The Rot's War Read online

  THE ROT'S WAR

  THE IGNIFER CYCLE 2

  Moments after Sen stepped through the revenant arch, an inky darkness flooded out across his world. Over the wreckage of a city broken by revolution it surged, engulfing the grand Grammaton tower, smothering the King's Aigle palace and drowning every last caste in the dark. Sen alone escaped; a young man prophesied to raise the Saint and save his world for good.

  But he failed.

  Now his world is gone, and his friends are just memories swallowed by the endless dark…

  Now those memories haunt him, trapped in a strange white cell with no possible means of escape…

  Now a lost figure is watching, a clocksman who claims to be three hundred years old, seeking to fulfil an ancient vow…

  And now the Rot is resurgent, its great black mouth spreading wide across both the future and the past, unleashing a terrible hunger that no world can withstand…

  The second book in The Ignifer Cycle, a new fantasy saga.

  THE IGNIFER CYCLE

  1. The Saint's Rise

  2. The Rot's War

  These and all Michael John Grist's other books can be found here.

  To hear when his newest book is out, receive a free bestselling book, and get access to special deals and giveaways, join the free newsletter.

  Note – 'The Rot's War' is a thoroughly altered version of the book previously published as 'Ignifer's War'.

  For SY

  CONTENTS

  CORPSE WORLD LOST

  BOOK 1. THE VEIL

  Cell I - Cell II - Freemantle I - Cell III - Freemantle II - The Veil I

  BOOK 2. THE END OF THE WORLD

  Grammaton Square - The Roy - Seasham - The Moth and the Butterfly - Flight - Fates of Aradabar - Freemantle III

  BOOK 3. CRALEY SHARK

  Craley Shark I - Cell IV - Cell V - Hate - Cell VI - The Defeated I - The Defeated II

  BOOK 4. AN ARMY

  Lonnigan Clay I - The Veil II - Aulks - Lonnigan Clay II - Lord Quill I - Battle I - Decatate - Battle II - Black - Efraius - Battle III - Lord Quill II - King Seem I - The Emeritus - Battle IV - King Seem II - Awa Babo I - Awa Babo II - Freemantle IV

  BOOK 5. THE SAINT

  Craley Shark II - The Rot's War - Lonnigan Clay III - Lord Quill III - King Seem/Sharachus III - Awa Babo III - Alam - Sen - Craley Shark III - Freemantle V - Craley Shark IV

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  The Last (excerpt)

  CORPSE WORLD LOST

  Freemantle's day began like any other. He woke on his white bed in his white room. He washed in the white glass water box, ate the white food from the white plate, put on his white clothes, then sat in his white chair and opened the veil to watch over the world, as he always did.

  Things were changing within. There was an ongoing revolution in Ignifer's city, the city of his birth, and he'd watched it swelling for days, as the siege lines formed up and people from all castes found common cause beneath the banner of the Saint. He'd watched their early skirmishes against the Adjunc ring up and down the Haversham tradeway, seen the fires break out and the printing presses burn, and witnessed the bodies nailed into the bricks of the Grammaton clock tower.

  Now a drifting pall of smoke overhung the dark side of the Levi River, beneath which all manner of castes armed themselves with railing spikes and blatting bats, taking position behind great ramshackle barricades facing off with Moleman bastion forts.

  The change was coming.

  Freemantle hovered in the air above the Carroway barricade, listening to the buzz of excitement rising from the city's coopers and brick-brazers, its glassmakers and gearshapers as they prepared for war. He flitted on, nimble as a ghost, to a second barricade near Gilungel Bridge, where a wide range of castes from Indurans and Dogsbodies to Spindles and Caracts swarmed throughout the aggregation of trade halls and bathhouses, sharing what little food and water they had and speaking of the glories and the terrors to come.

