We looked back down at the pictures and the faces of boys who would never get any older.
Dench’s shoulders slumped again and the sharp tone left his voice. “There’s a plan behind this. Don’t know what or why, not yet, but I can feel it in my bones. Spent enough time in the Specials to know it when I see it.”
“Is this really all you could find?”
Apart from the pictures, all he had were the reports from the mortician detailing approximate age and so on, date, time and place of death and not a damned thing else.
Dench spread the pictures out across the table again, and tapped at one now bloodless throat. “This isn’t random. I’m sure of it, sure as shit stinks. Somebody targeted these boys. Don’t know why, but someone really hated the poor bastards, or hated what they represent perhaps. Downsiders, hmm?” He paused, as though an idea had just struck him. “Find the link, and you’ll find your killer. Perhaps.”
Without another word, he left to go back to Top of the World, back to keeping his sharp eye on Perak and juggling pissed-off cardinals and ambassadors. I didn’t envy him.
I looked back down at the pictures. I didn’t envy myself much either. I spent a fruitless couple of hours checking out where the boys had died, but apart from the fact they were all murdered close together, which could mean anything, all I got was rain down my neck.
In the end, I went where I’d lately taken to going when I needed to think and a sharp mind to ask all the right questions and tell me not to be such an arse. My one refuge from the world. Right then, I needed that something fierce because my head was spinning so fast I thought it might fall off.
Erlat kept a house in the Buzz, a discreet place for the wealthy gentleman, those from Over Trade who had money to spare but wanted to taste the underbelly, as it were, when they wanted some kicks but weren’t brave enough for Under proper. The Buzz provided those kicks in small, hygienic doses. It was a byword for clean whores and drugs that wouldn’t make you go blind, probably. A place more like a ghost town lately.
Erlat’s place didn’t look like much from the outside—a house like a thousand others just here. Walls dark with grime and synth, mean windows that shed a patchy light on to the walkways which were at least fairly solid. The splashes of paint were new, grouped around the door. Someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to scrub them off.
She hadn’t been here long, only a couple of months since the ’Pit had opened up, but she ran a good house and word had spread. The Buzz patrons always loved to see a few new faces—as well as parts further down.
Kersan opened the door for me and let me in with a deferential smile. The waiting room was as plush as any I’ve seen, with rich velvets draping the walls, artful drawings, mostly of nudes with modestly placed hands and a few less modest that hinted at the business Erlat ran. Scented candles worked their magic on me and my shoulders stopped their habitual hunch against the world. Erlat’s house was calm, was order, was an oasis in the shit.
“Madame is with a client,” Kersan murmured. He was one of the few who knew who this face was hiding, but he was as discreet as they come. He had to be, in his job. He probably knew the grubby secrets of half of Clouds. “I’ll inform her you’re here as soon as she’s free.”
I’d like to point out at this juncture that I am not, and never have been, a client of Erlat’s, not in the usual sense. Along with Lastri, she’s one of the few attractive—in Erlat’s case very attractive—women I’ve never tried to talk into bed. In this case, I try not to think about why Erlat is here, running a brothel.
It’s not my business to judge, and I try not to. I’ve nothing against ladies who work this profession. But Erlat’s from the ’Pit, and not just that: she was brought up in the pain factories. Erlat did this because it was better than all she’d previously known, because she was trained for it, and she’s happy that now she gets a choice of her clients; that, in her words, they cherish her. She once told me she knew nothing else, no other way to be. There’s something rather tragic about it, about her, that she expects so little from life and even I can’t just ignore that. Added to that I liked her and if I tried talking her into bed I’d screw it up at some point and she’d want to strangle me and, so, well, I haven’t tried.
It wasn’t long before Kersan ushered me into her room. She’d managed to salvage a fair bit of stuff from her old place: the lounger, the bed that looked like it was made for six. The bath. Ah, the bath—until I went to the ’Pit I’d never experienced the luxury. Now I was becoming addicted, especially as my own living arrangements currently meant I was sleeping on the sofa behind my desk. The best I managed there was a quick sluice in the sink, but Erlat’s bath was a thing of beauty. Shaped like a large barrel, it came up to my chest, deep enough to sink right in.
