Fade to Black (17 page)

“Still, it seems a little odd…” I trailed off, unsure what this woman knew, or whether I should be revealing what Pasha and Jake did. They’d seemed pretty clear that most of the populace knew nothing about their lives after the matches, or what happened to the girls that went missing.

“That he comes to a place like this when he spends his time rescuing girls like me?”

Ah
. “Well, yes, now that you mention it.”

She leaned forwards and picked up a tray of the little sweet-meats. “Please, do try them. They’re scrumptious.” I picked one and chewed it thoughtfully as she carried on. She was right – it was glorious. “Pasha is why most of us are here, rather than with
them
.”

“He got you away from them, and you do this?” It hardly seemed a fitting end to a rescue story.

She shrugged, a delicate action that seemed to hide a multitude of emotions. “For some of us it’s too late, Mr – I’m sorry, Kersan didn’t say your name. I’m Erlat.”

“Rojan, just Rojan. Too late? I’m sorry, I don’t catch your drift.” Or I did, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe
it. Or maybe I wanted to be blind, so I didn’t have to think about it. That sounded more like me.

“Are you an Upsider?”

“Yes, I am. I’m here to find my niece.”

She turned her liquid brown gaze to the table, but not before I saw the flash of pity. “I’m sorry, truly I am. I hope that Pasha can find her in time, or that she gets a different mage instead of Azama. They each have their own favourite things to do, and Azama – it’s almost all his girls here in this house. Because of what he preferred to do, and after a while… After a while it’s all you know. Now at least I pick and choose my clients. I am not forced. I am cherished to a certain extent. It’s the only way I can be. I know no other, I was taught too well.” She licked her lips nervously, and drew up the long sleeve of her silky green robe. There was no brand, but a faint scar where one might have been once. I caught a movement as Kersan reached behind him for something.

I couldn’t think of a word to say. I wanted to say I was sorry, but I didn’t know her and it would be insincere, even if that’d never stopped me saying anything before. I wanted to say it didn’t have to be that way for her, for any of them, if only because I had to hope that for Amarie. I wondered at myself for even thinking these thoughts, when I could be trying to jump her bones.

“I suppose – I don’t – if you’re content, then that’s good.” Kersan pulled his hand back and sighed. Had they thought I would hurt her? Of course, she must have done. Little
Whores, Pasha had said they were called, lowest of the low, a crime against the Goddess and to be treated as such.

Erlat smiled again, a little strained but it was a start, and tucked her legs under her in a curiously attractive way. I think it was because she put away her working persona, and became herself. A young girl chatting about the goings-on around her, the gossip. Of a sudden, she looked ten years younger – that is, she looked about eighteen. So young, with an elegant poise and a depth and knowing behind her eyes of a woman twice her age. A twist in me, for how she got that knowing, because she’d belonged to this Azama. I was starting to wonder just how big a bastard he was.

“So Rojan, why have you come to see me? Did Pasha recommend my services?”

“No! Er, no, nothing like that. Pasha is – unwell. We need to know about Azama, the Jorrin brothers. Jake seems to think you might help there.”

She tilted her head, and reminded me of a mouse I’d had as a pet, many years ago. He used to look at me the same way when he wanted something. I doubted she wanted another kernel of corn.

“Kersan,” she said, and the boy slipped silently out of the door. “We’ll find what there is to find. We’re so much more invisible than Pasha and especially Jake. Everyone knows them, so when they ask questions it gets noticed. Besides, men are so indiscreet in the bedroom, and do love to boast. Men like Azama don’t even see us unless we try to hamper
him, or we can be used. But the young girls are easier to control than those of us that managed to get out. While we wait, may I entertain you? A bath? A massage? Anything else?”

A flush crept up my neck. This was ridiculous. I was embarrassed, and I’m never that. Embarrassed that I’d thought of the girls I’d used, and yes, that included the girlfriends, as nothing more than warm flesh that I had to have. Interesting only as long as I didn’t have them, and then… there was always another to catch my fancy. Now I could see nothing else but those young girls we’d rescued from the hole, the boys that had cowered in the Jorrin brothers’ flat. Erlat before Jake and Pasha had rescued her, young and hurting, and now knowing nothing else. People, with their own hurts, their own reasons for what they did. It shocked me to silence for a moment.

