Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall

by Francis Knight

  So who would dare order one? Someone very sure indeed they wouldn’t be rounded up in the general “Inquisition everyone first, ask questions of the widespread bodily parts afterwards” mood.

  Alchemical Research was the biggest, and most powerful, department. Perak had a few friends there, from his time working with them. But the new head was an ambitious man, and wasn’t above a bit of backstabbing. An Inquisition didn’t sound his sort of thing, though. I knew the rest of the departments—Theology, Law and so on—but not much about the individuals who led them, and even that little was more than most people knew. Ministry liked to hide who they were, which person did what, the details of those whats. Liked to keep everyone Under in their place through ignorance. It had worked pretty well, right up till the Downsiders started telling everyone a few truths, but Ministry were past masters at misinformation and starting the wrong rumour to counter the right one, so maybe only the Downsiders really believed it, and not all of them.

  So who would dare order the Inquisition out?

  “They started last night,” Pasha said. “Down in Boundary. Picked up a load of people, all Downsiders of course, in the name of finding the murderer. And any heretics while they’re about it, naturally.”

  “But the guards—”

  “The Downsiders don’t trust them. A guard was killed the other night—most Downsiders reckon it’s the guards that are doing the murdering. A fair few Upsiders feel the same, from what Guinto tells me. That’s just an excuse though.”

  The muscles in his jaw worked as he tried not to spit it out, tried to keep his tone level. “I couldn’t get down to where that woman was, not unless I wanted to be picked up too, and I almost was.” Shame radiated off him, perhaps because he hadn’t stayed to get rounded up like the rest. Had an odd sort of honour like that, Pasha. “It’s not really the murderer they’re after, though that seems part of their orders. Heresy, that’s what they’re looking for. Us Downsiders are all heretics, because of the devotional.”

  Blood and ashes, the old way, as it had been Upside before Ministry sanitised worship, made it “better”, “less violent”, and, incidentally, stripped it of anything remotely majestic. No music except on holy days, and then all you got were vacuous hymns waffling on about how lovely and nice the Goddess was. No stained glass to wash you with coloured light. No hellfire and damnation in the sermons. No blood in the devotional, just a nice little promise to be a good boy, thank you, Goddess. The Ministry had no romance in its soul, and it had sucked the soul from the city, too, made it a bland and tasteless thing.

  Now here were the Downsiders with their raucous music, their vibrant belief, their blood and ashes and anger. Their knowledge of the truth. Too many for the Ministry to delete from their precious city. Someone had been waiting their chance, though, that was plain. An Inquisition to find the murderer and, while they were at it, quietly denounce any Downsiders they picked up as heretics, and a few more bodies made it to the Slump.

  What could I say to Pasha? Nothing. Nothing that wouldn’t have sounded trite, insincere or worse, because I wasn’t a Downsider. I didn’t have to put up with the spits and insults and the fear of being picked up because of how I looked and sounded. I could never really know what it was like for him, same as no one can ever really know what it’s like for anyone but themselves and that’s a blessing and a curse, I’ve always thought.

  Usually I’d have said the insincerity anyway because I’m all charm that way, but not to Pasha. Not today. A sudden attack of tact, perhaps, but I was sure I’d get over it.

  We reached a stretch of walkway that passed under the lab. The stench of wet smoke curled around us and made me cough as I wondered if any of the machinery we needed had survived. It was almost time for our daily session, and we needed Glow now more than ever, but it wouldn’t do much without Dwarf’s magnifying gizmo.

  Pasha stopped suddenly, startled, his eyes wide, mouth open. Then he ran along the swaying walkway, not towards the temple where we’d left Lise but towards the stairwell that led to the lab. When he got his gun out, I ran after him.

  I’d thought he was running for the lab, but we hadn’t got there before he suddenly stopped. A dim landing where clanking walkways twisted off into darkness. A dim landing and, oh shit, a body I recognised. Taban from the lab, fellow pain-mage, with his throat cut back to his spine. So much blood. It robbed me of my voice, as though I was the one with his throat cut.

