The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1)

by Michael John Grist

  Alam looked at him tiredly. "You sound manic."

  "I know you don't believe me. That's why I brought a full copy." He held the paper out.

  Alam made no move toward it.

  "It's for you," Sen said. "I ask only that you read it. If it makes any sense to you, then I hope you'll join us. Our address in the Slumswelters is written on the back."

  Alam didn't take it. "What sense could it make? You need help, Sen, but not from me. People are going to die because of that paper."

  Sen gave a sad smile. "People have been dying since I started it. But if we do nothing, everybody in the city, in the world, is going to die. You've seen the size of the Rot. It's only getting bigger, Alam. I know you've heard the stories from overseas, where whole lands have been cut off. Mare's seen it herself."

  "And writing a paper will stop that? You're crazy."

  Sen offered the paper again. "Take it and I'll go away. Read it, and I won't bother you again."

  "You'll go away? You promise?"

  "I promise. You won't see me again, unless you want to."

  Alam took the paper. "I'll read it. Now go away. I'm tired. I have to work in a few hours."

  Sen felt a weight shift. The anger was gone, and the indifference was back. But now it was feigned.

  Alam was engaged.

  * * *

  Alam waited while Sen picked up his spikes, sheathed them, and left the roof.

  He turned the paper over in his hands. The title read, 'The Saint Will Rise.' It was so simplistic and direct it was childish. He tucked it into his stovepipe jacket, then went back down the stairs to his cot.

  Sleep was hard to find. Instead he rolled and twisted, trying to push Sen from his thoughts. Could he really have Feyon with him, and the others, and Gellick too? The thought of them out there together wormed in his mind and wouldn't let go. Flashes came back of Sen in a tower fighting with a Spider. Some time after the Grammaton chimed for three he rose, tuned a revelatory, and went to the roof to read by the gaslight.

  As he read, a dizzy uncertainty crept over him. Here his dreams of Sen's adventures across the city were written in mass print. They might be a trick, but the reach of his paper was not. The Saint was famous, and over the last year he had snatched glances of it himself. Just holding it in his hands, a paper that was a death warrant, was strangely exciting.

  He began to tremble. He bit his lip against it, but there was no way to forget now. For nearly two years Sen's visions had lingered in his head.

  What if they were true?

  As the sun rose around him, the truth tumbled down. He only had to look up to see the black hole was getting bigger. Even in the Roy he'd heard the rumors of lands lost to the dark.

  The paper rustled in his shaking hands. A cold sweat rose on his skin, souring his jacket. He would be expected at the Aigle soon. It took an effort of will to fold the paper and jam it into his jacket. Sen was his past. Scrivenry and the law were his future. He'd said he would read it, and he had.

  Back in the dormitory room he brushed his hair tightly into the stovepipe hat, rubbed at the glum circles under his eyes, then hurried down to the waiting Ogric cart without. Collaber and the rest were there already.

  "Late," Collaber spat. "You've got no respect, spittle."

  Alam ignored him. He'd long since stopped caring what Collaber had to say.

  The cart trundled away into the Roy, and Alam heard the first trumpet calls of the King's Molemen across the city, rallying the new Adjunc to battle lines.

  It didn't mean anything to him then, though it soon would.

  TREASONOUS FARE

  Sen arrived back at the millinery first, and sat on the rooftop looking out over the city. The printwork fire of The Soul was only a distant glow on the underside of the clouds from here, but there were more fires along the Haversham, more papers and the homes of those who had read them.

  Feyon returned next, and they ate grilled fish on sticks she'd bought from Carroway.

  "It was easy," she said. She'd been to the Seasham and surrounding districts around the Abbey, dropping copies of The Saint in the gardens of townhouses and habitry blocks. "All the Molemen and Adjunc were at the Haversham burning what they could, laying down barricades."

  Sen nodded, and pointed at the glow off the clouds over the Roy. "They took out The Soul. Maybe the others will follow. Their presses are burning, and their staff…"

  "It's a hard cost," Feyon agreed.

