The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  At the start they had been easy to kill. Their throats were soft and their underbellies brittle; built out of weak young children, built out of grizzled old man's bones, built out of mudworms and fresh tree sap and grass. They stuttered and moaned, those that had mouths. Some had no features at all, some had three heads, some scuttled like spiders on a bed of men's arms, some had thorny front carapaces and nothing but jellied blood and bone in back.

  At the start killing them had been as comedic as it was horrific. When their lumbering bodies had first come over the churned Sump fields, they were met by the King's Halberdiers, by Lord Quill's Decatate, and even by the citizenry at large. Ignifer's forces had eviscerated them with ease, tearing their bodies to pieces and leaving them in huge quivering piles. That first day had been an orgy of disgust and violence. The towering piles of corrupted Drazi flesh that scattered the landscape were obscene.

  They were also fuel. The remnant Drazi dug vats into the earth and filled them with their own dead, from which they mogrified a second batch.

  These new breed Drazi were different. Gone were the most horrific mogrifications, the most inept, the most easily butchered, and in their place came something more like the Malakite caste; ape-like creatures with thick knurls of muscle. Yet they still boasted random dangling limbs, with fangs and claws where they shouldn't be, with useless eyes embedded in their elbows and their innards garlanded like a crown about their heads, and that led the King's troops into believing they hadn't really changed.

  The forces of Ignifer's city rode out once more to the slaughter, and were in turn slaughtered. Citizens who'd emerged wielding nothing more than raking hoes and kitchen knifes were mauled to death. Neophyte Halberdiers who broke formation in the glee of anticipated butchery were torn from their saddles and ripped to pieces. Older Molemen streamed out in their red tubing suits with blatting clubs wielded high and were run down by creatures that fanged them in the back and dragged them under. Hundreds died before the retreat was sounded.

  From the safety of the wall Lord Quill watched the bodies of his fallen forces dragged back to the vats, where they were steeped in glowing light, and stewed, and by the dawn reanimated as the latest incarnation of the Drazi. Again, these fought better. Again, their useless mogrifications were fewer. They sharpened themselves ceaselessly upon loss, somehow sharing what they'd learned in death through the mogrification of their vats.

  The next night Lord Quill led his Decatate on a raid into the thick of the Drazi encampment. They cast explosive charges into the breeding vats and set the siege plain to flaming chaos. It seemed that victory was theirs.

  Yet noxious smoke from the vat fires washed over the city, and carried the Drazi infection with it. Corpse smoke fumed in the avenues and alleyways of the old Yore district, rolling through the Diadem and into artisanal Carroway and the craftsman's Calk, filtering into the many river-falls of the Levi, seeping into sewers and weirs and rising up to corrupt the homes of the highest caste.

  Drazi sprang up amongst the citizenry. The first struck in the King's palace, as Dukes, Earls and courtesans were reduced to ravening beasts that slaughtered and mogrified dozens more before they could be slain.

  Still the smoke thickened and spread. Panic filled the city. The King's Halberdiers were roused and went from door to door with smoke masks stuffed with protective herbs, killing any who showed signs of the Drazi sickness, but they couldn't halt the flood, and often fell to the disease themselves.

  Fresh outbreaks continued to erupt, and the city went mad, turning against itself as the wealthy fled their infected districts and charged across the Levi bridges to the north. The poor denizens of Jubilante and the hilly neighborhoods circling the rusted Aigle skyship in the Gutrock foothills were usurped and expelled from their homes, as the King sent his Halberdiers ahead to clear the path.

  The city fell into civil war, as over the course of one day the rich and the poor halves of the city changed places across the Levi River. Tens of thousands of evicted peoples were driven into the filthy Levi water, churning now with Drazi fallout.

  Many of them drowned, and those that learned to swim were picked off by the King's archers. Within a few days the far banks, where once the walled loop of the city containing the Sanctor and Grielry Fop districts, the King's Yor and all the buildings of court, fell silent.

