The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  On the ocean beneath raced an innumerable armada of ships, led by a double-hulled clipper with vast white wing-sails thrust to either side. Behind it came oft wood carracks thronged with spine-skinned Caracts preparing ballistae, and fluyts crewed by snub-nosed Runts from the Meran Reach readying bow-mounted grapnel trebuchet. Vast steaming iron hulks with rusted barnacle sides rose like sheer cliffs, while brass-banded cogs and caravels erected towers of attack, and hundreds of smaller vessels flitted amidst their towering decks; hoys and crayers, picards and coracles, throwing up a brine cloud of spume.

  In the city now there flowed a brown tide of bodies moving in lockstep toward the magma; mogrified creations of all shapes and sizes, with arms where there should be legs, legs where there should be heads, too many chests and countless staring eyes. They advanced with a singular mind, ignoring the crushing blows of the Rot's tongues.

  The scale of the army was staggering. It was the stained glass image from the Gloam Hallows come to life and more. He could never have imagined it would be so wondrous. At the fore of this great comet Sen glimpsed a tiny figure atop a winged white horse, lunging ahead with his twin misericordes extended, soaring toward the blackness over the city until…

  Everything stopped.

  The impact with the Rot never came. The army hung in the air like carvings on a revenant arch.

  "They'll lose," came a voice from beside Sen.

  He turned. Behind him stood a woman, a Halfhead Induran with rooty brown skin covered in moving black tattoos. Her right lip sagged, her right eye twitched, and something about her snagged in Sen's mind, but he did not know why.

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  "My name's not important any more," she said. "All that matters is that I'm here."

  He grunted. "Why are you here?"

  "To watch the battle, of course."

  Sen nodded. In this place, in this time, that felt normal.

  "That's why I'm here too," he said.

  The Halfheaded woman cocked her head to one side, surveying him curiously. Now Sen saw that the figures in her tattoos were moving; running across her face. There was a small Moleman figure inked in a crude rendering that Sen thought he recognized. The figure ran over her nose and back again, before embracing a copy of what must have been the Halfhead herself, while droplets of black rain fell from above. He watched the sequence repeat, repeat, repeat, even as different actions took place on her forehead, on her right cheek, her lower jaw, down to the seam of her tunic where he glimpsed larger things turning and whirling like great machines beneath her light leather armor.

  "That's Daveron," he said, looking up. "He's my friend."

  "He is. Until you forget him."

  He frowned. "Why would I forget him?"

  "Why would anyone forget anything? Because they got old and died. Worms came for their brain and eyes. For power, Sen."

  "You know my name," he pointed out.

  "I know much more than your name. Though you'll have forgotten all that."

  Sen nodded. What she said seemed to make sense. He understood it, or thought he did.

  "You're fading already," said the Halfhead. "I can see right through you."

  Sen looked at his hands. The scars were there, though the blue-green of the Saint's power was gone, and his skin seemed translucent.

  "That's strange," he said.

  "You're losing yourself," said the woman. "You've lost the Abbess and Gellick. You've lost me. You'll forget the others soon too."

  He sighed. He remembered that much. "I know. It's very sad."

  "It's more than sad, Sen. It's the reason you're going to die."

  She pointed past him to the silver army in the sky.

  He looked back, and saw something strange. All the beasts and beings and machines of the army, the trail of the silver comet, remained motionless, yet the black tongues of the Rot continued to spread amongst them, spinning nets and biting down like a black disease.

  "It doesn't care about your laws," said the Halfhead woman. "I learnt that as it consumed me. It wins by attrition."

  "The Rot," Sen said. "This is the first time it struck our world."

  The woman smiled then, and the motion pulled up her sagging lip so it hung crookedly straight. "Not the first time, Sen. Try again."

  He puzzled over that, as the blackness spun and whipped. The army was dying as the Rot tore its fighters apart. They had no chance, unable to move. As he watched one of the hulking Aigle sky ships shattered into multiple pieces that flew outward in a slow-motion explosion.

  "What do you mean, not the first?" he asked. He knew his history. "The Rot came first to Aradabar."

