Before him lay the Groan debtor's prison, a stark gray block against the iron sky. Within its sheer walls were the mad, the indebted, those usured into servitude. They tasted like the end of all things in his mind, sunk into chaos and sadness and pain. He wondered if Daveron was there even now, working on the indentured, learning to cull the living for the value of their flesh.
Beyond the prison lay the Levi River, and the Bodyswell plague fires, where they immolated the sick who could not be saved, or could not afford the cost of a cure. The scent of burning bodies blew on the wind, carried from their pyres down by the riverside. He left the Fallows mud behind and trudged along the black-flagged Levi bank, thinking dully of the future and what place he might find within it.
He went south until the hazy grit of Afric filled the air. Beneath a disused cargo bridge near HellWest he stopped, amongst drunken dockworkers who stank of cheap rye liquor and the scarab. Perhaps this would be his place now, he wondered, amongst the lowest of caste, always hiding his scars, working only to survive.
A few half-sleeping sotted men grunted as he passed between them and settled in a coil of splintery old rope. He ate a greasy bacon roll bought from a dockside hawker, and listened to the bawdy jokes of the men as they gradually drank and smoked themselves asleep.
"How much for this?" one of them slurred, a scarab-fumed Pinhead wrapped up in gray baling tarp, turning the pages of the Book of Airs and Graces. It must have fallen from his pack.
"A mother," Sen answered flatly. "The truth."
The Pinhead cackled. "You'll find the truth between a damask's knees, boy. Maybe your mother too, if you fancy. A copper will buy it."
Sen picked up the book. "It's not for sale."
The man shrugged, then snuggled deeper into the shadows, nudging Sen's feet to the side. He was snoring loudly within moments. Sen lay in the gray smog, surrounded by the dreams of lost and broken men. He'd never felt so alone in his life.
* * *
Hours passed, but sleep only came fitfully. He rose and left Afric with the dusk, crossing the dark-side bridge to the Slumswelters, where he wandered round the millinery by night. He stood in the second floor hall, looking at the whitewashed walls and ceiling. His scrawled maps of the city were still there, scribbled over the graphite-smeared walls and ceiling. It seemed the nest of a mad person.
He sat in the middle of it, and laid the Book of Airs and Graces down before him. He didn't want to read it, but reading it seemed inexorable, now. What else was there to do?
Its heavy leather cover had been dented and scuffed. He lit a single candle, then opened the book by its orange light, and found the paper within yellowed with age, thin and crinkling under his fingers. Its printed lettering was faded and hemmed in by miniscule hand-written notes, crammed in at the corners and edged in between lines.
He studied the pages of contents and saw two books in outline, one titled Airs, the other Graces. It seemed the Book of Graces he already knew; it appeared the same as the book of Saint Ignifer which he'd studied in the Abbey. All the Saint's familiar stories were here, from his birth and early heroics unifying various misunderstood Unforgiven to his final assault against the Rot in the Fates of Aradabar.
The other book though, Airs, was entirely new to Sen, though it came before the Book of Graces. Its chapter titles were a litany of strange foreign names; Mjolnir, The Yoked Empire, Aberrythians 1 and 2, Foment, Decrial Fie, broken in places by terms that seemed familiar, but altered; Heart Asunder, Seem Of Absalom, Aradabar Lost, Revels of Avia.
Their strangeness urged him on. He skipped to the final pages of Airs, the Revels of Avia, and found the text there near impenetrable, so written and re-written with notes that they obscured the original text. He picked a point and tried to read but his eyes kept slipping off, thrown by meaningless words and sentences that ran for pages only to stop abruptly, incomplete.
As a new day dawned without, he gleaned only fragments, that it was a story of revelation, a prophecy of the doom of worlds, but it left his head aching. The Butterfly's madness seemed fitting, on a diet so congested. He imagined spending years trying to fathom sense from theses ramblings, and shuddered.