  Gellick came next, followed by Daveron, then Mare last.

  "Indura is wild," Mare said, her eyes bright and alive, her navvy's kerchief pulled away to reveal her tattoos. Sen could feel the bloodlust fuming off her. "They're ready to rise right now. Some marketmen on the barrowstage of Spitstock Square caught up a lost Adjunc and broke it across a wheel, for all to see! People were drinking its blood. It was chaos."

  Feyon grimaced.

  "And they saw your face?" Sen asked.

  "My tattoos just made them wilder. The Adjunc have pulled out and you can feel the change in the air."

  Sen turned to the others. "Gellick?"

  "The grindyards are shutting down," answered the Balast. "No shipments are coming in from HellWest. I've never seen it like that before." He took a moment, seemingly overcome by an emotion Sen could only feel the hint of. "The air was starting to clear. The people were lost. They just wandered, all of them."

  "Did they read the Saint?"

  "Some of them. The younger ones. None of them understand what is happening. They want the white back."

  Sen turned to Daveron.

  "Gilungel Bridge has been cleared of stalls," he reported smartly. "Cannon are being mustered from Belial even now, and chained into position on the bridge in the event of a charge on the Roy. Standing troops are being called up from outside the city to guard the foothills, while the new battalions of Adjunc are moving into position on the Haversham, commanded by Molemen. They're setting up bastion forts at strategic intersections. When the city rises, they'll be ready."

  Sen nodded. They'd been preparing for this moment for so long. They'd expected something like this. Now the real war would begin. "We'll be ready too."

  "And Alam?" Feyon asked.

  Alam was the key.

  Sen hadn't realized it for a long time, though he'd searched long and hard for Alam's role in the pattern his mother had prepared. When it finally became clear, it was like a cog slotting into a gear train, inching the great Grammaton clock tower hands forward. It was elegant and perfect.

  "I believe he'll come," Sen said. "He's been through a lot. They were cruel, and he's become harder, but I think I got his attention."

  "Did you tell him about me?" Gellick asked. "Did you say I miss him?"

  Sen smiled. "I did. I talked about all of you. Maybe that touched him more than anything."

  The Balast turned away with a glittery tear in his eye.

  "Now we should sleep," Sen said. "It'll be our last chance. There's a long day ahead."

  One by one they peeled away, to their various beds around the millinery. Tomorrow would be the last day. Tomorrow, the city would rise.

  * * *

  The Aigle palace loomed before Alam like a great mechanical mountain, jagged and black with soaring turrets and swaying cross-bridges, standing far taller than anything else in the city. If he watched closely, he could just discern the whole bulk of it steadily revolving against the night sky, eclipsing the stars with its barbed silhouette.

  The Ogric cart rattled closer up the broad, fountain-studded gardens that encircled the palace. The talk in the cart was uneasy, as the boys whispered about the flood of troops lining their route into the upper Roy.

  It was like nothing Alam had seen before. Usually the roads were patrolled by only a smattering of Molemen and Adjunc, but now there were hundreds, if not thousands, of city infantry dressed in dark tabards on the roads, wielding longspikes, lances and swords. Usually they only came within the city walls for ceremonial events, and only
then one battalion at a time.

  Now there seemed to be dozens of them. As the Ogric cart had passed up from Jubilante, Alam had seen the coats of arms of the Duke Gravaile, the Earl Ygstat, the Cormorant Hammerton, and many others. It supported what Sen had said. It made his palms sweat and his heart race.

  The cart halted in the Aigle's massive shadow, and now Alam felt the bass thrum of the skyship's engines turning, revolving the citadel and bringing the scrivener's entrance into line with the ramp.

  Alam jumped down from the cart along with the others, each jostling for position as the tower turned above. Collaber led the way running up the ramp, weaving round the thick pink-gray bodies of Adjunc to reach the top just as the tower stopped on the scrivener's gate. Clamping locks clanked into position, the attendant Moleman checked Collaber's brand, then a single-handed clock over the entrance began to count down the sixty seconds remaining.

