The Fade

13

Time is slippery and unreliable. I wake and sleep and it's hard to tell the difference. Fevered nightmares curdle with the hallucinations that cloud my eyes when they're open. Sometimes I'm aware of the shelter of the rock, of Feyn sitting next to me and talking. Other times I'm flitting through a world of horrors, bewildered, consumed by pain. Moments of lucidity float like windows on a sea of delirium.

Faces from my past loom up at me, distorted. Master Allet, Aila, Keren, Chorik. Someone saying a name, over and over. Belek Aspa. Voids, where do I know that name from?

At some point I feel my stomach clench and its contents come rushing up my throat to fill my mouth. Feyn is there to clean my face, but afterward he makes me eat again, and I throw it up again, which clears my head a little. He makes me eat a third time, and I keep it down.

I can sense large things moving about in the undergrowth beyond my bunk of stone, soil and vines, but whether they are real or not I can't tell. Insects creep on the edge of my vision and crawl up my arms and into my hair. Feyn tells me they're just the pricking of my nerves given shape by my tortured mind. It doesn't help.

It's impossible to get comfortable. Moving is a torment as my bones seem to grind against each other. The sickness crawls beneath my skin, fighting to burrow deeper while my body struggles to cast it out. It's a black, oily, vile thing, a taint in my veins.

Somehow, in amongst it all, I find the lucidity to begin a chant. At first it comes brokenly, in bits and pieces, but in time the phrases link up, form a chain and hold solid. I sink into a shallow trance. I have to drive out the taint. It's the only way I'll make it through.

If I die now, I'll never see my son again. I surface from a dream of knives into a state of suspicious clear-mindedness. My body aches but my thoughts feel like mine again. It's night outside my shelter, and the mist basin is raucous with sounds of life. Something enormous and wet slurps through the fungal underbrush beyond the layer of vines that protect me. A small crab, its shell polished as a mirror, is sidling through my den, segmented eyes watching me. It's cool and dark, and a hissing wind scours the land.

Feyn is sitting cross-legged at my feet, listening to the cacophony outside. He turns and looks at me, sensing me wake.

'I feel better,' I say, quietly.

He shakes his head. 'It is how it happens. The worst is coming.'

My momentary hope collapses. 'What's the worst?'

'My people call it… the translation is ''Shadow Death''.'

I don't much like the sound of that.

'Long in the past, we thought we could beat the sickness by facing it,' he continues. 'Many went out into the sun, to test themselves. Many died. But those who did not die, they became changed.' He pokes the steadily approaching crab with a stick of petrified lichen-tree and it scuttles away from him. 'Even now, some want to test themselves. Some take the risk, to make Shadow Death.'

'You were exposed,' I say. 'Out there. You caught the sun too.'

He shakes his head. 'a'Sura'Sao have skin that protects us, like the animals who walk in the day. We can stand in the light for a short time. It depends which sun, what time of day, many things. One sun is stronger than the other.'

I sigh, and relax a little. That news relieves me of a tension I didn't realise I had inside me. I manage a smile. If I die now, at least I did this. At least I got him out.

'The ones who make Shadow Death and survive are stripped of all things,' he says. 'They are made new.'

'How?'

'It is in their eyes and thoughts, and in the things they speak. They have been to the end and returned. Only Shadow Death can do this.'

'How long will it be?'

He brushes his hand through my lank and stinking hair. 'Soon.'

And yet I feel better than I did before, as if I was already on my way back. A cruel deception. I shift my weight and settle.

'Talk to me,' I say. It comes out more pleadingly than I intended. 'Talk to me until it comes.'

'What should I talk of?'

'You,' I say. 'Tell me about you.'

He seems uncomfortable about this, and I suddenly begin to understand why I know so little about him, even after all we've been through together.

'Our way is… not to speak of our own histories,' he says. 'We believe that now is the only importance. Others may tell our tales, but for us to speak of our own, it is… not polite. It is boastful.'

