The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  He held his palms before him and studied them by starlight. They were tough from a long lifetime of yoking beasts into his empire: forcing iron grilles into the iris-like mouths of the massive landshark worms so they could hunt the Dusts; selectively breeding spiders into producing a silk stronger than spun diamante; harnessing the winged Mandray lizards with choking bridles and clippings out of their wings.

  He'd yoked so many creatures large and small, always to the purpose of gaining greater knowledge, yet the one true knowledge he sought had always eluded him. What he was.

  He traced the lines of his palms, wondering at how deeply they seemed to run. For two hundred years he'd lived in this body, a half-blind Autist stolen from his cave at the fringe of Absalom. Together they'd tamed the Dusts and sinklands, built the Yoked Empire out of disparate roaming tribes and bent the world to the service of civilization.

  And now they were dying.

  His Autist body was getting older and slowing, though he did not feel old in his mind. Dozens of new avenues for innovation occurred to him every day: mating Hoplite ants with their larger cousins the Arynx to create a kind of grazing insect cow; training Mandrays to work with landsharks to better repair his empire's roads; refining the new breed of fish-stinging Castles-of-Clouds he'd fitted with conductive caps in Redemption Bay.

  He knew he would die soon. The Autist that had shared its flesh and its mind so long ago was now an ancient thing long past the natural term of its life, held together only by Seem. He feared to lose this oldest and first host. He did not know what would become of him then, and he feared becoming what he had been before, a thing barely conscious, a black and enfolded lump alone on the dusts.

  Yet the alternative sickened him; to take another body as he had the Autist's. There were many that would volunteer to conjoin with the King of the Yoked Empire, but he did not relish taking a life for his own. For all he yoked the will of beasts to his intent, he could not stomach yoking a sentient mind.

  He let himself drift on these thoughts, as ever. The stars blurred in his vision. Soon he would face that choice and no longer be able to look away; impotent solitude or sacrifice. Perhaps then he would find out what kind of beast he truly was.

  The voice came to him quietly, in a lull in the low breeze, so low he barely noticed it.

  "I can help you," it said.

  Seem thought nothing of it. Words and phrases arose in his mind often, coming from some hidden wellspring of his conjoined union that he did not control. He addressed these thoughts as his own, and through that action made them his own. At times he felt himself in dialogue with the Autist, or found himself as the Autist in dialogue with the black lump.

  "How can you help me?" he asked of himself.

  "I can craft you a body that will never fade, and fill it with all the knowledge you seek. You will never need to take another body again."

  Seem pondered this strange thought for a time. It was dissimilar from any he'd had before. "How would you do this?"

  "I have an empire at my disposal," said the voice, "a vast Federacy more advanced than anything you can conceive of, Seem. I can give this body to you, if only you wish it."

  Seem's relaxation faltered. He often talked with himself, but rarely to offer things he did not know or understand. His ears pricked up and he pulled his wings in.

  "What is your Federacy, and why have I not heard of it before?"

  "Do not be afraid," said the voice, "I mean you no harm."

  Seem stood then. He looked about him, but saw nothing unusual. There were the bat clouds and the stars, the brass roof underfoot, the perfect radial streets of his city spreading out toward the Dust on one side and the Sump on the other, twinkling with candle light.

  He was alone as ever, but he felt the difference now. There was a presence at the edge of his mind, outside the tightly-bundled combination of the lump and the Autist. It was cold and angular, unlike any of the castes or creatures he'd yet met or domesticated.

  He was not truly alone.

  "You see me," said the voice. "Very good. You are the first in your Empire to do so. You will not be the last."

  "Who are you?" asked Seem aloud.

  "I am Emeritus of a Federacy that has existed long before you were born and will continue long after you die," came the voice. "Unless our empires are joined. Seem, I've come to offer you eternal life."

  Seem frowned. "How can you speak in my mind?"

  "I use the veil, a gift I was born to. Through it I reach across our world."

