Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (25 page)

If I’ve learnt anything, it’s this: Rojan, keep your stupid fucking mouth shut. I may even make it a new rule number one.

Because when I dropped that lie into the cold space at Top of the World, I once again managed to screw the city, and everyone in it. Go me. All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d rather see possible war than an innocent man Inquisitioned, even if he
is
a priest.

“Dench killed those boys. With his own hands. He’s working for the Storad.” It felt like a betrayal, until I remembered that Downside family taken by the Inquisition, and all the others like them. Remembered that Dench could have stopped that. Then it felt pretty good.

All hell broke loose. Fat Cardinal wobbled so hard I thought he might actually fall over. Pasha stared at me like I’d gone completely mad. Everyone else just went crazy.

“You
fucker
.”

A smack across the chops from an Inquisitor’s gauntlet isn’t pleasant at the best of times but with Lise’s concoction blasting through me like a furnace it felt like the top of my head had come off. I landed flat on my back with a scream, sliding inexorably towards the gap, and the drop. Dench’s lip curled in contempt, but I thought I read something else there, too.

I scrabbled at the smooth stone, trying to grab something, anything, to stop my slide but there was nothing. Even if there had been, Dench strode towards me and it seemed no one was able, or wanted, to stop him. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of angry men, but no one wanted to get in his way. That Inquisitor’s uniform was really doing its work.

I started to slow and began to hope I’d stop in time, but a kick from Dench set me going again. It was slicker than soap, that stone, and my fear of the drop stymied any thought of using my magic with anything approaching delicacy.

“Can’t leave well enough alone, can you?” Dench growled. “Couldn’t just stay Under, out of trouble, out of my fucking plans. Couldn’t do as you were told for once in your life. I was going to save the city. I still am, once I’m done with you—I am
the
Inquisitor and I don’t need any entrails to know you’re a fucking unbeliever. I’m going to drop you in the Slump. Do you think they’ll care?”

Another kick, and my legs dropped over the edge. I could have sworn I felt every inch of the drop below me and that paralysed my brain as surely as any concoction of Whelar’s.

Behind Dench, Inquisitors flooded the circle and all of a sudden everyone stopped shouting. Obedience is ingrained into us somehow and, faced with those uniforms, everyone’s subconscious took over and shut them up. One or two tried, to my surprise, tried to protest, tried to fight back against the inevitable. They ended up crumpled heaps on the floor.

Which wasn’t much help to me. The weight of my legs dragged me further over, and the wind caught at the hem of my coat, whipped it round and snapped it out like a banner. I was torn between pissing myself and throwing up, neither of which was a helpful response, true, but the only responses I’m capable of when dangling half a mile above what would soon be my final resting place. I hoped the rats choked on me, and that was the only rational thought I was capable of because the rest of my brain had shorted out in terror.

I lost sight of what was going on in the circle—nothing good was all I could figure in the swirl of people—when my head dropped below the stone. My good hand scrabbled about, hoping perhaps to grab at Dench’s foot when it came for another kick. I’d have grabbed anything at that point.

I did a stupid thing—I looked down. I couldn’t
not
look.

Space stretched out below me, a dizzying, vomit-inducing void with the faintest of lights, tiny pinpricks to show me where I’d splat. Beyond was the darkness of mountains, and a smaller spread of pinpricks—a camp, a siege parked right on the craggy flanks of the mountains, the only space to be had. Right underneath me was the huge bulk of Trade, great blocky warehouses next to the mess that was the Slump, no lights, no inhabitants, just waiting to swallow me up. The rest of Under was just as dark, just as far away. Should have stayed there, Rojan, should have stayed where you knew, with the people that are yours. Should have remembered not to care.

Hindsight is such a wonderful thing. My bad hand lost what little grip it had. All that was left between me and oblivion were a couple of fingers gripping slick stone and a brain that refused to work for horror. Even the black had shut up.

But I had whatever Lise’s little concoction had given me, and I had pain. Oh yes. I slapped at the stone with my fucked hand and if I screamed it wasn’t a bad sound, it was the sound of magic running through me till I thought I might burst.

Dench’s helmeted face loomed over me, and the moustache wasn’t drooping now. I had time, perhaps, for one spell before I dropped and terror blanked my mind completely. Time to save myself, or to kick back against that tyranny.

“I’m sorry, Rojan. Really. But the city needs this. I’m doing this so people will live.”

He sounded like he meant it.

“Yeah, me too,” I said and let the magic take me. And him.

