"And they built the vats," said Sen, filling in the history.
"They built the vats, and from the corpses of their comrades they distilled a rudimentary knowledge of battle. The second time we fought, they savaged us. They were as yet unskilled, but far more able than before, and numberless. The citizenry were slaughtered, even members of the Halberdiers. We retreated."
"And they learned from that."
"They learned. Quill fired the vats, but that only sped the infection on the air. By the time we had regained control of the city, they were ready for us. They had fashioned weapons, built ladders, begun the earth slopes against the walls. All things they knew nothing of before, things they must have learnt from the dead minds of the soldiers they tore down."
They walked without speaking for a time. Sen withdrew his spikes and held them up before him.
"So you killed Efraius."
"Based on a theory borne out by their actions. That's why they were pulling him back to the vats, to better learn from him. If they can pick us off without killing us, they do. They turn us against our own. So I killed him, on Quill's orders."
"So they'll be ready for me," said Sen, turning the spikes smoothly over his fingers.
"For the spikes. Though that won't be the worst thing. They won't have your skill, your experience; they'll still be like children to you, only children who have studied some, practiced some. The worst thing will be their faces."
Black fell silent. Sen didn't press him.
They stopped at the rubbled base of an old bridge over the canal. The stone slabs that paved it were coated in a thick paste of soot. At each corner a simple carved figure stood, something like a winged woman holding a trumpet, but so coated in soot it was beyond recognition.
Black turned to face him.
"Who are you, Sen? None of the men know you. I feel like I've seen you many times, at the edge of the fighting, but at random. Where else did you go?"
Sen shrugged. What did it matter if Black suspected him? He could bend the truth of his war against the Rot and it would still be true. "It's a time of war. My scrivenry was destroyed when these districts were rubbled, along with all my fellows. I had to help them in the flight from the dark side."
Black glared. "I already know you're no scrivener. Your skill with the misericordes belies that. And you don't sound like a man from the poor side of the Levi. I've known many low men, and they don't talk like you. Not one of them calls him Lord Quill like you do."
"I'm from another city. I came here as a child."
"See, I don't believe you," said Black, leaning in "You say you're here to fight, and every day you fight, but I don't think that's why you're here."
Sen shrugged. "You'll believe what you want to believe."
There was a sharp scraping sound of metal on metal, and suddenly the edge of Black's gladius was against Sen's throat.
"If I thought you might betray us, even for an instant, I would slay you without a moment's pause."
Sen lifted his open palms. He'd seen Black fight, and knew he was no match for him. If the man wanted him dead, he'd already be dead. "I know it."
"Then tell me the truth. Who are you? Why are you here?"
"I wouldn't lie. I haven't lied yet. My name is Sen, and I've come for Lord Quill."
Black kicked out and suddenly Sen was in the air, his legs knocked from beneath him with Black's palm on his chest driving him down. His back slammed into the stone and air whooshed from his lungs, with Black's knee coming to rest on his sternum. The gladius had not left his position against his throat.
"An assassin?"
"No. I don't want to hurt him. I need him."
"Need him for what?"
Silver points of light danced across Sen's vision. He realized he'd cracked his head on a stone. This hadn't been part of the plan.
"For a larger task. There's another war going on, Black."
"Another war?" asked Black keenly, his face drawing close, his one live eye blazing. "What war could possibly be more important than this?"
"Not more important," Sen gushed. "Only different. Without Quill we'll fail."
"In what land is this war, Sen, and why would Quill fight it?"
"In this land, and this city," Sen answered. "He would fight it for all the same reasons he fights now."
Black's dead features puddled in a frown. "You're talking about a war to come? What are you, some pretender to the throne, hoping to rally future support for your claim?"
"No," said Sen harshly, "I don't want to rule. I want to save the city. And yes, this war is in the future, a long time in the future. Have you heard the story of Saint Ignifer, fighting the Rot?"
