Fade to Black (7 page)

“Fine, fine,” I muttered and fished in my pocket for the picture of Amarie, something to focus the spell on. “Fucking fine.”

“Daddy, look at me, I’m a princess.”

Brought out into the light, the picture began its short loop. A fair-haired little princess waving to her daddy. The room around me began to fade away as I gathered myself. The lights dimmed in my eyes; Griswald’s smell no longer assaulted my nose; the rough fabric of the sofa no longer lumped under me when I shifted. The tiniest inklings of my magic, all I could use without an extra power source, without pain, tingled where the picture touched my fingers. Shit, I really did
not
want to do this.

“Daddy, look at me.”

I had to, for Perak, and for the boys we both once were.

Down – she was down – and it was dark there. She was crying – awful, wrenching sobs for her father. For my brother. If I wanted to know more, if I wanted to help her out of there, I had to do it. I’d promised Perak. Fuck, I’d promised Ma too, to help Perak, keep him safe. A promise I’d failed in for too long.

I laid the picture on my knees and kept contact with the edge of one pinkie. The rest of that hand grabbed and twisted – and pain spun through me, over me, picked up the residue of my magic and thrust it into my head. Stars pulsed
and beat in time to my heart, dazzling me, pulling me into the whirl, and then I was there, with Amarie. Two hundred and… thirty… four feet below me. Yes. Four hundred and two feet to my east. I can tell which way north is, easy as spitting, which Dendal always says is spooky, and not part of my magic, since I don’t need to hurt myself to manage that part.

My magic though, that’s something on top, the difference between knowing just by looking which way north is, and having a map drawn with all the details and fiddly lines on it. This time the map took me to a dark and airless chamber made of reconstituted stone, water dripping down the walls, the stench of synth everywhere. I tried to ignore the darkness around me, the pull of the magic, to go deeper, always deeper, lose myself in the black, be comforted by it, become it.
You want me, you need me.
A whimper cut through all that.

Amarie huddled in a corner, a small angular shape folded in on itself. Two bright eyes, wide with terror, peeped over her scabby knees. Behind me, off in the darkness, something growled. Something
big
. The sound bounced off the walls and seemed to grow rather than diminish: a growl from beyond history to prickle the neck, pump fear-quickness to legs and say, “Here is something that wants to eat me.”

I wasn’t even really there but I felt my eyes grow to mirror Amarie’s. She couldn’t see me, hear me, know I was there, but I crouched down beside her anyway. How could I not?

“I’m coming. Hold on, because I’m coming to take you home, to your daddy. Just you hold on for Uncle Rojan.”

She couldn’t hear me, couldn’t have, but her eyes flicked round as though she had and her whimpers subsided.

Then I was back in the office, on my knees with Dendal holding me up. I threw up sour beer all over his shirt.

See, this is why I don’t like other people relying on me, on responsibility. Because dislocating your own thumb to cast a spell really fucking hurts.

So here I was, an hour later, in the arse end of the city, as far down as you can go without hitting the ’Pit, and in a far worse area than I’d found Lise. If I recalled correctly I was just yards from one of the ports where the ’Pit had been sealed, keeping the dead and dying from infecting everyone else. This was truly the bottom of the shit-pile, as evidenced by what I was trying not to step in.

I should have slept first, really. I’d been knackered before the spell and I was worse after. My thumb throbbed like buggery. But there was a girl down there, in that dank and awful place. My flesh and blood. Just a small girl, alone and afraid in a room with who-knew-what. If I was a religious man, I’d have prayed. Instead I told myself that sleep was for idiots and went where Dendal told me.

The walkways down this far were corroded and shaky, but it wasn’t far to fall. In fact it was about six feet to the bottom
of everything that was called Mahala. I didn’t come down here often. Maybe I was just as snobby about what was below me as everyone in Heights or Clouds or Top of the World. Everyone likes to have someone to look down on. But if you hit this place, all you could look down on was rats – and not by much, because they were better-fed than the people round here.

Dendal had given me an address and a name. Someone who could help me get into the ’Pit, though how or why Dendal would know someone like that, who knew? I’d seen him leave the office precisely once in the three years I’d been working there, when Lastri was sick and he’d taken her some food.

