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.