The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  He went to the Haversham, peeking out from a narrow alley and down to the great creaking hulk of the HellWest frigate, perennially moored at the head of the harbor. Its sides bristled with hundreds of spikes, upon which dead and dying breakers of the caste law hung. He went up to the edge of Grammaton Square, that massive spreading delta for the Haversham tradeway's river of commerce. At night it was curiously quiet, with every hawker's stall lying crumpled and disassembled like so many sad bone sacks, as if a great bloodless battle had been fought there and lost.

  For a long time Sen stood and gazed out. An Allswellman trooped around the far periphery, his little light as small as a shellaby bug against the Square's immense scale, meandering on its own private course.

  Overhead the great bulk of the pink sandstone Grammaton clock tower loomed, making him feel small and insignificant, just another insect dwarfed in the shadow of its grip on time and fate. The Square seemed a kind of glorious shadow beneath it, reflecting its greatness on the earth.

  After a time lost staring in wonder, he strayed round the tower and peered through the bars of the Tiptanic Gardens, into a stunningly cultivated realm of green that stretched all the way down to the Levi River. Even at night it brimmed with the bright firework pop of winter cherry blossoms, the white tears of hawkenberry buds, the velvet of purple nightswort and the gleam of silver moonlight on the red magnate oaks at the center. The low chime of wind-rattled ukalele blossoms carried in a discordant, beautiful harmony.

  It took his breath away. Here the King would come at times, it was said, lording his concubines for the Lords to see. Here the upper castes of the Roy would play away their days, the Blues and the Aurochs and the Antioles, all. Again his thoughts turned to Feyon, and again he turned them away. It seemed impossible that such wealth existed here while so nearby there was abject poverty in Indura. It was hard to understand.

  Each night he pressed on, and weeks passed. He no longer dreamed of the Abbey so much, nor woke up in tears for Sister Henderson. He grew stronger and faster with the misericorde spikes, taking his efforts out of the millinery and dancing balletically through the park, challenging himself to invent new maneuvers that took advantage of the environment he moved within. Each night he pasted more copies of his message, and each dawn as he laid down to sleep he thought of all the seeds he'd put out there, just waiting for his mother to stumble upon one of them.

  At any moment, she might come. At times lying in the larder, his heart thrilled at the possibility. He wasn't sure what he wanted to say, if he would even be angry or happy to see her, after all her lies and manipulation, but at least then he would have answers.

  So he worked through the long, cruel winter. He bought a thicker nib and started producing fifty pages a night. He posted in all the districts of the dark side, from Flogger's Cross in the damp shadow of the city wall to the Seasham fringe, up close to the edge of his Abbey. He didn't once repeat a route until he'd seen all the places there were to see, as winter steadily turned to spring, and the nights began to grow shorter.

  Only then did he notice that all of his papers had been torn down.

  LORD QUILL

  It was on a hairpin route beginning from Belial and ending at the Calk, a seventy-post run that left him exhausted but satisfied, that he noticed his posting of the night before was missing.

  He ran his hands over the dolmen wall, certain that it had been there, but there was no sign of it. He walked back along the previous night's route to check the Slumswelters corner, where another posting was gone. It was odd, but didn't seem all that unlikely. Fly posts were ephemeral things.

  He backtracked further into Carroway, where the strange occurrences continued. The lamppost paper on Hundred Man lane was gone. The posting on Bright's Wax Distillery was gone. The posting on the water sump just off Swidlington canal was gone.

  He sped up, finding more and more of his postings gone, until finally he was standing back in Lord Quill Square, where he'd finished the last night's run. There he found his posting on the Man of Quartz' boot not gone, but defaced. His message had been crossed out, and replaced with a new message written in wispy strokes.

  Go back to your Abbey, boy.

  For a long moment he stared. They were simple words but they meant a great deal. He spun around as if he might somehow catch the culprit at work, scanning the nearby streets, but saw no one and felt no one. The square was silent and dark but for the half-Balast ceramicist working at her kiln.

