The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  "The Saint is coming for us," she called, raising her voice over theirs so the silence flashed out once more. "And he's coming for the King, and the Molemen, and the Adjunc, and that monstrosity in the sky!"

  She pointed up and they went wild again. This was the red meat they wanted to hear. This from a beautiful high caste Blue, from a charismatic young woman with a terrible scar across her throat, from the mouthpiece of the Saint.

  "He comes not because we love him," she went on, riding the waves of their fervor, "and not because we pay him any tithe. He comes not because we worship at his feet, or because we say the right words when the holy day comes by, or because we love him and praise him and call out his name, but because he loves us." She beat her chest hard. "He loves every last one of us, from the Ratfer who sieves the Levi's filth to the Oriole standing atop the Auroch Bank, and he longs for us all to live, and for us all to rise!" They cheered, but she didn't give them long. "He needs us now, just as much as we need him. He will rise at our side, but it falls to us to rise first. We must make the stand, we must run the charge and spill our blood, we must even give our very lives, to show what freedom from the King means to us, to show how a free people fight! Because the Saint is for us, and we are for him, and Saint Ignifer must rise!"

  The crowd went wild. People whooped and screamed. People wept and pumped their fists or wings or Sectile claws in the air.

  "On the Balast charge," Feyon shouted, then shouted it again, until the call was shouted back through the warehouse and out through the many barricade halls, where it was met by more cheering, and a growing clank of re-cast metal on rudimentary armor, rising until it was a deep pulse in the air. Strange weapons thrust upward and all eyes were upon her. It was like something from one of the stories they'd told, of armies meeting in battle for the Yoked Empire or the Mjolnir Federacy, except it was hot and stank of sweat, and soon some of these people were going to die.

  "For the Saint!" she yelled out one final time, and the cry went up and was echoed back.

  She stepped down from the box while the echoes rang out, then left the warehouse and climbed up a ladder to the barricade ramparts. Two Ogric guards greeted her with sharp, nervous nods, standing watch over the street behind. Here they were shielded from the nearby Moleman bastion by a dense outcropping of tall manufactories. She returned the nod sharply, like a general would, while surveying the empty surrounding streets and the rampart walkway which ran to the right, along the tops of roofs and the jumbled portions of barricade in the streets.

  The chant from below drove her on, and she hunched over to run the rampart track, ducking low as she burst out of the manufactory cover and the Moleman bastion came into full view to her left. It was a wooden palisade of stakes weighted with rubble at the base, situated at the junction of three streets on the route to the Calk. Even in the shallow flicker of light cast by revelatory flares, lying in the streets between the bastion and the barricade, she could see that it bristled with long flintlock muzzles and the dark black mouths of cannon.

  As she sprinted a flintlock pop rang out. There was a puff of smoke, and nearby a chair took the brunt with a resounding 'clack', twisting out from its mooring.

  Then the run was finished, and Feyon dropped nimbly down by the side of the Ratfer boy she'd seen before, in a kind of turret-top with a rampart made of an old oftwood dresser. The boy was missing an eye, barely the age she'd been when the Abbey first called to her parents.

  "Lady Feyon," he said.

  "Josiah," she nodded.

  Another rumble of strange thunder from the Rot rolled over them, shaking the barricade.

  "The Saint likes a show," Josiah said.

  "It's all a show," she answered, then laid flat on her belly to inch up to a slit in the rampart. Here she could get a better look at the bastion, and the long sweep of street leading up to it from the Calk. It was a straight run, with clear sightlines in all directions.

  Good.

  Another flintlock popped, and this time she saw the flash, but the lead ball buried itself harmlessly somewhere in the wood of the barricade.

  "Careful," the boy said. "They've been taking potshots since it got dark."

  "They're weighing their attack," said Feyon, sliding backward. "Finding the range for their cannon."

  The Ratfer boy handed her a long, silver-stocked flintlock from the stash by his side. She checked the barrel, powder, casement. Daveron had trained them, while the Duke Gravaile had been siphoning munitions from his own troops for months.

