I woke up with my nose shoved into the shabby sofa behind my desk, my feet resting on Griswald’s mangy head.
Something hard–whatever it was that had woken me–prodded my shoulder. I opened one eye and thought about feigning death, again, when Lastri’s face glared back. She wielded the ruler like one of Jake’s swords and prodded harder, as though she was enjoying it.
I fumbled myself to sitting, my eyes rheumy and gritty. How long had it been since I’d slept? Too long, and when you considered every sleep I had was littered with dreams of a dark, dead city, of Jake watching me with reproachful eyes, of my niece saying her prayers for me, who could blame me?
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Time you sorted yourself out,” Lastri snapped. “Time you grew up and grew a pair of bollocks.” She snorted in disgust and, thankfully, left me to it.
I patted Griswald on the head and managed to get up. Dendal was in his usual position in the corner surrounded by a hundred different candles and Pasha sat, jittery all over again, on the corner of his desk, talking to Erlat. They shared a sideways look, conspirators in something and not just getting me to sleep, I was pretty sure of that. Whatever it was, they were welcome to it–I had enough screwing with my head without anything else on top.
Erlat murmured something to Pasha but all I heard was Jake’s name and that “it’s going well. Slowly, but she’ll get there.” The shoulder that was facing me seemed to do so in a very pointed way and she made a show of not looking at me as she dropped a comforting hand on to Pasha’s.
Pasha’s smile was strained, but he got up and walked her to the door. “Don’t risk it next time. Keep out of sight where you can. It’s getting dangerous out there, and… they mean business, Erlat.”
“They always do.” She flicked a glance my way. Not a nice glance, but not an “I want to strangle you” Lastri special.
I tried. I did, although I still didn’t know what I’d done to upset her. But I got as far as “Erlat—” before she shut the door on me and what was, to be fair, probably going to be something sincere but lame-arsed.
Pasha came and sat on the corner of my desk, his jitters worse even while he laughed at me. “For someone who spends as much time with women as you do, you have no understanding of them, have you?”
“I have no idea what the hell goes on in women’s minds. It’s all right for you, you can see what they’re thinking. How come you can tell her to be careful, but when I try, she stops talking to me?”
Another laugh that couldn’t quite cover up whatever was making him fidget like he had an infestation of insects in his underwear. “When you have the answer to that, maybe she’ll talk to you. She doesn’t hate you anyway. Not yet. You’ve still got time to really piss her off.”
He pretended not to see how relieved I was, so I pretended that I wasn’t and made a mental note to go and see her. Maybe, and this was pushing the bounds of my knowledge of social niceties, apologise. For whatever it was.
I sat opposite Pasha and tried not to wonder if my left hand was about to fall off. It felt like it and the juice that gave me fired me up, woke my brain and other things best left dormant.
“You found the woman?” I asked.
“Didn’t get the chance.” His voice worried me, jittery as he was. His glance flicked to Dendal and back again. “Do you want to go and see how Lise is?”
I took my own, thoughtful look at the oblivious Dendal as he bent over his papers, his scratching pen the only noise other than his faint, cheery hum.
“Of course I do.”
By the look of the grey light that was bouncing down off all the cunningly concealed mirrors and through grubby light wells, I took it to be mid-morning which meant we could see where we were going. The streets were empty, too silent, too still. Too dead. We found a stairwell and headed down.
“I got us special passes in case any guards ask us why we’re out,” Pasha said and handed one over. On Official Special Business, it said, and that sent a shiver down me.
“What was it you didn’t want Dendal to know?”
“Inquisition. That’s why it’s so quiet, why I told Erlat to be careful.”
He didn’t have to say anything else; that was quite enough to put the fear of anything you care to name up me. “Perak—”
“Hasn’t got complete control. He said as much. Plenty of factions within the Ministry, all wanting their own thing. All wanting to save their own arses, their own everything. Well, one of them has called an Inquisition.”
