The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  Freemantle peered at Sen. "Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe it was a vision only, a trick of the veil. She said herself, that army never fought in the skies over Aradabar. It never existed, except in Avia's dreams. Perhaps it's just what you wanted to see; the Saint's army from legend. How could Mare know any more than you do, if she's just a memory in your head?"

  "How could she just be a memory in my head, if I don't even remember her?" Sen countered.

  For a moment they sat in silence.

  "Tell me about her," said Sen, "Mare."

  Freemantle did. He didn't need to look at his notes to describe her on the first day in the Abbey; her sarcasm, her cruelty, the cruelty she'd experience all her life. She was a survivor, if nothing else. She'd helped Sen find his purpose at the millinery, and taught him how to use his misericorde spikes, then sailed away. When she'd returned she'd fallen in love with Daveron, and roused Indura to the cause of the Saint.

  At the end Sen just sat there. He didn't feel hollow or sad. Rather there was no disappointment or hint of recognition at all, and that scared him. To lose his eye hurt. To lose his mind was terrifying. Worst of all, he remembered some of the parts of the story, those that crossed with his path, but it was as if his memory had been extensively edited, like a portion of The Saint that Feyon had overhauled. The holes Mare had left had been filled in.

  "I don't remember any of that," he said cautiously, as if the words themselves might rear back and bite him. "Daveron was always alone. It was just him and me for years in the millinery, before we gathered Feyon and Alam." He lapsed into silence, thinking back on the night he'd arrived at the millinery after abandoning the Abbey. He'd been so alone then, weighted with the loss of Sister Henderson. He'd rejected Alam at the Swidlington canal and regretted it instantly. The millinery had been so cold. The pain of those first nights bit into him still, and that felt real. He couldn't imagine how it would have felt to have another person there.

  Yet Freemantle had described their training with the misericordes, and how Mare had helped him settle on writing circulars to seek out his mother. In his recollection none of that had happened. He'd found the spikes in the millinery, hung up as if left there by his mother ten years earlier. He'd come up with the idea to write his circulars alone.

  He'd been so alone, for so long. He'd yearned to go after Alam every day; had berated himself for sending him away. He could feel the guilt of all those lost years still. Who had he been trying to protect?

  Now Alam was gone. They were all gone. He felt tears welling in his one good eye, and rubbed it gently. "I'd hoped the notes might help," he said, trying to cover for the emotion. "But they don't."

  Freemantle laid his hand on his shoulder. Sen looked at him; this strange man who was helping him, but for what? They didn't know each other. Maybe soon Sen wouldn't know him at all. He felt torn between a true understanding of who and where he was. Yes, he'd risen as the Saint, but he'd always been so alone, so what did it matter? He'd trusted nobody, and when he'd gone to ask Alam for his help, he'd seen that mistrust mirrored back to him.

  Only Feyon had loved and accepted him, and she too had been alone for so long. They were dying flames hugging to each other in the dark of the forest. Then Daveron. Daveron was just another cruelty he'd put out into the world; torturing him, forcing him to betray his own kind his own family, time after time, and for what?

  For more loneliness? To fulfill the prophecy of his mother, who was lonely and lost herself? Guilt swelled in him powerfully. What was any of this for?

  "Don't tell me about them again," he said quietly.

  Freemantle frowned. His surprise was plain. "What?"

  "The memories," Sen said, and barely prevented his voice from cracking. "It hurts too much. I can't focus."

  "I don't-" Freemantle began, then pointed at the stack of books they'd written. "We wrote all of this."

  Sen remembered that. Those days of recollecting seemed so simple now, so naïve. He waved dismissively. "It's fiction to me. It doesn't help. We have to focus on the task. Don't worry, I won't forsake that. It's all I have left."

  Freemantle looked shorn, like a little lost lamb. Sen tried to stop himself from reveling in the other man's sadness, but there was a twisted pleasure there, no matter how he resisted it. He was hurting, and some part of him wanted other people to hurt, even if it was cruel. Freemantle had suffered enough; if anyone knew loneliness, it was him, but still.

