She smacked my shoulder but I got a laugh. “None! Now do it.”
So I changed her face. Not much, but enough that she didn’t look like my sister any more. It almost certainly wouldn’t work for long, because the cardinals – hell, everybody by now – knew that I could disguise myself and other people. Then again, it wouldn’t last all that long without me concentrating on it. Long enough for Perak to sort something out, I hoped.
Lise ran her hands over her face. “That feels really bizarre.”
“Welcome to Rojan’s world. Now get yourself in that room. I’m going to get in touch with Perak and see what we can do.”
I helped her get all her bits together, all the plans and tools and Goddess-only-knew-what else. She wouldn’t let me in the room though. “Not yet. The machine might not work. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”
I waited until she’d locked the door behind her, and went to find some guards to hopefully do a better job of guarding the lab before I woke Dendal and got him to contact Perak.
Chapter Four
Another night with no sleep was just what I needed. Not. Perak hadn’t been asleep either when I’d got hold of him, but he was incandescent when he found out what had happened. That was clear despite the tinny echo of Dendal’s communication conduit, as was a bone-deep despair of ever being able to do anything, anything at all, without the cardinals trying to fuck it up.
“But Lise is safe, you say?”
“For now. She doesn’t look like her, and she’s locked herself in. But for anyone determined enough, that won’t be a problem.”
I was fairly sure I heard some muffled swearing at the other end. “Fine. Leave the cardinals to me. Oh, and Erlat’s Mishan-liaison friend – I got her message a few minutes ago. I’d incur some of the Goddess’s displeasure and lie through my teeth, but they expect that. Maybe Erlat can help… yes. She’d be perfect. Listen – you need to get out of the way, even more so now. Get down to the ’Pit as soon as you can. With any luck – no, I won’t have the cardinals in line, I doubt I ever will. But I should have something worked out. Look, the sooner we get going, the sooner you two will be safe, the sooner we’ll all be safe. In the meantime I’ll do what I can for Lise, with what men I can spare. I’ll sort something. You know I will. But while she can stay in the lab, I need you out of the way. I’ll tell everyone… well, I’ll tell them that Lise isn’t at the lab any more, that I’ve moved her somewhere. You too. Maybe they’ll believe it, maybe they won’t. But I need you down there, finding me a tunnel I can use.”
He was as good as his word, and Specials were swarming over the lab long before the sun rose. Lise was as safe as anyone was going to be.
So there I was, early the next morning, cursing the stomach that had made me agree to this particular escapade, and it had a lot to answer for.
We didn’t take most of the new mages down to the ’Pit – as nursemaids go, I am crap. After a quick run through their paces, Pasha and I decided that taking the younger ones would be madness. Half of them didn’t even know what their talents were yet, and the other half were at the perilous stage of knowing just enough to be dangerous to themselves and everyone else around them. But Halina proved to be as capable as I’d thought, and levitation might be handy when you were planning a quick pig-snatch-and-grab. So Pasha and I had asked her and she’d looked blandly curious and said OK.
We made our way down to Boundary, trying to be unobtrusive. I’d disguised myself a bit, a quick remoulding of my features. My conversation with Erlat was playing on my mind, along with about a thousand other things. Pasha and Halina noticed the change, but Pasha knew enough not to say anything and maybe Halina thought I did it all the time. Even disguised, I was twitchy. Was that man on the corner watching me? Was that bold cardinal hatching a neat little plan to hand me over to the Storad, or one of his comrades planning the same to hand me over to the Mishans? Was that junkie on the corner one of their men? It would almost be a relief to get to the ’Pit.
From Boundary, we rode down in the lift that lived in a once-hidden access point to a place most had believed was sealed off and free of people, a cesspit of synthtox and chemicals that could eat you up from the inside. It hadn’t been quite as bad as that – the chemicals would probably take ten times as long to kill you as the people that had, in fact, lived in the ’Pit.
I shut my eyes and concentrated on the thought of food, real food, beef and gravy and all those things I’d probably never see again, had become addicted to over a very short space of time when they’d been available to me down in the ’Pit. The thought of fat, crispy bacon on the hoof – trotter, whatever – in the Storad camp took my mind off the fact that the lift was coffin-shaped. And badly maintained. And a long, long way from the bottom.