It took me about for ever to fall asleep. Not just because of the rancid smell of the mattress either, but from too many questions crowding my brain. If Pasha had been right, how did Azama know we were planning something? Because he’d been watching the Jorrin brothers’ place? Why had he warned us he knew by sending the prisoner to kill Jake rather than just getting us all? Was he bringing me here to use me, was that why he’d targeted Amarie? Were we about to walk straight into a trap? And just why the fuck had Jake threatened Pasha for saving her life? I didn’t have any answers, but the questions kept my brain fizzing long after my body begged for sleep.
The rhythmic tap and swish of Jake’s feet on the stone floor as she went through her sword practice finally soothed me. And her: all the tension seemed to run from her muscles until her face was calm, the still mask I’d come to know. I wondered if I’d ever really know what lay behind it. I watched her practice with lazy, half-lidded eyes. Fluid as a cat, no hint of favouring her wounds, rhythmic and hypnotic. Beautiful and deadly.
Next thing I knew, Jake was prodding at my shoulder with one of her scabbards. I don’t think she’d slept; her eyes were bloodshot and her cherry-red hair, normally impeccably bound back, now curled in loose tendrils around her face. I sat up with a grimace and scrubbed at my eyes to try to get them to open properly.
“Time to go.” She nodded at the floor beside me, to a plate piled with, oh Goddess, with bacon. The fat, crispy smell of it woke me fully. It was get up and eat or drown in my own drool. I got up.
Jake tapped her foot and fidgeted with her swords while I shoved the bacon in as fast as I could. I doubt the Goddess’s tits could have tasted better. The instant the last bite had passed my lips Jake was off, and I ran to catch her.
She called a cage once we were outside and we rattled off over the housetops, the chains weaving between towers and raindrops. Instead of looking down, I kept my eyes on her. She seemed to have shrunk somehow. Not in height, in personality. Before, her sheer presence was enough to stun a man stupid. Now she seemed… I don’t know, younger. Unsure of herself, almost like part of her was missing. She looked helpless. I wanted to tell her it would be all right, put a comforting arm across her shoulders.
I was a good boy and kept my hands to myself. Mainly because I’m quite fond of all my bits being in the places they’re meant to be rather than on the floor, unattached and messy with blood. So instead I said, “Are you sure just the two of us will—”
“Yes.” A dark look from under her brows, a tightening of her lips, made me think pushing it was a bad idea.
“OK. So, we have a plan?”
“We have a plan; didn’t I say? The mages eat well, and they make sure the girls do too, they make sure everyone does down here. So the girls last longer, see? And everyone else thinks everything is all right. Carcasses from the slaughterhouse, some of them go straight up to the castle. Today, you and I are slaughtermen. We take the carcasses to the duly appointed place and hand them over. Then we don’t return with the others, but follow. There’s a way in. There has to be, and that’s the best way I can think of to find where it is.”
“Then what?” I didn’t like the sound of this, but what option was there?
Jake frowned up at me like I was stupid. “Then you use your magic to find where your niece is. We can go from there.”
Fabulous. My hand was still throbbing from last time and I hadn’t felt my index finger for a while. Maybe I should try somewhere else to hurt myself, but where? I wanted to keep my legs ready to run. “Just how sure are you that Amarie is anywhere near Azama?”
“P—he said that you knew she was in the main keep, in the tower. Makes sense that’s where Azama’d be. It’s still a big area to look through. I was hoping – well, I was hoping maybe you could track magic, seeing as you’re the only magic user we have now.”
Other words seemed to form ghosts on her lips so I could almost hear them. “Because that’s what Pasha was going to try to do.” But the words stayed unsaid.
“I can try,” I said. “Have to be really close for it to work, though, within feet. It’s not like tracking people.” Like I’d ever actually done it before. I mean, I know the theory, kind of. But I’ve never traced magic. At least partly because, again in theory, there shouldn’t be anyone Upside using magic to trace. Except me and Dendal and the drunkard who slept outside the office, and my once-a-year-or-less-if-I-could-get-away-with-it habit didn’t really count.
“Exactly. That’s why we could never try before. Without a tracker, it would have taken months to scour the whole castle, get close enough to trace, and months without getting caught. Too risky, for everyone. But if we find Amarie, then he shouldn’t be too far. He keeps them close, mostly.”
I knew we were nearly there because of the smell of shit. The cage jolted to a stop and the boy lowered us to the street. Odd, this time I barely noticed the drop.
