We hid in the doorway of a grocery shop just on the border of Trade and Heights. The window held an expanse of bare, expensive-looking shelves punctuated by two wrinkled apples and a lonely pomegranate, all for sale at roughly a month’s income for anyone from Under. The shop owner looked briefly hopeful until he spotted the blue-white undertone of Pasha’s skin and tried to shoo us off, but I shut the door in his face and ignored him.
It didn’t take long to rearrange our faces, to the dismay of the grocer watching through the window as he stood protectively over his stupid apples. Screw him, mages were legal now and he could get bent. Luckily he didn’t seem the sort to create a commotion, just watched aghast, mouthing some obscenity about Downsiders that, thankfully, I could only lip-read, not hear. We turned our backs to him, and got all the quiet and privacy we wanted, or, rather, I did. Pasha was tight-lipped against what he could surely hear in his head.
I used Pasha’s juice even though the throb of my hand would have been enough for a hundred such spells–I could probably have rearranged things so I was a woman and he was an elephant. My black didn’t like it, but I told it to piss off and it went back to chuckling, biding its time. It would have me in the end, and it knew it.
I took away the blue-white undercurrent of Pasha’s skin that marked him as a Downsider, made him look a bit more imposing. Made him seem more the lion he was than the monkey that he looked like. I couldn’t resist making him look more of an ugly lion, though. He took a look in the window for a mirror and waved at the open-mouthed grocer with a savage grin.
“Prick” was all he said, and turned back to me. “What about you?”
I’d been thinking on it as I’d walked. I–we–needed to get into Top of the World, where all the biggest and most influential Ministry lived and worked. No ordinary guards on the door, I thought we could be certain of that. Specials for sure. Maybe, and the thought made me shudder, maybe even Inquisitors. I needed to look like someone who belonged there. Someone whose presence wouldn’t be questioned.
So I grew a moustache, careworn and drooping. Dench wasn’t a good look, if I’m honest, but needs must when there’s a killer on the loose with a thirst for your throat. I really hoped we didn’t bump into Dench–he’d probably find new and interesting ways to kill me.
“Pretty good” was Pasha’s verdict when I’d finished. “I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
With a cheery wave to the by now rather sick-looking grocer, and hoping he didn’t run screaming to the guards, we tried to hurry towards Clouds, progress slow because there were more people about here. The curfew hadn’t been enforced, not in Clouds where many lesser Ministry kept their homes, all bright and shiny towers on their platforms. The curfew had been for us scummy types from Under.
I felt sick as we pushed past shoppers on the Spine, through the upper levels of Heights and on towards Clouds. Sick not only because they all looked smug and well fed, didn’t have that ground-down look to them. More because of the shops, and what was in them. Down in No-Hope, the shops had fuck all. Some grey reconstituted mush if you were lucky and had plenty of money spare, which, with Trade shut down, no one did. No jobs, no money, no food, no nothing, except hunger and rats. Always there’s rats.
The thought of starvation obviously wasn’t crossing anyone’s mind much up here, and, despite what it was costing me and Pasha and the others in pain, there was no shortage of Glow either. Someone had been siphoning it off from the factories where we sent it, and that really made me want to hurl. Factories, what they produced to trade, were what kept everyone Under alive and someone was stealing that. I shouldn’t have been surprised–I suppose I wasn’t–but I was still pissed off. Thing is, I always want to be surprised and the blow when everything is just as crap as I expect can really sucker-punch the air from your lungs.
The shops in the upper reaches of Heights weren’t full, but they weren’t empty like the grocer on the border had been, like all the shops in No-Hope and what they were selling was a damned sight better than mush. Fresh vegetables and fruits, some of which I’d never even seen before. Proper bread, rice that didn’t have weevils in it. No bacon, sadly. I’d have fallen to my knees and promised eternal faith in the Goddess if there had been. Well, maybe. All right, probably not, but I’d have been very pleased.
So, little meat, and what there was, was stringy, full of grey gristle and barely enough to feed a very picky cat. But that was only to be expected–the synth disaster had killed off a lot of the animals, and, while there had been some, I suspected that what meat there was turned up secretly and for a select few. What had been brought up from the ’Pit was probably long gone, into the fat bellies above.