  He approached her, now brushing oil over her cooling works.

  "Did you see anybody near Lord Quill?" he asked.

  She was startled a moment, then looked down at him blankly. She was tall, with rocky lines grooved through her face.

  "I've a bust of Lord Quill for sale," she answered, following a well-worn script. "Fresh from the kiln. You can have it for three coppers, as it's yet to cool."

  Sen shook his head. "Over there, at the statue. Did you see anybody pasting tonight?"

  She peered closely at him, to the statue, then cackled, a sharp staccato sound like two stones being hammered together. "It was you! You was over there. You was there last night too!"

  "Only me, you're sure? No one else came by?"

  She wagged her finger gleefully. "It was you."

  He scanned the square again. There were three ways in and out, through arches in the encircling buildings. The only ones watching were carved statues gazing down from the eaves.

  There was no one here, but that didn't mean anything, because there had been someone. His mind raced ahead. It had to be someone who knew him, who knew he'd come from the Abbey, who was now trying to stop him from finding his mother.

  He didn't know how to react. Outrage and anger, or should he be happy? It seemed like a kind of clue. The fleeting possibility that it might be one of the Sisters passed through his mind, keen for him to return to safety, but he didn't think that was likely. They believed in the dream of his mother too much to interfere with her plans.

  So who?

  He had no idea. He would have to find out. A new plan developed in his mind, and he circled the square, looking round at the rooftops and in through windows, working out the details. Here, perhaps. There.

  He tore down the paper on Lord Quill's boot, and put one of his own in its place. Then he left the square and returned to the millinery. In his room he gathered up his blankets, some apples and bread, then stood silently, listening and feeling outward.

  There was no one nearby, not in his building nor in the surrounding streets, as he had become accustomed to. Everything felt normal. Still, he snuck carefully out of the back of the millinery, refilled his flask in the park, then took back-alleys to Lord Quill Square. At its edge, between a stamp-smithy and a provener's stop, he laid his hands to an old leaden gutter pipe and climbed up.

  Within moments he was on the roof, crawling low over gray shingles, peering down on the square from above. His fresh posting was still there. The ceramicist was sweeping clay smatterings from her shop-front. Sen waited until she went back inside then slid down to the roof edge, to hide behind a rain-beaten stone angel. Peering past its misshapen wings he could clearly see the statue of Lord Quill, as well as each of the various alleyways and avenues entering and leaving the square. There he settled down to wait with the bedroll wrapped around him, spying through the crook of the angel's arm.

  * * *

  Nobody came that night.

  Through the last hour of darkness a slow train of drunkards leered past, and a brougham passed through, but none of them went over to Lord Quill. Sen chewed on the bread, sipped water from his flask, and waited as the stars faded and Saint Ignifer rose up with the dawn.

  He grew warm and drowsy in the winter sun's warmth, already unfamiliar after living in the darkness for almost a week, but he staved off sleep as the square bloomed to life. Steaoplygic washerwomen scraped their cloths and nattered at the fountain. Induran peddlers passed through drawing carts of amaranth wine. Once an Adjunc stalked
a beat through the thick of them, its pink-gray skin looking sickly against the cobbles, spreading silence as it went. Sen ducked beneath the blanket and held his breath until it was gone.

  Still nobody came. A second night fell, and soon shellaby bugs were glinting through the square like floating revelatory lights, living out their short, shimmering lives unaware of the boy on the roof nearby, watching. He stretched out his cramped limbs as best he could behind the angel's gown, and relieved his aching bladder directly into the gutter. He caught himself smirking giddily at what the few drunken stragglers below might think of the sudden shower in the gutter pipes.

  He woke from a light doze as the second day dawned. The posting remained untouched.

  Throughout that long day he was scarcely able to keep his eyes from drooping closed. Numerous times he woke with a start, from dreams of Gellick and Alam tossing Cuttlebones in the square beneath him, of Mare huddling up to Lord Quill's boot and burying a stash of topaz incense. Each time he roused he looked around blearily before realizing where he was, and why. Then he would struggle to focus on Lord Quill and vow not to drift off again.

