Fade to Black (23 page)

“Yes.” A dark look from under her brows, a tightening of her lips, made me think pushing it was a bad idea.

“OK. So, we have a plan?”

“We have a plan; didn’t I say? The mages eat well, and they make sure the girls do too, they make sure everyone does down here. So the girls last longer, see? And everyone else thinks everything is all right. Carcasses from the slaughterhouse, some of them go straight up to the castle. Today, you and I are slaughtermen. We take the carcasses to the duly appointed place and hand them over. Then we don’t return with the others, but follow. There’s a way in. There has to be, and that’s the best way I can think of to find where it is.”

“Then what?” I didn’t like the sound of this, but what option was there?

Jake frowned up at me like I was stupid. “Then you use your magic to find where your niece is. We can go from there.”

Fabulous. My hand was still throbbing from last time and I hadn’t felt my index finger for a while. Maybe I should try somewhere else to hurt myself, but where? I wanted to keep my legs ready to run. “Just how sure are you that Amarie is anywhere near Azama?”

“P—he said that you knew she was in the main keep, in the tower. Makes sense that’s where Azama’d be. It’s still a big area to look through. I was hoping – well, I was hoping maybe you could track magic, seeing as you’re the only magic user we have now.”

Other words seemed to form ghosts on her lips so I could almost hear them. “Because that’s what Pasha was going to try to do.” But the words stayed unsaid.

“I can try,” I said. “Have to be really close for it to work, though, within feet. It’s not like tracking people.” Like I’d ever actually done it before. I mean, I know the
theory
, kind of. But I’ve never traced magic. At least partly because, again in theory, there shouldn’t be anyone Upside using magic to trace. Except me and Dendal and the drunkard who slept outside the office, and my once-a-year-or-less-if-I-could-get-away-with-it habit didn’t really count.

“Exactly. That’s why we could never try before. Without a tracker, it would have taken months to scour the whole castle, get close enough to trace, and months without getting caught. Too risky, for everyone. But if we find Amarie, then he shouldn’t be too far. He keeps them close, mostly.”

I knew we were nearly there because of the smell of shit. The cage jolted to a stop and the boy lowered us to the street. Odd, this time I barely noticed the drop.

Jake led the way in silence down through the boarded-up shop and dark corridor to the slaughterhouse. I tried not to think that going via a death-house was an omen.

Darin wasn’t happy to see us, and I can’t say I blame him. He bustled us past his real stockmen and into his office, where he provided us both with the protective suits the men were wearing. They had a rubbery sort of coating that felt odd under my fingers.

“Keeps the blood out,” Darin said.

Nice.

Jake managed to find a way to stash her swords in the baggy suit so they weren’t too obtrusive, and with a few quick twists her hair was up and bundled under a floppy hat. At a swift glance, she was just a stock boy. My pulse pistol went into an inside pocket. Jake looked at it with avid curiosity, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t say.

Darin took us through the dark door and into the stink of death. The room stood empty, but at Darin’s quick nod one of the stock boys, with a suspicious glance at us, went to fetch in the first of the cows.

The next hour or so, I kept to the back of the room and tried not to look. Or hear. Or smell. The bacon swirled in my stomach, maybe in protest at what was happening to its bovine brethren. The first few cows were reluctant but not overly so. Yet, even though the stockmen knew what they were doing, and did it as quickly and humanely as possible, the rest of the cows knew. The whole thing descended into shit and blood and bawling animals. Even Jake found it easier not to look, at least until the beasts were dead. Once the noise had died away she pitched in to help gut and dress the
carcasses. Me, I’ve never been good with blades. Especially after that incident with the angry husband and the bastard sword. So I kept out of the way and in short order all was ready.

Jake came to find me and looked me over with a critical eye. She appeared more like a stockman than ever at first glance, the splash of blood lending her an authenticity that she took pains to reproduce on my protective suit.

Another doorway led out the back, into a cobbled yard surrounded on three sides by stock pens, each groaning with cows and a few pigs. How was it so little of this meat made it Upside? Or maybe it did, if you could afford it. If you could afford it, you probably kept quiet about it.

