“Erlat, enough. I’m going to make everything right, third time pays for all. Get to the lab, wait for me there. I need you to help me.” If I made it, that was, but there was no point saying that part. “Please.”
She stood up, dusting her hands down her dress, adjusting where she’d hitched it up to make it easier to move, over the makeshift holders for the two guns she had.
“If this is one of your damnfool ways of trying to protect little old me —”
“It isn’t, I promise you that. I need you there to help me, because I can’t do it on my own. I think I know what I’ve got to do, but I need to see Perak and Jake safe first.”
She looked at me awhile, speculating, but there wasn’t time for more arguing and she knew it. “Fine,” she said, and whirled off in a perfect display of high dudgeon.
Quillan soon had the mob moving out and down. The gangs moved with an easy grace, loping down into Heights and taking to the walkways, swinging from one to the other as easily as I might walk one. Easier, because they didn’t seem to have any terror of heights. I did, and mine was telling me to not do what I was about to do, no, really, don’t.
Quillan frowned my way. “So what is it you’re going to do?”
I tried a smile but I got the feeling it came out pretty mangled, because Quillan flinched and took a step back.
Yagin turned up his own grin – I think he’d seen something in me he recognised. “He’s going to go and put the screws on someone.”
“Hopefully.”
That seemed to satisfy him and he followed his men down, flipping on to a walkway with a cheery wave of a knife. Quillan lingered but there didn’t seem much I could say. In the end, he put a protective arm around Cabe and said, “You looked after my boy, and I’m grateful for that. And you don’t act Ministry.”
“If I have my way, no one is going to act Ministry after this. If.”
He grunted at that, and left finally with a thoughtful frown.
At last it was just Dendal and me – he’d sent Allit and Lise and the magelets back down with the rest. Someone was going to regret the invention of that weapon, of that I could be quite sure.
“I know what you need to do, and I know you can do it,” Dendal said. “I’ve always known that’s what the Goddess sent you to me for.”
“Enough of the Goddess crap, all right? I’ve got enough to be going on with without her sticking her fucking nose in.”
His glance was reproachful and made him look more monk-like than ever. It struck me that maybe he really was some kind of monk – he’d devoted his whole life to doing what he saw as her work. Sadly, that involved me.
“Don’t say fuck,” he said. “It isn’t nice. And it doesn’t matter if you believe in her, it matters if she believes in you.”
“Oh, fabulous, buggered whichever way, gee, thanks. Look, can we get on? Only Perak’s about to be overrun and there’s these big nasty machines Outside on their way to take pot-shots at him, not to mention us, and the Slump’s on the slide, hell, maybe the whole city might be about to fall down around our ears if they manage to crack another tunnel. If nothing else, I’d quite like to have a living brother at the end of this, if it’s all the same to you.”
It’s really annoying when you vent your spleen like that and the person being vented at just pats your hand like you’re two and having a tantrum, but what could I say? I had to do it. When push comes to shove, sometimes it’s best to get a proper run up and say, Sod push, let’s fling that shit as hard as we can.
I settled down, not trusting my legs due to them having a tendency to give way at the important moment of a spell. I wanted to hope there wasn’t going to be any of my blood this time, but let’s face it, hope is for idiots and loonies.
Once I called it, clenched my hand and felt the bones grate, felt the pain run up my arm, warm and red and oh so familiar, the juice came in less than half a heartbeat. The black laughed and clapped its hands. I knew you’d come to me in the end. You promised.
I had, and I would, but I had to hold off long enough to do this first.
Deal?
Deal.
The pain built, took over every thought, a thread of red in the black across my vision. Concentrate. Perak and Jake. Could find them both with my eyes closed and half a brain, usually. Hard now though. Very hard, because black was everywhere but I pushed and it came, the knowledge of exactly where they were. Five hundred yards up, forty yards to the east. Push, harder, because Jake’s got her back to a wall and four Storad in front of her and Perak’s trying to help but looks like he’s more frightened of the gun in his hand than he is of the Storad. Push, harder, harder, forget about no sleep and no food and being screwed, and that something just broke in the front of my head somewhere with a pop. Maybe my brain exploded – certainly felt like it, but no great loss to the community. Forget the warmth of blood flooding down my face, from eyes and nose, frothing in my mouth with a bitter tang.