The Rot's War Page 2

  He didn't remember clearly where he'd just been. A fog like the Gloam Hallows? On the mountain, fighting the Rot? Dreams vied with memories and left him adrift. Had he been walking through the mists, or flying with his father? Had he stepped through an archway or pushed through a wall?

  He sat up and shaded his eyes against the bright light. The room was square, with book-filled shelves and a paper-strewn desk and a chair and a kind of water box at one end, all of it white. Sitting on the desk at the chair and looking at him now was a strange figure; he was tall and thin, with a broad lantern jaw and a mop of dark hair, dressed in a long white robe. Rising off him came a sense of enforced calm, obscuring hints of a roiling panic underneath.

  "Good morning, Sen," said the man, as if perfectly tranquil.

  Sen squinted at the figure. Despite the hidden depths, he didn't appear to pose any threat. He hadn't even risen from his seat.

  "Is it morning? Where am I?" His voice came out rough.

  "You're in my cell," the man said. "Is it too bright? I'll lower the levels."

  Somehow the brightness diminished, becoming more of an auburn glow, though Sen didn't see how it was done. There were no torches in sconces on the walls, no alchemical globes fizzing on the desk, and no windows at all. At least it was more comfortable now, and Sen swung his legs out of the bed. He was wearing white trousers made of some kind of light cotton, not the heavy ghasting leathers he'd worn on the mountain, along with a light white tunic. His right arm, which had been purple with bruising when he'd last seen it on the mountain, was now perfectly pale and smooth.

  He frowned, because there was something else strange about that, and it took a moment before he realized what it was. There were no scars. He pulled back the sleeve and saw only plain white skin all the way up his forearm. For a moment this stymied him, and he turned his forearm this way and that.

  He raised his other arm and studied the flat expanse of skin. Dimly he thought this should be a shocking development, but he found himself only curious. He pulled up his trouser legs and studied his bare feet and calves. There was not a single scar there either.

  The figure was speaking.

  "…new body. It's all right, take it slowly. There's food here, if you can stomach it. It's not very substantial, but it's all you'll need."

  The tall man rose and advanced gingerly, holding out a white tray which Sen looked at for a moment, then took. It trembled in his plain pale hands. It seemed to be made of an unfamiliar material; smooth and light but molded as perfectly as fine-bone porcelain. On it was a white plate, where three slabs of a white substance quivered.

  "I think it's a kind of chemical food combination," the man said, backing away slightly, as if Sen was a dangerous kind of animal. "I've been eating it for a long time, and it's served me well."

  Sen looked up at this strange figure with his big jaw and anxious, old eyes, and tried to put some order onto what he was feeling. "What's happened to me? I had scars, but they're gone."

  The man nodded slowly. "This is a new body." He enunciated each word clearly. "You've passed through the veil, though I don't know how, as it's not how I came here. I don't think you're an observer, come to replace me."

  Sen couldn't grasp what he was saying; the words felt slippery and unreal. A new body? Observer? "I don't understand what you're talking about. Who are you?"

  The man sat down again; each movement careful and controlled. "My name is Freemantle Mons. I'm a clocksman and an observer. And this-" he paused, as if thinking how best to explain himself. "This cell is where I live."

  Sen looked around him. "It's a cell? Like in a prison?"

  Freemantle nodded. "It's a prison for me. Now for you, too."

  Sen tried to stand up, pushing the tray away onto the bedspread, but his legs quivered and rebelled and he sagged backward. The room swam. "A prison where? My name is Sen. I've come from the city of Ignifer, where I was fighting the Rot, and..."

  "I know who you are," said Freemantle. "I know about the Saint and the Rot. I've been watching your revolution."

  That made no sense at all. "What? How could you watch it? This cell doesn't even have any windows."

  Freemantle gave an anxious smile. "It's difficult to explain." He paused, pursed his lips, then went on. "I don't need windows because I watched through the veil. And what is the veil?" He held up a hand to forestall Sen's questioning look. "I close my eyes and I see the world. That's the veil. It's like dreaming, but what I see is real. Sometimes what I think even influences the world, making small changes."

