The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  Instead Awa Babo was born into ruin. The final stretches of blast-forged diamante were overlaid atop his diameter even as the forces of King Seem approached the Emeritus' pyramid. Most of the army of Gnomics who had spent their lives creating him lost any motive will when they were cut from the veil with the Emeritus' death, leaving them to mill like penitents around Awa Babo in his Aigle pit.

  Into that ruin Awa Babo woke.

  He tasted the world about him for the first time. He had no eyes or ears or sense of touch, but he read the veil with his mind. He felt the world about him as a flow, a buzzing sea of infinitesimal particles moving seemingly at random, without control. At first it was all chaos, a whirlwind of information too dense to grasp the meaning within, but soon constants found their way in. Shapes and colors emerged, patterns that flowed and shifted but retained an overarching structure.

  He felt the power of the many channels running through him, the crystal energies pulsing along cords banded for that purpose. He reached out to his outermost limits and learned the curvature of his shape, learned the extent of his powers and the depth of the void within him. He read within his frame the design the Mjolnirs had created, saw the cost his birth had levied on their Federacy, and at last came upon a name. Awa Babo, after the lost son of his lead architect.

  Outside King Seem's armies roved in the last Mjolnir city. They stole into the Peregrine towers, forced open the great slagheap furnace, and caused the Emeritus' once gleaming pyramid to turn as black as matte obsidian.

  So Awa Babo was born into a mind with no means of impacting the outer world, haunted by half-remembered dreams of King Seem's slow approach. He remembered the pain of birth, as every one of his war engines had been cut away; the Aigles and Ators that were meant to be his senses, limbs, and nerves. Without them he was a blind and senseless metal-shelled infant in a pit, trapped within his own mind. There was nothing left for Awa Babo to control, no machines to fight back with, nothing to feel or see with, and no hope for there ever to be again, as all of his makers and himself included were cut from the veil at the moment the Emeritus died.

  They abandoned him. Their passing diminished him, and the great shell he was born within quickly grew to be a tomb. His shining new body was buried in its pit and left there to rot.

  Soon scavengers dug down to him and hammered at his outer shell, but he had been made too well. These were the Gnomics that remained, living a fallen life in the ruins of their greatness. Few of them understood the heights their people had reached under the Emeritus' direction. Even when they organized, and brought their strongest drills and built their most powerful forges atop Awa Babo's shell, they couldn't crack him open.

  Generations tried, hacking at his outer surface to no avail, attempting alchemical perforations, pile-driving hammers from five fathoms high, using saw blades polished with diamante themselves, but none succeeded.

  They gave up, and they forgot. Awa Babo was left alone again, in the bay in which he had been born. Gradually the wind blew earth over the tunnels dug down to him. He charted each piece of dust as it covered his gleaming skin, every grain of soil. They were all known to him, all of them ingrained with the patterns of life on the veil.

  So his mantle grew. The bones of the craftsmen who made him, left to mill and die, were mulched in with the limestone pastings of their homes, the worn down dust of their clothing, the grass seeds of the Mjolnir fields, and flecks of rusted metal that had once been the walls of an Aigle sky-ship. This blanket of earth baked and crusted together, forming a solid roof above.

  A long silence of years passed.

  From time to time primitive creatures found their way into his dark tomb, carving out passages through the caves around him. They banged on his flawless diamante shell and listened to the musical notes ring out. In time they brought others of their kind, who sang notes in harmony with his tones. They erected incense fires about him, a wooden tabernacle to enclose him, and a system of woven veils to keep him separate from the outer chamber. They built a shrine in the cavern about him and sacrificed their young on his back, allowing their blood to ran down his outer skin in hopes of rain, of good hunting, of valuable salvage.

  He tasted their blood, and through it tasted the outer world. He listened to their thoughts as they prayed. Like the Emeritus before him, he became a god.