  When the second dusk finally came he was barely able to keep his eyes open. All his water was gone and his mouth was too dry to chew the last rock cake. He tried to focus on the statue but his mind lanced off in strange directions. The children playing below became the Abbess standing over an empty grave. The ceramicist became Sister Henderson calling out his name for Allilaju.

  At midnight he climbed wretchedly down into the square, where the posting seemed to mock him. Weak and bleary-eyed, he trudged back to the millinery, unable to think clearly. Weaving across an intersection at the edge of Carroway, he stumbled over a hump in the road and fell hard. He cupped his hand to his nose, and blood pooled in his palm. He shuddered with the pain, pulling back his cowl to let some air in.

  Some time later, as he wandered dizzily along the Calk wall, an Adjunc descended.

  He felt it like a shadow, heard it as it thumped near, and only realized what was happening as he spun to see it rearing above him. Terror flooded through him and his legs buckled. Its underside was mottled gray, two mismatched torsos fused by slack rubbery flesh, offering a bare wall of meat and bone. Its six undercarriage legs spread like jaws, ready to seize him like a giant fist and set to work skinning him like Feyon's sister in the Roy.

  His jaw stretched tight in a scream, scarcely able to conceive of how Sister Henderson had been able to fight in this same moment. Then its arms descended and snatched him up, crushing his chest and face against its bony underside, lowering the skinning blade to the nape of his neck. He felt the cold metal cut in and knew he was going to die, when something happened.

  A black shape burst out of nothing and hit the Adjunc. Sen couldn't see well with his head braced against the torso, but it seemed to blur round the Adjunc's head, striking three stunningly fast blows to its head and neck. Sen could barely follow it, though the sense of it was strangely familiar. Then the Adjunc gave an awful bellowing wail and fell to the side, releasing him to slap against the hard stone flags.

  Sen rolled away as fast as he could, while the scorpion-like beast thrashed out its death throes. The black thing was there still, hovering over it to drive a final blow in, before it turned in flash of glittering eyes and was gone in a blur of long legs, leaving Sen staring after it.

  It moved too fast to see what kind of caste it was, and he was too weary and shocked for his eyes to work properly.

  The Adjunc bellowed again, driving any rational thought from his mind with the intensity of its pain. He rose unsteadily to his feet and staggered away from the dying beast, trying to follow his strange savior's path with his body and his mind, but it had already clambered the Calk wall and now was lost amongst the steady thrum of the Balasts.

  So he swayed in place. A cold wind stung him awake.

  He'd almost just died.

  The Adjunc's wails were fading now. Sen lurched back toward it, feeling sick and weak, unable to believe what had just happened. The beast's legs kicked in the air like a dying beetle. Its lumpish torso had broken backward in its dying throes and blood had splattered and smeared over the flagstones, gushing from two deep stab wounds in its throat. Part of its head was missing completely, as though bitten away.

  Sen staggered away. He didn't want to be caught when its fellows descended, drawn by its siren howl, which steadily faded behind him, lost in the warren of Slumswelter streets.

  HUNT I

  When he woke with the night, safe in the dark of the millinery larder room, he could feel it.

  It took some time to understand what he was feeling. Not just the pain in his neck where the Adjunc had crushed him close, or the numbing sense of foolishness from pulling his hood back after the fall, or the headache and hunger from two days without sleep. This was something else.

  He sorted through all the things he'd felt, and picked out the familiar sense of the creature that had saved him. The blur of it resolved slightly in his memory; something black, perhaps Sectile, and faster than anything he'd ever seen. It had killed the King's most feared creation in seconds, and he could feel it even now.

  The sense of it was murky, like something from deep underground. As he picked it out, he realized that it wasn't only familiar, but that it felt like home. That stymied him for a time, as he separated his own confusion from the sense of it. Perhaps it had always been there, for as long as he could remember, ever-present and faint beneath the minds of the Sisters.

