Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall

by Francis Knight

  “Rojan.” Oddly, I’d all but forgotten Jake. When I looked up, she was frowning at me but there was no anger there, at least not for me—there was a whole world of anger for other things, but not for me. No, I got a pity I couldn’t stand. “Guinto’s a good man, he is.”

  “So why’s he tormenting Pasha like this? Why’s he covering for a girl he knows is murdering people?”

  “Why did you do that, risk falling into the black? Why push so hard?”

  “Because…because I have to, because otherwise I’ll hate myself even more than I already do. Because it’s right, and I’m fed up with always being wrong.”

  “Did you ever think that’s why Guinto is doing it? Why Pasha listens? Because he thinks it’s right? You can’t save everyone, Rojan. I know you think you should, but you can’t. And you can’t save Pasha from the Goddess, from what he needs, if he doesn’t want to be saved. Or me. But you can do this. I know you can. Just don’t lose yourself in the process.”

  I stared at her in horror, that she’d seen through me so easily, seen past all my act as she had once before. She believed in me, and that was the worst part. She believed in me and that gave me no choice.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Even I wasn’t stupid enough to try magic again, despite the fact I had enough juice sloshing around to launch myself to the moon. Abeya was somewhere with sun. Up, that meant, somewhere above Trade almost certainly. Once Jake had gone I stared at Lise’s picture on Dwarf’s desk for a long while, then dumped what juice I had in a Glow tube where at least it might help when Ferret-face found it, and started.

  Up, that was where I needed to go, but Up was dangerous for someone like me, someone from Under. I needed someone who knew how it worked up there, someone who could open doors and make people look the other way. Well, there’s no point having a brother who’s Archdeacon without using it, right? Besides, Perak had been conspicuous by his absence, and after Lise and Dwarf and what happened to them, after what Abeya had tried with me and Pasha, I was a tad jittery. Sure, Dench was looking after Perak, but I hadn’t seen or heard much from him either, apart from nebulous comments about how someone had already tried for Perak’s life once. If I hadn’t been ready to go Up, the remembrance of that dropped into a conversation spurred me on.

  First things first. I eyed the door with trepidation before I knocked. Lastri answered, green-eyed still and looking fit to split. At least she had the energy for a bit of hate, which meant she’d probably stopped throwing up. Shame.

  I gave her a cheery grin and a wave to piss her off a bit more, and asked for Dendal. She let me in but I made sure to keep my back to the wall, just in case. Especially after I noticed all the knives in the kitchen. No point in tempting her.

  Dendal and the boy seemed better, too—no more green froth at the mouth. They sat in the main room amid Lastri’s spartan belongings and Dendal actually seemed pretty with it as he led Allit through a basic spell. He kept calling the kid Rojan, but that was normal for Dendal.

  A little clay pot sat on the table between them. Allit pinched himself, squinted in concentration and the pot lifted off the table. Maybe only half an inch, and it wobbled like a lush’s gut, but it was a start. Then Allit caught sight of me and the pot dropped, cracking on a corner of the table.

  Lastri muttered something dire but at least Allit was pleased to see me. Dendal gave me a vague wave, and said “Grimbol, how are you?”

  Who the hell was Grimbol? I shook that off—it didn’t matter.

  “Did you see? I made it move,” Allit said, his voice a mix of fear and pride.

  “I saw. Has Dendal helped you figure out what your Major is yet?”

  A dejected shake of the head.

  “Not to worry—I only figured mine out six weeks ago.” And hadn’t that been a day? Hopefully Allit would work his out without quite so much broken glass or blood. “Dendal, I need you to send a message for me.”

  Dendal’s eyes came back from wherever they’d been, all attentiveness when communication was in the offing. “Of course. Who to?”

  “Perak. I need an in, someone to help me Upside.” I needed to warn him, too. If Abeya was Upside, then who knew who her next target was? I was sure she had a next target, too—you don’t get that murderous and then turn it off like a tap. She wasn’t going to stop, I was sure of it.

