Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise (23 page)

It took a while, because Yagin and all the rest had been fired up for a fight and all that aggression had to go somewhere. Most of it was aimed at me. But Quillan and Guinto managed to calm them some, mainly by promising them that they’d still have plenty of Storad to batter the crap out of down by the gates, when they got there. The magelets helped more, all bright-eyed and full of hope, saying how they could help, showing Yagin what they could do and giving him a few nasty ideas that made him grin like a shark.

My main problem was Jake.

“What do you mean, she refuses to go?”

The squeak of Dendal’s knuckle twisting in its socket as we huddled by the pillar accompanied Perak’s faint answer, sounding tinny when channelled through Dendal. I wasn’t too keen on the amount of gunfire coming through, either.

“She just won’t,” he said. “She’s like a woman possessed, and there’s no arguing with her. Goddess knows how long we’d have lasted without her, but now she says she’ll cover our retreat but she’s staying.”

Women and my love for them will be the death of me.

“All right, I’ll think of something. Just hold on, as long as you can. If it comes to it, you leave, all right? Let the bastards have Top of the World – it’s not going to do them any good, not if I have anything to do with it. You just find somewhere safe and try to keep Jake out of it. Remind her she’s your bodyguard so she should be guarding your body or something.”

I got him to promise, and then Dendal’s conduit snapped off and he shoved his knuckle back home.

“Well?” asked Erlat.

“Well…” I sucked it up, everything I was about to say, changed the habits of a lifetime and got serious. “You get this lot going. Down to the gates. Those machines will be here soon, and we’re going to need all the men we can get down there.”
Just in case I can’t do what I’m planning.

“
But Top of the World? The Storad?”

“Let me worry about that.”

Erlat sat back, her lips pressed thin. “Jake. Always Jake. You’re going to swan in and rescue her, be her dashing hero – or try to be.” I’m fairly sure the snort was of the derisive kind.

“And that’s wrong, is it? Trying to put right what I fucked up by letting Pasha get on that machine, which he did because I wouldn’t let him kill himself trying to rescue her? Stopping her killing herself, or at least letting herself be killed? That’s a bad thing, is it?”

At about this point, several things that probably should have been obvious much, much earlier struck me – I am not the sharpest blade in the drawer, especially when my magic kept nagging at me to be used, when I hadn’t slept since who-knows-when and I couldn’t recall what real food, or indeed anything remotely edible, looked like. Erlat opened her mouth to say something else, but I got in first.

“Erlat, enough. I’m going to make everything right, third time pays for all. Get to the lab, wait for me there. I need you to help me.” If I made it, that was, but there was no point saying that part. “
Please
.”

She stood up, dusting her hands down her dress, adjusting where she’d hitched it up to make it easier to move, over the makeshift holders for the two guns she had.

“If this is one of your damnfool ways of trying to protect little old me —”

“It isn’t, I promise you that. I need you there to help me, because I can’t do it on my own. I think I know what I’ve got to do, but I need to see Perak and Jake safe first.”

She looked at me awhile, speculating, but there wasn’t time for more arguing and she knew it. “Fine,” she said, and whirled off in a perfect display of high dudgeon.

Quillan soon had the mob moving out and down. The gangs moved with an easy grace, loping down into Heights and taking to the walkways, swinging from one to the other as easily as I might walk one. Easier, because they didn’t seem to have any terror of heights. I did, and mine was telling me to not do what I was about to do, no, really, don’t.

Quillan frowned my way. “So what is it you’re going to do?”

I tried a smile but I got the feeling it came out pretty mangled, because Quillan flinched and took a step back.

Yagin turned up his own grin – I think he’d seen something in me he recognised. “He’s going to go and put the screws on someone.”

“Hopefully.”

That seemed to satisfy him and he followed his men down, flipping on to a walkway with a cheery wave of a knife. Quillan lingered but there didn’t seem much I could say. In the end, he put a protective arm around Cabe and said, “You looked after my boy, and I’m grateful for that. And you don’t
act
Ministry.”

“If I have my way, no one is going to act Ministry after this. If.”

He grunted at that, and left finally with a thoughtful frown.

