sen. Before our time, before this city was ever formed. Back to Aradabar to find the wound that caused the Darkness to swallow our world. Only then can you stop it."

  As she spoke, the Darkness swallowed the volcano's caldera, and flowed down the mountain to the Gutrock wastes. They had only moments left. "But how? I've tried so many times to open the veil on another time, but every time I come back here."

  Now the Abbess smiled, though it was pained, and she was leaning heavily on her desk. "You've not been offering enough. To travel that far you need the memories and faith of a lifetime."