Rojan Dizon 02 - Before the Fall Read Online Free Page B

the big kid he was.
    Yet even Erlat’s graceful poise looked strained today. She kept fiddling with the coil of hair and darting quick, furtive looks at the Upsiders that crowded the temple. I went to stand with her and was about to ask her what she was so worried about when the prayers stopped and a deep, soothing voice boomed out from the altar. Erlat forgot about me, her focus riveted on the preacher.
    I didn’t really pay attention to the words at first, figuring they’d be the usual “Isn’t the Goddess lovely, do as you’re told now and you get a nice afterlife” brainwashing Ministry bullshit. Instead, I watched the congregation. The two Goddesses should have given it away, but perhaps I was feeling a bit dense that day.
    Most of the Ministry temples refused entry to Downsiders, thought their ways of worship disgusting and heretical. The way so many priests had got the vapours when the ’Pit had opened up had kept me amused for weeks. The Downsiders, predictably, had said “screw you then” and opened their own, smaller temples, most of them one-room affairs that turned back into bedrooms when the prayers were done. Just another way of everyone showing how much they hated “the others”. Stupid, of course, but that’s people for you. Why like anyone when hating them is so much more fun?
    Only Pasha, Jake, Dog, Erlat and the boy were all Downsiders, obviously so, and they weren’t the only ones in here, not today. Yet they got no funny looks, no sneers, and that was odd. They were, it seemed, welcomed. I could even see the sign of their devotional on Erlat’s hand, a black circle on her palm and a spot of blood in the centre, a practice that had most Ministry men fit to split.
    Then what the guest preacher was saying seemed to register.
    “And so all of us are people first,” he said. “Upsider or Down, Ministry or not, we are all believers. This man,” he pointed to an Upsider who started at being pointed out, “this man wants what is best for his family, what it is only right they should have. Food, warmth, safety. This man,” his pointing finger picked out a Downsider flanked by two children, all shadowy skeletons in clothes, “wants the same. Do you hate either of them for wanting what you want?”
    I let the simple words, the even simpler message, wash over me without taking them in. The congregation hung on his every word, and I could see why, hear why. The words almost didn’t matter; it was the depth of his voice, the rolling smoothness of it, the utter conviction that rattled in every syllable. It was hard to stop yourself getting pulled along by it, no matter the simplicity of the sermon, but I managed it when he started saying we should praise the Goddess for giving us this test, this chance to show her how faithful we really were. Grateful for slowly starving to death? Bollocks to that, was all I could think.
    Yet who was in the congregation was telling. A man who was a leading advocate for Downsiders, who spoke often and eloquently and was mostly ignored by everyone. Another, who was his equivalent among the Upsiders. Spokespeople, perhaps, for their factions. Both steady, reasonable men from what I knew of them, and maybe that was why they were so ineffective. Want something doing? Get someone with a burning passion, get an extremist who thinks he’s doing the Right Thing, who can make everyone burn as he does. People will follow that. They don’t often follow anyone whose main message is “I think we should be nice to everyone”.
    This preacher was different, though, because that was his message but his burning need for it came through. An extremist of a different nature perhaps, but if you burn, people will warm to your flame no matter how crazily it leaps and devours the curtains, the house, the city, the world.
    It showed in the eyes of the people up by the altar with him. Two altar boys, watching him with rapt attention, and a woman, not much more than a girl, really, maybe