"I'll try to find a way," he said. "I want to tell them too. This is amazing."
Craley nodded. She spread her arms again, so happy she could barely contain herself. "I'm so glad you see it."
"And are they all like this? All the rooms?"
At that a cloud fell over Craley's face. "No. Sadly, they're not. Come and see."
She strode out of the room past Freemantle and moved one door down. There she laid his hand on the handle.
"This one's different. Brace yourself."
She opened the door inward, and they both looked through onto nothing. It wasn't a room but a shapeless blackness, with only a few lights peppering the inside, like distant stars. Freemantle felt himself growing woozy and nauseous, tipping slowly forward.
Craley shut the door before he could fall through.
"That's what the Rot's done, I expect. We're looking out into the Darkness. I'm sure there used to be a world there too, but now it's gone. I checked about fifty of these doors, and more than half of them are like this. Others are like the first room, and some of them even have people inside, like you."
Freemantle thought he might faint. This on top of the rest? "Wha- you mean, other observers?"
"Other observers," Craley echoed, nodding cheerfully. "They were all just as stunned as you to have me walk through their walls, where there had never been doors before. I couldn't get any of them to step outside, but I think with time, you could."
"Do what? Why would I-?"
"You want to organize," she said brightly. "I need you to, I expect. I couldn't really talk to many of them, they don't have the same language as us and some of them look very strange, but then that's your job. You passed through the Heart's path for an observer, so you're different from me. I wouldn't want to communicate by belching out gassy chemicals, but it might be fine for you." She winked. "We need that. If I'm going to hunt down the Rot and harness it, to stop it from turning all these worlds," she spread her arms to encompass both wings of he corridor, "to black, then I'll need your help to rally them before it's too late."
Freemantle swallowed. It was a lot of responsibility, suddenly, a great deal more than just sitting in his room peering through the veil. He hadn't been outside of his room for hundreds of years, and now there were countless other rooms with other observers in them? Would they make a Council of their own? It seemed strange and terrifying, but also it was also enticing. There was something exciting about the prospect of meeting others. He'd reveled in having Sen these past months; now he could talk with other worlds, and share their experiences.
He cleared his throat. "So you'll hunt the Rot?"
"Of course," said Craley, "and find the Heart if I can."
"Find the Heart," Freemantle repeated, as if this was perfectly normal.
"That's right, and help it out. I'll also catalog all of these worlds, or I'll help you with that." She gestured to the doors. "I'm an excellent librarian."
The situation was already far out of Freemantle's control. He felt like a child out in the world for the first time. "I'm sure you are."
"I am. Now shall we go back?"
They went back. They sat in Freemantle's room, where he felt more comfortable. They talked until there was nothing more to say, discussing the world and the Worlds and the Heart. They talked until Freemantle was no longer in shock but beyond it, exhausted by the scope of what lay ahead. At last Craley rose to her feet.
"I have to go now," she said.
"So soon?" Freemantle asked. The panic was there again, but not so bad as ever before. There was a door in his cell wall, and many more doors to open. "Where do you need to go?"
"There's someone waiting for me. But don't worry, I'm sure I'll come back." Another wink. "As I said, we'll need your help. Learn these people, Freemantle, learn their worlds and their heroes. We'll need them all when the time comes."
Freemantle nodded, though he was baffled. He rose to his feet and looked about for something to give Craley, some food, a backpack, but of course there was nothing.
Craley smiled. "I'll be fine. It's just beginning, really. And thank you. You're a good man, Freemantle. You were good to my father and you've been good to me. I'm leaving the world in good hands."
Tears rose in Freemantle's eyes again. Everything was changing, in this room that had been his prison for so long. At last he was free. Craley gave him another hug.
"I'll see you soon," Craley said. "There's much work ahead.
"Goodbye."
Craley nodded, then strode out of the door and turned left. With that she was gone, and moments later the sound of her footfalls was gone too.
Freemantle stood before the doorway for a long time, waiting for some internal stability to come. Everything truly was different now. The presence of a door thrilled and terrified him. His automatic reaction was to plug into the veil and hunker into the world to watch the people he knew, the descendants he loved, and bury himself that way.
But by doing that he'd be making himself a prisoner, when that's never what he'd truly been. He'd accepted this role from the start, no matter how much he'd regretted it in the years that followed, and now he would accept this new role too. The Heart had never asked him for more than he was capable of giving.
Plus there were others now, observers just like him. They were waiting for him to come, each probably more scared and alone than he was, unable to understand what had happened. He tried to imagine a bizarre figure coming through his wall, different to him in shape and tongue, showing its teeth in a grin, pointing back the way it had come and trying to communicate in bubbles or some other unforeseen way. It would have terrified him.
