Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise

by Francis Knight

  “The Storad want you dead, you know that, of course? Of course. You stopped their previous plan, they don’t want you messing with this one. But that man, my creepy talker, isn’t Storad, and isn’t working for them either. But he still wants you dead or, if not dead, then in the hands of people you probably don’t want to be in the hands of. Good thing it’s dark in here or the evening could have ended before it’s begun.”

  “He can join the queue.” I suspected I sounded far more blasé than I felt, but people wanting me dead was getting old, though no less worrying. “What’s his reason?”

  One shoulder went up in a subtle shrug. “He’s not Storad; he’s Mishan. One of their ambassadors, as it happens. They’ve been coming in dribs and drabs, negotiations and so on. Ministry likes to keep them entertained, and we were hired. He’s got a fondness for my girls, me, so he’s kept on coming even though most of the rest are back the other side of their gate. This one is a liaison supposedly, between the Mishans and the Ministry. Trade, food, what we’re bartering, all that sort of thing. Including cardinals.”

  “We’re bartering cardinals? I don’t suppose we get much for them.”

  “For the Goddess’s sake!” Erlat slammed her glass on the bar, bringing a few drunkly interested looks from the Ministry boys down the other end. “Can’t you take this seriously? Me seriously? I’m trying to help you here, help us all, and all you’re doing is making fun.”

  I shut my eyes and tried not to see the things swimming there before I snapped them open again and nodded a sorry. “All right. Mishan liaison wants me, dead or not so dead. What for?”

  Erlat settled down again. “Some of the cardinals are, well, in talks shall we say? Not official ones either. One or two have already sneaked their families over, and they’re just waiting for the right time to run themselves, before the Storad get here. The Mishans want the best deal in return. Money, goods, guns – you name it, they’re trying to get the cardinals to pay it. But they aren’t forgetting that if the Storad win, the Mishans might well be next on the list of places and people for them to destroy. They’ve hated each other a long time, and until now Mahala has been the only thing that’s kept them from trying to rip each other’s throats out. How we made all that money, right? So one of the prices the Mishans are demanding in return for saving a few cardinal skins is you and Lise.”

  “Lise? But —”

  “But nothing. Lise is a damned genius and they know it as well as you do. If Perak wasn’t Archdeacon but was still inventing guns and all the rest, they’d ask for him too. As it is, he’d just be a bonus. The Mishans need someone to make things for them, or to show them how to make guns and whatever else so they can defend themselves when – and as far as they’re concerned it is a when, not an if – the Storad destroy us and start threatening them. And they want you handed over as an initial peace offering, so they can give you to the Storad if they need to.”

  The only word that came to mind was “Shit.”

  “Quite.”

  “Does Perak know about this?”

  “I suspect so, or at least he guesses. Jake’s mentioned it once or twice – I think she was hoping I’d find out what I could. I’ll tell Perak as soon as I can; at least he might be able to keep Lise safe.”

  All of a sudden that bold cardinal’s snide words didn’t seem quite so much bluster, and Perak wanting me out of harm’s way made a lot more sense. So did getting out of this bar about now.

  I slapped down the last of my money on the bar, took what was left of the bottle and offered my arm to Erlat.

  “Perhaps you’d like an escort home?”

  She took my arm and I got a proper smile out of her at last. “Only if you promise to finish that bottle with me. Maybe take me up on my offer for once, and let me ruin you for other women. And to be careful, whatever it is you’re planning on doing. A corpse would suit them just as well.”

  “I promise faithfully on the Goddess’s fictional arse to both finish the bottle and be as careful as I can. That do?”

  And there, a laugh that lightened all the black thoughts in my head. “It’s all I’m going to get, isn’t it?”

  The streets were lonely and dark, but I was sure I saw a pale face turned up to watch me as we passed.

  That pale face bothered me, a lot. I couldn’t be sure it was the same one that I’d seen earlier when I was with Halina, but in light of what the cardinals had argued, and what Erlat had told me, taking chances seemed stupid. Especially if it wasn’t me the Mishans were after – there was Lise to warn too. So, reluctantly because Erlat’s house was a safe haven and I wanted that right then, I didn’t stay there once that bottle was finished. I made sure I didn’t have too much of it too.

