I tried the old faithful, never-fails smile. “Business will be strictly unfunny, I guarantee. I have sworn off women.” I tried to intimate with only facial gestures that I would fall off that wagon at the first hint of provocation.
My smile failed: she looked distinctly underwhelmed by my promise.
“And don’t you forget it,” she snapped. “I’ve had two cardinals have their flunkies ask me to lure you somewhere dark and out-of-the-way already. I’m no fan of the Ministry but I’m not beyond actually doing it, if you piss me off.”
It looked like I was behaving for the time being, which was a shame because there’s nothing like a flirt to take your mind off the damnfool thing you’re about to do.
We made our way out into the ’Pit proper, a maze of streets and scrunched-up buildings that hid behind a curtain of the constant rain – run-off from above which never stopped, which ran and dripped and pooled in glorious decay among the roots of Mahala. Towers loomed over us, dark and forbidding now, just shells that held up the rest of the city above, with girders criss-crossing, buttressing. No one manned the cages that dangled uselessly above us, which had once whirled and clanked in a complicated dance as they took people where they needed to go. The ’Pit was a husk, empty of life and sound and all the vibrancy that had once made me think I could quite enjoy life down here, even if said life was cheaper than shit.
Pasha didn’t say anything – this was home to him, or had been, and now it was nothing. His face lost that contented, secret little grin I’d got used to just lately and he looked sallow and gaunt under the sparse rend-nut-oil lamps that lit the street. He took out a floppy old hat I recognised, slapped it on to protect him from whatever the hell was in the water that dripped on us, then shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and went on.
Halina had no such qualms. She looked about with calculating eyes, maybe assessing the value of everything she saw. What she did see wasn’t much – the Downsiders had abandoned their homes when the ’Pit was unsealed, gladly, but they’d brought everything that they could up with them. All that was left was what even they didn’t think was worth anything.
We trudged the streets, heading for the tunnels, the few that we knew of. For the castle that lay at the heart of them, at the heart of Mahala. Halina stopped dead when the castle loomed out from behind a huge tower that supported the weight of the city above it. From here, mostly all you could see was the curtain wall, with the keep rising up out of the top like some demented bread that had been overloaded with yeast, but the sheer size of it was enough to batter the brain into submission. I’d seen the castle before, and wished I hadn’t, so Pasha and I merely carried on. Halina ran to catch up after a while.
“Is it true?” she asked me in a whisper, as though she didn’t want to disturb the ghosts that lay thick about us.
“Which part?”
She gave me that sideways look again, like the worth she was assessing was mine. I probably equalled half a rat, by her sneer.
“The pain factories. They were down here, right, like the sheets said? The mages? Dendal said not all of the mages, but still, enough, right? And the Downsiders helped them, and the Little Whores. And they – I mean, Pasha’s a Downsider and a mage and —”
She yelped when I gripped her wrist so hard my knuckles cracked. “Shut the fuck up. Especially shut the fuck up in front of Pasha. You don’t rate me much, I get that. But don’t talk about that in front of him, don’t even think it because he can hear that too. Don’t think of him in the same thought as them – hell, don’t even think about him at all, especially not with that sneer on your face. Or you’ll rate me much, much lower. Or higher, depending on if you’re scoring on how much I will zap your arse, because I will. You know nothing about him, all right?”
Her face looked like I already had zapped some tender part of her. “But, I —”
“You know what you think you know from the sheets you saw every day down in the Stench, when people were done with them. The sheets tell you shit, excepting what a few cardinals want you to think. You know crap-all.” I took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t really want to go in there again, and I know that Pasha doesn’t, for reasons that would blow your mind if you knew the half of them. But we have to, so we’re going to. It would help if you kept your mouth shut about the rest until you have half a clue what you’re talking about.”
I’ll give her this: she shut up, though I could tell she didn’t like it. That sideways glance fell on me more and more often as we went, the lip never ceased to curl, but she carefully avoided looking at Pasha and every now and again a frown would crease her forehead like she was really thinking.
The closer we got to the castle, the quieter Pasha got, the more his shoulders hunched. I couldn’t say I blamed him – the place didn’t exactly hold happy memories for me either. Halina walked behind us, subdued and thoughtful.
We reached the massive bulk of the outer wall. The main gate – an arching monstrosity bedecked with statues of what had presumably once been great warriors, now blank-faced with time and synth – was still blocked off, but one of the smaller ones had been freed up and two guards lounged at either side looking bored. A glance at the official pass Perak had given us and we were through into one of the closes – a series of squares surrounded by buildings that looked like they should be falling down. Houses crammed into spaces too small, bleeding into each other in an incestuous orgy of bricks, gently rusting girders and stone blocks, broken tiles and crumbling mortar. Narrow, twisting alleyways snaked between the squares, taking whichever path they could in the tangle. Cracked cobbles were slick under our feet, but the air, while harsh and ferociously cold, was mercifully free of the sounds that had long reverberated around the stone. I could see the echo of them on Pasha’s tight-lipped face none the less.
“So where are these tunnels?” Halina asked.
A fair enough question. “Most of the ones we know about lead from these squares. Some are pretty short, and now only lead out into the ’Pit, where the city grew after they were made. But some – maybe six or seven, maybe more, maybe less, maybe none – will take us Outside. If we can find them.”
“Outside,” she said. “Doesn’t seem possible. I mean, they always said there was no Outside… but it’s got to be real now, right? Where else are the Storad coming from? It just doesn’t feel real.”
“It will.” Pasha shook out the map that Perak had given us – he’d had his men scour this castle thoroughly since the ’Pit had opened up, and especially since Dench had defected, more or less willingly. The old archdeacon had kept down here a secret from all but a few Upside, and except for a couple of shorter tunnels that he’d used and those that Perak’s men had found, no one knew where they all were.
So the map was sketchy, but it was better than nothing.
“Where do we start?” Pasha asked.
A few hesitant dotted lines on the map showed where there might, possibly, be tunnels. Fewer bold lines showed where some had been found and blocked.
“Perak’s had his guards searching, and they’ve found some, but he needs most of his men up elsewhere, at the gates,” I said. “Things are getting tricky down by the Mishan gate, so I heard. Let’s just hope we don’t get another riot, because that’s all we damned well need. Perak’s left us a few men though. They’re based in the barbican.”
Luckily the map showed us the route to get there too, because the castle was a maze of squares and alleys that looked like they went in the right direction before they doubled back on themselves. When the mages had been based here, it had all been closed off, and things added to make getting in, or around, harder – doorways bricked up, false doorways added, alleys that led to nowhere.
Halina’s silky shirt, and the way it was moving over the more obvious parts of her anatomy, was doing very strange things to me. To distract me, and in the interests of knowing who the hell you’re working with, and maybe having them not hate your guts for threatening them, an
d not just because she looked stupendous, I got talking to her. I had a hope that if I was at least nominally nice, maybe she wouldn’t think of taking those cardinals’ flunkies up on their offer. I was even fairly gentlemanly and asked her about herself, which earned me a knowing raised eyebrow from Pasha.
“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.
Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise Page 5