The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  It was too soon. He'd expected Quill and the Albatross would hold it for longer, but it was already trying to flee. Now it fell to him and his aerial host to complete the work they'd begun so long ago.

  Without further thought he cast a half-bale of silk down, where a squadron of Mandray-carried landsharks were already dropping away to catch it, then he flapped his massive wings upward, paying out silk as he went.

  In moments he breached the convulsing lip of the Rot's jaw. Bats and Mandrays who flew too close in his wake were burst open on its vast, featureless ridges as it pulsed madly, caught in the throes of escape. Their bales of silk fell, but were caught by others flooding in behind.

  Seem/Sharachus soared upward, over the lip until he was racing backward along the swelling head of the Rot, climbing its flank like the bulging skull of a mountainous Scranth, and his army soared after him. At his signal they began forking off to the sides behind him, paying out silk like they were laying down the branches of a tree. In jerking fits the Rot compressed itself tighter with every passing moment, thickening toward escape like a manta ray burrowing into the sand of the ocean floor, turning Seem/Sharachus' upward flight into a sharper and sharper ascent.

  He caught a glint of starlight reflecting off a Wyvern-rider to his right, drawing closer, and felt a fresh exhilaration steal into his heart. In truth he had never been abandoned, and this fate had always been waiting. For the part of him that was Sharachus, every moment of it was an unbridled joy; a Spider who had never spun a web in his life, after his spinnerets had been ripped cruelly away, his legs and mandibles wrenched out, now spinning the greatest structure with Spider silk ever attempted.

  The peak of the Rot's bulging black head became visible ahead, as it contracted again; a thick lump where the stars halted. Seem/Sharachus winged himself higher still, seeing more than just one point of light to the side now; there were glints everywhere as the army rose up from every point around the Rot's circumference, bearing their own bales of Spider silk.

  At the Great Library they had split the dial and flown in all directions. At the Rot's edge they had all dropped silk for landshark squadrons to burrow into the ground, tethering it to great anchors of earth many fathoms down. Now they all flew upward toward the same peak, spinning the radial arms of a web big enough to entrap a continent, so large no single Spider could ever spin it alone.

  "The Saint must rise!" he cried, and flew harder even as the air grew thin. So much of the web had already been spun by his army, but none of it would matter if he could not reach the center and fuse the radial arms in a single keystone knot. The Rot would just compress itself through whatever gap they left.

  Now its vast body bucked like an earthquake below, with half-formed tongues shooting up to smash his warriors, as it glimpsed what they were doing. The dead dropped their threads but others caught them and flew on. From the city Seem/Sharachus felt the most distant sense of Lord Quill raking one vast gouge from the beast's underbelly.

  He plunged upward and his mind drifted in the dizzy climes, until in the spiraling stars he saw the face of Dreychak, just as he'd been in the sewers beneath the city. An Unforgiven Wight, hunted by the King. He'd been Sharachus' first and only friend, and the Adjunc had taken him and Spiked him on the HellWest frigate, for all to see the secret shame of his caste.

  Seem/Sharachus blinked away the vision and beat his wings harder. All he saw was silver now, like clouds floating around him. In his claws were bundles of silk, but he didn't remember what for. There were glimmering reflections all around him from silk strands, floating as they fell. The land below was dark. Bodies were dropping nearby, the strongest of his army defeated by the thinness of the air, and he smiled.

  He could catch them all. He'd been so well-trained that he never dropped a single bauble, when he was juggling for the King. He could blow bubbles at the same time, and scamper and dance for their amusement, and then there would be no beatings afterward, and some food, and a chance to sleep. Would Avia be there waiting for him, he wondered, in the stables surrounded by rotten hay? Would his own son?

  He tumbled and fell. This was all right. Sen had always been kind. Sen had never meant to beat him with a rock in the dark of the Ambertham line. Sen had never meant to let him go mad in the bright sun above the Gutrock wastes. He would come for him now.

  From below deep thuds rang, as the bodies of his most trusted officers thudded into the undulating black land below, lost forever. Seem/Sharachus waited for his turn. Surely he had worked hard enough, for long enough? The glimmering end threads of silk didn't mean anything to him now.

