Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (18 page)

That pricked my conscience, small though it may be. I had already destroyed us once. “No, Father. We’re trying to save Mahala.”

“Save us with magic.” He might as well have spat in my face, the tone of his words was that vitriolic. “Kill us, destroy us. Make the Goddess turn from us.”

Like she’d ever looked at us, if she even existed. “And thus ends the theology lesson for today, thank you. Where is she?”

“I don’t know!” But he had a clue, I could see it in the sudden shift of his eyes as he thought of it. She wasn’t here, but he thought he knew where she might be.

“All right, you don’t know,” I lied. “Did you know what she was doing, that she was the one murdering boys? Pain-mages specifically? Did you put her up to it?”

His mouth flapped open as though he was speechless with shock. “No!” he managed at last. “I swear on the Goddess herself, I didn’t make her, I didn’t know,
if
it’s true. Why would I help you to find the killer if I knew it was her? I’m still not sure I believe you, that it
was
her. You don’t like me, I’m aware of that, and you know how I feel about pain-mages. But that—no. All life, everything created by the Goddess, is sacred to me. Even your life, unholy and sinful as it is. I do not wish death on you, I wish that you see the way clearly and renounce your magic, that you be cured of what ails you.”

Do you know, I even half believed he might be telling the truth, at least the truth as he saw it. He was so earnest in it, so
sure
. If it was a lie, he was good at it. Still. “But if the Goddess exists, then she gave me this unholy magic. Why would she do that if I’m not to use it? I’ve seen priests before who thought they were the Goddess’s weapon.” I smiled brightly. “They usually go completely mad. Or get murdered when it turns out faith isn’t much of a weapon, physically. It’s a great emotional cosh, though.”

His answering smile was withering, full of disgusted pity so I wanted to tear into him with words that would shake him to his core. “One day you will see, and you will be blessed. In the meantime my daughter is missing and your sister awakes. I can take you to Lise, and then I must try to find Abeya before you have her arrested. Do you have any evidence?”

Nothing concrete, except my testimony and who would believe me? Not many people and none of the ones that mattered—the Inquisition—that was the trouble. Not that I was going to admit that. “An eye-witness, and some other evidence.”

The smile became more genuine as he realised I was probably bluffing. Must have been losing my lying touch. When he got up, he seemed relaxed again, in control. I didn’t see how I could get anything else out of him, so I let him take me to Lise.

He left me alone with her, which I appreciated. She was still pale under her dusky skin, still shadowed around the eyes, but those eyes flickered when I spoke and when I took her hand she squeezed it. It seemed very small and fragile in mine, and I dreaded having to tell her what had happened to Dwarf.

“Hey, Lise, you’ve been lollygagging too long, time to get up.”

She squeezed my hand again and tried to say something but the breath of words wasn’t enough to hear.

I kissed the back of her hand. “You’re going to be okay, you hear? And I’m going to catch whoever did this.” I was pretty sure by now it was Abeya, because I was sure as shit it wasn’t looters or rioters, and as sure it was connected somehow. Destroy the generator, the people who knew how it worked, destroy the mages that would ultimately power it. Destroy the city, or at least make it weak enough to walk right in. Maybe Abeya only wanted a part of that—destroy the mages for all the torture they’d put her through—but I was fairly sure by then someone else was behind her, twisting an already fragile mind to breaking.

“If I ask you a question, can you nod or shake your head? Or squeeze my hand once for yes and twice for no. Can you do that?”

A squeeze on my hand, another flutter of those eyes. How can someone worm their way into your heart so quickly? Lise had, with her smarts, with her devious nature and her way with mechanicals and electricals that had me floored in admiration. A sister I’d not known I’d had until a few weeks ago but she was everything to me now, pretty much all I had that I wanted and was mine. All this trying to work out who was killing people, who was running rampant with a knife and a grudge, it was for her, to find out who’d done this to her. I’m not saying I didn’t care for those poor boys, or Taban but…it was there, in the back of my head all the same. I loved her in a way I haven’t loved any woman since Ma died—platonically. I think it was that, the strangeness of it, that made it so much more real. She was an anchor for me in a life that had been utterly rudderless and pointless before.

