The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  The things he'd done to Craley stung him. He remembered well his own years of solitude. In the Abbey he'd been alone for ten years, ever since his mother left. That had been hard. Like Craley, he'd fed himself, and spent his days in quiet study, and walked around the grounds trying to convince himself he wasn't going mad. How many hours had he spent by his mother's grave, blaming her for dying? Some of the Sisters had spoken to him occasionally, but mostly they just let him be.

  When the children had come, Feyon, Alam and Daveron, his world had transformed. Befriending Alam was the best thing he'd ever done. Without him in those early years, who would he be now?

  He shuffled backward away from the sleeping man at the desk. He'd watched over Sen in those years too, or so he'd claimed. But he'd done nothing. He'd never come to help him. He'd never been kind, never reached out, never sang him to sleep or sat with him and ate.

  He'd been so alone, and the memory of it dug at his heart. That was how Craley felt now, and it was Sen's fault, and that he couldn't bear.

  Freemantle didn't need to know. It would serve neither of them for those stories to be written down. It would only hurt.

  He climbed back into the chair, wedging himself carefully into position with the pillows, and closed his eyes. He would go back to Craley, to the moment after he'd died, and promise to stay. What did it matter if the world died in thirty years time? They could be together until then. That would mean something. They might be happy. He could be the father he'd always wished for himself.

  The veil opened to him, then slipped. Sen opened his eyes in the white cell again, confused and uncertain. Something was wrong, but he didn't know what. Had he lost the way, had the door already closed? He tried again, this time holding firm to the image of Craley at the door, looking down on Sen's corpse, but his every effort at purchase rebounded. He couldn't grasp a handhold, and opened his eyes again in the cell.

  Too thin.

  A yawning pit opened within him. There was nothing to hold onto anymore; not in that place, in that time. He'd worn it through with his travels, with his death. Through the veil he could feel the Corpse World teetering on the edge of the Darkness, as thin as oiled vellum glowing through a candle flame, ready any minute to disintegrate.

  He closed his eyes and hunted for a place to latch onto. He scrabbled at the weeks and months that followed his death, at the year to come and a year after that, all the while as Craley grew older and settled deeper into herself. Through the veil Sen could catch glimpses of her at her bookshelves, at her pendulum, talking to her statues, and felt his heart rending.

  This was his fault.

  He tried harder, throwing whatever he could into the veil. Nothing mattered more now than finding his daughter and being there for her before the loneliness sank in too deep. He scratched and scraped until finally there was a point thick enough to bear his weight, and he flung himself through the veil and back to the Gutrock, dragging Craley and the tabernacle with him.

  THE DEFEATED I

  On Craley's eighteenth birthday the world outside returned. She went out on an infrequent trip to throw away bucket-loads of used cans and saw the Gutrock at her feet, where before there had been only the veil. Nearby were her old heaps of sun-beaten, desiccated refuse; cans and mottled papers heaped on the porous lava rock.

  She stepped out and looked around. The sky was blue and clear but for the black circle of the Rot overhead. It was bigger than before, now half as large as the sun.

  A day later Sen returned. Craley sat on the roof of the tabernacle and waited for him. She saw his resupply convoy approaching from a distance, like a dark snake over the white rock, with Sen at their head. Their foot and hoof-beats sounded like a gathering thunderstorm.

  They stopped at the shack and settled quietly, wheezing and drinking from flasks. Sen approached and looked up into the sun at Craley on the tabernacle roof. She looked down at this man she'd once called father, whom she'd killed.

  Nothing had changed about him. Four years had passed since he'd died in the white but nothing had changed at all. His hair was the same, his scarred face bore no new wrinkles, his clothes were exactly the same as before.

  "I knew I hadn't killed you," Craley said.

  "No," Sen replied. "Though it did hurt."

  They looked at each other, and Craley felt Sen examining her mind; his whispery touch playing across the skin of her thoughts. "But you've changed," said Sen. "Not just your body. Your mind."

