The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  Aspelair was a quiet blur as he walked away from the Abbey, still but for a few Ogric rickshaws trundling by, perhaps ferrying supplicants at the Roy back to their townhouses. A Steaoplygic cooper wheeled past with a cart of empty wine casks, his oversized hindquarters bobbing luridly with every step.

  Sen walked and let the grief envelop him. Sister Henderson was gone. His friends were gone. His life as he knew it was over, and that was hard. At some point he stopped in the shadow of a silent winery and pulled the pack the Abbess had given him off his back. It was heavy, and coins somewhere inside clanked against the smooth curbstone as he set it down. The top cinched open, and within he found a kerchief, which he knotted across his face before continuing on.

  The night swallowed him up. His tears gradually faded, replaced by a strange sense of unreality, that everything was so calm and still, as though life outside the Abbey walls should be just as devastated as it was inside. But life went on. The stars still twinkled above like fairy tale heroes. Nobody here cared about another Adjunc raid.

  Aspelair grew quieter and darker as it veered further from the Haversham tradeway, heading out of the Seasham district. The revelatory lamps overhead became less frequent, so the orange gloam from each faded further into darkness before he reached the island of the next. Somewhere across the city the Grammaton clock tower chimed for eleven.

  Hours passed, and he skirted into Yarbury in the dark, past Teller's Bend and toward the shadow of the city wall, into the old rum district of the Shibboleth. Here he passed through empty interstices and roads littered only with the scattered mulch of the day's newsprint. His hob-shoes clacked on the dim cobblestones, but as the streets wended further into darkness, he heard an answering echo to his every footfall, ringing out from behind.

  He stopped at the peak of a low stone bridge over a fetid canal, listening. Two more clacks came, before silence rang out in the stillness.

  He knew it was Alam.

  Indecision held him for a moment only. He could run, and leave his first real friend behind. He could hide and watch Alam go by, his long frame so thin against the Shibboleth streets, his lone voice perhaps calling Sen's name into the city. That way their last memories together would have been of throwing Cuttlebones in the grounds, talking with the others long into the night, and an embrace at the Abbey gates.

  Sen kicked at a stubborn tuft of grass shooting up through the disheveled cobbles, and wiped his cheeks. He couldn't do either of those. Instead he sat on the low wall, above the buzzing Gomorrah flies rising from the reed-choked canal, and waited.

  Soon, Alam came into view. He was slinking in the shadows, trying to remain hidden, but when he saw Sen sitting at the bridge, he stopped and came out into the moonlight. No revelatory light reached them there. Sen waited as he clacked softly over.

  "Alam," Sen said. It came out more warmly than he'd expected. For all his confusion, he was glad to see the Spindle here. He knew no one else in the whole city.

  "We meet again," Alam said.

  Sen gave a small smile, then turned to look down at the canal. It was clogged with effluent and debris carried down from the Levi. Chunks of rotten meat festered in the cold dark, amongst the dense mulberry reeds.

  "Why are you following me?"

  Alam took a seat on the bridge wall beside him. "I don't know. Not really. Mare didn't want me to."

  "No," said Sen, and looked up at his friend. There was something different about him. stronger, perhaps. "You were worried about me."

  "Probably. You've never been out here before."

  Sen gave a little smile. "I have. When I was four years old. My mother brought me out, and this is the way I came back." He pointed at the canal.

  Alam looked down, into the clouds of flies and reeds. "It's disgusting."

  "Yes. It was like this then, too."

  They sat in silence a time longer.

  "You can't come with me," Sen said softly. He didn't want to say it, but he had to. "You know that."

  "I know you think so," Alam said. "I don't know that it's true."

  Sen looked at him, then pulled back his tunic sleeve to bare his scarred arm. He let that speak for itself for a long moment, before adding words. "Sister Henderson died for these, Alam. I can't let that happen again."

  Alam didn't say anything, and Sen let his arm drop. For a long time neither boy spoke.

  "I have to do this alone," Sen said at last. "Whatever this is. I hope you understand."

