The Rot's War Read online

  Sen looked sadly down at his own lump.

  "That's amazing, Gellick," he said, following a script from long ago. "Really amazing."

  Gellick shrugged. "It's nothing. Practice. My parents do this every night in gravel and clay, when they read their Hax. Stone knows stone."

  Sen prodded at his gray lump. "Do you think I can know it?"

  "I don't know," said Gellick, after a time. "Is it important that you do?"

  Sen flashed a smile. "Sister Henderson thinks it's important."

  "But do you?"

  He gave the clay a light punch. "No. I suppose not."

  "Then that's the reason. To make something, really make something, you have to care."

  Sen cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it has to matter. You have to give something. Time, energy, effort. I spend hours every day preparing for the Hax, because the day I don't I'll begin to calcify."

  Sen nudged the hard-skinned rock-man on the shoulder. It hurt him now, to hear the callow words come from his own mouth. "You'll never calcify. We'll ride together, Prince Coxswold and Saint Ignifer forever."

  Gellick stroked the line of Lord Quill's powerful arm, then looked up at Sen with his eyes shimmering. "Do you really think so?"

  "Of course. Why would you calcify if you didn't have to?"

  Gellick turned the hero before him. He set it down on the desk, then turned to Sen, and now there was something different about him, something new in his jewelly green eyes.

  "Sen," he said, "it's all right."

  "What's all right?"

  At that Gellick began to change. His body grew, turning dark with a crusted outer lith, the emerald shine fading from his eyes. Now his voice rumbled when he spoke. "I know what you have to do. I understand. And it's all right."

  Sen began to cry, though he didn't know why. His hands before him stretched out, growing into those of a young man, his scars becoming tight and thin.

  "I didn't mean for you all to die," he said. "I'm sorry."

  Gellick patted his back. "It's all right, Sen. We all die. We're all lost."

  Sen threw his arms around the Balast's shoulder; he was too bulky now to close the hug. Instead he clung to him and wept, remembering the pride in Gellick's face as he'd set off to rally his people to the fight, the determination to make that moment count, even if he couldn't hold on to it forever.

  Gellick patted his back.

  "It's all right, really. It's harder for you than me. I never doubted you'd save us, not for a second. I still believe it."

  Then the Balast was being pulled away. Sen looked up and saw him shrinking into the distance, as was the Abbey and the world.

  "Wait," he called desperately, hungry for one more moment with his friend, "Gellick wait, I need you."

  "Goodbye, Sen," the Balast said, his voice hushing to quiet. "Thank you for all you're going to do."

  The world sucked into a speck of dust and was gone.

  * * *

  Freemantle was there, and he caught Sen as he staggered up from the chair shouting and gasping. He calmed him and guided him to the bed, where he cocooned him in place with pillows, wrapped up beneath the white covers.

  Sen felt frantic and torn. He knew he had to do something urgently, but he no longer knew what it was. He felt pale and sickly, with a cold sweat making him clammy and ill. He gagged as if to vomit, and what he swallowed back was bilious and foul. His gaze flicked hungrily around the room, settling on details for seconds only before darting away again.

  What was he looking for?

  "What did you see?" Freemantle asked. "Did you pass through the veil? Did you see the world?"

  Sen tried to focus on Freemantle; the big jaw, the unruly hair, the concerned eyes. It took him three runs to tell the whole of it, speaking too fast and missing out details, pausing at times to catch his breath and losing his place. His own mind felt slippery, like he couldn't hold on to it.

  When he finished, Freemantle studied him with a puzzled, worried expression. "You mean Gellick, don't you?"

  "What?"

  Freemantle frowned. He turned to pick up one of his notebooks and flicked through it, settling on a page of fresh writing, then looked up at Sen with an expression of growing concern. Sen looked back at him with wide eyes, sensing that something was not right, but not understanding why.

  "In your story," Freemantle prompted gently. "You saw him in the Abbey when he helped you carve the figure. He told you about his Hax, and you talked about calcification. You wanted him to stay, you recognized something about him, but throughout your story you only called him 'the Balast.' You mean Gellick, don't you?"

