Fade to Black (6 page)

“You keep your hands to yourself, or I’ll use my pistol on you. A lot. In a certain area between your legs.”

Dwarf held up his hands and chuckled in the filthiest way imaginable. “No, no, she’ll be safe with me. I like mine willing, and there’s precious few who’ll be that when they see my face. What did she use on you?”

“Electricity.”

He went very still apart from his eyes, which darted to and fro like wild animals in a cage. “Electricity, oh my boy, the things we could do. Consider her safe. What’s her name, so I’ll know her?”

“Lise, and be sure to keep her secret till her birthday. Daddy is something high up, but he doesn’t know how to look for people. I don’t think he wants it broadcast that she keeps running away, so he won’t use anything official to find her. Three months till she’s sixteen. Deal?”

Dwarf nodded, slow and thoughtful. “You think she’ll really come, and she’s really that good?”

“I’m surprised she’s not here already. And she’s damn good. Look at the hole she made in my coat.”

“Then I owe you, and not just keeping her safe. The ’Pit. The bullets I made went down to the ’Pit, and don’t ask me how I know that, or tell anyone how you know.”

The ’Pit? That was for corpses or those soon to be corpses.

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask, but I’d pushed Dwarf as far as he could go. I knew Lise would come in handy for something other than making my day more interesting and way too painful. “Deal.”

I shook the rain from my coat and pushed open the door to the Beggar’s Roost, thinking dark thoughts about the synth levels in the falling water, almost fifteen years on from sealing the ’Pit. They said it was back at safe levels, but who knew for sure when it was the Ministry talking? There were still cases of synthtox down at Boundary, where the rain pooled before it drained away through the ’Pit. Where it looked like I might be headed.

Synth: seeing Perak again had brought it all back, the way my, our, mother had died, when all I wanted to do was forget it. I concentrated on the task at hand instead and made for the bar, trying to ignore the dancers under the special Glow globes, lights more commonly known as Ten-Pinters, because they made the girls look as good as if you’d had that much to drink.

Dench was nursing a pint at the end of the bar and eyeing up the dancers. He was a thick-set man in his fifties with a drooping, care-worn face and equally drooping moustache that belied an easygoing manner, especially with information. Today he had the frazzled air of someone with fifty things to do and only the time to do five.

I took the seat next to him casually and he nodded, as
though to someone he’d never met before who just happened to be there. He didn’t look at me after that, but stared vacantly at the dancers and mumbled over his glass like a drunk. I followed his lead and ran my eye over the girls.

A place like this, they were likely either riddled with pox or hooked on Rapture. Spotting the junkies was easy – they moved with a languid grace, as though the world revolved at a different pace for them. The faces were blank of emotion, the drug sucking all feeling from them as surely as a knife drew blood. That was the attraction, of course, especially for girls in their profession. Don’t feel, don’t care, only survive. Make a hideous existence possible. If Lise ran away again and didn’t get under Dwarf’s friendly umbrella, this was probably what she had to look forward to. I’d been firm with Dwarf because I couldn’t leave anyone to that, even if they had tried to blow me up. The white and clammy underbelly of a pious city, where the shit falls to the bottom, quite literally.

And the Ministry, the offices of the gods who keep those in Top of the World in chains of piety, let it happen. Why? Never quite figured that out.

Of course, every now and again some starry-eyed acolyte will come down here to do Good Works and Save the Fallen. Most of them fall prey to a knife somewhere dark and fetid, followed by a judicious lifting of their purse. Some have such a crisis of faith, due to the fact that the Ministry haven’t sent these people to the ’Pit already for such crimes against the Goddess that they never believed were permitted, that they go
mad. Some succumb to the Rapture, especially the acolytes that go mad. Occasionally we actually get a good one, one who accepts things as they are and tries to help. They do some good too. And hey, guess what? The Ministry “promotes” them in order to stop it. The Ministry like us down here, wallowing in shit. I think it makes them feel better about themselves. More pious or something.

Maybe I should cheer up. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be incredibly rich and handsome, but I doubt that’ll happen either.

Dench straightened up a tad, drained his drink and nodded at the steward for more beer. Once he’d skimmed the froth by sucking it through his moustache, an act that always made me feel vaguely sick, he started talking, low, almost as though he was still mumbling to himself.

