"What ails you?"
He had no answer.
"Ague," he tried. "In the bones."
His father looked more closely at his son. Daveron was fourth of a litter of seven, and received no special dispensation, though he had been first to acquire the red. His father had shown pride in the past, but ague was a sign of weakness, as was any.
"Ague is a matter of the mind," his father simply said. "Do your duty by the King."
He tried. He pushed the knife onto the Scabritic's skin. It couldn't even scream, as they had it so firmly bound. It was only a sliver of knuckle, nothing too debilitating, only a second-tier shaving, but still he could not bring himself to press the knife through.
He couldn't stop remembering the pain Sen had forced onto him. He felt it trembling through his middle in nauseating waves. At last, with his father staring so hard he could feel the shame thickening between them, he completed the slice, then vomited to the side.
His father barked with disgust.
"Get out."
Closeted in the accountancy rooms, Daveron sweated furiously over old slivers to be organized and patrol shifts to be aligned. There was a lot of preparation to do, after the slaughter of their brother in Carroway. The flyposting children were already being questioned by his brothers and by the other prime butcheries, so their screams rang round the usury yard. Daveron could barely focus for the tremors rippling through him and the sweat pouring down his face.
It's only the ague, he tried to tell himself. His stomach somersaulted and he gagged, and the chills took him, and he wondered again and again why he hadn't yet told his father about Sen's den in the Slumswelters, and The Saint, and all the things that had been done.
But he did not, not that morning and not in the afternoon, when his father admitted him to attend a gutbusting. Yet here the effect on him was worse still, and he could not even swing a bat once. The shame heaped up and made the sweats and chills worse. His father watched with mounting disbelief as he stood before a captive Ratfer, late on his scarab-debt, and could not even hold the blatting cudgel without trembling uncontrollably.
"You wear the red," was all his father could say, as if wearing the red and failing to torture were utterly incongruous. Of course, he was right. It had never happened before. Now it was happening to his son, and to him. "This is intolerable."
Daveron didn't try to explain, not how it felt, not his fear of the pain or the sense of the pain in others. No Moleman had even been so afflicted, and if it were widely known it would lead to the family being pilloried, cast down from their prime position, and perhaps even hung on the spike for disobedience to the King's law.
That night his father came to him again, dragging an infant Ratfer, one of the few not yet dead from the catchment the previous night. He was burned and scarified already, missing an eye, and his father threw him on the floor before Daveron while he squatted at his ledger work.
"No Moleman has ever broken the covenant of the red," his father said. "No matter your sickness, you cannot relinquish the King's trust. Do what must be done."
He tried to beat the infant around the head. He tried with a chain and a knife, then with a brand and a flail, but with every one he failed. No matter how hard he tried, he could not force himself to cause more pain. Each time he even handled a tool of torture he would break out in sweating and nausea, as the memories of what Sen had done rose afresh.
He begged his father for more time, hoping this 'ague' would fade, but it did not. The next day it was the same, and the same after that. If anything his revulsion toward pain grew worse, and so his father's demeanor changed. There had never been love between them, as there was no sense of love in Molemen, but there had been pride in his accomplishments and how early he'd earned the red.
That pride died. His father set him in the ledger room, to work at cataloguing all their oldest debt flesh-records. But now even touching those brittle, dried-out mementos of pain sent shivers of memory through Daveron that incapacitated him, left him gagging. By night he had nightmares of the chair in the Slumswelters ruin, with Sen glaring back at him, spikes raised. The screams from the butchery pealed in his dreams, and the memory of pain only grew stronger as time passed.
When his father came to offer him a final chance, Daveron could only drop to his knees and beg for understanding. His father looked at him with a smile of contempt.
"You are no longer my son. You will clean the yard and the equipment, such as you are able, and work the ledgers of patrol as though un-fealted. Fail in even that, and I will kill you myself rather than suffer the disgrace. Do you understand?"