  Sen's mouth widened. His hand climbed to his mouth, his brow furrowed and began to twitch.

  "Who's Gellick?" he asked, barely a whisper.

  * * *

  They began the Book of Sen at the beginning, with his earliest memories. Sitting at the desk they took it in turns to write. When Freemantle wrote Sen told him the stories of his life, his birth, his time in the Abbey, the lonely years searching the city for his mother, his friends and the revolution. Together they made sketches of people and places; all the things that he'd seen and done.

  When Sen was writing Freemantle set down his own recollections, drawing from his years of watching over him. There were no clocks in the white cell and no way to record how long passed while they worked, other than the cycles of their own bodies. They slept in shifts when they grew tired. The white jelly food slabs came and they ate. The broken desk was repaired while they slept, and Sen's hands healed. Together they built up a vision of Sen as complete as possible.

  The terror was distant for Sen at first. It was hard to believe he'd really lost anything; there was no hole in what he recalled from his days in the Abbey or his time writing the Saint. As far as he recalled, he'd done much of it alone. He'd rebuilt the millinery alone, though he'd wished Alam would have come and joined him. He'd rallied the Calk on his own, standing on their limestone wall and calling out a fresh Hax.

  At first he didn't believe Freemantle when he told him otherwise, pulling from Freemantle's own memories of the revolution. Gellick did this? Gellick was here? It didn't seem possible that he could so completely forget one of his closest friends. Besides, what did Freemantle know? What if Freemantle was lying to him still?

  Then he thought back to the strange Balast in the classroom. Who was this boy, if not Gellick? There were no good answers.

  It meant that already he'd forgotten one of his friends. How much more would he lose? Gellick had thanked him for what he was about to do. That did terrify him. What if he lost Mare or Daveron? What if he lost Feyon; every precious, awful, delirious moment? That would be the worst thing he could imagine; except when it did happen, he wouldn't care, because he wouldn't remember what he'd lost. Who would that make him then? Would he believe he'd written the Saint entirely himself, that he'd raised the city to revolution and fought off the Rot alone?

  He shuddered at the thought.

  "We need more," he told Freemantle, after they'd filled the first book. "For when I forget everything and I'm at the edge, and there's nothing left inside here." He tapped his head. "I need to know who they were and what they meant to me. I can't afford to forget why I'm doing this."

  Freemantle could only nod, though Sen could read his sense of horror plainly. Freemantle was afraid. He'd had some understanding of the risks of the veil from his own losses, but they had been slow, spread out over centuries. Sen's loss was jarring and total, and he didn't know if he should be encouraging this young man to butcher his own mind any further.

  "I can't imagine it," was all he said.

  "We don't need to imagine," Sen said. "We're going to live it."

  They worked for what could have been days, adding details just as Sen had once fleshed out The Saint newspaper in long raucous sessions with his friends. They filled in spaces with names, numbers, scents and impressions down to the tiniest of details. Sen
described the blouse Feyon wore the first time he met her; an ornate white ruffled thing that looked like a cake. He shared his memories borrowed from Alam's head, of the boy Collaber who'd dunked his bedding in piss. He talked about the way it had felt to sit on the rooftop in Carroway, looking down at the statue of Lord Quill and waiting for Sharachus to show.

  The Book grew both forward and backward at the same time, swelling to three of Freemantle's white notebooks, then five. They added torn out papers that held rough maps and sketches, the layout of Aradabar beneath the Gutrock wastes, the look on Sharachus' eye when he was about to tell a strange joke, the pattern of scars on Sen's right hand.

  As he wrote Sen relived those days in the millinery; how frantic it had seemed then, capturing so many heroes both living and dead in paper and ink, forging a unified narrative out of their interweaving stories, with which to spur his city to revolution. The stakes had been high then, but now they were higher. This was a Hax for his own sanity, upon which rested a world that had already disappeared.

  Could he bring it back?

  "That's enough," Sen said at last, when they set the seventh book down on the desk. It made a pile as tall as a clenched fist. How strange to think that this was his whole life.

