"Scrivening?" Sen asked. "For five years?"
"It's better than the other options. I don't want to fight in the King's Infantry, or stand guard at Groan. So it's this."
"Even though they hate you here?"
Alam laughed. "You think life was a peach in Carroway? Do you think they'd welcome me with open arms in a unit of the King's Guard? Of course not! Life's not pleasant for low castes, Sen. You'd think with your scars, you'd have learnt that by now. There's a ladder and Spindle is toward the bottom; I'm nothing to the others here, just as they're nothing next to Feyon. They stamp me down harder, because I'm trying to climb up."
His eyes shone now. Sen tried to think a way around this, but of course, there was none. The city's system of caste and law was an abominable cruelty.
"I'm sorry. Truly. I'm trying to do something about it."
Alam snorted. "Trying? What are you trying?"
"Something I need your help with," he said, as the pain in his temple peaked. "And it's not to do with Feyon. I swear, I haven't seen her since the Abbey. It's much bigger than that."
"As big as the bruise on your face will be?"
"Bigger. Just listen to me."
"I'm listening."
Sen opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't think of the words to explain all that he'd been through. He knew this Alam wouldn't believe him, no matter what he said. But there were other ways to convince.
"You know I can share things through touch," he settled on. "I can show you where I've been, and what I need. We only have to touch."
"I'm not coming near you."
"Just give me your hand and I'll show you."
"Show me what, the latest gavotte? No."
"Please, Alam. If we were ever friends, just give me your hand for a moment. That's all I'm asking."
The Spindle frowned. Still, he leaned over and reached out one hand. "What now, you want I should tickle behind your ear?"
Slowly, carefully, Sen took Alam's hand.
Images came like a burst of sunlight through dark clouds. In a flash, Sen saw Alam's dream of a new manufactory, a bigger and better one than even his father's, where he would craft mechanisms they'd never seen before and revolutionize gearsmithing. For that he would take all the cruelty Collaber and others could throw at him, and wear the stovepipe hat of shame, and use it as fuel to make his father's memory proud. He didn't need Sen or the others for that. He didn't need the past. All of his focus was bent upon enduring the present to build achievements in the future.
Their hands broke apart and both Alam and Sen jerked backward, white-faced and panting.
"What was that?" Alam gasped, rubbing his thin white fingers over his eyes. "It was never like that before. What did you do to me?"
Sen felt like he was swimming up from the depths of Alam's misery and dreams. He shook his head to clear it away. "Did you see it?" he managed, pushing through the fog. "The Gutrock, and King Seem?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I went there," Sen said, steadying himself. "It's true, all the stories about the Saint. The Rot is coming, Alam, and it's going to destroy everything. I need your help. I know you saw it."
"The Rot? By the Heart, Sen, are you still singing that tune? I didn't see anything! It was some kind of trick."
"It wasn't a trick! Listen to me, Alam."
"No, you listen to me," barked the Spindle, leaning over to stab his bony finger hard into Sen's chest. "You never do that to me again. You don't come here again, not ever. You stay out of my life, do you hear me? I don't need you, Sen, and I don't want you. Do you understand?"
"Alam, wait," Sen began, but the taller boy cuffed him sharply round the head once, twice, growing frantic.
"Do you understand? Answer me, Sen, do you understand?"
"Yes, all right, yes."
Then Alam was on his feet and backing away, still pointing his finger Sen. "I'm not your friend any more. I have my life, and you have yours, and don't mix the two up. If I see you here again, I'll toss you off the roof."
Then he was heading down the stairs and gone, leaving a trail of confused anger in his wake.
* * *
Back on his cot Alam lay and trembled. He didn't understand what had just happened, tried to shove it away but still flashes of whatever Sen had shown him bit at his mind; insistent memories that wouldn't stay quiet. There were images of a black lump, some kind of a giant Spider, and a black mouth falling to consume the land.
