The Rot's War

by Michael John Grist

  It warmed him inside, and began to fill the hole of empty millennia.

  "Here," he said, tapping the map, beginning to outline the strategy. "It begins here."

  LONNIGAN CLAY III

  On their last day, Lonnigan Clay stood at the fore deck of the Albatross looking out at the burning Eye of Heaven on the waves before him. It was a doorway, Sen had told him, to a place called the veil, where the last survivors of a lost caste hid away from the world.

  "They're an off-shoot of the Gnomic breed," he had said, on that beach so long ago. "The last few sentients after the Mjolnir Federacy fell. You know your history? After King Seem wiped out their Federacy, they built the last of their Aigle ships into the Eye and linked it to the veil so they could never be hunted again."

  "And now I'm to hunt them again?"

  Sen had grinned. "Not to kill them. You'll use them as a door. With your new ballista you'll knock, the door will open, and I'll be waiting on the other side to catch you all."

  For years Lonnigan had thought and rethought through those words. He didn't understand, but now he had faith. It was a mission and a reason to be, and he welcomed it. Without his quest to avenge his wife and a son, without the Shrew and his dream of changing his caste, what else did he have?

  The Eye of Heaven seemed to shiver with each lap of the waves around it, sending sheens of blazing light running up and over its surface like refractions from an oily bubble.

  By his side stood Mollie, her hair twisters turning in the wind. One of her hands rested easily on Lonnigan's large diamante shell. This was a reason too, now. For the longest time he'd thought she was dead, along with the rest of the crew. But she was Half-moon Mollie, last of her breed to flee the confines of the Eye, mogrified to the caste of her choice, and she wasn't fated to die by the hand of her own people.

  For a time she had remained with the ex-Mjolnirs, in the timeless space behind the veil. They had helped and guided her, before once again she grew tired of the suffocating safeness they lived within.

  Two years had passed before she came to Lonnigan at a dinning bar, long hours after one of his better exhortations had resulted in both funding and volunteer navvies from the crowd. She sat at the beer-sloshed table opposite him, where he was resting his drunken head in his claws, and waited.

  He heard her by the sound of her hair-twisters, and looked up. At once his eyes filled with tears. She was a ghost returned.

  "I said they couldn't kill me," she said. "Now I ask to join your crew, if I may. That was a rousing invocation."

  He was almost speechless. Then again, he was Lonnigan Clay. "Can you pay for your berth?" he managed.

  She smiled, and dumped a heavy leather pouch on the table. It clanked sweetly.

  "Opal rubies," she said. "Harvested from the Emeritus' pyramid before my people fled. They should be enough to triple your fleet and fill it with everything the future will need, and build you a bolt-mounted bombe large enough to bring us all through."

  At that he truly was speechless.

  "My people have no wish for the world to end either," Mollie went on. "They asked me to bring this to you. They understand your hunt, and agree to be used as your doorway through the veil."

  "I-" he began, but his throat had seized. "Mollie. I didn't think-"

  "I know," she said, and set one hand upon his oversized mumpen claw. "It's good to see you too, Lonnigan. There will be time. I'm not going anywhere, now."

  He sold the rubies to kings and emperors, and further built up his fleet. Men and women flocked to join his armada, dreaming of a brighter day.

  Beneath his feet now lay the perfect boards of the Albatross, the fastest ship on the ocean. The two great stalk masts jutted out from her midriff in an enormous V, strapped with billowing white sails that hung down almost to the water. The wings of the Albatross.

  Down the center of the ship lay the ballista. It was crafted from woods and metals that no longer existed, bought from an insightful Mog on the shores of Erithrea, who claimed it had been cut from the famed hulk of Awa Babo in the Mjolnir ruinfields. Lonnigan doubted that, but Mollie confirmed it was Mjolnir. Everything about it seemed to hum with focused power; its sole purpose to wreak destruction. Mollie had looked the ship over and nodded.

  "This will do."