'There's nobody else to tell me,' I say, gently insistent. I need something to keep my mind off what's to come, but more than that, I want to know about this person that I've risked my life for, whom I've dragged from a Gurta prison for no sane or logical reason I can think of. I deserve that much. 'Will you do it? For me?'

He drops his eyes. 'I will tell you,' he says. 'But if you survive, you must never speak of my boastfulness.'

He's perfectly serious. I treat it with the gravity it deserves. 'I won't say a word.'

So he talks. He talks of being born into a coterie, which I learn is the best translation of their name for a clan or a group. He talks of the travelling life, of hunting and herding when the nights come. He talks of storing food for the retreat to the high caves during the Season of Days, when the suns are on opposite sides of Beyl and so Callespa is bathed in permanent light, except during the brief periods of halflight when the mother-planet shadows us. He talks of the ways they have come to live beneath the suns, and how they exist on the hostile skin of our moon.

Then, when he has evaded the issue long enough, he talks about himself. A quiet, shy child, living in the shadow of his brother. The elder sibling was a hunter, a fighter and explorer. Handsome, strong and capable, he attracted the admiration of the young people of the coterie. Feyn was slight and not inclined to physical pursuits, but he was fiercely bright and a voracious learner. He spent his time with the elder folk of the tribe, or listening to the debates of the Pathfinders. He tells me that the Pathfinders are an elected triumvirate who lead the coterie.

As he speaks, I begin to see a life of quiet alienation, a boy wise beyond his years who could not engage with his peers, even in the small world of the coterie where everyone knew everyone. He walked with the Loremaster – the coterie's teacher-of-wisdom – instead of hunting with the other boys or practising his crafts. Comfort came in learning, and in the company of adults who wouldn't mock him or force him into unwilling competition.

Books were a rare commodity in the travelling life, where portability was vital, and most knowledge was carried in the heads of the Loremasters, whose apprenticeship involved memory techniques that gave them Khaadu-like recall. They were living libraries. But occasionally books were found or traded with distant outposts, and made their way into circulation among the coteries of the SunChildren. The Loremaster of Feyn's coterie had one such book. An Eskaran novel called The Light In The High Tower.

Feyn's obsession with this strange language, its alphabet and structure, became all-consuming. He pestered the Loremaster to teach him what he knew of Eskaran, but was disappointed to find the Loremaster's knowledge woefully incomplete, for he had only learned a little from another Loremaster called Siaw. He had intended to decode the book, but he did not have enough of the language to make it possible. It was wasted on him.

In his early adolescence Feyn left his coterie and joined another, taking the book with him as a gift. SunChild coteries meet occasionally in great fairs during the Season Of Nights, he says, and it's not uncommon for members to swap groups. Some did it for the change, or to find new friends or partners, or to get away from someone they disliked. Feyn did it to travel with Siaw.

Under his tutelage, Feyn began training to be a Loremaster, and he learned Eskaran. Though Siaw's own knowledge was imperfect – picked up from sporadic contact with Eskaran traders on the fringes of society, the source of what few tales we have of the SunChildren – he knew enough to show Feyn how to read his book.

I've never heard of The Light In The High Tower. By Feyn's account it seems to be a cheap romantic novel, of the kind you might find circulating among the handmaidens in any aristocratic court. I don't have the heart to offer my opinion. To him, it's a stunning piece of literature, a window into a society he can only imagine. To me, it sounds like something I'd use to wedge a door open.

'I became excited by an idea which said: go underground,' he tells me. 'I wanted to go to this place, Bry Athka, where the book speaks of. They have a University, a great place of learning. That is true?'

'It's true. My son went to the military school there.'

'You have been to the University?'

