"Is that it?" she asked. "That's the best you can do?"
He was too broken to laugh.
"I tried," he whispered, as the tongue descended. "I can't control it."
"Then don't control it," said the Sister. "Only guide it, like a misericordeist guides the flow of force."
The Rot's tongue fell then, striping across his face and breaking his jaw, his sternum, his pelvis. The pain was excruciating, but it didn't kill him. There was still the smallest flicker of the Saint remaining, clinging to his heart and keeping him alive.
"Only lead," said the Sister, "and the Saint will follow." Then she winked, and faded back into the burning fog.
Sen coughed blood. He had seconds left, but perhaps he understood.
It wasn't about brute force and control. That was the King's way. Through his Molemen and Adjunc, through his laws and caste he enforced his will. But Sen had broken it with a story about cantaloupes. He had used words and ideas to lead the people. He hadn't forced them. They'd followed him because it was what they wanted to do.
Now he had to do the same. And as he realized that, he saw that the path forward had already been prepared, and written across his body.
He reached inside and snagged the remaining thread of the Saint around his heart, and gave it a gentle tug. Within it were five strands, each a friend, and for each there was a place written into his scars. He led the sense of Daveron into the intricate swirls on his body that told the story of the Moleman god Awa Babo, and how he came to support the Saint. He led Gellick to the tale of Lord Quill, the last Man of Quartz, and Mare to the Albatross pirate king, and Alam to tales of King Seem's great library city, and Feyon to Avia's own story, etching marks into her own son's skin.
Their threads found a home in the pattern of his scars, and more of the Saint returned after them like water finding a new level, pouring into his body with a rush of strength, repairing broken bones and torn skin.
Another tongue struck but he didn't notice, as he effortlessly sorted through the thickening pattern of minds in the flow, distinguishing them by caste and thought: the faith of Balasts and Indurans, the dreams of Molemen and Spindles, the hopes of Ratfers and Mogs and Scabritics and Gawks and Ogrics and Appomatox, all looking up at the skies and waiting for their Saint to rise.
Sen wrapped that faith round his body like a Balast Hax, turning his scars into a focusing lens for the Saint's wild blue fire, growing faster and brighter as more rushed back in. He honed the channels and speed until they became a single blazing beam of blue light, lancing around his body like the Heart's own hand writing him afresh.
So the true power of the legend swelled within him, and Sen was born again on the mountaintop as Saint Ignifer himself. His scar lines shone as bright as the Gutrock sun, and beneath that power the world moved at his command. With one thought he coaxed the volcano to erupt, lifting him into the sky on geysering roots of fire a hundred thousand minds and three thousand years strong. With fists of blue flame he beat armor out of his scars and cast new misericorde spikes that blazed like white-hot iron, answering a call that rang through his mind with the power of millennia.
The Saint must rise.
His pulse became the pulse of the world, and across that world he felt the darkness biting down. The eruption shot him up to meet a dozen whickering black tongues sent by the Rot, and he flew into battle. Their lashing blows beat against him like the tide in HellWest, slashing at the burning armor of his scars and tearing at his roots.
But the Saint was stronger, and carved a furious Hax for all life upward through the tongues and into the curdled black mass of the Rot itself. The Rot roared and vomited a black gush down upon him, but the acidic rain only flashed and sizzled off his blazing armor. His spikes cut a path, and as more tongues whipped round he threaded them on his blades, chaining them back to the anchor of faith streaming up from the city.
The Rot wailed and thrashed, but the Saint was relentless in his assault, hacking up into the Rot's throat past the desiccated mulch of worlds it had churned before, past the relic weapons of old empires that only flamed off his scars like pebbles. Further still he climbed, beating a trail up into the silence of the past, digging deeper and higher until he was all the way back to the very death of the Heart and the core of what the Rot really was.
