Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (7 page)

I was right to be, but in those dark days I had no choice, not really. I could have not done it, I suppose, but the thought of Jake looking at me afterwards was almost as much of a spur as the thought of how pissed Dendal would be. He’d start banging on about not living up to my potential, disappointing the Goddess and so on and so forth. That was enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies.

So I lay back in the chair and put my hand on the contraption. I shouldn’t, I knew that. I’d done my stint for the day, enough, more than enough, more than I could handle. Any more was a risk, a big one. So was not doing it. That’s what I told myself, but I knew that for the lie it was. Fuck, I wished I was the man I’d been, who could shrug off guilt and responsibility, who could pretend he was a cynic, make people believe it, too.

I held the lock of hair in my good hand and squeezed the pain out.

The whirl of it took me for long, long breaths. I was everywhere, nowhere, I was bliss and I was blessed. No fear here, not in the black, no fear of people knowing me, expecting things of me that I couldn’t deliver, expecting me to be a better person because they thought I was. No fear of fucking it all up. No skimming it, not now, not after so much in one day. I was deep in the black, swimming in it, wanting it. Shaking from a need that no one who wasn’t a mage could ever know.

The hair, I had to concentrate on the hair but it was hard when that seductive voice kept on calling me.

Come on, Rojan, sink in, swim in fearless freedom. Come on, you know you want to.

The old me would have given in, wouldn’t have given a crap about anything but losing the ever-present fear. I wasn’t that different, but I did have one thing I hadn’t before. People weren’t just relying on me, they were believing in me, too. They believed in me, so I had to.

The hair, concentrate on the hair. Even with my eyes shut, I was a blinding brightness in the black, searing my eyelids with it. A moment of vertigo, of the sensation of tumbling end over end in a void, and then the knowledge came, thundering up my arm from the hand that held the hair.

A mile to the west, a hundred yards up from where I was. Somewhere cold and airless. I pushed harder, so that I was half there and yet still half in the pain room. Achingly cold and with a smell I recognised, a lingering hint of decay over and above the familiar smell of the city. Too dark to see, so I pulled myself back some. Still dark, but not black now. A small rend-nut lamp meant I could see outlines, vague humps in the shadows.

The glint of light on metal; instruments laid out with cool precision. Scalpels, knives, weird clamp things that I didn’t even want to know what they were for. A stone slab, well scrubbed but still with dark marks engrained into it.

I knew where I was, and my stomach shrivelled. A mortuary, one I was intimately acquainted with, having seen my own dead body there or what looked like it anyway.

I turned to look down at the boy. Dead. Not just dead, but with a slash across his throat so that the spine was a hint of white showing through a now bloodless cut. The murdered boy from outside the temple, whose death had nearly caused a riot.

By the time Dench found me, I’d discovered a bit myself from the mortician’s records, or the few he’d allowed me to see without proper authorisation. A dozen murders: Jake had been right, and the details I’d got made my stomach wish it had never been born. All young boys on the cusp of puberty, except one lad in his twenties. All Downsiders, all with their throats cut back to the spine. I’d seen a few other things to make me shudder, too—mostly a certain doctor, previously in my father’s employ. The good Dr Whelar, now performer of postmortems on murder victims, once inventor of a nasty little potion that shut off magic by making everything numb. I still dreamed about the time I’d been without my magic, the way he kept poking me with that syringe. The good doctor’s motives were, at best, self-serving and the thought of him being involved, however vaguely, with these murders gave me a pain. Or maybe it was indigestion.

Dench didn’t have much more for me. We sat in a dingy bar up at the top of No-Hope and he laid out what little he had. Only two bodies had been identified and that was scant help because they’d both been missing from home when they died, one for a week, one for a month. Their families hadn’t been able to shed even a drop of light on where they might have been, or who with. Dench had some pictures but I wasn’t that keen on looking at them, because they were all done after the kids had died. He shoved them under my nose anyway.

“We all have to do things we don’t want to, Rojan.” His careworn face had an extra edge of frustration to it under the faint glow of rend-nut lamps and his usually impressive moustache looked limp.

“You’re head of the Specials. You can do what you want, to whom you want. Must be nice.”

His smile was as cynical as my own, but there was a twist of something different about him today, of some regret. He’d always cared too much for a guard of any sort. It was what made him one of the good guys in a world of bastards.

“If only that were true,” he said. “But none of us is free to do what we want. Not even Perak. He’s trying, mind, and he’s got everyone all in a twist. The older cardinals want everything to stay the same. The new ones want change, but not the sort where they lose anything, which is the sort Perak is trying to accomplish—and they don’t like that. So Perak’s going to have to work damned fucking hard if he wants to actually see any change rather than everything staying the same just with him at the helm. And then there’s all the business with the ambassadors.”

I suppressed a grin at the thought of the ructions Perak was making. Dench didn’t usually talk much and especially not about what he did, or what went on up in Top of the World, so I made the most of it. “Ministry could do with a big stir. And what business with the ambassadors?”

