In Afric the air was clear of grit for the first time, as all work in the various factories had ceased. At Carmarthy station he found the bi-rail station bombed-out and broken, the train carriage torn from the track and lying sidelong on the street, crumpled under its own weight. The severed bi-rail lines curled across the street like glinting intestines. Everything was smoking, and clumps of cooling metal ticked and hissed.
He picked through the wreckage to the yard-house, where the roof had been scorched but the doors were only blackened by soot. He wrenched open the padlock with his spikes and tugged a handcart and rope from inside.
Up the wrecked bi-rail scaffold, he climbed to the track. Where the metal had twisted away it still glowed a soft red. He looked out, back upon the city he'd passed through. It seemed to be broken into pieces, with large tracts completely dark as though in hiding, other areas simmering with fires and the hubbub of fighting.
He could feel the fever rising up, the sense of defiance redolent in the air like sweet harsh incense on the Haversham, discordant but growing stronger. He could feel the Molemen and the Adjunc too, retrenching, organizing, preparing.
It would be a war for the ages.
He wedged three timber struts out of the wrecked line and bound them in a triangle frame, affixed a block and pulley, then winched the handcart up to the track like he'd once tried to raise up the press. Swinging above him he wondered what would happen if he released it and let it crush him.
Surely the Saint would not rise. The Rot would descend and all would be dark, as it was in the darkness that came before.
He set the cart carefully to the rails, then stepped aboard and pushed the seesaw handle down, lifted it up, and the cart trundled forward. He worked the handle harder and the cart gained speed, rumbling over the rails. He felt the wind of motion rush across his face. As the sun drew up over the Heart's corpse, he left the city behind.
* * *
When Alam woke, he was surrounded by old friends.
They were all there. Gellick patted him solemnly on the shoulder. "I've been practicing at Cuttlebones," he whispered. "I'm much better now."
"That sounds good," Alam managed, his voice a croak. He looked round at them all, reveling in this moment because surely it was just a dream. Any moment he'd wake to the cold faces of Collaber and the other scriveners, pouring piss on his face.
"One point is a victory, ok?" he tried, expecting the flood at any moment. Instead Gellick's face split in a huge grin.
"He remembers me!"
Alam shrank a little, waiting for the piss to come, but still it didn't come, and he didn't wake from this wonderful dream. Instead Mare came, and placed a plate of deliciously aromatic toasted cheese before him, and a flask of water. Her face was strange, covered in dark and swirling marks that looked like people.
"Hang in there, hero," she said.
The savory smell of the cheese brought him round, and he sat up. His back throbbed. He looked at his hands, in bandages. It had all really happened, except one thing was different. He could feel it in the air.
"Sen's gone," he said
"In the night," said Feyon, "to raise the Saint."
The words echoed dim memories, of Sen pouring images into him in an intoxicating rush. It was the greatest gift he'd ever received. Through Sen he felt like he'd been there for all of it, writing over his worst times in the dormitory like scars onto skin, carving him with a new confidence and purpose.
He looked into their faces, all as sincere as Sisters at prayer. "You all believe him," he said, more statement than question. "You think the Saint is coming."
"We do," said Feyon. "And I think you do too."
Looking past them, he saw that the walls of the pressroom were different now, no longer covered in paper and string. Instead they had been whitewashed, and sketched over with angles and lines he recognized.
He pointed. "He's drawn a map. I recognize Grammaton Square."
"Now we just need a scrivener," Mare answered with a smile. "To manage the revolution."
He laughed, not only because the very idea of managing a revolution was ridiculous, but also because here he was, a scrivener trained in the King's own academy, turning those skills against his master. It was delicious.
He looked round at their faces; all set and focused, and nodded. This was it, then. His life as he'd known it was over, and he was back where he belonged, with a gang of misfits dreaming dreams far too big for their castes, driven there by a mad boy whose scars should have fated him to death a long time ago.
It was good.