“Good. All right. Who did this, was it a woman?”

A squeeze that made me smile, thinking I knew—and then another, telling me I was wrong. Or at least wrong about who’d killed Dwarf, who’d destroyed the generator, screwed the pain lab, screwed Mahala.

Maybe not Abeya then. Maybe…Guinto?

“Someone you recognised?” I asked. I knew she went to temple. It wouldn’t be a stretch for her to come here; her rooms weren’t far, and she spent all her time there or at the lab, as far as I knew. Hadn’t Guinto said he’d met her?

Again, a single squeeze that raised my hopes, and another that dashed them. Maybe I was totally wrong. I never like to think I’m totally wrong. Who does?

One of the women who were acting as nurses came over, an older lady with grey hair and kind eyes that crinkled at the edges as though she smiled a lot, though she wasn’t smiling now. I didn’t even think about getting in her knickers, which shows you the sort of lady she was. She reminded me of Ma in a weird kind of way.

“She needs to rest now,” she said, and the schoolmarmish tone of her voice made me nod before I even thought of disobeying. Instead, I kissed Lise on the forehead, promised her I’d be back soon and that she’d be better and left. At the least, who I now knew was murdering people wasn’t here ready to attack her again.

It was a wrench going back out into Mahala, into the shifting dark of moving shadows that could hide anything, everything. I kept one hand on the handrail of the walkway, the drop beneath more of a threat to me at the moment than the people I couldn’t see on the street

I kept feeling that I’d missed something, something important. When I got to the stairwell at the end of the street, Tabil was waiting for me in a darker shadow trying to look efficient. All I could think of were his sniggers, though, and whether everyone was safe.

“Reporting for duty,” he said immediately, with a salute so sharp I could have cut a throat with it.

“Good. I need another one of your lot to watch over my sister.”

Not Abeya, not who’d killed Dwarf and tried for Lise anyway, possibly not Guinto. Cardinal Manoto? It seemed unlikely that he could overpower Dwarf when he was defending his beloved gadgets. But whoever, they were still out there. The attack was on the machinery. Not on the Ministry installation, on the machinery. On what gave us power. Dwarf was dead and the only, best person who knew how it all worked—Ferret-face excepted—was Lise. I had a suspicion it was whoever had got into Abeya’s fractured head somehow, though no real clue who that was except they had access to bacon and therefore it was someone with money, or power, or both. But that didn’t mean I could neglect Abeya and her murders. “I need another two, on Guinto.”

Tabil raised a sceptical eyebrow in the gloom. “On Guinto? Are you sure?”

The eyebrow wasn’t the only sceptical thing about him; his voice dripped with it. A man after my own heart. Maybe he had a point, though—Guinto was popular, well liked, listened to, even by those who’d rather be rampaging all over the city and setting it alight. Putting Specials on him, given the mood of the city, would be like putting a gun to Mahala’s head and pulling the trigger.

“Well, you don’t have to advertise who they are. Be discreet. You can do that, can’t you?”

A smirk, all cocky. “We prefer using the uniform for putting the fear of the Goddess into people.”

I suddenly realised how aggravating I can be, because this guy was just like me and annoying the crap out of me.

“Can you do this or not? Dench said you were going to help.”

He muttered something under his breath. I only caught a part of it, something about how I must have something on Dench or why would he help a worthless shit like me? Right then and there, after the day I’d had and the sun was hardly up yet, after the days that had come before, the days I knew were about to come that would be even worse, it was enough. Enough to have me grab at his throat so quick that the rookie didn’t have a chance to duck away. Enough to make me say screw it and bunch my bad hand into a fist, to groan out some pain. To hear the song in my head, calling, always calling, pulling me in and down. I was stretched so far I was pretty sure he heard it when I snapped.

His eyes goggled over a gasping mouth as I squeezed, letting all the anger, frustration and pain well up into my fingers, and my voice. Such a simple thing it would be, to rearrange him. I could see how to do it in my head, see how I’d make him look. I shoved him up against a crumbling wall and my face into his.