  For centuries he had been alone; through the fall of the Yoked Empire and the descent of the Corpse World into a dark age of savagery. Alone he had walked the pathways of his labyrinthine mind, testing the edges, coming to know the power he was designed to wield. He had been forged for war, but there was no war.

  Then there was.

  His new people had an enemy who fought with them over the bison and Yoax that roamed the ruinfields of Mjolnir. They fought in disorganized sorties, counting coup with their edgeless blades, measuring rites of humiliation and thereby apportioning hunting grounds accordingly.

  His tribe were weak. For generations they had been forced by stronger tribes to forage for berries and gather the grasses of the sea. In this way their bodies became sallow, their spirits dampened, and so their children too were born with diminished dreams and hopes.

  They endured. When other tribes came to war with them and stole what garments they'd woven, what spears they'd sharpened, what young they'd raised, they painted themselves with ash and wailed dirges of despair. Their young ran from them in the night, seeking new roles in stronger tribes, leaving them a tribe of the old and the weak.

  Awa Babo knew war better than any creature alive. In his mind were the memories of all the war machines of the Mjolnir Empire, stored in warrens of crystal. He had only to think it and before his eyes the blasting of the Faderan dockyards sprang to life once more, or the revenge of the Aigles over Harpsichord Bay, or the shelling of the Onk capital Onkan. He knew the process and the industry of war, the logistics and strategy. He was born for it.

  He answered the prayers of his people. He could not speak as he had no voice, but he made images of his knowledge and placed them in the minds of those in the tribe who revered him most. He gave them an understanding of warfare which superseded their plains morality of bloodless combat. In their dreams he taught them how to mine copper, how to make and burn charcoal hot enough to smelt metal, how to hammer and shape that metal into blades and armor. He taught them how to create incendiary bombs of hot oil, how to redouble the strength of their Rowen oak bows with Hawkswood, how to double-beat the bole of a Caulk blade back upon itself, and how to wield each and kill with total economy of effort.

  He taught them strategy. Through words and images planted in their minds he showed them how to encircle a rival village, how to stun and shock with fierce and unforgiving violence. He showed them how to slay in cold blood, and how to take with force, without compunction. He taught them torture and rape as tools of mastery and warfare. He taught them how to stare in their enemy's eye while cutting his throat, and he taught them well.

  For two years they prepared; forging coil armors and caulk blades, potting oils and unguents, until finally he gave the dream ordering the first attack.

  It was a rout. They completely over-awed their enemy, and under the tutelage of Awa Babo they made these conquered men and women their slaves. They raised the children as their own and taught them their new ways. Within a generation they ruled over the ruinfields with an iron fist. From their towns new factories belched smoke and the streams ran with acidic waste. Other tribes were beaten into bondage. Within a century they formed a nation, filled with cities that pulsed and heaved with industry, growth, and technology.

  Awa Babo had no eyes so could not see, but felt their progress from his faithful. He walked their dreams and saw what they had seen. To watch the tribes subjugated and the villages burned neither made him happy or sad, which surprised him. He had been built for war, but in war he found no joy, simply a catalog of things he'd known would happen, progressing toward an end he knew would come.

  It brought him no rel
ief from his long loneliness. The slaughter drove his people to raise him higher, and sacrifice to him more, but none of them really spoke to him. They did not truly see him, and that was his greatest dismay. So as the new empire grew, he stopped speaking to them. He fell silent in their dreams, no longer teaching them what they came to him to hear.

  They grew angry and afraid. They pleaded with him, sacrificed more of their enemy's blood down his sides than ever before, but he did not relent. In time they left and the cavern was silent again.

  His mind cooled. He'd been made for war but war did not satisfy him. It was one stage in a cycle that he knew the beginning and the end to. Even the Emeritus had died, his empire destroyed. The Gnomic caste that created him had died. Everything died except Awa Babo himself. They had made him too well.