  Alam sighed. "I don't. Your prophecy, your mother, I don't understand. But that's all right, I suppose. I guess we chalk this one up to experience."

  Sen smiled. It was a lot to think about, that they might never see each other again. He didn't know how long he'd survive, on the streets. But it gave him strength, to think that Alam could accept this and move on.

  "What about you?" he asked.

  "Me?" Alam asked. "I don't know exactly, but I'll be OK. Maybe I'll make another gear manufactory, like my father."

  "Then I'll know where to find you."

  Now Alam gave a sad smile. "And I won't know where to find you. But I'm written into your scars, right?" He nodded at Sen's arm. "So perhaps our paths will cross again."

  Sen just looked at his friend. There were so many things to say.

  "Perhaps. I hope so."

  "Well, good luck." Alam held out one long hand. Sen looked at it for a moment, reminded of the memory of Alam's father's hands, reaching through the Abbey gates. Then he took it and they shook.

  "Good luck, Alam."

  "I'll go, this time," said Alam, standing. "Give you a taste of it."

  He walked away, down off the bridge and back into the shadows of the Shibboleth. For a little while Sen could still hear his footsteps, clacking on the cobbles, then that sound faded too, and he was alone.

  * * *

  He dropped down on to the overgrown towpath. Swidlington canal, it was called. He remembered it from his many hours of map study, ingraining the roads, bi-rails and districts of the city into his memory. The mulberry reeds were frosted in clumps, and crunched underfoot. The Gomorrah flies were an accompanying buzz, like an ugly chorister of rot and decay.

  He went west. Hours passed in a trudging rhythm through the weeds and mud, and his mind drifted to the past. He'd been four years old when last he'd come this way, and there were still landmarks he remembered. A blush of green ivy climbing an outhouse wall. An iron bridge with rivets molded in the shape of the Heart.

  "Remember this," his mother had whispered in his ear, the first time they'd come this way.

  A dull headache settled in. Around him the districts changed, passing through a corner of Belial where muffled screams rang out from the Molemen usury yards, the pain a spike in his mind, through Carroway which felt like sawdust and precision, toward the ancient, silent Slumswelters.

  It began to snow again. He barely noticed the salt tang creeping into the air as he drew near HellWest docks.

  The Grammaton chimed for four, no longer so far off. Dawn would come in a little while. He was hungry and tired, so he stopped underneath a familiar, Hasp-stone bridge. Here the canal was barely moving, so thick with stinking detritus. The bridge above was ancient, its large stones time-hoared and out of alignment, shifted by long years of use. It was quiet but for the endless buzzing of flies.

  He took off the pack again and sat down against the old bridge stones. Everything he'd packed was still there: more warm winter clothes, a blanket and bedroll, a knife, a hammer, pewter water flasks, a small cooking pan, and some food wrapped in oilskin. He munched on an oatcake and drank cool water from one of the flasks.

  There was one new addition; at the bottom lay a heavy leather wallet, filled with gold and silver coins. He tucked it into his tunic and said a silent thank you to the Sisters, then climbed up the stone embankment, into a Slumswelters street. It was desolate, wind-swept, and still. The low pale moon lit an empty stone-flagged road stretching into the distance, lined with hollowed-out buildi
ngs. In the moonlight their skeletal frameworks were starkly visible, though plainly they had once been grand. Many boasted fine marble pillars, delicately carved, though few still supported roofs.

  It had once been the site of the King's Roy, filled with wealth and lacquered with gold, before the Drazi infection came and the district was cursed. Now it felt like a mausoleum.

  He started north, following the road away from the canal, through a cross-hatched network of blocks where every intersecting street was the same, stretching away like threads in a simple weave, flanked with empty façades and bare stone. In places the wind whistled through empty windows, in others whole structures had crumbled upon themselves in jagged mounds.

  At one corner he passed a building entirely pasted over with decades of accreted political papers, a thick wattling of pulp now yellow and hard with age. Most of the writing and ink had bleached away, but in places he made out words of advertisement, playbills, political slogans, circulars.

