Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall

by Francis Knight

  “We can’t do much against a whole Inquisition,” I said. “Not if we want to live. But there are things we can do.”

  When we finally got to the temple, I checked on Lise—still unconscious but improving, the nurse said, so I favoured her with a wink—and then we made our careful way down to the border of Boundary and No-Hope, to a dank and dismal box that someone called home, and a woman quietly weeping. I wondered if Taban’s wife would weep quietly, and what it meant that this time the victim was no Downsider. There had to be a link, and I thought I had an inkling of what it was, but I had no way to be sure. Maybe the weeping woman could tell us if I was right.

  We passed along a cesspit of a walkway, and the Inquisition had been thorough down here, too, I had to give them that. Doors ripped off, bedding and mattresses strewn everywhere, shattered pictures of the Downside Goddess, toys looking sad and lonely with no one to play with them. A one-eyed stuffed pink rabbit with ratty ears that flopped in odd directions stared at me, as though willing me to take it home and love it.

  On this one walkway almost no one was home in a city where everyone was supposed to be home, under curfew. At least the Inquisition had gone, moved on to other places, other families. It wasn’t much of a consolation. When it started to rain, a thin drizzle that sliced down through walkways and fall-nets, it seemed fitting.

  We ducked under a stairwell ravaged by synth and time and there was the house I’d seen, scrunched between its neighbours like it was ashamed to exist, the top listing drunkenly as the house above squeezed it. The door was black with grime and mould, and damp ran down the wall. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. It took a while for it to open a crack, and a bleary, wary eye poked round the edge. She took one look at me and tried to jam the door shut. “I don’t know nothing, I don’t! I’m no heretic either. Please, don’t.”

  I looked down. Maybe the allover and the flapping black jacket that made me look like a Special had been a mistake, but my head had been too muzzed up to think about changing.

  “We’re not the Inquisition, or Specials, or even guards,” I said to the shut door. “We need to know about the boy.”

  Pasha moved behind me, and I knew he’d be talking in her head, soothing words in an accent she knew and trusted. The crunch of his finger dislocating made me feel ill, but it seemed to work, between that and me assuring her we hadn’t come to take her away.

  Eventually the door opened again, the eye more wary than before. I held out my hand palm up and showed her the ring, the one I’d used to find her. Her hand flew to cover her mouth before she reached for it, and I let her take it in shaking fingers.

  “I gave that to Jabol,” she said. “It was his father’s. Have you found Jabol? Is he all right?”

  “I think perhaps we ought to come in,” Pasha said. I was glad to let him take the lead; he had a natural sympathy, honed by years of working with the kids he’d rescued from the pain-mages in the ’Pit. He knew what it was to hurt and it showed in the soft tones of his voice, his gentle hand on her arm as he led her inside and sat her on the one rickety chair. That sympathy was something that always amazed me about him, something I wished I could do. When I try it, it always ends up coming out as sarcasm. Not helpful, so I kept my mouth shut for now and looked around.

  The house was your basic one-room hovel with two sodden mattresses, a thin blanket apiece, the chair and a table made out of an old crate. A portrait of the Downside Goddess, with a stub of candle in front of it. A crappy little stove stood in one corner to heat the place and cook on, but it ran on Glow and seeing as the only places that got any of that these days were some factories and Ministry, it was good for nothing. The windowless space was lit by a guttering rend-nut oil lamp, wafting its sickening scent into every corner. Even supplies of that were running low.

  The walls ran with damp from the almost incessant rain that filtered through all the cracks and crevices above, and down again through the floor to some poor soul even worse off than she was. The water held a faint tinge of synth and I made sure not to touch it. She didn’t have much choice—she’d be drinking synth-tainted water same as everyone else down here.

  The woman seemed to fit the room. Unfair, perhaps, but true. Her face was thin and pinched, all softness knocked from her by life, leaving only harsh angles. Her dark, sodden hair lay in tangled clumps around her neck, and the rag that might be called a dress couldn’t hide the frailness of her, like a bag of sticks. No food, not for weeks probably. There wasn’t much to go round and what there was, was vile. Everyone was getting thinner down here, but, by the looks of it, she’d been thin to start with and was now more than halfway to skeleton.

