The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  Sen.

  She palmed the copy easily and read through it in a dimly lit dinning bar, from the open screeds against the King, the war for all castes, interspersed with teachings of the Saint and even tales of two sisters, Caraly and Mare, who traveled the oceans together, and Prince Coxswold, and Awa Babo.

  And she understood. This was Sen's rebellion. It was the beginning of something, a place where she could play a part, and a way to fight the Rot that had bounded all her life.

  In three months, jumping ships at port whenever it served her goal, she reached HellWest. During the voyage she added to her tattoo with makeshift needles and ink, branching it outward like black veins across her skin, telling the stories of her life on the streets, of her life on the seas, of the Rot descending from the sky above.

  She knew as she stepped into the hot bustle of her old city, that if she were caught by Adjunc they would tear all her stories away. She welcomed that fear, because it made her strong. She knew too where she might find Sen, the ruin in the Slumswelters that his mother had taken them both, but when she went to find him there, there was no sign.

  At the Abbey, the Abbess wept to see her. She spread her arms and her wings wide and pulled Mare into an embrace tighter than any the captain had bestowed.

  Yet she did not know where Sen was, could only tell Mare he'd last gone to the Slumswelters and the others, to gather them all in. As they said farewell at the Abbey gates, the Abbess saw for the first time the tattoos hidden beneath Mare's long sleeves.

  She smiled. "I think you're happy, now," she said. "Much more than you ever were."

  Mare rolled down the sleeve, not because she was ashamed of her markings, but because she was too proud. Still, she met the Moth Abbess' smile.

  "I am," she said.

  She went to Alam first. She waited for him in the street outside his scrivener's dormitory, but when he saw her he looked away. She said his name but he refused to acknowledge her.

  "Why are you not with Sen, Alam?" she called after him. "Come with me."

  He gave no answer, so she did not persist. That night resting in a broken scarab shack on the Levi banks, she tattooed the feel of the city onto her skin, woven within her story.

  Next she went for Gellick, but found all of Coxswold Street in the Calk a wasteland of pounded white lime, the houses demolished to make room for the expanding grindyards, and there were none nearby who remembered him. Next she went to the fringe of the Roy, for Feyon, but did not dare enter. An Induran Deadhead covered in tattoos would never make it beyond Gilungel Bridge.

  At last she went to Daveron, at his father's butchery yard in Belial, and found something she had not expected at all.

  DAVERON III

  Life went on for Daveron, as intolerable as ever.

  No one spoke to him and no one listened to him, apart from Sen, and every time he handed over troop movements or patrol plans to Sen, he felt sick. The work his family did made him sick. The weapons he cleaned made him sick. Talking to Sen was the only thing that kept him sane, but it also made him more of a traitor every time, and more broken inside.

  Time passed, and every day brought a deeper misery. He read The Saint sometimes, looking for something to hold onto, but found little. It was too much to change, and too much to lose. For his whole life he'd believed one thing about Molemen, and himself, and his role in the red. It had all been so simple.

  Now he was nothing. At night he was nothing. In the day he was nothing. The pathetic sense of gratitude he felt when Sen came only made the rest of the week worse.

  Week after week of nothing stretched before and behind him. The words of The Saint became a blur, as his family and his people exploited the law further at the King's direction. They saw it was wrong, but they adjusted. Daveron could not join them in that shift. The laws they enforced came to seem more and more like crimes themselves, which in time made him question the legality of the laws they'd always enforced.

  Was it really fair to murder a man for his debts? Was it really wise to mutilate for the sake of money?

  The Saint gave clear answers, but they only served to cloud Daveron's thinking, mixed as it was with the memories of that awful night. Nothing was clear, and only grew more murky as the months passed. He envisaged his life stretching on, forever a traitor, and accepted the role.

  It was a kind of duty. He lost track of whether it was fear that compelled him, or some twisted sense of grievance, or some strange new morality. What were laws, and what were crimes?