  Yet Feyon wouldn't want him to be cruel. He thought of how she'd always tempered him. Her love had meant so much, coming out of death and acrimony. Forgiveness. Good things could still come. He forced himself to reach out and touch Freemantle on the shoulder. Such gestures had never come easily.

  "You'll remember for both of us. I can trust you to do that for me? Tell me what I need to do. But I don't want to feel like this if I don't have to."

  Freemantle looked at him, clearly conflicted, eyes shining. "Of course, Sen. It's your life."

  "Not my life," Sen answered, more coldly than he'd meant to. "His life. Some other Sen. Now, we need to focus on what I can do. I have to save Feyon."

  Freemantle looked like he was about to cry, but he nodded and forced a purposeful tone. "Yes, of course. Save the world. You have to at least rest for a time, recover a little."

  Sen regarded him through the lid of his one good eye. He was understanding things now that Freemantle couldn't, because Freemantle hadn't seen the Darkness like he had. He hadn't run before it, and jumped past it again and again. That secret knowledge told him that there would be no recovery from this. They'd all warned him, hadn't they? The Abbess, his mother, even Mare. It was going to get worse. He wasn't going to heal nicely at the end of this road. He was going to be nothing in both body and mind. What use was recovery?

  But he could still be kind. "I don't think we have time, Freemantle," he said gently.

  "Of course we have time," the man protested. "You traveled back in time to go there in the first place. You can just travel back again."

  Sen shook his head. The answers were far from clear, but he was getting a better sense of the veil now, after traversing it so many times, after losing parts of himself to its invisible knife. "That's not what I mean. I mean this doorway, this window to the Corpse World may not last that much longer. As I passed through Grammaton Square I felt it dwindling, like it was being eroded out by my passage. Even here, I can feel it. If I wait too long or go through too many times, I know it's going to come for us."

  Freemantle watched him. He was seeing a different man, Sen sensed. A man resigned.

  "It's taken my eye," he went on, as softly as he could. "It's taken two of my childhood friends, and even then the Abbess said Mare was not enough. She had to give me every memory she had, from the whole of her life. I looked in her eyes and saw a child, Freemantle." Despite himself he felt tears welling again. "She'd forgotten me, and the Abbey, and Henderson, and everything that she'd become. Then I used her. I used her love for her sister, and I ran her into the ground." He gulped. Saying these words now hurt. "How long until I'm just like her? A child getting used by the veil? I have to finish this quickly, before it gets that far."

  Freemantle nodded. His grief was thickening, but his resolve was firming up as well. He'd seen wonders and terrors, Sen knew. He was not weak.

  "How many more times can you walk the veil?" he asked.

  Sen held up his left hand. The right shivered against the blankets beside him, beyond his control. He made a fist, then lifted one finger from it.

  "Daveron." He lifted another finger. "Alam. Avia. Feyon."

  Four fingers stood up before them.

  "Four times," said Freemantle flatly.

  "Each more powerful than the last. Maybe there are others, for small steps. The Abbess, Sister Henderson. But those four are where the power is."

  The two of them stared at the fingers as though there may be an answer within them. Sen wondered what kind of person he'd be at the end, with even his mothe
r forgotten. He thought back to the look on Leander's face, the Abbess, when she'd forgotten everything. She'd been happy, perhaps, but so empty. At least she'd remembered her sister, at the end.

  But without Avia's quest, without her scars and her cruelty, who would he be? Avia's quest had defined every part of his life. Without it he was nothing, just another helpless refugee from the Rot, left to die in the ash with no purpose or faith, crushed beneath the system of a brutal world.

  That thought made him angry. That was a sense of justice, and perhaps it had always been part of him. He hoped so. He had to be more than just the life his mother had made for him. It felt important that he be good.

  He looked at Freemantle. "I may lose more of my body, too. I don't know how much there'll be left of it by the end."

  Freemantle looked him up and down. He didn't say anything. The stains of blood were there for both of them to see.

