Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise

by Francis Knight

  My brother had been living Over Trade too long. “Yes, give them guns. They’ll fight just as well as your guards. Better, maybe. Less to lose. But they live here too, and they’ll die just as quick when the Storad get in.”

  “The cardinals will never agree. I mean, yes, of course, you’re right. Should have thought of it myself, but they’ll never agree.”

  “Easy. Don’t tell them.”

  I could see the idea turning over in his head, almost see where he was working out how to persuade all the other Ministry men this was what they needed to do. He had his work cut out there – despite everything, most of his cardinals still looked on anyone from Under as sub-human. But people from Over, well, I couldn’t see many of them fighting hand-to-hand, not unless it got right to the end. Over, life was easy and well fed, nothing much to trouble you. Under, life was one long fight from cradle to grave. It’d make a refreshing change to fight someone who wasn’t a neighbour.

  “What about Jake?” Pasha asked. “I’m not just leaving her out there and hoping for the best.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Hiding, but there’s two thousand men or more walking down that road right now, and that valley isn’t big. Soon there won’t be anywhere left to hide. Not that hiding comes naturally to her. You know as well as I do what’s likely to happen – the first hint of anyone finding her, she’ll take out as many as she can, while she can. All or nothing.”

  He didn’t need to spell it out any plainer.

  “You can talk to her?”

  “Yes, of course. She’s a bit far away, so she’s faint at times, but I swear I could hear her if she was on the moon.”

  “Good. OK, look, Perak, you get those guns out to people who might do us some good – vicious, underhand people are who we want right now. But not just any old gang-hand. Get someone down there asking for volunteers – I guarantee there’ll be plenty who will if you agree to let them be armed. They want to fight.”

  “And then?” Pasha twitched with impatience.

  “And while Perak is picking out who gets to shoot people for Mahala, you talk to Jake. Find out where the men are, where the flamey things are. Who’s in charge, apart from Dench, what tent they’re in, if she can. Where Dench is too. Anything so we’re not going in blind.”

  “Going in?”

  My brother can be annoyingly pacifistic at times, and when you’ve got a bloodthirsty enemy at the gate is one of those times.

  “Yes, Perak. It’s too late to sit back and hope we can weather this siege. Mahala survived the last ones by being a bunch of conniving bastards, and we’re going to do the same this time. This time, we have a Jake in their midst to show Pasha what’s what. We’ve got a load of guns, and a load of bullets. We have a load of people from Under who would be more than happy to shoot a gun, as long as you make sure there aren’t any cardinals around. You may want to keep the Upsiders and Downsiders separate though. We take the fight to the Storad, before their mates turn up mob-handed, and when we’re done with them, then we bring Jake back.”

  Perak went to the window, and though he stared out into snow-swirled darkness I don’t think he saw anything out there. Finally he said, “All right. All right, I’m going to have some explaining and persuading to do in Top of the World, but all right, I’ll persuade them if I can. I can’t do a damned thing without them playing merry hell about it anyway. Pasha can concentrate on finding out what he can, from Jake or whatever other way. I’ll send someone down to see who they can gather up, if anyone. And you, Rojan. You are going to be resting like you should. Aren’t you.” Not a question, an order from my archdeacon, from the Mouth of the Goddess.

  I couldn’t give a toss about what the Goddess wanted.

  I sighed inwardly, wishing I could rest like he wanted me to. But this, all these Storad outside our walls, Jake trapped out there on her own, people huddling in their homes wondering if tomorrow would come and if it did whether they’d be alive to see it… everything came down to me. One little action of mine had brought us to this, and I was getting us out of it too, if I could. “Not a chance in hell.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Pasha asked. “Not magic. If you do —”

  “Ever heard the saying, ‘When confronted by a tiger, throw shit at it. Because there will be shit’? I’m going to make sure there’s shit to throw.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Stench smelled even worse the second time around. I tried holding my breath but by the time I got even a quarter of the way in I was near fainting. In the end I settled for breathing through my mouth and the shirtsleeve that covered it, and trying not to gag. At least this time I knew where to find the Stenchers.