The deal, unspoken but real in my mind, was this: I got a bath and Erlat to help me untangle my thoughts, tell me what an arse I was. Afterwards, we talked and she could be herself. No pretence of seduction except when she teased, no smooth talk and practised wiggles. Instead, I did my best to make her laugh, though it always seemed to end up being at my expense. I didn’t mind—I liked to hear her laugh, to know that for a few moments she’d forgotten why she was here, why she felt she knew nothing else. Besides, she helped keep my rampant ego in check and my sanity on this side of lost. I never heard the black in Erlat’s house.
Erlat was a sight to make a grown man believe. I’m not sure in what, but she made me believe in all sorts of things. I’m not certain how old she was—come to think of it, neither was she—but she had a serene poise that came from seeing the very darkest of what life had to offer, straightening her shoulders and bearing it with grace.
The face of a young woman, maybe eighteen or twenty, with smooth skin and a mouth that seemed built to laugh, especially at me, and most especially when she was making me blush. And eyes that had seen far more than a girl her age should. There was something about Erlat that always twisted my gut a little, put me off balance. Not that she was a Downsider, or that she’d once worn brands. Not that she ran a brothel either—hell, brothels are some of my favourite places. I couldn’t be sure what it was, only that it happened.
She was dressed today in a green robe that skimmed the floor, but was split up the side to give enticing glimpses of a smooth thigh that I tried not to notice. Her dark hair was in its usual elegant coil at the nape of her neck, showing off the angles of her face to perfection. We’d gone past the stage when she thought she needed to be someone else, smooth like a precious stone, polished and impenetrable—her professional persona—with me, and I could be myself with her, too. Perhaps that was what I didn’t want to screw up by jumping her.
“Starting to smell, are we?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Stink like anything.”
Her nose wrinkled in a delicate show of faux-disgust. “I can tell. Off you go then.”
She didn’t turn away when I started to undress, but stared at me with a frankness that made me blush. Again. Erlat’s the only person alive who can make me blush.
She laughed at me, and made a show of turning her back. “You’re such a prude, Rojan. Are you sure you don’t want company in your bath?”
I got out of my clothes quick before she turned back again—a trick she tried every time, a game she liked to play with me. I slid into the water just in time. “Quite sure, thanks.”
As usual, the water felt hot enough actually to peel off skin. I dangled my bad hand over the side and shut my eyes. Or tried to. I kept seeing dead bodies, dead boys.
Erlat’s hands on my shoulders jerked me out of my thoughts. Her fingers kneaded the muscles there, forced them to loosen. She didn’t usually stay—she normally left me to my bath and we talked after. This time, though, her hands were welcome.
“What is it?” she asked. “Still mooning over a woman you hardly know, like a teenage boy? I told you, I could make you forget her. On the house, too. Oh, the things I could show you. I could ruin you for other wom
en.”
She laughed at the way my shoulders tensed up again under her hands. She loved to tease me about the fact that I wouldn’t take her up on her offer. At least it stopped me brooding, which was, of course, exactly why she said it.
“So what is it then?”
I often wondered if Erlat didn’t have a little magic of her own. She always knew when something was on my mind, and always seemed to know the best thing to do, or say, how to tease me till I spilled it out. It was easy just to let it all out, tell her all the thoughts that were plaguing me while she soothed and kneaded. Damn, but she was good.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. I need to concentrate on getting the power back on, but five days isn’t going to be anywhere near long enough to get the generator going, and I’m not sure I’m going to last that long. And these boys dying—we need to catch whoever’s doing it, or there won’t be a city left to save, not once everything kicks off. But I came here first because I wanted to tell you to be careful. All of you here.”
