The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  Black shook him. For a moment he thought he recognized the Deadface before him, imagining it was one of his lost friends returning to tell him all was well, and the Rot was gone.

  "Wake up, they're coming again."

  Sen shrugged him off. His spikes were still in his hands. He looked down and saw himself covered in blood. Was it the blood of yesterday, or today? He wasn't sure. Had he done anything but kill for weeks?

  He heard the sound of the Drazi clambering up their ladders. The wood socked against the outer wall as their weight shifted, becoming a steady scraping as more ascended, their weight stabilizing the wood. He was listening intently when the first Drazi leaped over the black stone ramparts.

  For a moment Sen was transfixed. It was Efraius.

  The Gawk charged at him, twin rudimentary spikes in his hands.

  "Efraius," Sen began, stepping forward.

  A slim gladius tore the Gawk's head from his shoulders. Sen let out a cry of anguish, then Black was upon him.

  "Wake up, you fool," he cried, "it's the Drazi."

  He turned back into the assault. Sen heard his blade whishing in the air, heard the sheer slicing sound it made as it cut Drazi to pieces. He just looked down at the head on the floor, watching as its motions stilled and its eyes stopped blinking.

  "Efraius," he mouthed.

  The head fell still.

  The noise of battle rushed upon Sen. Somewhere Black was roaring, "Get up! Get up!"

  He turned his head.

  Drazi were swarming the walls. They were everywhere, and they all looked like Efraius. They were longer and thinner, their faces changed, their teeth battered where Sen had smashed them. Some of them carried misericorde spikes in their long thin hands.

  One ducked around Black and charged at Sen. He twisted but not fast enough. Its first spike passed low through his side, the second high through his chest, and he fell back, trapping the blades in his body. The Drazi tried to yank them free, pulling the holes wider, but the angle held them. It was still tugging at them when Black shoulder-charged it from the battlements.

  "Get up!" roared the Deadface.

  Sen lay still. He felt the pain in his wounds, felt the blood leaking from him as more Drazi charged in. They all carried spikes now, like poor lost Craley.

  The weight of it was too much. He couldn't think about it. He couldn't bear it. He stared up at the clouds and waited to die.

  * * *

  It was dark. He wasn't sure if he was dead or alive any more. The screaming had ceased. The dreams of flaming bodies and disease were gone for now. The sky was motionless and dark overhead, but for drifts of black smoke that sailed by, occluding the stars.

  Bodies, burning.

  He heard footsteps moving over to him. Black's Deadface loomed over him.

  "I should kill you where you lie," he said.

  Sen said nothing, his eyes tracking Black's. They held like that for a time, as tears leaked down the side of Sen's face.

  The Deadface bent and lifted him like a child. He drifted in and out of consciousness.

  On a bench in a yellow-sheeted hut somewhere off the cinderfields, Black bribed a Bodyswell healer to ease the spikes from his body. Sen wept throughout, not for the pain but because he was still alive. He reached out to stay the hands of the blood-spattered man in filthy white robes, but his weak arms were batted aside.

  He felt the stitches go into his body. Events broke into flashes, as the pain sucked him in and out of consciousness. Black was by his side. Visions of two thin men played before him, one a Gawk, one a Spindle. They all suffered. Efraius and somebody. Feyon was there and so was Freemantle, alone in his white room. In the corner sat Avia, and Saint Ignifer, and with them the entire army of the defeated, galloping once more to their deaths.

  He knew now that he would never see them again.

  BATTLE III

  But he didn't die.

  He roused into silence. Before there had been groaning, but now that was gone. He opened his eyes and saw the high stone ceiling of the Sunken Jib above him. He was lying on the bar top in a strange quiet, and felt peaceful, as though something had been lifted from him. The pain was gone. The emptiness didn't matter.

  Something moved across his vision and he tracked it. His mind cleared sharply, as the brown thing sighted upon him, its bloody snout sniffing the air.

  Drazi.

  In the inner siege plain, beyond the cinderfield killing grounds. Inside the Sunken Jib.

  He noticed bodies of soldiers lying nearby, all of them dead, some gutted, their entrails spread like rags across the floor. Scraps still trailed from to the muzzle of this creature with the face of Efraius.

