Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise by Francis Knight Read Free Book Online Page B

actually doing it, if you piss me off.”
    It looked like I was behaving for the time being, which was a shame because there’s nothing like a flirt to take your mind off the damnfool thing you’re about to do.
    We made our way out into the ’Pit proper, a maze of streets and scrunched-up buildings that hid behind a curtain of the constant rain – run-off from above which never stopped, which ran and dripped and pooled in glorious decay among the roots of Mahala. Towers loomed over us, dark and forbidding now, just shells that held up the rest of the city above, with girders criss-crossing, buttressing. No one manned the cages that dangled uselessly above us, which had once whirled and clanked in a complicated dance as they took people where they needed to go. The ’Pit was a husk, empty of life and sound and all the vibrancy that had once made me think I could quite enjoy life down here, even if said life was cheaper than shit.
    Pasha didn’t say anything – this was home to him, or had been, and now it was nothing. His face lost that contented, secret little grin I’d got used to just lately and he looked sallow and gaunt under the sparse rend-nut-oil lamps that lit the street. He took out a floppy old hat I recognised, slapped it on to protect him from whatever the hell was in the water that dripped on us, then shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and went on.
    Halina had no such qualms. She looked about with calculating eyes, maybe assessing the value of everything she saw. What she did see wasn’t much – the Downsiders had abandoned their homes when the ’Pit was unsealed, gladly, but they’d brought everything that they could up with them. All that was left was what even they didn’t think was worth anything.
    We trudged the streets, heading for the tunnels, the few that we knew of. For the castle that lay at the heart of them, at the heart of Mahala. Halina stopped dead when the castle loomed out from behind a huge tower that supported the weight of the city above it. From here, mostly all you could see was the curtain wall, with the keep rising up out of the top like some demented bread that had been overloaded with yeast, but the sheer size of it was enough to batter the brain into submission. I’d seen the castle before, and wished I hadn’t, so Pasha and I merely carried on. Halina ran to catch up after a while.
    “Is it true?” she asked me in a whisper, as though she didn’t want to disturb the ghosts that lay thick about us.
    “Which part?”
    She gave me that sideways look again, like the worth she was assessing was mine. I probably equalled half a rat, by her sneer.
    “The pain factories. They were down here, right, like the sheets said? The mages? Dendal said not all of the mages, but still, enough, right? And the Downsiders helped them, and the Little Whores. And they – I mean, Pasha’s a Downsider and a mage and —”
    She yelped when I gripped her wrist so hard my knuckles cracked. “Shut the fuck up. Especially shut the fuck up in front of Pasha. You don’t rate me much, I get that. But don’t talk about that in front of him, don’t even think it because he can hear that too. Don’t think of him in the same thought as them – hell, don’t even think about him at all, especially not with that sneer on your face. Or you’ll rate me much, much lower. Or higher, depending on if you’re scoring on how much I will zap your arse, because I will. You know nothing about him, all right?”
    Her face looked like I already had zapped some tender part of her. “But, I —”
    “You know what you think you know from the sheets you saw every day down in the Stench, when people were done with them. The sheets tell you shit, excepting what a few cardinals want you to think. You know crap-all.” I took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t really want to go in there again, and I know that Pasha doesn’t, for reasons that would blow your mind if you knew the half of them.