Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (16 page)

“Going
in
?”

My brother can be annoyingly pacifistic at times, and when you’ve got a bloodthirsty enemy at the gate is one of those times.

“Yes, Perak. It’s too late to sit back and hope we can weather this siege. Mahala survived the last ones by being a bunch of conniving bastards, and we’re going to do the same this time. This time, we have a Jake in their midst to show Pasha what’s what. We’ve got a load of guns, and a load of bullets. We have a load of people from Under who would be more than happy to shoot a gun, as long as you make sure there aren’t any cardinals around. You may want to keep the Upsiders and Downsiders separate though. We take the fight to the Storad, before their mates turn up mob-handed, and when we’re done with them, then we bring Jake back.”

Perak went to the window, and though he stared out into snow-swirled darkness I don’t think he saw anything out there. Finally he said, “All right. All right, I’m going to have some explaining and persuading to do in Top of the World, but all right, I’ll persuade them if I can. I can’t do a damned thing without them playing merry hell about it anyway. Pasha can concentrate on finding out what he can, from Jake or whatever other way. I’ll send someone down to see who they can gather up, if anyone. And you, Rojan. You are going to be resting like you should. Aren’t you.” Not a question, an order from my archdeacon, from the Mouth of the Goddess.

I couldn’t give a toss about what the Goddess wanted.

I sighed inwardly, wishing I
could
rest like he wanted me to. But this, all these Storad outside our walls, Jake trapped out there on her own, people huddling in their homes wondering if tomorrow would come and if it did whether they’d be alive to see it… everything came down to me. One little action of mine had brought us to this, and I was getting us out of it too, if I could. “Not a chance in hell.”

“So what are you going to do?” Pasha asked. “Not magic. If you do —”

“Ever heard the saying, ‘When confronted by a tiger, throw shit at it. Because there will be shit’? I’m going to make sure there’s shit to throw.”

The Stench smelled even worse the second time around. I tried holding my breath but by the time I got even a quarter of the way in I was near fainting. In the end I settled for breathing through my mouth and the shirtsleeve that covered it, and trying not to gag. At least this time I knew where to find the Stenchers.

I looked over the vats and felt bizarrely pleased they were full. The scum on top looked even worse today, with a livid green tint to it that screamed “plague waiting to happen”, or at least “highly contagious form of the galloping trots”. Either one would work nicely, especially if it was fast-acting.

I found a knot of Stenchers just off the corridor where I’d discovered Halina flying and throwing men around. They huddled in a loose circle with the rattle of bones between them. When I got closer, I realised what they were betting on – how many days till the Storad reached Top of the World, with side bets of whether they’d let any Mahalians Under live. No one seemed to be betting yes on that last one.

A gangly face looked my way. He grunted something to his pals, and then they were all looking at me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being the centre of attention, but the calculation there sent the hairs on the back of my neck quivering.

One of them stood up, his frown almost hidden underneath the ground-in dirt. Well, probably dirt.

“What do you want?”

I didn’t get the chance to reply before one of the others growled out, “Here, that was the one that took our Halina away. She all right? What did you do with her? She’s going to be one of them mages, right?”

A low mumble around the circle, from which I gathered that while they didn’t really approve of mages as such, anyone who managed to get out of the Stench was on to a good thing.

“Yes and no,” I said before I could even think about it. Possibly not the best move, because the circle stood up and it was as tall as me and a lot stronger. I held on to my pulse pistol, and wondered how many people it could take at once, if I had to. Thing was, if I did, there went my chance of getting them to help. And I needed their help, even if I wasn’t going to say how much.

“What you mean?” The guy who seemed in charge moved my way and I did my best not to lean back away from the smell. Small breaths through the mouth, that was the trick. Even so, my eyes were watering.

“She came to be a mage, that’s true.” The urge to lie was almost overwhelming. I’ve lied my whole damned life, and it’s a hard habit to break, especially when the truth might be very painful to my person.

“And? She all right? Why are you down here?”

“You know what’s happening up there, don’t you? The Storad, the gates.”

“Course we know. We stink, we aren’t stupid. Be amazed what ends up down here for us to read. That’s why Halina went. Couple of us tried to volunteer but they told us to fuck off. Stupid, I thought. We were willing, and that’s what counts. But they wouldn’t give us no guns, no nothing, and I said in that case the fancy boys from Over can die. Let them wear the Storad down, and when they lose – and they will – less of them for us to worry about. We’d have fought if they’d let us.”