Jake led the way in silence down through the boarded-up shop and dark corridor to the slaughterhouse. I tried not to think that going via a death-house was an omen.
Darin wasn’t happy to see us, and I can’t say I blame him. He bustled us past his real stockmen and into his office, where he provided us both with the protective suits the men were wearing. They had a rubbery sort of coating that felt odd under my fingers.
“Keeps the blood out,” Darin said.
Nice.
Jake managed to find a way to stash her swords in the baggy suit so they weren’t too obtrusive, and with a few quick twists her hair was up and bundled under a floppy hat. At a swift glance, she was just a stock boy. My pulse pistol went into an inside pocket. Jake looked at it with avid curiosity, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t say.
Darin took us through the dark door and into the stink of death. The room stood empty, but at Darin’s quick nod one of the stock boys, with a suspicious glance at us, went to fetch in the first of the cows.
The next hour or so, I kept to the back of the room and tried not to look. Or hear. Or smell. The bacon swirled in my stomach, maybe in protest at what was happening to its bovine brethren. The first few cows were reluctant but not overly so. Yet, even though the stockmen knew what they were doing, and did it as quickly and humanely as possible, the rest of the cows knew. The whole thing descended into shit and blood and bawling animals. Even Jake found it easier not to look, at least until the beasts were dead. Once the noise had died away she pitched in to help gut and dress the carcasses. Me, I’ve never been good with blades. Especially after that incident with the angry husband and the bastard sword. So I kept out of the way and in short order all was ready.
Jake came to find me and looked me over with a critical eye. She appeared more like a stockman than ever at first glance, the splash of blood lending her an authenticity that she took pains to reproduce on my protective suit.
Another doorway led out the back, into a cobbled yard surrounded on three sides by stock pens, each groaning with cows and a few pigs. How was it so little of this meat made it Upside? Or maybe it did, if you could afford it. If you could afford it, you probably kept quiet about it.
We loaded the carcasses on to an open-backed cart and jumped on after them, settling on the benches that ran along each side. The driver – one of the mages’ goons, Darin had whispered – fired up the cantankerous engine after a lot of cursing and shot out into the quiet of a street that wasn’t awake yet. The only other person in sight was a drunk slumped in a doorway with a bottle just about to fall out of his limp hand.
We spluttered down the road, the cart’s engine coughing like an old man with pneumonia. The springs had gone, so we jounced over the cobbles and potholes, jarring bones and bruising backsides. Once we turned off the main street, Jake sat up straight, her eyes sharp as she kept track of our route. From what I could make out, Darin and his stockmen kept this secret with their lives, until now. It still might cost them that if we were caught.
I’d thought we’d make for some part of the wall that surrounded the castle, but the driver turned off the street before we could see it properly past the towers. Jake stood up, frowning as we bounced along an alley so narrow that I’d have lost fingers if I put them between the cart and the wall. The driver pulled to a squealing stop as the alley ended in a wall faced with dressed stone. One of the stockmen gestured to Jake to sit, but other than that they all pretended we weren’t there.
The driver leaned forward and rummaged under the board that held the controls and then tossed a black bundle back to us. Hoods. The other stockmen hurried to put them over their heads, and at an urgent, whispered word we followed suit. Something metal ground along rust by the sounds of it, and the driver moved the cart forwards. I braced for the impact, but when a gruff voice said we could take the hoods off, the alley was gone and a deep blackness had taken its place, punctuated by Glow globes set far apart so everything was flickering shadows and pools of brightness.
“What the—”
Again, a gesture from one of the stockmen, indicating rather urgently that I should stay quiet. I shut up and kept alert as we moved along a tunnel. It was old, I could tell that. The stones it was dressed with were worn smooth, the same size and composition as the ones in the castle’s curtain wall. I thought back hard to the stories Ma used to tell us – well, me. Perak never actually listened. Even then, such stories were frowned upon by the Ministry, which is probably why Ma liked to tell them.