  Then he caught a tiny fragment of sound, perhaps carried as a vibration on the Spider silk still gripped in his clutches. It came not through the air but in that oldest communication, the very first words of the Spider folk to him, that had seen them raised from spiders to Spiders, to a caste with their own homes and rights and payment for their labor.

  "We are," their voices had said then. "We exist."

  "Our King," the vibration said now, and he felt it in his bones. It was coming from his people, from old lost Aradabar, dead for so long. "Save us, our King."

  It was all that he needed.

  They were with him still; even after everything. He felt them watching him now, watching him fall and waiting for him to rise. The Rot below thickened and he felt it readying to spring away. Any second it would leap through the gap in his web and go back in time, to his Aradabar where his world would end again, and Avia would be lost again, and his endless exile would begin again, and wasn't that enough already? Hadn't they scampered through this dance enough times by now?

  It's enough, came the voice of Sharachus in his mind, with a strength he had never had alone, that came now from their union.

  Breathing didn't matter. Dizziness didn't count. He beat his Bat wings and spread his eight Spider limbs, and in seconds he caught three threads and fused them. Three more wing beats passed and he glided on a thermal to catch four more, then seven, then ten, always knotting them in to the sticky heart. After that he couldn't see anymore, as his eyes failed him in the darkness, and his wings fell still, but he could still glide on his many legs, and he could still feel the vibrations coming in through the silk in his grip.

  Here, the army told him, steering from far below. Here, King. So they led him like a landshark on a leash, tilling the air with thread and fusing, always fusing until the knotted ball was as thick as his chest, as big as a silken bale. Here, great King.

  He caught all their colored balls. He blew rose water and bubbles for his people, always for his people, and they thanked him as he fell, so that as the Rot thrust up for its final retreat, it found its path blocked as never before.

  AWA BABO III

  Last of all, after ferrying Lonnigan Clay, Lord Quill and King Seem/Sharachus through the veil, Awa Babo and Craley Shark passed through it together, arriving before any of the others. They emerged from a fading revenant onto a silent cobblestone street, scattered with newsprint and floating ashes borne on the wind. To either side stood proud townhouses, many marred by fresh buckshot scars. Their windows were shrouded with thick lacy curtains or boarded over from the inside. The rich smell of wood smoke and pitch carried on the wind.

  "Down there," Awa Babo said, pointing down a peaceful tree-lined avenue. At the end there was a long pink wall split by a wrought iron gate, beyond which hung dark trees and the dim outline of a cathedral. "Your father grew up there."

  Craley studied it silently for a long moment. She still remembered her earliest father, the Appomatox who kept her in a cage living off offal and scarab shells. This Abbey was the home of her second father, who'd locked her in a different kind of cage and abused her in a different kind of way.

  Now both of them were dead and gone, but looking at the Abbey wall she understood that both had been prisoners too, bound by their fate.

  "There goes Seem," Awa Babo said, pointing up to the sky. Across the dark mass of the Rot the bright silver l
ance of King Seem's Yoked army flew by. Their battle calls fell across the city and joined with the Balast charge driving up along the Haversham, with the flood of Drazi spreading out from Grammaton Square.

  Craley nodded. If anything, she was excited. This was her first time in the real world, and what a night to arrive.

  "Gone to get his webbing," she said. "I always wondered what all that silk was for."

  Awa Babo just nodded.

  "And where's your army?"

  "I still have to fetch it," said Awa Babo, and his lips wrinkled in a wry smile that was all Sen. "I think I have the strength to walk the veil one more time."

  "Using my father."

  "Using the last fragments he left behind. I'm sorry, Craley."

  Craley snorted. "Don't be sorry." She held out her hand, and Awa Babo shook it.

  "To raising the Saint," Craley said.

  "To raising the Saint."

  Craley started off for the Haversham at a sprint.

  * * *

  Awa Babo watched her go, remembering another youth running down this same street a long time ago, a Spindle. It was an echo only, laid underneath the memories his machine mind had crammed into Sen's body, and soon it would be gone too.

