Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (6 page)

I mustered up the spit to speak, which is hard when you’ve got a Special glaring at you as though he wants to arrest you for being alive with intent. “Dwarf says a few days, but he’s been saying that for weeks.”

Perak nodded as if that was what he expected and twiddled a knob. It came off in his hands. “Oh. Well.” He blinked hard and looked round at his Specials. “It’s all right, you can go.”

I let out breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding as they shut the door behind them.

“Rojan, I—I’m in trouble,” Perak said. He didn’t look at me but kept fiddling with the generator. “No one—I mean, Ministry—is what I thought. Not at all.”

I pinched at the bridge of my nose. Probably only Perak, and maybe Dendal, had ever been under any illusions about the Ministry. I wondered how he had taken it when he’d finally realised that Ministry wasn’t about faith but control. Badly, I suspected.

“I don’t suppose they are. Question is, what are you going to do about it?” Not a lot would have been my answer, except maybe raze the whole of Top of the World where Ministry reigned, let everyone from Under come up to Heights and Clouds and look at the sun, share it, share everything. I was more likely to spontaneously turn into a woman than that happen any time soon.

Perak didn’t see it that way. When we were growing up, I used to wonder if we had the same father, because, while I’m the ultimate cynic, Perak is the opposite. He
is
hope. It gave him a certain, and incredibly annoying, optimism that everything would turn out all right.

Now his eyebrows plaited together in thought and he took on a determined look, almost as though he was paying attention. Wonders will never cease. “I’m going to change it,” he said. “Make it what it was always supposed to be. You know some of them even want to recreate the ’Pit, the, the…you know.”

“The torture, Perak.”

He grimaced at that word; his daughter had almost become a victim herself as the mages tried to force me to join them.

“They say it’s the only way, that the ends justify the means. That people will die if we don’t. What’s worse is they’re right, people
are
dying. Starvation, cold, fighting…Other cardinals are convinced that all this is a plot to undermine them, discredit the Ministry. They don’t believe it is true, it’s just some Downsider plan, misinformation, the start of a coup perhaps. All of them, almost every last cardinal, see the people from Under as nothing but a means to provide labour, and Downsiders as vermin who only know how to fight and kill each other. The Death Matches—” He cut off at that and glanced at Jake and Dog. “I’m sorry, but they use that as an excuse, to show what barbarians you are. I’m trying to put things right, to how they should be, but that only makes the cardinals hate me more because that way they’ll end up with less than ultimate wealth. You know, I had three delegations yesterday. One of them outlined ways we could discreetly dispose of Downsiders, hell, anyone from Under who looks too uppity, so that the rest of us can survive, another quoted scripture to show that Downsiders are heretics, agents of Namrat and should all be burnt, and the third—I’m not even going to tell you that.”

“What do
you
think, Perak?” Jake was wound up tighter than one of Dwarf’s springs, but her voice was soft.

Perak tried a smile, but it came out wrong, frazzled. “I think I have too little support among my cardinals. I think most of the cardinals I have make me sick. I think I wish I had no faith, like Rojan, so it wouldn’t be such a shock. I think what the mages down in the ’Pit did made the Goddess turn her back on us, and it’s only priests such as Guinto, people who are willing to believe, who will bring her back. I think I’ll be dead soon, that this city will tear itself apart, if you don’t get the power back on.”

The pleading look had me swearing in my head, because this was how it always started with Perak. It always ended with me in the shit.

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 unusual 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.