We loaded the carcasses on to an open-backed cart and jumped on after them, settling on the benches that ran along each side. The driver – one of the mages’ goons, Darin had whispered – fired up the cantankerous engine after a lot of cursing and shot out into the quiet of a street that wasn’t awake yet. The only other person in sight was a drunk slumped in a doorway with a bottle just about to fall out of his limp hand.

We spluttered down the road, the cart’s engine coughing like an old man with pneumonia. The springs had gone, so we jounced over the cobbles and potholes, jarring bones and bruising backsides. Once we turned off the main street, Jake sat up straight, her eyes sharp as she kept track of our route. From what I could make out, Darin and his stockmen kept
this secret with their lives, until now. It still might cost them that if we were caught.

I’d thought we’d make for some part of the wall that surrounded the castle, but the driver turned off the street before we could see it properly past the towers. Jake stood up, frowning as we bounced along an alley so narrow that I’d have lost fingers if I put them between the cart and the wall. The driver pulled to a squealing stop as the alley ended in a wall faced with dressed stone. One of the stockmen gestured to Jake to sit, but other than that they all pretended we weren’t there.

The driver leaned forward and rummaged under the board that held the controls and then tossed a black bundle back to us. Hoods. The other stockmen hurried to put them over their heads, and at an urgent, whispered word we followed suit. Something metal ground along rust by the sounds of it, and the driver moved the cart forwards. I braced for the impact, but when a gruff voice said we could take the hoods off, the alley was gone and a deep blackness had taken its place, punctuated by Glow globes set far apart so everything was flickering shadows and pools of brightness.

“What the—”

Again, a gesture from one of the stockmen, indicating rather urgently that I should stay quiet. I shut up and kept alert as we moved along a tunnel. It was old, I could tell that. The stones it was dressed with were worn smooth, the same size and composition as the ones in the castle’s curtain wall. I thought back hard to the stories Ma used to tell us – well,
me. Perak never actually listened. Even then, such stories were frowned upon by the Ministry, which is probably why Ma liked to tell them.

Among the tales of derring-do, of the castle and the warlord who’d built the city out of nothing but holding a handy pass between two rich nations that hated each other, of his sons and grandsons who’d been cleverer and craftier, I recalled a story of a siege. The two neighbouring nations had decided that Mahala was making too much money as their middleman, and secretly made a trade agreement. Yet they couldn’t pass the mountains except in range of the walls of the castle. Again in secret, they amassed what armies they could from nations more used to hunting, farming and trade. As one marched from the south, so the other came from the north. The castle was trapped between two armies, or so it seemed. But what the foreigners hadn’t understood was the basic nature of our people, at least as it was then, before the Ministry toppled the mage King and set its regimentation over everything, turned us into traders just like the rest. Even thirty years ago, a man couldn’t properly call himself man unless he’d served his stint in the army, learned bow and sword and horse.

Back in the days of the warlord and his sons and grandsons, the way of the blade was every man’s right, and his duty too. To protect the city and the small, high pastures that fed it – pastures that we’d later built on in our arrogance. Yet then, to fight for it, with it, to be part of it was a thing every man
aspired to. But not to fight stupidly, or without forethought. No, that wasn’t our way. As the warlord had once famously said, “The Goddess gave us arms that we might wield a blade, legs that we might steer our horse. But she gave us brains so that we might stab the enemy in the back before it comes to outright war.”

Brains are our birthright. And not just any brains, but the ability to be fucking sneaky. That’s what won us our power then, and brains are what get us our power now. The same kind of brains: how to twist something until we find out what its best use is, and then use it till it bleeds. These days it’s the ability to invent things the rest of the world wants, even if it means stealing the idea, snuffing out the competition and stiffing your customers for as much money as you can.

Back then, being a sneaky bastard meant you had tunnels that led right from your keep that weren’t only well hidden, they were nigh-on impossible to find. And incidentally led to the rear of exactly where any army stupid enough to try and besiege you would pitch its camp. Even then, the warlord hadn’t gone straight there and attacked. Oh no. “Sneaky bastard” wasn’t an apt description for him. “Sneaky, devious and downright underhand bastard” was more like it.

