Four hours later found us back at the death matches. Jake had another fight and she refused to back out or delay. The money was vital, and so was her not pissing off the men who owned the arena – Ministry men. If she didn’t show, she said, they’d know something was up rather than just guessing. At least they pretty much left the matchers to themselves, hardly came out of their little compound, just so long as everything ran smoothly.
The other Ministry men, the Specials trying to pass themselves off as Downsiders, were still asking around for me, but they didn’t seem to have twigged that I’d joined up with Pasha and Jake, because no one was talking to them. So far.
So Pasha and I hid in the viewing room behind blacked-out one-way glass, and watched in silence the parade of fights before hers. Pasha had said nothing since we’d found Azama’s men dead, and I’d no heart for talk either. Those children, young boys this time, haunted me. Their weak moans of fear, the scarred bodies, the brands on their wrists. I’d done what I could to help Jake with them but they were pathetically afraid of me, whimpering whenever I got close.
They seemed to know who she was though, whispered her name on lips stiff with terror and a faint “please, Goddess” kind of hope, reached hesitant hands out to try to touch her. She soothed them, and though she never touched anyone else that I’d seen, seemed to have a pathological hatred of it, she had no problem helping the boys, covering them and holding them though they flinched from her hands.
She’d found someone to pass a message and within minutes there were people there to help, two women who gathered the boys together and led them gently away. Jake had coaxed Pasha away from the bodies, away from the house, and brought us back here.
Now Pasha sat and watched blindly as a succession of men tried to murder each other in front of us for money, or at least pretend to. It looked all too real to me. I kept a glass topped up with drink for him, worried at the lack of anything that could be construed as emotion on his face. I’d thought he was used to it, or as used to it as anyone could be. But he sat and stared and drank until finally his eyes slid shut, and maybe that was a mercy for both of us. I took the glass from his limp hand and set it on the floor.
With him out, I took the scrap of paper out of my pocket. I hadn’t let either of them see it, unsure what it meant precisely. That Amarie was targeted, that was all. They’d taken her on purpose, this particular girl. Because of Perak? Or because of me?
Jake came out for her match to a thunderous reception from the crowd, which yanked me from my thoughts. The match was brief, almost perfunctory, and she disarmed the man in only a few minutes. Still, he managed to cut her a couple of times when he shouldn’t have been able to touch her. Her mind wasn’t on the match, that was clear, or on the pleasing of the crowd. My mind wasn’t on it either, a succession of images parading through my mind relentlessly until I wished I had the luxury of drinking myself stupid like Pasha. But we had yet to find any clue as to Amarie’s whereabouts except that she was west of Jake’s place, and the whole situation chafed at me.
I contented myself with a couple of stiff shots until Jake came back and slumped into a chair. I took Pasha’s place and poured her a drink. She took it gratefully and eyed Pasha. He lay back in his chair, alternately sweating and shivering in his sleep and muttering under his breath. The hard creases on his face made him seem both older than time and just a child. It seemed Jake could hardly bear to look at him. She turned her eyes away and stared at the floor.
“So what was it with him today?” I asked.
She jerked one shoulder and drained her glass, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “Those two men – he knew them, from years ago. He had a personal score to settle, and he’s pissed off someone beat him to it.”
“Personal?”
“None of your business.” She stood up and paced the floor. “But I’m glad he didn’t get to pass the favour on to them. I think – I think it would have destroyed him, no matter that he had good cause. He wasn’t made that way.”
I had to agree with that. Pasha had courage, I’d no doubt – he’d never flinched from things that made me shudder – but to kill a man… like Jake, I think it would have destroyed him. You only had to see the way he looked at Jake, at the children he’d helped, to know he had the softest of hearts. That he probably broke it every time he had to get a girl out of one of the holes he’d shown me.
I turned back to her. “Is that why you do it too?”
She stopped pacing and stared at me guardedly for a moment. “Something like that.” The look on her face warned me not to ask any more.