  The more he thought about it, the more he recognized it as a flavor in the air he'd just taken for granted for years, never distinct until the moment it had leapt from nowhere and killed an Adjunc in seconds.

  He rose to his feet in the chill air, and felt the creature's mind shift to reflect that, becoming more alert. He froze, because how was that possible? It couldn't possibly see him, unless it was somehow in the room with him.

  Slowly he turned. There were shadows. There was the chimney. In a corner there was a rounded lump that made his heart skip a beat before he realized it was his winter cassock.

  So what?

  He took a step, and felt the shift in the air. He clicked his fingers, and felt a similar shift. It had to have heard him.

  He left the larder room and paced rapidly through the millinery, lit by late evening light, climbing to the roof with his spikes drawn. From the roof he looked out over the park and unnamed streets as the night deepened, peering into the dead eyes of burnt-out buildings across the street, but saw nothing, though he felt its mind tracking him.

  "Hello," he called. His voice echoed down the frosty, empty streets. "I know you're out there. Talk to me."

  No answer came.

  "Do you know my mother? Where is she? Tell me!"

  Still nothing came. The sense of it shifted, growing perhaps concerned, but that was all. There was no blur of movement, no spiky black zigzag across the street.

  Sen descended back into the millinery. He had to think. Out on the street he tried to feel his way toward it, running into the neighboring buildings and charging up dusty stairs, rummaging through rooms filled with tall weeds, but nothing he did seemed to draw him any closer.

  Standing on the street he spread his arms.

  "I just want to talk! Come out."

  But the creature, whatever it was, didn't want to talk. It didn't come out. It didn't respond to anything he said, whether he pleaded or threatened.

  So he made a new plan.

  In the park he scrubbed away the worst of the Adjunc's blood, then shrugged on his cloak and set out into the night streets. To Carroway, he felt the presence following with him, though there was no sign of it anywhere. In the night markets he bought more paper, so much he could scarcely carry it, along with a half-gallon each of paste and ink. He ate grilled pork bits on gritty rye bread from a brazier-stand near the Calk, then back in the millinery larder room he wrote out one hundred copies of his message until his hand cramped and his wr
iting grew sloppy.

  It was already late, but still he set out to post. He walked swiftly, posting a new combination of his previous routes, from Lord Quill in Carroway on through the Slumswelters, fringing on the Calk, Belial, the Boomfire. At times the sense of the creature was strong, at others it grew fainter. He began to detour into new streets and districts, posting on revelatory lamp posts dotted around Grammaton Square and gutter-drains on Haversham sidings, while the thread to the creature grow fainter still.

  It couldn't keep up.

  When all one hundred copies were up he circled back down his route at a run. Through Carroway all his papers were already gone, and the same was true in Belial, but then stuck to a HellWest quaystone he found one remaining posting, from just after he'd started to detour. The sense of the creature was strong here.

  "Slowing down, are you?" he shouted into the salty air. His words echoed back unanswered, but that didn't matter. He was gaining.

  He ran on. Dotted near the Haversham he found several more papers remaining, though not in the order he'd posted them. As he kept on he tried to fathom what route could have made such a strange pattern, scanning the rooftops and revelatory gas-lines, watching for some sign of the creature's long black limbs, but saw nothing.

  In the span of less than an hour all his postings near HellWest disappeared, though Sen had never strayed far from any of them. Somehow it had stayed out of sight, plucking some postings while missing others, then returned to finish the job.

  The sun was already dawning, but he couldn't stop now. The creature seemed to be adapting as he shifted the pattern of his movements, so Sen adapted too. He started backtracking randomly, cutting corners through townhouse hutch-gardens, ducking down alleyways and taking shortcuts across canals. Still he saw nothing, constantly greeted by the same frustrating sense of the creature ebbing out of sight. Frustration made him angry and he ran faster, past the first hours of the new day. With his hood pulled tight he sped though the gathering crowds, until at last he was standing again before Lord Quill as the ceramicist called out her wares, looking at new words freshly scrawled across his final posting.