He sat down again.
"Calm down," said Craley. "Unless you think working up a sweat will help the fragments rise up."
Awa Babo swallowed an angry retort. It was meaningless anyway.
"Listen," said Craley. "I never traveled the veil, at least not without Sen's help. I don't think I'm able to, though obviously you are. I can't take us to the armies, and I can't take us to the end of the world. I've spent my life researching for that one battle, just as Sen spent his life preparing to orchestrate it, but once we're there I'm not going to be that useful. I'm a historian. You're a strategist. I think we need to hash this thing out, if we're going to beat the Rot. As far as I can tell from Avia's madder texts, no other world across the Corpse has ever truly defeated the Rot." She paused, and sucked in a whistling breath. "It's a big ask. So I suggest we sit here, and talk about strategy, and hope some fragments rise up of what my father did before you killed him."
Awa Babo watched his own fists, Sen's fists, clench on the table before him, the knuckles whitening. Something in Craley's tone angered him further. Something mocked him.
"You would have done the same. You would have killed him too."
The look of amusement brightened in Craley's eyes. "Kill Sen? I already did that once. But I was twelve years old at the time. How old were you?"
There it was; the mockery. It shouldn't annoy him, since compared to Awa Babo this Craley was as short-lived as a shellaby buy, barely even alive. Still it infuriated him. "Have you any idea what it felt like to be born in a body you couldn't control? Can you imagine four thousand years with only memories of loss to keep you warm; the family that should have encircled you being ripped away? Unless you've lived out those empty eons you can't presume to judge me."
Craley laughed again, but her eyes were hard. "Of course I can judge you. My true father kept me in a cage for the first three years of my life; not only alone but scared, hungry and cold as well. Did you have any of that to contend with? I haven't controlled my life once. I have done what Sen said, and while he heaped misery, loneliness and this Heart-blasted burden on me, I came to love him at the same time. Did you have to love your captor, King Seem, because he was your only hope? No. So listen to me, Awa Babo, Moleman god. I would not have killed Sen again, nor would I have hungered for the Darkness to come kill me, because I'm not a selfish coward."
"I am not a coward!" Awa Babo said sharply, slamming one hand down onto the desk. The wooden game pieces rattled and fell over.
Craley's face showed her dispassion. "Where's the proof? Like I said, I haven't seen you do anything yet except sell out the world."
"And do you think I wanted that?" Awa Babo shouted, letting the anger rise and rule him. "You don't know what it was like. It wasn't a choice with any free will. It was a choice of unbearable imprisonment or reprieve. Death was my only option."
"And kill all the world, including the man who'd come to free you? I would choose imprisonment."
Awa Babo slammed his fist on the table again and found himself on his feet, the game pieces tipping to and fro as he shook the table itself.
"You don't know what it was like," he insisted.
Craley's voice became low and dangerous. "Unless you want to fight me, machine, I suggest you sit back down."
"Machine!" cried Awa Babo, not even knowing why. "I'll show you."
Craley rose to her feet in a blur, her misericordes seeming to leap into her hands. She leaned over to bring one of them looping around Awa Babo's head far faster than he could react, and with it she pull him in, but abruptly stopped as memories from Sen flooded between them.
Craley's misericordes dropped to the ground with a clatter. Her face turned pale and a low moan escaped from between her lips. The two of them then slumped to the floor, where they lay quietly, overwhelmed with a shared sense of loss.
Awa Babo was in the moments of his birth again, waking to the sense of dislocation and loss as his war machines were cut away. Mixing in with that were images of a woman slicing into a baby's face, and a screaming Moleman bound to a chair.
Sen was still there, in the gaps in between, reaching out to them with an answer. Awa Babo reached back but Sen's touch eluded him. He scrabbled at the edges of himself but couldn't get a firm grip, but perhaps he found something else instead.
After a time the fit passed, and he pushed his new body unsteadily to its feet, even as Craley lifted herself as well, slumping into her chair.
