Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise

by Francis Knight

  We hadn’t worked out what his talents were exactly. Not yet. Every mage has a Minor and a Major. Took me years to figure out that what I’d thought was my Minor – the way I could mould my face to look like other people – was in fact part of my Major, and the rearranging of things was just a matter of wanting to enough, and being able to stand the pain I needed to make it. My Minor – finding people, how I’d made my living in the recent past – didn’t hurt so much, which is all relative because it still hurt like a damn bitch. But Allit hadn’t figured out what either of his talents was yet – all he’d managed was moving a cup about an inch, which might mean everything and nothing. As it went, not exactly helpful, though he could probably work it up to something useful in time.

  We needed him to find out what else he could do, round about yesterday. As Dendal’s and Pasha’s more logical methods hadn’t worked, I was getting him to try anything we could think of to see if we could stumble on it by accident.

  I’d started by looking at the sorts of spells he’d accidentally cast when his magic first showed itself. Around about puberty, a proto-pain-mage knocks himself, or gets hurt in some way, and the magic leaks out, often in a way that might give a clue to his emerging talents.

  Allit hadn’t shown anything much, or not much he’d talk about anyway. There were other ways of finding out, but they weren’t so pleasant, and I had a soft spot for cocky little Allit, whose bravado was covering up a whole shedload of fear. So we tried everything else, and it was slow, very slow. We didn’t have time for slow.

  After another few fruitless attempts, I had him stop before his thumb started squirting blood all over me. A boom-shudder rocked us, harder than the comforting rumble of Trade. Perak said he was working on it, which filled me with bone-deep dread. Another reason to be out here freezing my arse off with Allit. I didn’t want to think what shit Perak was going to drop me in this time – the tunnels had been bad enough.

  “All right then, Allit,” I said. “Look out over the city. Really look at it. What do you see?”

  He muttered under his breath, something about it being “unfair”.

  “Tell you what I see. I see Top of the World, where Ministry looks down on people like us because of where we’re from, see us as just ways to get them what they want, money, power, all that happy horseshit. I see Clouds overhead, stealing our sun. I see Heights, see the people there look up with hope. I see Trade, see what made us great and also made us arrogant and led to us being weak. Look down, though, Allit. Look down at No-Hope Shitty; further, look into Boundary, in the Slump, the Stench, all the other crappy little places full of people with crappy little lives just doing the best they can to stay upright. See all those poor bastards down there. No sun, no food, no fucking hope. People like us. Well, like you perhaps, because the only hope they can find is to believe in a ministry that’s done little except squeeze them dry, sucked their souls, made them want what it offers whether they like it or not. Whether it’s helpful or hopeful or not. ‘Believe in us,’ they say, ‘believe in us, do as you’re told, get a nice life from the Goddess after you’re dead, there’s a good boy.’ Well, don’t know about you, but I’d prefer a nice life right now, and I believe that the Goddess is a crock of shit.”

  I swallowed the bile back down – it was getting easier to do that, or maybe I was mellowing a bit in my old age – and sneaked a look at Allit. His mouth hung open like I’d just told him I liked to bugger goats. I used to hide it, the fact that I don’t believe in the Goddess, in all that Ministry tells us. Mainly because Ministry had this distressing habit of disappearing anyone they didn’t like, and they really didn’t like disbelievers. I used to hide it, hide a lot of things, but I was done hiding now. It hadn’t done me a whole lot of good.

  “But, Rojan —”

  “But nothing. Just look. Look up, then look down.”

  He did, reluctantly at first, with hesitant little side glances at me every now and again. I didn’t really expect much, at least not for him to see what I saw. He’d been filled with every sermon, from Dendal’s essays on morality to Pasha’s passionate rants about the ’Pit’s version of the Goddess. None of this sanitised, soulless crap down there. In the ’Pit she was all blood and glory, enough to turn a boy’s head.

