Seriously, if I ever find the bastard who invented the syringe, I will not be held responsible for my actions. I may, however, stab the fucker in the eye with one.
I woke when I landed with a jolt of half-numbed pain as my bad hand hit a stone floor. I tried not to scream because Jake’s boots were in front of me. Tried not to throw up, too, but didn’t manage that. I lay there, panting, the taste of stale bile filling my mouth and the vague imitation of pain filling my head, making it twist, wondering what the fuck I was doing. I couldn’t be sure any more because it was all too much, and I wanted to rest, somewhere quiet. In the black. I wanted to forget everything else, wanted it very badly indeed.
A flicker of movement in front of me resolved into Jake, who seemed torn between worry and spitting-blood-angry if the way she clenched her jaw was anything to go by. I fought to stop the shudders and only partially succeeded. She held out a hesitant hand, let it waver by my shoulder. Hated to touch, be touched, she always had, though she managed with Pasha now. And with me, because the hand fell soft on my shoulder and she helped me to sitting before she turned away to Pasha as he struggled upright. The warmth of that hand stayed long after it had gone.
Two Inquisitors in front of me got me on my feet pretty damn quick, had me clenching my fist to squeeze out some juice in a panic, almost forgetting I was still half numb and wouldn’t have enough juice to squish a rat. But they weren’t paying any attention to me, or to Pasha. They were, in fact, only statues. Very lifelike ones, sure, but no people inside the uniform, just stone.
I let my heart settle a bit before I tried saying anything. Mainly because whatever I wanted to say was going to be full of swearwords. Instead I took a look around. Square room, bare floor, whitewashed walls, two candles that guttered in the breeze from the open windows. No easy escape out of those windows either, even though they were big enough to fit through and had no bars. Outside it was a fuck of a long way down to a big splat, and I backed away hurriedly so I couldn’t see the drop. One door, slamming behind us.
Guinto sat hunched in the corner, though I almost didn’t recognise him at first. He seemed like a ghost of himself, pale and drawn, his lips trembling but determined as he glared at me.
Pasha and Jake argued quietly behind me, and I caught snatches.
“They came, and I couldn’t stop them, not me and Dog on our own. Guinto said… he said it would be all right, that we should come with them. Besides—”
Pasha’s voice, hot and angry but a worried angry. “This is the last place you want to be. I can see–they knew. They all knew, and they let it go on anyway. You can’t kill all of them.”
“Why not? And you can’t protect me from everything. I can look after myself, remember? I wasn’t leaving you up here, without even trying to help.”
A pregnant pause, but I didn’t turn because I was pretty sure what I saw would only burn a hole in my gut, especially when I could still feel her hand on my shoulder. Envy is such an ugly thing but I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t talk my way out of my feelings or even smother them with other women, though I’d tried pretty hard.
So it came out a lot sharper than I’d intended. “What the fuck is this place? I mean, are we likely to get Inquisitioned? Don’t know about you, but I don’t want that goat’s entrails on my conscience.”
I risked turning and got the full force of Jake in my face.
“You have to help me stop Guinto,” she said. “He wants to confess to all those murders, but I know he didn’t do them, and so do you.”
“Jake, I–that’s not really at the forefront of my mind at the moment. He can do what he likes, but there’s Abeya up here somewhere on the loose, Perak getting shot at and I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. Oh, and Dench is seriously pissed with us, me, and he’s working for a cardinal now, too. A cardinal who thinks that he can zap our brains and suck our magic out and it’s a perfect solution, at least until he manages to kill Perak, ally with the Storad and be rid of us for good. One priest having a fit of idealism doesn’t figure high on my list of priorities right now.”
Her mouth set in a determined line. Too stubborn by half, she was. Too sure that what she was doing was right. I admired that about her, even when it was being a pain in the butt.
“It should,” was all she said before Pasha took over, his voice tight with, what? Anger, fatalism, exasperation? I couldn’t be sure, but whatever it was it clipped his words into little bombs.
“You don’t get it, you never got it. If he confesses, Under might as well die. It will die, in flames. Everyone knows it wasn’t him, couldn’t have been. And Downsiders would kill for him. He was the only one treated us as humans, as people. Only he accepted us, made us welcome. You Upsiders think you hate Ministry. Well, we had more cause, a lot more.”
“Us Upsiders? You were born here.”
“And my parents are too ashamed of that, of what I am, what I’ve become. A Downsider, like all the rest. I lived there too long, suffered there too long, to be anything else now and we hate with a vengeance your Upside Goddess doesn’t know. Our Goddess knows violence and pain, death and sacrifice. She knows it because so did we, the mages taught us that well. Too many Downsiders know it can’t be Guinto. He was preaching when one boy died, and I’ve got half a dozen men say they saw another leave the temple, leave Guinto and he died on his way home. Guinto didn’t leave, and those men will swear to the Goddess on that. He believes in us when no one else will, when all else they get is spat in the face. If Ministry take his confession, all Under will be in flames. I’ll set the first taper myself.”
