The Fade

14

The cave mouth opens a short way up a barren mountainside. At the foot of the mountain is a great flat stretch of scarred yellow-brown rock, which terminates suddenly at the edge of a sheer cliff. Beyond it is a sunken basin, bordered on all sides by steep escarpments and distant peaks.

Mist hangs thick in the basin, broken by the caps of colossal fungi. Mycora. The Caracassa mansions are built into the roots of one of these, many thousandspans underground. They emerge from the drifting vapour like humped islands, or tower above it, swollen discs spreading outward from their massive stems. The jagged tips of sandstone pillars are dimly visible down there, hazy shadows in the whiteness.

And above it all, the sky. The terrible sky.

The horizon is dominated by the colossal presence of Beyl, the mother-planet, looming before us as we burst from the cave and begin to slide and scramble down the mountainside. She's a vast orb of black and purple and green, banded with darkly glowing clouds of poison, flickering with storms the size of continents. She dwarfs our little moon, so massive that she snuffs out the risen sun. The last vestiges of the sun's light are dwindling as her enormous bulk slides across it.

Halflight. The false night brought on when the mother-planet eclipses one or both of our suns. But it won't last long: further along the horizon, the sky is brightening, heralding the arrival of another sun. A second dawn is coming, and if we're not under cover by then, we'll not live to see another.

I can't think straight. My mind is a mess of conflicting fears and instincts, foremost of which is the sheer wrongness of being outside. The idea that there is nothing above me, an endless emptiness, forever… I feel like I might just float into the sky and disappear. My body is seizing up with fear. It senses the day, lurking in sullen abeyance. It knows how slender the window of night is. It knows what will happen if the sun catches us in the open.

Escape. It's all there is. It's all I can allow myself to consider. If I think about anything more than skidding down this treacherous mountain slope, I'll fall apart. My body is burning with exhaustion: our short rest has done little to redress the rigours of our flight from Farakza. The Gurta are behind us, promising death as surely as the suns. Only Feyn can deliver me. This is his world. I have to believe in him.

We reach the bottom of the slope as the Gurta emerge from the cave. They have the altitude to put us within the range of their bows, and though the distance should make it an impossible shot, I've faced enough Gurta archers to know that impossible doesn't apply.

'Feyn! Don't run straight! Zigzag!' I shout at him. He's a little way ahead of me, having taken the lead on the way down. He's heading for the mist basin, the only feature of the landscape within reach of a sprint. Eerie crackles and piping noises began to drift up from below: the first soloists of the night chorus, tricked by the eclipse.

He starts to jink left and right randomly, as do I. We lunge and brake and throw our weight in different directions. I'd feel ridiculous if I didn't know it was our only chance of avoiding their arrows; and moments later I'm proved right. A shaft fires past my ribs and misses me by inches. Three more clatter around us, but none as close as the first. The last one falls some way behind. We're gaining distance while they stand still and fire.

I risk a glance back. They've resumed the chase. I call to Feyn and he understands: he breaks into a straight sprint again, and I follow suit.

The wind is picking up, stirred by the drastic drop in temperature. The air is cool and bone-dry. The sky is filled with stars, uncountable stars, and stroked with feathery strands of bruise-coloured cloud. Beyl's skin prickles with auroras, phantom tentacles thrashing over her flank at the point where she swallowed the sun.

The flat shelf of land is bare and blasted, hard stone pounding my soles through my shoes. My vision has narrowed to a tunnel, and I keep Feyn square in its centre. He's racing towards the mist basin as if he intends to fling himself off the cliff when he reaches it. Maybe he will. Maybe it's better than the alternative.

Glid larvae are dispersing before us, absurdly peaceful, floating down from the breeding grounds on the mountaintops. They ride the switching winds, using their membranous hoods as parachutes, fat grub-like bodies curled beneath, heading for the sea of soupy mist.

I can't think about them. I can't think about anything. Hysteria is threatening and the moment I let it in it'll shatter me.

Feyn alters course. He's seen something. I try to spot it but I can't, so I simply follow. We're heading for a hump of rock on the lip of the basin. Nothing makes sense over the scream of my senses telling me to fall to my knees and dig at the earth with my hands, to get back underground. I can feel the impending dawn, the insidious rise of the second sun over the mountains, and I know how an animal must feel as it hides from the gaze of a predator. The terror of that blazing eye will surely kill me, even before its light does.

