The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  "Hello, Craley," Sen said.

  Craley only nodded.

  Some forty ghasts trailed across the rock behind him in a pale line, blindfolded again, bearing supplies in heavy backpacks.

  The two of them barely spoke, bar a few simple exchanges giving directions to bring in the supplies. Craley carried a full bag each trip, though it was still too heavy. This time they had to drop some of the supplies down the book-well in the bucket, there were so many. Enough for five years, maybe seven.

  When the restocking was finished Craley brewed tea and they sat together and drank it.

  "You've grown," Sen observed.

  "It's been three years."

  "It seems so fast."

  "It's been three years," Craley repeated, her tone dead. "Where have you been?"

  "Away."

  "Where?"

  "Away."

  Craley got to her feet, lifted the teacup high above her head, then smashed it down on the floor. Her face didn't flush. This wasn't even the outer edge of her anger. This was just to speed things up.

  "Where?" she demanded.

  Sen looked at the shards of the ceramic cup, lying in brown tea puddles now soaking into the rug. "Nowhere," he said calmly. "Organizing this supply run. The last person I truly spoke to was you."

  That mollified Craley. She sat back down. "You really think you're saving the world, don't you?"

  "I'm trying."

  Craley shook her head slowly, calmly. She'd planned this moment for years, waited for it.

  "I found nothing," she said, relishing every word. "Nothing, in all the books. Not one sign of your army, not one shred of evidence they ever existed. There's no one to take and you're wasting your time."

  Sen sipped at his tea, unperturbed. "Then you had better keep looking."

  Craley laughed. "And if I don't, father? I could walk out of this hole you've put me in and never return."

  Sen looked at her, then took another sip. "You won't."

  "Why wouldn't I? You know so much, tell me that."

  Sen set the tea carefully down. Craley knew all about his abilities now; to read people's emotions, to look into their minds and fish out the best way to manipulate them. Craley had prepared for it. All Sen would see now was the cold wall of hate she'd spent three years building.

  "You've stayed this long to tell me what you think of me," Sen said. "I understand that, Craley. I can see it. You hate me and I deserve it. But you won't leave now because there's nothing out there for you."

  Craley frowned. It was true she knew no one, but that could change. She had all her life still, or twenty-seven years at least. That was better than a lifetime of reading dusty old books.

  "I'll make something for myself. It's better than staying here hunting for ghosts."

  Sen shook his head. The shallow, sad smile came back, and Craley began to sense a change in him. Three years earlier he'd been distraught. Only a day had passed for him, but he seemed harder somehow. Resolved. "You don't understand. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about really nothing." He pointed to the door. "Go see for yourself."

  Craley met his steady gaze, ready to argue further, but the set of Sen's eyes convinced her otherwise. She went to the door and swung it open.

  Outside there really was nothing; an endless white space. Moments ago she'd been out here hauling bags, and now all that was gone. Craley reached out into the white but there was nothing to touch. There was no Gutrock, no line of weary ghasts, no sun and no sky. She stepped out onto white and swung her arms slowly through the emptiness.

  Sen was standing in the doorway behind her.

  "What have you done?" Craley asked, her voice catching on shock and anger. "You said there was thirty years. You said I had a choice!"

  "I changed my mind," said Sen. "I've taken away the choice."

  Craley stared at him in disbelief. Of all things, she hadn't expected this. It cut right through to the heart of her rage, nursed and planned for so long. Her revenge was to tell her father there was no hope. She would revel in this petty defeat. She didn't care that the world might end. The world had done nothing for her. All that mattered was hurting Sen. She would do that then leave.

  Now even that had been taken away from her. It left only one thing. She laughed, and started back toward the door.

  "Do you think I'll keep doing this now? Why in the world would I?"

  "Because it's your only way out."

  Craley laughed again. Let her father see this one coming. She palmed her hand-carved spike, as she'd practiced doing so many times, and slammed it with all the force of her barrel shoulders into Sen's face. He gave a gasp of shock as the blade entered his right eye and passed backward through his brain. Blood rushed from the wound.