  "Four times," Sen said again, his voice firmer now, "and build an army that doesn't exist."

  * * *

  They began with detail. Sen described again the legion in the sky and on the land he'd seen advancing upon Aradabar, that bestiary of winged, finned, and mechanical things; their weaponry, the raiments, their multitude of colors, forms, flags, pennants, and Freemantle wrote it all down.

  Together they tried to match where all the individual battalions, trompes, units, schools, flights, and brigades were from. Some of them Freemantle thought he recognized from his three hundred years overseeing the world, in stories he'd overheard in the nomad huts of the Garabaldi Steppe, at sea with the tawny crew of the Albatross, in the crepuscular depths of the Cave-worts of the Spell promontory. Some he recognized from pictures he'd seen in great crumbledown tombs in the badlands of Arrythia, in ghost towns of the underwater Decaprix empire, in the lost flotillas of Curl.

  In all he recognized some one-hundredth of Saint Ignifer's army. He knew the Fibrous people of the Naryngal Spine mountains, who lived on cliff-tops and drank the beetle rains when they fell, though he'd never known them to go to war, never seen their odd ball and string weapons. He knew the landsharks of the Absalom Dusts but had no idea how they could be reined, netted and armored, with their teeth augmented by iron grilles, with saddles thrown over their backs so strange Moleman-like creatures without any hair could ride them. He couldn't explain the flight of the Ptarmigans or Mesoplodonts, of the thousands of foot-soldiers decked out in armor of Dust-plate and lacquered bark, marching along a vast invisible bridge. He had seen some of the humming machines or things similar to them in the ruins of the Mjolnir civilization; metal skeletons fossilized in millennia of accreted dust, their wooden screws and propellers long since decayed away, leaving spaces where exhumation parties could pour in ghast plaster to form statues of the parts left behind. He'd seen the Gull-drawn zeppelins above the city of Ignifer, and many of the mogrified body-combinations to come slavering out of the Manticore.

  But he couldn't name any of them specifically. At best he could guess within a thousand fathoms of their origin, within a thousand years of their era. Every one of the creatures Sen had described was different in some way from the accounts he'd read or heard, familiar at points but outlandish at others, composed of warriors from armies he'd never known to have existed.

  Sen looked over the list they'd created, taking in the few scant notes Freemantle had been able to add beside the few that he recognized.

  "How can I find an army that doesn't exist?" he asked.

  Freemantle lifted his eyes from the list to meet Sen's. "I don't know."

  They sat in silence for a time, reflecting. For Sen the puzzle was perplexing. He'd grown up dreaming of Saint Ignifer and his army over Aradabar; but that army had never existed, because Saint Ignifer had never existed. Mare had said as much herself. The army was just another of Avia's visions he was meant to make real. Perhaps if he could study the book she'd handed him, Avia's Revels, but it hadn't passed through the veil with him.

  "I could go in the veil," he said abruptly. "Maybe the Abbess' book will be there. There may be answers."

  "Or there may not be," said Freemantle. "If you go for only that but find nothing, will you use up one of your memories?"

  Sen didn't know. "Maybe." He chewed on his quill. "But we can't answer these questions here, only by thinking. We need an expert, someone who could recognize these peoples."

  Freemantle mused on that for a moment. "We need an historian."

  "An historian," said Sen repeated, then remembered what Freemantle had said earlier. "Like Gorshalty. Someone who knows our world deeply. Can you think of anyone like that?"

  Freemantle leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrowing with the possibility. "Probably not Gorshalty, he was a student of natural philosophy, not war. But there should be many. Let me think." He scratched his lantern jaw. "We'd have to go back much further. In the more recent years of Aberainythy and the kings before him, the work of most historians was crushed, around the same time the Unforgiven were rooted out. The Molemen interpolated all scripts leaked through underground presses and hung offenders from the Spike line. Before even that, some two hundred years ago, well, that was the burning of the Stathrich library in the Fallowlands, where the Groan debtor's prison now stands. Stood."

  Sen leaned in. "And before that?"