  "You really think this is going to work?" he asked.

  She smiled, radiant for him, radiant for them all. "I do. I absolutely do, Josiah."

  He reddened. She'd learned all their names, every one of the lieutenants she spoke to, as many of the people as she could. There were thousands, but she knew hundreds, and they loved her more for it.

  They settled to wait. The pulse from below was quiet now, as every man woman and child prepared for what was to come. Hunkered down, Josiah and Feyon watched as the Rot swirled and roared above. In the quiet moments Feyon thought about Sen, somewhere atop the mountain and counting on them all.

  She would not let him down.

  Then something happened; something long and black detached from the sky and lashed down like a streak of lightning. It unfurled in a second only, a solid and sinuous column of black that hammered down somewhere to the north with an ear-splitting explosion and a resounding tremor in the earth.

  This was one of the Rot's tongues. The size of it was terrifying, the speed, and for a long moment Feyon just stared as it snaked back up into the sky, trailing fragments of shattered masonry.

  The Rot had begun its assault. Sen had told them all about the Fates of Aradabar, when the Rot had battered the city to soften it for consumption, but to see such a thing as this…

  Another tongue fell, exploding buildings somewhere off toward Afric, making the turret upon which she sat shift noisily on its uneven foundations. Feyon clutched the rampart and stared in awe. It seemed like the sky itself had waged war upon the land. How could they defeat that? The odds were overwhelming. It was easy to forget in the throes of passionate speech about the King and his forces that he was not even the real enemy; this vast force in the sky was. The Rot. It was nothingness, and you couldn't fight nothingness with fists or flintlocks. Only the Saint stood a chance.

  She looked up and saw more tongues forming in the churning black, like clouds preparing to vent.

  "By the Heart," Josiah whispered. "In all my days."

  Feyon gritted her teeth. Mare had warned them of this too, had seen it at the Harkern Fear, but seeing was truly believing. A third tongue fell, crashing somewhere in HellWest, sending up a chorus of screams and a great splash of Sheckledown Sea.

  "Can the Saint truly defeat this?" Josiah asked. He wasn't even looking at her. He was just staring out at the tongue as it pulled back, dropping detritus from a shattered ship over the runnels of the Boomfire.

  "He can," Feyon said, trying to convince herself too. "He will."

  More tongues fell, spewing fire as revelatory supplies caught or saltpeter stores combusted, and still they waited. Her heart drummed in time with the roll of punishing thunder, and they waited. Tongues fell faster, ravaging the land, and they waited, until gradually she became aware of a deep thrum rising up through the barricade, filling the air around them. This wasn't the Rot. This was something else, and it brought a creeping grin to her face.

  She turned to Josiah. "The Balasts are coming."

  Peering out from the rampart edge, she saw dust rising from the moonlit cobbles on the Calk road. The rumble was growing louder still, with words emerging from it now, triumphant, unified, filling her mind like the unstoppable voice of a god.

  "The Rot is coming, and the Saint must rise!"

  Josiah's little face was alight with excitement. She felt it rising in her too, welling up in the shaking of the barricade and the cacophony in the air. It was really happening, it
was beginning, and anything was possible. Moments later Gellick burst through the cloud of dust, running alone with his arms held aloft, his mouth open wide and roaring.

  His Balast army followed. Feyon covered her ears as the massive pulse of their passage became unbearable, an endless hammering of stone feet on stone cobbles, stony throats calling out their Hax, drowning the popfire as Moleman discharged flintlocks and raced to charge cannons.

  The Balasts stampeded directly at the bastion like a living stone battering ram, and Feyon raced back down the trembling barricade rampart, down the ladder to leap on her cabbage box podium and face the gathered masses, all on their feet and craning toward her.

  "Now!" she cried at the top of her lungs. "For the Saint!"

