Fade to Black (13 page)

Pasha shrugged. “Oh, I’ve another place to stay. I’ll get Dog to show you the way; he lives near by. I’ll come find you when we’re ready.”

When Pasha turned up to fetch me, I was sitting bleary-eyed on top of the bedcovers. I hadn’t bothered to undress or get under the damp blanket because I knew I wouldn’t sleep much, no matter that I was knackered. Too many thoughts running round my head for that, though I’d managed a doze. Even that hadn’t been much help because I kept seeing lost girls, teeming crowds of them, ghost-like and pleading, and every one had Amarie’s face. I’d spent the night looking at the walls, at the pictures of different brands that Pasha had pinned there. Part of his job, no doubt, to know which brand meant ownership by which person, but it made my stomach twist and my heart burn. I suspected not all the girls in the pictures had been alive when they were made.

So I was pretty glad to be out of that room with its ghosts staring down at me. Pasha gave me a penetrating look, not
unsympathetic, but said nothing and led me back to the bar. It was empty, either too late at night or too early in the morning. I couldn’t tell – to my eyes morning and evening all looked the same here, and I didn’t know how long Pasha had left me asleep. The girl who’d served us before kept a wide berth and wouldn’t look at Pasha. A young boy brought us more food and Pasha picked at his. I didn’t feel so much like eating myself.

He broke the silence first. “I think I may have found the men you’re looking for.” At last, the first bit of good news. “I’ve talked Jake into helping you too. You’re going to need it. These guys you’re looking for work for Azama, Tam was right about that. And she wants to catch him, wants to catch him something fierce.”

“What’s so special about him?”

He might have told me, but Jake came in and he clammed up again.

“You want to help, Mr Dizon?” She slid along the bench next to Pasha, her face hard and bright with savage hope. “Now’s your chance.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

She let me eat first. I restrained myself from shoving it all in in one giant, bloody, gloriously meaty lump only with a great deal of effort. Instead I chewed through another steak that made my mouth think it had died and gone to heaven. Jake disappeared about halfway through, following Dog out
into the dark street. Pasha stayed and watched me eat. The instant I was done, he stood and made to leave. I wiped hastily at my mouth, licked up a stray bit of gravy and followed.

“Where are we going?” I flipped up the collar of my coat, but it didn’t do anything to stop the rain from dribbling down my neck and back.

Pasha shrugged on a high-collared coat of his own and slid on a floppy hat that would have made his monkey features comical if it weren’t for the set, savage look he had. “To find some girls. The mages move them about, so it’s not always easy to find them. Usually they’re kept locked up tight, but maybe they’re moving them somewhere, or resting them. Or maybe they’ve only just got them, haven’t had a chance to spirit them away yet. Won’t know until we get there, but when they do this, it’s the only chance we have to get them out.”

We slipped through dark streets, the lights dimmed now for the ’Pit’s version of night-time. Chains rattled and clanked overhead, cages whizzed by, sometimes too close for comfort so I ducked instinctively. Lamp-lit rain fell, soft, insistent and with a faint hint of synth, beautiful and deadly. Music no longer blared but murmured. The bright shops were shuttered and the crowds had thinned, but new crowds were already coming out to replace them. Night people, same as you got Upside, a city’s underclass, even lower on the scale than someone like me. People to clean the streets, hawk forbidden wares, rob the unsuspecting. I could see some of them eyeing me up
as a potential target, but then they’d catch sight of Pasha’s face and slide back into the dark alleys to lurk and wait for someone else. I made sure to keep close to Pasha.

The ancient towering roots of Mahala surrounded us and pulled us in. Maybe it was a vain hope that they wouldn’t spit me back out. Pasha led me away from the busier district of shops and arcades, out into a wilderness of dark stone buildings with darker synth gouge-lines swirling across their façades, split by midnight alleys where what I hoped were only rats scurried among the rubbish. The Seal was lost in darkness above us. The streets emptied and a pang of trepidation struck my gut. If Pasha wanted rid of me, here would be the perfect place. My hand never left the butt of the pulse pistol.

