Fade to Black (35 page)
Authors: Francis Knight
Tags: #Fiction / Urban Life, #Fiction / Mystery & Detective - Hard Boiled, #Fiction / Fantasy - Epic, #Fiction / Gothic, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Adult, #Fiction / Fantasy - Paranormal
Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?
No, I can’t say that I have, probably because it never occurred to me to write down all the stories in my head. I’ve always read, and always made up little stories but it was only when I was struck down with ME that I started to write—I was housebound, and it was almost a defence against daytime TV. So I wrote one of my little stories and found I was addicted to writing.
Did the idea for the Rojan Dizon books come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
As with most of my ideas, it came a piece at a time, each piece from a different direction. The idea really takes hold when they gang up on me. The theme came from one direction, Jake from another, whereas Rojan came as I was writing. He was kind of an experiment—I’d never written in first before, and he is polar opposite to me in many areas (though we do share a trait or two), so he was almost a challenge I set myself, to see if I could do it. I splurged out fifty thousand words in a month—at this stage it was a future dystopia world, but then my writers’ group pointed out, quite fairly, that I am horrible at making up future tech.
One member suggested, “Why not make it a dark fantasy?” which kind of fed into a separate idea I’d had for a world where magic lived with technology. I dabbled a bit then left it on my hard drive for a few years, tinkering with it every now and again in between other projects. It was only when I decided to actually knuckle down and do something with it, when I started with the idea of pain magic in fact, that it really came to life. It was waiting for me to have the right idea to make it work, I think.
What inspired you in your creation of the city of Mahala?
Again, not just one thing though I suspect that
Bladerunner
and
Sin City
had their influence! The city hives from some of Dan Abnett’s Warhammer books were always interesting to me as well. Mostly it was something that happened as I was writing the story. It grew with the telling.
Which level of the city could you imagine yourself living on?
Well, I’d like to live in Clouds, because it’s nice there and there’s sun, but like Rojan, I suspect I’d end up somewhere less salubrious. To me, the underbelly is more interesting. If not as pleasant.
How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire trilogy/series before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?
Hardly at all. Generally I start with a character, in a situation. I have an idea of the tone or atmosphere I want to create, and the type of emotional response I’m aiming to invoke—happy, dark, bittersweet, nostalgic, etc. I have
a vague idea of what might be the ending (which usually changes a lot). Other than that, it could go anywhere!
Where did the idea for pain magic come from?
I can trace that back directly—to Thomas Convenant. At one point he broke his ankle and a healer fixed it, but to do so she had to take the pain and injury on herself. I’ve always been drawn by the idea of consequences to magic (as there are consequences to everything), especially what might make it a less than desirable thing to have. If it’s all reading and waggling fingers and cool fireballs, well that’s fine but a magic that you
really
don’t want to use unless you have to… that became very interesting.
Who could you imagine playing Rojan in a film adaptation of the book? And how about Jake?
Oh, now that’s tricky. I use photos of real people, sometimes actors, sometimes not, on my wall as I write for inspiration. I kind of had Christian Bale in mind for a while (because of a photo of him with one brow raised, as though questioning everything, very Rojan) but I’d have to go with Adam Beach. Jake, well Jake was based on several very varied influences, but I recall having a photo of Deadly Little Miho from
Sin City
up on my wall as I wrote the scenes where Jake fights, so Devon Aoki would suit very well.
Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?
Too many to mention! C. J. Cherryh really kick-started my desire to write; such complicated and very real characters. Terry Pratchett is phenomenal, but I wouldn’t even attempt to go there… he’s done it so well. Jim Butcher’s the Dresden
files for sure, Phillip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, the list goes on. There’s plenty outside the genre that I think have influenced me too—as a kid I devoured Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell novels, and lately Robert Low’s Oathsworn series left me slack-jawed in admiration. Probably every book I’ve loved has influenced me in some way.
Do you have a set writing routine and if so, what is it?