Which probably meant everyone was in even bigger shit than before. No one had called an Inquisition since, well, since the last time a mage had gone batshit. It was the Inquisition that had decided we were unholy, agents against the will of the Goddess. Ministry had fallen on that with glee and dropped on us the edict that made us illegal. The Inquisition had rounded up all the mages they could find, and no one knew exactly what had happened to them. There were plenty of less than savoury rumours though, ones that I didn’t care to contemplate. Of course, they’d probably regretted that later when the synthtox kicked in, but by then mages were secret which was helpful when they started rounding them up again, as they had with Pasha, to help with pain-farming for Glow.
Thing was, from all I’d read and heard about the Inquisi tion, they weren’t bound to follow Ministry. Once they were let loose, anyone in contravention of their orders was fair game. Before, they’d been sent after mages, and it didn’t matter what lofty position they held, how much money they had–the Inquisition didn’t care. They’d taken mages, heretics, unbelievers, people who complained about the Inquisition, people who looked funny… anyone they thought was an affront to the Goddess. Hence my keeping my feelings about religion to myself for the most part. The Inquisition were a law unto themselves and the Goddess.
So who would dare order one? Someone very sure indeed they wouldn’t be rounded up in the general “Inquisition everyone first, ask questions of the widespread bodily parts afterwards” mood.
Alchemical Research was the biggest, and most powerful, department. Perak had a few friends there, from his time working with them. But the new head was an ambitious man, and wasn’t above a bit of backstabbing. An Inquisition didn’t sound his sort of thing, though. I knew the rest of the departments–Theology, Law and so on–but not much about the individuals who led them, and even that little was more than most people knew. Ministry liked to hide who they were, which person did what, the details of those whats. Liked to keep everyone Under in their place through ignorance. It had worked pretty well, right up till the Downsiders started telling everyone a few truths, but Ministry were past masters at misinformation and starting the wrong rumour to counter the right one, so maybe only the Downsiders really believed it, and not all of them.
So who would dare order the Inquisition out?
“They started last night,” Pasha said. “Down in Boundary. Picked up a load of people, all Downsiders of course, in the name of finding the murderer. And any heretics while they’re about it, naturally.”
“But the guards—”
“The Downsiders don’t trust them. A guard was killed the other night–most Downsiders reckon it’s the guards that are doing the murdering. A fair few Upsiders feel the same, from what Guinto tells me. That’s just an excuse though.”
The muscles in his jaw worked as he tried not to spit it out, tried to keep his tone level. “I couldn’t get down to where that woman was, not unless I wanted to be picked up too, and I almost was.” Shame radiated off him, perhaps because he hadn’t stayed to get rounded up like the rest. Had an odd sort of honour like that, Pasha. “It’s not really the murderer they’re after, though that seems part of their orders. Heresy, that’s what they’re looking for. Us Downsiders are all heretics, because of the devotional.”
Blood and ashes, the old way, as it had been Upside before Ministry sanitised worship, made it “better”, “less violent”, and, incidentally, stripped it of anything remotely majestic. No music except on holy days, and then all you got were vacuous hymns waffling on about how lovely and nice the Goddess was. No stained glass to wash you with coloured light. No hellfire and damnation in the sermons. No blood in the devotional, just a nice little promise to be a good boy, thank you, Goddess. The Ministry had no romance in its soul, and it had sucked the soul from the city, too, made it a bland and tasteless thing.
Now here were the Downsiders with their raucous music, their vibrant belief, their blood and ashes and anger. Their knowledge of the truth. Too many for the Ministry to delete from their precious city. Someone had been waiting their chance, though, that was plain. An Inquisition to find the murderer and, while they were at it, quietly denounce any Downsiders they picked up as heretics, and a few more bodies made it to the Slump.
What could I say to Pasha? Nothing. Nothing that wouldn’t have sounded trite, insincere or worse, because I wasn’t a Downsider. I didn’t have to put up with the spits and insults and the fear of being picked up because of how I looked and sounded. I could never really know what it was like for him, same as no one can ever really know what it’s like for anyone but themselves and that’s a blessing and a curse, I’ve always thought.
Usually I’d have said the insincerity anyway because I’m all charm that way, but not to Pasha. Not today. A sudden attack of tact, perhaps, but I was sure I’d get over it.
We reached a stretch of walkway that passed under the lab. The stench of wet smoke curled around us and made me cough as I wondered if any of the machinery we needed had survived. It was almost time for our daily session, and we needed Glow now more than ever, but it wouldn’t do much without Dwarf’s magnifying gizmo.
