The Rot's War Read online

Sen set the tray down. "They," he echoed hollowly. He felt empty inside. Looking at Freemantle made him sad, sitting meekly there in his white robe, desperately happy to have company and deeply ashamed to have nothing else to offer. This small white cell was all he'd had for three hundred years.

  He looked again at his own white, scarless hands. Behind the surprise of the blue blood and the white food was the fact that his city was most likely gone. If he thought about his friends being erased, about Feyon no longer existing at all, then panic ate at his belly too. But what could he do? He was a prisoner now, like Freemantle. He felt tears prickling at his eyes.

  How could this have happened? He'd done everything his mother had set him up to do. He'd raised the Saint and fought the Rot. If she'd known about this, she would have told him, wouldn't she?

  Wouldn't she?

  "You're a new man here, Sen," said Freemantle, forcing a bright tone. "With a new body. Perhaps here you can fight in ways you couldn't before."

  Sen looked at his milk-pale arms. Even speaking now seemed exhausting. "My scars are gone," he answered dully. "I needed them to channel the Saint. I don't know what else I can do."

  "But it's not only your scars," Freemantle persisted, plainly trying to distract Sen from this awkward truth. "There are other clues that this place is different, that we in fact are not the same people we once were."

  Sen just watched him.

  Freemantle hurried on. "A second is less immediately obvious than your scars, but you'll notice soon enough. We have no excretory orifice."

  Sen looked at him blankly for a moment, then caught on. "Wait, do you mean…?"

  "Yes. Tasteless to speak of I know, but absent all the same."

  Sen cocked his head. This was an effective distraction. "How can you…?"

  "You can check. It's an easy enough matter. There's only smooth skin."

  Sen touched his stomach and squeezed. "But that would mean…"

  "There's no waste chute in this room," interrupted Freemantle, gesturing around, "because there's no need for it."

  Sen thought this through. Next to the blue blood, it was a curiosity. He looked briefly at the plate of white bars that he'd just eaten. "So what's in here, then?" He pointed to his stomach. "I've seen animals gutted, I know what organs should fill this space, how they work to process food, rejecting what the body doesn't need. Yet if there are no rejections, do we still have those organs?"

  Freemantle hurried on, clearly glad to be on more upbeat ground. "The short answer is 'no'. I conducted a few minor surgeries on myself in the early days. As I said, I was a clocksman and I like to know how things work. I found only a kind of waxy white cladding filling my abdominal cavity, where the visceral organs should be."

  Sen watched his stomach as he poked and prodded it. "It looks the same."

  "There are other differences still."

  "What are they?"

  "These bodies don't sweat, so we never need to wash, though I do like to wash anyway." Again that shy smile. "They don't get sick, and they don't age. As I said, I've been here three hundred years and I haven't aged at all. They also don't feel pain the way we used to in the world."

  "Ah," said Sen, raising his bandaged palms. "Yes."

  "Exactly. We feel some, enough to know we're hurt, but it's very hard to hurt yourself in this cell. You didn't realize you'd done that until you'd calmed down, did you?"

  "I suppose not." Sen rested his hands together. "Like a Moleman."

  "Other differences are emotional," said Freemantle. "I noticed when I first arrived that I didn't feel much sadness, even though I'd left the world behind. I expected to be distraught, but I didn't feel that in the way I'd expected. Instead I felt a kind of numbness, a pleasant drifting feeling, as though I was hearing about a story that happened to somebody else."

  Sen considered that. "Like you'd been drugged?"

  "Like a mild scarab treatment, yes, but all the time. Do you feel the same?"

  Sen sat back on the bed and thought. He considered the frustration in his belly, and recognized that it hadn't overwhelmed him. Surely he should be on the ground weeping if Feyon was really dead?

  "I suppose so. All my friends may be dead, the world could have ended, but I'm sitting here talking, and I feel mostly calm. It's almost as if those things are less important."

  Freemantle nodded. "It's how things seem. It's something these bodies do to us. I suppose it helps me be a better prisoner."

  They sat in silence for a time. The sadness of those three hundred years was everywhere; trapping them as surely as the walls.

