Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (19 page)

I hesitated at the door to the office. Something didn’t feel right and I cursed under my breath. Comes to something when a man goes home to find it isn’t what it was when he left.

The office seethed with people – youngsters, magelets. They were perched on Pasha’s desk, on the lumpy old sofa, on whatever floorspace they could find. One was even sat astride Griswald, who looked bizarrely pleased, or as pleased as a century-old stuffed tiger can look.

I was about to vent my entire spleen and ask what the hell everyone though they were doing when I caught sight of Halina and Dendal in a cleared space in the centre of the room. Dendal’s candles guttered in the breeze of more people breathing than our office had seen, well, maybe ever. The magelets were rapt, watching with avid eyes as Halina cracked a finger out of its socket.

I’d never seen Dendal quite so with it, or not for so long a time, not for more than five minutes or so. Then again, magic and its uses in the service of the Goddess always got him focused.

“All right, see how Halina concentrates, pulls that pain in. You feel it come up your arm like a warmth, a knowledge. Yes?”

Most of the kids nodded, though one or two looked dubious.

“Then you have to show it what to do, lead it along your path, whatever your path is. It will want to go somewhere else, almost always, but you are the master. Remember that. You master it, not the other way around.” Ah yes, the start of Dendal’s famous “mastery” speech. Soon he’d start banging on about control and I’d start to nod off. Or I would if there was any space to sit.

“Halina?” Dendal murmured.

She favoured us all with an arch and superior smile, half closed her eyes and concentrated. Nothing much happened for a moment, and then a boy gasped as Griswald lifted into the air and twirled slowly round, as though showing off his new boy-coat.

Halina let Griswald down to the floor gently, and Dendal caught my eye before he carried on.

“You all know by now what happened to Pasha. And the warning there is twofold. That is what happens if you can’t control your magic, when it masters you rather than the other way around. And also,” he held me with eyes clearer than I’d ever seen, “also sometimes it is what you have to do. No matter what the priests say now, they once held that the Goddess made us this way for a purpose. I believe that, with all I have. You have a purpose, and so does your magic, but it’s up to you to decide what that purpose is. For Pasha, it was to save Jake and others like her, perhaps to show us the way. It always was his purpose, and he was clear in his mind about what he was prepared to do for her, for them, us, and he did it. Now, Mahala is going to need us, and soon. She’s going to need everything you can give it, everything you can give to the people who, whether they like it or not, know it or not, will be relying on us, on the guards, on Lise and whatever genius she can perform. So I need you all to work with me, with Halina and Rojan here to do your best to learn some control. And I need you to think on your purpose, for the Goddess.”

At the mention of my name, they turned to look at me, and I couldn’t bear it. All young kids, all half starved, half scared to death with not just the siege, the threat of the Storad, but with half-formed magical urges. And with hope. That was the worst. They looked at me like I was giving them hope.

Cabe was there, the boy who’d cut his hand in the Slump, and his look was the worst. “They all rise,” Allit had said, and hadn’t known what he meant. What Perak had told me to concentrate on, because I was damn-all use for anything else right now. Was this it? These kids, were they going to rise? It didn’t seem possible, and even if it was, I wasn’t going to be the one at their head.

It was the oddest thing: until a few months before I’d been untroubled by family or friends, except for Dendal, who barely counted as he was away in his head so often. I’d liked it that way too – no one to worry over, or to worry over me. No one to be responsible for, or care about and then see them die, like Ma. Only now I had family, I had friends. Pasha had been right – they were my way back into the world rather than being apart from it. I had these kids, who were almost like a second family because I saw myself in them at every turn, wanted to make sure they didn’t make my mistakes. My family, and a weight on my heart, on a conscience that wanted so very badly to be feckless and free. And still I couldn’t do that to them, not to these kids who were just trying to figure out what they could do, how they fitted in. Boys like I once was, full of fear. I was still full of fear. I think I always will be.

Cabe said something to me, I don’t know what. I couldn’t listen. I didn’t care if Allit had seen them rising, had seen them going up to take on the Storad at Top of the World. I didn’t care what he’d seen, because I wasn’t going to let it happen. Not to these kids,
my
kids.

If it wasn’t going to be them, it had to be something else, something I hadn’t thought of, some
one
I hadn’t thought of, and it had to be me doing the thinking because Pasha was gone and Perak had his hands full.

It was down to me.

The thought crushed the breath from my chest like a tombstone had landed on it. If it was down to me, we were screwed and I couldn’t look at that damned hope any more.

I made for the door, ran into Cabe’s father, Quillan, pushed past him and out.

It was down to me.

There had to be something I wasn’t thinking of, some
one
. There had to be a different way. Goddess’s tits, I would have given over a fair part of my anatomy to have Pasha back, just there, showing me how to be the good guy. I had a funny feeling I was going to make a right cock-up of it on my own. I usually did.

