Fade to Black (4 page)

The walkway swung alarmingly with all the people crossing, barging and pushing to get home before the sun went, but I managed to get across without screaming like a little
girl. The hospital was new, scavenged from the guts of the old building that had stood here and refaced with a newer type of steel that shone faintly in the lights of the Glow globes hung around it. I made my way towards the larger glow of open doors. The Sacred Goddess Hospital never shut.

Inside was more traditional: lots of wooden panelling, floors that squeaked under my shoes and the scent of every hospital everywhere – disinfectant, boiled cabbage and death waiting to happen.

It didn’t take long to find out that Perak was in one of the private rooms on the top floor, which made me raise my eyebrows, though not as much as the phalanx of hatchet-faced guards outside the door. They stood out like blood on a bandage with their bright red uniforms, red linen over pale body armour. Each of them had a gun at his hip, a new innovation. Mahala alchemists had used black powder for various things in our less salubrious past; the ability to use that powder to launch a piece of metal into someone’s body was relatively recent. Luckily, that meant it was also too expensive for most people, especially the sort of small-time low-lives I dealt with on a daily basis. It should also be out of the reach of guards – the Ministry had yet to equip them with guns due to the cost – and the fact that it wasn’t was unnerving.

I recognised one of them, Dench. He often gave me surreptitious tip-offs on bounties coming up in return for a small cut. He nodded almost imperceptibly to the other guards, murmured he knew who I was, and let me in.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The room was small but well appointed, much more so than the open wards below. Instead of bare whitewashed walls, lush hangings in muted green and gold softened the square room. The Glow globes, while dimmed, were top-notch quality; and proper fruit, not reconstituted crap, sat on the side table in enough variety to shame all but the best grocers. Perak must have done well for himself, or had powerful friends.

He was asleep, the dark hair that we’d both inherited from our father mussed and clumped with blood. He’d always taken after our mother more than I had. His skin was lighter, a creamy brown like Ma’s, his cheekbones somewhat broader than my own too-gaunt ones, the nose shorter. But that we were brothers showed in the rounding of our chins, the downward tilt to our eyes, the shape of our mouths.

A sheet covered him below the waist and blood spotted a large bandage that was wrapped tightly around one shoulder and over his chest. A doctor with a sharp, dark face leaned over him, his fingers registering Perak’s pulse.

The doctor scowled at me. “No visitors, not yet.”

I shrugged. Putting this off would be a relief, but Perak didn’t have that luxury. “I’m his brother.”

The doctor laid Perak’s arm down and regarded me critically, maybe assessing the likeness. He seemed convinced. “Hmm. Well, when he wakes up again you’ve got two minutes. We managed to get one bullet out. The other’s still in his chest somewhere.” He shook his head so his hair flopped over
his forehead. Suddenly he lost his arrogance and looked young and tired and pissed off. “This is only the third bullet case I’ve ever seen. The others were minor, but the potential for damage – the wounds are nothing like knife or sword wounds and we’re still learning. That bullet might be fine, or it might kill him, and I haven’t a clue which it will be. Whoever invented guns, I just hope Namrat takes the guy’s soul
and
balls when he dies.”

The doctor made for the door, trailing weariness in the slump of his shoulders. He turned at the doorway with an afterthought. “I haven’t told him everything about his wife. He just knows she’s dead. Perak said you find people for a living and you’re going to find his daughter. If you think anything about the mother’s death would help, come and find me after. Ask for Doctor Whelar.”

The room was deathly quiet when he left, with only the bubble of Perak’s breath to break the silence. I went over his words earlier, the way he’d sounded as though tears were choking every word. I’d never known Perak cry before. I’d rarely seen him any other way than in his own head, grinning at what went on there and occasionally trying it out in the real world, generally with disastrous consequences.

Of course the consequences had always been left for me to deal with, like that time he’d mixed together all the powders, liquids, bits of soap, paint and scraps of wood he could find with a thimbleful of black powder he’d found somewhere, and lit the resulting mess. Right near the guard’s station. It was
a clear area, he said, like that was an obvious place for an experiment. Well, yes, it was clear because no one went close if they could avoid it, so as not to get arrested for being alive. Which at least meant no one got hurt when it all exploded, but the station had a large hole in its side and the guards were seriously pissed off. Who did they chase? Oh yeah, me. Almost caught me too. I suppose it was inevitable that Perak would end up in Alchemy Research.

