Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (17 page)

I dropped my next bullet into the gathering snow, swore like a motherfucker and grabbed another. Too slow. A Storad, eyes glassy as Pasha rummaged in his head and gave it a nasty suggestion, turned on his neighbour and shot him through the eye. But Pasha wasn’t quick enough, not together enough, to brainwash all of them. Not before three men grabbed at him and a gun came round, a finger ready on the trigger.

If I believed in the Goddess, I’d swear on her that everything seemed to stop then. Time stretched, and all I could think of was Pasha. Not Jake, not how I’d have to tell her he was dead, if we found her. Not her, but him. How he’d taken me under his wing once. Talked to me, believed in me, told me not to be such a shit. Been a friend, the best I could recall.

I don’t remember telling my hand to bunch into a fist, or recall with any clarity the pain swirling through my head, firing up my juice. I remember the black calling, though, telling me now was the time, right
now
. I’d promised it once, it reminded me. I’d promised that it could have me, and now it was collecting. A voice, not mine or the black’s but other than that I couldn’t say who, saying,
Not now. Not for this. Not even for this.

Then Malaki ran a bullet through the heart of the guy holding Pasha. Guards came up, guns ready, and the new recruits were with them. Bloodied and gaunt and terrified, all of them, but they came anyway. I relaxed my hand, willed the juice away, told the black to piss off, it wasn’t having me today. I almost succeeded, and got on with the business of shooting at men I’d never met.

By the time we’d finished at the wrecked gates, all the snow was pink- and red-streaked with blood. Broken flamers lay in bits of tangled metal, fresh snow covering them up as though to hide the fact they’d ever been. Not all the bodies were Storad, not by a long shot. The last sergeant of the guards lay right at the foot of the gates, three Storad bodies in various states of shot-through-the-face around him. Malaki was still upright, though it looked more from stubborn determination than anything else, as blood dripped freely down the left side of his face and off his chin. Something was changed about him, about all of us probably, but it was marked most upon him. A moulding of his features from stiff and uncompromising to grim yet – what? I couldn’t say. Only that I liked him a hell of a lot more, especially when he said, “Right, all of you, group up. You’re all my men now.”

He didn’t seem to care that more than half them had never been his, that most had been until earlier today a bunch of men and women from the bottom of Heights, the top of Under, fairly respectable people who were only there because it seemed expedient for their careers to say yes when asked by Ministry. Yesterday, Malaki would have been happy arresting them for standing with intent to look at a Special, and they’d probably have done a runner at the first hint of a Specials uniform within a hundred yards or more. Today, that didn’t matter.

Malaki pointed to one of the Heights men, who’d all somehow seemed to accumulate a lot of weaponry. The flamer seemed to ride easy in his hands and two guns poked out of a pocket. The cardinals were going to have a fit.

“You, yes you. You’re my sergeant now. In fact, you’re all Specials now, got it? You serve me, the Goddess, and the Archdeacon, in that order.”

No one argued, though I silently reserved the right to tell the Goddess to go fuck herself if what she wanted was at odds with what I needed to do. All the new recruits looked different shades of stunned – them, Specials? What were left of the guards looked much the same.

“Right,” Malaki said. “We hold the gates, and we are going to keep holding them. There will be more men coming, I promise you that. Ours
and
theirs. But these gates belong to us, and no one is going to take them. Got it?”

“But —” Pasha began. He looked worse than ever, grey and sick, one hand trembling and the other held to him where he’d taken a burn from the flamers. I could almost feel the pain coming off him in waves, feel the juice building in him. Not just juice either – desperation, a touch of panic.

Malaki glanced his way and cut him off. “I haven’t forgotten, but holding these gates is primary. I swore to the Goddess first, not the Archdeacon, and this city is hers, and will stay hers.” Turning his back on us, he began barking out orders which all the men and women leapt to obey. Funny how the threat of dying together could make all those old arguments trivial. Now, after this, none of those men and women even gave Pasha and me a sideways glance.

Perhaps that’s what made it easier for him to slump to the ground, cradling his burned arm. The lion was still there though, under the grey skin and the tremor. It was there in the way his dark eyes bored into mine, the way he gritted his teeth. “Rojan, we have to go.”

If it hadn’t been Jake out there, if it hadn’t been Pasha looking like he wanted to burn holes in the snow with his eyes, I might have laughed. But it was, so I didn’t say a damn thing about how I was no use, a mage who daren’t use his magic for fear of going batshit, and one who was so strung out on worry and pain he could hardly stand. I like to think it was very restrained of me not to say, “Pasha, what the hell are we going to do?”, though I suppose he could hear it anyway.

