The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2)

by Michael John Grist

  This was his penance now; this endless quest in search of what he'd lost.

  "It's not only rope and wood that holds this boat afloat," he went on, forcing the good cheer. "We have weapons."

  "I know that, as do the men. I seek the same end as you, Lonnigan. But they will not admit us readily."

  "Then we'll all go down for the cause, if we must," said Lonnigan, an old refrain he'd trotted out numerous times to numerous financiers. Offering death had excited so many of them. They wanted to live wildly, or at least toy with the notion. Very few insisted on boarding the Shall-I-Row and hunting the Eye in person. The Shrew was the exception; but then the Shrew had his own deficiencies, and his own motivations.

  "I'll see it through," said the Shrew, his reedy voice insistent. "But will you?"

  Lonnigan turned to face him. The Shrew sat on the third level of the bookshelf, his inset Gnomic eyes a-bulge from his oversized head. Tiny weak fingers sprouted at the ends of half-length arms that jutted uselessly from his feeble and concave little chest. He had only holes for ears. He was a physical wreck, broken by the Ague peculiar to his caste, but his mind was still prodigious. In his day he'd overseen the entire mercantile dispatches of Rey de Gorgone, the greatest magnate the world had yet seen.

  "I've nothing to lose," said the Shrew.

  Lonnigan laughed. "You think I like to be a Cray?" he asked. He held up his mumpen claws. "You think this is living any better?"

  The Shrew leaned back in his shelf, eyes filled with harsh judgments. Here was one who saw through Lonnigan's act, who had sought him out for his own reasons, who knew more about the Eye than perhaps any other alive. "Then what of Mollie, Lonnigan?"

  Lonnigan shrugged. "What about Mollie?"

  "I think we both know what she is."

  "She's a fool child who doesn't know any better. What does it matter what she is, or where she came from?"

  "She favors you," said the Shrew, "but how far will that stretch when it comes to betrayal of her own kind?"

  Lonnigan gave a short sharp laugh. "Her own kind expelled her. She has no truck with them."

  The Shrew shook his little head. "Not even enough to return with the great prize of Lonnigan Clay? How do you know she won't hand you over in trade for an end to her exile?"

  "You say she favors me," said Lonnigan, letting more of his genuine anger through than he'd intended. The Shrew always cut him to the core. "Yet I believe her. Enough with these tired games, Van Sant. I am captain here."

  The Shrew's beady eyes stared at him. "Then why don't you accept her favor? She could take their shape, as you well know. Be them all over, and fill in the gaps in your broken mind. Wouldn't that be enough?"

  Lonnigan met the odd creature's beady glare with his own. Only the Shrew knew of Lonnigan's true losses, and the real reason he sought the Eye. It wasn't for treasure, or bounties or power, but something more valuable by far. He'd had to confess his truth, to earn the Shrew's backing. He rarely raised the subject, but in such moments Lonnigan felt himself drawing close to an edge he'd avoided since his piracy days. He set his teeth and forced his mumpen claws to remain low, afraid a sudden impulse might decapitate the Shrew. "You know I'll not live a lie. You know that."

  The Shrew blinked, then he grinned, and the tension dissipated. "I've always admired your stubbornness, Lonnigan. It makes me feel better about my own deformities."

  Lonnigan shook his head. "It's what you make it, man."

  "Don't call me that."

  "It's what you are," Lonnigan insisted. "A man in the form of a broken Shrew. The Gnomics were not kind to their offspring, I know it, with this Ague. But here we are." He grinned. "It will all be returned to you."

  "I'll not dare dream it to be so," said the Shrew quietly. "As I've said, they won't even notice us on their flanks."

  Lonnigan clacked one of his claws once; a short, sharp staccato through the silent forecastle. "They'll notice me."

  The Shrew narrowed his already narrow eyes. "Aye, they might well notice you."

  At that Lonnigan stamped to his feet. The diamante shell at his back rang musically off his chair. There was work to do, and none of it could be changed now. The plan was in place.

  "The bombe awaits," he said.

