The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  Sen gulped. His legs felt weak. Perhaps he could feel what was coming. "How can I give that? I'll not understand what I have to do when I arrive."

  The Abbess answered with a rasp. "You use me."

  Sen stared at her. He understood, and he shook his head. "No," he said, even as the Darkness filled King Seem's crater to the brim. "I can't do that."

  "Sen," she chided, affectionately but firm. "We're beyond childish things now. We do what must be done, because what is love, what are good or evil, if there is no world to witness them? I've spent a lifetime being his child. Let me be a sword."

  "I can't take your whole life, Abbess."

  She smirked, though the Darkness was buckling her backward now, forced into her chair. "Why not? I have no use for it now."

  He leaned in. he didn't know what to say.

  She whispered. "I should have done this a long time ago. Don't judge me harshly, please, Sen. I always did my best."

  She leaned forward then, cowling her warm wings and pressing close enough for the stubs of her antennae to touch his forehead. Memories spilled out, and Sen opened his mind to receive them, bringing on a rush of heady color and light as he was born into the world anew.

  THE MOTH AND THE BUTTERFLY

  They were twins, Leander and Varial, a Moth and a Butterfly, and the first thing Leander knew was the joy of her sister's plumage, bright even upon her birth. She felt the warmth coursing off her. All those colors, such beauty. She did not know then that the thing she saw before her, so joyous, bright, and full of life, was not just another part of herself.

  At night when they lay side by side to sleep in their small chrysalis, Leander would stroke the bright skein of Varial's wings as though it were her own, a coverlet to nestle her body within.

  They lived far to the north of Ignifer's city at the center of the world, deep in the white Hasp mountains along the Angelway. Their existence was one of caves, rocks, a chrysalis crib made of fallen branches, and a home hollowed out by wind. Theirs was a commune filled with other creatures of the air, who had rejected the world before it could brand them low of caste.

  In that place Leander and Varial learned their world together. They learned to walk and to speak, and saw the bright flying things above them, and heard from their parents that they too would learn to fly, one day.

  That day came. Proud and excited, they walked from sunrise behind their somber-faced parents, hand in hand. When one of them grew tired the other pulled. They stroked each other's wings as encouragement, pronging antenna for fun.

  At the top of the Angelway they were led to the edge. It was their appointed day, and there were no others flying in the skies nearby. They stood hand in clawy hand at the edge and looked out at the vast valley that stretched out before them. For the first time in their lives they saw a horizon that was not a wall of mountain rock. Here the horizon was endless.

  Beneath their feet lay a great overhang, dropping to the earth many fathoms below. It was burnt red like Leander's wings, spotted with green and brown brush, spreading toward the Absalom Dusts. There unharnessed landsharks tilled the dust, and herds of Dielle roamed, and beyond it lay lands they'd never heard of. The familiar white Hasp mountains tapered out on either side, so the world stretched out to a flat horizon. It was more space than they'd ever seen before.

  From behind their father spoke. "The time has come, daughters."

  The twins stood transfixed. They didn't notice when their parents climbed down from the Angelway edge behind them, pulling the long wooden bridge in after.

  Varial was first to speak into the empty whistling air, always the bolder of the two. "It's beautiful."

  Leander gulped but said nothing. Instead she turned to seek out their parents, but they were gone.

  "It's time," Varial said.

  Leander nodded. She flexed her wings and her sister followed suit, silhouetting their shapes against the powder blue sky; one a ragged brown hourglass, all tawny mottles and blurry black rim-eyes, the other a vibrant blunted triangle, dazzling with kaleidoscopic colors.

  Leander felt the wind against the tough thin membrane of her Moth wings. The chasm arched away beneath them, and a hollow pit of fear opened within her. They clasped hands, looked at each other. Varial smiled. Leander swallowed her fear.

  "I love you sister," Varial said.

  "I love you too," Leander replied.

  They leapt from the edge together.

