Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall Read online

  Erlat smiled up at Dog, who looked like he’d been hit with a fifty-pound gladhammer. No surprise, because Erlat was polished to a gleam like jade, as easy on the eye and as hard to see through. Everything about her was elegant, from the smooth coil of dark hair at the nape of her neck to the slinky cut of her dress and the way she moved, as though she slid through the world without leaving a ripple. It looked like Dog had forgotten how to talk because he just nodded dumbly when she spoke to him and grinned like the big kid he was.

  Yet even Erlat’s graceful poise looked strained today. She kept fiddling with the coil of hair and darting quick, furtive looks at the Upsiders that crowded the temple. I went to stand with her and was about to ask her what she was so worried about when the prayers stopped and a deep, soothing voice boomed out from the altar. Erlat forgot about me, her focus riveted on the preacher.

  I didn’t really pay attention to the words at first, figuring they’d be the usual “Isn’t the Goddess lovely, do as you’re told now and you get a nice afterlife” brainwashing Ministry bullshit. Instead, I watched the congregation. The two Goddesses should have given it away, but perhaps I was feeling a bit dense that day.

  Most of the Ministry temples refused entry to Downsiders, thought their ways of worship disgusting and heretical. The way so many priests had got the vapours when the ’Pit had opened up had kept me amused for weeks. The Downsiders, predictably, had said “screw you then” and opened their own, smaller temples, most of them one-room affairs that turned back into bedrooms when the prayers were done. Just another way of everyone showing how much they hated “the others”. Stupid, of course, but that’s people for you. Why like anyone when hating them is so much more fun?

  Only Pasha, Jake, Dog, Erlat and the boy were all Downsiders, obviously so, and they weren’t the only ones in here, not today. Yet they got no funny looks, no sneers, and that was odd. They were, it seemed, welcomed. I could even see the sign of their devotional on Erlat’s hand, a black circle on her palm and a spot of blood in the centre, a practice that had most Ministry men fit to split.

  Then what the guest preacher was saying seemed to register.

  “And so all of us are people first,” he said. “Upsider or Down, Ministry or not, we are all believers. This man,” he pointed to an Upsider who started at being pointed out, “this man wants what is best for his family, what it is only right they should have. Food, warmth, safety. This man,” his pointing finger picked out a Downsider flanked by two children, all shadowy skeletons in clothes, “wants the same. Do you hate either of them for wanting what you want?”

  I let the simple words, the even simpler message, wash over me without taking them in. The congregation hung on his every word, and I could see why, hear why. The words almost didn’t matter; it was the depth of his voice, the rolling smoothness of it, the utter conviction that rattled in every syllable. It was hard to stop yourself getting pulled along by it, no matter the simplicity of the sermon, but I managed it when he started saying we should praise the Goddess for giving us this test, this chance to show her how faithful we really were. Grateful for slowly starving to death? Bollocks to that, was all I could think.

  Yet who was in the congregation was telling. A man who was a leading advocate for Downsiders, who spoke often and eloquently and was mostly ignored by everyone. Another, who was his equivalent among the Upsiders. Spokespeople, perhaps, for their factions. Both steady, reasonable men from what I knew of them, and maybe that was why they were so ineffective. Want something doing? Get someone with a burning passion, get an extremist who thinks he’s doing the Right Thing, who can make everyone burn as he does. People will follow that. They don’t often follow anyone whose main message is “I think we should be nice to everyone”.

  This preacher was different, though, because that was his message but his burning need for it came through. An extremist of a different nature perhaps, but if you burn, people will warm to your flame no matter how crazily it leaps and devours the curtains, the house, the city, the world.

  It showed in the eyes of the people up by the altar with him. Two altar boys, watching him with rapt attention, and a woman, not much more than a girl, really, maybe twenty though there was something childlike about her. More to keep my mind off Jake than for any other reason, I watched her as she gazed first at the priest and then at the Goddess, the more vivid one. A Downsider without a doubt but that didn’t bother me, not with the way she stood with her eyes demure, a pose belied by the intensity of her gaze.

