Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (5 page)

“What is it?”

Green is what it was. A virulent green that seemed unnatural. Nothing that colour should ever be injected into a person, that’s what I was thinking.

Lise flashed a grin, always most alive when talking about her work. She launched into a long and complicated explanation, but I only understood half the words. Something about a re-synthesis of an existing organic compound that might be valuable as an…an…nope, can’t remember or pronounce what she said. There were other words, like valency and allotropy and something that sounded like it had too many Xs and Zs in it. Her voice trailed off at my blank stare.

“Pretend I’m utterly ignorant of all forms of alchemy,” I said. “You won’t have to pretend very hard.”

A delicate frown probably revealed that she didn’t think anyone should be ignorant of alchemy, but she tried anyway. “The solution Doctor Whelar injected you with, that made you numb.”

“You can keep it away from me.” I still had nightmares about that, about being totally powerless, about being
normal
. Well, normal-ish, in that I couldn’t work any magic when I couldn’t feel any pain.

Lise sighed. “No, this isn’t it. It’s what I made from it. A very interesting compound, and it has lots of—” She gave me a despairing look and skipped the long words. “It has lots of different ways of being put together, and each one does something a little different.”

I glared at the green. “All right. What does this one do?”

Her turn to glare at the green. “I don’t know. I managed to test all the others, on myself. Nothing very spectacular though at least one might be helpful to the doctors at the hospital. But this one, I don’t know. I tried it and it didn’t do anything.”

“You injected it into yourself?” I tried not to come over all big brother, because I’ve never been comfortable with the job, the prospects or pay. Or indignant younger siblings.

“I
did
manage to live to fifteen without you. Anyway, I tried it on Dwarf first, and I learnt from you how to bugger myself up.”

What was wrong with them that they had to test things on themselves? It wasn’t the first time I’d caught them out either. But as Lise had so artfully reminded me, she was technically almost an adult, and I wasn’t any better myself either. I gave in with as much grace as I could muster. “So what’s the problem?”

“Would looking at it under the microscope help you understand? It’s a really good one, one of Dwarf’s own. You can see
everything
.”

I was perturbed by the way she blushed when she said Dwarf’s name, but figured it had to be some weird crush thing. I mean, he looks like a doll that’s been buried for ten years then dug up and had experiments run on it. With scalpels and clamps. Don’t get me wrong, man’s a genius. A twisted genius: give him anything mechanical and there’s no better. Given Lise’s own talents, that expertise had to be the source of the blush.

As all this flashed through my mind, Lise glared at me again. Although we didn’t share the same mother, it was like being ten again and figuring out just when it was best to stop what you were thinking before you got a ding round the back of the head with a spoon. I figure that look is universal among women. I decided that discretion was the better part of not getting a ding round the back of the head, and said, “I don’t think even one of Dwarf’s microscopes would help.”

She raised her eyes to heaven and waved her hands as though asking the Goddess for some damned help, please. There’s something about Lise that always makes me feel unutterably dense. Maybe it’s the scare factor of her brains, or possibly it’s all that puberty going on. I tried a self-deprecating grin, but it didn’t seem to help.

“Look, it’s really easy,” she said. “You know we’ve been running a few tests on you all? Trying to quantify magic? I mean, the possibilities are—All right, don’t look at me like that. We need to know how to make the interface with the generator work properly. You, Pasha, Taban, Dendal, you’ve all given us some blood to test. And under the microscope, this,” she waved the green tube, “shows changes when introduced to your mage blood, but not to mine or Dwarf’s not-mage blood.”

“Is this going to end in ‘And so I want you to inject it into yourself’? Because the answer is ‘Not on your fucking life’.”

I’ll give this to my sister—she has a really impressive pout.

“But we need to get the generator going, and soon. Yesterday would be good, you don’t need me to tell you that. And this could be the answer to the interface problem.”

I won’t bore you with the details of the not-really-an-argument that followed. Suffice to say, it ended with Lise looking smug and me with a vial in my pocket along with a carefully wrapped syringe and a promise to try it, before I headed to the pain lab.