  "That explains that, then," he said in a curiously detached voice.

  Then he dropped to his knees, fell forward out of the tabernacle onto his hands, and slumped flat on his chest. His blood leaked onto the white, where it spread into a wide puddle and began to fade.

  Craley felt as though a weight had been lifted off her. She watched as the white slowly began to eat at her father's body. This had to be the veil. Only the tabernacle that Sen had built remained.

  She went back inside and closed the door. Nothing else inside had changed. Her heart beat hard, but she felt good. She cleaned up the mess of her broken teacup and felt better.

  She was truly alone, now, but perhaps it was all right. This could be a life, still.

  She returned to her books with a lighter heart. She was a prisoner in a cell still, but now it was a prison of her own making, with her father and jailer dead. The hatred that had consumed her for so long was gone. She remembered her passion for words and knowledge.

  She moved her cot down into the library, along with enough food, water, and revelatory gas that she very rarely needed to venture back up to the surface. Down there in Seem's Great Library she didn't feel alone. The greatest minds the Corpse World had to offer were all around her. She walked the perimeter of the grand portico holding forth to the fallen statuary, conducting long discourses with them about her daily discoveries. She gave them names and characteristics, so they became her only friends.

  Years passed. She charted time using a range of clocks she built from first principles, lifted from the dry descriptions she found in ancient books. She built scaffolds out of salvaged shelving that reached to the ceiling of the grand portico, allowing her to affix a great marble pendulum there, strung with unbreakable Spider silk. With it she measured the long hours and days as the pendulum arced over the mosaics. She perfected a range of clockwork chronometers that gave her a close rendition of an hour, a minute, a second, synchronizing them with the pendulum and the circadian rhythms of her own body.

  And throughout, she continued searching for the army. It was the task she'd done all her life, and though she'd told Sen it was impossible, she'd never truly believed that. It was too grand a vision to be false. The library was there for her, and burrowing through it always made her happy. She was the first to read all these words in millennia, the most privileged of ghasts.

  Over the years she read thousands of books. She came to understand the system of the library as envisioned by King Seem so long ago; the two great circular chambers symbolizing the Heart and its brother, with the Corpse World forming where they met. She learned language after language, soaking them up into a brain now empty of distractions. In her readings, stretching from the Solio Knights in the early Zenotopic era to the spread of the Mjolnir Federacy, she found odd pieces of evidence that turned her thinking upside down.

  Going back over the earliest books she'd read, the Book of Airs and Graces and Avia's Revels, she found new truths in fresh translations. Her deeper knowledge reversed some stories she'd taken for granted since the Butterfly Abbess had explained them to her, undercutting the foundations of all her understanding. In chapter after chapter she found bright, clear meaning within the mad prophesies of Avia; her words as recorde
d by King Seem's hierophants or the Moth Abbess' Sisters, until finally the ultimate impossibility simmered to the surface.

  She found her own name.

  The first time she saw it she was shocked to her core, and thought she must have made a mistake. It was written in Outer Hebron, a language of the Men of Quartz, and concerned Avia's position on the cave-writings of the Anasanz. They were a caste unknown in the world Craley had grown up in and were only alluded to vaguely as 'the beaked hill people of the Arrythians' in the Book of Airs and Graces. It had taken a lifetime of study in books unknown to the world to understand that the Anasanz and the 'beaked hill people' were the same, but that understanding led to ripple effects in all her translations.

  Where before she'd read a few nonsense syllables she'd taken to be a kind of grammatical marker, she found 'Saint Craley Shark'.

  It was far from the only mention. Once she started looking, she found hundreds, if not thousands.

  She built a timeline from woven tarpaulins and strung it around the library's grand portico hall, inking it with dates of the world and mentions of herself; from the first sentience of the Heart through its fratricide and self-dissolution, into the subsequent spawning, growth, and evolution of all life on the Corpse Worlds. She charted the growth of empires and kings, learning their names and their stories and their falls.