  In its hands were twin spikes.

  For a moment they stared at each other, sharing some weird kinship. Then the Drazi leapt, Sen moved, and it was over in a second. The Drazi was lying across his chest, one of its spikes sunk into the shallow outside of Sen's thigh, the other twitching in palsied fingers against the makeshift wooden bar.

  Sen gazed into its eyes, fascinated, so close to his own. He held it tight as it trembled and went limp, then held on a moment longer, seeking out in its features the things that were not Efraius, that made killing it all right.

  Then he pushed it away. The broken bottle he'd driven into the back of its head clattered to the ground. He lay still and breathed for a moment, then rolled off the bar, lurching under his own weight. He pulled the blade from his thigh and stuffed a wad of dirty gray bandaging into the bleeding flap. The stitches in his waist and chest pulled tight as he stood but he welcomed the pain, because the pain gave him purpose.

  He had to save the Decatate. If nothing else, that mattered now.

  At the bottom of the bar top was his armor, but he ignored it. It had only ever slowed him down. Instead he took up the Drazi's spikes, looked around one last time across the counting house that had become a bar and now a carrion hall, another grave for the Decatate, then ran out into the thick of the invading Drazi mass.

  He killed three before he'd realized it; a leap, the stitches tugging at his waist, blood flowing from his thigh, a turn, three thrusts, and they fell in his wake.

  He ran on.

  They were everywhere across the cinderfields. They were flowing over the wall like a brown swathe of lava, washing across the rubbled barrens and funneling along the paths beaten by numerous soldiers, heading toward the distant Levi bridgeheads.

  Two more died in his wake, a slice to the jugular and a spike through the eye. They collapsed and he sprinted on. Closer now, he could clearly see the breaches in the wall. Great holes had been blasted in the top of the scaffolded ramparts that could only have been wrought by mangonels. They were learning.

  Drazi poured through the gaps largely unobstructed now, stepping over the bodies of their fellows. Drazi dead lay in mounds at the feet of several silver figures still battling on, the last of the Decatate. Everywhere else, from the battlements to the blasted cinderfields where lumbering Ogric had once waited with their body carts to ferry away the dead, the Drazi piled in.

  He spilled the guts of one as it ran by, almost incidentally. Steam rose from the entrails. The thing screamed and Sen ended its suffering with a spike through the brain.

  Was he too late?

  His eyes scanned the battlements desperately, seeking the burning figure of the last Man of Quartz, but all he saw were the lightly furred bodies of the Drazi leaping and rolling over everything.

  The city was falling. It couldn't be, because in legend Lord Quill saved it, but it was happening now before his eyes. Was this his doing? Had he somehow brought his curse with him and killed the world five hundred years early?

  He leapt over the bodies of fallen beasts, ignoring the pain of his wounds. He ran by the smoking cart of a Mog, its owner savaged and spread out behind it. He ducked under a low-slung caulk blow and sidestepped a javelin, coiling around each of the Drazi attackers and puncturing their bodies with his spikes before they had time to a
djust.

  At the wall he hit the flood. The weight of Drazi slammed into him and pushed him back. He stabbed at them and killed three, five, seven, but there were always more pushing from behind, blocking his path.

  Above he heard one of the Decatate cry out.

  "I'm coming!" he called back.

  He sprinted around the Drazi influx and threw himself at the wall, digging his spikes into the tight mortar-points, and began to climb.

  A Drazi came for him and he kicked its face, dislodging Efraius' long jaw and sending it squealing to the ground. More Drazi fell past him, victims of the Decatate blades above. He heard a voice calling down to him but couldn't make out the words over the screams and war cries and the ringing clash of metal on stone.

  Halfway up the wall, completely exposed, a strange sense of calm overcame him and everything seemed to slow down.

  He turned to survey the city behind him. Flames had ignited somewhere and were sparking through distant districts they'd thought safe; the Calk, Carroway, carrying on the breeze toward the Levi. Smoke fitfully obscured the dire battles at the Levi bridges, where wounded soldiers fought side by side with whichever damasks were bold enough to run out brandishing candlesticks and pimiento daggers.

