The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

It looked like they'd been spared. They were just lucky Gellick had been awake, and lucky the roof had been rotten, and lucky the park provided good cover, and lucky the Molemen hadn't been coming at them from all sides, so that altogether his survival and Gellick's survival rested entirely on luck.

  In the dark, he sat beside Gellick, who was still breathing crazily, overcome with the fear.

  "I'm sorry," Sen said, holding his palm against his aching temple. It didn't help, but it was the only thing he could do. "I should've known that would happen."

  The cold part of him that was King Seem pushed back against the guilt, already blooming richly for the dead Moleman and the dead children. It pointed at the wicker cages, and the King's brand, and the actions the Molemen had taken for years before that night. It pointed at his posting about the King, and how he'd known what it would cause.

  So he held the guilt at bay.

  He'd known, when he'd printed and posted his childish joke about the King, what would happen. He'd known it would be this, because this was what the King and the city did. Yes, he'd killed a Moleman. Many more would have to die before the revolution was done.

  He thought back on that burning sensation of failure as his misericorde cleaved through the little Moleman's chest. Perhaps that was the lesson here. It opened up another chink in his thinking, that while the Molemen may not feel pain, and were not a caste like most others, in truth they had feelings of a kind still.

  Panic. Shame. Failure.

  He looked at Gellick, putting the pain and nausea in his head to one side, and doing everything he could to project confidence and calm. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I caused that. The truth is, I killed a Moleman last night. They're looking for me."

  Gellick blinked, then stared as if he was seeing a new person. The fear in his eyes shifted so it pointed at Sen. He looked at the injury on Sen's temple. He looked at the scratches and cuts he'd sustained on the sprint through the park, on his cheeks and arms, where his scars had been flashing for all to see as they charged away.

  "Why?"

  "I was trying to save some children. The Molemen caught them for flyposting."

  Gellick thought about that. "They thought they were you?"

  Sen nodded. "I couldn't save them all. Some of them, only."

  The fear began to ease. Gellick's emerald eyes looked away, down to his hands in his lap.

  "I didn't know it would be like this," he said quietly, a low grind like Ogric wheels turning over gravel. "I didn't think-"

  "Neither did I," said Sen. Then he rested one hand on the Balast's shoulder. There was little of the old warmth remaining, like a thin veneer over a cold shell. Sen tried to pump heat in, just through his thoughts.

  They remained like that for a time, as the life of the city continued above, filtering oddly down the well, like sounds heard underwater. So this was the life Sharachus had led for years. Running, hiding, always afraid. Sen had been hunted all his life too, but never like this. It relit the flame of anger that had sparked the night before.

  "It won't be like this again," he said, trying to believe it was real even as he said it. "I promise."

  "How do you know?" Gellick asked. "How can you know that, Sen?"

  Sen thought back to Daveron, and the way he'd showed himself only to him. What was that, but a kind of beginning? It started a story that he'd have to continue. By even doing that, he'd endangered the Sisters, the Abbess, all the other children of his school.

  All gambled on what a Moleman would do.

  "My mother chose Daveron for a reason," he said. "I'm going to find out what it was."

  DAVERON II

  Daveron didn't tell anyone about what he'd seen in the shadows of Carroway.

  Not his father in the butchery yard, or his brothers, or his fellows in the brigade. As a junior usury butcher for the King, it should have been his responsibility to say everything, to share it all, but still he didn't.

  The long night had been frustrating, and seeing Sen out there, posting his paper, had almost made him laugh. Few things had that effect on him. Sometimes, while his father was blatting a lumpen Bellyhead about his jellied chops, or slicing cuts off a Exemious' kidneys, he would think back to the quiet days in the Abbey, and one of the foolish jokes the Balast used to make, and have to stifle a chuckle.

  His father would look over at him, as if he'd sensed the momentary lapse. Molemen did not laugh. Molemen found nothing funny, least of all the King's debt.

  Sitting in the butchery yard in the night after the long Carroway sweep, he made a mental accounting of why he hadn't told anyone. It was true, that if he reported that he'd seen Sen, that would lead back to the Abbey, and to the children and the Sisters, all of whom would then end up on his father's torturing slab.

