The hall was too complex. He'd never worked on anything like it, so many potential actions carrying motion and information, so many possible points of control in levers, screw-wheels, penny-weight piles, steam-chargers. He had no idea where to begin.
But there had to be a way.
He forced himself calm and closed his eyes. He pushed everything away, ignoring the raspy breath of the Mogs, and listened to the pulse of the Aigle's vast heart. Every machine was like a heart, his father had taught him, pumping with power, serving to animate some need, whether it was the vast springs and pendulum that drove the Grammaton clock tower or the pistons and pulleys that worked the Roy canals and aqueducts, and through every heart there passed a pulse.
He strived to pick it out.
The image of his father rose up in his mind again, not as he had been broken at the gates, but younger, back when his touch had been everything to Alam and his words mattered more than the Heart itself.
"The simplest path, Alam," he'd always said. "Gearing takes the simplest path, with the greatest economy, for whatever purpose you have in mind. It's the greatest derivation of the Heart's beauty."
He delved for it, through the pistons and the constant whirr and clack of clockwork. He'd thought it constantly ever since Sen had told him his role, reliving the brief moments he'd spent in their earlier. There was always a pattern, and perhaps now he began to feel it.
He opened his eyes and scanned the hall, not looking to understand the details but seeking only the most basic pattern amongst the constant clack of gears interconnecting. He ran his eyes and fingers over coils of spring, jerry-wheels and cup-rotations, screw-shanks and weighted pendulums, seeing and dismissing. Even for a revolving mechanism as vast as the Aigle's, tuned to timings and requests, the gearing ought be simple, and this was anything but. There were just too many processes underway, far more than were necessary to resolve the simple act of turning on an axle.
He fixed on that, the one thing he knew for certain; that the palace turned. He held to it and struggled to extrapolate. This was an Aigle, the last of the Mjolnir skyships, and probably even the most knowledgeable of Mogs didn't understand half of what it could do. For them it merely revolved, and almost everything else was extraneous to that. It no longer flew or fired shot, no longer managed an armada at its back. It only turned, and the rest was just noise obscuring the signal he sought.
That meant that turning was the main or only use it had been put to for years, decades, even generations. Again he scanned the hall, the machinery, and found a pattern he hadn't looked for before. The position of the Mogs; cogs of a kind in their own machine. One of them was in the middle between the pistons, bleeding from his head, while the other had charged from another position. Alam tried to run back the clock, remembering where it had run from.
A corner. He strode over, running his gaze over thousands of pieces of machinery no more distinct than the others. He studied the dials and displays, the levers and pivots, the cogs and spindles; here the points of the central dial had been added over with newer ones, the weld-marks visible still, offering symbols Alam recognized. Here was the mark for the scrivenry, here the ostlery, here the kitchens, and there, plum in the center, was a golden embossed A, for Aberainythy.
This had to be it. He scanned the controls nearby, letting his eyes race faster than his thoughts, tracking the transformations and connections to a single batch of dials and levers. There was no time, and this had to be the path. It felt like the path. In the immense noise of the Aigle's information, this was the signal.
He cranked the dial around, pulled the lever nearby, and instantly felt the Aigle jolt. The pistons whined to a shuddering halt, then slowly began to pump in the opposite direction. Alam clung to a handle and felt it underfoot as the Aigle sped into reverse, gathering speed as he pushed the lever further up. In moments the pistons were hammering at full power and the Aigle was rotating as fast as the Mjolnirs had once intended it to, wheeling to fire ballistae at their enemies.
Then it stopped.
Alam staggered against a slow-turning screw-pole as the world jolted, with the dial locked now on the King's tower.
The grinding of the revolve ceased, and Alam threw the lever back to halt the revolve completely. His heart thumped in his chest and he pulled out his ratchet, praying it would be enough. This was for his father. It was all for his father, and he was ready now. When a pair of red-suited Molemen rushed through the entrance moments later, he rushed to meet them with his ratchet held high.
