The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  Finally he splayed Craley's guard, then stepped inside and placed his crossed blades against her heart. Craley tried to bat them away, but in doing so exposed her wrists. Sen jammed the hafts of his spikes into them, cracking off bone. The shock rang up Craley's arms and her spikes flew from her hands, skittering over the mosaic floor to rest outside the twin circles of lamplight.

  Craley laughed. Sen stepped back. "You see why you lost, then?"

  Craley rubbed her wrists. "You fight dirty."

  Sen twisted his forespike in an elaborate flourish and bowed. "Is that not in your books?"

  "Nothing so crass." Craley strode over to her fallen spikes and picked them up. "I follow the masters."

  Sen chuckled. "Then you follow them softly. But that's nothing to be ashamed of; you've never really fought before, have you? You pull your blows, because in a fight against empty air there's nothing to push against. There's no way to complete a sequence without a person to stick your blades into. It makes you predictable; you follow the timing of an orderly duel when real fighting's nothing like that."

  Craley frowned. "You're saying I'm too perfect?"

  "Your forms are. Your sequences are. Now you can get rude with them, throw the force in and bend the rules of the masters."

  "But they're the-" Craley started, then trailed off. In truth, all the masters were dead. "Let's go again."

  Sen nodded.

  They fought for the rest of the day and into the night. It was a revelation to spar with Sen. Craley tried to map his maneuvers as she always had her imaginary enemy, but now she put weight behind every blow and defense. It made a great difference. Sen was agile, fast, and highly skilled, but he could not alter his gravity or prevent the full force of a blow from carrying through.

  Neither could Craley. Adding weight to her own blows slowed her and changed the rhythm of her moves. At times that helped, allowing her to roll from one attack into another with a momentum she'd never felt before.

  She cut a slice across Sen's arm. Sen cut one across her shoulder. He plunged a spike through the skin of her calf and she slammed the haft of her weapon into his jaw, cracking a tooth.

  It was marvelous. As they fought back and forth, shedding blood and sweat behind them, she felt the fog of her lonely life steam away like water off the hot Gutrock. This was what she'd always wanted; a full speed dialog back and forth with the best the world had to offer.

  More was coming now, she could feel it, and it filled her with excitement. Soon she'd have the chance to test everything she'd become against a reality she'd never known. Sen's choice of her was not random. Avia had not named her for nothing. She was going to become Saint Craley, and together she and Sen were going to save the world.

  THE DEFEATED II

  After they fought they ate, and after they ate they lay around a low fire and spoke. It was too long spent across the veil, thinning the Corpse with every moment he lingered, but Sen didn't care. He felt better doing it than he had since Craley was three years old. This girl he'd raised at a distance had become a good and powerful woman. He had been no kind of father, but still he was a father of a kind.

  They spoke of the fight and the fights to come. So much had changed already. Perhaps only a week ago he'd been standing in the Levi shack with the corpse of Craley's father strapped to the table beside him, looking down at the tiny baby.

  Now he looked at Craley, who was sleepily admiring her new wounds. Beside the tears in her hips she had a few furrows across her shoulders, chest, legs, and back. Not many, none too deep, but he could feel the girl's pride swelling up off her.

  Girl. She was not a girl anymore. She'd grown up alone, talking like a madwoman to statues and carved figures, but she wasn't mad. She was Sen's age now, and just as ready as Sen had ever been for the things to come. In truth she was more ready even than him, because she knew everything, when Sen still knew so little.

  Weariness stole over him, and the list of heroes Craley had given him drifted across his thoughts. It was a truly elegant solution. He looked at the Spider silk pendulum, and the tapestry detailing all the lost armies.

  "You've built wonders here, Craley," he said quietly. "More than I ever thought possible."

  Craley smiled sleepily. "But you came back. Even after I said I couldn't find them. You still came back."

  She didn't ask why. Sen felt her curiosity, though it was muted. Perhaps not everything needed to be said. Yet he felt he owed her this. "I was alone for much of my life, like you. In the Abbey. In the Slumswelters. I had my moments of madness. I don't want that to be your whole life."

  Craley pushed herself up on one elbow. "Except none of that's true, is it? You weren't alone. You had the Sisters. You just don't remember them. You had Gellick and Mare, but you've lost them."