Pasha stopped suddenly, startled, his eyes wide, mouth open. Then he ran along the swaying walkway, not towards the temple where we’d left Lise but towards the stairwell that led to the lab. When he got his gun out, I ran after him.
I’d thought he was running for the lab, but we hadn’t got there before he suddenly stopped. A dim landing where clanking walkways twisted off into darkness. A dim landing and, oh shit, a body I recognised. Taban from the lab, fellow pain-mage, with his throat cut back to his spine. So much blood. It robbed me of my voice, as though I was the one with his throat cut.
“Did you hear?” I managed to ask Pasha as we stared down, and wondered how I’d managed to go all these weeks working with Taban, passing the time while waiting for Dwarf to hook us up, taking our minds off what was to come by sharing a morbid joke on the nature of what we were doing, and I knew nothing about him other than he was a pain-mage and knew some seriously filthy jokes. Had been a pain-mage.
“The killer?” Pasha said. “No. No, just Taban. I–he was thinking of his wife, how he wouldn’t get to see her again.”
I’d never even known he was married, never asked, too damned obsessed with magic, with pain and the lab, with righting my mistakes. I blinked hard and stared up, and up, past labyrinths of walkways that staggered drunkenly between houses, a never-ending net that had me caught. Up past looming buildings that stole the sun, past the vast seem-to-float estates of Clouds. Top of the World was up there somewhere in the gloom, full of ministers, cardinals, priests, arseholes and maybe a good man or two. Maybe.
I didn’t really see any of that–I was listening to a voice, not any voice but a Voice, my father and his hypnotic magic, explaining to me how he was doing it for good reasons, that it was right, it was in praise of the Goddess. How I’d hated him for treating people like fucking cows, milking their pain, and now I knew for certain I wasn’t much different. That had always been my fear, that I’d be like him. Only I was–it had snuck up on me without detection, a small decision here, an overlooked detail there, an unnoticed person, only wanted for their pain…
Fuck that. I’d climb Top of the World and face the height, or, rather, depth, from its lip, stare at it full on and scream in defiance as I dropped into the Slump before I became another him.
I looked down at Taban, a smudge of extinct life surrounded by greyness, a sucking blandness that seemed to eat at your soul if you looked too long. Bizarrely, I wished I was back in the hellhole of the ’Pit. It had been a shitty place in a world of shitty places, dark and violent and so grim it made me want to fork my eyes out, but it had been noise and colour and a vibrant, fervent grasp at life, at wrenching every last drop out of it and feeling it drip into your mouth. The ’Pit had been alive. And I’d destroyed it as surely as I had the Glow, and let the Downsiders out of slavery into this–into a long slow sucking of the soul, and probably a grisly death at the end. Go me.
It took a while to get everything done–call the guards, tell them the fuck all we knew, have the body taken to the mortuary. When we were finally free to go–the passes worked wonders–and I turned towards Guinto’s temple and Lise, something else stopped me in my tracks. Or, rather, a few someones.
As I said, there hadn’t been an Inquisition in years but I knew trouble when I saw it. Perhaps that uniform was seared into the group consciousness or something, because all of a sudden my bollocks seemed to be making a bid to hide under my shirt.
Specials induced a kind of sweating dread whenever they appeared anywhere, the mere sight of the uniform making guilty thoughts appear in the heads of even the most blameless. They were pussycats next to these guys.
Ministry set a lot of store by uniforms, and it made sense. A guard’s uniform wasn’t much different from anyone’s normal clothes, but they were all the same colour, and had a tabard over that that designated them as guards. The uniform said, to the law abiding at least, “Just your regular guy, who’ll help you out if you need it. I’m an officially regular guy, you’re safe with me.” Wasn’t strictly true, of course, but the uniform gave that impression to your man on the street.
A Specials’ uniform was made for stealthy combat–a hand-me-down from the assassins of the old warlord who’d founded Mahala. A leather allover with subtle armour, inserted plates of metal that you couldn’t see but could stop a blade dead, hidden knives that could whip out and take you in the eye or heart before you could say “shit”. Understated, silent and scary with it. The uniform said: “Hey, I’m quiet and soft and could kill you in an eye blink, and no one will see, or care, so do as you’re damn well told.”