  She caught me watching and it seemed to startle her, but I smiled the old faithful, never-fails smile and got one in return. Pretty, she was, in an ethereal kind of way, with short, black hair that floated in the air, a blue-white undertone to her dusky skin making her look otherworldly and such a burn behind her eyes.

  The priest shot me an isn’t-that-inappropriate-during-a-sermon look. I left him to it, and left her with a wink that made her giggle behind one hand and the priest frown and stumble over his words. I turned back to the congregation before he could call anyone to throw me out.

  The biggest shock of all was the huddle of people right at the back of the temple. You could tell they were Ministry and something high up by the fat, sleek smugness of them, by the bland masks of piety that stank of fakery, to me anyway. All except one, and his was a face I knew. My brother Perak. The new Archdeacon.

  Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I might have been the only person in the city who didn’t believe in the Goddess—or at least the only one I know—and my brother “ran” the Ministry, was the mouth of the Goddess. But maybe, just maybe, the city of Mahala had a chance, if the rest of the Ministry would actually let him do anything without having a group apoplexy.

  Yet at least Perak was an improvement on the old Archdeacon. Less of a torturing bastard, which was nice. More visible, too—the old Archdeacon had kept himself under wraps and secret, but Perak’s openness, his willingness to see and be seen, was starting to endear him to Under even as it was pissing off the cardinals he insisted followed his lead. Hence his appearance here.

  Perak watched the new preacher keenly while his entourage tried not to get too close to any of the oiks from this far down. One of them watched, aghast, as Dog carefully made his ash and blood devotional, his tongue poking out of his mouth in frowning concentration. It was tempting to wander up to the Ministry man and make the devotional myself, just to see how quickly he moved, but I restrained myself.

  Perak muttered something and it was interesting to watch the responses, from a quick, earnest nod from one, a hatchet-faced woman in her forties decked out in a cardinal’s robes, to outright glares at Perak’s back from others. One particularly fat and smug-looking cardinal looked like he’d swallowed a cat. Or perhaps that he would happily throttle Perak on the spot. I took it that Perak’s reign as Archdeacon wasn’t going smoothly.

  I let my gaze wander over his little company. Bishops and cardinals by the lush robes, and none of them looked happy to be here. Ministry had never given a steaming crap about anything or anyone under Trade before now, never ventured down here where the sun feared to shine. All they cared about was, was there enough power for the factories, enough people to work there, to grind down and make a slave to their wealth?

  Maybe Perak was giving them a nudge in the right direction but from the news I’d managed to find, overhear or bribe out of someone, it looked increasingly as though they might answer that nudge with something else, like a stab in the back.

  The sermon finished and the alms box came round. Perak put in enough to feed a dozen families for a week, if they could find any food to buy, that is. The others put in, too, some more, some less grudgingly. Fat Cardinal looked as though he was contemplating stealing the box back.

  I looked around the temple with a jaundiced eye. They were all fools, every one. For thinking the Goddess could help, would help, or that praying was a useful thing to do. Nobody was going to help us but us. I wanted to shout it out, tell all of them ho
w useless it was, but I caught sight of Perak’s face, shiny with belief, Erlat’s look of sudden hope, and I couldn’t.

  Instead I turned on my heel, hurried out into the rain that was a welcome relief from the piety, all the bile curdling in my stomach like a bad pint. At least I knew why there were so many guards tonight—they wouldn’t be taking any chances down here with the Archdeacon in attendance.

  “Hello, Rojan.”

  The voice was no more than a whisper, right in my ear, but the sound of my real name almost stopped my heart. Then a man stood in front of me, with a careworn face adorned by a drooping moustache and the frazzled manner of someone with too much on his mind. Dressed like a guard, but he wasn’t one. Dench was in charge of the Specials, and the merest hint of them on the street could cause sweaty palms, guilty consciences and mass panic. The elite guard of the Ministry, who’d spent years sending convicted criminals to the ’Pit, and not realised what they’d really been a party to.

  “You must have the wrong person.” I tried to push past but he wasn’t having any of it.

