He did not notice when Sen rose from the corner and walked around to look over his shoulder at the pages. It was a book from one of their lessons together, an old study of fauna drawn in with colored beetles, one Gellick had always liked. Now the Balast cupped it like a living thing in his big hands, his bulk creaking and cracking as the stony ligaments of his body worked to turn the pages. Sen felt more sadness building in him, for Gellick's father left like a gravestone in their Hax room, for these solitary hours spent struggling to hold on to the past, for the truth that Gellick would always fail, and the memories would always slip from his grasp.
Sen reached down and lifted the book gently from the Balast's lap. Only then did Gellick show any surprise, though it took a moment for it to register on his stony face.
"Hello, Gellick," Sen said.
Gellick looked up. His green eyes were dull in the wan revelatory light. For one awful moment, Sen thought Gellick wouldn't remember who he was. Then he spoke, his voice deep and low.
"Hello, Sen."
Sen held up the book. "I remember you loved this, in the Abbey. It's a good book."
Gellick chewed on that for a long moment, his molars grinding like the ink-clogged cogs of the press.
"I know, I should have returned it. I'm sorry. I thought if I could just memorize it, I wouldn't need it any more. But I can't. Not more than a few pages. Then they fly away, like thirty-eight raindrops off Prince Coxswold's head."
Sen smiled, even as his heart ached. Gellick wasn't surprised to see him, probably because he didn't think Sen was really there. He wondered how often Gellick imagined conversations with his old friends. He reached out and took the Balast's cold, rough hand. He pressed the book back into it. "I'm not here to take it, Gellick. I'm here for you."
The Balast looked at him, then back to the small book in his hands. He smiled too. "Butterflies and moths," he said, achingly slow. "They're my favorites. They live just a few weeks. Their whole life is fresh."
Then the smile slowly ebbed. It hurt Sen to see it go.
"I'm sorry I left, Gellick," he said. "I know you were happy in the Abbey. But I'm here now. I'm really here."
Gellick listened a long moment, as though Sen had continued speaking after he'd finished. Then he nodded. "You're here. I see you. And I know you left. You had things. Your mother." A twinkle returned to his eyes briefly. "Did you find her?"
Sen nodded, biting back tears. He didn't want to tell his friend all of it, the disappointments, the lies. In a mind like Gellick's that would only be a cruel thing to dwell on. He settled on a half-truth. "I did, in a way. In the Gloam Hallows. She was beautiful, Gellick, all lit up in light."
"Lit up in light," repeated Gellick. "That does sound beautiful. The Gloam Hallows is very far away, isn't it?"
"It is. Across the city, past the Drazi smokestacks where they burned Alam's father."
Gellick nodded, his neck crunching. He looked past Sen, as though into a hidden world written across the Hax-room walls. "I think of Alam every night," he said, settling again on Sen's face. "Of you, too. Cuttlebones. We had a nice time, didn't we?"
Sen nodded. The sadness rose so thick that tears spilled down his cheeks.
"We will again. Gellick, I want to take you away from here. I need your help."
The spark flashed in Gellick's eye again. "I'm not good at algebraic sums anymore, Sen. I can't help with your studies."
Sen laughed. "It's not that. It's something else, something bigger."
"What?"
"Let me show you. You don't need to stay here anymore."
"My father's here. I can't leave him."
Sen swallowed hard. "Your father's dead, Gellick. He's just a rock, now."
Gellick turned slowly to the black figure at his side. For a moment myriad emotions played beneath the hard mask of his face, before settling again. "That's right, I forgot."
He rose grindingly to his feet. "Let's go."
* * *
They walked the white lime-dust of the Calk together in silence, punctuated by the thump of Gellick's footfalls, then down Carroway side-alleys until they reached the silent graveyard of the Slumswelters.
Sen heard Gellick's intake of breath as he reveled at the array of crafted stone on display in the fine old mansions. Along rubbled empty streets, he led the Balast to the millinery.
"This is it," he said, gesturing at the broken building, half-overgrown by the park's late summer greenery. "It used to be a hat shop, before the Drazi came."