Erlat read my mood perfectly. She walked over to the tub and tested the water with a delicate hand. “Rojan, if you’d like to relax? Many of the matchers find our hot tubs are very good for unknotting muscles. I’ll go and see about towels, so you’ll have it to yourself.” There was a mischievous glint in her eyes. “I promise not to take advantage of you when I get back.”

She left the room, and me in a state of bewilderment. If she’d been one of those girls, if Azama had done what she’d hinted at, how could she joke about it? Nevertheless the thought of a bath was relaxing. There was nothing I could do now except wait, wait for Kersan or Erlat to come and tell me what they could find out. I stripped off and slid gingerly into
the tub. The water was so hot, I thought it might actually slough the skin off my legs, but once I slid in to the neck, my injured hand dangling over the side, it was bliss. All the muscles in my back and neck relaxed slowly and untangled themselves. The steam fogged my eyes so I shut them, lay back and thought hard about Pasha and Jake.

I couldn’t figure them out. Mousy little Pasha with the courage of a lion. Aggressive, blank-faced Jake with her tender looks at Pasha, her softness with those boys we’d found, the hints of emotion beneath her icy façade. The pair of them, and what went between them, were an enigma, but one I fully intended to solve. That they were only friends was true, at least in the physical sense; the way they avoided touching each other made that evident. But there was something else, something that held them together like invisible string. Which was a pain because I was very attracted to Jake, gods knew why.

I must have nodded off, because I woke with a start when Erlat and Kersan came back in. Erlat giggled and turned away when I got out of the tub, and Kersan handed me some towels and a robe.

Once I was dried off and decent, Erlat turned back; her face was more serious now. “I found out what I could, from some of the other girls. Big party in last night, and they do like to talk after a drink,” she said. “Azama had his own men killed. Seems they were taking a liberty or two, and he’s not one to take that lightly. So he took his price for them – and kept a
watch on their place, just in case. And now Azama suspects it’s been Jake and Pasha thwarting him all this time, rescuing the girls. He’s taking the threat seriously – Pasha and Jake have been getting too close lately, I suspect, and there’s talk that he’s moving.”

“Where to?”

“Where Jake and Pasha can’t, or won’t, follow him. Upside.”

“Upside? But the guards, surely they’ll—” Not unless Azama was Ministry. The only answer, the only hope he had Upside. The Ministry was behind this, behind Azama. Had to be: let’s face it, the Ministry are behind everything, only—Fuck, even I’d not thought they were that bad. But the Ministry had banned mages, and being caught using magic Upside was still an execution offence. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “Whereabouts Upside?”

Erlat waved the question away, as though we were talking of the moon or something equally remote, somewhere she had no hope or expectation of seeing, so why should any individual place there worry her? “Just Upside.”

This could be good news. I
knew
Upside, and more importantly I knew how it worked. Knew every nook and cranny, every infested hole of it, at least anywhere further down than Heights. If Azama really was Ministry, I doubted even they would have the balls to hide him there, up among the rich boys and people who might actually give a crap. No, down somewhere low I reckoned. Somewhere where life, whilst not
as cheap as in the ’Pit, was at least reasonably priced. If that’s where he was headed, we had a chance to catch him.

“I don’t think it likely myself,” Erlat said. “All the machinery is down here, nice and hidden. That’s the reason they sealed the ’Pit in the first place, to be totally secret. It’d take too much effort to move everything Upside, even if the scandal wouldn’t ruin them.”

“I’m not sure—”

Her eyebrows crinkled quizzically. “You do know what they’re doing?”

“Not
totally
certain, no. Or maybe, more accurately, I don’t know why.” Pasha had been infuriatingly cryptic and Jake could hardly bear to talk about it.

Erlat clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, Rojan, it’s so nice to have amusing company for a change.”

Warmth crept up my cheeks and burned at my brow. Surely I wasn’t blushing? I hadn’t done that in years.

She patted my knee. “I’m sorry, I’m just playing. I know Upsiders don’t know what’s going on. All they know is their machines work. They don’t stop to think how, as long as it isn’t the synth.”

Realisation began to dawn. This wasn’t just some little pleasure palace down here, where they could throw off the yoke of piety and be as debauched as they pleased without anything getting out, or knock off the occasional criminal they wanted to get rid of.