  "No," she answered. "This is the second time, Sen. Its first attack was against us, and we drove it off. So it came here, to a weak place, before the Saint existed."

  Sen struggled with that. He remembered fighting the Rot, that was true, but they hadn't done it here. They'd fought in the future, three thousand years ahead. His head swam.

  "That's impossible," he said dreamily. "It's history. It came to Aradabar. It came to us. It can't go backward."

  The woman snorted. "Do you think time is the same for the Rot as it is for you and me? Sen. It moves at will, always searching for the weakest point. And this army," she pointed at the frozen silver comet, "never existed to stop it."

  She snapped a finger, and silvery army disappeared. There was no sound or fire, just a withering of the thousands of warriors and their beasts and machines, like a piece of paper crumpling into a fast black fire.

  The army was gone. The Rot spread wide, opened its throat to the Darkness, and fell across the city, sending them both tumbling into the gorse.

  Sen came to lying amongst silvery flowers. Above him was the woman's twisted face, and around her hung all the constellations he'd loved as a child; the great warriors of their day.

  "Saint Ignifer," he said softly, as the stars one by one winked out, as the Rot ate the world. "Lord Quill's chariot. The Albatross. Awa Babo. They're dying too."

  "They're dying too," repeated the female. He could barely see her face now, as the darkness thickened. "The world was swallowed at Aradabar, Sen. The Corpse World, and only a flicker of faith keeps it alive. But the Darkness is coming. You have to find them first."

  He looked from the stars to her. She was so strange, and fading already in the blackness that had swallowed everything else. "Find who?"

  "Saint Ignifer's army, of course. Make them real, and drive the Rot back for good."

  He smiled. He'd already done that once. How many more times? "I'll save Aradabar."

  "Not Aradabar. Aradabar is gone. Save Ignifer's city, Sen. The Saint is strong there. Make your stand atop the ruins of our revolution, and the Rot will never escape. Destroy it for good, and keep the Corpse alive a little longer."

  Sen heard it all, but only one thing stood out. "Our revolution," he repeated. Had she been there? He watched the dulling shapes rush and canter over her face, and for the last time felt a spike of familiarity in it.

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm M…" she began, but he couldn't hear the rest of it, as her wispy figure faded away, and eddies of white mist rolled in.

  FREEMANTLE III

  Freemantle worked on the Book of Sen. He sat at the desk with his inkstone and quill, writing out line after line of question and answer as though he were trying to cement the facts into his own mind. The images and people from this lost world washed over him in a way they never had when he was watching it himself. That had been immediate, almost tangible, but he realized as he looked over the pages of Sen's life, it hadn't been real.

  He'd forgotten about real.

  He'd let the veil take his sadnesses away, and wrapped himself up in his observations of the Corpse. He'd studied the minutiae so he wouldn't feel the losses at his core, but those losses were rising back to the surface now.

  Looking over the Book of Sen, he saw page after page of neglect, lies, and torture by those closest to him, w
ho should have protected him. His life had been filled with loss; the loss of his mother, of Sister Henderson, of the Abbey and his closest friends, the loss of Feyon, and now the loss of his world. Reading through those stories stirred deep emotions in Freemantle that had been dormant for hundreds of years.

  There had been joy in Sen's life, too. Fleeting moments of happiness made all the richer for their briefness, intervals where it seemed that nothing terrible was truly impending, that no dark shape actually clouded the horizon. In their conversations they'd spoken of the most intimate details, because Sen had realized those were the last things he wanted to lose. The first time he'd kissed Feyon in the doll room. The first time he'd seen her after her betrayal, withered in the home of her parents. The first time they made love, whispering in the dark of the millinery with the streets outside silent and only the whistle of the warm wind through the buckshot-riddled walls.

  Freemantle couldn't remember moments like that of his own. Surely he'd shared times like that with his Kelly, but they were gone now, stolen by the veil. All he had was the vague feeling of love, and whatever he'd written down in his Book.

  Sen's memories demanded an answer, demanded justice, and that inspired Freemantle. It raised in him a specter of hope that he dared not look at too clearly or closely lest the desire for it swamp him, fill him, and crush him when it was not realized.

  Could he also go back?