The problem was, Lise was right. The generator was like my pulse pistol only on a much grander scale. It would take magic, magnify it, and pulse it out to all the machines of Trade, power up Glow lights, you name it. With an added twist—Lise and Dwarf had worked out how to turn magic into electricity, and they reckoned electricity could do things even magic couldn’t. Even if they were wrong, with that electricity we could power everything—Trade, carriages, lights, heat, with the minimum of magic, and pain, to power the generator/magnifier/transformer/whatever you want to call it. Less pain was the thing, though. An idea which I found very appealing.

Until that happy day came, we had this. Two chairs facing each other. A Glow tube attached to the back of each one on some sort of rig that looked like someone had had a lunatic dream about rivets and robot giraffes and then made the dream a reality. It might look weird but the rig made the Glow tubes easy to swap out when they got full. On one arm of each chair was a gruesome-looking mechanism, a version of the improved pulse pistol that would take our pain, magnify it and dump it into the Glow tubes. A first aid box for afterwards. My hand was never going to get any better till Dwarf and Lise got that generator working.

“All right, Allit, you sit here.” Dwarf got him settled on a crate, and came to plug in me and Pasha. “It’s not pretty, but you need to see how it’s done. All right?”

I settled back in the chair, my stomach in all kinds of knots. Not pretty was putting it mildly. Painful, stupid, dangerous, sickening, the road to madness, that’s what it was. One of us was going to fall into the black, sooner rather than later, because it was wearing us down, sloughing off parts of what held us together, grating off chips of sanity. Well, that’s how it felt to me, though Pasha and the others seemed to be holding up okay. But I felt better if I imagined it wasn’t just me, and I had to do it.

I’d taken away the power, and, until we could get Lise’s generator working, I had to do something or a load of Downsiders would have come up out of the ’Pit just in time to starve with everyone else. Pasha did this because he knew it was the right thing to do, because he was that kind of guy. I was doing it because guilt and the consequences of being responsible for the first time in my life were eating a hole in me and it was this or drink myself stupid. Plus, there was this lady who I wanted to think I was good and noble.

Pasha and I settled into the chairs and shut our eyes—we’d learnt early on that watching someone else go through substantial amounts of pain only makes it worse. Dwarf clipped us in, one of his cables snaking from a holster round our arms to the Glow tube at our backs. I took a deep breath and squeezed my bad hand into a fist. Not-quite-healed breaks ground against each other, pinged and growled under my scarred skin. Magic was everywhere, all in my brain, singing across my skin, lighting up my nerves like fire. It was beautiful, terrifying, maddening and fucking glorious. A dim noise penetrated, and I recognised my own voice as I groaned the pain out of me. Recognised too the wet crack as Pasha dislocated another finger, the strangled grunt as he socketed it back home again.

The light of the Glow grew brighter, seared my eyes but I barely saw it. The black was coming for me, had grown these last weeks.

Come on Rojan
, it whispered.
Come on, fall in, let go, let yourself become me
. I wanted to, oh I did.
You want me, you need me
. The black was everything you feared or hated wiped out. The black was cool, was comfort, company for the alone, fearless for the fearful, was excruciating bliss. Mages had lost whole lives in there.

The dark edges of it flapped at the corner of my mind, always closer, every day, making me a little mad even when I wasn’t using my magic. I had tried the black once, and liked it, so why not come again? Why not stay this time?

I launched myself out of the chair with a yell, dragged the mechanism off my arm, threw it on the floor and stamped on it. A cog, probably something vital, whizzed off into a corner and landed with a tinkle. It was only a pair of hands dragging me back and the look on Dwarf’s face, as though I’d killed one of his children, that stopped me pounding it into dust.

My heart staggered back to something like a normal rhythm and Pasha let go of my arms. Allit sat in wide-eyed shock on the crate, a glass of something sweet and fizzy forgotten in one hand.

