Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (4 page)

“Perhaps you’d like an escort home?”

She took my arm and I got a proper smile out of her at last. “Only if you promise to finish that bottle with me. Maybe take me up on my offer for once, and let me ruin you for other women. And to be
careful
, whatever it is you’re planning on doing. A corpse would suit them just as well.”

“I promise faithfully on the Goddess’s fictional arse to both finish the bottle and be as careful as I can. That do?”

And there, a laugh that lightened all the black thoughts in my head. “It’s all I’m going to get, isn’t it?”

The streets were lonely and dark, but I was sure I saw a pale face turned up to watch me as we passed.

That pale face bothered me, a lot. I couldn’t be sure it was the same one that I’d seen earlier when I was with Halina, but in light of what the cardinals had argued, and what Erlat had told me, taking chances seemed stupid. Especially if it wasn’t me the Mishans were after – there was Lise to warn too. So, reluctantly because Erlat’s house was a safe haven and I wanted that right then, I didn’t stay there once that bottle was finished. I made sure I didn’t have too much of it too.

I even kept part of my promise to Erlat about being careful and rearranged my face, just a touch, so that I didn’t look like me but instead like some blandly forgettable guy from Under.

Pale Face was still there, lurking, but I was pretty sure I fooled him – men came and went at an alarming rate from Erlat’s house so I was just one of several, even at that hour. But he was still there, and that opened up a whole load of possibilities in my head. I hurried as quickly as I could without looking suspicious and got to the lab.

The office was quiet as I passed, dark except for the flicker of Dendal’s candles. The lab was quiet too – it was the middle of the night. That hadn’t stopped the boom-shudders from keeping on coming though, and another one rocked the lab just as I got there. A few heartbeats later something smashed inside – call it a gut feeling or paranoia, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the usual sort of smash that came after the boom-shudders.

I had my pulse pistol out and the door half open even before I thought about it. Another smash, and someone swearing – Lise.

“Oh, you Goddess-fucked bastard, do you know how long it took me to make that?”

By the time I got to her, whoever had been doing the smashing was regretting it. The lab was in near-darkness, just one faint Glow globe hanging over Lise’s desk. At the edge of its light, a man hunched over his stomach, holding on like he thought it’d fall out otherwise. The blood was very dark on his hands, and it was on the long screwdriver that Lise had taken to keeping with her at all times. I don’t suppose he’d have been all that comforted to know she could have called upon any number of torturous instruments if she’d wanted.

Lise herself stood under the light, looking pale but furious in a blizzard of bits of machine, even worse than normal. Two of Perak’s guards whom he’d assigned to protect Lise and the lab lay unconscious a bit further in. They obviously weren’t up to the job.

Lise caught sight of me and stepped back from the man on the floor, from her screwdriver sticking out of his stomach. “Rojan, I – oh, I – I – he broke my gyroscope! Bastard. It took me
days
to get it all aligned properly. And he wanted me to leave, he kept grabbing me and…”

She sat down in the chair behind her desk, hard enough I thought the legs might snap, a hand over her mouth as the man on the floor looked up, still with a faint look of surprise. By the time I got to her, he’d keeled over and stopped breathing, and the pool of blood had reached Lise’s feet. She stared down at it like she couldn’t work out what it was.

“Rojan, I – I —” Normally all poise and technical know-how, Lise was reduced to a stammer. Shock, most certainly, and I couldn’t say I’d be any better if I’d just stabbed a man with a screwdriver. Especially not at just-turned-sixteen. I definitely wouldn’t have pulled myself together as quickly as Lise did.

