Fade to Black (3 page)

I threw myself into my shabby chair behind the desk with no two legs the same length and a complicated system of books and pieces of folded paper trying to keep it level. I’d long since come to the secret conclusion that the desk was alive. I’d get it level, go home, come in the next day and it would be more uneven than ever. We’d come to an uneasy truce, me and desk. I stopped trying to make it flatter than a
flatbread, and desk made sure it wasn’t so tilted that my cup slid off when I wasn’t looking. I’d taken to taping my pens to the surface, none the less.

I reached into one of the drawers, gingerly: we had yet to come to a truce about the springs that made the drawers snap back shut on unsuspecting fingers. My hand darted in, grabbed the bandage and was out again before desk knew what I was about. A small but satisfying victory.

I laid my right hand on the desk, palm up, and undid the hasty bandage from earlier. My finger throbbed with the release of pressure and a runnel of blood oozed out. Luckily, I was used to this sort of thing. It still hurt though. I used the old bandage to clean the wound up as much as I could and got a dollop of the thick green salve that Dendal swore by poised and ready. This was going to sting something chronic. You could etch steel with that salve, I was sure.

“Told you, shouldn’t use the pistol.”

Dendal’s papery voice startled me and the salve dropped from my fingers and splatted on to the floor.

“Namrat’s bloody balls, Dendal, you almost gave me an apoplexy.”

He grinned at me in an absent-minded way, his thin, grey hair flying about him haphazardly. A spare sort of figure, quite a bit older than me, though I’ve no idea how much. He’d just always been around. He had thin, fleshless cheeks, a shy smile that could transform his face into a kindly grandfather’s, and a sort of air that he should be meditating, or was. His thoughts
were probably a thousand miles away, playing with fairies. He wasn’t always very
here
, if you see what I mean. Too obsessed with his work. Lastri made sure he ate occasionally and didn’t fall out of the window thinking it was the door or something. But Dendal wasn’t just another absent-minded idiot with fly-away hair. When he managed to get his head out of his books he was sharper than the blade on my pistol and shrewder than ten rich traders. When he spoke, I listened. Well, mostly.

“Pistol’s clumsy for someone like you, Rojan.”

I looked up sharply. It wasn’t often he could recall my name. “No, it’s a pretty efficient way of producing pain. I promise you that.”

Dendal hummed a tune under his breath and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. My thumb was forgotten as his eyes detached from the now. He linked his hands together and
twisted
, bringing a great crack from his hand and a breathless cry. Shit, I hated it when he did that.

His eyes flew wide and he began to babble, nonsense things at first, gradually becoming more coherent. One of his fingers stuck out at an odd angle. Dislocated. Double shit.

Lastri stood behind him, her usually bland face looking worried now as she mouthed something over his shoulder. Something about Dendal trying to contact me all morning. That explained the pinging noise in the carriage – I’d been too distracted by Lise at that point to answer.

The quality of Dendal’s voice changed, became deeper, younger. A voice I knew and never wanted to hear again,
channelled through Dendal, who would take any pain for his magic, to fulfil his gift and communicate.

“Rojan, at last!” Perak’s voice was rasping and weak and I wondered what trouble I’d have to get him out of now. We hadn’t spoken in almost eight years, and that was how I liked it.

“Perak.” I tried to keep my voice steady as I swore in my head. My brother was trouble, always had been, and if I got involved I knew the trouble would end up being all mine while he waltzed off into another daydream, unaffected. He didn’t have his head in the sand about life; it was so far down he could see bedrock.

“Rojan, you have to come.” There was that rasping again, and a bubbling sound in his voice. He spoke so low I could barely hear him, but the panic was obvious as he rambled. He’d always seemed to float through life, never seeing or hearing any dangers, and this fear seemed so unlike him I sat up and really listened.

“I’m in the Sacred Goddess Hospital. They took her. They shot us and took her. You have to come, you have to help find her. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Find people? Please, you have to come.” He trailed off and it was only then that I realised he was crying.

My teeth became islands in a mouth as dry as desert. “Find who?”