  Sen regarded the strange man. None of what he was saying sounded very likely, and the strong emotions he was masking undercut that further. Again he pushed again to stand, and this time his legs wobbled but held. He stood by the bed waiting for the flush of dizziness to pass. Better to act than to listen to more nonsense. "There must be a door somewhere. Where is it?"

  "There are no doors," Freemantle said. "You can check, if that will help."

  Sen started toward the wall, moving with deliberate care so he wouldn't fall. It felt like a heavy bag of newsprint was tied to each leg, slowing him down. At the wall he put his hands to the surface, such plain and simple hands without scars of any kind, and ran them over it. It was perfectly smooth, but strangely warm.

  "I feel heat," he said, and turned to Freemantle. "Perhaps there's a furnace beyond?"

  Freemantle raised one bushy eyebrow. "I've never noticed that before. It might be an artifact of your passing, or indeed there could be a furnace. In either case, there's no door to find out. This cell is our world now, and the veil is shut off."

  Sen ignored this gibberish and continued running his palms over the wall. He moved steadily along it to the bed, past the white glass water box to the desk where Freemantle was sitting.

  "There are no doors," he repeated as Sen shuffled past. "No windows, no way in or out."

  Sen continued on his circuit regardless, but the walls were utterly smooth and unbroken everywhere he touched them. Now he was breathing hard. He'd exerted himself, and he sat back down on the bed, his legs shaking with the effort.

  "If there's no doors, then how did I get here?"

  "You came through the wall," said Freemantle, and pointed to the warm patch. "Through the veil, I expect."

  Sen felt a headache coming on. Talking to this man was like trying to hold smoke. "You keep talking about a 'veil'. What do you mean?"

  Freemantle nodded, licked his lips and leaned in slightly. "Do you remember anything about your passage between the mountaintop and this place? Was there a white space, completely featureless?"

  Sen frowned. He did remember that, vaguely. "Yes. Like mists."

  Freemantle snapped his fingers, then seemed to regret the undue enthusiasm. "Precisely. That's the veil. You went through a revenant arch in the world, you walked through the veil, and you came here."

  Sen slumped backward on the bed, feeling more weary than he'd thought. "To this cell."

  Freemantle nodded.

  "But why? I thought I was going to…" He trailed off. What had he thought he was going to do? Meet his mother, probably. Fight the Rot in other worlds. This didn't match that expectation at all. "Why?"

  "I don't know," said Freemantle. "But I'm glad you're here." The panic began to rise in him again, though there was little sign of it in his face. "I thought I was alone."

  Sen tried to make sense of this. Unfamiliar words and ideas buzzed in his head like slippery fish in the Abbey pond. "But you have your veil, don't you? Your windows that aren't windows. I'm sure there are great celebrations in the city right now."

  Freemantle gulped. The panic began to rise. "I, uh-"

  Sen sat up a little straighter. He was catching a sense of something now; blackness in the air, blackness descending. The panic surged and Sen pressed against it. The surface of Freemantle's mind was clean and logical, like gears lining up in a Carroway workshop, but there were pieces out of order; a fault in the machinery, and through it c
rept something new. Fear.

  Sen's mouth went dry. His voice came out low. "What happened, Freemantle?"

  Freemantle shifted in his seat, and met his eyes. Sen could almost feel what was coming before he answered.

  "It started with the Grammaton," he said. "The clock hands stopped after the Rot disappeared." Sen rose to his feet at that, and Freemantle started talking faster. "After that everything began to dwindle. To turn black, as if it was being," he cast about for the right word, "unpainted. The volcano disappeared, then the stars and the moon, then the city and all its people too, until finally Grammaton clock tower itself was gone." Freemantle's eyes shone. "I woke up here, and now I can't go back. The veil won't open for me anymore. I can't see anything at all where the world should be. I thought I was alone, then you came through the wall."

  Sen stared at him, stung by the intensity of his emotions and the images he caught in the air, but scarcely believing it. "You're saying the world is gone?"