“He said Perak sent him,” she said. Without saying anything about it, we held hands. Hers was cold, with a faint tremor, but her voice was steady enough once she got going, started to think in that logical way that always left me floored. “The orders even had Perak’s seal on, look. Only… only Perak never
sends
for me. He comes here – I think he likes it in here with all the machines. Better than cardinals, he says. More reliable, less likely to argue. Even if he did want me to go to Top of the World, he wouldn’t
order
me. And he needs me here now, more than ever, so I knew something was odd. But when I said something, and one of the guards went to take a look at the orders, he, he – I don’t know, it’s a blur really. But he took out the guards and said I was going with him whether I liked it or not. He grabbed me and that’s when the gyroscope broke. I just meant to keep him away from me. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

I pulled her in and gave her a hug, and she let me for once, even hugged me back. Not for long, but it was enough to know this had scared her, badly. Scared me pretty bad too.

First things first. I made sure the door was bolted and secure – since the last time someone had tried for the lab, I’d made sure there was extra security, and so had Perak, though we’d had to be subtle because Lise wasn’t keen on being mollycoddled as she called it. Then I checked the guards – both out cold, who knew how. Finally, the body. He didn’t have anything on him that was any use for working out who he was, but it didn’t take much to guess, at least broadly.

“One of the cardinals’ men, isn’t he?” Lise said. “I thought it was you they were after, to give to the Storad. Or the machines, you know, try to sabotage them like they did before.”

“It’s not just the Storad who’re after me. Or you. The Mishans are quite keen on acquiring us both, so I hear.” I sat back and thought for a minute. “All right. A cardinal’s man, probably, or perhaps working for the Mishans. Hard to say, or if it’s a cardinal which one. I could find out, but dead bodies are hard. So we concentrate on what we do know. We need you here, no doubt about it. Without you doing your thing, we’re screwed. Without me, there’s only going to be so much Glow to go around. We can’t just go and hide. Well, I can in the ’Pit for a while tomorrow, but not forever. What’s the most secure room in this place?”

Lise indicated a door in the far corner, which as far as I knew was always kept locked. “In there, only —”

“Only nothing. Firstly, you’re going to go in there and stay in there until I can get some better guards. Keep working, because we need you to do that. But I can make you less… findable, at least for now. And you can play with chemicals to your heart’s content. Make this place a death trap for whoever you don’t want in here, and that’s anyone you don’t know, OK?”

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. That donkey line of hers, the stubborn crease in her forehead, was good for more than just thwarting her brothers. “OK. What are you going to do?”

I sat back. What could I do about cardinals? Or Mishans even? Not much, or not right away. I wasn’t going to say that. “First, I’m going to change your face, just a bit. Make you less of a target. Then I’m going to let Perak know. If he warns the cardinals off, perhaps… I don’t know. We’ll think of something. It’s just for long enough, right? Just until we finish this thing. To do that, we need you now more than anyone – we can’t do this without you.”

I thought she was going to say something else for a moment – “Are you sure we
can
finish this?”, perhaps. She had that kind of look on her face, but not for long.

“All right. Will it hurt?”

“Not you,” I said, and wished I hadn’t when she flinched at the reminder of where all the juice was coming from. “Not much, no. No more pain than my hand is giving me anyway. How many warts do you want?”

She smacked my shoulder but I got a laugh. “None! Now do it.”

So I changed her face. Not much, but enough that she didn’t look like my sister any more. It almost certainly wouldn’t work for long, because the cardinals – hell, everybody by now – knew that I could disguise myself and other people. Then again, it wouldn’t last all that long without me concentrating on it. Long enough for Perak to sort something out, I hoped.

Lise ran her hands over her face. “That feels really bizarre.”

“Welcome to Rojan’s world. Now get yourself in that room. I’m going to get in touch with Perak and see what we can do.”

I helped her get all her bits together, all the plans and tools and Goddess-only-knew-what else. She wouldn’t let me in the room though. “Not yet. The machine might not work. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

I waited until she’d locked the door behind her, and went to find some guards to hopefully do a better job of guarding the lab before I woke Dendal and got him to contact Perak.

Another night with no sleep was just what I needed. Not. Perak hadn’t been asleep either when I’d got hold of him, but he was incandescent when he found out what had happened. That was clear despite the tinny echo of Dendal’s communication conduit, as was a bone-deep despair of ever being able to do anything, anything at all, without the cardinals trying to fuck it up.