He could hear a lot, I’d no doubt – his arm was still smoking and the smell of cooking flesh, from him and all the others, mixing together with the smell wafting from what was left of the tunnels, quite put me off bacon for the rest of my life. He had juice enough to hear half of Mahala. But he couldn’t hear everyone, and that was the problem.

“When we took the gates,” he said in a whisper. “I could hear her up till then. Her and her two men. We came from this side, they were doing what they could on the other. Doing a good job of it too, chaos for a while. Sneak into a tent, take out the men inside, sneak out. And then – I can’t hear her now. Her men are dead, and I heard her start to say something, heard her say, ‘Dench’ and then… nothing. She – I – I can’t think she’s dead. Can’t,
won’t
. I don’t care what Allit saw. Do you see?”

I think I saw more than he thought. That the grey tinge to his skin wasn’t just from worry about Jake, though that was part of it. He’d killed men tonight, and Pasha wasn’t a killing kind of man. He’d done it for her, as he had once before and that had almost broken him, and yet he’d do it all again, if he had to. Would go as far as he must, for Jake. And now he was asking me to go out there, beyond the gates, out into who knew how many more Storad who were licking their wounds, biding their time till their reinforcements arrived, perhaps. Or perhaps not. But he had to, because if Jake was gone, or if she wasn’t and he left her there, then he had nothing except a useless faith in a useless goddess who would do bugger all for him except give him the faint, fool’s hope he’d see her again someday after they were both dead.

He laughed, all pity and anger, and I realised he’d seen that last thought in my head. “You’ll see one day, you will. Until then, I will not say she’s dead. I just can’t hear her. Maybe – maybe what Allit saw, only maybe he didn’t see all of it? Dench has her, but when Allit saw her she was alive. Maybe Dench got that helmet on her? I swear that’s what was blocking me before, at the tunnel. Maybe she’s unconscious. Maybe lots of things. But I have to
know
. Are you coming with me, or not? You can walk on your own, and I can use my magic. Between us we make one good mage. What do you say?”

What can you say to a friend who asks you that? Just to find out whether the woman he loves, and you do too, is alive. There is only one thing to say. Of course, I injected my own charm into it, so as not to appear too soppy.

“Fine, but you’re paying the cleaning bill to get the blood out of my clothes, and I expect a lot of beer at a later date. A
lot
of beer.”

He grinned at that and held out his good arm for me to help him up. But the grin had lion’s teeth in it, and it wasn’t only a lion that walked with us. A big, gleaming tiger followed in our trail, invisible, silent, watchful, waiting for his chance. Namrat, all teeth and hungry eyes, patient as time, cold as mountains. Namrat the stalker, who would have us all in the end. Death.

I tried telling him to piss off, there’s a good little kitty, but it didn’t work.

We didn’t get far. Maybe we would have done, maybe we’d have found Jake, Pasha could have rescued her like the dashing hero he seemed to want to be, whether she needed it or not. Maybe everything would have turned out differently if we hadn’t been so screwed, and if the first of the Storad reinforcements hadn’t decided to turn up.

Maybe if Pasha had been concentrating on them, rather than on listening in and trying to figure out where Jake was, they wouldn’t have surprised us like a pair of children caught stealing sweets. Or if I’d tried a find-spell – but that hadn’t seemed the best plan, all things considered. I could have borrowed Pasha’s juice, but he was determined to be the hero, the one to find her, so I didn’t even suggest it.

As it was, we were huddled out of the wind behind a short row of tents. Pasha was sure he’d found Dench at least, in the end tent, when the tramp of a thousand, two thousand, more feet crunched through the thickening snow towards us and, crucially, between us and the gate. It seemed I only had time for one hurried breath – which I regretted when I realised the frozen puff of it was a giveaway – before there were men everywhere. They looked tired, cold and pissed off, but that would probably only make them meaner if they found us. Which they would, because there wasn’t much room in that little valley and those men wanted to find a billet somewhere, preferably out of the wind and snow if they were sensible.

Pasha dismissed them with a wave of his burned hand, but I was thinking a bit more clearly. Didn’t matter if we found Jake if we couldn’t get her out, that’s what I was thinking. Or if we died trying. I mean, yeah, it’d look good in the history books, men dying heroically to try to save their lady-love and all that, very tragically romantic. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be a stupid way to go. Romance I’m all for, but I’ve never been a fan of tragedy, which, when I think on it right now, is seriously ironic.

Pasha. Pasha!
I knew the little bastard could hear me in his head, but he took no notice until I grabbed his arm and shook it until I thought it might fall off.

