Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (12 page)

There was nothing understated about these guys. A breastplate etched in whorls of red and black that seemed to, but didn’t quite, depict a nasty fiery hell with what might be the twisted faces of damned souls screaming imposed over the top. A short helmet in the shape of Namrat’s head, all teeth and snarls, with a visor that covered the eyes so they could see out but you couldn’t see in, making them appear eyeless, soulless. Metal gauntlets the colour of blood—so it wouldn’t show perhaps. All in all, the Inquisitor’s uniform was balls-out “I don’t give a fuck who you are, I’m judging you and if you come up wanting, I will crush you like the pathetic bug that you are and send you screaming into hell so that Namrat can rip your soul to shreds. I may piss on you afterwards.”

Ministry set a lot of store by uniforms because, as a way of telegraphing just how fucked you are, they
work
. Well, they were working on me anyway. No matter the orders of an Inquisition, what made them dangerous was that when they were set in motion, they were
always
on the lookout for heretics and unbelievers, whoever they were. Part of their strength and part of the reason they’re dangerous, even for whoever gives them their orders.

Given that I am a heretic, an unbeliever and a mage to boot, I was feeling fairly vulnerable.

They came along the walkway as though they owned it and, frankly, if they’d asked, I’d have handed over the deeds without a squeak. Pasha didn’t seem to have noticed them, rubbing his forehead as though trying to rub out what he could hear. He stared down with sick fascination as the guards covered Taban and muttered a few snatches of sentences under his breath that I didn’t quite catch but that sounded like a prayer.

Luckily the Inquisitors didn’t seem to have noticed us yet either—they were busy breaking down the door of a house at the other end of the walkway, though one, a captain perhaps by the extra ornamentation on his helmet and a specially tormented-looking soul on his breastplate, looked our way. The eyeless visor gave him a detached quality, a predator eyeing up his prey.

Under his gaze the guards started to swear and rush to get Taban’s body on to a stretcher and hoisted up to a block and tackle that would take it to the level of the mortuary. If even the guards were left sweaty and panicked, me and Pasha were screwed. The guards were done with us so I grabbed Pasha’s arm and dragged him into a dark doorway. He started to say something, loudly, but shut up quick when he saw my face. He flicked a glance back towards the walkway, flinched and then set his mouth in a grim line. Pasha the mouse was about to go all lion on me, I could tell. If he did that, we were probably both dead.

“Just keep quiet, act calm and we’ll get away, all right?” He made to say something, but I cut him off. “You open that mouth, they hear your accent, you might as well be dead already. Look, down in the ’Pit you looked after me, right? You showed me how it worked, made sure I didn’t do anything stupid that’d get me killed. This is me returning the favour. You’ve seen what they’re doing, what you say they’ve done down in Boundary. You want me to have to go find Jake and tell her you aren’t coming back because of some fool notion of yours? We shut the fuck up, get the fuck out, live to fight another day. Got it?”

He settled down a bit, looked less as though he was going to explode with indignation and I thought we might actually get out of this with our arses intact.

Then the screams started. Behind us, from where the Inquisitors had finished breaking down the door and were busy pulling people out of their home. Pasha leapt out of my grasp like he’d been struck with some of Lise’s electricity and was halfway there before I could catch him again.

Luckily I was a fair bit bigger than him, because trying to hang on to a man who’s writhing more than any snake is hard with only one working hand. I got to him before he made the corner of the next stairwell between us and them, before the Inquisitors could see him and decide they had room for one more. Pasha smacked me a good one and almost sent me flying. In the end, I had to sit on him to stop him.

He shut up, luckily—me sitting on his ribs didn’t leave him much breath for talking. I leant forward and took a peek around the corner of the stairwell. No one seemed to have noticed us brawling.

The Inquisitors were doing a very thorough job. Not content with dragging out a Downsider family—father, mother, two boys and a baby—they’d started on the furnishings as well. Chairs flew out on to the street, followed by a table, a couple of filthy mattresses, ragged clothes that might pass for the family’s best temple-going dress. Then the damning evidence, what the Inquisition had come for. A picture of the Goddess, all blood and violence and Namrat looking mean. Not a fluffy kitten or sunbeam in sight. Two pots with brushes—one black with ash, one to hold the blood.