The arrow hits me with the force of a hammer, punching through my shoulder in a nova of agony. I manage to stagger a dozen more steps before my balance deserts me and I fall on my face. Shock starts to settle in but my training won't let it. Subconscious defences, built up over many years, dam the flood. Teeth gritted, I start to get up as another arrow skips across the stone to my left. What kind of range do these bastards have, anyway?

Then Feyn is there, pulling me up, and we run. The arrowhead is sticking out of the front of my shoulder and it grates against my collarbone with every step, but I can still feel my arm and I can flex my fingers. I want to be sick.

Ahead of us. A fissure in the earth, a split in the hump of rock on the edge of the mist basin escarpment. That's what we're running for.

The sky to our left has turned purple-blue, dazzlingly rich. The tips of the mountain peaks are limned in fiery brightness.

Another arrow skitters past us, falling short. They must know what we know. Because as I watch the world bleaching before the dawn, I realise that we aren't going to make it. And if we don't, they certainly won't.

We're still a hundredspan from the fissure when the edge of the second sun clears the mountaintops.

Sunrise.

The world goes white. An awful, seething white, tinged with a burning blue. Shadows are smashed into cracks and crevices. The rocks and pebbles at my feet are thrown into sudden and sharp relief, every detail branded on my vision even after I shut my eyes. And with the light comes a prickling heat on my skin, the deadly glow pushing against me, scouring, pummelling.

Sheer primal panic claws at me like some frenzied beast trapped inside my ribs. I hear myself scream but it doesn't feel like me. My arm is thrown up in front of my face and I don't know which way is forward any more. My heart wants to burst; it beats so hard that I feel it's about to split. I stagger, flailing, shrieking.

Feyn, shouting at me. I can't hear the words. Somehow, I'm running. Sunlight surrounds me like flame. I'm stumbling through an inferno, my skin shrivelling at its touch.

I know nothing but the need to get out of the gaze of that cruel blue star. My lungs ache and my head swims. I fall, but Feyn has me, dragging me on.

'Keep going!' he cries, and I understand this time. 'Keep going!'

Then, shadow. Wonderful shadow. Somehow the fissure has swallowed me, somehow enfolded me in its protective sheath of dense rock. I'm crammed inward, borne on by Feyn. The arrow in my shoulder catches against the rock and the pain almost makes me pass out, but it's pain and it's real and I hold on to it. I'm barely aware of my surroundings, only that we are crushed together, sandwiched between stone, and Feyn has his arms around me, holding me close to him.

The Gurta are screaming. The sound comes to me through the haze. Somehow I raise my head, pulled by a savage need to watch them suffer. Consciousness hovers just close enough to permit it.

My eyes adjust quickly, bringing more detail with every passing moment. I see them fall to the ground, pawing at their faces, their high-pitched cries raw with desperation. Their pallid cheeks blister and rupture, oozing. Their movements become spastic as their brains scramble with sun-madness. Hair comes away beneath their hands. They scratch at the skin of their arms, tormented by furious itching, and the skin rips under their nails, wounds seeping with blood that instantly cooks black. Gore and bile drool from their noses, their mouths, and stains the crotches of their armour. Their cries become strangled, their white eyes yellowing and turning blind. One by one, they collapse and are still, but the deadly light of the sun is relentless, corrupting them. They boil with foulness from the inside out.

I can't take my eyes away from them. Mesmerised with horror. There's no satisfaction in this. Even they don't deserve this.

It takes some time before they cease to draw breath, by which time they are charred and sundered. Were it not for their armour and clothing, it would be hard to tell what they once were.

Gradually, I come back to myself. My skin is burning, itching. My shoulder is pulsing with pain where the arrow rests. I'm exhausted almost to the point of collapse. But overwhelming it all is the relief, the pure and incredible relief of shadow after light.

I'm alive. Even if only for this moment, even though I know in my heart that I've been sentenced to death by the touch of the sun, I'm alive. The sensation is dizzying. I feel desperate, eager to touch and taste and see and experience every tiny thing. Swept up, carried away, I have no idea why I do what I do next but I do it anyway.

With my good hand, I grab Feyn's head by his hair, tip his mouth up to mine, and I kiss him, hard.

The moment – and it's only a moment – is strange. There's no beard and his lips are so thin and soft, not like Rynn's. There's the taste of him, foreign, not like any Eskaran I've ever kissed. Everything is unfamiliar, and everything is wrong, and even before I notice that he's not responding I know it was a mistake but I still couldn't help it.