MARE IV
Mare tore over Gilungel Bridge at the head of Saint Ignifer's Induran army like a shooting star, leaping over warped cannon and shock-faced Molemen, punching through the broken waves of disoriented Adjunc with a savage glee stamped across her face. She was the white-hot point at the Saint's cutting edge, driven on by the swollen chorister of her own ragged people, the lowest of caste.
She burst into the Roy for the first time in her life, and raced up the wide boulevard as Gellick's Balasts and Feyon's dark side army broke through the infantry ranks ahead, line-by-line, forcing opening a slim path. Flintlock fire spat and she saw Balasts go down heaping on Quags, on Molemen, on Spindles, on Adjunc. Their bodies littered the street and her pony leapt over them, faster and faster until the Aigle dawned ahead like a gyrating mountain.
Dark lightning raked the black sky and bursts of answering fire lit the Aigle's turrets and walkways like a Moleman's torture yard. Through the torrent of slick rain the grind of the palace's engines blended with the crash of falling tongues, and she whipped her mount across the body-scattered gardens and headlong toward the ramp leading up. Only a last line of Adjunc stood in her way, and she urged the horse headlong into them.
Their grasping arms stopped the beast flat but not her. Standing in the saddle, she leapt and flew through the air above them. For a moment she glimpsed the broad thoroughfare behind, blanketed with bodies lost in fighting, Balasts milling wildly, their charge long-broken. Feyon's army was screaming through the dark rain, while the rest of Mare's Induran wedge were bogged in combat with Molemen, Adjunc and crowds of infantry.
Nobody had followed her through the gap. She was alone. Cannon fire boomed from the Aigle above, crashing down amongst bodies like ripples in a pond. Blood and smoke was everywhere and the chorister-Hax was forgotten.
Then she hit the ramp hard and rolled, coming smoothly to her feet at a sprint for the gate into the Aigle. It was revolving now already. Flintlock fire cracked behind her, the tang of buckshot roiled through her hair, and a final clutch of Adjunc guards charged down to meet her, rearing their unwieldy bodies back, their dead legs spreading like grasping fists.
Great stones flung from below crushed them aside, knocking them teetering from the ramp. She glimpsed Gellick and three other Balasts waving up at her, with Feyon by his side, then the Aigle was grinding closed, the entrance gateway closing like an iris.
She sprinted the last yards through the rain and thunder then dived, into darkness and cold as the jaws of the Aigle palace clamped shut behind her.
She rolled to her feet in a narrow stone entranceway lit by burning torches in sconces, spinning with her spikes flared out, but there was nobody there; no Adjunc or Molemen, only a passage leading forward. The sound from outside was gone, leaving her with only her own rasping breath.
She ran ahead to where the entranceway ended in a simple stone staircase winding upward into darkness. Down the hollow middle hung a long, taut rope, ending in a kind of bucket-carriage filled with three dead bodies, each naked and written in some way with scars or birthmarks.
These were for the King.
She studied the ropes and recognized the pulley system, one used by navvies at sea for ascending the masts quickly. She tipped the bodies from the cart and climbed in to the carriage, then slashed one of the ropes with one swipe from her bladed spikes. The counterweight high above released and the cart lurched off the ground and tore upward into the dark.
&
nbsp; Iron-smelling air rushed around her, and in the black she envisioned Sen somewhere far across the Gutrock atop the mountain, waiting for her to finish this moment. She owed everything now to him for giving her this chance, and she would not fail, not after the months spent pouring her strength into the legend of the Saint.
Three days earlier had been her first time to go to Indura in three years, into the sick air of that mangled swamp where only the most deformed castes hunkered in their mogrified-mangrove homes. Atop the central spiking stage in Spitstock square she had climbed up beside the dying Adjunc, slowly thrashing out its death as its limbs were sawn off, and called to her people.
"You think this is a rebellion," she shouted, pointing at the dying Adjunc. "This is the gravest revenge you can imagine?"
The ones nearby listened, but a raving madwoman was nothing new to Indura.
