Fade to Black (30 page)

He stepped towards us and Jake raised her head, as though against her will, to stare at him with dull, useless hatred. Then her gaze shifted and the rage drained away with her mouthed word. “Pasha.”

Pasha huddled by the side of the altar, blank-eyed and twitching. A splash of blood smudged one cheek and his hands twisted, always twisted as he kept himself in the black.

Jake struggled to her feet and lurched towards him, but a nod from Azama brought one of his goons out of the dark to grab her. The instant his hand touched her arm she turned on him like a wild thing, like the snarling tiger that snaked
around the Goddess’s legs. The sheer ferocity took the goon by surprise – no doubt he was more used to the young girls and their subservience – and before I could even raise a hand to help Jake, to pull him off her, protect her, his face was bloody from where she’d raked her nails down over one eye and cheek.

Flash, Pasha had called it, her way of fighting. Not really a fighter, an acrobat, a show, an act – yet now it came to it, I still wouldn’t have liked to take her on. She’d have killed me.

I don’t think she really saw anything – her eyes were as wild as her movements. Every veneer was gone, every last bit of varnish over her soul, and all that was left was as she’d said – fear and anger, and this goon got the lot. He just about managed to raise an arm against the onslaught, to grope for the gun in a pocket, and then it was over, at a word.

“Stop.” The voice, the sane, smooth, rational voice of reason. Azama’s Voice. It had always been my father’s Major, the way he could use it to command, to cajole, to conjure images to dance in your head. Yet either he’d never shown me its true power when I was a boy, or it had grown beyond all reason. That one word – “Stop” – and Jake froze in mid-swipe. The goon lay like a felled tree, hand still halfway to the gun. I halted in mid-step. The Voice was everything.

Azama’s lip curled up in a sneer as he looked at Jake, then me. “See how easy it is? You, hold her this time and don’t let go.”

The goon stood up and grabbed at Jake, his hands rough as he yanked her to her feet with a whimper. “You’ll pay for that,
bitch,” he whispered in her ear. “For a long time. Azama can use you to power a whole factory, all on your own. I wonder how long you’ll last?”

His whisper seemed to break her free of Azama’s spell and she writhed silently in the goon’s grasp, trying with everything she had, but he had her now. I fingered the pulse pistol in my pocket, and wondered how many more goons lurked in the dark edges of the temple. Too many, almost certainly, and mages too without a doubt. Azama wasn’t stupid. I’d have gone for it anyway, anything to help her, to stop that goon pawing at her. At that moment I’d have killed any man in front of me to help her, save her from what I knew was coming, but the Voice turned on me, caught me.

“Shall I assume that Dr Whelar and my guards are dead? I’ll take that as a no for your answer then, Rojan? Shame: I was hoping you’d follow in the family trade.”

Jake stopped fighting at that reminder of who I was, and Azama piled in, piled it all on to her in a voice like treacle. “Don’t tell me he didn’t say? I’m very proud of my son. Or I was. He did a splendid job flushing you and Pasha out, don’t you think? Ah, my favourite blasphemous little bitch, Jake. Did you think a change of name and dyeing your hair would mean I don’t recognise you? You always screamed so prettily, begged for atonement so pleasingly. I know you’ll do so again, because I’m very sure you need to atone to the Goddess, and we know how to do that. Don’t we?” His voice was soothing, smooth as skin, soft as pillows.

He walked towards her, slow and steady, his eyes not leaving hers. I expected her to lash out, kick him in the nuts.
Some
thing. But she stood there in the goon’s grasp, unmoving except for a tremor that shuddered through her at intervals. She seemed pinned to the spot, powerless before his voice.

As I seemed to be. I tried to summon the will to move, to pull all the magic into me and blow it out of his big, fat head and save Jake from her worst nightmare. It all narrowed down to that, to Jake, to getting the goon’s hands off her before she dissolved completely. That thought was what made the power come, flowing blessedly through me like a stiff shot of the green stuff, warming me, making my mind buzz with it. Only, try as I would to push it out, to turn Azama into nothing more than a pile of goo, all I could hear was his voice, and I wanted so badly to believe him. I wanted him to be the father I remembered.

