Fade to Black

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Before the Fall

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To Burtus, and afternoons of pendulous crunchalating.

Because Dwarves make perfect muses.

I forced the door, nice and quiet, with my ever-so-slightly-illegal pulse pistol at the ready. Magic wasn’t usually on the agenda for runaways, but this little madam was exceptional: booby traps a speciality – I’d almost gone up in flames this morning. Twice. If it wasn’t for the obscene amount of money her parents had offered me to find her, I’d have given it up as a bad job.

The room beyond the door was even more dingy and rubbish-strewn than the corridor, and that was saying something. Rainwater had driven through a broken window and the faint stench of synth drifted up from where it pooled. I sidestepped around it. You could catch a fatal dose and never know until it was too late. Residents hurried away behind me with a mutter of footfalls. One sight of me, a burly man in a subtly armoured, close-fitting all over with a flapping black coat, and the scavenge-rat teens that called this place home
took to their heels. I dare say it looked too much like a Ministry Special’s uniform with an added coat. Living this far down, a nose for trouble was essential.

I checked around carefully, trying to listen past the far rumble and thump of factories above us. A flash of movement off to my left, a hint of bright blue shirt. Lise, the girl I was after. With nothing to alarm me – yet – I made my careful way in. There it was again: a flicker of blue, floating in the gloom. I slid my fingers round the pistol’s trigger and pointed it. It wouldn’t kill her, but it would give me just enough of an edge. I didn’t understand it myself because it’s not my kind of magic, but the man who sold it to me had explained it as a way of interrupting thought processes, quite abruptly. An almost painless magical cosh, if you will. It would shut her down, at least for long enough for me to restrain her. Killing people wasn’t my line of work, or my style. If I’d had a taste for it I’d have stayed with the guards or, Goddess forbid, gone into the Ministry Specials, but I hadn’t liked the amount of paperwork, or the restrictions. I preferred the more freeform business I was in, where responsibility wasn’t something I needed to worry about.

I slid forwards, making sure there were no nasty surprises waiting in the rubbish at my feet. She moved again and black hair whirled out as she ran down a short corridor. I followed with exaggerated care, in case she had any more tricks in store for me. She wasn’t stupid. There had been those booby traps. Plus, she’d covered her tracks like a professional. It had taken
me a week to find her, a length of time almost unheard of. I’d nearly had to resort to magic, and I never like to do that.

The information from her parents had shown me she was book-smart at least, a high-ranking fifteen-year-old student in alchemy. Bright enough to cover her tracks almost seamlessly; and ruthless, or desperate, enough to defend her retreat. Clever enough to come down here, on the border of Namrat’s Armpit and Boundary, right where the people she normally mixed with wouldn’t dream of coming. Where people minded their own business or else, and she had a hope of hiding without falling into the black hole we knew as Namrat’s Armpit, or the ’Pit for short. I tried not to think of the alchemist’s brew of toxic chemicals, residue of the synth disaster, just below the floor.

Rain rattled a broken window and a door snicked closed ahead of me. The little brat had led me a merry chase, but I had her now and the fat pay-purse was all but in my hand. She knew I was there though, and she’d proved resourceful so far. I decided not to trust the door, or the girl. Trust wasn’t a luxury I could afford in this line of work. I had a small wooden baton attached to my belt and used it to push the handle down.

As I pushed, fat sparks bloomed from somewhere above and dripped down the doorframe. I leapt back just in time to avoid the blast. Heat seared the exposed skin of my face and hands and the stench of burning clothes choked me. I rolled until I was sure the flames were out.

Electricity was a new development, and not more than two or three of the really good alchemists had got a grip on it yet. Luckily. Yet she’d learned from my earlier care with her traps, wired the whole damn thing and rigged it up to black powder just as an added bonus in case I avoided the electricity. I was reluctantly impressed.

Runaways had never given me this much trouble before; it was the bounties that did that. This girl had a powerful desire not to go home. Having met her parents, I could sympathise, but a paying job is a paying job, and once I took one on it was hard not to follow through.

I slipped through the door with the pulse pistol held out in front of me. The room was dank and gloomy, lit with fifth-hand light bounced down from better areas far above. Among heaps of rubbish, a parade of small puddles rippled on the bare stone floor where rain leaked through two broken windows. The water gleamed with an oily glint – synth, almost certainly. A thin, filthy mattress contaminated the end of the room. A small light, a rend-nut-oil lamp with a glass cover, scented the air as it glowed next to the makeshift bed, casting a pool of warm light on the sodden blanket that was littered with food wrappers – pretend meat, fake gravy, the tarted-up processed vegetarian shit that was the only kind of tasteless junk available down here. Or pretty much anywhere under Trade.

