The Fade kj-2

by Chris Wooding

  'y donnnee oo juuust lie still?'

  He's taking my trousers off.

  I begin to writhe, driven by some force, some primal thing that makes me kick and thrash even though I'm not exactly sure what's happening. My foot connects and there's a grunt. An instant later I'm hit by a slap that whiplashes my face back towards the light. White, fizzing stars crowd in around the edges of my vision.

  There are other people here too. Shapes in the corners.

  Why is nobody stopping him?

  My senses are settling. I can almost see him now. One hand around the waist of my trousers, pulling at them while I buck my hips. He's trying to hold me down with his other arm. He's bigger than me, but he's clumsy and I'm getting less so by the second. Something about my clothing is foiling him and he can't get it off while I'm fighting, so he hits me again.

  This time it doesn't faze me. I lash out. He recoils, holding his throat, wheezing. I don't think I hit him hard enough but it doesn't matter: he's hurt and I'm not half so helpless now. I get my foot to his chest and shove him. He's heavy, but there's no fight in him any more and he stumbles away, trips, goes down coughing. I can tell by the sound of his breathing that I didn't crush his windpipe, but he's going to have trouble speaking for a while.

  My body feels connected to my brain again. Things are beginning to assemble themselves into some kind of clarity. I pull myself back, up against the wall, tugging my trousers up my thighs with one hand.

  I push with my heels and somehow I sit up, though I almost faint doing it. The rock is damp and warm. I look for the man who was on top of me, but he's retreated into the shadows. I'm exhausted from the effort of moving.

  Drugs. They kept me drugged. That's how I'm here.

  Faint memories come swimming up like fish rising to nibble at the surface of a pond. I remember the sound of water and the creak of timbers, the rocking of a hammock. The weight of manacles on my wrists. I look at my hands and I can see the marks. Gurta manacles, toothed on the inside, that grip harder the more you struggle. I must have been a good girl. The cuts aren't deep. I still have my hands.

  I remember the sound of their voices, laughing and shouting and joking. Sometimes talking to me in their own tongue. Jibing, insinuating. I hope I didn't reply. I don't think I did. Better if they don't know. Better if they think I can't speak their language.

  There must have been a journey. I have a sense of time passing, a jumble of images. We went through caverns. Past crystalline outcrops and giant fungal blooms. The creaking of a cart beneath me… Yes, I remember… I was in a cage, on a cart. We travelled along roadways, the ground made even by chthonomancy, protruding rocks spread and flattened by Gurta Elders. I remember crossing a stone bridge over a chasm, the red glow and warmth of magma far beneath us. At one point we passed into a rockworm tunnel a hundred spans in diameter, streaked with phosphorescent algae still feeding on the residue of the ancient monsters millennia after they disappeared. I remember the sense of expansion, of coming out from the narrow, enclosing earth into that vast, cylindrical cavern, stretching away into darkness.

  I remember them feeding me, and me eating, too drugged to realise they were drugging me. Splitroot or chamis oil, I bet, or some Gurta plant I've not heard of. Bastards.

  I remember their faces crowding round me. Pale, slender, fine-boned, blue-eyed. Talking in that high, singing way of theirs. One of them had a dirty mask over the lower half of his face, and he was ministering to me. Examining me.

  I don't remember anything else.

  It's a prison. I understand that much, at least. A rough-hewn cave, irregular in shape so probably natural: Elders wouldn't make something this uneven. I count a dozen in here, though my vision hasn't quite recovered. They're pretty spread out, sleeping in corners or talking or just watching me. Some of them have little nests of blankets and rags that they're guarding warily.

  It's hot. The heat comes from the walls. That means we're either very deep underground or we're near some geological kink like a lava channel or a steam fissure or something. Torchlight spills through a grille that's been fixed to the only obvious exit: a hole in the ceiling, twenty spans above me. Cross-hatched bars separate us from whatever is beyond.

  I try to raise myself and suck my breath through my teeth as my back protests. Complaint noted. More gingerly, I lever myself into a less vulnerable position, and I wait to see if anyone else fancies trying anything. Nobody seems to want to. That's good.