"We can do better than this!" she yelled at them. "Raise your sights, Indura, to the King. Bring that bastard down!"
A desultory cheer went up. None of them believed there was a chance of what she was saying. Still, more gathered in case something interesting might happen. This was entertainment in Indura. Not one of them could imagine it was even possible to overthrow the King, or defeat the Molemen in pitched battle, or break through the Roy and assault the King's Aigle itself.
Their gravest revenge was the torture of a beast even lower than they.
She would show them more.
On that stage she spiked the dying beast through the brain, stilling its screams and the crowd's entertainment. They shouted and booed, hurled mud and rotten fruit, but as she pulled off her hood, then stripped off her sleeved blouse and skirts until she stood completely naked before them, they fell silent, staring at the tattoos that covered her body.
Every line and design was a sentence to death, and it stilled them. They'd never seen anything like her before.
"Will you be as base as he makes you?" she called out over them. "Will you be filth, because the King consigns you to filth? Can you be no better than this?"
They were silent, but for one voice that called from the back. "Who are you?"
"I am Mare of The Saint," she answered. "I'm going to kill the King, and you're going to help me."
They listened as she told them of the battle to come, sowing seeds of a terrible vengeance and a brighter future ahead for them, drawing them all out of the mud and into the light. Most of them cared more for the vengeance than the brighter future, but they drew in more, gathering until the crowd numbered over a hundred.
"The Saint will stand for you too," she called. "Every one of Induran stock, we lowest of caste, we who are fit to hunt the Gut for cast-offs, to tread the ammonic vats of Afric tanneries, he will stand for us! The Saint is our father and our lover and our brother, and he will rise to stick a spike through the King's belly and wind him on a spit."
The crowd had swelled and shouted and grew, as others shuffled closer from dark corners and twisted alleyways, all of them spotted with infection and misshapen with tumors, staring up at the defiant lines marking her body. She spread her arms for them to see it all.
"This is your world," she shouted. "These are your bodies, in the city that you own. Lay claim to both now, their strength and their rage, and help me slaughter the King who told us all otherwise."
They roared, as she took out her inking stylus and block. They clamored closer as she raised up the first of those at the edge, a decrepit Ratfer with half his snout lost to the creeping ague. She ripped off his foul shirt, shaved a patch clear in his shiny back fur, and began to draw the Saint's story across his skin too.
He screamed with the simple, honest pain of it, and the throng roared. They fell about in convulsions, rallying others to join them. They formed a steady line to reach the stage, baring their diseased skin for her anointing touch.
So she tattooed along them all, in long arcing lines that carried from one pockmarked body to the next, tying them together as parts in a story that didn't end, of the Saint and his love for all castes, of their own caste and how it was formed, how it was broken, and why it yet had hope for bloody redress and reason for pride. She wrote them through the night and into the final day, until when she left Indura for the barricades, and they followed at her back.
Soaring up through darkness in the King's skinning tower now, tears stung her cheeks. Indura that she'd rejected for so long had now risen for her, had brought her this far, and now it fell to her. She had never been so happy in her life.
The cart jerked to a stop and she leaped out, into a revelatory-lit octagonal chamber walled edge to edge with patches of skin. She recognized it from the story Sharachus had told Sen; a tapestry of suffering no different from the one that robbed her of her mind in the mogrifer's laboratory, that claimed the bodies of others as meat to be manipulated. Here the King did his own skinning, and laid up his own mad path of a prophecy across the walls.
At the center, thick with muscle and bare but for blood and a loincloth, stood the King who presided over it all. Aberainythy, the spider at the heart of the web.
He was waiting for her, with two long and bloody skinning awls in his hands, and a strange black hunger in his eyes. He looked over her for a long appraising moment, like a thing to be possessed.
"I like your tattoos," he said at last.
Mare charged, raised her spikes and leapt.