I lurked somewhere out of the way, under a dripping overhang of crumbling concrete, and took a look around. The air was dull and gloomy, as it always was in Boundary. The sun was rising, peeking over the mountaintops to shine on the godly in Top of the World, but it probably never made a direct appearance this far down. The sun rarely got further than Trade, fifty or more levels above us, and the only lights here were the fitful beams of dirty yellow Glow globes that should have been replaced years ago. All they really lit up was the damp running down the walls.

When I finally moved, I walked warily and kept my hand on the butt of the pulse pistol in my pocket. I needn’t have worried. The allover and coat that looked like a Specials uniform did its trick. In places like this, fear was better than any weapon. Especially when I was going to see a man who didn’t
show on the records, or at least on any record I could find. Tam Ratana. I’d never had to use his services before, but I’d heard of him in hushed whispers and Dendal had pointed me this way.

I reached the doorway I was after, a blank face in the pitted, dark body of the building. The windows to either side were crudely boarded up and decorated with some inventive language the scavenge-rat teens had undoubtedly thought highly amusing. I gave the door a solid knock. It was firmer than it looked, with a faint ring of reinforcing metal. After an age, and a couple more knocks, something clicked behind it. Someone must have seen something they liked, because there was an extensive scrape of locks and bolts before the door sprang open.

I couldn’t see much in the dim light beyond but I could smell plenty, enough that I was glad I hadn’t bothered with breakfast. I gripped my pistol tighter in my pocket and edged in. The door swung shut behind me and locks and bolts rattled home again. It was only when I turned that I saw the little man lurking behind the door. I put my back to the wall of the corridor, more from habit than any actual worry. He seemed spry enough, but the lines, droops and general sagginess of his dusky skin and the gnarled roots of fingers clubbed with rheumatism made me put his age at least eighty. He gave me a piercing look, but he didn’t seem in the least bit frightened. I must have been losing my touch.

“Tam Ratana?”

He gave a bobbing nod, and I was reminded of the little birds you used to see in the upper parks, where the sun shines straight on to your skin and isn’t second-hand, bounced off innumerable mirrors and concrete pillars before it reaches you. Of course you only got to see the birds, and the sun, briefly before the guards threw you out for being “from Under”.

“What do you want?” Tam’s voice was scratchy, like the rustle and scrunch of walking on gravel. It gave no hint of how he might feel about me being there, no anger or confusion or even curiosity. Muffled steps ran and petered out further down the corridor. He wasn’t on his own in this place. I’d planned on getting some more information on just who this man was before I did anything else, but now I thought straightforward honesty might be the best policy.

“Dendal sent me. I’m looking for a kidnapped girl. My niece.”

He smiled, completely unsurprised, his mouth wide and gummy. He crooked one knotty finger at me and headed off down the corridor, seemingly unaware of, or unconcerned by, the target his back made. I followed cautiously, past a dark opening on my left, full of the sound of someone trying not to be heard and failing. The person who had made those muffled steps earlier? I forced any nervousness from my face and carried on behind Tam but kept a discreet watch. No one fell into step behind me.

Then we were out of the dark, dank corridor and into a fuggy little room, full of old-fashioned, overstuffed chairs and
bright rugs worn almost to rags underfoot. A musty, organic kind of smell, not unpleasant, assaulted me and I was reminded of a back-street shop my mother had taken me to when I was no more than five, before the ’Pit had been sealed. Before she got sick. A dark, secret kind of place where women had talked in whispers to the proprietor and swiftly hidden whatever little brown packets he had sold them.

Tam indicated I should sit. Bundles of dried plants – herbs, I thought with astonishment – hung from the ceiling to dry. My mother had always dried her own, but even when I was a child it was a rare practice. There was so little room to grow frivolities such as herbs and since then the synth had killed most of them.

Speaking of synth, its deadly tang underlay the sweet-smelling herbs. Not just a tang, but full-blown synthtox, there in the corner. A body reeking of it. A thin, frail body that could have been a man or woman. Not much hair to speak of, fluttering eyes big and black in a face that was drained of everything. I looked away.