“You’re helping me because you want the power back on, don’t you? Or do you want to sit in the dark and wait to starve, maybe wait till the Storad or the Mishans, fuck, maybe both, come marching in as though they own the place and there’ll be nothing we can do about it? Dench has got other problems, but this one is mine and you will fucking well help me or I will make your face look like a duck’s arse. Permanently. I could do far, far worse, if I wanted. And I’m hanging on by a thread here, and you are tempting me. So. Very. Badly. So you do what I ask like Dench said, and you’ll still have a dick to swing come tomorrow.”

It was all I could do not to just have at it right there and then. Change his face, shrink his dick. A couple of other really nasty little things that occurred. The black was telling me to do it, do it, more pain, more magic, fall in, do it.
You need me, Rojan. You know you want me. Do it, and you can be free
. And I wanted to, oh, I did. To be free of everything, fear and pain and darkness, of the deathly weariness that ached my bones.

“Enough.” The voice stopped me, commanding, smooth, expecting to be obeyed. I can’t tell you how much I hated Guinto’s voice. My vision cleared a little, though, and I watched him watching me with a curl of contempt on his lips. That was what made me let go—that contempt, from someone like him, a Ministry man, maybe a man who’d aided a murderer.

Tabil fell back against the wall, taking great, heaving breaths. I pointedly ignored Guinto and leant in, keeping my voice low. “I know what he says. We’re unholy, right? And you the Goddess’s man. I can be much more unholy than that. Remember who you swore to serve. Her, not
them
. Do I get the men, or not?”

He rubbed at his throat, at the vivid red mark I’d left there, and nodded. “Subtle, as you say. But Dench will have something to say about this.”

I smiled at him, and savoured the flinch. “Yeah. Probably to you. Now do what you were ordered to do and help me.”

By the time he’d scurried off, Guinto had gone, but Jake stood in his place. Come to temple perhaps for morning prayers. She watched me carefully, as though I was someone she’d never seen before. One hand rested lightly on a sword and her head tilted to one side, as though she was considering me. As though maybe I wasn’t the person she’d thought. I turned away from that thought, that look and the vast anger that underpinned it. Maybe I wasn’t who I thought either, even who I was under all my pretences and cynicism, but I couldn’t take it, that look. Not the cool pity of it, not the sorrow that I wasn’t the man she’d thought me, the rage that life Upside wasn’t what she’d thought, what she’d hoped all those years for. The lady doesn’t like it when you’re not good and noble.

Instead I stalked off into the darkness of the stairwell, up and up, away from the fetid smell of home and into the corrupt air towards Trade and Over, wondering what the fuck I thought I was doing. Cocking it all up good and proper seemed the most likely answer. I fingered the envelope in my pocket, with Abeya’s hairs in it. She hadn’t attacked Lise, but she had tried for both Pasha and me, maybe Dendal, too, with that note. Or someone had—Abeya wouldn’t have had any way to get to Pasha’s parents, or to fool Dendal.

Maybe she’d got wherever she was going now, stopped her headlong run so I could get a fix. I had to find her, work out what was going on and she was the key, the link. Guinto wasn’t going to help, so it looked as though screwing my hand up some more was in my immediate future.

I swear, the decision was nothing to do with the little voice that kept calling, that was a constant companion now, even when not using my magic.

Oh, Rojan, come on in. It’s warm in here and no one relying on you. No one will die because you fucked up. It’ll just be you and me. You and me. No fear, Rojan. Just blackness, sweet bliss. The freedom you always knew should be yours. Come on, you know you want to.

Not that, I swear it on Namrat’s deathly bollocks.

I was cold and sweating by the time I reached the pain lab. It seemed the best place for the job. Familiar, lonely, with no one to disturb me. I’d forgotten about Ferret-face. He tried to talk to me, tell me something about the apparatus in the pain lab but I didn’t really hear him. There had to be something here. Something I’d missed earlier.

Instead of listening to Ferrety, I wandered around Dwarf’s desk, and Lise’s. So odd to think of him not there any more. Just another cold body on a slab. I cast an eye over the odds and sods on his desk but it made as much sense to me as prayers and temples. That is, not a fuck of a lot. Cogs and wires and springs. His favourite pair of needle-nosed pliers that had always looked so doll-like in the big sausage fingers that were deceptively delicate. Despite Lise’s desk facing his, he had a picture of her on his desk, nicely done in oils. She grinned up at me and I thought that I’d only ever seen her happy when discussing alchemy and electrics with Dwarf.

