Fade to Black (18 page)

“Do we have any idea where Azama is?” I asked. “Any idea at all?”

“In the castle somewhere, but it’s immense, not to mention almost impenetrable. Every time we get close, he moves. Sometimes we get lucky: we got Erlat out from a holding-house, where she was being ‘rested’. Once or twice we’ve come across a smaller factory, got thirty girls out of one, down in one of the outer parts of the old castle. But that’s not much to him. A blip. A minor inconvenience. The main place – they’ve got most of the old castle to themselves. No one will live there anyway, excepting by the walls. The places that are open, well, it’s tricky to get in, and if you get caught, guess where you end up? That leaves you only, what, fifty acres over each of four levels at least? Even if there was no one stopping us, no guards on the old castle walls, it’d take years to search it all. I’ve been in parts: there’s corridors and rooms where you don’t expect and hidden stairways and… Years. It’d take years.”

“But which part is due west of Jake’s place?”

“What?”

“My tracking – the spell. Directly west, that’s all I could make out. Which part of the castle is that?”

Pasha frowned for a moment. “I’m not sure. We can find out, though. Come on, it’s time to go find Jake.”

“Where is she?”

“Going to see a man about a cow.”

We took one of the cages. Pasha waved down a boy and we climbed in. I held on tight to a support strut as we clanked off at far too great a speed for my liking. Especially when we were fifty or more feet in the air. The cage rattled along, bouncing round the junctions till I was sure I’d be sick.

Pasha stood thoughtfully, balanced and keen-eyed now he had something to focus on. The match arena passed under us, its bright lights piercing the mesh that formed the bottom of the cage, painting him in stripes of gold and black. He didn’t look at the arena though; he was staring at the looming bulk of the old castle.

Pasha murmured at the boy and the cage changed direction abruptly at the next junction, almost doubling back on itself and causing me to hold tighter to the strut. Rain, sliced into tiny droplets by the surrounding mesh, settled into a film on my face and hands. “Why the change?” I asked, once I thought I could manage it without stammering.

Pasha grinned like that little monkey again. “How’s your sense of direction?”

Not good when I’m dangling fifty feet above the ground, because the only direction I’m thinking about is down. However, what I said was “Pretty good, usually.” It is too: I can tell which way north is with my eyes shut. No dislocations are required, it just happens.

“Then from up here might be a good way to see what’s due west, right?”

“Right,” I managed, and concentrated on not looking down.

It wasn’t long before Pasha got the boy to stop the cage. I didn’t recognise the area, but presumably Jake’s place was down there somewhere. We were surrounded by the jutting bones of Mahala, old buildings made of solid blocks of dressed stone, great girders that held up the Seal. Not part of the original castle, but of the town that had grown up about it as it became more powerful. Down below us, houses, shops and other buildings, made of whatever could be scrounged together, jostled for position, squeezed in between the stone towers. Inside the old buildings, families camped out in rooms that had once maybe been warehouses or rich merchants’ townhouses, later fortified and strengthened with stone or steel to support additions above. Narrow slit windows flickered with light. The lucky ones, living inside stone that had lasted a thousand years and looked strong enough to last a thousand more, instead of in shacks and shanties that were vulnerable to whatever synth was left.

Pasha had the boy move the cage on a few feet and peered down. I risked a look, and thought maybe I could see the narrow alley that led to Jake’s door. I tried not to notice how far down it was.

“All right,” Pasha said. “Which way?”

I shut my eyes – not without some relief – and tried to feel
it. North was that way, which made west a quarter-turn to the left. My boots squeaked on the mesh as I moved to face the right way. When I opened my eyes I was staring straight at, not part of the castle but one of the buildings that had grown up around it. A warehouse originally perhaps. Music blared from it, grey washing fluttered at windows and a stunted ginger cat with patchy fur sneered at me before a chubby toddler grabbed it from the sill with a crow of delight. Too close, I knew that. I hadn’t been able to tell much, but this tower was too close.

“Any idea what’s directly behind that?” I asked.

Pasha stood beside me and stared out thoughtfully. “One way to find out. Boy, you get us the other side of that?”

