The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  On top there was a hole leading into the wall, and darkness.

  Sen looked back over the dim and grand hall, lined with its hundreds of giant figures, stood to attention as though they were Saint Ignifer's court. In the distance he thought he saw the twinkle of water. Beyond that, sunk to the bottom and far out of sight, lay the corpse of the Scranth.

  It would have taken a hundred giants a hundred lifetimes to carve it all. He unpacked the last torch carefully from his ragged pack, sparked the striker off a knot in the Saint's hair, and advanced into the dark.

  * * *

  The tunnel was rough-hewn and narrow, and the uneven floor inclined sharply upward. He proceeded slowly in the flickering light, fingers tracing the walls. The tunnel weaved left and right but always up, until he lost any sense of where he was in relation to the hall behind. At times he felt a breeze blowing by, carrying the dead dust-smell of the Gutrock.

  Soon the tunnel widened, revealing odd features emerging through the rough floor and walls. Beneath him ran a long flat ridge of sculpted stone, and he wondered what it meant, until he saw a line of three square stones passing across the middle of the tunnel, from the long flat line and into the rock, and understood. These were stepping stones, and the long flat stone was the curbstone of a street.

  He was back in the city, walking a corridor of stone hewn through the solid Gutrock, along a buried ancient street. It was strange to imagine the city receding away on either side, lost beneath the rock while he passed this solitary, lonely path through the middle. How many souls had died here when the volcano erupted?

  The tunnel wound on, past the thick stone bole of a lamppost, the lamp itself still buried somewhere overhead in the rock. Briefly it ran alongside a wall painted with a faded blue seascape, through a doorway in a red brick wall and down the long stone shelves of a library, with only dust remaining where books had once been. Across an open cobbled space, at last the tunnel ended at an arch, which led into the base of a round stone tower.

  Sen entered, and found no more Gutrock within. It was a tower of old Aradabar, perhaps part of the palace, composed of a single spiral staircase leading upward. Sen wondered who had carved this odd trail after the eruption. Was this what King Seem, the greatest King the world ever knew, had done with the millennia since Aradabar fell?

  He started up the stairs.

  Circling round and round, his stomach churned like a tossed Cuttlebone, and he began to feel a different presence in his mind, something old and dusty, turning in faded circles like a dying pulse. At last he emerged into an open chamber at the top of the tower, and was greeted with the breath of dusty Gutrock air blowing over his face. Broad beams of sunlight lanced in through a large open window that overlooked the wastes.

  It was good to be back above ground. For a moment he reveled in the light and the air, but his attention was soon drawn by a glossy black lump resting in the center of that empty turret. It was as big as a sack of milling flour, and from within Sen felt the strange, faded pulse. The thumping of his own heart grew painful as if in sympathy, trembling his whole body.

  Sen took a careful step closer, barely breathing. The lump had no limbs, no face, though its surface was shiny in the light. He drew his spikes slowly, careful to make no sound, and inched closer still. The thing gave no response. It did not breathe or show any other sign of life beside the strange pulse of its mind.

  He drew close enough to prod the side with one of his outstretched spikes.

  "King Seem?" he asked.

  Slits flashed open in the sack, and something like a mouth opened up, shooting a stalk of black flesh that slapped against Sen's chest and bit deep through the ghasting leathers. At once all sense fled his mind. Through graying vision he watched the lump lift itself up on chicken-thin legs, as his own body collapsed on its side, and a darkness as complete as the Rot rose up and drove him under.

  KING SEEM

  King Seem breathed again, and old memory coursed through him, every instant from his birth to the end of all he'd built finding its home in this new mind.

  Again he was born as a shapeless thing in the dusty sinklands of the Absalom Plains, a lump of black enfolded flesh that throbbed with the slow pulse of life. He felt his mother die beside him once more, a seed-eating Dielle with a graceful, tawny hide. The herd left her behind but still he remained, expulsed at the edge of her cooling body.