Murder, in the red dark of the times that came before. He felt that same joy the Heart felt in the death of its own twin, that then spread into everything, infecting all life, and bringing with it not only cruelty and pain, but also growth and rebirth.
There the Rot screamed, and swirled, and disappeared, and just as he prepared to level the killing blow, the Saint ripped itself out of Sen to give chase.
Leaving Sen to fall.
His blows fell in empty air as sound and motion rushed back in, and he dropped from the sky alone. The blue armor of the Saint tore away, replaced by the eruption's roar and the sting of cinders on his skin. Hot wafts of sulfur and ash struck him like physical blows, dragging tears from his eyes as he tumbled down through the superheated air of his fading pillar of fire.
He could still feel the power of the Saint as he fell, but it was distant now and growing farther apart. Now the caldera was rushing up toward him, streaming with dark red lava floes. He tried to reach back for the Saint, to lead the echo of wild blue fire through his tingling scars once more, but it was gone, chasing after the Rot like an unfettered star.
He shielded his hands across his eyes as the heat from below grew unbearable, and streams of flame puffed around him and the air grew too hot to breathe. This was how it ended, he realized numbly. The Saint risen, the Rot driven away, and him left to tumble into the fires below.
He felt his body burning, the ghasting suit crisping away to skin which reddened and flared. He cried out with the pain, and knew he was going to die. His spikes grew too hot in his fists and he released them. His hair singed in the furnace-like heat and the sound of the magma churning filled his ears.
Then there was a wrenching pain across his chest, and his fall swerved into an arc, which smoothed into a rise. He cried out, not daring to pull his burning hands from his eyes, but still he felt the shadow of great wings beating above him, felt the sense of something familiar spreading into him through its touch.
As he rose away from the heat he looked up, and saw a huge creature holding him, with the webbed wings of a Bat and the eight cocooning limbs of a Spider.
Memories flashed into his mind from its touch; a vision of Seem and Sharachus fighting even as the liquid slurry of their bodies sank down through the Gutrock, each vying for mastery, each refusing to be subsumed. Into the darkness in the ruin of Aradabar they gouged each other like the Heart, fighting out of instinct, until at last a balance was struck and what emerged from that struggle was a wholly new creature, reborn into the light.
"I have waited for you," it said now, its voice gruff, "as I always swore to."
Sen blinked as the new memories bedded into his mind, sharing the peace both Seem and Sharachus had found within each other, no longer alone. Their stillness crept into him and calmed his panic, bringing sense back to the rush of his fall.
"Sharachus?" he called, tears whipping from his dried-out eyes in the hot wind.
"And Seem," the creature replied, "we are here together."
He felt strength pulse from the creature into him, from the beauty in two lost and lonely souls finding completion in each other.
"I thought you were dead," he called.
"We were," it replied, "as we were before. Now we live."
Sen rubbed his eyes, and his body lurched as Seem/Sharachus swooped sharply through a thick wreath of outflung black ash, diving through the tides of dark smoke rising off the volcano slope.
"I was fighting the Rot," Sen called up, as they whipped forward in great wing beats, heading back toward the caldera. "But it fled, and the Saint abandoned me to follow. What happened? Where did they go?"
"To another time," said Seem/Shara
chus, then dived beneath a spraying arc of magma, plunging through a blanket of black smoke to emerge above a molten lava flow pouring down the mountainside like a burning Levi River, crusted in places with dark patches of cooler rock.
"What do you mean, to another time?"
Seem/Sharachus only grunted, and beat its great wings toward the low peak of gray rock jutting up through the baking flow of orange and red. There the revenant arch still stood atop an islet in a swollen caldera lake, untouched by the burning fog of sulfur or the flow of molten red stone, outlined with a faint blue nimbus.
The heat swiftly grew unbearable, but as they sank through the revenant's blue glow it fell away. The air cleared, and Seem/Sharachus lowered Sen to his feet in front of the arch, its limbs unclenching to set him free. Sen staggered as he took his own weight, then spun to gawp up at the powerful bulk of this new Seem/Sharachus, half Bat and half Spider.