He shut his mind against it, focusing on the throb in his elbow where Sen had bent it. This was the reality. For this he would he dry-whipped for days, and that was all there was. This was his lot, his caste, and he would face it. If he bore it long enough, he'd be a scrivener for the King, and in time he'd start his own manufactory in Carroway. In ten years he should be in profit, and might have enough even to marry and have his own sons and daughters, who he could train like his father trained him. There was a girl he liked in the kitchens opposite, peeking her chubby face every now and then through the windows. She was no Feyon, but she was real.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed Sen's memories away.
* * *
Sen stood on the rooftop, shocked and bruised. He'd expected Alam to be confused, perhaps angry, but not like that. The depths of his anger numbed him. Perhaps he was lucky to be alive.
He went down the stairs, and for a moment paused at the door to Alam's room, listening to the sounds of breathing, the feeling of Alam as he buried himself in dreams of a brighter future, one without any hint of Sen or the Saint. He stayed there a long time, listening to the shuffling as young men moved in their covers, trying to figure out what he should do.
But he couldn't think of a way to fix it. It wasn't like the Abbey where digging a grave was enough. This was a question of caste, and the things Alam had to do for himself, and he couldn't help any of that with words and promises.
Perhaps that made it fate. He rubbed at his jaw, and allowed Alam's misery to fade from his thoughts, replaced by an echo of his persistence. That strength was something to revel in. Alam was strong, and Sen believed he would ultimately be successful. He would get his manufactory no matter the cost, and fulfill his father's dream and more.
That was a pleasant thought. He left the lye-house comforted, and walked out onto the streets of Jubilante. Sun-bleached buildings surrounded him, their empty façades as unwelcoming as the blank-faced ruins of Aradabar. This place was barren ground to him, but even so, a powerful seed was growing within.
* * *
Back in the millinery he stood in the main hall and surveyed its condition. There was so much work to do: a false hero to make real, a city of many castes to unite, an uprising to begin. But first, there was the soggy thatch hanging down through the ceiling plaster in rotten black clumps. There were the floorboards that were cracked and in places missing altogether, leaving holes to the mud-floor below. There was the gaping arch in the wall that allowed fluttering moths in to dance around him.
The place stank of must and mold. For six months he'd been ignoring these things, as he plastered them over with whitewash and black graphite.
Now it was time to fix them.
He started work on the repairs alone, that night. With the Abbess' money he bought tapers of wood, hammer and nails from the night markets, and set to work repairing the floors, though each repair he began went wrong. It was hard to concentrate, and he couldn't stop thinking about how much he missed Alam. For six months he hadn't thought of it so much, but now he did. He wanted his friend with him.
After hammering his own fingers twice, and succeeding in only worsening the unevenness of the floor with slats crudely hammered over cracks, he moved to the press. If he could at least set that up, then he would be making good progress.
First he lined the worm-bitten stairs to the second floor with a greased slope of oft-boards in two parallel rails, then tried first to push, and then to pull the steam-press up in its barrow. It proved too heavy, though, and he co
uld scarcely roll it two stairs high before the weight rolled back, once knocking him down with a smack to the hip and nearly crushing him under the barrow's wheel.
As he lay in the wind-blown cakes of dust and wafted dandelion seeds, he felt a deeper level of nostalgia spreading through him, leaving a bittersweet taste in his mouth, like one of Sister Henderson's awful bark-tinctures. It wasn't just that he missed Alam, but he missed them all. Gellick, Mare, even Daveron and Feyon. He wanted to see them all again.
He shook his head to clear the muddled thoughts. Alam had rejected him, and that was his starting point. There was no reason to linger on something he could not change. There were other things to do, and if he did not have Alam then he would have to learn to do them on his own.