  Craley knew it. Her chest was now fully filled out with jaws and jaw-ribs, her arms were thicker, the trestles of hair in the pits of her collar-bone clavicles had darkened to black, like two ominous eyes above the chest mouth. And above that, she had the answer.

  "You haven't changed at all," she said.

  Sen gave a peremptory nod and entered the tabernacle.

  Craley remained on the roof watching the blindfolded ghasts as they unloaded their packs. There were more of them now than on any previous expedition. She wondered at the effort it must have taken to prepare all this, and still keep the library secret.

  When the ghasts finished unloading they rose and began the walk away in silence. They were better trained this time. Not a word escaped their lips, not one of them lifted his or her blindfold. Craley watched them retreat over the nearby rise, then sat a time longer. She knew Sen would be inside; looking over her creations, her notes, the world she'd built in the portico.

  Eventually the sun set over Ignifer's mountain, splashing a barrage of burnt oranges and flowery pinks across the sky. Below her Sen emerged and looked up.

  "You kept looking."

  Craley let the words hang in the air between them. There was a tone of wonder in Sen's voice that annoyed her, as if he'd expected something different. What else could she do, trapped in the veil? Craley had nothing to say to him. She'd already said it all when she'd thrust the spike through his eye.

  "I felt for sure you would have stopped," he went on.

  Craley couldn't resist. "Then why did you bring more supplies?"

  Sen shrugged. He waved at the heaped goods beside him dismissively, as though gathering and transporting such a large train of supplies was nothing. "It's enough for a life. I thought maybe…" He trailed off.

  "I thought I'd never see you again." Craley said. She was surprised by how flat and uninterested her voice was. Her father was here, again. This was just how things went. "You were dead."

  "I think I was, for a little while," Sen said. "In this place, at least. It was harder to come back. I meant to be here earlier, but," his face took on a pained expression. "It was too thin. It's strange how the veil works." He smiled with a surprising warmth. "You did put out my eye, if that's any consolation."

  It wasn't. "It's back now."

  Sen waved the comment away. "Another eye, in another place. I don't claim to understand how it works."

  They stood for a time, as the skies to the west filled the silence between them with slowly rolling waves of color. The sunset phased to drops of gold splashing up off the clouds. Craley didn't know what to feel. Anger? Ambivalence?

  "Will you continue looking?" Sen asked. There was hope in his voice now, and did that annoy Craley? She couldn't tell anymore, and didn't answer immediately. Instead she just looked down at the man who had rescued her, who had imprisoned her, whom she'd killed. He seemed smaller than she remembered.

  "I'm taller than you now," she called down.

  Sen gave a grunt of laughter. "And you know how to wield a spike."

  Craley felt the same humor stir within her, inexplicably. Not anger, then. "What will you give me, if I continue?"

  Sen smiled, and spread his hands wide to encompass the tabernacle, the supplies, the disk-dappled Gutrock, the mountain. "All of this. The world."

  Craley snorted.

  "And that," said Sen.

  "What?"

  "That spirit. You get to keep that too, if you want."

  Craley's eyes narrowed. She felt the old anger stirrin
g, jostling with the desire to rush down and hug this man who was her father, who was Saint Ignifer risen, who was the only person she'd ever really met in all the world.

  "I already have it."

  "Do you? I think it has you." His eyes narrowed. "You've been through a lot, Craley. I think I glimpsed some of your madness, through the veil. But maybe you've come out the other side now. I'm glad to see that."

  The quizzical expression on Sen's face made the confusion of feelings stronger, pulling at the walls Craley had constructed over the years, until abruptly all of that simply drifted away, leaving in its place an odd amusement.

  "You're a strange man, Sen."

  "Strange," mused Sen, saying the word slowly as if savoring it in his mouth. "More than strange. I've done terrible things, Craley. I stole the life from a child who knew no better."

  Craley swallowed hard. Was that an apology? She wasn't ready for it. "You had to."

  Sen shook his head. "No, I didn't. There would have been another way, if only I'd been smart or strong enough to know what it was."

