It wasn’t far to Fat Cardinal’s rooms. In fact, it was suspiciously close. Through a door, Dench trailing behind like a bad smell, along a corridor and then a cavernous interior echoed around us, all done in polished bronze and marble. Cold, austere, bland and somehow chilling to the soul as well as the skin. Pillars arched over us, moulding into the spire that topped every building here, it seemed, and skylights between them let in the dusk. No Glow lights, no birds or moths lit the place, for which I was glad, though I could see the fittings for the cages. Instead, proper wax candles in stark-lined candelabra lit the room in bronze flickers.
I somehow didn’t feel right disturbing the silence, so I waited till Dench led us through to a room that was almost opulent in its faux-frugal simplicity. A plain desk at one end, but made of a wood I’d never seen before that shone like gold. Plain curtains, but thick and heavy and purple. Simple icons on the wall, religious images of saints and martyrs, but they were old, very old, and all picked out in gold leaf. A bare chair, made of the same wood as the desk. It seemed overlarge. I was starting to have a very bad feeling about this.
I turned to face Dench, thinking of trying to mumble out a question, and stared straight down the barrel of my pulse pistol. A quick pat down, and, yes, all that was left in my pocket was the vial and syringe Lise had given me, what seemed like an age ago, the lollipops I used to keep Dog sweet and the envelope with Abeya’s hairs in.
“I always said you’d make a really crap Special, Rojan. If it helps, I’m sorry, you were supposed to stay Under. I have my orders.”
With a sideways glance at the guards to make sure they didn’t see, he dropped an eyelid in an elaborate wink.
Which didn’t comfort me much, because then he fired, and the arcing pulse slammed into my forehead like a fucking great hammer. I didn’t even have time to curse Dwarf for making the damn thing more efficient so even someone with Dench’s little magic could knock out a rhino.
It all went blurry after that. A lot blurrier.
When my brain finally started sending urgent messages to my body again, along the lines of “get up you stupid sod before someone uses a proper gun on you”, someone was sitting in the chair under the window. The candles didn’t really help much lighting the room and his face was half in shadow, but I could tell who it was. Fat Cardinal–Manoto. One of Perak’s cardinals who’d come to the temple Under to see Guinto, who’d been Under a dozen times when Ministry men have long had a history of being allergic to Under. And here was me investigating a dozen murders. Who’d looked daggers at Perak’s back, and murder at me. Who I’d last seen exiting Erlat’s house, leaving her looking shaken. There was no mistaking that prissy pursing of the lips or the way the flesh folded around his ring of office. Fat when so many starved. It made me want to puke.
I pushed myself up off the carpet and tried for sitting. I managed on the second attempt, and found Pasha doing the same next to me. He didn’t say anything but the look he shot Dench, standing next to us with my pulse pistol in one hand and a bullet gun in the other, was of pure hatred.
Dench kept his face carefully blank and I began to wonder what was behind that mask, and who he was taking his orders from. And if he was following them or just pretending to.
“Before we start,” Fat Guy said from the comfort of his chair, “I’d like to point out that Dench is under instruction to shoot you in the back of the head at the first hint of you using your magic. With the bullet gun, that is.” He shrugged in an oddly delicate manner. “I understand you’ve been tracking mages. Where there’s one there’s more, and more’s the pity. Well, soon enough we’ll be rid of you, whatever Perak says, no matter how he hides. No use for you now. Not now the Storad come to us with coal.”
Resisting the urge to use the returning throb of my poor fucked hand, to use the juice I was just begging to use, may be the hardest thing I’d ever done. Instead, I said, “Coal? So?” and it came out quite well.
Manoto shook his head sadly, as though over a child that doesn’t understand a basic lesson. “A new power. One where we wouldn’t be beholden to the unholy. And yet Perak still refuses to negotiate. Even now, with mages dying and a generator in pieces. Still relies on you and your kind. Well, there’s some of us who won’t.”
“We’re keeping you in Glow, for now at least.” I eyed the way his jowls wobbled. “And without Glow, you’re going on one hell of a diet.”