“How about if I ask nicely now?”

One of the others started to say something, but this guy glared at him and he shut up. “Oh, you want us now, right? We’ve got something you want, I’m thinking. I’m also thinking you haven’t said what happened to Halina.”

“She came to be a mage, and she’s good, damned good. She’s fine, considering.”

Something white appeared in the brown crust of the lead guy’s face, and I realised his lip was curled against what he’d just heard. “I know a liar when I see one. She’s dead then. Sent her off like they would have done us, no weapons, nothing but a cheery wave I expect. Right?”

“Yes and no. Being able to throw a man across a room counts as a weapon. And she’s not dead.”

A laugh behind the lead guy – the man who I thought had been with her when I found her. It was hard to tell under the uniform crust over their faces, the identical drab brown of their rags, but the voice sounded familiar. “She could kick the shit out of any one of us. Or at least
throw
the shit out of any one of us.”

A slice of the lead guy’s hand and the laughter stopped. “So she’s not dead, all right. But now you’re down here asking us to fight again, I expect, with no weapons. Die when we could be down here, defending our own, not that miserable lot of pious bastards up there. I pity the Storad who makes it down here, though I don’t reckon they’ll bother us much. No one does. Rumour is, they just want to screw
you
over, not us. No, you just piss off, Ministry boy. You want to save Over, you’re going to have to do it yourselves.”

The Stenchers weren’t going to help us by being a weapon. Bang went another great plan.

The plan to gather together a few men from Under hadn’t worked so well either, as I discovered on my way back up.

Halfway through No-Hope, in the most innocuous area full of the kind of proud poor who just worked hard and kept their heads down, I found what looked like a brawl. I began to sidle my way round – one thing Under teaches a guy is when and how to avoid trouble – before I saw who was in the middle of said brawl.

Malaki let off a shot, and the two Specials with him followed suit. They weren’t shooting at anyone in particular that I could see, but it was enough to give everyone a bit of pause. Not for long – after their initial fright, the crowd surged in on them again. Specials had got where they were by being the scariest thing anyone knew, but that wasn’t the case any more. Now the scariest thing was Outside and on its way in, and from the look of it, Malaki’s attempt at press-ganging a few likely-looking lads had backfired in a spectacular fashion.

He wasn’t taking the sudden lack of fear from everyone well, but he knew when he was beaten. He caught my eye, saw where I was standing at a nice and handy place to get the hell out of the mess he was in, and headed in my direction. He only pistol-whipped a couple of guys on the way. The other Specials made a line behind him and managed to extricate themselves. The crowd around them dissipated with a mixture of triumphant aggression and sneering catcalls.

I had no love for the slab-faced Malaki, but I did kind of feel sorry for him just then. He looked utterly confused and defeated as we headed up the stairwell.

“Don’t they
want
to fight?” he asked.

I looked out over the glowering faces as they crept back into their lives. “You’re asking the wrong people. Round here, these are just folks trying to get by, and shit-scared. They’d fight, but not for you, or for Ministry, and most certainly won’t if forced. Volunteers, I said. You want to go further down maybe. Find some of the gangs, if you can get that far and still live. They may hate Ministry, and you, but they love a good fight.”

Malaki glared at me and shook his head. “Impossible. I have to find men, Perak says, so I’m trying. But I’m with the cardinals on this one. I’m not sure I want to give guns to just anyone who wants one.”

“So you’re trying to strong-arm some poor suckers who wouldn’t know a fist if it hit them in the face? You think those people who just left – the apothecaries, the grocers, the bakers, you think they’re the best men for this? That forcing them might work?”

“Better than the alternative,” Malaki said. “I don’t want men too eager to shoot.”

“You don’t want anyone so piss-scared that they’ll shoot whatever turns up because they’ve got their eyes shut either. We need to use our strengths, not try to force people into things they can’t do.”

He grunted at that, but then dropped another little zinger into the mix. “Like your little mages. They’d come in handy too, down by the gates. Cardinals are going to insist on it, and I agree.”

I stopped dead and he almost ran into me as I whipped round. “And you can piss right off. They’re
kids
, Malaki.”
My
kids, I was beginning to think of them as. Too reminiscent of me at that age, mostly not knowing what the hell they were doing. But they weren’t going to end up like me, not if I could help it, and they weren’t going to blow themselves up trying to be Malaki’s secret weapon either. “You get them over my dead body. Or yours, whichever you prefer.”