I snatched a look at Guinto in the corner, pale but calm, his eyes steady. Waiting to do his duty. Sometimes I think I’ll never understand people.
“You’d light Under for a man who hates you, loathes what you are, what we do?”
“And he’s right to,” Pasha said. “I hate what I am, too, I always have, but I can deny it, control it. Not use it, at least once we’re set. But it’s not just me, Rojan. It’s all of us Downsiders. Left to fucking die, because of where we come from, what we sound like. A reminder of what was once done to us in the name of the Goddess. Except to him, and maybe you and Perak. You help us, and perhaps Under has a chance to survive.”
I stared at Guinto again, and he looked back with serene eyes that were somehow touched with madness. Not a frothing at the mouth kind, not a laying about with any weapon to hand kind, but the quiet, determined kind of madness of a man who’s deluded himself into thinking he’s doing the right thing. For the Goddess. I wanted to pick him up and give him a damn good shake, maybe slap some sense into him, but it wouldn’t do any good. He was putting everyone’s lives on the line, directly or otherwise, but he was doing it for the Goddess, so that was all right then.
He might be useful, though.
“You knew she was doing it, didn’t you?” I asked him.
His gaze flicked between me and Pasha, hunted, but he said nothing.
“It’s all right. Pasha here feels constrained not to read the thoughts of a priest. Even you. You can lie if you want. The Goddess doesn’t look kindly on that, though, and Inquisitors have some nasty ways of making sure people are telling the truth, so I’ve heard.”
He avoided Pasha’s look with a sideways hunch of his shoulders. “I suspected something, but not that. Abeya was–she’d suffered very much, and it affected her in odd ways. I wanted to help her. I did help her, she was getting better. Only she became odd, distant. Then the boys started turning up dead, and she was her old self again. It made me wonder, but I pushed that thought away. Not my poor, dear Abeya. So sweet a child under it all. Until the day you came to the temple.”
“The boy at the end of the street?”
He nodded miserably, and I was surprised to see tears dripping from his chin.
“I knew then. After you left, I found her with blood on her dress and she was so happy. I tried to get her to pray with me, but she wouldn’t. She used the blood to make the devotional, said the Goddess was guiding her. Told me they were all mages, and hadn’t I always said they were unholy? She was doing the Goddess’s work.”
“And you believed that?”
His eyes grew haunted as he looked up at me. “Yes. No. I–I thought I could help her still, could stop her. She was clearly in some sort of mania, and who could blame her? Who could blame her for her hate after all she’s suffered? I thought I could confine her to her rooms, until her mind became more balanced. Then he came.”
“Who?”
“Cardinal Manoto.” Guinto gave a thin smile at what was probably a snarl on my face. “Yes. He didn’t say much, only a few words, but he came with some present for her–that bacon–and it all changed. She changed.” The way he looked at me, pleading as though he wanted me to tell him it wasn’t true, none of it, that Ministry wasn’t corrupt, made me want to shake him again.
“So what changed? She was already murdering people.”
“Everything. After I threw you out, she kept asking about you and Pasha, about what you did, where you worked. Kept needling and needling for answers. I told her nothing, until I found you in her rooms. I had to warn her, or she would have… I told her what you were. I thought it would help her to know what you were doing, the pain lab, the Glow, that you were helping the city, us, even if I don’t approve of the methods. So I told her.”
He told her. And how the fuck did he know what we were doing? We’d taken pains to keep ourselves and what we did under wraps–too many people wouldn’t like it. For wouldn’t like it, read probably kill us. It was bad enough that Dendal had insisted on that damned sign to advertise we were mages, but to Downsiders the news we were producing Glow, well… Only Guinto wasn’t high up enough in the Ministry to be in on that secret. Perak had told me he’d kept it down to maybe five or six people, all the highest rankers. So how did Guinto know what to tell her other than that we were mages? Only then I caught Pasha’s eye and I knew.
Pasha and Jake at the temple, telling all their souls to their priest. Because they believed he was a good man. So they’d told him what we were doing at the lab, Pasha had confessed he was using his magic to make Glow. Guinto had given him a nice guilt trip about it, and then spilled it all to Abeya to “help” her.
“And then she tried to kill both me and Pasha, tried to lure Dendal in too, I think.” Maybe she hadn’t known the bacon was poisoned, but afterwards it didn’t matter–what had mattered was that we were mages and we were making Glow.
