Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall Page 6

  It was like that time when I was twelve and he was ten and he’d somehow managed to piss off every single bully within a half-mile radius of our crumbling house. He was small for his age, and they were hulking great brutes. They’d have killed him if they’d found him. So who took the kicking of a lifetime? Who spent a month pretending he didn’t have broken ribs and accidentally firing off random spells every time he breathed too hard? Ma never did work out what had happened to her saucepans or why the bedroom suddenly turned blue.

  Yet Perak wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, couldn’t see on the street. We needed power and we needed it right now. We needed more mages, and I was the one who had to find them because that’s how my magic runs. When I looked back at him, I realised that there was more he wanted to load on to big brother’s shoulders.

  “Go on, out with it.”

  “The Storad, the Mishans…you know they’re outside the gates?”

  “Perak, even Dendal knows they’re outside the gates.”

  Perak’s smile was most peculiar—almost world-weary, cynical. Not what I’d associate with my dreamer of a little brother. “I don’t suppose he knows how many there are. Not very many people do, but I can see them from up in Top of the World. Not just a few. An army each. The Mishans perhaps we could manage, if we got some power back soon. Note the perhaps and the if. Not a straightforward people, though, all backwards and forwards and no telling what they’ll take as an insult. Sneezing at the wrong time might be enough to set them against us in earnest. And the Storad…the Storad are hard men. Their ambassador in particular, and a man with a secret, I think. They’re all men with secrets. But, of the two, I fear them the most.”

  “Hard fighters,” Jake said suddenly, and Perak shot her an enquiring look. “Some of them, the mountain tribes. It’s, I don’t know, like a religious thing with them.”

  I thought back to a Death Match I’d watched, one where I’d been certain she was outclassed against a Storad who was slick with his sword; obviously not quite slick enough. I noticed she neglected to say that fighting was a religious thing for her, too.

  Perak inclined his head. “So I hear. On the one hand, we have a temperamental lot of loosely joined tribes that outnumber us ten to one, but are hot-headed, volatile perhaps, prone to fighting among themselves. I can arrange that they do just that. On the other…the Storad. I’m doing my best to stall them, placate them, deal with them, both the Mishans and Storad. But they know we’re weak. I think they’re waiting for something, but I don’t know what. I do know we haven’t got long. The ambassadors have both said as much in roundabout, diplomatic terms. Five days. At best. That’s how long we’ve got.”

  I opened my mouth to say something really smart and cutting, about how he didn’t want much, did he? He didn’t give me the chance. The utter defeat in his voice caught me off balance, and made me notice the new lines on his forehead, the first touch of grey in his hair.

  “And just to top it all off, we’ve got someone murdering Downsiders, we’ve got Downsiders up in arms and Upsiders hating them just for being here. We’ve got anarchy just waiting for one more spark to make it explode. And I don’t think that’s coincidence, do you? If that happens, this city is lost, whether you get the power back on or not.”

  He didn’t say it—“please find whoever’s killing those boys”—but he didn’t have to. It was in the defeat in his voice, something I’d rarely heard in a brother who thought everything was an opportunity. He had his hands full of ambassadors to placate and disgruntled cardinals who didn’t want change, any sort of change, and especially the sort Perak would bring. Dench had already hinted that he didn’t have the time for this, not if he wanted to keep Perak safe, and his Specials and the guards were hard pressed enough with keeping a lid on the explosion.

  Which left me.

  I was going to say: “Goddess’s tits, Perak, I’m having enough trouble keeping my shit together just keeping the Glow at this level, never mind getting everything up and running in five days and, oh, finding a killer while I’m at it.”

  Then I caught sight of Jake. The way she was looking at me, hoping.

  Like I said, the reason I do most things is so the lady will think I’m good and noble. Not because I am good and noble, but it’s a hell of a way to get them interested. This was going to be a fuck of a lot of being good, too much for my liking, but it might have its advantages. Besides, it was Perak asking.

  “All right, I’ll try. I can’t promise anything, though.”

