The Fade

32

The city hid deep in the earth, far from the day.

It sprawled across the vastness of the cavern, innumerable lanterns and softly glowing windows crowding the swells and dips of the stony landscape. A plague of lights crept up the cavern's sides, and hung from the ceiling in clusters of stalactite dwellings, grim chandeliers of rock. Dimly reflective veins of metal and patches of ghostly, luminescent lichens shone like distant nebulae, occupying the void which the lights had not yet overtaken. Here in the endless dark, the tribes of Eskara had created a starfield, and they called it Veya, the Underhome.

I knew the city well: its plazas and alleys, its bridges and monuments, its bars and dens and secret societies. I knew where the pitmen brought their exotic beasts to fight for money; I knew where a person could sell a little of their soul for a skinmark of subtle power; I knew the cut-joints where they made dirty fireclaw potions for the dweomings in the slums. I'd visited the clubs where the aristocracy smoked and drank and made their deals. I'd walked through the sculpture-graveyards in the Greyslopes, their forms heavy with meaning, incomprehensible to anyone but the secretive race that created them. I'd watched a starving child give up his life in his mother's arms while she was too insensible to care.

The city cradled me. Here, among the many, I could be as alone as I wished or as involved as I liked. I stalked Veya like a predator prowling its territory, seeking to know every part. I investigated restlessly, sometimes silent and aloof, sometimes plunging into the society of others. To know the city was to have control over it.

The riverbank was bright and busy, even at this time, when most of Veya was asleep. Sharp-featured men and their elegant consorts sat in the forecourts of expensive bars, sipping from delicate goblets. Courtesans haunted the tables of those men and women who dined alone. The air was full of the scent of cooking fish and the perfumed oil of the lanterns.

I leaned against the rail that separated the promenade from the steep embankment to the river. On the neathways side stood one of Veya's five shinehouses, casting its pale glow high and far. The dwellings of the wealthy coiled and bulged and slid along the water's edge. Some were fashioned like breaking waves, others as swollen seed pods or spiral columns. Stone and wood and ceramics blended into each other in a carefully planned tangle. The architects of Veya were nothing if not creative. This city was glutted with art.

I spotted my contact coming along the promenade. He had that look about him: a man who had mastered his territory, a man who knew the city. There was no need to swagger. People just sensed it, and deferred. Muggers chose other victims, not really understanding why. Merchants spoke to him as an equal, even though he was obviously not rich or important.

'Keren,' I greeted him, as he joined me at the rail.

Keren always looked battered and scruffy, as if he had just hauled himself out of bed. Somehow the fact that he didn't trouble about his appearance only strengthened his aura of weary dangerousness. Two small, implanted silver tusks protruded from just below his bottom lip. A thick head of shaggy black hair hung untidily over his face. His low forehead and grizzled cheeks were skinmarked with curving patterns.

'Orna,' he replied. He studied a freighter that was approaching from upriver, surrounded by a rippling island of light. It was being escorted by a half-dozen militia sloops.

After a moment, Keren made a vague motion towards it. 'Trade goods. Rumour is, Jerima Vem has twenty sacks of powdered bonecane on there, out of his warehouse up in the Shivers. The den-runners round the Ashenpark are chewing their hands off wanting to get at it, but it's sewn tight. Vem's bribed or threatened every harbourmaster from here to Bry Athka.'

'I heard,' I replied.

He nodded. 'Makes you wonder. If he's moving that much bonecane, how come everyone knows? Vem's not so careless with his information. Smells like a decoy to me. Or a trap.'

I looked sideways at him. 'It is.'

He grinned. 'What you know, Orna?'

'Vem's going fishing. He's after Silverfish.'

Keren barked a laugh. 'Silverfish? He thinks Silverfish would fall for something like this?'

'Exactly. Vem's intelligence network's a joke.'

'So how'd you find out?'

I turned my cheek to show the Bond-mark there: three diagonal stripes. 'Ledo's keeping Jerima Vem very sweet right now. Makes it easier for certain information to come my way from time to time.'

Keren grunted. 'Forgot. The marriage, right? Never could keep track of aristo politics.' He was already calculating how this information could be useful, who he could tell, what kind of leverage he might gain. 'What've they got against each other?'

'Vem and Silverfish? That I don't know. Silverfish has been plaguing Clan Jerima lately: interfering with shipments, leaking sensitive information, stealing from him, that sort of thing. Vem wants him off his back. So he came up with a tempting target.'

'It's too tempting.'

He pushed off the rail suddenly, and walked into the forecourt of a bar. The bulky guard – placed there to prevent the detritus of the street from sifting in – paid him no attention. Keren lit a cigarillo at a brazier and returned, wreathed in the sweet, cloying scent of smokevine.

We stood together in silence. As always, Keren offered a cigarillo to me, and as always I declined. I waited while he finished. Keren wouldn't be disturbed during a cigarillo, nor would he speak of anything important until he was done.

'Found your man,' he said as he flicked the butt away, sending it skittering across the promenade.

'Where?'

'Back streets off the Grand Plaza.' He gave me an address. 'This evens us up, okay? For the other thing?'

'We're even,' I agreed. We always played this game, tallying favours and debts. Some people wanted money, but Keren wasn't that way. He traded information for information, with anyone and everyone he could. He wanted to know it all. I respected that hunger.

We took our leave and headed in different directions along the promenade. I was glad to be alone again. I needed time to centre myself, to let all traces of sensitivity and sentiment bleed out of me. For what I intended to do, they would only get in my way. The address Keren had given me was on the fifth floor of a building in a maze of narrow, knife-slash streets. Here, in the area around the Grand Plaza, dwellings were stacked high and pressed together hard. Balconies of wood and ceramic faced each other, close enough to jump between. Curved windows with webbed frames and tinted glass glowed green in the heights. Jabbered conversations and laughter swelled and faded, the voices of unseen couples wandering arm-in-arm, somewhere in the labyrinth.