Gellick looked it up and over slowly, as though seeking to memorize every detail. "We're going to make hats?"
"Not hats, Gellick. We're going to raise the Saint."
Perhaps Gellick didn't hear that clearly, or didn't understand, or didn't care. He just nodded, as if this was another part of the dream.
Sen led him inside, and what floorboards remained creaked and groaned under Gellick's weight as they walked the lower floors to the remnant of the wooden stairs. By a half-shuttered window he withdrew a set of flints and snicked a revelatory lamp hung on the wall.
Gellick swept his slow gaze across the interior lit by the orange gaslight, lingering on the fresh ruin wrought by the steam-press, lying in rotten wood and mud.
"What happened?"
"The stairs broke," said Sen. "I wanted to get Alam to come help me, but he wouldn't. He's got his own life, now. Maybe he's angry."
Gellick studied the stairs. The lamp cast deep shadows over the wizened wood, the three-slat hole where the press had fallen through. "Angry," he said, as though tasting the word on his tongue. "Because you left."
"I don't think it's that. More because of his caste." Sen smiled sadly. "But maybe, yes, a little because I left. He gave me this." He held the lamp up to his face, where a dark bruise had swollen like over-ripe fruit around his eye.
Gellick looked for a long moment, then laughed abruptly. "He hit you! It's good he didn't explode your eye, like a rock in the grindyards."
"That's true."
Gellick nodded wisely. "Yes. It happens often, to rocks. You wouldn't look good with an eye-patch." He thought for a long moment. "Like a pirate."
Sen couldn't help but smile. "That's right. And look, you're loosening already."
"Maybe," agreed Gellick, nodding gravely. "Maybe you're right."
"I am right. And I need you, so it benefits us both for you to stay."
Gellick made another slow survey of the dark ruin. "Stay here," he said, the words deep and thoughtful in his voice. "To help you. But there are no rocks to break here, Sen. What would I do?"
"You can do more than break rocks, Gellick. We're going to finish what my mother started, and spread the legend of the Saint. We'll print it, like a city newspaper."
Gellick narrowed his deep-set eyes, and the lith of his face made a grating sound. When he spoke his voice was dull again. "I break rocks, Sen. I don't know about newspapers."
"Neither do I. We'll learn together. We'll build this place back up, and together we'll change the city."
Gellick stood still as a pillar, thoughts rolling across his eyes. Sen wondered, if he leaned in close enough, he might hear the sound of his brain grinding forward. "Change it into what?"
"Into roots," Sen said, thinking back to the feeling he'd had when he'd first started posting, hoping only to draw his mother's attention. "Roots and branches, to make the Saint strong when the Rot comes."
The Balast's eyes widened. "The Rot, from the book?"
"That's right. It's coming, Gellick. I have to raise the Saint to stop it."
Gellick gazed at him a long moment. "I don't understand. How will a newspaper help?"
Sen opened his mouth to explain further, then stopped. It wouldn't help Gellick just to say the words again. He looked down to the millinery mud, where dandelions were growing up through cracks in the wooden slats. He bent down and plucked one, holding up its fluffy white head to the light.
"It's a dandelion," Gellick said, nonplussed.
"It's a beginning," Sen said, turning the dandelion head so the seeds twinkled in the revelatory light. "Look at all these seeds. Each one of these could be the Saint."
He blew, and the seeds popped away from the dandelion stalk, a hundred brown motes floating. Gellick made a little startled sound as they drifted by his face.
"They were easy to shed, weren't they?"
Gellick nodded uncertainly.
Sen picked one of the seeds from the air, then dropped to the floor and planted it in the soil. "Now that seed will grow roots. It will be harder to pull up, won't it?"
Gellick thought a moment, nodded. "I suppose so."
"Good. Now imagine the Saint was that seed. He's an idea, like a symbol in your Hax. If he has strong, deep roots, and his symbol spreads into lots of people's minds, then the Rot won't be able to pluck him out, will it? My mother already made some roots for us. She wrote the Book of Saint Ignifer, or the Books of Graces, and that's the seed. Our newspaper will be like the sun and the rain, helping the seed grow. If we do it well enough, then when the Rot comes it won't be able to pluck the Saint up at all. He'll be able to fight back, and send the Rot away."