  He had built the Albatross around those salvaged strips of an ancient god, designing it from the ground up for speed, traction, and power. He had fitted in sluicegates to funnel water through the base of the ship to better anchor the ballista when it fired. He had fine-tuned the bow arms and designed windings from the gut linings of narwhals, delivering unprecedented power. Each bolt for the ballista was fifteen feet long and half a foot thick, and when fired flew as far as twenty fathoms distant, with enough power to sink a frigate in one hit.

  Within the wings were reams of white rigging filled with his navvies; twin-bodied Plenytwins working in synchrony, diminutive but agile Dogsbodies, slender and wail-minded Wights working their own sections, thorny green Caracts, double-mouthed and garrulous Appomatoxes. On his ship all were equal if they were equal to the task, as was his promise to all in the armada. All earned their share, and cast their lots. Now they clawed their way up and down the diagonal masts, furling here, gathering there, some working to connect the ballista to the bolt-bombe.

  The bombe was the largest he'd yet used; built from a shell of hand-smoothed petrite containing an intact gyroscope bought for a full opal, rumored to be the last unfinished heart of an Aigle skyship. When fired to full spin it contained enough momentum to rubble a city.

  Behind the Albatross lay his armada; hundreds of ships in every shape and size; barques, fluyts, galleons, subaquats, half-contors, serenades. Amongst them somewhere was the Ten Fathoms Hence, the first ship he'd commissioned after Sen had set him on his new path.

  This path.

  Thousands of navvies made up his crew, all of them gathered from aling bars and scarab joints in the cheapest dockside neighborhoods in all the cities of the Corpse World. In every one Lonnigan had walked in brazen and unafraid, told his tale, and walked out with recruits. Able-bodied men and women who were lost, who had failed, who were hanging on to life with a weakening grasp for want of a reason to hang on any harder.

  He beat the despair from them with his sense of purpose, and they bent before him gladly; relieved to be finally part of something that mattered. He sent them to their berths and gave them their roles and made them live again for his vision.

  For years they had trawled the oceans following the white bulk of Heaven's Eye, each time growing closer, until even the smallest fishing ships at the tail of the Albatross armada's V formation could spy it from their crow's nests. It blazed like the borealis; white fire on the horizon. It renewed Lonnigan's faith. It was a good thing he was doing, better than any he'd done before.

  "It'll be a new world," Sen had told him, in those last moments on the Meran shore while his estranged wife angrily shelled aulks in her hut. "It'll be a new place for all your crew, where none of you are hunted and can start again. Also, you'll be a legend returned to life."

  It prickled at his vanity then, and it did now; to listen to the boy talk of constellations shaped in his name, of stories spread across the breadth of the world about the mysterious Albatross Cray.

  "And no one ever found me," he said. "I disappeared."

  Sen had smiled. "Because you come with me. You have always come with me, Lonnigan. You gain a future and leave behind a legend."

  Lonnigan had laughed.

  "Nearly there," came Mollie's voice, pulling him back into the moment.

  She shone in the steaming light rippling off the Eye of Heaven. It was bigger than anything else in the world, bigger then the Emeritus's black pyramid, taller than the Grammaton, perhaps even larger than Ignifer's volcano, and now they'd hunted it down a second time.

  "It's beautiful," said Lonnigan. "I never stopped to think that before.

  Lights flashed across the dome's glistenin
g soap-bubble surface. Behind them the bombe-bolt was winched onto the ballista bed, and the crew began winding the launching axles.

  "It is a door," Mollie said, "with many ways in. Your friend Sen was right. Do you believe he'll be waiting on the other side?"

  Lonnigan smiled, his big orange face splitting across the middle. "There'll be a war waiting, Mollie."

  She stroked the outer edge of his shell. "And you're sure none of it was a dream? The veil does that to some."

  He nodded. He'd thought about that too, many times. The first time he'd hunted the Eye, it had been because of a lie. He'd lost all his crew bar Mollie to that fantasy, and did not wish to do that again.