  So I wasn’t expecting much, maybe just a new perspective for him, outside himself and into the world. Make him think. That’s what Ministry has traditionally hated, above all else – someone who thinks for themselves rather than swallowing what they are fed. Maybe what they hated about pain-mages. If there’s one thing to be said for dislocating your thumbs to cast a spell, it’s that it really makes you think about what’s necessary and what’s just fluff.

  Allit looked up with longing, as anyone from Under might. A wintry sun managed to break through a gap in the clouds. And then he saw something else. His eyes jerked wide and he snapped back towards me, away from the edge. When he tried to speak, nothing came out for a moment, until a breathy, horrified whisper. “I can see them. They’re coming, more machines, bigger machines. I can see them. Mountains, men, machines. They’re coming.”

  The ragged edge to his voice made rivulets of ice run down my back. I didn’t need to be Pasha, rummage in his head with my magic, to know that Allit was so scared he was about to piss himself. And this was a boy who’d taken to hurting himself on a regular basis like a bird took to the air. It was about then that I noticed what he was doing with his hand – he had hold of his cut thumb and was pinching the two edges of the wound together, tighter and tighter, twisting as he went. Pain, meet magic.

  “Allit?” I grabbed his shoulder with my good hand. “Allit, what are you seeing? Where are you seeing it? Allit?”

  He shook himself like a boy waking from a bad dream, his hands trembling so hard they looked in danger of falling off. “We need to go find the others. Find Perak. Tell them. More Storad coming, no good, it’s no good. More machines. Bigger ones, with, with…”

  He rubbed a shaking hand over his eyes and I realised he was trying not to cry, trying to be a man about it. When I was a kid I always loved being big brother to Perak, though I came to loathe it later, to fear it, to run from it whenever I could. Events and people were trying to cure me of that, with varying success. But when Perak was small, when Ma was alive and our father still lived with us, and Perak looked at me like I knew everything… Yeah, I loved being big brother then. Looking at Allit, at the fear in his thin, hunched shoulders, the way he looked at me like I had the answer to everything, like I was some sort of god, well, maybe it turned my head. Who doesn’t like to be thought of as a god? Big brothering slid back into me like it was coming home.

  I got him to his feet and draped an arm over his shoulder. “It’s all right, Allit. I’m going to make sure it’s all right.”

  I’ve always been a superb liar.

  Chapter Six

  By the time we got back to the offices, Allit had himself under control, of sorts. I really was starting to like this kid because he reminded me of me, when I still had stars in my eyes and hope in my by now grubby little soul.

  I told Allit to go see if there was anything to eat in the kitchen – not because I thought there was anything worth eating in there (I knew there wasn’t) but more to keep him out of the way while I talked to Pasha. Lastri gave me a glare like I’d tried to poison the kid or something, and went to see what she could do about fattening him up. Not a lot, probably.

  Of course, with Pasha being the way he was, the way his magic ran, I didn’t need to tell him much. He cast a surreptitious glance at Dendal, who was oblivious to anything but what was dancing in his head. Unspoken, we’d taken to not telling him everything. Most of it, but not everything. Whatever else he might be, and he’s a lot of things, Dendal was a gentle soul and these were not about to be gentle times. Crazy perhaps – I mean, when he remembered, he was a powerful mage, the strongest we had – but he also had an in-built faith in people that I couldn’t quite bring myself to destroy. That’s wi
thout the wandering through his days humming to himself and playing with imaginary fairies, which could be fatal if he lost concentration at a vital point. We told ourselves we were keeping him in reserve, and perhaps we were.

  I checked for any traps my desk might have laid for me and sank warily into the chair behind it. Pasha came and took up his customary position on the corner of the desk, his back to Dendal and his candles so that his outline seemed to flicker with a halo of light.

  “I caught bits,” he said in an undertone. “Did he really see it, do you think?”

  I shrugged and played with a pen, adding to the doodles on my blotter. “I think he’s found one of his talents, yes. Makes me wonder – the first time, when his magic started. I wonder what it was he saw that’s left him so jittery.”

  “I could take a look? No, all right, maybe not. So if he saw it, if it’s real… He thinks it is, at the least. Here, look, I caught this much.”