Still, he’d never meant any harm, which was part of the reason it rankled so much. Now real life had finally caught up with him.

I was just beginning to doze myself when Perak woke up. He struggled to sit and I helped him get settled on some pillows and tried not to see the way his eyes tracked me. When I sat back, he couldn’t hold it in any more. Tears choked him until I thought he’d open up his wound with the wrenching sobs. Or maybe I just worried about that to take my mind off the misery that seeped into me. I was reminded just how much I loved him, even if he had almost got me thrown in jail at least four times, more than one of which would have meant a one-way trip to the ’Pit. I remembered what I’d made myself forget when I’d cut myself off from him: his generous heart, a complete faith that everything would work out; one I could never share. That faith was stretched to its limit now.

“She’s only six,” he kept saying. He couldn’t seem to say anything else without it coming back to that. “Only six.”

I didn’t know what I could say to him that would help. In
the end there was only one thing I could do, the reason he had called me. “What happened? And since when have you been married?”

He managed to pull his sobs back into him, and gave me a ghost of his old smile. “Not long after I saw you last, when you—” He didn’t need to finish that sentence.

The last time I’d seen him had been just after our mother’s funeral, when it had seemed that I was going to be the only one responsible for him. As I’d been for so long growing up, since our father disappeared not long after Ma got sick, before we knew for sure what it was, that it would kill her. I was ten and all I really remembered of my father was his dark hair, his bitterness and his voice. I remembered the timbre of that voice, the way the rhythm of it seeped into your head and conjured pictures there. It stayed with me long after his face had become a blur, or I’d learned to hate him for leaving us. Leaving me. I’d been responsible for both Perak and Ma since then and when she died I’d wanted to be free of it, of responsibility, of people depending on me.

After the funeral, Perak and I had had words, you might say, although the words were all mine. I’d pretty much told him the only reason I’d put up with him that long was for Ma’s sake. I hadn’t meant it; her death had still been too raw then, and all the bitterness and despair of her long, slow decline had come spilling out in a black torrent of abuse. So I’d just spewed it all over him, watching the acid in my voice dissolve his smile till all I could see was a desperate, shocked
hurt. I’d stopped looking at him so I couldn’t see that hurt, but I couldn’t stop the bile. I turned to face the wall and my words fell out of my mouth without thought. When I turned back he’d gone and I hadn’t seen him since. If I was truthful, it was shame that had kept me from getting back in touch.

“So what happened?” I asked.

He shrugged as well as he could, his mouth dragging down into a grimace of pain. “We went out, for lunch. Left Amarie with a sitter, young girl from Under.”

“Under where? Where are you living?”

“Clouds,” he said, and I was frankly astonished. How had my daydreaming little brother managed to get a place in the rarefied air of Clouds? It seemed he almost read my mind. “I made a very lucrative discovery. They gave me a job in Alchemy Research.”

Now I was speechless, and he smiled again at the look on my face. Alchemy Research was the single largest, and richest, arm of the Ministry, ever since the disaster with synth when the ’Pit had been sealed off, years ago. Given the way our mother had died, and the long-hidden alchemical poisoning that had caused it, it was a subject close to both our hearts.

“You were right, what you said about me,” he said. “Took me a while to see it, but you were right. So I got my act together. Got myself a good job, a lovely wife, and Amarie. She was the pinnacle of everything I had.” He blinked back fresh tears. “We’d used this sitter before, nice young girl,
Amarie liked her. We came home early – Elsa wasn’t feeling so well – and when we got in…”

“And when you got in, what?” I had to prompt him; he was lost in his thoughts again.

