The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  Mare matched his confidence with a smile. "I've always been desperate. But it doesn't change the truth. I met your mother. Do you even know where your Sisters found me? In an abandoned building at the edge of the Slumswelters, one of a dozen places I sleep at. Such an amazing view of the city. I know you've been there, because she told me. Avia told me."

  Now his face became a mask, unresponsive, and she knew she had him. Probably she should have used this information earlier, but it had never seemed real. Now she knew it was.

  "Your mother saved me, Sen," she pressed on. "After you thought she was dead. She came to me after the Molemen took my brain, and kept me alive."

  His mask didn't falter, through she glimpsed tremors running behind it. "You're trying to hurt me," he said at last. "To control me, using scraps you've picked up in the last week, but it won't work. You're a liar and a thief. Why would I believe anything you say? Now you have a choice. You stay here, or you leave with nothing. There's no in-between."

  He pointed to the tray. "Now eat."

  * * *

  Mare focused on recovery.

  It galled her that it was the one thing he had told her to do, but she knew there was no choice. She knew he would come back soon to ask more about his mother, so she waited.

  But he didn't come.

  Days passed, and she began to doubt herself. Even as her body strengthened and the ache in her head dimmed, her doubts grew. Maybe he really hadn't believed her, and that changed her calculation. She couldn't stay here and redouble her thefts if she couldn't bring him under her influence.

  She just had to have faith. So she had faith, and waited, and recovered.

  For a week she watched them from her window, walking the grounds, sitting and talking, playing their childish games. One day the Balast and Spindle were throwing Cuttlebones on the lawns, and she opened the window a crack to better hear them, allowing a fresh spring wind to drift in, floating with hawkenberry blossoms.

  "Idiots," she muttered to herself.

  The Balast was hopeless at tossing the Cuttlebone horseshoe, but made a lot of noise every time his efforts came close to striking the metal pin target. The Spindle boy just laughed along, beating him easily every game. It was strange, because he'd changed so much from his days as a barking dog.

  She wondered what Sen had done to him, to make such a change. She wondered if Sen was trying to do the same thing to her.

  The rumbling laughter of the Balast disrupted her thoughts. She wondered if that was that an act, too, or if he was genuinely happy.

  "I clipped it!" he cried out, and gesticulated wildly at the game spike, surrounded by old brown Cuttlebone horseshoes. "I touched the spike, that's worth a point."

  "You have to get it round the spike, Gellick," the Spindle protested. "We've been over this a hundred times."

  "But I was so close!"

  The Spindle sighed. Mare almost laughed at how put-upon he seemed.

  "Do you really want a point for it?"

  "Of course! I'm taking one."

  "All right then, take it. Twenty-three to one."

  "One point is as good as a victory."

  "Sen," the Spindle called out tiredly, "are you sure you won't play?"

  Sen shook his head. "It's too easy. Train up on Gellick a bit more."

  Alam threw up his hands.

  Mare closed the window and turned away. It was important to keep focus. These children were not her friends, and they would not be. They were a resource only, and she would use them for her benefit, fitting in amongst them in just the ways the scarred boy wanted her to. If he wouldn't come to her, then she would go to him. Either way, she would get what she wanted.

  GELLICK I

  After his one-point victory at Cuttlebones, Gellick felt very pleased. It didn't matter that Alam believed he'd lost, because he still felt wonderful. It lasted all through their evening lessons and chores, through a dinner of steamed meat pie, his favorite, all the way up until they returned to their room.

  Then it started to ebb.

  It had been hard to sleep all week, knowing that Mare had nearly killed Sen in the bushes. It was even more uncomfortable since he had to remember it in his Hax, writing it out over and over in the sand, whispering it while the others went to sleep. He'd much prefer just to forget it, but that was a path toward calcification.

  Finally he slept, but drifted in and out of dreams. Mare was running after him, stabbing with a big wooden spoon. Some time in the middle of the night he woke to see Sen standing at the window, haloed by moonlight.

