Fade to Black (19 page)

No I didn’t, and I didn’t really want to know. The whole damn thing gave me the shudders. It looked like I was going to find out though, because Pasha carried on before I could protest. His voice cracked with suppressed anger.

“Because the mind is a strange thing. The children, they’re told they’ve sinned against the Goddess, that this is to atone. They think they’re doing the right thing by her. They’re told, over and over, that the synth was a punishment from the Goddess, that being in the ’Pit is part of their castigation. Most of the temples down here preach much the same, so it’s easy to take it further. That if they want to atone, become favoured again – the Goddess will love them if they do this, if they take what the mages do to them, they tell them that over and over, until they believe it. When a person believes in something, their mind, and body, will take such punishment you can’t imagine. And a child will believe anything you tell them, until they discover it isn’t true.”

Jake was silent, except for a small, lonely sound behind me that might have been a moan, or a moue of disgust, or sympathy.

I thought back to Dendal, to the quiet devotion he had to his magic, his utter belief that he was doing the Goddess’s work, and how he would suffer any pain to do it. Stupid, fabulous bastard. “People do the damnedest things in the name of belief.”

Pasha stopped to peer at me under the lamp. “Do you really not believe in anything, Rojan? The Goddess? Namrat? Anything at all?”

I led the way down the stairs, mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “No, not really. I stopped believing in things I can’t see or feel a long time ago. Doesn’t do you any good, and
can do a lot of harm. What you’ve just said proves it. Belief is as stupid as the people who believe and the things they believe in. I believe in cold, hard cash, keeping out of trouble and trying not to die. I believe the sun comes up because sometimes I get to see it, and I believe this is the only life we’re likely to get, and that earning good-behaviour points for the next life is worse than stupid, it’s downright ludicrous.”

I pinched my lips shut because I could hear the bitterness in my own voice. So I didn’t say the rest of it, except in my head, and maybe Pasha could hear that. There was no heaven or hell, or any place after death, fluffy and wonderful or full of pain. There was nothing. No divine beings to soothe us or condemn us. No gods or goddesses. Because no
sane
god would allow any of this to happen – the girls, the synth, the sheer ugly uselessness of death. No sane god would let a small girl get trapped in among a cesspit of bodies, let people just take them and, and – do whatever it was they were doing. Who let people live in a stinking shithole like this and only gave them a hallucination of niceness after they died for hope.

Or let my mother, a good and blameless woman, die after so much agony, after so much
faith
. Allow a death where the organs slowly dissolved but left every pain receptor intact. Where even the brain liquefied until there was nothing behind the eyes but pain. No recognition, no love, no emotion. Where finally you drowned in your own phlegm and the churning poison your body produced. And not in days, oh no. In
years
. No sane god would do that. And despite the evidence
of my own eyes I don’t believe in an insane god, even if I do swear by him often. Or, more accurately, swear
at
him.

An insane god might explain a lot, but if he was there, then to believe in him was to give him power. I had my own, hotly forged beliefs. This was it, all we got. There is no afterwards, the guy doesn’t always get the girl and happy-ever-after is a crock of shit. Now is all we have and we might as well make the most of it. I’ll admit I might have made more of it than some. What I actually said was, “The Ministry believe, and look what that’s done for everyone. They believe like fucking crazy, and it’s brought nothing but misery. That’s what I believe.”

Pasha fell silent; we reached the bottom of the stairs and a corridor that dripped with damp and skittered with rats among the rubbish. He raised the lamp and nodded at a door at the far end. He hesitated before he opened it, and gave me a look that shrivelled me. His eyes were very dark under the brightness of the lamp. “I feel sorry for you,” was all he said before he turned away and opened the door.

It was like a kick in the stomach, the soft way he said it, the fact that here was a fucked-up individual if ever I’d met one, and
he
was sorry for
me
. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. I was just going to get Amarie and get the hell out of here, back to normality, to my crappy little life.

The stench of shit as Pasha opened the door robbed me of my answer, because it was hard enough to breathe, let alone talk. The room was vast: long, low-ceilinged and filthy, lit by
lamps that gave off a strange glow reminiscent of your actual sunlight. But that didn’t really matter, because of what was in the room.