Her desk wasn’t much different. More wires, fewer cogs. A slew of diagrams that looked like a bad case of noodles. Pictures on her desk, too—one of Perak with his daughter looking like a fairy princess. One of Dwarf that took pride of place, and I began to wonder how far their friendship and intellectual camaraderie had gone. How much she wasn’t really mine, how nothing, no one, was, the black was right about that. How devastated she’d be when I had to tell her he was dead.

A picture of me too with my old face on, looking much younger, before me and Perak had fallen out all those years ago perhaps. I wondered where she’d got it, even as I thought that no one had ever kept a picture of me on their desk before. Why would they? The old Rojan was a bastard. Well, so was the new one, but in different ways, and now I was a Rojan with family, with people I cared about. I’d kept people away before, because I was afraid. Now I’d let them in, all of them, Dwarf and Lise and Perak, Pasha and Jake and Erlat, and the fear almost paralysed me, made me wonder why I’d done it.
So you can be a part of this city, part of the people who live here. So you can be a person, not an automaton
.
So you can serve the Goddess.
Dendal’s voice in my memory, from a time just after I’d destroyed the Glow and guilt was weighing me down like a stone. But it was hard, and I was afraid for all of them so that my hands shook. So that the black looked ever more tempting.
No fear here, Rojan. Come on, fall in. No fear, just sweet bliss
…

I stared at those pictures for a long time, working up the courage. I had to do this, find out where Abeya was, who was working her like a puppet, so we could get back to pumping out magic before she killed all the mages. I had to be strong, for everyone. I didn’t feel strong enough even for me.

Ferret-face made a strangled noise behind me as I made a fist, overstretched my poor fucked hand and something snapped in there. More pain than I’d expected, more juice. Too much for my ragged, overworked brain to handle. I had a brief glimpse of Abeya, somewhere where there was sun. Her face shining in light as she talked to someone I didn’t know, deathly pale skin and hair so dark it was like it shut off the sun. Then the black swamped me, laughing as it took me, as it soothed away all my fears and thoughts and left me only with cool comfort and my own blinding light. No fear, no responsibility, no ever-present horror of fucking things up worse than I already had.

The voice penetrated after who knew how long. Insistent, inside my head.
Rojan, come on, get the fuck out of there.
Soft, but sounding harsh as a gunshot in my black. I willed it to go away, to leave me alone, but it kept on.
Come on, you aren’t too far in, you can get out if you try now.
Trouble was, I didn’t want to. I only recognised Pasha’s voice when he said the one thing that might have brought me out.
Jake’s here, waiting for you. We’re all waiting for you. Don’t fall in, don’t be that person. Don’t leave.

Oh, he knew how to get to me all right, the little shit. I opened my eyes on a groan of pain from my hand that seemed to throb all through me. I was lying on my side on a bench in the lab. I’d been sick on the floor and my head ached something fierce. Didn’t matter, though, because I opened my eyes to her, to Jake watching me with eyes blue like the sky. A consolation, but not much. Enough to stop me falling backwards into the black again as my hand throbbed and almost had me screaming when I moved.

Pasha moved up behind her, and the consolation faded except that he looked as worried as her. “Goddess, you almost gave me a stroke. If we hadn’t turned up when we did—what did you think you were doing?”

Despite the lecture, he helped me to sit up. The room swirled nauseatingly. It hadn’t been like before, when I’d gone right into the black. Before it had been a bright and glorious light inside, velvet blackness around me, power running through me and lightning for bones. This time it had been relief, pure and simple, and taking that away made me want to be sick all over again.

I tried to speak, to explain, but nothing came out. A hand on mine, comforting. Jake. “Didn’t you see while you were in there?” she asked Pasha.

He gave me a dirty look at the way she held my hand and said, “I don’t like to look too hard in his head. Never know what I’ll find.”

“Try living in it,” I said. “It’s not pretty.” I tried to snap it out but I couldn’t seem to get any force in the words. “I was trying to find who attacked you. And attacked me, too.”