  My head is clearing fast as the drugs wear off. I should be applying my chua-kin meditation techniques to speed the process – in fact, had I been conscious before they drugged me I could have negated most of their effects that way – but I can't muster the willpower. Something's nagging at me, something I should know. I wouldn't be able to centre myself in such an unquiet state of mind.

  Then it comes to me.

  Rynn is dead.

  And I cry my guts out. The time that follows is a blur. Sounds are dulled. My senses operate in a murky, smeared world of strangers and their strange activities. I feel like I'm dead. I wish I was.

  They come with ladders, and one by one we climb from the pit. I climb, too. I don't have the strength to make decisions on my own.

  The guards wear the same armour as the soldiers on the battlefield, moulded from hardened sap. It's a process we've never been able to figure out, but it provides an ultra-light and tough material, whitish with a faintly iridescent rainbow sheen, that fits tight to their narrow bodies. Slim carapaces to house their fragile flesh. Slender swords hang at their waists.

  I climb the ladder and find myself herded onto the walkway at the point of a blade, to join the others from my cell. Outside the cell there is a cavern, sweltering and thick with shadow. The dark rock has folded into ledges and depressions, around which a complex and rickety wooden walkway has been built. Stairs lead down from a wide exit high on one wall. Heavy grilles of black iron mark the entrances to other prison chambers, some set into the floor like ours, others in the walls. I can see men there, fingers clenched around the bars, watching us hopelessly, their faces grimed.

  I shamble like a sleepwalker. I speak to no one, and no one speaks to me, except when the Gurta guards bark their orders in broken Eskaran. There is a man with us, his throat bruised, staring at me sullenly. He is bulky with muscle and fat, his hair receding, two rings through his lower lip. Small eyes under a heavy brow, glaring.

  They take us up the stairs and out of the cavern, into a series of wide stone corridors. Badly lit, weathered by time. I walk with my head down, barely noticing anything. We cross a room via a balconied passageway; beneath us, prisoners work mill-wheels to grind spores for bread.

  Shortly afterward, we are brought to a halt by a large iron door. One of the Gurta unlocks it with a heavy key, and the door swings open. A blast of dry, scorching air billows from within, as from the belly of an oven, stirring my hair. Red light falls across us all.

  We go inside. The forge is a world of noise and sweat and fire. A seething landscape of molten metal, of clanking chains and pulleys, of pounding, oppressive heat. Great metal jugs spit and steam as their contents are poured. Dirty, glowing liquid slithers down trenches, flickers of flame dancing between the black patches on the surface. Men with hoods of animal hide and goggled eyepieces, brawny arms dripping, rake through the vats for impurities and wrench on hissing iron valve-wheels.

  They put me to work on a device whose purpose I don't exactly understand. Another prisoner stands opposite me on the other side of a stone trench, through which a foul-smelling mineral slop flows, thick bubbles swelling and bursting on its surface. There is a kind of double barrier set across the trench, two heavy screens of cross-hatched metal. Our job is to slide them back and forth alternately, one arm pumping forward while the other pulls back, like trying to saw a log in two places at the same time. It's repetitive and seemingly pointless, and my shoulders ache and my back burns, but I do it anyway because I don't have the will to resist.

&nbs
p; After the first shift I can barely raise my arms. The next shift I work twice as hard. I need the pain. I want it. Punishment for being alive.

  The boy I work with is of a race I've never seen before, but I've heard stories. He's one of the Far People, a SunChild. Skin blacker than oil, irises so dark that it seems his pupils are enormous. He's slender and small, his hair hanging in tangles across his forehead. Seventeen or eighteen, I'd guess. His ears still haven't wholly healed from being clipped. The SunChildren cut the backs of their ears into fin-shapes as a rite of passage.

  Ordinarily, I'd have been fascinated by him. I'd have wanted to know all about him: how he came to be here, where he was from, what strange customs he held. I'd always been the curious sort; I suppose that was why I found Liss and Casta such good company when others found their endless gossip infuriating. But my curiosity has withered, like all my feelings, to a blackened stump.

  For his part, he doesn't say a word. I catch him glancing at me once or twice, but his gaze is quickly averted. Perhaps I see pity there, perhaps fear, perhaps nothing at all. But I'm thankful, at least, that he doesn't trouble me.