  “Did you hear?” I managed to ask Pasha as we stared down, and wondered how I’d managed to go all these weeks working with Taban, passing the time while waiting for Dwarf to hook us up, taking our minds off what was to come by sharing a morbid joke on the nature of what we were doing, and I knew nothing about him other than he was a pain-mage and knew some seriously filthy jokes. Had been a pain-mage.

  “The killer?” Pasha said. “No. No, just Taban. I—he was thinking of his wife, how he wouldn’t get to see her again.”

  I’d never even known he was married, never asked, too damned obsessed with magic, with pain and the lab, with righting my mistakes. I blinked hard and stared up, and up, past labyrinths of walkways that staggered drunkenly between houses, a never-ending net that had me caught. Up past looming buildings that stole the sun, past the vast seem-to-float estates of Clouds. Top of the World was up there somewhere in the gloom, full of ministers, cardinals, priests, arseholes and maybe a good man or two. Maybe.

  I didn’t really see any of that—I was listening to a voice, not any voice but a Voice, my father and his hypnotic magic, explaining to me how he was doing it for good reasons, that it was right, it was in praise of the Goddess. How I’d hated him for treating people like fucking cows, milking their pain, and now I knew for certain I wasn’t much different. That had always been my fear, that I’d be like him. Only I was—it had snuck up on me without detection, a small decision here, an overlooked detail there, an unnoticed person, only wanted for their pain...

  Fuck that. I’d climb Top of the World and face the height, or, rather, depth, from its lip, stare at it full on and scream in defiance as I dropped into the Slump before I became another him.

  I looked down at Taban, a smudge of extinct life surrounded by greyness, a sucking blandness that seemed to eat at your soul if you looked too long. Bizarrely, I wished I was back in the hellhole of the ’Pit. It had been a shitty place in a world of shitty places, dark and violent and so grim it made me want to fork my eyes out, but it had been noise and colour and a vibrant, fervent grasp at life, at wrenching every last drop out of it and feeling it drip into your mouth. The ’Pit had been alive. And I’d destroyed it as surely as I had the Glow, and let the Downsiders out of slavery into this—into a long slow sucking of the soul, and probably a grisly death at the end. Go me.

  It took a while to get everything done—call the guards, tell them the fuck all we knew, have the body taken to the mortuary. When we were finally free to go—the passes worked wonders—and I turned towards Guinto’s temple and Lise, something else stopped me in my tracks. Or, rather, a few someones.

  As I said, there hadn’t been an Inquisition in years but I knew trouble when I saw it. Perhaps that uniform was seared into the group consciousness or something, because all of a sudden my bollocks seemed to be making a bid to hide under my shirt.

  Specials induced a kind of sweating dread whenever they appeared anywhere, the mere sight of the uniform making guilty thoughts appear in the heads of even the most blameless. They were pussycats next to these guys.

  Ministry set a lot of store by uniforms, and it made sense. A guard’s uniform wasn’t much different from anyone’s normal clothes, but they were all the same colour, and had a tabard over that that designated them as guards. The uniform said, to the law abiding at least, “Just your regular guy, who’ll help you out if you need it. I’m an officially regular guy, you’re safe with me.” Wasn’t strictly true, of course, but the uniform gave that impression to your man on the street.

  A Specials�
� uniform was made for stealthy combat—a hand-me-down from the assassins of the old warlord who’d founded Mahala. A leather allover with subtle armour, inserted plates of metal that you couldn’t see but could stop a blade dead, hidden knives that could whip out and take you in the eye or heart before you could say “shit”. Understated, silent and scary with it. The uniform said: “Hey, I’m quiet and soft and could kill you in an eye blink, and no one will see, or care, so do as you’re damn well told.”