  What I wasn’t sure of was the why, or the next who, but Perak was already in danger of assassination so it wasn’t a great leap to think it might be him. Because I was sure, sure as I could be, that Abeya wasn’t doing this on her own. She’d known my real name, Pasha had said. And my real face, if it was her who had painted the murder list on the Goddess’s mural. Someone had fed her that information, someone had given her the poisoned bacon. Someone was goading her, feeding her lies, twisting her hate for their own ends, I was positive. Who, was the question, but I had my suspicions. Someone who wanted Perak’s pet project to fail, who wanted Perak out of the Archdeacon’s position. So, pretty much everyone in Top of the World, from what I could gather.

  Dendal’s head bobbed up and down as though it was on strings, his poisoned green eyes alight, making him look like a demented corpse. “Of course, of course.”

  The crack of his fingers made me wince in sympathy and Allit jumped out of his seat, but he soon settled. Odd how anything can become normal, if you see it enough.

  I’m not sure how Dendal does it, the communication. As I said before, it’s not like Pasha does it, he doesn’t read minds. It’s not like I find people either, because he doesn’t know where they are, exactly, except what part of his mental map they occupy. This map, trust me on this, has no relation to anything that actually exists. From what he says, it’s a map of how everyone is connected—so I am surrounded by a bevy of lovely women, which I can cope with. Who are all pissed at me, which isn’t so good. But also I’m connected to Pasha, who’s connected to Jake who’s connected to Dog who’s connected to…you get the idea. An interlinking web of people printed on the back of Dendal’s eyelids.

  Dendal described the actual communication once as sort of knocking on the door of someone’s head. I knew from experience that it sounded like a pinging in the back of your eyes. You ignore it or you look to it, and that looking is Dendal’s invitation, like a door-to-door salesman asked to wait in the hall because the home-owner doesn’t want them making the place look untidy. Only Dendal isn’t selling rend-nut oil lamps, or spurious ways to rid your home of synth, or cures for the tox that don’t, can’t, work. Sometimes, if the two communicators know each other well, he even acts as a conduit, a pipeline of thought and speech between them, which is seriously unnerving the first time. That conduit was what I was hoping for, because Perak’s absence, when he’d been so involved up till now…

  Minutes ticked by, punctuated by mutters from Lastri about overtaxing Dendal and various things involving pokers, a fire and a judicious shove. Allit squirmed in his seat, and I squirmed with him. It shouldn’t take that long—I’d seen Dendal get a fix in under a minute, and it usually took five, at most. After ten, and when sweat had popped out on Dendal’s forehead like transparent worms, I reached out and pulled one hand from the other, stopped the twist of his fingers and the subtle little cracks of bone against bone.

  Dendal swallowed hard and nodded, his eyes coming back from the faraway and to the here and now. Well, sort of. Enough that he remembered my name.

  “I’m sorry, Rojan. It’s—I can’t find him.”

  Dendal never couldn’t find them, ever. Except when…

  “Maybe he’s not dead,” Dendal carried on quickly, and my heart started again with a painful twist. “I just can’t find him. It’s like there’s a dead space, sorry, where he should be.”

  “How could that happen?” Dendal could get anywhere, to anyone. I’d seen him do it before, through everything a really good Ministry security could do, past another mage even, once. Nothing could stop him if he didn’t want to be stopped, except if the person he was try
ing to send to was dead. Until now.

  Dendal wrung his hands, but at least he wasn’t dislocating them now. “I don’t know. I only know he’s not there, he’s not anywhere. No connections. No links. Nothing.”

  This was worse than bad, this was catastrophic. Perak should be connected to more than any man in Mahala. Cardinals, priests, rectors, advisers, guards, just about everyone knew him. Even if they’d never seen him; he was connected to all of them via Ministry, or should be. My stomach turned cold. “Dench, what about him? Can you find him?”

  Dendal ducked away from my face and shook his head. Ashamed, almost. “I thought I had him, a tickle in my head, but it disappeared as soon as I saw it. I’m sorry.”