  I looked over the vats and felt bizarrely pleased they were full. The scum on top looked even worse today, with a livid green tint to it that screamed “plague waiting to happen”, or at least “highly contagious form of the galloping trots”. Either one would work nicely, especially if it was fast-acting.

  I found a knot of Stenchers just off the corridor where I’d discovered Halina flying and throwing men around. They huddled in a loose circle with the rattle of bones between them. When I got closer, I realised what they were betting on – how many days till the Storad reached Top of the World, with side bets of whether they’d let any Mahalians Under live. No one seemed to be betting yes on that last one.

  A gangly face looked my way. He grunted something to his pals, and then they were all looking at me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being the centre of attention, but the calculation there sent the hairs on the back of my neck quivering.

  One of them stood up, his frown almost hidden underneath the ground-in dirt. Well, probably dirt.

  “What do you want?”

  I didn’t get the chance to reply before one of the others growled out, “Here, that was the one that took our Halina away. She all right? What did you do with her? She’s going to be one of them mages, right?”

  A low mumble around the circle, from which I gathered that while they didn’t really approve of mages as such, anyone who managed to get out of the Stench was on to a good thing.

  “Yes and no,” I said before I could even think about it. Possibly not the best move, because the circle stood up and it was as tall as me and a lot stronger. I held on to my pulse pistol, and wondered how many people it could take at once, if I had to. Thing was, if I did, there went my chance of getting them to help. And I needed their help, even if I wasn’t going to say how much.

  “What you mean?” The guy who seemed in charge moved my way and I did my best not to lean back away from the smell. Small breaths through the mouth, that was the trick. Even so, my eyes were watering.

  “She came to be a mage, that’s true.” The urge to lie was almost overwhelming. I’ve lied my whole damned life, and it’s a hard habit to break, especially when the truth might be very painful to my person.

  “And? She all right? Why are you down here?”

  “You know what’s happening up there, don’t you? The Storad, the gates.”

  “Course we know. We stink, we aren’t stupid. Be amazed what ends up down here for us to read. That’s why Halina went. Couple of us tried to volunteer but they told us to fuck off. Stupid, I thought. We were willing, and that’s what counts. But they wouldn’t give us no guns, no nothing, and I said in that case the fancy boys from Over can die. Let them wear the Storad down, and when they lose – and they will – less of them for us to worry about. We’d have fought if they’d let us.”

  “How about if I ask nicely now?”

  One of the others started to say something, but this guy glared at him and he shut up. “Oh, you want us now, right? We’ve got something you want, I’m thinking. I’m also thinking you haven’t said what happened to Halina.”

  “She came to be a mage, and she’s good, damned good. She’s fine, considering.”

  Something white appeared in the brown crust of the lead guy’s face, and I realised his lip was curled against
what he’d just heard. “I know a liar when I see one. She’s dead then. Sent her off like they would have done us, no weapons, nothing but a cheery wave I expect. Right?”

  “Yes and no. Being able to throw a man across a room counts as a weapon. And she’s not dead.”

  A laugh behind the lead guy – the man who I thought had been with her when I found her. It was hard to tell under the uniform crust over their faces, the identical drab brown of their rags, but the voice sounded familiar. “She could kick the shit out of any one of us. Or at least throw the shit out of any one of us.”

  A slice of the lead guy’s hand and the laughter stopped. “So she’s not dead, all right. But now you’re down here asking us to fight again, I expect, with no weapons. Die when we could be down here, defending our own, not that miserable lot of pious bastards up there. I pity the Storad who makes it down here, though I don’t reckon they’ll bother us much. No one does. Rumour is, they just want to screw you over, not us. No, you just piss off, Ministry boy. You want to save Over, you’re going to have to do it yourselves.”