  Lord Quill put forward his demolition plans, and the King swiftly approved them. The bridges were reopened, Quill's Decatate along with the King's engineers swept into the ghostly realms of the elite, and every structure within a fathom of the wall was destroyed. Every last Drazi infection was hunted down and taken to the Manticore, where Molemen erected three huge smokestacks to burn them, in accordance with the winds.

  Thousands were slaughtered, infected and uninfected alike. A quarter of the city was leveled, including the Yor palace, but the infection was finally forced under control, and something akin to calm fell over what remained.

  Then the Drazi started coming over the walls.

  Lord Quill was the first to the ramparts with his Decatate at his back, slaughtering Drazi with a wild ferocity, but every day they returned faster and leaner, more adept at climbing and better equipped to fight. They had learned in death, and shared that knowledge in the vat.

  The onslaught became a constant siege. There were no more sallies outside the walls to burn the Drazi vats. Slain Drazi were to be dropped within the walls onto the newly rubbled cinderfields, where masked Ogrics and Mogs would ferry them for disposal. So the wall became a kind of manufactory line for processing living Drazi into dust.

  Every day they flung themselves at the wall, and every day Quill slaughtered them and burned their bodies; day after day, week after week. Gradually supplies in the city depleted. One by one the sources of fresh water, the thirteen wells sunk deep into the bedrock of the newly-named Roy, dried up.

  Yet there were always more Drazi.

  Delegations came from nearby nations to witness the slaughter, and returned to their homes with tales of an unstoppable foe. Some of those nations sat back to wait for the fall of Ignifer, thinking they would ride in once the killing was over and take the city at the center of the world. Others, terrified at the prospect of being over-run themselves, prepared for their own siege to come.

  Few sent aid to Ignifer's city. Few sent their young to die in a hopeless war. So the land north of Ignifer's city fell as silent as the south. Runners carried messages back and forth until Quill realized no more help was forthcoming. His cries for reinforcements, his simple argument that Ignifer's city was the floodgate holding back the swarm, was ignored. Neighbor nations shuttered themselves in with their supplies and soldiers and hunkered down to wait.

  The Drazi kept coming, and soldiers died every day. The people fell sick with malnutrition, and mutters of desertion spread. Quill fought on, but time was running out. It seemed there was a limit to all things, even hope.

  * * *

  A Drazi carrying a pronged bone-rake leapt over the wall, springing up as so many of them did now, using the catapli-like windings of muscle coiled in their lower backs. It stabbed the rake hard, and Lord Quill sidestepped neatly, flicking the sword of Oriole out to neatly behead the thing with a shiver of steam. He kicked its tumbling corpse down from the wall so as not to clog the ramparts.

  Another leaped up, and another, while several more sped toward him from either side. He whirled on the first and speared it in the air, his super-heated blade sinking into its tough hide like a Gull diving on the Sheckledown. As it fell its weight dragged his wrist around, slicing the blade sideways from its body so its guts sizzled down his forearm.

  He brought the blade back up in a half arc and sliced the second Drazi from groin to skull. The two halves separated and fell either side of him, showering him with more gore that burned quickly off his silver-coated skin.

  He spun and punched the tip of the blade through the throat of the Drazi to his left, ducked beneath the bone spur thrust of the one to his
right and reached out to clamp his silver gauntleted left hand around its throat, burning through its neck in seconds.

  A pike glanced off his thigh and lodged against his foot. He braced his knee against it and snapped it in two, then spun and hurled the roasted Drazi in his left hand at its bearer, sending them both down to the ground below.

  Something clashed by his ear and he spun, to see a young man in light leather armor, not of the Decatate, parry away a Drazi club-fist from Quill's head with a pair of long crossed misericordes. Quill slew the beast with an easy backhand, nodded his thanks to the young dark-haired man, then leapt back into the fray.

  He slew hundreds. The fighting lasted until the last rays of the sun went down, as ever, and the Drazi tide retreated in one fluid movement.

  As dusk fell he walked the inner siege line, seeing to it that every wounded man was carried away, to the Bodyswell for tending for some, to the Manticore fires for those who would die in transit. He hefted Drazi corpses to Ogric body carts himself, winked at shy gatherings of damask lingering at the cinderfield's edge, and wiped the last remnants of burning silver armor from his body into a bucket of cool water, to be recast in the night.

