Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (27 page)

Dendal wandered off with Guinto in a deep heart-to-heart about something. The Goddess probably, or my innumerable shortcomings.

Allit looked up at me, and I tried not to see what was in that look.

“You did this?” he asked.

“Not just me. Lise and Perak made the generator that made it possible. And Dwarf.”

“But you made the magic?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, a determined shine to his eyes. “You’re going to need mages, aren’t you? I heard Pasha talking about the Storad. Is it true? If it is, why is everyone so happy?”

“Do you always ask this many questions? Yes, it’s true. More than they put in the news-sheets.”

“Do you think we’ll win?”

“I don’t know. No one does. So, tonight, we’re celebrating the lights being back on and we’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.”

Funny how I knew as soon as she was there. Pasha was coming along the walkway and Jake ran to join him. Whatever trouble she’d had with touching, that part of her that had been broken, Pasha must have worked pretty hard on it because about the only thing of theirs that didn’t touch was the backs of their knees. They drew a few stares, and a raised eyebrow from Guinto, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t even mind, no incipient ulcer to bother me, no jealousy to burn at me. Well, not much. Because she was happy, happier than I could ever have made her, and I couldn’t begrudge Pasha the one thing that was his.

“Don’t you mind?” Erlat’s voice, soft and silky, startled me. Surprised me how much I minded that she’d been so angry with me. How pleased I was she was speaking to me again.

She didn’t look at me, only at Jake and Pasha and I watched her watching them. She seemed wistful, a touch of sadness in the cant of her eyes.

“No, no I don’t think I do.” It came, in a flash of understanding. “You were helping her, with the touch thing. That’s why she was coming to you.”

She still didn’t look my way, but she smiled, the slow smile of a cat playing with a mouse. “Of course. She—we all deal with things differently. It was hard for her, that the first man she wanted to touch was a pain-mage, just like those that…turned us into what we are.” She looked at me finally, a sly sideways smile. “And that the first man who
did
touch her was also a pain-mage. Easier if she learnt to touch from a woman, from someone who knew. Besides, I’m great at massages. Among other things. You really should try those. No charge.”

And there I was, blushing again. Blushing because she was flirting with me, and usually I’m on that like a starving man on bacon. So why was it that when
she
did it, it made my shoulders itch? Because of who she was, what she’d been? How she’d learnt those tricks? Because…

She must have watched these thoughts flick across my mind. I expect I looked pretty confused, which probably accounted for her laugh. “Did you work it out yet?”

And I hadn’t, not till she asked. In my defence I’d had a lot of other shit to deal with, but there’s something about Erlat that makes me see things differently,
think
differently. It remains to be seen if this is a good thing. But now she asked, had I worked out how I’d made her so angry, and my mind flicked over all that had happened, and latched on to one thing Pasha had said.
I want people to treat me like a person, not a thing.
And I had, and I did. Hadn’t I thought that Abeya was angelic because of how she looked? And how did that turn out? Not so well.

Erlat made me blush when she teased me because, when I looked at her, I looked at
her
, not at how I could talk her into bed. And then I’d turned round and disregarded all she was and is, and treated her like a doll that needed big old strong me to protect her. Because it made
me
feel better.

“Erlat, I’m sorry.” I couldn’t think of a single other thing to say, nothing that wouldn’t sound stupid, or make things worse.

I tried for shamefaced, and the effort made her laugh. A good sound, that loosened things inside me, just a little.

“Good.” She wrinkled her nose in faux-disgust. “You could do with a bath. I promise not to take advantage of you. Much.”

With that, she left me standing there like a gawping, red-faced idiot and went to make some other poor sap blush by using her best seductive slide of a walk, smiling her professional smile and getting him to dance with her. She disappeared into the party, into groups dancing, drinking, laughing. Feeling the hope, just for once.

I couldn’t join in the party, though. It felt like I was staring at it through glass, so I only watched and stared at the lights, at Dendal’s fairies. The thump of Trade was a comfort, the knowledge that the life of Mahala was pumping through its veins again. But I could still feel the boom-shudder of the Storad engines as they tried to take down the gates. This was a night of hope, but I had none for me.

So I watched and drank the hooch and wondered where the hell we’d be come tomorrow.