If I’d thought about it straight, I’d have done something more useful, like get myself off that damned edge. But the drop would be worth it for the look on his face as he started to fade. Just before he disappeared completely, I caught a faint, “Oh you
bastard
.”

Then he was gone. Rearranged. I think I was quite merciful, really. I could have done all sorts of nasty things, but he was a good man still, better than me. So I sent him Outside. From this high up I could see it, clear as clear. I could see the lights from the mass of humanity camped on our doorstep that, I hoped, were the Storad, waiting. They were welcome to him.

The effort had been too much, though. The black had only been waiting, biding its time until I did something as stupid as cast a spell while I was so shagged. It leapt on me with tiger’s fangs. The world whipped away, ceased to be important. Footsteps headed for me, but it didn’t matter, because that song was in my head, the sweet pull of it too much.

Just as I was expecting a crunching boot to come down on my fingers, the sound came. A sound I’ve always associated with Jake—the unmistakeable swish of swords sliding out of scabbards. Everything went quiet above me, so quiet I could hear the squeak of my fingers as they slipped ever further along the stone. Even that didn’t matter.

A voice slipped into the quiet, not loud, not forceful, but determined, measured and oh so sure of itself. “I think that’s enough.”

Perak, head-in-the-clouds, dreamer Perak, sounding like he owned the world and all should obey. Good, he could sort out the mess, because I was busy.

Welcome home, Rojan. You’re going to love it in here.

My fragile grip finally gave way, and I didn’t even care.

I gave myself up to falling, to just dropping back into the void and the welcome arms of the black. Endless bliss, endless comfort. At least until I hit the Slump. That was fine. Everything was fine, because I had the black to wrap me in warm words.

The fingers that gripped my bad hand were strong. The jolt snapped my eyes open and almost ripped my arm from its socket as a bonus. Even then, my eyes saw only black and my light in there, blazing and brilliant. No fear. There was no fear here, no one relying on me, no one trying to kill me.

Stay this time, Rojan. Stay in here where it’s safe.

“Yes.” I think I said it aloud.

“No.” The voice penetrated, slid through the black like a knife in the guts. The voice of reason, of hope for the hopeless. “No, you’re staying.”

I tried to ignore it, tried to concentrate on the black and what it was promising me, but the voice wouldn’t let me. I opened my eyes and the black was still there but I could see a shape, a man above me.

“You’re staying,” he said again. “We need you to stay.”

It was that “need” that did it, cleared my head so that the black screamed in frustration. Lise, Lise still needed me, especially with Dwarf gone. Little Allit, who needed someone in the here and now to teach him how to use his magic and not blow his own legs off while he was doing it. Pasha and Perak, too, perhaps. They needed my magic, if nothing else. Everyone did. The magnitude of that almost crushed the breath from me, but it gave me enough to tell the black to fuck right off. It went, but not without a parting shot.

You’ll come back, you know you will. You know you want to. Only I can give you what you want.

“Yes,” I said again, because it was right. But not now. Not yet.

“Good,” said the voice, and my vision cleared.

Guinto stared down at me, and my first reaction was to yank my hand away. Not a clever reaction, but, still, saved by a
priest
. I’d almost rather have dropped.

Almost.

Neither of us spoke as he helped me back on to the platform, or as I lay there gasping like an asthmatic pig. It took a while before my head cleared and my legs didn’t keep jerking like they were sure there was still that drop beneath me. Guinto helped me up, and I remembered my manners. “Thanks. Though I’m not sure why you did that.”

His smile was as beatific as ever and still made my stomach turn, and so did his words. “Because the Goddess sent you to me. How could I let her gift die?”

He turned away before my stunned brain could think of a suitably waspish reply. Beset on all sides by the tyranny of good men. And that was a revelation, too—thinking of a Ministry man, a priest, as a good man. But there, Pasha had said it. Good men do bad things and bad men do good. I kind of wondered where that left me. Deep in the shit probably.

The circle of people had thinned now, and no Inquisitors to deaden the mood. Enough guards to populate a whorehouse or six, some of the uniforms we’d seen in the Home of the Goddess with their wrought metal nipples, but no Inquisitors, or Specials.

A man strode towards me with a confident step, a smile splitting his face. It was only when he engulfed me in a hug and the waft of incensed robes I realised it was Perak. What the hell had happened to him?

“I knew I could rely on you,” he said. “When the temple exploded—who else would do that?”

There was nothing left of the Perak I’d thought I’d known, the soft-hearted, head-in-the-clouds little brother whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to drop me in the proverbial. Well, he had, but everything else…“What happened?”