He leafed back to the beginning, and began reading the book titled Heart Asunder. It told the Butterfly's story of creation in greater detail, nothing like the one he'd learned in the Abbey. The Sisters had taught him that the Heart only spoke the word and there was land, and water, and light. In contrast, the book of Heart Asunder was far darker. In a black void before time began, there was the Heart. The Heart was alone, and out of its deep and endless boredom, it cut itself in half. At first its twin was a delight to it, and together they built myriad worlds upon which new life sprang up. But as the Heart studied the work of its twin, it saw its own work replicated in every detail, and was dismayed.
For there was nothing new under the many suns. Every world of its creation was alike to the worlds built by its brother. The Heart grew enraged at this, and in a quarrel it slew its brother, simply to have something new to break the endless monotony of the darkness before time.
With that first murder, the Rot was birthed. It churned the vast corpse of the Heart's twin to rich loam, spitting out something new and altered behind it, a million Corpse Worlds that hung each distinct and apart in the great black void. Upon each of those worlds new seeds germinated and grew, blooming to fresh life that lived and moved and thought for itself. So the remaining twin of the Heart rejoiced to see something new in the darkness.
Sen read on, faster as he flicked through histories of empires on Corpse Worlds he'd never heard of, filled with parables on a morality he didn't recognize, where babies were cut in half to settle debt and castes were driven into slavery, while throughout it all there was the life-bringing churn of the Rot.
In the book of Ends the Rot was described, a thing not quite sentient but more than random. It could be as large as the sky or as small as a speck of dust, capable of unleashing unspeakable force in an instant, or birthing vast new expanses in the blink of an eye. It lived off dissolution, on the unraveling of order into chaos, and grew stronger the more it consumed.
Wherever it was challenged, it conquered. Its hunger fuelled the engine of endless creation, churning the older worlds and leaving fresh soil behind for new life to take root in, though always there was less; less substance, less matter, less of everything.
In the book of the Yoked Empire, it was King Seem who first saw the end to come. Through the visions of a mad girl named Avia he glimpsed the ultimate spiral into nothing, as the Rot ate and re-ate the Heart's corpse, consuming until there would be nothing left at all.
Seem sought a way to fight it, and found that way in the ravings of Avia. Through years of her garbled speech, she taught him of a hero to come, Saint Ignifer, who would stand against the Rot. She bade Seem bend his empire to spread faith in the Saint, sowing his roots deep into the mind of the world, in the hope that faith alone would prove a bulwark against the Rot.
Deeply in love, King Seem did as she asked. He carved the legend of Saint Ignifer in a thousand stone revenants, and wrote it in a hundred thousand books, spreading them through all the great library cities of his world-spanning empire. He even stood by and watched as Avia herself carved the legend of the Saint into her own son's skin.
Then came the Rot, destroying Aradabar and Seem with it.
Sen set the book down. His hands were black with old ink, his eyes fuzzed with images of the Rot. Weak evening light filtered through the arch, and he realized a night and day had passed him by, lost in the Book. Had he slept? How much of it had been real, and how much dreams?
On the millinery rooftop he looked out over the city, imagining the darkening night as the coming jaws of the Rot. This was what his mother had believed, and everything now seemed to echo with it, as the Rot churned the air and the sky and the land. All of these things were born from death, would grow, then one day spiral and fade.
He lifted his scarred arms before
him and watched the lines twist and blur. He blinked, and saw the Heart murder itself in the red-dark behind his eyes. In starlight he read the birth and death of civilizations. He felt the turn of the Rot like an almighty plough rumbling through the sky, unraveling reality, taking its tithe, leaving only a diminished fragment behind.
Sen breathed in the salty air, and it seemed that even now the world around him was dwindling. This was the meaning of life, and an end to all things. He saw the Rot spreading its jaws over entire cities, crashing down in bursts of black flint and pumice, and in the cries of navvies from HellWest he heard the slow and steady drumbeat that marked the world's fading pulse.
