Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise

by Francis Knight

  A single boom-shudder, weaker than the others. We’d taken out one machine but the other, further away up the little valley where I didn’t have a hope of reaching it, was still going. The only consolation was that the extra distance made the shots weaker. The narrowness of the valley meant that if they wanted to move it nearer, they’d have to dump the closer one over the lip of the valley. Time, we’d gained a little time. How long till they fixed the closer machine or gave it up as a bad job and dumped it? Who knew? Maybe a day. Maybe a week. Without a plan, it didn’t matter because we were going to be screwed.

  Of course, Perak had a master plan – he always did, that was the problem. The other problem was, he was being all cagey about said master plan. All I knew was it involved our sister Lise and some contraption she had in mind. I trusted her ingenuity more than I trusted Perak’s planning, if I’m honest. Perak is far too fair-minded to be properly sneaky. While being fair-minded is useful in some, probably most, situations, when you’re about to plunge into a war it’s a hindrance. But hey, Perak was Archdeacon. Who was I to argue? Of course, that didn’t mean I hadn’t. But still, Perak was being distressingly obstinate and vague, while Pasha and I were whacked out on pain and juice.

  Speaking of obstinate, here Perak was now, breezing up to the office like an old statesman, saying goodbye to Erlat at the door with a knowing look, making me wonder what was going on when I wasn’t looking. Perak came in, glad-handing Lastri, putting her on the back foot – oh yes, didn’t I love that! – taking the time to ask after Pasha, and apologising for keeping Jake away from home so much.

  Jake herself was a step behind him, freshly back from her reconnoitre of the pass. I tore my eyes away because I could feel Pasha’s gaze burning a hole in my neck, and concentrated on Perak. He looked nervy now, like he was strung out on something. Stress, no doubt – I wouldn’t have swapped places with him for anything. Storad at the gates and half his remaining cardinals at his back, either hating him or hoping to sneak their way into his job when he fucked up. The other half of the cardinals were ratting it out, and I could hardly even blame them, though naturally I did, at vitriolic length.

  “A good job at the gates,” Perak said, but there was an edge to his voice, a suppressed… something. “Should give us some extra time.” He lowered his voice so that Dendal and Lastri – despite her loitering with intent to eavesdrop – couldn’t hear. “We’ve got something to show you.”

  There was something in the way he said it that jerked me back to full awakeness. Like we were boys again and he wanted to show me something he’d discovered – what happened when he mixed these two chemicals together, or some little gizmo he’d not only repaired but improved. The look in his eye for his big brother, and surrogate father, that said “Look at what I did!” I’d missed that, and had forgotten I’d missed it.

  He glanced at Pasha and nodded towards the door. He took us through the pain room, through Lise’s work room which was a riot of bits of metal, brightly coloured cables and cans of oil, racks of tools that looked like instruments of torture, half-built gadgets and machines. On the other side of her work room was a door that was, or always had been when I’d noticed, kept locked. Perak glanced my way with a conspiratorial grin and took out a key.

  The room the other side of the door was just as incomprehensible to me as all the rest of Lise’s gadgets and gizmos. A contraption stood in the centre of the floor. I’d be more specific but it looked like a big pile of complicated metal to me. I could see about half of Lise – her top half seemed to be inside the machine and I could hear the tinkle of metal being adjusted and her cursing under her breath.

  She pulled out when she heard us come in, her face smudged with oil and her dark hair tied back tight so as not to get in the way. “I think it’s done,” she said to Perak. “But I’m not sure about the couplings.”

  They launched into a conversation that I only understood about half the words of, so Pasha and I took a closer look at the machine. It came up to about my chest, and like the pain-room generator it had a seat attached and a rig for taking magic – that is, for siphoning off a mage’s pain. It isn’t pleasant and this rig in particular looked even less so, a nest of cables around shining pistons and toothed cogs and other things I have no name for. It reminded me of nothing so much as a tiger, of Namrat, Death, always chasing us, wanting to eat us. Death was never far away. It made my stomach turn.

  “That thing scares the shit out of me,” Pasha whispered.

  “Me too.”

  Lise started to talk in a language I could understand – she knows how I feel about alchemy and all the rest.

  “I think we’ve got it right. I think this is what we need, what will keep us safe till we can make something, or do something, to fend off the Storad for good. I’ve got some plans for some machines like theirs. Got a factory working on them, but it’ll take longer than we have, and even longer to scrounge up the raw materials we need. So, to give us some time, I made this. It might even help against the machines Allit saw, the ones on their way.”

  “What is it?” Pasha asked, and he sounded as disturbed as I felt. Genius machines though Lise’s contraptions were, they tended to be centred on one thing – our pain and how to use it.

  Lise grinned like the kid she was only just starting to grow out of. Nice to see her smile again, and only this, these things, would do it for her. Since Dwarf had died, she’d retreated into her work until it was all she saw, all she thought about. It worried me, but we needed her to do just that too.