There was nothing understated about these guys. A breastplate etched in whorls of red and black that seemed to, but didn’t quite, depict a nasty fiery hell with what might be the twisted faces of damned souls screaming imposed over the top. A short helmet in the shape of Namrat’s head, all teeth and snarls, with a visor that covered the eyes so they could see out but you couldn’t see in, making them appear eyeless, soulless. Metal gauntlets the colour of blood–so it wouldn’t show perhaps. All in all, the Inquisitor’s uniform was balls-out “I don’t give a fuck who you are, I’m judging you and if you come up wanting, I will crush you like the pathetic bug that you are and send you screaming into hell so that Namrat can rip your soul to shreds. I may piss on you afterwards.”
Ministry set a lot of store by uniforms because, as a way of telegraphing just how fucked you are, they work. Well, they were working on me anyway. No matter the orders of an Inquisition, what made them dangerous was that when they were set in motion, they were always on the lookout for heretics and unbelievers, whoever they were. Part of their strength and part of the reason they’re dangerous, even for whoever gives them their orders.
Given that I am a heretic, an unbeliever and a mage to boot, I was feeling fairly vulnerable.
They came along the walkway as though they owned it and, frankly, if they’d asked, I’d have handed over the deeds without a squeak. Pasha didn’t seem to have noticed them, rubbing his forehead as though trying to rub out what he could hear. He stared down with sick fascination as the guards covered Taban and muttered a few snatches of sentences under his breath that I didn’t quite catch but that sounded like a prayer.
Luckily the Inquisitors didn’t seem to have noticed us yet either–they were busy breaking down the door of a house at the other end of the walkway, though one, a captain perhaps by the extra ornamentation on his helmet and a specially tormented-looking soul on his breastplate, looked our way. The eyeless visor gave him a detached quality, a predator eyeing up his prey.
Under his gaze the guards started to swear and rush to get Taban’s body on to a stretcher and hoisted up to a block and tackle that would take it to the level of the mortuary. If even the guards were left sweaty and panicked, me and Pasha were screwed. The guards were done with us so I grabbed Pasha’s arm and dragged him into a dark doorway. He started to say something, loudly, but shut up quick when he saw my face. He flicked a glance back towards the walkway, flinched and then set his mouth in a grim line. Pasha the mouse was about to go all lion on me, I could tell. If he did that, we were probably both dead.
“Just keep quiet, act calm and we’ll get away, all right?” He made to say something, but I cut him off. “You open that mouth, they hear your accent, you might as well be dead already. Look, down in the ’Pit you looked after me, right? You showed me how it worked, made sure I didn’t do anything stupid that’d get me killed. This is me returning the favour. You’ve seen what they’re doing, what you say they’ve done down in Boundary. You want me to have to go find Jake and tell her you aren’t coming back because of some fool notion of yours? We shut the fuck up, get the fuck out, live to fight another day. Got it?”
He settled down a bit, looked less as though he was going to explode with indignation and I thought we might actually get out of this with our arses intact.
Then the screams started. Behind us, from where the Inquisitors had finished breaking down the door and were busy pulling people out of their home. Pasha leapt out of my grasp like he’d been struck with some of Lise’s electricity and was halfway there before I could catch him again.
Luckily I was a fair bit bigger than him, because trying to hang on to a man who’s writhing more than any snake is hard with only one working hand. I got to him before he made the corner of the next stairwell between us and them, before the Inquisitors could see him and decide they had room for one more. Pasha smacked me a good one and almost sent me flying. In the end, I had to sit on him to stop him.
He shut up, luckily–me sitting on his ribs didn’t leave him much breath for talking. I leant forward and took a peek around the corner of the stairwell. No one seemed to have noticed us brawling.
The Inquisitors were doing a very thorough job. Not content with dragging out a Downsider family–father, mother, two boys and a baby–they’d started on the furnishings as well. Chairs flew out on to the street, followed by a table, a couple of filthy mattresses, ragged clothes that might pass for the family’s best temple-going dress. Then the damning evidence, what the Inquisition had come for. A picture of the Goddess, all blood and violence and Namrat looking mean. Not a fluffy kitten or sunbeam in sight. Two pots with brushes–one black with ash, one to hold the blood.