  Pasha held the woman’s hands and she stared at the scars that ringed his fingers, ran over his hands like vines. “You’re mages.” Her voice was full of horror and she yanked her hands away as though Pasha was infectious. “You’re mages, them that took all them girls, all them kids.”

  “Not like them, no.” Pasha held on to it well, but I could sense the frustration, the furious hurt. Wherever he was, someone hated him. Upsiders hated him for being a Downsider, Downsiders hated him for being a mage.

  “The opposite, in fact,” I said.

  She didn’t believe us, that was plain, but I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  “Where’s Jabol? What have you done to him? What? Tell me!”

  Her voice took on a hysterical pitch, rising higher and higher so that even Pasha’s soft words didn’t help.

  When she slapped him and spat on him, I snapped and grabbed her by one shoulder. What sympathy I had for her was cold and hard now. “He’s dead, that’s where he is. And we didn’t take him, or kill him. We want to find out who did so we can stop them killing anyone else, and for that we need your help. I know you’re scared, I know that pain-mages did some terrible things, but we aren’t them and if you touch Pasha like that again you’ll never find out what happened to Jabol. Pasha suffered more at mages’ hands than you can possibly know, so you leave him be and look at him like the man he is, not what your mind tells you he is.”

  She stood quiet in my hand, aghast at my words. Pasha looked just as shocked.

  “What?” I said it more to myself than anything. Where had that come from? Not my cynical soul, surely. “And if you ever tell anyone I said that, I will pull your ears off, roll them up and stick them up your nostrils.”

  Pasha grinned his monkey grin, but my glare stopped whatever he was about to say.

  The woman sat down abruptly. “Dead, he’s dead, then. I thought he must be, to not come home for so long, but I always hoped, always. All we ever had in the ’Pit. Hope and faith.” She started crying again, not quietly now but great heaving sobs that seemed they might pull her inside out.

  I crouched down in front of her, waited till the sobs tailed off into a more desperate kind of blank grief, and at least attempted some tact. It was quite hard. “I know that, I do. But whoever killed Jabol, he’s killed at least twelve others, Downsiders mostly. We need to stop him. I need you to help us.” I thought it went quite well. Pasha certainly looked at me as though I’d had a personality transplant.

  The woman looked down at the ring, stroked it with one forefinger, before she looked at Pasha from under shame-filled lashes. Her voice was thick with the tears she was going to shed, later and perhaps for months to come. “You brought me this back. I suppose…He left for temple, six days ago. He’d been a bit withdrawn, but boys are that way at his age, aren’t they? Lucky to get two words out of him some days.”

  “Anything else? Anything happen earlier? Anything, well, odd?” Because I had a suspicion of our link and I needed her to confirm it.

  She looked between the two of us, confused. “I don’t think so.”

  Pasha clearly had the same suspicion as me, because he asked, “Did he have any kind of accident?”

  “Accident? Oh, you mean when he slipped on the stairwell? A fortnight or so ago. Had a bruise the size of a dinner plate on his back,
but other than that he was fine.”

  “And nothing odd happened after that?”

  “Odd? Well, someone stole my best dress and at the same time left a lot of frogs on my bed. The lady next door ran naked down the street screaming, but we’re not sure why. That’s all. Not really odd, any more than everything is odd up here.”

  Me and Pasha shared a look. We had our link, and all that was left was one last question. “What temple did he go to?”

  “Father Guinto’s. Where else? None of the others let us in.”

  Chapter Nine

  “But why would Guinto want to kill pain-mages? It doesn’t make sense, especially when he offered to help. He got us into the mortuary, got us to the bodies, remember? Without that we’d never have found Jabol’s mother.”

  Pasha was upset, pacing across the threadbare rug of the office. I sat at the desk, mindful of the drawers, and tried to talk to him but it was hard with Dendal butting in every few seconds. It would have been easier if the comments were relevant.