  “Don’t give me that shit, you weaselly bastard. Don’t worry, no one else heard. Just wanted to see how you’re doing, that’s all.”

  Yes, and I’m a banana. “Fine. Busy. You know.”

  A smile twitched his moustache. “So I hear. You’re doing a good job, with the magic and all, replacing the Glow. Three factories up and running now, is it?”

  “Hoping for four next week. And more lights and some heat before the winter sets in.”

  The food we could eke out for a while, though we were all getting skinny and I spent the best part of every day with a grumbling stomach. But the heat, or lack of it, would be a major problem before long if we didn’t get our fingers out. It often feels cold enough in the dead of winter to freeze your knackers off. “Still finding more mages. But it won’t be enough, not to replace all we had.”

  Dench’s sigh came right up from his boots. “That’s what I was afraid of. I’m still clearing up the last mess you made. Don’t make any more, all right? It’s getting bad on the streets. Just to add to it all, I’ve got four dead Downside bodies with their throats cut and I haven’t a clue who did it. And it’s going to get worse unless we can—”

  As if to make his point for him, a commotion echoed from an alley at the end of the street. Indistinct words shouted in a harsh voice, running feet, the subtle sound of knuckles hitting flesh. Dench was off in a flash, and I followed him, as much out of curiosity as anything. I kept my hand on the pulse pistol in my pocket, just in case.

  What we found by the alley mouth stopped me like a brick wall. A body, twisted and broken. Blood dripped through the metal grille of the walkway with a steady plop. Dench crouched by the body and turned it over. Someone had taken a knife to the body’s throat so viciously that the spine gleamed wetly in the fitful light.

  “Goddess, saints and martyrs,” Dench muttered. “The shit’s really going to fly now.”

  Someone behind me threw up noisily, and I wasn’t far off myself. The face, covered in blood, was of a boy, no more than twelve or thirteen. A Downsider, no question. Poor bastard: survived the horrors of the ’Pit to freedom and then gets himself murdered.

  Guards tried to keep people back but the temple was emptying fast now the sermon was finished, and the pub over the walkway spat out as many people, most of them drunk on whatever paint-stripping hooch someone had managed to brew up in their bathtub and spoiling for a fight. It was like trying to hold back the wind.

  “The guards.” A boy’s voice, shrill with fear and hate. A Downside accent. “The guards, they killed him. They’ve been killing all those Downside boys.”

  Dench whipped round, but it was already too late. The crowd surged, other voices called out, Upsiders and Downsiders both. Two guards fell under a sudden swamp of people.

  Then it was a maelstrom of arms and half-glimpsed faces, of blood and shouting and a firing gun. Even that didn’t stop the mob. The whole simmering mess boiled up and over, right there at the bottom of the temple steps. Guards against population, Upsiders against Down, everyone scared and hungry and cold, and had been for weeks. It had to come out somewhere.

  I backed up into a boarded-up shop doorway, trapped by a baying mob. Two baying mobs, three if you counted the guards. Dench was in there somewhere, too, drowning in angry people—I couldn’t see him but I could hear the swearing. He probably counted as a mob all on his own.

  I looked around desperately and caught sight of Pasha and Jake at the top of the temple steps, beyond the mob that had taken this end of the walkway. Jake had her hand on her swords, the hard, brittle look about her again. I felt more than heard Pasha’s voice in my head, and for once I needed no coaxing.

  Come on, quick!

  I needed no props, no scrap of cloth or picture, not to find Jake when she was branded on my heart and brain. I dropped to a crouch, just in time to avoid something smashing into the door and showering me with glass and booze. One quick squeeze of the bad hand, and a picture of her in my head. That part was all too easy; the eyes, the mouth that might smile at me if I was lucky, or good and noble, the hands that itched to use her swords.

  A surge of pain, of magic, of true bliss, the lure of the black, more tempting even than her. A simple rearrangement of where I was, and then I was on my knees in front of her, trying my best not to throw up on her boots.

