Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (4 page)

“He’s on his own there. What are the chances of me getting up that far?”

“Slim to bugger all. I’ll keep my eye on Perak, but if I do that I can’t be down here too.”

“So you want me to…?”

“Keep your eyes and ears open, that’s all. Let me know if anything strikes you, because if we don’t catch whoever it is, the city is in big trouble. And keep up with the lab, most importantly. Getting the power back on would go a long way to solving our problems, even if Ministry is busy denying you exist or what you’re doing. We’re relying on you.”

Four words to strike dread into my heart.

Two of the Specials came with a blanket and covered up the boy, more gently than might be expected. One murmured a prayer over him, picked him up and carried him to the carriage.

Father Guinto met him on the way and more prayers followed, a blessing. For a Downside child, from a member, however lowly, of the Ministry. I’d never thought I’d see the day.

“How did he get to be a priest?” I muttered.

“Because he’s good at it. But mainly, I suspect, because he didn’t tell anyone that actually he’s a good man till after he got ordained.”

For a man of the Goddess, sometimes Dench is as cynical as me.

Dwarf had come up in the world since the ’Pit had gone, fairly literally. Instead of a crappy little lock-up under Trade where the thump of the factories used to rattle your bones to dust, he had a nice, clean lab to work in that was almost, but not quite, in Heights. Or it had been clean, until he’d moved in. Dwarf couldn’t work unless he had chaos around him. He said it aided creativity. I was more of the opinion that he was just a messy bastard, but I couldn’t fault his results.

We’d left Jake and Erlat helping Guinto at the temple with Dog playing bodyguard, like Jake needed one. Me, Pasha and the boy manoeuvred our way round piles of sulphuric-smelling crates, bottles of mineral oil, bits of cog, bundles of cobbled together wires hanging from the ceiling so I had to duck into Dwarf’s home from home.

The Ministry, thanks to the fact that the new Archdeacon was the brother of the old, dead me, and the fact that Dwarf was the one person who could work out how to get the factories running and the lights on, had given him everything he could have asked for.

Except one thing: a power source. A long time ago, pain-mages ran Trade, the machines, the lights, everything. It was all power drained from their magic, their pain. But Ministry had decided pain-mages were messy, and dangerous, what with the number that went bananas when the black got them, generally taking a portion of the city as they went. A particularly nasty altercation between two magical rivals had almost toppled the whole place when an area under Trade was blasted into bits. The Ministry said enough was enough, banned mages and rebuilt some of the area, calling it Hope City. A name which had lasted all of about a day, when the more familiar No-Hope-Shitty had replaced it.

Instead of mages and their pain magic, the alchemists had come up with synth. Only synth had caused an epidemic which had decimated entire parts of the city. Even now, years later, people still died of the synthtox.

So, panic in the Ministry. They’d brought in Glow, a supposedly side-effect-free power source. It had worked pretty good, too. Right up until I destroyed it all. Every last drop. I told you I was good at pissing people off, didn’t I? Well, Glow was that same pain magic. Only, to get the amount they needed it wasn’t the mages who were supplying the pain.

I don’t think I need spell it out any more plainly, and I’d rather not, because then I’d have to remember what that looked like. Anyway, so I screwed an entire city to stop it, to stop them, and get the ’Pit opened so the Downsiders could leave. Now we had bugger all power, not a lot of food and not much to trade to get food, because the factories had shut down without Glow. Long story short, we were fucked.

This is where Dwarf came in, and me and Pasha and, we hoped, our new little friend would, too. Dendal helped out, when we could get him in this reality. Thing was, pain-mages had been illegal till a few weeks before, on, well, pain of death. Now they needed us and our magic before everyone starved. Unofficially, of course. We might have been legal, technically, but Ministry hadn’t yet seen fit to tell everyone what we were doing, because most of them didn’t know this place existed and Perak was at pains to keep it that way. If the population—never mind most of Ministry—had known what we were up to, using that same old pain, the lab would have been so many little bits of metal. It didn’t matter that it was our pain we were using, the Downsiders had nervous tics at the thought that someone might use someone else’s pain, and the Upsiders had spent the last twenty years being told we were against the Goddess and should be handed over to the guards if found.

And the Ministry…the Ministry hated us and always had. We were a threat to their power, I think that was the problem. Even Perak couldn’t do much about that—the Ministry is factions within factions against factions, but he was working on it. If we could come up with enough Glow to get Trade running properly, he reckoned he could get more than half the cardinals on his side. At least
nominally
on his side. Until we could do that, though, we were mostly secret, for the good of our health.