Dench’s moustache drooped even further and his shoulders slumped. I gathered Perak wasn’t making his life an easy one, even if Dench did agree with the sentiment of what he was trying to accomplish. “I’ll give you this; him and you have about the same level of tact and diplomacy. That is, fuck all. The Mishans are, well, frankly they’re a bunch of idiots. But there’s a lot of them, and they could overrun us if they get in. The Storad…they’re even trying to be reasonable. They’ve come up with deal after deal, and all we need to do is agree to a partnership. They’ve got coal.”

“Coal?”

“Some power source they mine, and they’re making some of their own machines now. Offered us a deal: sell us the coal so we can use that instead of you and your pain. Have to give up a few other things, though, and Perak won’t listen to reason on that, he won’t even
try
to negotiate and that’s one thing he’s got the cardinals on his side for, though not for the same reasons.
They
don’t want to lose their precious status, to be able to lord it over Outsiders and hold them in our pocket by holding all their trade.
He
thinks you’re going to get him his power back on so we won’t need to trade away any of our advantages just to stay alive.” He gave me a sideways glare. “You and that fucking generator. I pray to the Goddess it works, I really do, and in time, but I don’t think she’s listening. Perak’s put all his hopes on it. On you, for fuck’s sake! Sometimes I think he’s completely insane. Come on, tell me. Do you think it will work? Because I don’t.”

Dench never got this worked up, or not that I’d seen before, and I’d certainly never heard him say fuck half as much. The moustache bristled with a life of its own and his eyes looked like they might pop out of his head. It was quite an education.

“You’d be better off asking Dwarf, or Lise. I’ve got no idea how the thing’s supposed to work. But they tell me it will, and I believe them. In time? I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to scare up as many mages as I can, so at least we can have more power than we have now. But even if it does work, if we get the power back on, or I find enough mages that we don’t need the generator, then we’ve still got these murders and they could be enough to topple this city if we don’t stop it. It was close enough last time. Next time you might not be so lucky, and nor will anyone else.’

We looked back down at the pictures and the faces of boys who would never get any older.

Dench’s shoulders slumped again and the sharp tone left his voice. “There’s a plan behind this. Don’t know what or why, not yet, but I can feel it in my bones. Spent enough time in the Specials to know it when I see it.”

“Is this really all you could find?”

Apart from the pictures, all he had were the reports from the mortician detailing approximate age and so on, date, time and place of death and not a damned thing else.

Dench spread the pictures out across the table again, and tapped at one now bloodless throat. “This isn’t random. I’m sure of it, sure as shit stinks. Somebody targeted these boys. Don’t know why, but someone really hated the poor bastards, or hated what they represent perhaps. Downsiders, hmm?” He paused, as though an idea had just struck him. “Find the link, and you’ll find your killer. Perhaps.”

Without another word, he left to go back to Top of the World, back to keeping his sharp eye on Perak and juggling pissed-off cardinals and ambassadors. I didn’t envy him.

I looked back down at the pictures. I didn’t envy myself much either. I spent a fruitless couple of hours checking out where the boys had died, but apart from the fact they were all murdered close together, which could mean anything, all I got was rain down my neck.

In the end, I went where I’d lately taken to going when I needed to think and a sharp mind to ask all the right questions and tell me not to be such an arse. My one refuge from the world. Right then, I needed that something fierce because my head was spinning so fast I thought it might fall off.

Erlat kept a house in the Buzz, a discreet place for the wealthy gentleman, those from Over Trade who had money to spare but wanted to taste the underbelly, as it were, when they wanted some kicks but weren’t brave enough for Under proper. The Buzz provided those kicks in small, hygienic doses. It was a byword for clean whores and drugs that wouldn’t make you go blind, probably. A place more like a ghost town lately.

Erlat’s place didn’t look like much from the outside—a house like a thousand others just here. Walls dark with grime and synth, mean windows that shed a patchy light on to the walkways which were at least fairly solid. The splashes of paint were new, grouped around the door. Someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to scrub them off.

She hadn’t been here long, only a couple of months since the ’Pit had opened up, but she ran a good house and word had spread. The Buzz patrons always loved to see a few new faces—as well as parts further down.

Kersan opened the door for me and let me in with a deferential smile. The waiting room was as plush as any I’ve seen, with rich velvets draping the walls, artful drawings, mostly of nudes with modestly placed hands and a few less modest that hinted at the business Erlat ran. Scented candles worked their magic on me and my shoulders stopped their habitual hunch against the world. Erlat’s house was calm, was order, was an oasis in the shit.

“Madame is with a client,” Kersan murmured. He was one of the few who knew who this face was hiding, but he was as discreet as they come. He had to be, in his job. He probably knew the grubby secrets of half of Clouds. “I’ll inform her you’re here as soon as she’s free.”

