Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (10 page)

I might not be able to rummage in people’s heads like Pasha, but there are some fringe perks to being a mage. My perk was telling me I needed to stay, find out what was lurking underneath here, that it would help later. Help find whoever had done that to Lise and Dwarf. Dendal had said, and I believed him, that all of this was linked. Getting the power back on, the boys being murdered. A riot had kicked off over the last of those, and now here was Guinto soothing it all like he had magic of his own.

Or maybe that was just my excuse for a quick flirt. Guinto repelled and fascinated me in equal measure, and anything I could find out about him would perhaps help stop the creeping up my back every time I looked at him.

“Your father?”

“Guinto. Adopted, of course,” she said, probably because I looked sceptical. He was an Upsider through and through and there was no doubting she’d come from the ’Pit. “I’m one of his good deeds. Abeya.”

“Charmed, I’m sure.” See, I can be nice, too, when I want. Usually only when I’ve got a chance with a pretty woman smiling at me, true, but it’s better than nothing and it kept my mind off everything else.

I would have followed up with something better—resolutions be damned—but Guinto came and put rather a crimp on the moment. A disapproving priest will do that to flirting.

He eyed me somewhat suspiciously but with a hint of challenge, as though I was a dare, something for him to overcome. There was something else, too, something that I’d tried to pretend I hadn’t seen in his temple, in these mobsters-turned-people by his smile. Something that I couldn’t share, that seemed fake to me, and anyway was certainly crushed by these riots. Hope. As far as I’m concerned hope is a rude word.

Guinto inclined his head in a paternal fashion that irked me no end and held an arm out to indicate the walkway and stairwell. I glanced round to Jake, and she was by my elbow. Close enough to touch and worlds away, but when she nodded I grudgingly followed Guinto.

He smoothed the way through crowds of angry Downsiders in a manner that had me almost admiring him. It certainly saved my backside, if some of the looks were anything to go by. I got away with a couple of spits and a few snarled not very complimentary names that made me wonder what Pasha had to put up with every day from Upsiders. With Guinto leading, passing out blessings and feel-good like crumbs for birds and Jake watching my back, it didn’t take us long to get to his temple a few levels under the pain lab.

He led us through the main temple, though he had to stop every few paces as someone else clasped his hand, asked for a blessing, thanked him. Upsiders and Downsiders both. He glad-handed them, blessed them, smiled over them, and finally we were through to the rooms at the back.

A woman ran up to him and whispered in his ear. He thanked her before she darted off again. Blood stained the cuffs of her crisp shirt, making my heart stutter.

“Lise? Is she…”

A kindly smile that I didn’t believe for a heartbeat, and then Guinto said, “She’s steady. You can’t see her just yet, they’re still working on her, but she’s out of immediate danger. Please, let me be the gracious host.”

I’ll give him this: his room was spartan in a way Ministry’s never were. No luxurious carpets, no expensive wines in crystal decanters, no candles scented with herbs instead of the fish-guts smell of a rend-nut lamp, no grinding wealth and status into the faces of the poor bastards who lived down here. Whitewashed walls, a wooden floor polished to gleaming, a simple dark wood desk. I bet
he
didn’t argue with his desk. Not Guinto the tranquil, who looked like nothing short of the end of the world would faze him, and maybe not even that.

There’s a lot I could say about Guinto, but while I don’t believe and never will, his faith was…reassuring. The solidity of his belief was like one of the safety nets under the walkways for the fallers and jumpers; I’d never had need of it, or wanted to, but it was nice to know it was there for those that did. Of course, those nets failed pretty often. So did the priests the Ministry sent down here.

He sat behind the desk and smoothed his hands over the worn wood. “A lot of priests have sat here before me, and will after me. The Goddess is our link to each other.”

I refrained from mentioning that his predecessor in this particular temple had been so depressed at the state of things Under that he’d become a Rapture addict and thrown himself off a walkway. One of the better ones, he’d been, the ones who hadn’t a clue how bad it really was till they got here. The priest before that used to steal all the alms and spend it on working girls, and he was a better one, too, at least compared to the one before him. Didn’t seem polite to bring it up somehow. Especially given the way Abeya was looking at me.

Time for rule five. I have my own carefully honed set of rules that keep me in one piece. Rule one states mine is not to do and die, mine is to do the job and take the cash. Rule two is don’t mess with Ministry unless you like being dead. Among others, rule five states always look respectable in front of their relatives.

Given that, what Guinto actually said threw me: “I believe we may have got you here under false pretences.”