  He pushed himself up from his cot as quietly as he could, then creaked and rustled over to the window. Sen slid over to make room at the sill.

  "Was that you sneaking?" Sen whispered.

  "My joints pop," said Gellick, as quietly as he could, but still Sen made a face and hushed him. "My joints pop," he whispered as quietly as possible, barely allowing any air to rasp over his big stone teeth.

  "That's better. Here, lean on this."

  Sen lifted a pillow from his cot and handed it over. Gellick leaned it against the window, and looked out over the grounds. The Abbey was pale with moonlight, like something out of a fairy tale.

  "I think I can see Prince Coxswold," Gellick said in his raspy whisper, "over there, sneaking into the refectory."

  Sen chuckled.

  "He's looking for thirty-eight steamed meat pies. I hope the Abbess won't catch him."

  "She'll make him clean all the pie tins if she does," Sen replied. "Ugh."

  Gellick gave a shudder which shook the wall. "I hate scrubbing pie tins."

  Sen chuckled again, and Gellick felt his worries about Mare drifting away. If Sen was relaxed enough to laugh, then Gellick would probably be all right too.

  They looked out of the window for a while in silence. The twittering of night birds larked down from above, and somewhere out by the pond frogs were making their sluggy barks.

  "You never met my mother, did you, Gellick?" Sen whispered into the stillness.

  Gellick thought about that for a while. It had to be about Mare, he knew that, but wasn't sure how. Even he knew that Sen's mother had been dead for a long time.

  "We only see Balasts and the like, in the Calk," he whispered. "Was your mother a Balast?"

  Sen chuckled. "No. Just something Mare told me. That maybe she was alive."

  Gellick brightened. "That's good news."

  Sen shrugged. "If it was true, then I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it that way. But it was a lie."

  "Why would she lie about that?"

  "Because she's a liar. Don't worry about it."

  Gellick puzzled over that for a while, until he let it go as something he just wasn't able to understand. The Fluctile races could be difficult.

  "What are you looking at?" he asked instead.

  "Over there," Sen pointed. "To the wall."

  Gellick looked past the graveyard to the wall. It wasn't particularly interesting. "Why?"

  "I'm waiting to see if Mare runs."

  Gellick shivered. "Will you go fight her again?"

  "No. I'll just watch. She's free to leave whenever she wants, that's what I told her. You are too, you know. If you want to."

  That was confusing. "I don't want to go! I like it here. There's lots of color. And it smells better than the Calk."

  Sen's nose wrinkled. "How does the Calk smell?"

  "Like a toilet," Gellick said.

  Sen had to clap a hand over his mouth to stop himself laughing.

  "What? What is it?"

  "Sorry," said Sen, getting himself under control. "I just didn't expect you to say that."

  "Well it does. It's the chemicals they use for fixing the lime. In the grindyards. It smells like that a lot of the time."

  "I won't argue."

  Gellick stayed by Sen's side until he got too sleepy to stand up any longer.

  * * *

  The next day Mare left her room and went to join them.

  Her
transformation had to be gradual. It had to seem real. At first she sat apart from the others at lessons and meals, while they laughed and played in the grounds. She watched, and thought back on the transformation the Spindle had gone through, trying to slow down its stages so they matched her own.

  It was clear that some kind of emotional threshold needed to be crossed. She wasn't sure exactly what that moment would be, but as she watched them interact, and grow closer, and forge the kind of bonds of trust and affection she'd only heard about in stories, she began to have a clearer idea what was needed.

  It didn't help that she'd seen nothing like this on the streets of Indura. Every child she'd ever known would have sold her out for just another rind of bread. On the streets they were all alone. But these children were not alone, even in spite of their castes, and it was because of the foolish boy in the middle. It wasn't hard to fake a desire to join them, because it was a feeling she really felt. It actually ached, but lots of things had ached before, and she'd taken control of them all, and turned each to her benefit.

  So she would with this.