Among the tales of derring-do, of the castle and the warlord who’d built the city out of nothing but holding a handy pass between two rich nations that hated each other, of his sons and grandsons who’d been cleverer and craftier, I recalled a story of a siege. The two neighbouring nations had decided that Mahala was making too much money as their middleman, and secretly made a trade agreement. Yet they couldn’t pass the mountains except in range of the walls of the castle. Again in secret, they amassed what armies they could from nations more used to hunting, farming and trade. As one marched from the south, so the other came from the north. The castle was trapped between two armies, or so it seemed. But what the foreigners hadn’t understood was the basic nature of our people, at least as it was then, before the Ministry toppled the mage King and set its regimentation over everything, turned us into traders just like the rest. Even thirty years ago, a man couldn’t properly call himself man unless he’d served his stint in the army, learned bow and sword and horse.
Back in the days of the warlord and his sons and grandsons, the way of the blade was every man’s right, and his duty too. To protect the city and the small, high pastures that fed it – pastures that we’d later built on in our arrogance. Yet then, to fight for it, with it, to be part of it was a thing every man aspired to. But not to fight stupidly, or without forethought. No, that wasn’t our way. As the warlord had once famously said, “The Goddess gave us arms that we might wield a blade, legs that we might steer our horse. But she gave us brains so that we might stab the enemy in the back before it comes to outright war.”
Brains are our birthright. And not just any brains, but the ability to be fucking sneaky. That’s what won us our power then, and brains are what get us our power now. The same kind of brains: how to twist something until we find out what its best use is, and then use it till it bleeds. These days it’s the ability to invent things the rest of the world wants, even if it means stealing the idea, snuffing out the competition and stiffing your customers for as much money as you can.
Back then, being a sneaky bastard meant you had tunnels that led right from your keep that weren’t only well hidden, they were nigh-on impossible to find. And incidentally led to the rear of exactly where any army stupid enough to try and besiege you would pitch its camp. Even then, the warlord hadn’t gone straight there and attacked. Oh no. “Sneaky bastard” wasn’t an apt description for him. “Sneaky, devious and downright underhand bastard” was more like it.
I always loved the stories about him. This was one that had stayed with me, all this time. Because when the two armies had camped and sent forward their negotiators, the warlord said only, “If siege is what you want, siege is what you shall have, if you can bear it. The high valleys you now camp in are those we use for our tests of manhood. A boy must withstand the terrors that lurk there for seven nights, alive and sane. If you can do the same, if you can become men to our customs, we’ll treat with you.”
The negotiators went away well pleased, and left an even more pleased warlord behind. Every night a dozen of his best assassins went through the tunnels, slipping through the openings hidden among the numerous caves for which the castle is named. Every night they would creep, silent and hidden, around the campfires. They’d sneak up on the sentries, slit the throats of at least twenty men each, before they made such an inhuman wailing as to wake the entire camp. Then, when the hunt was on, they’d fade away, back to the tunnels and their warlord’s appreciation. More than one noble house found its estate through the endeavour.
Each night, the number of men hunting the assassins grew less and the murmurs of the armies – simple, superstitious men, mostly farmers – grew louder. By the fifth day, more than half the armies had deserted. By the seventh, when the negotiators returned, full of bluster and blowhardiness, all that was left of the armies was their standing soldiers, and not even all of them. The warlord sent them packing with a well-placed regiment or six, and Mahala never faltered in its duty as middleman thereafter.
All of which meant that we’d found a tunnel, one that most likely led straight into the heart of the castle. The cart rumbled on, out of the cramped initial tunnel and into something far grander. Smoothly dressed flagstones kept the floor level and we jounced less. The roof vaulted away from us, up into darkness and the secret rustle of bats. For all this was a tunnel, not meant to be used by the general population, vast carvings decorated the walls. It took a minute or two, but then I began to make them out in the dim light of the Glow globes. A history, not of the castle or the warlord but of warriors, his élite assassins. Men trained to use their pain magic to defend the city, defend the Goddess who protected it and us – with their lives, if called upon.
On one wall that training was depicted, going from battle-hardened veteran back through to pre-pubescent novices as we neared the castle. On the other, scenes for which the assassins were justly famous until the Ministry began its insidious campaign, casting pain magic as something sent not by the Goddess but by Namrat. A thing of evil, to be feared and, above all, reported so that its practitioners could be “saved”. Even before they deposed the King, pain magic had been mistrusted by anyone who wasn’t a mage, only abided because it powered the machines that were our livelihood and, of course, because the King had a habit of using extreme prejudice and decapitation against anyone who said a damn thing against it. Not many would – it was our power, a necessary evil, and one that the Ministry had got rid of just as soon as they could, replacing it with something even worse, the synth.