“It’s good,” Pasha said to him, when I couldn’t speak. “And it’s not so good. The pain is only the start, but it’s not the pain that’s the problem, not really. Our pain is all that’s keeping Mahala running, all that’s between us and starvation. It’s all we’ve got, all anyone has got, and we can’t even tell anyone. You can imagine how that would go down. But all the same…it’s like nothing else, ever. It’s like standing on Top of the World and seeing everything spread below you, like basking in the glow of the Goddess’s smile. But while it feels like her smile, it’s on Namrat’s face. It will take you if you let it, take you and keep you, and
that’s
the worst. Because there are times you’ll want it to. You think you’re up to it?”

Allit watched the Glow globes, the pulse and power of them in a city with no power, no nothing. Except this. Glow to run some of the factories, to make things to trade, to get us all food to eat. Something rather than nothing. Grey mush to eat rather than starve. Do something that was an abomination, or so he’d have been taught by the priests, do the unholy to save the city.

That’s how it always starts, isn’t it? People doing what goes against the grain because they think they’re doing the right thing. That’s how my father started Downside, using others’ pain to save the city. But I wasn’t going to be like him. I wasn’t, I couldn’t. I might be, and that was the thought that was haunting me. That was what the black was hanging on to, using it to try to drag me in—not that we were doing the unholy, that we were abominations in the eyes of the Goddess. Hell no, because I don’t care what she sees. No, it was the fear that I’d be like him. That I’d fuck it all up even worse than I already had, that I was responsible for this mess in the first place. I told myself to shut the fuck up, I wasn’t helping. It worked. For a bit.

Allit nodded, a determined little thing, and held out his hand.

“Not yet.” Pasha laughed. I envied him that sound, that feeling. “Not yet. First you have to see what you can do.”

Pasha and Dwarf took Allit off to put him through the exercises Pasha had thought up. Didn’t rate them myself, but you never knew. They left me, on purpose I felt, with the pain room.

I stared at the machine for a while, hating it, and hating more that I wanted to get back on it. Not because I had a city to get back up and running, but because I wanted to see the black again. I was losing my mind quite clearly, maybe had already lost it.

Yet people were relying on me, whether they knew it or not. Relying on the little power that we managed to pump out, the meagre trade goods that were being produced and bartered with our lurking neighbour countries for food. I had to pull myself together when all I really wanted to do was fall apart, fall into the black where no one relied on me and I was free of the fear.

All in all, I was glad when the door opened and Jake came in, trailing Dog, as always, to meet Pasha after the pain room because she couldn’t bear to watch. Her in the room took my mind off my mind and on to other bodily parts.

I’m a sucker for women, all of them. Tall, short, skinny, plump, more than plump, I don’t mind. It’s not what they look like, as such, though I like a pretty face as much as the next guy. Unless the next guy is Dwarf, who takes what he can get. No, it’s the way they move that gets me every time, and Jake had such a way of moving, all artless grace as if she oiled her muscles, wrapped up in snug and slippery leather topped today with a silk shirt that clung to all the best places that it dried up all the spittle in my mouth every time. I’d seen her fight like a tiger, like Namrat himself. She fought as though every moment was her last, that maybe she wanted it to be. Her eyes were the giveaway, haunted still by all she’d been through, but there was something strong in there, something that could never be broken, not truly, though some had tried and left their mark.

I would rather die than say that, which led me to the utterly banal, ‘Hello.’ All charm, that’s me.

The door opening again saved me from making a total arse of myself, although when two Specials came through it was a toss-up which would be worse, making an arse of myself or having my arse handed to me. They weren’t all pleased about mages being legal.

Dog looked a little bewildered, which wasn’t unusual, but he followed Jake’s lead as she backed up to a wall, wary on the instant, each hand dropping to a sword that she knew how to use all too well. Her gaze flicked to me and away again and I was acutely aware she was wishing I was Pasha, which did my ego no good whatsoever.

Perak’s entrance calmed me—a bit. At least he didn’t have his little entourage of cardinals this time but he had that faraway look in his eyes, the one that generally meant I was going to get dropped in the shit and have to take responsibility. I’d rather take the Specials.

He smiled at me, perhaps not even noticing how I looked, and wandered over to the generator. “Will it be long, do you think?”