  They took up the war cry even as they yanked the tarpaulin walls back and flooded out into the night like lava over Aradabar, flintlocks and clubs held high, met by thousands disgorging from buildings up and down the barricade, all raising their voices to join with the thunder of the Balast Hax.

  "The Saint must rise!"

  Feyon charged with them, carried aloft on a tide of fierce and righteous joy, racing down the street until from ahead there came the enormous crunching as Gellick's army hammered into the Moleman bastion. She leapt into the fray but was still too far back, only catching glimpses as their massive Balast bodies tore the palisade walls to shreds, knocking cannons aside like Cuttlebone spikes, trampling the disciplined Molemen underfoot and hurling Adjunc broken to the side.

  Then she was running with her people through the ruptured walls of the bastion itself, chasing the Balast tide with a wild prayer leaping up in her throat. Here a wounded Adjunc lurched toward her, but a shot from behind burst out its throat.

  She turned, saw Josiah at her side and keeping pace with a wicked grin on his face, and threw up her arms.

  "To the Roy!" she cried. "To the Roy!"

  The cry was taken up, and became the new chant as her army raced after the Balast horde, bound for Gilungel Bridge and the barricade behind which Mare and all of Indura were waiting.

  DAVERON IV

  Daveron went to Belial. The streets there were deserted, with all the Molemen away at bastions facing the dark side barricades, and entry to his father's usury yard was simple. All the weapons that had once hung from the yard walls were gone, along with the three cannon berthed there. Soon they would be used.

  He thought back to the day he'd left this place, hand in paw with Mare. He hadn't said goodbye when he left, because such emotions were not the Moleman way. He'd only walked out, ending his days as a blight and an embarrassment. His father had probably been grateful.

  Yet still he found his old red tubing suit hanging above his father's cot, as though he'd one day hoped Daveron might return to don it again.

  Tonight he would.

  Striding out of the yard in the red again, he felt a strange sense of sadness and completion. Since Sen had come he had gained so much, but had lost everything else, everything that once mattered. He would never again make his father proud. He would never wear the red as a dutiful lien of the King. Now he was a traitor to all he'd once valued most high.

  At the Haversham, Molemen admitted him through the bastion-line without question. He was a Moleman of the red, on the King's business, and what could there be to doubt about that? No Moleman had ever turned on his own before.

  Approaching Gilungel Bridge he thought of Mare, as the depths of what he was about to do opened before him like a chasm. Even now she was standing at the second barricade, dependent upon him. Perhaps she could even see his approach, folding into the ranks of his own caste with a simple, easy acceptance.

  She had found that on her ship, The Gleet's Parade. He had found it with her. He thought back on that moment in the usury yard when she took his paws, and all the many changes it had made in him; in their bed he remembered her stroking his fur, her touch tattooing her name across his body, so their stories joined in places and ways he never would have thought mattered.

  But it mattered. He mattered.

  A storm wind whipped at him, flurrying half-burnt copies of The Saint into his face. He felt the crash of thunder tremble his innards as the Rot's black tongues beat down across the city, sending up clouds of rubble and dust.

  He loved her. She was everything, now, and that was so much more than he'd ever lost. He thanked Sen for helping him see. He owed debt a and so did all his brothers and sisters, and this was the price.

  At the Gilungel Bridge mount, as the river's salty rot thickened the hot summer air, he looked upon the latest fortifications: a heavy wall of timber barred the bridge, with a single archway to pass through guarded by Molemen armed with flintlocks, standing ram-rod stiff with their eyes on the streets.

  They didn't even see Daveron. He walked amongst them and through the archway onto the bridge, where he entered the front ranks of a thick mass of Molemen and Adjunc, surrounded with cannon and chain-shot, stacks of flintlock rifles, kegs of black powder, barrels of musket balls.

  He moved amongst his fellows with ease, as though he'd never been gone. He took up a flintlock and stood beside the first cannon overlooking the bank and the route back to the dark side. The river lapped hard below, driven by the gusting storm winds. He could feel the Rot's presence drawing down above, driving the city into chaos.

