Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall

by Francis Knight

  The mortuary itself was one of the older buildings here in Trade. Seems a funny place to put it, if you ask me, but Heights and Clouds didn’t want it—they had their crypts and mausoleums and such, all nice ways to pretty up the fact that you were dead. Yet too far down would be unseemly. Ministry’s version of the Goddess said death was a good thing, to be looked forward to. Earn enough gold stars in this crappy life, you get a perfect afterlife for free! We didn’t get mausoleums. We were lucky if we got cremated and sprinkled somewhere not too smelly. Mostly bodies got dumped in the Slump. Once the mortuary had finished with you.

  So the mortuary sat precariously balanced between a raft of silent factories that would usually have made the floor shake, and the once glaring but now dark shops, boutiques and arcades that made up the other side of Trade.

  Outside it was an ugly square block of a building, squashed between “Alchemy Pros” and “Gizmos and Gadgets” and a series of small shops above, select little boutiques selling everything the man of wealth and leisure could want or imagine, but they hadn’t had much to sell lately.

  Inside the mortuary wasn’t much better, all blocky lines, grey walls and carpets the colour of rotting moss. Maybe mortuaries are built to be depressing. It wouldn’t surprise me.

  The nurse was brightly efficient in her starched white robe, her face scrubbed and shiny, her dark hair tucked into a cap as starched as the rest of her. I have, it has to be said, a weakness for nurses. Maybe a reaction to all that starch. This one looked me up and down and raised an eyebrow and a corner of her lips. As good as a flashing sign, or it would have been, to the old me. Maybe I was getting old or something, but I returned a smile that was nothing more than polite and didn’t pursue it. It had only been hours since I’d sworn off women, and you have to make a bit of an effort. I’d already fallen off the wagon by flirting with Abeya.

  Pasha showed our credentials, including a letter from Guinto which seemed to do the trick. The nurse looked the papers over and turned her interested gaze on Pasha. This job must have been really boring. I supposed she didn’t get to meet many guys who were actually alive. Pasha disappointed her even more than I had—he didn’t notice the smile beyond a quick hello and a request to see the bodies.

  She huffed off down the corridor like the world’s most scorned woman, leaving Pasha and me to follow, he with a confused frown as to what he’d done to offend her.

  The inside of the mortuary was colder than Namrat’s heart, so that our breath formed clouds in front of us and I began to worry for those more important parts of me, that shrunk, scaredy cat, into my trousers.

  The nurse opened a door and led us into one of the rooms they used for “scientific study”. Basically that means chopping people up to find out how or why they died. Sometimes, it’s rumoured, the cause of death is being chopped up on the slab, especially if the Ministry feel you’ve been a naughty boy. Once they’re done, and for the cases of unnatural death made their report, the bodies end up being shunted out into the Slump where any rat unlucky enough to call it his home at least has some food.

  A marble slab dominated the room with a stand next to it covered in all sorts of instruments of torture, or possibly morticing, mortuarying or whatever they called it. I looked them over with some trepidation. At least one appeared to be some sort of device to twist off your bollocks. I wasn’t sure I’d fancy that even after I’m dead. If the rumours were true about chopping up live naughty people, that made what I was seeing even worse. And eye-watering.

  Some marble-faced drawers were set into the wall.

  “Here’s one,” the nurse said, her voice as chilly as the slab itself. “I’ll get the rest sent down, those that are left anyway. I’m pretty sure some have been Slumped.”

  She said it the same way I might say “I ate dinner”, with a cool detachment that shivered my shoulders, and left us with the body. A boy, again, about twelve or so. Throat slashed back to his spine, obviously a Downsider. Not the boy I’d seen earlier, the one I’d been looking for as a mage, but similar enough. A boy, as I’d been once upon a time, too far away to recall with much clarity.

  We both looked, but neither of us really wanted to touch him. We had to, though, if we wanted to find out anything, and these bodies were almost all we had to go on.