“I’ve got no leads to speak of. Been a few of these kidnappings lately, and I can never find who did it. You know what it’s like. The only thing I did find out, I don’t have time to follow it up. Won’t lead to anything anyway. Never does, cases like this.”

Code for “I’m not allowed to look into this too far” maybe. The Ministry paid his wages, and sometimes, just sometimes, they don’t want people caught. Not
Ministry
people anyway.

“And just what was that only thing?” I mumbled over my own beer without looking at him. He spluttered at the bald question so I placated him as best I could. “All I want to do is help you out here. I can take a load off you. One less case for you to worry about.”

He gave me a sour, disbelieving glare from under bushy grey eyebrows. “Two guys, similar to the description the husband gave. Stayed down in Boundary, night before she got taken. Boarding-house owner complained because they didn’t pay up.”

“Two guys who can afford to be dressed all in leather, they stay down there, and give themselves away because they don’t pay? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

His face became guarded and pinched. “Yes. And no.” Three words that spoke volumes to me. Told me – again – that the Ministry were wrapped up in this somehow and Dench didn’t like it one little bit. And that was all I could get out of him.

I didn’t bother going home. My rooms would be covered in paint, because Sela was a girl of her word, and I was too tired to clean up now. When I left the Beggar’s Roost I threaded my way through the dark, rotting alleys and up dank stairwells towards the office. At least down here, a mere few storeys above the bottom of Boundary, the walkways didn’t bother me so much. Besides, moonlight never made it down this far, sucked up by the godly folk above us, so I couldn’t see how far it was to fall.

The little temple stood open as I passed, sandwiched between a brothel and an apothecary that only ever had two herbs in stock, and those were both best for cooking. The priest here was one of the better ones, but I ignored his call to join in prayers. Temples held no interest for me, not any more.

I watched the poor deluded fools going into a bland, whitewashed box instead of the temples we used to have, before Ministry tightened the strings on our souls, before they got rid of anything remotely joyful. It had been a slow, insidious path from the glorious Ministry revolution, saving us from the corrupt mage King, to this. At first they’d been benevolent dictators. One little step at a time, but all those little steps over decades added up to total control of mind and body.

It had started when the synthtox came, when the Ministry knew it had fucked up and a slow wave of hatred had moved up from Boundary. They’d stamped on it, but made it seem like it was for our own good. It started with the banning of any song lyrics that weren’t hymns, to protect people, to let them know only faith. Then the changes in the prayers. The proliferation of these soulless buildings that masqueraded as temples, robbed of the grandeur, the serenity, the
peace
they had once had, even when I was a boy. Before the synth ruined everything, scarred a generation with loss and grief, where most everyone under Trade had known and lost someone to the synth, or the sealing of the ’Pit. It had started with one little step, and ended with this.

They tried to keep up the pretence, but religious men in the Ministry now were few and far between. There was a flurry of activity in the temple, a poor and spartan thing compared to those I’d gone to as a child. No stained glass to strain the faint sun and paint rainbows on the floor. No incense, no choir, no pomp. No tranquillity.

I’d call the people entering “worshippers” for want of a better word – most of them only went in to get out of the rain. But they gave thanks, Goddess knows what for, poor bastards, and they gave alms. They never wondered, never thought that they were the ones who needed the alms. In the churches Over, no bastard gives a lousy coin. These fools gave because then they were better, weren’t so low they couldn’t afford a bit of charity. It was a piss-poor way to feel better about yourself, and I couldn’t even bring myself to do that any more.

I made it on to the wider walkway that fronted the office, avoided the homeless man slumped in his usual spot outside the All Night Flash Fry Grill, spouting some claptrap about the end of the world, and unlocked the door. The office was lit, which seemed odd given that it was somewhere between midnight and dawn. Dendal sat at his desk, papers skewed across it every which way, scribbling something in crabbed handwriting that might as well be code. I shut the door quietly so as not to disturb him and padded across to my own desk.

