The Fade

27

Next turn, the guards beat me half to death.

I'm eating in the food hall when they pull me away, spilling my gruel of spores and tubers. I hear them coming and I know they're coming for me, but I don't react. I let them take me.

The punishment is conducted in full view of the other prisoners. They pull me to the floor and pound me with short, vicious clubs. There are chua-kin mantras and techniques that can block out pain or induce unconsciousness. I don't use any of them.

This is no less than I deserve. For Rynn.

The other prisoners are uneasy. Some have stood up from their benches and are being threatened by guards with swords. Angry cries are rising, abuse thrown at the Gurta. Gurta swear-words, learned for the purpose. Rough rootwood tables are pounded with stone spoons and empty bowls. The cooks have stopped stirring their cauldrons around the central fire and are watching.

The guards don't hit my face too hard, at least. I get to keep my teeth and no bones break. I'm thankful for that.

I'm mostly unconscious when they're done. I'm dragged by my arms, my heels dancing and juddering behind me. My mouth is full of the salt-metal tang of blood and my body is a blazing knot of agony. I drift in and out of awareness. Then suddenly I'm falling, there's nothing under me, and I'm shocked from my torpor by the slap and plunge of warm water. I flail, sinking, drowning… then I break surface, and my lungs find air long enough to throw up all the liquid I just swallowed.

I'm in a smooth-sided, circular pit, filled with brackish, vile water. Its stink is in my nostrils and all over the back of my throat. There's torchlight in the room above. Pale, narrow Gurta faces are watching me from the edge of the pit.

There are rusted metal rings set into the side of the pit just above the level of the water. I loop my arm through one. The torchlight disappears as the guards do. I hear a door close somewhere above me, and darkness comes. Eskarans have good eyes, able to make use of the smallest glimmer of illumination. But in the total absence of light, we're blind.

The pain settles in like damp, and swells. One eye is slowly forced shut by bruising. My cheek feels huge. The only sound I can hear is the lap of the water around me. In a moment of grim humour, I wonder if I've finally solved the mystery of where they dump all the shit from the cells. I actually smile a little, until the pain becomes too much.

Rynn always told me I had a perverse attitude. He was pretty fond of it, as I recall, even though it used to drive him mad at times. The more I'm ground down, the more defiant I become. I float, hanging loosely from the ring, and inside I'm laughing at the men who beat me. I'm scorning them for not killing me. There's nothing they can do that's worse than what's already happened. Fuck them. I'm not even close to breaking. I can still hear the faint, dolorous clang of the bell, humming through the walls of the pit. By its tolling I estimate that I've been down here two turns, although I might have slept through it once or twice so I'm not sure. Sleep isn't so easy: I have to put the ring under my armpit to support me while I doze, but soon the circulation cuts off and I wake with my arm sparkling numb. The snatches I get are more frustrating than being unable to sleep at all. But this is all part of the punishment, so I endure.

They lowered a bucket of water a while ago. Clean water, not the filth I'm floating in. I drank as much as I could, puffy lips pressed to the rim of the bucket. They pulled it away before I was done, but it was enough to keep me going.

Eventually the lock clatters and the door creaks open. Torchlight appears overhead. Weak as it is, it makes my eyes tear and run to look at it at first, so I shade them with my hand and look away. A rope splashes down next to me, with a crude harness of belts attached.

~ Put it on ~ someone urges me in Gurtan. It takes me a while to process this simple command; slowly I reach over and pull it to me.

~ Put it on ~ they say again. I pretend not to understand at first, until they make hand signs. Then I strap myself in. It's not easy with a dead arm.

I hang on as they pull me up. I'm pathetically weak. It's an effort just to keep pushing away from the side of the pit with my legs, but if I didn't, they'd just drag me up anyway. When I get to the top, I'm lifted to my feet, unstrapped and marched out of the room at swordpoint.

They take me through a series of corridors I've not seen before. Some are panelled in rootwood from ancient mycora, or flocked with shredded bark from lichen trees. Small shinestones are set into the wall. The sight triggers a stab of nostalgia for the trappings of civilisation. I've become used to the grim, sweltering world of dank caves, bare stone rooms and growling foundries. Shinestones are an unexpected luxury here.

These corridors are better cared for than those I've seen so far, and better decorated. There are even some Gurtan flourishes on the lintels and sconces. Scholars whisper past in their robes, some quite young, fresh-faced. They don't seem the least surprised to have a bruised and exhausted Eskaran woman in their midst, soaking wet and reeking.