We stood there glaring at each other for a while, but he looked away first.

“What do you suggest then?” he said at last.

I sighed and carried on up the stairwell. “If you won’t use the people best suited for the job, at least pick people who might want to do it for what you’ve got to offer. Volunteers. Try right up under Heights, maybe the bottom of Heights too. Where they’re close enough to see what they can’t have, close enough to taste it, to want it above anything. Then offer it to them – promotion, a job in Ministry or the Specials, a promise they can believe in, even if it is a load of shit. But no strong-arming them. Or anyone. It’s going to be a shitstorm: you know it, I know it. You want people who want to be there, or all you’ll have after the first five minutes is a cloud of dust as they very sensibly run like buggery.”

He sneered at that, but I got him to agree to at least try in the end. It didn’t seem much, but it was all I could do. I left him to it and went to the lab, went to sit with my kids, my little proto-mages, and help them figure it all out as best they could, while we still had the chance.

The snowfall had thickened till it was hard to see more than ten yards in front of you. A blessing in many ways, because it drew a screen across the crap, blotted out the decay of the walls Under, the flimsiness of the swaying walkways. The city was reduced to orbs of Glow lights shining on whiteness. At least the slush underfoot was a drab grey, else I’d have thought I’d managed to rearrange myself into some weird place where everything wasn’t screwed to hell. If I ever found myself there, I dare say I’d be bored to tears in under an hour.

I was screwed to hell too. I’d been a good boy and not used any more magic, but that didn’t make a lick of difference to the throb of my poor hand, where the juice built up like water behind a dam. Didn’t make a lick of difference to the black either. It was back, had never really been away, was singing sweet nothings in my ear. The trouble with the whiteness of the snow was that it showed up the shadowy outline of a tiger stalking towards me out of the corner of my eye. Then I’d blink and it would be gone, only to stalk me from another direction. I tried my best to ignore it, but that was quite hard.

Above the remaining inner gate, most of the lights were out, leaving only faint reflections off falling flakes to light the grim faces of the men stood behind it. Guards, or what was left of them, but they looked different that day, in that dim light. No longer more arrogant than I was, no longer looking smug and a bit superior in the knowledge that Under, their word was as close to the law as anyone was going to get. They had been all those things and I’d been on the receiving end more than once, but that day, behind that gate, huddled under snow and the gaze of half a dozen cardinals who watched from a nice, warm, safe window… with half their number killed or wounded already, the enemy having reinforcements on the way and they were the poor bastards at the brunt… that day they looked like any other men. Tired, scared, gaunt from too long without a decent meal.

You’d think the boom-shudders from the machines stopping would have brought some relief, a bit of cheer to them, but no. Those echoing sounds had punctuated our lives, day and night, and now they’d stopped it felt quiet. Too damned quiet, leaving people room to think dire thoughts, to panic. If the guns had stopped, maybe that just meant the infantry were on their way.

Worse, the guards now had reinforcements. Worse because those reinforcements were made up of precisely the sort of people they usually spent their days scaring the crap out of and extorting bribes from – no one very important, though they weren’t from Under so the guards wouldn’t be too worried about how much they’d jackbooted them in the past. Only a bit worried. Still, it looked like Malaki had taken my advice with who he’d rounded up – these weren’t Ministry men: they were from the borders of Heights, the top of Under. I recognised one or two, and the type – merchanters’ kids mostly, with the odd priest or factory owner’s son or daughter thrown into the mix. It was in the careful way their clothes were cut to mimic a Ministry man’s, the sharp look in their eye as they watched for the main chance. Not Ministry, but wishing they were, people who spent their time looking ever upwards, working out how to get there, apologists for the Ministry. Not likely to get funny thoughts about shooting cardinals when no one was looking. Men and women who would volunteer because it might give them an edge the next time Ministry were hiring, or at least get them a weapon if things didn’t go to plan, rather than from any sense of helping anyone else.

So the guards weren’t just tired and hungry and scared of what the Storad had to offer. Now they had a bunch of clueless people milling about, people who probably had no idea what they were doing and were only getting in the way. But at least they were there, and they’d learn soon enough.