I’d like to point out at this juncture that I am not, and never have been, a client of Erlat’s, not in the usual sense. Along with Lastri, she’s one of the few attractive—in Erlat’s case
very
attractive—women I’ve never tried to talk into bed. In this case, I try not to think about why Erlat is here, running a brothel.

It’s not my business to judge, and I try not to. I’ve nothing against ladies who work this profession. But Erlat’s from the ’Pit, and not just that: she was brought up in the pain factories. Erlat did this because it was better than all she’d previously known, because she was trained for it, and she’s happy that now she gets a choice of her clients; that, in her words, they cherish her. She once told me she knew nothing else, no other way to be. There’s something rather tragic about it, about her, that she expects so little from life and even I can’t just ignore that. Added to that I liked her and if I tried talking her into bed I’d screw it up at some point and she’d want to strangle me and, so, well, I haven’t tried.

It wasn’t long before Kersan ushered me into her room. She’d managed to salvage a fair bit of stuff from her old place: the lounger, the bed that looked like it was made for six. The bath. Ah, the bath—until I went to the ’Pit I’d never experienced the luxury. Now I was becoming addicted, especially as my own living arrangements currently meant I was sleeping on the sofa behind my desk. The best I managed there was a quick sluice in the sink, but Erlat’s bath was a thing of beauty. Shaped like a large barrel, it came up to my chest, deep enough to sink right in.

The deal, unspoken but real in my mind, was this: I got a bath and Erlat to help me untangle my thoughts, tell me what an arse I was. Afterwards, we talked and she could be herself. No pretence of seduction except when she teased, no smooth talk and practised wiggles. Instead, I did my best to make her laugh, though it always seemed to end up being at my expense. I didn’t mind—I liked to hear her laugh, to know that for a few moments she’d forgotten why she was here, why she felt she knew nothing else. Besides, she helped keep my rampant ego in check and my sanity on this side of lost. I never heard the black in Erlat’s house.

Erlat was a sight to make a grown man believe. I’m not sure in what, but she made me believe in all sorts of things. I’m not certain how old she was—come to think of it, neither was she—but she had a serene poise that came from seeing the very darkest of what life had to offer, straightening her shoulders and bearing it with grace.

The face of a young woman, maybe eighteen or twenty, with smooth skin and a mouth that seemed built to laugh, especially at me, and most especially when she was making me blush. And eyes that had seen far more than a girl her age should. There was something about Erlat that always twisted my gut a little, put me off balance. Not that she was a Downsider, or that she’d once worn brands. Not that she ran a brothel either—hell, brothels are some of my favourite places. I couldn’t be sure what it was, only that it happened.

She was dressed today in a green robe that skimmed the floor, but was split up the side to give enticing glimpses of a smooth thigh that I tried not to notice. Her dark hair was in its usual elegant coil at the nape of her neck, showing off the angles of her face to perfection. We’d gone past the stage when she thought she needed to be someone else, smooth like a precious stone, polished and impenetrable—her professional persona—with me, and I could be myself with her, too. Perhaps that was what I didn’t want to screw up by jumping her.

“Starting to smell, are we?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Stink like anything.”

Her nose wrinkled in a delicate show of faux-disgust. “I can tell. Off you go then.”

She didn’t turn away when I started to undress, but stared at me with a frankness that made me blush. Again. Erlat’s the only person alive who can make me blush.

She laughed at me, and made a show of turning her back. “You’re such a prude, Rojan. Are you sure you don’t want company in your bath?”

I got out of my clothes quick before she turned back again—a trick she tried every time, a game she liked to play with me. I slid into the water just in time. “Quite sure, thanks.”

As usual, the water felt hot enough actually to peel off skin. I dangled my bad hand over the side and shut my eyes. Or tried to. I kept seeing dead bodies, dead boys.

Erlat’s hands on my shoulders jerked me out of my thoughts. Her fingers kneaded the muscles there, forced them to loosen. She didn’t usually stay—she normally left me to my bath and we talked after. This time, though, her hands were welcome.

“What is it?” she asked. “Still mooning over a woman you hardly know, like a teenage boy? I told you, I could make you forget her. On the house, too. Oh, the things I could show you. I could ruin you for other women.”

She laughed at the way my shoulders tensed up again under her hands. She loved to tease me about the fact that I wouldn’t take her up on her offer. At least it stopped me brooding, which was, of course, exactly why she said it.

“So what is it then?”

I often wondered if Erlat didn’t have a little magic of her own. She always knew when something was on my mind, and always seemed to know the best thing to do, or say, how to tease me till I spilled it out. It was easy just to let it all out, tell her all the thoughts that were plaguing me while she soothed and kneaded. Damn, but she was good.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet. I need to concentrate on getting the power back on, but five days isn’t going to be anywhere near long enough to get the generator going, and I’m not sure I’m going to last that long. And these boys dying—we need to catch whoever’s doing it, or there won’t be a city left to save, not once everything kicks off. But I came here first because I wanted to tell you to be careful. All of you here.”