  Days passed while she watched them. A week went by and then another, and still the moment had not come, but she was patient and kept telling herself that it would. Patience had always served her before, outlasting the other children for a shot at a dinning bar's trash, picked over for scraps. Outwaiting a gang that had hunted her into the sewers, being willing to take the stink and sludge for a day and a night longer than any of them, and thus surviving.

  This was easy. It was comfortable. To her surprise she found herself almost enjoying the passage of time. She couldn't deny that it was good to have meals guaranteed every day. It was even pleasant to hear the Balast's laughter and not be afraid.

  Gradually spring blended into summer. The grounds grew thick with flowers and the scent of rich life, something she'd never experienced before in the muck of Indura. Summer there meant putrefaction, a thinning of the swamp waters leaving viscous oil and half-rotted bodies behind for Gomorrah flies to buzz around.

  Not here. It affected her in a way that was hard to control, as it affected the other children too. They splashed each other in the pond, climbed trees just to swing from the branches, had races around the Abbey. It was foolish but part of her was intrigued by this new kind of life, so foreign to the life she'd lived before. She hadn't ever realized it was possible for her too, until one day the Balast came to sit by her side, and the moment came.

  Gellick. She didn't look at him because she wanted her transformation to seem real, and unwilling. If it was pity, this surface version of Mare would resist.

  "I was afraid of you," said the Balast in his gravely voice. "After I heard what you did. I had bad dreams that you would come stab me in the night, like you stabbed Sen. But that was months ago, and you didn't come, did you?"

  He was a fool, she knew that already. It was obvious that she hadn't come to kill him, because he was here beside her. Still she bit back an angry retort. It wouldn't help to insult him now, wouldn't usher in the moment she'd been waiting for.

  "Did it hurt?" he asked.

  "Did what hurt?" she snapped.

  He pointed to her head. "When they took out your brain?"

  That stung, and she glared at him, momentarily breaking the character she'd been building for months. His big face was so dumb, so stupid, that she thought it was possible he didn't even realize how wrong it was to ask her that. A dozen stinging ripostes flashed through her mind. Did calcification hurt? Did it hurt to know every time he said his Hax he lost a little more? Did it hurt that his parents were slowly turning into stupid rocks that barely knew his name, only good for grinding to dust?

  But she managed to bite her anger back. Instead, she looked into his earnest emerald eyes and saw a warmth that made her deeply uncomfortable. It was weakness to feel this way, the very emotions she was supposed to be aping, but try as she might she couldn't just turn them off. It was ridiculous, because she was not some coy wench waiting to be cosseted, she was not as weak as Alam.

  But still.

  She opened her mouth to curse the Balast, but the usual angry words didn't come. She thought for one terrifying moment that she might start to cry, as she had only once in her life before, in the moments before the mogrifers came for her. Then she had sobbed and begged and offered to do anything they wanted.

  But she was not with the mogrifers now, and it was not the same. Instead she felt a kind of twisting inside, as though her guts were adjusting themselves. She already lived on the edge of the knife at Sen's whim, no matter how she tried to tell herself otherwise. Talking to Gellick could not make things any worse.

  "Yes," she said flatly, a truth she'd never voiced before. "It hurt very much."

  Gellick reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. His palm was heavy but gentle, and evoked in her a welter of emotions. The last time she'd been touched like that was when the mogrifers laid her on their bench.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  Then the tears came, and there wasn't a thing she could do to stop them.

  * * *

  Sen watched Mare cry, watched Gellick patting her back tenderly, and felt her emotions wafting through him too. She'd been softening for days, and he'd felt the bitter snipe of her mind changing. It moved him too, in a way that made him strangely happy.

  He'd been waiting for it. Nearly three months had passed since she'd almost killed him by the wall, since she'd said those things about his mother. He'd wanted to ask her so many times, but always thought back to what the Moleman had told him.

  You have to be strong.