  He closed his eyes and felt for the flows in the veil. He hadn't expected the strength of the three old heroes he'd brought; they were nothing like the quiet flows in his cave of old. Here they rippled upon their armies with wild waves of faith, laden down with a confusing array of intense emotions. They sparked innumerable tides that cut across the regimented framework Sen had built with his five generals and their newspaper, leading to overlaps and chaotic clashes that diminished the whole. So many threads were coming into alignment, and he had to manage them all; an army of the defeated come to fight for all time.

  That was the second task on his list. First came the job of stealing his own army. He opened the veil and stepped through.

  Four thousand years flashed by in a blur of white, and he emerged atop a great rumbling Ator, driving down a horizon-straight roadway across the flat purple fields of the Mjolnir Federacy. To either side Gnomic peoples lined his way, these ancient predecessors of the Moleman caste, some waving towels to usher on the Emeritus' success.

  At once he sensed thoughts on the veil, as the Aigle and Ator minds communicated with each other ceaselessly. It was the end of the war with the Yoked Empire, and the Mjolnir armies were losing. On the horizon came the cloud of Absalom dust that followed Seem's Yoked army wherever it went. Seem had buried hundreds of Mjolnir sky and landships in dust already, and now he had brought the dust with him over the Hasp mountains to bury everything that remained.

  The irony of that thought amused Awa Babo now. It wasn't Seem who stole away his arms and his legs, but himself. He wondered if Avia had laughed when she'd planned it this way.

  Seem's clouds advanced. From the Ator's top deck, many beaten metal levels above the ground, Awa Babo looked back over the metal ranks of his defensive contingent. There were two other Ators and an Aigle in this battalion, each humming with forged-crystal engines. There was enough power here to destroy a city. They certainly would have slowed King Seem down, though they could not have stopped the flood from coming on. Their sacrifice here would have been pointless.

  There was a much better place for them to die.

  Awa Babo reached out and took command of his ships, all these war machines he'd been built to control, that had been built to listen for his word. They came to him at once, phantom children with simple minds clamoring for their father.

  "I'm here," he told them wordlessly through the veil. "I'm here for you."

  A new sense of purpose filled him, as his mind spread into their immense structures like fingers in a glove. This was what he'd been born to, what he'd always hungered for, and only the first stop of many. The road to the Emeritus' pyramid was long, and by the end of it his army would be vast.

  He waited until Seem's dust cloud was upon them, cloaking every machine in dust. Nobody would see, nobody would ever know what became of the Mjolnir armies, not for thousands of years to come.

  He opened the veil door and drove the first rank of his children through.

  After many such steps more, he resolved them all into existence throughout the city of Ignifer at once. Dozens of great Aigles and Ators popped into existence on the land and in the sky across Grammaton Square, Belial, HellWest and the Roy, up and down the Haversham, in Afric and the Fallowlands, each a vital piece in his checkerboard strategy. Finally he brought his Ator to rest on Gilungel Bridge, amidst the wreckage of cannon and dead Molemen after the Balast charge. Already the Rot was lashing out at Quill's Drazi, the first tongue rippling as Lonnigan Cray's bolts pierced it.

  The veil closed behind him for a final time, stripping the last of Sen's early memories, and he knew he would walk it no more.

  The stones of Gilungel Bridge groaned under the immense weight of the Federacy's most massive Ator. Awa Babo stood on the lower deck and drove it onward, grinding over dropped flintlocks and tiny cannon, crumpling them under rolling treads made of wheels each twice as tall as a grown Spindle. Outside a driving ichor rain beat against the Ator's hull, and the deep clash of thunderous battle rang overhead.

  With part of his mind he spoke across the veil, controlling his machines as they took up battle with the Rot across the city, while with the rest he bent to other works. He sent Gnomic medicians rushing ahead to gather up a single small figure on the river's fringe at the end of the bridge. They lifted him tenderly onto a stretcher and bore him back to the great Ator's belly. It revolved open like the Aigle palace and the Gnomics rushed him in, laying the figure down on a medical plinth to work on his grievously wounded body while Awa Babo stood nearby and watched on.

  "Mare," the dying figure said, looking up into Awa Babo's gray eyes. "Sen, I saw Mare! She was wondrous."