Black blinked and pulled back a little. "Of course. A child's myth. What's it got to do with this?"
Sen paused a moment before continuing. Saying these things now made a mockery of the bonds he'd struck with the Decatate. Here in their midst he felt more at home than ever. Except was that true? There was no Feyon here. If only Alam and Feyon were here both, he'd have everything.
But they weren't here. They were dead in another age, waiting for him to find a way to bring them back.
"It's not a myth," he said. "The Saint's real, and so is the Rot, and I need Lord Quill to help me fight it."
For a moment the gladius pressed tighter, and Sen felt it draw blood. Then the blade pulled away, and the weight of Black's knee on his chest eased off.
Black stood over him. "I prefer a madman to a liar."
"You think me mad," said Sen, reaching back to rub the swelling welt in the back of his head.
"Perhaps. What does it matter if you are? You fight well, but no assassin worth his ale would have been taken down as I just took you now. Perhaps you are a fool. Perhaps you are telling the truth. It doesn't matter, as long as you are no threat."
Sen pushed himself to his knees, swaying slightly. Black reached out and hauled him to his feet.
"I'm no threat."
"I'm glad to hear it."
The two stood quietly for a time, looking out over the cinderfields.
"Will you win your war, if Lord Quill joins your ranks?" Black asked.
Sen answered without pause. "The battle perhaps. I don't know about the war. That may last the rest of my life."
Black nodded, accepting this with the same stoicism he accepted it all. "The Drazi tomorrow will be different. Their faces will be different. Be ready for it."
Without waiting for a reply he strode away.
Sen stood silently as the Deadface's footsteps faded away. The noise and light of the Sunken Jib seemed very far away. Closer were the cinderfields. The Drazi. The ash-smeared bridge before him.
His head still reeled from hitting the ground, and weak nausea gripped him. He walked up to the bridge's railing statue and leant against it. The stone was smooth and cool, its carved features leveled by time.
He stood there for a time, thinking over the conversation with Black. He'd told him everything, and it hadn't seemed to matter. Lonnigan had been easy compared to this. It disturbed him how close he'd come to saying nothing about his quest. It disturbed him how much he wanted to stay right here, in the thick of the fighting, because of who Lord Quill was, and the Decatate.
He'd never had a father. Not really. Not brothers or sisters either, but here he did.
He found himself looking down at the canal banks, where new foliage was springing up from the corpse-fertilized soil. Finally he remembered why it looked so familiar, and it almost made him laugh. It looked so different than it once had, or would, with the city dark and the entirety of the lower depths before him demolished.
It was the bridge over Swidlington canal, where he'd left Alam the day he ran from the abbey. It was the beginning, really, to everything that had followed. The Gutrock, the mountain, the veil.
The angelic figures on the bridge had faded by that time to featureless stone stumps. The ravaged cinderfields had become another warren of Flogger's Cross, veering away to Indu
ra in the damp of the wall's curve.
He sighed. The last time he'd seen Alam was as he died, stolen by the Darkness in the Aigle's gear chamber. Another soul left behind, another friend abandoned. The shame of it ate at him. He thought of Craley, just a child when he'd taken him from his father's provening den. A lost child whose life was cheap. Sen had spent so much of it already.
Now here he stood, thinking about leaving all those people behind. Taking up with the Decatate and living that life, but it would be just as much a lie as Lonnigan Clay's life. The Darkness would come, and soon. This war was just a brief reprieve.
He patted the angel's head, and laughed. What would Alam say if he saw him now?
A small light winked to life on the opposite bank of the canal. At first Sen thought it was a shellaby bug or an odd refraction of the moon, but as it grew closer and brighter, it became clearer. It walked across the bridge with its long Spindle arms swaying gently.
Alam.
He came to rest standing on the bridge beside Sen, the fuzzy light about him reforming into color and solid shape.
"You've used me up," he said.
Sen felt his heart sink, as though he'd fallen into a sudden hole and couldn't stop the descent. At the same time he smiled, because how could he not be happy to see his oldest friend.