There: I had admitted it. That was why I’d come, a confession that didn’t come easily, wouldn’t have come at all if it had been anyone else. Erlat’s house wasn’t just full of working girls; it was a refuge for all sorts of waifs and strays, mostly Little Whores who didn’t have anywhere else safe to be. I thought back to the new splodges of paint around her door. “More careful. Maybe shut up shop for a while. That riot outside the temple was just the start.”
A thumb pressed right on a nerve. It didn’t hurt but it did make my arm spasm so that my good hand splashed about in the water to no command of mine. “I don’t need you to tell me how to run my business, mister playboy fancy pants mage. I’ve weathered worse than a bit of paint and I don’t need you to play the dashing hero.”
I sat up in the bath and turned to face her, splashing water over her best rug. “I know that. Just be careful, all right? Please?”
Her look was brittle, sharp, as if she was about to say something caustic, a look I’d never seen on her before. I had no idea why what I’d said had upset her. Whatever was on her mind, she didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything else at all, not even to tease, which bothered me all the way to the office.
I kept to the edge of the buildings as I hurried along the rickety walkway towards the office, my coat collar flipped up against the drizzle that dripped from every eave for fifty or more levels above me. It was heading towards dusk somewhere up there, but the only way to tell down here was a chill in the air as the sun left. A hint of the winter that was fast approaching.
Dendal was still in his corner, scratching away with a pen by the light of his candles. A comforting sight, familiar, so that I could almost imagine that the last weeks hadn’t happened. I patted Griswald’s moth-eaten head and fell into my chair.
I shook my head and tried to shake the weariness from me and the growing fear that I was going to lose my shit, any day now. Fall right in and never come back. Maybe take out some part of the city when I went—Top of the World, perhaps, or Clouds. Then Under could see the sun again with the added bonus that up there was where all the Ministry men lived. I could make them have to live in No-Hope. It sounded very tempting.
“You can do this, Rojan.” Dendal’s soft, papery voice right by my ear.
I fell out of the chair and my heart near enough hammered through my ribs. “Namrat’s fucking balls, Dendal, stop doing that!”
He stood looking down at me as I picked myself up, his hair a wispy cloud around his head. Back from the fairies for once, I could tell by the sharpness of his gaze. And the fact he’d got my name right.
He sat in the wonky chair on the other side of the desk. “Well, you can. We’ll find enough mages, power up the city. That’s what the Goddess wants us to do, and she’s given us what we need to do it. That’s why she sent you to me all that time ago, for all this.”
His mouth set in a determined line and his watery eyes were certain.
Again, I wished that I could believe like that, that I could be so sure. “I hope so, Dendal, I really do.” But hope was hard to come by.
“Told you before, you need a little faith, a bit of belief.”
“And I told you—” I didn’t repeat myself, because I didn’t think I believed in all those things any more. Except the part about not crossing the Ministry, and I can talk almost any woman alive into bed if I put my mind to it. The almost is the real kicker.
Anyway, we had more pressing problems such as piss all power and not much time to find it in. A pain-mage who could have really helped, the same fucked-up sort of boy I’d once been, was dead with no chance of unfucking himself, and this pain-mage, me, was too strung out to be much good despite Erlat’s massage. Oh, yes, and I needed to stop a serial killer before the city exploded in righteous indignation. “The boy was murdered.”
Dendal muttered a prayer, the usual bullshit about how the boy would have a nice time now he was dead. I resisted the urge to say if the Goddess was so nice, how come we all lived in a shithole having shit lives? Couldn’t we have a bit of heaven before we died? Maybe some nice food rather than the reconstituted grey mush that seemed to be all we ever got. I’d have sold my soul, yes even worshipped the Goddess, for another taste of the bacon I’d only ever seen in the ’Pit and which had disappeared like smoke once we’d opened that ’Pit up. Disappeared straight into the guts of the Ministry men up in Clouds and Top of the World, I had no doubt.
But Dendal believed, and I owed him a lot, so I kept my mouth shut on the bitter bile that threatened.
“It’s all part of the same thing,” Dendal said after a moment. “The murders, the power. But you can do it. I know you can.”