  The flow of free-fall washed over them both. Leander sank into it, feeling the fear melt away as the wind beat on her leathery wings. She felt the latent power in her wingstack, the resistance her spread wings gave to the air, the control she could exert by a twinge to the left or the right, and felt exultant. She was ready to brace against the descent. She knew she would fly. She let out a whoop of triumph and turned to her sister.

  Varial was screaming. One of her beautiful wings had ripped in half and was trailing powdered color to the winds. Horror filled Leander as her sister spun out of control, tumbling below in a chaotic roll.

  The joy of the fall peeled away at once, and Leander straightened her angular body into a dive, aligning her wings to guide her. The wind that moments ago had been welcoming now bit hard, stretching her fibrous wing-skin painfully. She gritted her lips and tensed her young frame harder.

  Moments later she collided into her cartwheeling sister with a crunch, far harder than she'd intended, too quickly to latch on. In the chaos she accidentally punched a fresh hole through her second wing. Varial howled and Leander was carried by her own momentum further on, wheeling madly.

  Sticky color powder from her sister's wings clouded her compound eyes. Disoriented and spinning, she spread her furled wings and let the wind bite. It wrenched her upward, and her dizzy eyes caught again on poor Varial. She dived once more, working her wingstack so hard she felt sure it would rip, soaring down the rock face like she was born to the air.

  "Fly, Varial!" she shouted as she dived, knowing even as she yelled that her sister would not hear her, that the words were whipped from her mouth by the roaring air. "Fly!"

  The red and brown expanse of the Absalom Dusts whistled ever closer, and she plummeted faster through the colored powder trail of her sister's shedding wings. Wheeling brunifer boughs and scrag bushes came into sharp focus and for a moment Leander thought she wouldn't make it in time; they would both slam into the desert and spread their wing shapes into the dust.

  "Varial!" she shouted as they passed the uppermost pod-tips of the tallest brunifers. "Varial!"

  They collided in a crunching blur, and this time Leander was able to latch on. She immediately canopied her wings and the wind ripped at them, stretching the skin to breaking point. Her wingstack rebelled, the currents drove her into a barreling spin, but she held her wings spread until the mad revolve slowed and they landed in the thick sandy dust with a thump, together.

  Leander came to some time before dusk. Beneath her were only shreds of powder; the last sparks of color from her sister's beautiful plumage. Her whole body ached, her wings burned, and her wingstack felt as though it had been hammered in a kiln. She ignored the pain and raised her head to seek out her sister.

  Varial was sitting on the lowest bough of a nearby brunifer tree, her ruptured wings outlined skeletally against the setting sun. Leander rose and moved toward her, padding softly through the unfamiliar dust. At the base of the tree she saw the pockets of dust in the folds of bark where Varial's feet had rested. Of course she couldn't fly. She had to climb.

  Her sister's voice drifted down from the low bough, filled with misery. "Go away, Leander."

  "But I-"

  "Go away. You should have let me die."

  Leander wanted to say more, to reach out and heal the gap between them, but there was nothing she could say. Instead she curled up at the bottom of the tree and quietly wept.

  * * *

  The next day Varial started walking into the Absalom Dusts. Leander tried to argue that they should return
home to their parents where they could try the Angelway leap again, but Varial ignored her.

  "I can never go back," was all she said.

  They walked the Absalom wastelands together, headed for the city at the center of the world. They knew nothing more than its general direction, and walked with the glowing ball of the sun at their left shoulder in the morning, at their right shoulder until dark. They spoke little, letting the silence between them speak for itself. They tramped through valleys of vast, sand-scoured machines, long and lone mementoes of a war they knew nothing about.

  For food they foraged tough-cased orange seedpods from the tops of the lower scrag brunifers, cracking their shells on the rusted metal edges jutting from the dust. They supped the fleshy green marrow from within, drank the watery milk, then moved on.

  At night they lay apart, so Leander had only her own wings for comfort. She cowled herself, but they did not hold off the cold that descended at night in that barren place. Varial without fail climbed to the lowest bough of a nearby brunifer and held silent sentinel through the night.