  But it wasn't that. He didn't care about those people any more than a butcher should.

  Still something had prevented him from talking. It was elusive.

  He polished a set of his father's awls and thought about it, looking up at the night sky. Sen had often talked about the Rot, the black hole that would one day come for the world, but there was no place for the Rot in the stories of his people. For them, the half-machine god Awa Babo was both the beginning and the end of the world.

  Was it for that, that he hadn't reported Sen? Some sense of a grander movement at play, in which he would play some significant part? It puzzled and fascinated him at the same time.

  The King's law was clear, and absolute. Yet he hadn't followed it.

  He thought back to Sen's eyes, gleaming from the darkness. They weren't the normal eyes of the criminals the butchers hounded. Those people died for the stupidest reasons; for debts they'd let build up, for frauds they'd committed, for breaking the clearest laws on caste. None of them went to their deaths willingly. None of them showed themselves to the very Molemen coming to carry out their sentences.

  But Sen had. He had taunted Daveron directly, looking right into his eyes, which was strange, because as Daveron looked up at the butchery yard wall, he saw those exact same eyes looking right at him again.

  * * *

  It was easy to climb the butchery yard wall. Sen crouched atop it at the edge, where it abutted the main building, and looked down on an open space floored with sawdust and filled with equipment for torture. There was a large breaking wheel, a half-guillotine, a mobile spike-stand, and numerous wooden stands with braces, one for pitch capping, one for the winding of entrails. It made Sen sick to look at.

  Around the walls were arrayed various weapons; long halberds, battering rams, flintlock rifles. Gathered in one corner were several large iron cannon, stacked beside with metal balls, and sitting meekly in the middle, illuminated by a pool of revelatory light, was Daveron.

  A row of blood-crusted weapons were laid out on a black mat at his feet, a blade was in his hand, half-polished, and his eyes were already fixed on Sen.

  Sen stared back, his heart pounding. He hadn't felt anything specific, no presence in the yard, so Daveron being there confounded him. But, of course, he'd tamped down all his senses, the only way to think clearly surrounded by so much pain, and Molemen had so little emotion they were hard to sense in the best of times.

  Leading to this. For a long moment he didn't move, hoping Daveron would look away, had not really seen him, but he did not. He was looking directly at him.

  "I hadn't thought to see you again, Sen," he said, breaking the stillness between them. "Not after last night."

  Sen's heart hammered. He was wearing his ghasting leathers, the balaclava hid all but his eyes, but still the Moleman had recognized him. He considered running, dropping back into the Belial street and returning to the millinery. His head still throbbed and his balance was weak, leaving him ill-prepared for another escape if the little Moleman was to bring out a bugle and raise the alarm.

  But he couldn't back away now. That would show weakness, and weakness was always a mistake. Daveron had taught him that himself.

  Instead, heart raci
ng, he dropped down into the yard and approached the little Moleman. Daveron had grown and thickened in the past months, laying on muscle beneath his fine downy fur, though his eyes were as still as ever. He wore the red-tubing suit of a fully fealted usury butcher.

  "Hello Daveron," Sen said.

  "I see you're carrying weapons," Daveron answered, ignoring the greeting. "Misericordes, thigh-harnessed. It is such a weapon that killed one of my brothers. Do you intend to use them here?"

  Sen said nothing, only looked down at the seated Moleman. There were a lot of confusing emotions tied up in that death, a lot of things to think through and figure out, but none of that would benefit him now. Daveron showed no sign of emotion, and neither could he. The only way was to attack, and never defend.

  "You made the red. Congratulations."

  Daveron cocked his head to the side, as he always had whenever Sen had asked a question about pain, or his notion of taste, something that made no sense. "I do not think you came here to congratulate me."

  "No, you're right. I need you."

  Daveron regarded him. "That is an odd thing for you to say, especially after the way you have behaved. We are on opposite sides of the law. I am a butcher of the King now, Sen, and owe no debt to you."