He could, at rather more speed than was good for my nerves. The way the cage swung out round the junctions so my feet went sideways almost decorated the mesh in interesting colours. I just about held on to what was in my stomach and kept my eyes shut. It didn’t really help, but at least I wasn’t forced to see the ground too far away and at an odd angle.

Finally we rattled to a stop and Pasha’s whispered “Oh shit” got my eyes open.

“Oh shit” was about right. The tower was behind us now, and due west – due west was the biggest, chunkiest building I’d ever seen, built of blocks of stone bigger than houses. The old castle barbican reared up before us, ahead of a wall. It was easily fifty feet high, and that was just the outer one. It spread left and right, disappearing into the gloom. Inside of that,
past a flat space we couldn’t see into from this height, was another taller wall. No cage wires crossed the walls, no clanking chains. Beyond, tier upon tier of stone, each one piled on the other till the eye reached the forbidding grey bulk of the keep, with a great, squat tower at the top. Mahala had always gone in for building up rather than out, it seemed, and this particular part – the tower, the very centre of the keep – was exactly due west of Jake’s place.

I took a breath and looked down to scan the wall for entrances. There were none, except the bricked-up and impassable barbican. “How do you get in?”

Pasha looked sideways at me. “Into the main castle? You don’t. Always been that way, since before they sealed us off. Even if you could, getting to the keep? We were pretty sure that’s where Azama was basing himself, somewhere in the inner keep, but how to get in? We can get into some of the outer parts, guard towers and such, even found a few girls there, like I said, but no way to get further. Lots of corridors and doorways bricked up, others hidden. Of course there’s a castle gate, but that was bricked up too, same time we got sealed. Even if we found a way – like I said, you could spend years searching and not find anything. We might have been able to get in, perhaps, but the problem was always where to go once we were there.”

“And now Amarie is in there. Well, there must
be
a way. If they’re really preparing to move, it’s going to be a vast undertaking. We must be able to spot something, some sort of activity.”

Pasha leaned his elbows on the cage railing, his eyes dark and unreadable. “Maybe. But he’s a clever bastard, Azama. We aren’t even sure he’s going to move. He’s jittery,
maybe
. That won’t make him stupid. Or maybe he’s put that rumour about to make us rush so we trip up. Come on, we need to find Jake. She had an idea about getting us in.”

The cage clanked off over the houses, away from the intimidating bulk of the castle. If I was of a fanciful nature, I’d say it felt like it was watching me, but I’m not, so I’ll just say it really gave me the fucking creeps.

The temple was small and shabby. The doors were hanging off, so I could make out the statues – the Goddess, the faithful, the martyrs. Namrat, though his face was covered with a black and gold striped cloth. Namrat the tiger, the stalking figure of Death.

Pasha seemed content to wait outside, leaning against a post that held up the roof of a little shop selling pastries. We hadn’t waited long before Jake came out, diffident and awkward today. Her left hand was stained with the devotional – a black circle of ash, a red spot inside. The old prayers, not the new, sanitised ones. The red spot would be blood.

“I never took her for a religious person,” I murmured before she got close enough to hear.

“Pretty much the only hope we have down here,” Pasha said. “All we’ve got to look forward to. Why, aren’t you?”

I snorted a laugh. “Not likely.”

Pasha looked as though that made him pity me, and Jake’s look was the same – she must have overheard, no matter how quiet I thought I was being. A serious, gentle pity that pissed me off something rotten. Maybe because I deserved it, I don’t know.

“Don’t you go to temple, Rojan?” Jake looked at me with a puzzled frown.

I kept a tight lid on my words. “I believe in one thing. I believe I know where Amarie is.”

The soft little smile playing around her lips just made things worse, because she was smiling at me, damn it, and I would have admitted to being Namrat’s bastard love-child if she’d do it some more. She shook her head, like I was a lost cause, and turned away to meet Pasha’s gaze. There was that feeling again, that they were talking without talking, and a tingle in my hands. A little thrill of magic in the air.

