Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall by Francis Knight Page B

welcome.
    “What is it?” she asked. “Still mooning over a woman you hardly know, like a teenage boy? I told you, I could make you forget her. On the house, too. Oh, the things I could show you. I could ruin you for other women.”
    She laughed at the way my shoulders tensed up again under her hands. She loved to tease me about the fact that I wouldn’t take her up on her offer. At least it stopped me brooding, which was, of course, exactly why she said it.
    “So what is it then?”
    I often wondered if Erlat didn’t have a little magic of her own. She always knew when something was on my mind, and always seemed to know the best thing to do, or say, how to tease me till I spilled it out. It was easy just to let it all out, tell her all the thoughts that were plaguing me while she soothed and kneaded. Damn, but she was good.
    “So what are you going to do about it?”
    “I don’t know yet. I need to concentrate on getting the power back on, but five days isn’t going to be anywhere near long enough to get the generator going, and I’m not sure I’m going to last that long. And these boys dying—we need to catch whoever’s doing it, or there won’t be a city left to save, not once everything kicks off. But I came here first because I wanted to tell you to be careful. All of you here.”
    There: I had admitted it. That was why I’d come, a confession that didn’t come easily, wouldn’t have come at all if it had been anyone else. Erlat’s house wasn’t just full of working girls; it was a refuge for all sorts of waifs and strays, mostly Little Whores who didn’t have anywhere else safe to be. I thought back to the new splodges of paint around her door. “More careful. Maybe shut up shop for a while. That riot outside the temple was just the start.”
    A thumb pressed right on a nerve. It didn’t hurt but it did make my arm spasm so that my good hand splashed about in the water to no command of mine. “I don’t need you to tell me how to run my business, mister playboy fancy pants mage. I’ve weathered worse than a bit of paint and I don’t need you to play the dashing hero.”
    I sat up in the bath and turned to face her, splashing water over her best rug. “I know that. Just be careful, all right? Please?”
    Her look was brittle, sharp, as if she was about to say something caustic, a look I’d never seen on her before. I had no idea why what I’d said had upset her. Whatever was on her mind, she didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything else at all, not even to tease, which bothered me all the way to the office.
    I kept to the edge of the buildings as I hurried along the rickety walkway towards the office, my coat collar flipped up against the drizzle that dripped from every eave for fifty or more levels above me. It was heading towards dusk somewhere up there, but the only way to tell down here was a chill in the air as the sun left. A hint of the winter that was fast approaching.
    Dendal was still in his corner, scratching away with a pen by the light of his candles. A comforting sight, familiar, so that I could almost imagine that the last weeks hadn’t happened. I patted Griswald’s moth-eaten head and fell into my chair.
    I shook my head and tried to shake the weariness from me and the growing fear that I was going to lose my shit, any day now. Fall right in and never come back. Maybe take out some part of the city when I went—Top of the World, perhaps, or Clouds. Then Under could see the sun again with the added bonus that up there was where all the Ministry men lived. I could make them have to live in No-Hope. It sounded very tempting.
    “You can do this, Rojan.” Dendal’s soft, papery voice right by my ear.
    I fell out of the chair and my heart near enough hammered through my ribs. “Namrat’s fucking balls, Dendal, stop doing that!”
    He stood looking down at me as I picked myself up, his hair a wispy cloud around his head. Back from the fairies for once, I could tell by the