Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall (9 page)

Sacred Goddess was the only hospital that I’d trust enough with my sister. All the ones further down were for those with little hope and less money, run by scammers, madmen or plain quacks. All the ones further up—I needed to know where, precisely, and I didn’t. Not that they’d have let us stay. We’d be thrown out for being from Under faster than Dendal could say fairy.

Any doctoring that needed doing, we were going to have to do it. Only I’m fairly crap at even basic first aid past what I needed to know for repairing after a spell and Dendal—yeah, well, Dendal isn’t someone I’d trust with a pair of scissors.

“If I go to get someone, will you promise me you’ll look after her?” I asked. “No wandering off in your own head?”

He huffed, affronted. “Of course!”

It would have to do. I couldn’t risk my magic to get me there—for all I knew where I needed to go was on fire too—so I used the rather more mundane door.

I took a look back as I shut it. Our hope, the city’s hope. My sister. My sister in the care of Dendal. We were all depending on a man who spent ninety-nine days out of a hundred singing happy songs and playing with sparkly fairies in his head.

We were so screwed it was almost funny.

It wasn’t far, almost straight down twenty levels, but that trip is one I try not to remember. Flames and heat, smoke and embers, screaming men full of hate, screaming children full of fear. Wondering whether the superstructure would hold up. They’d built for times such as these, long ago, before Ministry had taken over. A solid backbone of the city that was supposed to hold up against fire, against mages going batshit crazy, against alchemists playing with black powder and blowing up parts of the city and themselves on a regular basis. It’d worked, mostly. When it didn’t, it failed spectacularly, as it had over in the Slump.

That had been a better part of the city once, where the demi-rich used to live and stare up at Clouds and wish they were rich enough—or magic enough—to live there. Alchemists, doctors, those sorts of people. A quiet and reasonably non-shitty part of the city. Until a mage had, almost inevitably, gone totally off his tree in the incident that led to us being banned.

Now the Slump was a mess of girders and stone, great fat splinters as big as trees, mingled with dust and ghosts. It was downmarket even for rats. I tried very hard not to think about the Slump as I hurried.

Not thinking about that meant I thought about other things, like the riot around me. After the first flush of hatred, things seemed to have settled down into a more subdued grudge match and the further down I got, the quieter it got. If you were poor enough to live this far down, energy was for other people and the unrest above hadn’t reached here. Yet. It would.

I hurried as best I could, keeping to the shadows out of anyone’s way, and it wasn’t long before I stopped outside the door to my old rooms. The passageway still smelled of old socks and cabbage. This was home, or had been. I had no home now, except the sofa behind the desk at the office. I’d given these rooms away.

Pasha answered on the third knock, still buttoning his shirt, his hair awry and his face sheened with sweat. His monkey face screwed into a scowl. “It’s a hell of a time for a social call.”

The door to the bedroom was ajar and I caught a glimpse of Jake’s naked back as she lay on the bed, of the scars that marked her, inside and out. Pasha moved to block the view, and I wondered whether she was still phobic about being touched or whether Pasha was working on that. Whether perhaps I’d interrupted him working on that.

“Well?”

I pulled myself together and gave myself a mental cold bucket of water to the groin. “Haven’t you been listening?”

“What? We were—I was listening to what I wanted to.”

He opened the door wider, and shut the door to the bedroom with his foot. The main room was bigger than I remembered, maybe because they had bugger all to fill it with. At least they’d managed to clear off the globs of paint that a couple of vengeful exes had decorated it with.

The remains of a meal lay on the table with a guttering candle in between the plates and I caught a hint of perfume and the glimpse of a shirt dropped carelessly on the floor by the bedroom door. Ah. Well, Pasha was going to have to wait a while longer to work on it, a fact which gave me a perverse and guilty satisfaction. Really, I should grow the fuck up.

I shut the door behind me. “Listen,” was all I said.

He stared at me for a moment, frowning, then he shrugged and twisted a finger out of its socket. It didn’t take him longer than about three seconds.

“Shit—what the hell happened?”

“Another murder. Then someone murdered a guard back. They got into the lab and…”

I couldn’t bring myself to say it, but I didn’t need to with Pasha—he lifted the words right out of my head. Probably lifted a few I’d rather he hadn’t, too, but I put on a brazen front about that. “Lise—the only decent hospital I could get her into is on fire and she needs help. You’re the only person I could think of.” Not strictly true; I knew a few nurses, very well indeed. Sadly they also knew me well enough that they’d all cheerfully strangle me.