  I even kept part of my promise to Erlat about being careful and rearranged my face, just a touch, so that I didn’t look like me but instead like some blandly forgettable guy from Under.

  Pale Face was still there, lurking, but I was pretty sure I fooled him – men came and went at an alarming rate from Erlat’s house so I was just one of several, even at that hour. But he was still there, and that opened up a whole load of possibilities in my head. I hurried as quickly as I could without looking suspicious and got to the lab.

  The office was quiet as I passed, dark except for the flicker of Dendal’s candles. The lab was quiet too – it was the middle of the night. That hadn’t stopped the boom-shudders from keeping on coming though, and another one rocked the lab just as I got there. A few heartbeats later something smashed inside – call it a gut feeling or paranoia, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the usual sort of smash that came after the boom-shudders.

  I had my pulse pistol out and the door half open even before I thought about it. Another smash, and someone swearing – Lise.

  “Oh, you Goddess-fucked bastard, do you know how long it took me to make that?”

  By the time I got to her, whoever had been doing the smashing was regretting it. The lab was in near-darkness, just one faint Glow globe hanging over Lise’s desk. At the edge of its light, a man hunched over his stomach, holding on like he thought it’d fall out otherwise. The blood was very dark on his hands, and it was on the long screwdriver that Lise had taken to keeping with her at all times. I don’t suppose he’d have been all that comforted to know she could have called upon any number of torturous instruments if she’d wanted.

  Lise herself stood under the light, looking pale but furious in a blizzard of bits of machine, even worse than normal. Two of Perak’s guards whom he’d assigned to protect Lise and the lab lay unconscious a bit further in. They obviously weren’t up to the job.

  Lise caught sight of me and stepped back from the man on the floor, from her screwdriver sticking out of his stomach. “Rojan, I – oh, I – I – he broke my gyroscope! Bastard. It took me days to get it all aligned properly. And he wanted me to leave, he kept grabbing me and…”

  She sat down in the chair behind her desk, hard enough I thought the legs might snap, a hand over her mouth as the man on the floor looked up, still with a faint look of surprise. By the time I got to her, he’d keeled over and stopped breathing, and the pool of blood had reached Lise’s feet. She stared down at it like she couldn’t work out what it was.

  “Rojan, I – I —” Normally all poise and technical know-how, Lise was reduced to a stammer. Shock, most certainly, and I couldn’t say I’d be any better if I’d just stabbed a man with a screwdriver. Especially not at just-turned-sixteen. I definitely wouldn’t have pulled myself together as quickly as Lise did.

  “He said Perak sent him,” she said. Without saying anything about it, we held hands. Hers was cold, with a faint tremor, but her voice was steady enough once she got going, started to think in that logical way that always left me floored. “The orders even had Perak’s seal on, look. Only… only Perak never sends for me. He comes here – I think he likes it in here with all the machines. Better than cardinals, he says. More reliable, less likely to argue. Even if he did want me to go t
o Top of the World, he wouldn’t order me. And he needs me here now, more than ever, so I knew something was odd. But when I said something, and one of the guards went to take a look at the orders, he, he – I don’t know, it’s a blur really. But he took out the guards and said I was going with him whether I liked it or not. He grabbed me and that’s when the gyroscope broke. I just meant to keep him away from me. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  I pulled her in and gave her a hug, and she let me for once, even hugged me back. Not for long, but it was enough to know this had scared her, badly. Scared me pretty bad too.

  First things first. I made sure the door was bolted and secure – since the last time someone had tried for the lab, I’d made sure there was extra security, and so had Perak, though we’d had to be subtle because Lise wasn’t keen on being mollycoddled as she called it. Then I checked the guards – both out cold, who knew how. Finally, the body. He didn’t have anything on him that was any use for working out who he was, but it didn’t take much to guess, at least broadly.