“Elsa’s dead,” he said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “They killed my wife, they almost killed me, and they took my daughter. You’ll come, won’t you?”

I didn’t hesitate. He’d caused me enough grief to last a lifetime while he sailed through every calamity without scratch or punishment, left all of it for me, but I couldn’t leave him with this. I hadn’t even known he was married, never mind a father. Yet now his wife was dead and his daughter was missing. The years, and with them the animosity, rolled away. No matter how much I hated it, I was always going to be big brother. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Dendal staggered to a chair and began the painful business of putting his finger back. At least he’d have enough power from that for a spell or two later, storing the pain, the power, in his muscles for a time until it leaked slowly away. One advantage of the dislocation over the cut, as he often told me, at infinite and tedious length. Pain dislocating and pain putting it back. Twice the pain, twice the power. Which is all very well, but I’d rather have as little pain as possible.

Seeing Perak again was going to be a different sort of painful. On my own personal scale of bad days, this was shaping up to be at least an 8.4.

The Sacred Goddess Hospital was one of the plusher ones, up above Trade, and it took me most of the rest of the afternoon to negotiate my way up the ramp. Mahala’s Spine they call it, the link between each layer from the depths of Boundary to the pinnacle of Top of the World. By the time I reached the right level, the sun was setting behind a rack of rainclouds. I stopped the wheezing carriage and watched for a while. It wasn’t often I got up high enough to see the sun directly, normally relying on second- or third-hand light bounced from mirrors or seeping dimly through light-wells.

From here, I could see right out over one side of Trade, the huge, hulking factories that seemed to permanently shake the feet as they pounded out Mahala’s lifeblood – the technology we invented and made so well. Behind them sat warehouses, black and squat and menacing. No buildings above the factories or warehouses – they’d have been shaken to pieces – so
I could see, far off and grey, the tops of the mountains that surrounded the city, that gave us our strength, and our weakness, the reason we built up rather than out. The reason we had to trade for food, because we had so little land left to farm.

Mahala was built to make you look up, and then up again. The other side of Trade, the merchant houses, shops, arcades, markets, showrooms and laboratories were all covered by more buildings, so that all I could make out in the lowering light were facings, flashing red Glow lights shouting out wares, and black chasms between. Walkways clung to them like spider’s webs, as if they were spiders trying to spin a city. Above lay Heights, on graceful spires and spindles, then Clouds, giant platforms that I would never see except from underneath, full of gardens and rarer wonders, or so I’d heard.

Above everything, on a spire so thin it seemed it must break, with only the gossamer strand of the Spine reaching its dais, sat Top of the World. Heart of the Ministry, home of the Archdeacon, far off and impossible to reach. All the better to look down on us, mere mortals, unworthy of divine notice, or sun, at least once you got down past Trade. I supposed you couldn’t see us from up there; Under-Trade, or the area they called the Buzz, was where rich men might come if they were feeling adventurous, but not too grubby. Down further into the murky depths where the sun was a rumour, buildings squashed together as though for comfort, was the area once called Hope City, now known as No-Hope Shitty, and, at the bottom, Boundary. The city used to go further, before the synth.

Ah yes. Synth. Hailed as the great invention to save mankind from pain-mages and from the city’s reliance on the power they had, the way they could run all the machines in Trade, make us the city that everyone looked to. Only magic had its side effects: odd splurges that got out of control, weird fogs that choked and fumed; the pain-mages either falling into the black or going mad and blowing up portions of the city, or each other, on a fairly regular basis as the workload increased and the number of mages didn’t, or not very fast. So when the Ministry discovered synth, they knew they could topple the King – a mage himself, with a habit of defending every mage’s action even when they were blowing each other and the non-magical populace up. With a new power source behind them, the Ministry had banned us, for “the good of the city”, introduced synth to run the machines, and all had been well. The Glorious Revolution had saved the city and of course, as the instigators, the Ministry had become the new government. Fair, even-handed – or they were to start with. Never stays like that, does it? But most importantly, they were
not magical
. The air cleared, no one blew anyone else up except the odd alchemist. All the same, it had taken them years to realise synth was killing people.