Pasha was already rummaging in a cupboard and he came up with a familiar box. He’d spent a lot of time stitching Jake back up after the Death Matches and, if nothing else, he was damned good at looking after people. There were a few other bits and bobs in the box that might come in handy, too, painkillers for starters. I was quite tempted to ask for some myself, just to make it all go away, the black tatters on the edge of my vision, the creeping voice telling me how wonderful it would be…

Jake appeared in the doorway, fully dressed and all business, buckling on her swords. A look passed between them, that old feeling of unsaid words being spoken, of the invisible string that bound them together.

“We’re walking,” Pasha said to me before I could suggest a quick spell. I think he’d seen a lot more than I’d thought in my head. “And bad news like Jake soon gets around.”

Good, because maybe that would help us through quicker. I couldn’t help jiggling, wanting to run, but it would be useless—and dangerous. A running man in a riot is a target for everyone, but especially guards. We wouldn’t do Lise any good if we were arrested, or mobbed.

By the time we’d gone up two levels, I was glad Jake was with us for more than something nice to look at. The gangs had moved down now. There was a lot of furtive running in and out of doorways and more and more came to swell the angry numbers clotting in lumps on the walkways. A lot of Downsiders in this area. Some of them had crude torches made from whatever wood they’d been able to find and the flickering orange glow made faces demented in the dark.

Jake stalked towards them like a tiger and they fell back, muttering, to let us past. A legend she’d been in the ’Pit, a Death Matcher like no other, and while they didn’t know it’d mostly been faked, it didn’t matter because, when cornered, Jake fought like Namrat himself and her swords were for more than show. Especially now, when anger radiated off her like a cloud and her hands were twitching on the hilts of those swords. Angry at the world and everything in it—in other circumstances, she’d have been one of the mob, would have been leading them, no doubt.

My back prickled when the mob turned and followed us, and I imagined the stab of a knife, the thud of something big and heavy on the back of my head. Felt the built-up hate with a focus now. It seemed to charge the air like Lise’s electricity.

At the end of a walkway so blackened by fire I kept imagining it was turned to ash and would drop us, screaming, into the yawning drop underneath, stood another group. Upsiders this time, yet with the same look of hate, the same charge of it in the air around them.

We were dead, I was sure of it, due to be stomped flat between two snorting, charging opponents. I was already curling my hand with a groan, and trying to pretend I didn’t hear the voice, didn’t want what it offered, when the priest appeared.

Guinto simply stepped forward from out of a darkened, smouldering doorway, for all the world as though he was taking a stroll. His gentle smile seemed to radiate goodwill, to reach inside and make you want to be good to your fellow man. I resisted the urge—I’ve been a cynic too long to suddenly start thinking everyone is nice and the world is a fluffy, lovely place when patently this part at least is a shithole. Cynicism is harder to give up than drugs and women put together. Instead I wondered how in hell he was doing it and realised it didn’t matter, because he was and I might live to the end of the day, which is always a bonus.

The effect on the mobs was dramatic—they lowered torches and clubs and a few even shuffled their feet like naughty schoolchildren.

Jake hesitated and I could see it play out across her face, in the clench of her jaw and the way her eyes held Guinto’s. Anger fighting with piety, with wanting the Goddess to look on her kindly, to love her as the mages had always told her the Goddess wouldn’t because of what she was. To lay about with her swords at every injustice aimed at Downsiders, or to take what Guinto was offering? Piety, a need for the Goddess’s acceptance, won, but only just and her swords were still ready because the Downside Goddess was all about fighting.

Jake was the first to go forward and ask for Guinto’s blessing, and then the mobs became not mobs, but people again. Clubs were surreptitiously dropped, and the torches lost their menace.

“That’s one hell of a trick,” I said and Pasha shot me a vicious look.

“No trick. It’s just that we believe something you can’t see, won’t see.”

’Pity rolled off him in waves and made me want to smack him a good one round the chops. ’Pity from Pasha, some screwed-up Downsider who had everything I wanted, and who I liked anyway, despite myself. Hating him would be like kicking a puppy. So instead I snapped out, “We don’t have time to play with imaginary friends.
Lise
doesn’t have time.”

He looked like he was about to snap something back, but he bit down on it and glanced at Jake. The Downsiders were following her lead, following something real and substantial from their old lives. The ’Pit had been full of misery and pain, but at least that was what they knew and they found comfort in the familiar. Guinto leant over and whispered in her ear and she nodded before she began talking quietly to the Downsiders. She flicked a meaningful glance at Pasha.