  Great battles were fought and won and lost; lines of ownership, nationhood and fealty were drawn and redrawn. Ideas promulgated, were quenched, inquisitions rose and fell, some castes were branded evil then those same castes were branded heavenly. Saints were named, heroes were declaimed, sinners cast down and history was rewritten.

  Throughout it all were Saint Ignifer and Saint Craley Shark, moving in tandem like the sun and the moon; Ignifer in the light, Craley Shark obscured in shadow, but every bit as essential.

  Every day her giant pendulum swung and she walked with it around the tapestry; watching volcanoes erupt, lands sink under the waves and other lands rise up out of them. She charted the flow of hope and the flow of the Rot, and she knew them to both be different sides of the same coin. She saw them both at work in the turning of the heavens and splitting of the earth, in births and deaths, exultations and great discoveries, wars, famines, genocides.

  Yet there was an imbalance. The Rot was too ravenous, and because of that there was always less, until in the end everything would be swallowed in the Darkness that came before. The Rot would die with nothing more to eat, the light would fade, and one day whatever remained of the Heart would see what it had wrought, and falter into lonely madness.

  She found herself written throughout that story as a savior, Saint Ignifer's daughter and the greatest hero of all the Corpse Worlds. She gulped the words down. She had killed Sen, the embodiment of Saint Ignifer, but this was war for all the thousands of Corpse Worlds, locked in endless, epic battle with the Rot. Death was surmountable as long as something lived on. Death was a cycle just as Life was, and only together and in balance could they triumph over the endless Dark.

  The notion that she might be a hero in that celestial story filled her with pride. She wanted to make it real, even as she half-suspected that all of this was the self-deception of an unhealthy, solitary mind.

  Was she going mad to see herself in the old stories? Translations could take her in many different directions. Was there a Saint Craley, or was it her lonely fantasy, seen in words where it didn't exist? Her father was dead, the world was lost, and here she was trapped in the white of the veil, utterly apart from all other castes. Was it any surprise she wrote herself into the legends as the only one to bring back balance?

  She spoke to the statues and they spoke back, sometimes agreeing, sometimes mocking.

  "If I am mad, can it be repaired?" Craley asked them. "Can you help me heal my mind?"

  There was no way. Without other people to hold up a mirror, she no longer knew what she was, and what did it matter anyway? She was here. What did her fantasies hurt, when it was only her alive, only her in all the white, living only for her own ends?

  Still she searched. She used her new madness to find patterns where there had been none before, falling into sympathy with the madness of Avia. She used Saint Craley Shark as a touchstone and a guiding light, and in that great hero's towering shadow she sought out the army as the Sisters of the Butterfly Abbess had taught it to her, as Avia had envisioned it, as her father had laid it out in sketches of beasts and men and flying machines, until gradually, one by one and in the strangest of places, she found them.

  They'd been hiding in plain sight all along, just like Saint Craley. She'd known them since the beginning. Now she saw them for what they really were.

  CELL VI

  Sen burst into wakefulness, lurched up from the chair in which he'd been tightly pressed in with pillows, and collapsed to the floor.

  His mind spun. He gasped and pressed his hand to his right eye, expecting to feel the blood where Craley's blade had skewered him through, but all he felt was the crinkly scratch of blood-crusted fabric, tickling from his eye socket.

  He laughed, then almost vomited. On his hands and knees he struggled to catch his breath, looking at the white floor and remembering the look on Craley's face, the joy she'd felt in killing her own father.

  Except he wasn't Craley's father. He'd never been her father. Her abductor, perhaps. Her jailer. Never her father. The wheezing became painful, and Sen looked to the side.

  There was Freemantle. He sat at his desk, also wedged in with pillows, facing Sen. His eyes were closed though, and his breathing came as a regular whistle through his broad lantern jaw.