  “Why would anyone want to kill us?” I asked. “Because the reminder is an embarrassment to Ministry, even if we are the only power source they have. Some of them don’t care about that. Most of them don’t even know we’re making the Glow—Perak’s keeping that as quiet as he can. I suspect most that do know, don’t care except we’re still around. Because a lot of mages have been right bastards to a lot of people. Because we’re unholy. Because, because, I don’t know!”

  Because Guinto made my shoulder blades itch something fierce would be my answer, but I probably wasn’t the best person to ask. Priests have this tendency to bring me out in a rash. “Look, I’m not even saying it is him.” Though he was my first choice. One boy dies outside the temple he’s preaching at, one boy after going to his temple, Taban not more than ten minutes’ walk from him…And Lise was in his care, a fact that made this all the more urgent for me. “We should talk to him, see what he has to say. You can take a peek, see what you find.”

  Pasha stopped pacing and stared at me, horrified. “Look inside a priest’s mind? I—I couldn’t. No, I couldn’t.”

  “If you can’t be good, be careful,” Dendal said.

  I ignored him. “Even after everything? You know, better than anyone, what people are capable of. Even those who say they serve the Goddess.”

  “But Guinto’s not like them. He—he’s the only one, only priest in the whole damned city, who doesn’t spit on Downsiders, call us heretics. He’s a good priest, a good man. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Hide in plain sight,” Dendal said, and that was almost relevant.

  “Yes, but if it’s him…”

  I didn’t need to be able to see into Pasha’s head to guess what he was thinking. Jake and Guinto—she was fierce in her belief, and she believed in him. All the Downsiders did. Pasha, I think, depended on the fact that at least one person who wasn’t a mage or Jake didn’t think he was an abomination, treated him as though he was a person, not a thing to be despised. If it turned out Guinto was killing these boys…I didn’t want to be the one to tell Jake. I didn’t want to see what that would do to Pasha, or think about the riot Guinto’s arrest would cause. But people were dying, mages were dying. Without them we were sunk, every last one of us, and Pasha knew that as well as I did.

  “We’ll just talk to him for now, all right? You could take a look in some of the others’ heads, couldn’t you?”

  Pasha stared at the ceiling, as though praying for guidance. I don’t think he got any, but he nodded in the end, tight-lipped and furious.

  “Picnic time!” Dendal said, and we left him to his own head.

  Pasha was jittery all the way, tense and fidgety. He kept glancing up at the windows we passed, his hands twisting in front of him. Smudged faces looked down at us through the gloom, wary eyes following our progress. I wondered what they were thinking, but I couldn’t quite pluck up the nerve to ask Pasha. He looked as though he’d burst if I said one word.

  The temple was quiet when we entered; the curfew was still in effect, and not many were risking breaking it, not with an Inquisition around. A few brave souls had come, or maybe they’d been caught here when the curfew came in. They sat on the pews, heads down, and the murmur of useless prayers washed over me. The plaster saints and martyrs lined the aisle. Pasha stopped by each one to make the proper devotion but I headed straight for the altar, and the door behind it that led to where Lise was being nursed. Where Guinto should be.

  Abeya slipped out of the door before I reached it and when she saw me, she dimpled nicely and ducked her head. Shame I’d sworn off women. But, screw it, I needed something to take my mind off what I couldn’t have, and if I was going to do that I should do it properly.

  I cranked up my best smile and took her hand to kiss it. When I made to let go, she kept hold of my hand and her smile was brighter than Glow. Made me feel all tingly, and pushed thoughts of Jake into a deep dark corner where I hoped they’d stay.

  Pasha caught up, muttering darkly under his breath. Abeya ignored him and pulled me through the door. “I suppose you’re here to see Lise?”

  “Not only Lise, no.”

  She gave me an amused, sideways glance and blushed, but didn’t stop until we got to Lise’s bedside. “She’s much better, but we don’t know when she’ll wake up. Or even if. It’s always hard to tell with head injuries, the nurse says.”