  There was nothing understated about these guys. A breastplate etched in whorls of red and black that seemed to, but didn’t quite, depict a nasty fiery hell with what might be the twisted faces of damned souls screaming imposed over the top. A short helmet in the shape of Namrat’s head, all teeth and snarls, with a visor that covered the eyes so they could see out but you couldn’t see in, making them appear eyeless, soulless. Metal gauntlets the colour of blood—so it wouldn’t show perhaps. All in all, the Inquisitor’s uniform was balls-out “I don’t give a fuck who you are, I’m judging you and if you come up wanting, I will crush you like the pathetic bug that you are and send you screaming into hell so that Namrat can rip your soul to shreds. I may piss on you afterwards.”

  Ministry set a lot of store by uniforms because, as a way of telegraphing just how fucked you are, they work. Well, they were working on me anyway. No matter the orders of an Inquisition, what made them dangerous was that when they were set in motion, they were always on the lookout for heretics and unbelievers, whoever they were. Part of their strength and part of the reason they’re dangerous, even for whoever gives them their orders.

  Given that I am a heretic, an unbeliever and a mage to boot, I was feeling fairly vulnerable.

  They came along the walkway as though they owned it and, frankly, if they’d asked, I’d have handed over the deeds without a squeak. Pasha didn’t seem to have noticed them, rubbing his forehead as though trying to rub out what he could hear. He stared down with sick fascination as the guards covered Taban and muttered a few snatches of sentences under his breath that I didn’t quite catch but that sounded like a prayer.

  Luckily the Inquisitors didn’t seem to have noticed us yet either—they were busy breaking down the door of a house at the other end of the walkway, though one, a captain perhaps by the extra ornamentation on his helmet and a specially tormented-looking soul on his breastplate, looked our way. The eyeless visor gave him a detached quality, a predator eyeing up his prey.

  Under his gaze the guards started to swear and rush to get Taban’s body on to a stretcher and hoisted up to a block and tackle that would take it to the level of the mortuary. If even the guards were left sweaty and panicked, me and Pasha were screwed. The guards were done with us so I grabbed Pasha’s arm and dragged him into a dark doorway. He started to say something, loudly, but shut up quick when he saw my face. He flicked a glance back towards the walkway, flinched and then set his mouth in a grim line. Pasha the mouse was about to go all lion on me, I could tell. If he did that, we were probably both dead.

  “Just keep quiet, act calm and we’ll get away, all right?” He made to say something, but I cut him off. “You open that mouth, they hear your accent, you might as well be dead already. Look, down in the ’Pit you looked after me, right? You showed me how it worked, made sure I didn’t do anything stupid that’d get me killed. This is me returning the favour. You’ve seen what they’re doing, what you say they’ve done down in Boundary. You want me to have to go find Jake and tell her you aren’t coming back because of some fool notion of yours? We shut the fuck up, get the fuck out, live to fight another day. Got it?”

  He settled down a bit, looked less as though he was going to explode with indignation and I thought we might actually get out of this with our arses intact.

  Then the screams started. Behind us, from where the Inquisitors had finished breaking down the door and were busy pulling people out of their home. Pasha leapt out of my grasp like he’d been struck with some of Lise’s electricity and was halfway there before I could catch him again.

  Luckily I was a fair bit bigger than him, because trying to hang on to a man who’s writhing more than any snake is hard with only one working hand. I got to him before he made the corner of the next stairwell between us and them, before the Inquisitors could see him and decide they had room for one more. Pasha smacked me a good one and almost sent me flying. In the end, I had to sit on him to stop him.

  He shut up, luckily—me sitting on his ribs didn’t leave him much breath for talking. I leant forward and took a peek around the corner of the stairwell. No one seemed to have noticed us brawling.

  The Inquisitors were doing a very thorough job. Not content with dragging out a Downsider family—father, mother, two boys and a baby—they’d started on the furnishings as well. Chairs flew out on to the street, followed by a table, a couple of filthy mattresses, ragged clothes that might pass for the family’s best temple-going dress. Then the damning evidence, what the Inquisition had come for. A picture of the Goddess, all blood and violence and Namrat looking mean. Not a fluffy kitten or sunbeam in sight. Two pots with brushes—one black with ash, one to hold the blood.

  The father’s face, pale already in the giveaway that this was a Downsider family, grew paler still. His wife began to sob, quietly, desperately.