  Could he return to his Kelly, and would she know him if he did? Could they somehow be together again, reunited across the veil?

  He pushed the thought from his mind and concentrated on the paper before him; stories of Alam and Gellick fooling in the grounds, playing tricks on the Sisters, spending long afternoons painting clay to look like sausages then slipping them stealthily onto Feyon's plate.

  Freemantle enjoyed reading about the 'generals'. It kept at bay the thought that these young people were actually dead, and soon even the memory of them might be gone, bar these few words he was now marking on paper.

  He read on, about Gellick making slow jokes in the millinery, warm little parties they had in the millinery to celebrate a big story broken, Feyon's eyes darting occasionally to Sen, and Sen catching her and smiling back.

  He read it because there was nothing else to do.

  Then Sen gasped, wedged in the white chair, and a thick wet sound followed.

  Freemantle spun from the desk to see something terrible. The wall facing Sen was splattered with blue blood.

  Sudden fear chilled Freemantle, but he acted swiftly. In three loping strides he was kneeling before Sen, gazing into the ruin of his face.

  His right eye socket had burst, leaving a pale cyan hole. Blue blood flowed from it startlingly bright in that white place, soaking into Sen's tunic and the pillows cushioned about him, into the fabric of the chair and spreading on the floor. Sen's one remaining eye spun in a panic as he came awake, whirling from the floor to the ceiling before settling on Freemantle.

  He screamed then and struggled to rise, reaching up to touch the space where his eye had been, but Freemantle caught and held him before he could worsen the injury.

  "Shh, it's all right," he said, though he did not believe it. He'd seen numerous diseases, injuries, and deaths across the Corpse, so many crimes, murder, rapes and tortures that they had ceased to turn his stomach, but never this.

  Sen's eye had exploded from his head.

  He lifted Sen and half-carried him to the bed, shocked by how light he seemed. Sen's feet trailed the ground beneath him and his one good eye flickered, half-conscious. On the bed he tossed side to side weakly, murmuring to himself but saying nothing coherent. Freemantle tore three long shreds from the bed sheets, and delicately inserted the first into the vacant eye socket to staunch the bleeding.

  Sen murmured as the rag went in; his left eye fluttering. The white rag turned blue immediately, and Freemantle pressed the second gently after it, then the third, applying soft pressure until the flow slowed. At some point Sen fell unconscious, and his mumbling and pawing at Freemantle's restraining grip halted.

  Freemantle took a halting breath. Blue blood covered his arms and chest. He stripped off his robe and washed in the water box, then ripped another sheet and began to wash Sen's face. After the worst of the blood was cleansed away, the damage no longer looked so terrible.

  He had lost an eye. Also his skin had turned grayer, his breathing was labored, and he looked thinner and weaker already. The sight of it triggered a creeping new fear in Freemantle.

  What had happened?

  * * *

  Sen woke nauseous. His thoughts lolled like sea foam on waves of pain that pulsed through his head. Spatters of remembrances jumped up at him like rattlefish, snapping at his mind and spitting out chunks of the things he'd done and seen in jumbled jigsaws. He watched them, felt them, and tried to focus on the things their teeth told him in spite of the pain.

  He'd been with the Abbess. He'd seen the Butterfly. He'd watched Aradabar fell.

  The ache flowered outward from his face, thumping with a slow pulse down his neck and into his shoulders, starting a twitch he could barely control.

  He'd seen Saint Ignifer, and the army, and a strange woman with tattoos that moved. He knew her name was missing. Perhaps this was one of his friends.

  He opened his eye, and harsh white light lanced in. For a moment the pain grew worse, then the lights dimmed and Freemantle was there, his broad jaw tight and his eyes concerned.

  "Sen," he said, "there's been an accident."

  He listened as Freemantle explained. The pain settled deeper, but he regained better control over his breathing. He learned that he'd just lost his right eye. Under Freemantle's careful guidance he probed the puffy edges of the wound, recoiling at the pangs that shivered through the enflamed skin. Freemantle talked throughout, trying to paper over the loss until Sen interrupted.

  "I'm going to lose more," he said Sen flatly. "Not just memories, but parts of my body too. It's another cost we'll have to accept."

