We stood there glaring at each other for a while, but he looked away first.
“What do you suggest then?” he said at last.
I sighed and carried on up the stairwell. “If you won’t use the people best suited for the job, at least pick people who might want to do it for what you’ve got to offer. Volunteers. Try right up under Heights, maybe the bottom of Heights too. Where they’re close enough to see what they can’t have, close enough to taste it, to want it above anything. Then offer it to them – promotion, a job in Ministry or the Specials, a promise they can believe in, even if it is a load of shit. But no strong-arming them. Or anyone. It’s going to be a shitstorm: you know it, I know it. You want people who want to be there, or all you’ll have after the first five minutes is a cloud of dust as they very sensibly run like buggery.”
He sneered at that, but I got him to agree to at least try in the end. It didn’t seem much, but it was all I could do. I left him to it and went to the lab, went to sit with my kids, my little proto-mages, and help them figure it all out as best they could, while we still had the chance.
Chapter Sixteen
The snowfall had thickened till it was hard to see more than ten yards in front of you. A blessing in many ways, because it drew a screen across the crap, blotted out the decay of the walls Under, the flimsiness of the swaying walkways. The city was reduced to orbs of Glow lights shining on whiteness. At least the slush underfoot was a drab grey, else I’d have thought I’d managed to rearrange myself into some weird place where everything wasn’t screwed to hell. If I ever found myself there, I dare say I’d be bored to tears in under an hour.
I was screwed to hell too. I’d been a good boy and not used any more magic, but that didn’t make a lick of difference to the throb of my poor hand, where the juice built up like water behind a dam. Didn’t make a lick of difference to the black either. It was back, had never really been away, was singing sweet nothings in my ear. The trouble with the whiteness of the snow was that it showed up the shadowy outline of a tiger stalking towards me out of the corner of my eye. Then I’d blink and it would be gone, only to stalk me from another direction. I tried my best to ignore it, but that was quite hard.
Above the remaining inner gate, most of the lights were out, leaving only faint reflections off falling flakes to light the grim faces of the men stood behind it. Guards, or what was left of them, but they looked different that day, in that dim light. No longer more arrogant than I was, no longer looking smug and a bit superior in the knowledge that Under, their word was as close to the law as anyone was going to get. They had been all those things and I’d been on the receiving end more than once, but that day, behind that gate, huddled under snow and the gaze of half a dozen cardinals who watched from a nice, warm, safe window… with half their number killed or wounded already, the enemy having reinforcements on the way and they were the poor bastards at the brunt… that day they looked like any other men. Tired, scared, gaunt from too long without a decent meal.
You’d think the boom-shudders from the machines stopping would have brought some relief, a bit of cheer to them, but no. Those echoing sounds had punctuated our lives, day and night, and now they’d stopped it felt quiet. Too damned quiet, leaving people room to think dire thoughts, to panic. If the guns had stopped, maybe that just meant the infantry were on their way.
Worse, the guards now had reinforcements. Worse because those reinforcements were made up of precisely the sort of people they usually spent their days scaring the crap out of and extorting bribes from – no one very important, though they weren’t from Under so the guards wouldn’t be too worried about how much they’d jackbooted them in the past. Only a bit worried. Still, it looked like Malaki had taken my advice with who he’d rounded up – these weren’t Ministry men: they were from the borders of Heights, the top of Under. I recognised one or two, and the type – merchanters’ kids mostly, with the odd priest or factory owner’s son or daughter thrown into the mix. It was in the careful way their clothes were cut to mimic a Ministry man’s, the sharp look in their eye as they watched for the main chance. Not Ministry, but wishing they were, people who spent their time looking ever upwards, working out how to get there, apologists for the Ministry. Not likely to get funny thoughts about shooting cardinals when no one was looking. Men and women who would volunteer because it might give them an edge the next time Ministry were hiring, or at least get them a weapon if things didn’t go to plan, rather than from any sense of helping anyone else.