Daveron nodded meekly. To work only on paper ledgers was a great disgrace already. It was the work given to children, as yet not trusted enough to wield a blade. No butcher of the red had ever been relegated so completely.
His father spat. "And in my home, take off the red. You do not deserve to wear it."
That was the last time his father spoke to him.
* * *
Two weeks passed. Daveron's life became an endless drudgery of shame. The work was a shame, and the nightmares were a shame, and his brothers were all ashamed of him, so their shame at his presence became his own deep, inner pain.
He had let them all down. He had failed them in the worst possible way.
Then Sen returned.
Daveron was at work in the yard by night, setting machinery to rights and polishing equipment. It was hard even for him to clean the blood from used blades, but he steeled himself and did it, lost in the misery.
This time he did not see Sen at the wall, nor creeping across the sawdust, nor even standing immediately before him in the dim revelatory glow. He had eyes then only for his own suffering, and all he had lost.
"I did not know it would do this," came the voice.
Daveron recognized it at once. It brought a shudder of fear, that he had come to repeat the tortures that had started this. At the same time, he simply did not care. He had been pushed too far already, beyond his tolerance. If Sen were to torture him more, or kill him, then perhaps that would make things simpler. He would like to surrender, now.
"Sen," he said, looking up. The boy wore his ghasting leathers, but with his hood unfurled, so the scars of his face stood out. Such was his arrogance. "What you have done to me…"
He trailed off. There was no means of conveying the way he felt, not to this boy.
"I see it," Sen said, "and I am sorry for it. You were always fair with me. The world has not been fair with you."
Daveron felt torn between laughter and tears. To speak of the world in such a casual way was crippling. The world had done nothing to him but show him respect and give him a valued role. It was Sen that had taken those things away. And yet, he could not help see a glimmer of something true.
His caste now damned him, for facets of himself that he could not change. He was trapped, perhaps for life, in a role of perpetual shame. He would never wear the red with pride again. He could not even die without bringing greater shame on his family name. He had only to endure. And was that solely Sen's responsibility?
"The world," he said, every syllable sucking what little strength he had away. "Your world."
"The King's world, Daveron. Here." He held something out, and Daveron, despite his exhaustion, flinched. But it was not another misericorde, but only a roll of paper. Reed paper, just like his postings.
"This is your rag," Daveron said.
"Read it," said Sen. "I can wait."
Daveron wanted to spurn him. He wanted to throw the paper in his face. But what he wanted did not matter now. That which was necessary, and had to be done, was all he had now. So he took the paper, and unfurled it. The title line remained the same, but now there was a number appended beneath it.
#2
And a new headline: 'Molemen – the King's rats.'
He chuckled at that. "You seek to belittle us."
"Read it," Sen said. So Daveron did.
It said thin
gs he hadn't thought of before.
'Imagine a caste of such great genius,' it began, 'that they can mogrify the very trees of the land and bodies of its people to their whims. Imagine a caste of such intricate brilliance that they can lathe the living skill from minds and implant it into the remade bodies of the dead. Imagine a caste so gifted that they can build entirely new creations, with the ability to pull a plow without growing weary, or create a living sewery of interwoven roots and branches, or construct unheard of means of healing and efficiency that the Bodyswell could use to keep plagues entirely at bay.
'Imagine a world shifted under their steady, righteous hands. Imagine streets patrolled with as much forbearance as faithfulness to a set of steady, equitable laws. Imagine a city freed of torture and the immeasurable and squalid taint of this frivolous, jealous King of ours, named Aberainythy of the Roy, and open your eyes to a new possibility.
'Open your eyes to the Molemen of our city, and see in them not the things they have become, but only their great potential.
'See that the Molemen should not be our enemies. They should be our fairest arbiters and brightest inventors. They should not be our fragile, desperate King's hammer, but the fine-tuned hammer of creations to ease and improve every citizens' life.'
