The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  Back in the millinery, they ate meat roasted on the fire and drank amaranth wine as the dawn sun rose with Saint Ignifer, enjoying alcohol for the first time. The Saint was spreading into the city, and the roots were beginning to form.

  The dark side erupted the next day. Fresh patrols sped through the streets, fresh bonfires blazed, fresh victims were carried in, but thanks to Daveron, Sen knew how to avoid them all.

  They began work on the fourth edition.

  Feyon contributed pieces of Court gossip to break open the system of Dukes and Earls in the Roy. Sen spent hours carving new woodblocks mocking the King, showing him as a squalid spider at the center of the city's web, as a black-eyed jester prancing at the urgings of the Rot, as a kind of Moleman too fat for the red. In fragments they re-told the story and preachings of Saint Ignifer at the Fates of Aradabar, sewing in details from their own lives, and the lives of the other children from the Abbey; Mare, Daveron, Alam and themselves. They shared scraps of news snatched from the wind as Sen walked his routes round the city.

  The law on caste was tightening and imports into the city were being cut by a third. Access to the Bodyswell healers was now limited to castes of Spindle and above. Hundreds of petty criminals, once punishable by minor mutilations, were now being sent to the Manticore to be made into fresh Adjunc.

  So they warned the populace of what was coming. They advised on how best to pacify a Moleman brigade, and how best to shutter their homes against the Adjunc, and offered a simple system of personalized code by which they could discuss the King and his actions directly. They listed the names of those who had been taken, so that they would not be forgotten. They urged the habit of reporting on your neighbors for petty infractions to halt, as the King responded with outlandish force against even the slightest of crimes.

  They tried to build bridges between the castes. Where they could, they brought together castes that had long hated each other, through legends where they achieved greatness together. They pointed out the shifts in casteal law, and listed the many ways bars on cross-caste relations had no place in the past or in the world wider than Ignifer's city.

  They also kept a steady watch on the Rot, reporting on its objective size and growth with every passing paper. With every passing paper, it grew.

  The King fought back, but couldn't stem the flow. Blacksmiths rejoiced as fresh orders for cannon and swords poured in, preparing for broader, stronger raids and a coming uprising. The funding for standing armies was increased, sucking in a crippling tithe from the poorest districts. Sen, Feyon and Gellick worked together in a blur, producing a paper a week and sending out two thousand copies, rising to three thousand, four thousand.

  So the weeks and months passed at a frantic pace, and summer fell into autumn. They bought a brazier and installed it by the hole in the wall, bought more blankets and new winter clothes, and wrote their stories in a warm bubble of revelatory and firelight.

  They soon surpassed every other paper to become the most widely read in the city, distributed in every district from Indura to the Roy, telling stories that inspired, that uplifted, that amused, that cut to the quick of the King's corruption in a way no other paper dared, that openly championed defiance. And every day the King failed to stop them.

  The spiking of all those holding copies of The Saint slowed to a trickle. There were simply too many copies and not enough Molemen, and even the King could not continue to slaughter hundreds daily. The city simmered into the cold of winter and on through to spring, with nightly raids becoming as much a part of life as the acidic messages of The Saint.

  Leather-tubed ghasts carried their editions to the Gutrock, where they left them scattered throughout the ruins and tunnels of Aradabar. Balasts shredded them into the dust of their Hax, and damasks whispered their tales to clients by dim revelatory light. Ogric rickshaw pullers read The Saint as they lazed in their carts between fares, and industrial men in congested bi-rail carriages ate up every line as they jostled for space. Ladies in the Roy read the stories of Cherlyndra and Mare in their genteel adventures together across the oceans, while Spindles, Gawks, and Scabritics read about the escapades of Prince Coxswold on the bi-rails and in their breaks from work. Merchant navvies in HellWest bought up compendium copies printed in bulk chapbooks and carried them out across the Sheckledown Sea, to sell in foreign markets from the Amphemian archipelago to the Ice cities of Hark.