  Sen looked down at the weapons by the Moleman's feet. Interleaved amongst them were thin squares of flesh on several ring spikes, carefully carved from living bodies as deposits on payments to be made. It sickened him.

  "This is not about a debt," Sen said. "It's about something bigger, about the King, and the Rot."

  Daveron's eyes narrowed. "Your mother's prophecy, then? I thought it might be, when I saw the name of your infantile posting. You still believe those old stories. Yes, you do, I see it in your eyes. There are treatments for this madness, Sen." He set the rust-dark rag down amongst the tools, and pointed with the half-polished blade. "Slit within the eye, sever the aqueous bridge between the brain's hemispheres. I would perform the procedure, if you wish."

  "I'm not mad, Daveron."

  "Are you not? You have murdered a Moleman as he rendered the King's fealted law. You have posted treason in contradiction of every law on decency that exists. And here, you have entered a butchery yard unlawfully, in dead of night, be-weaponed. Surely you know the extent of your crimes already. Come, it will be painless."

  The Moleman rose, and laid one swarthy hand on Sen's arm.

  Unbidden images beat into Sen's mind, despite the wall he'd put up, of screaming faces, cries for mercy, so much blood and flesh counted like money. In a second he glimpsed a dozen different tortures inflicted with clinical detachment, each carefully curated in a segment of Daveron's mind.

  He jerked away, shocked by the power of the unexpected flow. He hadn't even tried to reach out, but the images had come of their own, so grotesque he felt sick. Blinking, he refocused on the usury yard again, and saw Daveron looking puzzled before him.

  "What was that?" the Moleman asked. He looked down at the blade in his hand. "What did you…?"

  Sen reacted instinctively. With one misericorde he struck Daveron's wrist, dislodging the blade from his grip, while he side-stepped and wrapped the other swiftly round his throat. Daveron had a second only, but no weapon to hand, and this time Sen pressed harder and faster.

  The same sense of failure welled up from Daveron, the same panic Sen had felt alongside the wicker cages the night before, until his breath stopped and he sagged in position. Then Sen slung the Moleman over his shoulder like a sack of posting papers, unclasped the butchery yard gate, and loped into the night.

  * * *

  Daveron came to bound with ropes, in the corner of a dark, mud-floored room lit by one dull revelatory. The air smelled of rancid hay and lime dust, and through the shadows he glimpsed small lights; holes in the wall, leading out to the reddish lamps of the Boomfire. This was somewhere in the Slumswelters edge, perhaps, atop a hill; presumably the place Sen had spoken of several times in the Abbey. The patrols had covered the entirety of that neighborhood, but then Sen was wily, and would have hidden himself well.

  He wasn't hiding now. Sen stood before him, half-naked but for a tight loop of sackcloth about his waist. The myriad white lines of his scarification gleamed menacingly in the dim light. He was only fourteen, but was already taking on the powerful body of a man. He held a single misericord in his hand.

  Daveron strained against the ropes binding him, but there was no slack. He wondered clinically if this was how his captives felt, as they waited for his father's blade to descend. Of course they felt pain, and fear of pain. That was part of the calculation, why the butchering worked so well. Daveron felt none of that, of course, only a curiosity about what would happen next.

  He looked into his captor's eyes.

  "Do you mean to kill me here, Sen?" he asked. "In this place?"

  Sen shook his head. "I hope not. I need you."

  His voice sounded different than before. He'd noticed it in the butchery yard but it was obvious now. Deeper, more assured.

  "If you need me, untie me. I'll hear what you have to say."

  Sen laughed, a bitter sound. "You won't. You already tried to cut my brain in half, like the mogrifers did to Mare. At best you'll report me for what I've done, see me spiked, then go back to your father and your bloody work."

  "You would not be spiked for this crime," said Daveron calmly. "Indentured to Groan, perhaps, but not the spike. At some point you would be remanded by Adjunc, of course, who would flay you alive, and your other crimes would require special consideration, for the full debt to be repaid." He considered the full gamut of tortures Sen would have to undergo. It was extensive. "Still, there is some hope of leniency for those who go to the bracer's yard willingly."

