Fade to Black (14 page)

He nodded, too breathless maybe to talk, and got himself to his feet before bending down to pick her up again. I pretended not to see the tears that dripped on to her skin, or the way her face twisted in terror as he wrapped her in the rug with soothing, murmured words and took her out to the waiting women.

I was on my own. I could have walked out of the door and no one would have cared, and ten minutes earlier I would have done. But now all I could think of was whether there were more of them down there, alive.

I’d been jolted out of my comfortable existence, where I’d been peripherally aware that not everyone had my style of life but sure that, the Ministry notwithstanding, there had been a reverence for life; that something like this would not, could not go on. I knew the worst parts of Upside. It was part of my job to know the worst of it all up there, but whilst there was hot-blooded murder and cold-blooded assassination, and whilst you got the odd person whose views on girls were extreme – they don’t last long as a rule – I’d never heard of
anything approaching this. Not treating people as we used to treat cows, when we had any. And Amarie was here somewhere, maybe in a place just like this, and I had to get her back. I had to. I couldn’t bear the thought of telling Perak what had happened to her if not.

By the time Pasha came back I was in the hole, in amongst the dead, looking for the dying.

Once they’d got all the girls out and into the cage, ready to be whisked off to wherever, Pasha took pity on me and led me back to his room. I don’t remember much about the trip; my mind was too busy trying to block out the sight of that hole, the smell that seemed rammed into my nostrils, the pitiful efforts of that girl to escape her rescuers. I do remember Pasha buying a bottle of something on the way, because the first thing he did when we got there was open it and pour us a generous measure each.

I sat on the bed, barely aware of my surroundings at first, staring into the green depths of the booze as though it held some sort of answer.

“Takes you pretty bad the first time, doesn’t it?” Pasha asked. “But it gets worse than that.”

I looked up from the drink. Pasha was watching me carefully, with pity in the set of his mouth and a dull fury in the shine of his eyes.

“It gets worse?” I couldn’t, didn’t want to, imagine anything worse.

Pasha stood up and went to the desk. I noticed again the pictures pinned to the wall over it, now closely lit by a lamp. Pasha unpinned one and gave it to me. A forearm, with a mark branded into the wrist. I scanned the others: the same, except some of the marks were different. The one I held showed a swirling pattern, a stylised letter A. Others were spiky, hard shapes, or representations of other letters.

“Part of my employment with Jake. I try to track the girls, make sense of the different brands and what they mean. I record them, each new one I find. Whether the kid is alive or not. I have to, to try to make sense of who does what. Try to make sense of their pattern so we can break it.”

A sick roiling in my stomach was alleviated by a slug of the drink.

“What worries me about your niece is she isn’t in that pattern,” Pasha went on. “Not at all. Why her? Why not take someone who wouldn’t be missed? Why send the Jorrin brothers up that far when they could have found any number of girls closer, easier, less likely to bring trouble? Why
her
?”

A question I’d asked myself more than once, though not too closely because I was uncomfortable with the answers I’d got. “Maybe… maybe to get at Perak? He invented that damned gun.”

“Or maybe to get
you
. Odd, that you’re a pain-mage and
you’re the one to come down here after her, right to where pain-mages are needed,
wanted
.”

That was the answer I didn’t like. “No one knows I’m a mage, except Dendal.” And I didn’t see him having anyone shot just to make me use my magic properly. Lastri might, if the person being shot was me.

Pasha raised a suspicious eyebrow. “No one? Your brother, family?”

“He’s the only family I’ve got, and no, he doesn’t know. He just knows I find people, not how I do it. It doesn’t pay to advertise, and we hadn’t spoken in years anyway. Look, I don’t care why, I just want her back. Now, how are we going to do that?”

Pasha frowned, like his question still bothered him, but he left it for now. “I can’t track them like you do. That’s not how my magic works.” His mouth stretched into a predatory smile. “It’s very good for other things though. Yet I can’t ever have the power they do, because I won’t use anyone else’s pain, you see? They can, and will, and it makes them very powerful. That power is what you’re up against, trying to find your niece. You might find her, if you’re good, but can you get her out? Tonight we were lucky, like I said. The girls were ones they’d used up, finished with, and none of the mages was there. Relatively easy to take, once we know where it is. But the main factories, that’s another matter entirely. You ever fought against a pain-mage with almost unlimited power?”

