I had to pause in my answer because more blood came up. If this carried on, I wasn’t going to have any blood left, but even that didn’t matter much.
“You’ve got a daughter, and she’s already without a mother. Even I wouldn’t make her an orphan if I could avoid it.” Little Amarie, whose kidnap had started this whole sorry mess. A niece I’d never met, who laid flowers at the feet of the saints and martyrs for me, who prayed for me. “Besides, it’s not just Top of the World, is it? Machines, down there. More Storad. On way. Just taking out Top of World not going to cut it. Open door. Big brother will sort it.”
Perak’s gaze went to the windows, to the ominous orange flicker that said everything that needed to be said. Storad in Top of the World, more at the gates, more in the tunnels too, probably, mining, cracking. We had men, we had everyone now, fighting for us. But against those machines, with Storad in place up high, perfectly placed to rain down death on anyone and everything…
This was a chance. A chance to put everything right, make a fresh start, do it properly this time. It was the only chance we had and he knew it.
Perak went and opened the door.
I shuffled over, not wanting to look inside, at the machine that I’d last seen with Pasha’s body on it. I didn’t want to die. I still don’t. I had no choice, not really, not if I didn’t want to drink myself to death over what-ifs. I wished I’d taken the time to ask Lise if she’d fixed the machine.
Erlat helped me, and I leaned on her. Funny, I’d always admired Jake because she fought back against all that happened to her, fought with everything she had until this last, when it had become too much. She’d refused to stay broken. But up there, in Top of the World, when I’d seen the world clearly, like glass, I’d realised.
I admired her, thought I loved her, because I’d thought she was strong. Then I’d seen, at Erlat’s, that perhaps I thought I loved her because she was safe, because Pasha was always there so I wouldn’t have to try, and get it wrong in my usual style. Now there was no Pasha, the illusion crumbled.
When I fall for a woman, I always fall hard. But this time, I hadn’t realised I’d fallen. Not until now, when there was piss all I could do about it. At least that meant I wouldn’t do my usual sort of screw-it-up. No, I was going to do a different sort of screw-it-up.
“Rojan, are you sure?” Her voice. Erlat’s, soft and smoky, no teasing now but still pushing the black away for me, letting my mind back.
I fell into the chair attached to the demented machine that was going to save everyone. Had to keep my breath for the words that mattered, so I only nodded.
Funny how she always knew the right things to say and do. She held my hand, and I gripped it tight enough I probably almost broke her fingers. She didn’t flinch. Strong inside and out. I hoped so, because she was going to have to be. Strong enough for us both.
Enough breath for a few words. Not many. “Perak, first Top of World. Next lot, gates. You’ll have to sort the tunnels, I’m not sure I can manage that too.”
“Twice? You want to use this twice?”
Again, only a nod. Last few words. Make them count. “Erlat.” She looked at me, her face dim in the faint light, but I saw. She’d tried to hide behind teasing, behind making me blush, and I’d hidden behind Jake, behind thinking I loved her. Out of fear. But right then there was no hiding. There was no fear, or not of that at least. I was out in the open, not even any scathing words to hide behind. It was just me, and her. Use the right words. Don’t screw it up. “You ruined me for other women.”
Just for once, because the world is a contrary and fucked-up place, the words were the right ones. But her sudden, radiant smile was twisted, and when she kissed me – Always save the best till last. And it was, my last kiss, my best kiss even if I was covered in blood and had no breath left. It was the kiss that meant the most, out of all the kisses, and there have been a multitude. But none like that, never like that, because I meant that one with everything I had. Finally, when it was too late, I’d figured it out. Typical.
“Come back,” she said at last, one hand smoothing my hair back from my sweating forehead. I lied even without breath when I nodded. She knew it too, I was pretty sure, because with a last look she turned and ran. Not fast enough that I didn’t see the tears, and they pained me more than anything, more than my stupid buggered hand, more than that machine was going to.
