The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  Sometimes he caught sight of the Eye of Heaven in the distance, as if taunting him, but it did not hold the appeal for him that it once had. Perhaps there were secrets inside, but they weren't his secrets to ask or demand. He no longer saw his crewmates; little Bomsy and Mollie both fell silent, leaving him alone on the great wide ocean.

  Yet he wasn't alone. There were the Castles-of-Clouds pumping their strange, heart-like bodies below him. There were gulls and geese sweeping by overhead. There were Ptarmigan pods on the horizon, and once he saw a flotilla of leaping dolphins.

  Time passed.

  He found he could hold his breath longer, and dive deeper. He grew strong and sun-weathered. The clouds above were full of meaning and the seas below full of life. In time he managed to dive all the way down to his lost ship.

  The Shall-I-Row lay becalmed amidst upsurges of growing seaweed and anemone on the sea floor, with barnacles taking root already on its bows. Her keel was broken in two where the sea had flattened it. Seeing it like that sparked an intense, implacable regret. All his navvies had trusted him, and he'd used them like candles to burn. Mollie and Bomsy and Van Sant had believed in his vision, because he'd asked them to, even if he hadn't truly believed it himself.

  Sen's lost war began to seem brighter. A war for all the world. Perhaps that way he could begin to repay some of his debts.

  On his second trip he gathered up some of the looser timbers, dislodged in the wreck, and carried them to the surface, where he left them in his shell. He made a third and fourth trip for more lumber, and on the fifth he snipped away whole lengths of sail and rigging that hadn't yet rotted, and on the surface he built a raft.

  He brought up a barrel for holding rainwater. He caught and hung fish to dry off his new mast and crossbar, fashioned from stretches of old railing. He tethered his two sails with reworked rigging knots, and soon enough unfurled into the wind and set a course by the Rot in the dark night sky, bound for Ignifer's city.

  * * *

  He came in on the trade winds, as summer was fading to autumn. The city walls hung white like chalky cliffs over the harbor and docks. He paddled his raft into the HellWest harbor, where once his arrival would have led to an impromptu carnival in the streets, feting the buccaneer king. Now he moored silently at the Crellathon Quay.

  People surrounded him, but not because they knew who he was. Without his crew, without his trebuchet-masted ship, who was he? He cut through the ranks of castes like they were waves, pressing a path he had never taken before, but knew well from all the times he'd thought about taking it.

  He came to rest in a graveyard in Carroway, off White and Gimble lane in the Dyers quarter. The air was filled with the scent of persimmons and mauve as the bleaching fires browned their colors, to blend the fabrics high castes would wear in the King's Roy.

  At a large mossed-over grave he sat, and traced the timeworn words with the tips of his claws.

  Laverne and Damaris Clay

  Lost from the Salubrious.

  May they rest eternal In the Heart's Embrace.

  He'd never believed they were dead. They weren't dead now. But this was the closest he would ever come to them again.

  * * *

  The next day with the dawn over the Sunsmelters wall he ambled to the Hugueknot merchant house off Grammaton Square and drew out the last of the Shrew's trade savings.

  At the HellWest docks he bartered for a lease on a new ship. As he walked the planks from quay to quay navvies began to recognize him; the great orange diamante shell, the massive mumpen claws, the stark jut of his oblong head. He heard their whispers and awe, that this was the Cray who warred with the gods and lived.

  Perhaps he would finally turn that legend to good.

  That night in the Gyre'n'Gimble alehouse, not far from his new ship the Ten Fathoms Hence, he held a crowd of roughed-up and worn-down navvies rapt throughout the bar chime for last orders with his tales of his war on Heaven's Eye. They cheered at the bombe sailing by overhead. They shivered as Van Sant made his farewells and greeted those he loved. They fell silent as Sen told his own tale of the Rot and the Darkness and a great war to come. They leaned forward, utterly gripped, as he described his survival on the ocean's surface, alone. They applauded as he finished, with him striding up into the Gyre'n'Gimble to tell the tale.