He didn’t seem to catch my meaning. “Jake—I mean, I know you told me about her, about the Death Matches and the swords, but my Goddess, she’s something else. You got my note? I had to stay out of sight, because I knew someone was trying to kill me, I just wasn’t sure who, or why. My personal guard helped me. Hid me from everything and everyone, I don’t know how. One acted as my decoy, so that people would think I was still around while I tried to get support. But I didn’t know what to do, there wasn’t much I
could
do, Inquisitors at every turn. They—they almost had me. Then she came, and, well, there’s some Inquisitors who won’t be walking very well for a while. Or fathering children ever perhaps.” A frown creased his forehead as he remembered. “She—actually she gave me a damn good talking to. I’ve never seen anyone quite so
passionate
in their belief. Certainly not any of the cardinals it’s my misfortune to have inherited. And she believes in you, too, Rojan. She knew you wouldn’t let an innocent man be found guilty. She believes in you utterly.”

Now that was a thought to warm the deepest recesses of my anatomy, especially the more mobile parts. “But the Storad? The Mishans?”

Perak’s genial face hardened at that, into something I’d never seen on him before: grim determination. It looked like he was really taking all this archdeaconry seriously.

“Do you think I’d have allowed it, the destruction of all our mages? Of
you
? I was just a figurehead, am still, perhaps, but I could stop it. I’d have browbeaten every last cardinal into accepting it, you. But I don’t think I need to any more.”

He glanced behind him, and there was where I saw the change. Cardinals and priests and all the holy fuckers were looking at me, at Pasha, with a new gaze. Not distaste, not horror, not hate. Appreciation, maybe only of what we could do for them rather than us as people, but it was a start perhaps. Felt pretty weird, but I was sure I could get used to it.

The woman whom Pasha had stared at all through proceedings tried to approach him now, but he turned a cold shoulder on her and had eyes only for Jake.

The woman stopped, hesitant, hand outstretched as though she wanted to touch him but didn’t dare, and her eyes…her eyes were the same as Pasha’s I saw now, the same blackness to them, the same shape of sorrow at the corners.

But Pasha didn’t see. Jake took his face in her hands and there, they were talking in their heads again, that invisible string that bound them together. I don’t know what she said, but I could guess—I love you as you are, everything you are. I believe in you. It was in the soft look of her eyes, the tender, hesitant movement of a lip as she leant in to kiss him, a soft kiss that grew between them so I had to turn away. Pasha, who’d had nothing except everyone’s hatred and Jake, and had everything I wanted.

I turned away sharply before I got an ulcer. “The Storad?”

Perak said nothing but walked over to the gap that looked down on all of Mahala. He crooked a finger at me and, not wanting to look like a big girl’s blouse in front of my little brother, I sidled over. I kept one hand on the end pillar, though.

The sky was lightening in the north in a haze of yellow that slid over everything and I realised I’d never really seen a dawn, not properly. We stood there for a while, watching as the light grew, as the city began to look like buildings again rather than humped black shadows below us. A flash of emerald green as the light hit some Clouds estate, and it took me a moment to realise the green was grass under the sun. I wondered what a real garden looked like, and what sun on the flowers would feel like.

Finally, the sun cleared the horizon and I closed my eyes, let it warm the back of my lids. Here at Top of the World, sunlight was free.

“Rojan, what do you see?”

This was going to be one of those talks that ended up with someone trying to convince me the Goddess was real—I’m familiar enough to recognise the start of that talk, but I hadn’t expected it of Perak.

“Please, Rojan.”

I reluctantly opened my eyes and looked down, and then gripped the pillar hard enough that I yelped as a bone grated in my bad hand. What
did
I see? Across and slightly down from us sat the vast estates of Clouds, open to the sun, bright and cheerful like nothing could touch them. Under lay Heights, a little shabbier, a little shadier. Below Heights, where Trade raised its bulky, ugly head, it was like a line was drawn. Light and dark, bad and good. Below was all twisted shadows, noisome mist that snuck out over the Slump directly underneath us. Under didn’t look real, not from up here. From down there, up here looked mythical.

Perak pointed to somewhere, a dark mark on the far side of the city where buildings stopped and mountains began. Outside. Out of this shithole, out of this place where I was sure there would always be two sides, always corruption and ease versus blind hope and poverty. It was far away but I thought I could see a hint of movement.

“What’s that?” I thought I knew—after all that’s where Dench was, I hoped—but I wasn’t sure.

Perak said nothing but handed me a long brass contraption and indicated I put it to my eye. A telescope; I’d heard of them but Under had no need of them, not when you were crowded in like fish in a barrel. Up here, though, maybe if I looked I could see for ever.