Shh! I think I
—

Most of the reinforcements went straight to the gate, as Malaki had said they would, though at least they didn’t launch straight into an attack – they seemed content to dig in and wait awhile, and I doubted Malaki would go on the offensive with the few men he had. But a group broke away from the main force and headed our way. They spoke among themselves and I didn’t need to understand their gruff language to know what they were saying, the mantras of soldiers and guards everywhere, I don’t doubt: “
Over
here, it
’
s out of the wind,” “My boots are killing me,” “That sergeant
’
s a slave driver,” “This is out of the way; we won
’
t get volunteered if he can
’
t see us,” “I
’
d kill for a cup of tea – get the fire on.”

Three more steps then they’d see us and we were dead meat. My hand clenched on instinct and I had to bite back a groan and the sudden, driving need to use my magic, pull all the juice through me and say hello to my madness.

I tried again to get Pasha’s attention but he was as lost as I was, only he was lost in trying to find Jake. He hissed a victorious “Yes!” under his breath, but it was almost too late. The soldiers were on top of us.

My hand was itching now, the juice restless inside me – such a change from the days when I was afraid to use it – but it was scaring me more and more too. The black was looming always larger inside me, growing like a cancer, but one I craved and feared at the same time. I was like a junkie after Rapture, knowing what it would do to me but wanting it all the same. I couldn’t give in, not now or we were lost, and so was Jake. We were lost if we stayed there long enough to be found too, so I did the only sensible thing I could think of.

I grabbed Pasha’s burned hand and smacked it on to the ground between us. His eyes flew open and I could see his tonsils as he was about to scream but he didn’t get time. I had hold of his hand and sucked the pain from him, stole it, used his juice not mine, became that bastard I always told myself I wouldn’t be. I picked up some of his magic too, I think, because I’d swear I heard one of the soldiers think,
Hey, what was that?

I had to do this now or not at all, so I sucked out all the pain I could and thought of the lab, warm and waiting for us. A rearrangement, a piece of magic big enough that it brought a fresh scream from Pasha – or maybe that was because we were no longer in the snow, no longer just yards from Jake. We were sprawled on the floor of the pain room and this time Pasha was throwing up all over the place, looking like I’d sucked half his soul out with his pain and juice. I didn’t feel much better myself. Everything kept wobbling in and out of focus like I’d had a fatal amount of booze.

“Bastard,” Pasha managed at last. “Jake, what about Jake? I have to find her. Have to get her out of there, she’ll… Oh, you
bastard
.”

He staggered to his feet and stood there glaring at me like Namrat himself, like he wanted to eat my soul.

“Don’t you care? I though you at least cared enough about Jake, but no. Obviously not. So to save your own skin, you’ve condemned her to who-knows-what. She’s – they’ve caught her, you know that’s worse for her than if they killed her? Worst thing, for her, to be trapped, to be held. I thought you were better than that, I really did. Looks like I was wrong, doesn’t it?”

I staggered to my feet and tried not to imagine using my juice – even using Pasha’s had woken up my black, brought it laughing into the back of my head. Pasha’s tirade stung too, at least partly because he was right, though so was I, but the sting came out front and centre.

“Us getting shot in the head wouldn’t help her any, would it? You want to save her, you need to be alive to do it, usually. And preferably alive to enjoy it afterwards too.”

Looking back, I think that was the point where he snapped – but instead of raging further he shut up, stood still as the statues of the saints and martyrs in the temples. His face took on their marbled sheen and his eyes – I’ve never seen anyone whose eyes looked quite like his then. They were usually dark and angry, spitting sparks at the injustices of life, but now they took on a cool, dead calm that jangled my nerves and made my heart go cold.

“You don’t get it.” His voice was soft as snowclouds, cold as midwinter on the mountains. “You never did. Never will, too wrapped up in your own head. It’s not a sacrifice unless it hurts. If doing it, giving it, is as easy as, as, getting up in the morning, it’s not a sacrifice, it’s just doing something, meaningless movement. Real sacrifice, like the Goddess tells us, showed us when she gave her hand to Namrat, real sacrifice
hurts
. I would do anything to find Jake and get her back. Anything, no matter what it costs me. You won’t because you don’t care enough about anything but yourself to hurt like that. You never were willing to go far enough.”

We stood and stared at each other, and the sting got worse because maybe he was right. Then again, maybe he was just stupid; I couldn’t tell which it was, or whether I’d saved him for me, because he was my friend and I needed him, or for him. Whether I’d ever be the sort of guy who could willingly sacrifice myself for anyone.