So, at the last of it, it was Perak and me. Brothers to the end. He’d dropped me in it, again, but that was all right. I’d done plenty of dropping myself. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that responsibility is something you have whether you like it or not. There’s no running, only movement that makes you think you’re escaping. And when you’ve fucked up, you have to take the consequences.
Perak held the syringe in shaking hands. “I can’t.”
“Have to.” And then, because he was my little brother and I loved him, “It’s all right. It’ll be all right. I’ll take care of it, I promise. Just a quick trip into the black then back again, right as rain.”
Those were almost the last words I spoke. There was nothing else to say and once he’d slid the needle under the skin, once the juice stated flowing through me like electricity, words didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but this.
The juice came, of course it did, thundering up my arm, the greatest thing in the world, the most dangerous because I wanted it so much. But it kept coming, the jab doing its work too well, kept coming and coming and I could feel every waft of air on my face as pain, every twitch of every nerve as a searing agony.
Perak plugged me into the machine, surrounded me with wires and blinking lights and whirring noise, and I trusted to him and to my sister, relied on them in fact. Felt the machine take me and twist me, spin out my juice, make it more, make it swell till it filled everything.
I panicked then, thinking I knew why Pasha had died, that he couldn’t control it, it was too much, too much for any one man. There was no terror to match that, not even a drop off the edge of the world could compare, a streaming, aching terror knowing that it could only get worse, more, as the green stuff in the syringe took hold. Lise’s little concoction to amplify pain. It would get worse, and the pain would explode and I would be gone… I had to master it or I was dead, like Pasha. Nothing much left to mourn over, and no one left to mourn anyway, if I got this wrong.
I think I called her name, one last time, said, “Erlat” before I couldn’t talk any more, before my mind forgot what talking was.
Then I was home, hovering on the edge of the black, so big now that it was the world. It was everything. It was nothing.
I was light and dark, and the light was life and the black was death. I knew that, I’d always known it, but… Dendal had said to embrace the black, know that it was part of me. And the light was too bright, too much life; that was where Pasha had gone wrong. I had to embrace the black inside me if this was going to work. I had to conquer it, be the whisper in its ear rather than the other way around.
So I flexed my hand and relished the pain. Stepped into the black, into the pain and craving and glorious nothing of it.
Welcome home, Rojan. I knew you’d come in the end.
And here I am now, lost in that fearless black, maybe for ever. It’s warm in here and I have nothing to fear, no one to rely on me, no worry of making things worse. There is nothing but the pain, and that is far away and dim within my marrow, agony and ecstasy. I watch the brightness of me pierce the gloom of velvet nothing and try to listen for the voices.
Sometimes, when the black fades a little, when I think that maybe, if I tried, I could fight my way out, I hear them. Perak’s strong voice, little brother with his head in the clouds no more. The scritch-scratch of Dendal as he reads some scripture aloud to me in his querulous monk’s voice. I wish he wouldn’t. The other voice, the one I wait for. A face I think I glimpsed once, when the veil was thin, or maybe I only wished it. A pair of soft eyes, an elegant coil of hair at the nape of her neck. I
never know what she says, and maybe that’s a mercy, but the black is always thinner when she’s here, less consuming, less tempting. It’s enough that she comes, perhaps, enough for ever.
But I think there’s someone in here with me. I think you’re here, listening to me. Or maybe I am batshit crazy, finally. I think you’re here, but I can’t tell if you’re real or just my imagination come to play tricks with me. Mostly it doesn’t matter. While you’re here I have someone to tell my tale to, someone to be with me in the loneliness of the black, even if you are an imaginary friend. I wonder if you look like the Upside murals, flowery and soft, or the Downside ones, full of piss and vinegar, all blood and death and sacrificed hand. And sometimes I wonder if this is the heaven you had planned for me, or if you gave me to Namrat and I’m in hell.
