Fade to Black (16 page)

What we found was a brace of fearful, hollow-eyed boys, shaking and filthy in a locked closet, branded on the wrist. And a scrap of paper, with a hectic spot of blood on the corner, with Perak’s address and Amarie’s name on it.

Four hours later found us back at the death matches. Jake had another fight and she refused to back out or delay. The money was vital, and so was her not pissing off the men who owned the arena – Ministry men. If she didn’t show, she said, they’d
know
something was up rather than just guessing. At least they pretty much left the matchers to themselves, hardly came out of their little compound, just so long as everything ran smoothly.

The other Ministry men, the Specials trying to pass themselves off as Downsiders, were still asking around for me, but they didn’t seem to have twigged that I’d joined up with Pasha and Jake, because no one was talking to them. So far.

So Pasha and I hid in the viewing room behind blacked-out one-way glass, and watched in silence the parade of fights before hers. Pasha had said nothing since we’d found Azama’s
men dead, and I’d no heart for talk either. Those children, young boys this time, haunted me. Their weak moans of fear, the scarred bodies, the brands on their wrists. I’d done what I could to help Jake with them but they were pathetically afraid of me, whimpering whenever I got close.

They seemed to know who she was though, whispered her name on lips stiff with terror and a faint “please, Goddess” kind of hope, reached hesitant hands out to try to touch her. She soothed them, and though she never touched anyone else that I’d seen, seemed to have a pathological hatred of it, she had no problem helping the boys, covering them and holding them though they flinched from her hands.

She’d found someone to pass a message and within minutes there were people there to help, two women who gathered the boys together and led them gently away. Jake had coaxed Pasha away from the bodies, away from the house, and brought us back here.

Now Pasha sat and watched blindly as a succession of men tried to murder each other in front of us for money, or at least pretend to. It looked all too real to me. I kept a glass topped up with drink for him, worried at the lack of anything that could be construed as emotion on his face. I’d thought he was used to it, or as used to it as anyone could be. But he sat and stared and drank until finally his eyes slid shut, and maybe that was a mercy for both of us. I took the glass from his limp hand and set it on the floor.

With him out, I took the scrap of paper out of my pocket.
I hadn’t let either of them see it, unsure what it meant precisely. That Amarie was targeted, that was all. They’d taken her on purpose, this particular girl. Because of Perak? Or because of me?

Jake came out for her match to a thunderous reception from the crowd, which yanked me from my thoughts. The match was brief, almost perfunctory, and she disarmed the man in only a few minutes. Still, he managed to cut her a couple of times when he shouldn’t have been able to touch her. Her mind wasn’t on the match, that was clear, or on the pleasing of the crowd. My mind wasn’t on it either, a succession of images parading through my mind relentlessly until I wished I had the luxury of drinking myself stupid like Pasha. But we had yet to find any clue as to Amarie’s whereabouts except that she was west of Jake’s place, and the whole situation chafed at me.

I contented myself with a couple of stiff shots until Jake came back and slumped into a chair. I took Pasha’s place and poured her a drink. She took it gratefully and eyed Pasha. He lay back in his chair, alternately sweating and shivering in his sleep and muttering under his breath. The hard creases on his face made him seem both older than time and just a child. It seemed Jake could hardly bear to look at him. She turned her eyes away and stared at the floor.

“So what was it with him today?” I asked.

She jerked one shoulder and drained her glass, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “Those two men – he knew them, from
years ago. He had a personal score to settle, and he’s pissed off someone beat him to it.”

“Personal?”

“None of your business.” She stood up and paced the floor. “But I’m glad he didn’t get to pass the favour on to them. I think – I think it would have destroyed him, no matter that he had good cause. He wasn’t made that way.”

I had to agree with that. Pasha had courage, I’d no doubt – he’d never flinched from things that made me shudder – but to kill a man… like Jake, I think it would have destroyed him. You only had to see the way he looked at Jake, at the children he’d helped, to know he had the softest of hearts. That he probably broke it every time he had to get a girl out of one of the holes he’d shown me.

I turned back to her. “Is that why you do it too?”