  For several days he lay there, still as a rock on the Absalom Plain. Vultures descended to eye him, to pluck at the meat of the Dielle that had borne him, but none approached too close.

  Rain came to the dust, and for a week the sinklands were awash. The black lump that was him was lifted and carried by the raging currents toward the sea. It came to rest on an inland coast, where a half-blind Scabritic bat-hunter found it. He lived in a cave with three hundred bats, all of them yoked with collars of bark and leashes of vine.

  He carried the lump to his cave and left it by his side as he slept by the fire, enjoying its warmth. In the night it touched up to his belly and began to shift. By daybreak the fire had dwindled to white ash, and the Scabritic remained still, the black lump buried half into his middle.

  After three days he rose on legs for the first time, a conjoined creature, reveling in this new union. He remembered things that had never happened to him, people he had never met; mostly cruelty at the hands of a tribe that belittled him. Now he was a new thing; stronger, masterful, impossible to resist.

  He walked the crag-tops with his leashed bat cloud, watching them dart and wheel through the air, flocking swiftly to pluck Jalopy geese from the sky. The beauty of their hunt entranced him. Their endless high calls sounded like joyous delight to his new ears, so he took the sound as his name.

  That night he ate so many roast geese that his belly distended. He sent the bats to their perches and slept. By morning his pale body had been strengthened, and he had grown the stubs of two wings in his back.

  "What am I now?" he asked himself, speaking for the first time, in a language he had never learnt for himself.

  Within a week his Bat wings were complete. He stood on the crag top and spread them wide, their leather folds feeling the wind's exhilarating power. With his flock of bats about him, he took to the skies.

  It was wonderful. His mind felt at peace. He flew through the morning clouds and looked over the land that had borne him, that would be his, the Absalom Plains. It was a barren place, dusty and dry, littered with heaps of boulders and spiked by clumps of reedy sand-grass. In the distance he saw smoke rising, and knew that this was a fire, around which other creatures would be gathered.

  He flew to them, with the distant notion that they might know him, and tell him what he was.

  They were roaming tribesmen, hunters of the Dielle flock. He descended amongst them, but they had never seen his kind before. With his wings and cloud of bats, they thought him to be a god. So he became a god.

  In their company he learned the greatest skill of his strange body, to know a thing simply by touching it. He touched the tribesmen and knew their minds, their short and brutal lives always fighting for enough food and water to survive, always battling the dust's mighty landsharks. In touching them he knew their aspirations and needs, and made them his own.

  He studied the dusts. Through touch he learned all of its creatures great and small, from the mighty predator land sharks to the tiniest hoplite ants. In every case he came to know what they sought, their hunger and their drive to procreate, and so learnt how they might be yoked, just like the bat-cloud that had fed his Scabritic forbear.

  So he set traps, and caught the land sharks in food traps with underground spike fences. He leashed them with twined leather bridles, and taught them to plough lines in the dust for food, within which seeds could be planted. He gathered hoplite ants and built them into frames, from which he could culture the sweet honey they produced.

  He taught these first skills to the tribesmen, which enabled them to build permanent farms in the du
sts for the first time. His lessons brought them time for leisure, and leisure led to culture, art, and knowledge, and the beginnings of an answer to what he was.

  Years passed, and he flew the plains spreading knowledge wherever he went, asking only for knowledge in exchange. Trade lines sprung up in his wake, roads were built that connected burgeoning villages, then towns, then cities into a fledgling empire. Wars came and went, all defeated by the wisdom of his armies. He only had to touch the enemy to know their mind. When the mighty Mjolnir Federacy came, bruising the earth beneath their great Aigle skyships and Agor landships, he united his people and buried them forever during the flooding of the dusts.

  So his rule washed out from the desert plains, yoking the world to its own advancement, to knowledge and growth. At the center of his lands he founded the library city of Aradabar, the beating heart of his Yoked Empire. He built it high with towers of glass, made it a wonder to behold, and filled its coffers with staggering wealth, its libraries with wisdom, and its schools and universities with able young minds.