We kept a large sofa behind it, jammed against the wall between the spare chair and a stuffed tiger that Dendal refused to throw away, even after moths had mauled it so badly you couldn’t tell the colour any more. I took off my knee-length coat, eyed the new burn hole sourly, rolled it into a soggy ball for a pillow and lay down on the sofa with a sigh. It had been a long, extremely trying day and I had a lot to puzzle over
before I could start seeing about finding Amarie. I needed sleep first, because exhaustion and beer were fuddling my brain. The sofa wasn’t long enough to stretch out on, so I propped my feet on the tiger’s head, wriggled my shoulders and shut my eyes.

“So, you’re going to the ’Pit in the morning then.” Dendal’s voice was right by my ear; I’d never even heard him coming. I jumped half off the sofa before I realised it was him.

“Namrat take you for his bitch, Dendal. Don’t
do
that.”

He sat on the chair by my desk and gave me a wild grin. “But I like doing it. Take your great filthy feet off Griswald. Thank you. Now, you’re going to the ’Pit, yes?”

“Maybe. And how do you know about it anyway?” Stupid question. Though he had other, more shadowy talents, the bulk of his magic – his Major – was communication and knowing things, just as my Major was finding people who didn’t want to be found, with the occasional flare – my Minor – of making my face look different, though I don’t use that part too often. It isn’t especially useful except for pissing people off. “OK, wrong question. Why do you want to know?”

Dendal picked up a pen from the desk and began twirling it through his fingers, which generally meant he was going to try to be artful. It rarely worked, precisely because of the way his magic was. Communication – and truth. “Oh, no particular reason. But are you?”

“I don’t know. My niece – you know that’s who I’m looking for? I thought so. She’s down there, that’s what my gut is
telling me. But there shouldn’t
be
anyone down there. Except corpses, anyway. And what about the synth? Even if she is down there, how do
I
get down there? And what the fuck am I going to find when I get there?”

“Your gut? Tut-tut.” Dendal shook his head, as though at a small child. “Have you tried your magic?”

“No.” A cautious one-word answer seemed best, before Dendal started banging on about my potential and how I was wasting it. Truth was, not only do I not like pain, I didn’t want to end up like Dendal, addicted to the magic, a slave to it, lost in my own head more often than not. I’ve had to pull him out of the black before, a thing I hate worse than using my magic, because it reminds me what I’m afraid of. And Dendal isn’t a bumbler in there – no, he’s big and bright in the darkness, and fucking powerful, and still the black is stronger than him. It rules him, I sometimes think.

Worse, if I use my magic, if I let that black into me, let it pull me, I could be sent stark raving mad by it. It’s happened, quite often, before our brand of magic was banned. Pain magic – and the mages who use it – are far too unreliable. But at least it doesn’t poison anyone but the mages. Much.

“It’s about time you started believing in more than your gut, Rojan.”

“You know me, Dendal: I believe in cash, and that men aren’t made for monogamy, that there isn’t a woman alive I can’t get into bed if I try hard enough, and never cross the Ministry. Shit like that. I believe them like crazy.”

“You have to believe that you’re better.”

“I think my ego’s big enough, don’t you?

Dendal pursed his lips. “At magic, Rojan. You never use it unless you have to, and not the way you were built to use it. You use cheap tricks and toys. You could be so
good
, if you just believed in it. You were made to use magic, and not just for playing about with.”

I scowled at him, but he just grinned more. “No, I was made to be a bastard.”

“It’s time to start using it. And if she’s in the ’Pit, I think I know how to get you down there. After that, you’ll be on your own, unless I can call in a favour or two.”

The pen had stopped whirling and Dendal was watching me, no smile on his usually cheerful face. It wasn’t often he was both mentally present and serious, but when he was – when he was, I listened. Pain magic wasn’t the only kind he could conjure.

I creaked to weary feet. “I’ll get the knife.”

“You will not. For this, no cutting corners, pun intended. Not for your niece, Rojan. Not for family.”

I wanted to say I had no family, as I had when I’d taken this share of the office and Dendal had pretended to believe me with a sly, knowing smile. Instead I sat back down and stared at him for a while, trying to gather the will to resist him and cut myself instead, but nothing and no one could defy Dendal in one of these moods. I’m not sure whether it was the sharp shine of his eyes, or the reproach behind them that got me
every time. Namrat himself would have a hard time defying that.