  * * *

  The decks were a whirligig of activity as the distant light of Heaven's Eye drew near. Off to the west the sun was pink and sinking into the waves, while to the north the white glow of the Eye had become a furious blaze, rearing up like a leviathan moon across the horizon line as they drew closer. Its light cast sharp crosshatched shadows through the riggings as the Shall-I-Row's navvies scrabbled hand and claw for rope, for whipping sail mounts, to tally the wind as it shifted and switched.

  Lonnigan rose to the forecastle mount and fired off a flintlock musket into the starry night.

  "To the oars!" he cried, as the crew looked up. "Batten the sails and rig-in the booms, stow the rigs and every man below deck and pulling this boat into the promised land, you hear me lads? To the oars!"

  The crew complied in a frenzy. The eerie white ether-light of the Eye drove them on at a break-neck pace.

  "Start the drums, Timemaster!" called Lonnigan. "Ready the rhythm of fate! From here on we ride into the eye of the Gods!"

  In moments the decks were empty, and from below came the timber-thrumming thud of the Timemaster's drum, matched by the lulling rise and fall of the crew's voices singing in time. The Shall-I-Row swept over the waves, one hundred oars splashing in the brine, reeling the bright dome of light in.

  Half-moon Mollie approached at Lonnigan's shoulder, and he turned. Her retinue of hair-twisters and twirlers shuffled along silently at her back as ever, doing their ceaseless work. Her moon-white face shone strangely in the reflected light, and her cloak of gossamer shadow rippled in the dimming dusk.

  She'd been with the crew for six months only, gathered in from a spit of island where some past ship had marooned her. She'd told her story to none other than Lonnigan, and what she'd told him had been more confounding than clear. She remembered little, she claimed, other than her exile for unnamable crimes, but there was something about her that entranced him. In her he'd seen the Eye.

  She'd joined the crew. By day she drifted around the decks like a cloud, never settling, sometimes whispering strange words that terrified the men. In the damp secrecy of their hammock beds they called her a witch, but never to her face. She was clearly a witch with power. What were her hair-twirlers, those tiny winged beasts that endlessly followed her? How had she survived on that tiny island with not a scrap of food? By what sorcery had she not been driven mad?

  "You really mean to do it," she said in her usual sultry tones. "Assault Heaven."

  "As I always have, Mollie," he said, gently now for her.

  She watched him for a moment, surveying his hard rectangular head, set sharp against the nearing white crackle of the wall.

  "They're watching us, you know. They'll have watched your approach all these long years."

  "I expect as much from gods."

  She angled her head. "They're not gods, Lonnigan, you know that. Only people who lost their home a long time ago. My people."

  Lonnigan clacked his mumpen claws. "Not gods, but we make such sport for them, do we not, with our miserable little lives? If they had a shred of compassion they would give me back my wife and child. They should never have stolen them."

  Mollie smiled sadly. "You know your wife and child do not lie within. These people seek only quiet, Lonnigan, and to fade from the world in their own way. But you won't see that."

  "I see a higher caste that looks down on my own, that rules this world and ordains the fate of us all, that sees me as only their toy."

  Mollie shook her head. "Am I welcomed at every port, Lonnigan, with each city's king trotting out to meet me? Of course not. I am nothing to them, just as you are to my people. They lost their Federacy millennia ago, they lost their lord and master, and there was no place for them. They
received no sympathy, and give none now."

  "They make their choices and I make mine."

  "The Gods," said Mollie.

  "We are such sport," said Lonnigan, and clacked his mumpen claws. "With our gay little lives, for them, are we not?"

  "You're bold," said Mollie. "And angry. But that won't force them to hear you."

  "I'm not bold," said Lonnigan. "Not the way new-born eggs or half-headed chickens are bold. The Shrew is bold, though. Despite you taunting him without redoubt. He'll die for this."

  "He's already dead," said Mollie. Her beautiful green eyes sang closer to him. "In his mind. You don't have to follow."

  Lonnigan smiled. "Bewitch me, would you? But captains don't faze, Mollie. You're a comely lass, I'll grant you, but even ten hundred of you would not swear up to the debt I owe the Shrew."

  "I'll slay the Shrew, if you'd let me."

  "And you know I'll not."