  So it was that the Deadhead Induran Mare came across a bound backlog of The Saint halfway around the world, and knew at once what it was, and what it meant for her.

  MARE III

  For nearly two years Mare roamed the oceans.

  Her first ship out of HellWest docks was the Gleet's Parade, crewed by a sorry troupe of rheumy once-tanners and pearl divers with their wind lost to the scarab. The captain thought her a boy, with her breasts bound tight and her hair cropped short. He took her bribe with a grunt and granted her a position below decks.

  Pulling out of the city under the brace of a sewer-stinking wind, she felt free for the first time in her life. She'd dreamed so long of escaping the city, and finally she had done it. She peered through the cracks of the galley timbers as they left HellWest dwindling behind, like a great bustling clamshell that shrank until it was nothing, and the stench of salt, sweat, and old vomit filled her world.

  The galley-master drunkenly cuffed her, set her to work scrubbing the offal-mired privy decks. She set to it. She was the youngest aboard ship, and the only girl, surrounded by hard and weathered men.

  When the first of them came for her that night, lying in her low-slung hammock at the deck's dark tail, she was ready. She stuck him through the throat as he reached to unlatch his pants. His blood sprayed across her, and she made no effort to avoid it or wipe it away. As he gurgled out his last she walked the deck and stabbed three more men through their throats, men who'd eyed her through the day. She left them to bleed out.

  With the dawn, the captain had her haul the bodies up, then toss them over the edge. The captain had her lashed at the mizzen, but she didn't cry out, kept eye contact with the others in the crew throughout. He didn't kill her, because he was already short-crewed, but he did lean and breathe his whiskey breath on her face.

  "Take any more and I'll have you myself."

  There was nothing more than that though, and no man bothered her again. Each day she worked silent and solitary throughout, each night she lay in her hammock and looked out at the stars through the knot-holes in the hull.

  Months passed, and she saw the lands of the world off the Gleet's Parade bow, from the Great Harms boat-wall off Lymeria Bay to the thorn-choked waters of the Folded Delta. In each new city she went ashore and walked the streets, reveling in the breadth and depth of castes, from the sour tongue-worms of stick-thin Falitrey to the scaly eyes of fatted Alconthropes.

  Then one day the sky turned black. It was the middle of the day, and they were moored off a knotted wreck-barge on the Faldrop Edge. Mare was repairing sail in the underdeck, when screams rang out from above and the light began to dim.

  Mare ran up the gantry deck, and there she stood amongst navvies crying out to the Heart and their mothers, as the black hole in the sky grew. It expanded in pulses, wider and wider, swallowing up the blue sky and clouds, eclipsing the sun, a black so complete that it dizzied the eye. There were no stars and no moon within it, though the darkness itself seemed to churn, shifting with every beat that pushed it further across the sky, like a great mouth forcing its jaws open.

  Men screamed and dived overboard as it swelled, ducked their heads underwater as if that would somehow save them. Others climbed the rigging with their arms flung out, as though welcoming some long absent master.

  Mare knew what it was. Sen had spoken of it, the Rot. She knew what it meant, and merely stood and watched as it spread down toward the ocean, down until it stopped just above the waves, down until it circled them on every side like a second horizon. This was the end of the world, and it could reach
anywhere.

  The blackness lasted an hour, less. In that time she killed a man who came at her hoping for one last tryst. His body fell into the water amidst the others, unremarked. After that the black receded, as though appeased by the sacrifice. It shrank back to a black wound in the sky, though bigger than before.

  The navvies were terrified. They loosed the full sail and fled from the Edge. For days they did not stop speaking of it, pointing to the black hole, whispering about the churn there had been in the dark, the lack of stars, the end of all things to come. At the next dock half the crew fled, racing to dinning bars and scarab dens to sot themselves and tell of what they'd seen.