“What? Lise—”

“Is, as I said, steady and being looked after perfectly well by Pasha and one of my worshippers who is also a nurse. But this, you turning up, is a message from the Goddess, I think. You find things out, so I hear. So do I, as a priest. People tell me things, and, besides, Lise is a frequent visitor so naturally I was concerned when Jake told me what had happened. That isn’t quite what I meant, though it was a convenient excuse to talk to you without any suspicion falling on me. Dendal tells me you find people, and Jake here seems to believe in you, despite rather…contrary reports.”

“Contrary?” Actually, I kind of liked that.

Guinto’s smile set to work again, but it was lost on me. “Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen you in a temple.”

“Are you going to turn me in?”

“No, no. I believe faith should be willing, not forced. Well, we have faith aplenty,” his mouth said, though I’m pretty sure I saw a “we’ll convert you yet” in his eyes. “What we don’t have is an answer.”

“To what?” Though I had one of those sinking feelings I knew, and that it would involve me being responsible and shit. And also that I’d do it, purely because of how Jake had recommended me, how she was looking at me. Time to get that tattoo artist on standby for my forehead. Maybe it should just read “Sucker”.

“You know what started tonight’s unpleasantness? What started the unrest that led ultimately to your sister’s injuries?”

I had my own suspicions about what had happened to Lise, and it wasn’t rioters, but I let that slide for now. “The murders.”

“Indeed. I want you to find the murderer.”

“Listen, Father—”

“Please, call me Guinto. I’m Father only to those who believe.”

I wasn’t going down that road. There are limits. “Father, don’t you think that if I had any idea how to track them, I would have by now?”

The laugh was genuine, I was sure. A full-throated guffaw that made Jake frown and fiddle with her swords.

“No, I don’t,” Guinto said when his laughter subsided. “But maybe you’ll be more inclined when you hear everything.”

“Inclination isn’t the problem.” It wasn’t either—I was already trying to find out who this killer was, though I’d be damned if I’d tell Guinto that. I had other pressing things to contemplate, too, like Perak pleading with me to get the power going, quick, and the two people who could help the best were now dead or injured. Which left me with some nasty, nasty choices. Carry on as we were, which meant the Storad and the Mishans walking right on in, which didn’t appeal. Screwing as much magic out of as many mages as we could find, which might get the power going but would probably mean several lunatic mages, me included. Not much better. Or the third option, which wasn’t even an option—carry on where my father had left off and start torturing people. I felt grubby even thinking it.

Jake nudged me with the hilt of a sword and I realised Guinto had said something.

“These aren’t random murders,” he said again. “I don’t think it’s only someone taking things out on Downsiders. Someone is purposefully trying to stir up trouble. I’m sure of it.”

Which had been along the line of my own, and Dench’s, thoughts. The only question was: “Why?”

Guinto shrugged elegantly. “I’m not certain, but think on it. With each murder, even the ‘unofficial’ ones that not many Upsiders know about, with each one, unrest grows, until this one. This explosion of hatred—it was waiting to happen, and so someone
made
it happen. On purpose. Yet what does it gain anyone? Who knows? Maybe…” He shut his eyes with a pained look, and when he opened them it seemed as though he was making a confession that ate his soul. “Maybe even the Ministry, may the Goddess forgive me. I can—well, I can get into Ministry in a way you can’t, find out what people are saying that even Perak—
especially
Perak—wouldn’t know.”

Even I, with my ingrained hatred of everything Ministry, couldn’t quite see how they’d benefit from wholesale riot, and I said so. “Maybe you’re right, though I don’t know why. Besides, you’re forgetting something. I can’t find one person in a city just like that. I need something to focus on. Dench couldn’t find me anything, and without that…” I can find people I know well without a prop, but a random somebody? I need something of theirs to focus on, something to link me to them.

“We thought, well, Dendal thought—” What was it with Dendal being coherent all of a sudden? And landing me right in it, too? Just when you want him to be playing fairy hide and seek, he turns up lucid as you please. “Dendal thought maybe the bodies would give you something. I can arrange for the mortuary to let you have access. I often go to make a final blessing on those that have died untimely. I can get you in, and not many can give you that.”

Bodies. Some of them a couple of weeks old. Oh, yeah, great. Thanks, Dendal.

“I tried it,” I said. “Boy I was tracking was the one that died outside the temple.”

That was when Jake sealed my fate for me. “If you’d give us a moment?” she said.

Guinto stood with a benign smile and left.

“Lise?” was all Jake had to say. “Dwarf?”