The wavering light of the lamp made the room behind seem black as Namrat’s heart. Namrat: tiger, stalker, winner
in the end. Death. If I was a religious man, I would have prayed to the nice Goddess that he wasn’t stalking me today. As it was, I kept still and kept looking. She had to be in there somewhere.

My finger tightened on the trigger at a shadowy movement in the dark beyond the mattress, and something flew towards me. I leapt away, but not in time to completely avoid it. It smashed on the stone and let loose a rush of greenish gas. Streamers of it ballooned like smoke, sticking in my throat and blinding my stinging eyes. Oh, she was good, more than good. She was making me work for my money. That’s nearly as bad as using magic.

Footsteps pattered on the concrete as she passed me and I aimed the pistol blindly. Pain leapt through me where the blade on the trigger bit my skin, not much but enough to give me some power to fire. The pistol let loose a buzzing pulse in a wild trajectory and I was rewarded with a snatch of a scream that ended with a heavy thump as she fell to the floor.

I took a few moments to drag myself away from the gas, wiping my streaming eyes and coughing it up. Finally it began to clear, helped by the breeze from the broken windows, and I could see her. She was stretched out in an ungainly pile, face-down in a puddle. Before I did anything else I cuffed her. She’d given me too much trouble already; I wasn’t taking the chance of her escaping now, or maybe pulling something else out of her bag of tricks. I rolled her out of the puddle, saw to
my bleeding thumb with a quick bandage from the stash in my coat, and had a look around as she came to.

It was, quite simply, a shithole. Walls crumbling where they hadn’t been strengthened against the ravages of prolonged synth contact. No window intact. No direct light, not ever, not down this far, yet no Glow tubes to light the room. No nothing really, except that mattress and the oil lamp, something only the poorest of the poor ever used, because of the rancid smell. Even the people who lived in Boundary didn’t live in this sort of place, unless they were seriously desperate. The rats weren’t keen either, which was its only plus.

I had to wonder why she thought this was preferable to living with her very well-off parents, albeit an arrogant bully of a father, and a mother sneaky where he was blunt. Another three months, her sixteenth nameday, and she could have left them to themselves.

They were made for each other. He’d been a big man, fifty perhaps, had once been muscular by the looks but running a little to fat. Two streaks of grey sliced through his black hair like arrows and he had a way of walking as though he owned anywhere he was – or, perhaps, anyone. He’d given me the creeps, especially as there had been something so oddly familiar about him. Not the face as such – bland in a fleshy kind of way – but the way he held himself, the gestures of his hands. It had brought back long-buried memories, but I’d shrugged off that creepiness, told myself I was imagining the familiarity,
when I’d seen how much he was willing to pay. I’ll forget a lot for that much cash.

As he’d shouted and railed, threatening to have my licence withdrawn if I should even dare to think about refusing the job, his wife had winked and flirted and hinted at other methods of payment. She was perhaps ten years younger than him, carefully trim to the point of being haggard, with a shrewish mouth and watchful eyes. I’d been tempted to refuse them, just to see what would happen, but the money was good and I preferred the runaways to the bounties. They were easier to find, less likely to try to kill me, and I could pretend I was doing something towards setting the world right rather than souring my underdeveloped conscience by condemning some small-time fraudster or petty thief to twenty years or, worse, a one way trip to the ’Pit.

Well, runaways
had
been easier, until this one.

She groaned as she came back to herself and I stopped looking in the tatty cloth bag that probably held all her possessions. There was little enough in there, except for a large stack of money. I was a good boy for once, and kept my fingers away from shiny temptation. Daddy probably knew how much she had, down to the last copper penny.

“Come on, Lise, time to stop playing house and go home. For some reason your parents are looking forward to seeing you.”

I hauled her up to her feet, not as gently as I could have; the wired door could have caused me a lot of pain, or worse, and
she’d burned a hole in my best coat. She obviously hadn’t been thinking clearly, didn’t know I was a mage or didn’t know that pain is a very good source of power for magic. Not many people do, because there aren’t supposed to be any pain-mages any more, not since the Ministry took over. My pistol isn’t the only possession of mine that is ever-so-slightly-illegal.

She wasn’t very steady but I grabbed her bag and half pulled, half carried her back to the carriage. On the way she regained the use of her voice and I was treated to a stream of language I was sure a girl of her age and privileged background shouldn’t know. By the time we reached the carriage and I had the door open ready to throw her in, she was kicking and biting and doing everything in her power to get me to let go. I was tempted once or twice to dump her as hard as I could on the floor, or maybe use the pistol on her again, but I held on to myself with all the restraint I could muster. Her screeches brought a gaggle of spectators to see us off, and I had a reputation to keep clean. In public anyway.