The father’s face, pale already in the giveaway that this was a Downsider family, grew paler still. His wife began to sob, quietly, desperately.

“Heresy,” the lead Inquisitor said in a voice like the clanking shut of a cell door.

“No, I—” was as far as the father got. A gauntlet slammed into his face, brought blood from him and tears and screams from his family.

I couldn’t look as they took the family away, couldn’t bring myself to watch, and some small part of me was ashamed of that, ashamed of the fear that left me weak and wobbly. The bigger part of me was concentrating on not letting Pasha get up, because if I did, I knew,
knew
, he’d be out there roaring like a lion and it would do nothing at all except get him killed with them. Apart from anything else I didn’t want to have to say to Jake, “Well, I could have stopped him, but I let him go and now he’s dead, for nothing.”

When the cries had faded, when the street no longer smelled of threat and Inquisitors, I got up off Pasha. Warily, it had to be said, but he didn’t leap up to lump me one. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had—I was feeling pretty much like lumping myself at that point—but Pasha always surprised me.

He walked around the corner, slowly, as though he was dreaming. A soft hand on a wrecked chair, on what was left of the door. What was left of a home and family.

“We could have done something,” he said. “We could have helped.”

“Got arrested with them? Got taken up to Top of the World, found guilty, because, let’s face it, we both are in their eyes, and chucked off into the Slump? Who would that have helped?” True enough, as far as it went. Not far enough, no matter how practical, and I knew that because there was a slosh of bile chewing at my stomach and a wish that I could scrub myself clean and douse myself with disinfectant. As if that would make my soul sparkly fresh again. If only it were that simple.

“We could have done
something
.”

That was Pasha all over, why I liked the little bastard and sometimes hated him, too. He made me look past myself, made me look outside, and inside, too. I didn’t like it very much, because what’s inside is festering like a month-old corpse.

He picked up one of the pots, or, rather, what was left of it, and dipped a finger in. It came away black with ash and he slowly, deliberately, smeared it in a circle on his palm.

We should have been getting the fuck out of there, in case there were more Inquisitors, in case they decided to do a sweep of the whole area, but I stood and watched, transfixed despite myself, as Pasha brushed off the ripped picture of the Goddess and set it on a little ledge. He didn’t seem aware of anything else as he pulled a knife out of his pocket. Small, bone-handled, with Namrat and the Goddess carved into the hilt, locked in their epic battle. Life versus death. To Pasha, to the Downsiders, it’s the battle that’s important, not promises of a golden afterlife though that’s nice, too. No, it’s the fight, the never-ending struggle that’s the thing, even if you knew Namrat would always win in the end.

When he came to use the knife, to make the dot of blood in the centre of the devotional, I looked away. Too personal a thing to watch, even for me. The soft murmurs of his prayer were enough to give me goose bumps, especially when I heard my name in there.

It wasn’t long before he came to stand next to me and we surveyed the damage, to the house, to the blood-soaked walkway where Taban had died, and for what?
Why?
Why him, why any of them? Why was my sister lying in a bed unconscious and lucky to be alive?

As usual, I covered up all my thoughts and feelings. “I hope you weren’t praying for me to see the light and get converted.”

That brought half a smile from Pasha. “No, I know when I’m asking too much.” The smile turned into a sly grin. “I did ask that you not sit on me again, dickhead.”

Arsehole. “Sure, and next time I’ll let them take you, too, if it makes you feel better.”

“I’m not ashamed to be a Downsider, and I’m not a heretic. Fuck anyone who says different.”

I was glad to be away from that corner and we hurried toward Guinto’s temple in silence for a while, until Pasha broke in thoughtfully: “They weren’t looking for a murderer, did you notice that? A victim right there, and they didn’t even glance at him.”

Oh, I’d noticed all right. But then, what else could you expect from the Ministry but to use the murders of a few people they find inconvenient in order to make sure their boot of authority was firmly in place? It didn’t even need Perak’s approval—any minister could order an Inquisition. It did make me wonder who it had been, though, who felt safe enough to order it, what they were really after.