Daveron stopped reading and looked up. Near every word of the paper was treasonous. The punishments heaped up by the sentence, and made his mouth dry. To even suggest a caste have capabilities wider than its remit was a crime punishable by the most painful death. To repeat that claim again and again, and to insult the King so completely in the process, would make for a drawn-out, living death the likes of which Daveron had never seen before.
"Keep reading," Sen said.
Daveron read on, even as his hands trembled.
'Yet this is not the role his Molemen play. Instead of turning our gaze up to the light of greater things; health, wealth, security and tradition, they gouge out our eyes and strim off our flesh for a few farthings of debt. Instead of using their capacity to grow this city and this land, they grind the rest of us into the dirt, and grind themselves in the process, for the greatest prisoners of the King's foul law on caste are the Molemen themselves.
'They lock into themselves his unctuous bidding as their greatest deliverance. They raise their sons and daughters within a prison of shame from which there can be no escape, and force them to fashion their own fetters with a lifetime of cruelties done.
'Imagine a Jalopy goose with all its white feathers plucked, wading beneath the weight of an immense black stone, and crowing out its pride to so carry its burden. Imagine a roaming Dielle with its legs cut away, left to tumble and roll over the plains like a boulder-weed, claiming pride at how swiftly it can roll. These are the Molemen of this city, so broken by the rule of their King.
'So I say to you, my brothers and sisters of the red: Look away from the shackles he has placed upon you. The time is coming to rise up against the chains that bind you. Rise up against the King that breaks your hearts and your minds before you have a chance to think for yourselves. Rise up for Awa Babo, that great patron lord of the Mjolnir ancients, who raised a glorious federacy from their ingenious inventions, and built the very Aigle palace our King now sits within. Rise up for Saint Ignifer, who stood with Awa Babo against the rot when the time came. Rise up and take the shining role that is rightfully yours.'
Daveron stared at the paper. It was hard to think. He'd never read anything like it in his life. In all his tortures, he'd never heard such utterings said aloud. Open rebellion. A naked claim to the self-interest of a caste. A statement that anything should be rightfully given.
And Awa Babo? The Mjolnir Federacy? It rewrote the history of the Molemen as not one of servitude and obedience, but one of true greatness. It brought tears to his eyes with a swelling sense of confusing pride.
He looked up, and there stood Sen. This was far beyond boyish exuberance and a desire to push back at the Sisters that had raised him. This wasn't foolish immaturity and a desire to stand in the brightest light at all times. This was a civil war in the making.
"How can you-?" he began, but didn't know how to finish. The chaos that would ensue, after this? His brothers would beat the city bloody for months, hunting for the press that produced it. He fought for his voice. This had to be stopped. It had to end now, lest hundreds die, or thousands.
"You must not post this, Sen. It is absolute foolishness. The greatest foolishness."
"I already have," said Sen. "Two hundred copies across the dark side, and more tomorrow. The call for patrols will go up soon, I think. What I need from you is a warning. Where will your people strike, and when will they come to us?"
Daveron's mouth opened and closed. He couldn't breathe. The stakes had just shifted immensely. Two hundred already posted? The King would do everything in his power to quell the flow of this paper. Everything possible. There had been thirty Molemen per district on that first night, now there would be mobilization of them all. The tortures to come would be legion.
"I can't project-" he began, then made himself stop. For a moment he'd been about to actually share some of what he knew, but he couldn't do that, it simply wasn't possible. "I will not tell you. I will not send my brothers to their deaths, at the hands of a murderer."
Sen shook his head. "Did you not read the paper, Daveron? I believe what I wrote. Truly, I do. I've seen it in you, and I see it now. The way the King uses your people is abhorrent. I want to change it. Maybe you don't understand that now. You're still grieving for what little you've lost, so you can't see how much you've lost just by being born in this city, under this King. And you think I want to trap your brothers?"
"You killed one already! How can I trust anything you say?"