  After a time, there was no more war in all the world. There was little suffering, only that which Seem could not yet control. Knowing the innermost desires of all things, he ruled wisely and well, with only the question about what he was remaining to puzzle him. He sought still, and asked his young people and his old, but nowhere was there an answer, no matter how hard he searched.

  Then came Avia.

  Almost a century of peace had passed. His cities filled the dust-thick Absalom Plains, and his people multiplied. Aradabar grew massive, fringed by itinerant camps of knowledge-traders, carrying books from place to place. He visited them often, walking their tent-encampments to see what new things they had brought. Then a random child screamed at him from the crowd, and he was intrigued.

  "You too will fall, great King!" she shouted. "So is it written, so is it known."

  She was a pale thing, with dark hair and wide wild eyes, borne aloft by her parents on a makeshift cot. Her words meant nothing, since he knew no thing able to strike him down, but he felt the ribbon of something new inside her fevered madness. He felt at once there was a startling kind of truth in what she said.

  He'd always known his Scabritic body would some day fail. Though centuries had passed, he had felt it growing old and weakening, but that brought him no fear, because he already knew with a clear certainty that the Seem-ness of him would not die with the host. Rather it would take on a new host, and live on for centuries more.

  Yet what the girl said seemed true also, and more than anything he yearned for the truth. He went to her side, wading through crowds which peeled back before him. She was carried by her parents, who ducked and bowed in apology.

  "She is sickened and mad," they said. "Only that, great King, forgive her. We go to the sooths for treatment."

  "There is nothing to forgive," he said, "her speech is free." He knelt in close to see her face. She was young, not yet of age, with the blotchy pale skin of a consumptive, but her wide gray eyes entranced him. There were depths in them that reflected his own self back.

  "What ails you child?" he asked.

  "All things," she answered, calming now. "I see all things, great King."

  He smiled, to show he was no threat. "And you see me?"

  She nodded. "I see you broken. I see your city destroyed, your armies wracked, your empire buried around you. I see the fall of everything you have built, consumed in fire, and a giant mouth swallowing the sun."

  He continued smiling, to show those nearby he knew these were only the dreams of a fever-maddened child. Still, something about her shook him.

  "Do not fear, that day will never come."

  "I know that it will," she answered, her eyes locked to his, though her head began to weave side to side. "I have seen it, and nothing you can do will stop it."

  He looked to her parents, and held out one hand. "May I?" he asked. They nodded their assent, though perhaps they did not know what for. Tenderly, Seem placed his palm on the girl's hot brow, and pressed his mind into hers.

  Her madness snapped up at him like a landshark, stronger than any mind he'd ever known, dwarfing even his own. In its spinning black mouth he saw all the things she had said and more; his empire destroyed, his body reduced to a black lump, and endless millennia of lonely, empty yearning.

  He jerked back with a gasp. What she had shown felt more real than anything he'd ever felt. In the thick of the crowd, a spark of something new formed in the depths of King Seem's heart. For the first time in his long life, he felt fear.

  He ordered her carried to the tallest tower of his palace, and summoned a phalanx of the best scribes to note every word of prophecy that passed her lips, and a warren of his empire's greatest philosophers to fathom it, and a glut of medicians to work upon repairing her broken mind.

  For days and nights his wisest men and women remained at her side, catching every word that spilled from her lips, setting them down on endless reams of paper, and arguing over all their possible meanings. When he visited, in what moments he could grasp away from managing his empire, he asked her questions about what she'd shown him, though she rarely spoke to him directly.

  Instead she raved; endless streams of chaotic images, of the end of worlds, of eruptions and a churning of life, in snatches of verse interspersed with half-told stories. Fascinated, he began to visit her for longer each day. He read all the notes of his scribes, and occasionally thought he glimpsed meaning in her words, when she spoke of the Heart, or the Rot, or a great hero to come.