  “One of the cardinals’ men, isn’t he?” Lise said. “I thought it was you they were after, to give to the Storad. Or the machines, you know, try to sabotage them like they did before.”

  “It’s not just the Storad who’re after me. Or you. The Mishans are quite keen on acquiring us both, so I hear.” I sat back and thought for a minute. “All right. A cardinal’s man, probably, or perhaps working for the Mishans. Hard to say, or if it’s a cardinal which one. I could find out, but dead bodies are hard. So we concentrate on what we do know. We need you here, no doubt about it. Without you doing your thing, we’re screwed. Without me, there’s only going to be so much Glow to go around. We can’t just go and hide. Well, I can in the ’Pit for a while tomorrow, but not forever. What’s the most secure room in this place?”

  Lise indicated a door in the far corner, which as far as I knew was always kept locked. “In there, only —”

  “Only nothing. Firstly, you’re going to go in there and stay in there until I can get some better guards. Keep working, because we need you to do that. But I can make you less… findable, at least for now. And you can play with chemicals to your heart’s content. Make this place a death trap for whoever you don’t want in here, and that’s anyone you don’t know, OK?”

  She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. That donkey line of hers, the stubborn crease in her forehead, was good for more than just thwarting her brothers. “OK. What are you going to do?”

  I sat back. What could I do about cardinals? Or Mishans even? Not much, or not right away. I wasn’t going to say that. “First, I’m going to change your face, just a bit. Make you less of a target. Then I’m going to let Perak know. If he warns the cardinals off, perhaps… I don’t know. We’ll think of something. It’s just for long enough, right? Just until we finish this thing. To do that, we need you now more than anyone – we can’t do this without you.”

  I thought she was going to say something else for a moment – “Are you sure we can finish this?”, perhaps. She had that kind of look on her face, but not for long.

  “All right. Will it hurt?”

  “Not you,” I said, and wished I hadn’t when she flinched at the reminder of where all the juice was coming from. “Not much, no. No more pain than my hand is giving me anyway. How many warts do you want?”

  She smacked my shoulder but I got a laugh. “None! Now do it.”

  So I changed her face. Not much, but enough that she didn’t look like my sister any more. It almost certainly wouldn’t work for long, because the cardinals – hell, everybody by now – knew that I could disguise myself and other people. Then again, it wouldn’t last all that long without me concentrating on it. Long enough for Perak to sort something out, I hoped.

  Lise ran her hands over her face. “That feels really bizarre.”

  “Welcome to Rojan’s world. Now get yourself in that room. I’m going to get in touch with Perak and see what we can do.”

  I helped her get all her bits together, all the plans and tools and Goddess-only-knew-what else. She wouldn’t let me in the room though. “Not yet. The machine might not work. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

  I waited until she’d locked the door behind her, and went to find some guards to hopefully do a better job of guarding the lab before I woke Dendal and got him to contact Perak.

  Chapter Four

  Another night with no sleep was just what I needed. Not. Perak hadn’t been asleep either when I’d got hold of him, but he was incandescent when he found out what had happened. That was clear despite the tinny echo of Dendal’s communication conduit, as was a bone-deep despair of ever being able to do anything, anything at all, without the cardinals trying to fuck it up.

  “But Lise is safe, you say?”

  “For now. She doesn’t look like her, and she’s locked herself in. But for anyone determined enough, that won’t be a problem.”

  I was fairly sure I heard some muffled swearing at the other end. “Fine. Leave the cardinals to me. Oh, and Erlat’s Mishan-liaison friend – I got her message a few minutes ago. I’d incur some of the Goddess’s displeasure and lie through my teeth, but they expect that. Maybe Erlat can help… yes. She’d be perfect. Listen – you need to get out of the way, even more so now. Get down to the ’Pit as soon as you can. With any luck – no, I won’t have the cardinals in line, I doubt I ever will. But I should have something worked out. Look, the sooner we get going, the sooner you two will be safe, the sooner we’ll all be safe. In the meantime I’ll do what I can for Lise, with what men I can spare. I’ll sort something. You know I will. But while she can stay in the lab, I need you out of the way. I’ll tell everyone… well, I’ll tell them that Lise isn’t at the lab any more, that I’ve moved her somewhere. You too. Maybe they’ll believe it, maybe they won’t. But I need you down there, finding me a tunnel I can use.”

