Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (20 page)

From here I could just make out where the Spine twisted through the concrete clouds and on, up to the rarest heights of the pinnacle that was Top of the World. Home of the highest of the Ministry, placed where they could look down on us mere grubby-souled mortals.

I looked back down and knew that for the mistake it was instantly. Down was a long, long way. I held on to a friendly wall. Me and heights don’t mix. We are not friends. We ignore each other when possible. It’s not the height that worries me exactly, it’s the splat at the bottom. The thought of going higher brought me out in a sweat, but higher was where I needed to be. What I also needed was someone who knew their way around.

Or Pasha perhaps, with his knack of rummaging in people’s brains. Which was handy, because, when I looked down, he was glaring back up at me. I held on to the wall, tried not to think about all the space underneath and waited for him to catch up.

He got to where I was and the glare dissolved into gawping. He was a Downsider, or had been for most of his life. The sky was a distant memory for him if he’d ever seen it other than a few glimpses since the ’Pit had gone, and the time he said he’d been Outside. I let him stare for a good while, watched him turn his face up to the sun with a tentative smile, before he shaded his eyes and stared at the grey smudge of the mountains.

“I wish I was there,” he said at last, and I remembered his talk of being Outside, of having seen it. I’d scoffed at it at the time but now I wasn’t so sure.

I was still pretty peeved about our row earlier—Pasha always made me look at myself hard and I never like what I see when I do that—but I needed him and he knew it. For more than just the ability to rummage in heads, and maybe he knew that, too. I hoped not. Anyway, I kept my voice level, and my peeves to myself.

Besides, I really wanted to know. “What’s it like out there?”

He let out a little gusting breath that seemed to ache and turned away reluctantly as though turning away from the Goddess’s smile. “Not shit.”

He moved on, up, and I followed. Neither of us spoke about where we were going—I reckon we both knew the likely outcome and it wasn’t kittens and sunbeams. We didn’t speak about our words earlier either. We both knew we were never going to agree on a lot of things. But he was here and I was grateful not to be alone.

“I was hoping you could be a little more eloquent,” I said and was rewarded with a hint of a smile.

“The sun is free there.” The smile grew bitter. “People are free there. No one cares what colour your skin is, what your accent is, what…what brands you have or if you use magic. No one cares about that.”

The wistful way he said it, the way he left the important part unsaid—and here they do care—gummed up the words in my mouth. What to say to that? “I don’t care either. And your problem is you care too much.”

His gaze slid sideways to me, and there, mousy little Pasha with his monkey grin was back. “Your problem, too. Only difference is I don’t pretend otherwise by behaving like a prick.”

Ouch. That shot hit home. Luckily, he didn’t dwell on it.

“So, where do we need to get to?”

I stopped and looked up, and up again. “Up there, I reckon. That’s where Abeya is.”

We both stared at Top of the World for a moment. A tall, impossibly slender spire that arched out over the city. All the better to see our sins.

Perak would be negotiating with Ministry, with Storad and Mishans, or should be, only…only if he was, why couldn’t Dendal find him? He should be, was, I hoped, trying to make everything right somehow, though I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that in Ministry no one man could do everything, could wield all the power, even if he was Archdeacon.

But both our neighbours were waiting for us to make a wrong move, waiting for us to fail utterly.

“Think you can get us in?” Pasha asked.

“You mind having your face rearranged a bit?”

“No. You use my juice, though. No falling in. I couldn’t swear I’d be able to get you out again.” He grinned his monkey grin again, but it had a hard edge to it. “Or that I’d want to. I’ve seen how you look at Jake.”

And seen inside my head, too, at least once. Because it was Pasha, because I liked the little sod and not
just
because he’d know if I was lying, I told the truth. “I look, it’s true. Hell, I’d have to be dead not to. But that’s all.”

I could have said more, like if she was with anyone else I’d have given it a damn good try, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to Pasha, to strip him of the one thing that was his, truly. But if I’d have let that slip, well, I have this reputation as a hard-hearted bastard to keep up.

He nodded, as though he guessed what I hadn’t said. “You aren’t quite the prick you make yourself out to be, are you?”

“Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Good. Why did you follow me, anyway? You could have stayed down there, fed the tubes like we should be doing right now. Could have stayed with Jake, and stayed safe because up there—it’s Ministry at its greatest power. Perak’s trying but…” And at that point I wondered what the fuck I was doing trying this. Don’t mess with Ministry, it’s bad for your health. Rule two. I had magic to be making, Glow to produce, a sister lying in what was almost a hospital bed. Lies to tell to women. I didn’t need this shit. “Dendal can’t find Perak, can’t contact him.”