'A few times,' I say, not mentioning that my longest visit was to murder a respected academic who was about to publish his treatise on the dangers of foreign conflict to a merchant society. Caracassa's enemies would have wielded it over the Turnward Claw Alliance for years to come if it reached general circulation. He'd been repeatedly warned, but he was too stubborn to listen. I wasn't proud of myself for killing an old man for what seemed such a small thing, but neither did I feel guilty. I was under lifedebt: I was Ledo's weapon. Conscience was a luxury I gave away when I skinmarked my cheek with the sign of a Bondswoman.

Then he tells me the story of a girl, who treated him kindly and whom he fell in love with, but who would not accept him in the end. Her heart was with the hunters, not a quiet Loremaster-in-training. Knowledge and learning did not keep a girl warm at night, or make her feel safe.

It was an achingly familiar story. I almost began to tell him how my son had gone through the same thing more than once, but I felt it would cheapen Feyn's experience, and by the way he spoke of this girl, the wounds were still fresh.

So he left that coterie and travelled alone for a time. It was a dangerous thing to do, but SunChildren sometimes took such journeys of self-reflection. Feyn felt he had to examine himself and decide if his life was on the right path.

'My sorrow drove me away,' he says. 'I felt I had no worth. What worth was it to read a book? What worth was it to know the words of a society I would never be with? Tradition had kept the a'Sura'Sao at a distance from the Eskarans. Our meetings with your people were brief, and in far places. So I decided I would meet with the Pathfinders of many coteries at our next gathering and persuade them that I should go to Eskara and learn your ways, and teach you of us.' His eyes come alive at the thought. 'I would go to the University at Bry Athka and return an explorer! Braver than any hunter!'

'You did this for a girl?'

'At first I thought that was true, but it was not for her. It was to be done for me.'

'What happened?'

'When I had made to decide, I travelled to meet a coterie I knew of. We travel certain routes, you understand? We leave markers and trails for a'Sura'Sao, who know how to read them. Our lands are full of secrets for our kind, hoards of food and equipment, buried sunsuits, maps to hidden places. It is necessary for us to help one another to survive. I could pick up their trail and follow.'

'But you never got there.'

'I could not catch them before… mmm… you call it ''big wind''?'

'Hurricane,' I say. I remember Reitha telling me about the storms that sometimes engulfed our moon, blanketing all the known lands and probably far beyond, laying waste to anything not hardy enough to stand up to them.

'Yes. It comes sometimes at a certain time of year. I took shelter in the caves, and I had many supplies, but it blew for seven days and it did not seem as if it would stop. So I began to think… now is the time I must go underground. Why should I ask permission? The Pathfinders might say no, and then my life is worthless.' He's fidgeting now, embarrassed by his impatience, ashamed.

'So I went underground. Gurta caught me. They took me to Farakza. I think they had never seen a SunChild, so they thought I was a… freak?' I nod as he looks to me for approval of the word. 'But the scholars know I was a SunChild. Otherwise, the chirurgeons would cut me up. So they try to learn my language, but it is not easy, and I think they forgot about me.'

'You were lucky,' I say.

'What is luck? This is twice time you said it.'

I'm about to reply, but suddenly it feels as if the world has plunged away from me. My head starts to pound, my body feels simultaneously lighter than air and heavy as lead. It feels like an attack, like poison flooding through me. Feyn sees it.

'It is beginning. The Shadow Death.'

I can feel the pain growing, rising, inexorable as the dawn that did this to me. I grab Feyn's hand and hold it tight.

'Don't leave me.'

'One way or another,' he says, 'you soon will be free.'

There's a stabbing like a rusty blade in my guts which drives the breath from me. All sense flees in the oncoming panic. I can't face what's coming. I crush his hand as if I could break the bones there, lessen the pain by sharing it. Feyn sits and watches me as my vision clouds and my body arches and delirium clamps icy fingers around my head.

I'm dying. Nothing can stop that now.

'Jai, I'm sorry…' I mutter through clenched teeth, and they're the last words I'm capable of saying before my throat begins to seize.

Of all the final thoughts I could have had, why an apology?