  “I knew I could rely on you. I’ll send Dench with what we’ve got on the murders, though it won’t be till tonight probably. It isn’t much, but maybe it will help. And thank you.”

  It surprised me, then, that his smile was almost worth it all on its own, the way the worried creases smoothed away, how his shoulders stopped hunching somewhere up around his jaw. Helping my little brother. It felt kind of good, in fact. Until I started thinking about what it actually meant, and the work—and magic, pain—it involved.

  Perak left and I sank into the chair, trying to ignore the contraption on the arm, the way it seemed to call to me. I had other things calling, and the reason was smiling at me in a way that made me feel quite odd.

  She perched on Pasha’s chair opposite me. “You know I’ll help, we both will, however we can. There’s been more killings than they’ve let on, you know that?”

  No, I hadn’t known that. “How many?”

  She shrugged, and the ice cracked a little. Downsiders being murdered, people like her and Pasha. Little Whores, both of them, tainted by the mages, branded. Collaborators is what those brands and rumour said, even when they were anything but, had spent their lives fighting against what had gone on. They were walking targets, hated by everyone who knew their secret, knew the mark on their wrists, something I hadn’t really realised in my own quest to avoid getting lynched.

  “I’m not sure exactly,” she said. “Maybe a dozen? Any Downsider could tell you that. Upsiders don’t care. Ministry don’t care, except Perak. He sees, but the rest—we’re only Downsiders. We don’t matter. If it was Upsiders getting murdered, or Ministry, they’d have the killer caught by now.” That last with a pained twitch of her lips. A devout follower of the Goddess, she was, with a faith that somehow shamed me. Made me wish I did believe. I would, if I could believe as hard as she did.

  “I care,” I said, and the smile…good job I hadn’t finalised that deal with the Goddess, or I’d have to have started believing right then.

  Pasha came back in at that point, shattered the moment when she turned her smile on him and racked it up a notch.

  It only took a couple of minutes to tell him what Perak had said.

  “All right. What first?”

  And that was the question. I could spend my time trying to find one person in thousands upon thousands, and all the time we weren’t getting the power back on, helping people live, we were helping people die. A dozen Downsiders were dead, and that was bad, but not as bad as a hundred a day dying, a thousand a day, and it was heading in that direction. More if the Storad and Mishans made good on their threat. Yet one more murder and perhaps it wouldn’t matter, because there’d be no city left.

  What we really needed was more mages. Lots more mages. Then, with more power about, I could concentrate on finding the killer.

  It was up to me, and I hate it when it’s up to me. “Until Dench brings us what he’s got, I can’t do a damned thing about finding the killer. When he brings me that, I’ll start. Until then, the power is the thing.”

  I fumbled around in my pocket for the name that Lastri had given me, possibly another mage. Possibly. I had a name to go on, so maybe I could just go to the records hall and…I wasn’t kidding anyone but myself. A record search would take days and we didn’t have days.

  Lastri hadn’t only left a name, but something else, too. A lock of hair. The note said he’d gone missing a couple of days before after some sort of incident. Not unus
ual when the magic grips you the first time, often by accident. Sometime about puberty, you get a knock, or hurt in some way, and it kind of leaks out, raw and untamed. Often scaring the crap out of the proto-mage and anyone or anything nearby, such as Ma’s saucepans.

  He was a Downside boy, so his feelings regarding mages would be complicated at best. Like Allit, he’d probably deny that he had any magic, anything to distance himself from what had gone on in the ’Pit. He’d run away and finding runaways, that was my speciality.

  “I can stay, do another session,” Pasha was saying. I hated it when he was so, so, so damn fucking nice. Not to mention good and noble. It seemed to come naturally to him. Bastard.

  I glanced up, and caught the grey tinge around his eyes, the slight tremor in his hand.

  “No, it’s all right. Get some rest, come back then. I’ll see what Dench has got for us.”