The usual suspects—my family for putting up with me being off in my own head so much. Absolute Write for invaluable advice on all aspects of writing, and for the friendships I’ve made there. The T-Party writers’ group for camaraderie and curry and for telling me when my writing sucks. Bettie and Luke for much the same. Alex Field and my editors go without saying!

This feels like the worst kind of Oscar speech, doesn’t it? I’d like to thank my parents for having me, and the dog for being fluffy and every book I’ve ever read and Microsoft for making Word and the postman for bringing me my contracts and…so I’ll finish by saying I’ve probably missed out someone, so here, have an acknowledgement.

Francis Knight
was born and lives in Sussex, UK. She has held a variety of jobs from being a groom in the Balearics, where she punched a policeman and got away with it, to an IT administrator. When not living in her own head, she enjoys SFF geekery, WWE geekery, teaching her children
Monty Python
quotes and boldly going and seeking out new civilisations.

Find out more about Francis Knight and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
www.orbitbooks.net

BEFORE THE FALL

look out for

BITTER SEEDS

by

Ian
Tregillis

PROLOGUE

23 October 1920

11 kilometers southwest of Weimar, Germany

Murder on the wind: crows and ravens wheeled beneath a heavy sky, like spots of ink splashed across a leaden canvas. They soared over leafless forests, crumbling villages, abandoned fields of barleycorn and wheat. The fields had gone to seed; village chimneys stood dormant and cold. There would be no waste here, no food free for the taking.

And so the ravens moved on.

For years they had watched armies surge across the continent with the ebb and flow of war, waltzing to the music of empire. They had dined on the detritus of warfare, feasted on the warriors themselves. But now the dance was over, the trenches empty, the bones picked clean.

And so the ravens moved on.

They rode a wind redolent of wet leaves and the promise of a cleansing frost. There had been a time when the winds had smelled of bitter almonds and other scents engineered for a different kind of cleansing. Like an illness, the taint of war extended far from the battlefields where those toxic winds had blown.

And so the ravens moved on.

Far below, a spot of motion and color became a beacon on the still and muted landscape. A strawberry roan strained at the harness of a hay wagon. Hay meant farmers; farmers meant food. The ravens spiraled down for a closer look at this wagon and its driver.

The driver tapped the mare with the tip of his whip. She snorted, exhaling great gouts of steam as the wagon wheels squelched through the butterscotch mud of a rutted farm track. The driver’s breath steamed, too, in the late afternoon chill as he rubbed his hands together. He shivered. So did the children nestled in the hay behind him. Autumn had descended upon Europe with cold-hearted glee in this first full year after the Great War, threatening still leaner times ahead.

He craned his neck to glance at the children. It would do nobody any good if they succumbed to the cold before he delivered them to the orphanage.

Every bump in the road set the smallest child to coughing. The towheaded boy of five or six years had dull eyes and sunken cheeks that spoke of hunger in the belly, and a wheeze that spoke of dampness in the lungs. He shivered, hacking himself raw each time the wagon thumped over a root or stone. Tufts of hay fluttered down from where he had stuffed his threadbare woollen shirt and trousers for warmth.

The other two children clung to each other under a pile of hay, their bones distinct under hunger-taut skin. But the gypsy blood of some distant relation had infused the siblings with a hint of olive coloring that fended off the pallor that had claimed the sickly boy. The older of the pair, a gangly boy of six or seven, wrapped his arms around his sister, trying vainly to protect her from the chill. The sloe-eyed girl hardly noticed, her dark gaze never wavering from the coughing boy.

The driver turned his attention back to the road. He’d made this journey several times, and the orphans he ferried were much the same from one trip to the next. Quiet. Frightened. Sometimes they wept. But there was something different about the gypsy girl. He shivered again.

The road wove through a dark forest of oak and ash. Acorns crunched beneath the wagon wheels. Gnarled trees grasped at the sky. The boughs creaked in the wind, as though commenting upon the passage of the wagon in some ancient, inhuman language.

The driver nudged his mare into a sharp turn at a crossroads. Soon the trees thinned out and the road skirted the edge of a wide clearing. A whitewashed three-story house and a cluster of smaller buildings on the far side of the clearing suggested the country estate of a wealthy family, or perhaps a prosperous farm untouched by war. Once upon a time, the scions of a moneyed clan had indeed taken their holidays here, but times had changed, and now this place was neither estate nor farm.