I stole a couple of green fruity things neither of us knew the name of and we headed on up with sticky hands, growling stomachs demanding more and sugar tingling on our tongues. The crowds thinned as we went higher, the shops stopped as Heights petered out, and then we were all but alone as we went ever higher. Once above the platforms of Clouds, which stood below with towers straining to reach us, they looked less impressive when you could now clearly see what was above them.
Top of the World hovered over us, a vast spire that seemed made of light and ice. The Spine spiralled up to the underbelly of the most powerful place in the city. Glow lights lit the deep shadow it cast, set at good intervals. More lights here than perhaps in the whole of No-Hope. I was tempted to smash them one at a time as we passed but Pasha persuaded me that if I wanted anyone to believe I was Dench, being a vandal wasn’t going to help. Which was sensible, logical, but didn’t stop me wanting to one little bit.
Instead, I hung on to my anger, pushed it down, formed it into a hard ball of hate. If Perak was alive–please, whoever might be listening, he was alive–if he was, why was he letting this happen? Especially when he’d seemed so concerned about people Under starving. I knew the answer–Archdeacon he may have been, but all-powerful he wasn’t. Ministry was faction against faction, and most of them hated Perak and his liberal ideas. He’d said as much, and Dench had hinted at it, too. Made me wonder why they’d promoted Perak, but that was pretty obvious.
Perak had always been a pushover, that was the trouble. Easy to talk around, not much iron in his spine. He was quite happy wandering through life, inventing things and doing what he was told. Only now he’d hardened up, started standing up to them, and they didn’t like that. He wasn’t the daydreamer I’d left behind all those years ago. Not at all. They’d signed up for a warm body to do as he was told, sign what they told him to sign, be the pious face of the “new” Ministry after the old one had made such a hash of things.
What they’d got was someone too stubborn for that. He was probably doing more to piss off more Ministry men than a hundred people like me. It was enough to warm the cockles of my heart. It was also enough to make me fear for his life, and I had no way to know if it was too late for that. Rule two, remember? That goes double if you’re in the Ministry and you mess with them, and now he’d disappeared. After Dendal couldn’t contact him, I’d tried, too, tried to track him but with no more luck before I had to stop. The black had almost got me again, and I could still hear its chuckle, feel the pull. I really needed to sleep before I tried any more spells. Sleep for a long time, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
By the time we reached the end of the Spine, where it led through an imposing arched gate into Top of the World, it wasn’t just the shadow that was making things dark. The sun touched the tops of the mountains and Pasha stopped to watch it for a heartbeat.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“But we’re going to do it anyway, right?”
“What happens if we don’t?”
“She carries on murdering mages. Us probably, if she can. No mages, no power. No power, no trade, no food, no heat. Everyone dies. The Storad and Mishans just walk in.” It helped to say it out loud. Gave me a bit of resolve.
“We could go straight to Dench.”
“We need to get in first. I tried to find him, same time I looked for Perak but no luck, so we don’t know where he is. Maybe, for Dench, I’d need a prop–I don’t know him that well. Besides, no reason to say he’ll believe me, or be able to help. Might not even want to. He sounded pissed off at Perak himself last time I saw him. Who knows what power plays are going on up here? Could be anything, and Dench’s loyalty isn’t to us, it’s to the Goddess and the city.”
Pasha’s look was speculative, but he nodded in the end. “All right. Do you have any sort of plan?”
“Not really. Try to find Perak firstly, but looking like this will help.”
No one was above an Inquisition, not even the Archdeacon. That was what my insides were telling me had happened to Perak, and the scary part. Well, that and the fact that they used divination–via goat’s entrails, would you believe?–to decide if you were guilty in the eyes of the Goddess, and, if you were, it was a long drop off Top of the World into the Slump. All it would take would be the goat to have had a dodgy breakfast, or a bribe to the entrail reader, and you were dead quicker than spit. Even the Ministry had never been overly fond of the Inquisition as a rule. A desperate measure, because like I say, anyone is fair game. Unless you knew who to bribe. Who would take a bribe, because the Inquisitors were promoted Specials, and word was none had ever taken anything in return for lenience or turning a blind eye. Which made setting an Inquisition a desperate move by someone who was sure he’d not get nabbed himself. And here I was, disguised as the man in charge of those Specials.