  “This will take your pain, yes, sorry,” she said. “Magnify it like the generator. But it does something very specific with it. It’s…” She hesitated, and gave me one of her looks, the one that makes it very clear how dense she thinks I am about mechanicals. “It’s like your pulse pistol. Sort of. Only a lot bigger. I’ve even built in some directional controls, look. Should be able to pinpoint who you want, or spread it over an area. Like the front of the gates.” She pointed at a couple of dials like I was likely to understand.

  I must have looked dubious – I certainly felt it – because she started to defend her contraption before I’d said a word.

  “It’s like electricity. Magic is, I mean. We can’t seem to get a way to make enough electricity to be useful except this way, not in time anyway. It’s… Rojan, this is hard to explain when you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. We can use it as a shield. Sort of. You know how electricity arcs… No, I don’t suppose you do. Look, just, just believe it, all right? You could use this to spread a pulse right across the gates, or anywhere you can reach. Probably to the lip of the valley. Maybe further.”

  “All right, I believe it. Does it work?”

  That got me a pout and a glare. “Not yet, but soon. I think. Only…”

  That didn’t sound good. “Only what?”

  Lise threw her screwdriver into the toolbox at her feet. “Only, I don’t know! The theory is sound, I’m sure of it, but I don’t know what the effects might be. I can’t be sure.”

  “Sure of what?” Perak asked quietly.

  Lise turned away to stare at a picture that peeked out of the toolbox. A face that only a mother, and perhaps Lise, could love. Dwarf’s weird-ugly features stared up out of the picture, from beyond the grave. Lise’s mechanic hero, and perhaps more. “He’d have known. But I can’t be sure.”

  “Lise, sure of what?”

  “What it’ll do to the mage in the rig.”

  Oh, fantastic. Three guesses who was going to end up in that rig. “I don’t think —”

  That was as far as I got because an ominous crack sounded from what seemed like under our feet and the remaining faint boom-shudders stopped. The sudden, if relative, silence was like a razor down the spine.

  Lise paled and ran to the main lab, to the telescope she’d set at the window where she studied the Storad and their machines as best she could. Perak shut his eyes and murmured what could only be a prayer under his breath before he follo
wed her.

  I followed more hesitantly and was rewarded with Lise’s “Oh shit, fuck and arse.”

  The near gun was still out, thank crap. But the far gun, the one I couldn’t reach from inside Mahala, had stopped because the Storad had finally done what they set out to do. My little shenanigans down at the gates had bought us bugger-all extra time. A crack split the left-hand gate right down the middle and it hung from its great hinges like a leering drunk.

  The Storad were no longer at the gates. They were on their way through them.

  Chapter Eleven

  We were back on that stupid rock again, high above what was left of the gates. I held on for grim death and Pasha and Allit looked out and told me what they could see and hear above what I could see for myself.

  The left-hand gate was a mess of metal and stone, chunks of both strewn across the gap inside. Across the chaos came the Storad, a stream of dark-haired, pale-faced men who looked as hard as the mountains they came from. The far machine which had taken the gate down stood Outside in the distance, quiet now, looking smug.

  Men dropped down on the path from the narrow valley, came through the ruined gates in a regimented flood, distinct groups heading for distinct areas. One group to the dead Glow machines that had been used to lift and carry all our wares, where they began to strip anything we’d left, which wasn’t much. Another group set up what looked like some kind of command centre just inside the gates, Dench in among them. Still others checked out the furthest reaches of the compound, or tested the inner gates that led inside. Not as strong as the outer gates, but it might take a day or two to get through them.

  Some of the guards shot at them, though their aim wasn’t great and most of the Storad stayed well out of the guns’ current range in any case. Perak said the last lot of guns down at Factory Three could shoot more than double the distance. Until then, or until a decision as to what the hell to do had been reached, Malaki ordered the guards to stop shooting.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Pasha’s monkey features scrunched up in concentration as he surveyed below. “It’s… ah, there. Dench. He knows, Rojan. He knows what you and I can do. That I’m looking in their heads right now, trying to work out what they’re about. Got them all repeating a phrase over and over in their heads so I can’t see past it. Currently, said phrase is ‘Fuck Rojan.’”

  “Nice. He doesn’t know about what Allit can do though, does he? Allit?”

  The kid was pale but stoic, his eyes shining with hero worship of Pasha and, dare I say it, me. It felt good, but part of me knew I was going to have to let him down gently, because a hero I ain’t.

  He shuffled forward and grabbed at a finger as he’d seen Pasha and I do countless times. A twist, a crack that made me grimace along with him, a whimper from a voice not yet broken properly. But he was made of stern stuff.

  His eyes went far away, as though he was looking somewhere else, and I suppose he was.

  “Almost here,” he said in a whisper, and we knew what he meant. More Storad machines, more men. Then his mouth cranked up into a one-sided smile. “Not just them. Others too. Below.”

  “What do you…? Oh.”

  From up here we could see the inner gates, see where the Storad had noted our lack of shooting and had sent a small sortie to check them for strength, for weaknesses. We could see this side too, see what the Storad couldn’t. A barrel-load of men. Guards in their tabards, milling restively, waiting for the order to shoot.