  The urge to rush down and hug Sen grew even stronger, but still she resisted it. Yet he was here. That meant something.

  "Will you stay this time?" she asked. "Just for a little while, I mean."

  Sen's smile grew wider. "For as long as I can, it would be my pleasure."

  * * *

  They sat in the tabernacle with the door open, letting in a warm breeze that carried the dry sulfur dust of the Gutrock. They sipped hot tea Craley boiled over the revelatory stove.

  "I don't spend much time up here," she said awkwardly. It was strange to talk to another living person. For so long her only comrades had been statues and figures from tapestries. "Mostly I work down in the library."

  "I saw the pendulum," said Sen. "The tapestries. How many languages do you speak now?"

  "Not speak," Craley corrected, "read. Somewhere around ten, but they conflow and saltrate, so it ends up I can read almost everything, at least in broad strokes."

  Sen frowned. "I don't know what those words mean, conflow and saltrate."

  Craley gave a shy smile. "Ah, you wouldn't. I think I made them up. I couldn't find the right words to describe the cross-pollination and sideways movements of the structures of language, so I invented them. Conflow means something like you'd imagine a river delta of language to look like; a broad flow of many tongues contracting into a single stream flowing narrow but with great depth. Saltrate is about accretions that survive these changes, that essentially remain constant while all about them each era's parlance erodes the bedrock. Between the two, I can peg my way through most texts, with referencing and use of the omnichron."

  A faint smile played on Sen's face, and he raised one eyebrow.

  "The tapestry," said Craley. "The history of the Corpse World."

  Sen nodded slowly. "You know much more about these things than I, now."

  "Wasn't that why you brought me here?"

  Sen sipped his tea, then set it down on a nearby can crate. "Part of the reason, yes."

  Craley watched him closely. The same question that had been in the back of her mind for years now came to the fore. She voiced it.

  "You're talking about Saint Craley."

  Sen's eyes widened. "Saint Craley?"

  That was interesting. "Ah, you don't know then? It could be coincidence, I suppose. But she was an Appomatox, too. She's hidden in some of the lost gospels, off-cut from the Book of Airs and Graces, and of course in Avia's Revels. It's in the prophecy."

  Sen chuckled. "So you're in Avia's prophecies too, are you?"

  "I thought you must have known."

  Sen shook his head. "Though I suppose it's a sign I've been on the right track. Honestly, I picked a child who was lost, drawn from a memory of a friend. I came to you, saw that you could be smart, and that was all."

  Craley nodded. She didn't have to ask who the friend was, or what Sen would have done if she hadn't had the potential she sought. She'd read about it all.

  "Saint Craley is a kind of precursor to Saint Ignifer, I think," Craley said, "or descendant possibly. They overlap a lot, interchanging at times. There's not a lot on her, but she seems to be a continuation."

  Sen nodded. "That's interesting. Sometimes I forget how deeply Avia saw."

  Craley finished her tea, then rose to her feet and moved to the trapdoor. "Come with me. There's a lot I need to show you."

  She opened the hatch and started climbing down. Sen followed.

  At the base, at the end of the rock-hewn tunnel, two revelatories were already glowing either side of the ever-swaying pendulum, in the wide portico hall. Craley led Sen to the start of her tapestry and began telling the story of her research, explaining the threads she had woven through legends and time, and her answer to the search for Saint Ignifer's army.

  It took hours, and Craley answered Sen's questions in detail; about the heroes, about the armies, about what it would take to bring them on board. When it was done they stood at the end of the tapestry where four complex lines converged. Craley spread her arms and smiled.

  "The defeated," she said. "The armies who lost, who were destroyed, who failed and were written out of history altogether. They're your saviors."

  "The defeated," Sen repeated. "It's genius."

  "It's only the same logic you used to choose me. You chose a girl whose loss would change nothing."