  As the night steadily lifted, memories of dry lessons about the Drazi infection came to life like wraithy figures in his mind. He imagined the empty gray streets filled with the dead and dying, as the plague mogrified their bodies into hideous outbursts of limbs, teeth, and guts. This was where the infection had first taken hold, and only Lord Quill, the last Man of Quartz, had been able to save the city.

  Now it was abandoned, and cursed.

  He saw few people as he went along. Once a motley-dressed Scabritic tottered by, bobbling a pink pig's bladder on a stick, smelling of the scarab, with blistered, infected skin. As he passed, Sen saw both of his eyes had been put out and replaced with black coals. His mind was broken, crammed with slithering thoughts that made Sen shudder and hurry until he was clear.

  Down various shadowy avenues he glimpsed figures crawling, deep in their various addictions. At a paper-plastered corner an old white-skinned Big-eye was creeping along the wall and studying the old print closely, muttering to himself.

  "Where are you, my love, they said you were here."

  His mind felt like a musty old library to Sen, with all the books in the wrong places, the words and meanings switched.

  At times he veered out of the Slumswelters, into the quieter fringes of Carroway, where a few odd drunken Ogrics wandered back and forth with their carts, looking for lost navvies to ferry back to the docks or the Boomfire. These at least were simple, like the fetchlings, driven by basic desires.

  He moved faster now as the sun rose and the streets began to show signs of life. Soon the Calk wall rose before him, at the edge of the Slumswelters and Carroway, a line of great white dolmens like a set of teeth, set close together and biting upward. He looked at it and thought about the Balasts on the other side, working their great, slow muscles that churned the city's stone and smelted its metal, keeping its beat alive. From beyond, through the thick pall of white dust that hung above it like a cloud, rang the dense throb of industry; stones milling, anvils being hammered, the furnace's roar.

  It was here somewhere.

  He paced along the wall surveying derelict buildings, past Ogrics carrying their burdens to market, until at last, atop a low hill overlooking the Calk and the city, he found a fire-ravaged structure long abandoned. It stood on the corner of an overgrown park, turned to brown now and rich with the sickly sweet scent of decaying hawkenberries. To either side the blackened struts of burnt-down houses flanked it, and still the air hung with the mildew stink of burning.

  Up the pot-holed cobblestone hill he went, until he was close enough to pick out the flintlock buckshot-holes riddling the building's front. A faded and cracked sign lying on the weed-shot flagstones told him it had once been a milliner's store.

  He walked through the open doorway, skitters of broken glass crunching underfoot. He remembered that from the day he came with his mother, as the only thing he could feel with his blindfold on. Now he looked into the dark interior and saw it was a gutted shell, blackened in places by fire and soot. All the furniture but for a heavy old larder was gone, or smashed into kindling on the mud floor. All the windows were broken, and a chill dawn wind blew through their open mouths. In places the floorboards themselves had been prized up and carried off, revealing peaty brown soil beneath. It smelled of old ash, rotting hawkenberries, and urine.

  He climbed the rotten stairs to a large open hall on the second floor. As he remembered, the wall was torn open like a rude arch, revealing a stunning view of the city skyline. For a long moment he stood, looking over the Slumswelter roofs to the distant Grammaton tower, the gas-lit Haversham leading up to it, the crescent moon spread of HellWest, and all the lights of the Roy dotting the dark hills. He remembered how he'd felt back then, how broad and deep the city's mind had seemed. It was here his mother had left him.

  "Remember that I love you," she'd said. "And come find me."

  Now, nearly ten years later, he stood in the same place, looking out at the same city as the sun broached the horizon, with the same black hole of the Rot overhead.

  "I'm here," he whispered, into the wind. "Where are you?"

  No answer came.

  Down the hall he found a small windowless room, probably once a storage space, where the door still clung to one of its hinges, and the ammonium stink was weaker. An array of moonlight sparks in the wall attested to flintlock rounds fired through the thin exterior. He found the small dark balls scattered on the floor, wadded up with cobwebs. He kicked them aside and laid down his pack.

  Perhaps he could stay here. He could fix the door, and stop up the holes. There were no Adjunc in the Slumswelters, because there were no people. He could start his search for her here, if that was really what he was going to do.

