Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (21 page)

“It’s all supposed to be like this. Not just here, all of it.” He kept his voice down, but there was no disguising the wistful anger in his voice.

“I keep telling you about the Ministry—”

“It’s not the Goddess that’s the problem, Rojan. It’s people, men, abusing what they have in her name. It’s not Ministry, but the rotten few.”

“You always knew that, and that Ministry are the rotten all. Now where should we—”

“It’s different
seeing
it, though. There are good people here, too, even here. I can feel them. I’m going to prove it to you.”

Oh great, just what we needed. Pasha on a faith kick. “Now listen—”

“No. Over there, that’s the place.”

I wished he’d let me finish a sentence, but at least he was thinking of why we were here. I looked at where he’d pointed.

There are temples and then there are
temples
. I used to love them as a child, all hushed reverence, the colours of the stained glass puddling on the floor, the scent of the incense, the murmurs of prayers. Haunting places they were, even for me, until Ministry stripped them, made them bland and soulless like their prayers, like the poor deluded faithful. Stripped for us scum, at least, because this was a temple to end all temples and in the old style, too.

Not
a
temple,
the
temple. The Home of the Goddess, even I knew that. Where her spirit was supposed to be strongest, where she’d fought Namrat for us, where she’d made her useless sacrifice of a hand to stop Death from stalking us. Ridiculous of course—if that had ever happened, and it hadn’t, it had been a long, long time ago, before Top of the World even existed, back when we were just a castle in a handy pass with a sneaky bastard warlord ruling us. It couldn’t have been here, not in
this
temple, but that didn’t stop a little chill shuddering my shoulders, almost as though I was being watched and the watcher was keen on the contents of my soul. A quick buff and polish probably wasn’t going to help there, so all I could do was put on a brazen front and sneer at the feeling in my head.

An arch pointed up, and up, towards the spire that reached higher than any other, the fragility of it enhanced by the translucent stone that caught the last of the sun. The Glow moths gathered here in huge numbers, flickering around and through the intricate fretwork making the stone seem to ripple, alive.

Through the open arch, the coloured windows painted patterns on the runner that led the eye down the aisle to the altar, all gold and ivory and bedecked with Glow birds in their cages and a few errant moths that flickered around the faithfuls’ heads. A figure bent before the altar, limned in Glow. I recognised the robes. Perak, his hooded head bent in prayer. Something loosened inside my chest. A few cardinals knelt nearby. I recognised the spare woman with the hatchet face, and I couldn’t miss the fat one. Manoto…who I was here to find. Perhaps.

I didn’t want to be awestruck as I entered—I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me like that in a temple even if I wasn’t wearing my own face—but it was hard not to be. The ceiling vaulted high above us, and that had been made bland with whitewash, but somehow the temple still retained a sense of the wonder it must have been in its glory days. More Glow birds and moths lit the whitewash in flickering lights and shadows. The depiction of the Goddess was the Ministry one, too, the bland one. No flowers this time, but still, sparkly sunbeams and the Goddess looking benevolent and rather stupid as she patted Namrat’s fluffy head.

The effect was spoilt by the two large and very ugly guards, from what I could see of them at least. One either side of the aisle, blocking our way forward. Blocking anyone from getting too close to Perak—even the cardinals were kept at a distance.

I could make out more of the guards further in and it wouldn’t have been a problem, not with this face, except they weren’t Specials. They weren’t even Inquisitors. Their uniforms were a mystery to me, nothing like anything I’d seen before. Not understated like the threat of a Special, not forbidding like an Inquisitor. Like a priest’s robes, only shot through with pliable metal plating so that when they moved, the skirt swirled and clanked. They didn’t wear gloves as such, but the gauntlets would have been enough to give Namrat pause, all bits of leather and nasty-looking spikes that gleamed in the flickering light of the Glow moths that settled on the guards’ shoulders. The close-fitting helmets were similar to the Inquisitors’, only they had a visor in place like a snarling tiger that almost hid the ugly mug underneath. Over their chests was some sort of plate affair, moulded musculature so that it looked like the guards could lift weights with their nipples. Maybe they did. They were certainly scaring the crap out of me.