Pasha didn’t look at me when he answered. He seemed entranced by the spire of Top of the World, as though wondering how something so slender could support the palace that was visible on the platform at the top. “I came because I need to show you it isn’t Guinto, that there are some priests who are good, that there’s some part of Ministry that is capable of that. I have to believe that or go mad. Because—well, because even if you are a prick, you’re my friend, too. You helped us before, more than you needed to. You could have walked away like all the others. But you didn’t, and that tells me a lot more than all your talk.”

I suppose I couldn’t expect much else from a man who reads minds, but I glossed that bit and said, “How did you get Jake to stay behind? I thought she’d be here, swords at the ready to watch your back. She’s been angry enough for about ten people.”

The low laugh made shivers run up my spine, made me wonder if I really knew Pasha at all. “I came because I can’t find her. She’s—you’re right, she’s angry, angry like you’ve never seen. At you, at me, at everyone probably. At life. You remember what Guinto said to me, about obstacles? We’re trying, we’re both trying but…I can’t…She’s really trying, Erlat’s helping her, it’s working, but I hate that
I
can’t help, and she hates that I hate and…we’re all at crossed purposes, crossed
feelings
. Sometimes you can’t put those into words, even in your own head. The thing…with my parents. That just topped it off for her, that and the thought you planted in her head about it being someone Ministry. They gave us enough grief to last a lifetime Downside, and she hoped it would be different Upside. But it isn’t, wasn’t, and she can’t bear that. I think she’s going to do something all crazy and heroic, possibly with swords. The Goddess,
our
Goddess anyway, says it’s that you fought that matters, and so that’s what matters to her. She’s going to show you, and me, and everyone. Up there. Got something to prove, I think. And I’ve got something to prove, too.” He wouldn’t look at me as he said it, and I got the feeling that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to say it.

He strode ahead on up the Spine, singing one of the Downsider songs that, from what I could tell, was probably called “Bastards from Hell”. For the first time I began to wonder whether the little git had outmanoeuvred me, whether he had some agenda I didn’t know about, and whether it was him or Jake who had the death wish this time.

We hid in the doorway of a grocery shop just on the border of Trade and Heights. The window held an expanse of bare, expensive-looking shelves punctuated by two wrinkled apples and a lonely pomegranate, all for sale at roughly a month’s income for anyone from Under. The shop owner looked briefly hopeful until he spotted the blue-white undertone of Pasha’s skin and tried to shoo us off, but I shut the door in his face and ignored him.

It didn’t take long to rearrange our faces, to the dismay of the grocer watching through the window as he stood protectively over his stupid apples. Screw him, mages were legal now and he could get bent. Luckily he didn’t seem the sort to create a commotion, just watched aghast, mouthing some obscenity about Downsiders that, thankfully, I could only lip-read, not hear. We turned our backs to him, and got all the quiet and privacy we wanted, or, rather, I did. Pasha was tight-lipped against what he could surely hear in his head.

I used Pasha’s juice even though the throb of my hand would have been enough for a hundred such spells—I could probably have rearranged things so I was a woman and he was an elephant. My black didn’t like it, but I told it to piss off and it went back to chuckling, biding its time. It would have me in the end, and it knew it.

I took away the blue-white undercurrent of Pasha’s skin that marked him as a Downsider, made him look a bit more imposing. Made him seem more the lion he was than the monkey that he looked like. I couldn’t resist making him look more of an ugly lion, though. He took a look in the window for a mirror and waved at the open-mouthed grocer with a savage grin.

“Prick” was all he said, and turned back to me. “What about you?”

I’d been thinking on it as I’d walked. I—we—needed to get into Top of the World, where all the biggest and most influential Ministry lived and worked. No ordinary guards on the door, I thought we could be certain of that. Specials for sure. Maybe, and the thought made me shudder, maybe even Inquisitors. I needed to look like someone who belonged there. Someone whose presence wouldn’t be questioned.

So I grew a moustache, careworn and drooping. Dench wasn’t a good look, if I’m honest, but needs must when there’s a killer on the loose with a thirst for your throat. I really hoped we didn’t bump into Dench—he’d probably find new and interesting ways to kill me.

“Pretty good” was Pasha’s verdict when I’d finished. “I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

With a cheery wave to the by now rather sick-looking grocer, and hoping he didn’t run screaming to the guards, we tried to hurry towards Clouds, progress slow because there were more people about here. The curfew hadn’t been enforced, not in Clouds where many lesser Ministry kept their homes, all bright and shiny towers on their platforms. The curfew had been for us scummy types from Under.

I felt sick as we pushed past shoppers on the Spine, through the upper levels of Heights and on towards Clouds. Sick not only because they all looked smug and well fed, didn’t have that ground-down look to them. More because of the shops, and what was in them. Down in No-Hope, the shops had fuck all. Some grey reconstituted mush if you were lucky and had plenty of money spare, which, with Trade shut down, no one did. No jobs, no money, no food, no nothing, except hunger and rats. Always there’s rats.

