The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  The world she led him to was a dream he fell into gladly. From the Abbey's rooftops and towers, he stood guard. He watched as she cut deeper lines into her infant son, and as began challenging him with difficult tasks. When she 'died', he dug up her body at her orders, and led her walking from the Abbey.

  Then he returned, to stand his final guard. For many years there was no change, until at last the Adjunc came, and the boy left. Sharachus followed. He read Sen's posted messages with alarm, and decided to protect him by tearing the papers down. He hadn't expected to be hunted in turn, and by one just as fast as he. So when he woke to find himself trapped by the boy he'd always protected, his limbs contorted around the rail lines and a cold stare stamped on the boy's face, he could only think what a joke it was that he had ever thought to help the child at all.

  * * *

  Sen sat silently as the Spider finished. The story was fantastical, but there were moments of plain truth sprinkled throughout. Of course he'd read about the purging of the Unforgiven, though all the history books stated it happened several hundred years ago, in the wake of the Drazi plague. It was true there were no more Shufflers or Bats or Wights left in the world, nor Spiders. And his mother had died, then come back to life, or perhaps faked her death from the outset.

  These things were true. The other matters, about the Rot preserving the King, could easily be decried as fantasy, but they did not make the rest any less real. If this 'Sharachus' had truly been trying to protect him for all this time, then he had done it a great wrong in crumpling its chest, just like the King.

  Wordlessly he rose and started to dig out its limbs. Its carapace creaked and it gasped as the weight lifted free. When it was clear Sen sat and looked into its compound eyes.

  "Will you flee now?" Sen asked.

  "No," said the Spider. "But I have hurt you, I think, with what I have said here. It was never my intent."

  Sen shook his head. "And I hurt you. I'm sorry, Sharachus. You saved my life, and for that I am in your debt."

  The Spider's big eyes blinked audibly in the dark. "I have not heard my name spoken by another in many years."

  "It's a good name."

  They sat quietly for a time, with only the distant sound of trains to accompany their thoughts. Sen wondered at the path his mother had left behind, for him to follow.

  "Where did she go?" he asked at last. "Please. You must have followed, when she left you in the Abbey. Tell me."

  The Spider nodded, then rose creaking to his feet. "I will do better than tell you. I will take you there."

  GLOAM HALLOWS

  They emerged from the underground through a sewer grate near the Levi River, in the turgid light of a cloudy afternoon. The river's banks were broad and gray, festooned with rickety shacks for fisherwives to hang their catch, and littered with torn rags and alchemical detritus from the Cressier Quarter mogrifying labs nearby.

  They'd surfaced on the other side of the river, in a district he'd never been to before, perhaps Docket or the Mire, across from the dark side but still far from the Roy. This was the industrial section of Ignifer's city, where the lowest of caste came to toil in chemical manufactories, work in the Dirondack canneries, serve at the pleasure of the Molemen mogrifers and ultimately fuel the Drazi smokestacks with their bodies.

  A shudder passed down Sen's spine, and he looked out over the broad gray expanse of the river. It was fast-flowing and studded with little fishing tugs, which pulled their way back and forth on long chains, pinioned to the anchors on the bank. Flocks of parasitic gulls wheeled and cawed above, and the stench of salt and rotted seaweed filled the air, from the last tidal backwash of the Sheckledown Sea.

  Sharachus sucked in a deep breath, and let it out with a shudder.

  "We walk the banks to Afric," he said. "Then we ride for the Gloam Hallows. Cover up."

  Sharachus hooded his oversized head and buttoned his odd mocking coat, slathered with dried purple blood. Sen did the same, then by the riverside scooped up handfuls of thick tarry muck and rubbed it across his face beneath the cowl, on his hands and arms too. It smelled like chemical rot.

  "Come," Sharachus said. He did not wait for Sen to question him, simply started away down the bank-path. Sen watched his strange gimbal-footed gait for a few moments, then followed.

  Hours passed, and the river flowed on by their side. Corpses lay on the sandy banks in places. A Shoalmite fisherwife hacked into the meat of an infant narwhal while it struggled for breath, digging out its stomach and eating the glistening yellow innards.