  "We could be together, you and I," said Mollie. She reached out a perfectly white finger and stroked a soft line down the right side of his oblong orange face. "You don't need Heaven to know that."

  Lonnigan laughed. "And what would that life be worth, coming at the price of such a betrayal?" he asked. "I suspect less than nothing." He stepped back and spread his four arms wide, red claws gesturing out and around the ship, to the riggings and sails and masts and planking.

  "She's mine," he said, "my ship, but bought with the Shrew's pot. My command, but emboldened by the Shrew's means. I could have left it off at any time, Mollie. I just chose not to."

  She clucked softly. "You are stubborn."

  "So stubborn that they can't keep us out."

  "They'll never let you pass. No man alive can enter the last Mjolnir Ator by force. I only left their ranks after cutting every tie I had."

  "Your crimes," Lonnigan said. "But you're here now. You want something from them too."

  "Perhaps I'm homesick," said Mollie. "Or perhaps I only take passage on this ship because I'm in love with its captain. Perhaps I follow where he goes."

  Lonnigan looked away. "We all bear our own burdens."

  They stood in silence for a time, the white blazing wall spreading before them, at times sending fronds of stark lightning forking into the sea.

  "There's a coracle," said Lonnigan, "off the bow. You and your retinue could debark and make for greener seas. If you oared three days south you'd hit the Enola Shay shipping lane, and there'd likely be a crew along to fetch you up soon enough."

  Mollie shook her head, her rattan hair-tails whipping, so the little waspish mouths of her twirlers snapped at the air. "I am for you. Will you not reconsider this foolishness?"

  Lonnigan looked at her, into those beautiful, haunting eyes. On some level he knew she was right. He'd done enough. But on another level, he could not stop himself now. He had to see it through, or else who would he become?

  "It's a fool's errand," he said. "We'll likely all die."

  "Then we'll die."

  He smiled. They were of the same heart in that. "The coracle's there all the same," he said, then turned and click-clacked his way off the forecastle deck. Half-moon Mollie watched him go.

  * * *

  The bombe rested silent and dark in the dim and dripping Foc'sle hold. Lonnigan ran his claws along its sleek polished black-iron surface. At the nose end of its ovoid form was the dial, and Lonnigan spun it full around to the limit. He toggled a release lever, and the bombe whirred as the scope inside it began to gyre.

  Tiny hisses of long-pent steam escaped through the filed down rivets. The bombe began to rock on the deck with the powerful revolutions happening inside, jiggling its own massive weight up and down.

  Lonnigan reached up to the deck trapdoor above and threw it open, spilling dim light in. A rope descended through the gap and Lonnigan took it and locked its the grapple mount to the bevel ring on the bombe's nose, screwing it tight before the juddering became too fierce to handle. Then he unpinned the floor decking and the floor beneath the bombe gave out, dropping it into the flooded lower bilge deck, where it frothed the rotten sea foam white.

  Lonnigan climbed up through the ship swiftly, unclasping all the deck hatches above the bombe until he was standing again on the poop deck with the white furnace of Heaven's Eye looming directly before them like a wall, thinning out the ropes and masts with its glare.

  "You best hurry," said Half-moon Mollie by his side.

  The Shrew Van Sant was at the wheel on the forecastle, staring into the crackling white power of the Eye. Little Bomsy Maller stood beside him, helping him guide the wheel, while from below the sound of oarsmen driving the ship forward swelled up through the timbers.

  At the trebuchet mast Lonnigan affixed the bombe line to the trebuchet line, loading the weapon. Next he threw open the oar deck doors and yelled the men up and out.

  "To the nest!"

  His wide-eyed navvies threw down their oars and raced up the ladders and into the rigging, swarming upward like ants into the broad crow's nest platform at the top of the trebuchet mast. The triple-stemmed oftwood mast groaned under their weight. Lonnigan knelt at the mast's base and unbolted the first set of iron locks, then pulled the thick metal chock clear through the three parts of the mast, unleashing them from each other. The middle mast wavered freely on its axis point, two thirds of the way up.