We rounded a corner and Pasha stopped, abruptly enough that I ran into him. He held a finger to his lips for quiet and crept on. The building ahead looked like all the rest. Synth had left its mark in line and crease and wrinkle. Chunks of brick and concrete had fallen from the walls and sat in little heaps of sodden dust. The doorway was a black mouth in a decayed face. Windows that had once seen the sun looked out blindly into perpetual night with only the fitful gleam of lamps two streets away to give me light enough to see. A shadow moved in the doorway and my grip on the pistol tightened. Pasha tensed and melted into a shaded recess so well that, if I hadn’t known he was there, I wouldn’t have seen him. I tried to do the same, with less
success. A cage clanked overhead and I bit my lip to hold in a startled yelp.

The shadow in the doorway resolved into a muscle-bound man with a good-natured and what women would call an interesting face. Craggy where it should be smooth, a nose that had been broken one too many times, a silvery knife scar that ran down one cheek, and a snarling wariness behind his eyes when he saw me. A sword hung at his waist and I couldn’t help but see the blood dripping from it.

“You’re late, Pasha: we’re pretty much done bar the cleanup. Who’s the ponce?”

Pasha stepped out of his hiding place. “No one special. Find anything?”

Craggy Man grinned and it reminded me of Griswald the stuffed tiger, all teeth and menace. “Got a couple of the bastards’ goons, and some girls. Got them before they took the girls too far. Some of them, anyway. Some of them… well, you know.” His mouth twisted bitterly.

Another cage rattled and Craggy Man waved an arm over his head. The cage lowered to the ground near the end of the street and Craggy left for it with a grim nod.

A quick glance told me this wasn’t an ordinary cage. It was larger, and two women operated it rather than the usual men or boys. Another three women came out as it dropped to the ground, and a couple of men.

Pasha took my arm and led me into the building. I stopped at the doorway, pulling him up short. There were five men
lying on the floor, bleeding from deep slashes. They moaned in pain, and one of them writhed as though a snake was winding its way through his gut.

Pasha called after Craggy. “The hole?”

Craggy nodded to the man writhing on the floor. I caught a glimpse of the inside of his belly and looked away. “He’ll show you. Most of the girls are through there.” He pointed to a dark doorway on the other side of the room. “They’ll have to come out through here, there’s no other way. But if they have to come out this way, make sure they see this lot.”

Pasha gave a short little nod, and the man-square left.

“What the…” I couldn’t say anything else. Men were bleeding from everywhere in front of me, a sight I’d never had to deal with before, not on this scale. Deep slashes to their muscles that exposed the occasional wet glint of bone or coiled rope of guts. I thought of the sword the big man had held, which dripped with blood, and I couldn’t repress a shudder.

“Just goons,” Pasha said when he caught sight of my face, misreading me it seemed. “Not mages. We aren’t giving them any power.”

That wasn’t what had me open-mouthed in horror.

The two men from the cage came in and with a short greeting to Pasha they set about handcuffing the men on the floor. They offered nothing in the way of resistance but one man quietly begged and another prayed under his breath. Their words were ignored as the two men wrenched arms up behind backs, further than they had any right to go, adding a few thin
screams to the noise. Their pain set my fingers tingling and I fisted my hands to try to stop it, try not to store any magic. Not from this.

I looked at Pasha and the weak, scared look was gone. He looked like a different man as he strode over and grabbed at the hair of the writher. The man screamed piteously, but Pasha looked at him as though he’d kill him on the spot for a lousy copper. I tried to speak but my mouth was as dry as ancient hills.

“Where is it?” Pasha said, his voice flat and hard.”

I don’t—” the man began, but Pasha shook him by the hair, and a stream of hot blood splashed from his gut on to the floor. “Under the rug, behind me. Under the rug!”

“Tell them to start getting the girls out,” Pasha said to one of the two men as he strode for the rug.

“What are you doing?” I found my voice at last. “This is torture. You’re no better than they are, no better than the Ministry. At least Ministry just kill people, they don’t see them in agony first.”

Pasha stopped at my voice, and the gun was pointing at my face again. There was no quivering this time. “You think? Come and take a look.”

I hesitated; I wanted nothing to do with this. Even if the mages were kidnapping girls, for whatever reason, I wasn’t sure they deserved this. Prison, yes; long slow torture, no.

