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Last to Rise(82)

By:Francis Knight




A Storad turned his flamer my way, snow hissing and popping from the heat, and I only just got away in time – half my jacket went up in flames and I had to roll to put the fire out before I started burning too. Rolling in a mixture of snow and shit isn’t pleasant, you can trust me on this, but at least I wasn’t burning any more.



Halina acquitted herself far better than I did – she didn’t seem to give a steaming pile of what she’d just dumped on the Storad who knew she was a mage. Her wild laugh punctuated the gloom like lightning as she used her magic to pick up Storad and bash them into other Storad, to lob the now-empty barrels down an alley to bowl over men and just generally cause mayhem. She hovered above us, just out of range of the flamers and hard to see in the swirl of snow, and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. I wished I was.



Gunshots went off all around, the flash of the muzzles searingly bright in the darkness, the sound of the shots deafening, echoing round and round the square, over and through each other till I thought I’d happily go deaf. Other noises – thuds, screams, gurgles. Men and women with no guns doing what they could with what they had. I can clearly recall a man whose ancestors must have been butchers, back when we had animals to slaughter, because he was brandishing two old and rusted meat cleavers like he was Namrat and they were his teeth. Others used kitchen knives or rough clubs made out of whatever they’d had to hand. Swear to the Goddess, I saw a man take out two Storad from behind with a chair leg. It snapped across the back of the head of the first, and then the man used the jagged end to stab the next in the side of the neck.



No one gave a shit who was Downsider and who was Upsider: it was us, Mahalians, against Storad and that was all that mattered. I like to think maybe, after all this, they’ll remember that: that when it came to it, when they had to, they fought together and battered the crap out of a common enemy. I don’t hold out much hope, but I have some.



But my clearest memory – I hesitate to think on it even now. My clearest memory is when I knowingly killed a man for the first time. I’d let off wild shots before, down at the gates, but apart from one lucky shot to the shoulder, had never known whether they’d hit. I’d once left a man – my father – knowing that if I did he’d die. But never like this. I’d never knowingly shoved a gun in a guy’s face and pulled the trigger. How far would you go?



He came at me with a flamer and I had nowhere left to turn, nowhere left to run, stuck in a corner between the bar and a neighbouring shop. Even with the heat of the flames singeing my eyebrows I hesitated, but instinct, craven self-preservation took over. I raised the gun, shut my eyes and shot him. A messy wound in the side of his head when I opened my eyes again, surprised I was still in one piece. It didn’t kill him straight away, oh no. He had time to stare at me with an almost comical look of surprise before he slid to the ground and bled his life out into the snow and shit. And all I could think was, Why does death have to be so stupid?



I didn’t think it for long, because there was always another Storad with a gun or a flamer, so I fumbled another bullet into the gun and on we went. The battle – if you could call it that, it was more a protracted brawl with added guns – seemed to last a lifetime, but I don’t suppose it was more than fifteen minutes before the square was quiet. Or quieter at least – plenty of moans from the wounded, the occasional scream as someone set a bone or finished somebody off. Bodies all over, slumped and humped shapes on the ground, snow falling again now to cover them over decently, like shrouds. Mostly Storad bodies, but a fair few of ours. I couldn’t seem to think, except, They all rise. For good or ill, we were rising. All I could do was stare through the whispering snow.



I was still staring when a man ran into the square. He almost got a face full of bullets, but he stopped with his hands up and a startled look and I recognised the Specials uniform. So did everyone else, and the sound of multiple guns being cocked echoed around us.



“Wait!” the Special said, and they did, thankfully. “On the Spine. They’re… too many of them. We’re getting massacred. The Archdeacon ordered me to come and find you. Please.”



Funny, how human he looked. Specials had always seemed so, well, untouchable, imperturbable, like nothing could shake them if they didn’t want to be shaken. That was part of why they scared the crap out of everyone – they, and the fear they inspired, were the rock we were built on. But this one, the tone of pleading in his voice, the sweat and blood drying in his hair, the wild stare of his eyes – he was a man first. The rest saw it too. They didn’t see the uniform, or at least didn’t let it blind them to the fact that the man wearing it was desperate. Or most of them didn’t.