The cold air outside slapped a bit of sense into me, but not much. Snow drifted down in little clumps through the mesh of walkways, a dollop here, a cluster there, a blob to wriggle its chill way down my back. It dusted the walkways so that they looked like icing on a fancy cake.

There had to be something. All I had to do was think of it.

Someone came out after me and I whipped round, ready to snap them in two with words, but I came up short when Halina looked at me with half-closed, appraising eyes.

“Running out on them already?” she asked, as though she already knew the answer. “Why am I not surprised?”

“No!” I shut my eyes for a heartbeat, because actually, yes. Until then, until she asked me so baldly. “No. Did Dendal tell you Perak thinks these kids are the answer, the only answer he’s got? That we can use their magic, send them down to the gates, only he doesn’t know what it’s like, how most of them probably haven’t a clue what their Major is yet, and would probably kill themselves if they tried anything. Only there has to be something – Allit saw, or rather heard. ‘They all rise.’ What does that even
mean
? Perak thought maybe mages, but it’s not, it can’t be. Or not these mages anyway. And the Storad are almost through, and if we don’t figure it out now it’ll be too damned late and Pasha will have died for nothing. All that sacrifice, all that hurt, wasted, and I can’t let that happen. I have to do something, only I can’t use my magic unless I want to make another Slump, and what good am I at anything without it? I’m a fair bounty hunter and a world-class flirt. That’s about it.”

For a moment there, I thought Halina was going to slap me and tell me to pull myself together. I probably deserved it too. She looked out into the deepening snow for a while, and then seemed to come to a decision.

“When you went to the Stench without me – what was it you were really after?”

“A weapon. Actually, shit. Lots of it.”

“You wanted… oh.” She laughed at that, a snide, cynical laugh touched with glee. “You know, I find I like the way you think, at least on some things. Well, I can get you the Stenchers, and the shit. Those scummy bastards will do what I tell them, or they’ll feel the slap of my magic. But that won’t be enough on its own. What else?
Who
else?”

The answer was, of course, simple.

Everyone.

Under wasn’t the same place that it had been even a few weeks ago. The snow kept on coming, but by the time it got to No-Hope it wasn’t white any more. It picked up all the dirt it could find on its way down, maybe sucked out the corruption of Clouds, the avarice of Heights, so by the time the No-Hopers saw it, it was streaky grey flakes that slapped wetly against the skin before they melted and dribbled down the back of my coat. Even with no rain, my neck got wet.

The streets and walkways were dark, as most of the Glow got siphoned to the factories, and what was left, people were hoarding to keep themselves warm. The walkways were empty too, a watchful, pensive kind of silent that I’d never experienced before, even during curfews and on the brink of riots, when everyone was too damned angry to be quiet. Now the air was like a bowstring stretched beyond all normal tolerance, and it thrummed with fear.

Down here, if the Storad came in, there was no place to run, no place to hide that they couldn’t find us in the end. Over wasn’t much better but at least there were the gates towards the Mishans for the people with the right connections, the right amount of money. Only someone from Over had any of those things. A chance to beg asylum, to sell yourself off into servitude perhaps, buy your way out. This far down, all there was to look forward to was Namrat silently stalking you, and he might be quick and come by a Storad gun, or he might be slow and let you starve to death, but he was coming and there was no escape.

I hunched my shoulders against it, against the fatalistic feel, and the way my own mind tried to tell me that that was as it should be, because we’d always been told we were worth nothing and sometimes we believed it. I found myself turning to say something to Pasha, faced only snow-swirled air, snapped my mouth shut and carried on.

One building stood out among the rest, and I could see the glow of its lights even from two levels up. Guinto’s temple. I hesitated – priests and I have a less than happy history. Basically I loathe them, and they aren’t so fond of me, but Guinto and I had come to an uneasy truce. He didn’t try to convert me, I didn’t tell him he was full of shit. As truces go, it was sort of working. Again, I turned to say something to Pasha, and couldn’t, and couldn’t bear the crushing weight on my chest either.

Right then, even talking to a priest was better than what was going on in my head, so I made my way to his temple and, after only a small internal rant about fucking Ministry and sodding priests, went in. If I had something to hate, right there in front of me, I might feel better. Besides, Halina was off firing up the Stenchers, Dendal was away with the fairies again, and Perak was busy with a plan he wouldn’t tell me about. I had work to do too, and Guinto might be my best asset.

The temple was packed to bursting, fuller than I’d ever seen it so that it was hard to see the statues of the saints and martyrs, and the murals of the Goddess were lost in a haze of people. A quick inspection showed why – a table with a vat of something that smelled suspiciously like hot water that had once seen a cabbage, somewhere far back in its history. It was doing duty as “soup” for the people who crowded round, thin hands offering up a cup or bowl.