  He couldn't go to her, but until he knew for certain that what she'd said was a lie, then he couldn't leave the Abbey either. Just as before, when he'd stood before his mother's grave with the children arriving nearby, he had to know.

  Now he walked back across the grounds. In the past two months so much had changed. Alam was standing by the pond, looking out toward the gates. He still did that sometimes. Daveron was sat at the trestle table, a respectable distance from Feyon. They were both watching Sen.

  Sen walked over and sat with them.

  "We don't need to worry about Mare anymore," he said to the little Moleman.

  "Because she's weeping?"

  "Because she's changed. And Feyon, here." He rolled up one of his sleeves and held his bare arm out to her. He felt oddly generous, as though nothing could hurt him. "On the first day, you said you wanted to touch my scars. You can if you want."

  The Blue girl's eyes widened. "Really? You mean it?"

  He nodded. "Once, now."

  She gulped, then reached out and laid her trembling fingers on his skin. Her fingernails were studded with tiny shining crystals. Her touch was soft, barely stroking the surface. It felt like a butterfly, wings flitting delicately, and fleeting images of her in a home filled with satin and lace came to him, alongside a hint of something darker, a pale body in the road screaming.

  She gasped and snatched her hand away.

  "Thank you," she blurted, then jostled her way up from the trestle table and hurried ungracefully to the sacristy.

  "She was about to cry too," the Moleman observed drily. "Reddened cornea, I've seen it many times."

  Sen had seen it as well, and felt it. Her touch still seemed to hover on his skin, the warmth in the lines of his hand, the sense of darkness underneath all the sugar and riches. "She was, wasn't she?"

  "Perhaps you have that effect on women."

  Sen turned to Daveron. The Moleman was flat-eyed and emotionless as always.

  "It's a joke," Daveron said. "Molemen joke too."

  "Oh, right," said Sen. Absently he re-rolled his sleeve, not sure why he had even offered that. Since the first day Feyon had been an annoyance, badgering him about his scars, and now this.

  "Will you leave then, now?" the Moleman asked. "Your Abbey seems to be safe."

  Sen blinked, noticed his hand was cupped round the spot Feyon had touched. He let g
o. "What?"

  The Moleman cocked his head. "Leave. You told me it's what you were waiting for. Now the Abbey is safe. Will you leave?"

  Sen looked away. He didn't feel the same urgency to go as before, but it was still true that his presence endangered the Sisters. Perhaps the time had come.

  "I'm not sure. There's something I need to know first."

  The Moleman nodded. "About your mother."

  Sen smiled, accepting that the Moleman knew this much about him, perhaps more. Did he know what Mare had said about his mother, too? Perhaps he suspected as much. "That's right."

  "Then stop wasting time," said Daveron. "Find out."

  AVIA I

  Time passed, and Sen let it go by.

  Mare was changing, but she wasn't ready yet. He didn't want to send her spiraling back into a past where she'd tried to manipulate him, where everything with her was a fight for dominance, with a request for help coming only as a sign of weakness.

  So he settled himself down to wait.

  It helped that these were the best days of his life. Every day was a kind of miracle, to spend with friends. The Sisters had always been kind, and Sister Henderson had acted like a kid around him many times, but this was different. He loved to be around Alam and Gellick, teasing each other and tossing Cuttlebones. He liked Daveron's long, reluctant silences, spiked by utterly deadpan jokes, and even Feyon was funny at times too, though she didn't mean to be.

  He even grew to appreciate Mare. She'd clearly suffered; he caught hints of it at times, flashes of harsh imagery when she was nearby, working their way through her guarded thoughts. There was a cruelty to her, but also a kind of stubborn solidity that he admired. She'd been through things that would have killed him many times over, and survived.

  She joined them in classes. She even threw Cuttlebones a few times, but shyly, as if she was afraid of somehow getting it wrong. Sen welcomed her in, along with the others, but showed no special interest. He didn't ask her questions. When she shared something from her life, about Indura or the Molemen, he listened politely but didn't pursue it.