  They hadn't been able to blast the bridges yet. There must have been no warning. The city was on the brink of falling. Everything would be lost, but he would fight on anyway, and for some reason that last thought filled him with joy. It was simple and clear. He let out a loud whoop and raced the last stretch to the top of the wall, hand over hand as he had once climbed the Abbey cathedral, climbing to prove he was who he thought he was.

  Beyond lay the endless swarm of the Drazi, and beside him fought the blaze of Lord Quill himself.

  "Sen," called the Man of Quartz, swinging a double caulk in one hand and the sword of Oriole in the other. They sliced through the Drazi like hot wax. "I thought we'd lost you days ago. Instead here you are, clambering up the wall like a Spider. It's good to see you alive."

  "It's the end, Lord," Sen called out over the mad clamor. "They're onto the Levi. Soon they'll be in the city proper."

  Lord Quill cut three Drazi in half with a single blow, met Sen's eyes briefly for a beat, then crushed a Drazi skull with a shattering punch.

  "How do we win now, Lord?" Sen shouted over the melee. "You're a hero for what you do here, your name rings through the ages, but how do you do it? How do you turn the Drazi?"

  Quill cut the feet off a Drazi, took a spear point in the upper arm which spewed hot stony blood, then snapped the spear and sliced the Drazi in two through his lower ribs. Sen dispatched three with spikes peppered into their chests as fast as flintlock fire.

  "I've been thinking about your question," Quill boomed in his rumbling voice, as if nothing Sen had said was strange.

  Sen blinked, and almost missed a double axe head thrusting at him like a spear. At the last minute he stabbed it to the side with one spike point and impaled the Drazi's wrist with the other, spinning around the falling weapon to strike its wielder in the forehead. The beast's skull cracked open and it fell screaming.

  "What question?"

  "The cost," called Lord Quill, stamping down on the extended arm of a dying Drazi as it struggled for a weapon. The bone imploded with a sick compound crack. "What cost for victory."

  "You said everything."

  Lord Quill winked. "Now I think I know what it means." He laid his caulk and the sword of Oriole out flat before him, braced against each other so they formed a kind of wall, and pressed them against a ten-wide swathe of the scrabbling Drazi horde.

  His skin flared a shade whiter. The Drazi cooking under his splayed weapons screamed, Lord Quill leaned in hard, and in a feat of outsized strength he stopped the flow of them dead.

  Sen's mouth dropped. Every second more Drazi piled up behind the wall of Quill's twin blades, but he held them motionless. They jabbed at him around the sizzling metal, cutting into his arms and chest, but he didn't waver. He roared into their faces and pressed forward.

  They slid back.

  Sen advanced after him, spiking any Drazi that escaped the burning wall. Beside him the Man of Quartz shook with the strain. Currents of light crackled over his skin as step by step he pushed thirty, perhaps forty Drazi back, up to the broken edge of the wall, and then beyond.

  They fell and Lord Quill followed.

  Sen watched in disbelief as the last Man of Quartz dropped from the battlements to the outer siege plain. Lord Quill was gone.

  Sen leaned out to see his blazing figure down below, pummeling the morass of Drazi he had fallen into, every blow landing with a sickening crack, laughing wildly.

  The mad joy resurged in Sen's chest. So this was the end, and he welcomed it; the answer to all his uncertainty. Everyone else had died, and he was finally ready to join them. He reversed his grip on both spikes and leapt from the edge after his hero.

  Something slammed into him before he could clear the battlement. It thumped the air from his lungs and knocked him sideways onto the battlements, where he gasped and rolled and the weight came off.

  Black's slack face loomed over his own.

  "That's twice," he said.

  "Quill's down there," Sen gasped. "I had to-"

  "I saw," Black interrupted, turning from Sen. He knelt by the breach hole and unsnapped the black crossbow pipe from his right chausse.

  Sen rolled to his knees and looked down into the mad fray below. The Drazi had stopped assaulting the walls and were instead converging upon Lord Quill like shellaby bugs to a candle. He met them with mad laughter and a whirlwind of white-hot steel, shouting out for them to come closer.