Frankly, given all this I thought Dendal was nuts to advertise we were mages, but then again he’s pretty nuts all over.

Dwarf hunched under a precious Glow lamp, tinkering with something mechanical. Or electrical. I couldn’t quite grasp the difference. Not my field of expertise. Dwarf’s sausage fingers manoeuvred something with a precise delicacy and he sat back with a sigh.

He’s well named, is Dwarf. Short and squat, with a mobile, rubbery sort of face that could give trolls nightmares. An absolute genius with anything mechanical and, lately, with newly discovered electricity, too.

“Rojan!” he said when he looked up, and then his face took on the shamed scrunch of a loved-to-death stuffed bear. “Er, welcome, Maki. Is he the one?”

Pasha nudged the boy forward. The look of Dwarf made him tense—I’d seen it do that to grown men, given the weird stamp of his face, but the boy held up well.

“One what?” The boy looked set to run, every muscle stretched and ready, his eyes darting to and fro, looking for escape.

Dwarf got down off his high stool with the help of a pair of crutches—his legs had been fairly well mangled about the time I fucked my hand—and was eye to eye with a twelve-year-old boy. “You know you’re special, don’t you, boy? You can do things others can’t.”

The boy tried to back up, but Pasha caught him in gentle hands.

“It’s all right,” Dwarf said. This might have gone across better if he hadn’t looked so much like a gargoyle anticipating its next meal. “Mages are legal now. You don’t have to hide.”

The boy tried to run then, and I caught a glimpse of tears on his cheeks. Pasha held him by one shoulder and, despite all the knee and elbow action, he went nowhere.

Dwarf climbed back onto his high stool. “A Downsider, yes? We haven’t recruited any of them yet. Don’t doubt they’d see it differently, what with what the mages did to them.” He looked back at me. “Where’d you find him?”

“A hospital tipped us off.” I neglected to mention that the nurse in question had been one of the ladies who’d whacked me one. “No family, or, if he has, he wouldn’t tell the nurse.”

“And about to get the crap kicked out of him when he was found.” Pasha frowned, making him more monkey-like than ever. “Not the first. Or the last.”

“Mages, or Downsiders?” Dwarf asked.

“Both.”

“I’m not a mage, I’m not!” The boy stood, pink and indignant, to cover his fear.

“So how did you fire my pulse pistol then? Nice job, by the way, Dwarf. Took out every guy in front of him. Very handy, considering.”

“It’s a gun, anyone can use them. Some of the guards do. Why wouldn’t I be able to fire it?” The words shot out of the boy like belligerent bullets.

I felt sorry for him then. He stood straight, his eyes too big for his scrawny, too-pale face, but he had a cocky way about him that made me grin. Made me think other things, too, such as how that cockiness was probably covering up a boatload of fear.

I pulled out the pulse pistol and handed it to Dwarf. “Shoot me.”

His face rolled up into a grotesque grin. “My pleasure.”

Dwarf made a show of holding it to my temple before he pulled the trigger with a theatrical swoosh while the boy’s eyes and mouth competed to see which could be rounder. The razor swung out and sliced Dwarf’s thumb, but instead of a jolt of juice that ended with me slumped on the floor all that happened was a dry click, and Dwarf swore and sucked his now bleeding thumb.

For a moment I thought the boy was going to piss himself, but he got under control quick enough and eyed the pistol eagerly. “Why couldn’t he fire it? Why aren’t you on the floor?”

I pulled out my more conventional gun—the one I prefer using because, although it’s only got one shot and has a habit of misfiring at awkward moments, the person it hurts is not me.

“This is what you’ve seen the guards carrying. It uses black powder and a spark to fire a bullet out. This one,” I swapped with Dwarf, “doesn’t use black powder. What powers it is magic and if, like Dwarf, you don’t have any magical power it won’t do anything but cut your thumb. If you do, it takes the pain and magnifies it, concentrates it into one pulse. You didn’t kill those men, but you did knock them out long enough for us to get out. And, incidentally, let me know I’d found the right boy. Like it or not, you’re a pain-mage. How you use it, well, that’s up to you. You don’t have to be like
them
.” Code for “you don’t have to be a murderous torturing bastard”.

He nodded thoughtfully and stared at the pulse pistol for a good while before he looked up at me. “So you’re a mage? What about him?” He nodded at Pasha.

“Him too.”

“Did either of you…you know. In the ’Pit?”

“I didn’t even know the ’Pit had anyone in it until a couple of months ago. Ministry kept it all locked up tight. We thought it was infected with synth, so everyone stayed away.”