He tried to refocus, stuffing the press with blankets to protect its innards, then levered it out of the barrow. It hit the mud floor on its side with a thump, and he righted it with levers. Using what knowledge of gearing he'd learned from Alam, he erected a simple block and tackle pulley affixed to the second floor ceiling, and attempted to hoist it up. Sweating, straining under the effort, he managed to raise the press halfway, before the stairs themselves gave out under the weight. The press crashed through the rotten wood, crunching deep into the crumbled boards and mud below.
The rope had shredded and torn up his palms as it was yanked through.
He stood there looking at his bleeding hands and laughed.
He was further behind than when he'd started. Alam would have known to rig supports for the press' weight, and together they could have easily hauled it up. But he didn't have Alam, and now he had no stairs. It was ridiculous, how much he'd done and how far he'd come, to still be utterly stymied by something so simple.
He threw down the pulley ropes and stalked out of the building. He'd meant to wait until he had the press functioning, until the first editions were out, but he didn't have the spirit for it. If he was going to have help, let the help come now.
He made for the Calk wall.
GELLICK II
It hadn't made sense to Gellick, when their days in the Abbey came to an end. One moment they were all happy, studying lots of words and things he couldn't really remember, and it was good. The white dust of the Calk was far away, and for the first time in his life he could really think.
Then it all disappeared.
"It's over," Alam had said by the Abbey gates, and he was right. Sen left, and so did Mare. Feyon didn't come again, and that just left Gellick, Alam and Daveron, but Alam wasn't talking and Daveron rarely had. The games of Cuttlebones in the snow and the night-time conversations that had become better than his Hax just stopped, leaving only a few lessons with the Sisters by day, which he'd never much understood. It was almost as bad as the white of the Calk.
Daveron left soon after, and Alam followed. He'd tried to explain where he was going, to the Roy for something, but it didn't make much sense to Gellick. When word came a month later that his father was calcifying, it felt like no loss to leave.
He returned to the Calk. Back through the dolmen wall and into the white, he felt the numb clouds of plastery dust enveloping him, filling him up inside with slowness and dimming his mind back to the slow trudge it had always been. Already his body felt stiff, his tongue moved slowly, and he began to forget.
On Coxswold Street, his father was far gone, barely able to move around their small rented rooms where every scrap of the stone floor was covered in a thin layer of garbled Hax sand. The patterns had been lost, leaving only meandering lines scrawled around his father's huge body, fragmented memories of a habit his frozen mind no longer truly understood.
Gellick stood above his hunched father, as massive and strong as a boulder, and knew that this had happened so quickly because he had left. His father had sacrificed himself so Gellick could escape, leaving himself alone, and now he was paying the price. With no one to talk to, he had calcified much faster than before, turning almost to solid rock in just six months.
Gellick went to work in the Calk grindyards, taking his father's place, as was the Balast custom. He smashed rocks for plaster and mortar by day, then by night he sat with his father in their white Calk room, telling him stories of the past again and again, about Gellick's mother and Prince Coxswold and all the pretty little lullabies they'd taught him as a baby to keep the calcification away.
Of course, it was too late. When his father finally breathed his last and became stone, Gellick wept oily tears. Then he went on with the Hax, telling his own story up to and through the Abbey, trying to make it so real that he'd never forget. He wrote it across the sand a dozen times, a hundred, but with every repetition he knew it was less.
Already he was forgetting. He was beginning to calcify. He was a Balast, and this was his fate.
* * *
Sen climbed the Calk dolmen wall with ease. Inside, the air was heavy with powdery white dust, so thick he could scarcely breathe. The ground was a featureless chalk expanse, pounded flat and hard by the passing of many Balasts. There were no parks or shoots of greenery anywhere, no browns of mud or wood, no painted signs or colorful clothing, only the endless dust from the grindyards permeating and coating everything.
He walked on, and either side of him great Balast bodies drifted by like ships in a fog, barely looking where they were going. Some carried groaning stacks of metal on their shoulders, some led huge carts piled high with chaff, others simply wandered as though lost.
None spoke.