“We can’t do much against a whole Inquisition,” I said. “Not if we want to live. But there are things we can do.”

When we finally got to the temple, I checked on Lise—still unconscious but improving, the nurse said, so I favoured her with a wink—and then we made our careful way down to the border of Boundary and No-Hope, to a dank and dismal box that someone called home, and a woman quietly weeping. I wondered if Taban’s wife would weep quietly, and what it meant that this time the victim was no Downsider. There had to be a link, and I thought I had an inkling of what it was, but I had no way to be sure. Maybe the weeping woman could tell us if I was right.

We passed along a cesspit of a walkway, and the Inquisition had been thorough down here, too, I had to give them that. Doors ripped off, bedding and mattresses strewn everywhere, shattered pictures of the Downside Goddess, toys looking sad and lonely with no one to play with them. A one-eyed stuffed pink rabbit with ratty ears that flopped in odd directions stared at me, as though willing me to take it home and love it.

On this one walkway almost no one was home in a city where everyone was supposed to be home, under curfew. At least the Inquisition had gone, moved on to other places, other families. It wasn’t much of a consolation. When it started to rain, a thin drizzle that sliced down through walkways and fall-nets, it seemed fitting.

We ducked under a stairwell ravaged by synth and time and there was the house I’d seen, scrunched between its neighbours like it was ashamed to exist, the top listing drunkenly as the house above squeezed it. The door was black with grime and mould, and damp ran down the wall. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. It took a while for it to open a crack, and a bleary, wary eye poked round the edge. She took one look at me and tried to jam the door shut. “I don’t know nothing, I don’t! I’m no heretic either. Please, don’t.”

I looked down. Maybe the allover and the flapping black jacket that made me look like a Special had been a mistake, but my head had been too muzzed up to think about changing.

“We’re not the Inquisition, or Specials, or even guards,” I said to the shut door. “We need to know about the boy.”

Pasha moved behind me, and I knew he’d be talking in her head, soothing words in an accent she knew and trusted. The crunch of his finger dislocating made me feel ill, but it seemed to work, between that and me assuring her we hadn’t come to take her away.

Eventually the door opened again, the eye more wary than before. I held out my hand palm up and showed her the ring, the one I’d used to find her. Her hand flew to cover her mouth before she reached for it, and I let her take it in shaking fingers.

“I gave that to Jabol,” she said. “It was his father’s. Have you found Jabol? Is he all right?”

“I think perhaps we ought to come in,” Pasha said. I was glad to let him take the lead; he had a natural sympathy, honed by years of working with the kids he’d rescued from the pain-mages in the ’Pit. He knew what it was to hurt and it showed in the soft tones of his voice, his gentle hand on her arm as he led her inside and sat her on the one rickety chair. That sympathy was something that always amazed me about him, something I wished I could do. When I try it, it always ends up coming out as sarcasm. Not helpful, so I kept my mouth shut for now and looked around.

The house was your basic one-room hovel with two sodden mattresses, a thin blanket apiece, the chair and a table made out of an old crate. A portrait of the Downside Goddess, with a stub of candle in front of it. A crappy little stove stood in one corner to heat the place and cook on, but it ran on Glow and seeing as the only places that got any of that these days were some factories and Ministry, it was good for nothing. The windowless space was lit by a guttering rend-nut oil lamp, wafting its sickening scent into every corner. Even supplies of that were running low.

The walls ran with damp from the almost incessant rain that filtered through all the cracks and crevices above, and down again through the floor to some poor soul even worse off than she was. The water held a faint tinge of synth and I made sure not to touch it. She didn’t have much choice—she’d be drinking synth-tainted water same as everyone else down here.

The woman seemed to fit the room. Unfair, perhaps, but true. Her face was thin and pinched, all softness knocked from her by life, leaving only harsh angles. Her dark, sodden hair lay in tangled clumps around her neck, and the rag that might be called a dress couldn’t hide the frailness of her, like a bag of sticks. No food, not for weeks probably. There wasn’t much to go round and what there was, was vile. Everyone was getting thinner down here, but, by the looks of it, she’d been thin to start with and was now more than halfway to skeleton.