  The guards had always been an arrogant bunch of bastards – I swear it was on the application form: “Please rate your arrogance from 1 to 10” and only someone putting 11 had a hope of getting in. I suppose it came with the territory. They got to do things most of Under only got to dream about. Like having a decent wage without having to bust a gut for it. They were damned good at not busting a gut to solve any crimes, certainly. Instead they revelled in their small rise above the masses, in the freedom to do whatever the hell they liked to a suspect as long as he wasn’t Ministry, and Goddess help them if they arrested a Ministry man.

  They hadn’t signed up for this, I could almost see that thought radiate off them. They’d signed up for a uniform that meant they got to bully people in their normal course of work, for a steady stream of bribes, for the little extras that being a Ministry man, however menial, could give them. They were just your regular guys with a tabard and not much else. I could hardly even blame them for joining up – a job’s a job and you do what you can for you and yours. Perak had brought about enough changes as it was, ones that screwed with their nice, contained little lives. New captains, ones who frowned very hard indeed on bullying, bribery or extras. On top of that, now they had to risk their arses in a way they never had before, in a way few of us had ever had to, and they had to be shitting bricks down there. I almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

  Even without the different uniforms, you could tell the Specials from the regular guards. While the guards shuffled about like naughty children told to stand in the corner, the Specials stood serene, on the surface at least. Waiting with an infinite patience that was somehow even more bollock-clenching to look at than the uniforms or any amount of bravado would have been.

  But bravado wouldn’t have helped then. The guards were crapping themselves and, looking the other side of the gates, I couldn’t blame them. All of the guards and Specials had guns now – Trade had been pumping them out as fast as its factories could, at least until the raw materials ran out. The Storad, though, had come for war. Had prepared for it, must have done, must have just been waiting for the right time. Every damn one had a gun or something like it, most had two. Some had other contraptions that grew on their backs like weird metallic monkeys. I didn’t know what they did, but I did know I didn’t want to find out. And behind them, perched in the top of the valley and looking over them like a watchdog, they had the machine that had already taken down gates that were strong as mountains. It was silent now, presumably so as not to blow up its own men, but it was still there, and it still worked. The other machine, the one I’d bent, looked neglected and bleak, but it didn’t matter. A few people wouldn’t be a problem for the machine that was left. No, they’d soon be a big fat mess.

  All in all I was glad I’d never taken up that career in the guards, and that I’d have made a really crap Special. Then again, at least I wouldn’t have been perched on that rock like an idiot, trying not to think about falling off.

  The three of us were silent as we each surveyed what was below us.

  “What do you think?” I said in the end. I’d twisted one of the big guns, but the other had been beyond me, too far, too much. One was a start but I knew we’d have to sort the other sooner rather than later, because at some point the Storad would finish their inspection and the boom-shudders would start all over again, against the inner gates this time. I had no idea how I was going to sabotage that machine – there was no way I could reach it from inside the city, and I didn’t fancy the tunnels again one little bit.

  “I think we’re screwed,” Pasha said. “Can you do the same again with that machine? Or something worse? Worse would be better.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Allit said in a dreamy voice. “More on the way. Lots more. We won’t do it in time… I think… I…” He shook his head and went quiet.

  “I can try,” I said, and I’d had a few evil plans hatch in my head. “But…” Shit, I couldn’t believe I was saying this. “I can do a bit from here, same as before, though that one’s too far really. Like you said, Dench knows what we can do. Or at least, thinks he does. But if we got close, I could make it so they couldn’t repair it, or not without a lot of replacement parts.”

  “You want to go down there, in that lot?”

  “No. No, I really don’t. But I think I might have to.”

  Pasha gave me a funny look, like I’d grown an extra head or something. “All right,” he said in the end. “We’ll see what Perak’s plans are first. And then we’ll both go. If I
let you go on your own, no telling what might happen.”

  We made our way back, and I was glad to have a few buildings between the gate and me so I couldn’t see the drop any more. Perak wasn’t down in the office though, of course. He was up in Top of the World. We stopped off to see Lise, who was staring through the telescope.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Well, I’d get that thing going if I were you, and preferably so it doesn’t screw over the mage in it. Look, have you had any other ideas? Any other plans? You know, better guns? Something nice and explosive? We could really use something explosive about now.”

  “One or two, over and above the guns we’ve got coming, but they aren’t ready. They’ll take a day or two to make, more, even if I can find enough raw materials, and even then I can’t make many – not enough, that’s for sure. Then the factories need a pattern set before they can churn stuff out. But that’s not the main problem. It’s steel we’re short of. They may not work even then, and I should really be concentrating on the shield.”

  An idea struck me, harmonising quite nicely with my idea for attacking the working machine perched up in the valley. I couldn’t help what was probably quite an evil grin. “I might be able to help you out there. With the steel, that is. See what you can do, because I think we’re going to need everything you can give us, as soon as the factories can make it.”

  She frowned at me but for once she didn’t argue and we left her muttering under her breath about tensile strength and minimum carbon content. Or something.

  Top of the World was a long way from the lab, but with the Glow back on I managed to snaffle a vial to power up my carriage. It was a pretty shit ride, with knackered suspension and ripped upholstery that had been torn out by unhappy “customers” in my former life as a bounty hunter, but it beat walking, or screwing with my hand any more to rearrange myself and Pasha up there.