“In the keep,” Pasha said. His voice came out as a croak, but he coughed and tried again. “She’s in the keep.”

Jake fiddled with the hilt of one of her swords. “No surprise, we thought as much. We’ve just never known for sure, and not enough help to just go for it, no one to tell us
where
in the keep. Rojan, if we can get you in there, do you think you can find them, her? Exactly?”

I thought about how hard it had been, getting past whatever protection was on her just to find the due-west direction. It would be worse in there, the magic closer, more intense. My poor hand throbbed at the thought. So did my head, at the
thought of how deep I might need to go into the black. Whether I’d make it back out again in one piece, with my mind still my own.
Princess, Daddy
.

“Yes, I can.”

At about that point I found myself praying to the Goddess and had to tell myself not to be so fucking stupid.

Pasha’s face scrunched up in amusement, the little monkey again. Maybe he really could see my thoughts. I experimented:
That Pasha is a right smug bastard
.
No wonder Jake won’t touch him.
No doubt about it – he looked like I’d just slapped him.

Jake was oblivious. “Rojan, would you like to see something?”

“That depends on what it is.”

Her smile blew all thoughts of Pasha away. “Something you’ve not seen for a long, long time. If ever.”

By the time the cage set us down on firm ground, I was ready to kiss the street, I was so glad to have solidity under me again. No walkway Upside was ever that bad. I might even have done it, if the stink of the place hadn’t warned me. It smelled like shit. Literally.

My stomach rolled over. It hadn’t recovered from the cage yet, and now I was being assaulted by a smell strong enough to make my eyes water. No wonder the street was empty. “Jake, what are we doing here?”

She looked around furtively, as though gathering her bearings, then made her way to a shop with boarded-up windows. “I came down earlier, trying to find out more about the Jorrin brothers and why Azama had them killed.”

“Taking liberties, Erlat said.”

Pasha brought up the rear, his face simian, but he seemed to have recovered from my mental blast.

With a gentle shove, one of the boards came away easily from a window and Jake peered into the darkness beyond. “Ah, yes, but what kind of liberties? Makes a difference.”

Jake stepped over the low sill of the display window and held the board until Pasha and I followed, when she pushed it back into place.

“I don’t see why.”

As the board snicked back into place, total darkness descended, leaving me blind. I reached out and found Pasha’s shoulder.

“Wait a few minutes for your night eyes to come in,” he said. “Look, if they were going against Azama, it would maybe explain why they took your niece. One for themselves, not for him. But if her kidnap was on his orders and it was something else they did that pissed him off, then that’s another matter entirely. How many girls have you seen on the street since you’ve been here?”

I opened my mouth to say, “Loads,” then shut it with a snap. None, that was how many. I’d seen children, but now I came to think about it they were all boys. Not many of those either, compared to the number underfoot Upside.

“They’re running out of children?”

My eyes began to adjust and I could make out a dark blob that was Pasha, another that was Jake and a wall with a darker space in it behind them. We picked a careful path to the doorway.

Pasha went through first. “We can get some light in a
minute. Can’t risk it being seen from the street, see. Mind the steps. And yes, I think they’re running out of children. Which still doesn’t answer why your niece in particular.”

I went down three steps into another open space. Pasha shut the door behind us and fumbled about with something on a wall. After a minute or so a light flared, dazzling my eyes so I was blinder than I had been in the dark. I squinted against it until I could see again. A plain, squalid room with a hole in the floor: stairs leading down. Down? I’d thought we were as far down as we could get.

Pasha led the way. His voice echoed off the stone stairwell, flat and unemotional, as though he had to distance himself from what he was saying. Or maybe not show me how much he disliked me. “And when they run out of children – well, they go to find some more. They’re getting desperate enough that they’re taking people off the streets, and not just children, anyone. No one says anything, no one
sees
. They daren’t. Only, you know, it’s a funny thing. There’s only so much a person can take of what they do. They rest them in between sessions, but still… in the end, it’s the mind that gives out, gives up. And it’s the children that last longer, they figured that out long ago. If they get them young enough, they’ll last a long time. You know why?”