  He took pride in nothing. He existed, and he worked, but none of it mattered. Every day he half-expected to see Sen hung from a spike. It wouldn't make him happy now, wouldn't come as any kind of relief, it would just be another featureless hump on the Gutrock waste of his days.

  Only then he would be truly alone. So he started to fear it too. The depths to which he sank disgusted him, but his new emotions had control in ways he could not control. Sometimes at night he wept with the fear, silent and huddled in his blankets, lest his father hear.

  The shame of it was too intense. The waves that came from within were too cruel.

  He was not a Moleman anymore, but some new kind of thing, a breed of Unforgiven with his body out of his control. Though he wore the red yet, when inspectors came and other butchers visited the yard, he never wore it righteously. It took every effort he had to wear it and not visibly tremble.

  It stood for everything he no longer could be. It meant pain, and he did not want any more pain.

  Then Mare came.

  She entered the usury yard in darkness, just like Sen, while he was at work sweeping the grit floor. He didn't notice her until she stood before him, and took his paws in her hands.

  It was a shock. He hadn't been touched for a year. Then to look up into those eyes, into the sunken half of her face that had been mutilated by his people, brought the sickness and shame right to the surface. Just looking at her was pain, and he dreaded the revenge that would surely follow.

  But she had changed, and no blows came. Her skin was deeply tanned, her Deadhead covered in a thick layer of flowing black hair, and her eyes shone brightly as they ran across his face, down the white tubing he wore. He pulled his paws weakly back and balled them at his waist, ashamed of how far he'd fallen.

  "You're looking for Sen," he said. His voice sounded strange. He hadn't spoken to any one except Sen for a long time. "He's in the Slumswelters somewhere." He looked down at the floor, waiting for her to leave.

  But she didn't leave. Instead she touched his chin, lifted his snout, and looked into his eyes. There were strange dark lines inked across her cheeks; tattoos that would get her skinned by the Adjunc in a second. "I came for Sen," she said, her voice warm where once it had been curt and mocking, "but now I'm here. I want to know what he did to you. You're different, Daveron. What happened?"

  He had never valued warmth before. His father had always been direct, and he'd admired that, it was the way of Molemen. But now her warmth stirred the sickness inside him, only making him weaker.

  He pulled his face away. "Nothing. This is no place for you, marked as you are. The law has changed. Go away."

  "I go where I will, Daveron." She laid her hands upon his shoulders, stirring the warmth further and forcing him to look at her. "Now tell me."

  The weakness rose up and became hot in his eyes. He could not resist it, stronger than he'd ever felt before. So it was a surrender, but hadn't he surrendered a thousand times already? Let it be his cry for help, even from an old enemy. So the tears spilled from his eyes, and he told her what Sen had done to him, about his father's revulsion and his loss of the red, and a year of being rejected within his own home and his own skin.

  At the end she wrapped her arms around him. She stroked his head, and he found he let her, expecting at any moment a dagger to fall. Let it. He wanted it to, if he had fallen so far that her touch meant anything to him at all.

  But it did mean something, and no dagger fell. It was weakness
to want such mercy, to hunger for such tenderness, but he wanted it more than anything, and to deny that would hurt even more. He wept and she kissed his cheek, until at last she pulled away with determination and something like anger in her eyes. "I think you should come with me. There's nothing for you here."

  "I have to stay," he muttered. "Sen needs me-"

  She ignored him, and spoke over him. "We'll go to Sen together. I'll be the judge of what he needs."

  She took him by the paw, and to his surprise, he followed.

  * * *

  He told her where to go, but they did not go there at once.

  Rather they went to a cheap dinning bar on a small Boomfire side street off the docks, surrounded by the sound of damasks groaning hard at work through the thin walls, where no record would be kept of their caste. They hunched over warm meat soup and corned-beer at a rough-hewn wooden table in the dirty shadows. Cheap candles burned in hanging-pots, fuming the air with the musky smell of fake topaz, barely covering the stench of vomit, rotten wood, and sex.