“Come
on
.” He was glaring at me, his eyes hot and frantic with some emotion I could only guess at. One of the men to my side drew a gun from inside his jacket.

“Just say the word, Pasha. You can’t trust an Upsider; they’re the ones that keep the trade alive. Without them we wouldn’t be doing this. He don’t care about them, or us.”

Pasha shook his head, bent down and rolled the rug back, revealing a thick, bolted door set into the floor. He kicked at the bolts till they came loose and his eyes never left mine. He was trying to tell me something, trying to will it into me through his burning eyes, and I couldn’t for the life of me have said what it was. I only knew that his transformation from wizened, comical monkey to avenging angel was scaring me badly. He heaved the door open and a waft of fetid air rushed out, making him gag a little as he let the door clang open.

“This is the hole, where they put them when they’re done, when they’ve used them up,” he said, gesturing into the dark with his gun. “The girls here are ones they’ve finished with, mostly, which is why they’re easy to find, because they don’t care about them any more. A body can only take so much, then they hand them to the goons to take their pleasure in what’s left. Look in.”

I felt the prod of a gun barrel at my side. I had no choice, but I didn’t want to look down there. I didn’t want to see what had made this mouse of a man so ferocious, or why others thought torturing the people who owned it was of no consequence.

A collection of tiny gasps sounded to one side of me. The women from the cage had come in and gone through the
doorway at the back of the room unnoticed by me. I turned my head that way now, and there they were, ushering twelve or fifteen girls through towards the cage. They were dressed in all manner of clothes, from rags for the smallest to silk and satin for the older. Every one of them had a cringe in her eye that rose to panic when she saw us. A brand on each wrist. I could see whip-marks across the shoulders of some, fresh bruises to faces and old wounds that had burned their mark into the skin, while others were seemingly untouched, but just as dead around the eyes. I searched their faces for Amarie, but she wasn’t there. The women held tight on to them and ushered them forwards with soothing words.

There was one little girl at the front, no older than eight or nine. Her eyes were far too large in her face as she tried not to look at me. Scars ran down both arms, winding down around the brands, seeming almost alive, with the pink raised skin, the blood-red scabs of fresher wounds and the silvery marks of old ones. The fear in her eyes shamed me somehow, and then she stole a glance at the hole. When she saw it was open, her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted. One of the women picked her up gently and carried on shooing the girls ahead, helped now by one of the older girls, who still couldn’t have been more than twelve.

Pasha waited till they’d gone and then handed me a lamp. “Look,” he said, and there was such a dead, defeated quality to his voice I could do nothing other than obey. Flesh thunked and thudded as the two men began hauling out the
injured goons, making sure they hit the doorjamb on the way out.

I swallowed hard. I had a sudden knowledge of what I was going to see when I managed to aim the lamp into the dark mouth of the hole. The stench warned me, and I tried not to breathe as I looked down.

There was a drop of about two yards or so, and then it was just a pile of bodies. A tangle of stick-thin arms, purple-bruised legs, nests of dark hair. I couldn’t seem to take it in, the smallness, frailness, the vulnerability of them, the realisation any one of these could have been Amarie, and even if they weren’t… My thoughts became incoherent and I struggled to control myself, only to think how
satisfying
it would be to deliver a good hard kick that might finish off the last of the men that still lay on the floor behind me. I looked back down into the hole and wondered how deep it went, how deep the bodies went. Then one of the bodies moved.

“Pasha! One’s still alive.”

He stood next to me, and I knew what it was he’d been trying to tell me. That he would do anything, anything at all to stop this happening again. He looked down with me and caught the movement. Almost before I realised he’d moved, he was clambering down, finding some handholds in the wall to lower himself gently in amongst the bodies. One of them flinched and began to try piteously to crawl away from him. I heard him murmur something, and a hand flapped briefly, accompanied by a strangled moan of fear.
Then he had his arms round her and reached up for me to try to grab him.

I stuck my hand down, as eager now as him. I was almost falling into the hole myself before his hand gripped mine. I inched my way back slowly until I had enough leverage to pull him and the girl up. When they finally flopped on to the floor, Pasha was shivering and I couldn’t see the girl breathing. I barely even noticed she was naked. “Is she alive?”