  At that Seem launched himself into the sky. With powerful wing beats he climbed several fathoms high, until the simple night sounds of the city below were muted by distance, and he could study his palace as if it were a model lying below. There was no movement, however, no sign of any intruder.

  "What kind of beast are you?" he said aloud.

  "I am a Morphic, Seem, like yourself," came the voice in his mind. Seem had never heard the name Morphic, and it meant nothing to him. "I come bringing knowledge, and an offer of peace."

  Seem wheeled about, tracking the silvery cirrus clouds for any sign of a spy, but there were only his bat clouds on their nightly hunts. "I have knowledge and peace already."

  "Not like this," said the voice. "I have weapons you can not imagine. My ships fill the sky and the land and will roll over your civilization, should I wish it. But I do not wish to bring only destruction. What you have built has great value to me, and I would prefer it be preserved. Rather I seek to yoke your empire bloodlessly to my own."

  A shiver passed through Seem, though not of fear. He'd never known fear his entire life, and would not until he met the child Avia in many years to come. This was anticipation. Excitement, even. There'd been wars before, but none that posed him a challenge. None that spoke to him on this 'veil' and offered knowledge he did not already have.

  "I know the novel intrigues you, as it does me," the voice continued, "yet pause before you think us into a conflict that will burn down this Corpse World. I offer greater rewards than you can imagine. I offer answers to the great question of what you are."

  "Tell me."

  "I will tell you and more, if you agree to cede your empire to me."

  Seem snorted. "It is no empire, in truth. It is tribes spread across the Dust, gathered together in loose affiliation."

  "I disagree," said the voice calmly. "Let us speak plainly, as men who might be brothers should. You have built your empire. I have built mine. They cannot both survive, as mine must always grow. I require your Empire to feed my Federacy. You require a body as host for your true self, as timeless as the Heart. Neither need serve the other. It is an exchange."

  Seem's mind danced with these strange concepts; Federacy, the Heart, a timeless body. "Even if I wished it, my people are not mine to exchange."

  The voice laughed warmly in his head. "Come, Seem, surely you see more broadly than that. Did you take the body you now occupy by a negotiation as civilized as this, or did you merely take it?"

  Seem quelled the anger rising within. "That was different. I had no such mind then, I acted from instinct alone. I will find a willing host for my next transition."

  "And what more willing than a host with no mind to resist with? I can build you a body of pure diamante that will never tarnish. Would you not prefer that?"

  Seem blinked. A body of diamante? "Perhaps I would, but not at the cost you ask. I cannot cede something I do not own. "

  "That we shall see," said the voice. "For twenty years I have made preparations on your ageless body, anticipating this day. It is empowered with the veil, linked to every one of my machines of war. Through it you will see a new world, Seem. You will be my greatest general. I have bent the resources of the entire Mjolnir Federacy to create this, for you. Would you not even see it?"

  "I will not," said Seem. The answer came more easily than he expected, but if he could not easily take a body even to extend his own life, how could he surrender the lives of all in his care?
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br />   "I think you will, and soon, Seem. Until then we have reached impasse. I have no other choice. So our war begins, great King."

  THE EMERITUS

  The first Mjolnir Federacy scouts were captured by Mandray-riders at the eastern edge of the Absalom Dusts. They were strange creatures from a caste as yet unknown, whose bodies seemed half-formed. Seem named them Gnomics. They were pink and hairless, diminutive, with features, fingers, and limbs that looked like they had not been fired in a kiln long enough. They had no fingernails, no eyelids, and their noses were small and snub, their eyes simple smooth discs, their skin too smooth and stretched.

  They wore light armor manufactured from a previously unimagined lead and petrite composite, and carried sighting oscolopes of a complexity beyond the Yoked Empire's understanding. Seem had them questioned, but none of them spoke. They did not seem capable of speaking. Neither did they have any interest in eating or anything else. They allowed themselves to be moved, even positioned, but they showed no sign of inner will. When offered a range of sustenance they did not eat or drink.