I didn’t like the way he smiled at that, or Dench’s awkward shuffle behind me. Had they bought Dench? How had they? Specials swore to the Goddess, not to man or Ministry. Utterly unbribable, except perhaps by her. Was he the cardinal’s man? He’d been pretty pissed off at the way things were going, but this? I couldn’t believe it of him. Not Dench, staunch and caring under that moustache.
I thought back to the wink, and found a flicker of hope that someone up here was on our side, even if he couldn’t say so. Someone other than Perak. And where was Perak? Was he safe? Was he dead?
“You remember Doctor Whelar?” Manoto said.
Oh, I remembered him all right. He stepped out of the gloom in the corner, and seemed as I recalled–dishevelled, harassed, a bit smug but a good doctor nonetheless. Too fucking good. The concoction he’d invented, the one that numbed everything including my magic, had almost done for me once before. To his credit, and the only reason I hadn’t left him to his fate like my father, was that he was a doctor first and a Ministry pawn second. I suddenly wished I hadn’t been quite so lenient, especially when I saw the syringe in his hand and had to wonder whether he’d been testing things on dead people at the mortuary rather than the dead pigs he used to use.
“Hello, Doctor. How are your bollocks?”
I couldn’t help the grin as he instinctively curled over as though to protect them. The memory of my sharp elbow was still strong, it seemed.
Fat Guy’s sharp tone cut through that. “You’re supposed to be dead. You and this other thing. That would have been the end of Perak’s stubborn refusals, and we could start making this city work again. Why did you come here? What did you think you’d achieve? Wasn’t the death of one archdeacon, the near destruction of our entire city, enough for you? You want to destroy the process of rebuilding, regrouping, avoiding allout war? What is it that you want, Rojan?”
So, he had recognised me. From where I’m not sure–maybe Dench had told him, and that didn’t bode well. At all.
Call me cynical, call me stupid, call me whatever you want, but here, this was my chance, this was–what I never got to say, because Pasha was on his wobbly feet, lip curling, eyes hot with hate.
“I know you,” he said. “I remember you, from a long time ago. When you told my parents I had a higher calling, that I’d serve the Ministry and they were so fucking proud. They didn’t know what you were taking me to. Didn’t know I was a mage. Neither did I, at first, but I found out. And when I wouldn’t do what the mages told me, wouldn’t torture people for Glow…” His words dried up in a clamp of his lips, a scrunch of his monkey face.
Fat Guy didn’t move for a moment, but I thought I saw a flicker of something there, of shame perhaps. Ridiculous, to think a Ministry man could have any shame left after all they’d done, and still did. Yet his voice held some sort of compassion to it when he spoke. Fake, it must be. Yet it seemed real to me.
“I didn’t know. None of us did, not then. Mages! Scripture is quite clear on them. Later… later we found out what the Archdeacon was doing, but he persuaded us. We had no other choice, or so he said, and we believed him. We wanted to. Wanted to ignore it, or maybe that was his magic, using his voice the way he did. He said it was the unholy killing the unwanted, the unfaithful, or converting them, for the survival of the faithful. The Archdeacon said so, and we… we believed him. His voice, no one could resist when he used the voice, and that’s when we knew he was a mage, too.”
He turned a speculative eye on me, the twitch of his lip disdainful. “When Rojan destroyed all that, when he killed the old Archdeacon and Perak came into power, then it was pick a side or die, and those on Perak’s side, those who’d keep the mages as useful pets–we didn’t want that, them. Not any more, but it was only days before the Storad and Mishans realised we were all but helpless. We had to be strong, or appear to be, or we would be lost. All of it, every part of the city would die. We did what we had to do, always. And he wouldn’t even try to negotiate, because he had his mages, he had his stupid generator that wouldn’t work. That was why I had Perak shot. So I could bargain with the Storad, Mahala could live, even if the life was different. For the Goddess. Always for the Goddess.”
For themselves more like. I’d long since given up the notion that any Ministry man did anything other than for his own comfort or wealth, and I wanted not to think of Perak, of whether he was alive or dead, so I let my mouth flap. “Does that include murdering boys who you think are becoming pain-mages?”
The confusion seemed real enough. “No. No, of course not. Dench?”