A thin line of blood trickled down one cheek, and she’d been cut a couple of times in other places. Pasha was in no state to patch her up, so I cast around and found the kit he’d used on her before. A simple affair: needles, tweezers, thread, antiseptic, ampoules of something that wasn’t labelled, though I could guess, and some dressings that were at least clean. “Where’re you cut?”
She looked up at me and down at the kit, her shoulders stiff with indecision. Finally she nodded and I sat down next to her. She shrugged off the upper portion of her armoured allover and blood marked her undershirt on her shoulder where the man’s sword had found a gap. I pulled at the ripped material, hoping that I could stitch the wound through the tear, although part of me thrilled to the thought of her without the shirt. There was something about her. The cool exterior, her very aloofness, the way she kept even Pasha at a physical distance. A challenge, the chase, that was what always thrilled me, and I soon got bored once I had them. It probably says something profound about me. Like I’m a total bastard when it comes to women, even if it is unintentional. Mostly.
But I felt in my bones that she would be the ultimate chase. I might never catch her, never know what it was behind that icy mask, what drove her, who she really was, underneath, and that was a heady thought, because I love a woman with a bit of mystery about her.
I calmed my fingers from their twitching impatience and picked a needle. Then my fingers trembled for a whole new reason. I’d never stitched anyone up before. I’d never needed to: there was always a hospital handy. How were you supposed to see through the constant seeping blood? I took my life in my hands and used a dressing to mop at the wound. Jake tensed away from me with a hiss but kept her hands mercifully away from the swords.
“I’m sorry, I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I – have someone other than Pasha do it, I mean. And he—” Her voice lowered to a whisper, as though she was ashamed to admit a weakness. “I don’t like it when people touch me.”
“So I’ve noticed,” I said drily, but a little voice in my head was pleased that she had said it, confided in me. Shown me the smallest part of her, a little chink in her armour. “I’ll do my best.”
“Me too.”
It took a while, and Jake was a solid block of suppressed tension by the time we’d finished, but I managed it without touching her with anything other than the needle and tweezers. Even so it was a bizarrely intimate moment, as though by allowing me into her closed little world she had exposed herself, afraid of doing it maybe, but that she trusted me enough made me feel strangely privileged.
Jake shrugged her allover back on to her shoulders and looked at me, as though maybe really seeing me for the first time. She hesitated with the material halfway up her arms, just a moment, nodded and gave me the hint of a smile, a good warm one, like she shared with Pasha. It was like being blessed by the Goddess: a unique experience in a man’s lifetime.
After that she was all business again. “We’ll leave Pasha here for now; he could do with the rest. Meantime, we’ve got a few people to talk to. Subtly. Which means you’ll be doing all the talking, because subtle I am not. You manage that, you think?”
“I think I can cope. Who exactly are we talking to?”
“Oh don’t worry, you’re going to love this place.” She laughed, a deep-throated sound that made a tingle thrill up my spine. Does the Goddess do double blessings?
Jake and I stood across the way from a nondescript house in a down and dirty area. Well, all right, downer and dirtier than was average down here. The building pressed up against the old castle wall that was the root of Mahala, the well we’d sprung from. The blocks of the castle were black with dirt, except where the synth had scoured grooves in them, little riverbeds of insidious poison. Hard up on the left was a crumbling archway that might once have been triumphal, with its eroded statues of warriors long dead, their faces blank now, forgotten heroes of another world. To the right of the ramshackle house, the cobbled street gleamed wetly as it squeezed between a butcher’s, shut up for the night, and a bar that was no more than an open stall with a flapping awning keeping the worst of the rain from its solitary customer.
“Ask for Kersan, tell him I asked you to come. He’ll know what you’re there for – he talks to Pasha normally. He’ll ask you a question, to make sure you’re legit. The answer is Home. Home Farm. OK?”
“What sort of place is it?”
“Don’t worry. Let’s just say everyone does what they do from their own free will. If I go in, it’ll give everything away. But this is where gentlemen of taste come to relax. Gentlemen who don’t like their women branded.”