  Yet this time it was real. The second dream of the veil had confirmed it for him, coming only weeks after he first returned from the sea. He'd seen the youth Sen for the second time, except it hadn't been Sen, but a copy of Sen; a different man living in the young man's skin. In the white they had walked together, and spoken, and he had introduced himself as Awa Babo, the very same Awa Babo built into his ship.

  "Ballistae," Awa Babo had told him then. "Not trebuchet. With grapnel hooks on the end of fathom-long cables."

  So Lonnigan Clay had received his orders.

  Now he turned to Half-moon Mollie, and looked into her piercing violet eyes. "It was the most real dream I ever had, Mollie. It showed me things I couldn't have guessed. I believe the war is ours to win. Have faith in that."

  She nodded. "I have faith in you. Let's open the door."

  Winding the ballista took an hour, but in that time neither of them moved from their position at the prow, side by side. In the water before them wave-breaker ships were deployed to serve as a floating wall; simple vessels with large flat wooden boards reaching down into the water a tenth of a fathom deep. They locked into place to form a dam encircling a harbor-like space around the Albatross. Once they were in place navvies skittered out along them carrying thick lengths of rope, which they used to pull heavy metal scaffold beams across this harbor, locking them into the floating barricade and the ship's flanks.

  The Albatross became rock-steady on the ocean. His armada gathered closer in behind. He signaled for the bombe to be wound, and soon he could hear it, spinning to full fury at the head of the ballista bolt. Mollie reached up to turn his head to face her.

  "I love you, you mad Cray," she said.

  "And I love you, sweet Mollie."

  Then he turned to face the armada.

  They'd rehearsed so many times. So many times they'd been near, but not near enough. Now was the time. He reveled in the moment. He felt Mollie's cool hand at his back, as the fleet fell silent before him.

  The bombe trembled on its ballista table. The furled sails stirred in a light wind. The waves lapped at the timbers. This was what everything had led to; saving a city that was not his own, in a time he wouldn't recognize, for people he would never have known. It was just mad enough.

  He raised one orange-claw straight above his head. Gasps lifted up across the water, then he brought his claw hammering down on the balustrade. It clanged off the metal, and the sound rang out. He opened his mouth and shouted the order they'd all been waiting for.

  "Fire!"

  The winch lines were cut and the ballista released. The bombe-bolt shot out with a tremendous shriek of twined cords, rocking the ship backward in the water despite the wave-breaker walls. The bolt sung through the air with a high whine, cutting a sharp flat parabola toward the white wall of Heaven's Eye.

  Every eye in the fleet followed, trained on this speck of polished petrite at the head of its bolt. Lonnigan's stalky eyes lifted. The bombe sailed, and glittered, and struck.

  White light washed over the armada like a tidal wave. The ocean trembled and the air filled with the low droning roar of the gyroscopic blast, growing louder and brighter until Lonnigan could only just make out the shipwalls of the barricade beginning to buckle. Beyond that the white was too intense.

  His whole body trembled in sympathy with the roar of the bombe, and the white light rushed frozen over his skin. He realized he was screaming wordlessly into it. He felt all his old anger wipe away as they soared into the white and the white soared into them, rising to unimaginable speed.

  Then they were caught. He felt the sense of it wash through him, as knowing hands guided him and his armada on a path through the whiteness of the veil.

  "Godspeed," a voice said, as it set him down.

  "Who are you?" Lonnigan called out.

  "Awa Babo," the voice answered. "We have met before, Lonnigan Cray, and will meet again soon."

  The blazing white light retreated. The barricade wall came back into shape and color before Lonnigan, though now it was battered and many of the spokes in the scaffold were torn. He caught glimpses of the Albatross' wings afire and barked out swift orders to the dazed navvies in the pit to unroll the pumps and put them out.

  In front of them the white retreated further. The buzzing noise that seemed to stop all thought faded, leaving a hollow ache where it had been. The shaking of the ocean subsided and the last fringes of blazing white echoed away.

  Lonnigan's jaw dropped open. By his side Mollie gasped.

  They had been at open sea somewhere near the thirtieth parallel west, hundreds of leagues from the nearest land. It had been day.