  I think I stared at him for a while. I’m not sure, because disjointed thoughts kept running through my head, such as, if Perak was dead, was Amarie all right? Was she safe? I’d done so much to keep her that way, I couldn’t bear it if—Perak, was he dead, or not? And Dench, one of the few people I could call friend. Dwarf, Lise, Pasha, now Perak and Dench. Whoever it was behind all this, they seemed to have an abiding dislike for anyone connected with me.

  I’d known when I came here that I was going to have to go Up. Mine and Pasha’s and every damn pain-mages’ life depended on it, maybe Perak’s life, too.

  I was going Up in the world, whether I liked it or not. I tried to look posh, but it didn’t come easy.

  I took the Spine, a once jostling road full of Glow carriages and people who ran from Boundary and twirled its spiral way right on up to Top of the World. I could perhaps have rearranged myself there, but I came over all sensible and didn’t. Mainly because the black was giggling at the back of my mind, just waiting for me to do that so it could pounce. Later I’d let it, but not then.

  The curfew had been lifted, at least partially—it had to be, or people were going to start starving in their own homes, and some probably already had. Even so, there wasn’t much traffic. A few handcarts, some people trying to shop for food without much luck. The shops were drab and drear without their Glow lights flashing, advertising everything from herbs to Glow carriages to intricate little machines for anything you could imagine. Most of the shops were shut in any case. Nobody had much to sell except their services, or, in some cases, themselves.

  I hunched into my long jacket against the seeping cold and kept my head down. Nobody gave me a second glance and I reached the underside of Heights without comment or trouble. Here was the line between the haves and the have-nots, visible as a grubby tide mark against the city. On this level, by Trade and Buzz, all was grime and filth and faces that barely saw the sun except second-or third-hand as the levels above stole it all. Those faces were hard and gaunt, like the lives that shaped them. Pinched in, closed off, at least when out on the streets when it paid not to look too friendly. Looking friendly was an invitation for a knife in the back and a careful mugging.

  Less than twenty steps upwards, across the line from dirty and depressing into shiny and hopeful, and there she was. The sun, pale and watery in a winter sky, but worth stopping to look at because I saw her so rarely. As always I took a few minutes to savour it, real sunshine on my face. It probably wouldn’t take long before some guard noticed me and tried to bounce me back Under, so I made the most of it.

  Uncanny, people thought, how the guards always knew who belonged up here and who didn’t. But there was no magic involved—Under the faces are pinched and wary. Over, the faces are sleek and bright-eyed. It’s easy to spot when you look closely. Over, the faces know a real hope, and Under it’s a desperate grasp that, perhaps, there might be some. If we’re very good and lucky and pray hard enough, we might find a shred of hope somewhere, anywhere, for once in our lives. A different kind of faith, and answered about as often as prayers. It’s hard not to let that show on your face.

  I found a gap between towering buildings that even here dominated everything. The walkways were firmer up this far, more intricately decorated with little brass icons of the Goddess, but with a drop underneath to scare Namrat himself. I tried not to think of that, without much success, and looked out over Trade where they’d never build, not over the factories anyway, not unless they wanted to be shaken to bits.

  For once no clouds marred the view, not a one. The sky was hard and clear, but the distant mountains were indistinct, perhaps shrouded in mist. If that’s what they were—no one went Outside. Or if they did, no one ever heard from them again. Either it was so nice they never came back, or, more likely, they didn’t make it out. Ministry had always been very firm about not going Out. They meant it subtly, of course, but dead is still dead.

  The mountains, the pass that Mahala dominated, our not-so-friendly neighbours, they were rumours, things far off and unimportant to anyone Under, whose main concern was living to the end of the day. They said those things were real, but they say a lot of things. Most of which are a load of old bollocks to keep us in line, keep us hoping, wanting. But I was sure Outside was real—Pasha claimed to have been there once. Logically, it had to exist, but Ministry didn’t like people thinking logically. It upset them. Opposite of faith, see? In a funny way, this was my own faith, that there was more to the world than Mahala. That maybe in other places it wasn’t so shit. I had to believe that, or go batshit.