  The Molemen around him were calm, as unemotional as ever. They did not speak to their fellows, or move, or chant as the rebels did. They only stood, holding tapers and packing saltpeter, ready to shred the first face to show. They were just tools of the King, doing his bidding, accepting their exploitation as if it were the very height of honor. He thought back to Sen's first posting on the Molemen, and how it had taken an outsider to see the truth. They did this to themselves, because it was the system they were born into.

  All that had to change.

  Peering into the dark of the city, past the Haversham façades to the nearest end of the Glave, he could just pick out the line of the rebel barricade, with tiny figures moving atop it. Amongst them somewhere was Mare.

  He looked south down the Levi's banks, waiting. The Grammaton chimed for ten, but still there was no movement. Sweat trickled through the fur down his chest, hot in the tubing. He'd never noticed before how uncomfortable the red was.

  Around him there had to be one hundred cannon stacked down the bridge, all trained on the banks, along with hundreds of the new Adjunc milling on their stalky legs. The plan was clear. The cannon would decimate the rebels across the water long before they ever reached the bridge mouth, and destroy any large-scale siege equipment they were bringing to level against the bridge.

  All that would be left after the fusillade stopped would be stragglers on foot, and they would be hit with a disciplined array of staggered fire, with enough cannon chainshot and flintlock fire to stop even a full Balast charge. Adjunc would swarm down on the remnants, leaving none left alive. It would be a massacre.

  "It will work," Sen had promised him, a week earlier as they sat together on the millinery roof. "Trust me."

  He'd held out his hand, and Daveron took it, opening himself up. He'd felt this before, back on the first night of his new life, when Sen had tortured a sense of pain into him. Once again they blurred together, their memories intermingling, though this time there was no pain, because above all Sen was content, and so was Daveron. The feeling they shared was instead one of belonging. He felt Sen's love for Feyon mix with his own for Mare, with their shared pride to be a part of The Saint lifting them both higher.

  Then Sen did something to push it further than before, delving beyond memory to something old and wild, something that stirred in Sen and bit when it was touched. The remnant bead of King Seem. Slowly, with both of them focused and sweating, he passed that bead to Daveron.

  It took a long time to return to himself, as the bead of Seem moved throughout him, teaching his body and his mind new things. Lying back on the millinery roof, he began to feel more sensation than ever bef
ore, things he'd never been so attuned to: the sweet scent of hawkenberries from the park, the feeling of the rough roof beneath his fur, the warm touch of the sun.

  "You'll get used to it, with time," Sen said, sitting up. "Just don't give them that chance."

  Daveron nodded numbly. Until now his role in The Saint had been a bloodless thing, his betrayal only a matter of papers and stories. This was something different. He looked at his paws, imagining the awful power they now held.

  Sen read the doubt in his face. They knew each other better than any, now. "Was this what your people were meant for?" Sen asked. "Exacting pain for debt, regardless of circumstance? Murdering like criminals for the King, offering no quarter or mercy? Do you think Molemen are good and righteous in all they do?"

  Of course, he couldn't answer yes to that. Not after getting to know Mare, how she'd been gathered by his people for mogrification only because of her caste. It wasn't what the great Awa Babo had ever meant when he made the Moleman race. The actions of his people had become deplorable, divorced from any sense of righteous law, with punishments steepened out of all proportion to crime.

  "Think of it as setting them free," Sen said.

  "Many of them would rather die than lose their duty."

  "Then they'll die," Sen said. "And the rest will be free."

  That was a good thing. It had to be a good thing.

  A cry rang out behind, and Daveron turned. The thunder was deepening, rattling the bridge and trembling the cannon, but it was more than the Rot's tongues. He squinted into the dark of the river bank until there came a glint of white dust, then a smudge, then round the swerve of the Levi River poured the Balast charge, tumbling like an unstoppable fist of stone bearing right for the bridge.

  Orders came from behind to stoke the cannons. Daveron weighed the final balance and made his determination, accepting the burden he would forever bear.