The last of their guerilla fighters had retreated behind the rubble walls. Their days of harrying the King's advance were over, as the Molemen bastions had inched within striking range, and their cannon were in position and ready for a fusillade.
It would be soon. Everywhere was abuzz with rumor, fear, excitement, and anticipation, for the grand battle to come, for the spreading dark of the Rot in the sky, blanking out the light, and for the dreamed-of coming of Saint Ignifer. In the hot and sweaty furniture-walled halls and streets of the barricades, people prayed, planned, and honed their makeshift weapons. In annexed school rooms Scabritics and Bellyheads discussed in hushed tones how best to kill Adjunc. In a bakery's shelled-through wall Spindle metalsmiths teamed with Ratfers to prepare stolen cannon. In a hutch made of broken bed frames Appomatox squatted in damp corners with Febriles to divvy up the looting to come. Everywhere thoughts of the Saint reigned supreme, and all eyes turned to the dormant volcano on the horizon, where the scarred boy who would save them all had gone to battle the Rot.
A heavy, staticky fog hung in the air, charged with the thickness of rising summer dust, with war and a coming thunderstorm, with the pregnant crackle of swelling belief, marking everything as a prelude to the Saint.
It would be soon. Blood would flow in the streets, and men and women now squatting side by side would be killing and dying on the cobbles. The Rot would widen its jaws to seal out the sky, and the Saint would rise or not rise, and on the strength of both the city would either live or die.
In the last hours of daylight on the last day, Alam and Gellick prepared the last order of The Saint, timed to the day and hour Sen had set, while Mare, Feyon, and Daveron waited and watched in silence. They were all sweat-drenched, stinking of ash and ink, tar and the sewer, looking up at the map of their attack sprawled across the millinery ceiling.
Everything was going to change. Gellick cranked the press, and the final copies churned out under the Saint's banner. Feyon and Mare collected their copies, set them carefully in their bags, and for a long moment they all stood in silence together, respecting a kind of silent communion.
"Remind me again what this is all for," Alam said.
Only Mare laughed.
They'd barely spoken throughout the week, falling into easy rhythms as clear as they had ever been in the Abbey, when they'd first helped Sen dig up his mother's grave.
"All the lines are in place," said Daveron, his voice strangely loud after the silence. "I can manage Gilungel Bridge. After that it's a charge through infantry to the palace."
"Indura can handle infantry," Mare said.
"And the Calk?" Feyon asked, turning to Gellick.
The Balast nodded. He'd left the millinery once to go there with a crate of special copies of The Saint, coming back silent and covered in lime-dust.
"You're sure?"
"As Prince Coxswold," he rumbled.
Alam looked at his friend, at them all; pale and exhausted faces on crooked, worn-out bodies. Together they would storm the King's Aigle. It was madness, but they all knew that. Even Sen had known it.
In the last three days he'd felt himself changing. Hard walls he'd erected for years had come tumbling down; against caste, against the hierarchy of districts, against perceptions of rank as a system you could be born into. There were only so many bad jokes about stupid rock cakes he could take, and still feel angry at Sen and his plan. He and Gellick had even played Cuttlebones a few times, in brief furloughs.
"I think we're about even now," the Balast had occasionally mused while he was turning the press, hours after he'd lost every game, bar the few Alam had given to him. "Don't you think so?"
He couldn't stay angry faced with that.
"So this is it," he said. "We go."
"I think we drank all the amaranth already," Feyon said.
Mare winked. "We'll have one in the Aigle. The good stuff."
They said their goodbyes. Alam hugged Daveron, then Mare, then Gellick. The Balast squeezed him so tight he could hardly breathe.
"Do it right," he whispered in Alam's ear. "Like your father taught you."
Then they were gone, leaving only Alam and Feyon behind.
"You and me, at the end," she said. She was more beautiful than she'd ever been, now, though she was filthy and streaked with dirt.
"Sen's lucky," he said, letting go of the last of whatever jealousy there'd been between them. "I'm happy for you both."