No, it was much worse than that. “They banned pain
magic,” I started, “too weak to power much if you abide by the rules, use only your own pain. Too open to abuse. That was all right because by then they had the synth to run everything—”

“—Only when the synth turned out to be toxic,” Erlat carried on for me, “they had to do something. It was supposed to be temporary, just until they could find a synth replacement. A necessary evil. Only they never found one. So all of Mahala is run on this now. On pain magic. Glow.”

I sat in shocked silence for long moments. Pasha had hinted, I knew the kids were being taken to mages, after all. I’d suspected, but hadn’t
wanted
to think it. I’d not fully admitted it, not in one hit like this, what they were doing with them.

“But, but that would take hundreds of mages. Hundreds, and there aren’t that many of us.” In fact I could name four that I knew of, and that included me, Dendal and Pasha, and that poor drunk bastard who slumped outside our office every night, his mind blasted by the black. We have to keep hidden Upside, but even so.

“It would take hundreds if it was themselves they channelled the pain from.” She smiled, a sad, fragile thing, acknowledging the way the world worked and her part in it. Somehow that was the worst of all, the part that cracked my heart for her, that she accepted it. I had an old-fashioned urge to kiss her hand, anything. Something. Nothing would help.

“Which is why they built the factories down here,” she
carried on. “You only need a few mages that way. Hundreds of people, oceans of pain. All gathered to make Glow, feed the never-satisfied monsters they call their trade.”

Trade: what the city had been built on, had thrived on with not much else going for it except ingenuity and the ability to drive a hard bargain. Without trade Mahala was dead, and so was the population. So little land left to farm, so much destroyed by synth, we survived because the rest of the world beat a path to our door for our inventions. Without a way to run the thunderous machines in the Trade district, we’d have nothing to barter for food. We’d starve.

All the thousands and more of us.

Instead, Ministry was using the lowest, poorest people of society to make sure everyone else prospered, and handily clearing out the bits of the population they weren’t so keen on, those likely to cause trouble or make their city a bit too grubby. Which left only one question.

If they were clearing the dregs, why did they take Amarie?

I had no way of finding Jake, and I wasn’t sure I could make my way back to the matches without getting lost, or mugged, so I accepted Erlat’s offer of a bed for the night. I didn’t accept her offer of sharing it with me. I must be getting old or something.

Kersan led me to a dormitory he shared with the other boys who worked here. There were a few spare beds, shabby but with crisp, clean sheets and warm grey blankets, and I settled myself in. But no matter how much I wriggled and fought with the blanket, how many times I thumped the pillow, I couldn’t sleep. Amarie was out there, somewhere. Cold, alone and afraid. I hadn’t dared ask either of them what might have become of her, what the odds were that I could find her, and soon enough. I was afraid I knew.

Finally I sat up. Pasha was sitting on the bed next to mine, looking dishevelled and a little green around the gills. He
didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to; it was in his eyes. Time to go.

“Have you ever been Upside?” I asked.

He shrugged, eyes on the floor. “Yes. I remember it was grey.”

“Grey, that pretty much describes a lot of it.” To be honest, even though there was no sun down here, there was more life, more vibrancy than I’d ever experienced Upside. Now it came to it, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go back. I could get used to it down here, but it wasn’t time for that yet. We didn’t know for sure what Azama was planning, to make sure he was safe down here or to cut and run to Upside. I could hazard a guess. A magic factory, that wasn’t a small undertaking from my limited understanding, and I didn’t even want to
think
of what kind of machinery and such they’d have to move. Any interrupting the flow of Glow to Upside would be costly, maybe devastating to the trade Mahala relied on.

If Azama really was heading up there, he’d have to do a lot of preparation first. My mind began turning over all the places he might hide Upside, all the derelict warehouses in Boundary, abandoned when the synth came to town. Would they be big enough? Hard to say. Before synth, when all we’d had for power was pain magic, and no using other people’s pain to run it, trade had been thinner. It had made us money all right, but nothing compared to what we could turn out with synth and then with Glow. Those old warehouses were pretty small. You could probably fit half a dozen into one of
the minor new ones up there in Trade. The bigger, newer ones took up vast cubed acres. So, where else? And, more importantly, where was he moving them
from
?