He pulls gently away, his hand between our lips. His eyes are sad, brimming with that soulful and fatherly understanding that I hate so much.

'No,' he says quietly. It's not long before the sickness sets in.

Feyn allows me a short rest before we move deeper into the fissure. I could stop here and sleep forever but we have to get the arrow out of me and find a safe place before I'm too weak to stand. The fissure – the legacy of a long-dried stream – is wide enough for us to squeeze through and Feyn is confident it will take us to the floor of the basin, but I know that I'll never make it down with the arrow sticking through my shoulder so we break off the head and I pass out for a few moments. Then he breaks off the flight, which is worse, because I stay conscious.

I've become suddenly very cold, mentally as well as physically. Logical. No time for despair. One foot in front of the other. Survive.

Feyn is right; he'd read the land well. The fissure runs down to the sloped sides of the basin. He doesn't seem any the worse for the brief exposure to sunlight, nor does he waste time on sympathy for me. Every fibre of my body wants to give up. Everything seems pointless now. But he just won't stop.

The bottom of the basin is marshy and dank. Thick creepers straggle out of scummed pools to wrap around the trunks of lichen trees. Huge fungus-flowers sit like veined and spotted cauldrons, enticing in unsuspecting insects. Gnarled mycora roots arch overhead, long chains of algae hanging from them. The hoots and cackles of the animals are loud. I catch sight of something slithering rapidly along the arm of a lichen tree, but it corkscrews away before I can identify it.

The mist is thin down here, like a grey membrane across our sight. Above us is a bright haze of blinding cloud. I can only assume that the mist protects us to some degree, or that the uneclipsed sun hasn't risen high enough to shine directly down into the basin. Either way, I just don't care any more. I stagger, limbs like stone, following my dark guide through the murk.

One foot in front of the other.

Survive.

Feyn finds a shelf of dirt and rock high up on a slope, overhung with vines like a curtain. He checks it expertly for signs of occupation, scans the surrounding foliage, and then ushers me inside. I'm shivering. I want to scratch myself to relieve the awful itching but I can't stop thinking of the Gurta, how their skin came away beneath their nails. Will that happen to me? Maybe Feyn knows. I daren't ask.

I slide under the low roof of the overhang and lie down on the soft, loamy soil. It smells of freshness and moisture and a vegetable kind of scent that I don't recognise. My eyes are beginning to sting and water. My shoulder is going numb where the length of arrow is lodged in it. I'm afraid, not of the pain that I believe is coming, nor the horrible death that will follow, but of my helplessness to prevent it. The waiting is always the worst.

Feyn checks me over swiftly. His expression is remarkably unconcerned. At first I find it reassuring, but later I realise that it's just his way. I know what he's thinking. If I die, I die. Nothing can be done. He'll move on. The SunChildren don't really do mourning.

'Stay here,' he says, with a swift grin.

'Was that a joke?' I ask weakly, through parched lips. 'You'd better keep me alive if you want to learn some better ones.'

'I will do what things I can,' he says, and then he's gone, disappearing through the curtain of vines.

I sleep. Even through the pain in every part of me, exhaustion demands its due. Feyn returns with water in a funnel-shaped fungus bloom, and he makes me drink even though swallowing hurts like blazing fuck. Then he positions himself behind my head and gives me a stick to bite on. I know what's coming but neither of us say a word. The stick tastes like dirt, bitter and acid. I nearly bite through it when he pulls out the arrow shaft.

He salves and dresses the wound with ripped sections of his shirt, then makes me eat a sweet paste folded inside a bland-tasting mushroom the size of my hand. He grinds up some spores and spreads them on my exposed skin, which calms the itching a little. He has the quiet, efficient manner of a physician, and I submit because I have no choice. Never in my life have I felt so bad, never in the depths of the worst illness in all my turns.

'It is done,' he says.

I look up at him, my eyes asking the question that my lips won't.

'It will pass within three days, or it will not pass,' he says. 'Your skin is not like mine. I do not know if the sickness got deep.'

'What if it did?'

'Then you will die. There will be very much pain. I will make poison for you, if it is that way.'

I cough feebly in surprise at his bluntness. 'Do you know what the Eskaran word ''tact'' means?'

'It means ''to lie.'' Is that right?'

I smile. It hurts my face. 'Yes, that's right,' I croak, and then I go back to sleep.