Perak arrived, wrapped up in a couple of thick woollen robes that looked like they could keep out the end of the world. He had that dreamy look to him again. The one that usually meant I was about to get dropped in it.

Pasha was there too, looking worn at the edges. His monkey grin was fixed to his face as though he’d nailed it there, but fresh marks across his fingers, new bruises along his wrists where he no longer took care to keep his cuffs pulled down over his brands, told their own story. Those wrists were thin too, thinner even than they should have been, and his jacket flapped around a frame that had never been big and was now almost skeletal. He looked like a walking corpse.

The three of us gathered under a Glow light in the shelter of an office that usually held the guards checking goods going in and out. At least it had a brazier to warm it, but it was a mean one and all it did was stop my nose from turning blue. Malaki and the last remaining sergeant of the guards looked over our shoulders at what Pasha had brought. A large sheet of thick paper, much creased and filled with pencil markings that had been scratched in, crossed out and drawn over.

“Here’s the gate.” Pasha’s voice cracked, but he swallowed hard and tried again. “And here’s Jake. Two of her guys left with her, that’s all.”

He pointed to what could have been a group of boulders. Or possibly a tree. Whatever Pasha’s talents, they didn’t include drawing. Whichever, it was on the far side of the valley, where the wind whipped down over the mountains like a knife to saw through your bones.

“Did she have any kind of weather gear?” I asked, but Pasha gave me a don’t-be-stupid-she-didn’t-expect-to-be-camping-Outside look so I shut up.

It didn’t take him long to point out all the relevant information that Jake had managed to give him. Where the main force was, what sort of weapons they had – at least a third of the Storad had the flamers they’d used before – where their leader was billeted, and where Dench was. He, it seemed from what she’d managed to overhear or otherwise weasel out of some unlucky bastard, wasn’t exactly welcome, more tolerated. From what little we knew of them, the Storad had a funny kind of code and to them Dench had sold his own men out. That made him a traitor and, while useful, not to be trusted.

Malaki and the sergeant pored over the map and asked a load of technical questions which Pasha stumbled answers to. Malaki cocked an eye my way and I tried not to flinch. Not very successfully, because old habits die very hard indeed.

“What exactly is our objective here, Your Grace?” he asked.

Perak looked long and hard at Pasha and me before he gave his answer. “Twofold, captain. One: those reinforcements on their way? We want them to find nothing of use when they enter the valley. No troops, no camp. Nothing.”

The captain raised his eyebrows at that. Perak never wanted anything done by halves.

“And second?”

“Second, the captain of my personal guard is out there with two of her men. I would like them back.”

“That’s —”

“What your orders are, captain. This could actually be to our advantage, if we play it right. You know where their leader is billeted. Take him out. And Dench too. Jake and Pasha can also keep you apprised of any changes in the situation as and when they occur. But I want her and those men back, understood?”

I was hard pressed not to grin – someone else was getting dropped in the shit for a change, and it was much more gratifying to see it from the outside.

Malaki threw me an evil look before he and the sergeant left.

Perak deflated after they’d gone, and I realised his commanding tone had been at least half bravado. “All right. Pasha, you go down to the new recruits. I reckon they’ll take better to someone who isn’t a guard or Special. And then —”

And then it was too late. Any plans we might have made flew out of the window as a big, fat crack reverberated below us, followed by a series of screams.

They’d fixed the machine I’d bent, and it had taken just one shot to break the inner gates. They were in, and killing anyone in front of them.

Perak and I raced to a window. The inner gate was off its hinges and Storad were running amok below, guns firing, flamers burning every man they could reach. Pasha groaned behind us – every man’s thoughts were in his head, all their pain, panic, everything. I’ve never known quite how he managed to stay sane through it all.

The guards fell back, the new recruits in among them, and any differences were forgotten in the face of Namrat stalking through Mahala, his tiger teeth ready to rip throats out, to take the dead and send them where he would.

If I’d thought about it, I probably would have stayed where I was, or moved back in the tactical manoeuvre that is also known as “getting the hell out”. I certainly wouldn’t have gone charging off the way I did. The old me would have found a handy bolthole and stayed there till it was all over. Not any more, though it was still tempting. But I wasn’t the old me any more, or not completely.

Pasha and I ignored Perak’s shout behind us and ran, not away, towards. Fuck only knows why, when everything was telling me to get away and quick. Probably because I knew there was no chance of Pasha hanging back, not with Jake out there, and I wasn’t letting him take all the glory. I had my pulse pistol out from habit, but sense kicked in and I dragged out my bullet gun instead.

