Rojan Dizon 03 - Last to Rise

by Francis Knight

  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.

  I couldn’t even tell if I was being sensible or a complete dick when I finally said, “Pasha, I’d have done it, stayed there, died even, if I could have been sure it would have helped, if we could have found her in time, saved her like you wanted to. Dying while saving her, that I can understand, that I’d do. Yes, I would. Dying while failing to? Stupid. And I never took you for stupid. You’re too wrapped up in everything but yourself, too wrapped up in trying to be her hero to remember she’ll want you around to be her hero for a while. And you have that, had her to go home to, and you don’t even know what that means. Everything I wanted, you have. And you’re ready to throw it away.”

  An almost silent snort of what might have been laughter, a twist of lips that was a grotesque imitation of his usual monkey grin.

  “Throw it away? No, get it back. And not just for her, for all of us…” He shook his head and left, silent but intent. On what I couldn’t be sure, though “damnfool way to try to rescue Jake” would have topped the list.

  I should have followed him, but I couldn’t. I envied him like I never had before. Not because of what he had, but because of what he was prepared to do for it, her. I was jealous of the strength he had inside him, even when I thought it was making him stupid.
r />   So I didn’t follow him, because all that would have come out and I didn’t think he deserved it. Instead I sat and stared at my stupid throbbing hand and listened to that insidious voice inside me, telling me to do it, do it, blow the whole place, you know you want to. And I did want to. Too much. Not for anyone else; for me.

  Perak jerked me out of it when he came in, looking wearier than I’d ever seen him. I opened my mouth to ask him something, something important perhaps, I can’t recall, but I didn’t get the chance. A buzzing zap, familiar but ten times, a hundred times louder than I’d ever heard it before. A burst of something arced past the window, split, pulsed, arrowed down towards the gates.

  I knew what it was. Lise’s infernal machine. Like my pulse pistol, she’d said, only bigger, stronger, more sustained. Only… only…

  I was out of the room, through a startled gaggle of magelets and banging on the locked door of the machine room before anyone else had even moved. No sound from the other side. Allit and some of the other kids came up behind me. I panicked then, because I thought I knew what I was going to see in there, and I didn’t want them seeing it. Bad enough that I had to, and I had to get in there and know for sure just how stupid Pasha had been. So I did something pretty stupid myself – gave in to that voice, clenched my hand and let a bit of juice in. Not much, enough to rearrange the lock so I could open the door. Enough that my vision went all black, that my heart stopped in terror as I wondered if this was it, this was the thing that was going to take me once and for all.

  For a while, it looked like it was. I floundered in the dark of my head, wanting to sink in, give up, fall back, but knowing I couldn’t. Not yet, not until I’d seen, until I knew.

  I don’t know how long I was in there, maybe only heartbeats but it felt as long as the rest of my life. I’d probably still be there now, and none of the rest would have happened the way it did, except for something that felt like it smacked my brain out of my head and brought me back to the here and now. Sitting propped up against the door, which it seemed I’d rearranged behind me. I may have overdone it, because the lock appeared to have melted and then hardened again, and no one was going to be coming in without some very specialised cutting gear.

  So I was on my own, except for the machine and what lay on it.

  Weird, sometimes, the things you see when you don’t want to see anything else, to admit what is right in front of you. That machine is now burned into my brain. I can recall every rivet, every twist of cable, every demented cog and gear. The shine of oil across the top, the little slick underneath where Lise had dropped the oilcan and no one had mopped it up. The faint smell of tangy metal to the air. How everything was lit by the pale swirl of moonlight on falling snow that came through the window and picked out shapes in silver light and black shadow. How those shadows seemed to morph into the shape of a stalking, drool-toothed tiger. The shattered glass of the syringe where it had fallen from Pasha’s hand with a few drops of Lise’s concoction, the one that amplified magic, still clinging to the pieces. The random thought of He must have stolen it from her drawer. I can recall it all, every last detail, because I stared at it rather than at Pasha.

  It should have been me on that chair. Would have been, if I’d had half his guts or passion. Then perhaps I’d have been lying there, smoke still drifting from my hair, blood dripping from my hand where I’d brought out my juice, the drips getting slower and slower until finally they stopped. Until I stopped. Lying pale but serene, my eyes half shut and looking… triumphant.

  I must have sat there for an age, maybe two, just staring at him, but almost all I can remember thinking was, How can death be triumphant? How? After a time the room became blurred, colours swam in front of my eyes and the black slipped back in for good. It had never really gone away, but now, with this in front of me, proof if it was ever needed of my own lily-liveredness, its voice had fangs that drove deep.

  Chickenshit, it said, and it didn’t need to say anything else, but it did. Oh yes. Chickenshit. If you had any bollocks at all you could have ended this. Gone down to those gates and blown all those Storad sky-fucking-high. Got on that machine and zapped the crap out of anyone you felt like.