  Pasha’s face became a grimace as he twisted his finger. A gasp, a wet crack. I shut my eyes, wished I could leave this, go home, dammit. Home to women and warmth and booze and Glow lights and not knowing where they came from. I squeezed my poor fist, and fought off the voice, the siren call.

  Tricky this. My two talents, my Major and Minor, were rearranging things and finding things, or more specifically people. My Major I was only just coming to grips with—rearranging my face for example, or rearranging where I was. It got Dendal quite excited, the possibilities, but I was restricted by the way it made me throw up a lot when I tried anything too ambitious. Also by the fact that the more I used it, the more that song sang in my head.

  Finding people was both my Minor and a lot easier. It didn’t take so much pain, I didn’t throw up on my boots quite as often, and it was more useful in earning money. A city this size, with the Ministry in charge, people go missing every day. Sometimes it’s not even the Ministry making them disappear—runaways, men with warrants for their arrest, or merely glad to be away from the missus, so glad they stayed away, that sort of thing. Nothing too strenuous, or dangerous. I like my arse where it is.

  Of course things had got more complicated lately, not to mention risky, but finding people I could do. We’d decided our best bet on finding the murderer was to figure out who the victims had been—most of them were unidentified and Dench had made little progress on that. But we had an edge that he hadn’t. We had magic, and once we knew who they were, maybe it would become clear why them instead of any number of other Downsiders. Why these ones might give us a who. There had to be a link between them and I could hazard a few guesses, but we needed to know because hazardous guesses don’t get you very far in finding a murderer unless you’re very lucky.

  Yeah, this was a long shot, but it was better than the alternative, which was me trying to find the murderer using something intimately connected to him—the dead body itself—as a prop. Seeing how close and personal I need to be to my props, I really didn’t fancy that, especially as I figured it had as much chance of working as me turning into a priest.

  Pasha did his thing, but the frown gave away the fact that nothing much was happening. We hadn’t really expected it would. Dead bodies aren’t known for thinking many thoughts for Pasha to overhear.

  By the boy’s feet was a ragged bag, his personal effects, I assumed. I opened it up and had a rummage. The boy hadn’t had much on him, or maybe he’d been rolled after he’d been killed. A tattered pair of trousers, much patched and stained. Same with the shirt, and a pair of shoes that had seen better days. Nothing in the pockets. The only item I thought might do was a chain, an old necklace with something green hanging off it. A cheapjack thing it was, probably worth less than my spit, but maybe I could use it.

  The trouble was anything of his would only tell me where he was. Useless. I was hoping, which is usually as helpful as a piss into the wind, that someone had given him the necklace. A mother, brother, someone who would know who he’d been.

  It took four bodies, I’d thrown up twice, had long since decided the floor was quite comfortable if you ignored the cold and, hey, who really needs two working hands, before I got anything useful. The sure and certain knowledge that the ring in my hand was connected somehow, some way, with a dank box of a room nine hundred yards down, half a mile south. Slap bang on the border of No-Hope and Boundary, which was even worse. I could hear a woman weeping, quietly, as though not to disturb anyone. Such a sad and lonely sound that whispered away from me as the black came calling.

  I let the ring drop from my hand and opened my eyes, concentrating on not retching up what little was left in my stomach. So glad I hadn’t bothere
d with dinner. I tried to get up, and Pasha had to help me. My hand was one big throbbing ache, a lure for the black, and even though I wasn’t casting now, it still sang to me, called me through my bones.

  Pasha slapped me across the brain with an internal Hah! and my eyes came back into focus. “Don’t listen to it. Don’t,” he said aloud.

  “No, no, all right.” My voice sounded disjointed, as though I wasn’t really speaking. As though I wasn’t really present. I looked down at my hand, expecting to see I was half here and half there, in that room with the weeping woman, that I’d begun rearranging things without noticing, but I looked pretty solid. More than could be said for my brain. Just fall in, that’s all, just fall in and it will all go away, all your fears, all this responsibility, all these people depending on you will disappear…

  I staggered with the force of it, the desperate want.

  “Stop it!” Pasha’s voice whipped in my ears and in my head. When I looked at him, his monkey face was panicked. “Stop, please. You know it’s not the answer. And if you fall in—I’m not sure I can get you out.”