  And he was moving forward.

  "That's impossible," Sen whispered.

  He was moving the entire Drazi horde. They spiraled around him, packing in tighter until there were hundreds swirling in his orbit, drawn by his laughter, his heat, his deep rumbling voice.

  "He's singing now?" asked Sen faintly.

  "Old Decatate drinking song," Black said, snapping the T-arms of the crossbow into place, and pulling the cord strings from within to string them to the contact tips. "All about damasks."

  Sen looked from the crossbow to Black's face, realizing what he was planning. "You can't."

  "He'd do the same for me," Black said sharply. "The standing order. They don't take us alive."

  Sen laid his hand over the crossbow vault, preventing Black from loading the bolt. "This is not you or me, Black. This is Lord Quill! He saves us all, he saves the city, he leads the Drazi away into the sky, I know it; maybe that's what he's doing now."

  Black backhanded him across the face.

  Sen landed hard on his side, so the stitches in his belly tore out and fresh blood welled from the wound. He struggled to rise but his head lurched and he succeeded only in pushing himself forward weakly. He tried again but couldn't seem to get his hands braced under him, flopping from side to side. Black had hit him hard.

  Now he heard the whining ratchet of Black winding the crossbow.

  "No," he moaned, unable to move.

  "Why?" replied Black without looking. "Because you need him for your war? This is the war I care about, Sen, and I care for him a thousand times more than I do for you. This is the end, and he deserves to go out like the hero he is."

  "Then let him! He's making his choice."

  "Not his choice anymore," Black said, and lifted the black metal crossbow and sighted it to his eye.

  Sen's vision lolled and he tried to edge forwards, but smacked his face hard into the battlements instead.

  "What did you do to me?"

  "Nerves in your neck," Black said calmly. "It'll wear off soon. He's making good progress. He might make it to the vat before they pull him down."

  "Let him!" slurred Sen, struggling to approach.

  "He'll be out of range. He must mean to fire them again, but I can't take the risk. If they get him, with everything he knows, the whole Corpse World will fall w
ithin a year."

  His finger tightened over the trigger-pull. Sen surged forward on a burst of the Saint, and his spike slammed through Black's chest.

  The crossbow discharged into the masses of Drazi below, far from the tornado about Quill.

  Sen stared down at his still trembling hand, holding the spike. He hadn't meant to do that. Blood trickled over his knuckles. Black rolled and looked up at him, his eyes wide.

  "Assassin," he mouthed. Foamy blood rose to his lips.

  Sen held his red hand before them both. "I didn't-"

  Black snorted. Sen waited, but he didn't breathe in again.

  He looked up. Quill was still advancing upon the Drazi vats, the sparking light at the heart of the brown tornado, pulling the Drazi encampment with him. Sen eased Black away with no time for grief, then flung himself off the battlements and down to the Drazi masses below.

  He landed on a pile of the dead, a rib cracking in his chest. He ignored it and rolled to the siege plain of mud and blood below. The Drazi were drawing away from the wall like a tide, toward Lord Quill, and he ran with them.

  The nausea from whatever Black did faded as he ran. None of the Drazi were attacking him now, rather they blurred by on either side, only groping forward for Quill. Soon he was in amongst them thickly, squeezing through until they were pressed so tightly he could scarcely breathe.

  Quill's voice rang closer now, lustily bawling out crude lyrics, punctuated by the sweep and scythe of his caulk and sword. Sen had to be right there for what was coming; the change thrummed in the veil. This had to be the moment, and here was the army.

  The Drazi bodies before him were rampacked, so he used the spikes to find purchase in ribs and clavicles, climbing up their bodies. The gap behind him sealed and a solid mass of shoulders and heads lay ahead. He rose up and ran, picking his way over a slippery plain of flesh with all the nimbleness that he'd once used to run the night roofs of his city.

  The singing of Lord Quill stopped. Seconds later Sen saw the vat clearly, stretching away as large as Grammaton Square. It was on fire, though this wasn't any fire he knew. This fire raged beneath the vat's surface, like the glowing lights in the walls under Aradabar, fuming a multitude of oranges, yellows and reds.