"I can't believe it," he shouted over the bass grind of the volcano. "You're alive."
"We are alive," agreed Seem/Sharachus, then pointed past Sen with one Spider limb. "As is another."
Sen turned to see the revenant arch, where a kind of skin of blue light now played across its open face.
"What's happening?"
"This revenant is a doorway, Sen, protected by the Saint above all else. The door is opening."
"What?" he shouted, as the pattern of lights on the blue skin rippled fiercely, like rain drops drumming on the Abbey pond. "A doorway to where?"
Before the new King could answer, the blue skin of light inside the revenant arch shifted and a figure stepped through.
Sen's breath stopped. It was a tall and beautiful woman in a billowing cloak, with piercing dark eyes and long black hair. Sen's eyes fogged with tears. She looked just as she had in the Gloam Hallows window, like a figure yanked straight out of legend.
Avia.
She strode over the steaming rock to stand before him. They were almost the same height.
"Mother?" he asked.
"My son."
She touched the scars she'd once carved on his face, and memories unfurled in his mind. Within her he saw a thousand Corpse Worlds across the wreckage of the Heart, sown with a thousand seeds left to grow as she buried the legend of Saint Ignifer in their soil, each one prepared against the coming of the Rot.
He saw himself as a bloody infant; Avia looking down her scarring knife with tears in her eyes. He saw King Seem by her side, and Sharachus lost in the sewers, and so many years spent praying it would all somehow be enough.
And then she was here.
He looked into her eyes and saw the dust of the darkness beyond. She hadn't come back just to see him. She wasn't here to settle down and become a family once more.
"The Rot isn't dead," he said. "Is it?"
She gave a sad, heavy smile. "The Rot swallows worlds, my son. You could never kill it with the strength of only one."
Sen felt the fight go out of him. He already suspected the answers, now. He'd seen enough, understood enough, to guess what was coming next.
"And where did it go, mother? Where is it now?"
She rested her hands on his shoulders gently, and looked into his eyes.
"I wouldn't ask you to leave your friends behind," she said. "I never could."
Sen snorted. "Like you never asked me about carving these scars? Like you never asked to plan my entire life."
"I didn't make your choices for you. I only prepared the way."
The old anger warred briefly within him, at the life she had condemned him and all the Sisters to, even as he understood it. It was the way of the Saint, to guide and to lead.
It didn't make it any easier.
"You want me to go after the Rot," he said, feeling the weight of the words as they came out. "Across the Worlds. This is what you've always wanted."
She shook her head. "It's never what I wanted. It's what I've had to do, to give this world and a million like it across the corpse a chance. To save ourselves, we have to fight."
Perhaps she was right. He tried to imagine the vast sacrifices she had made. Three thousand years ago she had left her husband and lover behind, to go mad in the ruins of his own empire. She had cut into every inch of her infant son and left him in a city that wanted to kill him in the most painful way, all for this.
It was not something he could ever do. He shook his head.
"I can't go. I can't abandon Feyon or my friends, not for any other world. I promised them I would come back."
Tears welled in her eyes. "I made that same promise. And here I have come back. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but there was no choice. The Rot drives, and we must do what we can to survive."
Sen shook his head. Tears brimmed in his eyes too. "I won't leave them."
"Then they will all die, Sen, as if they never were, and all this will be for nothing." She spread her arms to encompass the sky. "This is a war, my son, and the whole of the Corpse needs you."
"I don't care about the Corpse."
"Then don't care for the Corpse. Forget the thousand times a thousand worlds, and the billions of souls just like Feyon and your friends that live upon them. Leave them to die beneath the Rot, so it grows stronger and the Saint becomes weak. But tell me this, Sen. Who saved Aradabar?"
He blinked.
It was another trap, like the ones the Abbess had always used. He could see its steely jaws closing on him already; its perfect logic trapping him in place.