  When Seem touched them, attempting to reach into their minds as he had with so many other beasts, he saw nothing. They were empty, but for faint echoes of a birth, and a warm and loving god that had cradled them all their days.

  A week passed and the first of them died, slipping away without a word or a sound. Seem had them fed and watered by tubes inserted down their throats, but it made no difference. In dissection afterward all the food and water remained in their stomachs, undigested. Their bodies had decided to stop living and there was nothing he could do to save them.

  The voice came to Seem again after the last of the Gnomics died. He stood by its cot surrounded by his finest medicians, as they clamored to be the one to open up this last of the strange creatures and unfold the secrets within, claiming knowledge none of them held.

  "My children have impressed you," said the voice.

  Seem turned, but of course there was no one there but the wise men and women of his empire.

  "I bred them to this, as you see," the voice said, "much in the same way you have bred your people. They respond to my thoughts only, carried over the veil. For me they live and for me they die."

  "What are you?" Seem asked aloud.

  His medicians turned to him, startled, and Seem strode from the room.

  "I believe I am much like you," the voice went on. "I am a Morphic, a name I invented which means 'change'. Unlike you, I never saw the need for a host. I only need reach out, and I have as many bodies as I wish. They do as I bid. I'd like to show this to you. You should see the reach of my Federacy, so you know the futility of war. Everything you have built would be destroyed."

  Seem strode down a long balustrade above the Great Library. At the open edge he took to the air, his wings carrying him up to a needle spike at the top of his first glass learning tower, where he alighted and stood, looking out over the sunset across Aradabar.

  "Your creatures died like they had no living force within them," he said. "I have never seen that before. How did you do it?"

  The voice sounded amused. "I do not think you ask because you would like to reproduce it. They sicken you. But then you are a sullied Morphic, fallen into flesh too young. Had you lived as I did after my first birth, for centuries alone, you would have learned other ways to spread into the world."

  "This is the veil you spoke of."

  "It is," replied the voice, almost greedily now. "We both were born with the skill to speak through it, directly into the minds of others. You have let that skill atrophy, and I doubt you will ever be able to commune with another mind over distance. So I offer you a body that can commune for you."

  "The diamante host you're offering. So you want to make me more like you?"

  The voice sounded amused. "And why not? We are brothers in caste. I know you carry a deep hunger to understand what you are. I know this hunger has driven your Empire's search for knowledge all this time. It has driven me too. Let us share our understanding."

  Seem considered.

  "Come as my brother," the voice said. "Our war is not yet daubed in blood, but for a few petty sacrifices. I would gladly give a thousand more to have you by my side. See what I have built, and am building for you. Make your choice then."

  Seem took to the air.

  "Tell me the way."

  He felt the voice's happiness in his mind. "I will guide you."

  A golden line appeared in the air before him, stretching out across the sky. He blinked but it did not fade or alter. It cut through the clouds, headed north across the Dusts.

  "I will await you," said the voice, then faded.

  Seem was alone with the line. There were people below that he should notify; his viziers, his head librarians, but none of that seemed to matter in the moment. This golden line offered the knowledge he'd always sought, and he flew after it. Through the night he flew over the Dusts of Absalom, passing by a dozen growing towns where fences penned in Dielle, and banks of Hoplite ant-castles stood in tidy clusters, and sandy fields lay tilled in long neat rows by landshark-drawn ploughs. Through the following day he drew close to the edge of the world he'd known, and the end of the Dusts.

  For many days further he flew on, following the golden line. He flew over the Hasp mountains, so high that ice formed on his bat wings as he soared above the spiked teeth of the world, then he was beyond even that, and a new land unfurled, further than he'd ever traveled before.

  It was a place he could not have imagined, where the land was richly purple with strange trees. The orange dusts of Absalom and green of the Sump plains were left far behind. He flew on and saw a vast empire built out of conquest, linked by arrow-straight stone-paved roads. Crops of all kinds bloomed up in a patchwork of ordered fields. Towns spewed out smoke and ash as factories smelted metals, creating bizarre engines of war that Seem did not understand. In no places did he see libraries or schools, as filled the towns of the Yoked Empire, or even more than one kind of caste. In all places there were only the strange little Gnomics, working on their weapons.