She leaned in and kissed his cheek. It was a delight. "You always deserved better."
Then she took his hand, and together they left the pressroom behind. He would die tonight, he was certain of that. There was no other way to do what Sen had asked of him. But at least he would go proud, and with his friends.
* * *
It was evening on the last day, and Sen stood at the mountain's peak looking back over the spread of the world. The Rot almost touched the horizon now, with few stars skirting its edges. It felt like he could reach up and smear its inky blackness with a finger.
Down below spread an ocean of smoke clouds, dark as tar, masking the world he'd lived all his life within. This was the city, burning. Through occasional gaps in the cover he glimpsed fragments of his old world, so very far away. A piece of the Levi. A hint of HellWest.
Underfoot, tufts of hot sulfuric steam gusted up through cracks in the rock, blowing a stinging dust into his eyes despite the balaclava pulled down tight. The last of the snow had petered out hours ago, left behind as he neared the mountain's volcanic peak, replaced by hot bare dirt and stone. Even the air itself was baking and dry.
He hadn't eaten for a night and a day, but that didn't matter. Up here he felt strong. The trickle of restrained rage from the city was clearer this high, as though sharpened. Tens of thousands were thinking of the Saint, praying for a hero who didn't exist, and that buoyed Sen along.
He turned to the volcano's crater mouth. It was as wide around as Grammaton Square, and roiled inside with an inner bowl of fire. The caldera. Reds and yellows baked and roiled through a rippling crust brighter than a metalsmith's furnace. Vapor and steam belched out in angry geysers, matched with spits of fiery magma. Waves of heat poured off that lake of fire, setting trickles of sweat pouring down his face. The craggy brown rocks beneath his feet trembled and hissed as the earth shuddered, preparing to vent its defiance into the hungry black belly of the Rot.
On a lonely outcrop of rock at the crater's edge stood the final revenant arch, fuzzy in the broiling air. It was a perfect twin of the one on Aspelair, in front of his Abbey, tall and carved with hundreds of battling figures. This too must have been placed by Avia, before the first arrival of the Rot, commemorating a hero who hadn't yet risen for the first time, but whose myth was set to save the world.
The scale of Avia's vision overwhelmed him. According to the legend of the Fates of Aradabar, this was where the Saint fell.
This was where he would rise again.
GELLICK III
Gellick went to the Calk.
The siege had stilled all work at the grindyards for days, as supplies of lime-rock, saltpeter and quartz were cut off by the blockade in HellWest. The ever-present fog of white lime in the air was gone, and half-calcified Balasts stood scattered in the streets like tumbled boulders, looking up at the unfamiliar black sky, completely lost in their own hardened minds.
They'd never seen this before. They didn't know what to do.
Gellick walked a Hax through the Calk and told them.
"Follow me for the Saint! Follow me for Prince Coxswold. Follow me for your family and freedom!"
With no one else to direct them, no work to do and no dust and sound to entomb them, they listened. They knew Prince Coxswold, from the stories their children had told them from a paper they had never read. They knew of Saint Ignifer from oral legends passed down Hax to Hax; that he was good, that he stood for Balasts, that he fought against calcification.
It took long hours. Gellick walked amongst their still
, staring bodies far into the night, working patterns with his feet through the streets and along the walls, bringing them steadily into line with a greater Hax than just their own.
"Follow me for the Saint! Follow me for Prince Coxswold!"
It was a Hax for all the Balast castes, the Liths and the Silicastes, the Petrochors and the Men of Flint. For the first time in their lives, they could hear the voices of their fellows over the smashing of the grindyards, and see their faces with the fog of the white gone. Gellick's call to a common Hax was a chorister they could not resist, coming from a place within that had atrophied long ago, but still longed for that sense of belonging.
One by one, from the boldest and least calcified to the oldest and furthest converted to rock, they raised their voices in a burring chant, rising into a deep bass harmony that found resonance in the repetition and rightness of such a simple, swelling Hax.