"I guess something rose up," Craley said, and lifted a pale hand to wipe blood from her lips. "It's good to share. So did he take the war machines or not?"
Awa Babo managed a weak smile. He saw so many things now, with such clarity, and they made a joke of all his life. "No. That task falls to me. I will be my own jailer."
THE ROT'S WAR
In the aftermath they drank more tea, recovering. Gradually the color returned to both of their faces. They spoke only enough to know that they'd both felt the same sensations; that whatever Awa Babo had experienced he'd put Craley through as well.
They sipped, and sat.
Craley reached out to one of the black carved pieces on the wooden board. It was a shapeless blob that seemed to be made of strange bubbles. She turned it over in her hands.
"What does that represent?" asked Awa Babo.
Craley looked up. "It's the Rot." She reached out to another black piece and lifted it. The only difference was in the precise shape; the bubbles were arranged in a slightly different pattern. Awa Babo now realized that all the black pieces looked much like this.
"And that?"
"The Rot," replied Craley without looking up. "Every bit of it, tongue and body and throat. I don't have pieces for the Darkness, because that's not a factor in this war." She gestured to the playboard, which now Awa Babo saw had been sketched with the outline of a city; Ignifer's city, complete with districts, major structures and the Sheckledown Sea. "This is the Rot's War, and I've been playing it for years."
Awa Babo scanned the game set, and focused on the pieces carved in white sandalwood.
"Am I in there somewhere?" he asked.
Craley flashed a brief grin, and pointed. The piece stood tall on its end, but Awa Babo was struck by how much it resembled the shell he had once inhabited. "You're famous," she said.
"What about you?"
Craley shook her head. "I'm the game master. There's no piece for me, because I don't fight in this war, not as such."
Awa Babo nodded, and studied the remaining pieces. He saw the ones that represented his Aigles and Ators, then the ships that must belong to the Albatross, and the bestiary of King Seem, with the horde of identical Drazi under Lord Quill. One piece remained though, a figure standing with two dark spikes bared.
"And that's Saint Ignifer?"
Craley shrugged. "I just call him Sen."
Awa Babo nodded. "It looks like you." Craley only laughed, then began to set the pieces into their starting positions on the cross-checked board.
"You play the good guys," she said, "I'll be the Rot. We'll see if anything else floats up."
They played, and Craley explained the rules as they went. The Rot could occupy any square near to it, with no rules governing its direction of movement. It began as just one black piece, then grew organically as round by round the black player added pieces on. It had the option to occasionally spike out its 'tongues', which were projections three squares long, and destroyed anything they came into contact with. It killed white pieces either with tongues or by enveloping them in itself. Eventually, if played for long enough, there were enough carved black pieces to fill the entire board.
That was how their first game went, despite Awa Babo's best efforts to hold back the tide.
"The Rot wins," Craley said, as she swiped the board clear. "It nibbles at the edges, you see, but also it plunges into the heart. Once it took your Lord Quill, you had nothing left to absorb the tongues, and Saint Ignifer was doomed. The real challenge though is if you play properly."
Awa Babo felt that he was being insulted, but was too fascinated to care as Craley spun the board and began to set it up again. This time she talked through the strategy for the white team, Sen's army of the defeated. The white player could only ever hope to block the Rot temporarily, not stop it permanently. The key to their defense was the Saint Ignifer figure, which had to power to destroy the Rot pieces around it, but only if it maintained sightlines to the five generals, each of which had their own pieces as well; Alam, Daveron, Mare, Feyon and Gellick.
All the white pieces moved following different sets of rules, either diagonally or in straight lines or geometrical shapes. The ships of the Albatross could only traverse the back edge of the board, symbolizing the Sheckledown Sea. Lord Quill was limited to the middle, symbolizing the ground, while Awa Babo and King Seem could go anywhere, as their forces could take to the sky. The five generals could only stay within the city, and moved slowly.