  The boys flooded in after him. Alam was the last through, and barely made it before the tower revolved again.

  Beyond them lay a dark, metal-walled corridor, lined with intermittent lamps that glowed with a white-ish fire that wasn't fuelled by revelatory gas, but something else. Collaber led them off and the column of panting young men advanced. The Pinhead had only once shown them the route and the timings to walk through the ever-shifting maze of corridors to their scrivening chamber.

  Each day the route was different, though the pattern of their passage was the same. Sometimes they passed a farrier's stable where ostlers worked hay and brushed down mounts, sometimes they passed a small tanning works where strips of scarred skin were fermented into leather.

  Today the route led past a room of gears.

  Alam stopped at the entrance while the others kept walking, transfixed. He'd never seen anything like this before. It was a huge hall, lit by large globes casting white-ish light over four vast pistons, like great Sectile legs. Each was as big as a house, and shot up and down with great force.

  The walls were covered with a wealth of gearing, arrayed like the shop-displays of his father's manufactory yard, though considerably more complex. There were toothed plumb lines and black-metal escapements stretching from floor to ceiling, cogs of many different sizes and transverse reticules at many angles, slow-release springs of bimetallic copper and zinc joined to cables and flywheels that spun and clicked, each working dozens of dials.

  Every bit was alive. It felt like looking into a living clockwork brain. In the pistons and cogs he read immeasurably complex calculations being worked through and implemented. This was the brain of the Aigle, that controlled the spin and kept the King forever safely ensconced.

  He remembered to breathe.

  Amongst the machinery there were squat, dark-skinned creatures moving; checking a value here, tweaking a rotor there. They looked like furless Molemen, a caste he'd never seen before and only ever heard about in stories. The Mogs; the King's elite mogrifers, who transformed not living bodies but mechanical ones.

  The urge to stride in and study the Aigle's mechanisms was strong. He had so many questions. What power drove the pistons, and illuminated the lights? What ran the drivetrain, where was the axis, and how did the Aigle overcome the huge drag of its own friction?

  He caught himself three steps in he stopped himself. One of the Mogs saw him and started over, bleating something in a strange language. This was madness. To be caught here would be a breaking offense at the least.

  He ducked back into the corridor and ran. There was no sign of the other boys. He passed a doorway and checked the clock above it; only twenty seconds remained before the next revolution. He ran faster, rounding corners and making turns, until in the last few seconds he saw the others passing through the wall into their scrivenry block, and followed them with only a second to spare, almost getting crushed by the mechanical door as it sealed over.

  "Idiot," the boy at the back of the line hissed. "You'll get us all whipped."

  The scrivenry block was a dank and windowless hall lined with desks and chairs, buried deep in the citadel's belly. It stank of burnt inkstone and cabbage, and was patrolled by the steely eye of the arch-scrivener.

  Alam bowed and nodded into his seat like a cog in the Aigle's brain, panting quietly, and set to his work of the day; codifying casteal writs, signing law in the name of city dignitaries, duplicating ordinances, but today the task was different.

  Today he was set to copy a battle order. Scriveners weren't supposed to read the papers they copied, were supposed to be mere conduits through which information passed, but Alam had never fully mastered that skill. Now he couldn't stop his eyes from racing down this page. It was orders for an attack on the dark side, directing a specific cohort of Adjunc with Molemen captains to take the southern tip of Carroway in an advance from the Haversham.

  He stared at it. Everything about it was confounding. He'd seen Molemen function alongside Adjunc before, but not together in this way, not with the Molemen ruling the Adjunc in a military maneuver. And if they were attacking Carroway, what did that mean for the future?

  It sharpened his sense of unease and started a fresh cold trickle of sweat down the back of his neck. The Pinhead came round, and Alam tried to focus. He carefully laid out his papers, quill, nib-knife, candle and ink-stone on the desk, and started in on his administrative duties.