  Soon the Absalom Dusts began to deepen and soften, becoming an ocean of sand. They did not know the name of this place, nor what lay beyond it. The stories they'd heard as children from their parents at the chrysalis-sac had only stretched as far as the dusty wastes; stories of how the Angelway's face became so rimed with salty tears, of the winged armies flying in the sky above ancient Aradabar, of the mighty landsharks and their deal with the Bat-winged King for a land as soft and lush as the womb.

  The city at the center of the world was just another legend to them. All their lives they'd heard tales of its grand golden sky walkways filled with fluttering beasts, of a King who ruled with a generous winged claw, of lands untouched by the persecution of caste, a place of soaring silver towers and fellowship.

  They skirted the soft sand's edge in silence. As days turned to weeks, Varial's Butterfly wing-powder returned more brilliantly than before, with color and form budding on the bare-boned scaffolding of black sinew like summer flowers. Leander did not dare speak of it, though she longed to. At times she longed to fly. She remembered the sheer joy she had felt after first leaping from the Angelway cliff, as the wind spoke directly to the very pores of her drab brown wings. She remembered that single moment when she'd seen her sister tumbling, and felt not fear or concern but a brief spark of jealous joy.

  Now she walked in Varial's wake, and buried all the joy beneath her guilt. She knew that if she could only take her sister in her arms, she could fly the both of them to the wondrous city at the center of the world in days. But she could not suggest that. She could only trudge with her head hung in the tracks of her sister, and lie beneath her at night as she sat on her branch, and listen to her weep through the night.

  One morning she woke to find her sister standing over her holding a club of brunifer wood in her hand. Her wings were spread wide but the bright new sheen of powder was gone from them, leaving only the black outlines like winter tree branches. The club's end was vibrant and sticky with color, and around her the orange dusts were coated with the colors of her wings. Varial's eyes were bright with a quickening of pain and madness.

  Leander gazed at her in horror.

  "Why are you following me?" Varial asked. Her tone was unlike any Leander had heard her use before. It was harsh and empty; the tone of the long cold winds that had coursed through their earliest memories, that their mother had shielded them from within her glorious wing-blanket of color.

  Leander was too rooted with terror to speak.

  "Why?" demanded Varial, and beat the dusts at her feet with the club, spraying powder. "You think you pity me, sister, but you're the one I pity. You're the weak one, not me."

  Leander lay frozen.

  "If our roles were reversed I would have left you by the wayside long ago. Do not follow me any further. Go home, Leander. Go back to your mother and your father."

  Varial raised the club above her head. Leander closed her eyes and whispered, "I love you sister."

  The blow never came. When she opened her eyes, her sister was walking away through the mud, her wings trailing slackly in the dust. She followed.

  They continued like that for weeks, never speaking. Leander's dreams of flight faded, as Varial took to beating the fresh growth of color from her wings every night. Through the ocean of dust they came to a village of pygmy cloud-creatures on the edge of a great steaming waterfall, their skins transparent and showing their milky innards within. They could not communicate, but stopped long enough to be given soapy salt suds mined from the waterfall's inner ledges, and rest upon the cloud-soft sprigs of heathery bracken.

  They continued on, and Varial never looked back. They passed through the harsh mid-winter steppes of the Caract people, once watching the grand hunt of a giant beast that towered like a mountain and ran on numerous snakelike legs. They walked a stone bay-strait for three days across a vast expanse of bubbling green algae. They came upon roads of chalk, of gravel, of splintered slate, roads forgotten and overgrown with webbish tubers, as strange sucking plant-mouths watched their progress. They passed through forests where the trees groaned at night, through lands filled with dry warm snow, and through old lava-tunnels that led them under jungles so dense they seemed at first like a solid wall of vegetation.

  At last they came to the coast, and learned from a mad old man by a town of rough whale skin huts that it was the Sheckledown Sea, which they could follow south to the lands of Ignifer, and the city at the center of the world. The man spoke only limited words of their tongue, and laughed when they spoke too quickly. They left him behind to wander the coastline with his hundred-weight chain lagging behind. Before they were out of earshot they heard him whipping at the sea.