  Sen nodded. Yes, of course. It was easy to forget about the forgetting. There must have been Sisters, or how else had he eaten, alone in an Abbey as a child? He'd read about Gellick and Mare.

  "You should ask Freemantle," Craley went on. "You wrote it all down for this reason."

  Sen considered telling her that he'd been there. He'd seen Freemantle, and the papers, and hadn't woken him.

  "Tell me again about the defeated," he said instead.

  Craley groaned, and rolled onto her back. "My armpit really stings. Why did you cut me there?"

  Sen chuckled. He remembered that strike, giving Craley a little something to remember him by. The sweat would make it annoyingly painful for days. "It'll keep you on your toes."

  "I can't put my arm down properly," Craley grumbled. "How will that keep me on my toes?"

  "I can give you matching ones on your heels, if you like. That ought to do it."

  Craley laughed. "You want to hear about the army, or not?"

  "Yes, please."

  "You'd think Saint Ignifer would know his own army. But all right."

  She went on, and Sen lay back, luxuriating in the rich words, in the way Craley spun stories together out of the holes in history. They could have used her when they were writing The Saint.

  There was a navy, and an army, and a force in the air, and a general to watch over them. There were figures from his own admiration of the stars, already sown into The Book of Airs and Graces and tethered to the Saint. There was the Albatross on the water, endlessly seeking the white Eye of Heaven to demand the return of his wife and child. There was Lord Quill, the last Man of Quartz who'd driven off the Drazi infection that destroyed the Slumswelters district, then flew into the sky in his chariot with a dozen fair maidens. There was King Seem himself, lost to the ages for millennia, with an army of all his Yoked Empire that never came to fight for Aradabar. Last of all there was Awa Babo, the Moleman God and great mind of the Mjolnir Federacy, a machine destined to lead the greatest fighting force on the Corpse World.

  Sen luxuriated in the tapestry of history. All of them had failed, or disappeared, or been vanquished in battle. All of them were columns upon which the hope of the world now stood; the hidden foundation to the Saint Ignifer legend that he'd never been able to see. The foundation to the legend of Saint Craley too.

  Thinking of that made him smile. Avia had played some tricks in her time. Turning this girl, this young woman, into another Saint had to be up there with the best.

  His eyes closed and he drifted for a time. He wasn't sure what would happen if he fell asleep in the veil; if he'd be kicked back to Freemantle in his white cell or just wake here, with his daughter of the same age by his side, but it didn't matter. He'd pushed himself too hard for too long. He'd earned this.

  "…vince them?"

  He blinked, rousing at the tail end of Craley speaking. "What?"

  "I said, how will you convince them to join you? Glowing scars are impressive, but I can't imagine any of them will care about the Rot. They haven't seen it. The Darkness is an abstract concept to them. They're also drunks, or megalomaniacs, or their minds just don't work like ours. How will you convince them?"

  Sen shi
fted slightly. He felt bone-weary, and cozier than he had in what felt like years. Had he slept when Craley stabbed him in the eye? Maybe, but not properly. This would be his first real sleep in weeks.

  He imagined himself darting back and forth in history, interacting with the greatest heroes of their ages, learning what he could, finding the points where he could delve in and twist. Manipulation, that was what Craley had called it. He smiled at the thought of trying to manipulate Lord Quill, the savior of Ignifer's city. How would he talk the machine mind of Awa Babo into helping his cause?

  He had no idea. But then he'd set out for Craley with little idea what to do. The answers would come or they wouldn't.

  "I'll manage," said Sen.

  Craley shifted position, and gave a grunt of pain. Sen felt her readying to say something about the cut in her armpit, but she let it go. He smiled to himself. They'd really fought. They'd both taken scars. That felt good, because it was real.

  "I'll fight better next time you see me," Craley said sleepily.

  "I know you will," Sen answered. "Not only in misericordes, but also in the art of war. The army will need a strategy."

  "Strategy," Craley echoed, "for the great general."

  Sen let himself drift back into darkness. Probably he should go back to Freemantle, but at this moment he didn't care. He wanted to be near his daughter. He wanted to wake up beside her, and laugh about their scars, and talk about the army more.

