Free Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall by Francis Knight Page A

pain out.
    The whirl of it took me for long, long breaths. I was everywhere, nowhere, I was bliss and I was blessed. No fear here, not in the black, no fear of people knowing me, expecting things of me that I couldn’t deliver, expecting me to be a better person because they thought I was. No fear of fucking it all up. No skimming it, not now, not after so much in one day. I was deep in the black, swimming in it, wanting it. Shaking from a need that no one who wasn’t a mage could ever know.
    The hair, I had to concentrate on the hair but it was hard when that seductive voice kept on calling me.
    Come on, Rojan, sink in, swim in fearless freedom. Come on, you know you want to.
    The old me would have given in, wouldn’t have given a crap about anything but losing the ever-present fear. I wasn’t that different, but I did have one thing I hadn’t before. People weren’t just relying on me, they were believing in me, too. They believed in me, so I had to.
    The hair, concentrate on the hair. Even with my eyes shut, I was a blinding brightness in the black, searing my eyelids with it. A moment of vertigo, of the sensation of tumbling end over end in a void, and then the knowledge came, thundering up my arm from the hand that held the hair.
    A mile to the west, a hundred yards up from where I was. Somewhere cold and airless. I pushed harder, so that I was half there and yet still half in the pain room. Achingly cold and with a smell I recognised, a lingering hint of decay over and above the familiar smell of the city. Too dark to see, so I pulled myself back some. Still dark, but not black now. A small rend-nut lamp meant I could see outlines, vague humps in the shadows.
    The glint of light on metal; instruments laid out with cool precision. Scalpels, knives, weird clamp things that I didn’t even want to know what they were for. A stone slab, well scrubbed but still with dark marks engrained into it.
    I knew where I was, and my stomach shrivelled. A mortuary, one I was intimately acquainted with, having seen my own dead body there or what looked like it anyway.
    I turned to look down at the boy. Dead. Not just dead, but with a slash across his throat so that the spine was a hint of white showing through a now bloodless cut. The murdered boy from outside the temple, whose death had nearly caused a riot.

Chapter Five
    By the time Dench found me, I’d discovered a bit myself from the mortician’s records, or the few he’d allowed me to see without proper authorisation. A dozen murders: Jake had been right, and the details I’d got made my stomach wish it had never been born. All young boys on the cusp of puberty, except one lad in his twenties. All Downsiders, all with their throats cut back to the spine. I’d seen a few other things to make me shudder, too—mostly a certain doctor, previously in my father’s employ. The good Dr Whelar, now performer of postmortems on murder victims, once inventor of a nasty little potion that shut off magic by making everything numb. I still dreamed about the time I’d been without my magic, the way he kept poking me with that syringe. The good doctor’s motives were, at best, self-serving and the thought of him being involved, however vaguely, with these murders gave me a pain. Or maybe it was indigestion.
    Dench didn’t have much more for me. We sat in a dingy bar up at the top of No-Hope and he laid out what little he had. Only two bodies had been identified and that was scant help because they’d both been missing from home when they died, one for a week, one for a month. Their families hadn’t been able to shed even a drop of light on where they might have been, or who with. Dench had some pictures but I wasn’t that keen on looking at them, because they were all done after the kids had died. He shoved them under my nose anyway.
    “We all have to do things we don’t want to, Rojan.” His careworn face had an extra edge of frustration to it under the faint glow of rend-nut