Guinto presided over the squirming, pushing mass of people with his usual – and to me infuriating – serenity. He blessed people, comforted them, told them to have faith, the Goddess would protect her own.

What a crock of shit, but he was doing more than most anyone else, just with the “soup”.

He caught sight of me, cocked a questioning eyebrow, and made his way through the hordes of hungry parishioners.

“I won’t say it’s a pleasure,” he said, but he was smiling his superior smile, the one that made me want to zap him with a bit of magic, just to see what he would do. “But you’re always welcome, you know that.”

I wanted to say something sharp and cutting, wanted to rant till steam came out of my ears and my head stopped thinking all these stupid thoughts, but all I could see was the drip-drip-drip of Pasha’s blood on the floor, all I could hear were gunshots and screams. I opened my mouth to tell him why I was here, what Halina and I had decided, and nothing came out.

Guinto dropped the smile, took me by the arm and led me into his office-cum-quarters behind the altar. He didn’t say anything, for which I was glad, only bustled about getting two glasses and a bottle of something pinkish and vile-smelling.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” he said, and handed me a full glass.

I put it down without drinking, and found my voice. “Pasha’s dead.”

He sat down behind his stark, darkwood desk and ran his hands over the polished surface. “I know. We held a service for him.”

I slumped into the chair opposite. “One he’d have liked, I hope.”

“Of course. A full-blown Downside service, with the blood-and-ash devotional and the choir singing one of their hymns. I’ve always quite liked the Downside hymns, so full of passion, don’t you think? Of course, don’t tell anyone I said that. But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

I hated it when he did that – he claimed it was because the Goddess gave him insight. I say perhaps he was just a shrewd old bastard who only wore the face of a benign and holy priest.

“No, it’s not. I can’t do anything up there. Can’t use my magic, not unless I want to go batshit crazy or die, or I can’t use it until I’ve had about a week’s sleep and we haven’t
got
a week. Perak won’t let me even go out there with a gun. So I thought, if I can’t do anything Over, maybe I could do something Under.”

I’m sure he only smiled his smug smile just to really piss me off. Worked too. “Who says you have to do anything? I thought Rojan didn’t give a rat’s backside about anything except money and women and staying alive?”

“Yeah, well, Rojan’s changed. Not for the better, I often think – I mean, look at me, I’m talking to a priest and I haven’t once wondered what it is you’re guilty of. I’m stuck with being responsible, because I am. I’d much rather not be.”

“So what are you going to do?”

And there it was, the question that had been rattling round my brain all the way down here. Nothing wasn’t an option, not any more. Not after Pasha – it had to be worth something, what the silly sod had done. I owed him that. Without any magic it was going to be tricky, because I’d have to start using my brain. That should have been a warning really.

“You remember Allit?” I said. “The young mage? Well, he’s discovered one or two things he can do. One of them, well, we’re not sure exactly what it does, but we think perhaps… he can see what’s going to happen. Perhaps.”

“And?”

“And we’re going to do something about it. ‘They all rise,’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant at first, and I don’t think he did, but… they all rise. Under. No-Hope and Boundary, the Stench, anyone in the Slump. Malaki wouldn’t take help from Under except what he wanted to strong-arm out of people unwilling to give it. None of them want to take help from Under, except maybe as cannon fodder so they can escape. The cardinals – the ones that are left – are pitching a fit, trying to press-gang people into fighting, the sort of people they usually happily ignore. But they wouldn’t give guns to the likes of us, because who knows who we might shoot and it might be them. But I’ve seen what’s Outside, I’ve seen what’s coming and it makes what battered down our gates look like a kid’s toy. Against that, we’ve got guns and bullets and not enough guards Over. But we’ve got people down here, hordes of them. Nasty vicious people, or just people who want to live and have had to fight their whole lives to fend off the alternative, to stave off Namrat. Which is precisely what you want in a person during a war, and you want them on your side. Right?”

“I don’t think I…”

“Father, Mahala has got an army down here. They just don’t know that’s what they are, what they’re capable of, because they’ve been stomped on for too long. We’re going to wake them up.”

“‘We’?”

I allowed myself a smile. “Yes, we. Look, Perak can’t do as he wants because he’s got cardinals breathing down his neck, cardinals who’d probably keel over with outrage if he even suggested it. He didn’t say it outright, he can’t, but he’d do it if it was just that, I’m sure of it, but he needs those cardinals, and the guards and Specials. He needs them all willing and on his side if we’re to have a hope here, if he wants to come out alive whether we beat the Storad or not. But Perak’s known-full-well-to-be-a-pain-in-the-arse brother? He can do a lot of things an archdeacon can’t. And a priest who defied Ministry to allow Downsiders in his temple, who allowed the blood-and-ash devotional, who almost any man Under would listen to? Handing out soup or what passes for it is all very well, but what do you think will happen when the Storad get in? And they will get in. What will happen to Under then? I tried before, to get people Under to help, and they wouldn’t. All busy trying to get out, or believing some bullshit about how the Storad would leave them be, or, the sensible ones anyway, busy putting up what defences they could. They wouldn’t fight for Ministry, and I don’t blame them. But they’d fight for themselves. If you asked them to.”