My feet were getting jittery and I kept seeing flashes of Lise, bloodied and barely breathing. All we had left, all Mahala had left. Pretty much all I had, too. “Pasha—”

He held up a hand, as though he was trying to hear something, then nodded. When he spoke, I realised what Jake had done, what she’d shoved down her constant anger for. “I’m going. I’ll be quick, I promise. Guinto’s told her we can take Lise to his temple—he’s got rooms there, and a couple of his parishioners are nurses. You stay and look after Jake.”

Look after Jake? It almost made me laugh; she could kill me as soon as blink. Yet the look on Pasha’s face was serious, and I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. “But Lise—”

“I’ve already spoken to Dendal. She’s pale, but breathing steadily. He’s got the bleeding stopped. We’ll get her to the temple, it’s not far from the lab. I’ve sent Dog to check on Erlat, but I don’t think the fires got that far from what I can hear. Please, stay. It’s all Downsiders between here and the lab, all as full of hate as these were a few minutes ago, I can hear them.” He paused to lick at lips stiff with anger, and I wondered how much he could hear, and whether he agreed with them. “Look, an Upsider, in that lot…you’d be more danger than safety to her, and you’re in no state to be trying any more magic and changing how you look. You know I’m right about that. Keep an eye on Jake for me.”

He didn’t say it, in his voice or in my head, but I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking—that I was too strung out, would only get in the way, that I might say or do something in a mob that would make it all worse. I was a liability. He was right, which didn’t make it any easier to swallow. For once, though, I did swallow it, because I trusted Pasha. These last few weeks, it had been mostly me and him powering up the tubes, and sharing pain makes you share other things, even if it’s never said.

“Look after Lise. I—”

I didn’t need to say it. He nodded tersely and disappeared into the smoky gloom, leaving me to endure an impromptu sermon. Bastard—he’d done that on purpose, I was sure.

If I listened too hard I was going to puke and thinking about whether Pasha had got to Lise yet, whether she was going to be all right, made me come over all jittery so I took a deep breath, let it wash over me and watched Jake. Among strangers she was still brittle, the ice queen, but as a Death Matcher the Downsiders knew her, looked to her perhaps. Some of the Upsiders knew her, too, that was plain, though that was more caution concerning her swords, her anger and what drove her.

Guinto moved between the groups and something came in his wake, ripples of feel-good that had Upsider and Down looking warily, but, importantly, not angrily, at each other. After a word from Guinto, one Downsider even offered a hand to an Upsider, and it was accepted. Animosity seemed to drain from the air. Yet there was something about Guinto that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, something just that touch creepy. He was smooth, too damned smooth, and I never have been able to trust a man who smiles that much. Perhaps that says more about me than it does about Guinto, but I kept expecting to find out that his benevolence was a trick, a veneer to fool us all before he had everyone at each other’s throats even worse than before. The old bait and switch that Ministry have used so well. I hoped not, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

“Amazing how he does it, isn’t it?” The soft voice startled me from my thoughts. The girl from the temple, looking even more angelic and ethereal today in a soft white dress that flowed and clung and made some very naughty thoughts pop into my head. I know I’d sworn off women only the day before but, hell, promises are made to be broken, especially given that my chances with Jake were less than bugger all.

A guy’s got to take his fun when he can, right?

Besides, I seriously needed some distraction from thinking about Lise. There’s nothing like a pretty woman to distract me from something, anything, so I cranked up the smile. “Nowhere near as astonishing as you look in that dress.” Cheesy, yes, but that kind of stuff really works if you sound like you mean it, and I always do mean it. That’s my trouble.

It worked this time, too, because she blushed prettily and tried to hide a smile behind her hand.

I took the other, kissed the back of her fingers the old-fashioned way, and her blush deepened. ‘A pleasure, I’m sure. I’m—”

“Maki, yes, I know. I’ve heard a lot about you. None of it good. My father says you’re a terror with women, but he hopes to lure you to the way of the Goddess.”

Good luck to him with that. At least she was helping take my mind off Pasha, whether he’d got there yet, whether Lise was still alive…I wanted to grab Jake and run after Pasha, but I’d be worse than useless in the mobs above, no real help to Lise, and the girl’s hand on my arm felt good. It kept me there, for now, that and a sense of something wrong down here, somewhere. Something subtle, but there.