"The Saint," he said.
"And where is the Saint, Sen?" Avia asked. Now the tears spilled down her cheeks, as she saw what this was doing to him. What it was making him, a responsibility none would want to take on. "Where was he first born?"
He shook his head. It wasn't possible. "No."
She touched his chest, and said "yes", and with that he understood.
There had never been any Saint Ignifer, he was just a legend his mother had invented. But the Rot had been real. It had really destroyed Aradabar. Yet something had stopped it from consuming the world.
"The Saint saved Aradabar," he said.
Avia nodded. The pieces fell into place.
"So I have to go back, to save Aradabar."
"Yes."
He felt dizzy. His sense of time and space twisted. How could he be the very hero he'd grown up idolizing?
"The revenant will take you Beyond," Avia said. "What you do from there, Sen, will stand on your shoulders. If you do not save Aradabar, then none of this will ever come to be." She waved her hands around the mountaintop. "Your friends will never be born. This world will have died three thousand years ago."
Sen felt something shift inside.
"This world isn't real," he mumbled.
"It is potential. The Heart has room for all things. I made it real by opening the revenant to it. Only you can keep it that way.
He weaved in place. His whole life; Feyon, the Abbess, the Sisters. "None of them even existed? You made them up!"
"They can be real, Sen, if you slay the Rot. If you build up the Saint. If you draw on all the strength that you can, they can be real."
She pushed her palm flat against this chest, and in an instant he felt the city, and within its flow he felt his friends; Alam was in the cuffs of a Moleman brigade, bloodied but unbowed, shouting out his caste while they marched him out of the Aigle palace. Mare stood atop the turret still, looking out at the fiery river winding down the volcano's side, watching the last blue light die from the sky. Daveron lay at the Levi's side, while Bodyswells tended to his flintlock bullet wounds. Gellick stood with his people at the Aigle base, bleeding crystal from a dozen gashes in his lith, amidst Molemen and infantry who were no longer fighting but all gazing up at the stars in wonder, now that the black mouth of the Rot was no longer there.
Last of all he saw Feyon, moving through the gardens amongst fallen low caste fighters and Infantrymen alike, tending to wounds as best she could. Perhaps she felt him watching, and in some way looked b
ack. The thread was too tenuous to send anything but the simplest message, so that was what he sent.
It wasn't words or a feeling, but an image of the two of them growing old together, and building a new version of Saint Ignifer's city, and bearing children to carry the Gravaile name proudly into the future.
Then he let the connection go.
"She will be with you," said Avia. "In every deed and word. You'll carry your friends across the darkness, and plant their memories in the ashes of Aradabar. You will make them real in this place, by using their strength as the seed."
He nodded. Feeling dizzy and uncertain was no use. The Rot had to die, and Aradabar had to be saved. He looked into his mother's eyes, seeing for the first time the doubts she must have felt all this time.
"You'll help me," he said.
"In all the ways I can. But when you pass through that doorway," she pointed at the revenant, "you will be alone. No two paths through time and space can be the same. You must find your own way back to Aradabar, and banish the Rot forever."
Sen smiled. So it went with fate, and heroes. He turned to his father, or the creature that had been his father. His big head was bowed, his bat wings crooked and slack. It seemed pointless to ask, since this place was not yet real, but still, it mattered.
"You'll watch over them? My friends?"
"As if they were my own family," the King rumbled back.
Sen looked around. He took a breath of the simmering, ashy air, and on that air he felt the taint of the Rot.
It was still there, even within him. Its tendrils were everywhere, soaked into the land. Its mouth hung over the world still, three thousand years in the past. If those jaws fell, then his city would never be built, and the Sisters would never be born. Everyone he ever knew would remain as lost possibilities in the mulched black of the Rot's belly. So its jaws would continue churning across the Corpse, grinding all the worlds beneath its great black teeth.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 47