  "You could try the veil," said Freemantle.

  Sen looked up sharply. "You said it was closed."

  "For me it is. But perhaps not for you. I don't know how you're even here, if the veil won't open." He paused. "You might be able to pass through."

  Sen sat up straight. "Tell me how."

  Now some of Freemantle's false good cheer fell away. "It's not without risks. There are things you should know, before you attempt the veil."

  Sen tilted his head to the side. If the world had gone, what was there left to lose? "What risks?"

  "You could lose pieces of yourself," said Freemantle, then tried for a smile, but it turned sour. "I know that sounds strange. I've been looking through it for a very long time, and I forget things. Things I never should."

  "What things?"

  Freemantle sighed. "What my wife looks like. My boys' names."

  Sen frowned at that. It was the first time Freemantle had mentioned them. "You had a family?"

  The sadness surged and receded swiftly. "I did. I scarcely remember them now."

  "But that could just be time. Three hundred years is a long time, Freemantle.

  "No, it's not that. I drew sketches. I wrote these things down, Sen." He gestured to the shelves, stacked with their neat white books. "Half of these are about me. When I realized I was losing things, I started making a record of everything I could remember. The 'Book of Freemantle', I called it for a while." He smiled, but humor escaped him again. "I know I forgot, because when I look at the pictures of my Kelly that I drew, I don't recognize her." There was the pain. "I see my boys' names, and there's no familiarity attached to them." He paused. "They're gone."

  "But you still remember them?"

  Freemantle shrugged lightly. "That's two different kinds of remembering. The veil took what matters, and that's only through looking. I don't know what it will take if you try to walk through it again."

  Sen snorted. "What does it matter if it takes everything? We don't have anything else here."

  "It can change you," Freemantle said. "When it takes things, you become a different person. My Kelly and my boys are the last things it blurred, but I've lost a lot of other people too, and each loss altered me. I know I had parents once, and childhood friends, but who? The only things I really remember are my descendants. I've got thousands of them throughout the city, and my love for Kelly and the boys carries onto them. I think that's part of the job of an observer."

  "You said that already," Sen said. "Observer. What is it? Why are you even here, Freemantle?"

  Another sad smile spread across Freemantle's broad jaw. "That's the mystery, Sen. This dwindling, this unpainting? It's not the first time I've seen it." He let a slow pause develop, but Sen didn't speak. "It came for the city in my time as well. It was slower then, but it was the same. And it fell to me to stop it."

  Sen blinked. "You're saying the world ended before? Or almost ended? Freemantle, how did you stop it?"

  The strange man smiled. "I don't know. If I ever knew, I've forgotten. All I know is I came here to observe, and the world went on. I don't know why that happened. I've never understood it, though I studied that question a great deal at the beginning."

  Sen stared at him, buoyed by a new sense of urgency. "So tell me. Tell me whatever you remember.

  Freemantle gazed blankly for a moment, then nodded. "I can do better than that. I wrote it all dow
n." He went to his shelves and fetched a book, opening it to the first page. "I haven't read it for a long time. It's like a story to me now, too. You're welcome to it."

  He handed the book to Sen, who began to read.

  FREEMANTLE I

  It was four fifty-nine and a minute from dawn when the clocksman Freemantle Mons felt the Grammaton clockworkings die. He was up in the great clock tower's belfry alone that night, calibrating old cogwork and balancing up the pennyweight piles, with a gas revelatory lamp tuned soft and hissing by his side.

  It was a gradual death. It spread up from the coils as the unravel slowed, and the three story pendulum's swing faded out. It shifted along from the swing-banks and train escapement, and crept the tick-tocking cogs that filled out the central mechanism, leaping up three belfries of balance contraptions, up old scales and measures weighing out hours and seconds. It passed through them all, leaving all of them silent, up to the top where the four clock faces hung.

  Freemantle followed it to the peak, and watched the Grammaton death pass into the great bronze ball at the heart of the clock, and from there to the spindles that went north, south, east and west to the four clock tower faces, and shut all the hands down.