“But Lise is safe, you say?”

“For now. She doesn’t look like her, and she’s locked herself in. But for anyone determined enough, that won’t be a problem.”

I was fairly sure I heard some muffled swearing at the other end. “Fine. Leave the cardinals to me. Oh, and Erlat’s Mishan-liaison friend – I got her message a few minutes ago. I’d incur some of the Goddess’s displeasure and lie through my teeth, but they expect that. Maybe Erlat can help… yes. She’d be perfect. Listen – you need to get out of the way, even more so now. Get down to the ’Pit as soon as you can. With any luck – no, I won’t have the cardinals in line, I doubt I ever will. But I should have something worked out. Look, the sooner we get going, the sooner you two will be safe, the sooner we’ll
all
be safe. In the meantime I’ll do what I can for Lise, with what men I can spare. I’ll sort something. You know I will. But while she can stay in the lab, I need you out of the way. I’ll tell everyone… well, I’ll tell them that Lise isn’t at the lab any more, that I’ve moved her somewhere. You too. Maybe they’ll believe it, maybe they won’t. But I need you down there, finding me a tunnel I can use.”

He was as good as his word, and Specials were swarming over the lab long before the sun rose. Lise was as safe as anyone was going to be.

So there I was, early the next morning, cursing the stomach that had made me agree to this particular escapade, and it had a lot to answer for.

We didn’t take most of the new mages down to the ’Pit – as nursemaids go, I am crap. After a quick run through their paces, Pasha and I decided that taking the younger ones would be madness. Half of them didn’t even know what their talents were yet, and the other half were at the perilous stage of knowing just enough to be dangerous to themselves and everyone else around them. But Halina proved to be as capable as I’d thought, and levitation might be handy when you were planning a quick pig-snatch-and-grab. So Pasha and I had asked her and she’d looked blandly curious and said OK.

We made our way down to Boundary, trying to be unobtrusive. I’d disguised myself a bit, a quick remoulding of my features. My conversation with Erlat was playing on my mind, along with about a thousand other things. Pasha and Halina noticed the change, but Pasha knew enough not to say anything and maybe Halina thought I did it all the time. Even disguised, I was twitchy. Was that man on the corner watching me? Was that bold cardinal hatching a neat little plan to hand me over to the Storad, or one of his comrades planning the same to hand me over to the Mishans? Was that junkie on the corner one of their men? It would almost be a relief to get to the ’Pit.

From Boundary, we rode down in the lift that lived in a once-hidden access point to a place most had believed was sealed off and free of people, a cesspit of synthtox and chemicals that could eat you up from the inside. It hadn’t been quite as bad as that – the chemicals would probably take ten times as long to kill you as the people that had, in fact, lived in the ’Pit.

I shut my eyes and concentrated on the thought of food, real food, beef and gravy and all those things I’d probably never see again, had become addicted to over a very short space of time when they’d been available to me down in the ’Pit. The thought of fat, crispy bacon on the hoof – trotter, whatever – in the Storad camp took my mind off the fact that the lift was coffin-shaped. And badly maintained. And a long,
long
way from the bottom.

Pasha looked surprised when I offered to go first, but that was purely a face-saving move. I’d have at least five minutes to have a little gibber of terror and relief at the bottom while the lift fetched the next person. I managed to pull myself together by the time Halina stepped out and looked round with a wide-eyed stare and a wrinkled nose. The smell of synth was pretty strong down there, enough that it felt like it was stripping the inside of my throat of its skin.

While we were on our own, as Pasha came down in the jolting lift, Halina gave me a sideways glance that spoke volumes, mostly of a series of books called “You Look Like Something That Just Dropped Out Of My Nose, Only With Less Charm”.

She was looking pretty fine. Lastri had dug out some of her old clothes, or so she said. I really couldn’t imagine Lastri in this little number though – a clingy shirt in a blue bright enough to have an eye out, cinched at the waist to show off Halina’s figure in all the very best ways, and a pair of close-fitting trousers that brought me out in a sweat.