  Pasha didn’t give me any time to recover. There was no time, I saw, when my eyesight cleared. He yanked me to my feet and into the vestibule of the temple. Jake and her swords covered our backs—I had no doubt what would happen to anyone foolish to come within striking distance. A kick in the nuts and a sword through the face.

  Erlat comforted the boy in the vestibule, both of them pale and shaky but unharmed. Dog patted the boy’s hand awkwardly, while the other hand held a sword about as big as I was as nonchalantly as I might hold a dinner knife. He looked worried now, but managed to wave.

  I didn’t feel much better than the boy looked, and I was pretty sure my disguise had slipped, too, because he looked as though he had no idea who I was.

  Part of the mob broke away, men from the pub; drunk, belligerent and looking for trouble in the temple. Jake slammed the door shut but there was no bar or lock—it was a temple, anyone could come in whenever they wanted, that was the point.

  “Perak?” I asked.

  “His guards got him out of the back door. Which is where I’m thinking we should be heading,” Pasha said.

  That was as far as we got before the door slammed open again. Three drunks swayed in the opening, and two of them had knives.

  “Fucking Downsiders in our temple,” the biggest one said and hefted his knife. “Stinking the place up, scattering ash and blood. Defiling the Goddess, that’s what they’re doing. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “But I do allow it.” The preacher stepped up beside me and faced the men head-on. “Would you tell priests how to run their temples?”

  The drunk sneered and looked like he was about to say something but a series of shots echoed along the walkway too close for comfort, followed by a chugging sound, one I’d not heard in long weeks.

  A carriage rumbled round the corner, pulled to a grinding halt and spilled out Specials. In their close fitting allovers, the Goddess’s own elite looked more like something from Namrat, come to eat us all. The allovers squeaked as they piled out of a carriage built to hold a dozen. Metal plates, inserted along the forearm and shin of the uniform to ward off knife or sword blows, clanked dully. The faint light of the temple’s candles where it spilled into the street gleamed off the smooth surface of the uniforms. Smooth as water, all the better to slip someone’s grip. Knife hilts showed in odd places, thrust into little pockets out of the way ready for just the right moment. These uniforms were built for attack and defence, designed long ago for the assassins who served the warlord who founded our city. Together with the set, stolid faces of the Specials and the reputation that preceded t
hem, the uniforms worked well at intimidation, too.

  Stillness rippled outward from where they stood in an implacable line, followed by everyone else moving back, and back again. No one messed with Specials, not ever. Not even the Archdeacon, as the last one had discovered, because while they might work for the Ministry, they swore to the Goddess, not any man. While in practice that usually meant they obeyed the orders of the Archdeacon—the mouth of the Goddess—it also meant that if an archdeacon were to be naughty in the sight of the Specials, he’d damn well know about it. Though not for long.

  Each of them had a little pain magic, not much but enough to give them the edge in any fight, fair or otherwise. Enough to power that one carriage between them; two of them sat in the front seats and I could see the hint of blood and bandage from here.

  One of the Specials stepped forward and inspected the suddenly silent crowd. His face looked as though it had been carved out of stone by someone practising while drunk, all slab-sided and with an odd angle to his jaw. Something very unprepossessing about a man whose glare could make you believe he could shoot bullets out of his eyes and was only waiting for the opportunity to do it. “Home,” he said. “Now.”

  To emphasise his words, the rest of them raised guns and pointed them into the crowd.

  Which miraculously wasn’t there any more; people leaked away along alleys, down stairwells, into dark doorways. The drunks at the temple door slunk off with the rest, not so drunk they didn’t know trouble when they saw it. Within minutes, all that was left were a few of the braver guards, a slightly dented and extremely pissed-off-looking Dench and the dead body. And us in the temple.

  “The Goddess always provides,” the preacher said smugly and I restrained myself with an effort.

  Dench caught sight of us lurking in the doorway and after a consultation with the lead Special, he trotted up the steps. “Father Guinto, glad to see you. You,” he pointed at me, “come and take a look.”

  Confused, I went down to the walkway with him. The metal was slippery with blood and spilt booze, making my boots skid and me hold on to the handrail for dear life.