  Freemantle met his gaze briefly, then looked away. Now there was shame in amongst the fear, as if he was somehow to blame. "Our world is gone. The veil's closed, though I've tried many times to open it."

  Sen opened his mouth, but could think of nothing to say to that. How could the world be gone? He'd just saved it. He'd spent years building up a legend, and now that legend had risen and driven off the Rot, so how could the world be gone? It wasn't possible. If he really thought about it, it meant that all of them were dead; Alam, Feyon, Daveron, Gellick, Mare, and he couldn't just accept that.

  It just couldn't be.

  His legs trembled under him. He pointed directly at Freemantle's face. "You're lying to me."

  "I'm not," said Freemantle, but Sen was already moving past him, his exhaustion forgotten. He seized the desk and upended it, sending papers fluttering to the floor, then worked to break off one of its legs. It was some kind of composite material and snapped away easily. With it he attacked the wall.

  He scratched and beat it, stabbing and grinding, trying to dig in or smash a hole through, but to no avail. It wasn't made of plaster or brick or wood or metal, or any substance he'd ever come across before, and he was unable to make a single scratch.

  He moved on, thumping at the wall in different places, trying to pry open a hidden passageway. He beat it high and low, leaning his whole weight on the leg. There were shelves above the broken desk filled with books and he swept them to the floor, but the surface behind them was no different. He ran his fingers along the point where the shelves met the wall, but it was seamless, with no nails, screws or glue; no signs of a join at all.

  Some of Freemantle's panic began to pass into him, and dark visions of the world ending echoed through his mind. He saw Feyon screaming into darkness. He saw Gellick steadily unpainted away.

  He shifted the bed sideways with a grunt and searched the floor beneath it, prying and hammering with the desk leg, but it was just as impossibly smooth as the wall, as sheer as mirrored glass, with no sign of any carpentry joins.

  "I'm sorry," Freemantle said quietly, as Sen passed him by, "I've tried all this before," but Sen ignored him. His hands throbbed from gripping the desk leg, his legs wavered with every step and his vision blurred with more images of some black end, but he kept trying. Freemantle shifted smoothly out of the way as he wavered to the other side of the small cell, to the white glass water box.

  In the white ceiling above there was a kind of grille, and he poked the leg into that.

  "It's where I wash," said Freemantle. "It's just for water."

  Sen dragged the bed over and stood on top of it to stab at the grille. The holes didn't budge, and there was no sign of the pipes used to supply them. A drop of water came out, but that was all.

  He stopped and looked around the room, panting now and dizzy atop the bed. The room was truly a cell. Freemantle sat in the middle, surrounded by his broken desk and disheveled bed, with his white books and papers spread across the floor. Sen had torn its calm order apart. He was about to mumble an apology when he saw something strange on the wall: a blue smudge in the shape of a hand.

  It took him a moment to realize what it was. He looked down at his own hands, clutched around the desk leg, and saw blue. What? He dropped to one knee, then Freemantle was there to catch him before he fell any further. He let go of the desk leg and peered at his palms, where the sharp edges had torn slits into the skin. There was uniform pale muscle underneath, from which a faint blue liquid ran like blood, but like no blood he'd seen before.

  He looked at Freemantle with his own sense of panic welling over.

  "What in the Heart is this?"

  CELL II

  Freemantle guided him to lie on the bed, and Sen didn't resist though he could not stop staring at his palms. To lose his scars was one thing, but to bleed blue? It was ridiculous. The wounds looked more like lines cut in a piece of fruit, with hardly even any pain.

  He turned them before him even as the tall figure of Freemantle ripped stretches of sheet and wrapped them snugly round the wounds, talking smoothly the whole time to cover the tension.

  "Our bodies are different in this place, that's all, they're not like our bodies in the real world. I'm sorry, I should have warned you, but…"

  He kept on going and Sen tuned in and out. The blue color was outlandish. He watched it spread into the makeshift bandages and thought of Alam again, so long ago, when he'd beaten him on the Abbey's chalk path. He was every bit as confused now as he'd been then.