I'm led into a room in which a single shinestone lantern of wrought iron hangs from the ceiling on a chain. Against the walls are glass-fronted cupboards, drawers, a worktop crowded with alembics and alchemical devices and complex brass ticking things. Charts and books lie open. The air smells of old blood.

In the centre of the room is an X-shaped frame, tilted at an angle, with straps at every end. Standing next to it is the Gurta chirurgeon I saw the last time I was working in the forge.

It's a chirurgery. They're going to dissect me.

No.

And suddenly I'm fighting. Thrashing in the arms of my guards. Every fibre of my body is rebelling at the sight of that frame, where they'll stretch me out and cut the flesh of my belly with their knives. I stamp out at one of them and feel their ankle break beneath my heel. The man shrills, a Gurta cry of pain. I know the sound well. Then someone clubs me round the back of my head and I sag forward. Fuck, that hurt. I struggle but someone hits me again across the head again and I stop.

It's hopeless. Lack of food and the fact that I've been floating for two turns, barely using any of my muscles, has left me unable to fight against the three remaining guards. One of them is cursing me, sitting on the ground, holding his foot. The rest pin me while the chirurgeon looms closer, carrying a long, hollow glass needle in which an amber liquid glitters. I try to avoid it, but I don't have the strength. Nothing can stop the progress of that point. It sinks into my arm and peace spreads from where it touches me. I relax and keep relaxing until everything goes black. This battlefield is scabbed with bloody pieces of men. The cavern roof presses low, shedding stalactites as it shivers with the rumble of explosions. The air is punctured with the dreadful rhythm of shard-cannon fire.

Yet I am unharmed. I fly on small, whirring wings, buoyed on the thermals from smoking corpses of Eskaran and Gurta alike. I pass over faces frozen in horror and shock, caked in mud and gore. I am blown towards my destination on a wind that smells of rancid meat.

Soon I see him. He is crouching in a crater, pressed close to the dead. They surround him, his departed comrades, their gazes blank and stunned. He is trembling. Tears have cut tracks through the filth on his face.

He is my son.

I fly to him, and he sees me. He reaches out to me desperately, but I am too small and too high, flitting.

'I am here,' I say. 'I have found you.' But the whispered voice that comes is gibberish. The message hides inside. A code. Our language.

'Where? Where are you?'

'I am coming to you,' I tell him. But then there is a great gust, and the wind turns against me with the bellowing heat of an oven.

'Where are you?' he cries, but I am being blown away, and my small wings cannot fight the fury of the wind. I struggle against it, but my efforts are all in vain.

'I am always with you,' I say, but now I am too distant to be heard. I wake in a study, grander than anywhere I've seen in this place yet. Polished wood and shining metal everywhere. There are no windows, by which I surmise we're still deep in the heart of the prison, but there's a primitive air-circulation system dependant on convection.

I've been strapped into a chair, hands and feet secured. Sitting opposite me is a Gurta in late middle age. His hair is long and white with hints of yellow, tied in a ponytail. His beard hangs in two thick streamers from his cheeks, but his chin is bare. He's wearing a robe of red and silver, and his fingernails have been grown out and sharpened.

It takes me a few moments before I notice something else. I'm not wet any more. Nor can I smell the stench of that pit on me. I look down at myself. My clothes have been laundered. My skin is no longer dirty. I think they even washed my hair.

They stripped me and cleaned me up. I start to think about what else they might have done while I was unconscious, but I clamp the lid quickly on that. Better not to know. Dissociate. Nothing happened. Make yourself believe it.

It takes me a short while to realise that they aren't going to dissect me after all. What in the Abyss is this all about?

I wait for the Gurta to speak. To one side of his chair stands a complicated orrery in brass and gold, used for calculating tides and seasons according to the movement of celestial bodies. Only four are shown: those whose heat or gravity are strong enough to affect us, in our world deep beneath the ground. The two suns, Oralc and Mochla, blazing with stylised ripples of light; the mother-planet, Beyl, a vast, blank orb; its moon Callespa, tiny in comparison. Us.

The spheres are held up by metal arms attached to a dozen small cogwheels that force them to move in synchronicity. Beyl has almost reached the far side of Oralc. On the surface, the suns will be coming together in the sky. That puts us somewhere around the end of Ebb Season and the start of Spore Season. Up on the surface, the nights have lengthened to almost equal the days. If it's accurate, and I assume it is, then I can't have been here for as long as it feels.

The Gurta leans forward and harrumphs. His eyes are pale grey, washed-out, like those of a corpse. I hate his kind and everything about them. 'Please tell me your name,' he says in accented Eskaran.

I consider being awkward, but I decide it's better to seem cooperative for now. I need to know what he's after, and stonewalling him won't help.

