Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (5 page)

“I’d never been out of the Stench before you came,” she said in answer to my question. She kept looking at me askance, as though I wasn’t what she’d expected or the wastrel she’d been told about. She got over it. “Most of us never leave – never get the chance, which is pretty much the only reason I came with you. You didn’t tell me I’d be working for Ministry though.”

“Would it have made a difference? I mean, for the chance to get out, do something. Eat, for example.”

She cast me a sharp glance and thought about it for a while. “Maybe not. Pasha’s already taught me more about using magic than I’d managed to teach myself over the years.” She even managed to keep the sneer at him being a Downsider out of her voice.

“For someone who taught herself, you’re pretty good,” he said. He hadn’t seemed to notice her antipathy, though I knew he had, that it burned him inside, but he never let it colour his words. He wasn’t that kind of guy. “Wonder why we haven’t found any more women mages?”

A softening of her sneer at the compliment, and then a wry laugh from Halina. “I expect there have been more of us, but maybe they all fall into the black.”

“I’m not sure —” I said.

“Well, women tend to have more pain in their lives as a matter of course.” She laughed at what was probably a comical look of confusion on my face. “You know, monthlies and such. Don’t cross me then, I warn you, because that constant ache makes me formidable, not to mention touchy. You may not survive the encounter, for all your super-duper magic power. Then there’s childbirth. I mean, sure, the doctors have painkillers, but no reputable doctor would come Under, and especially not to the Stench. And there’s ways and ways of not going through it, but all the docs give you is something for the guy to take, and who’s going to believe them when they say, ‘Hey, babe, I’m safe’? Not me, that’s for damned sure. I’ve seen too many girls caught out by that one.”

I was pretty sure she didn’t see my guilty flinch – I’d been known to use those words myself in the, ahem, heat of the moment.

“I figured out about the black fairly early on,” Halina continued, “and no way am I going to just take some guy’s word for it. So, I got pretty good at fending off attention. I don’t want to go crazy popping out a baby. Dendal said he thinks that’s what happens to women mages, or perhaps that’s why we’re rarer, because we’re more likely to fall in. Best way to avoid that is to avoid men, the way I look at it.”

My first thought was, naturally,
What a waste
, followed by
Well
,
that explains it
. Then I gave myself a mental slap, because she was the most experienced of the mages we’d found, and we needed her. Which was quickly followed by the thought that she’d be one hell of a challenge, and that’s what I live for.

I must have given it away somehow, because she fixed me with a glare that promised I’d find out just how good she was at her magic if I tried anything. A reply to my own little threat earlier, and she meant it just as I had. So I didn’t try a damn thing. I certainly thought about it though.

By the time we reached the inner gate to the keep – as hideously decorated with faceless statues, and as black with synth as the outer gate – and the guards that Perak had left there, I was impressed by more than just her shirt and what filled it. She was sharp, very sharp, and she had a firm grip on just what she could and couldn’t do with magic. She also had a caustic tongue that made me feel like an optimist in comparison. In other words, I liked her – opinions about Downsiders excepted, and maybe that was just a matter of time – even if she didn’t like me. I felt pretty confident that she was going to be a great addition to our little gang of mages. Maybe that would be enough, but I doubted it. Even down here, we could feel the boom-shudders as a tremor through our feet, a slight shaking of the walls around us that made my shoulder blades itch.

But for now, a simple little job of blocking tunnels, a smart, attractive woman next to me who presented the best kind of challenge. What could go wrong?

It started off all right – it always does. The guards, bored at being left to wander around down here where there wasn’t much chance to bribe anyone and simultaneously grateful they weren’t up by the gates where they could get shot at, had found several tunnels and made a start of blocking them from the castle end. They’d also done a few quick and dirty sorties to figure out where the tunnels led – mostly down by the gates of the castle leading out into the ’Pit, though they’d been overtaken by the growth of the city and led to places that were now inside its walls.

It didn’t take much for Halina and me to block them more thoroughly. Me via rearranging a few bits of rock and wall into interesting shapes and her by levitating a few bits of handy rubble – otherwise known as what was left of some nearby houses – into place. She really was very good. It didn’t hurt too much, and I made sure not to overdo it. We still had the pain lab to visit later on again, and overdoing it would be a bad, bad idea.