Cows.

Not just one or two, but row upon row of them in iron stalls. Their great heads poked out and rooted around troughs in front of them. They were so
big
. I’d never realised. The rump of the nearest one came to my shoulder. It looked at me with blank eyes and shook its head with the weirdest groan I’d ever heard, a deep, bass sound that reverberated in my belly. I was more than glad the damn thing was chained to its stall, especially given the horns. It was nothing like the cows I’d seen in books when I was a child. They’d looked warm and cosy, probably with a name like Buttercup. This looked like a demon in disguise who would be at home being called Evil Git.

It snorted, a hot, heavy rush of air, and I took an involuntary step back. My boot landed in something soft and squishy. I hardly dared look. Shit. Greenish, stinking shit covered the floor, and now my boots. Fabulous.

Jake and Pasha moved past the row of black and brown backs, and I hurried to follow them, treading carefully so as not to slip. I did
not
want to end up face-down on this floor.

The room carried on and on, seeming endless, for long minutes. Finally the far wall came into view, along with a small wooden hutch that might have been an office. Beside it was a dark doorway, open, the smell of death on the other side. That
may sound a bit fanciful, but I know blood when I smell it, and I remembered the smell of the slaughterhouse when I was a boy, when there were still animals to slaughter and meat enough for everyone.

I reached the office just as Jake opened the door and went in. Pasha and I followed. I wasn’t sure what I expected, a man dripping in diamonds maybe, what with the price of meat and leather Upside. Instead there was a bald, fat blob, dressed in rags. The top might once have been knitted, and maybe it’d been green, but now it was grey with age and had unravelled in various places, giving him the look of a statue overrun with lichen. The grey pallor of his skin did nothing to dispel that idea. His face was blotchy and drooped down in two folds by his mouth. A statue of a depressed dog, that’s what he looked like.

The jumper was tied on with pieces of its own unravelling, and another length of yarn held up what was left of his trousers, which were stained the same greenish-brown as the stuff on the floor. The only serviceable pieces of clothing he had on him were his boots, but, given the state of the floor, stout boots weren’t too much of a surprise.

His grey face dappled into purply-blue when he saw Jake.

“I ain’t done nothing, I ain’t,” were his first words. The words of the not-so-innocent everywhere when confronted with the truth, or someone likely to arrest them or make things painful. His left hand scrabbled for a drawer in his desk, but Jake slid a blade out of a scabbard, making sure it scraped
nicely. The sound made the left hand stop abruptly and it dangled uselessly in mid-air. “I ain’t done nothing. I
told
you.”

Jake left the talking to Pasha. He perched on the edge of the desk, his little monkey face lit up with a smile that looked kind – until you saw his eyes. Then it looked like Namrat the tiger, all grinning teeth and waiting death. “I’m sure you haven’t, Darin. Now, we’ve been friends awhile, yes? You’ve done us favours and we’ve done you favours. So why the sudden panic?”

Darin’s eyes darted to and fro as he thought, but not for long. Jake was getting restless and the blade inched forwards. “It’s changed now. It’s that Azama. Oh, a cruel bastard, that one. Crueller than the rest of ‘em put together. And he came back Down, and found out, about the favours I did you.” He was pale and sweating now, the creases of his face more pronounced as he screwed himself up to say it. I wondered briefly who he was more afraid of, Jake or Azama, but came to the conclusion the answer to that was “whichever one was in front of him at the time”.

“He found out?” Pasha licked his lips and he lost the smile, replacing it with a sudden frown. “How?”

“I don’t know, I swear, I didn’t tell him. But he knows. He… he found that last lot of girls I sent out. Poor wee things are dead as this lot of cows come tomorrow.”

Jake’s sword moved in a blur, but a motion from Pasha stopped her. Pasha looked worse than Darin did, all pale skin and sweaty, shaking hands.

Darin squeaked at Jake’s movement, then sagged back into his chair when Pasha stopped her. “Please, I can’t do you no more favours. Wouldn’t do you no good anyway: he’ll catch them. They won’t be safe, I’m sure of it.”

“But you’re still alive.”