  He fell asleep, and dreamed of the army. He was standing on the cliffs by Aradabar once more, while a voice with no body whispered sounds that could have been words in his ear. Warriors soared by him, in the air and on the ground and on the water, surging into battle, until suddenly they were gone.

  The Rot was gone. The Darkness was gone. The magma swelling over Aradabar was gone.

  "This," said the voice, though he couldn't make out any more.

  "This," he repeated to himself. This was what he'd always wanted. Peace in his city, peace amongst castes, peace between father and daughter, between friends and enemies. Peoples coming together in the glass towers of learning to share their knowledge, to build something better that could last.

  He woke in the portico with a start. The revelatories had gone out, and in the total darkness he couldn't see a thing, yet he saw the only thing that mattered.

  The Darkness.

  It crept over Craley and him like a cold Levi tide, and he sprang up at once. "I have time yet!" he shouted into the emptiness, but the Darkness didn't care. It didn't think or feel, didn't have compassion or emotions, it simply was, and this was what it did.

  It crawled up his legs as he tried to fire the spark in his scars. Craley was swallowed whole, as were the lower levels of the library. The world quivered like a thin blade of grass in a breeze, ready any moment to tear all the way through.

  He should never have fallen asleep.

  "Wait!" he shouted, as the Darkness lapped up his chest, erasing his scars and all the stories of his life. He squeezed his eyes tightly as it gulped at his neck, thinking of the great white swell of Heaven's Eye on the ocean, and the crew of ragtag castes racing across the waves in a ship with sails outflung like a gull's, and of a captain called the Albatross who would never stop hunting for the family that he'd lost.

  The Darkness flowed over his jaw and into his mouth just as his scars finally sparked and the veil opened, tipping him through into the past.

  BOOK 4. AN ARMY

  LONNIGAN CLAY I

  The sun had barely risen over the Sheckledown Sea, and little Bomsy Maller was up in the crow's nest of the frigate 'Shall-I-Row', scanning the pinkish horizon. The ship bustled beneath him, with navvies crawling out over the sails below, caulking with tar or oiling the riggings.

  Bomsy sighed, and scratched his small round head with his small black hand. He'd been with captain Lonnigan Clay for six years now, watching as his hunt for the Eye of Heaven took on mythic proportions. He'd stood by in a dozen different ports as the captain regaled drunkards, sots and scarab-addicted navvies with his tales of treasure and infamy awaiting them on the six seas, sparking the fresh light of his mad chase in their eyes. He'd seen the captain polishing his diamante shell and burnishing his claws to stand before wealthy patrons and seek their investment, promising all the miraculous bounties Heaven's Eye would afford. He'd stood by at the Ryce shipyard as the Shall-I-Row had been gutted and refitted with a trebuchet mast, driving their chief patron near to bankruptcy in the process, all for the sake of a whirring gyroscopic bombe that might have the power to crack open the Eye.

  Bomsy sighed again, and ran his little eyes over the storm-shrouded horizon. Four times they'd sighted it, their glowing white prize, in all their years of he hunt, but they'd never caught it. Once they'd fired a bombe from the trebuchet mast, but it had fallen in the waves off the Eye's bow; a fortune lost to no end.

  Bomsy supposed that this was now the purpose of his life; following Lonnigan Clay around the Corpse World and doing his bidding, taming his madness when he could, looking for answers in Heaven's mystery. The Eye had befuddled countless navvies before them, and would no doubt befuddle navvies for generations to come.

  Except Lonnigan Clay was no ordinary navvy. In physique he was an exceptional Cray; his orange diamante shell shone with a gleaming brilliance, his limbs were massive and powerful, and his huge mumpen claws could snip a man in half. Yet it was his vision that drew the lost masses to his quest. He delved into the depths of their hearts and gleaned that which was lacking, then offered that back to them in ways that bound their fate tightly to his.

  "Ride with me, lads," he told them in port after port. "You'll get what you seek."

  It didn't matter what it was. Riches. Love. Revenge. Power. Lonnigan spoke to all the broken types and they loved him for it. He'd spoken to Bomsy too, when he was dying in the gutter of Ignifer's city after cutthroats had set upon him, stealing his last purse as first mate. Lonnigan had saved Bomsy then, and what didn't Bomsy owe him for that?