If you’re here, you’re probably not real. I’ve never believed in you anyway. But if you are here, if you’re really real, there’s perhaps just one thing I need to say.
I didn’t do this for you. I didn’t do this because you said it was right, or because it was my duty to you or I was doing your work. I did it for me, and Pasha and Erlat and everyone else. Because I said it was right, because, so help me, sometimes a guy’s got to be responsible for his actions, and a sacrifice has to hurt or it means piss all. And sometimes there has to be hope, even if there’s none left for me. I learned that if nothing else. But I didn’t do it for you.
So I’ve only got one thing left to say now. Screw you, lady. Screw you.
Epilogue
“What do you think, Allit?”
I looked up at the new statue in Guinto’s temple and tried to find some tactful way of saying it. Then I remembered who we were talking about, and just said it. “Rojan would hate it.”
Perak laughed, but it had a mournful edge to it. “I know, but it was unanimous. Every council on every level, ratified by the main council. Even what’s left of the Ministry agreed. Probably because Guinto bullied them into it. I think Rojan may enjoy the irony, at least. And the notoriety.”
We both looked at the statue of Rojan, set in place along with the other martyrs, before the aisle led to the statues of saints and on to the mural of the Goddess. The mural was new – neither the Upside sanitised version nor the Downside blood-and-glory version of the Goddess. No longer what Rojan insisted on calling “that stupid fluffy shit”, this was a new Goddess for a new time. I caught myself wondering if that’s what had always happened – men made her in whatever shape they needed her to be in. Rojan would certainly have said so, and would have gone on to say how moronic it was, because that was people all over, too stupid to live. That thought made me laugh, though I kept it muffled for Perak’s sake.
Summer sunlight shafted through the new stained glass of the windows, puddling along the aisle runner, green chasing blue across the altar and a deep red glancing off Rojan’s face, making his statue look embarrassed to be there.
You wouldn’t be embarrassed if you knew what you’d done. No, he’d have been crowing about it, most surely. He still could, perhaps, though I’d long ago given up hope of him ever coming back. Thoughts of Rojan were now in the past tense, and knowing that made me wish that he was here to see the statue, made me wish I could have heard him swear about it and “all that crap people think they need to believe in”. Instead of him and his acerbic mouth, all I had was his old jacket, the one with the burn marks in it, even though it dragged on the floor behind me when I walked. It was almost all I had left of him, except what he taught me, and I treasure it even now.
Dendal often used him as a warning to me and the other young mages, what might happen to them, us, if we gave in to the song that came calling every time we cast a spell. But Dendal couldn’t keep the hint of pride out of his voice, or resist telling us too that if we had to do it, then we should, for the Goddess. We were her blessed children, but blessings are put there for a purpose, or so he said. Rojan would have rolled his eyes at that, but I tried my best not to.
I walked out into the sunlight and smiled up at the sky. Guinto’s temple wasn’t in No-Hope Shitty. Not any more – there was no No-Hope-Shitty. Top of the World had come down in a blaze of magic and blue flame, taken Clouds with it as it tumbled slowly into the Slump. Taken out half the Storad army at a stroke, and Rojan on Lise’s machine had stopped the rest with man-made thunderbolts that stunned them where they stood in the valley. The same thunderbolts that even now still flickered around the gates, letting no one in or out all the while he was still alive, still hooked up.
Rojan let the sun in Under and destroyed the Ministry, as surely as if he’d assassinated the Goddess. Most of the cardinals and bishops had run for it, had begged or bought their way through the Mishan gate when it looked like Mahala would fall. Perak had seemed to take a very great delight in denying them the right to return afterwards – he’d told them to go and spread the word of the Goddess among the Mishans, but the smile he’d said it with spoke of another thought entirely.