  The shrine built over him rotted to dust. The paintings and blood on his skin wore away with mold and the slow steady drip of water from the cavern roof overhead. At times lost cave-walkers found their way into his nest. He steered them out again, while reading from their minds the state of the world above.

  War. Growth. Death.

  It was the same. Always the same, endlessly repeated. It made him weary. The Mjolnirs with their Emeritus seemed very far away, and their success or failure would have changed little. Ultimately they would all die, as the Emeritus, as the Alops, as the Mjolnirs.

  He waited to die.

  When the Darkness came he felt it as a change in the flow of the world. He felt its tendrils reaching out and begin to dampen everything from underneath the veil. He saw it in his core as a nullity, a nothing, a thing to end all things, and in his core he exalted.

  Finally, it would be over. The endless dance, the ceaseless cycle would come to an end.

  He felt the Darkness touch every part of him, beginning to mute the edges and quiet the voice of his mind. He felt the world about him, the crust of earth baked hard over his head, begin to lose cohesion. The thousands of strands of memory that made him what he was, that tied him to the land and the life histories of every speck of dust, began to blur. He began to forget.

  If he ever knew happiness, it was then.

  Then came Sen.

  The veil opened with a crack, rousing Awa Babo from his deep slow slumber, then sealed itself over.

  "I can't let you die," this creature said, in words Awa Babo did not know but could easily interpolate and understand. "I need your help."

  * * *

  Awa Babo read the flow of the creature before him and saw patterns unlike any he'd seen before. Normal beings flowed and ebbed; the tiniest pieces that made them up shifted and rolled like sands on the tide. No matter how many ebbed away or gathered, the beach remained a beach, the coast remained the coast. Their contours were fixed, though the fragments of being that made up those contours, those interiors, changed from moment to moment.

  For the thing Sen, the boundaries were absolute. The edges where he began and ended were impermeable. Nothing flowed across him or through him. It was as though he were not part of the veil, not part of the world, but rather a thing cut out and laid over the top of the Corpse.

  Within the boundaries of his form it was stranger still. Normal bodies floated and flowed in a myriad directions, from time to time lit by flashes of colored light, representing phases of emotion, enlightenment, anger, or understanding. At the center of each was the spark, which tied them to the veil. In some the spark was bright and vivid, such as the young and virile, while in others it was dim and ebbing, as in those soon to die.

  Within the Sen creature there was no random motion and no flickering of light, instead there was a blue energy brighter than any spark Awa Babo had ever seen. He explored its rippling fringe with his mind and felt the contours of it shaping the body the Sen thing inhabited, even the weaponry at his waist and the clothes over his skin. His whole body was made of light from this spark, so that not one speck of dust from the Corpse World truly touched him.

  Awa Babo peered closer still, into the deep blue of the Sen creature's core, and what he saw there seemed impossible. His spark was almost out. Its light must have once been blinding; now the space that it had filled as empty as the Darkness.

  He spoke meaning in the Sen creature's mind.

  "What are you?"

  The Sen thing seemed to understand, and responded with its strange words.

  "I've come from beyond the veil to find you, Awa Babo. I'm building an army to fight a thing known as the Rot."

  Awa Babo saw the images of the Rot in the Sen creature's mind, and knew it was brother to the same Darkness he had felt. But where he had seen the Darkness as a welcome end to his long waiting, the Sen creature despised it and feared it. He longed only to destroy it.

  This puzzled Awa Babo, and he peered closer. Around the blue spark he caught glimpses of the world Sen sought to protect. He saw a Blue female and a broadly-smiling man in a confined white room. He saw a child named Craley Shark, and a pirate known as the Albatross, and a warrior named Lord Quill, and the King who had destroyed the Emeritus' Federacy. They circled the Sen creature's strange spark like constellations around the Corpse World.

  "What are you?" Awa Babo repeated.

  "I'm a man," replied the Sen creature. "I left the Corpse World when my city was destroyed, and I have traveled through the veil to save it. I need your help to do this."