At last it was just Dendal and me – he’d sent Allit and Lise and the magelets back down with the rest. Someone was going to regret the invention of that weapon, of that I could be quite sure.

“I know what you need to do, and I know you can do it,” Dendal said. “I’ve always known that’s what the Goddess sent you to me for.”

“Enough of the Goddess crap, all right? I’ve got enough to be going on with without her sticking her fucking nose in.”

His glance was reproachful and made him look more monk-like than ever. It struck me that maybe he really was some kind of monk – he’d devoted his whole life to doing what he saw as her work. Sadly, that involved me.

“Don’t say fuck,” he said. “It isn’t nice. And it doesn’t matter if you believe in her, it matters if she believes in you.”

“Oh, fabulous, buggered whichever way, gee, thanks. Look, can we get on? Only Perak’s about to be overrun and there’s these big nasty machines Outside on their way to take pot-shots at him, not to mention us, and the Slump’s on the slide, hell, maybe the whole city might be about to fall down around our ears if they manage to crack another tunnel. If nothing else, I’d quite like to have a living brother at the end of this, if it’s all the same to you.”

It’s really annoying when you vent your spleen like that and the person being vented at just pats your hand like you’re two and having a tantrum, but what could I say? I had to do it. When push comes to shove, sometimes it’s best to get a proper run up and say, Sod push, let’s fling that shit as hard as we can.

I settled down, not trusting my legs due to them having a tendency to give way at the important moment of a spell. I wanted to hope there wasn’t going to be any of my blood this time, but let’s face it, hope is for idiots and loonies.

Once I called it, clenched my hand and felt the bones grate, felt the pain run up my arm, warm and red and oh so familiar, the juice came in less than half a heartbeat. The black laughed and clapped its hands.
I knew you’d come to me in the end. You promised.

I had, and I would, but I had to hold off long enough to do this first.

Deal?
 

Deal.
 

The pain built, took over every thought, a thread of red in the black across my vision. Concentrate. Perak and Jake. Could find them both with my eyes closed and half a brain, usually. Hard now though. Very hard, because black was everywhere but I pushed and it came, the knowledge of exactly where they were. Five hundred yards up, forty yards to the east. Push, harder, because Jake’s got her back to a wall and four Storad in front of her and Perak’s trying to help but looks like he’s more frightened of the gun in his hand than he is of the Storad. Push, harder,
harder
, forget about no sleep and no food and being screwed, and that something just broke in the front of my head somewhere with a pop. Maybe my brain exploded – certainly felt like it, but no great loss to the community. Forget the warmth of blood flooding down my face, from eyes and nose, frothing in my mouth with a bitter tang.

At last it came, the sweet rush of juice, up through the black, swelling through me like wine, or sex, or… actually there’s nothing better, not even sex, and this is me saying that.
Nothing better than juice. Juice is everything, and the black will give me everything I need, I’ll be nothing
but
juice. When I let it, and that’s not just yet.

I opened my eyes a crack, and Dendal was there, saying, “You can do this, if you try, Rojan.” I had just enough time to be gobsmacked that he got my name right three times in a row, which meant things must be getting serious. Then he was fading, I was fading, bleeding through reality, rearranging it around me, a push here, a swift alteration there, swirling the world like dragging my hand through water. Easy when you know how and so, so hard. And then I was right next to Perak at Top of the World and blood was everywhere. My blood.

I threw up a whole load of it, wiped more from my nose and when I could focus again everything was tinged a pinky red. Everything being the inside of a vaguely familiar room up in Top of the World, a cell of sorts, which was plusher than any place I’d ever lived. Or had been till I puked blood all over the carpet, but I didn’t think that would be a problem for long. A little Glow-moth, as delicate and rare as the real thing, fluttered sadly around my head, its bright colours dim. No backing out now, no talking myself out if it. All or nothing.

Perak helped me up, looking panicked so I wondered just how bad the blood was. Pretty bad, by the way his hand was shaking and he looked like I wasn’t going to be the only one throwing up. “Rojan – I thought – oh,
Goddess
, Rojan, what are you doing?”

“Never mind that,” I managed to wheeze out. “You had a plan?”