His words bounced oddly round my head. They seemed to enter my ears as a vile, insidious outpouring, but by the time they reached my brain they made complete sense. I tried remembering what it had been like when my father had left, how much I’d hated the bastard for abandoning us, and all I could summon was the wish to keep hearing his voice, to see the pictures it made in my mind, to wallow in its reassurance. My father’s voice had always meant safety to me when I was young. His voice had been warmth and reason and comfort. Hearing it again made everything between then and now seem irrelevant, a shallow experience not worth thinking
about. I was safe with the voice of my childhood, and all the years of terror and reproach between were nothing.

Azama strolled towards Jake, and even when he signalled the goon to let her go, still she didn’t move. When he lifted a hand to stroke her cheek, she jerked back, but not for long. He had her with his voice, with his words, no matter the real sense of them.

“I do it because I love you, because I want the Goddess to love you, forgive you. You know that. It was always because we love you and we want you to be in the Goddess’s favour.”

Jake’s mouth worked, but no words came out. The Voice was right, and rational, sane in an insane world. We were safe in the Voice.

“Maybe I’ll be even more generous and assign you to Pasha. You’d like that, hmm?”

I glanced at Pasha, and he was fighting it, every step, every word. Sweat poured from him, soaked his shirt, dripped from his brow with every twitch and tremor. He tried to speak, but only a moan came out. It took me long moments to work out why he fought, when the Voice was so right, when it rolled with such richness in my head. How could it be wrong, that voice of childhood, which always knew the answer to everything my young mind could ask? Then Pasha managed to come out of whatever nightmare he was in, just for a few brief moments. He looked up at me, and I felt him in my head.
Please, Rojan, please for the Goddess’s sake, not again. Please. For Jake – it’ll break her.
Please, Rojan. Please, because I can’t, I want to but I can’t,
we
can’t, not against him…

His voice echoed weirdly, at odds with Azama’s power. It seemed that was the last of Pasha’s strength, his fight, because his eyes rolled up into his head and he slid to the floor. The sound of him hitting the ground, the muffled, meaty thud, gave me a glimpse, a hope. Azama’s voice was so right, so very right… and so wrong. Pasha twitched and moaned, fallen in for good now, into the black. I could feel him drawing away from me.

“Pain is the only salvation any of us has, the only atonement we can make to our Goddess,” Azama said in a seductive whisper. So true, so very true.

I kept my eyes on Pasha, on the fading movements, the whispering breath, the thought that he’d spent his last ounce of energy on trying to save Jake, through me. Sacrifice, the Goddess and the tiger. Pain was my only salvation, the only salvation, the only chance of atonement or redemption any of us had. Azama was right, so right.

He turned the Voice on me, his eyes full of hope. “You’ll join me, Roji. Become what you were always meant to. You can’t turn me down now, not when I made sure no one else need die like your mother. We’ll keep Mahala running, you and I, keep her people fed. The right people, of course. The faithless, the dissolute, the feckless all end up down here in the end. They’re worth nothing, except the means to power Mahala, to save the righteous from starvation.”

I wrapped my fingers around the pulse pistol. The Voice told me to trust it, that it knew what was best and that was pain, to atone for my sins, to make the Goddess love me despite them, despite my hatred of her.

“You can help save them all, Roji, save them from Namrat, from damnation. You can save a whole city of people, just by saving these girls down here, making them atone through the searing brightness of pain. When we hurt is when we’re closest to the Goddess.”

Pasha was almost gone now, fading away from me. If I had to track him, soon all I’d get would be a blur, a slick black place where he once was.

“You can be a great hero, save them all, and save the city too. You will save everyone, if you join me. You’re so very much like me.”

I yanked my gaze away from Pasha and back to Azama, to his sneering lips, his honeyed, hypnotic words that made such
sense
, even while I still wanted to puke all over his shoes.

“I think I’ll save you first.” I pulled out the pulse pistol and got him right between the eyes. Azama seemed to want me to be a priest. I didn’t want to be one, though: priests never get the hot chicks.

The
thunk
of Azama hitting the floor made my lips curl. The goon holding Jake let go of her to go for his gun, and she staggered to the altar, to Pasha. A bullet zinged off the floor next to me and I looked up to see half a dozen of the fake Specials advance on us, all with guns drawn.