When I looked, it wasn’t for ever I saw. Inside, guards mooched about with weapons bristling. No other people—the gates further in put a stop to wandering around, or out. I guessed that maybe this was some sort of trading position, outside the city proper but inside the actual walls. A buffer so that Ministry could maintain the position of “Outside doesn’t exist so don’t get any funny ideas about leaving”. Crates stood lonely and abandoned with nothing to put in them. Massive cranes towered over everything, their Glow tubes dark, their moving parts still, looking like dead animals. The gates themselves, the ones that led to mythical Outside, were firmly shut, and solid-seeming enough that they looked as though they’d never been opened, nor ever would be.

Outside was a seething mass. The Storad probably. A lot of them, and in among them was some monstrous carriage, five times the size of any I’d seen on the streets of Mahala, covered in thick plates of metal. Smoke belched from a little chimney on the top and it rumbled very slowly towards the gate. On the top, a long tube swivelled round looking like the barrel of a gun only much, much bigger.

“Coal,” Perak said. “Steam. In there, they were all afraid that we’d lose our edge. Our superiority that came from the Glow. With that, with the Storad making their own machines now, using coal and steam, we were always going to lose that edge. That thing’s been sitting there for over a week now, and there are others. Sometimes they practise firing, and one of those can take a chunk out of a mountain. Dench, and he wasn’t alone, thought negotiation was our only hope. If the Storad weren’t the people they are, I’d agree. But even as they tried to start negotiating, the boys started turning up dead. Playing two games at once. I knew they were connected. And I knew that, even if we negotiated, the Storad would walk in afterwards, that we’d be their slaves. I won’t have that. With no mages, we’d have no protection against those, or whatever other things they’ve come up with, and my ears tell me they’ve come up with a lot. Really, I think Dench was a misguided idealist. He wanted the city to survive, and this was the only way he could see. He wasn’t a bad man, mostly. What did you do to him?”

I shrugged. “I sent him where he wanted to be, I think. Down there, with them. Perak, you…you aren’t how I remember.”

“We’re neither of us the boys we used to be, Rojan. You think I’m dreaming, but I’m not. I’m thinking. There’s a difference.”

I stared down at the Slump, at the last resting place of so many people. If I’d been a religious man, I might even have said a prayer for Dench, except for that family that got Inquisitioned, and for Dwarf—I couldn’t know if he’d had a hand in that, but I had a feeling that maybe, maybe he had, or at least knew about it and had said nothing. “Not a bad man, but some of the things he did…”

“None of us can do good all the time, the Goddess teaches us that, and that is why there is forgiveness. When I look at this city, I see the temples, I see the Slump and Trade and Under. I see…A city built on two things. On the Goddess, and magic. I am one, and you are the other. I see very clearly, and I’ll make the rest see, too. This city cannot survive without both. Maybe a third thing—pure bloody-minded and inventive stubbornness, which we have by the shovel-load. Whatever we did, whatever
you
did, the Storad were ready, waiting. They were just trying to make it easier for themselves, give themselves a lever for negotiations. Now we’re past the point of no return.” He looked at me, and there was none of the dreamer there, but all of the drop-you-in-the-shit. “We need mages now more than ever, we need Glow like we’ve never needed it before, to stay alive. The city is relying on you.”

I rubbed my good hand over one eye, and wondered if at least I’d get some sleep first. Whether, if I didn’t, one spell and I’d be batshit crazy. I was pretty close right then anyway. Which was probably why I laughed and, once started, couldn’t stop until I had no breath left.

“Perak, if you’re relying on me, do you realise how fucked that makes us? I’ve screwed this city twice now. You want for the third time to be the charm?”

He took me by the arms and shook me until the snickers and hiccups subsided. “No, Rojan. Why do you say that? You’ve saved this city from itself twice now, though you don’t seem to think so. Third time pays for all.”

That sobered me like a slap to the face. If I needed to pay for what I’d done, I probably didn’t have enough bollocks for everyone to jump up and down on. I’d like to say quite clearly that those weren’t tears. It wasn’t the thought that everything might get even worse, that I’d lost one friend and now everyone was on the line, again, because of what I’d done. Because I’d had a fit of conscience and couldn’t see an innocent, if not particularly likeable, man die for something he didn’t do. That people had already died because of me, and would keep on doing that until I put everything right, if I could, if it was even possible.

They weren’t tears, oh no. It was windy up there, that was all. Still, I was grateful when Perak held on to me until the wind stopped.