The thought of starvation obviously wasn’t crossing anyone’s mind much up here, and, despite what it was costing me and Pasha and the others in pain, there was no shortage of Glow either. Someone had been siphoning it off from the factories where we sent it, and that really made me want to hurl. Factories, what they produced to trade, were what kept everyone Under alive and someone was stealing that. I shouldn’t have been surprised—I suppose I wasn’t—but I was still pissed off. Thing is, I always
want
to be surprised and the blow when everything is just as crap as I expect can really sucker-punch the air from your lungs.

The shops in the upper reaches of Heights weren’t full, but they weren’t empty like the grocer on the border had been, like all the shops in No-Hope and what they were selling was a damned sight better than mush. Fresh vegetables and fruits, some of which I’d never even seen before. Proper bread, rice that didn’t have weevils in it. No bacon, sadly. I’d have fallen to my knees and promised eternal faith in the Goddess if there had been. Well, maybe. All right, probably not, but I’d have been very pleased.

So, little meat, and what there was, was stringy, full of grey gristle and barely enough to feed a very picky cat. But that was only to be expected—the synth disaster had killed off a lot of the animals, and, while there had been some, I suspected that what meat there was turned up secretly and for a select few. What had been brought up from the ’Pit was probably long gone, into the fat bellies above.

I stole a couple of green fruity things neither of us knew the name of and we headed on up with sticky hands, growling stomachs demanding more and sugar tingling on our tongues. The crowds thinned as we went higher, the shops stopped as Heights petered out, and then we were all but alone as we went ever higher. Once above the platforms of Clouds, which stood below with towers straining to reach us, they looked less impressive when you could now clearly see what was above
them
.

Top of the World hovered over us, a vast spire that seemed made of light and ice. The Spine spiralled up to the underbelly of the most powerful place in the city. Glow lights lit the deep shadow it cast, set at good intervals. More lights here than perhaps in the whole of No-Hope. I was tempted to smash them one at a time as we passed but Pasha persuaded me that if I wanted anyone to believe I was Dench, being a vandal wasn’t going to help. Which was sensible, logical, but didn’t stop me wanting to one little bit.

Instead, I hung on to my anger, pushed it down, formed it into a hard ball of hate. If Perak was alive—please, whoever might be listening, he was alive—if he was, why was he letting this happen? Especially when he’d seemed so concerned about people Under starving. I knew the answer—Archdeacon he may have been, but all-powerful he wasn’t. Ministry was faction against faction, and most of them hated Perak and his liberal ideas. He’d said as much, and Dench had hinted at it, too. Made me wonder why they’d promoted Perak, but that was pretty obvious.

Perak had always been a pushover, that was the trouble. Easy to talk around, not much iron in his spine. He was quite happy wandering through life, inventing things and doing what he was told. Only now he’d hardened up, started standing up to them, and they didn’t like that. He wasn’t the daydreamer I’d left behind all those years ago. Not at all. They’d signed up for a warm body to do as he was told, sign what they told him to sign, be the pious face of the “new” Ministry after the old one had made such a hash of things.

What they’d got was someone too stubborn for that. He was probably doing more to piss off more Ministry men than a hundred people like me. It was enough to warm the cockles of my heart. It was also enough to make me fear for his life, and I had no way to know if it was too late for that. Rule two, remember? That goes double if you’re in the Ministry and you mess with them, and now he’d disappeared. After Dendal couldn’t contact him, I’d tried, too, tried to track him but with no more luck before I had to stop. The black had almost got me again, and I could still hear its chuckle, feel the pull. I really needed to sleep before I tried any more spells. Sleep for a long time, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

By the time we reached the end of the Spine, where it led through an imposing arched gate into Top of the World, it wasn’t just the shadow that was making things dark. The sun touched the tops of the mountains and Pasha stopped to watch it for a heartbeat.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

“But we’re going to do it anyway, right?”

“What happens if we don’t?”

“She carries on murdering mages. Us probably, if she can. No mages, no power. No power, no trade, no food, no heat. Everyone dies. The Storad and Mishans just walk in.” It helped to say it out loud. Gave me a bit of resolve.

“We could go straight to Dench.”

“We need to get in first. I tried to find him, same time I looked for Perak but no luck, so we don’t know where he is. Maybe, for Dench, I’d need a prop—I don’t know him
that
well. Besides, no reason to say he’ll believe me, or be able to help. Might not even want to. He sounded pissed off at Perak himself last time I saw him. Who knows what power plays are going on up here? Could be anything, and Dench’s loyalty isn’t to us, it’s to the Goddess and the city.”