  "Hurrah!" cried the pipsqueak Bomsy Maller, now somewhere amidst the mass of men at the top. The rest were all yelling and shouting and singing bawdy sea songs; ready to burst into Heaven, ready to claim the bounty Lonnigan had promised them for so long. The strange white light bathed everything now.

  "In your eye!" cried the Shrew Van Sant from the forecastle, steering the ship's great rudder with his stubby little arms, straight into the face of the wall.

  "Here we go my lads!" boomed Lonnigan as he yanked the final trebuchet lock free. "Hold on tight."

  For a second nothing happened.

  Then the crow's nest began to tilt on its axis, weighed down by the mass of the crew. The whole ship shuddered as it teetered on the edge of balance, then accelerated into the downswing. The men whooped wildly as it gathered speed, seesawing the lower half of the mast up. They cheered when their descent jerked, as the bombe line attached to the mast tautened, and dragged the bombe into the air.

  As the nest reached halfway to deck there came a series of crescendoing thuds from below as the bombe bounced up through the open hatches. At three-quarters fallen the bombe's bass rumbling gyre trembled through the very air, growing louder until its black-iron mass erupted through the poop deck hatch in a spray of wooden shrapnel. It soared up in a sweeping parabola over the forecastle, and Van Sant screamed as it shot above his outstretched gimble arms. Then the nest crashed into the deck, all the navvies tumbled out, the line snapped as the grapple lost its grip, and the bombe was unfurled, sailing through the air toward the white wall of Heaven's Eye.

  Navvies stumbled to their feet to watch it; a black eclipsing sphere against the burning white. Mollie stood at the quarterdeck with the wind in her writhing hair. Van Sant was at the wheel. Lonnigan stood proud with the diamante shell on his back splitting the ether-light into a rainbow of colors, waiting as the bombe flew in silence.

  In the washed out white Mollie caught Lonnigan's eye.

  Then the bombe blew and the Eye of Heaven exploded. Rainbows coruscated through the darkening skies as the white wall hurtled backward on a pulse of raw gyring power, along with the sea beneath them which sank rapidly away. The Shall-I-Row fell into a sudden descent down the wall of a canyon-like wave, speeding toward the bottom cup of an hourglass-shaped depression in the ocean itself.

  At the base the ship coasted to a stop on glass-flat waves, and there was ragged silence. Two immense walls of water hung immobile to either side, forming a kind of valley in the sea, deep enough to block out the moon. It was suddenly cold and dark on deck. Looking up Lonnigan could see the great shadows of watery leviathans moving in the blue walls risi
ng above him; Ptarmigans and Mesoplodonts. The tail fin of one emerged through the watery wall, and that seemed to break the spell.

  "Below decks!" Lonnigan boomed, just as the white breakers at the tips of the valley walls began to curl in. "Get below decks!"

  He ran to Mollie and hauled her bodily to the bombe hatch, tossed her down, then roared the men into the oaring post. He saw little Bomsy Maller jump down after Mollie. Van Sant at the wheel just smiled at him.

  The great watery walls began to fall. The ship bucked and heaved as the water below shifted, as the water above closed in. Lonnigan flung himself after Mollie, down toward the bilge and snapping hatches shut behind as fast as he could, then the waves hit and everything flashed to black.

  THE VEIL II

  Lonnigan came to in a white space.

  Everything around him was white. He wasn't on the ship, nor in any place he'd ever seen, though Van Sant was by his side.

  "Odd," said the Shrew, getting to his feet. His arms were no longer gimble-lengthed. His eyes were round and full. Ears grew in place of earholes, as if he was young again, before the Gnomic Ague had leveled him. "Do you think this is Heaven?"

  Lonnigan hoisted himself to his feet. "I don't know," he said. "But you've been re-formed. Look at your arms."

  The Shrew spread his arms and looked down their length. He reached up to touch his ears, nose, and face. His mouth opened then closed again. "I'm whole."

  "Games," said Lonnigan, "they're just toying with us."

  "Maybe not," said the Shrew. He looked up into the white, and then something Lonnigan had never seen before happened.

  The Shrew began to smile.

  "They're here," he said.

  "What? Who's here, the crew?"

  "No," said the Shrew, his eyes focusing on some far-off point.