  Our lives are measured by the clanging of an enormous bell, somewhere far above us. Each bell marks off three hours. Unconsciously, I count the strikes and match them to the rhythm of work and rest. Even through the haze of grief, I can't help but try and put things into order.

  Gurta use the same system of turns, segs, hours and minutes that we do. We adopted it from them, after all. They use different terms, but the divisions are the same: two hundred and seventy-two turns to the year, the time it takes the mother-planet to circle its sun; ten turns to the orbit, or the time it takes our little moon to circle the mother-planet; one full rotation of Callespa counts as a turn; a third of that is a segment, or ten hours; thirty hours to the turn; ninety minutes to the hour. Deep beneath the surface, time is governed by the tides, the tug of the looming mother-planet.

  I work, I eat, I sleep. Beyond the forge I see only a quad where they put us for several hours per turn, and a hall where we eat during breaks from the forge. I barely know where I am most of the time. I can't wake up out of this stupor and I don't want to, because without it I'll have to feel again. Instead, I lose myself in the push and pull of the screens, little caring that by being so zealous I'm making the boy work just as hard as me. He doesn't complain, and I wouldn't listen if he did. I wear myself out, savouring the agony of aching muscles. As soon as I rest, I sleep. There's no time for thinking.

  Turns pass. I don't know how many. The others avoid me. They see the ruin in my eyes. I know the faces of all twelve of my cellmates, and the names of everyone but the boy. We work with several dozen others at the forge, but at the end of each shift we're returned to our own cells. I notice who talks to whom, tracing their allegiances. The prisoners I've seen are almost entirely Eskaran males. I've seen no other women. It doesn't surprise me. I know how Gurta deal with foreign women.

  We've a Khaadu in our cell along with the SunChild, and I've seen a Banchu and an Umbra and heard talk of Ya'yeen elsewhere in the prison. The Khaadu's name is Nereith. He has a wary friendship with Charn, the bulky man who tried to forcefully make my acquaintance while I was drugged to the back teeth. Charn's throat is almost back to its normal colour now. I can't even muster the passion to hate him.

  Once, I'm woken briefly by the sound of tears. It's the boy. Everyone else is asleep, but the boy is crying quietly. It seems like a dream, and I'm coddled back to oblivion again; but the next shift, in the red light of the forge, I see the bruises on his face and arms. They're blue against the black of his skin, almost invisible. But I see them.

  The same turn, someone is taken. We're in the quad when they come for him. I'm sitting on my own, as I always do, staring at the ground between my feet, my mind empty. I hear the scream, and look up to see a man I don't recognise being bundled away by guards, while others threaten nearby prisoners with pikes. There's no need. Nobody is going to his rescue.

  'They'll come for you next, you sons of whores!' he's shrieking. 'You're all meat to them! They'll come for you next!'

  The prisoners look away. So do I. It's getting harder and harder to shut out the clarity. The haze that cushions me is tattering away. I fight to keep hold of it, but it isn't working. More and more I'm aware of things around me, of conversations. Old instincts are kicking in, subconsciously gathering information. I'm Cadre: I'm a spy, a warrior, an assassin, trained since childhood in the arts of subterfuge and combat and murder. I've suffered and suffered again, in ways that would crack the mind of someone weaker. But I'm recovering. And I can't stop it.

  I have my own spot in the cell, where I curl up on the hard stone floor and find the blankness that is my only respite. But soon I'm robbed of even that sliver of peace.

  For the first time since Rynn died, I dream. And when I dream, I dream of my family.

  30

  His knee breaks sideways beneath my foot, but I've clutched his head and cracked his neck before he really registers the pain. I let him fall and I'm gone as he folds to the ground, an emptied sack. Sometimes they give me a problem – an unexpected twist here, a swift parry there – but mostly it's just like disassembling dolls.

  In the fighting-trance, I am separated. Oil on water. One part of me cold, clinical, governed by mantras and techniques familiar as breath. The other part is my terror, my anger, my bitterness, all mixed together into one nameless emotion that burns like the brightest fuel. The Cadre don't deny our passions; we harness them, and unleash them on those who would oppose our masters' will.