The father’s face, pale already in the giveaway that this was a Downsider family, grew paler still. His wife began to sob, quietly, desperately.
“Heresy,” the lead Inquisitor said in a voice like the clanking shut of a cell door.
“No, I—” was as far as the father got. A gauntlet slammed into his face, brought blood from him and tears and screams from his family.
I couldn’t look as they took the family away, couldn’t bring myself to watch, and some small part of me was ashamed of that, ashamed of the fear that left me weak and wobbly. The bigger part of me was concentrating on not letting Pasha get up, because if I did, I knew, knew, he’d be out there roaring like a lion and it would do nothing at all except get him killed with them. Apart from anything else I didn’t want to have to say to Jake, “Well, I could have stopped him, but I let him go and now he’s dead, for nothing.”
When the cries had faded, when the street no longer smelled of threat and Inquisitors, I got up off Pasha. Warily, it had to be said, but he didn’t leap up to lump me one. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had–I was feeling pretty much like lumping myself at that point–but Pasha always surprised me.
He walked around the corner, slowly, as though he was dreaming. A soft hand on a wrecked chair, on what was left of the door. What was left of a home and family.
“We could have done something,” he said. “We could have helped.”
“Got arrested with them? Got taken up to Top of the World, found guilty, because, let’s face it, we both are in their eyes, and chucked off into the Slump? Who would that have helped?” True enough, as far as it went. Not far enough, no matter how practical, and I knew that because there was a slosh of bile chewing at my stomach and a wish that I could scrub myself clean and douse myself with disinfectant. As if that would make my soul sparkly fresh again. If only it were that simple.
“We could have done something.”
That was Pasha all over, why I liked the little bastard and sometimes hated him, too. He made me look past myself, made me look outside, and inside, too. I didn’t like it very much, because what’s inside is festering like a month-old corpse.
He picked up one of the pots, or, rather, what was left of it, and dipped a finger in. It came away black with ash and he slowly, deliberately, smeared it in a circle on his palm.
We should have been getting the fuck out of there, in case there were more Inquisitors, in case they decided to do a sweep of the whole area, but I stood and watched, transfixed despite myself, as Pasha brushed off the ripped picture of the Goddess and set it on a little ledge. He didn’t seem aware of anything else as he pulled a knife out of his pocket. Small, bone-handled, with Namrat and the Goddess carved into the hilt, locked in their epic battle. Life versus death. To Pasha, to the Downsiders, it’s the battle that’s important, not promises of a golden afterlife though that’s nice, too. No, it’s the fight, the never-ending struggle that’s the thing, even if you knew Namrat would always win in the end.
When he came to use the knife, to make the dot of blood in the centre of the devotional, I looked away. Too personal a thing to watch, even for me. The soft murmurs of his prayer were enough to give me goose bumps, especially when I heard my name in there.
It wasn’t long before he came to stand next to me and we surveyed the damage, to the house, to the blood-soaked walkway where Taban had died, and for what? Why? Why him, why any of them? Why was my sister lying in a bed unconscious and lucky to be alive?
As usual, I covered up all my thoughts and feelings. “I hope you weren’t praying for me to see the light and get converted.”
That brought half a smile from Pasha. “No, I know when I’m asking too much.” The smile turned into a sly grin. “I did ask that you not sit on me again, dickhead.”
Arsehole. “Sure, and next time I’ll let them take you, too, if it makes you feel better.”
“I’m not ashamed to be a Downsider, and I’m not a heretic. Fuck anyone who says different.”
I was glad to be away from that corner and we hurried toward Guinto’s temple in silence for a while, until Pasha broke in thoughtfully: “They weren’t looking for a murderer, did you notice that? A victim right there, and they didn’t even glance at him.”
Oh, I’d noticed all right. But then, what else could you expect from the Ministry but to use the murders of a few people they find inconvenient in order to make sure their boot of authority was firmly in place? It didn’t even need Perak’s approval–any minister could order an Inquisition. It did make me wonder who it had been, though, who felt safe enough to order it, what they were really after.
“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.”