I was cold and sweating by the time I reached the pain lab. It seemed the best place for the job. Familiar, lonely, with no one to disturb me. I’d forgotten about Ferret-face. He tried to talk to me, tell me something about the apparatus in the pain lab but I didn’t really hear him. There had to be something here. Something I’d missed earlier.
Instead of listening to Ferrety, I wandered around Dwarf’s desk, and Lise’s. So odd to think of him not there any more. Just another cold body on a slab. I cast an eye over the odds and sods on his desk but it made as much sense to me as prayers and temples. That is, not a fuck of a lot. Cogs and wires and springs. His favourite pair of needle-nosed pliers that had always looked so doll-like in the big sausage fingers that were deceptively delicate. Despite Lise’s desk facing his, he had a picture of her on his desk, nicely done in oils. She grinned up at me and I thought that I’d only ever seen her happy when discussing alchemy and electrics with Dwarf.
Her desk wasn’t much different. More wires, fewer cogs. A slew of diagrams that looked like a bad case of noodles. Pictures on her desk, too–one of Perak with his daughter looking like a fairy princess. One of Dwarf that took pride of place, and I began to wonder how far their friendship and intellectual camaraderie had gone. How much she wasn’t really mine, how nothing, no one, was, the black was right about that. How devastated she’d be when I had to tell her he was dead.
A picture of me too with my old face on, looking much younger, before me and Perak had fallen out all those years ago perhaps. I wondered where she’d got it, even as I thought that no one had ever kept a picture of me on their desk before. Why would they? The old Rojan was a bastard. Well, so was the new one, but in different ways, and now I was a Rojan with family, with people I cared about. I’d kept people away before, because I was afraid. Now I’d let them in, all of them, Dwarf and Lise and Perak, Pasha and Jake and Erlat, and the fear almost paralysed me, made me wonder why I’d done it. So you can be a part of this city, part of the people who live here. So you can be a person, not an automaton. So you can serve the Goddess. Dendal’s voice in my memory, from a time just after I’d destroyed the Glow and guilt was weighing me down like a stone. But it was hard, and I was afraid for all of them so that my hands shook. So that the black looked ever more tempting. No fear here, Rojan. Come on, fall in. No fear, just sweet bliss…
I stared at those pictures for a long time, working up the courage. I had to do this, find out where Abeya was, who was working her like a puppet, so we could get back to pumping out magic before she killed all the mages. I had to be strong, for everyone. I didn’t feel strong enough even for me.
Ferret-face made a strangled noise behind me as I made a fist, overstretched my poor fucked hand and something snapped in there. More pain than I’d expected, more juice. Too much for my ragged, overworked brain to handle. I had a brief glimpse of Abeya, somewhere where there was sun. Her face shining in light as she talked to someone I didn’t know, deathly pale skin and hair so dark it was like it shut off the sun. Then the black swamped me, laughing as it took me, as it soothed away all my fears and thoughts and left me only with cool comfort and my own blinding light. No fear, no responsibility, no ever-present horror of fucking things up worse than I already had.
The voice penetrated after who knew how long. Insistent, inside my head. Rojan, come on, get the fuck out of there. Soft, but sounding harsh as a gunshot in my black. I willed it to go away, to leave me alone, but it kept on. Come on, you aren’t too far in, you can get out if you try now. Trouble was, I didn’t want to. I only recognised Pasha’s voice when he said the one thing that might have brought me out. Jake’s here, waiting for you. We’re all waiting for you. Don’t fall in, don’t be that person. Don’t leave.
Oh, he knew how to get to me all right, the little shit. I opened my eyes on a groan of pain from my hand that seemed to throb all through me. I was lying on my side on a bench in the lab. I’d been sick on the floor and my head ached something fierce. Didn’t matter, though, because I opened my eyes to her, to Jake watching me with eyes blue like the sky. A consolation, but not much. Enough to stop me falling backwards into the black again as my hand throbbed and almost had me screaming when I moved.
Pasha moved up behind her, and the consolation faded except that he looked as worried as her. “Goddess, you almost gave me a stroke. If we hadn’t turned up when we did–what did you think you were doing?”
Despite the lecture, he helped me to sit up. The room swirled nauseatingly. It hadn’t been like before, when I’d gone right into the black. Before it had been a bright and glorious light inside, velvet blackness around me, power running through me and lightning for bones. This time it had been relief, pure and simple, and taking that away made me want to be sick all over again.
I tried to speak, to explain, but nothing came out. A hand on mine, comforting. Jake. “Didn’t you see while you were in there?” she asked Pasha.
