Before the Fall by Francis Knight

Author:Francis Knight [KNIGHT, FRANCIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy - Epic, Fiction / Fantasy - Paranormal, Fiction / Fantasy / Urban, Fiction / Gothic, Fiction / Mystery & Detective - Hard Boiled
ISBN: 9780316217729
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2013-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Dendal was waiting for me when I got back to the office, dog-tired, with the rank taste of rat hooch on my tongue and Erlat’s door slam in my face, the sound of something solid hitting the back of the door as I left ringing in my ears. I hoped whatever it was he wanted, Dendal would be quick about it.

Then I looked a bit harder. Dendal kept hopping from foot to foot and he had a piece of paper in his hand that was crumpled from the way he clutched it. It wasn’t going to be good news.

“Go on.” My voice sounded weary and petulant even to me. Everyone seemed to be dumping responsibility on me from a great height. Why should Dendal be different?

He didn’t say anything, but held out the paper. It didn’t say much. Just one sentence. Our son is dead.

I sank down to the sofa. Another murder. It had been too much to hope I could sleep first.

“I’ll go to the mortuary first thing.” Oh goody, something to look forward to.

“No, no.” Dendal did another little hop. “Their son isn’t dead. They only wish he was.”

I watched him closely–something bothering him, something close. Something I was missing. I needed about a week’s sleep, but it didn’t look as though I’d be getting it any time soon, so I said, “Start at the beginning.”

“It’s Pasha’s parents,” he blurted out, and that was all I needed to know. Which didn’t stop Dendal blathering on. “I, well, the tone, you know?”

I did know. Dendal’s speciality, his Major, is communication. He takes and sends messages in his head. Not like Pasha, he can’t read a mind as such. Instead, he acts like a conduit for messages. And being such a gentle soul, he was pretty good at picking up tone, or emotional backlog or call it what you will. If he said they knew Pasha wasn’t dead but hoped he was, then they did. It was the last thing Pasha needed right now. It would be like ripping up his dreams while jumping up and down on his heart.

“We don’t have to give him this. Not now, not yet.’ Maybe in a year’s time, if we were all still alive, when he’d got some sort of life back and he’d unfucked his head a bit. “We’ve all got other things to worry about.” Like, was Erlat going to be safe if Manoto came back? At least she had a gun, which gave me a small bit of comfort. She was pissed enough to use it on me, though, which wasn’t. Goddess’s tits, I even managed to fuck it up when I wasn’t sleeping with them.

Dendal hopped again, back and forth, till my eyes went all screwy. “I promised, Rojan. I can’t not send on a message. It’s what I do.”

“Seriously, now is not the time. The generator is all but dead with fuck all hope of fixing it, we’re hip deep in dead mages, Pasha’s already strung out

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