  The Stenchers weren’t going to help us by being a weapon. Bang went another great plan.

  The plan to gather together a few men from Under hadn’t worked so well either, as I discovered on my way back up.

  Halfway through No-Hope, in the most innocuous area full of the kind of proud poor who just worked hard and kept their heads down, I found what looked like a brawl. I began to sidle my way round – one thing Under teaches a guy is when and how to avoid trouble – before I saw who was in the middle of said brawl.

  Malaki let off a shot, and the two Specials with him followed suit. They weren’t shooting at anyone in particular that I could see, but it was enough to give everyone a bit of pause. Not for long – after their initial fright, the crowd surged in on them again. Specials had got where they were by being the scariest thing anyone knew, but that wasn’t the case any more. Now the scariest thing was Outside and on its way in, and from the look of it, Malaki’s attempt at press-ganging a few likely-looking lads had backfired in a spectacular fashion.

  He wasn’t taking the sudden lack of fear from everyone well, but he knew when he was beaten. He caught my eye, saw where I was standing at a nice and handy place to get the hell out of the mess he was in, and headed in my direction. He only pistol-whipped a couple of guys on the way. The other Specials made a line behind him and managed to extricate themselves. The crowd around them dissipated with a mixture of triumphant aggression and sneering catcalls.

  I had no love for the slab-faced Malaki, but I did kind of feel sorry for him just then. He looked utterly confused and defeated as we headed up the stairwell.

  “Don’t they want to fight?” he asked.

  I looked out over the glowering faces as they crept back into their lives. “You’re asking the wrong people. Round here, these are just folks trying to get by, and shit-scared. They’d fight, but not for you, or for Ministry, and most certainly won’t if forced. Volunteers, I said. You want to go further down maybe. Find some of the gangs, if you can get that far and still live. They may hate Ministry, and you, but they love a good fight.”

  Malaki glared at me and shook his head. “Impossible. I have to find men, Perak says, so I’m trying. But I’m with the cardinals on this one. I’m not sure I want to give guns to just anyone who wants one.”

  “So you’re trying to strong-arm some poor suckers who wouldn’t know a fist if it hit them in the face? You think those people who just left – the apothecaries, the grocers, the bakers, you think they’re the best men for this? That forcing them might work?”

  “Better than the alternative,” Malaki said. “I don’t want men too eager to shoot.”

  “You don’t want anyone so piss-scared that they’ll shoot whatever turns up because they’ve got their eyes shut either. We need to use our strengths, not try to force people into things they can’t do.”

  He grunted at that, but then dropped another little zinger into the mix. “Like your little mages. They’d come in handy too, down by the gates. Cardinals are going to insist on it, and I agree.”

  I stopped dead and he almost ran into me as I whipped round. “And you can piss right off. They’re kids, Malaki.” My kids, I was beginning to think of them as. Too reminiscent of me at that age, mostly not knowing what the hell they were doing. But they weren’t going to end up like me, not if I could help it, and they weren’t going to blow themselves up trying to be Malaki’s secret weapon either. “You get them over my dead body. Or yours, whichever you prefer.”

  We stood there glaring at each other for a while, but he looked away first.

  “What do you suggest then?” he said at last.

  I sighed and carried on up the stairwell. “If you won’t use the people best suited for the job, at least pick people who might want to do it for what you’ve got to offer. Volunteers. Try right up under Heights, maybe the bottom of Heights too. Where they’re close enough to see what they can’t have, close enough to taste it, to want it above anything. Then offer it to them – promotion, a job in Ministry or the Specials, a promise they can believe in, even if it is a load of shit. But no strong-arming them. Or anyone. It’s going to be a shitstorm: you know it, I know it. You want people who want to be there, or all you’ll have after the first five minutes is a cloud of dust as they very sensibly run like buggery.”