  The Gleet's Parade took on new navvies, but soon they too heard the rumors. Wherever they went, from the coral-spit towers of Meran to the depths of damask Undulation, the story of the black sky spread, until it grew so fantastic that great tongues had come spitting out of it to crush nearby boats and split the ocean down to the seabed. A thousand men had died, a thousand ships had been sucked up into its maw, and more.

  And there were new stories too, of other places the black sky had spread and bit down, its jaws a solid black wall that cut through the sea and blocked off all passage. Old colonies that lay beyond it no longer existed. Once-profitable trade routes were simply gone. Gradually the Gleet's Parade changed, becoming a place of fearful glances to the sky and the horizon, and any sense of purpose Mare had once felt on leaving HellWest eroded, as each new day gave it the lie.

  There was no escape from the Rot.

  After half a year she changed ship. She stopped caring where they went or why, no longer hoping for some new fate. She simply watched the waves go by, and scrubbed the decks, and watched the sky along with every other navvy.

  Some time in her second year at sea, crewing with a leprous gang of smugglers in a fleet-hulled schooner, the black-masked captain came to her hammock at night.

  "I know you're a lass," he said, kneeling beside her. Her fingers crept to encircle the knife at her chest, as she had before, but the captain held his hands open before him. "Not to fret, girl. I'm not a man to force his gains. Nor will any man of this crew. But should you wish it…"

  He let his voice trail off, then peeled back the black mask. Behind the black was no sign of leprosy, but a face written over with inter-lapping lines, black ink drawn into his skin.

  It reminded her at once of Sen and the stories he'd told. Yet these were not scars, but intricate tattoos, depicting figures and places, maps and beasts, the new inked atop the old, with no speck of skin left unwritten.

  He grinned at her fascination, and the movement of his lips and cheeks pulled the dense patterns into new positions. "My own rebellion," he said. "Now we pass as lepers, as you pass for a boy."

  Mare studied him, wondering what would make a man cover himself so completely in a death sentence. "I knew a boy once, with marks like that," she said. "Though his were carved."

  "Oh aye?" the captain asked absently, slumping to his side. "Perhaps he's the one to save us all, then." Mare said nothing as he went on. "I knew an Induran once. Good woman, she worked hard as any I know. And did she have a lot of love to give?" He chuckled, the sound rich and throaty.

  "Where is she now?" asked Mare.

  He grinned widely. "She gone."

  Then he stood up and left her.

  She went to him later that night. She was sixteen, and it was her first time to be with a man by choice, not for money or influence. By the light of a dim revelatory she saw his whole body, covered in crisscrossing lines.

  "Stories," he told her, "what all I've known, of people and places. Rebellions, every one, against that." He pointed upward.

  "The Rot," she said quietly.

  "And all that it stands for. So we fight every day, in what we are. It's the deepest way there is."

  She drew closer and he took her hand in his, traced her fingers down one of the patterns on his chest, telling as he went about a hero who fought a monster. Across his flat dark stomach the story wove between many others, of how the hero passed through many tests on the long and lonely journey to face his enemy, until the final battle came at last. Then the ink-line reached up to the captain's face, where it split and headed directly into his eyes, within which two circles had been tattooed in gray. The monster was himself, he told her, and so he fought endlessly with the demon inside.

  "What does it mean?" she'd asked.

  He smiled. "Let me show you."

  He took her hands and her body in his own, and showed her how to begin. She'd known this before, many times on the street, but never like this. At first it was gentle, only growing strong as she was ready, and as he moved within her, she felt something strangely familiar, not felt since the Abbey. Odd images rose as they moved together, of sitting around a revelatory in Sen's room and sharing her life, telling secrets she'd never shared with another.

  When it was over, she felt a new kind of understanding which welled up with her tears. For so long she'd been alone. She stroked the captain's flat, kaleidoscope chest, her fingers shivering over the sense every pattern left in her skin.

  "You stay until the dawn," he told her. "Then you go."

  She did.

  The next day the captain instructed the men to take her into the riggings and teach her how to pull the sail. That night she went to his bed again. When they were finished, he spoke quietly into her ear. "One year, my Mare. Then you leave."