The King's first skinning awl took her low in the thigh, the second through her side, but still she climbed, held aloft by a sudden blue light that sparked into existence around her. The King's mouth opened wide and a black hand flung out for her face, but the blue seared it away just as she raised her sparking spikes over his head. The black thing let out a terrible cry, then her blades slammed down into the King's staring eyes, driving deep through his brain to punch out the back of his skull.
For a moment, everything stopped.
Mare hung. The blue fire sizzled. The black stub in the King's throat wailed even as blackness oozed from his eyes, impaled like corpses on the HellWest frigate.
Then black fire exploded from the King. It flung Mare back and tore outward through the chamber walls and roof like they were wet paper, casting stone rubble and a thousand skin fragments tumbling into the air like hawkenberry petals. Mare slammed off a stub of standing rock and fell flattened to the chamber floor, but the blue light endured and encircled her, keeping the worst of the tearing black wind away until the great force of it was spent.
Then it was gone, and the King dropped in the middle of his broken tower, just a corpse. Mare shuddered to her knees, splattered now by black rain in the open air, and watched the black smoke arc up into the black dome of the sky, conjoining with its master.
Her vision dimmed. She was fading already. The King's awls were still lodged in her body, but the blue light was there still, flickering round her tattoos. She took hold of the awl in her side and pulled. The thick, curved blade sucked out with a wash of blood and agony, but the blue light flooded into the gap, shoring her up. She sucked in a breath and moved to the awl in her thigh, yanked it free, and again the light plugged the wound.
Seconds passed while the blue fire crackled, and she felt a strange kind of painless burning as her skin and muscle knitted together.
Then the blue peeled away, and she let out a sob, because this was surely the Saint. He had been inside her and deemed her, a Deadhead of Induran, worthy of saving! The light flew up and out of her, to streak over the city where it grew thicker and stronger as a sudden rain of blue lines sucked up into it, like roots of lightning shooting up from the city and its people.
The Saint was rising.
Pride filled her, that the Saint had not only saved her, but been born within her. Mare, the mother of the Saint. She watched his fire jet across the dark underside of the Rot and race toward the distant bulk of the mountain where Sen would be waiting, growing in strength as a river of faith rose.
She slumped to the side, truly content for the first time in
her life. Whatever happened atop the mountain barely seemed to matter now, because the King was finally dead, and Indura was free. She closed her eyes and was back in the mogrifer's den, though now all the Molemen were gone and she was opening up the cages and setting the children loose.
Dark rain ran down her face. The sky was black with the Rot but for a single blue star in the distance, rising atop the mountain, engulfed by black. Then the mountain erupted. A column of blue fire spewed up into the sky, splitting the Rot in two, and within it Saint Ignifer rose.
CALDERA
The crackling blue power of the Saint hit Sen like a hammer on the mountain's anvil, and with it came all the chaotic minds of the city, their hopes and prayers forged in blood and suffering, crushing his sense of self and filling him up with the power of a dream, a notion, an ideal.
The Saint.
And it was too much.
The power overwhelmed him, flooding in as a riotous, chaotic torrent that he couldn't manage or contain. Bursts of fiery blue power shot out of his mouth and his eyes, from his fingertips and streaming skin, freezing him just like he'd frozen on his first trip to the Haversham, when the minds of so many different castes had proven too much.
He couldn't focus. He couldn't see clearly, couldn't think clearly, and couldn't resist as the first of the Rot's tongues plummeted down to smash into his chest, beating him flat onto the rock at the caldera's lip.
He tried to scream but couldn't, tried to marshal his thoughts but there was no time with the Rot's tongues continuing to pummel him, striking blue sparks off the Saint and weakening his power with every blow.
Pain ripped into his chest as a tongue broke through and shattered a rib. Another fell and snapped his left arm in half, leaving him screaming as it reared back.
Then the Saint was gone. He felt its fire ebbing back toward the city, abandoning him in search of another champion. A numbing blackness fell across his vision, and as a final tongue dropped from above he glimpsed a ghostly vision of Sister Henderson standing on the rock beside him, wearing a withering expression on her long Gawk's face.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 46