  Many begged to join his crew; for the chance of glory, for the chance to be remembered and pass into legend, for the chance to die in the service of a truly great man who built new ships from the sunken bones of the old, who blew a hole in the armor of Heaven's Eye and defied the very gods when they tried to smite him down with a valley in the waves, who lived on to tell the tale and lead another battalion out to fight again.

  The Ten Fathoms Hence sailed a month later, loaded down with navvies, supplies, and all the materials he would need to build an immense bow-like ballista down the center of the ship. The huge weapon made conventional masts impossible, so instead his sails extended diagonally outward to port and starboard, catching winds no other ship dared to harness. At full sail the new ship looked like a magnificent white bird, gliding effortlessly and low over the world's oceans.

  In time they came to call him the Albatross.

  LORD QUILL I

  It was morning, and the Drazi war swarm encamped on the siege plain below the city of Ignifer were preparing to attack. Lord Quill lay naked on his bed in a turret of the southern wall, his muscular Quartz body drifted with the limbs of sleeping damasks. His skin now lay fallow, gray as a Balast, but intermittent sparks twitched beneath the smooth surface.

  The damasks sighed in their sleep, their skin so colorful against his, even by the faint dawn light. Were there three? He couldn't make them out clearly. One of them beside him groaned low, hardly the coquetry of a courtesan damask, and Quill smiled. Underneath the paint and the performance there were always real people, and in many ways that was the part he liked best.

  The Grammaton chimed for All Gather, and he lifted himself from his nest amongst their bodies. His fine robes, gifted to him by King Alium, lay on the floor like fallen leaves. Bending to retrieve them, he was reminded of how the King had prostrated himself in his Pale Chamber when he gave Quill all of this; his harem, his treasury, his Lordship and the sword of the city.

  Quill had bowed low, shown grace as he'd been honored so highly, but inside he'd felt like laughing. There was no hope for the city any more. Nothing that gold or titles could buy would stop the hordes of Drazi. Yet he'd taken the gold anyway, the robes and the titles, and draped himself in them proudly. He'd raised the Oriole blade high, and the King had thanked him again and again. Of course he had. Lord Quill was the last Man of Quartz.

  Down the side of the bed he spotted two more damasks sleeping on the floor rugs; a Pinhead and some kind of Gull, its wings furled over it like a blanket. Added to the buxom Euphlact, sexless grasshopper-ish Sectile and the Gawk on the bed, that made five. Five wasn't bad.

  He strode to the turret of the tower and looked out over the blasted ruin that the city had become. The stale fog of disease hung everywhere in a smoky pall, thickened by the endless corpse fires burning in the Manticore and the dust shaken up by the demolition squads.

  He'd ordered the destruction of the outer districts himself, but still it never failed to dismay him. Plaguebreaks had been necessary to halt the spreading infection, but the demolition had fomented its own corruption; the stink of open sewers and exhumed corpses was abhorrent and terrible for his soldiers' morale. Now all that remained was an expansive cinderfield, a killing plain of ash and ruins.

  He sighed, as he often did when unobserved. Everything was triage now, delaying the moment the city would fall. It made him frustrated; the war, the Drazi, the whole blazed continent. Nobody would survive this.

  "Idiots," he whispered, his fingers clenching over the balcony railing hard enough to crumple the copper.

  In the distance over the southern wall he surveyed the glistening Drazi vats, lit from within by th
eir alchemical fires. The dark swarm spread around them, filling the churned Sump farmlands to the horizon with a brown blanket of seething flesh. They were rousing already for their morning assault.

  There'd be time enough for that soon, and Quill looked away, to Grammaton Square where several regiments had been billeted in the encircling townhouses. At least the Grammaton clock tower had escaped his demolition orders. It was a symbol now of the city's defiance, though its slender pink was blackened with soot. In its teetering shadow hawkers on the black market struggled to sell what pitiful few scrapings they could scavenge from the dead.