  I didn’t take long to look. It didn’t pay to stay in the same place for long because of the guards, but of course I had a new way to deal with that. A small rearrangement. Make my face sleek and well fed, make my skin darken even further so it looked as though it saw the sun on a regular basis. I couldn’t do much about the eyes, though, so I kept my head down and carried on up.

  While I walked, I thought on what I’d seen, where it would fit. Abeya with sun on her face. That could be anywhere Heights and above, depending on the area. I tried to conjure the image again—Abeya, sun on her face, talking to a man I didn’t know, who looked odd somehow, though I’d not seen enough of him to know why he seemed odd. Pale skin like milk, hair dark as Namrat’s heart; I’d seen someone like that before but couldn’t think where.

  There had been…there had been grass. I knew that, I’d seen it once when I’d sneaked into an Over park. Not for long. I’d been thrown out for being from Under in approximately ten seconds. But ten seconds was long enough to catch a memory of grass, and I was sure Abeya and the man had been somewhere like that, which narrowed it down. A few parks. I’d heard that in Clouds, on the big estates that sprawled like weird, concrete mushrooms over the rest of the city, sucking up all the sun for the good and righteous, people had gardens. I wasn’t entirely sure what a garden was, or what it was for, though Ma had shown me a picture once. Grass and flowers and shit like that. Not plants for eating or anything useful, it had seemed to me.

  I came to a point where a big side road split from the Spine, and realised I was lost. I’d never been up this high before, and I didn’t know what was where. Close above was Clouds—vast platforms perched on the tops of the higher buildings of Heights. The shadows cut sharply into the sunlight, leaving whole areas of Heights and below—the ones with lower rents, naturally—in almost perpetual shade. At least their light was only second-hand, first-hand at dawn and sunset when light sliced across the city like a cleansing knife, which seemed luxury to me.

  From here I could just make out where the Spine twisted through the concrete clouds and on, up to the rarest heights of the pinnacle that was Top of the World. Home of the highest of the Ministry, placed where they could look down on us mere grubby-souled mortals.

  I looked back down and knew that for the mistake it was instantly. Down was a long, long way. I held on to a friendly wall. Me and heights don’t mix. We are not friends. We ignore each other when possible. It’s not the height that worries me exactly, it’s the splat at the bottom. The thought of going higher brought me out in a sweat, but higher was where I needed to be. What I also needed was someone who knew their way around.

  Or Pasha perhaps, with his knack of rummaging in people’s br
ains. Which was handy, because, when I looked down, he was glaring back up at me. I held on to the wall, tried not to think about all the space underneath and waited for him to catch up.

  He got to where I was and the glare dissolved into gawping. He was a Downsider, or had been for most of his life. The sky was a distant memory for him if he’d ever seen it other than a few glimpses since the ’Pit had gone, and the time he said he’d been Outside. I let him stare for a good while, watched him turn his face up to the sun with a tentative smile, before he shaded his eyes and stared at the grey smudge of the mountains.

  “I wish I was there,” he said at last, and I remembered his talk of being Outside, of having seen it. I’d scoffed at it at the time but now I wasn’t so sure.

  I was still pretty peeved about our row earlier—Pasha always made me look at myself hard and I never like what I see when I do that—but I needed him and he knew it. For more than just the ability to rummage in heads, and maybe he knew that, too. I hoped not. Anyway, I kept my voice level, and my peeves to myself.

  Besides, I really wanted to know. “What’s it like out there?”

  He let out a little gusting breath that seemed to ache and turned away reluctantly as though turning away from the Goddess’s smile. “Not shit.”

  He moved on, up, and I followed. Neither of us spoke about where we were going—I reckon we both knew the likely outcome and it wasn’t kittens and sunbeams. We didn’t speak about our words earlier either. We both knew we were never going to agree on a lot of things. But he was here and I was grateful not to be alone.

  “I was hoping you could be a little more eloquent,” I said and was rewarded with a hint of a smile.

  “The sun is free there.” The smile grew bitter. “People are free there. No one cares what colour your skin is, what your accent is, what…what brands you have or if you use magic. No one cares about that.”