  Sen laughed. "And you've expanded it. I never even thought that was possible. A girl, yes, but how could the total loss of an army not impact the world? Freemantle and I wrestled with that for days. What good would it do us to take an army but up-end the world so either of us might never be born? You've answered the question. If these armies were defeated, generals and soldiers all, then they already lost their role. The world had no need of them anymore."

  Craley smiled. Praise from her father still mattered. "It's elegant, I agree. I researched every member of every army to be certain none of them went on to make a significant impact upon the world. None of them did. They disappeared from the flow. It's like they're waiting for you."

  Sen laughed again, warmer and louder. "Your grandmother was crafty."

  Craley shrugged. She considered saying that Sen was not her father, not in any way that mattered, so Avia was not her grandmother either, but held back. In a way they were all family now, bound to the same task. For years she'd followed the trail he'd left behind, and it was part of who she was as much as it was a part of Sen.

  She tapped her father in the chest. "Now we fight," she said.

  "We do?"

  Craley nodded. From the harnesses at her thighs she pulled a pair of black metal misericorde spikes. They'd been in one of the first boxes she'd opened, in the last supply dump.

  Sen grinned. "I hoped you'd take to them. All right."

  * * *

  In the center of the portico hall, weaving in and out as the pendulum swung across the floor, they bared spikes and faced each other. Sen stripped off his shirt, and in the orange revelatory light his interwoven scars shone blue, covering every bit of skin in burning loops and zigzags. These too were a mixture of ancient and modern tongues, with the larger part written in pre-Mantic telling an ancient story she could read with ease.

  The rise of Saint Ignifer.

  Sen bounced lightly, slashing his misericordes through the air a few times before him. "Not to kill. I don't want to go through that again."

  "Not to kill," Craley nodded, and advanced.

  For four years she'd trained throughout the library, against shadows and imaginary enemies. At first it had been slow work, learning how to handle spikes that were too big for her, with no one to show her the way but dusty descriptions and a few rare diagrams in ancient books. Steadily though she learned; how to spin them, how to lash them, how to drive them and use them for both offense and defense. From books on ancient combat she'd learned Frauk's Gambit, Hellophines' Underfeint, Dralikon's Compensation. She'd never fought a live opponent before,
but in some ways that had made her training harder, because every fight she ran she had to fight both sides at the same time, like playing chess against herself, drawing tactics from all the greatest misericordeists in history.

  Sen advanced to meet her and Craley slashed in with Diregor's Sweep. Sen evaded with a sidestep, slapping Craley lightly on the shoulder. Craley grunted and attacked again, employing Spinney's Retrench without even thinking, stretching herself wide and low with only one blade in the ascendant. Sen caught the blade's blunt edge on his counter spike, stabbed his elbow down into Craley's bicep even as he turned the blade away, then kicked her legs out from under her as she tried to snatch back her balance.

  On the floor she rolled, and the flat of Sen's forespike slapped hard into a groove of the mosaic where she'd been. Her breathing intensified, she came to rest on her left side, then whirled into Changbracht's Hurricane, a whirligig of spike arcs and kicks that allowed a fallen misericordeist to turn her low center of gravity to her advantage, drawing her overconfident enemy into a hedge of unpredictable metal.

  Sen paused, then slammed a kick into Craley's midriff, somehow planting the boot and withdrawing it in a gap in the spinning cycle.

  Craley rolled and came up panting. "Where did you learn that?"

  "On the streets of HellWest," Sen answered, "or maybe Aradabar, I can't really remember anymore. It could be from King Seem." Then he leapt to the attack by driving both spikes right at Craley's midriff. Craley tried to turn the blades, but still they punched through the outer edges of her belly, needling holes deftly in the skin just above the muscle.

  "Now you'll have some scars of your own," Sen said. He was grinning.

  Craley stared at him. Her hips hurt and blood was trickling out, but it was more embarrassing than anything. "They're not very good scars."

  "Come get some better ones then," said Sen, spinning both misericordes round his thumbs.

  Craley attacked again, plowing through a combination of Deacon, Salace, Shell, Grellathon and others, all of them masters of their age, but Sen turned them all with relative ease.