Dench’s face up here should have been a free pass—from what he’d said, he was in charge of looking after Perak, and that should have been enough. That and who isn’t scared of Specials? Something told me that I had misjudged things. Maybe it was the glare from the guard on the left. More likely, it was the way the one on the right shot out a spiked fist and grabbed me by the throat. He growled, making me think irresistibly of tigers and Namrat, while his friend did the talking. Maybe Growler hadn’t learnt to talk yet.

“If you piss off, nice and quiet,” Talker said, “we won’t spread your guts all over the carpet. No one gets close to the Archdeacon. Not even you.”

What the hell? Dench should have been protecting Perak, and there Perak was at the altar. I’d thought the worst could possibly be that Dench would already be here, not that he wasn’t welcome. Why not? I flicked a glance at Pasha. Sometimes he could persuade people…but no. His lips were pinched, and
I can’t hear them
,
I can’t get in
sounded in my head.
I can see Perak, but I can’t hear him either.

Talker glared at Pasha for a moment then turned back to me. “You wouldn’t be bringing a pain-mage in here, would you? That would be very unhealthy.”

I tried to say, “Gosh, no, wouldn’t dream of it.” What squeaked out past the hand on my throat was, “Will be for you when your arse gets blown up.”

See now, this is what I hate about being responsible and shit. Or one of the things. It makes me cranky and then something escapes from my mouth that shouldn’t and then, well, and then people often try to kill me.

Luckily—although in retrospect it wasn’t all that lucky—the gunshot distracted him. The sound echoed around the space like a lost soul and someone screamed at the end of it. A swift elbow into Growler’s groin and I was free, gasping for breath and desperately trying to see where the shot had gone. Perak had been praying right by the altar, but I couldn’t see him now. Instead, guards milled in confusion, some with guns out. They didn’t look happy. Or most of them didn’t. I caught a sly look between Manoto and a Special who was lurking at the back of the temple, but I ignored it for now.

By the altar a knot of these new guards shielded me from seeing anything much, but the blood on the carpet was unmistakeable. I couldn’t help myself—as big brother I was always going to be responsible for Perak however much I hated it. That didn’t matter. What mattered was whether he was still alive. I twisted away from Talker and Growler and ran. First Dwarf and Lise, the attempt on Pasha, and now Perak. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone up there didn’t like me. Someone down here certainly seemed determined to kill everyone I cared about, or try to.

So when someone blindsided me with the butt of a gun, making pain burst in bright lights behind my eyes and magic seethe in my bones, I let the black take me, let my anger and fear suck it in and blow it out again before I had a chance even to think what I was doing. No control, not this time, not now. All I knew was that someone had tried to kill my sister, had killed one friend and tried for another, and now my brother, and I was pissed as hell.

When the dust cleared and my brain came back to the here and now, I sat on what was left of the carpet. There wasn’t much of it and what there was, was mostly now not much more than coloured string. Talker and Growler were flat on their backs next to me, along with the guard who’d whacked me. All three were covered in a thin film of dust and scattered Glow moths that were still and dark. All three guards had their hands over their ears and their mouths open. I wondered why they weren’t screaming, before I realised they might be, but I seemed to be deaf. No noise, no voices, not even the sound of my own ragged breath, only a soft silence that creeped the skin on my back.

I’d never been so glad to hear a voice in my head.
“Goddess’s tits, Rojan. Did you just blow up the Home of the Goddess?”

“I think so”
was all I managed to think back.
“Oops?”

A whey-faced Pasha got me on to my feet and sounds started to creep back in again, faint to start with. My breathing was the first thing, followed by Pasha’s as he surveyed the damage. Then little moans filtered through from the guards on the floor, and then, much worse, the ominous click of a gun right behind me, quickly followed by something familiar—the jab of a syringe. My father’s best work in conjunction with the good Dr Whelar, developing a jab that deadens any pain and thus renders a pain-mage utterly useless. The next sound was a gasp from Pasha as a guard grabbed him, and he too got the syringe.

About half a heartbeat after the jab, everything was numb—feet, hands, tongue, arse, everything. I had my work cut out not falling over, never mind anything else. Hands turned me round, so I was face to face with Fat Cardinal. And without my magic, that meant
my
face.