  His hand shook on my shoulder and we stared at each other. He’d never mentioned it since, and neither had I, hadn’t even wanted to think about it, how I’d followed him into his black, into his own personal heaven and hell. How I’d brought him back, for her. He’d tried to thank me once and I’d told him to shut up. I’d saved him, condemned a whole city for her, for Jake and for a small girl who I’d still not met, my own niece who like most everyone else thought I was dead. Perak said she prayed to the Goddess every night to keep me safe in heaven, laid flowers at the feet of the saints and martyrs for me, and that ate at me in ways I can’t even begin to describe.

  “Rojan—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I didn’t want to hear it, any of it. He’d been rummaging in my thoughts, I knew that now, but I didn’t want to talk about it. All the while it was in my own head I could shut it out, pretend it wasn’t there. I’d killed us all as sure as if I’d put a gun to each and every head in the city, and a small girl prayed that I was safe in heaven.

  “I know where to go,” I said, hoping the change of subject would throw him. Fat chance. “I know where he came from, who misses him.”

  “And we’ll go.” His voice was soft with pity, more than I could bear. “In the morning. When was the last time you slept?”

  “Keep out of my head,” I snapped, but it was too late. He knew, I could tell by his face.

  “You’ve been going to the pain room a lot more than you should, haven’t you?”

  “No.” I wasn’t about to admit it, even if he knew. I had to keep some shred of my old self intact, and the old Rojan would have died before admitting to anything of the sort. He would have laughed, probably, said something short and cynically pithy, but I wasn’t laughing today and pithy was beyond me. “Pasha, we have to go now, all right? The sooner the better. These murders won’t solve themselves, and if they don’t get solved…then the Storad and Mishans will get to have the smoking remains of this city, for all the good it does them.”

  “And since when did Rojan care about that? About anything but women and booze and cash?”

  I glared at him. “Why do you always have to be so fucking right?”

  His smile was grim and strained as he steered me towards the door. “It’s easy when you can see the answer in someone’s head. You’re doing no one any good like this. I’m under strict instruction from Dendal that you get some sleep before the black takes you. If it does when you’re like this, I don’t think even he could pull you out. I will go and find this place, find out about our boy. Me and Jake, any Downsider will at least listen to her. And, yes, I can see where it is in your head.”

  The nurse turfed us out on to the dark and dismal walkway with a sniff of rebuke. “Pasha, I—”

  “No buts, Rojan. We need you alive, and not in the black.”

  And then it was too late. What I hadn’t realised until then was it wasn’t only reading minds, hearing thoughts, that Pasha could do. Oh no: when he wanted, he could sneak into your head and suggest to it that a good long sleep was just what you needed.

  I remember the walkway rushing up to greet me, remember the black suddenly fading in its song, and an arm catching me. After that, the only black was sleep.

  He really was a fucking bastard. It was his best quality, and I always liked him for it.

  Chapter Eight

  I woke up with my nose shoved into the shabby sofa behind my desk, my feet resting on Griswald’s mangy head.

  Something hard—whatever it was that had woken me—prodded my shoulder. I opened one eye and thought about feigning death, again, when Lastri’s face glared back. She wielded the ruler like one of Jake’s swords and prodded harder, as though she was enjoying it.

  I fumbled myself to sitting, my eyes rheumy and gritty. How long had it been since I’d slept? Too long, and when you considered every sleep I had was littered with dreams of a dark, dead city, of Jake watching me with reproachful eyes, of my niece saying her prayers for me, who could blame me?

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Time you sorted yourself out,” Lastri snapped. “Time you grew up and grew a pair of bollocks.” She snorted in disgust and, thankfully, left me to it.

  I patted Griswald on the head and managed to get up. Dendal was in his usual position in the corner surrounded by a hundred different candles and Pasha sat, jittery all over again, on the corner of his desk, talking to Erlat. They shared a sideways look, conspirators in something and not just getting me to sleep, I was pretty sure of that. Whatever it was, they were welcome to it—I had enough screwing with my head without anything else on top.