  You still can. Then we’ll be together. Best friends for ever.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I think it was Dendal who got me on my feet, patted my back like I was a two-year-old who’d just had a bad dream and said, “There, there.” Perak came too; I know that because I heard him say a blessing over Pasha. Not the Ministry-approved bland crap either. A proper blessing, one of the old ones, full of brimstone and anger. I think Pasha would have liked that.

  My recollections get a bit hazy after that – just odd sights and sounds. Dendal got me along to the office and I sat on the lumpy sofa and stared at Griswald as though he had any answers. Allit crying, his face all blotchy. Erlat looking frazzled and tearful, cracks in her gemstone façade. Lise swearing, sobbing as we passed through her workshop, rattling her toolbox in frustration and guilt, ripping up the plans for the machine. Snow falling past the window, soft and silent in the dark. Dendal reading some scripture in his dry, papery voice which had a hitch in it now. A cramp in my chest, the sound of the black laughing at me, calling me chickenshit.

  It all came back into focus when the door opened and Jake walked in. My first thought was, How the hell am I going to tell her? And tell her it should have been me, not him? But the look on her face, the way it had closed off completely, iced over, told me she knew. She hadn’t needed anyone to tell her – she’d known anyway, because Pasha was no longer in her head, and I wondered how lonely that would be, to have silence when you’d had the comfort of that voice with you always.

  Out of all the faces around me, hers was the only one with no hint of tears. Blood, yes, and mud, frustration and a dead, bone-achingly empty tiredness, but no tears. Pasha had done what he set out to do – somehow, and I wasn’t sure how right then, he had saved her. And boy was she pissed off about it.

  I staggered to my feet, unsure what I was going to say, what I could say that would make any difference. How far would you go? How far would I go for her? Not as far as him, it had always been that way. That’s why she loved him, not me. Or one of the reasons anyway. But now I thought on what he had said about sacrifice, that it was supposed to hurt or what was the point? The Downside Goddess was big on sacrifice, on fighting the inevitable. If she existed, then Pasha should be getting a damned great reward right about now. But who had his sacrifice hurt more? Because Jake wasn’t crying, but there was something fragile just under her surface, obvious in the way she moved, as though she was suddenly made of glass. Like she would shatter if I said the wrong word.

  I chickened out, afraid to break her even worse than she already was. My only consolation in all this was that I’d managed to get her a few weeks of happy with Pasha. Not much, but some. And yet maybe that was worse, because now she knew what she’d lost.

  So like the coward I was, am, I said nothing and she drifted past me, pale and ghostly, empty of anything. I don’t think she even saw me, left us all behind in silence as she went to the machine room. She stayed there a long while.

  Perak broke the silence in the end, first with a murmured prayer, and then pulling himself together and speaking out loud. “He bought us some time. He got Jake enough space, enough chaos to get out, and us some time. He did that, at least.”

  “Time for what though? Arranging our funerals?” I tried not to let the bile out, but it was there and it dripped through every word. The stupidity of it, the sheer waste. Why, Pasha? We could have done something, could have got Jake out some other way that didn’t involve you dying, so why?

  Goddess only knows what Perak was about to say, because Dendal had an attack of lucidity and his voice was unusually sharp. “To do what we have to, Rojan. What you have to. And if you don’t, I will.”

  I stared at him, alarmed by the sudden strength of his voice. I half suspected he was going to go on about Godd
ess-given work, or what she expected of me, so I tried my best to deflect him because that always made me want to blast steam out of my ears.

  “What happened, then? When Pasha… when he used the machine…”

  “It worked. Partially,” Perak said. “Took out a small area of their men, helped us keep the gates because it scared the rest stupid. Helped Jake get away because the small group was the one holding her, and that’s all he wanted, I think. But they won’t stay scared, especially if they find out we aren’t using it again. And we are not using it again.”

  He said it very matter-of-factly, and his eyes were steady on mine. “Are we clear on that?”

  Like I was ever likely to go near the damned thing ever again. I didn’t even want to look at it, and I valued my own arse too much to contemplate using it now. “We’re clear.” And then, because thoughts were swirling around my head that I didn’t want to think, “And where are we? The Storad outside the gates?”

  “Still there,” Malaki said. “They got spooked for a bit, but they won’t be long. Not long.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Perak sighed and the captain shook his head. “Whatever we can.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Perak and Malaki went over what they knew, numbers of men, of guns, where they were, where the Storad had dug in, all the thousand and one details that someone needed to look over and I was glad it wasn’t me. Between the guards and recruits and Pasha, we’d held them off. For now.

  Allit stirred in the corner of the office as far from Pasha’s desk as he could get, twisting his fingers. The pop as one dislocated seemed very loud, but what really got my attention was the look on his face as he saw whatever it was that he saw. Future, past, present? Concrete or shifting? We didn’t know for sure, but still, something was better than nothing.