  "We can do more," Freemantle said. "There are whole sections we haven't delved into. I can remember details about the Carroway barricade that we haven't yet written, then there's more about the millinery, and-"

  Sen rested a pale, scarless hand on the man's shoulder. He was afraid, and that was OK. They were both afraid. There were terrible losses to come; losses he wouldn't recognize until after they were gone. Writing it down had only made him more aware of this. Mare would leave him. Feyon would turn away. Even Saint Ignifer would desert him at the end.

  He had to accept that. It was worth it, if there was a chance of saving them. This was the choice between loneliness and duty, the same choice Freemantle had faced. "It's all right. Details won't matter. The Book of Sen is finished."

  Freemantle looked him in the eye. "This is your life." The words came heavy with restrained emotion. Despite talking for days, exchanging and transferring information, they hadn't really talked. Sen hadn't shared his growing fear, though he knew Freemantle felt it. "We have to get it all."

  "I know what it is," said Sen. He'd expected Freemantle to resist. For him would come the harder burden of telling Sen what he'd lost, if he ever returned. He would have to see that look of surprise again, as all he had to offer was news of loss. "It won't mean anything if I can't get back into the veil."

  "And what will any of it mean if you can't remember who you are?" Freemantle went on. "What if you become a different person, one who doesn't want to make this sacrifice anymore? I can't force you to do it. It might all be for nothing."

  "Then I'm not who I think I am."

  "You are what you remember, Sen," said Freemantle, almost angrily. "When that's gone, you won't be anything. Gellick was important. You can't let yourself forget that."

  For a moment Sen felt his control flagging, as an unfamiliar wrinkling of confusion and anger pushed through. Was that something the 'real' Sen would feel, the Sen who had had Gellick in his life? He smoothed it over as best he could.

  "But I will forget," he said. He patted the book pile. "We have this, and it's better than not remembering at all. I'll know their names and what they did for me." He took a breath. "I grew up inspired by Saint Ignifer, Freemantle. From stories written in books. But he wasn't even real. At least Gellick was real, and so are the others, they're all heroes. I can be inspired by that."

  "But you won't know," persisted Freemantle, "you won't really know."

  Sen gave a fixed smile. "Maybe. But I can't hide here any longer. We've spent enough time trying to hold onto the past. I can't wait for the Darkness to come and consume us."

  Freemantle stared. There was nothing more to say, so Sen stood, and smoothed down his white tunic. "I'll go, then."

  "You don't know where," said Freemantle, his tone hopeless. "You don't know what you'll do."

  "I'll do what I always do. I'll look for my mother. If anyone knows how to stop this, it's her."

  "And if you can't find her?"

  Sen squeezed the strange, solitary man's shoulder. What use was there worrying about things he couldn't change? "Have faith in the Heart, Freemantle. I'll find a way."

  He went to the white chair, and Freemantle followed. He helped wedge Sen into the seat with pillows from the bed. "You burst out, last time," he explained. "I don't want you to hurt yourself."

  Sen looked at him. Freemantle stood there somber-faced, one hand resting protectively on the stack of books on the desk.

  "You may be a different person when you return," he said softly. "After you forget."

  Sen reached out to clasp Freemantle's arm. "I trust you to remember for me. Wait for me, please."

  "I'll be waiting."

  Sen closed his eyes, and thought of his mother.

  BOOK 2. THE END OF THE WORLD

  GRAMMATON SQUARE

  He opened his eyes to ash.

  It fell like a slow, muffling rain around him that hazed the world, through which smudges of fire gleamed in the distance. Shouts rang out muted by the ash, too stifled to pick out. Sen looked down and saw a carpet of cinders underfoot, beneath which lay stone flags. Around him he picked out lumpish mounds through the gloom, and padded through the dust toward the nearest.

  Bodies lay clustered about the charred remnant of a hawker's stand. A dead Adjunc lay in the midst, the ash rendering its garish pink skin to a flattening gray. Around it lay five other bodies, their castes hard to make out for the terrible damage the Adjunc's death throes had done. Now they seemed at a kind of peace, their makeshift weapons forgotten and half-buried in ash.