  Yet try as he might, he couldn't focus. He was weary from lack of sleep, starry-eyed from the incredible sight of the Aigle's brain, and baffled by the orders before him, and each of those things seemed to feed into and amplify the ideas Sen had placed in his mind. If the King really was planning an assault, then what would that mean for Gellick and the others? It would be civil war, like in the Satrapy. Not just thousands would die, but perhaps half the population of the whole city. And if Sen was right about that, then could he be right about the Rot too?

  He held his quill as firmly as possible, but could not still the trembling in his hand.

  When the arch-scrivener stopped at his desk an hour later, he found Alam still laboring over his third sheet of coarse vellum, sweat straining forth on his forehead as he struggled to lay down his letters neatly. Beside him on the counter-top lay two fouled copies, the print run with inkblots and smudges.

  He thrashed Alam about the back of his head with his ruler. "What work is this, spittle? Haven't I taught you the cost of such impecunities, and on a matter of such grave urgency? Is it thoughts of some damask slattern that muddles your thinking so?"

  Alam began an apology, but the Pinhead beat him again, this time with his fist. "You disgust me. All of your caste are alike, unlearned in propriety, self-control, the steely discipline of the law. You are like animals."

  As Alam reeled from the blow, his jacket split open and Sen's copy of The Saint fell out. He tried to sweep it up, but it was too late. The Pinhead saw it and snatched it away.

  "This treasonous fare?" he shouted, bringing the scratching of quills throughout the room to a standstill. "This poison addles your mind and muddies the King's law?"

  He slapped Alam twice across the face with the paper, then yanked him to his feet by the throat and marched him down the ranks of his fellows. Through the winding Aigle he dragged him, until they emerged in the ostlery courtyard, where he commandeered a groomsman to flog Alam's back with a leashed whip thirty times.

  "And consider that a font of good fortune," the Pinhead said. "If you were caught in the streets with this filth," he shook the paper again, "they would most like spike you alive. Consider this your day of greatest luck, as I cannot spare a single scrivener, not even a spittle of such febrile regard."

  He watched while the groomsman staked Alam to a water post, then began the lashing. With each blow landed, Alam bit back the screams, until eleven had fallen and he couldn't hold them in any longer. This satisfied the Pinhead for a time, until twenty lashes had fallen, then he took to tearing sections from The Saint and forcing them into Alam's mouth, waiting for him to chew and swallow before the next lash fell.
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  Sickness from the heavy lead ink followed quickly, so that as he was lashed he also vomited soggy black mulch. Several times the Pinhead kicked him in the belly to force the rest up, then whispered in Alam's ear that if he ever stepped so much as a hair out of line again, he would be forced to etch his crimes into his own skin, then handed over to the Adjunc to be flayed alive.

  When it was done, Alam couldn't stand. His back was on fire, and it felt as though all the blood in his body was draining hot down his legs, though the leash on the whip had kept even a drop from spilling. The Pinhead slapped a cotton swathe over his shoulders, patted it hard, and doused it with stinging naphtha, then led him back to his desk. There the Pinhead tossed before him a slim rusted needle and thread and ordered him to work a 'millenicrux', sewing the vellum pages he'd fouled to the remnants of The Saint, a thousand times a thousand stitches.

  Alam tried to focus on the papers before him, but he was weak with pain and nausea. The fibrous toughness of the vellum made the task of pushing the needle through near impossible. Throughout the sweltering day he worked, stabbing himself in the fingers repeatedly until they were swollen and bloody, but he labored on in a feverish fugue until the Pinhead came again. He stuffed the papers and needle into Alam's fist and closed his fingers about them, then kicked him reeling out through the scrivener block exit.

  "Do not come back until it is finished," the Pinhead called after him, as he staggered after the others down the halls.

  He cleared the revolving mouth with seconds to spare, and tumbled down the ramp as the Aigle twisted on behind. Adjunc jostled him the rest of the way, their cold gray bodies as hard as iron. He staggered into the Ogric cart, where he lay on his side with his back and fingers throbbing, while the other boys prodded him or spat on his chest until the sport grew dull.

  He barely noticed. There was only one single thought in his head now, rotating like the Aigle.

  Sen.