Last to Rise(64)

One Storad reacted quicker than the others to this wild-eyed apparition coming for them, and turned his flamer towards the threat. I shot him, managed to hit him too, high up in the shoulder so he half span and his flame scorched the guy next to him. But I couldn’t reload on the run, especially with only one hand that worked properly, and there were too many Storad. Pasha seemed to realise where he was then, what he was running into. A gunman aimed at Pasha’s head, then inexplicably turned the gun on himself and blew his brains out. “How far would you go?” Pasha had asked me once, and I saw it again now, just how far he would. Further than he’d be able to handle, once the lion wore off.



Pasha wasn’t the sort of guy who could rationalise it, tell himself he had to, that these men would have killed him given half the chance. Me, I’d shrug it off most likely, at least on the outside. My conscience does what I tell it to, or at least I like to think so, and I was telling it that these bastards deserved everything they got. But Pasha – it would break him; but he didn’t care about it right then. He wasn’t thinking about tomorrow when this would haunt him, when he’d remember what they were thinking as he killed them, see their wives and children in their heads as they died. It would break him, but he didn’t care so it looked like I was going to have to.



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.





Chapter Seventeen





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.”