And when Gellick passed by, leading this Hax of which they now felt a part, they began to follow. Their stiff and solidified muscles flexed, and like a flow of smelting metal through the grindyard furnaces, they thickened around him as the stirring rod, as he walked the Calk back and forth like the patterned lines of his name writ in sand.
Dozens added their voices and bodies to his living, breathing Hax, and dozens more followed, then hundreds, until thousands of shambling Balasts rumbled on at his back, each following the other, following his voice and their voices and the promise of the Saint to come.
Many of them would die, in the hours to come. Gellick knew that, even understood it.
"They'll be free," Sen had told him, while they tossed Cuttlebones together in the park, the day before he left. "For the first time in their lives they'll be free."
"They'll be dead," Gellick had answered, blunt because this was a blunt matter. "They'll be blasted apart. They'll never cross the bridges."
"It'll be like Prince Coxswold," Sen had said, "as he chases down all thirty-eight fairies that stole his buns."
"It won't be like that," Gellick had said, in no mood for lightness. "They'll die. There's no buns for dead Balast."
Sen had sighed. "They'll die anyway, Gellick. The Rot won't spare them. And if the Saint rises, and we win, then they won't ever have to go back to the Calk again, if they don't want to. You know the difference it's made for you."
That had startled Gellick so much he misthrew his horseshoe, embedding it deep into the ground. "You can't take the Calk away from them!"
Sen shook his head. "Not take it away, Gellick. Of course not that. I want to make it a choice. The King put your people there to make them slaves. I think you see that now. And Balasts are good slaves, you can herd them to do whatever you want. You don't give them a choice, and they follow instructions well. Think of your father. Was he happy to calcify, in the dust? Was he happy as a slave? Or was it just that he never considered any other way?"
At mention of his father, Gellick frowned.
"He didn't want me to calcify. He sent me to the Abbey."
Sen nodded. "Exactly. In doing that, he gave you a choice for your life to come; the Calk or the city. You chose the city. All I want is to offer your people the same choice, one they've never had before. But they'll have to fight for it, along with the rest of us. Freedom isn't free."
Gellick had thought about that. He began to understand what Sen was offering. It was good to be in the light, and to breathe clear air, and see things that were interesting, and remember. What would he give to have his father here with him, thinking and speaking just like him?
"Life is short, for Balast," he said.
"It doesn't have to be."
"Except for this," Gellick said. "Except for when they die under the King's cannon."
Sen gave a sad smile. "It's not just for the people in there now." He pointed at the Calk. "It's for all their children, too. Your children, Gellick, when you marry. When you have a son, and a daughter. Don't you want to give them that choice too, the same as your father gave you?"
At that Gellick's eyes began to moisten with shimmering tears.
"Yes."
"Then yes. Then we ask them to fight, even if they don't understand why. We have to make that choice for them. You have to."
It was hard. It was all of his people. But the things Sen said, the way he'd felt for so long both inside and outside of the Calk dust, were true. He was the only one who had seen both worlds. The only one who could decide for them all.
"They'll fight," he said. "They'll fight with me."
"With us," Sen said, and clasped his hand.
Perhaps he'd never really believe in the Saint. Even though he'd spent years building the paper together, and spreading his legend, he didn't really believe there was a hero who watched over them all, and cared about them all. Even Balast? But he'd trusted Sen, and wanted to be with him and the others, so he'd printed the paper and written the words, because that was the price to no longer be alone.
Now, looking out over the thousands of his Balast fellows stretching back through the Calk, shouting at the top of their powerful lungs the same words he'd poured into their simple minds, he began to believe.
Standing atop the grindyard wall, he altered his Hax as the Rot began to rumble overhead like distant thunder. His people took up the new chant, repeating the simple words like the Sisters at chorister, again and again until the earth shook with the weight of their single voice.
"The Rot is coming, and the Saint must rise!"
