Last to Rise(60)

“Yes and no. Being able to throw a man across a room counts as a weapon. And she’s not dead.”



A laugh behind the lead guy – the man who I thought had been with her when I found her. It was hard to tell under the uniform crust over their faces, the identical drab brown of their rags, but the voice sounded familiar. “She could kick the shit out of any one of us. Or at least throw the shit out of any one of us.”



A slice of the lead guy’s hand and the laughter stopped. “So she’s not dead, all right. But now you’re down here asking us to fight again, I expect, with no weapons. Die when we could be down here, defending our own, not that miserable lot of pious bastards up there. I pity the Storad who makes it down here, though I don’t reckon they’ll bother us much. No one does. Rumour is, they just want to screw you over, not us. No, you just piss off, Ministry boy. You want to save Over, you’re going to have to do it yourselves.”



The Stenchers weren’t going to help us by being a weapon. Bang went another great plan.



The plan to gather together a few men from Under hadn’t worked so well either, as I discovered on my way back up.



Halfway through No-Hope, in the most innocuous area full of the kind of proud poor who just worked hard and kept their heads down, I found what looked like a brawl. I began to sidle my way round – one thing Under teaches a guy is when and how to avoid trouble – before I saw who was in the middle of said brawl.



Malaki let off a shot, and the two Specials with him followed suit. They weren’t shooting at anyone in particular that I could see, but it was enough to give everyone a bit of pause. Not for long – after their initial fright, the crowd surged in on them again. Specials had got where they were by being the scariest thing anyone knew, but that wasn’t the case any more. Now the scariest thing was Outside and on its way in, and from the look of it, Malaki’s attempt at press-ganging a few likely-looking lads had backfired in a spectacular fashion.



He wasn’t taking the sudden lack of fear from everyone well, but he knew when he was beaten. He caught my eye, saw where I was standing at a nice and handy place to get the hell out of the mess he was in, and headed in my direction. He only pistol-whipped a couple of guys on the way. The other Specials made a line behind him and managed to extricate themselves. The crowd around them dissipated with a mixture of triumphant aggression and sneering catcalls.



I had no love for the slab-faced Malaki, but I did kind of feel sorry for him just then. He looked utterly confused and defeated as we headed up the stairwell.



“Don’t they want to fight?” he asked.



I looked out over the glowering faces as they crept back into their lives. “You’re asking the wrong people. Round here, these are just folks trying to get by, and shit-scared. They’d fight, but not for you, or for Ministry, and most certainly won’t if forced. Volunteers, I said. You want to go further down maybe. Find some of the gangs, if you can get that far and still live. They may hate Ministry, and you, but they love a good fight.”



Malaki glared at me and shook his head. “Impossible. I have to find men, Perak says, so I’m trying. But I’m with the cardinals on this one. I’m not sure I want to give guns to just anyone who wants one.”



“So you’re trying to strong-arm some poor suckers who wouldn’t know a fist if it hit them in the face? You think those people who just left – the apothecaries, the grocers, the bakers, you think they’re the best men for this? That forcing them might work?”



“Better than the alternative,” Malaki said. “I don’t want men too eager to shoot.”



“You don’t want anyone so piss-scared that they’ll shoot whatever turns up because they’ve got their eyes shut either. We need to use our strengths, not try to force people into things they can’t do.”



He grunted at that, but then dropped another little zinger into the mix. “Like your little mages. They’d come in handy too, down by the gates. Cardinals are going to insist on it, and I agree.”



I stopped dead and he almost ran into me as I whipped round. “And you can piss right off. They’re kids, Malaki.” My kids, I was beginning to think of them as. Too reminiscent of me at that age, mostly not knowing what the hell they were doing. But they weren’t going to end up like me, not if I could help it, and they weren’t going to blow themselves up trying to be Malaki’s secret weapon either. “You get them over my dead body. Or yours, whichever you prefer.”