It didn’t help that Dench side-stepped the question. “You’re not as cynical as you seem, Rojan, I know that, and I knew you’d take it to heart. I had to keep you searching. Otherwise you’d be under my feet worrying about Perak, poking that nose about up here.”
“And what would I have found?”
Fat Guy smiled, a patronising smirk that made me want to smack it off his face. “Dench knows you well enough, Rojan. Well enough to know you’d have found things that would hurt your cynical soul, and that you’d interfere with.”
Again, Dench’s face was carefully blank when I looked. Far too carefully. In the thorn bed of my heart, a little flower of hope. Always played very close to his chest, Dench. A cynic as much as I was, and as hopeful. He’d helped me and Pasha before, against all expectation. He wasn’t a Ministry man, not really. He was the Goddess’s man. A small hope but, hey, I’m from Under. We take any damned hope we can get.
He watched me watching him, and his moustache twitched a fraction. There was more to this than it seemed, that twitch said and my nerves settled, just a bit. Not enough to forgive him pulsing me, but a bit.
“Politics,” the cardinal said. A word that brings a nasty taste to my mouth. “I want you to understand. We want what’s best for the city, truly we do. Perak and a few of his sycophants still think mages can save Mahala, can be relied upon, aren’t unholy. The rest… the rest mostly are thinking of their own skins by allying with the strongest faction–the one that wants all Downsiders dead, and mages, too. The one that thinks they should ally with the Storad and use their idea for steam-driven machines, using Storad coal. But Perak insists, oh he insists that he has the answer, that we need only to wait. In the meantime, I’ve had Doctor Whelar make a few modifications to his little invention. Numbs the local area–the brain. Pain receptors still work, even if thought doesn’t. While the brain is out, we can make and take as much pain from the mage as we want. Falling into the black won’t be a problem–Whelar’s concoction is like… an artificial black. You’ll never know. Pain-free. A perfect, if temporary, solution.”
I let my smile ratchet up a notch as Manoto fidgeted. “So, you wouldn’t be interested in knowing that the murderer is almost certainly up here somewhere, then? That maybe she’s got other people in mind to kill, other people she blames for what happened to her Downside? That I think that perhaps the Storad put her up to it, or at least helped her?” Because all this talk of them and their coal, I’d remembered where I’d seen Abeya and who with–and where I’d seen a guy like that before. In a Death Match against Jake, a Storad with jet hair and pale skin and a look as hard as mountains.
Manoto’s mouth fell open, but neither he nor Dench had a chance to say anything. Pasha had fallen back behind me and maybe Dench had been concentrating too hard on pointing the gun at the back of my head.
“Guinto,” Pasha said in a moan. “Guinto, Inquisition arrested him, he’s here and… and, oh Goddess, and he’s going to confess to the Inquisitors.”
All eyes turned to him, where he stood in a corner twisting his fingers. “Only he didn’t, he didn’t. And this man, this cardinal”–Manoto flinched–“he knows more. Not what he says. I see in his head. All twisted in, Rojan. Knots on knots. But Ministry is rotten. All of it, you were right. Only Guinto… and Jake. Jake’s here, too, and oh shit is she pissed.”
That last, and he looked right at me. I knew what he was doing, making me do this because of her. If she was up here, she was as good as dead, and, let’s face it, so were we. The gun cocked behind me, but I ignored it. Instead I let myself wallow in the throb of my hand, in the juice that had been building, slowly, all this time.
“Rojan, don’t make me.” Dench, giving me a chance. It didn’t matter, because he’d shoot me if he had to, if he thought it was his duty. “I did what I had to, not what I wanted to. And I will again, if I have to, if it means this city lives.”
I wanted to go, right there and then. My hand clenched into a fist without me telling it to and the sweet throb of pain filled me, made lights run in my eyes and lightning in my heart. I could feel Jake, somehow, through Pasha in my head. I knew where she was, I could find her with my eyes shut. I let the knowledge of where she was seep into me and squeezed my hand some more, let the black talk me into just doing it.
Right up until Whelar jabbed me with his syringe and my brain went bye-byes.