Jake studied the battle scenes with interest until the way ahead lightened, a hundred Glow globes arrayed across the way like so many fireflies. I didn’t like the look of what they illuminated, not one little bit. The tunnel closed off, not suddenly but a gradual rounding and narrowing of the carvings until it drew down to one small, hard point. A passageway, unlit, dark and ominous, so narrow that a man would have trouble swinging anything bigger than a letter-knife. High on the walls of the passageway slits had been cut into the stone, just wide enough for arrows. Other, larger openings might have been a better way in, if it weren’t for the boulders that balanced on their lips.
Worse was the welcome party arrayed at this end of the passage. A dozen men, all in Specials uniforms, which, now I came to think of it, bore a distinct resemblance to the uniforms the assassins had used. Black high-collared allovers in smooth leather leaving nothing for an assailant to grab, decorated only with dark blue paint in discreet swirling designs. Long gauntlets up to the elbow designed especially for close work, with flexible palms and fingers and steel plates inserted along the arm bones, used to block a knife or even sword attack. Along the underside, the hilts of throwing-knives peeped out shyly, overshadowed by the subtle but nasty-looking metal lumps on the knuckles. Boots meant for silent movement, soft-soled but reinforced with steel from ankle to knee.
Specials, the face, sword and swift knife in the back of the Ministry, and unturnable, unbribable, even by Ministry, or so rumour went. They swore to the Goddess, not any man. While in theory that made them of and for the people, in practice, because the Archdeacon was the mouth of said Goddess, it made them the Ministry’s hunting-dogs. Not to be messed with if you like all your bits and pieces attached. On the meaner streets of Upside the merest hint of a Specials uniform could create a mass panic. Even in Clouds or Heights, the appearance of a Special might cause sweaty palms and clenching hearts.
The uniforms weren’t the worst part, the part that made my balls shrivel, my heart stutter and my mind go utterly blank in panic. Most of these were shabby replicas, covering men who from their pallor were obviously Downsiders, hired thugs pretending they were somebody. No, the thing that really made me want to panic was the one genuine uniform, and the face of the man wearing it.
Dench, my Upside informant in the guards. There was no mistaking that drooping face or moustache. What was he doing down here? More specifically, what was he doing in the Specials? Maybe he was the one who’d known I’d come down here, had brought the Ministry on my tail and a prisoner to murder Jake. Maybe. It didn’t really matter. The Ministry knew I was down here, and what I was after. If any one of those men knew an Upsider was here, I was dead. Actually, worse than dead. Yes, there are things that are worse. I did not want to be Azama’s new source of power for his pain magic. Nuh-uh.
I shuffled on the bench and lowered my head so that the guy sitting next to me partially obscured my face. I should have brought a hat. Or been sensible and not come down here in the first place, or not let my hormones get the better of me when I let Jake talk me into this damn fool idea or… The cart rattled to a stop.
Dench and one of the fake Specials stepped forward and I huddled down, hiding my face with my benchmate. It wasn’t going to be enough. Dench had the driver bring the cart forward under the brighter lights by the entrance to the passageway.
“Get down, one at a time,” Dench snapped at the stock-men. They began to file out of the cart and drop to the flagstones where Dench got each of them under a brighter Glow light and inspected their faces. With each one, he gave a curt nod once satisfied. Azama, or the Ministry – and I couldn’t be sure whether they were the same or not – was taking no chances, but checking everyone trying to gain access to the castle.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. It wasn’t just me I had to worry about either: Jake had one of the most recognisable faces Downside, and someone was going to know it was her just as soon as she got under that light. As for me, I was surprised Dench hadn’t picked me out already. The cart was almost empty of men. My turn soon. It was now or never.
I grabbed for my left hand, the one still swollen and bruised from trying to track Amarie, gripped the index and middle fingers and twisted hard. The fingers came out of their sockets with a pair of crackling pops that sent shudders of pain up my arm, into my brain. I couldn’t keep it all behind my clenched teeth and a hiss escaped. It might be enough, I hoped to fuck that it would be, because I hardly ever used my Minor, the one thing my father had given me, a talent for disguise. In fact, I’d used it less than a dozen times all told, mostly when drunk or trying to piss someone off, and one of those times I’d almost popped an eyeball.