While we were doing that Pasha had a look around and managed to find one of the tunnels tentatively marked on Perak’s map. Like all of them, it was cunningly disguised – what made them such a bitch to find, all thanks to our sneaky bastard warlord ancestor.

“It’s a lot bigger than the rest,” Pasha said as he led the way.

He wasn’t joking either. The rest of the tunnels were narrow at the castle end, with slits for arrows, or nowadays guns, to shoot through, and bigger ones for a handy boulder or some hot oil to drop on an unsuspecting enemy. Perfect for defence. Even if they weren’t now blocked up, it would take a handful of men to hold them against a hundred. The problem being, of course, that we’d never expected anyone from inside Mahala – the defected Dench – to use the knowledge of their existence against us, or that we’d need so many men up by the gates at the same time.

The tunnel Pasha had found would take a battalion to hold. The entrance, like most of the others, was hidden in what appeared to be a solid wall, in this case a blank three-storey-tall affair in one of the inner closes nearer the main keep. The mechanism that opened it was hidden inside a hollow brick – even if you knew where a tunnel was, finding the mechanism was like trying to find a fresh breeze in the Stench. When Pasha pulled on the lever for this one, half the wall rolled away on silent… hinges? Rollers? Who knew? Behind it the tunnel yawned off into darkness. No defences here, just wide-open tunnel, which was odd. A frigid wind made the skin on my face tighten and something else – no idea what, but in hindsight perhaps telling the future – made my balls shrivel.

“Much as I don’t like to suggest it, I think we may need to check this one out before we seal it,” Pasha said. “See where it goes. Why it’s different. Maybe it’ll be right for whatever Perak and Lise want to use it for. There’s no one in it, anyway, I can tell you that.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right.” The thought of it didn’t fill me with confidence. I allowed myself one concession to self-preservation. “Perhaps taking a guard or two might be prudent?”

Pasha raised an eyebrow at that, but in the end he conceded it might be wise. A half-dozen guards lounged around the entrance looking bored, and when Pasha asked, four of them looked glad of the chance to do something. The other two waited at the entrance, ready to close the tunnel up, seal it as best they could if everything went tits-up. Not an inspiring thought. Slightly better was the fact that since Trade had started pounding out guns, all the guards had them.

The differences were plain to see inside the tunnel as well as at the entrance. The other tunnels were, shall we say, less crappy-looking than this one. They had dressed stone lining them, at least most of the way, frescos and murals all along the walls, a flat, paved road underfoot. This one had lumpy rock walls that looked half finished and an earth floor that had turned to dust so that little clouds puffed up with every step. Even with the breeze that brought goose bumps up all over, the air felt flat and dead.

“Hey, look.” Halina bent down by one wall, just by the entrance. “I wonder what these do.”

Pasha held his Glow light where she was looking. A series of what looked like lumps of stone poked out from the wall. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it if they hadn’t been so regular, like they were put there.

Halina reached out to tug on one, but I was quicker and grabbed her hand away. “The man who had these built was one sneaky little fucker. For all you know, that could bring down a ten-ton slab of rock on our heads.”

We all looked up, but there was nothing to see except more rock. That didn’t make me feel any better about those little lumps of stone.

“Let’s just see where this goes, shall we?” I said. “And not touch anything on the way.”

We crept on in, quiet as we could be, listening always for other footsteps ahead, for the sound of furtive breathing or the clank and jingle of the armour all the Storad wore. Every now and again Pasha would twist a finger and we’d stop while he listened, but each time he’d say they seemed far away – far enough to be at their camp probably, though not knowing how much this tunnel twisted it was hard to tell.

The tunnel seemed to go on for an age, mostly straight but with sudden twists and turns that appeared out of the gloom as we went forward, all with guns out, just in case. Every turn brought my heart into my mouth. What if there were Storad just around the corner, what if Pasha couldn’t hear them, what if Dench had found a way to block him, what if, what if till my eyes went screwy.