"I know." His voice sounded strangled. "I'm sorry."
"Now you're fighting a war alongside Lord Quill, using me. And Craley, you've used that girl up before she ever had a chance."
"I never meant it," began Sen, but the shining figure of Alam spoke over him.
"You don't need to explain to me. You think I don't understand?"
Sen opened his mouth but no words came out.
"This is not forgiveness," added Alam. "You know that. Forgiveness is conditional. This is acceptance. You sent me to my death, Sen. Now you'll send Craley, Lord Quill, the machine Awa Babo, all of them to their deaths, and you know it. But I accept it. They will too."
Sen reached out, but the distance between him and Alam was too great; like always, like that first time at this canal when Sen had sent him away.
"I always loved Feyon," Alam mused. "Did you know that? Probably you did. She was never far from my mind. But she wasn't for me. That was plain from the beginning."
"I-"
"No apologies, Sen. There's nothing to say. It is what it is. I had my life. I scrivened. I fought for you, when you called. I didn't hate doing that. My father would have been proud at the end. That was enough."
"It's not over," Sen protested. He felt guilt for enjoying his time with the Decatate. He had responsibilities now. Duty was lonely but it couldn't be ignored. "We'll win this time. I'll stop the Rot, I promise. I'll bring the world back and the Darkness will never come."
Alam tilted his head slightly, as though amused. "You still believe that?"
"Of course."
"And what's left to help you do that? Avia, Feyon? You've lost the others already."
Sen nodded.
"That's not much."
"It's everything that I am."
"And what will you be when you've used them up, Sen?" Alam seemed sad. "What will remain? You're already thinking about staying here, in the middle of the goriest war the city ever saw." At that he smiled. "I'd say you're going crazy, but actually, you are, aren't you?" The smile faded. "You're forgetting why you're here. I don't think there's any answer to that."
Sen stared at his Spindle friend vacantly. His figure was already shimmering, the darkness beyond washing through him
"Don't go," he said weakly. "I don't want to be alone any more."
"I've been gone for a long time. Haven't you realized that yet?"
Sen started to speak again, but the figure was gone.
He felt the loss deeply, cutting into him, though already he'd forgotten the reason why.
The night hung dark about him. The bridge, the cinderfields, the stars. His fingers rested on the cold lump of stone. Black's words rang back through his mind.
Be ready for their faces.
He knew he'd lost another memory; he felt the ache in his stomach, piling atop Efraius' death, so many deaths. He felt like throwing up. He didn't know who it was, only a long thin figure standing before him in the darkness, light rolling about him.
The bridge meant nothing to him now. He sensed that once, even recently, it had meant very much. Now it was only a soot-stained remnant of another world, subsumed by the new, coated in the ash of the dead. Something had been torn from him, and it left him cold and lonely.
He turned his back on it, and headed toward the Sunken Jib and the light and life of the Decatate.
EFRAIUS
They were telling stories of Efraius. Sen sat amongst them with a watery ale and listened.
Efraius had joined the Decatate eight years ago, when Black had caught him cutting purses in the lower Haversham, stealing from dimewrights and incensiers. He'd tried to swipe Black and the Deadface had broken his arm without a thought. But Black hadn't left him there. He'd dragged him by the broken arm to the Bodyswell, waited in the long lines, and paid for the repair.
Sen looked around the group. Smoke was wafting from their weak scarab cigarillos, from the braziers of dried yak dung they were huddled around.
He'd known these men and women for only two days, but already he knew more about them than the people he'd forgotten. This was their hax, this repetition of the lives of those they'd lost, to make them real, and it felt real to Sen.
