Last to Rise

Chapter One





There is, perhaps, some universal truth that no one has seen fit to tell me about. Namely that if I have to find someone they are always in the shittiest place I can imagine, and I can imagine a lot of shit.



This place had to take the prize though. Right down in the bowels of Mahala, where the sun never shone. It didn’t get much of a breeze either, which was a pity because it could have used one.



Down past No-Hope-Shitty, on into even-worse Boundary and across towards the base of the Slump, its mangled remains reminding everyone what can happen when a mage goes batshit crazy. That was where you’d find the Stench – it’s above the ’Pit but not by much – and the people who made sure we didn’t drown in our own waste. There’s a few people who might say that I belonged there too.



I picked my way carefully past the dripping girders, under the newly lit Glow lights that still gave me a thrill to look at. Their light didn’t pierce much of the darkness – down here wasn’t considered priority for Glow, and the lights were sparse – but at least I could see where I was going and what not to step in, which was most of it.



I moved past vast, evil-smelling vats of who-knew-what except that it was lumpy, a gruesome brown-green that was bright even in the gloom, and was giving off fumes that smelled like they could kill at ten yards. I was grateful I didn’t have a curious bone in my body, because nobody wanted to know what was in them, surely. Guessing would be enough.



Water kept on drip-drip-dripping from the ceiling, filtered down through a hundred or more levels of city above us, through cracks and crevices and light-wells. At least, I hoped it was only water, because it sidled down the collar of my coat like it had found a home. The faint chemical tang of synth overrode other, more earthy smells, and I wondered how many of the Stenchers had succumbed to the synthtox.



There didn’t seem to be anyone about but I knew my man was down here somewhere. Since the Glow had come back on, mages were needed to power it rather than be hunted down and executed for being unholy (among other things). So now we were free to get killed for more prosaic reasons, though mages were still pretty shy about coming forward. After all, it might have been a bluff – the Ministry had tried that one before, and no one Under Trade trusted the Ministry, even when they were in temple, praying the proper, sanitised prayers.



With mages actually needed now, the new archdeacon had issued a notice of reward for anyone coming forward with information on… unusual occurrences. So now we had people falling over themselves to offer up their fellow man. Mostly it was out of petty vengeance of some sort or another – men dobbing in someone they thought was having an affair with their wife, or a professional rival, or just that snobby bastard from the next level up who kept dumping his rubbish over the walkway instead of sending it down the bucket lifts to the Stench. Often the dobbers-in did it for the money too – money meant food, and food was hard to come by, what with the siege on one side of the city and neighbours of doubtful intent on the other, with nothing much in between except level upon level of starving people all hemmed in by the ring of mountains that kept us safe, or had done up till now.



Given that siege, any food was difficult to find. Good food, something edible that wasn’t watery mush or riddled with beetles, was almost mythical. By this point, when we’d been under siege for long enough that rats were looking mighty tasty, I’d have sold my soul for bacon and my left arm for anything that didn’t taste like sawdust and mouse droppings. Except my soul wasn’t worth a bent copper in the state it was in, and, due to a small incident involving how my magic works and me feeling rather vengeful, my left arm wasn’t up to much either; at least my hand wasn’t. What it was, was screwed.



Of course, everyone was trying to take advantage of the money the Archdeacon had offered by reporting each other for such things as “looking funny”, “walking strange”, “having a wart” or, on one memorable occasion, “talking shit”. A lot of more serious accusations flew about as well, but I didn’t care about them because some pretty serious allegations can be laid at my feet too.



But in among all that, we’d had a few useful reports. Yesterday a man, thin as a stick and still with the stink of this place on him, had sidled into the office, looking askance at the sign on the door:



LICENSED MAGES, ALL MAGICAL THINGS ATTEMPTED. SPECIALITIES INCLUDE INSTANT COMMUNICATION, MIND-READING, PEOPLE FOUND AND THINGS REARRANGED. FEES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.



It was a good sign, all the better because now we were legal and casting a spell no longer meant getting arrested, a term that had long been a euphemism for “dying messily”. Still, the Ministry had spent a couple of decades telling everyone how evil and unholy we were, and it was taking time for people to adjust.