Not only had I not, I
really
didn’t want to. It would be
tricky at best. The more you hurt them, the more power they get, unless you can tip them over into death quick smart. To do that generally means you end up physically weak yourself, because of the power you need to do it. Dendal was fond of telling tales of that sort of thing, before pain magic was banned Upside, when two mages would fight and almost the only thing that determined the outcome wasn’t who was better, but who could hang on to life longer. I’m fairly sure Dendal only told me these stories because he knew what a coward I was for physical pain. Well, he calls it cowardice; I prefer the terms “sensible”, “practical”, “intelligent” or “not-stupidly-masochistic”.

“It doesn’t sound like the best plan,” was what I actually said.

“Not the best plan, indeed. Which is why we haven’t managed to rescue any from the factories. Occasionally the mages get a bit lax when the girls are resting, or the mages are gathering a group to take in, or like tonight when they’ve finished with them, but they’ve tightened up a lot lately. A
lot
. But first, you need to try to track her. If she’s in a holding-house on her way to the factories, we’ll have a chance, and we can rescue whoever else is there too.”

And hope that wasn’t exactly what someone wanted me to do. But who? I shook that thought away. It wasn’t helping. I sat on the bed again, or slumped more like. The pictures swam in front of me, skin and brand blurring together. For a heartbeat they seemed to merge to form a sketch of Amarie’s
face, then melted, moulding to the faces of the girls tonight. Today. Whatever. I had no idea what time or even day it was; I only knew that it seemed like weeks since Pasha had woken me.

Pasha took the picture out of my hand. “It’s been just over a day.” He smiled at my startled look, a sad twitch of his lips. “Part of my magic. You can sleep here. You’ll need your strength to find her. Drink the rest, it’ll help. It’s the only thing I’ve found that does.”

His voice sounded muffled and far away but it seemed to make sense, so I drained the glass and didn’t object when he took my coat off and draped it over a chair, pushed me so I lay down on the bed. I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow.

It seemed like I’d only closed my eyes for a second when someone shook my shoulder.

“Wasft?”

“Rojan, you’ve got to wake up.”

“Snff,” was all I could manage to that. My head was stuffed with something sticky that made my thoughts run like cold treacle.

“Rojan, will you wake
up
?”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. I squeezed my eyes even further shut, then opened them. Everything looked fuzzy. I blinked rapidly, and Pasha’s urgent face swam into view.

“At last! Come on, you have to get out of here. There’s Ministry men all over, looking for you.”

“Ministry?”

“Yeah, trying to look like Downsiders. Not doing such a bad job either, but I can smell one a mile away. It’s in their head, see? Anyway, not many people down here have guns, excepting me and one or two others – they’re too expensive unless you steal one like I did. Besides, who else but Ministry would have a picture of you and be showing it around every last bar and shop?”

With one last hard blink and a scrub of my eyes with the heels of my hands, I was awake. Kind of. “How long did I sleep?”

Pasha looked apologetic. “A couple of hours. But it won’t be long before someone says they saw you with me, and then this place will be crawling with Ministry. I don’t want to be here when that happens.”

“Neither do I.” I rubbed a hand up my face and took the glass of water that Pasha proffered. If I concentrated I could barely taste the synth. At least it took the worst of the after-taste of green booze off my tongue and made me feel semi-alive again. “If not here, then where?”

“I know a place or two. Come on.”

We slipped out into streets dim with night, slick with rain and peopled by shadows. Pasha kept a hand on his gun under his coat, and I did the same in my pocket with my pulse pistol. How in heck did the Ministry know someone had come
down here, and especially, how did they know it was me? I had to trust that Dendal was all right, that they hadn’t dragged it out of him one way or another, either one of which would be very painful. I had to trust that, because the alternative was too awful to contemplate.