  “Heresy,” the lead Inquisitor said in a voice like the clanking shut of a cell door.

  “No, I—” was as far as the father got. A gauntlet slammed into his face, brought blood from him and tears and screams from his family.

  I couldn’t look as they took the family away, couldn’t bring myself to watch, and some small part of me was ashamed of that, ashamed of the fear that left me weak and wobbly. The bigger part of me was concentrating on not letting Pasha get up, because if I did, I knew, knew, he’d be out there roaring like a lion and it would do nothing at all except get him killed with them. Apart from anything else I didn’t want to have to say to Jake, “Well, I could have stopped him, but I let him go and now he’s dead, for nothing.”

  When the cries had faded, when the street no longer smelled of threat and Inquisitors, I got up off Pasha. Warily, it had to be said, but he didn’t leap up to lump me one. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had—I was feeling pretty much like lumping myself at that point—but Pasha always surprised me.

  He walked around the corner, slowly, as though he was dreaming. A soft hand on a wrecked chair, on what was left of the door. What was left of a home and family.

  “We could have done something,” he said. “We could have helped.”

  “Got arrested with them? Got taken up to Top of the World, found guilty, because, let’s face it, we both are in their eyes, and chucked off into the Slump? Who would that have helped?” True enough, as far as it went. Not far enough, no matter how practical, and I knew that because there was a slosh of bile chewing at my stomach and a wish that I could scrub myself clean and douse myself with disinfectant. As if that would make my soul sparkly fresh again. If only it were that simple.

  “We could have done something.”

  That was Pasha all over, why I liked the little bastard and sometimes hated him, too. He made me look past myself, made me look outside, and inside, too. I didn’t like it very much, because what’s inside is festering like a month-old corpse.

  He picked up one of the pots, or, rather, what was left of it, and dipped a finger in. It came away black with ash and he slowly, deliberately, smeared it in a circle on his palm.

  We should have been getting the fuck out of there, in case there were more Inquisitors, in case they decided to do a sweep of the whole area, but I stood and watched, transfixed despite myself, as Pasha brushed off the ripped picture of the Goddess and set it on a little ledge. He didn’t seem aware of anything else as he pulled a knife out of his pocket. Small, bone-handled, with Namrat and the Goddess carved into the hilt, locked in their epic battle. Life versus death. To Pasha, to the Downsiders, it’s the battle that’s important, not promis
es of a golden afterlife though that’s nice, too. No, it’s the fight, the never-ending struggle that’s the thing, even if you knew Namrat would always win in the end.

  When he came to use the knife, to make the dot of blood in the centre of the devotional, I looked away. Too personal a thing to watch, even for me. The soft murmurs of his prayer were enough to give me goose bumps, especially when I heard my name in there.

  It wasn’t long before he came to stand next to me and we surveyed the damage, to the house, to the blood-soaked walkway where Taban had died, and for what? Why? Why him, why any of them? Why was my sister lying in a bed unconscious and lucky to be alive?

  As usual, I covered up all my thoughts and feelings. “I hope you weren’t praying for me to see the light and get converted.”

  That brought half a smile from Pasha. “No, I know when I’m asking too much.” The smile turned into a sly grin. “I did ask that you not sit on me again, dickhead.”

  Arsehole. “Sure, and next time I’ll let them take you, too, if it makes you feel better.”

  “I’m not ashamed to be a Downsider, and I’m not a heretic. Fuck anyone who says different.”

  I was glad to be away from that corner and we hurried toward Guinto’s temple in silence for a while, until Pasha broke in thoughtfully: “They weren’t looking for a murderer, did you notice that? A victim right there, and they didn’t even glance at him.”

  Oh, I’d noticed all right. But then, what else could you expect from the Ministry but to use the murders of a few people they find inconvenient in order to make sure their boot of authority was firmly in place? It didn’t even need Perak’s approval—any minister could order an Inquisition. It did make me wonder who it had been, though, who felt safe enough to order it, what they were really after.