  I could see the office, the cobwebs in the corner, the array of candles in weird shapes, the top of Dendal’s head as he bent to start another letter, Pasha’s monkey face and the way he was twisting his finger out of its socket with a hiss of pained breath. Overlaid on all that, I could see… machines, mountains, men. Just like Allit had said. I tried to shut my eyes against it, but Pasha’s little insertion into my brain was still there.

  I’d seen the machines at the gates from far away, through a telescope at Top of the World. Monstrous guns on wheels, and they’d been bad enough. These machines were different. Imagine a spider got drunk and mated with a – hell, I don’t know, a lion and a giraffe or something. And then had some twiddly bits grafted on. They had too many legs, too many nasty, brutal-looking protuberances and weird twisting parts that looked like teeth at the same time as they looked like guns. Smoke oiled its way around them, making them vague and all the more disturbing. I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to be having nightmares about when I slept next, though they’d have a fight on their hands with all the other crap my brain liked to throw at me when I was weak.

  Maybe Dench had been right all along: maybe we should have allied with the Storad, should have bent the knee, swallowed our pride. Maybe I shouldn’t wait for the cardinals’ men to find me but hand myself over now, as long as the Storad promised not to use these things in anger. From this news of more machines, if not from the things already here, it was obvious that this had been long in the planning. They’d just been waiting for the best time, the time when we were weak.

  But now maybe we had an edge. If the boy could really farsee, then that might be all the edge we needed.

  Perak was there in minutes when I called him – he’d been in the lab, looking very secretive as he discussed something with Erlat. She gifted me a wink before she left, leaving me with the feeling that something funny was going on there. No time to think about it right then though.

  Pasha showed them what he’d showed me of Allit’s vision. Perak looked pale and shaky, kind of how I felt.

  “Are you sure?” he kept asking. “It couldn’t be a mistake, could it?”

  “Allit certainly seems sure,” I said, with a shrug that probably made me look a lot more unconcerned than I was. “But then, it’s only the first time this has happened to him that we know of.”

  “So perhaps —”

  “Perhaps we don’t want to take that chance, Perak.”

  He sat on the other edge of my desk and ran a hand through his hair. “No. No, you’re right. But by the Goddess, just when I though we might be able to do something, get this over with. I thought we had a chance, but with that on the way…”

  When I looked up, Allit was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Lastri’s hand on his shoulder. He looked very young all of a sudden.

  “Allit,” Pasha asked in a soft voice, “do you think you could do it again? Just to see if – well, if it’s still the same.”

  Allit’s voice was full of teenage belligerence and a hint of bewilderment. “I didn’t lie.” He looked at me, as though I had all the answers. “I didn’t.”

  “No one says you did,” I said. “But – first proper spell and all, well, first intentional one, it’s difficult. Maybe you aren’t farseeing. Maybe you are and it’s the other side of the world, not Storad in our mountains. Maybe a hundred things, but we have to be sure.”

  He looked between me and Perak, seeming to weigh it all in his mind. “All right. I’ll try it again.”

  Perak nodded firmly. “Good. In the meantime, at least I’ve got something to go on. Jake and Malaki, I’ve got some work for them to do, and I’ve got a few things to deal with myself – all these people who want you dead, for starters. Let me know what you find.”

  Pasha and I settled down with Allit, and got on with the business of him trying again. It didn’t go well.

  Finally, after blood had got everywhere, we’d got nowhere and Allit seemed on the verge of tears, I said, “Allit, when you… well, when you first found out you were a mage. What was it you saw?”

  Colour seemed to drain away from his cheeks, leaving him ashen, shaken. “Nothing.”

  “Look, you can farsee, perhaps; that’s good. That’s great. But I need you to able to do it again. You need to as well, or you’re going to end up one big ball of frustration.” Not to mention he’d end up in the black, or going kablooie when it all went tits up, as it would.