A clatter of metal to the side and then Jake had her swords, her wall and comfort, and the ice queen was back, as though the poor wretched girl of minutes ago was a dream. She stood in front of Pasha, shielding him, her swords ready and a lunatic grin pasted across her face, as though this was what she’d lived for all this time, why she’d survived. This was the moment Pasha said she hoped for, prayed for.

Her glance flicked up to the image of the Goddess hanging before us, stern, cruel and commanding, no hint of the sympathy her images usually held. With a whispered prayer that I only just caught – “Let it be today” – she went for the goons.

The next few minutes were a jumble of swords and bullets and swearwords, of magic pulling at me, pushing me, twisting inside my head, inside my gut till I was sick again. All over Azama’s shoes, which made me feel a little better.

The men weren’t mages, at least. Just goons, pretend Specials, or Jake and I would almost certainly have died right there. I’d have died anyway if not for Jake, of that I’m quite sure.

I had no doubt the mages wouldn’t be long either. When I’d stopped throwing up, I did a quick stocktake. Pain: present. All too present. Whoopee, situation normal, hand completely screwed. Goons: down and out. Two were unconscious – mine. Four were on the floor in various states of bloody distress – Jake’s. Flash, my arse. When her back was to the wall, she was more vicious than any tiger. Speaking of which, the last goon had got too close to the tiger chained at the bottom of the mural and was regretting it in a very vocal and splashy fashion. Bullets that had hit home: none, except one that had pinged from a wall and taken Azama’s ear off. I wasn’t too worried about that one. Fathers I had fucked over: one, even if it felt good and simultaneously a betrayal. Painted goddesses with painted whips in their hand, glaring at me like I was on the cusp of hell as they stood over a bloody, accusing altar that screwed with my gut: one, but it was a pretty bad one, mainly because I agreed with her. I was on the cusp of a hell worse than Namrat’s kingdom. Dying Pashas: one. Jakes shaking me and telling me to “Do something, just fucking
do
something! Please, Rojan”: one.

I staggered up and flopped against the wall. I wasn’t sure what I’d done in the last few minutes, but I did know it had screwed me. Parts of my brain seemed to be missing, were black when I tried to look in. But they also seemed to be growing, sidling their way into my thoughts, taking them over, pulling me in, leaving only little pictures of the world that seemed like fake cut-outs.

A hand in mine, pulling at me, linked me back to here and now. Jake, her face wet with tears, saying, “Please, Rojan…” I couldn’t seem to grasp what she meant, until she reached up on tiptoe and kissed me. It wasn’t much, a cold pressing of the lips with a plea inside it, but hell, I’ve never knowingly missed a kiss.

The lights were bright suddenly, lighting up the dark parts of my brain and telling them to shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. Reality hit me with a good left hook. Pain in my hand, the tingle of magic, the smell of blood from the goons and beyond, from the altar under its forbidding Goddess. It was the blood on the altar that did it. I may not believe in all that religion shit, but this, in her name… Dendal had been right about one thing: it was about time I started believing in something, and that something was putting this right, one step at a time, no matter the cost. Like, me being lynched when everyone started starving to death. I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care about anything but stopping what he’d started, about making Jake not afraid any more, and about not being my father.

Jake’s voice was vague behind me. The knowledge that very soon mages would be here, mages better than I was, stronger, was a mere afterthought. Pasha lay slumped on the floor, the sketch of him in my mind almost too weak, too dark to see. One step at a time, and I would start with him. For Jake, because she’d kissed me, because she was crying and I couldn’t bear it. And for Pasha, because he was one of those kids once, and because he had helped me and all I’d done in return was fuck him over.

Another noise, this time one that penetrated.

“Holy Goddess, Rojan. I never thought you’d do it.” I looked up into the surprised and careworn eyes of Dench. The gun in his hand was loosely pointing my way, but drooped as he took in the rest of the room. “Oh, we are in
big
shit.”

I couldn’t seem to grasp how he was there, and if he was, why he wasn’t shooting me. I had more important things to worry about, such as what Azama might try once the pulse wore off.

“I need whatever Whelar had in that syringe.” I don’t know who I was saying it to, but Jake lifted her head from where she bent over Pasha’s still form.