I always loved the stories about him. This was one that had stayed with me, all this time. Because when the two armies had camped and sent forward their negotiators, the warlord said only, “If siege is what you want, siege is what you shall have, if you can bear it. The high valleys you now camp in are
those we use for our tests of manhood. A boy must withstand the terrors that lurk there for seven nights, alive and sane. If you can do the same, if you can become men to our customs, we’ll treat with you.”

The negotiators went away well pleased, and left an even more pleased warlord behind. Every night a dozen of his best assassins went through the tunnels, slipping through the openings hidden among the numerous caves for which the castle is named. Every night they would creep, silent and hidden, around the campfires. They’d sneak up on the sentries, slit the throats of at least twenty men each, before they made such an inhuman wailing as to wake the entire camp. Then, when the hunt was on, they’d fade away, back to the tunnels and their warlord’s appreciation. More than one noble house found its estate through the endeavour.

Each night, the number of men hunting the assassins grew less and the murmurs of the armies – simple, superstitious men, mostly farmers – grew louder. By the fifth day, more than half the armies had deserted. By the seventh, when the negotiators returned, full of bluster and blowhardiness, all that was left of the armies was their standing soldiers, and not even all of them. The warlord sent them packing with a well-placed regiment or six, and Mahala never faltered in its duty as middleman thereafter.

All of which meant that we’d found a tunnel, one that most likely led straight into the heart of the castle. The cart rumbled on, out of the cramped initial tunnel and into something
far grander. Smoothly dressed flagstones kept the floor level and we jounced less. The roof vaulted away from us, up into darkness and the secret rustle of bats. For all this was a tunnel, not meant to be used by the general population, vast carvings decorated the walls. It took a minute or two, but then I began to make them out in the dim light of the Glow globes. A history, not of the castle or the warlord but of warriors, his élite assassins. Men trained to use their pain magic to defend the city, defend the Goddess who protected it and us – with their lives, if called upon.

On one wall that training was depicted, going from battle-hardened veteran back through to pre-pubescent novices as we neared the castle. On the other, scenes for which the assassins were justly famous until the Ministry began its insidious campaign, casting pain magic as something sent not by the Goddess but by Namrat. A thing of evil, to be feared and, above all, reported so that its practitioners could be “saved”. Even before they deposed the King, pain magic had been mistrusted by anyone who wasn’t a mage, only abided because it powered the machines that were our livelihood and, of course, because the King had a habit of using extreme prejudice and decapitation against anyone who said a damn thing against it. Not many would – it was our power, a necessary evil, and one that the Ministry had got rid of just as soon as they could, replacing it with something even worse, the synth.

Jake studied the battle scenes with interest until the way ahead lightened, a hundred Glow globes arrayed across the
way like so many fireflies. I didn’t like the look of what they illuminated, not one little bit. The tunnel closed off, not suddenly but a gradual rounding and narrowing of the carvings until it drew down to one small, hard point. A passageway, unlit, dark and ominous, so narrow that a man would have trouble swinging anything bigger than a letter-knife. High on the walls of the passageway slits had been cut into the stone, just wide enough for arrows. Other, larger openings might have been a better way in, if it weren’t for the boulders that balanced on their lips.

Worse was the welcome party arrayed at this end of the passage. A dozen men, all in Specials uniforms, which, now I came to think of it, bore a distinct resemblance to the uniforms the assassins had used. Black high-collared allovers in smooth leather leaving nothing for an assailant to grab, decorated only with dark blue paint in discreet swirling designs. Long gauntlets up to the elbow designed especially for close work, with flexible palms and fingers and steel plates inserted along the arm bones, used to block a knife or even sword attack. Along the underside, the hilts of throwing-knives peeped out shyly, overshadowed by the subtle but nasty-looking metal lumps on the knuckles. Boots meant for silent movement, soft-soled but reinforced with steel from ankle to knee.