THE MOUNTAIN
Noon, and Andesite station on the Gutrock obtrusion was deathly silent and dark. All the ghasts and nifthinders were gone, away protecting whatever homes they had in the city, perhaps fighting Adjunc in the streets. The station sat like a dead sentinel on the crag top.
There was no one at all.
Overhead the black of the Rot had spread even further, blocking out the sun and the sky to leave only a thin sliver of blue at the horizons. It was strange, to walk beneath an empty blackness even in the day.
Sen dismounted from the handcart, his hands raw. Looking back, all he saw were a few rising tufts of smoke over the obtrusion's volcanic rise, with the occasional brief flash of red as explosions or cannon fire blew. They were only droplets of color against the hanging pall of the Rot, though the sense of the city's frenzied fever remained with him.
The Gutrock gondola station was unmanned, with no one working at the mills to turn it, so he began walking through the long exhausted stretches of Aradabar. He'd brought his ghasting balaclava but didn't bother to slip it on, as there was barely enough light to see by.
Through the long, dark day he walked, while the world broke apart somewhere far behind. It was unreal to be so alone, walking the shredded outer streets of Seem's city. Through the darkness he went until the blue at the edges glimmered, and the sun set in the western slit of sky, and a fringe of faint stars emerged. He glimpsed King Seem drifting through that narrow alley, then Awa Babo and Lord Quill, all his heroes climbing up into the belly of the Rot.
It grew close to pitch black on the Gutrock. He tuned a revelatory lamp and proceeded in an orange bubble of light.
The trail soon became familiar, as he passed the extent of the gondola's wires and the terminus, where the pitboss' sifting station still squatted in the belly of a rusted old carriage. From there he passed beyond onto the Gutrock proper. It had been years, but each raised bluff and tunnel was hung with memories both his own and King Seem's, spanning millennia. It had taken him days then to reach the great exhumed crater. Now he knew the way, and it took only a dark day and a black night.
He skirted around the crater's edge and the King's palace, where Sharachus had died, bound for the lowest slope of Ignifer's mountain, named after the volcano that had buried Aradabar. The peak was out of sight, shrouded in the black above, but so vast it seemed to bend the world. It would be the first place the Rot's mouth touched down.
He started up toward it.
* * *
In the millinery, the hours passed in a blur of urgent, ceaseless industry, as The Saint changed into something new.
Mare, Feyon, and Daveron came and went night and day with hardly any rest, running the city's dark side rooftops and sewers as Sen had taught them, charting the advance of the King's forces and ferrying that information back to Alam and Gellick in the millinery, who mapped the ebb and flow of power through the city across the walls and ceiling.
Pitched running battles occurred constantly up and down the Haversham and through Grammaton Square, with Adjunc and Molemen facing off with rag-tag groups of rebel raiders, Spindles and Ratfers in improvised wooden armor with weapons beaten out of shovels and smithing irons. From the dark of a Levi sewer weir Mare watched the Molemen finalizing their reinforcements to Gilungel Bridge, stacking the last of their cannon on its numerous mounts and erecting wooden barricades stocked with flintlock rifles and barrels of sal
tpeter powder.
From a coracle scavenge boat chained at the middle of the Levi River, Daveron tracked the battalions as they marched down from the Roy in war-armed lockstep, flanked by fresh swarms of Adjunc rushed from the Manticore. He estimated numbers and positions with a usurer's eye, taking stock of their weaponry load, their powder, their defensive positions.
From the rooftop edges of Grammaton Square Feyon watched the King's forces advance in a clearly demarcated line of bastion-forts built from reinforced spiking timber, studded with flintlock rifle perches and shot-holes for cannon. They were run with clockwork precision, used as staging grounds for lightning Adjunc raids that occasionally spurted out and cleared the streets, then advanced into the gaps they'd made, allowing cannon to roll deeper into Carroway, the Boomfire, and up the Docks.
In the millinery Alam gathered all their information together and mapped it into the grander strategy, ignoring the pain of his healing lash-welts in the rush to keep up with the constant stream of information, putting the precision of his scrivenry skills to the test. With Gellick's help he transcribed directives from the map, bending Sen's plan to fit the reality, setting the orders into press plates which Gellick ran through the press under The Saint's old banner.