The air got colder, the breeze brisker. The boom-shudder of the guns was felt more than heard in the castle, but the shudders got fainter and the booms got clearer as we went on. We had to be getting close to Outside. I could smell meat crisping already, though I brushed that off as wishful thinking. But the end of the tunnel meant Storad, though we’d heard nothing so far. Pasha handed me the lamp so he could twist his knuckles again and try to hear how far away the camp was.

Sadly, he should have tried about a hundred steps earlier. Then maybe we’d have had more notice and we could have retreated in style. Instead, the first we knew about anything was when Pasha’s eyes flew wide open about half a heartbeat before something – a bullet as it turned out – pinged off the rock right by my head and zipped off down the tunnel behind us. I didn’t even have time to say, “Shit,” before a whole bunch of Storad appeared round the next bend, looking menacing in some weird sort of armour I’d never seen before and dark, twisted helmets. We were near the end, it seemed, and they’d snuck in since Pasha had last listened, or he’d been fooled by the twisting nature of the tunnels. Or maybe Dench really had discovered how to block him at close range.

Whatever, there was a brief, frozen moment in time as we all stared at each other before reality kicked in. We were seven. They were about twenty, with more coming round the corner, no longer caring about being quiet or sneaking. Big, nasty-looking men with guns in their hands.

We ran.

I’ll say this about Halina, that girl could really shift, fast enough that I began to wonder if she’d bypassed those cardinals’ flunkies and decided to leave me to the Storad herself. Probably helped that she wasn’t actually on the ground but propelled herself through the air. I’d have given my left bollock to be able to do the same. I very nearly did give it too, when a bullet grazed the top of my thigh, leaving a burn, a rush of juice and a quick thanks that it hadn’t been just that bit higher, thereby putting an end to my favourite hobby. I could have rearranged myself out of there, of course, but that took time and I had to sit down while I did it or I’d fall down. There was no way in the world I was sitting down while a bunch of Storad came for me with guns, so I ran with everyone else.

Unfortunately, it’s quite hard to outrun a bullet. Pasha did his best to plant the idea in the shooters’ minds that they might want to aim somewhere else, but I reckon it wasn’t too easy while running away, plus the Storad language wasn’t ours. Bullets zipped about all over the place. One of the guards fell just as we came to the next twist, and had no hope of getting out of the field of fire. Pasha and I picked him up by the shoulders and half dragged, half carried him around the bend, but he was already dead.

“Where in hell did they come from?” Pasha was wheezing like an old man and something, a bit of bullet or a scrap of shattered rock, had sliced a cut across one eyebrow. “One minute they weren’t there, the next they were.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me. Best answer, Dench is a tricky bastard. Now what?”

His eyes took on the dreamy look that meant he was listening in to people’s thoughts. “They’re slowing down. I can’t hear them properly for some reason – they sound far away even though they aren’t, and I don’t know much Storad, but I
think
they don’t want to come round that corner and find a bunch of guns in their faces.”

“Can’t say I blame them. How about we use the time to get the fuck out and see if we can block the tunnel? At least jam the door.”

“Good plan.”

I suppose we could have left a couple of people to slow them down in a rearguard action, but the guards were all piss-scared – this wasn’t their usual kind of work. Now they were getting shot at, and while Pasha and I had grabbed their comrade and spent a few seconds deciding what to do, they’d been legging it as fast as they could.

Being the brave and heroic kind of guy I am, I ran after them. We played cat-and-mouse with the Storad, running between twists in the tunnel, hoping they wouldn’t catch sight of us, or catch us with a bullet before we rounded another corner. Luck held out, mostly. One of the guards got a bullet in the arse, but he managed to stagger on out of sheer terror: mages weren’t the only things lied about in the news-sheets, the Storad had a pretty fearsome reputation as baby eaters and captured-person buggerers, and this time I had no idea how true any of it was. I didn’t want to stop to find out either.

The Storad still weren’t far behind when we got within sight of the entrance, though I’m sure hearing their breathing was just my imagination. The guards were already running for their lives across the close, leaving Halina by the mechanism. She shouted a few choice words after them, but she didn’t run.