It wasn’t just an attack, it was a massacre. The ground was slick with blood and burned bodies, a sight to sicken even the hardest heart, but we didn’t have time to dwell on that. The Storad came, and we fell back before them, all of us, Special and guard helping new recruit and vice versa. Before that onslaught, we were all one. I remember thinking at least I’d die quickly, before I got to see Mahala completely destroyed, and wondering how the cardinals would put a Ministry spin on this, make it the Goddess’s will.

The Storad came through the swirling snow, flamers out in front. Guns weren’t all that much help when you couldn’t see what you were shooting, but their flamers – all they needed to do was get in range, flick the switch and watch men burn.

I fired my gun three, four times, fumbling the reloading with my bad hand so that I was alive with juice that I daren’t use, making my vision go black in patches, tempting me. That black tiger shape was everywhere I looked. I couldn’t see that I was doing any good with my gun, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’ve done some messed-up shit in my time, but to shoot a man, even a man who wanted me dead…

I wasn’t the only one either. All I could hear, in between shots, was people praying, pleading for help, for absolution. The guard next to me kept up a constant litany to the Goddess, even while his shaking hands raised his gun, while he pissed himself when a bullet came the other way and took a chunk out of his cheek before it flew off into the dark.

It was Pasha who turned it. I suppose it was always going to be Pasha, because he wasn’t just fighting for Mahala, or for his life. He was fighting for everything that made his life bearable, made it worth living, and she was out there somewhere, and in his head too. Jake would be fighting with all she had; she always did, so that the Goddess would love her, because she had to or die inside.

One second Pasha was next to me and the next he was running forward with a wild scream. His gun wasn’t out but he ran with his hands twisting and cracking, holding them out like they were the weapon, and I suppose they were. Before him Storad stopped firing, their faces confused blurs behind the swirling curtains of snow. One of the men holding a flamer turned without stopping his fire, and three Storad gunmen went up in flames. I can hear the screams now, the smell of their skin as it crisped. I can hear the words behind me, from men who would never accept a mage, words that spoke of fear of magic even as it saved their ugly butts.

And I remember the sudden rage at that. How I wanted to take my poor buggered hand and twist it, wanted to rearrange the whole damned place and everyone in it, Storad and Mahalian, wanted to twist their brains and make them
see
. Instead, I came over all sensible for once and lurched after Pasha. Snow and blood made the ground treacherous and I slipped more than ran. Pasha didn’t seem to notice, or care, but arrowed straight for the outer gates, or what was left of them. Straight for a bunch of Storad with guns and flamers at the ready.

The thing about Pasha was that he looked like a sulky monkey, he was as jittery as a mouse walking past a cat – but when he had to, when something he cared about was threatened, he turned all lion; and then caution, and indeed anything approaching sensible, went out of the window. Generally at the worst possible moment, like now.

I’d have bet any money you like that he didn’t even see those Storad waiting for him. All he was thinking about was where Jake was, if she was safe, whether whatever Allit had seen would come true. Almost laughable, considering she could probably dissect any one of them in two heartbeats. But that was all this was to him now, all these blood and bodies, all that was in front of him. It was all about Jake.

One Storad reacted quicker than the others to this wild-eyed apparition coming for them, and turned his flamer towards the threat. I shot him, managed to hit him too, high up in the shoulder so he half span and his flame scorched the guy next to him. But I couldn’t reload on the run, especially with only one hand that worked properly, and there were too many Storad. Pasha seemed to realise where he was then, what he was running into. A gunman aimed at Pasha’s head, then inexplicably turned the gun on himself and blew his brains out. “
How far would you go?
” Pasha had asked me once, and I saw it again now, just how far he would. Further than he’d be able to handle, once the lion wore off.

Pasha wasn’t the sort of guy who could rationalise it, tell himself he had to, that these men would have killed him given half the chance. Me, I’d shrug it off most likely, at least on the outside. My conscience does what I tell it to, or at least I like to think so, and I was telling it that these bastards deserved everything they got. But Pasha – it would break him; but he didn’t care about it right then. He wasn’t thinking about tomorrow when this would haunt him, when he’d remember what they were thinking as he killed them, see their wives and children in their heads as they died. It would break him, but he didn’t care so it looked like I was going to have to.