Pasha’s look was speculative, but he nodded in the end. “All right. Do you have any sort of plan?”

“Not really. Try to find Perak firstly, but looking like this will help.”

No one was above an Inquisition, not even the Archdeacon. That was what my insides were telling me had happened to Perak, and the scary part. Well, that and the fact that they used divination—via goat’s entrails, would you believe?—to decide if you were guilty in the eyes of the Goddess, and, if you were, it was a long drop off Top of the World into the Slump. All it would take would be the goat to have had a dodgy breakfast, or a bribe to the entrail reader, and you were dead quicker than spit. Even the Ministry had never been overly fond of the Inquisition as a rule. A desperate measure, because like I say, anyone is fair game. Unless you knew who to bribe. Who would
take
a bribe, because the Inquisitors were promoted Specials, and word was none had ever taken anything in return for lenience or turning a blind eye. Which made setting an Inquisition a desperate move by someone who was sure he’d not get nabbed himself. And here I was, disguised as the man in charge of those Specials.

All of which made my bowels rather watery as we approached the gate. Maybe looking like Dench hadn’t been such a good move, but I didn’t know any other face that would get us in well enough. I could have pretended to be Perak, but, firstly, the Archdeacon isn’t going to wander along the Spine with no guards and, secondly, if Dench was to be believed, there was a good possibility people were trying to kill him. Or maybe already had, but I tried not to think of that.

It started off all right. The two Specials on the gate—the Specials we could see anyway—snapped off a couple of salutes and we were in. They gave Pasha a once over, but I growled out he was with me in the best imitation of Dench I could manage and they let him go with only a cursory pat down for weapons and a few questions.

I tried not to gawp as we entered the rarest of atmospheres. Mahala is built to make you look up, and up again. Top of the World more so. It wasn’t just another area of Mahala, it was another world. A nice one.

A broad plaza stretched in front of us, so, so
clean
. That was what struck me first. No filth, no grubbiness. No taste of hopelessness in the air that seemed fresh and cold off the mountains that were clear from here and very real, black against the setting sun.

Space was the next thing I noticed—nothing crammed in, no buildings jostling for position like starving men round a plate of bacon. Here there was room to breathe, and air worth breathing. I found myself standing to my full height, stretching out my shoulders, expanding into the space. This was a place where people could
be
.

As the light waned, lamps came on. Glow lamps but like nothing I’d seen before. Gilded cages hung along every eave, outlined every doorway, and inside them birds flapped and twittered. Not real birds, but animated Glow tubes. Overhead, other Glows flitted about in the shape of moths, only moths like I have never seen, all colours pulsing through the Glow like rainbows. They flew around the spires, swooping down to the plaza a hand’s span in front of me and then off again. The light they gave off was subtle but together they brought out a, pardon the pun, glow in the buildings, changed them from finely wrought to staggering in their beauty, all ethereal shadows and etched light. I’d never seen anything quite so glorious, never even imagined that anywhere in Mahala was quite like this.

So, space, no filth, the bird-lamps and fluttering moths, those were all wonders, but the floor of the plaza was something I’d never seen except in a faded picture. Never expected to see either. A mosaic of dressed stone, all mellow gold in the light of the fluttering birds, and, in between the slabs, bright grass and scented flowers. Flowers!

The pattern seemed haphazard, a random jumbling of green and gold and the colours of the flowers fading against the coming night, blue here, orange and black together there. A garden, I supposed. Quite pretty in its way but I still couldn’t work out what it was for.

One side of the plaza was free of buildings, letting us get a clear view of sky, of peaks swathed in scarves of misty cloud, of the city below us like an oily black smudge.

The other three sides of the plaza were lined with impossibly thin spires topping gilded buildings that looked as fragile as spun sugar. No need for girders, for squatness to support the weight of countless houses above. No need for everything to be crammed together, because this was where Mahala stopped. And it stopped in heart-wrenching beauty so that I almost believed this city was a good and great place. Almost.

When I stopped staring, I noticed Pasha looking at his feet. “Grass. I haven’t seen grass in years.”

It felt weird under my boots, soft and yielding in a way I’d never known when I’d only ever walked on steel and concrete and soft under your boots meant you’d stepped in something it was best not to contemplate. I nudged him on—we were attracting a few stares.

As “Dench”, I didn’t have the luxury of looking too awestruck, but Pasha made up for it. We approached an official-looking building that still managed to appear graceful and awe-inspiring in the way they’d managed to get the thing to stay up—I couldn’t get my head around buildings that had no other buildings on top, no buildings leaning on them either side, propping them up, buildings that didn’t need to worry about weight or space. I was about to ask Pasha to start rummaging in heads and find out where we needed to go, when it all burst out of him.