He opened his mouth to say something, probably some little adage about the Goddess would provide, but shut it before he could say anything that would incur my sarcasm. He may have been a priest, and we held very different views on things, but he wasn’t stupid.

Finally he said, “It would be a busy day for Namrat if the Storad get in. But the Goddess —”

“Will reward you all in heaven with a pat on the head and a biscuit, yes, yes. But don’t you think she’d rather you didn’t all turn up at once? Did you ever listen to the Downsiders, what they think the Goddess means? The reward isn’t for dying, it’s for fighting against it every damned step of the way. That’s what the Goddess used to mean, before the Ministry sucked her dry.”

Guinto sat back and stared at me for a long time, and while he thought I kept my peace and drank the pink stuff, which tasted as vile as it smelled.

“What precisely are you suggesting?” he said at last. “Because I can’t go against what I feel the Goddess means to me. I can’t condone violence, except in self-defence. And even then it’s only a perhaps.”

Goddess preserve me from idiots and holy men. I’d have said that if I’d thought it would have helped, or the Goddess was listening. Instead I made an attempt at tact, which, as noted, is not something that came easily. “Perish the thought, Father. And I’m not wanting to press-gang anyone into doing something they don’t want to or can’t. I just want you to present people with the choice, and a few pertinent facts. Surely, after that, it’s up to them?”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Me? If you find me some willing bodies, I’m going to get them the means to defend themselves.”

And when they’d done that, when they’d found out they were strong… who knew? Maybe we could fend off the Storad, and then take down Top of the World like the black was always tempting me to do, make the Ministry fall, rip open Over and let the sunlight fall on Under. Perak might even help – he loathed the cardinals and all the rest about as much as I did and I was pretty sure he’d give up archdeaconry just the second an alternative presented itself.

Rojan Dizon, defeater of the Storad, leader of the Glorious Rebellion. Got a nice ring to it, hasn’t it?

The thing about priests, I’ve often found, is that they can be right sneaky bastards when it suits them.

Because although Guinto never tired of telling me what good, simple people his flock were, devout worshippers of the most benign Goddess, two hours later the doors to the temple shut behind a group of men who between them had probably mugged, embezzled, scammed, stabbed or otherwise fought their way through half of No-Hope. Well, some of them didn’t look too threatening, more disgruntled factory workers, but that covers quite a lot of disgruntled when their workday consisted of twelve hours’ humping around a lot of heavy stuff, leaving them with shoulders like battering-rams. Even after a month or more of starvation rations, they were still bigger than me, and intimidating as hell in the wavering shadows of a hundred candles perched along the statues and on the backs of pews.

Good simple people, my backside. They’d been suspiciously quick too, almost like Guinto had them on standby.

All in all, they looked pretty incongruous in front of the nice sparkly Ministry picture of the Goddess with her pet fluffy tiger. They looked
right
at home before the Downside mural of her, in front of Namrat and his death-dealing teeth.

Guinto seemed nervous as hell, and I wasn’t much better but I put on a bold front, kept my mangled hand out of sight in one pocket, and the other on the pulse pistol, just in case.

Guinto started, but it soon became clear he wasn’t too sure about getting it all into words, or perhaps just not sure how much he should say, whether it might hinder more than help. The men here probably knew crap all. Most of the news-sheets had been keeping it all as quiet and calm as they could, calling for stoic forbearance in the face of this little minor trouble that would soon blow over. The men here knew that for the bunch of shit it was, but they didn’t know much else except what the rest of the news-sheets were saying, such as we were all doomed when the baby-eating and defeated-opponent-buggering Storad made it through the gates. What they thought they knew was mostly bollocks, and I couldn’t decide which lot of bollocks was worse.

Guinto stumbled to a halt and looked at me. So did all the hulking bruisers. Not a nice feeling. I decided to say, Screw tact. It’d be lost on them.

So I got up on the little dais next to Guinto and said, “We’re fucked, well and truly.”

As motivational speeches went I could have done better, but I had their attention. So for once in my life I was honest, searingly truthful about just how screwed we were, and why; told them that all that shit about the Storad not bothering Under was a load of old bollocks and how I knew that; and just why they couldn’t escape through the Mishan gate. When their faces had begun to look like a bunch of slapped arses, I told them I was fairly sure that the Storad didn’t eat babies, and what we were going to do about it anyway.