  Seem followed the golden line to the Federacy's heart, where dense arrays of strange weaponry oriented to track him across the sky; mangonels and cannon, trebuchet loaded with ballast. Everywhere there was a dead silence, bar the hammering of metal on metal, for the Gnomics did not speak.

  At last, after nearly a week in flight with no time for rest, he came to the palace where the voice of the Emeritus lay. It stole his breath away.

  It was an immense pyramid that shone like a second sun, taller than anything in Aradabar. To look at it hurt his eyes. To think about how it could have been built, what kind of knowledge its construction required, confounded him. Drawing closer he saw it was built of thousands of angled panes of diamante, dotted with silver and gold and capped by a crystalline apex.

  He circled it three times, all the while drawing the tracking gaze of hundreds of Gnomics below, following him with their long iron cannon. On each revolution he drew closer to the tip of the pyramid.

  "Come in, brother," called the voice.

  Seem landed by the pyramid's crystal apex, where he found a large quartz door ajar. He passed inward, and went down a steeply descending staircase of sharp stone. The walls in places glowed from within, as though alive.

  After some two hundred steps the staircase ended in a corridor, leading to a brilliantly lit pyramidal hall in the structure's center. The light was so sudden and sharp it momentarily blinded him, so he cast his hands over his eyes.

  Daylight. He removed his hands and peered across the space. He was in the center of the solid pyramid, but it was blazing with daylight. He studied the walls and saw built into them were hundreds of white flues lined with beaten silver, funneling the light in from outside. The sloping walls were peaked with a grand crystalline vault ceiling as big as a Dusts village.

  In the very center of the pyramid hung a silver sphere standing upon four ivory pillars. The sphere was perhaps as
tall as Seem, and reflected the pyramid around it perfectly. Seem peered at his own weary body in the glossy silver, and wondered. Within this housing lay the Emeritus. Seem wasn't sure how he knew, but he felt it. Perhaps this was the veil.

  Either side of the sphere hung two enormous lenses suspended from the pyramidal ceiling, which gathered the sunlight and focused it into tight beams that ran into the sides of the orb. Beneath it were a system of complex cogs, pulleys, and platforms. Seem widened his gaze and saw the whole pyramid's floor was covered in metal rails and tracks that conjoined in places then split apart, though all of them led in concentric circles back to the Emeritus's silver orb.

  Now the Emeritus spoke for the first time, with a voice that came from all sides, no longer only in Seem's mind. "I'm glad you have come, my brother."

  It was rich and deep. Seem searched for the source, and saw Gnomics spotted around the pyramid walls, gathered in recesses in clusters of three, each of them closing its mouth as the Emeritus finished speaking. A chorus of many.

  Seem started to fly toward the silver sphere, but a rattle of projectile bolts darted across the space just before him, clashing off the stone floor and rails and halting him in his tracks. He looked to either side and saw more Gnomics standing at braced mangonels, the bolts pointed at him.

  "Not a warm welcome," Seem said. His usually rich voice echoed palely in comparison to the Emeritus'.

  "Warmer than any before have received." The Emeritus' voice filled the space completely. "You have seen more than any of my children but these few, and after we are finished they will die for the privilege. Such is the power of a god."

  "You're not a god."

  "I am, Seem. You have been too, or could have been, had you accepted the role your tribes placed upon you. It is what we were born for."

  Seem considered this. He looked around the brilliant white pyramid interior. "It is truly magnificent. You have built wonders, I will not deny it. The work of your towns dazzles me. But where are your schools and your libraries, where are your debate halls and arenas of oration? Your people are a craven caste, no wiser than the ants or sharks I furrow the land with. They are an extension of you and that is all. What kind of god does that make you?"