Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (3 page)

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 how 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 them, 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.

“That was a bit too close for comfort,” Dench murmured and I noticed the blood on his knuckles. “We’re right on the edge here, Rojan. Next time, it’s going to take more than a few Specials to break it up. This is a big pile of black powder waiting for a spark. And that spark is going to be one more of these.”

We looked down at the broken body. Some poor kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and look what he’d got for his trouble. “Someone said they saw the guards do it.”

Dench’s moustache bristled at that—I often thought it showed more reaction than he did. “Not
my
guards, I’ll tell you that. They know damn well I’d murder them myself if they stepped out of line. Besides, there weren’t any guards down this end of the walkway. They were all up by the temple, keeping a look out because of Perak.”

I cocked an eyebrow at the way he said it, a subtle warning.

“The old factions in Ministry are shifting now,” he said. “Not to mention the Storad and Mishans circling the city like sharks. Tricky bastards, and they’re bound to be up to something. Maybe even this.”

Ah, yes, the city’s ever-so-friendly neighbours. Or they
had
been, all the time they couldn’t trade with each other except through us. Now, not so much friendly as waiting with salivating jaws. The sneaky-bastard warlord who founded this city in a handy pass between two nations knew what he was about. Basically, this city was founded on extortion—pay us, we’ll let you trade for what you need. There was no other way for the Mishans and Storad to trade with each other, or nothing that didn’t involve several hundred miles, or so I’d heard. I could be wrong—officially Outside didn’t exist.

Over time we’d added to the captive market by being more sneaky and devious and very, very inventive. We grew, the city ran out of space and had to grow up rather than out because we filled the whole pass. We traded our inventions for food, because we had almost no land left to grow our own, but we got rich, and soft. Too soft, too reliant on our machines, on the power that ran them so that now, with no power, we were vulnerable.

“They’re waiting to see if we die so they can pick over our bones,” Dench said. “Maybe help along that dying a bit. They’ve parked an army on our doorstep, one either side, waiting, pushing. Got the ministers all in a twist and they’re lashing out all over. If Perak doesn’t get Mahala back up and running, and soon, I wouldn’t give a rat’s arse for his chances of making it to the New Year. Even if he does, he’s always going to have enemies there.” Dench smiled at that. “Not condescending enough to all the lowlives, your brother. Wants everything more equal, and of course if Down here gets more, Up there gets less. A viewpoint that is unique, and vastly unpopular, up in Top of the World, as I am sure you can imagine.”