  Before they left, Jake crouched in front of where I sat. She’d always had a phobia about touching—hardly surprising when you consider—but she brushed my hand with hers, a tentative thing, and I felt oddly blessed, almost as though the Goddess was trying to tell me something. Which only goes to show how knackered and fucked up in the head I was feeling.

  “You get some rest, too.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I couldn’t trust myself to say anything else, in case everything spilled out.

  When they’d gone, I sagged back into the chair and looked at the Glow contraption. Darkness lurked in the corners of my vision, waiting for me. I told it to sod off.

  Mages, power, that was what I could do right now. Until I’d spoken to Dench, or I managed to get hold of a prop to help me find whatever weirdo was killing all these Downsiders.

  I was fully aware that all this was an excuse. To find the boy Dendal thought might be an emerging mage I had to use magic. Well, I didn’t have to but that would take minutes rather than days we didn’t have. Funny, isn’t it? That I was so scared to use my magic once upon a time, because I was scared of the black.

  I was right to be, but in those dark days I had no choice, not really. I could have not done it, I suppose, but the thought of Jake looking at me afterwards was almost as much of a spur as the thought of how pissed Dendal would be. He’d start banging on about not living up to my potential, disappointing the Goddess and so on and so forth. That was enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies.

  So I lay back in the chair and put my hand on the contraption. I shouldn’t, I knew that. I’d done my stint for the day, enough, more than enough, more than I could handle. Any more was a risk, a big one. So was not doing it. That’s what I told myself, but I knew that for the lie it was. Fuck, I wished I was the man I’d been, who could shrug off guilt and responsibility, who could pretend he was a cynic, make people believe it, too.

  I held the lock of hair in my good hand and squeezed the pain out.

  The whirl of it took me for long, long breaths. I was everywhere, nowhere, I was bliss and I was blessed. No fear here, not in the black, no fear of people knowing me, expecting things of me that I couldn’t deliver, expecting me to be a better person because they thought I was. No fear of fucking it all up. No skimming it, not now, not after so much in one day. I was deep in the black, swimming in it, wanting it. Shaking from a need that no one who wasn’t a mage could ever know.

  The hair, I had to concentrate on the hair but it was hard when that seductive voice kept on calling me.

  Come on, Rojan, sink in, swim in fearless freedom. Come on, you know you want to.

  The old me would have given in, wouldn’t have given a crap about anything but losing the ever-present fear. I wasn’t that different, but I did have one thing I hadn’t before. People weren’t just relying on me, they were believing in me, too. They believed in me, so I had to.

  The hair, concentrate on the hair. Even with my eyes shut, I was a blinding brightness in the black, searing my eyelids with it. A moment of vertigo, of the sensation of tumbling end over end in a void, and then the knowledge came, thundering up my arm from the hand that held the hair.

  A mile to the west, a hundred yards up from where I was. Somewhere cold and airless. I pushed harder, so that I was half there and yet still half in the pain room. Achingly cold and with a smell I recognised, a lingering hint of decay over and above the familiar smell of the city. Too dark to see, so I pulled myself back some. Still dark, but not black now. A small rend-nut lamp meant I could see outlines, vague humps in the shadows.

  The glint of light on metal; instruments laid out with cool precision. Scalpels, knives, weird clamp things that I didn’t even want to know what they were for. A stone slab, well scrubbed but still with dark marks engrained into it.

  I knew where I was, and my stomach shrivelled. A mortuary, one I was intimately acquainted with, having seen my own dead body there or what looked like it anyway.

  I turned to look down at the boy. Dead. Not just dead, but with a slash across his throat so that the spine was a hint of white showing through a now bloodless cut. The murdered boy from outside the temple, whose death had nearly caused a riot.