  Mare told him of her life at sea, all the things she'd seen. Daveron listened, and ate without speaking. When they were finished they went back to their room. There was only one bed, a yellow-stained blanket loosely draped over a mattress of sheeted musty hay. Daveron insisted Mare take it, and she did not resist.

  In the dark of night, as the passionate cries of damasks all about warbled like a chorus of morning fetchlings, she went to him. She knelt by his side and touched her fingers to his bristly face.

  "He hurt you," she said, barely a whisper.

  He tried to speak, but found the weakness rising in his throat.

  "I know pain," she went on, and lifted his paw to her head. Slowly, she worked his stubby fingers into the mass of twisted dark hair, to the hot skin over her brainpan, where once he'd struck her. The memory of that pain rose in his throat, though something new rose up within it, quelling the nausea. He stared up at her in wonder, feeling things he'd never felt before, while she rubbed his fingertips against the soft contours of her head.

  "I know how it changes you, makes you afraid," she went on. "I once hated you and your kind more than any of them. But not any more."

  "I won't feel it," he whispered, as she began to pick at the fastenings of his white tubing.

  "I know," she soothed, pulling his tube-suit open. "I know you won't, but you need this. And I want to."

  He'd never been so close to a woman before, at least not like this. All he knew about it was what he'd seen of his father, who visited damasks with the other usury-men in his employ, bucked and heaved in a kind of senseless ritual, neither enjoying it or not enjoying, just doing another work to be done.

  He gulped, clearing the hot block in his throat. "I don't know what to do," he whispered. "I'll do it wrong."

  "There is no wrong." She slid a bare leg over his tightly muscled body, rising to straddle him. "It's just you and me."

  He looked up at her, barely able to distinguish her face in the dim orange streetlight fading through the ragged drawn curtains. She leaned in to kiss his velvety cheek, and ran her fingers along the line of his snout, back up over his soft forehead.

  "I want to," she said again.

  He reached up to support her back, and she arched into his touch. He felt nothing as they began, though he sensed her touch as a clinical thing, felt her warm breath on his gray-furred skin. His breath did not quicken, nor did he groan or gasp, as did she.

  Then something changed. As she touched him, her body painting his with her strength and scent, the memory of her fit welled up within him, though now it blurred into something new as they moved together. He touched her and thought for a terrifying, startling moment he could really feel her. He stroked her back and kissed her hands, and the sense grew stronger and firmer, building like the Grammaton tolling to clarity, carrying him forward on a rising tide until by the end he was gasping and crying and alive in a way he'd never felt before, just as she was in his arms.

  "You feel it," she said, breathy and full of wonder, running her fingers down his cheek. "You feel me."

  They lay together through the night. She did not return to the bed.

  Three days later, after more long nights at each other's side, slowly learning each other's body in the dark, they went back to the millinery.

  MILLINERY IV

  Sen, Gellick and Feyon were there now, after spending the last three weeks on the move, barely staying ahead of the patrols. They were working on the next edition, as always. They had long since used up all the ideas they could think of, exhausting anything relevant from the Books of Airs and Graces, insulting the King in every imaginable way, breaking down every caste and remaking them in a new image, adapting every fairy tale Feyon had invented about Cherlyndra and every permutation of Prince Coxswold.

  Now every hour was a fight for engaging ideas, in between running around the city and through the sewers in their Ogric cart, evading raids. They barely slept, and when they did it was only to dream of endlessly shuffling words on paper, and endlessly moving between any one of the seven safe houses they maintained.

  Day by day both were getting harder.

  Then Mare and Daveron came.

  They walked into the millinery print room unobserved. Their footsteps on the stairs meant nothing to the three of them, so deeply buried were they in debate. Only when Mare cleared her throat, and Daveron said hello, did they look up and realize what was happening.

  Sen stared.