The eyes grew wary again as he regarded Pasha. “He’s from Downside, though. They took my sister.”

Pasha could hardly bear to look at him, at any of us, as he pushed up one sleeve. There in the tender flesh under the thumb a mark had been burnt into his skin. A brand, to say which mage had once owned him. A mark that shamed him—the Ministry had set about powerful rumours Downside about the branded, so that any escapees would be brought right back, or killed. “Little Whores” the rest of the Downsiders had called them, not realising then, and many still didn’t, no matter the truth of it.

So the brand was a mark that shamed him, made him a target even more than he already was, and one that made Pasha proud, too—that the mages had tried to get him to join them and he couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, do what they wanted: torture people for power, and the pleasure some of the mages got from it as well.

Luckily, the boy didn’t land on the disgust and revulsion side of the fence, but on the pity.

“My sister,” he said, awestruck. “Her name was Janny.”

Pasha’s smile twisted and he shook his head. “There were so many, and so many forgot their names. Were made to forget them.”

A subject bitter to Pasha’s heart—while Jake had never known any other name, Pasha had been older when they’d taken him, and the circumstances different. He had a family Upside, somewhere, and all he needed to do was remember his name, their names, to maybe win back something like a normal past. He’d spent a long time with Dendal trying to recall that name in the face of other memories that promised punishment should he manage it. “I’m sorry.”

The boy nodded again, blinked back tears and took a deep breath. I was starting to like him, especially when he said, “All right. Why did you bring me here, then?”

Dwarf clapped his hands and grinned. “Excellent! You’re going to help feed the city, light the city—you’re going to
save
the city. You’ll be a hero and all the girls will love you, which is the only reason R—” He caught himself in time. “The only reason these two do it, for the women. It’s probably best to show you. Come on, come on.” Dwarf clattered off on his crutches.

Looking somewhat bemused, and I can’t say I blamed him, the boy let us lead him through to another area, just as dimly lit. On the way, Pasha managed to get a name out of him—Allit.

Dwarf called it his experimental lab. Me and Pasha and the couple of other mages we’d managed to find called it the pain room. Stacks of Glow tubes ranged along one wall, making Allit flinch. I could well imagine why, but we weren’t going to torture anyone to fill them. Anyone except ourselves.

We made our way past the bulk of what Dwarf and his assistant Lise assured me would be a fully working electricity generator/magic enhancer/thing any day now. He’d been saying that for weeks, and Lise glanced up from where she was tinkering with a load of cables right in the guts of the thing. A flash of a smile and she burrowed her way back in—like Dwarf she was only happy when tinkering. I really wished they’d stop the tinkering and get on with it.

Lise wasn’t quite sixteen, but a genius alchemist and one of the few people in the city to have a handle on this new electricity. She was also my half-sister—a recent discovery, and I didn’t know her at all, it felt like.

I stopped listening to Dwarf’s little lecture-cum-tour of the lab and went to watch as Lise reached inside the machine with a screwdriver.

“Do you think you can get it working soon?” I asked.

She glanced up at me and away. “I hope so. It’s getting pretty bad out there. A riot down by one of the temples, I heard. They brought the Specials in.”

I didn’t know what else to say; what
do
you say to a half-sister you only recently met? Especially when you killed your shared father. “Oops” doesn’t really cover it. I kept trying, though, and it kept getting easier, week by week. I was starting to like having a family again, people to care about.

She tinkered around a bit more then stood back. “We could try it now. You game?”

“I—not right now.” My whole body seemed to throb, starting at my hand and echoing out to the rest of me and I hadn’t even given my juice for the day yet. “Maybe after the pain room. It’s ready, then?”

She shoved her hands in her pockets and frowned at all the dials like they were trying to thwart her. Funny how pretty she looked like that, her dark hair flopping over her eyes and what my ma used to call a “donkey” line between her eyebrows. People say we look alike, me and Lise—we both take after our father—but I hope I’m never pretty.

“It’s not quite right,” she said. “The interface is out of whack. But I’ll get it, don’t you worry.”

Stubborn determination was something of a family trait, hence that “donkey” line. Makes us Goddess-awful to live with.

Lise pulled something out of her pocket and stared at it as if she couldn’t remember putting it there, before her face cleared and she held it out for me to take. “Oh. Yes. I made this for you.”

A glass tube with a stopper on one end. It looked suspiciously like it should have been attached to a syringe and for various reasons I have come to hate syringes with a single-minded passion some people reserve for their in-laws. I didn’t take it, but, given Lise’s expertise with alchemy, I was intrigued. As long as it didn’t get jabbed into me.