  It stirred Freemantle's blood, this revolution coming after so many long years of suffering. He'd watched the King's laws on caste grow harsher as the decades passed, beginning with the branding and rout of the Unforgiven caste and spreading into brutal bans on inter-caste marriage, insular curfews and draconian lending terms, with throttling limitations on ownership and work that forced all castes into narrow, slave-like lives.

  Now the young man named Sen was on the brink of overturning it all, beneath the menace of the Rot. Freemantle leaped across the city and traversed the broad Gutrock wastes in seconds, to the top of Ignifer's mountain where Sen was climbing toward the peak even now. At this elevation the Rot was everywhere; Freemantle barely had to angle his head to see it yawning massively overhead, a blackness in the sky that pushed the pale blue dawn down to the horizon on all sides, leaving barely a rim of light.

  It had grown enormous in recent years, testing its jaws across different stretches of the Corpse World. Three years ago he'd watched the Runt's coral-spit towers of Meran be consumed. Two years ago it was the wreck-nation of Faldrop Edge. Looking up at it now, he felt the rush of an old panic pass through him. If those jaws closed, what then? Would the whole world die?

  He wished Sen well, then returned to his city, coming to rest beside the great white southern clock face of the Grammaton clock tower, as he always did, and closed his eyes to look through the veil.

  Across the world's perfect sphere of oceans and lands he saw the light of his many descendants. They were everywhere, grouped thickest in the cities but also lining the coasts of all five continents and dotting all six seas. He tracked their movements and thoughts, sensing the pattern in all of their lives.

  The fear was everywhere. The shadow of the Rot hung over them like a second heaven, and many turned to their copies of The Saint, carried on ships from Ignifer's city and translated into a dozen languages. They pored over the pages and prayed for a savior to come.

  Then one came.

  Night fell across the city, and the wheels of revolution jolted to life. In the Calk the Balasts broke free of their dolmen wall and charged up the Haversham like a living battering ram, smashing a path through bastion forts and over Gilungel Bridge. A cheering tide of countless castes raced in their wake, writing their revolution onto the world in screams, violence, joy and surging pride.

  They fought in the streets of the Roy as the Rot's thunderous tongues lashed down amongst them, and a dark rain fell. Freemantle watched with bated breath as one of Sen's generals altered the Aigle's revolve from within, then another charged in to assassinate the King at his bloody work in the palace's tallest tower. As the misericorde spikes penetrated the dark King's brain, black and blue light shot out at once, the mountain erupted in fire, and upon the horizon a great blue warrior rose.

  Saint Ignifer.

  Freemantle was struck dumb by the vision. He had never seen anything like it in all his observations upon the Corpse World. The giant man wore blazing blue armor, and slashed crackling misericorde blades each as long as the Grammaton through clouds of ash and fire into the Rot's bulging flanks.

  It was dizzying; a celebration of faith rewarded, as the populace below called out the Saint's name and the Rot was driven back, and its tongues cut away, until suddenly it was gone. The overhanging dark of its bulk vanished from the sky, and the burning blue figure dissolved and fell as a remnant blue star, leaving a bizarre, echoing silence in their wake.

  The city fell utterly still. The fighting below stopped, as a steady, dampening rain of ash fell. No more tongues hammered the city. No more cries rang out. Freemantle scarcely dared breathe.

  The moment stretched out, past excitement into a widening, paralyzing panic.

  Freemantle felt the change like none o
ther could. He spun to touch the great clock face, always a pure and snow-like white, which already was tingeing toward dirty yellow. No vibration carried through the frosted glass, which meant the pendulum itself had stopped its swing.

  "No," he whispered, as the old fears rose up stronger than ever.

  He turned to the horizon, where the volcano's eruption was even now fading toward black. In the sky the change accelerated, as the newly unveiled moon thickened to a yellowing smear, then moments later winked out like an extinguished candle. Freemantle hung frozen, powerless to do a thing, as one by one the stars were eclipsed.

  He'd seen this dwindling before. He hadn't understood it then, when he'd given his life to prevent it, and he didn't understand it now.