  Freemantle made a pained face. "That's before my time as an observer. I know there were a plethora of historians writing in the Cladera period, though again many of their writings were consigned to burn when the new order of Kings ascended to the throne around four hundred years ago. Some of their works might still exist though. I know of numerous secret tunnels dug into the Gutrock, family vaults where the wealthy and powerful squirreled away their riches, where valuable tomes might still remain."

  Sen nodded, thinking of long whitewashing days in the millinery. "Books could be useful. Sharachus made a habit of stealing documents."

  "We could try that, yes, but this won't be like stealing a map, Sen. These texts will be written in a dozen different tongues, from Fell Mantic and Hath Mantic all the way back to the Aradabar diaspora tongues, the Roganauts, Callifresian, Senticore, and on. You wouldn't be able to read them, and even if you could, you still wouldn't understand them after all the cultural drift. Reference points change; we're talking about different worlds."

  Sen thought about that for a moment. "So who then?"

  "I've got another idea," said Freemantle. "Though it's not a good one."

  "Go on."

  "Well, early in my era, just under three hundred years ago, I watched a Big-Eye named Kankakee for a time. Pryce the Third was in the Roy and they were really starting to ramp up the use of the King's Spike, placing them on HellWest for the first time instead of in Grammaton Square. I don't really know how I got interested in him, he was a bottom-rank scrivener in the Numpting House of Rey de Gorgone. Perhaps I'd seen some of his writings published under a pseudonym in one of the tolerated periodicals. Anyway, he owned an oscolope and an orrery and made observations on the state of the heavens. I dropped in on him from time to time just to see what he was working on. He had numerous bizarre theories, and amongst them was an interest in the 'thinness' of our world."

  Sen perked up. "What kind of theories?"

  "I can't really remember, but strange things, like, he posited that the actual size of the city of Ignifer could not wholly fit within the confines of its own walls. He suggested there were pockets, even whole neighborhoods, made up of some kind of shadow substance that could stretch and elongate and shrink as the city required it. He called it 'Scry', but maybe he was looking into the Darkness itself."

  Sen frowned. "Interesting, but it doesn't sound very useful."

  "No, but he actually managed to prove it theoretically, though he could find no way to prove it experimentally. He was also interested in the fabled Eye of Heaven, the great white bulge of light that sails the oceans but none have ever seen at port, none have ever been known to board."

  "And ancient
peoples? Armies?"

  "Exactly. But, perhaps?" Freemantle's enthusiasm faded somewhat. "I may be misremembering."

  Sen mulled it over. It didn't seem a clear or certain answer, and that was a lot to gamble one of his four remaining memories on. "I'd worry he's too modern. If you have seen the whole of the world, dating back even before this Kankakee, and the figures I described are not even remotely familiar to you, then how could he possibly know?"

  Freemantle gave a sigh. "Only if he had access to the texts, but you're right, they were all destroyed. So we'll have to go further back, and hope you can find a way around the language problem. Sellathon X, he was a Fresian, a landmass almost antipodal to Ignifer's city, a few thousand years ago. Histaron's another, he's from the Mantic reformation in Great Yaw, the archipelago flooded when the volcano last erupted. And others, lots of them."

  Sen thought about that. It seemed an outsized gamble to use up one of his trips through the veil only to find a historian who shared none of the same reference points, who didn't speak the same language, who couldn't possibly understand the urgency of what he was trying to achieve. There had to be another way, conserving more of his memories.

  Then an idea came to him. At first it was just a glimmer, but as he pushed forward it gathered pace. "You said you know the location of secret books of history?"

  "Yes," said Freemantle, curious now.

  "I know where the mother lode is. If we take that, and-" he paused, running back through his memory and latching onto one specific instance, glimpsed in the shared life of one of the friends he still remembered. "We find somebody new, a blank slate, and we start from the beginning with them. Someone who can dedicate their whole life to this one task, and know the languages, the warriors, the armies, the battlefields, who can understand the importance of the coming war. Also someone who won't be missed if we take them, who won't affect the world with their absence."