All of which made my bowels rather watery as we approached the gate. Maybe looking like Dench hadn’t been such a good move, but I didn’t know any other face that would get us in well enough. I could have pretended to be Perak, but, firstly, the Archdeacon isn’t going to wander along the Spine with no guards and, secondly, if Dench was to be believed, there was a good possibility people were trying to kill him. Or maybe already had, but I tried not to think of that.
It started off all right. The two Specials on the gate–the Specials we could see anyway–snapped off a couple of salutes and we were in. They gave Pasha a once over, but I growled out he was with me in the best imitation of Dench I could manage and they let him go with only a cursory pat down for weapons and a few questions.
I tried not to gawp as we entered the rarest of atmospheres. Mahala is built to make you look up, and up again. Top of the World more so. It wasn’t just another area of Mahala, it was another world. A nice one.
A broad plaza stretched in front of us, so, so clean. That was what struck me first. No filth, no grubbiness. No taste of hopelessness in the air that seemed fresh and cold off the mountains that were clear from here and very real, black against the setting sun.
Space was the next thing I noticed–nothing crammed in, no buildings jostling for position like starving men round a plate of bacon. Here there was room to breathe, and air worth breathing. I found myself standing to my full height, stretching out my shoulders, expanding into the space. This was a place where people could be.
As the light waned, lamps came on. Glow lamps but like nothing I’d seen before. Gilded cages hung along every eave, outlined every doorway, and inside them birds flapped and twittered. Not real birds, but animated Glow tubes. Overhead, other Glows flitted about in the shape of moths, only moths like I have never seen, all colours pulsing through the Glow like rainbows. They flew around the spires, swooping down to the plaza a hand’s span in front of me and then off again. The light they gave off was subtle but together they brought out a, pardon the pun, glow in the buildings, changed them from finely wrought to staggering in their beauty, all ethereal shadows and etched light. I’d never seen anything quite so glorious, never even imagined that anywhere in Mahala was quite like this.
So, space, no filth, the bird-lamps and fluttering moths, those were all wonders, but the floor of the plaza was something I’d never seen except in a faded picture. Never expected to see either. A mosaic of dressed stone, all mellow gold in the light of the fluttering birds, and, in between the slabs, bright grass and scented flowers. Flowers!
The pattern seemed haphazard, a random jumbling of green and gold and the colours of the flowers fading against the coming night, blue here, orange and black together there. A garden, I supposed. Quite pretty in its way but I still couldn’t work out what it was for.
One side of the plaza was free of buildings, letting us get a clear view of sky, of peaks swathed in scarves of misty cloud, of the city below us like an oily black smudge.
The other three sides of the plaza were lined with impossibly thin spires topping gilded buildings that looked as fragile as spun sugar. No need for girders, for squatness to support the weight of countless houses above. No need for everything to be crammed together, because this was where Mahala stopped. And it stopped in heart-wrenching beauty so that I almost believed this city was a good and great place. Almost.
When I stopped staring, I noticed Pasha looking at his feet. “Grass. I haven’t seen grass in years.”
It felt weird under my boots, soft and yielding in a way I’d never known when I’d only ever walked on steel and concrete and soft under your boots meant you’d stepped in something it was best not to contemplate. I nudged him on–we were attracting a few stares.
As “Dench”, I didn’t have the luxury of looking too awestruck, but Pasha made up for it. We approached an official-looking building that still managed to appear graceful and awe-inspiring in the way they’d managed to get the thing to stay up–I couldn’t get my head around buildings that had no other buildings on top, no buildings leaning on them either side, propping them up, buildings that didn’t need to worry about weight or space. I was about to ask Pasha to start rummaging in heads and find out where we needed to go, when it all burst out of him.
“It’s all supposed to be like this. Not just here, all of it.” He kept his voice down, but there was no disguising the wistful anger in his voice.
“I keep telling you about the Ministry—”
“It’s not the Goddess that’s the problem, Rojan. It’s people, men, abusing what they have in her name. It’s not Ministry, but the rotten few.”