With the pain came the power, swelling up through me like a malignant tumour, forcing every thought that wasn’t about the spell out of my head. I let it grow and spread further than I ever had before, let it take me till it wasn’t pain any more but sweet, delicious magic. Until I saw why Dendal lived for it, why he loved it, why I’d always been afraid to use it, afraid I’d want it too much. It was everything, I was everything.
The pain, the magic, began to fade. Just a little. The world flapped at the edges of me, and a last fragment of sanity made a determined bid to keep me alive. I didn’t have long, only seconds. It’d have to be a makeshift job. Just enough so they wouldn’t recognise us, that was all.
I shut my eyes, took the thing in my head and squeezed. Not too hard, just right. Lengthen the nose, lighten the skin, compress the line of the jaw into a narrower shape. It would have to do. The magic faded, bleeding out of me, leaving me drained. I needed more: Jake, I had to do Jake too.
I held my breath and twisted the fingers again, shoving them back into their sockets. I fought against the urge to sink into the pain, to let the magic take over and make me forget it, make me forget fear and sweat and blood and kidnapped girls, and concentrated. Somewhere out there, back in the real world, Jake swore, vicious words that were nothing to what was inside me. Her cherry-red hair; that was the first giveaway. I deepened it to a dark nut brown with a thought, a silver spike through the blackness in my brain. Now the face: dull the cheekbones, spread the nose, thin the lips.
The magic drained again, and seemed to take a part of me with it, strength leaking out through every pore. The urge to feel that again, to fill myself with magic, to let go of my fear, had my good hand on my bad, ready to twist my fingers again, and again if I had to. It wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it never really had been. It was the feeling that the magic controlled me rather than the other way around, the thought of wanting something so badly I’d be prepared to give myself who knew what pain to get it. Now I’d delved in properly, now I knew the insistent knock in the brain of my magic trying to take me over, telling me how easy it would be to know it again, whenever I wanted, I wasn’t afraid. I was fucking shit-scared.
The worst part of it was, the black was everything you didn’t want in your life, gone, poof, just like that. Whatever it was about your life you hated the most, in the black it didn’t exist. For me, in the black there is no fear, and that was the part that called to me, the part that scared me the most, because I wanted it the most. A day without fear would be all the heaven I’d ever need.
“Hey, you, get off the fucking cart.”
I raised my head and looked around blearily. Dench beckoned me, a scowling sneer twisting his drooping moustache into an odd shape. Someone was next to me but when I looked it wasn’t anyone I knew, just some ugly boy. Only – it was Jake. No mistaking those eyes, the swift calculation behind them, nor the subtle tilt of her lips when she spoke.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’ve done,” she whispered, “but you’ve got to get up.”
“I don’t think I can.” My whole body felt rubbery, as though my bones had been taken out. My hand throbbed like a bastard, and all I could think was, if I did it again, everything would fade away into the blackness in me. I couldn’t do that, I had Amarie to find, Jake to win over – fuck, I had a life to live. If I let myself be tempted, I’d be lost for ever. But I wanted to, more than I’d ever wanted anything. I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I need a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute.”
“Hey.” Dench stepped up on to the footboard at the back of the cart. “You two, out. Now. Or we come in.”
“We’re coming.” Jake called, then quieter, to me, “You have to, or you’re dead.”
I tried. I did. But the effects of magic don’t go away quickly. I got to my feet and stumbled, almost falling on to the bench opposite. Only Jake’s hand on my arm stopped me.
She got me upright and helped me to the step. “You owe me.”
When I glanced her way her face was twisted into a grimace, and the moment I was down off the cart she let go and wiped her hand on her blood-splattered suit. Luckily, by then some strength had come back to my legs and I managed to stand, although I needed to steady myself with my good hand on the cart.
Dench peered at me, a little too carefully for comfort. His moustache was really quite impressive up close. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Felt a bit faint.”
“Well get your arse over here so I can look at you.”
I managed to get to where he wanted me without falling over. Dench grabbed my chin and tilted my face into the light, all but blinding me. It seemed to take years of bone-aching tension before he let go and I blinked away the dark splotches from my vision.
When I could see properly again, he was grabbing for Jake’s chin. She jerked away from him and her hand reflexively went for where she usually kept her sword. No, Jake, don’t. Don’t. I wished I could do what Pasha did – read minds, maybe send thoughts. I knew she didn’t like to be touched, that even Pasha was careful not to touch her, how she flinched away if anyone looked like they’d brush against her, even her grimace of distaste and that wipe of the hand when she’d helped me on the cart. Now that would be a disaster.