So production of The Saint continued, but it no longer told stories. Now it gave orders to the resistance, and with it they began to shape the flow of revolution.
Mare and Feyon gathered the copies then ran them out to the streets, beginning to organize the impromptu bands of rioters into a unified army, beneath the aegis of The Saint. Feyon was hailed and adored wherever she went, a beautiful and charismatic Blue of the highest caste, come to lead the mid-castes of Carroway in their hour of need. Mare was greeted in Indura as a savior, an Induran who'd been marking herself with an inked rebellion for years. They were both from The Saint, the symbol of hope for the revolt, and the information they brought was acted upon.
At their behest random castes who were blind to the wider struggle being waged, and largely at war for their own pockets of the city, came together beneath a hero they'd come to love and trust over the years. War-lines were drawn up and construction of dark side barricades began, built out of half-burnt hawker-carts, Ogric carriages, stolen broughams, furniture and door frames looted from Adjunc stables and Moleman outposts.
Soon whole swathes of Carroway, HellWest, the Calk, and the Boomfire were sealed up, roads and alleys stopped with heaping barricades behind which men and women of all castes rallied. The war in the streets devolved to guerrilla raids on the encroaching Molemen bastions, as the rebel line grew firm, their ranks swelling as Indurans took position next to Sectiles, ghasts next to Scabritics, high and low-born all together, driven by belief in Saint Ignifer and a driving fear of the swelling mouth of the Rot overhead.
They worked until HellWest was locked down and all districts three streets south of the Haversham belonged to them. New versions of The Saint went out every hour, massaging their gathering troops into position until the vast bulk of their forces were massed behind two barricades off Carroway with straight lines through to Gilungel bridge, through to the Roy, and only one possible target beyond that.
The King's Aigle palace.
* * *
Sen climbed.
The mountain was at times shale and slippery, with crevasses that opened under his feet and dragged him down, so he spent an hour or two climbing his way back out. Other times it was crystal and oblique, with hunks of chalky alabaster that painted his gloved fingers black and tried to drink his blood on their sharp edges. There were heaped boulders that rolled under his feet, and sand that slid his every step a half step backward. There were chasms he had to leap, and sheer faces he had to scale, wedging his fingers into tiny cracks until they bled.
At night winds scoured down the mountainside, bringing a bruising hail of pebbles and grit into his face. He clung to the rock and climbed with aching slowness.
On the second day the whole mountain shifted. A tide of gravel, rocks, and boulders thundered down upon him, trapping and crushing him in darkness that cracked his ribs and made every breath a too-shallow gasp. For hours he braced himself against the rockfall, straining all his muscles like Sharachus caught under the rails, until at last something shifted. Aching and battered, he emerged into the day's half-light.
The mountain outside was unrecognizable. What had before been a steep slope was now a near level field of rock shards and detritus. He could scarcely tell which way was up or down.
He threw stones and listened to them bounce away amongst cracks and gullies. He looked to the sky, but the Rot had stolen away any hint of guidance from the sun. He felt frost in the air, though it was summer down below, and a dry chill that cut at his eyes. He listened to the fever pitch of revolution as it grew far off in the city, and oriented himself by that.
The scree field ended and he found himself on bare brown dirt, loamy with recent rains. Clouds crept in around the Rot and a mist formed, so thick that water droplets coalesced on his face, mingling with sweat. Soon the brown mountainside was awash with soft mud, and he had to drop to his hands and knees to scrabble through it like an animal in Indura, using his spikes to gain purchase.
Next came the wall. From the damp and cottony mist a sheer cliff of granite emerged, rising up into white fog. He paced along it a little way, looking for a shallower incline or any easier way up, but there wasn't one. This was it.
He pressed his body to the slick rock, let his arms and legs take the strain, and started up. Soon his forearms began to burn, but there was no place to rest. He couldn't see the summit above or the brown mud below. Everything was white. There was no choice but to go up, so up he went, pulling himself hand by hand into the sky.