  Before them now was a city burning by night, beyond which a column of fire rose into the sky from a distant volcano. Flames were everywhere, and thick trails of lava rolled down the mountain's dark slopes. He felt the first licks of ash descend on his face, hot and dry. Even from this distance he could hear the chant of revolution ringing out, spiking through the low grind of the eruption.

  "The Saint must rise!"

  He recognized it, and tears filled his eyes. This was the city of Ignifer, as promised by Sen. His faith of years had been rewarded. There was the thin needle of the Grammaton tower, there in the distance was the King's Aigle palace, and squatting over everything was the Rot.

  Lonnigan looked up at it, filling the heavens like a surging sea, sending great black streaks down to crash in the city's midst. These were the tongues Sen had spoken of. They shot faster than the bombe, with a strange wave-like motion that made him nauseous. Where they struck they bit in and pulsed, as the Rot began to feed.

  Screams rang out across the water, clashes of metal on metal resounded, and that repeated string of words rose and fell on the wind, giving voice to the vision he had pursued for so long.

  Now Lonnigan lent his voice to the chorus. Those nearby joined him, and the chant spread back through his armada until their voices swelled across the ocean.

  "The Saint must rise!"

  Tears shed down Lonnigan's hard-shell cheeks. This was glory. This was what he'd sought all along, to be part of something like this. He did not know this version of his city or the people who inhabited it, but he knew they were the same as him. They were people of all castes just as broken and unsure as he was, rising together for something greater than themselves.

  He roared out the order, and it was carried back through the fleet to all two hundred and thirty two vessels of the Albatross armada, each winding their own ballistae and deploying their own wave-breaker tugs.

  "Fire!"

  LORD QUILL III

  Lord Quill and the Drazi horde burst through whiteness, from the siege plain of the Sump and into the city of Ignifer. A broad cobblestone square lay before them, with a grand pink tower in the center that soared upward into the pure black sky.

  Quill knew this place well, though five hundred years had changed it, and so many minds in the Drazi horde had changed him too. He was bigger now, thousands of bodies strong, and it was broader and wider than before.

  Grammaton Square.

  With a thousand Drazi eyes he surveyed his city at war. Fires blazed over the cobbles and flags. Hot drafts blew torn newsprint along with flurries of ash, gusting between the feet of his mogrified brown army. The façades of the square's townhouses wer
e battered through in places, smoking and ransacked. Tipped up wagons and smashed furniture lay scattered in burning piles, the fires slowly extinguishing under the weight of falling ash. The air smelt of sulfur and cinders.

  Looking toward the Haversham he saw dead creatures slumped in heaps atop each other, peppered with arrows and puddled with blood. Some were castes his swarm had never tasted before; creatures with large round heads and squashed-in faces, figures more desert cactus than person, as well as the Adjunc; those grotesque mogrifications he'd glimpsed in Sen's mind. These were servants of the Rot, built by mogrifers like the swarm's original creator.

  So much had changed since his time.

  With his thousand eyes he looked up past the Grammaton's white clock face to the darkness above, where the stars were obscured by the black bulk and thundering tongues of a thing he knew was his enemy.

  The Rot.

  It was dissolution. It was hunger incarnate, the same destructive drive that had propelled his swarm to engulf the city five hundred years earlier, and it was the opposite of what Lord Quill was offering. As he watched one of its tongues hammered down to the east, somewhere in old Carroway, where it began to feed like an insect sucking up blood through its proboscis.

  Here his swarm would fight. He'd always been a protector of this city. Now he would protect it again.

  "Drag it down," the Mjolnir war machine Awa Babo had told him, as it steered Quill and the Drazi horde through the rushing white of the veil only moments ago. It spoke with the face of the misericordeist Sen, but Quill knew from its touch alone that Sen was gone, taken like Efraius and countless others before him.

  There'd be time to grieve later.

  "Where it tries to consume you, you consume it," Awa Babo had shouted over the speeding mists, but the Drazi didn't need to be told how to do that. Despite Lord Quill's control at the reins, they still existed to feed.