  At times it seemed she even spoke of him, or some creature like him, born in the dust and raised to become king of a vast empire, but there were so many other stories she told that he could not determine what was prophecy and what was outright fantasy. In many ways he stopped caring about the distinction, and only buried himself deeper in the strange workings of her mind. He spent longer at her side with every visit, looking into her wild eyes, hoping to hear more of her truth, and ceased to concern himself with the affairs of his empire.

  Years passed like that, and so the little girl Avia grew. Her madness did not fade, but her body developed into that of a beautiful woman. Seem found himself drawn to her in ways that were new, that conjoined his fear with a strange new desire. The more time he spent with her, listening to her rambling voice, the more he felt this new urge build within him. He grew sick with it in his heart, hoping one day her eyes would open and see him, and know him for what he was.

  In those years, his empire fell out of balance. The scales he had kept in alignment for so long teetered. Outlier towns sloughed away from his rule, tribal strife broke out, and the Yoked Empire descended slowly into a long, slow civil war. Still he did not care. All that mattered was Avia, all he felt was the hollowness inside. His advisers begged for his attention, brought him news of the chaos outside every day, but their words meant nothing to him. The world outside Avia's chamber ceased to exist in his mind.

  So his advisers acted in desperation. One night they drugged their king, and took knives to Avia in attempts to cut the madness from her mind themselves.

  Seem roused to find them in the midst of their bloody work. In moments he beat them aside, and bent over the carved-open wreck of Avia, still too afraid to touch her. As the blood leaked from her body, she looked up into his eyes and in a deep, warm voice spoke his name for the first time.

  "Seem," she said. "King Seem, please save me."

  He stared at her, at once terrified and elated.

  "Heal me inside," she whispered, her wide eyes shining with tears.

  Her madness terrified him still, the thought of being eaten whole by its dark touch, but this was Avia, the only creature he'd ever loved, and he could not let her die. So he did as she bid. He laid his trembling hands on her forehead, and opened the doors of his mind.

  The landshark of her madness swallowed him. The world fell away and he was absorbed, racing through the darkness beyond, bound for the pulsing Heart of all t
hings, which slew itself as he drew near and unleashed creation anew. He saw the Heart's corpse churning in the dark, worked by the Rot, and he saw the first stirrings of life rising up, to swim in the seas of thinning blood, to walk on the fields of rotten skin.

  Eons flashed by, and on one world in thousands he saw those tiny beats of life rise and give themselves names, banding together to become a scattering of tribes across an endless plain of dust. He saw himself spat out, and Avia too, both anomalies of the Rot's frenzied, ravenous creation.

  And across those vast distances the Rot saw him, in the void of Avia's mind, and recognized him as an enemy. He was an aberration in its grand scheme, a thing that never died, and it flung itself to the attack; wrenching off Seem's wings, dissolving his horns, cutting his people and his empire to pieces. Yet at every stroke Seem shifted, changing his body using the talents born into him, taking on the forms of all the things he remembered, from Hoplite ants to Butterflies and Dark Giants. Using their many shifting hands he reached deep into the Rot even as it tried to reach deep into him, each striving for the other's center.

  Even as it stripped him apart from within, he too stripped it, until at its rotten core he glimpsed the Heart's first murder, and understood what the Rot truly was.

  Hunger. It was endless and unquenchable, a need to consume and destroy as base as any landshark's drives. So like a landshark he yoked it, and led it into himself. In the moments before it consumed him completely, he reached into Avia and drew together the flaps of her torn skin, sutured her organs and reached into her mind to still the panic inside. His fingers stroked her heart and squeezed it back to life.

  With a gasp she breathed, even as Seem's Scabritic host died, and Seem sloughed himself out of the corpse to the bloody floor, a black lump again.

  He awoke in a new body, the remnant of one of his advisers. Avia was looking down on him with the clear light of understanding in her eyes.