“I don’t know, I really don’t. It could have been rioters.”

“You don’t really think that,” Jake said, and her voice made me jump, the force of it, the hate that had shone through every rioter we’d seen. She wasn’t like me, had seen and experienced more than I’ll ever want to and that means I’ll never know her, not truly. Never really understand what it is that drives her. All I can do is imagine, and sympathise. It’s not enough.

Her stance changed, became a challenge, a threat almost. Anger bubbled just underneath the ice of her tone. “Do you?”

What was it about her that made me want to tell the truth when my whole life had been lies?

“No, I don’t.” And I didn’t even think it was anyone in Ministry either, or at least officially—most of them knew nothing about the lab. Someone did, though. I blinked against the recollection of Dwarf’s face, of his throat cut back to the spine. Just like the others. Dendal was right, this was all linked together. The destruction of the generator put a whole new spin on that idea. Perhaps the earlier murders had been nothing but a smokescreen to cover this particular attack, and the destruction of the generator. Or, as Guinto said, to stir up unrest. Or, perhaps, both. Either way, I had to find out who was doing it and stop them, quick.

“He’s offering to
help
, Rojan.”

Help, from a priest. It made me shudder just to think about it, and there was something so oily about the man I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust any offer of his.

“I’ll try the bodies,” I said. And I would, try my damnedest. Because it was Lise, and she was all I had except a brother whose every waking moment was taken up with his office and trying to stay alive long enough to make a difference, and a niece I’d spilled blood for and had never even met. Because, no matter how I try to fake it, no matter the black gloss I spin on everything, Jake’s always seen through that.

I hate it when people do that.

So that was how I found myself back in the mortuary at two o’clock in the morning, freezing all my vitals bits off. I’d satisfied myself that Lise was stable—no more bleeding and she was breathing better, had a bit of colour, and Dendal had promised to sit with her. Erlat was a worry at the back of my mind, but, as Pasha had said, the flames hadn’t got as far as the Buzz. Pasha had got Dog on checking anyway and, while he’s mostly just a big kid in a grown-up body, I’d trust him to look after anything I valued. Especially Erlat, because he’d been hit with the same sort of arrow of infatuation that I had with Jake. If anyone would look after Erlat, would bust a gut to find her and make her safe, it was Dog. I hoped that he wouldn’t need to bust a gut.

Pasha joined me on my little trip because he’d said maybe he could help, though it was more like he wanted to keep an eye on me. When they thought I wasn’t looking, he and Dendal kept exchanging knowing looks.

We’d walked to the mortuary through streets that had become suddenly, eerily, silent. No lights but rend-nut oil lamps with their fetid stench wafting over us, and the occasional building that still smouldered. It hadn’t only been Guinto who had quelled it; the streets were silent, but, if you looked hard, not empty. A few limp and bloodied bodies lay in doorways and across walkways. I couldn’t tell if they were dead or not, or who’d made them that way. Some guards mopping up the last of the embers, and here and there, in the shadows, Specials. Every one of them with guns and a weird look to them, as though they’d been pushed too far and weren’t beyond pushing back. Maybe that would be enough to keep things quiet, for now.

I halted by a notice, hastily tacked to a still-standing wall. Two notices, when I looked closer in the gloom. The first was a proclamation that Perak had—according to Dendal—issued under duress. Ministry through and through, it read:

Short, and maybe it doesn’t really capture the horror, because everyone Under knew what arrested meant. It had meant a trip to the ’Pit, though that wasn’t an option now. The options left weren’t much better. Pissing off Ministry generally meant you got to spend a while looking for your head, in their “behave or else” form of law and order. Things had been slack of late, since Perak had taken over, but it was still there, the fear of it, in the back of people’s minds. They’d lashed out under pressure, and were now regretting it under the stern boot of the Specials, who answered only to the Goddess.

The second notice was Perak’s personal message, I was sure of it. It talked of calm, of tolerance, of peace. And of a reward for information leading to the murderer’s arrest. It might have been more impressive if someone hadn’t scrawled “Bollocks” over it in a thick black pen. We’d lived under Ministry for too long to believe it could change, except for the worse. Even I couldn’t, and I knew our new Archdeacon was a good man, though beset on all sides, and maybe he wouldn’t survive the experience. Few good men survived in the Ministry for long.

When we got to the mortuary, someone was waiting for us. I recognised her vaguely—I thought perhaps she’d been the nurse who’d overseen me identifying my own body. Well, it had already been identified as me. I’d just wanted to make sure the bastard was good and dead.