Gellick frowned, looking down at the buried seed. "But how can it fight back? Even if it grows, it will only be a dandelion. Dandelions can't fight."
Sen smiled. "True, because that's a dandelion seed. But that's not what the Saint is. My mother thought that belief was a kind of power. If enough people believe in the Saint, then poof, he becomes real. She wrote him into her book, and her revenants, and even into the stars in the sky, so that people would believe. They're all seeds for the Saint. His legend is out there, we just have to help it grow, so we'll all bloom like heroes alongside the Saint, and together we'll kill the Rot."
Gellick shuddered, his outer lith milling noisily. "It doesn't make sense. Heroes from a dandelion seed? And I don't like to talk about the Rot." He started to turn. "I don't belong here, Sen."
Sen laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. He'd seen the Balast scared before, when he'd first told him about Mare and her knife. To get over that he'd had to talk to Mare directly, to know she was safe. It was not as simple as that now, because the Rot really was something to fear, but there was a way to show him what he'd seen.
He reached out through his hand on Gellick's shoulder, but it wasn't like it had been before. There was no sense of warmth, like muggy shallows in the Abbey pond. All he felt was a sense of lonely ebbing, like the heat of the sun fading from the stone cloisters at night, or the echo of footsteps dimming into nothing. There was nothing more than that.
He pulled his hand back and surfaced to see Gellick looking at him blankly. He had seen nothing, shared nothing.
"Wait," he said, as the cold sense of isolation spread deeper. "Please, Gellick. Let me explain."
Gellick sighed, a low and trembly sound. "You explained. I know you're trying, Sen. But I don't understand. I never did. Even in the Abbey." He paused, as if drained from saying so much. "I liked it there. It was different from the Calk. But now I have my father. I have my father's work."
Gellick briefly examined his chunky rock hands, squeezing them tight so the knuckles strained beneath his stony skin. "I look like my father. His hands are my hands. I want to be with him, now. With my mother, too."
Sen didn't know what to say. It seemed so hopeless. "But they're dead, Gellick. The future is cold for Balast, I know that. But you're still young. You won't end up like that, you don't have to."
Gellick grunted. "You don't know. It's hard, Sen. It's hard to think. It hurts." He looked up. "You were right. I almost didn't remember you, in the Calk. With my father there."
Sen nodded.
"He didn't know his own name, at the end. Only mine. He kept saying it. I don't want to become that, Sen, but I feel it happening."
"So stay here. I don't care if you become as hard and stupid as one of Sister Henderson's rock cakes, I won't leave you behind. Even if you forget my name, it won't matter, because I won't forget yours. I'll remember for both of us."
Gellick considered. "I always liked Sister Henderson's rock cakes. But they were very stupid."
Sen laughed. "So you'll stay?"
The Balast thought a moment longer, the sound of it almost audible. "Perhaps."
"Good! Yes, it'll be like the Abbey again, you'll see, I promise."
A smile twitched at the edges of Gellick's rocky mouth. "I do miss tossing Cuttlebones. Perhaps Alam will come, too?"
Sen's grin faltered. "I hope so."
"Me too. I want him to be happy." Then Gellick rose to his feet, with a crunching of his outer lith. "First though, I have to go to my father. In the Calk. I will decide."
Sen rose by his side. "I'll come with you."
Gellick waved his hand slowly in the air. "No. It's between my father and me. He will help me decide."
Sen just nodded. "All right. Can you find your way back?"
"Perhaps. We will see."
"I'll draw you a map."
"No map. If I remember, I may come." He smiled, though it clearly pained him, and started away across the cracked cobbles.
Sen watched him go, crunching down the barren street. His footfalls resounded long after the dark ruins swallowed him up, until even that sound was buried beneath the noise of a fountain in the park, gurgling as water from some ancient sewer passed below. The scent of the sea wafted through the air.