'My name-' I begin, and my dry throat demands I swallow before I continue. 'My name is Massima Leithka Orna. I'm a Bondswoman of Clan Caracassa, and a member of Ledo's Cadre.'

'Ledo?'

'Plutarch Nathka Caracassa Ledo. Magnate of Clan Caracassa.'

The scholar's eyes crease a little more, a half-smile. 'My name is Gendak. I am a scholar, from the city of Chalem.'

'Now we're introduced.'

'I must apologise for the way you have been treated,' he says. 'It seems there was some confusion. You were not supposed to be harmed. Unfortunately my request was overlooked by my peers in their eagerness to punish you. I acted to protect you as soon as I heard.'

His apology doesn't exactly seem heartfelt. He's not sorry, not really. He just wants me to know it's not his fault. I wait for him to go on.

'Do you know why you were punished, Orna?'

'I attacked another prisoner,' I reply. It still feels odd to speak, and more so because of the swelling in my lips.

'That is not the reason you were punished. It is who you attacked that concerns us.'

'Charn? What's special about him?'

'He is a skilled blacksmith. We have very few here who can forge weapons. Charn is a valuable asset to us, and you have put him out of action for some time.'

'His arm will be right in a few turns or so. Be thankful I didn't break it.'

'It is you who should be thankful. Your punishment would have been much worse.'

I stare at him. He sits back, smoothes his whiskers. 'You do not interact well with the other prisoners. In fact, you do not speak with them at all. Why is that?'

'Why do you care?'

'I'm interested.'

I don't reply. I'm not falling for an evasion like that.

'You do not want to tell me?'

'Not until you tell me why you're interested.'

A long moment passes. All his moves are slow, considered. He lapses into immobility between sentences. But his mind is working, I see that. He's calculating me.

'It has been my life's work to make a study of you,' he says. 'Of your people. The Eskarans.'

'To learn your enemy is the first step to subjugating them.'

'Or to making peace with them,' he counters.

'Your kind don't want peace,' I say, bitterly.

'Nor do yours.'

That's true enough. Especially not Clan Caracassa. They've been making a tidy profit from the latest war, this last seven years.

Gendak stirs in his chair. Unobtrusively, I test my restraints, but I'm strapped in tight. I wait for more. 'There is a long history of antagonism between our people,' he says. 'Nobody living can remember a time when we were not at war or engaged in a precarious stand-off. It has become accepted as the natural order of things. I do not think that is so. I think the key to making peace between our people is to understand one another.'

I'm not sure I believe what I'm hearing. 'You can't erase people's memories. Understanding is one thing, but too many people have been hurt by the war. There are too many grudges.'

'It has to start somewhere.'

His reasoning is sound, even if I don't agree. I don't think there can ever be lasting peace between us, and I wouldn't want there to be. I'd be happy to see every last one of them dead for what they've done to me. I'm remembering how they've been taking people away for dissection, how they beat me and threw me in a pit. How they killed my husband. Nothing can make me forgive them, ever. But my anger grew cold long ago. It doesn't control me.

'Your Elders say the destruction of my people is demanded by Maal's Laws. Wouldn't working towards peace mean defying them?'

He spreads his hands. 'Maal's wisdom was great. I am only seeking to understand you. How my studies are used – for war or for peace – will be out of my hands.'

'Does studying us include cutting us open?'

'There are other scholars who work towards other goals. Eskaran and Gurta physiology is very similar. You make excellent test subjects for new medicines and poisons, or as practice for our young chirurgeons. Gurta soldiers do not take prisoners as a rule. The only reason any of you are alive is because of your potential usefulness to us. When that usefulness ends, you will die.'

At least he's honest. And I don't miss the implied threat. Stay cooperative, or join the experiments.

'Your turn,' he prompts.

I pause for a time, thinking. 'I don't speak to the other prisoners because I don't care about them. I don't care what they have to say. I don't care about this place.'

'Is there anything you do care about?'

My son. My son, whom I'll never see again. Out there somewhere, fighting this fucking war.

'No,' I reply. 'There's nothing I care about.' They put me back into my cell. The other prisoners watch me climb down the ladder. As I descend I can see Charn glaring through the muddle of bruises and cuts that constitute his face. His paralysed arm is in a sling. I can feel his hate, but it's impotent. Even battered as I am, I've sent a message to everyone here. Nobody will fuck with me now.

The ladder is pulled up and the grille overhead slams shut. I walk to my corner to sit down, saying nothing. As I go I notice the SunChild boy. He's watching me, like the others. As far as I can tell, he hasn't been harmed.

I don't know why that's important to me, it just is.