Sen let out a slow, sad breath. "I did not mean to. I am deeply sorry for it. I only meant to save the children, taken in my stead. Did you see the children, Daveron? Did you partake in the torture of those innocents, so commanded by your King? Tell me that was right, and equal, and just. Tell me that was a case of following the law."
Daveron couldn't. Of course he couldn't. It had sickened him, and would have sickened him even if it were not for Sen's tortures that had ingrained him with a sense of pain. He had seen the effect of it upon his brothers and sisters. There was no law that mandated death by torture for the trivial crime of flyposting. There was no existing justification, and it was a crime in itself, against propriety and rectitude.
Yet they had done it, because the King had ordered it done, and so the new law was set. In that, Sen was right. They were the hammers of the King, driven not by ideals but by blind obedience. What did that mean?
"I-"
"Where will they strike?" Sen asked. "Tonight, and tomorrow, and the days and nights to come? When will they come to us, and where can we go to avoid their paths?"
Daveron's mouth battled with his mind. The shame piled up and confused him, mixing with the paper clutched in his fist, until he could not take it anymore. He couldn't think, and he couldn't trust, and he could not abide the deaths of so many just for a few scant words.
His own family would be shamed and slaughtered, if the whole truth were to come out. Every Sister in the Abbey would die. Feyon and her family, Mare, Gellick, Alam, all would die, along with everyone they knew. The excision would be total and complete, and how could he allow it? How was that right?
He squeezed the paper. He looked his torturer in the eye. Then he told him what he wanted to know. He knew it from his plans, the main role he'd come to play in his father's prime butchery yard, coordinating all the yards in Belial.
He told Sen what the raids would likely be, and when. He told him the patterns, and where the gaps were to avoid detection. And when he was done, and for a long time after Sen was gone, he remained there with his mouth open, staring up at the sky, where the engorged black disc of the Rot hung like a father to the moon, and wondered what he had become.
A caste-traitor. Lower than Unforgiven. Nothing and nob
ody at all.
And he knew that Sen would come back, and ask the same thing, and that he would help him again.
FEYON II
The next day the city burned.
The Molemen came out in force, along with the Adjunc, in raids that encompassed the whole sweep of the city, from the rarefied climes of the Roy to the grimiest depths of the Manticore. They broke open suspect buildings and churned out suspect castes, they snatched up known flyposters and pamphleteers, paper merchants and press smiths, until the HellWest frigate spikes groaned with the suffering weight of their dying bodies.
Great bonfires stood at street corners and in Grammaton Square, where troughs full of seized paper went up in belching clouds of smoke. Iron contraptions that resembled presses were wrenched out of homes and business and smelted down on the cobbles, here a clothes mangle, there a device for thinning out dough.
Sen went abroad with care, peeking from sump heads and off the edge of bi-rail mounts, watching the ordered chaos creep outward like a battle line. People were dying, and it hardly seemed to matter who they were. Any infraction became sufficient, as old grudges were settled in a great letting of blood.
He watched as a collection of tongues was made throughout the claggy puddles of Indura, of those who were suspected of speaking The Saint's name or repeating its slanders, and hammered to a post in Spitstock Square. In the Boomfire damasks were rolled down the street wrapped in slow-burning rugs, on suspicion of passing along copies of The Saint between their many lovers. Everywhere the law on caste was enforced with a blistering rigor, so that Caracts caught a foot outside the docks, or Bellyheads wearing a hint of purple, or Exemious found abroad without a Bodyswell slip were treated with the full, crushing weight of the law.
The violence continued into the night, as Sen and Gellick loaded Shellaby into the cart they'd bought three days earlier and fled into the damp shadow of the wall at Flogger's Cross. Daveron's warnings proved true, as the Molemen followed a previously set pattern. Some time around four by the Grammaton, they left the Cross and went underground on the Heckatoa bi-rail, passing beneath the raid as it went by above, returning to the millinery with the dawn.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 33