The mortuary itself was one of the older buildings here in Trade. Seems a funny place to put it, if you ask me, but Heights and Clouds didn’t want it—they had their crypts and mausoleums and such, all nice ways to pretty up the fact that you were dead. Yet too far down would be unseemly. Ministry’s version of the Goddess said death was a good thing, to be looked forward to. Earn enough gold stars in this crappy life, you get a perfect afterlife for free! We didn’t get mausoleums. We were lucky if we got cremated and sprinkled somewhere not too smelly. Mostly bodies got dumped in the Slump. Once the mortuary had finished with you.

So the mortuary sat precariously balanced between a raft of silent factories that would usually have made the floor shake, and the once glaring but now dark shops, boutiques and arcades that made up the other side of Trade.

Outside it was an ugly square block of a building, squashed between “Alchemy Pros” and “Gizmos and Gadgets” and a series of small shops above, select little boutiques selling everything the man of wealth and leisure could want or imagine, but they hadn’t had much to sell lately.

Inside the mortuary wasn’t much better, all blocky lines, grey walls and carpets the colour of rotting moss. Maybe mortuaries are built to be depressing. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The nurse was brightly efficient in her starched white robe, her face scrubbed and shiny, her dark hair tucked into a cap as starched as the rest of her. I have, it has to be said, a weakness for nurses. Maybe a reaction to all that starch. This one looked me up and down and raised an eyebrow and a corner of her lips. As good as a flashing sign, or it would have been, to the old me. Maybe I was getting old or something, but I returned a smile that was nothing more than polite and didn’t pursue it. It had only been hours since I’d sworn off women, and you have to make a bit of an effort. I’d already fallen off the wagon by flirting with Abeya.

Pasha showed our credentials, including a letter from Guinto which seemed to do the trick. The nurse looked the papers over and turned her interested gaze on Pasha. This job must have been really boring. I supposed she didn’t get to meet many guys who were actually alive. Pasha disappointed her even more than I had—he didn’t notice the smile beyond a quick hello and a request to see the bodies.

She huffed off down the corridor like the world’s most scorned woman, leaving Pasha and me to follow, he with a confused frown as to what he’d done to offend her.

The inside of the mortuary was colder than Namrat’s heart, so that our breath formed clouds in front of us and I began to worry for those more important parts of me, that shrunk, scaredy cat, into my trousers.

The nurse opened a door and led us into one of the rooms they used for “scientific study”. Basically that means chopping people up to find out how or why they died. Sometimes, it’s rumoured, the cause of death is being chopped up on the slab, especially if the Ministry feel you’ve been a naughty boy. Once they’re done, and for the cases of unnatural death made their report, the bodies end up being shunted out into the Slump where any rat unlucky enough to call it his home at least has some food.

A marble slab dominated the room with a stand next to it covered in all sorts of instruments of torture, or possibly morticing, mortuarying or whatever they called it. I looked them over with some trepidation. At least one appeared to be some sort of device to twist off your bollocks. I wasn’t sure I’d fancy that even after I’m dead. If the rumours were true about chopping up live naughty people, that made what I was seeing even worse. And eye-watering.

Some marble-faced drawers were set into the wall.

“Here’s one,” the nurse said, her voice as chilly as the slab itself. “I’ll get the rest sent down, those that are left anyway. I’m pretty sure some have been Slumped.”

She said it the same way I might say “I ate dinner”, with a cool detachment that shivered my shoulders, and left us with the body. A boy, again, about twelve or so. Throat slashed back to his spine, obviously a Downsider. Not the boy I’d seen earlier, the one I’d been looking for as a mage, but similar enough. A boy, as I’d been once upon a time, too far away to recall with much clarity.

We both looked, but neither of us really wanted to touch him. We had to, though, if we wanted to find out anything, and these bodies were almost all we had to go on.

Pasha’s face became a grimace as he twisted his finger. A gasp, a wet crack. I shut my eyes, wished I could leave this, go home, dammit. Home to women and warmth and booze and Glow lights and not knowing where they came from. I squeezed my poor fist, and fought off the voice, the siren call.

Tricky this. My two talents, my Major and Minor, were rearranging things and finding things, or more specifically people. My Major I was only just coming to grips with—rearranging my face for example, or rearranging where I was. It got Dendal quite excited, the possibilities, but I was restricted by the way it made me throw up a lot when I tried anything too ambitious. Also by the fact that the more I used it, the more that song sang in my head.