  "What can I do?" he shouted to the sky, but of course, as ever in his second life, no answer came.

  He looked to the Aigle, where fighters were laying down their makeshift weapons and sitting down in the streets as if tired, letting the rain of ash settle over them and gazing at the black sky in puzzlement, at the darkening streets, at their own thinning hands.

  Hadn't they won?

  Revelatory lights across the city dampened and died. Riot fires dwindled. Then a surge of inky darkness washed down from the Gutrock wastes and broke over the city like a wave. Freemantle's breath stopped. "Please," he whispered, but the tide carried on, rolling unstoppably over the battlements of the King's Aigle palace and smothering Sen's generals and fighters on both sides alike. It coursed down the hills of the Roy in seconds, engulfing Gilungel Bridge and flooding out through the city like grasping fingers, into Carroway and Belial and the Seasham, across Indura and Flogger's Cross and the Boomfire. It filled up the city as if it was a basin until there was no light left, and no sound, and only Grammaton Square below remained, then even that too was erased as the tides gulped it down.

  Terror burned in Freemantle, but what could he do? He looked out through the veil and saw nothing; his descendants were gone, the whole of the world was gone, and still the darkness was rising. Grammaton tower tilted and fell as its foundations dissolved, pulling a final groaning toll from the great Grammaton bell. In seconds that sound was silenced too, as the tides snatched up and ate the tower, and ate the spire, and leaped high to swallow Freemantle too.

  Where there had been a teeming nest of life, the darkness made a hole. Where there had been light and movement and noise, the dark made a vacuum, and blackness, and nothing at all.

  * * *

  He burst awake in his white room, gasping in his white chair. What had happened? At once he closed his eyes and tried to return to the world, but there was nothing to go back to. He tried again and again, but it made no difference. He stood up on shaky legs then sat down again, closed his eyes and tried to open the veil using a different memory, but all he could see was blackness.

  The room hung white around him. His world was gone.

  He tried repeatedly for hours, hoping, but nothing he did put him back on the Corpse World. Some times he let his mind drift, trying to sneak up on it as if on a dream, while at others he focused intently on opening the veil, reaching through, and…

  Nothing came.

  He looked at the walls. He looked at the floor. It couldn't be gone, but it was. The truth of it began to settle in the pit of his belly like a sickness. What he'd just seen happen had really happened. The world had been consumed in darkness and it was gone, and there was nothing left to return.

  For hours more he sat in his white cell, blank and reeling as after-images glowed in the dark of his mind. He saw the Rot flee again, and Sen fall again, and then the darkness felled his precious Grammaton tower.

  Panic came and he stood up to pace the room. He picked up his white books from his white shelves then put them down. He adjusted the chair, and remade the bed, and picked up his books again, scanning the words he'd written down over the centuries. There were treatises on the strange self-skinning practices of the Caract cacti-men in the Korithian deserts, and studies on the rapier-beaked Mandray lizards of Absalom, and catalogs of the Dark Giants of the Shallahar basin, the pygmy Runts of Meran, Gull-folk flocking in the ruined crags of some ancient cliff-top city, even the deep-sea leviathan whales like the Ptarmigan and Mesoplodont. He glanced over his records of a boy found alive inside a giant fish, the Cowface treasures discovered in the sub-rails, a new race of Malakites mogrified by a mad Painman from his fat vat.

  He put the books down helplessly. They described a world that was now gone. Visions of it played through his mind whether his eyes were open or closed; fire and smoke, people dying, the steady slide into the black oil-pit of nothing.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and wondered what to do, but could think of nothing. He'd been here before, and it had been terrible. He didn't want that back. He'd rather die than that. He clenched his fists and unclenched them. He forced himself to relax, to stay calm. Perhaps the world would be back in the morning, he lied to himself, knowing it wasn't true. Everything would be as it was, though this too was a fiction, like so much of his life. Eventually he drifted off to troubled sleep.

  He woke to lights, dappling within the darkness of his room.