  As they neared HellWest harbor, the black grime of coal-smoke thickened the air, grating in his throat and lungs. This was Afric, the city's industrial heart. They passed ships docked high in the river, saw lumbering bodies of half-Balasts fetching and carrying loads in the gritty smoke. The sound of hammers falling carried over the walls of smelter's yards and canneries, and the rotten scent of sulfur filled the air.

  Sharachus stopped before a looming grain silo hunkered beneath a suspended bi-rail line, barely visible through the smogged air.

  "We take the Ambertham line," he said.

  The bi-rail station was indistinct atop its scaffolds, a wood and metal platform sheathed in coal smoke. A steady stream of washed-out figures gradually climbed up the spiral stairs toward it.

  "I never rode a city train before," Sen said. "Except chasing you."

  The Spider gave no sign of having heard. "They will not notice you, here. The low castes congregate with the soon-to-die, and one more leper will go unremarked."

  "And what of you?"

  "They will not notice me, either," said the Spider, and darted away, into the lee of the Ambertham bi-rail. Sen watched as he swiftly climbed up the scaffolds, then disappeared into shadow underneath the carriage. He tried to pick out the Spider's contours against the dark carriage underside, but could not.

  Sen approached the station entrance, using a copper coin for the turnstile. The Scabritic stilesman looked him up and down as he entered, a mud-faced figure spattered with dark blood, but said nothing. Sen climbed the greened copper spiral to the bi-rail tracks and boarded the carriage.

  It was a tin-walled metal box lined with glass windows, mired with years of unwashed dirt. Industrial men slumped on hardwood benches lining the walls; ghasts come from their paltry Induran homes in the damp shadow of the Flogger's Cross wall, Spindles fallen from Carroway, Balasts thrown out of the Calk, all of them low castes, all bound for the Drazi smoke-stacks, the dusty Manticore, the Gutrock wastes.

  Sen sat amongst them. The metal floor sprung and flexed beneath his feet, in places bored through with rusted holes, revealing the dark timbers of the bi-rail scaffold below. He imagined Sharachus hanging underneath, webbed to the base, amongst the pistons and heavy iron machinery of the under-trellis.

  Soon the doors were shuttered by an idle-eyed Appomatox station guard, and the powerful ironwire hauliers yanked on the carriage, jolting it to motion. Sen rocked against the stony flank of a black-lithed Balast, but the man didn't notice. A steam whistle went up, and the train began its long arc through the city on the dark side of the river. Sen watched through the grimed window as the train ground out of Afric.

  At the HellWest edge the carriage shunted tracks, and he looked out over the broad sweep of the Sheckledown Sea, barely visible as a thin green mass through the grimy windows. Briefly he wondered if Mare was out there already, and where she was bound.

  The carriage picked up speed through the cloud-wells of the Manticore, over the stinking tannery yards. Warm ammonic vapors steamed the carriage windows a faint yellow, while the endless peal of wailing gulls echoed around them. Peering through the fogged glass, Sen saw Induran men and women below trudging animal hides in puddles of guanic waste.

  At the Manticore chasm the carriage halted and men got off, then continued, listing along a rickety rail by the coast. Soon it was swamped in the thick black smoke of the dead, approaching the towering Drazi smokestacks. Up close they rea
red back like three great cliffs, deathly silent and scattered about with mogrifer's black-walled laboratories. At the station several men exited the carriage, one weeping. He was met by Molemen who clamped their perfectly manicured hands about his wrists and led him down.

  Sen looked away.

  More stops came and went, at the dust-pits and the Gray, the city's debtor prison. Soon the carriage climbed to the Gutrock obtrusion, the last eruption's furthest flung crag. The carriage steadily ascended to a stunning view back over the city, then stopped briefly at the Andesite line station where the last of the ghasts disembarked for mines in the volcanic shale. Sen was left alone. Before him the final stretch of track ran down to the terminus, at the edge of the Gloam Hallows mist.

  The carriage picked up speed down the steep descent, then steamed and clanked as its brakes squealed into the shabby wooden Gloam Hallows station. A thick cold mist wrapped the windows and crept into the carriage. Sen exited swiftly.