A sign suspended on two tall flagpoles arced over the crushed-gravel lane that veered for the house. In precise Gothic lettering painted upon rough-hewn birch wood, it declared that these were the grounds of the Children’s Home for Human Enlightenment.

The sign neither mentioned hope nor counseled its abandonment. But in the driver’s opinion, it should have.

Months had passed since the farm was given a new life, but the purpose of this place was unclear. Tales told of a flickering electric-blue glow in the windows at night, the pervasive whiff of ozone, muffled screams, and always—always—the loamy shit-smell of freshly turned soil. But the countless rumors did agree on one thing: Herr Doktor von Westarp paid well for healthy children.

And that was enough for the driver in these lean gray years that came tumbling from the Armistice. He had children of his own to feed at home, but the war had produced a bounty of parentless ragamuffins willing to trust anybody who promised a warm meal.

A field came into view behind the house. Row upon row of earthen mounds dotted it, tiny piles of black dirt not much larger than a sack of grain. Off in the distance a tall man in overalls heaped soil upon a new mound. Influenza, it was claimed, had ravaged the foundling home.

Ravens lined the eaves of every building, watching the workman, with inky black eyes. A few settled on the ground nearby. They picked at a mound, tugging at something under the dirt, until the workman chased them off.

The wagon creaked to a halt not far from the house. The mare snorted. The driver climbed down. He lifted the children and set them on their feet as a short balding man emerged from the house. He wore a gentleman’s tweeds under the long white coat of a tradesman, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a precisely groomed mustache.

‘Herr Doktor,’ said the driver.

‘Ja,’ said the well-dressed man. He pulled a cream-colored handkerchief from a coat pocket. It turned the color of rust as he wiped his hands clean. He nodded at the children. ‘What have you brought me this time?’

‘You’re still paying, yes?’

The doctor said nothing. He pulled the girl’s arms, testing her muscle tone and the resilience of her skin tissues. Unceremoniously and without warning he yanked up her dirt-crusted frock to cup his hand between her legs. Her brother he grabbed roughly by the jaw, pulling his mouth open to peer inside. The youngsters’ heads received the closest scrutiny. The doctor traced every contour of their skulls, muttering to himself as he did so.

Finally he looked up at the driver, still prodding and pulling at the new arrivals. ‘They look thin. Hungry.’

‘Of course they’re hungry. But they’re healthy. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

The adults haggled. The driver saw the girl step behind the doctor to give the towheaded boy a quick shove. He stumbled in the mud. The impact unleashed another volley of coughs and spasms. He rested on all fours, spittle trailing from his lips.

The doctor broke off in midsentence, his head snapping around to watch the boy. ‘What is this? That boy is ill. Look! He’s weak.’

‘It’s the weather,’ the driver mumbled. ‘Makes everyone cough.’

‘I’ll pay you for the other two, but not this one,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m not wasting my time on him.’ He waved the workman over from the field. The tall man joined the adults and children with long loping strides.

‘This one is too ill,’ said the doctor. ‘Take him.’

The workman put his hand on the sickly child’s shoulder and led him away. They disappeared behind a shed.

Money changed hands. The driver checked his horse and wagon for the return trip, eager to be away, but he kept one eye on the girl.

‘Come,’ said the doctor, beckoning once to the siblings with a hooked finger. He turned for the house. The older boy followed. His sister stayed behind, her eyes fixed on where the workman and sick boy had disappeared.

Clang. A sharp noise rang out from behind the shed, like the blade of a shovel hitting something hard, followed by the softer bump-slump as of a grain sack dropping into soft earth. A storm of black wings slapped the air as a flock of ravens took for the sky.

The gypsy girl hurried to regain her brother. The corner of her mouth twisted up in a private little smile as she took his hand.

The driver thought about that smile all the way home.

Fewer mouths meant more food to go around.

23 October 1920

St. Pancras, London, England

The promise of a cleansing frost extended west, across the Channel, where the ravens of Albion felt it keenly. They knew, with the craftiness of their kind, that the easiest path to food was to steal it from others. So they circled over the city, content to leave the hard work to the scavengers below, animal and human alike.