  Around him Freemantle busied himself tidying the room; righting the desk and leaning it against the wall, dragging the bed back into position and swabbing down the bloody blue handprints Sen had left. He bundled the soiled cloths into a corner, put his books back on their shelves, and all the while kept talking about the veil, or the cell, or how he'd done these same things himself a long time ago.

  "But not to worry," he ended on, sitting on his chair again as if nothing had happened, looking at Sen with a forced smile that barely masked the panic. "They'll clean all this up properly when we go to sleep."

  Sen just sat there and thought.

  If this really was a cell, and he'd passed through a 'veil' to reach it, then was the rest of it true too? Could his friends really be dead, and was the world gone? This place was like nothing he'd seen or heard of in the Corpse World, like the inside of an oyster, coated in gleaming white nacre. He tried to imagine the 'unpainting' Freemantle had talked about. The city. The Grammaton. He imagined his friends disappearing in a tide of surging black, and…

  He looked up at Freemantle, finally catching hold of something he'd said perhaps minutes ago. "They?"

  Freemantle spread his panicky smile wider, and added a nod for good measure. "Yes."

  "That's the first time you've mentioned anyone else." It hurt Sen's jaw to speak. Everything hurt. "Who cleans up after you? Who's got us trapped here?"

  Freemantle radiated discomfort. "I don't know. I'm sorry, Sen. I just know that my food arrives while I sleep. My clothes are cleaned, the room is tidied, so that every day is white, and impeccable." He spread his arms in a slow shrug. "It's always been this way."

  "So you've got jailers?" Sen pressed, riding a new sense of hope. "They must have a way to get in. Have you ever seen them? Maybe we can trap one of them."

  "They don't come in," said Freemantle, shaking his head, and there was a sadness in him now. "Nobody does. I've tried that; pretending to be asleep for hours just waiting, but they never come. You're the first person I've seen in a very long time."

  Sen caught a full dose of the sadness then. A very long time. Hadn't Freemantle said something like that already?

  "How long?"

  Freemantle only smiled back at him, and Sen felt the sadness growing.

  "How long have you been stuck in this cell, Freemantle?"

  Freemantle met his gaze. "I'd meant to spread all this out. It's too much to take in at once. I-"

  "How long?"

  "Over three hundred yea
rs."

  Sen gawped. "What?"

  Freemantle gave a small nod.

  Sen stared. Three hundred years? That was a long life for an oft tree. Some Ptarmigan whales were reputed to live that long. But a person?

  He felt dizzy. He noticed a few flecks of blue blood on the wall high over Freemantle's shoulder. How did they get there? Perhaps the jailers would clean that too. He felt loose and giddy inside. None of this made sense. How could any person live that long? Freemantle didn't even look old, but what reason did he have to lie?

  He studied the anxious man in his white tunic, perched on his white chair. His large jaw worked silently beneath his stubble, barely hiding the inner turmoil of emotions. Sen thought back on his assault on the room, and what he'd said before it.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "About the room. And calling you a liar."

  Freemantle waved a hand awkwardly. "No, that's nothing."

  A moment passed, then Freemantle picked up the white tray with its three white jelly-like shapes. Somehow they'd survived Sen's rampage around the walls. "Eat something," he said, holding them out. "You'll feel better."

  Sen took the tray. Nothing seemed to matter, now, so why not? On his lap the three oblongs quivered in time with his trembling legs. Freemantle handed him a metal spoon, and tentatively he scooped away a piece. It didn't taste like anything. Perhaps mulched paper, or that one time Sister Henderson had made them white rice gruel, to give them a taste of what she'd had as a child. The thought of Sister Henderson made him sadder, because she was dead too, like everyone else. She'd been dead for a long time.

  "It's bland," he said.

  "I know," said Freemantle, almost apologetically. "You'll grow accustomed to it. It's all these bodies need."

  Sen ate one of the bars then half of another. He held the remainder out to Freemantle, who waved a hand.

  "I already ate mine. They've increased my ration, in the last day or so."