  Six years. Perhaps ten. The rest of his life.

  They weren't new thoughts. The white Eye of Heaven meant nothing to him anymore. He barely remembered the things Lonnigan had promised him all those years ago. A place to belong, perhaps, and respect from a crew. He had that now, despite his diminutive stature, but wasn't there something more? He let his eyes glaze across the horizon line, circling round from the pink of the sunset to the dying dusk to the west, where the low half-sphere of the moon was descending out of sight.

  Except that wasn't the moon.

  For long moments he scarcely believed what he was seeing; a white dome on the gray waters glowing like a pale echo of the sun, but not the moon. The moon was in the sky still, next to the pinprick black hole of the Rot.

  His jaw dropped. He'd never been on watch when the Eye was sighted before. It seemed unreal. This was it. He mustered himself to action and leaned over the rail.

  "She rides!" he cried to the decks below. "The Eye hastens and rides ten fathoms hence, alert the captain!"

  Immediately there was a rowdy bustling on the poop deck, as Tarheads and Mongrels and all of the Shall-I-Row's heathen crew ran for the rails to catch a glimpse of Heaven's Eye.

  "Captain!" cried down little Bomsy Maller. "Gather the captain, you fool plantains!"

  They rushed away, conferred briefly at the forecastle entrance to the captain's quarters, then sent in a representative.

  Captain Lonnigan Clay burst out within seconds. His great shell blazed in the dawn light, his crab-like Cray legs clattered over the wooden decking, and one of his eyes swiveled on its stalk to track the Eye on the horizon. He leapt to the rigging and scrambled it as neatly as any man, whether shelled or not; his large lobster claws hauling his great diamante housing up, his eight lesser legs grappling to ropes and mast with astounding agility.

  "She rides beneath the fifth meridian," Bomsy called as the captain drew near, "across the spouts of that roaming whale pod."

  Lonnigan bre
asted the crow's nest railing, where his great bulk dwarfed Bomsy, and stretched to his full height, segmented shell parts clanking as they spread apart.

  "Aye, I know her face right well," said Lonnigan in his burring, salt-roughened voice. With one leg he shook out the extension on an oscolope lens, then passed the bronze pipe to his large mumpen claw, which in turn held it to his stalky eye. For a long moment he peered into it to the distant white arc of light. "She rides vertiginous," he said. "She coruscates, not unlike the Borealis. She's ours."

  "Can I see, cap'n?" asked little Bomsy Maller.

  "You'll see all soon enough, my spry lad," said Lonnigan, affording him a quick wink. It didn't matter to Lonnigan that Bomsy was easily ten years older than him. All of his crew were his 'lads', whether they were men or women. "Muster all hands to the deck and ready us to ride on the Eye of the world!"

  With that he dropped from the crow's nest and slid down the rigs, to the poop deck where he spread his orange-clawed arms wide and yelled for the crew to bally up and tally-ho and get them waves a-marching.

  * * *

  In his quarters, alone but for the Shrew Van Sant at his back and the blind kestrel shadow clock in the corner, Lonnigan Clay turned wrinkled pages in a tattered leather-bound book with his large Cray claws. He pored over the words he couldn't read, the pictures he didn't understand; prophesies from a time long past, from a mad girl lost in the dead city of Aradabar.

  The Book of Airs and Graces, it was called. For years he'd searched for a path.

  "They'll not let us in," came Van Sant's voice from the bookshelves behind him. "You know that."

  "Aye," said Lonnigan distractedly, "we never expected it without a fight."

  The Shrew clucked in the shadows. "And if they won't fight?"

  "Oh, they'll fight," said Lonnigan. He'd been waiting for this moment for so many years. His quest had tested him in so many ways. He'd fallen very far since his days at the head of the largest navy the Corpse World had ever seen. He'd been a buccaneer for a time, profiting from other men's losses. He'd sacked towns and villages across the Marshal Spits, leaving wreckage in his wake. Somewhere along the way though, that fantasy life had caught up with his real life, and sucked out the core.