But they were chosen, like him. They'd be sitting now staring at their doors and waiting. He couldn't disappoint them. It was time to put three hundred years of observations to the test. He walked to the door and stepped out again, for the first time alone.
CRALEY SHARK IV
Craley walked a long time. She walked the length of the white, until it seemed she must have reached the vanishing point at the end of the corridor, then she walked on further.
She knew where she was going. She'd already seen it as she crossed through the veil, and faced down the nightmarish visions trying to block her path; yet for Craley they hadn't been nightmares, but dreams. She'd envisioned a Heart that was whole and at one with itself. She'd seen a hundred thousand worlds working together as one, with the Rot as a balanced, essential component.
They had filled her with joy. Sen had been there too, her Sen, standing beside her.
"We can build this," he'd said. "You and me, Craley."
It was everything she'd wanted. It didn't matter that when she'd turned to face her father, she saw the deep wound in his chest, with the bloody knife in her own hand.
"We can build it," he'd said. Then his face turned gray and he fell like ash to the floor.
It was sad, but next to everything they were going to build it didn't matter. Craley had looked out over the worlds and rejoiced.
Now she walked on, and the Rot at that moment seemed very far away, even though she knew almost all of the doors she was passing were empty on the other side, looking into the Darkness that came before.
Gradually the corridor changed to reflect that. Its white walls faded to gray, and in places trickles of a yellow fluid leaked down from the doorjambs, gathering in garish puddles garish atop the gray-white floor. As she progressed things only grew grimmer. The pale light faded until she was moving in a dusky shadow. The ceiling receded downward, and the floor splashed with foul yellow liquid like a sewer. The doors to either side shrank, becoming twisted organic balls like the trees of Indura, diseased things that wouldn't budge when she pushed on them.
Instinctively she knew these were the worlds lost long ago, already deep in the Rot's churning belly. This was the train of its passage, slowly gorging on all that the Heart had created. Beyond these doors, if she could open them, would not be the clean black of the Darkness that existed
before the Heart, but something worse, filled with putrescence and decay.
The ceiling dripped and closed in tighter. For the first time since coming to this strange in-between space a shiver of fear ran through her. The liquid underfoot was cold and stung like the slop in her first father's den. The ceiling shrank tighter and she had to crouch to continue, then drop to her hands and knees. She crawled through the filth into darkness, until finally she reached a dead end.
In the wall there was a small puckered hole, barred by no door. It looked cancerous, like a slit in living flesh leading through into the pulsing dark core of the Heart. It was only as wide as her wrist.
She pushed one hand in.
The edges were slick and shivered like flesh at her touch. This caused the Heart pain. She felt the Rot closing in around her, squeezing its throat tight on all sides to choke her. The floor throttled up around her body, the walls snapped her ribs inward, the ceiling crushed into her skull. She stretched through the wall until her shoulder was tight against the wall, straining for something, anything on the other, before the corridor ate her alive.
"Help!" she shouted, but it was too late to go back now. Her vision began to gray as the corridor squeezed, and she cried out again.
"Help me, please!"
Then something on the other side seized her. It pulled, tugging her arm so hard she thought it would rip off, until the hole opened to admit her. Her head sucked into the wound, then her body, and she slithered through and into a dark space beyond.
Her body slumped on a dark floor and she gasped, covered in blood and shivering. Her clothes had been torn away by the hole, leaving her naked and vulnerable. There were voices above and she looked up. Six figures were circled around her, and one of them Craley knew. She was looking down now with such intense compassion that Craley almost burst into tears. She had dark hair and dark gray eyes that saw the motes of distant worlds in their depths.
"Avia," Craley said.
"Craley Shark," Avia answered. She dropped to her knees and rested her hands on Craley's shoulders. She was older than Craley had expected, and different from the pictures she'd seen in countless Aradabar books, but she was beautiful still and powerful, and in that moment she seemed more like a mother than she'd ever imagined possible. "We've been waiting for you for a long time."
She felt a curious nausea well up with her.
"It's all right Craley, you're with us now. Hold on."
Craley turned back to the others, unfamiliar castes who were now seated at various places around this small dark room, a machine of some kind like the rising platform in the Aigle, with a long black glass at the fore. Through it Craley could see stars, as though she'd been born into the constellations of all Sen's heroes far up in the sky.
Gray filled her vision.
"We have her," Avia called, "now get us out of here."
Before she fell into unconsciousness Craley felt the machine pull away from the turgid corridor. Through the front glass she saw the field of stars shift, and knew they were leaving Freemantle and Sen and everything she'd ever known behind. They were headed to the stars in the black, to a thousand thousand other worlds across the Corpse, to rescue the Heart and together raise Saint Ignifer on them all.