  From above a tremulous clanging came, and Sen looked up to see the sandstone bulk of the Grammaton clock tower looming over him, swaying now with some unseen movement of the earth, setting the great bell chafing against its clapper.

  This was Grammaton Square.

  He turned to the north, where the dark townhouse façades at the square's edge lay like a faint and misted wave. Above them hung a rising fire, like a blood-stemmed flower in the sky. Ignifer's mountain was erupting. Near its topmost petal serrated lines of blue rippled like sun flare glinting off an oscolope lens. Sen squinted and could just make out a small blue dot falling down into the fires.

  That had to be him.

  This was Grammaton Square at the end.

  "Avia?" he called out, but no answer came.

  A horse somewhere whinnied, and its hoof beats galloped nearer through the ash, until suddenly the huge ash-streaked beast hurtled out of the darkness.

  "Whoa," Sen called as it charged past, white-eyed and panicked, but his words were fogged by the rain of ash, and the horse continued on oblivious, leaving curlicues spinning in the hot dry air.

  Sen raised his hands, and saw the pale lines of his scars returned, flickering faintly with some remainder of blue light. The Saint was moving within him again. He closed his eyes and tried to reach out across the veil, seeking his mother, but no answer came back to him.

  "The Saint must rise!"

  For a moment the shout clarified through the dense ash, startling him; the sound of Balasts at an unexpected Hax. He opened his eyes and looked around, but the square was empty still. The Balasts must be at the Aigle now, fighting alongside Feyon and Gellick against Molemen and Adjunc, if they weren't caught staring at the blue fire of the saint in the sky.

  Sen watched him now; this avatar of himself written upon the clouds, moving with an impossible fluidity. Great blue limbs swung sparkling misericordes that gouged through the black of the Rot.

  Boom.

  A tongue fell nearby, and the earth shuddered, chased by the sound of rubble ricocheting and landing. Sen barely saw it; a shadow in the curtain of embers.

  He closed his eyes again and thought of his mother. Perhaps she was here. He though
t of the Abbey and his childhood, of scars carved and days in the sun, but the white of the veil didn't open, and still Grammaton Square lay deathly still around him.

  He didn't know what else to do.

  Possibilities burgeoned in his mind. Perhaps there was some way he could help in the fight against the Rot. He raised his arms to try to channel what little strength he had toward the blue figure in the sky, but just then the Saint dissolved. Sen gasped. At the same time the lumbering black dome of the Rot peeled away, leaving Sen reeling.

  He reached out to the city's mind for purchase, but what his thoughts closed upon was slippery and slick, not the solid underpinnings of faith built up over years by The Saint. He tumbled to his knees in the ash.

  The dwindling was everywhere already. He held his hands to his temples, overcome with a searing vertigo. It was not only at the edges of the city, where it gathered thick and tall, but also underneath the surface of the world itself; in the flagstones, in the toll of the Grammaton clock, in the air, in his own body; eroding them all from within. Sen gasped and tasted ash. It was just as Freemantle had described it, a nothingness that he couldn't see or name or feel, that worked a blindness on his senses.

  The Darkness that came before.

  Already he felt the tides of it coming, breaking across the border farmlands of the Sump and flooding in over the Absalom Dusts, erasing their existence from his mind. Have faith in the Heart, he'd told Freemantle, but what faith could withstand this? He pulled his grasp back from the muddying minds around him, and tried to weave something together from the fragments of his power, to build a second Saint and fight, but there was barely enough power to light his way. Still the veil would not open.

  He stood, and reached out a final time; wider now, beyond the immediate districts until at last he felt a shimmering nexus of the Saint's blue fire. Daveron, as he lay dying beside the Gilungel Bridge. One of his generals.

  He set off at a sprint, his footsteps rapping sharply through the unearthly square. He clambered easily up the nearest townhouse façade to the roof, then raced across the top of the city's skin with revelatory lights shining in windows below him like drowning shellaby bugs, lost in the dense clouds of falling ash. Even these were dimming, their yellow light darkening to red.