  Sen scoffed. "Leniency. The law affords little of any meaning, wouldn't you say? What fate befell those children you swept up, guilty of no crime? What fate befalls every child born with a mark on its skin? For such marks they die, and that is the whole of your law. It was the same when I was born, and it remains the same now, no matter what I do."

  "It is the King's law, not mine. I merely enforce it, to bring order."

  "It is the Rot's law, Daveron, meant to hasten the end of this world. Is that what you stand for?"

  Daveron narrowed his eyes, as a strange image came into his mind, of a dark creature in a dark space, battling a version of the King who had black blood in his veins. He ground it down beneath his heel. "The Rot? I am no theologian, Sen. I have never cared about your scars, as you know. I stand for order in the city, for reparations and responsibility."

  Sen laughed. "Was it reparations, when your people lathed the skill out of Alam's father, leaving Alam to live or die on the streets? Was it responsibility to cut out Mare's mind that you might better build the Adjunc, only to swear off the actions they take?"

  "I am no mogrifer either. Do not judge me for the actions of all my kind. I am a usury butcher, Sen, and proud to wear the red. There is nothing you can do to make me revoke that. You know pain holds no sway with Molemen. I cannot be moved through torture."

  Sen drew closer, holding up the misericorde spike. "Are you certain of that, Daveron? You have never glimpsed what pain might be?"

  "Of course not," said the Moleman, though now a sliver of doubt crept in, as a new sense crept into him, reeking of failure. He didn't recognize it, didn't know where it was from, so he ground it under his heel also.

  "Then you'll see," Sen said.

  Something large stirred in the shadows beyond him, a figure at the edge of the revelatory glow. Daveron called out. "Who is that? I am a butcher of the red. Failure to release me will result in punishment by proxy upon you and all your family."

  "My family's all dead," came the low, rasping voice of a caste that didn't belong in this place, at this time. "Taken by calcification."

  "That's Gellick," said Sen. "You remember him? One of our friends from the Abbey."

  Daveron ruffled his snout as the Balast stepped forward
into the light. He had grown large and dark.

  "I'm sorry, Daveron," Gellick rumbled. His face pitted with misery, like a victim approaching the spike. "He won't listen to me."

  "Then stop him," said the Moleman sharply. "You have the strength. What he does here is unlawful, and he carries you with him."

  The Balast ground his hands together nervously, filling the room with a rasping sound.

  "Perhaps you should go, Gellick," Sen said. "You won't like this."

  "I'll stay," said Gellick.

  "Then you mustn't stop me," Sen said. "You agree to that?"

  "Stop what?" demanded Daveron, feeling the strange sense growing stronger in him, reaching up into his throat.

  Sen stepped closer, and reached out to touch Daveron's head. "This."

  A flurry of thoughts and sensations washed into him, beginning with the pointless death of a brother butcher in a dark alley, and spreading into shame and failure, through which some new thing crept, blooming like a horrible flower.

  He tried to jerk away from Sen's hot touch on his brow, but the bindings held him, and the flood of foreign feelings kept coming. He saw a black lump torn to oily shreds in a tower, and felt a deeper sense of loss than ever before.

  He fought back, surfacing with a gasp to look into Sen's eyes. Now the sense of this murderous boy somehow filled him; he felt the warm breeze on Sen's bare skin as if it was his own. He felt the cold metal of the spike in his hand, as if he held it in his own paw. His skin tingled with anticipation of what was to come, and for the first time in his life he felt fear, and was powerless to stop it.

  * * *

  Sen recoiled under the banal horrors of Daveron's mind; a black parade of pain arranged in a perfectly ordered catalog, with so many tortures filed away like numbers in a ledger. To Daveron they were each flat and meaningless, but fulfilling in that they represented a work completed, allowing some small measure of pride.

  Sen suffered just to see them. So many screams, so little mercy, and with each he longed for it to end, but each torture had already happened and there was nothing he could do to stop them now.