  "How will you find her?"

  Strangely, the voice that came from behind didn't surprise him. He'd felt the sense of her growing as he walked through the millinery, only hadn't put a name to it. Perhaps these were all pieces, falling into place. He turned.

  "Hello, Mare."

  She was standing in the silvery hall, silhouetted against the city and looking very different from when he'd last seen her at the Abbey gate. Her long ratted hair had been cut close to the scalp, and she wore the dark hessian trousers and strapped shirt of a HellWest navvy. On her back was a bulky pack and at her waist hung two long black lengths of pointed metal, glinting in the moonlight.

  "You needn't worry," she said, "I won't stay." She unsheathed the black weapons and held them out. "I only wanted to bring you these."

  Sen recognized them, the very same kind that Saint Ignifer himself wielded. Black iron lengths that tapered to a point, each as long as his forearm, used for both offensive and defensive fighting.

  "Misericordes," he said.

  Mare smiled. "I prefer to call them spikes."

  MARE II

  They sat in the millinery second floor hall, looking out of the torn wall to the city view beyond as a grimy sun rose up through dirty clouds, over the flames of a makeshift fire. It was warm and quiet, with the smell of old oftwood and tar crackling out of the flames. Already he'd glimpsed some of the images from her mind.

  "You saw Sister Henderson die," he said at last. The words hung for a time between them. To hear the details of how she died might only make it worse, but they were there already, fresh on the edge of Mare's thoughts.

  "I did," Mare said. "I never saw anyone kill an Adjunc before. She did it with those."

  She nodded at the misericorde spikes, now in Sen's hands. He looked down and squeezed them tightly. They were polished shafts of tapered black steel, and heavier than they'd looked, with a bound leather handle at the haft, narrowing to a pin-sharp spike at the tip. With these Sister Henderson had killed an Adjunc. Two, Alam had said. It was hard to imagine. He'd never even seen her handle a weapon before. Sometimes in the garden she would even fumble her trowel.

  "She came for me first, as soon as the alarm bell rang," Mare said. "I was already running, but she caught me. She dragged me with her to the vault, I think, s
o I could pass them on to you. Maybe she knew she was going to die."

  Sen gulped. It was a day ago, now. He hadn't slept, and his senses felt heightened, buzzing strangely beneath his skin. "Go on," he said, his voice low and thick.

  "She stood at the door when they came. I didn't try to do anything but get out of the way. Up close they're enormous things, like Barbary horses, and I rolled to the wall. Still, one of their legs stepped on me. Now my knee creaks."

  Sen's mouth had gone dry. He squeezed the spikes so tightly it hurt.

  "She didn't back down. She was holding them properly, not the way you're holding them, not like an iced candy pointing up. Like an assassin."

  Sen looked at the spikes in his hands. They didn't look like iced candies. They looked like swords. "This is how the Saint wielded them."

  Mare snorted. "If he was an idiot, he did. They don't have an edge, Sen. You may not like to hear this, but they are the weapon of an assassin. They're for stabbing, not slashing. Hold them properly, like Sister Henderson did."

  He tried it, reversing his grip so the spikes angled down from his fists. It felt strange, illicit somehow.

  "There's no guard. I can't protect myself."

  Mare sighed. "Of course there is. Even kids on the streets of Indura know this. Raise one arm."

  He raised his right arm.

  "Now twist your wrist and lay the spike down your forearm. Go on."

  He tried it. It hurt a little, not a natural angle to hold his wrist at, but he began to see the effectiveness. He was focused so much he wasn't paying attention when Mare brought a flaming length of wood off the fire and brought it clanging down on the spike.

  It made a ringing thwack, sending ashes dusting into his face, and drove the shaft of the spike hard against the bones in his forearm.

  "Ah, Heart's Balls," he swore, dropping the spike to brush cinders out of his air. "What did you do that for?"

  Mare had a strange, half-amused, half-unimpressed look on her sagging face. "You'll have to do better than that, if you're going to survive out here. But I think you take my point."