  Around me is the noise: the roar of battle. We crash down the slope like a wave, two dozen of us. We wash around glittering crystal formations; we pass beneath arches of petrified sap. Blades of mineral grass crush like spun sugar beneath the soles of my shoes. I dodge past translucent protrusions sharp enough to open me like a bloody purse. Momentum pushes our charge to a reckless speed.

  The air fills with the clatter of a shard-cannon. A man to my right is stitched across the chest and lifted from his feet, torn backwards as though pulled by elastic vines. The crystal forest erupts into puffs of glittering dust as it's punched by gunfire. I hold my breath. Inhaling that stuff would tear up my lungs pretty bad.

  We'd hoped they wouldn't have time to traverse their gun. We'd gained the high ground and flanked them, and we thought the element of surprise would be enough. I feel sick as the forest is shredded around me and Eskaran soldiers are cut to meat by needles of stone.

  Three heartbeats and we're on them. More Gurta are running up the hill to meet us, teeth bared, knives gleaming. The shard-cannon crew are firing through their own soldiers. The enemy are being cut down from behind, but they're still coming.

  One of them singles me out, seeing I'm Cadre, seeing I'm small and slender and mistakenly thinking that makes me less deadly than someone like Rynn. I feint left and then launch off that foot, using the slope to get the height I need. He gets halfway through a swing before my foot connects with his jaw. I hear bone splinter. I touch down on his far side and keep running. I don't think I killed him but I don't care; someone else can do it. I'm after that gun. I hate guns.

  Two heartbeats.

  I glimpse the lake through the trees now. The water's bright, illuminated by phosphorescent plankton. Its light melds with the glow of the crystal forest. Patches of lichen glitter in the darkness far overhead, streaking the cavern roof.

  One.

  And suddenly the forest is smashing around me, the air crazy with the insectile whine of projectiles and the sound of breaking glass. The gun has been turned on me, and I'm coming out of the forest, right into its muzzle.

  I break right and keep low, every new instant a miracle. Needles slice past, too fast to see. For a small eternity, I'm cupped in the hands of chance, life and death determined by the bucking of the shard-cannon, by obstructions and ricochets. Then there are no more crystal formations. The petrified white world of the forest peels back,
and I've made it.

  There's only six of them. Two manning the gun, four waiting, knives ready for the onslaught. They're yelling at each other in that foul dialect, everyone shouting orders, discipline crumbling. Just the sound of their fluting, trilling consonants makes something knot in my stomach. The old fear, the shame, the pain. I gather it and use it.

  I'm first out of the forest, emerging a little way right of the gun. The pitiful wall of rocks they've built to hide behind doesn't slow me at all. I use it as a springboard, leaping over and among them. The gunners are my targets. I slash one across the throat, slicing through muscle and gristle with my shortblade. It's chthonomantically-treated obsidian: cuts through flesh like it was warm butter.

  The rest of my assault force reach the emplacement moments later, by which time I've blinded the second gunner and broken his pelvis with my knee. The other Gurta can't touch me. Their strikes are slow, bodies declaring their intentions well in advance. I'm three moves ahead of everyone here.

  The gun has fallen silent, its rotating barrel spinning to a stop. I get out of the way of the Eskaran soldiers as they come charging in. The Gurta put up a fight, but it's futile. They're taken down in moments.

  When it's done, we count our losses. Three dead, one wounded, the rest covered in small wounds from flying splinters. I got off lightly with a few dozen scratches, nothing too serious. Could have been worse.

  I hunker down on the wall at the far edge of the emplacement and look out across the lake while the men reorganise. There are Ehru out there, far from the shore, tentacles rising and waving and touching. They iridesce with colour, oblivious to the men dying nearby. I can't help but waste a few moments watching before I turn my attention to the troops below.

  The main Eskaran force is forging along the lakeside. The enemy contests every step. Four hundred of us down there, all told. It's all to reclaim a tiny port called Korok which the Gurta took from us sixty turns ago. The Warmasters seem to think it's of critical importance, a staging point for bigger things, but I don't know about that. I just go where I'm sent. My fight is on the high ground, where the land rises to meet the cavern wall. We're meant to secure the terrain and take out the hidden guns that are butchering our forces on the shore. We're doing a pretty good job of it, so far.