  The rotten platform was empty, with no stilesman to tithe his stub-ticket. The carriage doors clanged shut behind him, and the driver exited from the front cab with a curse. He was a black-faced Orioc, whose starkly white eyes widened when he saw Sen standing alone on the platform. He spat once, then limped closer, leaning heavily on an Induran crutch.

  "You'll egress here, boy?" he asked, his voice softer than his fierce face suggested.

  Sen just nodded.

  "Nothing here but the mad mists and mogrifers," said the man, gesturing vaguely around them. "Have you come for that?"

  "I'm meeting a friend," Sen said.

  The man frowned, spat, then limped on up to the rear cab. The carriage gave a chug of steam as the boilers engaged with the haulier traces. He leaned out of the window and called something Sen couldn't hear as the train edged away from the platform, then he was gone, wheels singing off the damp tracks, gradually dimming as the carriage was swallowed up by the mist.

  Sharachus emerged from amongst the rails to stand beside him.

  "Meeting a friend," he said.

  Before them was the Gloam Hallows wall, barely visible through the veneer of mist that pulsed outward from the old city in broad white swells, like waves advancing on shore. It stood as high as the cathedral roofline, an unbroken barrier a fathom distant. Scattered across it Sen thought he could make out the black eyes of tunnels, dark hutches leading inward, though the billowing fog made everything uncertain. This was once the boundary wall of Aradabar, King Seem's library city.

  Sen felt a rising sense of unreality. The last several hours felt like snippets from another life, seeing places he'd only heard about in stories and legend. First the Spider, now this.

  "She came here," he said, his voice dull.

  Sharachus grunted. "It was different, when last I came." The fog lent his voice an odd cadence. "The wall was more fully obscured, the station barely visible scant feet away."

  Sen breathed in the cool mist, imagining his mother doing the same ten years earlier, so different after the smog of Afric and the Dirondack. It tasted of dew and earth, like early mornings in the Abbey grounds as the sun made clouds of vapor rise from the damp spring grass.

  "Why would she come here?" he asked.

  The Spider said nothing, merely started down the molding spiral stairs. Sen followed. The earth crunched beneath their feet, as though frosted, though it was not so cold. Instead this was salt, worked into all the earth of the Fallowlands, a salt-crusted wasteland of tough hillocks where nothing could grow. Back along Sen's path his foot-marks were clearly indented into the earth, as though into brown snow, reaching back to the bi-rail that was even now fading in a wallow of white mist.

  As they neared the wall, Sen noticed how perfect its construction was, each huge block set together flush and planed. The dark tunnels leading in loomed larger now, like gaping mouths. They drew close to one and Sen gazed into the darkness within. It was wrought around with carved designs that reminded him of the Abbey revenant arch on Aspelair, showing figures at battle perhaps, rising, though their outlines never quite reached completion, almost like some of the strange half-patterns in his scars. They seemed designed to frustrate, to suggest forms but never conclude them.

  The fog within the hole was thicker, an unformed shadowy gray that pulsed in and out like living breath. Sen found himself disoriented, swaying with the motion.

  "The mists move on strange tides," Sharachus said.

  Sen leaned into the tunnel but saw nothing through the dense swirls of mist, felt no presences ahead. Aradabar lay beyond.

  "Will you come with me?" he asked the Spider.

  Sharachus shook his domed head. "No. I do not trust this place."

  "Then tell me how I can find her. Where did she go?"

  The Spider stared into the mist a long moment, as though taking stock of his memories.

  "I don't clearly remember. Your mother knew her way, but it meant nothing to me. I do remember a strange light, glowing in many colors through the fog. It was strongest outside the ruins of a fallen cathedral, where at last she saw me, and bade me leave. I think perhaps she knew all along that I had followed, and allowed it. Perhaps if you search for that light, you will find the cathedral."

  Sen nodded. "A strange light."

  The Spider rested his hand-pad on Sen's shoulder. "I do not know if your mother is there any longer, Sen. It has been a long time."

  Sen nodded, then stepped into the dark of the tunnel.