  Before him stood two figures as if from a strange dream; Daveron in his white tubing, with Mare right there beside him, wearing long Induran sleeves with a plague scarf across her face. She wasn't showing much of her face, but he'd recognize those eyes and that sunken head anywhere. He'd never expected to see her again. He'd written about her so many times, under so many guises in The Saint, that she'd come to feel like a character only, a figment he'd imagined in some distant life.

  But here she was.

  Feyon rose to her feet first, pulling Sen to join her, even as Gellick was looking back and forth between the four of them in bafflement, as the silence between them lengthened. "Sen," he said uncertainly. "It's Mare? Mare and Daveron. From the Abbey?"

  "Welcome," Feyon said, recovering first and spreading her arms. "Welcome to you both."

  Sen nodded. Were Mare and Daveron holding hands? He didn't know what to say at all, but he had to say something. "Welcome, of course. And I know, Gellick. It's just, Mare." He grinned at her. Two years had passed, but now that she was standing here in this same place where she'd first given him his misericordes, it felt like no time had gone by at all. "I can't believe you're here."

  Mare smiled back. "I saw your paper on the Avernal coast. You got a few details wrong about me, so I had to come."

  His eyes widened, even as he felt the weight of so many strange memories pouring off her, the myriad things she'd seen fuming like rich topaz smoke in the air. "Avernal? That's the other side of the world."

  "You've acquired a long reach." She nodded round at the hall; the floor covered in papers, the iron bulk of the steam-press in the middle. "Is this where you print it?"

  It took Sen a moment to understand what she meant. "What, The Saint? No. We used to, just sample copies." He tapped Shellaby. "Now we have several printworks outside the city. We barely stay ahead of the Molemen as it is, thanks to, well, Daveron…" he trailed off as his eyes met the little Moleman's, gimlet black and gazing back at him.

  He'd last seen Daveron a week earlier. He'd seen him every week for nearly a year, and throughout that time he'd watched him sink deeper into misery, and selfishly done nothing to stop it. He couldn't. He'd needed Daveron where he was.

  Now Daveron was here, and there was something very different about him. He could feel the change in the air; he wasn't broken any more. Was that because of Mare? It didn't make sense. She'd always hated the Molemen worst, because of what the mogrifers did to her, but now they were standing next to each other and y
es, they were holding hands. Daveron felt like a whole different kind of caste; exhibiting a glow he'd never felt in a Moleman before.

  "Are you…?" he began awkwardly. "I mean, what did you…?"

  Feyon stepped forward, cutting him off. "I want to apologize," she said, looking at them both. "For calling the Adjunc to the Abbey. For how I was, before."

  Mare smiled at her, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the Blue girl. Feyon gave a little gasp. Sen was surprised too. In all their Abbey days Feyon had never touched Mare before, had probably never even touched a caste from south of the River. But it took only a second for her to embrace her in return.

  "It's all right," Mare said. "Truly. I've seen such things in the world that anything you did became very small. And of course, we've been sisters on adventures for years now." She winked.

  Feyon stepped back, with tears shining in her eyes. Her jaw opened but no words came out for a moment as she plainly tried to calculate what to say.

  "Drinks!" she settled on at last. "We need a toast."

  She strode off to their storage chest in the hall, ready at all times for a speedy flight on the cart, and made clanking sounds as she rooted around. Sen looked from her to Mare, mind racing with all the things he might say, though not certain he should say any of them.

  Mare chuckled. "You look like a stuck fish. Can't figure out if you're dead or alive."

  He laughed. "I feel it."

  "Landed yourself a rich one, too," Mare added, nodding toward Feyon. "Homemaker, I think."

  Sen felt his cheeks burn. "We're not… I mean, we haven't…"

  Mare chuckled. "I know just what you are. Or what you will be." She laid a hand on Daveron's shoulder. "Like us."

  "So you are…? I mean…"

  Mare chuckled throatily at his discomfort.

  "Be nice, Mary," said Daveron. She tweaked his ear, then stroked it better.

  Feyon came back, handing out cups and pouring amaranth wine while babbling a Roy host's inanities about the bottle's fine year and provenance.