Gellick led them out of the pale streets of the Calk, through the lintel-gate in the dolmen wall, and into the city at large. Down the rubble-littered streets of Carroway they rumbled after him into the city, calling out their new Hax with every step like a sword and a shield.
Striding at their head, general of a newly-born army of Balasts, Gellick thought again of his father, who lived his life entire in the dust of the Calk, who never once saw the sky, who died in the white. He imagined him marching at his side now, as if he'd never calcified, and the thought made him strong.
Round the corner of Lord Quill Square, the first bastion of the King appeared before them, at the edge of the Boomfire where a wooden fort of Molemen frames blocked the street, spiked with flintlock and cannon. He knew the war began here, he knew that Feyon was relying on him and his people for this, all of them waiting at their posts across the city, even Sen on his mountaintop, for the revolution to truly begin with a charge of Balast at its head.
He broke to a run. His feet crushed cobbles beneath his prodigious weight. He raised his arms in the air and cried out the words of this new Hax as a strange black thunder fell across the city, and charged, and his Balasts charged along behind. They raised their arms, and called out their Hax, and stormed toward the bastion-fort like a flow of magma cast from Ignifer's volcano itself.
FEYON III
Feyon walked with Alam to the edge of Carroway, where they stopped. The sky was a solid black, and a kind of thunder rumbled from the throat of the Rot, blending with the scattershot sound of flintlock fire.
She smiled at him. "Good luck"
He smiled back. "Good luck to us all." He strode off for the Roy, toward his own fate.
It felt strange to Feyon, to change places so completely. The Roy was her domain, Carroway his, but this was how it would end. A shiver passed down her spine, at what lay ahead. Be like Mare, she thought to herself, as she continued on alone, over cobblestones stained with soot and old blood. Be brave like Mare.
She entered the barricade that spanned the night markets in something like a daze, following the path their words had shaped, through spokes of broken cartwheels and tumbled tables, some pasted with copies of The Saint's directives. She nodded to a young Ratfer boy perched atop the barricade front wall, on the lip of an upturned cart. He nodded back, and she entered the depths.
Inside lay a long, emptied warehouse, filled with people. They sat scattered in clumps, about small braziers and revelatory fires, eating a final meal of scraps, sharing a last few word
s. The fume of scarab smoke hung in the air, and she held in a cough as she stepped up on a wooden cabbage-box already laid out at the warehouse's head.
She had not been born amongst these people. She knew them only at the surface level, from what Alam and Mare had told her, from living in the Slumswelters and passing amongst them, but perhaps that didn't matter so much. What mattered was that they knew her as an emissary of The Saint. She was the highest caste that ever deigned talk to them, but still her sister had died a horrific death, just for the smallest scar on her skin.
She was like them, unified in their hatred of the King, and they loved her for it.
That love unnerved her. She'd done nothing to deserve it, to become an idol whose name they'd etched onto their weapons and painted onto shabby banners, but they believed in the Saint, and they believed in her role in his rise.
She strived every day to be worthy.
A cry went up as she stood on the box, quickly spreading to the back of the hall and beyond, passing through corridors and alleys to the other buildings in the barricade, filling the air with clamoring voices that fell silent as she raised her arms.
The silence spread as thousands strained to hear, hungry for the sweet voice that had led them this far.
"The Saint will rise!" she shouted.
A cheer burst from their ranks. These people loved Saint Ignifer more than anything, loved his promise and his strength, even if he was only a legend to them. His name lay foremost on their thoughts and their tongues, as the only hero to stand up to the King and endure, and endure, and keep on enduring. They took up a frenzied chant as she stood there smiling beneficently.
"The Saint will rise, the Saint will rise!"
It didn't matter that everything the Saint stood for had been made up by a gang of children from the Seasham Abbey. The Saint promised them something better than the King's brutal rule of debt and caste. He promised to stand up against the Rot on their behalf, to fight for their betterment and very survival no matter how lowly their birth, and that meant everything to them.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 43