  Chapter Five

  By the time Dench found me, I’d discovered a bit myself from the mortician’s records, or the few he’d allowed me to see without proper authorisation. A dozen murders: Jake had been right, and the details I’d got made my stomach wish it had never been born. All young boys on the cusp of puberty, except one lad in his twenties. All Downsiders, all with their throats cut back to the spine. I’d seen a few other things to make me shudder, too—mostly a certain doctor, previously in my father’s employ. The good Dr Whelar, now performer of postmortems on murder victims, once inventor of a nasty little potion that shut off magic by making everything numb. I still dreamed about the time I’d been without my magic, the way he kept poking me with that syringe. The good doctor’s motives were, at best, self-serving and the thought of him being involved, however vaguely, with these murders gave me a pain. Or maybe it was indigestion.

  Dench didn’t have much more for me. We sat in a dingy bar up at the top of No-Hope and he laid out what little he had. Only two bodies had been identified and that was scant help because they’d both been missing from home when they died, one for a week, one for a month. Their families hadn’t been able to shed even a drop of light on where they might have been, or who with. Dench had some pictures but I wasn’t that keen on looking at them, because they were all done after the kids had died. He shoved them under my nose anyway.

  “We all have to do things we don’t want to, Rojan.” His careworn face had an extra edge of frustration to it under the faint glow of rend-nut lamps and his usually impressive moustache looked limp.

  “You’re head of the Specials. You can do what you want, to whom you want. Must be nice.”

  His smile was as cynical as my own, but there was a twist of something different about him today, of some regret. He’d always cared too much for a guard of any sort. It was what made him one of the good guys in a world of bastards.

  “If only that were true,” he said. “But none of us is free to do what we want. Not even Perak. He’s trying, mind, and he’s got everyone all in a twist. The older cardinals want everything to stay the same. The new ones want change, but not the sort where they lose anything, which is the sort Perak is trying to accomplish—and they don’t like that. So Perak’s going to have to work damned fucking hard if he wants to actually see any change rather than everything staying the same just with him at the helm. And then there’s all the business with the ambassadors.”

  I suppressed a grin at the thought of the ructions Perak was making. Dench didn’t usually talk much and especially not about what he did, or what went on up in Top of the World, so I made the most of it. “Ministry could do with a big stir. And what business with the ambassadors?”

  Dench’s moustache drooped even further and his shoulders slumped. I gathered Perak wasn’t making his life an easy one, even if Dench did agree with the sentiment of what he was trying to accomplish.
“I’ll give you this; him and you have about the same level of tact and diplomacy. That is, fuck all. The Mishans are, well, frankly they’re a bunch of idiots. But there’s a lot of them, and they could overrun us if they get in. The Storad…they’re even trying to be reasonable. They’ve come up with deal after deal, and all we need to do is agree to a partnership. They’ve got coal.”

  “Coal?”

  “Some power source they mine, and they’re making some of their own machines now. Offered us a deal: sell us the coal so we can use that instead of you and your pain. Have to give up a few other things, though, and Perak won’t listen to reason on that, he won’t even try to negotiate and that’s one thing he’s got the cardinals on his side for, though not for the same reasons. They don’t want to lose their precious status, to be able to lord it over Outsiders and hold them in our pocket by holding all their trade. He thinks you’re going to get him his power back on so we won’t need to trade away any of our advantages just to stay alive.” He gave me a sideways glare. “You and that fucking generator. I pray to the Goddess it works, I really do, and in time, but I don’t think she’s listening. Perak’s put all his hopes on it. On you, for fuck’s sake! Sometimes I think he’s completely insane. Come on, tell me. Do you think it will work? Because I don’t.”

  Dench never got this worked up, or not that I’d seen before, and I’d certainly never heard him say fuck half as much. The moustache bristled with a life of its own and his eyes looked like they might pop out of his head. It was quite an education.

  “You’d be better off asking Dwarf, or Lise. I’ve got no idea how the thing’s supposed to work. But they tell me it will, and I believe them. In time? I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to scare up as many mages as I can, so at least we can have more power than we have now. But even if it does work, if we get the power back on, or I find enough mages that we don’t need the generator, then we’ve still got these murders and they could be enough to topple this city if we don’t stop it. It was close enough last time. Next time you might not be so lucky, and nor will anyone else.’