THE END
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Now read on for an excerpt from The Last, book 1 of the Last Mayor series, available through shop links here! Read on!
Michael John Grist.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Rot's War has been quite an expedition. Originally written in 2008 right after I wrote the first draft of The Saint's Rise, I've barely revisited it since. While I was redrafting and hammering away for 4 years at multiple versions of The Saint's Rise (then titled Saint Ignifer's Rise) in hopes of getting a publishing deal, The Rot's War (then titled Saint Ignifer's War) languished.
Returning to it now after 10 years away has been a revelation, both in some of the things I was doing wrong in storytelling back then, but also a revelation in the weird, wondrous stuff I was coming up with. Crammed with ideas and characters, it read more like a series of short stories connected loosely by fragments of Sen's narrative. It was also an overwritten jungle, packed with flurries of adjectives and breathless run-on sentences. On top of that, the underlying plot mechanics were fuzzy and uncertain, because I hadn't fully worked them out myself.
Returning to edit this book in the last four months, starting March 2018 after I completed book 9 of my apocalypse series The Last Mayor, I began to realize how much work lay ahead. The jungle had to be tamed. More than anything, I wanted to tether the book's phantasmagoric wildness to a clear, clean narrative throughline. I think I've accomplished that, but of course you will be the judge. There are still plenty of characters, and the world is crazy, and everyone gets an emotional arc at the same time, but there is a through-line there that I couldn't see ten years ago.
Ten years. Phew.
It's been fun to 'talk' with that old version of myself, through the editing process. I can't say how many times I've rewritten a section, only to unearth some old revision from a previous version of me, where I'd rewritten it in almost exactly the same way. I guess I haven't changed that much.
Thank you to those who have had faith in this series, my original magnum opus: in particular to Rob Nugen, who always offers incredibly generous encouragement and advice, and to Katy Page, who has been requesting that I return to Sen's world for years.
In total there are numerous new chapters in the '2nd edition', with some large sections cut, and not a single part unaltered in some way. As with Book 1, I cut around 10,000 words and added some 40,000 new.
And book 3? When I get over the exhaustion of all this jungle-taming, book 3 is on the docket. I can't wait to take the world of Sen, Craley and assorted generals forward as their war against the Rot evolves...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael John Grist is a British/American writer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years, and now lives in London, England.
He writes science fiction and fantasy novels, and used to explore and photograph abandoned places around the world, such as ruined theme parks, military bases, underground bunkers, and ghost towns. These adventures have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.
OTHER WORKS
Last Mayor (science fiction thriller)
1. The Last
2. The Lost
3. The Least
4. The Loss
5. The List
6. The Laws
7. The Lash
8. The Lies
9. The Light
Soul Jacker (science fiction thriller)
1. Soul Jacker
2. Soul Breaker
3. Soul Killer
Ignifer Cycle (epic fantasy)
1. The Saint's Rise
2. The Rot's War
Short fiction
Cullsman #9 - 9 science fiction stories
Death of East - 9 weird tales
THE LAST (LAST MAYOR 1)
7 billion dead. 1 man alive. Would you survive?
THE LAST (EXCERPT)
1. NEW MAN
I wake up a new man.
It's hard to describe the feeling, as I lie on the rumpled sheets with Lara the barista nestled against my side. Faint morning light is filtering in through the skylight b
linds in my Bronx garret apartment, there's a tingling sensation all across my body, and the constant sense of pressure in the back of my mind is gone completely.
I can't believe it.
It feels like an extension of a dream into wakefulness. Ever since my coma a year ago, when I died and was revived multiple times by the finest doctors basic insurance can buy, I've had the twinges: crippling migraines that knock me out in the morning, in the night, in the middle of the day. Every time I have no choice but to crawl beneath the covers and ride them out for as long as they take.
Sometimes it's hours. Sometimes days. Now they seem to be gone.
I get up slowly, rolling my body forward, but no customary warning twinge comes in. I rub my eyes but no pain awakens there either. I feel, impossibly, good. It's a miracle.
"Avoid triggers," the doctor told me on discharge from the hospital. "Anything new or stimulating. Keep it clinical. No movies, no video games, no travel, and definitely no girls."
Keep it clinical, I think, and turn. In the fresh morning light Lara looks beautiful, with her coffee cream skin and curly dark hair spilled across the pillow. My memories of our date are cloudy, fogged by the constant pain of the twinges as they ramped up throughout the evening, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't clinical by the end.
Lara mumbles something and snuggles into the covers. I can't believe any of this. I sit on the side of the bed and run my hands through my short dark hair, probing, but there's nothing out of place; no brain-shaped chunks have come loose in the night.
I don't know what is going on. Has hooking up with Lara saved me when it should have damned me? At what point did the pain stop, and something else begin?
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