  No one had anything now. There was nothing to sell but that which was stolen or mined from the ruins. Ignifer's city had become a charnel house, ripped at by perpetual siege, and it disgusted him.

  The balcony railing snapped under his iron grip.

  The Drazi.

  The name alone filled him with rage. He could never kill enough of them, no matter how many times he strode the battlements, striking sparks with the Oriole blade and burning all those who came near. He slaughtered them all day, but more always sprung up in their place; malformed, goggle-eyed, hungry.

  The Grammaton chimed again, the familiar pattern of All Gather; the signal for a Drazi assault.

  He left the balcony and turned to the metal stand upon which his armor rested, tensing the muscles that caused his skin to fire. He shucked off the robe but already it was too late, the fine threads sparked and in moments the garment was only charred ash on the floor. He wondered if there would ever be another like it. If the Drazi took Ignifer, there'd be no stopping them. They would flow across the continent like lava, consuming all until there wasn't a thinking creature left upon the Corpse World's face.

  He focused on his armor. It was roughly-shaped, after being hammered afresh every night. He slapped the broad breastplate to his chest, the greaves and chausses to his legs and thighs, the gauntlets and pauldrons to his hands and shoulders, then stood for a moment as the silver began to melt. It ran evenly over his burning body, melting and affixing. In battle it would ebb and flow with his movements, forming an outer crust that afforded protection perfectly aligned to his form.

  A sharp intake of breath came, and he turned to find one of the female damasks awake. He controlled the rage he felt inside, and offered her a broad and sincere smile.

  "You should rest," he said, his burning throat producing a deep, fluid tone. "You had a hard night."

  Despite her obvious fear, this statement had something of the desired effect, and she gave a faint smile. It was an effort, but everything cost effort now. Their lovemaking had cost effort, but it was all to a purpose; so they could feel his strength, and then spread word of that strength through the city.

  Quill was a god. Quill could not be stopped. Quill killed Drazi in their hundreds by day and tupped the King's damasks by the bedload by night. Building a legend around himself was one of the most effective ways he'd learned to buttress flagging morale.

  It didn't hurt that he enjoyed it, as well.

  "They're coming again," said the woman. The fatigue of constant fear was clear in her eyes. She'd woken with the end of the alarm chimes, then. It meant he hadn't been able to quell the fear from her fully that night, and that concerned him. Usually his bedload of damasks were inspired after they'd spent such time in his company.

  Yet this woman was still afraid, and if he let that fear fester now all his work would be undone. The rest of them would wake alone and uncomforted, and go to their fellows where they'd spread that loneliness and fear in their looks, their faces, their sallow words. So it would spread down to the lowest of the damasks, who would spread it to his soldiers, within whom the fighting spirit he needed so badly would fade even faster.

  "Delay, isn't it?" he said sharply.

  Her eyes were fixed on the window, on the skies where an ugly Drazi creation with multiple misshapen wings might at any moment appear, yet on hearing her name she spun to face him.

  "Yes," she said, though her tone was as dull as her eyes.

  "Attend to your master," he barked, loud enough to startle her and rustle several of the others to wakefulness.

  "Yes, Lord Quill," she said swiftly, the creeping malaise replaced briefly by fear of his boiling hand.

  He'd tried that path before, of punishment, but it had brought him no pleasure or reward. His cruelty with them had led to fear, and then always to contempt. They obeyed him and hated him for it. His soldiers heard and began to see their leader as a beater of damasks. Rumors propounded; that he was lax, an impotent, unable to serve fully in the bedchamber.

  That was wars ago now, in his youth when there'd been no one to guide him. Wars had passed, though, and he'd learned better ways. Fear of pain at his hand was always superseded by fear of death at the enemy's, so it was that fear of the enemy he had to battle in their minds. In that battle his chief weapon was hope. He had to show these people that there would be something after this, that a new and better life would follow, to help them endure the present. He had to embody that hope in himself.