She’d not forgiven me for luring her away from the Stench under false food pretences; at least I assumed that’s why she kept giving me the old side-eye. Then again, she and Lastri had been very chatty, and no doubt Lastri had given her a highly colourful and probably not especially accurate character assassination of me and my ways. I say inaccurate – Lastri only knew the half of what I got up to, so any assassination attempt would be manslaughter at best.

What Halina said in the end, given that, came as a surprise. “Dendal says you’re pretty good at this magic. Says I should look at what you and Pasha do, and try to follow it. But he said a lot of stuff, and not all of it made sense.”

“That sounds like Dendal. I —”

“He also said I should ignore any of your attempts to take me out or sweet-talk me. I’m inclined to agree with him on that point. So no funny business, all right?”

I tried the old faithful, never-fails smile. “Business will be strictly unfunny, I guarantee. I have sworn off women.” I tried to intimate with only facial gestures that I would fall off that wagon at the first hint of provocation.

My smile failed: she looked distinctly underwhelmed by my promise.

“And don’t you forget it,” she snapped. “I’ve had two cardinals have their flunkies ask me to lure you somewhere dark and out-of-the-way already. I’m no fan of the Ministry but I’m not beyond actually doing it, if you piss me off.”

It looked like I was behaving for the time being, which was a shame because there’s nothing like a flirt to take your mind off the damnfool thing you’re about to do.

We made our way out into the ’Pit proper, a maze of streets and scrunched-up buildings that hid behind a curtain of the constant rain – run-off from above which never stopped, which ran and dripped and pooled in glorious decay among the roots of Mahala. Towers loomed over us, dark and forbidding now, just shells that held up the rest of the city above, with girders criss-crossing, buttressing. No one manned the cages that dangled uselessly above us, which had once whirled and clanked in a complicated dance as they took people where they needed to go. The ’Pit was a husk, empty of life and sound and all the vibrancy that had once made me think I could quite enjoy life down here, even if said life was cheaper than shit.

Pasha didn’t say anything – this was home to him, or had been, and now it was nothing. His face lost that contented, secret little grin I’d got used to just lately and he looked sallow and gaunt under the sparse rend-nut-oil lamps that lit the street. He took out a floppy old hat I recognised, slapped it on to protect him from whatever the hell was in the water that dripped on us, then shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and went on.

Halina had no such qualms. She looked about with calculating eyes, maybe assessing the value of everything she saw. What she did see wasn’t much – the Downsiders had abandoned their homes when the ’Pit was unsealed, gladly, but they’d brought everything that they could up with them. All that was left was what even they didn’t think was worth anything.

We trudged the streets, heading for the tunnels, the few that we knew of. For the castle that lay at the heart of them, at the heart of Mahala. Halina stopped dead when the castle loomed out from behind a huge tower that supported the weight of the city above it. From here, mostly all you could see was the curtain wall, with the keep rising up out of the top like some demented bread that had been overloaded with yeast, but the sheer size of it was enough to batter the brain into submission. I’d seen the castle before, and wished I hadn’t, so Pasha and I merely carried on. Halina ran to catch up after a while.

“Is it true?” she asked me in a whisper, as though she didn’t want to disturb the ghosts that lay thick about us.

“Which part?”

She gave me that sideways look again, like the worth she was assessing was mine. I probably equalled half a rat, by her sneer.

“The pain factories. They were down here, right, like the sheets said? The mages? Dendal said not all of the mages, but still, enough, right? And the Downsiders helped them, and the Little Whores. And they – I mean, Pasha’s a Downsider and a mage and —”

She yelped when I gripped her wrist so hard my knuckles cracked. “Shut the fuck up. Especially shut the fuck up in front of Pasha. You don’t rate me much, I get that. But don’t talk about that in front of him, don’t even think it because he can hear that too. Don’t think of him in the same thought as them – hell, don’t even think about him at all, especially not with that sneer on your face. Or you’ll rate me much, much lower. Or higher, depending on if you’re scoring on how much I will zap your arse, because I will. You know nothing about him, all right?”