In the orange light of a new candle he bent back to the book and read on. He read until all the hopeful tracts on faith and Saint Ignifer were replaced by the Rot's long, slow churn. Long screeds described the destruction as it uprooted mountains and filled in the seas, extinguished the sun and broke the moon apart, dousing all the pieces in dust. The words thickened like curdling milk in Sen's mind until he could barely breathe, until he reached the final page of the Book of Airs and let the book fall to the floor.
Days had passed, a week or more, and this was what he'd come to. He looked out from the millinery to see black clouds of pestilence everywhere, swallowing the city, until there was nothing but emptiness left.
SHARACHUS II
Sen sat atop a gargoyle's head, on a ramshackle old church deep in the Slumswelters, watching the moon slowly tumble across the sky toward the Rot. He didn't remember coming there, with only the vaguest sense of the dark and empty streets that had passed him by, each blurring into the next.
He looked down to the weed-choked street below, a long and silent fall, and wondered if his death would change anything in the grand scheme of things.
"You abandoned me," came a raspy voice from behind.
Sen turned to see the ugly, uneven frame of the Spider, standing atop the church's slates. His mocking coat was pulled in tight, but even in the darkness the stubs of his shorn limbs were apparent.
Sen wasn't surprised. He'd felt his presence in the background for days.
"Hello Sharachus," he said softly. "I wondered when you would show yourself."
The Spider eyed him, his many eyes glinting. "I waited for you at the Hallows, Sen. When you didn't return I searched for days, fearing you dead."
Sen shrugged. Even that much movement seemed like too much effort lost to the Rot. It was pointless to strive, to fight, when everything that had ever existed was doomed. "I'm here. You find me now."
"I find you different," said the Spider. "I had hoped the Hallows would bring you clarity, but instead you have become more lost."
Sen absently picked at a shred of dried moss from the tarred roofing, tearing it in half. "I'm not lost. I'm thinking about faith. What it's worth. How did you decide to believe it, everything my mother said? How did you take that step?"
The Spider's chitinous frame clacked dully as he moved to sit alongside Sen.
"It was no choice. I killed the King, and he was saved by a dark power. Sen, you see the mouth of the Rot in the sky, and you know it is growing. You bear the scars the King seeks. What else do you need to believe?"
A long moment passed, as Sen thought about his mother. If she wasn't in the Gloam Hallows, where was she?
"Aradabar," he said, almost a whisper.
"Aradabar," the Spider repeated. "Yes. It is a wasted place, full of ghosts. Perhaps also answers."
Sen turned to face him. Sitting so close, his Sectile features were strangely less repellent. The mismatch of his body to his head didn't matter, when the sheen of his compound eyes reflected the city lights and stars. In a way they were beautiful.
"I have to see it," Sen said. "I have to know."
The Spider nodded. "Then we see it."
* * *
They walked back through the Slumswelter together. The Carothaby bi-rail hung over them, heavily silent in the warm spring air, as the skies lightened toward dawn. The smells of fresh-baked bread and old ordure wafted close, carried from Indura down the canal.
"The Butterfly told me to find Seem," Sen said, "in Aradabar, as though he was still alive. Do you think that's possible?"
"Who can say?" answered Sharachus. "If we believe in the Rot and the Saint, it is a small step to other strange things too."
Sen sighed. "It's faith. But I never believed, not the way the Sisters do. Not like you."
The Spider chewed on that for a few steps, his jaw clicking rhythmically. "Well, I chose to believe when the alternative was death, or madness. The world I have known is a harsh place, so a harsh beginning, a harsh end, these things make sense to me, as long as there is the Saint for counterbalance. There has to be hope."
"Even if you know the Saint was invented, just a fevered creation of my mother?"
"What invention, Sen? Aradabar was destroyed, we have seen the lava rock for ourselves, and the relic fringes of his city, shrouded in mist at the Hallows. If that was the Rot, then something stopped it from destroying more. Why shouldn't it have consumed the world entire, if there was no Saint?"
Sen sighed. "Or the whole thing is false. There is no Rot. That was just a volcano, and volcanoes don't destroy worlds."