  Then there was only Freemantle, silence, and the glow of the moon. The Grammaton clock was dead.

  Time passed. Or didn't pass.

  "Four fifty-nine," said Freemantle, reading the giant dials in reverse. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bulky brass-cased watch, then flipped open the lid and looked at the hands. They read four fifty-nine, the same as the Grammaton, one minute from dawn.

  He stepped up close to the east face and peered through the clock's thin white glass skin out over the city, watching for the dawn rising over the Sunsmelters wall, due straight after five and the Grammaton's chime.

  But the dawn didn't come.

  He waited. He counted a minute, then past two and past ten, but still the sun didn't rise, nor did the clouds in the sky move, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor the hands of the clock.

  * * *

  On the street down below people stood in bunches, talking fast and loud. In Grammaton square, which should have been glowing pink in the dawn, there was only dark, and shadows, and four fifty-nine.

  The stall-mongers and hawkers, the denizens of many castes fresh out for their morning produce stood circled round and talking in low tones, gazing off to the east to the Sunsmelters wall and waiting for the sun to rise.

  Freemantle moved through their ranks with increasing urgency, taking to the Haversham tradeway as it lay deadlocked with motionless bodies and carts. He flagged a half-asleep Ogric rickshaw driver then together they sped east through the gathering, muttering throngs.

  At the Sunsmelters gates at the Flogger's Cross wall it was dark and quiet. The wall overhung the low-caste district, giving the streets a feel of mildew and mold. The wall was built of grindstone and towered half the height of the Grammaton, perfectly encircling the city.

  Affixed to the wall hung the Sunsmelters carousel shaft; a crisscrossed metal lattice housing a counter-weight elevator. At periodic points leading up through the grimy shadows this cage was stanchioned in with large rusted bolts. Freemantle stepped up to the shaft and banged on the large copper doors. A chill breeze swept by him, carrying old autumn leaves rustling in the moonlight down the cold cobble street.

  "You want me to keep waiting?" asked the rickshaw Ogric behind him, a thick-waisted and sallow-faced youth wearing a hessian sack over his knobbly, muscular tan frame.

  "No," said Freemantle. He drew his clocksman's many-pocketed waistcoat close around him against the cold. "And listen, go somewhere quiet. Stay away from the center, if you can."

  The Ogric boy laughed, a strange roughened bark. "And make no coin? Folks are all scared out of their wits, rushing place to place. I'll have that."

  He turned and started away, his footfalls and wheels trundling into the distance.

  "It's because folk are scared that you ought to stay away," Freemantle said under his breath,

  He banged the door again. After a time came the grind and clank of the elevator carousel gradually descending; in the dark all he could see was a small revelatory light descending in jerky fits and starts. At the gate he waited, until the carousel finally clanked into position, brakes locked in with a rusty ratcheting, and the great Sunsmelters gate opened.

  Inside stood Skinny Rich the Hog-boy. He was shivering slightly in the pre-dawn chill, holding his revelatory lamp close for warmth. Around his bunchy pink shoulders he wore a spun-iron mantle, the hood hanging down over his beady eyes and small pink snout.

  "Freemantle, fancy seeing you here, and what of all this?" said Rich, opening the door wide. He lifted a tin tube from its latch point on the rusted shaft's frame, and shouted into a conical opening at the end. "It's Freemantle, Grammaton man!" The ring of his voice echoed up the tubing all the way to the top. An answering call returned, too faint for Freemantle to hear, but Rich with his flapping ear pressed close heard it, and nodded.

  "What of the sun?" asked Freemantle, stepping in through the gate. Skinny Rich shut and fastened it behind him with a metallic clang. "I'm getting no chimes, and you've nothing to fire?"

  "You'll have to ask the boss," said Skinny Rich. "I'm nothing but a big pile of dumplings right about now."

  "Then I will," said Freemantle.

  Skinny Rich worked the cage-carousel's pulley gears, and the carriage shot up with a jolt. As they climbed Freemantle looked back over the dark city, still speckled with revelatory lanterns throughout. The air seemed calm still, but bated, as if the city was holding its breath. Freemantle wondered how it would be in a few hours, after midday or by evening, if the sun still hadn't risen. Perhaps the city would be burning, with widespread looting and a general civil uprising driven by fear.