No one knew of the toxic properties of synth to start with, and it was only when a new and virulent form of disease had swept over the plains north of Mahala, and then raced through the lower layers of the city, before it ate its way through most of the rest of the continent, that they’d realised something was
amiss. The synthtox. It seeped into every part of you, from the rain, the water you drank, the food you ate. In itself it wasn’t harmful, but it did something to the body, made it retain all the toxins that should have been flushed out, until the system could take no more and the tox took over. It was a long, painful death, as I could attest. Watching my mother die of it over a period of ten years was the single most gruesome experience of my life.

We couldn’t go back to pain magic: all the mages had either left, been sent to the ’Pit or been driven into hiding by the Ministry. The King they’d beheaded – the surest way to kill a pain-mage, because it’s so quick – and shoved his body off the edge of his own palace in Top of the World and left him for the rats. Without him and his absolute authority to protect them, and with the sight of his headless body plunging a hundred levels or more imprinted in their minds, the mages had scattered.

Even if the Ministry hadn’t got rid of all the mages, synth had been more powerful. Mahala had grown so much on the extra trade in the only way it could – up – that even if we’d had all the mages back they wouldn’t have been able to power a tenth of the new machines. So the powers-that-be had panicked, and pulled together. Synth had been banned and the alchemists and priests had come up with a new fuel, Glow, one shrouded in mystery, not as powerful as synth but at least clean. Of course that’s what they’d said about synth, but people would have believed anything at that point and maybe
it was even true. No one has ever been known to die from Glow, but it’s early days yet.

The lower places were the worst-infected by the synth, where the tainted water pooled. They’d cleared them out, sealed them off in Namrat’s Armpit, cleaned the remaining water supplies Upside. Over the course of the next few years the synth levels had dropped dramatically, though those who had it in their bodies already couldn’t get rid of it, and so they still died. Fewer each year, until now, almost fifteen years later, it was becoming a rarity except far down in Boundary.

If it was as bad as this, why didn’t I leave? Why didn’t we all? I could see those mountains, grey, mythical shapes. I knew they existed. Probably. I knew there had to be an Outside. I had yet to meet anyone who’d been there. For all any of us knew, it could be worse. According to the news-sheets it didn’t even exist, not really, a story the Ministry stuck to despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Even if I’d been tempted, two very real things kept me here. One, getting Outside would take more money than I could blag in a lifetime. Oh, things went out, machines, inventions, all the little things that kept us in crappy vegetarian mush.
People
didn’t, though. Maybe the occasional Special, the élite Ministry guards who escorted the merchandise out. But anyone else? If you weren’t Ministry, forget it.

The general feeling Under-Trade was either that, given the lack of people who’d actually seen it, it was mythical, or you’d die trying to get out. Neither appealed. Besides, reason
number two: Dendal. I owed the old bastard – quite a lot, and not money. Lastri would look after him if I went but… but I’ve abandoned a lot of people in my life. I just can’t quite see myself abandoning Dendal. Not least because, if he wanted, I’d be a smear of blood on his carpet, the knowledge of which sharpens the mind wonderfully. Only idiots tried to get Outside, that was the crux of it, and they died, or got sent to the ’Pit. I kept telling myself that, and never failed to stop to look at the pale ghosts of mountains when I got the chance.

But I didn’t stop to stare at the mythical Outside and the not-so-mythical but highly pungent Inside for long, because the view always left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Sacred Goddess Hospital was a great grey building, squashed between the outer boundary of Trade that supported its base and the more graceful area of Heights above.

I left the carriage and negotiated the clanking iron walkway that led out over the gap. I’ve said I prefer the lower-rent districts because it saves me money. It also saves my head. With one hand firmly on the handrail, I stepped out, eyes fixed ahead.
Just keep the hospital in view. Don’t look down
. You’d think I’d be used to it after a lifetime in this city, but I’ve seen too many fallers who’ve missed the nets and bounced their way down twenty or thirty levels. Or rather, I’ve seen what was left of them once they reached Boundary.