“I didn’t think she’d go that far! She liked you, I thought. Too much. I thought if she knew why you were doing it, that the only pain you inflicted was on yourselves, that she might take pity on you. As I did. I can’t condone your magic, but at least you’re using it for the right reasons, and so I don’t hate, I pity. I hoped I might get you to see the light, in time. I had hopes for you both, Pasha especially. But you, I hoped to bring you to the Goddess, you see?”
“Shame it didn’t work out that way, isn’t it?” I couldn’t keep the venom out of my voice, but Guinto hung his head like a penitent child. “And this is your way of making up for it, right? You’re going to confess to all those murders?”
“I am to blame. I suspected… and I did nothing except make everything worse. I am guilty.”
I said a very rude word indeed and, unable to watch his guilt-stricken face, went to stare at the statues. The implacable faces of the helmets, the thought of the inevitability of Inquisition, didn’t help one little bit. Worse, when I was pretty sure if I used my magic again any time soon I wouldn’t be coming back. That was looking more and more tempting. Maybe if I went totally batshit, I could take out Top of the World, like those long-ago mages had made the Slump out of a perfectly respectable area. Now that was tempting.
It wasn’t what worried me most, though–that was, why had Dench left us here, not numb? Or not as numb as we could have been? I didn’t have all my feeling back, not a lot of juice, but I had some and he had to know it. He was up to something, expecting me to do… something. What?
“So, where precisely are we? Are there Inquisitors out there? Maybe we’re just waiting for the goat? Have you actually confessed yet?”
“A holding cell, they said.” Jake’s voice was taut with disapproval, though I couldn’t tell who for. “We told the guards we had special information. Seems Cardinal Manoto had left instructions that Guinto be let in.”
“Oh, I bet he did.”
“Dendal got this too, just before we left,” she said and handed over a slip of paper. I recognised Perak’s neat, precise handwriting, though it seemed dashed off.
Ministers found out about pain lab, and that generator is destroyed. All hell broken loose. At least one minister working with Storad, possibly involved in murders, including Dwarf’s. No one to trust except personal guard. Even Dench… I can’t be sure about him. He thinks we should ally with Storad and maybe he’s right, but is he involved? Hope not, but must be sure. Pasha’s parents–the message from them was a lure to get you and Pasha together to murder you. His mother confessed. Only hope you are all still alive to get this.
Am lying low, using decoy, three attempts on life already. Please, send Rojan. No one else to trust.
I shut my eyes for a second, wanting this to be a sign he was still alive, but Jake had received it before we’d even got to the temple by the sounds of it. All I could say for sure was he had been alive.
Things were starting to make a bit of sense, though. Kind of. But I still didn’t know where Abeya was, what she was doing up here, and how she fitted into everything except as a puppet of some kind. But who was pulling the strings? Manoto, or the Storad? Both? Someone else? Were they pulling Dench’s strings, too?
Pasha came and stood next to me, staring up at the Inquisitors with the same sort of dread that was churning my gut.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
It was my turn not to let him finish. “Forget it. Tell me later. Now we have to figure out what to do. Abeya’s still out there, Fat Boy’s up to something and there’s still a Dench to see if he’s picked a side, or he’s still with the Goddess. Guinto can wait.”
“But if—”
“Later. We need to get out of this cell, all of us. I can’t manage that, not now. Probably not ever.” Though it was tempting to try, even if I knew I couldn’t rearrange more than me and another, even at my best. Dench knew it, too, and that I was far from at my best. The black was flapping at the edge of my vision, always calling. I wanted it like I wanted air to breathe. But not yet. Not now. Now I had things to do. Dench wanted me to do something, but what? Why?
“Sod Guinto, we’ve got other things to do. After we get out.”
“How are we going to do that?”
I really wished he hadn’t asked. Not as much as I wished I didn’t know the answer.
The drop from the window was nauseatingly long, and I held on to the sill like grim death and tried to ignore the dizziness and the scream that seemed to build behind my eyes. In the gloom of a moon-ridden night, I could just make out the Slump below. I found a chip of stone and dropped it. As a measure of the drop it didn’t help, because I couldn’t hear when it finally hit something. I tore my gaze away, almost hypnotised, and instead tried to concentrate on what was around us at our level.
The Home of the Goddess, or what I’d left of it, wasn’t far away, but it might as well have been miles. We seemed to be near the top of a spire, and everything was a long way away. Mostly down. I am not a big fan of down in large doses. Still, when the Goddess has your balls in a vice, you have to take what you can get. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. It did nothing for my vertigo, but at least my voice didn’t come out squeaky with terror.
“That way.”