We moved further out, into a neighbourhood that made Pasha’s place look positively plush. More than one building was propped up with huge steel girders – not for the Downsiders’ benefit, I assumed, because the rest of the place was such an unabashed shithole; no, it would be because someone important lived in a building far, far above, supported by this one. A thought that quickly gave rise to other thoughts, like – if I could find which building supported the Archdeacon’s palace in Top of the World, I could change the face of the city with one well-calculated girder destruction. It was a very tempting thought, moderated only by the matching thought of all the people living between the girder down here and the Top of the World up there. Shame.

I shook the persuasive thoughts out of my head and concentrated on where we were, on the towers, surrounded by shanty-shacks and wreck-built houses, on the shadows and dark chasms between buildings, blank-faced windows and eyes that might be watching. Not many, it seemed. Even the rats appeared to have deserted the place, and we walked warily through quiet streets and silent alleys. Every now and again a blurred face would appear at a window or opening, a brief smudge against the darkness before it withdrew. I kept my
head down. No knowing if the Ministry men had been this way, or would be here soon, and no sense showing my face to all and sundry.

At last Pasha stopped, at the entrance to an alley so narrow I might never have noticed it in the dark. A flick of his head indicated I should follow and we squeezed our way through the huge blocks of stone that held up who knew how many floors above us. A door sat at the end, a pathetic wooden thing that was half eaten away and hanging, just barely, by one creaking hinge. It looked like it would fall apart if I breathed too deeply.

“Where—”

Pasha stopped me with a raised hand and rapped on the doorframe, gently of necessity. I barely heard the rap, and I stood right next to him. Even so, a flake of stone above the door that had been hanging on for grim death lost its fight and fluttered to the ground. There was quiet for long moments, only broken by our breathing and the faraway beat of music.

A flash of metal whipped past me and a sword pinned Pasha to the door by his coat. Simultaneously, a boot hit me in the back and sent me face-first into the stone. I managed to get a hand out to avoid breaking my nose, but lost a fair bit of skin on my palm in the process, making me tingle with sudden magic.

“For fuck’s sake, Pasha, what do you think you’re doing? I could have killed you.”

By the time I’d turned, hand on pulse pistol, Pasha was
grinning sheepishly, his hands in the air, the gun dangling from a finger by its trigger-guard. Jake was glaring at him.

“Sorry. Only there’s Ministry men after him and—”

“And you thought bringing them right to
my
door was a good idea?”

“Where else could I take him? Besides, I think I know where the Jorrin brothers are.”

Jake’s mouth twitched with annoyance before she relented. “All right, you’re here now.”

The door opened straight into a room and, though it was much larger than Pasha’s, this place looked like it was about to fall down. There were holes in the wooden floor, the reek of damp and a hint of synth. Green mould made a surreal pattern on one wall and there was a nest of something small and scuttling in one of the holes in the floor. Even fewer things than Pasha had in his room. Just a bed, a chair with a few shreds of linen that might be clothes draped over it, an odd contraption in the corner I couldn’t name, and bare floor.

“I was right in the middle of practice.” Jake moved over to the clothes draped on the chair, rummaged till she found a threadbare towel and began to rub sweat from around her face and neck. Her hair was tied back in a complicated knot, but a few tendrils had come free and were stuck to the back of her bare neck. I tried not to stare there, or at the sweat sticking the undershirt to her. It was quite hard, until she shot me a look that could have curdled milk. “All right, Pasha, what have you got? The Jorrin brothers?”

“Maybe. You know that old place of theirs, up on Ruby Street? Seems there’s been movement the last week or so.”

“Could be anyone. Could be squatters, or they sold it, any number of things.” Jake finished rubbing herself down and walked over with the kind of easy grace that makes my knees go all funny. She wasn’t looking at me though. She and Pasha seemed to be able to talk without talking, if that makes sense. Her eyes softened just so, the corner of his lip lifted a touch and she nodded. Something had been decided, but I hadn’t a clue what.

“Azama is definitely back,” Pasha said finally.

There was no doubt now, there was a heart behind that blank façade. Her hand twitched and she looked down sharply at the floor, but not before I saw a flash of fear. Pasha looked at a loss for words. He put his hand out as though to comfort her, then seemed to remember and snatched it back. And I thought
I
had a screwed-up love life.