Her face looked like I already had zapped some tender part of her. “But, I —”

“You know what you think you know from the sheets you saw every day down in the Stench, when people were done with them. The sheets tell you shit, excepting what a few cardinals want you to think. You know crap-all.” I took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t really want to go in there again, and I know that Pasha doesn’t, for reasons that would blow your mind if you knew the half of them. But we have to, so we’re going to. It would help if you kept your mouth shut about the rest until you have half a clue what you’re talking about.”

I’ll give her this: she shut up, though I could tell she didn’t like it. That sideways glance fell on me more and more often as we went, the lip never ceased to curl, but she carefully avoided looking at Pasha and every now and again a frown would crease her forehead like she was really thinking.

The closer we got to the castle, the quieter Pasha got, the more his shoulders hunched. I couldn’t say I blamed him – the place didn’t exactly hold happy memories for me either. Halina walked behind us, subdued and thoughtful.

We reached the massive bulk of the outer wall. The main gate – an arching monstrosity bedecked with statues of what had presumably once been great warriors, now blank-faced with time and synth – was still blocked off, but one of the smaller ones had been freed up and two guards lounged at either side looking bored. A glance at the official pass Perak had given us and we were through into one of the closes – a series of squares surrounded by buildings that looked like they should be falling down. Houses crammed into spaces too small, bleeding into each other in an incestuous orgy of bricks, gently rusting girders and stone blocks, broken tiles and crumbling mortar. Narrow, twisting alleyways snaked between the squares, taking whichever path they could in the tangle. Cracked cobbles were slick under our feet, but the air, while harsh and ferociously cold, was mercifully free of the sounds that had long reverberated around the stone. I could see the echo of them on Pasha’s tight-lipped face none the less.

“So where are these tunnels?” Halina asked.

A fair enough question. “Most of the ones we know about lead from these squares. Some are pretty short, and now only lead out into the ’Pit, where the city grew after they were made. But some – maybe six or seven, maybe more, maybe less, maybe none – will take us Outside. If we can find them.”

“Outside,” she said. “Doesn’t seem possible. I mean, they always said there was no Outside… but it’s got to be real now, right? Where else are the Storad coming from? It just doesn’t
feel
real.”

“It will.” Pasha shook out the map that Perak had given us – he’d had his men scour this castle thoroughly since the ’Pit had opened up, and especially since Dench had defected, more or less willingly. The old archdeacon had kept down here a secret from all but a few Upside, and except for a couple of shorter tunnels that he’d used and those that Perak’s men had found, no one knew where they all were.

So the map was sketchy, but it was better than nothing.

“Where do we start?” Pasha asked.

A few hesitant dotted lines on the map showed where there might, possibly, be tunnels. Fewer bold lines showed where some had been found and blocked.

“Perak’s had his guards searching, and they’ve found some, but he needs most of his men up elsewhere, at the gates,” I said. “Things are getting tricky down by the Mishan gate, so I heard. Let’s just hope we don’t get another riot, because that’s all we damned well need. Perak’s left us a few men though. They’re based in the barbican.”

Luckily the map showed us the route to get there too, because the castle was a maze of squares and alleys that looked like they went in the right direction before they doubled back on themselves. When the mages had been based here, it had all been closed off, and things added to make getting in, or around, harder – doorways bricked up, false doorways added, alleys that led to nowhere.

Halina’s silky shirt, and the way it was moving over the more obvious parts of her anatomy, was doing very strange things to me. To distract me, and in the interests of knowing who the hell you’re working with, and maybe having them not hate your guts for threatening them, and not
just
because she looked stupendous, I got talking to her. I had a hope that if I was at least nominally nice, maybe she wouldn’t think of taking those cardinals’ flunkies up on their offer. I was even fairly gentlemanly and asked her about herself, which earned me a knowing raised eyebrow from Pasha.