  Awa Babo saw the man's memories of the end. He saw the great city of Ignifer pummeled by the Rot and swallowed by the Darkness. To him that seemed a peaceful thing, the end he had been waiting for.

  "You wish me to fight this Rot."

  "I do."

  Awa Babo watched the blue sparks in the man's body. He wondered about the travels through the veil that the man spoke of. In such journeys would Awa Babo have arms and legs too? Would he be able to live and die, as others did? Would he breathe, and touch, and see?

  He clamped down on these impossible hopes.

  "The Rot will be my redeemer," spoke Awa Babo. "I cannot fight it."

  "It is no redeemer. It is a destroyer."

  "Destruction is redemption. It is all that I seek. Now leave me."

  Awa Babo waited. The man Sen stood before him, the blue star within him turning. "No," he said at last. "You will help me."

  In his defiance, Awa Babo saw a vision of the Rot defeated. It was possible that this man would succeed. He would steal away the Dark promise of the Rot, and leave Awa Babo to live on endlessly as before. His non-life would stretch forever.

  "I cannot accept that," said Awa Babo.

  AWA BABO II

  Awa Babo had been born to cause unparalleled destruction.

  The Mjolnirs built him from memories of war taken from their other machines, fused in a copper vat with molten Petrite then cast into the crystal latticed bombe of his mind. Ingrained in him since that first light of conception was a knowledge of Aigle levitation screws and revolving cannon mounts, the countless rolling wheels of Ators limbs that moved at his command, of sensations of maneuvering together, of working at the Emeritus' demand.

  To that end, his mind had been shaped with a prodigious force of will, ready to command all the Federacy's forces from his first moment of wakefulness. He was at once the diamante of his shell, the inner cords of his mind, and the senses that allowed him to feel and manipulate the flow of the veil about him.

  Now he levied all of that power; the incredible force of will he'd been designed with, that he'd barely expended in the moments of his birth when the world had seemed tantalizingly his own, and bent it into a direct attack on the mind of the man before him.

  * * *

  For Sen it was like drowning, an immersion in will so strong he felt all sense of himself subsumed. The life of Awa Babo poured into him and he watched the broad expanse of millennia unfold like a great valley; a birth stunted and reduced, so many years alone, shame in Godhood as all it led to was death.

  He couldn't breathe.

  And he welcomed it. He hugged the machine close as
it poured into his hollow middle. There was so little of him left now that this was a reprieve, an end for an end. Buoyed on the grace of Seem/Sharachus' redemption, he had only this left to give.

  Lord Quill had said 'Everything', and now he understood what he'd meant. For all that he'd done to Craley, he deserved this and more, so let this end also be a beginning. Let another Sen in another place make better things of this than he had, so greater seeds would grow on in brighter worlds.

  With the last of his strength he shot blue fire into the machine's musty hull, burning through and shucking out the mind within. Across the veil he yanked at the genius that was Awa Babo. In the underground tomb that stank of damp and bat guano, blue fire jetted from his body to the machine's and back again. This was what it took, so he would be the final sacrifice down its flank.

  In his final moments, his final thoughts were of the woman he loved, and wishing he could only see her one more time before the end.

  Then the spark was exhausted, and the man Sen was gone.

  * * *

  Awa Babo felt the shucking, spooning him halfway out of his diamante shell, and latched onto man's body even as he held onto his bombe-mind, straddling the bridge Sen had built between the two.

  For the first time since the Emeritus cut off his war machines, he felt sensation. His skin tingled through Sen, and he felt the rasp of breath in and out of his Sen-lungs. His Sen-eyes picked out the contours of his own orbic shell, while his own sense of the veil mapped the movement of tiny particles passing by.

  He lifted Sen's hands before Sen's eyes and looked at them, through them. They were skin and bone, meat and muscle, but beneath that they lay the crackling blue fire, guided now by his own force of will.