  In the whale skin town they found work weaving strips of dried Stygeon scale into wind sails for the people's simple skiffs. Their nimble clawed fingers proved far more competent than those of the clumsy finned creatures that lived there, more fish than people. They sketched out the golden city for them, and mimed sailing the ocean to reach it. The town leader, a male with a wide fleshy upper lip, waggled his side fins in agreement.

  They worked in the whale skin town for two months, until one day they woke to find narwhal-bone collars around their necks, binding them to fish spine stakes driven into the ground. Varial smashed the collars with one blow of her powerful wings, and together they stole a long narrow skiff from the bone jetty at the beach.

  The fish-folk waded into the sea to chase them, but never took to the water. The sisters strung up one of the scale-weave sails they'd woven and let the winds carry them south. Leander watched the wind billow the coarse scales and thought again of flight. They ate fish and drank turtle's blood. At times Leander thought she saw a giant white mound rippling over the distant waves like a roving hillock, but it always slipped just out of sight. As the weeks passed they spoke to each other again for the first time in many months; simple exchanges as they lay under the starry nights. Varial would point to the gossamer constellations of Saint Ignifer or Awa Babo above, heroes from another time, and Leander would nod in recognition, remembering the same stories from their sac-hood. By day they spoke of the coming clouds, of the nearest school of Dapplefish, but never of the past.

  They came upon the city at the center of the world as summer took on a chill, sighting its towers in the distance; a smudge of parapets and scratchy dock lines on the horizon.

  They arrived at the HellWest docks unremarked and unnoticed, their small skiff batted between the wakes of larger ships. No welcome parade came forth to greet them, no generous overseer with an outstretched claw. Instead a pall of greasy smoke lined the vast sickle mouth of the harbor, and stocky figures moved in the distant grime, cursing and laughing.

  They moored at an empty dock and were overwhelmed by the shouting of a crowd of mixed-caste navvies, the leader of whom waved a curved baton and threatened to beat them. They backed away across the rotten wooden pilings, while
the navvies returned to the dock-line to drop great bronze anchor-weights into their skiff, tearing it to pieces for salvage.

  Nobody spoke to them. Nobody helped them. Above them hung their true welcome; the Spike line of the dead and dying, nailed to the upper dock wall. It spread from the quay and on into the distance, an uninterrupted line of figures impaled through the belly on raised wooden spikes.

  Crowds jostled them; stony Balasts thumped past in drifts of limey white, Ogrics grunted through their piggish snouts, pulling carts laden with dead oxen which drove them in and out of tire ruts and gutters. None of them noticed the Moth or the Butterfly, nor did they notice the men groaning and dying above on their spikes. None of them even looked.

  Leander was disgusted. This was not the city of her dreams, but a sunken place of cruelty and horror. She begged with Varial in the ammonia-scented doorway of a dinning bar to leave, to return with her to the peace of the Hasp mountains, but Varial ignored her.

  Instead she climbed up the nearest quay post, as she had countless trees and cacti and low carapace dunes on their way, to the nearest spike. There she clung to the post beside a dying man, and cowled him with her beautiful wings. She spoke in low soft tones that Leander could not make out, then wrapped her sharp claws around his throat and choked the life from him.

  Leander shouted for her to stop, but Varial didn't. A few castes in the flow looked up, some pointed and laughed, but none for more than a moment. Leander felt her heart breaking again, as the man died. When it was done, Varial simply climbed along to the next. Again she cowled him, whispered to him, then murdered him. She paid no heed to Leander's cries. Now she was a murderer.

  "It's good work," came a voice beside Leander. She turned to see an old Scarab-shelled woman wearing dark-blue robes, teetering on stumps of feet, with a dim revelatory light tuned in a lantern hung from her shoulder hump. "Good work for those who aren't afraid. Come with me if you'd see it done further."