The face that shattered a thousand Glow tubes, destroyed the tortured source, plunged thousands into darkness and starvation and left the whole city teetering on the brink of collapse and the Ministry in an embarrassing position, to put it mildly. A face many people would like to see in tiny pieces. The face that had been identified as dead by the face I had been wearing until a few moments ago, Dench.

The face that was, if Fat Guy’s look was anything to go by, about to get broken in half.

I’m not going into detail about the embarrassment that followed, the legs like wet noodles, the tongue that kept lolling out of my mouth like it wanted to escape, the march—well, pathetic wobble held up by two guards—across the dust-strewn plaza in front of hundreds of staring people. Most were still dazed from the explosion, and so was I, dazed and not quite right in the head.

The plaza kept swimming in and out of focus, but there were definitely bits of temple scattered across the stone. A gargoyle’s face leered drunkenly from in among the flowers, or what was left of them. The blooms appeared to have been lopped off neatly at the neck, scattering petals that blew around the space like orange and black snow. A dead Glow bird lay in a smashed cage, nothing now but dull bits of glass.

Feeling began to come back, just a bit, and I didn’t welcome it. I felt like I was in two places at once, here at Top of the World, in splendour that turned my stomach when I thought of the starvation below us and, at the same time, all was black around me, and I was light, and the voice was singing in my head, too sweetly, too much to resist. Only the grip of Pasha’s hand on my arm, a solid pressure, brought me back to me.

Other than that, let’s just say me and Pasha ended up in what Fat Cardinal probably thought of as a hellish and forbidding room but was in fact far plusher than any place I’ve ever lived. It had carpet and nice thick velvet curtains to keep out the chill. I’ve never had a carpet, and the only cheapjack curtains I ever managed to nail up were destroyed in the Paint Incident.

The room also had a Dench, which was stupid because he should have been protecting Perak. Why wasn’t he? He didn’t look too happy to see us—his moustache went from drooping and careworn to standing to attention as he shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He pinned me with a glare. I tried an ingratiating grin, but, as all my nerves were numb, I suspected it didn’t turn out too well.

“That blast, that was you, wasn’t it? Well?”

I tried to get an excuse out, tell him that Perak had been shot, but all that came out were mangled noises so in the end I just nodded.

“I should have fucking well known it. Holy shit, man, are you trying to make a habit out of blowing up archdeacons? Even—” He pulled up short and glanced at the guard at the door, primed with more nasty jabs for when this one wore off. I hated that guard already. “Even Perak?”

Again, all I could manage were a few strangled grunts. Pasha tried, too, with pretty much the same result. In the end, I finally spat out an approximation of “Shot”, that only someone off their tits on Rapture or very, very determined and used to dealing with drunks, might have understood.

I don’t think Dench was on drugs, but he seemed to get it.

“Who was shot? You’re not bleeding and neither’s Pasha. Perak?”

Another nod sent Dench to a chair in the corner to think and stroke his moustache, looking us over all the while. By the time he hunkered down next to us and talked in low murmurs the guard couldn’t hear, I could move my tongue to form words, even if I couldn’t feel it.

“You were supposed to leave looking after Perak to me, not come dancing in here like you owned the place. You’re an embarrassment up here, especially with your own face on. Most of them get by pretending the pain-mages all got destroyed, that the Glow they’re getting is some genius replacement Dwarf or the alchemists dreamed up. The rest only want to see you thrown off the top of Home of the Goddess and splat in the Slump. You were
supposed
to be trying to find out who’s killing all those Downsiders and stopping any more riots, helping to calm things down. Not making things worse. Remember?”

“Not Downsiders.” Well, that’s what I meant to say, but I had a heck of a good slur going on. “Mages. Definitely. I
told
you. I know who’s doing it, too.” Had he forgotten? Maybe he’d had worse things to deal with.

Dench went very still, staring at me like I’d gone batshit. Maybe I had, it was hard to tell any more. He was still staring when more guards came and dragged me and Pasha off on wobbly legs. “To see the cardinal,” one said when Dench asked.

I really didn’t like the way that unflappable Dench flinched at that.