That sobered him. “They got you, too? How—”

“Because I should have stayed sworn off women. Because I’m a dick, or at least I think with it. Abeya. It was Abeya. I managed to get away, but then so did she.”

“You have got to be—” Pasha sat down hard on the bench next to me, frowning as Jake squeezed my hand and let go. I resisted the urge to grab it back. Barely. “Why?”

I shut my eyes and tried to ignore the way whatever I’d snapped in my hand grated when I moved. Tried to ignore the juice thrilling through me, waiting to be used, wanting it.

“She’s branded, like you. Same brand even. She found out we were mages and, well, there you are. I’m surprised no one else has tried it, if you think about it. All that time in the ’Pit, all that torture from the mages. Surprised all the Little Whores haven’t ganged up on us and killed us all long before now. I think maybe Guinto added to it, all his talk of mages being unholy. Maybe he even put her up to it. He’s a Ministry man, so he’s guilty of
some
thing. Someone certainly is.”

Pasha shot off the bench so hard that I opened my eyes again to see mousy little Pasha in mid-lion-roar. “So, he’s a Ministry man. He’s a good man, too! A good priest. Sometimes good men do bad things, and bad men do good. Don’t you ever look at someone and
not
think what they’re guilty of?”

“Not often, no. And I’m mostly right. Fuck’s sake Pasha, you’re defending a Ministry man, after all they did to you? All those scars they gave you and those mages were supposed to be pious men, too. After all the shit the priests have given you, Upsiders have, even Guinto has, because you’re a mage, and you’re defending him?”

I’d pissed him off bad by now, but I couldn’t seem to help the words as they fell out of my mouth.

His eyes were dark with anger as he leant in and jabbed at me in time with his words. “Your trouble is you don’t believe in anything except saving your own skin.”

All my stupid rage drained away as I looked at him. He wanted so much to be the good guy, and he was, without knowing it. Better than I’ll ever be, and still he thought it wasn’t enough.

“And your trouble,” I said softly, and, yes, I was acutely aware of the irony, “is that you only believe in other things, not yourself. You let Guinto persuade you that’s as it should be. I don’t need to read your mind to know you’re thinking of doing what he said, stopping the magic, stopping being you so you can be some…some fakery of what they want you to be. He’s given you some false promise of how it’ll make everything better, for you and Jake, for your soul, for having your parents acknowledge you, for everyone. Well, it won’t, and you’ll still be a mage. All the prayer and belief in the world won’t stop that.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me. I almost hoped he would, that he would be as much of a bastard as me so I wouldn’t have to think of him as the good guy any more. Instead he stood back, wiped a hand across his mouth as though my words tasted bad to him and turned on his heel. He stopped at the doorway, and turned to leave his parting shot. “I almost wish I’d let the black take you properly, let you drown in it. I almost wish I couldn’t have brought you back, though you weren’t far in. But we’re even now. You saved me from it, and now I’ve saved you. I don’t owe you anything, not any more.”

The door shut quietly behind him and I let my head fall into my good hand. Oh, Rojan, so very good at pissing people off, even people you like, people you want to stick around. Kiss of Death. Obviously that extended to friendships as well as more romantic liaisons.

“Rojan.” Oddly, I’d all but forgotten Jake. When I looked up, she was frowning at me but there was no anger there, at least not for me—there was a whole world of anger for other things, but not for me. No, I got a pity I couldn’t stand. “Guinto’s a good man, he is.”

“So why’s he tormenting Pasha like this? Why’s he covering for a girl he knows is murdering people?”

“Why did you do that, risk falling into the black? Why push so hard?”

“Because…because I have to, because otherwise I’ll hate myself even more than I already do. Because it’s right, and I’m fed up with always being wrong.”

“Did you ever think that’s why Guinto is doing it? Why Pasha listens? Because he thinks it’s right? You can’t save everyone, Rojan. I know you think you should, but you can’t. And you can’t save Pasha from the Goddess, from what he needs, if he doesn’t want to be saved. Or me. But you can do this. I know you can. Just don’t lose yourself in the process.”

I stared at her in horror, that she’d seen through me so easily, seen past all my act as she had once before. She believed in me, and that was the worst part. She believed in me and that gave me no choice.