Dench didn’t miss a beat. His hand shot out and gripped her chin hard enough that her mouth scrunched into a puckered O. Her eyes flew wide and her hands fluttered uselessly. For only the second time, I saw real fear in her. There was something about the way she stood, the way she cringed her body away from Dench, together with the few things I knew about her just from watching, that made me think it wasn’t the situation that had her scared. Not the fact that if discovered, we’d likely be dead. She didn’t care, Pasha was right about that. It was that Dench had laid his hand on her, as though that was the worst thing that could happen to her.
She tried to pull away, but Dench gripped harder, his fingers digging in. For a second, I thought she’d kill him right there, the way her eyes were, all wide and staring above his fingers. The way her hands clenched by her sides ready to punch, and I didn’t doubt she was as good at that as she was with her swords.
Then he let her go with a gruff nod, though he cast me a curious look. “I’m watching you,” that look said; “I know there’s something odd about you.”
“All right, start unloading,” Dench said, and all the stockmen leapt to obey. Jake staggered back until she hit the wall, her chest heaving and her face grey and slick with sweat. I caught her eye but she looked away swiftly, maybe embarrassed, and hurried to help.
I turned back to the cart, my strength returning now, though the urge to fall into the black remained. A half-carcass of cow over my shoulder was enough to make me stagger under the weight but I got it centred and it wasn’t too bad as we made our way down the dark passageway. The weight was minor compared to the way Dench watched me and Jake, or the threat of Specials, however fake. They still had guns.
The passage was barely wide enough to get down with a cow on my shoulder, but I got to the end well enough and stepped through.
Into what I can only describe as Namrat’s kingdom.
By the time we’d offloaded all the carcasses, I’d managed to get myself under control. Just about. At least I hadn’t done anything totally stupid to give us away. I clenched my good hand into a fist in an attempt to stop the shaking. Not fear, not this time. This time it was anger and a raging pity that threatened my sanity. Jake wasn’t much better, a grim and even more silent than usual figure hunched in the baggy suit.
Beyond the passageway, after an alley lined with houses that leaned towards each other drunkenly over the way, lay a square that was evidently a meeting point of sorts, with the surrounding houses serving as barracks. The buildings all had a squashed look to them, as though the weight of the city above was too much, and everything seemed crammed in too close. Doorways too narrow, winding alleys that seemed no wider than a cat. Fake Specials strutted along the ancient streets, incongruous with the new-fangled guns that the officers wore, their pretend uniforms looking shabby and false next to Dench.
The carcasses now lay in a heap in a squat stone-faced building on one corner of the square, the quartermaster’s office, pantry and butchery. Already, two young men were jointing the meat and laying the different pieces on an array of shelves in a cold store. So far, so – well, not normal, but un-alarming, except for those guns and the fact that our disguise wouldn’t last much longer. At least Dench was still at the other end of the passage.
No, none of that was what was bothering me. The problem was what faced us when we’d found a way through, out of the square and where the other stock boys never went, through a tangle of alleys so tortuous I half felt like I was following some demented worm. The fake Specials were pretty lax in here – I suppose we’d got past where they thought they needed to be vigilant – so it wasn’t too hard. What we found the other side was.
The face of a girl in an upstairs window of a house that looked like it should have been demolished a few centuries ago, windows broken, beams drooping, tiles missing, revealing mould and synth-eaten struts. The girl was only there a moment, a brief flash of a tiny face marred with shadowy bruises before she disappeared. Even that might have been OK, if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that room outside the castle and the state of the girls there, and the black horror of the hole. If the hideous, shrill screams hadn’t reverberated around this tiny square of hell. If any of the men had even looked up from what they were doing. If the screams hadn’t ended with the sound of flesh hitting flesh and the tingle inside me. Even I was getting some power, from this far away, not even touching her. Worse, she wasn’t alone. Not by a long stretch.
Other moans and cries, some more muffled than others, crowded my brain. Other tingles worked their way along my fingers. A long-drawn-out scream of torture from one side, from a house that had once been smart and well-to-do but was now not much more than a gently rotting shell. The scream ended in a babble of prayer, that now the Goddess would love her, would forgive her, wouldn’t she? A more rhythmic noise from across the square and, Goddess preserve me, I knew what that was. Goddess knew I loved my women, even if I couldn’t hold on to one for more than five minutes without cocking it up. But I loved them, or at least the idea of them, because they were entirely willing.