  On the blazing battlefield it was easy. As a Man of Quartz he was near un-killable. Swathed in his molten silver armor, striding amongst the ranks of scrabbling Drazi, he was a living god.

  Behind the city walls though, in the bedchambers, it had been harder. He had had to learn new techniques, so that his war went on without end; throughout the day and the night both.

  Delay was looking at him now, her pupils dilated wide.

  "How many Drazi do you think I will kill out there today?" he asked her lazily, as another soldier might boast.

  She was surprised by the question. Soldiers were under orders not to discuss the fighting with their damasks, for fear that the barbarism on the walls would creep into the core of the city. Of course, all the men and women in his command did so. It was another thing Quill had learned, a way to let the soldiers feel they were not only following the strongest, greatest general that ever lived, but also bucking his laws to some extent. It empowered them, lending them some of the strength they saw in him and making them feel closer to being his equal.

  Of course a few would take it too far, and think it an excuse for further improprieties: sleeping on sentinel duty, drunkenness on the rampart, even speaking out against the war.

  These Quill expected. He had seen them before. He treated with them swiftly and starkly, first with a simple verbal warning, second with execution by his own boiling hand. His warriors learned to respect the line, yet he always had to kill a few in the beginning. He didn't enjoy that either, but it was necessary. This was war.

  The frightened damask didn't answer.

  "Delay," he soothed, his voice now as smooth as liquid topaz. "It's all right. How many?"

  She stammered in her answer. "Hundreds, probably, your Lordship."

  He smiled, and feigned being impressed. "Between two and three hundred, that's right. You're a smart woman. I could use your sort in my Decatate."

  He moved to collect his sword, then paused, as though struck by an idea. The young damask flinched slightly as he turned back to her.

  "Can you speak in Pre-Mantic?" he asked.

  "I, uh, I know a few words."

  Quill nodded at this. "I will need Pre-Mantic ambassadors for the Feraz embassy, when this skirmish is done. You might be perfect for it."

  The girl reddened. Quill smiled inwardly.

  "Your Lordship is too kind," she began, but he cut across her, his tone firm again.

  "See that this room is cleaned properly. There will be an inspection. This night you will be here again, along with the seven damasks of your choosing, and you will show me how well you can serve a man in the Pre-Mantic tongue."

  His tone was firm, but at the end he winked.

  Her mouth fell open. He had invited her back. He had offered her a future position that would raise her far above the ranks of the King's slatterns, to a position of true power. He had given her orders, lanced them with hope, a
nd also appealed to the expertise of the damask craft.

  He could tell she was about to gush out some inane gratitude, and he forestalled her with a raised hand. Better that she keep that debt inside herself, unspent, that it would fuel her day and all those she interacted with.

  "Don't thank me," he commanded. "You've yet to prove yourself. In Pre-Mantic, tonight."

  He retrieved the sword of Oriole and left the room. As he jogged down the spiral stone staircase from the turret the excited gossip of the damasks echoed round the walls. It was a trick he used almost every morning, though with different permutations. He used it with both the damasks and the soldiers, and they all responded well.

  He offered them a future.

  At the base of the turret stairs he called to his Decatate, the expert honor guard that fought with him at all times. They ran to him, their silver armor sparkling in a faint echo of his own molten skin. Over the Sunsmelters wall the first wave of desperate Drazi burst like a living wave, and Quill led the charge into their midst.

  BATTLE I

  Battle lasted for longer than usual that day, through the Grammaton's drunkenly tolled chimes for All Forth, Second Coming, Heeding Wake and All Rally. The Drazi came at them without rest, hauling their haphazard bodies over the grindstone battlements and into the defenders' forest of blades, buckshot, and pikes.

  Once they may have had a master, a Painman the likes of the Bunnyman King who had designed and marshaled them in long disciplined lines, but not any more. Now their master was gone and they were a stupid, diseased tide that washed over the land, sucking the life and marrow from villages, woodlands and croplands whole, living only to consume.

  Quill had slain many thousands of them.