She flirted with the idea of smiling at me before she turned and, letting a “Have fun” drift over her shoulder, she walked away through the arch, instantly swallowed by shadows of warriors.
I took a deep breath. Jake had said this was our best chance of finding Azama, of discovering who had killed his henchmen, the Jorrin brothers. Of finding Amarie. This was Pasha’s part of the usual information network, but he was in no fit state to talk to anyone. I fingered the pulse pistol, winced as my throbbing hand protested, and walked over to the door. Before I could knock, it opened on silent hinges.
The inside was a revelation. Clean, for starters. The door led into a large, square room draped in rich fabrics in a plush red. No one was visible and I stepped through. Candlelight flickered along the walls and gave off scents that worked on me subtly. My shoulders relaxed from a hunch I hadn’t realised they’d been in.
A boy, maybe twelve, popped out from behind the door and bowed. His clothes were pristine and pressed to a knife-sharp crease. “Sir, what is your wish?”
Startled, I blurted out my answer. “Kersan.”
The boy directed me to a plush settee before he darted off. I sat down, relaxed and tense at the same time, and considered the room, wondering what it could tell me about who lived here.
Something very studied about the way the velvet swooped along the wall, draped over the settees. It was in the lines of the gilt frames on the paintings – all very arty nudes – and the low tables with their trays of delicacies, and in the careful scent from the candles that lit the room with flattering light. The scent reminded me of home, when I was a boy. Of my mother, though that was at right-angles to my thoughts on who lived, and worked, here.
I shook that thought away as another young lad came in. He was about fourteen or so, with sharp black eyes and what would have been dusky skin a similar shade to mine, if it weren’t for the blue-white tones from lack of sun. He introduced himself in soft, musical tones. “I’m Kersan. You asked for me?”
“I did. Jake sent me, in Pasha’s stead.”
He frowned and looked me up and down discreetly. “Why hasn’t Pasha come himself?”
“He’s indisposed. I’m a friend of his.”
“I see. He is well?”
I nodded. It wasn’t that far from the truth. Physically he’d be fine once he slept it off. Mentally, maybe not so much.
“Then maybe I could ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Where is Pasha’s favourite place?” He looked at me intently, watching my face and eyes, for any hint of hesitation I suppose.
“Home Farm,” I said, and the answer made sense now. The farm that they took the girls, or rather the children, to.
Kersan relaxed a fraction, though his eyes stayed wary, and with good reason if half my suspicions about this place were correct. “Good. Would you like to come with me?”
I followed him down long corridors echoing with the soft sound of gentle music from behind discreet doors decorated in the same plush velvet as the walls, so you could hardly tell they were there until you were almost on them. The whole place was well kept, almost luxurious as the ’Pit went. He opened a door at the far end of the house and ushered me through.
I was not unduly surprised to see a young woman, a very attractive one as it happens, dressed in a silky, flowing green robe, split to the thigh, sitting on a large bed decked out in silk and velvet. The wooden bathtub, tall enough that it came up to my chest, and a softly upholstered settee were unusual though. Another low table covered in plates of tiny delicacies sat in front of a lounger. The girl stood up, came towards us and bowed. “Who is this gentleman?”
“A friend of Pasha’s.”
She looked sharply at Kersan, but the boy made a small gesture and she seemed reassured. “Any friend of Pasha’s is a friend of this house.”
Really? Pasha was a habitué of a brothel? Because there was no doubt in my mind that was what this was. That seemed completely at odds with everything else I’d seen of him. My surprise must have shown.
The woman laughed and indicated I should sit on the lounger. She sat next to me, smoothed back the elegant coil of dark hair at the nape of her neck and crossed her legs in a silky manoeuvre that almost popped my eyes from my head when the robe fell away from her thigh. “Oh, he doesn’t use our services. Except the massage, the hot tub, a friendly face or touch. He sleeps here often. Poor dear, can’t abide to sleep in a place on his own. He shares with Kersan.”
“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?