  Sen laughed more. He felt giddy; wild with dying, wild with being back here in this place. It had started to feel unreal, after what might have been a week in the veil, in the world, jumping backward and forward through time, place to place, always planning, always manipulating.

  Craley had gotten the better of him.

  "Hey, Freemantle," he said, but his voice was barely a croak, and the white-robed figure in his chair didn't stir. How long had he been asleep for, Sen wondered? How long had he been awake without sleeping, waiting for Sen to come back?

  The desk was strewn with books and papers. At a glance Sen could see he'd filled several more books; stacked to the side. Perhaps he was condensing the old notes, or adding new ones, or who knew what? Sen giggled to himself. Craley was reading. Freemantle was reading. In their cells they both worked like cogs in a clockwork mechanism, doing Sen's bidding, and what was that bidding?

  He laughed. No armies, Craley had said. They didn't exist.

  He tried to push himself to his feet, but something about the motion didn't work. He ended up flat on his back, reeling with a fresh bout of sickness. He rolled up to a sitting position and looked at his feet, and saw what the problem was.

  His feet had withered. They were gray and shrunken, like dead mice left to mummify in the hidden chambers of the cathedral. Every change of season the Sisters had sent him crawling into the ventricles behind the pipe organ to gather up dust and fetch whatever creatures had snuck back there to die.

  Mice shrank after death. Their little furry bodies thinned out and their eyes sank in, their fur receded showing bony ankles and tiny feet. Sen had studied one of their bodies once, smuggled out to the pond where he could look at it in the light. It looked lonely, just like him. That was perhaps the first grave he'd dug; down in the reeds, with only the smallest X of the Heart above it to mark its resting place.

  Now his legs looked like dead mice. He pulled up the robe to study them; beneath the knee his pale white flesh sucked inward to the bone, becoming gray and seamed, like chicken's feet. His ankles bulged obscenely. The bones of his feet protruded through the taut gray skin like the wooden structure beneath a hawker stand's leather apron.

  He laughed, then stopped, because it wasn't funny any more. Instead he ran one hand down his altered skin; it felt wrinkled and alien, like he was stroking the furrows in ancient bark. He tri
ed to move his toes, to shift his feet, but there was no response. The tendons rippled visibly beneath the skin, but there was no strength in them. He lay back and breathed until the shock passed and acceptance crept over him. He'd said as much to Freemantle. Piece by piece, he was going to disappear.

  When he felt clear-headed again, he rose back to his knees. It was harder to balance than he remembered, as he couldn't rely on his calves to help. At Freemantle's desk he looked over the new notes.

  Names filled the papers. A flash of recollection came back to him; speaking to a great Moth in the veil, as she spoke to him of the work he must do. There'd been something very familiar about her, a sense that he knew why her antennae were stubs, and why her wings were stacked at her back rather than outspread, but he didn't know why.

  Another one lost.

  The words on the papers blurred. He turned to look at Freemantle, sleeping so peacefully, except he didn't look peaceful. His plain white face bore lines of frustration and worry.

  It would be so easy to wake him. A jostle on his knee, a hand on his shoulder, and he would stir. He'd aligned his chair to face Sen, waiting for just this moment, but Sen hesitated.

  Freemantle would want to hear everything that he'd done. He'd have to tell him about Craley, and the cruelties he'd subjected the girl to; a lifetime of solitude, all for the vain pursuit of an answer that didn't exist. Shame burned bright in his chest.

  But not only that. Freemantle would ask him who he'd lost. Together they'd pore over the Book of Sen, and Sen would be forced to remember people he'd forgotten. Even the thought of that made him feel ill, now. The emptiness was not so bad, if you didn't know. The Moth was fading already; if he had to learn her name, and what role she'd played, it would be so much harder. He'd have to try to miss her. He'd feel guilty to that other Sen, the one who'd started him out on this hopeless quest.

  He slumped in position, leaning against the desk.