As I sat, two girls, young, gangly teenagers from the look of them, hurried away in alarm into the darkness of an opening at the far end of the room. They had dusky skin and dark hair, but there was a pallor underneath that suggested that hadn’t seen even so much as the little sun I got in a long time. Their eyes fixed on me and the younger seemed almost paralysed with fright, until the other dragged her away. I thought I saw a strange mark on the inside of her wrist, a tattoo of
some sort maybe, and caution sprang up in me again. There were gangs around here that no one from above Boundary would survive meeting. Then they were gone, and Tam’s watchful eyes were on me.

“Why have you come here?” There was a faint hint of accent, a flavour of somewhere that wasn’t here.

“You’re the man who knows how I can get to where I need to be,” I said, carefully neutral in tone, mindful of who else might be here, watching and listening. I’d never met anyone from this far down that was worth knowing. I took out the picture and showed it to him. “I’m looking for this girl.” Amarie said her little piece. By now it was starting to poke at my spine. “Daddy, look at me, I’m a princess.”

He looked at the picture carefully, watching it through three times before he handed it back with a shrug. “Lots of girls go missing every day in a city this big. You should know that, Mr Dizon.”

I wondered how he knew who I was, but then Dendal had surely told him I was coming. “I deal in runaways and bounties, not kidnappings. As far as I’m aware, there are few enough of them.”

He smiled knowingly and the skin on my shoulders began to itch. “Used to be there were few of them. Lately, a lot more. Too many, and the guards won’t, can’t, touch them.”

“Why not?” But I knew. Always the same answer to questions like that.

The knowing smile pulled back into an unnerving grimace
that might have been intended as reassuring, but only succeeded in showing his gums and the small brown stubs that were all that was left of his teeth. “They take them to the ’Pit. Not a guard alive that will go down there, Mr Dizon. Unless they’re Specials.”

No wonder Dench didn’t want anything to do with it. I’d have been off the job in a second if it hadn’t been Perak’s girl we were talking about. No, it wasn’t that. That pretty girl in the picture, far from all the cynicism in me, far from pain or sadness or fear. The child I had been once, before life had its way, scored its lines into me with savage glee. Or she had been, and I had to hope she still was, inside. That it wasn’t too late. A pretty girl who loved her father and now sat in a black box, sobbing. I felt a flicker of anger. Perak back in my life not five minutes and here I was, shouldering everything again.

I’d spent a lot of time and effort making sure that didn’t happen. Runaways and bounties: little responsibility, lots of lovely cash. The runaways wanted to be gone and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they could take care of themselves as well as I could. If I didn’t find them, they were just another kid turning adult, trying to make their way. The bounties – well, if I didn’t catch them, tough luck for the guards. If I didn’t take a job, or didn’t see it through, they weren’t my responsibility. But I couldn’t walk away from this, and not just because Perak was my brother. I swore vividly in my head.

“Who takes them to the ’Pit?” I asked. “There’s supposed
to be no one down there. They cleared it out before they sealed it.”

Tam laughed, looking like a wrinkled gnome who’s found he can make any wish come true with a wink of his eye. “That’s what the Ministry say, but when do they ever tell the truth? They sealed a lot of them down there, the dregs they wanted to do without. They thought the synth would kill them soon enough, and they’d be rid of all those too undesirable, too feckless and faithless to live in their brave new clean pious city. Only it’s not brave or clean, is it? They left them there to die, Mr Dizon. And when they didn’t die, or not all of them, the Archdeacon found a use for them.”

Left them there to die of the synth. I shook my head in shock, but it was likely true. In the ’Pit, who knew? It was sealed, but the tainted run-off from Upside was likely still filtering through: the water had to go somewhere. Now here was Tam, saying that people lived in that horror? The thought made me squirm. Not least because it looked like that was where I was headed.

“Why would they take girls down there?” I asked. “And how can I get her back?”

Tam grinned at me, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. “I can get you down there, so you can look for your niece. Papers that will get you through the Ministry checks. I can give you a name once you’re in there, a man who might help.” His head bobbed up and down as though it were on a string. “For a price. And there’s no one else can do that, excepting the Ministry.”