  At the top of the wall the carriage came to a squealing halt. Skinny Rich opened the gate and Freemantle stepped out and looked over the long Sunsmelter iron pools. The three great furnaces that interspersed them stood unlit, leaving the immense reserves of iron dark and cold.

  Figures scurried about the furnaces like ants, checking and fixing and talking and trying to fire them up without the aid of the sun.

  "Freemantle!" called a booming voice from below. Freemantle picked out the form of Flalangers, the Smelt-boss, decked out in oil-stained blue overalls, with a black-rimed shovel in his massive iron hands. He was a Man of Flint, a caste blockaded to the wall and districts south of the Levi River, for the immense damage their metallic bodies could cause. Here on the wall though he was revered; well-prepared by his caste to work in the midst of molten metal. He stood a head taller than Freemantle, glinting and as broad as a Balast.

  "Come on down," he called.

  Freemantle went down the steps and met him by a cold pool of silvery iron.

  "What of all this then?" said Flalangers as Freemantle drew close. "Is it you, and your hordes of clockwork monkeys? Have you been causing this?"

  "It's not the clock," said Freemantle. "How could it be the clock?"

  "The Heart blast the clock," cursed Flalangers. "Where's the sun?"

  "I came here to ask that same question."

  "Don't you start in with me, you blazed old ghost. Don't you try and blame me for this. How am I to burn sun when there is no sun to burn?" He threw an arm wide, taking in the dark eastern sweep. "There's nothing coming! Not a jot. What's happening here, Mons?"

  "I was hoping you might know."

  Flalangers said nothing, and the two stared out over the moonlit farmlands of the Sump for a time.

  "Follow me," said Flalangers eventually. "Let's not discuss this in public."

  He escorted Freemantle off the pit floor and into the cold dark environs of the inner wall. They went down several floors, through damp grindstone corridors and stairwells hung with muted revelatory lamps, their gas wicks hissing in the gloom, moths skittering around the fuzzy yellow haloes, until they reached a small, dim offi
ce. Flalangers gestured for Freemantle to sit on an old leather chair.

  "I don't spend much time in here," said Flalangers, seating himself in a whuff of dust behind the big oft wood desk.

  "So what do you know?" asked Freemantle.

  Flalangers leaned over the dusty desk. "Little. I'll accord with you on this, Mons. We're very uneven in this regard, you and I. I smelt the day, while you merely chart its progress across the sky, albeit in a highly visible way. I lead battalions of Smelters into the Smelt every dawn, and must often report on deaths. I'm trusted, and the men come to me with their ailments and their misfortunes. Do you follow?"

  "No," said Freemantle flatly.

  "What I'm endeavoring to say is that I know well the ways of men-folk, and you do not."

  "Flalangers, don't waste my time. Not now."

  "Then I'll not. It comes to this; we must not allow to circulate the knowledge that neither you nor I has the faintest understanding about this stoppage of time."

  "I agree."

  "That, on pain of bloody insurgency, we must act as if bearing ourselves fully appraised of the situation, and quite confident of its resolution."

  Freemantle sat back. "You're right, that would apply more to you than to me."

  Flalangers shrugged. "As I said, I am a leader of men. You are but a man in a tower, pushing levers and polishing cogs. Do I speak the truth, Mons, or do I err?"

  "It's true enough."

  "I know it. And we'll not have long. I assure you, Mons, if word of our uncertainty spreads, the city will fall from within."

  "I've considered that."

  "We must delay it, and seek to fix it, if we are able."

  "I don't think I can fix it," said Freemantle. "The clock won't wind. It's the stars and the skies that are out of time."

  "Well, perhaps something can be done here, but neither am I hopeful. We do not make the sun out here as people so often believe. We merely smelt it up to brimming speed and heat. But if there is no sun to smelt? We are at a loss."

  "Then this could be it?"

  "We've known that," said Flalangers. "We've known it could come."