“Yes, but…” He stared at me like I was a surprise naked lady in his bed and absent-mindedly wiped my face with the sleeve of his official archdeacon robes. I kind of liked the pattern my blood made on the cloth, in a funny, dreaming kind of way.

He pulled himself together. “I did have a plan, only it required this being in one piece.”

I looked at the mangled mess of wires and metal gizmos he held out, but I didn’t have a clue what it was supposed to be. All this new-fangled mechanics was starting to make me feel old.

“Simple words, please. And where the hell is Jake?”

Perak helped me to a chair and I managed to get my breath back properly. “I told her, like you said. To be my bodyguard. This section is locked off – cells for unbelievers. Easy to defend.”

“Yes, I recall. Tell me.”

“I did what you said. I couldn’t see anything else
to
do, so I sent all the guards to retreat, but I couldn’t because I had to set this. Only a bullet got it, and now it’s no use. So the Storad have Top of the World and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Yes, but what was it?”

“An ignition switch,” and then, because I probably looked confused, or perhaps because he was surprised I needed to ask, “a trigger. For everything I’ve rigged. All the black-powder traps.”

I thought back to the sunny-faced boy Perak used to be, wandering around in his own head. A boy who’d blown up the shop opposite by accident, and a guard station accidentally-on-purpose. Who’d invented the concept of using black powder to power a bullet because it had seemed an interesting exercise in applied alchemy, plus it involved a small explosion and hey, who doesn’t like an explosion? Perak may have been Archdeacon, but he’d always been a pyromaniac at heart.

Despite everything, or maybe because of it, a laugh forced its way out through a bubble of blood in my throat.

“Well, may the Goddess spank me bandy. You were going to blow up Top of the World, and all the Storad in it.
You
were!” That struck me as so funny, I’d have laughed my socks off if I hadn’t been in danger of choking.

“Well, er, yes. It seemed like the best idea, really, when Allit said the Storad would get here, and… and hell’s teeth, I’m sick of it, of them, of Ministry. Of my own damned cardinals! I was going to blow it all into the Slump – I made sure of where the charges were placed, simple physics really. I was going to blow it all and then we could start again, properly this time. All the charges are in place. Only now I can’t, and the Storad have everything up here,
and
more on the way. And now we’re trapped too.”

Funny how you can know a person their whole life, and still they can just turn around and surprise the air right out of your lungs. Perak, most devout archdeacon and unrepentant daydreamer, who saw the best in everything and everyone, had been about to blow the whole damned place. Blow up the Ministry. It made my head whirl, and then everything became very clear. The whole world was like glass, so I finally understood it. All of it, and what I had to do shone out as clear as a flaming brand in my head. I wanted to be sick all over again, wanted to run away and hide somewhere, be someone else, but I couldn’t. Not this time.

“Big brother will take care of it. Always big brother, whether I like it or not. No time now,” I said in the end. “Get Jake.”

“But she —”

“
Get Jake
.”

As if she’d heard me, a scream echoed through the doorway, and it wasn’t hers. No, her sound was harsh breath that hid everything, a clenched-teeth grunt, a vicious swearing. She was killing herself, suicide by battle, I had no doubt on that. Well, she could if she wanted – I wasn’t one to stop her – but not yet. Still, maybe discretion is the better part of staying the hell alive, especially when Jake was pissed off and had swords to hand, so I got to my feet on the third try and we went to her.

I left a sticky trail of blood behind me and walking wasn’t easy what with my whole body feeling like a very painful wet noodle, but luckily I didn’t have to worry about that for much longer. Through the door into a corridor that ended in another, narrower doorway. A whirl of black hair, a flash of sword, the crunch of bone. She was slicked in blood, her own and others’, but she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t notice anything, I don’t think, except the Storad the other side of that door. Didn’t notice, didn’t care.

Pasha had once said about her, what seemed like decades ago, before they got a little happiness, that she wanted to die on a sword but was too proud to let anyone beat her. That Jake was back, as though the other, happy one had never been. Closed off, dead-eyed, an ice queen but no volcano underneath – the ice went all the way through. She was still glorious, graceful as a cat, but I could see now what I couldn’t before, not properly. How could I not have understood?