  For a moment he lay still, staring at the dark ceiling as he remembered. Everything was gone. He blinked his eyes shut and tried to open the veil again, but still nothing came. Only darkness, and lights…

  There. Rippling and faint, there were strange lights set into the wall by the veil chair. They swirled and coalesced in the darkness, turning like stars in a slow circular dance. For a moment he thought he saw a shape forming within them, some kind of figure, but it was indistinct.

  He lifted himself from the bed and the main lights flashed on, filling the room with white. He approached the wall by the chair. It was smooth and white as ever, broken by no doors or windows, not made of wood or plaster, metal or bone or any kind of material he knew.

  He grew still and waited until the lights turned off again. When the darkness returned the vision he saw before him made him gasp.

  There was a man made of blue fire moving in the wall.

  He was a stick figure only, outlined like a slimmed-down Sectile caste, the contours of a man but thinned to the bone. Freemantle gazed at it for a long time, not daring to move lest the main lights come on and the vision be stolen from him. He didn't know what it meant, but he began to hope anew.

  Time passed, and his reduced life continued. He had no idea how many days went by, because the world had been destroyed and the veil showed him only blackness. He slept when he grew tired, and ate the food waiting for him in white trays when he woke. He did his exercises and read his notes and watched as the thing in the wall pulsed, and grew.

  Its face began to take on recognizable features: cheekbones, teeth, lips, eyes. It was a young man, perhaps barely of age. He sketched the features as they emerged, until he reached the moment of certainty.

  It was Sen.

  When it happened it happened quickly. The figure in the wall moved for the first time, and its lungs inflated. Its eyes snapped open, and something pushed it from behind. The solid wall stretched taut toward Freemantle, clinging to Sen's face and outstretched arms, until with a sucking sound he was pushed through. Freemantle sprang to the wall and slapped his palms against it, hoping for a way out, but already it had returned to its original solidity.

  Beside him Sen opened his mouth. His eyes fixed on Freemantle and he tried to speak. Then he collapsed.

  BOOK 1. THE VEIL

  CELL I

  Sen stepped through the revenant arch into white.

  One moment there had been the fire of the volcano and the crackle of the Saint's blue light running through his scars, with burning misericordes in his hands and the roar of falling rock and rolling magma all around, and then there was this.

  A thick and swaddling whiteness encircled him, as if the air itself had thickened to the consistency of millet ground in the Abbey's grindstones. He took a step and tried to suck in breath but the ai
r was chalky, like the lime fog of the Calk. He rubbed his eyes to clear them but there was nothing to see, only whiteness. The revenant arch was gone; there was no path back to the volcano, to his father King Seem or the city he'd left behind with all his friends.

  He called Avia's name, but the cottony white seemed to swallow his voice. He walked ahead, feeling for anything to orient himself by. It was like the Gloam Hallows mist, but at least then there'd been flagstones underfoot, and breezes through the mist.

  "Hello!" he called, but still no answer came.

  Then he touched a wall.

  It was smooth like glass, and cold, but no matter how close he pressed his face to it he could not see it clearly. He ran his hands along its surface, but there seemed to be no edge. It just went on and on. He went to draw his misericordes and poke it, but they weren't there at his waist. He wasn't even wearing the same clothes he'd had on at the mountaintop; instead he was dressed in white robes like a Bodyswell healer.

  He knocked on the wall, then pushed it, and it gave way a little. He pushed harder and it gave way more, stretching like algae in the Abbey pond until he was actually leaning into the wall, then somehow being sucked in, until suddenly the wall burst and he tumbled through into…

  A cold and white room. His head spun and he dropped to his knees. There was a man standing nearby, looking at him with puzzled brown eyes. There was a bed and a desk, and four walls with no door, then there was only black as he slumped forward into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  He woke in white.

  He was lying on a bed in the small white room, looking up at the white ceiling. He'd never seen anything like it before. Everything was a chalky-looking white, but it was real, or felt real in a way different to where he had just…