The Spider chuckled. "No one said faith would be easy, Sen. What is? But willful ignorance is no choice either. I have told you about the black light in the King. I swear, nothing short of the Rot itself would have prevented me killing him. So the knowledge is there for you to take. It may not be complete, but what is the quote? 'Only a fool scorns ignorance as the realm of the fool. The wise man is he who welcomes ignorance as the beginning of his learning.'"
Sen wrinkled his brow. "That's from the Book of Airs, isn't it?"
Sharachus nodded.
"How did you know that? I've never seen a copy of the book before."
Sharachus spread his lipless black mouth in a menacing approximation of a grin. "I climbed in to your hall while you slept, and read the book even as you did."
Sen nodded. Of course. "Clever."
"It was very dull," Sharachus said flatly. "Too many lists of the dimensions of a tabernacle."
That made Sen snort. "Yet there is wisdom in it," he said quietly.
"What?"
"Just something the Butterfly said. Wisdom. I couldn't see another way through."
"And lo," Sharachus said, sweeping an arm before him, "it has been revealed."
Sen laughed. "You're funny."
"Dreychak used to say that too. Before they took him."
They walked quietly a time longer.
"I'm sorry for what happened to you, Sharachus," Sen said. "It was wrong. You didn't deserve it."
The Spider shrugged. "Who can judge, really? All castes face their tribulations. I'm sure even the Blues and Aurochs of the Roy live a life constrained by their caste. My caste led me to you, and I don't regret that."
An Ogric rickshaw boy pulled by them, his eyes clappered like a horse. The clatter of his cartwheels still echoed down the street long after he was gone.
They separated near Carroway, each to their own tasks.
Sen went to the night-markets to buy equipment: tough ghasting leathers to resist the sharp crystal of the Gutrock, a belt with a ghast's clag-hammer looped in, a slit-eyed balaclava to protect against the sun's glare, tough gloves and rubber-soled boots, a double-looped pack that he stocked with dried jerky and canned beef, more pewter water flasks and hard grain-cakes.
Back in the millinery he slept through the day, surrounded by the nest of his scribbled notes from the book. Upon waking he found an old scroll lying on his bedroll.
"Sharachus?" he called, but the Spider was already gone. He unrolled the scroll and studied it. It was an ancient map of Aradabar, with the rough contours of the Gutrock wastes marked around it, where the lava had spread and cooled, forming a massive rocky plateau. He traced his fingers down the lines of Aradabar's poker-straight thoroughfares, around the carefully marke
d cupolas of its temples and palaces.
This was Sharachus' task, to find whatever past record of the buried city that he could. He was the ultimate thief, after all, able to enter any place unseen and rifle even the grandest libraries.
Sen whitewashed the walls and ceiling again, and with the map as a guide, began to rough out a loose outline in charcoal on the white. He knew from his studies in the Abbey that the Gutrock was infamously massive, inhospitable and near impenetrable, and without an accurate map they would never find anything within it. Yet an accurate map was impossible to come by. Every year hundreds of fresh ghasts, the lowest of castes rejected at every other city profession, took to mining it, and only a half survived the first month. A quarter of those survived the second.
Some fell to the sun; their vision and their minds burned out by the endless white reflections of that barren waste. Out in the depths, they went blind trying to divine secrets from the brilliant ivory rock, falling where they stood to bake down to the bone. Some simply fell, down a tunnel they'd carved or the forgotten tunnel of another, as they sought to dig down to the treasures of the city below. They broke their necks, snapped their backs, or had their ghasting leathers and skin stripped away by the razor-sharp pumice, bleeding to death in the sun.
Others went mad, afflicted on the rocky waves after living in isolation for days. Others became lost, their wasted bodies later found far out in the featureless expanse. Others still were crushed, or devoured, by the rock itself, as some mysterious motion in the earth there kept the Gutrock constantly shifting, hefting sections and dropping others, so the heaps and lumps of its landscape never remained the same, and the maze of dangers from tunnels and flaws in the Gut were different every passing day.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 20