Darin hunched a shrug, making all his excess flesh wobble. “I promised him – I promised him I’d dob you in next time, let him know when there was girls coming so’s he could catch you. Only I won’t, not if you don’t bring me no more girls to get out. You got to find some other way.”

“There is no other way.” Pasha reached down and grabbed at Darin’s top. Threads came away in his hand, so he grabbed for the fleshy throat. “But that’s not why we’re here.”

“It isn’t?” Darin rasped.

“Not this time. This time we don’t want out, we want in. Can you get us into the castle?”

“What? No! No, I can’t, so don’t you be asking me. I never been past the first gate, you know that.”

“But your beef goes in there, doesn’t it, Darin? Your meat goes everywhere. Best beef Downside and they pay a month’s wages just for a mouthful Upside too. Then there’s the leather. You must be a rich man, trading all that.” Pasha let go and Darin dropped back into the chair, which squeaked in protest.

Darin’s face bunched up in sudden spite and he waved his hands down over his top. “Do I look rich to you?” The wave moved to encompass the room behind us, the cows and the stink. “You think I’ve owned any of this for the last ten years
or more? I got bought out, and had no choice because it was stop trading or stop breathing. These cows are Ministry cows. All of them are. The only reason your farm is safe is because the Ministry don’t reach outside Mahala, they got more sense out there. But everything that comes in,
everything
, becomes theirs, one way or another. Even you two belong to them, don’t you? Jake fights in their matches, and she pays you to work for her. You’re both Ministry as much as I am, as everyone is, whether they know it or not. And for a while they didn’t search what was going out, because they thought it was all trade, things paid for. They checked, yes, but not too much, and the guards were easily bribed. Only the last trip, they found them, the girls.” Darin looked down at his hands, which tapped out a sad little rhythm on the desk. “It weren’t… I had no choice. No choice. They took them girls and killed two of my men doing it, and, and there ain’t enough men in the whole of Downside to resist them. There ain’t. We’re all Ministry, all of us, even if we don’t know it.”

Pasha stared out at the cows, chained up and acquiescent, waiting for the death they didn’t know was only a door away, and I wondered if he was thinking about what he’d told me – that everyone down here was a cow too, fattened up, kept satisfied and ignorant, or silent, before they were used. “You might be Ministry, Darin, but I’ll be fucked if I am. When’s your next delivery to the castle?”

“Now, I can’t—” This time Pasha didn’t stop Jake and the blade skittered over the desktop towards Darin’s copious
stomach. The point sliced another thread from the top, leaving the whole garment perilously close to falling off. Darin dared a look at Jake and his jowls wobbled. I can’t say I blame him; I’ve met a few nasty bastards in my time, men and women who’d kill you without a backward glance, but I’ve never seen any of them with such a cold hardness about the eyes, or such a still way of standing, as though she was just waiting for the movement that would release her like a spring.

Pasha had his gun out and laid it casually on one leg, barrel pointed at Darin. The dull gleam of metal, made for dealing pain and death, was like a parallel of Jake. I almost felt sorry for Darin.

The fat man gathered his wits. “The slaughtermen are coming in first thing. Reckon we’ll be ready to start taking the carcasses along mid-morning.”

Pasha patted his hand. “Then we’ll be here first thing too, and you can have a nice plan of where you drop off the meat, can’t you?”

Darin bit his lip and nodded.

“Good. I think you can stop now, Jake.”

She scraped the sword back across the desk, leaving a long gouge mark in the already scarred surface, and put it back in its scabbard. Her gaze never left Darin’s face and he fidgeted under her glare.

“I’m sure you won’t be telling anyone about this. Will you, Darin?” The gun was still lying on Pasha’s lap and one finger stroked the trigger, as though it was a pet.

“No, no course not, Pasha. Course not. Could you, er, point that somewhere else?”

Pasha’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, yes, of course. I forgot.” The gun disappeared into a pocket. “For now.”

We left the office and a shaky-looking Darin, and I picked my way among the shit back to the door.

“What are you planning on doing?” I asked as the smell receded, though it lingered on my boots. “If the castle is full of Ministry, then what the fuck can three people do in there?” Apart from get killed, obviously.

Pasha slid his gaze sideways to me. “Same thing we always do. Whatever we can.”