Finding people was both my Minor and a lot easier. It didn’t take so much pain, I didn’t throw up on my boots quite as often, and it was more useful in earning money. A city this size, with the Ministry in charge, people go missing every day. Sometimes it’s not even the Ministry making them disappear—runaways, men with warrants for their arrest, or merely glad to be away from the missus, so glad they stayed away, that sort of thing. Nothing too strenuous, or dangerous. I like my arse where it is.

Of course things had got more complicated lately, not to mention risky, but finding people I could do. We’d decided our best bet on finding the murderer was to figure out who the victims had been—most of them were unidentified and Dench had made little progress on that. But we had an edge that he hadn’t. We had magic, and once we knew who they were, maybe it would become clear why them instead of any number of other Downsiders. Why these ones might give us a who. There had to be a link between them and I could hazard a few guesses, but we needed to
know
because hazardous guesses don’t get you very far in finding a murderer unless you’re very lucky.

Yeah, this was a long shot, but it was better than the alternative, which was me trying to find the murderer using something intimately connected to him—the dead body itself—as a prop. Seeing how close and personal I need to be to my props, I really didn’t fancy that, especially as I figured it had as much chance of working as me turning into a priest.

Pasha did his thing, but the frown gave away the fact that nothing much was happening. We hadn’t really expected it would. Dead bodies aren’t known for thinking many thoughts for Pasha to overhear.

By the boy’s feet was a ragged bag, his personal effects, I assumed. I opened it up and had a rummage. The boy hadn’t had much on him, or maybe he’d been rolled after he’d been killed. A tattered pair of trousers, much patched and stained. Same with the shirt, and a pair of shoes that had seen better days. Nothing in the pockets. The only item I thought might do was a chain, an old necklace with something green hanging off it. A cheapjack thing it was, probably worth less than my spit, but maybe I could use it.

The trouble was anything of his would only tell me where
he
was. Useless. I was hoping, which is usually as helpful as a piss into the wind, that someone had given him the necklace. A mother, brother, someone who would know who he’d been.

It took four bodies, I’d thrown up twice, had long since decided the floor was quite comfortable if you ignored the cold and, hey, who really
needs
two working hands, before I got anything useful. The sure and certain knowledge that the ring in my hand was connected somehow, some way, with a dank box of a room nine hundred yards down, half a mile south. Slap bang on the border of No-Hope and Boundary, which was even worse. I could hear a woman weeping, quietly, as though not to disturb anyone. Such a sad and lonely sound that whispered away from me as the black came calling.

I let the ring drop from my hand and opened my eyes, concentrating on not retching up what little was left in my stomach.
So
glad I hadn’t bothered with dinner. I tried to get up, and Pasha had to help me. My hand was one big throbbing ache, a lure for the black, and even though I wasn’t casting now, it still sang to me, called me through my bones.

Pasha slapped me across the brain with an internal
Hah!
and my eyes came back into focus. “Don’t listen to it. Don’t,” he said aloud.

“No, no, all right.” My voice sounded disjointed, as though I wasn’t really speaking. As though I wasn’t really present. I looked down at my hand, expecting to see I was half here and half there, in that room with the weeping woman, that I’d begun rearranging things without noticing, but I looked pretty solid. More than could be said for my brain. Just fall in, that’s all, just fall in and it will all go away, all your fears, all this responsibility, all these people depending on you will disappear…

I staggered with the force of it, the desperate want.

“Stop it!” Pasha’s voice whipped in my ears and in my head. When I looked at him, his monkey face was panicked. “Stop, please. You know it’s not the answer. And if you fall in—I’m not sure I can get you out.”

His hand shook on my shoulder and we stared at each other. He’d never mentioned it since, and neither had I, hadn’t even wanted to think about it, how I’d followed him into his black, into his own personal heaven and hell. How I’d brought him back, for her. He’d tried to thank me once and I’d told him to shut up. I’d saved him, condemned a whole city for her, for Jake and for a small girl who I’d still not met, my own niece who like most everyone else thought I was dead. Perak said she prayed to the Goddess every night to keep me safe in heaven, laid flowers at the feet of the saints and martyrs for me, and that ate at me in ways I can’t even begin to describe.

“Rojan—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I didn’t want to hear it, any of it. He’d been rummaging in my thoughts, I knew that now, but I didn’t want to talk about it. All the while it was in my own head I could shut it out, pretend it wasn’t there. I’d killed us all as sure as if I’d put a gun to each and every head in the city, and a small girl prayed that I was safe in heaven.