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.”