She stopped pacing and stared at me guardedly for a moment. “Something like that.” The look on her face warned me not to ask any more.

A thin line of blood trickled down one cheek, and she’d been cut a couple of times in other places. Pasha was in no state to patch her up, so I cast around and found the kit he’d used on her before. A simple affair: needles, tweezers, thread, antiseptic, ampoules of something that wasn’t labelled, though I could guess, and some dressings that were at least clean. “Where’re you cut?”

She looked up at me and down at the kit, her shoulders stiff with indecision. Finally she nodded and I sat down next to
her. She shrugged off the upper portion of her armoured allover and blood marked her undershirt on her shoulder where the man’s sword had found a gap. I pulled at the ripped material, hoping that I could stitch the wound through the tear, although part of me thrilled to the thought of her without the shirt. There was something about her. The cool exterior, her very aloofness, the way she kept even Pasha at a physical distance. A challenge, the
chase
, that was what always thrilled me, and I soon got bored once I had them. It probably says something profound about me. Like I’m a total bastard when it comes to women, even if it is unintentional. Mostly.

But I felt in my bones that she would be the ultimate chase. I might never catch her, never know what it was behind that icy mask, what drove her, who she really
was
, underneath, and that was a heady thought, because I love a woman with a bit of mystery about her.

I calmed my fingers from their twitching impatience and picked a needle. Then my fingers trembled for a whole new reason. I’d never stitched anyone up before. I’d never needed to: there was always a hospital handy. How were you supposed to see through the constant seeping blood? I took my life in my hands and used a dressing to mop at the wound. Jake tensed away from me with a hiss but kept her hands mercifully away from the swords.

“I’m sorry, I’ve never done this before.”

“Neither have I – have someone other than Pasha do it, I
mean. And he—” Her voice lowered to a whisper, as though she was ashamed to admit a weakness. “I don’t like it when people touch me.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I said drily, but a little voice in my head was pleased that she had said it, confided in me. Shown me the smallest part of her, a little chink in her armour. “I’ll do my best.”

“Me too.”

It took a while, and Jake was a solid block of suppressed tension by the time we’d finished, but I managed it without touching her with anything other than the needle and tweezers. Even so it was a bizarrely intimate moment, as though by allowing me into her closed little world she had exposed herself, afraid of doing it maybe, but that she trusted me enough made me feel strangely privileged.

Jake shrugged her allover back on to her shoulders and looked at me, as though maybe really seeing me for the first time. She hesitated with the material halfway up her arms, just a moment, nodded and gave me the hint of a smile, a good warm one, like she shared with Pasha. It was like being blessed by the Goddess: a unique experience in a man’s lifetime.

After that she was all business again. “We’ll leave Pasha here for now; he could do with the rest. Meantime, we’ve got a few people to talk to. Subtly. Which means you’ll be doing all the talking, because subtle I am not. You manage that, you think?”

“I think I can cope. Who exactly are we talking to?”

“Oh don’t worry, you’re going to
love
this place.” She laughed, a deep-throated sound that made a tingle thrill up my spine. Does the Goddess do double blessings?

Jake and I stood across the way from a nondescript house in a down and dirty area. Well, all right, downer and dirtier than was average down here. The building pressed up against the old castle wall that was the root of Mahala, the well we’d sprung from. The blocks of the castle were black with dirt, except where the synth had scoured grooves in them, little riverbeds of insidious poison. Hard up on the left was a crumbling archway that might once have been triumphal, with its eroded statues of warriors long dead, their faces blank now, forgotten heroes of another world. To the right of the ramshackle house, the cobbled street gleamed wetly as it squeezed between a butcher’s, shut up for the night, and a bar that was no more than an open stall with a flapping awning keeping the worst of the rain from its solitary customer.

“Ask for Kersan, tell him I asked you to come. He’ll know what you’re there for – he talks to Pasha normally. He’ll ask you a question, to make sure you’re legit. The answer is Home. Home Farm. OK?”

“What sort of place is it?”

“Don’t worry. Let’s just say everyone does what they do from their own free will. If I go in, it’ll give everything away. But this is where gentlemen of taste come to relax. Gentlemen who don’t like their women branded.”

“What, I—”

She flirted with the idea of smiling at me before she turned and, letting a “Have fun” drift over her shoulder, she walked away through the arch, instantly swallowed by shadows of warriors.

I took a deep breath. Jake had said this was our best chance of finding Azama, of discovering who had killed his henchmen, the Jorrin brothers. Of finding Amarie. This was Pasha’s part of the usual information network, but he was in no fit state to talk to anyone. I fingered the pulse pistol, winced as my throbbing hand protested, and walked over to the door. Before I could knock, it opened on silent hinges.

The inside was a revelation. Clean, for starters. The door led into a large, square room draped in rich fabrics in a plush red. No one was visible and I stepped through. Candlelight flickered along the walls and gave off scents that worked on me subtly. My shoulders relaxed from a hunch I hadn’t realised they’d been in.

A boy, maybe twelve, popped out from behind the door and bowed. His clothes were pristine and pressed to a knife-sharp crease. “Sir, what is your wish?”

Startled, I blurted out my answer. “Kersan.”

The boy directed me to a plush settee before he darted off. I sat down, relaxed and tense at the same time, and considered the room, wondering what it could tell me about who lived here.

Something very studied about the way the velvet swooped
along the wall, draped over the settees. It was in the lines of the gilt frames on the paintings – all very arty nudes – and the low tables with their trays of delicacies, and in the careful scent from the candles that lit the room with flattering light. The scent reminded me of home, when I was a boy. Of my mother, though that was at right-angles to my thoughts on who lived, and worked, here.

I shook that thought away as another young lad came in. He was about fourteen or so, with sharp black eyes and what would have been dusky skin a similar shade to mine, if it weren’t for the blue-white tones from lack of sun. He introduced himself in soft, musical tones. “I’m Kersan. You asked for me?”

“I did. Jake sent me, in Pasha’s stead.”

He frowned and looked me up and down discreetly. “Why hasn’t Pasha come himself?”

“He’s indisposed. I’m a friend of his.”

“I see. He is well?”

I nodded. It wasn’t that far from the truth. Physically he’d be fine once he slept it off. Mentally, maybe not so much.

“Then maybe I could ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“Where is Pasha’s favourite place?” He looked at me intently, watching my face and eyes, for any hint of hesitation I suppose.

“Home Farm,” I said, and the answer made sense now. The farm that they took the girls, or rather the children, to.

Kersan relaxed a fraction, though his eyes stayed wary, and with good reason if half my suspicions about this place were correct. “Good. Would you like to come with me?”

I followed him down long corridors echoing with the soft sound of gentle music from behind discreet doors decorated in the same plush velvet as the walls, so you could hardly tell they were there until you were almost on them. The whole place was well kept, almost luxurious as the ’Pit went. He opened a door at the far end of the house and ushered me through.

I was not unduly surprised to see a young woman, a very attractive one as it happens, dressed in a silky, flowing green robe, split to the thigh, sitting on a large bed decked out in silk and velvet. The wooden bathtub, tall enough that it came up to my chest, and a softly upholstered settee were unusual though. Another low table covered in plates of tiny delicacies sat in front of a lounger. The girl stood up, came towards us and bowed. “Who is this gentleman?”

“A friend of Pasha’s.”

She looked sharply at Kersan, but the boy made a small gesture and she seemed reassured. “Any friend of Pasha’s is a friend of this house.”

Really? Pasha was a habitué of a brothel? Because there was no doubt in my mind that was what this was. That seemed completely at odds with everything else I’d seen of him. My surprise must have shown.

The woman laughed and indicated I should sit on the
lounger. She sat next to me, smoothed back the elegant coil of dark hair at the nape of her neck and crossed her legs in a silky manoeuvre that almost popped my eyes from my head when the robe fell away from her thigh. “Oh, he doesn’t use our services. Except the massage, the hot tub, a friendly face or touch. He sleeps here often. Poor dear, can’t abide to sleep in a place on his own. He shares with Kersan.”