It began to grow cold. The mist blew around him in sharp flurries, spreading a frosty breath that bit his skin where it touched. He remembered another time, climbing up the Abbey cathedral with Alam, and reveling at how simple and pleasant the climb was.
It wasn't simple or pleasant now. The wet rock grew icy, and every hand and foothold became treacherous, threatening to cast him off. His calves burned, then his thighs, as he tried to balance his weight evenly on the narrowest of toeholds. His fingers became so cold and hooked that they felt like foreign tools attached to his wrists, despite his gloves. Still he climbed, higher than the crater, higher than the Aigle, higher than anything else in the city.
He saw Sharachus in the darkness behind his eyelids when he blinked. An old friend. He saw Sister Henderson. This climb was for them. It didn't belong to him any more than he owned his scars. He was just the messenger, and the messenger didn't get to stop when he was tired, or cold, or afraid.
A lifetime later he crested the misted top. Snow lay all about. He clambered over the edge and hunkering down in the lee of a wind-driven crest of ice, bone-sick and trembling with the cold.
He couldn't rest long. A sharp wind howled down the mountain, chilling him further. He brought his gloved fists close to his lips and blew warmth onto them, but felt only cold. They looked like Alam's hand after his millenicrux punishment, basted with clotted blood from cuts earned in the climb. At least the mist began to clear.
He stood and faced the mountain. Before him rose a smooth slope of white, uninterrupted, rising to a deep azure band of sky at the edges of the slope, with the black dome of the Rot filling the rest.
He could feel it all around him now, the same sense he'd inherited from King Seem nearly two years ago, stinging at his mind. It was hungry, and empty, and its emptiness seemed to consume little details from his memory, robbing him of a certain look on Feyon's face, or the way she smiled when he did something dumb.
He looked up, and in the churning black thought he could see its black tongues slithering, winding back like the Scranth's tendrils, preparing to lash down…
He pressed on.
The cold gnawed into him. His mind wandered. He saw King Seem slugging along beside him and swatted him away. He looked to the
clouds and saw Avia, glowing as she had in the Gloam Hallows. By his side walked Alam and Feyon, their faces blanked with white.
"Keep going," Feyon said, in a voice too high to be hers. "Don't give up."
Alam said nothing, he was simply there, walking tall by his side.
On his knees at dusk, peering beneath the shredded ghasting glove on his left hand, he saw the tips of his fingers begin to blacken. He'd heard of frostbite; Mare had told stories of sailors in the Harkern Fear who lost their faces to it after only a few minutes on lookout, and how the only treatment was heat.
He scanned the slope, his eyes swirling like the snow. There was nothing to burn anywhere.
That night a snowstorm howled around him. He heard spirits shouting in the wind, tearing at his skin, endlessly repeating the last words he'd said to Feyon, about seeing her again.
It was all arrogance. He was snow-blind and drained but there was only forward. This was his role.
There were ridges of old magma spiked around the upper shoulders of the mountain like a crown. He climbed up and through them in the midst of the gale, then slid over a lake of red ice in a perfectly circular crater, and pressed on toward the peak.
* * *
The streets of the city grew quiet, as the revolution resolved into the settled lines of a siege. In the millinery the leaders of The Saint snatched sleep whenever they could, ate whatever dregs they could lay claim to. The pressroom became a wreck, splashed with papers and ink that no one cared to clean. Alam and Gellick worked in a smooth and numbing tandem, accepting the reports from Mare, Daveron, and Feyon as they came in, translating them through the ceiling and walls into stages in the final plan Sen had provided, and turning out appropriate orders through the press.
Their two barricades were now heaving with hundreds of castes from the dark side. All the lowest and most misshapen, from Indura and the Manticore, Flogger's Cross and Bibracte, The Clangells and Harroden, were behind one barricade by the Gilungel Bridge, led by Mare. All the middling castes, from Carroway and the Cressier Quarter, Glave and the Boomfire, Dray and Docket were behind another near the Calk, led by Feyon.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 42