Not as such. I work odd shifts, so it’s a matter of writing when I can. When I started, I also had two small children, so that was an extra challenge. Now I just write when I get the opportunity of an hour or two free! I have been known to tell the husband to “just go to the pub, dammit” in order to get some writing time in. He rarely complains.
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
I’d love to be able to fly—I have a secret hankering to be Storm. Lightning bolts an added bonus!
If you enjoyed
FADE TO BLACK,
look out for
A Rojan Dizon Novel
by Francis Knight
No-Hope-Shitty; the name says it all really. This particular part of the city, so far down it was almost the even-worse Boundary, was one of the crappier shit pits. The smell of hopelessness, of fear and the sweat of too many people in too one place, seemed ground into the dank buildings that crammed every available space.
I made my way along a swaying walkway that was only nominally attached to the clutch of gently mouldering boxes they called houses down here, and tried not to think how far down the gap underneath went. Farther than it used to. To keep my mind off the drop, I swore at Dendal in my head. Some damn fool notion he’d had was why I was here in the arse end of
the city. Trying to find someone I wasn’t even sure existed in a maze of synth-ridden houses and rotting walkways that looked as though they’d turn on me at any time and dump me down thirty, forty floors to the bottom of Boundary, or even farther to the newly opened Pit—to Downside.
Heights, or rather depths, make me nervous and nervous makes me cranky, so I kept on swearing at Dendal in my head. Downsider music, all wailing rage and thumping beat, rattled crumbling walls unused to anything more raucous than the occasional bland hymn. Wary eyes peered out at me from cracked windows. Here was somewhere I really didn’t want to be, not an Upsider like me. The whole area was crammed with the recent Downsider refugees, fearful and not without cause.
I’d ditched my usual outfit: the leather allover and the flapping jacket that made me look like a Special. It was handy for scaring the crap out of people, but Downsiders had a particular hatred for the elite guards, and that hatred was just as likely to overcome the fear that was radiating through the thin walls. I am many things but suicidal isn’t one of them, so I’d dressed to blend in with an old-fashioned button-up shirt, an old pair of trousers that didn’t quite fit. Just another guy feeling his way in this new and strange part of a city most of the Downsiders hadn’t even seen before six weeks ago. To them, the Upside of Mahala was the mythical come true, the alien place where things and people were weird. I kept having to remind myself of that. I’d even tried my best with my face, tried to give myself that Downsider blue-white undertone to my skin, rearranged things so I didn’t look as threatening.
That disguise had its drawbacks, though. I’d been scowled at, sniffed at, spat on, and sworn at on my way here. The sudden influx of refugees into Upside—only into the less salubrious areas such as No-Hope, but still—on top of the demise of
our major power source and the resulting loss of trade, jobs, food, and everything else had made everyone, Upsider and Down, tense. There had been incidents all over just lately, from both sides, events that made parts of No-Hope a dangerous place for someone like me, for anyone not a Downsider. They’d also made other places just as dangerous for the refugees. If I showed my real face here, if they knew it was me who had caused all those things, I’d have been pitched over the side of the walkway before I’d taken half a dozen steps from the office. Not hugely comforting, I had to admit.
I stopped on a corner between a boarded-up apothecary and a little grocery store that had run out of even really crappy food, wishing I’d brought a light of some kind, but candles were scarcer than food then, and I don’t like to use rend-nut oil. The smell of mingled rotting fish and day-old farts wasn’t a nice kind of aftershave and doesn’t pull in the chicks. Sadly, it was that or nothing, so I went with nothing.
Since the Glow, and the pain factory that provided it, had been destroyed by yours truly, power was at a premium and down this far in the city sun was a rumour. It wasn’t much past noon up in the rarefied air Over Trade. In Heights and Clouds and Top of the World, Ministry lived in the sun, shielding it, stealing it from us dregs. That much hadn’t changed, yet. It may never. Down here in Under, beneath the factories and warehouses of Trade that were eerily silent now, it might as well have been midnight. Even the cunning network of mirrors and twisted light-wells that gave my office a shred of real, actual sunlight for about three minutes around noon and an almost constant dusk for the rest of the day failed this far down.