Red Folly the moon-faced Autist was champing on an unlit wad of dried giblets. Cart the Pinhead was slurping noisily on his dull green Amaranth. Gorogan the beak-nosed Flyk lay back on the deck with his boots off and feet toward the fire, wisps of steam rising from his three-toed socks. Black sat still, poised, his live eye closed, hands folded peacefully in his lap before him. Several others whose names Sen hadn't yet caught were slumped in various stages of exhaustion, relaxation, listening as the tale of Efraius, or Sly Skillock, was passed around.
A humpbacked Ogric took up the tale and passed it on to a half-Moleman, on to a masked Cowface, on to a Steaplygic Sen had seen wielding two massive caulks at once.
Black had paid the Bodyswell for the bone-setting, then sat with Skillock the thief on the Levi banks, beneath the waving black flags of the Bodyswell line, with the musk of the corpse fires flowing around them. There he gave him the Decatate ultimatum.
"Pledge or die."
They'd all heard the tale before, but the words still raised a light clamor, as liquor glasses clanked together.
Skillock had pledged, and Black took him to the proving grounds in Lord Quill's estate, where his training began that very night. Six months later he fought his first engagement on Tiptanic Hill, slaying several Ontaurs, half-horsemen from the western nation of Celibaste. They went on to victory.
Someone else picked up the tale, weaving it through more encounters: Skillock's skirmishes against pirates aboard the Decatate frigate 'Roamer's Thousand' at the fringes of the Sheckledown Sea; Skillock running down landsharks for their pelts on hunting trips to the Absalom Dusts; Skillock prying out proveners and scarab addicts in the lowlands of the Sump, on behalf of the King's new edicts.
Then came the Drazi siege.
Sen was surprised to find himself mentioned by name. They retold the story of his street fight with the big Gawk; the words exchanged and the outcome. They retold their banter on the ramparts, retold Efraius's last night drunkenly asleep across the table where Sen and Black had spoken. They retold his fall from the battlements, and Black's crossbow bolt hammering into his chest.
At the end silence fell over the group. Sen found tears welling in his eyes. The big Ogric reached out to pat Sen's shoulder, and at his firm touch the tears broke down his cheek. He'd lost so much. He didn't even know what, but the ache inside was raw and real. Something was missing, something the facts from Freemantle's book would never fill in. He ached with emptiness. It seemed he was only a bringer of death. What
would his dirge be when he too was gone, but a litany of things lost and abandoned?
He saw again Feyon's eyes as she died in the ash before the Aigle palace. For what? How could he hope to bring back a Corpse World that was already dead?
Some of the group wept with him. He felt their grief rising like a chorister, beautiful in its way, binding them together. They had all lost so much by now, and it barely mattered what the names and places were. They were all the same, and there was strength in knowing that. He rubbed the tears from his eyes.
The next story began.
* * *
The following day he fought in a haze. At times the creaking of his own armor alerted him to movements he'd made but not realized. A breeze would alight upon his face and he'd decipher it as the swishing of a blade slicing a hair's breadth from his skin.
He watched the sky. He thought about the Rot and the Darkness, cycling round each other endlessly in time. Already this world was getting thin; he'd stayed too long. There could be no long-lasting fellowship for him. It was a curse. If he stayed long enough he'd see all these people swallowed too, just like Feyon.
Feyon. He loved her still, more than anything, but was it fair to try to bring her back? Was there any hope at all?
His body fought automatically. He watched the clouds overhead. What did the clouds care for the battle that was going on underneath them? What did it matter if all of the Decatate died, or all of the Drazi died? What did it matter if Ignifer was lost, and the Rot traveled back in time and the Darkness consumed them all? All things died, in time.
The clouds were slurry gray like the Sheckledown, running and blurring. His left hand parried the Drazi, his right hand slew them, his feet kicked their bodies back within the wall.
When the Grammaton tolled for midday the onslaught stopped. He barely registered the end of the attack, just stood there gazing up at the clouds, thinking of the night he and Feyon first kissed
Black shook him. For a moment he thought he recognized the Deadface before him, imagining it was one of his lost friends returning to tell him all was well, and the Rot was gone.
The Rot's War Page 28