  In that year she learnt everything the other navvies knew and more. She learnt the sails and the stars, the sextant, the keel, steerage, she learnt stowing and brewing and hawsers, and when she was alone with the captain, just the two of them nestled in the thin blankets on his hard bed, she learnt the stories of his people, a broken nation built out of the forgotten myths of a vanquished city: Aradabar.

  She traced the patterns across his body, and he stroked her dead head and kissed her hair, and all the while she remembered she had just one year with him.

  The night before they were to dock for the last time, he spoke to her before they took to bed. The ship was rocking gently in the tidal draw, and he took her hand as he so often did, laid it on his bare chest and began to sing.

  Mare didn't know what the song was at first, but slowly she recognized threads from the tales across his body. The hero who had to slay the monster that was himself, the girl who was stolen by the sea and had to fight her way out, the morphic abomination that lived to become the greatest king the world ever knew.

  When he was done he spoke, his voice thick but kind. "You are like me, little Mare. You have no home to hold fast to. I knew this from the moment I first saw you. Is it not so?"

  Mare looked into his tattooed eyes.

  "Perhaps you think the world has cursed you. You were hurt, and your body tells the scar. Perhaps you are angry, but it is only an anger upon yourself. There is no soul to punish for what you are now. You are like the man who must fight the monster within, when the true monster is without."

  He held up a slim black needle in one hand and in the other a pot of deep black ink.

  "We make homes of our bodies," he said, "and we remember our lives by the tales we tell across them. You are not alone in this life, and with ink, your skin will know it. Your heart will read your skin every day, and it too will know that you are not alone, and never will be again. In this way, we stake our claim to life."

  He held the needle for a moment in the open flame of the gas revelatory, then dipped it into the inkpot. The thick liquid sizzled on the hot metal, spitting up a wisp of smoke. Then the gypsy captain braced her palm against his chest, and held the needle so close to the back of her hand she could feel the heat.

  "I will begin your story here," he said. "With this ship, and myself. I will leave the rest to you."

  He pushed the needle into her dark-tanned skin, looped it under, and scraped the ink from the needle-tip inside her.

  The pain was delicious. They had coupled so many times, and there had often be
en a rough exhaustion, a whole-body kind of pain, but this was different. It was sharp and precise, focused in its meaning, in what it meant for her as a future and a past.

  A shiver of pleasure flooded through her body, and her skin tingled as the needle withdrew. With its touch, she abruptly understood that there was more than just endless roaming ahead of her, more than just so many moments strung together. She remembered who she was, who she had been, and realized she had the strength to say goodbye to this captain and move forward alone. She had her whole body to paint, and what remained of her life to do it.

  She gasped with these revelations, and looked into the captain's painted eyes.

  "You begin to see," he said.

  Through the whole night he worked on her, the thin line of their story in words and images from the back of her right hand and up her forearm, across the firm brown of her bicep, over her shoulders and back and on down her left arm, over the hollow at her elbow, to the palm.

  When it was done, she lay on the bed in a rapture. The pain lifted her above any sensation she'd ever felt before, while at the same time she felt absolutely, completely in thrall to him. She knew it was only temporary, and soon she would be alone again, and that made the intensity of the pain even sweeter.

  As the sun rose through the port-holes, they made love for the last time, his body moving against hers in waves that sparked and rejuvenated the line he'd painted within her, a start to her own story, a record of their time together.

  At the dock he bade her farewell without words, he simply held both her hands and squeezed the beginning and end of the line he'd drawn onto her. She felt the pain mingle with his touch, sealing the memories in. Then he was gone.

  That night she lay in a dockside inn and stroked the line of memories he'd left. Her skin was angry red, but she touched it over and again like a viol, to bring the pain to the surface.

  The next day at breakfast she saw a compendium copy of The Saint, in the hands of a navvy in his cups, and knew what it was at once.