I told myself that I didn’t need light for what I was here for. True, I didn’t. Instead, what I needed was pain, my pain. Which was a bitch, but I’d tried everything else, and everything else
hadn’t worked. Dendal was waiting and I didn’t like to disappoint, and not just because he’s my landlord and boss. He’s my boss because if he concentrated, he could spread me over a large portion of the city. He could do it accidentally, too, which was more likely, but I found it always best not to make him wait. He gets all insistent about his little obsessions and it’s easiest to just go along. Besides, I owe him a couple of legs, in that without his help I probably would have blown mine off long since while I learned my magic. So here I was.
The boy Dendal was after was a Downsider refugee; no records, no known address, not even a name to go on. All I had was a scrap of cloth and a hunch of Dendal’s. It was magic, or nothing.
Left to my own devices, I’d have said screw the little sod and left him there to fend for himself, no better or worse off than thousands of others quietly starving to death in the dark down here. Responsible isn’t high on my list of qualities. In fact, I usually try to make sure it doesn’t even appear on the list. But Dendal’s persuasive, and also really good at guilt-tripping me even if he doesn’t mean to. I hoped he would appreciate it, because this was going to hurt, and I don’t like to hurt.
With my good hand, I rummaged in my pocket for the scrap of cloth Dendal had given me. There wasn’t anywhere to sit that didn’t involve what was probably synth-tainted water, and the long ago alchemical disaster of the synthtox and the drawn-out deaths that followed were always close to everyone’s thoughts. The damn stuff still lingered, still made people sick from the inside out, so I crouched down and leaned back against a rickety wall that I hoped would take my weight. I was getting better at this, but still had a tendency to end up on my knees when I tried because it usually felt as though I were about to pop an eyeball, or perhaps a bollock.
I laid the scrap of cloth on my lap and stroked it with my good hand. My anchor, that cloth, the little bit of someone that would help me find them, in this case a boy. If I didn’t know someone, I needed a prop to help me find them—something of theirs, something intimate to them.
On the plus side, I didn’t need to dislocate my thumb to power up my magic today. On the minus side, that was because I’d fucked up my whole left hand in the incident that had led to all the Glow disappearing. The hand was still healing, and all I needed to do was try to make a tight fist to have white spots run in front of my eyes and power run through my veins. There has to be a better way to cast a find spell, any kind of spell, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet. When I do, they’ll hear the “halle-fucking-luyah” from Top of the World all the way down to the bottom of the Pit.
I made a fist and pain spiked through me along with magic, sweet and alluring, and oh so dangerous. It span around me, through me, calling, always calling. In and out, quick as I could, that was the best way. Before it tempted me, before the black rushed up to claim me. I’d beaten the black before, once, but I wasn’t so sure I could do it again. It was always there, waiting to trap the unwary, seductive and tempting. The price of my magic wasn’t pain, it was the threat of falling into the black and never coming out, of losing my fragile sanity to it.
It came quickly, flowing up my arm from the scrap of cloth—the sure and certain knowledge that the boy was to the east, a hundred yards away and two levels down. The pungent smell of a rend-nut-oil lamp overlaying the more insidious chemical tang of synth, an ominous flicker of shadows. Even more ominous-looking men. Four Upsiders in a half circle around a boy on the ground. Upsiders who looked seriously pissed off. One of them made a grab for the boy and a knife
gleamed in his other hand. In that gleam I thought I saw the rumour that was spreading everywhere but officially. Someone was killing Downsiders, and not just in fights either. Three dead boys already, and here looked like another in the making. No wandering along the walkways to find him, not now, not if I wanted to find him alive.