He blinked back to reality. “We must have disturbed something, someone. The sitter was dead on the living-room floor. Elsa screamed and ran for Amarie’s room. I was frozen, just looking down at the body. There – there was blood everywhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then there were shots from the bedroom. That’s irony, isn’t it? I worked out how to get black powder to launch bullets, I invented the concept of the gun and then – I ran in but Elsa was already dead. Amarie was there with two men, but she looked glazed, like they’d drugged her maybe. She tried to say something, but it was all slurred and—” He broke off again, and this time he couldn’t stop the tears.

“And that’s when they shot you and took her,” I said, when it was clear talking was too difficult for him. He nodded.

This wasn’t like any case I’d had before; I found runaways and bounty-hunted small-time thieves and embezzlers on the run, not kidnappers or anything that might turn too violent. I value my own arse too much and the responsibility of a life depending on me gives me the jitters. But the look on his face, and shame for the way I’d treated him, forced me to say what I did.

“I’ll find her for you, if the guards don’t first. You concentrate on getting well; when you are, I’ll have her here.” He
looked so pathetically grateful that I had to turn away for a moment. “You have a picture?”

He nodded towards the locker by the side of his bed and I took out the slim wallet, noticing it was real leather, a rarity these days that made this wallet worth about as much as everything I owned. First thing I saw in there was a card giving his rank at Alchemy Research.

“You’re a
cardinal
?” Cardinals were one step down from the Archdeacon, who ran everything like the spider at the centre of the web. The Mouth of the Goddess, who spoke her words to us for her. Supposedly. That was how he kept control, anyway. He spoke for the Goddess and everyone else jumped to obey, first the cardinals, who passed on orders to the bishops and down through the ranks. Everyone jumped, excepting maybe the Specials, but they swore to the Goddess herself, not the Archdeacon, so they had some leeway there. I couldn’t remember the last time they’d used it – they were usually pretty forward about doing the Archdeacon’s bidding.

Perak’s smile was small, lonely and rather shame-faced. “An honorific one only, because I’m head of research. I’ve never even been to Top of the World, and I only met the Archdeacon once, when I got the promotion. Too busy with my work.”

“What’s he like?” Not a pertinent question perhaps, but the Archdeacon ran my life whether I wanted him to or not.

“What? Oh. Ordinary. Just… just like anyone else really. Nothing memorable about him. He shook my hand, gave me
a funny look like he recognised me but couldn’t remember where from, said well done and then he was gone. I couldn’t pick him out in a crowd.”

Same old daydreaming Perak – he met the man in charge of the city, the man who loomed large in every aspect of Mahala, and couldn’t remember him bar he was ordinary. I went back to the wallet.

Behind the Alchemy Research card was a tatty and much-thumbed picture painted in oils, nicely done. I could imagine Perak showing it at every opportunity, to anyone who asked and anyone who didn’t.

The thin scrap of paper showed a vibrantly pretty girl of about five, fair hair blowing under a pretend tiara and eyes shining as she waved and said, “Daddy, Daddy, look, I’m a princess!” A ten-second loop, a hideously expensive piece of tech and just the sort of thing a proud father would carry. A niece I had never met because of my own stubbornness. There was a picture of his wife there too, and I could see that Amarie took after her, the delicate prettiness, the intelligent eyes, the bright blonde hair.

“What did the men look like?”

He shrugged, and I had to stop myself asking why he couldn’t pay attention to what was under his nose – it was obvious he’d thought of no one but his daughter.

“One tall and thin, scarred face – a cut across one eye,” he managed eventually. “The other was younger, but they looked similar, brothers maybe. They were dressed oddly – I don’t
know, but not like I’ve seen anyone else dress. Lots of leather. I don’t remember anything else.”

Leather, which only the rich could afford, and even then only in small pieces. There weren’t enough animals left to warrant killing them for their skin, though some got out when the few fattened ones were slaughtered for their equally expensive meat. Sometimes we got some leather in Trade, but its very rarity made it dearer than gold. Most of the farm animals had died of the tox and now it was more efficient to grow crops, which were more resistant to synth.

“You really think you can find her?” Perak asked, and for the first time he let a desperate, pleading hope into his voice.

“I’m sure I can,” I lied. What else could I say?

At least there would be no angry girlfriends, or rather exgirlfriends, waiting to launch another paint broadside.