He gave me a dirty look at the way she held my hand and said, “I don’t like to look too hard in his head. Never know what I’ll find.”
“Try living in it,” I said. “It’s not pretty.” I tried to snap it out but I couldn’t seem to get any force in the words. “I was trying to find who attacked you. And attacked me, too.”
That sobered him. “They got you, too? How—”
“Because I should have stayed sworn off women. Because I’m a dick, or at least I think with it. Abeya. It was Abeya. I managed to get away, but then so did she.”
“You have got to be—” Pasha sat down hard on the bench next to me, frowning as Jake squeezed my hand and let go. I resisted the urge to grab it back. Barely. “Why?”
I shut my eyes and tried to ignore the way whatever I’d snapped in my hand grated when I moved. Tried to ignore the juice thrilling through me, waiting to be used, wanting it.
“She’s branded, like you. Same brand even. She found out we were mages and, well, there you are. I’m surprised no one else has tried it, if you think about it. All that time in the ’Pit, all that torture from the mages. Surprised all the Little Whores haven’t ganged up on us and killed us all long before now. I think maybe Guinto added to it, all his talk of mages being unholy. Maybe he even put her up to it. He’s a Ministry man, so he’s guilty of something. Someone certainly is.”
Pasha shot off the bench so hard that I opened my eyes again to see mousy little Pasha in mid-lion-roar. “So, he’s a Ministry man. He’s a good man, too! A good priest. Sometimes good men do bad things, and bad men do good. Don’t you ever look at someone and not think what they’re guilty of?”
“Not often, no. And I’m mostly right. Fuck’s sake Pasha, you’re defending a Ministry man, after all they did to you? All those scars they gave you and those mages were supposed to be pious men, too. After all the shit the priests have given you, Upsiders have, even Guinto has, because you’re a mage, and you’re defending him?”
I’d pissed him off bad by now, but I couldn’t seem to help the words as they fell out of my mouth.
His eyes were dark with anger as he leant in and jabbed at me in time with his words. “Your trouble is you don’t believe in anything except saving your own skin.”
All my stupid rage drained away as I looked at him. He wanted so much to be the good guy, and he was, without knowing it. Better than I’ll ever be, and still he thought it wasn’t enough.
“And your trouble,” I said softly, and, yes, I was acutely aware of the irony, “is that you only believe in other things, not yourself. You let Guinto persuade you that’s as it should be. I don’t need to read your mind to know you’re thinking of doing what he said, stopping the magic, stopping being you so you can be some… some fakery of what they want you to be. He’s given you some false promise of how it’ll make everything better, for you and Jake, for your soul, for having your parents acknowledge you, for everyone. Well, it won’t, and you’ll still be a mage. All the prayer and belief in the world won’t stop that.”
For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me. I almost hoped he would, that he would be as much of a bastard as me so I wouldn’t have to think of him as the good guy any more. Instead he stood back, wiped a hand across his mouth as though my words tasted bad to him and turned on his heel. He stopped at the doorway, and turned to leave his parting shot. “I almost wish I’d let the black take you properly, let you drown in it. I almost wish I couldn’t have brought you back, though you weren’t far in. But we’re even now. You saved me from it, and now I’ve saved you. I don’t owe you anything, not any more.”
The door shut quietly behind him and I let my head fall into my good hand. Oh, Rojan, so very good at pissing people off, even people you like, people you want to stick around. Kiss of Death. Obviously that extended to friendships as well as more romantic liaisons.
“Rojan.” Oddly, I’d all but forgotten Jake. When I looked up, she was frowning at me but there was no anger there, at least not for me–there was a whole world of anger for other things, but not for me. No, I got a pity I couldn’t stand. “Guinto’s a good man, he is.”
“So why’s he tormenting Pasha like this? Why’s he covering for a girl he knows is murdering people?”
“Why did you do that, risk falling into the black? Why push so hard?”
“Because… because I have to, because otherwise I’ll hate myself even more than I already do. Because it’s right, and I’m fed up with always being wrong.”
“Did you ever think that’s why Guinto is doing it? Why Pasha listens? Because he thinks it’s right? You can’t save everyone, Rojan. I know you think you should, but you can’t. And you can’t save Pasha from the Goddess, from what he needs, if he doesn’t want to be saved. Or me. But you can do this. I know you can. Just don’t lose yourself in the process.”
I stared at her in horror, that she’d seen through me so easily, seen past all my act as she had once before. She believed in me, and that was the worst part. She believed in me and that gave me no choice.