This was something else. This was an affront to the Goddess, even if I didn’t believe in her. This was an affront to people, to the city and all its teeming crowds of men and women just trying to get by. Yet the people here, the fake Specials, the quartermaster, other men haunting the slick cobbles of the square, never even flinched. To them, this was normal.
These men weren’t even pain-magicians. It brought them no benefit.
Pain magic. Power from pain, and it need not be your own. It crawled over my skin, burrowed in like woodworms in oak. It made me want to use it, to raze this squalid place to the ground, to twist my hand to shreds bringing this castle down stone by stone. I hung by a thread. Now I’d dug the depths, now it knew me, all my fears came true. It called to me, sang my name in sweet black tones, a lover, a goddess, a pleading girl. To give in would be to die, unless I could master it. Dendal was always banging on about mastery. I’d never really listened, and now I struggled to remember the lessons.
All I could recall were the tales of before the synth, when pain magic was all the power we had, what set Mahala apart from the hordes at either side. What gave us the edge. Yet that edge came at a price. More than three in ten mages were destroyed by the magic, fell into it until they couldn’t think any more, couldn’t feel, knew only that they had to hurt themselves more and more to keep the pain at bay, to feel the surge they craved – a never-ending circle that would kill them if they let it.
Even that was preferable to this. That was voluntary; this was… this was inhuman. I took refuge in my only protection. “Fuck this for a game of patooty. Let’s go. Please?”
Jake’s bowed head snapped up. Her eyes were hollow, shrunken things that couldn’t even seem to conjure anger. She shut them with a look of pained control and nodded jerkily.
We watched from our hidey-hole in a narrow alley that pinched my shoulders while the other stockmen back in the square moved towards the passage, ready for the ride home. I followed Jake through a doorway half hidden in a corner. She shut the door behind us and leaned against it. Her breathing was halting, stilted somehow, so I thought she couldn’t be getting enough air in her lungs. Surely she’d faint, but when I held out a hand she slapped it away. I couldn’t tell what it was with her, whether it was anger and pity, like me, whether it was disgust or what. All I knew was that she wasn’t the same woman who’d started out on this, who’d been so adamant we’d come here, that we’d do this. The wall of protection – the swords, the flashy pretence at violence, Pasha’s acceptance, his presence – it had all come tumbling down, and now she was just a girl, younger than I’d first thought, up to her eyebrows and sinking.
She wouldn’t take the comfort of a hand so I said, “Are you OK?” A peace offering, but she didn’t take it.
The slightest shake of her head in return, the grip of her hands on the door handle, as though that was all that kept her upright. Then a deep breath, rasping in and out, a few determined, muttered words. When she raised her head, she was Jake again. Cool, calculating, eyes flat and chill, full of cold grace. Her wall was back, but it was shiny and slick with fakery, brittle as glass, so it might take just the wrong word to break it and lay a bleeding soul bare. She stepped forward in a smooth movement belied by the grit of her teeth and pulled off the protective suit. With a nod she indicated I should do the same.
“Where to now?” I asked.
She avoided my eyes and got her swords arranged to her satisfaction. She concentrated on that rather than look at me when she spoke. “To the keep. Any way we can. You ready?”
She looked up at that, and I saw it there. Maybe it was the magic leaking into me from what was going on around. Maybe it was just obvious, but I was sure that she was regretting it being me and not Pasha. They’d planned this long ago, waiting for the opportunity. Planned it and yet, when they got the chance, one of them wasn’t here. All she had was me instead, and I was a poor consolation. That look was a slice to the stomach from one of her swords. Well, I’d show her, show her I was worth two of him when it came to it.
“I’m ready. Are you?”
She fielded my question with a contemptuous look and headed to the far end of the room we found ourselves in, towards a door that looked semi-solid. “This way. I don’t know how we’ll get there, but the keep’s this way. We’d best get going before the Specials notice they’re two short.”
I asked the irritating tingle that was numbing my arm, and the pull of Amarie raised my hand a touch in the direction Jake was headed. Lessened the tingle too, an added bonus. The thought of how the ability came to me made my balls itch. I wanted it to stop. I wanted it all to stop, the power leakage, the screams. All of it. The only way that was going to happen was through me and Jake. If we were incredibly lucky and didn’t get ourselves killed first.
I followed her through the door and out into the twisting back-streets.