  At the battlement he surveyed the Drazi flood. There were no lights amongst them bar the vats; three huge eyes that glowed limpidly, shifting between green, orange and brown. They fed into the largest vat in the center via long radial aqueducts of flickering matter. The central vat was the one he'd ordered burned in the first assault. He'd tossed the incendiary himself, refined naphtha in a fused barrel. The Drazi had refilled it within a day. It was almost as large as Grammaton Square, and spewed out an endless procession of new breeds.

  He watched the rippling vats as his hot Quartz skin cooled. By moonlight he could just make out the shuffling bodies as they were birthed. There was a strange beauty in it; the coruscating pools, the clockwork movement of bodies, the fields of creatures of various generations lying to sleep in the dark, seeing the same stars and the same world as him. What did they think, he wondered, if they thought at all? Was there anything more to them than rawest hunger?

  The clacking of clog-booted feet came from the stairwell beside him, and he turned to see the young man from the wall. He was clearly weary, blood-spattered but strong, wearing his long misericorde spikes holstered at his thighs.

  "Lord Quill," the youth said, bowing at the waist.

  "You don't need to bow to me, son," replied the Man of Quartz, his voice gruff. "You saved me an embarrassment on the wall today."

  The young man stood silently for a moment. "It was an honor."

  "You have my sincere thanks." The young man bowed again, and Quill waved it away, gesturing to the rampart wall by his side. "Join me. Enjoy the view."

  The young man moved to the rampart edge and looked out over the Drazi horde.

  "I haven't seen you before," said Quill, studying his sharp gray eyes. "Are you with Pleny's fourth?"

  The young man nodded. "I just joined recently. I was a scribe, of sorts, before the war."

  "Letters, words," Quill mused. "A fine profession. Where did you learn to wield the misericordes so fluently?"

  "I taught myself, mostly. Since I was young."

  Quill grunted in appreciation. "I admire that. The world needs more self-taught men. What's your name, son?"

  The youth paused a moment, as if speaking his name was an embarrassment. Quill had seen that many times; children of the gentry risked shame by taking up weapons to fight. At least that was the old way of thinking. Perhaps he was contemplating giving Quill a false name, but when he spoke it was with the timbre of truth. "Sen. The Book of Airs and Graces played a large role in my mother's life."

  "Sen," repeated Quill, turning the name over slowly in his mouth. "Avia's son, isn't he?"

  Sen nodded.

  "It's a good name. I'm proud to have you fight by my side."

  Sen turned and gave another bow. "It's my honor."

  "Enough talk of honor," chastised Quill lightly and pointed out over the wall. "Look out there, tell me what you see."

  Sen peered into the darkness, over the sweeping encampment of Drazi forms. "Drazi. Tens of thousands of them, as far as the eye can see."

  "Drazi," confirmed Quill. "And what are Drazi, Sen? What does it mean, to be a Drazi?"

  The young man took a few moments to reply. "I'm not sure, exactly. There's so little about them in the books; about their origin. They're animals, I know that. They live to reproduce themselves, like the Bunnymen."

  "Bunnymen?" asked Quill. Of course he knew of the caste, but not of any way they resembled the Drazi.

  "An obscure reference," Sen said quickly. "Perhaps apocryphal. Suffice it to say they want to kill us all, but not because they hate us. We are simply food."

  Quill considered. "A fair answer. A better answer than most men would give, when they look upon the swarm. Monsters, they call them. Beasts. But they're not simply beasts. They learn, and they grow. When I first fought them they were nightmarish things, but slow and stupid. Soon after that they changed, becoming more like us; faster, more intelligent. They're changing, Sen, as we watch. Do you understand me?"

  "I believe I do, Lord."

  "And do you believe we can defeat them?"

  The young man turned to face him, and his gray eyes shone in the faint moonlight. "Shouldn't I be asking that question of you, Lord?"

  Quill allowed a smile. "We both know what answer you'll get from me. I want to know what answer I'll get from you."