He frowned in deep thought, and I had to wonder if he knew this. Part of his magic, his Minor, was just…knowing things sometimes. Not very useful things usually, like what colour socks someone was wearing. Did he know it, or was he just guessing like I was? Asking him wasn’t much use, because he’d just shrug and change the subject.
“Can I do it in time?”
He smiled, all beatific and angelic so it made me sick. “If the Goddess wills it. I know it burns you, I know. I’ve always known that about you, that you aren’t who you pretend to be.” He held up a hand to stop my sharp retort and I found myself wishing the fairies would come and take him away to play again. He’s not here in mind and spirit very often, our Dendal, but when he is, it’s uncomfortable for everyone else. He sees too much truth. Maybe that’s why he’s away so much—there’s only so much truth one brain can handle.
He opened his mouth to say something else, and I steeled myself for a small sermon on self-belief or the Goddess or possibly something about controlling myself, my magic—he’s very big on that, is our Dendal—when it came.
It started off small, a whooshing noise that crept up on us as we talked. What stopped Dendal mid-sermon was the sound of glass shattering, the muted roar of a thousand pissed-off people that, with that smash, grew to a scream, a howl.
While Dendal twisted a finger, drew on his magic, I ran to the window and pressed my face against the glass. Light greeted me, in a street that had rarely known it. The light of fire, of half the buildings in the street ablaze or just now catching, sending whirls of embers and smoke upwards, a prayer to the Ministry.
“Another murder,” Dendal said behind me. “And a guard murdered in return. There’s—”
I turned from the window and made a grab for him. His eyes were shut so he didn’t see what I’d seen. “There’s no time for that, because there’s a mob out there baying for blood too.”
Something shattered against the door and I wished, not for the first time, that Dendal hadn’t won the argument about the sign. The baying mob were Downsiders mostly, with a powerful hatred of mages more than likely. Upsiders wouldn’t have been much better. Guards and fear and confusion had mostly kept them from us up till now, but this had tipped them over into not giving a crap about any of that.
Another thud on the door, a whoomph of flames and a senseless, formless screaming outside. This was past just a murder, or even a dozen murders. This was all their fears spilling out into hate, one that might ignite the whole city—Upsiders had plenty of hate to let loose, too, and I didn’t fancy any Ministry man’s chances down here today.
I didn’t fancy our chances much either, unless we got out, right now. The word mage was all over the front door and that would be enough for many of those people out there to try to murder these people in here. I kept a tight hold of Dendal and bunched my bad hand.
“Rojan, no—”
I didn’t reply, I couldn’t. Words were beyond me. I’m pretty sure I fell, and that Dendal held me up. I held an image in my head, the safest place I could think of. The pain room. Hardly anyone even knew it was there, and it was buried beyond locked doors and some out-of-uniform Specials who lurked in the street outside. Besides, anyone would have to get through Dwarf and his lab. I wouldn’t have tried it, even with a mob at my back. Dwarf’s contraptions were his babies, and he’d defend them as viciously as any mother.
I landed on my knees and threw up all over the floor. Dendal helped me up and on to a chair. I looked down at my hand, my poor hand. I was going to lose it if I kept this up, but that wouldn’t be a problem because I was pretty sure my sanity would be way ahead of it.
“Rojan, is the generator supposed to look like that?”
With the sound of rioting echoing outside—screams, shouts, calls to “murder the bastards!”, though they were vague on which particular bastards they wanted murdering—I ground the heel of my good hand into an eye, tried to grind a bit of reality back into my head and looked over at the generator, our hope.
Our hope, the city’s hope for power, for warmth and light and food and not getting fucked over by our neighbourly Storad and Mishans, lay black and smoking, surrounded by a thousand little cogs and other bits of metal I had no name for. I blinked hard, hoping it was just my eyes, but it was still the same when I looked again. That’s when I noticed the rest of it—the dented door off its hinges, the smashed glass all over the floor mingled with tiny cogs. The pool of blood the other side of the doorway.
Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall Page 7