  Erlat murmured something to Pasha but all I heard was Jake’s name and that “it’s going well. Slowly, but she’ll get there.” The shoulder that was facing me seemed to do so in a very pointed way and she made a show of not looking at me as she dropped a comforting hand on to Pasha’s.

  Pasha’s smile was strained, but he got up and walked her to the door. “Don’t risk it next time. Keep out of sight where you can. It’s getting dangerous out there, and…they mean business, Erlat.”

  “They always do.” She flicked a glance my way. Not a nice glance, but not an “I want to strangle you” Lastri special.

  I tried. I did, although I still didn’t know what I’d done to upset her. But I got as far as “Erlat—” before she shut the door on me and what was, to be fair, probably going to be something sincere but lame-arsed.

  Pasha came and sat on the corner of my desk, his jitters worse even while he laughed at me. “For someone who spends as much time with women as you do, you have no understanding of them, have you?”

  “I have no idea what the hell goes on in women’s minds. It’s all right for you, you can see what they’re thinking. How come you can tell her to be careful, but when I try, she stops talking to me?”

  Another laugh that couldn’t quite cover up whatever was making him fidget like he had an infestation of insects in his underwear. “When you have the answer to that, maybe she’ll talk to you. She doesn’t hate you anyway. Not yet. You’ve still got time to really piss her off.”

  He pretended not to see how relieved I was, so I pretended that I wasn’t and made a mental note to go and see her. Maybe, and this was pushing the bounds of my knowledge of social niceties, apologise. For whatever it was.

  I sat opposite Pasha and tried not to wonder if my left hand was about to fall off. It felt like it and the juice that gave me fired me up, woke my brain and other things best left dormant.

  “You found the woman?” I asked.

  “Didn’t get the chance.” His voice worried me, jittery as he was. His glance flicked to Dendal and back again. “Do you want to go and see how Lise is?”

  I took my own, thoughtful look at the oblivious Dendal as he bent over his papers, his scratching pen the only noise other than his faint, cheery hum.

  “Of course
I do.”

  By the look of the grey light that was bouncing down off all the cunningly concealed mirrors and through grubby light wells, I took it to be mid-morning which meant we could see where we were going. The streets were empty, too silent, too still. Too dead. We found a stairwell and headed down.

  “I got us special passes in case any guards ask us why we’re out,” Pasha said and handed one over. On Official Special Business, it said, and that sent a shiver down me.

  “What was it you didn’t want Dendal to know?”

  “Inquisition. That’s why it’s so quiet, why I told Erlat to be careful.”

  He didn’t have to say anything else; that was quite enough to put the fear of anything you care to name up me. “Perak—”

  “Hasn’t got complete control. He said as much. Plenty of factions within the Ministry, all wanting their own thing. All wanting to save their own arses, their own everything. Well, one of them has called an Inquisition.”

  Which probably meant everyone was in even bigger shit than before. No one had called an Inquisition since, well, since the last time a mage had gone batshit. It was the Inquisition that had decided we were unholy, agents against the will of the Goddess. Ministry had fallen on that with glee and dropped on us the edict that made us illegal. The Inquisition had rounded up all the mages they could find, and no one knew exactly what had happened to them. There were plenty of less than savoury rumours though, ones that I didn’t care to contemplate. Of course, they’d probably regretted that later when the synthtox kicked in, but by then mages were secret which was helpful when they started rounding them up again, as they had with Pasha, to help with pain-farming for Glow.

  Thing was, from all I’d read and heard about the Inquisition, they weren’t bound to follow Ministry. Once they were let loose, anyone in contravention of their orders was fair game. Before, they’d been sent after mages, and it didn’t matter what lofty position they held, how much money they had—the Inquisition didn’t care. They’d taken mages, heretics, unbelievers, people who complained about the Inquisition, people who looked funny…anyone they thought was an affront to the Goddess. Hence my keeping my feelings about religion to myself for the most part. The Inquisition were a law unto themselves and the Goddess.