  Freemantle gave an uneasy smile, beneath which Sen felt his fear; about what he might lose the next time. He felt that same fear too, but couldn't afford to indulge it. There was no choice, and nothing he could do other than move forward.

  "You won't believe what I saw through the veil," he said.

  Freemantle listened rapt as he described his strange adventures; in and out of Grammaton Square, his friends dying, the Darkness coming again and again. Freemantle scratched notes in a new book throughout. Sen felt his one good eye welling up as re-told the Abbess' death. When it was all told his jaw ached, and he sat silently for a time, reflecting on what he'd seen.

  "So the Rot went back in time, to Aradabar," said Freemantle, scanning back over his notes. He looked up. "After you defeated it? That doesn't make sense."

  Sen shrugged; the movement dug into his neck and elicited fresh pain, but he ignored it as best he could. He didn't want to scare Freemantle. "What does any more?"

  "Time makes fools of us all," Freemantle said wistfully, then his eyes brightened. "That's a quote from Gorshalty, the Epicure historian." He paused, then stood to fetch a book from his shelf. Sitting again, he leafed through pages until he found what he was looking for. "Here. He's talking about the day the sun didn't rise and the Grammaton stopped." Freemantle looked up. "My day. He conducted dozens of studies on the objective nature of time, involving ships racing, weights dropped to the bottom of the Sheckledown, hikers climbing to the top of Ignifer's mountain. He concluded," Freemantle peered closer, then slapped the book closed. "Yes. Strange findings. He was pilloried for them; they were said to go against the word of the Heart. Time was not a river, according to him, but a sea. Given sufficient wind, or work at the oars, a ship could travel in any direction, even backwards in time. His death confession was that time makes fools of us all." Freemantle fell silent, then shrugged. "You and I too, I suppose."

  Sen snorted; again that hurt. "Fools seems a gentle way of saying it. The woman
on the cliff said the whole world was already dead. The Corpse; I think the Scarab-shell said it too, in the Gloam Hallows. So the Rot left me and went back and ate it all, and that means everything you and I ever lived didn't happen?" He paused to think. "Or it did happen, but in a kind of bubble, and the Darkness is eating that bubble now?"

  Freemantle nodded, growing more enthusiastic. "Yes, that would explain the dwindling. It matches what the previous clockswoman said to me, about the wick." He chewed on his quill. "Time, Sen. Faith. The Grammaton is a symbol if it's anything." He considered. "The Red Ague must have been the same, when I saw that dark vision of my Kelly. So many people died that the city just got," he paused, seeking the right word, "thin."

  "Thin," repeated Sen. It had felt that way on the last time into Grammaton Square; like he was only inches away from his feet punching holes in the fabric of life. "And getting thinner."

  They sat silently for a time. Sen thought back on the conversation at Aradabar, trying to summon details. The woman had seemed so confident. Find the Saint's army, she'd said, but from where? How was he supposed to find an army that didn't exist?

  "Who was she?" asked Freemantle. "The woman on the cliff."

  Sen shook his head slightly, sparking the pain again. "I don't know. She was strange. Her skin was covered in crawling black tattoos, and one of them was Daveron. Half of her head was missing, like some breed of Unforgiven, but she seemed kindly."

  "That was Mare," said Freemantle. A profound sense of sadness rose off him. "One of your generals."

  Sen felt no sense of recognition at hearing the name. "I don't remember her." He waited a moment further, thinking perhaps some hint would come, but no. "There's nothing."

  Freemantle smiled sadly. "And she told you to find Saint Ignifer's army?" He twisted the quill in his hand. "I thought you already did that. In your revolution."

  Sen shrugged again, this time unable to halt the grimace as unexpected tendons in his neck tightened around his cheek. "I was thinking about that. The army I saw, Freemantle, it was nothing like the army we used against the King. It was epic; not a rabble armed with kettle helmets and graveyard spike javelins. It was a real army, rallied for war." He remembered the enormous scale of them, streaking like a comet out of legend. "In the city we had many castes, many thousands of people, but this? This was an army for the whole world. Maybe for all time."