In that second game the pieces moved back and forth swiftly, each following their own rules as the Rot expanded. Awa Babo as the Rot attempted to block sightlines to the Saint, while Craley made maneuvers Awa Babo had not expected; sacrifices here to gain a foothold there, sometimes ignoring Saint Ignifer completely. Each move that obstructed the progress of the Rot caused it to slow and circle around the obstruction; the piece was destroyed but the Rot was pulled into strange shapes across the board. Craley's strange, swift movements lulled Awa Babo into a false sense of security, as he focused so much on expanding to swallow all the armies that he soon forgot about the single piece of Saint Ignifer.
"Touché," said Craley at last, and touched the Saint to the single larger piece of the Rot that symbolized the throat.
Awa Babo scanned the field, and saw now that somehow Craley had opened up sightlines to all five generals at once. Awa Babo had let those lines develop. As he thought back on the game, he realized that it was a brilliant strategy of deception; bogging Awa Babo down in chasing details while Craley had left her power pieces vulnerable.
It was obvious now that the odds were heavily stacked in the favor of the black player, so the only hope for white was a blinding flurry of sacrificial flank attacks, ending on a sightline assault via the Saint.
"Congratulations," he said, leaning back. "I can see you're an excellent player."
Craley frowned. "Congratulations? Wait, do you think I won?"
Awa Babo was now confused.
"I mean," he began, then paused. He looked at the board, and thought about what he knew of it from Sen, and realized the truth. "It's just a game," he said.
Craley swept the board again, eyeing him closely. "Of course it's a game. So why didn't I win?"
Awa Babo almost laughed. "Because we've already lost as soon as we start to play. It's not enough to beat back the Rot. Sen already did that. He fought it off in the sky, and the Rot just fled to a softer target."
"The Rot just fled," agreed Craley. "That's how this game ends every time. The Rot always flees, no matter how well white plays. Once I thought I had it encircled, trapped in the city, but I was never really close. Even playing against you, when you didn't even know that was my objective, I couldn't trap it. So it flees, and it goes to Aradabar, where we can't follow, and we couldn't fight with any strength even if we did. It eats the world. The Darkness comes." Craley made a circling gesture in the air, suggesting an oft-repeated mantra. "It's not enough to beat it in a fight. We have to contain it completely. We have to prevent it from fleeing, and then we have to destroy it. Can you see a way to do that?"
The game turned in Awa Babo's head. He began to think of the pieces in a different way, aligned with this new objective. He analyzed their capacities. It was only a game, so it was possible to create new rules based on the real-world capacities of the pieces. He applied his learnings of four millennia of military strategy, as programmed by the Emeritus and as learned from the fragments of Lord Quill and King Seem and Lonnigan Cray, each left over in the fragments of Sen.
"Let's play again," he said.
Craley grinned. "I thought you'd never ask.
In their next game Craley swept the board easily, employing tongues only once, in a way Awa Babo had been completely unprepared for. The game took almost an hour. When it was done Awa Babo leant back in his chair.
He thought about the rules, and the reality. Nobody knew the capacity of all the forces at play better than he, with his knowledge from Sen. There had to be a reason Avia had made this selection of ancient heroes. He leaned in closer, envisioning the reality of the city etched over the simple game board. Every square of it was overlaid with a thin patina of Sen's carved-out memories; running here, posting there, escaping Adjunc, bating the Molemen. The logic circuits of his mind, once been forged out of metal and diamante, thrummed harder than ever in their new home inside Sen's head.
"I have a theory," he said, and began repositioning the pieces at his end of the board. "I have some ideas about the capabilities of the Drazi."
"Let's hear them," Craley said, and put the single beginning black Rot piece at her end of the board to await white's first move.
* * *
Of course he failed. The game was designed so that white could never encircle the Rot, and the Rot could flee at any moment that it felt the battle going against it. No matter how many rules changes Awa Babo added, he still couldn't do it, though each time he crept a little closer, until finally he glimpsed the answer.