Six months on, and Under was getting used to seeing the sun on a daily basis. It was still pretty dim down in Boundary, but the tunnels in the ’Pit were shored up – we’d used a fair bit of the Slump rubble to fill them in, and the engineers that had once worked for Alchemy Research were sure they’d hold. Perak had men taking out strategic buildings, making huge light-wells with hanging gardens all the way down, growing what we could, what little would grow after the synth.
I went to see Rojan once, in the room where Pasha died and Rojan did what he did, where he is still hooked up to Lise’s machine, keeping any foolhardy Storad out until we are strong enough. I could only bear to go the once, because he doesn’t look like him any more. The curl of his lip at everyone and everything is flat now, his face thinner than ever, his body little more than a skeleton despite Erlat and Dendal’s efforts with broth and whatever else they can slide between his lips.
He looks like he’s dead, but he still moves, twitches and trembles like an old man, his broken hand grinding on itself, more pain, always more pain to keep him in the pain-free black. The doctors managed to stem the bleeding, enough to stop him dying, but they say they’ll have to amputate the hand soon. His fingers are little more than purple slugs but still he grinds it out, powers the machine that saved us, that keeps us safe until we’re rebuilt. Rojan’s in there somewhere, in his black, lost and alone and nothing like the man he was, yet somehow more him than ever, as though this is how he was supposed to be. Looking at him like that was warning enough.
That other concoction could have brought him out of the black, we were sure – the liquid that could numb everything. No pain, no magic, no juice, no black. But Rojan had insisted it all be destroyed; the doctor who’d invented it, Whelar himself, had either died somewhere down defending the gates or had scarpered through the Mishan gate and wasn’t coming back. All his research went up in smoke when the Sacred Goddess Hospital burned; Lise’s notes had gone when the pain lab was ransacked in the riots before the siege. If we’d had even a little bit left, she could have resynthesised it… But there was no more, and while Lise had tried, had almost torn her hair from her head in frustration, had even found a mix or two that was good for other things, nothing seemed quite able to bring Rojan back. Or maybe it was truly too late for him. Maybe it had always been too late.
Funny, though, how he had twitched less when Erlat came to see him, how he looked less thin, how his lips had moved and tried to form a word. Erlat has changed too, I think, but it’s hard to tell. The only change she’ll show is when she looks at Rojan, and her face twists, just a little, when he tries to say something, before she smiles a faraway smile. It makes me think, and wonder, and realise that I’ll never know what it was that made him do it. What drove such an apparently selfish man to commit the ultimate sacrifice? Or was all that sneering just an act? I wish I could ask him, but I think I know. I wish he was here, being sarcastic and swearing at everyone and caring underneath just the same, though he’d rather die than admit it. Maybe th
at was why he did it.
In the end, we can only speculate on the why, and many do, endlessly. Priests discuss it in their sermons, men and women talk about him over pints in the pubs, but no one knows for sure. All we know is that he did, and because of it we’re safe.
Dendal says Rojan was doing the Goddess’s work, that this was why he was here, why he’d been sent, why the Goddess had made his life the way it was, but Rojan would have laughed at that, or spat on it. Me, I think he was showing us, the mages he left behind, who need to know. We are magic, we are strong. But if that strength is needed – it’s up to us, whether it destroys us or not, what we do with it. Rojan was strong. Just not quite strong enough to save himself too.
I wonder, sometimes, how so much hate could live in one man and whether that hate was what brought us this – sun Under, Ministry a faint shadow of what it was, now full of good and pious men. People working for themselves, Upsiders and Downsiders not hating each other, even if they don’t love each other. Hope, the greatest thing he brought us, and the one thing he despaired of ever finding.
All the time, we were told to love, that the Goddess loved us and that would be enough, our hope, but us loving her back brought nothing but misery. It was hate, and fighting against what we hated with everything we had, that set us free and gave us a real hope. We were told that it was the great and good that would save us, save our souls and make our lives mean something. Maybe that’s true, like now, when everything is peaceful. Good men can now do good things. But then, to get that peace, what we needed was a really great old-fashioned bastard.
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