  He was as good as his word, and Specials were swarming over the lab long before the sun rose. Lise was as safe as anyone was going to be.

  So there I was, early the next morning, cursing the stomach that had made me agree to this particular escapade, and it had a lot to answer for.

  We didn’t take most of the new mages down to the ’Pit – as nursemaids go, I am crap. After a quick run through their paces, Pasha and I decided that taking the younger ones would be madness. Half of them didn’t even know what their talents were yet, and the other half were at the perilous stage of knowing just enough to be dangerous to themselves and everyone else around them. But Halina proved to be as capable as I’d thought, and levitation might be handy when you were planning a quick pig-snatch-and-grab. So Pasha and I had asked her and she’d looked blandly curious and said OK.

  We made our way down to Boundary, trying to be unobtrusive. I’d disguised myself a bit, a quick remoulding of my features. My conversation with Erlat was playing on my mind, along with about a thousand other things. Pasha and Halina noticed the change, but Pasha knew enough not to say anything and maybe Halina thought I did it all the time. Even disguised, I was twitchy. Was that man on the corner watching me? Was that bold cardinal hatching a neat little plan to hand me over to the Storad, or one of his comrades planning the same to hand me over to the Mishans? Was that junkie on the corner one of their men? It would almost be a relief to get to the ’Pit.

  From Boundary, we rode down in the lift that lived in a once-hidden access point to a place most had believed was sealed off and free of people, a cesspit of synthtox and chemicals that could eat you up from the inside. It hadn’t been quite as bad as that – the chemicals would probably take ten times as long to kill you as the people that had, in fact, lived in the ’Pit.

  I shut my eyes and concentrated on the thought of food, real food, beef and gravy and all those things I’d probably never see again, had become addicted to over a very short space of time when they’d been available to me down in the ’Pit. The thought of fat, crispy bacon on the hoof – trotter, whatever –
in the Storad camp took my mind off the fact that the lift was coffin-shaped. And badly maintained. And a long, long way from the bottom.

  Pasha looked surprised when I offered to go first, but that was purely a face-saving move. I’d have at least five minutes to have a little gibber of terror and relief at the bottom while the lift fetched the next person. I managed to pull myself together by the time Halina stepped out and looked round with a wide-eyed stare and a wrinkled nose. The smell of synth was pretty strong down there, enough that it felt like it was stripping the inside of my throat of its skin.

  While we were on our own, as Pasha came down in the jolting lift, Halina gave me a sideways glance that spoke volumes, mostly of a series of books called “You Look Like Something That Just Dropped Out Of My Nose, Only With Less Charm”.

  She was looking pretty fine. Lastri had dug out some of her old clothes, or so she said. I really couldn’t imagine Lastri in this little number though – a clingy shirt in a blue bright enough to have an eye out, cinched at the waist to show off Halina’s figure in all the very best ways, and a pair of close-fitting trousers that brought me out in a sweat.

  She’d not forgiven me for luring her away from the Stench under false food pretences; at least I assumed that’s why she kept giving me the old side-eye. Then again, she and Lastri had been very chatty, and no doubt Lastri had given her a highly colourful and probably not especially accurate character assassination of me and my ways. I say inaccurate – Lastri only knew the half of what I got up to, so any assassination attempt would be manslaughter at best.

  What Halina said in the end, given that, came as a surprise. “Dendal says you’re pretty good at this magic. Says I should look at what you and Pasha do, and try to follow it. But he said a lot of stuff, and not all of it made sense.”

  “That sounds like Dendal. I —”

  “He also said I should ignore any of your attempts to take me out or sweet-talk me. I’m inclined to agree with him on that point. So no funny business, all right?”