  Sen thought on it a moment. "It's hard to say. I know they will lose, that much is clear to me. Such kind as they are can not survive long. I do not know though how things will go for us here. Will we survive as we are? And if we adapt in order to survive, what damage will those changes wreak in years to come? I cannot say."

  Quill nodded appreciatively. For a scribe born to riches, he had a keen eye. "Another fine answer. We could use you in the Decatate, Sen."

  Sen looked up at the gray Man of Quartz without any hint of fear. "I would think you'd want a man more positive by your side, Lord."

  Quill shook his head. "I have no need of airy fantasists in the Decatate. You know the odds, you know the city may fall, yet you remain. You fight upon the wall when you could flee, as many have done. That's the type I need most. Realists who will fight, despite their fears."

  "The fears make the man," replied Sen.

  Quill grinned. "A quote from the Book? You have me at a disadvantage there, Sen. I never cared for scribing."

  "It's from the Book of Arrythians. King Fell says it to his son before they go into battle with the Periklon."

  "I know of them," replied Quill. "They are worthy forbears." He turned back to the ramparts.

  "And what of you, Lord?" Sen asked. "You are no airy fantasist either. What would your answer be?"

  Quill pondered for a moment. "To the men at large, I give the simple answer. We will be victorious. There can be no other belief in my mind on that score. To a single man, perhaps a wise man, though young, I would give a more tempered reply. We will be victorious, but as you say, I do not know what price we may have to pay."

  The young man said nothing for a time.

  Lord Quill's mind drifted to the night of pleasure ahead of him; women and men scraping together what damask they had, dolling themselves in the brightest raiment they had left in their soot-stained closets and doing all they could to please their Lord. There was something both heady and heroic about it. Brash, buxom women; lithe, generous men, terrified inside but bawdy with noise and light and color. It was part of what kept him fighting. Those souls had as much spark as the soldiers who fought on the walls, if not more, for they could no more be agents of their own salvation than could a child or an old man. They played what hand they could, as well as they could, and he admired and respected them for it.

  A fresh night breeze washed over him. The salty tang from the Sheckledown filled his lungs, along with the waft of brunifer forests from fu
rther down the Sump coast.

  The Drazi did not smell. He'd noticed that even when he was firing their vats. The clean breezes of the land washed over them, and they did not taint it any more than a stand of trees or a clump of hawkenberries would. Behind him lay the real stench. Despair, sewage, and corpse fires. The slow spread of disease and rot.

  He blinked, trying to focus, and the youth by his side spoke.

  "Is there a price that is too high, Lord? Is there a price for victory you would not pay?"

  Quill didn't answer right away. It was a question he'd thought of himself often.

  He'd been out once to the lands of the Sump, scouting behind the Drazi line to survey the damage they'd caused. It had been total. Everything was gone; every settlement, every cropped field, every tree, every blade of grass, every single sign of life was consumed and converted in their vats.

  "There's nothing," he answered. "No price that is too high."

  Sen nodded. Quill clapped him on the shoulder.

  "My headman, Black, will see you outfitted with the silver of the Decatate. You can find him in the Sunken Jib, in the King's Yore."

  Sen began to bow, then halted halfway through, a sheepish grin on his face. Famously, no man of the Decatate ever bowed to Lord Quill. "Thank you, Lord."

  Quill squeezed his shoulder, the flinty fingers bunching Sen's bones together easily. "Thank me when it's won."

  DECATATE

  Sen left the battlements and walked into the barren dark of the cinderfields, feeling dizzy. He had just spoken with Lord Quill, one of the greatest heroes from legend, and it didn't feel real.

  Few things did now. The days blurred one into another, driven onward by the constant thinning of the Corpse, thoughts of Craley always pursuing him. He didn't remember when last he'd slept. The Darkness was always there, ushering him onward. He fought in the day then stepped through the veil and fought again on some other day. Forwards, backwards, it was always the same. He'd watched the first flood of citizens race out to slaughter the Drazi, then watched them race to be slaughtered. He'd run from the corpse smoke with the lowest castes, then fired arrows into their ranks with the upper castes, as they tried to swim across the river. He'd lived so many short lives in his time in the siege that he'd started to forget who he was.