  Pasha, standing where Allit couldn’t see him, got that dreamy look he took on when he was listening in on someone’s thoughts. “You know, first time I heard anyone’s voice in my head, I thought I was going mad. Scared me stupid, so I didn’t want to try again. Or at least I tried, but it wouldn’t come.”

  Allit twisted round to look at him. “You were scared?”

  I laughed, more at the memory of myself at this point than anything. “We all were, Allit – I had no idea what the hell was going on, all I knew was things kept changing and I knew where people were without knowing how I knew. Made life a real challenge for a while, and then when I tried to do it on purpose, it all went wrong, when it went at all, which it mostly didn’t for a long time. Still don’t know what the hell I’m doing, really. But it’s going to happen sometime, whether you want it to or not. Best if you know how to manage it. Be its master rather than the other way round.”

  He took it a damn sight better than I’d taken that little speech from Dendal, way back when: I’d ended up not using my magic unless I really had to, and of course when it came to it I was out of control. Thing was, we were all right to be afraid. When I’d first joined up with Dendal I’d looked at him, slave to his magic, addicted to it like a junkie to Rapture, and thought, I don’t want to end up like that.

  I was beginning to think that it was inevitable. We were all slaves to it in one way or another, and I felt a twinge of guilt at bringing Allit into that fold, into that slavery. Yet the choice wasn’t much of a choice – if we didn’t help him, chances were pretty good he’d end up dead of it. Dendal had some really gruesome stories about mages who hadn’t faced up to their magic, ones he used to tell me over and over. I’d started to dream about them too just lately.

  The really scary thing is, I was starting to sound like Dendal, always banging on about mastery.

  Allit sat for a while, still pale and shaking, but in the end he took a deep breath and gave me a determined nod. Once he started, it seemed like he couldn’t stop till it all came out.

  “I saw lots of things, the first time. I found myself in the wrong end of the ’Pit, and, and I got knocked about pretty bad. Still had the last of the bruises when you found me and that was weeks later. And… and when you found me, I already knew who you were. I saw you, before. I saw what you did at the pain factory, with all the Glow. How it all ran, and you were full of it, full of Glow and you seemed to light up, it was running from your hands, from your eyes and there was glass everywhere and you were smiling, Goddess, the most awful smile, like you were Namrat coming to eat me. And then your father, you left him to di
e. On purpose, I saw you. Not clearly – it was vague and blurry, but I saw, and I saw you bring him up to be tried by Ministry too, and I saw you join him in the factory, and I saw him kill you. All those things, but only one happened. And I saw Pasha all whacked out, like his mind wasn’t his any more, and I knew you were both using magic, and I thought I might be and I didn’t want it. Not if that’s what it was, and when I met you it scared me because I thought that was you, that man with Glow running out of his eyes, and I didn’t want to be one of them. I saw other things too, before, the pain factory, the screaming and… and… later I think… I don’t want to see it any more! Only I was trying because you weren’t that man, you weren’t that scary, or all lit up with Glow. You helped me, that day you found me. You didn’t have to, but you did. I wanted to help you back, I did, I do, but… not the seeing. I don’t want to do the seeing.”

  Pasha was quicker off the mark than me when Allit finally came to a stop. A soft hand on his shoulder, and I knew Pasha would be in the boy’s head, talking to him, soothing him. Playing with what was inside there, taking away the fear perhaps. If only he could do that for good.

  Pasha was looking at me when he spoke, that little contented smile that he’d got lately just visible. “That’s not a choice we get. This is who we are, what we are. And it’s crap, and I hate it, and I love it too. But if you have it, you need to know how to keep a lid on it, or you’ll be just another mage who fell into the black, whether you mean to use it or not. And to do that, you need to know how it works, how to use it. We’ll be here with you, OK? I’m not going anywhere and neither is Rojan, or Dendal or any of us.”

  Pasha’s voice in my head. You taught me that, that this is what we are and we should be proud of it. So stop thinking otherwise. We need these kids, all of them, and they need us to show them. It’s us, all together. This is your way back into the world, instead of being apart from it. Remember that.