A group of children moved through the shadows and alleys with direction and purpose, led by a boy in a blue mackintosh. The ravens followed. From their high perches along the eaves of the surrounding houses, they watched the boy in blue lead his companions to the low brick wall around a winter garden. They watched the children shimmy over the wall. And they watched the gardener watching the children through the drapes of a second-story window.

His name was John Stephenson, and as a captain in the nascent Royal Flying Corps, he had spent the first several years of the Great War flying over enemy territory with a camera mounted beneath his Bristol F2A. That ended with a burst of Austrian anti-aircraft fire. He crashed in No-Man’s Land. After a long, agonizing ride in a horse-drawn ambulance, he awoke in a Red Cross field hospital, mostly intact but minus his left arm.

He’d disregarded the injury and served the Crown by staying with the Corps. Analyzing photographs required eyes and brains, not arms. By war’s end, he’d been coordinating the surveillance balloons and reconnaissance flights.

He’d spent years poring over blurry photographs with a jeweler’s loupe, studying bird’s-eye views of trenches, troop movements, and gun emplacements. But now he watched from above while a half dozen hooligans uprooted the winter rye. He would have flown downstairs and knocked their skulls together, but for the boy in the blue mackintosh. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, but there he was, excoriating the others to respect Stephenson’s property even as they ransacked his garden.

Odd little duckling, that one.

This wasn’t vandalism at work. It was hunger. But the rye was little more than a ground cover for keeping out winter-hardy weeds. And the beets and carrots hadn’t been in the ground long. The scavenging turned ugly.

A girl rooting through the deepest corner of the garden discovered a tomato excluded from the autumn crop because it had fallen and bruised. She beamed at the shriveled half-white mass. The largest boy in the group, a little monster with beady pig-eyes, grabbed her arm with both hands.

‘Give it,’ he said, wrenching her skin as though wringing out a towel.

She cried out, but didn’t let go of her treasure. The other children watched, transfixed in the midst of looting.

‘Give it,’ repeated the bully. The girl whimpered.

The boy in blue stepped forward. ‘Sod off,’ he said. ‘Let her go.’

‘Make me.’

The boy wasn’t small, per se, but the bully was much larger. If they tussled, the outcome was inevitable.

The others watched with silent anticipation. The girl cried. Ravens called for blood.

‘Fine.’ The boy rummaged in the soil along the wall behind a row of winter rye. Several moments passed. ‘Here,’ he said, regaining his feet. One hand he kept behind his back, but with the other he offered another tomato left over from the autumn crop. It was little more than a bag of mush inside a tough papery skin. Probably a worthy find by the standards of these children. ‘You can have this one if you let her alone.’

The bully held out one hand, but didn’t release the sniffling girl. A reddish wheal circled her forearm where he’d twisted the flesh. He wiggled his fingers. ‘Give it.’

‘All right,’ said the smaller boy. Then he lobbed the food high overhead.

The bully pushed the girl away and craned his head back, intent on catching his prize.

The first stone caught him in the throat. The second thunked against his ear as he sprawled backwards. He was down and crying before the tomato splattered in the dirt.

The smaller boy had excellent aim. He’d ended the fight before it began.

Bloody hell.

Stephenson expected the thrower to jump the bully, to press the advantage. He’d seen it in the war, the way months of hard living could alloy hunger with fear and anger, making natural the most beastly behavior. But instead the boy turned his back on the bully to check on the girl. The matter, in his mind, was settled.

Not so for the bully. Lying in the dirt, face streaked with tears and snot, he watched the thrower with something shapeless and dark churning in his eyes.

Stephenson had seen this before, too. Rage looked the same in any soul, old or young. He left the window and ran downstairs before his garden became an exhibition hall. The bully had gained his feet when Stephenson opened the door.

One of the children yelled, ‘Leg it!’

The children swarmed the low brick wall where they’d entered. Some needed a boost to get over it, including the girl. The boy who had felled the bully stayed behind, pushing the stragglers atop the wall.

Seeing this reinforced Stephenson’s initial reaction. There was something special about this boy. He was shrewd, with a profound sense of honor, and a vicious fighter, too. With proper tutelage . . .

Stephenson called out. ‘Wait! Not so fast.’

The boy turned. He watched Stephenson approach with an air of bored disinterest. He’d been caught and didn’t pretend otherwise.

‘What’s your name, lad?’

The boy’s gaze flickered between Stephenson’s eyes and the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder.