Fade to Black (5 page)

It wasn’t a whole lot of comfort, if I’m honest.

Perak’s eyes were drooping and red-rimmed. I left him with a solemn promise to find Amarie and he promised he would sleep. I wasn’t so sure either promise would be kept any time soon.

I slid out of the door and blinked at the brighter lights of the corridor. The guards either side of the doorway made me feel both that Perak was safer, and more in danger. Ministry paid the guards’ wages. Perak, my daydreaming little brother, had invented the gun – that incident at the guards’ station with the black powder now seemed prophetic – and now he’d
been shot, his wife was dead and his daughter kidnapped. I caught Dench’s eye and we didn’t need to exchange words. I had to talk to him soon though, and from the worried pinch of the skin round his eyes he wanted to talk to me. He palmed me a piece of paper as I made my way past, and I took pains to hide it from the other guard.

The nurses’ workstation was a blur of activity along the corridor and I read the note as I walked.
Beggar’s Roost, midnight
. Dench’s favourite pub, where the women were cheap and the beer cheaper, but only just. Well, it would be rude not to go, right? Besides, it wasn’t like I’d had anything planned for that night, not now.

The nurses were efficient and scrubbed to shiny-cheeked perfection, their acolytes’ robes brilliant white and stiff with starch. One of them – the name “Lilla” was embroidered on her robe – led me along corridors, down stairs, past wards that wafted the stench of synth at me so I hurried to get away, up another set of stairs and round till I was lost. I didn’t mind too much: the nurse was pretty in a clean and clinical way and I flirted my best. Even got a promise of dinner at a later date. Nurses: clean on the outside but, in my plentiful experience, absolutely filthy in bed.

Finally, with a dimpled smile and a giggle that hinted at much naughtiness, she showed me through a door. The room I entered was, simply put, staggering. I’d expected a cramped office overflowing with charts and bits of doctorly paraphernalia with cut-away diagrams of ears and hearts and livers.
Maybe a skeleton grinning at people. What I got was a full-blown laboratory.

Glassware covered every surface of one half of the room, sadly not bubbling in a mad-scientist kind of way. I kind of hoped something green and seething would emit a whiff of gas that would give me visions, but no such luck. A half-dissected pig lay across a table, but that wasn’t much of a consolation. Mainly due to the smell of shit, which made me think it might have still been alive when the good doctor started. Wait, wait. I backed up a bit.

A pig. A real live, er, dead pig. How much money did this hospital have? Pork was even more expensive than beef – pigs had suffered more than cows from the synth. And the skin: pigskin was worth more than gold – shit, more than diamonds, pound for pound. Altogether the pig was worth more than everything I owned
or
was ever likely to. Plus, I’d heard they tasted nice. I’d smelled bacon once, and I still dreamed of it sometimes. It smelled crispy and crunchy and a hundred, maybe a thousand times better than any of the processed slop that was all anyone from Under-Trade could usually afford to eat. And Whelar was cutting it up.

“Mr Dizon.” Whelar appeared as if out of nowhere, though in reality it seemed his desk lurked behind a display of pickled organs and animals with more than the usual number of limbs. A three-headed cat stared at me gloopily through the thick preserving fluid and I tried not to stare back. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

It took a moment to regain my composure. That pig was unnerving me. So was the cat. “I, er, oh yes. Elsa Dizon. You said if I had any questions?”

He looked me up and down. I seemed to meet his approval, because he indicated a chair next to his desk. He sat in the desk chair and swung it to and fro, his hands elaborately loose in his lap, but his lips were pinched tight. Trying to look unconcerned and failing.

“So, what do you want to know?”

“I’m not sure. What can you tell me?”

One of his fingers twitched to life and tapped out a staccato rhythm on his thigh. “Not much. She died very quickly. Two shots, as with your brother. One was directly into the heart, the other shattered her jaw. Not pretty.”

I shut my eyes briefly against the image of the delicate face in Perak’s picture shattered by a lump of metal. Not pretty indeed. “What about the bullets?”

The finger stopped its tapping for half a heartbeat before it continued. “What about them?”

“I’d like to see them, if you have them.”

Whelar’s lips pinched just a fraction more, then he relaxed and gave a curt nod. “A moment, please.”

He left and I took the opportunity to nose around. I kept away from the pig though; I didn’t like the way it grinned at me, or the smell. There wasn’t much else of interest, only instruments that I couldn’t name and which seemed designed for torture, messy stacks of paperwork and a framed letter
from the Archdeacon thanking Whelar for his sterling work in medical research.

It didn’t take long for Whelar to return; I guessed he’d only gone to order a subordinate to fetch the bullets.

“They won’t be long,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

I cast a sidelong glance at the pig. A neat little hole marred the skin by its neck. “The pig – seems a rather expensive thing to just chop up in a lab.”

To my surprise he didn’t become evasive or defensive, but instead grinned like a kid on his nameday. “Ah, yes, but it’s important, you see. More important than money. Did you know that pig’s flesh is more like ours than almost any other animal? One reason they succumbed as badly as us to the synth. So, very important in my research.”

“And what are you researching here?”

Yes, there it was: now he closed in. His shoulders hunched slightly, as if to ward off a blow. “I – I’d rather not say. Superstition, you know. Us doctors like to keep it all close to our chest until we know we’re right. It’s all theory at the moment, though there might be a breakthrough soon.”

“So that isn’t a bullet hole there?”

He looked about to protest when a knock at the door interrupted him and Nurse Lilla hurried in with a covered dish. She dimpled prettily in my direction while handing the dish to Whelar and left with a wink and an implied promise.

I dragged my eyes back to Whelar and gave him my best smarmy smile. He pursed his lips in tacit disapproval but said
nothing and shoved the dish my way. I took off the linen cover and peered at the two bullets rattling around in the bottom. I’d no idea what I was looking for: I’d never seen a bullet before – heck, I’d never seen a gun before today – but the request had made the good doctor fidget so I took them out and looked them over. One of them was so squashed I could hardly tell what it was, but the second still had a recognisable uniform shape and I peered closer. It was flattened on one side, but the other had a maker’s mark. One I knew from long acquaintance.

“Thank you, Dr Whelar, you’ve been most illuminating.” I only said it to make him squirm. OK, and to stop him seeing that I’d just palmed one of the bullets.

It didn’t look like much from the outside. A tatty lock-up on the wrong level of town, just under one of the towering factories of Trade. The hustling thump of machinery drifted concrete dust down to mingle with the rain that fell on the Over-Traders, and us too, once it had gathered enough dirt along the way. Drips bounced from building to building, across gaps and walkways, feeling their way down, until they reached my neck. I flipped the collar of my coat against them, and against the all-pervasive factory thump that shook the bones; it succeeded in stopping neither.

The tube that powered my scabby little carriage was the size of my hand, the shining element of yellowish-pink Glow a delicate filigree winding about inside. The ones that powered those factories above me were big as men, bigger, their elements twisted snakes as thick as my leg. Whole lines of them up there, side by side like monstrous fireflies lighting up
the underside of Heights day and night, powering the power of Mahala – trade. The heart of our city has always been trade, ever since our sneaky-bastard warlord ancestor decided that this mountain pass was where he wanted to build a castle and strangle all the trade through it. Our strength, apart from the cunning position, is what we can invent and produce for the outside world, and we’re damn good at it. Being the middleman between two countries that loathe each other helps too.

So, just under Trade, beneath the factories that were the pumping heart of the city, their rumble echoing through every brick and girder and bone. This place wasn’t a factory. It was a shack with graffiti that would make a whore blush painted over the shutter. It
looked
derelict, as though the only thing holding the place together was the neighbouring buildings, to the sides, above and below. In the shuddering darkness, the shop hulked like a giant abandoned baby, unwanted, unloved. A classic case of appearances being deceiving. Yet if you knew just where to look…

The bell-pull was disguised as a piece of chain that appeared to hold the door together. I made sure to avoid the myriad of traps that surrounded the shutter and doorway and gave the pull a yank.

It didn’t take Dwarf long to answer. He wrenched open the door with a scowl that seemed to occupy his whole scrunchedup face.

“What the fuck do you want?” This was a pleasant greeting by Dwarf’s standards. Then he saw who I was and dropped
the act with a twisted grin that only served to make him look twice as ugly as the scowl. “Rojan, come in, come in.”

I stepped through, ducking my head to avoid a string of cogs that Dwarf’s head cleared with ease. He walked with his odd, rolling gait down the narrow aisle between boxes of springs jingling from the shaking of the factory above and a consignment of sulphur that made my nose itch.

Dwarf was well named. I’m pretty big, but he only came up to just above my elbow and was as wide as he was tall. His so-ugly-it-was-attractive-in-a-weird-way face was mobile, lips and eyebrows and even nose seeming to mould to his mood or thought, so he had to exert a lot of effort to appear uninterested. He tried, though he’d never be better at dissembling than a five-year-old trying to con a sweet off their parent.

We came to the main shop floor, a riot of bits of metal, odd gangly tools and chemicals I have no name for. Everything smelled of oil and sulphur and metal and – actually, I don’t know. I only know that no other place in Mahala was quite like it. It smelled of ingenuity, something that seemed to ooze from Dwarf like other men oozed sweat.

Dwarf made himself comfortable in the tall chair behind his workbench and socketed a magnifying lens into his right eye. Something small and intricate lay in parts under a bright Glow globe. These bits alone in this place were perfectly still: while the factory rumble made everything else shiver, the workbench was one of Dwarf’s masterpieces, and the surface stayed tranquil and motionless. He rubbed his fingers against
his thumb, selected a minute screwdriver that looked even smaller in his fat, sausage fingers, and began to put whatever it was back together. “So, Rojan, what is it you’re after? You don’t like the pistol?”

“It works all too well. I don’t like the pain, but that’s bythe-by. I want to know who made this, and who for.”

I dropped the bullet into the circle of light on the bench. Dwarf didn’t move, still as stone for long heartbeats. Then his magnifying glass dropped out and he looked up at me beneath his beetling brows. “Rojan, you don’t want to get mixed up in this shit. I know you, and I promise you this will cause you more pain than you’ve ever known. Wave the bounty on this goodbye. I tell you this as a friend. You follow this, you’re going to find a lot of pain.”

Not the best answer I could have had. “No bounty on this one. I need to know. Personal reasons.
Family
reasons.”

He winced at that, his shoulders coming up as though to protect his neck. His rubbery face looked – well, it looked like an abused and incredibly ugly doll. But a scared one.

Dwarf licked his lips and stared down at the mass of cogs and springs and other less identifiable bits of metal that were tumbled around his desk. “You know I made the bullets, you saw the mark. Sometimes – ah shit, Rojan, sometimes you just have to take the job, you know? I’ve got rent to pay, same as you, and I’m quite fond of my legs being both this shape and attached to my body. I didn’t ask what the bullets were going to be used for, I just made the damn things and was
happy to have them out of my shop. This gun thing is Namrat’s invention, to be sure. No finesse, no
style
.”

This from a man who had once theorised about a hand-held device for castration from a dozen paces away. “Not Namrat’s, my brother’s. And now someone’s abducted his daughter.”

Dwarf stared down at his hard-bitten fingernails, but he said nothing. That was all I needed to know. Well, almost all.

“Which branch of the Ministry was it?” And why was the Ministry getting Dwarf to make the bullets when they had plenty of their own smiths?

He flicked me a look of absolute terror, one that made my balls shrivel. Dwarf wasn’t afraid of anyone that I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some bad, bad people in his shop.

“Rojan, I’m saying nothing.
Nothing
, you understand? I’ve got a family to—” He caught my eye and blushed, but he was still as stubborn, or as terrified, as ever. “OK, I got no family, I forgot who I was talking to, but I can’t say anything. Not if I want to live. It’s bad enough they’ll know you were here, if they find out what you’re after.”

“All right, Dwarf. All right. I’ll leave you to your cogs. But I want a favour.”

He looked up, half terrified still, half relieved. “Of course, of course. If I can, that is. Without losing my legs or any other vital pieces.”

“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. Depends whether the best – and most devious – alchemist I’ve ever seen comes
to see you like I told her to. She’s fifteen and she almost killed me three times in one day.”

Dwarf perked up immediately. “Fifteen, eh? A looker?”