  He sneered at that, but I got him to agree to at least try in the end. It didn’t seem much, but it was all I could do. I left him to it and went to the lab, went to sit with my kids, my little proto-mages, and help them figure it all out as best they could, while we still had the chance.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The snowfall had thickened till it was hard to see more than ten yards in front of you. A blessing in many ways, because it drew a screen across the crap, blotted out the decay of the walls Under, the flimsiness of the swaying walkways. The city was reduced to orbs of Glow lights shining on whiteness. At least the slush underfoot was a drab grey, else I’d have thought I’d managed to rearrange myself into some weird place where everything wasn’t screwed to hell. If I ever found myself there, I dare say I’d be bored to tears in under an hour.

  I was screwed to hell too. I’d been a good boy and not used any more magic, but that didn’t make a lick of difference to the throb of my poor hand, where the juice built up like water behind a dam. Didn’t make a lick of difference to the black either. It was back, had never really been away, was singing sweet nothings in my ear. The trouble with the whiteness of the snow was that it showed up the shadowy outline of a tiger stalking towards me out of the corner of my eye. Then I’d blink and it would be gone, only to stalk me from another direction. I tried my best to ignore it, but that was quite hard.

  Above the remaining inner gate, most of the lights were out, leaving only faint reflections off falling flakes to light the grim faces of the men stood behind it. Guards, or what was left of them, but they looked different that day, in that dim light. No longer more arrogant than I was, no longer looking smug and a bit superior in the knowledge that Under, their word was as close to the law as anyone was going to get. They had been all those things and I’d been on the receiving end more than once, but that day, behind that gate, huddled under snow and the gaze of half a dozen cardinals who watched from a nice, warm, safe window… with half their number killed or wounded already, the enemy having reinforcements on the way and they were the poor bastards at the brunt… that day they looked like any other men. Tired, scared, gaunt from too long without a decent meal.

  You’d think the boom-shudders from the machines stopping would have brought some relief, a bit of cheer to them, but no. Those echoing sounds had punctuated our lives, day and night, and now they’d stopped it felt quiet. Too damned quiet, leaving people room to think dire thoughts, to panic. If the guns had stopped, maybe that just meant the infantry were on their way.

  Worse, the guards now had reinforcements. Worse because those reinforcements
were made up of precisely the sort of people they usually spent their days scaring the crap out of and extorting bribes from – no one very important, though they weren’t from Under so the guards wouldn’t be too worried about how much they’d jackbooted them in the past. Only a bit worried. Still, it looked like Malaki had taken my advice with who he’d rounded up – these weren’t Ministry men: they were from the borders of Heights, the top of Under. I recognised one or two, and the type – merchanters’ kids mostly, with the odd priest or factory owner’s son or daughter thrown into the mix. It was in the careful way their clothes were cut to mimic a Ministry man’s, the sharp look in their eye as they watched for the main chance. Not Ministry, but wishing they were, people who spent their time looking ever upwards, working out how to get there, apologists for the Ministry. Not likely to get funny thoughts about shooting cardinals when no one was looking. Men and women who would volunteer because it might give them an edge the next time Ministry were hiring, or at least get them a weapon if things didn’t go to plan, rather than from any sense of helping anyone else.

  So the guards weren’t just tired and hungry and scared of what the Storad had to offer. Now they had a bunch of clueless people milling about, people who probably had no idea what they were doing and were only getting in the way. But at least they were there, and they’d learn soon enough.

  Perak arrived, wrapped up in a couple of thick woollen robes that looked like they could keep out the end of the world. He had that dreamy look to him again. The one that usually meant I was about to get dropped in it.

  Pasha was there too, looking worn at the edges. His monkey grin was fixed to his face as though he’d nailed it there, but fresh marks across his fingers, new bruises along his wrists where he no longer took care to keep his cuffs pulled down over his brands, told their own story. Those wrists were thin too, thinner even than they should have been, and his jacket flapped around a frame that had never been big and was now almost skeletal. He looked like a walking corpse.