  * * *

  He emerged onto a street of heavy mist and gray stone, lined with the hazed-over shells of ancient buildings. He looked around, trying to memorize the location of the tunnel, but even five steps in its mouth was already lost in the fog.

  He ventured on. The clack of his feet on old stone was the only sound in that damp, dead place. He passed the ruins of old bookyards, some broken apart as if gouged out from above, draping the street with sunken rubble. He passed vacant-eyed homes, dwelling places for the dead, and shuddered at the thought of long-dead bodies cast in ash-fall within, posed as though in life.

  He thought back to the histories he'd read as a little child, memorized for one of his mother's many tests. The Gloam Hallows was a spectral, sorcerous realm, and few but the bravest ghasts dared enter its perpetually mist-shrouded inner walls, seeking treasures to fish out into the light. Few returned with their wits intact.

  As legend told it, when the Rot broke Aradabar three thousand years ago, it was the only stretch of King Seem's great city not buried under the volcanic floes that formed the Gutrock wastes. Instead it became the new foundation of Ignifer's city, sprung up at the edge of old Aradabar and swelling around the Levi River, pushing out from the Gutrock obtrusion like blood clots around that volcanic dagger.

  Nobody lived in the Hallows. He couldn't think of any reason why his mother would have come here, other than that she was mad.

  He moved on. In places the stone flags underfoot were shot through with thick, muscular roots, though there were no trees he could see. In others he found street names carved into stone cornices, fleeting landmarks which seemed to shift like the mist. He passed up One Farthing Less to where it met Sycamore's Dying, then found himself on One Farthing Less again. Walking back the way he had come, he found names he didn't recognize, Hickory Three and Lost Down A Well, that he hadn’t seen before.

  At times the street grew so wide the buildings either side disappeared in the fog, broad squares that swamped him like a lone swimmer in an ethereal lake, while other streets narrowed almost to the point where he could barely squeeze through, ancient door lintels pushing into his ribs.

  Gradually, the light around him changed. It was barely discernible at first, hard to tell if it was any more than his imagination, but the mist seemed to be changing hue. It shifted from featureless white to a faint russet, dappling like sunlight through the Abbey oft trees. He tried to follow, but it came from no clear direction.

  The sensation came that the day was growing old, as darkness crept into the
mist. He came upon a large arch in coarse stone: two thick pillars holding a lintel, which led into the gutted ribs of a long, vaulted cloister. The colors here were stronger, revolving through different shades. Perhaps it was the place the Spider had spoken of.

  His heart thumped loudly, seeming to echo eerily through the mist, as he watched the lights revolve in the mist. Surely this was the place. An involuntary shudder ran down his spine. It meant his mother had passed this way.

  He walked through the stone arch, over cracked flagstones worn into a deep groove by years of shuffling feet. Either side hazy columns drifted by like masts in the mist, and he recognized the shapes of graves spreading out, rocked at strange angles on lumpish tummocks as though the earth had bucked in a sudden wave, then set.

  He moved on, hands on the misericorde spikes at his waist, and the light grew brighter as the cloister ended. He emerged into a circular chamber, domed with a cracked roof and ringed with misshapen statues. He peered at the figures as he passed; man-sized shapes that bore the fins and gills of sharks, outsized insects wielding swords, creatures that were only lumps of flesh with teeth.

  At the center of the chamber a figure resolved, at the end of the worn stone trail. It was a bright-winged, bespectacled Butterfly, a caste he'd never seen in the flesh, sitting at a stone slab altar like it was a desk, head bent at writing.

  Sen stared, startled, because this figure looked just like the Abbess. The only difference was in the wings. Where the Abbess had the leathery brown wings of a Moth, this Sectile bore the bright raiment of a Butterfly. He edged closer, taking in the same compound eyes, the same wafting antennae, all alike but for the vivid colors in her Butterfly wings, rippling light as she breathed.

  He stopped several feet away, and the Butterfly looked up abruptly as if he'd spoken, her writing hand stilling. Her face was the face of the Abbess. Sen stifled a gasp, though she remained unfazed, peering at him over her spectacles.