After eleven more games, Awa Babo tipped over the Saint Ignifer piece in surrender.
"You see?" said Craley, not gloating, just making the point.
"I see your point," said Awa Babo. "But do you see mine?"
Craley looked at him blankly. "What point?"
Awa Babo pointed to the board. "The game considers the Saint to be instrumental. He's the only thing that can actually kill the Rot. You said as much yourself; we couldn't win this war in Aradabar, and why is that?"
"Because the Saint didn't exist then," said Craley, as if reciting rote learning. "Because there's no faith to power him up."
"And how are we using the Saint here?" Awa Babo said, the revelations sparking through him. "Dancing five generals around the board, thinking about five sight lines when we should be thinking about nine. It's not representative. The generals are the absolute key, but we're neglecting them."
Craley frowned. "What do you mean, nine? And I wasn't neglecting them. I was hiding them. If they spring out too early, before the Rot is encircled, it will run. We've been through all this."
Awa Babo wagged a finger; another excellent gesture. "Exactly. We keep them in reserve so they can make the killing blow, but it's not the full reserve. Look," he shifted the pieces around, so that all of Sen's generals stood in a little clump above one square depicting the Aigle palace. "What about this? New sightlines." He pointed from the palace to Seem, Quill, the Albatross and Awa Babo. "Four more generals, including me. We need to harness the faith of these armies into the Saint too, then use that strength to kill the Rot. Can you imagine the strength of that? Before that point, we go all out to contain the Rot. When the time comes, we sharpen up this new version of the Saint's faith and shoot it off to Sen."
Craley stood up and walked around the board. She scratched her head. She went to say something, then stopped, then started again.
"OK. It's interesting. You want to power up the Saint with history, and that makes sense." She pointed at the four new generals. "Yes, each of these armies brings its own faith with it. What's more," she clicked her fingers and gestured at the 'omnichron' hanging on the walls around them, her tapestry of the Corpse World's history, "Sen and his friends already built all these heroes into their newspaper. Half the work's been done for us. We just need to focus them somehow, so they can fit in with the patterns their newspaper set up. But how do we do that?" She stuck her tongue out through the side of her mouth, lost in thought. "As far as I understand it, only Sen can focus the weave of the Saint."
Now Awa Babo
grinned broadly. "That's another flaw of your design." He tapped the Sen figure. "You only made one of these."
"Of course. There is only one."
Awa Babo grinned wider. It took a moment, but Craley slowly realized.
"Wait. You? But, how could you-"
"I'm Sen," he said. "I'm also Awa Babo. I can act as a lens for the new generals. Get me a sightline to the three others, and to the old five, and I believe I can connect them directly to Sen on the veil. The Rot can't block that. I was built to focus power through the veil, and in this body I still can. The force would be tremendous." He couldn't even imagine it. It would make the blue blast that broke his shell apart look like a candle flame in comparison. "The armies and generals just need to trap the Rot in position long enough for us to line all the generals up."
Craley was staring. "Then the Saint strikes harder than ever. Boom. We actually vanquish the Rot?"
Awa Babo grinned. They'd already tried countless strategies to hold the Rot in certain positions while they attempted to encircle it; rules changes that used the armies' natural abilities. Any and all of them could work for this.
"It's beautiful," said Craley.
Awa Babo was already thinking ahead. The Rot wouldn't know what was going to hit it. There was no way it could. It had never seen the precise unity of the Mjolnir thinking machines. Now he was going to gather those war machines himself. A shiver passed through him.
"We are all his army," he said, "even the ones who've never heard of the Saint. We're fighting for the same thing, but it's the Saint who will win the day. It's Sen."
Craley gleefully snapped one of the Rot's pieces in half. "Of course it is. But not our Sen." She waved the broken piece dismissively. "Some other Sen, before any of this happened to him. This Sen is going to win. For him this army will not be defeated, it'll be victorious."
She winked.
Victorious.
The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2) Page 37