“You always knew that, and that Ministry are the rotten all. Now where should we—”
“It’s different seeing it, though. There are good people here, too, even here. I can feel them. I’m going to prove it to you.”
Oh great, just what we needed. Pasha on a faith kick. “Now listen—”
“No. Over there, that’s the place.”
I wished he’d let me finish a sentence, but at least he was thinking of why we were here. I looked at where he’d pointed.
There are temples and then there are temples. I used to love them as a child, all hushed reverence, the colours of the stained glass puddling on the floor, the scent of the incense, the murmurs of prayers. Haunting places they were, even for me, until Ministry stripped them, made them bland and soulless like their prayers, like the poor deluded faithful. Stripped for us scum, at least, because this was a temple to end all temples and in the old style, too.
Not a temple, the temple. The Home of the Goddess, even I knew that. Where her spirit was supposed to be strongest, where she’d fought Namrat for us, where she’d made her useless sacrifice of a hand to stop Death from stalking us. Ridiculous of course–if that had ever happened, and it hadn’t, it had been a long, long time ago, before Top of the World even existed, back when we were just a castle in a handy pass with a sneaky bastard warlord ruling us. It couldn’t have been here, not in this temple, but that didn’t stop a little chill shuddering my shoulders, almost as though I was being watched and the watcher was keen on the contents of my soul. A quick buff and polish probably wasn’t going to help there, so all I could do was put on a brazen front and sneer at the feeling in my head.
An arch pointed up, and up, towards the spire that reached higher than any other, the fragility of it enhanced by the translucent stone that caught the last of the sun. The Glow moths gathered here in huge numbers, flickering around and through the intricate fretwork making the stone seem to ripple, alive.
Through the open arch, the coloured windows painted patterns on the runner that led the eye down the aisle to the altar, all gold and ivory and bedecked with Glow birds in their cages and a few errant moths that flickered around the faithfuls’ heads. A figure bent before the altar, limned in Glow. I recognised the robes. Perak, his hooded head bent in prayer. Something loosened inside my chest. A few cardinals knelt nearby. I recognised the spare woman with the hatchet face, and I couldn’t miss the fat one. Manoto… who I was here to find. Perhaps.
I didn’t want to be awestruck as I entered–I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me like that in a temple even if I wasn’t wearing my own face–but it was hard not to be. The ceiling vaulted high above us, and that had been made bland with whitewash, but somehow the temple still retained a sense of the wonder it must have been in its glory days. More Glow birds and moths lit the whitewash in flickering lights and shadows. The depiction of the Goddess was the Ministry one, too, the bland one. No flowers this time, but still, sparkly sunbeams and the Goddess looking benevolent and rather stupid as she patted Namrat’s fluffy head.
The effect was spoilt by the two large and very ugly guards, from what I could see of them at least. One either side of the aisle, blocking our way forward. Blocking anyone from getting too close to Perak–even the cardinals were kept at a distance.
I could make out more of the guards further in and it wouldn’t have been a problem, not with this face, except they weren’t Specials. They weren’t even Inquisitors. Their uniforms were a mystery to me, nothing like anything I’d seen before. Not understated like the threat of a Special, not forbidding like an Inquisitor. Like a priest’s robes, only shot through with pliable metal plating so that when they moved, the skirt swirled and clanked. They didn’t wear gloves as such, but the gauntlets would have been enough to give Namrat pause, all bits of leather and nasty-looking spikes that gleamed in the flickering light of the Glow moths that settled on the guards’ shoulders. The close-fitting helmets were similar to the Inquisitors’, only they had a visor in place like a snarling tiger that almost hid the ugly mug underneath. Over their chests was some sort of plate affair, moulded musculature so that it looked like the guards could lift weights with their nipples. Maybe they did. They were certainly scaring the crap out of me.
Dench’s face up here should have been a free pass–from what he’d said, he was in charge of looking after Perak, and that should have been enough. That and who isn’t scared of Specials? Something told me that I had misjudged things. Maybe it was the glare from the guard on the left. More likely, it was the way the one on the right shot out a spiked fist and grabbed me by the throat. He growled, making me think irresistibly of tigers and Namrat, while his friend did the talking. Maybe Growler hadn’t learnt to talk yet.