It was a beginning.
THE SAINT I
Sen slept through the day to wake in a hot and humid evening, surrounded by the newspapers he'd fallen asleep studying, bought from the night markets. He folded them to one side and looked out of the hole in the wall. It was good to see light on the street outside, not always hiding in the darkness, even if the sun would soon go down.
He climbed to the roof and sat unmasked at the edge, munching on a cheese roll. There was danger in sitting so openly, flaunting his scars, but at that moment he didn't care. There was no one around to see, and the feel of the warm sun on his skin was wonderful.
The sun gradually sank, and he basked in it like a cat, watching the empty street below until the figure of Gellick appeared, stomping near. At first he wasn't sure it was really him, as in the fading light of day the rock man looked unreal; a caste out of place.
But he kept coming. In the crook of his arm he held a large stone urn; in one hand was the book of insects. It was just like a tableau taken from their days in the Abbey, of Gellick walking the Cuttlebone course with Alam bickering over how many hits constituted a victory.
"You decided," Sen called down to him. "You found your way!"
Gellick looked around in confusion, before noticing Sen on the roof. Then a broad grin spread over his stony face, and he waved back, flapping the book.
"I made my own map!" he boomed proudly.
Sen winced at the sound, like cannon-shot echoing around the empty streets, but didn't have the heart to hush his friend. Instead he called back at an equal volume, one that he never would have dared try before.
"I knew you could do it!"
Gellick reached the door to the millinery, paused for a moment while looking between Sen and the entrance uncertainly, then shouted, "I'm coming in!"
Sen laughed, then climbed down from the roof to meet him, in the gloom of the ramshackle ground floor.
"Did you see your father?"
Gellick held up the stone urn. "Yes. He's dust now, like Alam's father."
Sen narrowed his eyes, not sure if this was one of Gellick's odd jokes. "He's dust?"
"Of course. I smashed him to dust. For the Hax."
Understanding crept up on Sen. It was something he'd never learned in his studies; the finer points of how Balasts dealt with death. "So, Hax sand is the dust of your family?"
"Of course it is. All my fathers and mothers, all the way back." He squinted slightly. "What did you think it was?"
Sen shrugged uncomfortably. He had spent all night sitting in the sand in Gellick's
house. "I just thought it was sand."
Gellick laughed merrily. He didn't seem like someone who had smashed his father to bits. "You're slow," he said, pointing at Sen's head. "You're slow today."
Sen swept a low bow. Feyon had her dolls, Sen had his mother's fake grave, and the dust of Alam's father was buried on top of the cathedral. They all had their ways of dealing with death.
"Perhaps I'm part Balast," Sen teased.
Gellick roared with laughter, and Sen turned red, because it really hadn't seemed that funny, but who knew with Balasts?
When he finished, Sen led him to the press, sitting where he'd left it the night before at the base of the steps, surrounded with a few splodged ink papers, test runs he'd tried.
"So what now?" Gellick asked.
"Now we need to get this upstairs."
Gellick looked at the press, at the rotten-through stairs, and back to the press.
"What is it?"
"It's a printing press, for making our own kind of newspaper. I told you last night."
Gellick plainly didn't remember, but it didn't seem to bother him. "OK. But your stairs have a hole."
Sen pointed to a stack of fresh lumber he'd bought from the night markets. "Here's everything we need to fix it."
Gellick set down his father's Hax dust in a dark corner, and they set to work making repairs. Neither of them was a carpenter, and they made mistakes as they started out, but the repairs were simple enough. Slats had to be added, the support had to be shored up, and they soon fell into a smooth, comfortable rhythm. Gellick hammered in nails while Sen held lengths of oftwood in place. They worked into the night, and Gellick loosened as they made progress, moving more smoothly, speaking more easily.
They didn't finish that night, but it didn't matter to Sen. Having Gellick there had already transformed the feeling in the millinery, and falling asleep to the sound of him muttering his Hax was a welcome, warm comfort. He woke the next evening to Gellick already hammering, and together they pressed on until the job was done, by which time more of his old friend was emerging.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 28