  "You will see her again," Awa Babo said to Daveron. He took the little Moleman's hand and held it tightly, not knowing why, while his attendants worked to seal over the wounds five flintlock shots had torn through his chest. His blood was everywhere, blending with the red leather of his usury butcher's suit. He was a dying figure, yet at the same time on the veil he was a fizzling nexus of incredible power. Through him, Awa Babo could feel the enormous power of faith in the city in new and startling ways.

  Daveron was a general, and a key pillar in Avia's vision.

  "Stay alive," he whispered to the little Moleman, as Gnomics rushed back and forth with alchemical swatches and charged crystal unguents, stitching with woven copper and sopping up blood with absorptive clay bricks. "The Saint needs you."

  "Where's Mare?" Daveron croaked, his eyes dancing. "The stars, Sen. I was looking up at Awa Babo. He was watching over me, over all of us."

  Awa Babo felt himself flush with some emotion he'd never felt before. Of course, the little Moleman was speaking of his constellation, but what did it matter? "I'm here," he said. "And Mare will be safe. She's killing the King."

  Daveron smiled, and his eyes fluttered close. "Good girl."

  * * *

  Awa Babo's forces encircled the Aigle palace with ease, each of his ships almost rivaling the Aigle in scope, absent the leering teeth of turrets many successions of Kings had built atop its solid chassis. The numbers of Molemen and Adjunc here was thickening, no longer broken by the low-caste charge.

  From his lead Ator Awa Babo looked down on the Balast Gellick and the Blue girl, Feyon, at the thick of the fighting in the body-strewn gardens around the palace's base.

  Now he remembered Feyon. She'd been there when he was born from his shell, looking into him with such judgment and empathy. She had loved Sen and Sen had loved her, and there was still a remnant of that love left behind in him. He watched her rally her army, a rag-tag mass of castes low and high, and lead them on a charge into a clump of Adjunc. The Balast Gellick was fighting with what seemed to be a metal revelatory lamppost, swinging it wildly at Molemen and Halberdiers.r />
  Now the might of the Mjolnir Federacy came to their aid.

  Four of his Aigles patrolled the sky around the palace, vast hulks that shimmered the air with their crystalline energies and fended off falling tongues. His Ators guarded the ground, bombe-turrets and mangonels firing into the black, while rank after rank of his war-rider Gnomics flooded from their ships in one- and two-wheeled craft, charging the field and tearing gouges into the King's forces.

  In the midst of that, Awa Babo felt Mare kill the King. It was a violent splash in the surface of the veil, disrupting everything. Overhead the topmost turret exploded and blasted a rain of leathery skin-slates out in a cloud, even as the volcano erupted in the distance, splitting the sky in two.

  The Rot saw what was happening and redoubled its attack, sending a battery of muscular black tongues plummeting down to the palace.

  Awa Babo steered his ships to take their full brunt. Tongues crashed into Ators and dropped Aigles from the sky, falling in flames and crunching swathes of the Roy to rubble. In turn they fired crystal resonances into the Rot, dissolving gouts from its tongues, hurling spring-wound basalt bombes into its throat from giant mangonels. His Gnomics worked in perfectly honed synchrony, ordered and drilled beneath his control, in tight metal confines reeking of saltpeter and acid.

  He turned and saw the Drazi vats across the city, deep into their fight to contain the Rot. They had trapped over a dozen tongues and were pulling them down, as a constant rain of bolts fell from the Albatross' armada. Awa Babo wished them all well silently and turned back to the Aigle palace, where now the tallest tower was beginning to creak, struck by a sideways blow of a falling tongue. He sent one of his Ators rushing up to buttress it. An Aigle hovered in to catch the tower's middle on its hull and guide it back into position. So he would save Mare, who the little Moleman loved, and so he would save Gellick, and Alam, and them all.

  "The Saint must rise!"

  Everywhere the cry rang out, and everywhere the wild blue power was surging, but out of control. On the veil it was disruptive and chaotic; too many peoples from too many eras were struggling to fight for the same thing, so their differences thrust them out of harmony. Soon, he thought, as the massive blue figure of Saint Ignifer blazed into sputtering light in the distance, struggling to refine all that confused power into focused might.