“If you piss off, nice and quiet,” Talker said, “we won’t spread your guts all over the carpet. No one gets close to the Archdeacon. Not even you.”
What the hell? Dench should have been protecting Perak, and there Perak was at the altar. I’d thought the worst could possibly be that Dench would already be here, not that he wasn’t welcome. Why not? I flicked a glance at Pasha. Sometimes he could persuade people… but no. His lips were pinched, and I can’t hear them, I can’t get in sounded in my head. I can see Perak, but I can’t hear him either.
Talker glared at Pasha for a moment then turned back to me. “You wouldn’t be bringing a pain-mage in here, would you? That would be very unhealthy.”
I tried to say, “Gosh, no, wouldn’t dream of it.” What squeaked out past the hand on my throat was, “Will be for you when your arse gets blown up.”
See now, this is what I hate about being responsible and shit. Or one of the things. It makes me cranky and then something escapes from my mouth that shouldn’t and then, well, and then people often try to kill me.
Luckily–although in retrospect it wasn’t all that lucky–the gunshot distracted him. The sound echoed around the space like a lost soul and someone screamed at the end of it. A swift elbow into Growler’s groin and I was free, gasping for breath and desperately trying to see where the shot had gone. Perak had been praying right by the altar, but I couldn’t see him now. Instead, guards milled in confusion, some with guns out. They didn’t look happy. Or most of them didn’t. I caught a sly look between Manoto and a Special who was lurking at the back of the temple, but I ignored it for now.
By the altar a knot of these new guards shielded me from seeing anything much, but the blood on the carpet was unmistakeable. I couldn’t help myself–as big brother I was always going to be responsible for Perak however much I hated it. That didn’t matter. What mattered was whether he was still alive. I twisted away from Talker and Growler and ran. First Dwarf and Lise, the attempt on Pasha, and now Perak. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone up there didn’t like me. Someone down here certainly seemed determined to kill everyone I cared about, or try to.
So when someone blindsided me with the butt of a gun, making pain burst in bright lights behind my eyes and magic seethe in my bones, I let the black take me, let my anger and fear suck it in and blow it out again before I had a chance even to think what I was doing. No control, not this time, not now. All I knew was that someone had tried to kill my sister, had killed one friend and tried for another, and now my brother, and I was pissed as hell.
When the dust cleared and my brain came back to the here and now, I sat on what was left of the carpet. There wasn’t much of it and what there was, was mostly now not much more than coloured string. Talker and Growler were flat on their backs next to me, along with the guard who’d whacked me. All three were covered in a thin film of dust and scattered Glow moths that were still and dark. All three guards had their hands over their ears and their mouths open. I wondered why they weren’t screaming, before I realised they might be, but I seemed to be deaf. No noise, no voices, not even the sound of my own ragged breath, only a soft silence that creeped the skin on my back.
I’d never been so glad to hear a voice in my head. “Goddess’s tits, Rojan. Did you just blow up the Home of the Goddess?”
“I think so” was all I managed to think back. “Oops?”
A whey-faced Pasha got me on to my feet and sounds started to creep back in again, faint to start with. My breathing was the first thing, followed by Pasha’s as he surveyed the damage. Then little moans filtered through from the guards on the floor, and then, much worse, the ominous click of a gun right behind me, quickly followed by something familiar–the jab of a syringe. My father’s best work in conjunction with the good Dr Whelar, developing a jab that deadens any pain and thus renders a pain-mage utterly useless. The next sound was a gasp from Pasha as a guard grabbed him, and he too got the syringe.
About half a heartbeat after the jab, everything was numb–feet, hands, tongue, arse, everything. I had my work cut out not falling over, never mind anything else. Hands turned me round, so I was face to face with Fat Cardinal. And without my magic, that meant my face.
The face that shattered a thousand Glow tubes, destroyed the tortured source, plunged thousands into darkness and starvation and left the whole city teetering on the brink of collapse and the Ministry in an embarrassing position, to put it mildly. A face many people would like to see in tiny pieces. The face that had been identified as dead by the face I had been wearing until a few moments ago, Dench.
The face that was, if Fat Guy’s look was anything to go by, about to get broken in half.