Standing before the entrance to the grindyards, the ground shook and the dust rang with the deafening pounding of stone fists on stone. Sen's eyes fogged and accretions of lime dust crystallized hard at his eyelid-corners, until blinking became painful.
He tried to read street signs, but they were all scaled over. He shouted questions to the Balasts as they passed him by, but they were too far calcified to hear, lost in the clockwork routine of their lives. So he wandered, and his breath became frothy with the alkali dust, his skin pasted with it in scabrous lines where his sweat pooled the dust along his scars.
In the relative shelter of an open square near the dolmen wall, devoid of any shred of greenery but for a few odd blocky sculptures, he coughed and hacked, spitting out white froth flecked with blood. Sitting on a stone bench he studied the sculptures and wondered that they were once branches, now encased in lime like the ruins of Aradabar, frozen forever. This was the fate that awaited Gellick, that awaited his entire caste.
He shuddered. It was like the Rot, a force that took and took until nothing was left. The Balast solution was the Hax. Many nights Sen had fallen asleep listening to the low murmur of Gellick whispering the story of his own life in his Hax pit. He remembered the endless stories Gellick would tell, of Prince Coxswold and his thirty-eight tears, or thirty-eight maidens, or whatever, all so he'd never forget his address, 38 Coxswold Street. But Sen couldn't even find the street.
He got back to his feet and this time hunted down young jewel-eyed Balasts outside the training yards, still fluid enough to think new thoughts. He spoke slowly and wrote in the dust, until finally one of them seemed to recognize the name Coxswold, and pointed out a direction. It sent him back past the thunder of the grindyards, into a narrow culvert perpetually barraged by fresh lime dust. He climbed a wall to rub clean the street sign, making out the old carved letters.
Coxswold Street.
Number 38 had a stone knocker, but it was welded shut with plaster. He shoved and the heavy door opened. It was as white and featureless within as without, a short corridor leading into dimness, with two formless entranceways opening to either side.
"Gellick?" he called.
No response came. He continued inward, to a Hax room coated with sand. There he saw a heavy black stone figure in the middle, seated with an array of repeated patterns spread round him on the floor.
Sen moved closer slowly, registering that this was an adult Balast, caught in the motion of writing out its memories, one thick black finger frozen ag
ainst the sand. As he drew in, it did not move at all, and he could see from its solid stone eyes that it had fully calcified.
Gellick's father.
He stood beside it and looked over the scrawlings left in the sand. From the far corner of the room the same swirling patterns repeated, up to the point the rockman's finger touched the dust, the same symbol repeated again and again, until at last calcification froze him forever.
Sen recognized the symbol, as he'd seen Gellick write it numerous times, in the dirt of the potato patch or in the mashed peas on his plate, scrawled as though it were some magic totem. It was Gellick's name. This was the last thing his father remembered, the most important of them all.
It brought a well of sadness up in Sen. He remembered Gellick telling him of his mother and father, and how much he feared calcifying like them. This was the end, for Balasts. Empty white nothingness, to the sound of constant thunder falling.
He worked his way carefully past the large black statue, careful not to disturb his last etchings, to sit in the corner and wait for his friend to return.
* * *
It was deep in the night when Gellick came back, rousing Sen from sleep. He had grown bigger and slower in the months that had passed since the Abbey. His outer lith was turning black like his father, and his eyes had lost their jewel-like luster. He didn't notice Sen, and busied himself preparing two plates of raw potatoes, drawn from a wire basket on the floor. He laid one plate carefully on the sand in front of his father's lap, into a ring in the dust that was already there, then settled rasping into the dust.
Sen watched as Gellick ate, slowly and methodically, just another job to be done with no pleasure involved, like hammering in the grindyards. When Gellick was done, he tuned up a revelatory light and gently lifted a well-thumbed book to his lap. He turned the pages reverently, occasionally stopping to note something down in the Hax sand with his finger. When he was done with each page he began it again from the top, sometimes sounding the words out to himself, reading each two or three times before moving on.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 27