  The room was filled with makeshift beds and patients and nurses—with the Sacred Goddess Hospital gone, and no one really trusting the quacks from Under if they had any brains, the temples had become temporary hospitals. At least doctors and nurses were spared the curfew, a small mercy and one in which I detected Perak’s hand. The crowd made me feel at least a little better about Lise being here—if it really was Guinto murdering people, then he’d have to kill a dozen other witnesses too before he could get to Lise. Even so, I made a mental note to ask Dench to send a Special down here, just in case.

  Lise did look much better. The lump on her head had gone down, the cuts were healing nicely and she had some colour in her cheeks. I extricated my hand from Abeya’s and sat down beside my sister. “Hey, Lise, come on, time to wake up.”

  I sat and talked to her for a time, while Pasha paced like a tiger and Abeya watched me with an approving smile, but Lise never stirred. I left her with a kiss on her forehead, and a fervent wish she’d wake up, and soon.

  Before I could ask Abeya if Guinto was there, he appeared in the doorway, looking soft-eyed and benign and a bit creepy to my mind. No one is that nice, not all the time, not even part of the time if experience was anything to go by, and it made me suspicious.

  I nodded a brief greeting. “Just the man we wanted to see.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been persuaded to see the light of the Goddess?” The corner of his mouth curled and maybe he was making a joke, but it seemed pretty poor to me.

  “When people stop starving, or trying to kill each other, or arresting people for being different, when we get the promise of a nicer time in this life rather than in some hypothetical next one, I might be persuaded. Until then, think of me as a challenge. A really big one.”

  The smile seemed utterly genuine, but I’ve always suspected the art of the fake smile was something they taught in the seminary. Priests always look genuine, even when they’re creaming the alms and spending it all in whorehouses. Looking genuine is part of the job description.

  Guinto motioned for Abeya to go and she did, not without a regretful glance in my direction. Definitely a promise there, and one I might have to follow up, even if only to get some more information on Guinto.

  When she’d gone, Guinto’s demeanour changed. Not so benign now, I thought. More guarded perhaps, making me ever surer he was hiding something. What, that was the question. If he was as good a man as Pasha and Jake seemed to think, maybe all he had on his guilty conscience was overindulging on sherry.

  Guinto led us to his office, sat at his desk and arranged his robes, ne
at and precise. “Well then, if not for salvation, what do you want to see me for? Have you any news on the murders?”

  Pasha beat me to it by half a heartbeat and that was probably just as well, as I’d likely have dropped out something savage. The bodies were haunting me. Just boys, who were discovering they were pain-mages, which was a difficult enough thing at the best of times.

  “We thought you might be able to shed some light on a few things.” Pasha shot me a meaningful glance, a “shut the fuck up and let me do the talking” look.

  “For you, Pasha, of course.” Guinto favoured me with a wry look before he turned back to Pasha. “For my flock, my most devout parishioners, anything. How is Jake?”

  “Well, thank you, Father. If—”

  “And how goes things between you? After everything you’ve been through, the fire of the Goddess, the road is slow and tough, I know. But a union of two souls, in every way, is a blessing, a prayer to the Goddess.”

  Pasha blushed brick-red. “We’re…working on it. Do you—”

  “Good. You know I pray for you both daily, that you find what solace you can with each other.”

  Pasha looked utterly stricken, like a boy singled out by an overly harsh teacher in front of the class. “Yes, Father.”

  This had gone far enough. You may have gathered I’m not overly enamoured of the priestly profession. I have my reasons; years of experience of less than faithful priests, of those more corrupt than the worst pimp, of seeing the Ministry turn Mahala into a soulless place full of greed and the very worst that man could do to man. Of seeing my mother die from the synthtox, a disease both caused and denied by the Ministry, a long slow agony and not a breath of kindness or mercy from any of them, or from the Goddess. This was almost worse, worse than ignorance of what was going on, this was purposeful, and it made me want to slap the good and virtuous Guinto round the side of the head. Besides, it was reminding me that Pasha had everything I wanted, and yet I wouldn’t have traded places with him for a second.