I made my way up a zigzag stairway, passing alcoves in which doorways were set. At the top, I found the door I wanted. It was identical to the others, polished and set in a carved wooden arch. A bell tolled faintly in the distance.

Warm light crept beneath the door. Good. He was in. I pushed back my coat to expose the hilt of an obsidian shortblade, and knocked. There was a pause, and movement within.

The door opened. A middle-aged man, his body bulky and strong. Hired muscle. He went pale as he saw the Cadre sigil on my shoulder.

'Careless,' I said, and shoved the door open. I grabbed him in a nerve-claw, rigid fingers digging into the flesh of his throat, thumb driven under his chin. Wracked with paralysing agony, he could do little to resist as I propelled him roughly into the living area. There I threw him against a writing desk with a crash, scattering rolls of parchment and shattering a vial of ink.

There were four in the room, including the man I'd just assaulted. One was Ekan, the man I'd come to see: doughy, face run to fat, expression betraying surprise. The rest were thugs.

Ekan had taken precautions.

The two remaining thugs came at me from either side. One had snatched up an iron candle-holder as a club, the other had a dagger. I went for the knife-wielder first. The thug stabbed clumsily: a small-time heavy with an unlicensed blade. I slid inside his reach, grabbed his wrist and drove my knee upward into the elbow, inverting it with a wet snap.

I pulled the man across me as my next attacker swung, protecting myself with the body of my opponent. There was a dull thud as the candle-holder struck the shoulder of my unwilling shield. I wrapped an arm round his neck and broke it, tossing him aside, then sprang for the thug with the candle-holder.

He took another swing. I dodged it and punched rigid fingers into a nerve-nexus to make him release his weapon, then I headbutted him in the bridge of the nose. Didn't expect that from a woman. There was barely time for him to yell before I delivered a short, brutal punch to his solar plexus, winding him. He staggered backwards, doubled over and gasping for air.

The thug who had opened the door was back on his feet, lunging, hoping to take me off-guard. Not a chance. They were nothing but street-brawlers, pugilists at best. They had no defence against the subtler fighting arts. I dropped under the punch, caught his arm and used it to throw him over my shoulder. He might have been heavier than me, but weight can be used against you. The thug crashed to the floor hard, and I punched him in the throat, crushing his larynx.

I rolled off, coming to my feet, stanced ready for another attack. None came. I drew a shortblade, walked calmly to where the surviving thug was still gasping for breath, and cut his throat. Afterwards, I turned my gaze to the last man in the room.

'You know what this is about, Ekan,' I said.

Ekan was already on the verge of tears, half-insensible with terror. 'Listen… no… you don't-'

'I'm not interested,' I told him. 'You were warned.'

'We can go!' Ekan blurted, eyes shining with sudden hope. 'We can leave. You won't ever hear from us again!'

'You should have listened,' I replied. 'The Caracassa family takes a bleak view when people try to undercut their prices.'

'No… no…' Ekan was begging, eyes fixed on my blade, which was dripping spots of blood onto the floor. 'I'm just an apothecary, I'm… I'm just an apothecary! I need to make a living like everybody else!'

'You make it selling cheaper versions of my master's products,' I said.

'They were my products! My potions!'

'You copied them from us, Ekan. You know it. I know it. If I let you get away with this, I'll have a dozen more of you to deal with by season's end. I've got better things to do with my time.'

'Leave him alone!' shrieked a new voice: Ekan's consort, appearing in the doorway. A slight blonde woman, fiercer than her size would suggest. 'Leave him the fuck alone! '

I looked from the consort to the sobbing child hiding behind her leg, clutching at her gown. Eyes flitting between the dead men in the room and her cringing father.

'Don't swear in front of your daughter,' I said.

Her face twisted in hatred. 'Mindless bitch! Doing your master's bidding like a slave! He'll stop! He'll stop selling them!'

'I'll stop!' Ekan pleaded. 'We can leave. We can leave right now, nobody has to know!'

'I'd know.' I motioned at the little girl. 'Take her away. She shouldn't see this.'

There was a moment of balance. I felt the situation teeter and tip. Ekan deflated, and something died in his eyes. I'd won. He'd accepted his fate.

'Go,' he said to his consort. He was trembling. 'Go on. It'll be over in a moment.'

Biting back tears of bitter fury and helplessness, the consort retreated, pushing the child ahead of her. The door slammed, and the girl began to wail in earnest.

I pushed Ekan around so that he faced the desk, forced his forearms flat onto it. I swept aside the tally charts and accounts that he'd been keeping. That done, I stabbed my shortblade into the desk and drew out a thick strip of leather.

Ekan stared at it. 'What's that for?'

'Tourniquet,' I replied. I bent closer. 'Which is your least favourite hand?' It was a long way to travel home on foot, but I walked everywhere if I could. I enjoyed the peaceful emptiness in the air, the roomy, quiet streets. The last bell of the turn had just sounded, the pause for breath before the city stirred again. Soon a new turn would begin, down here where there was no day or night, and the streets would begin to fill.

The Tangles were on the poleways edge of the city, up against the wall of the cavern. Here, dwellings were not built but carved into the gigantic roots of mycora, the immense fungi that grew on the surface, their discs spreading shade across the plains. Reitha talked about them often. Like much of the world above, their existence was only dimly comprehended by those races than hid in the endless passages of the underground. The surface was an alien place, of little interest to most. All they saw of mycora were the enormous root-systems that burrowed vast distances through the earth and rock. In the Tangles, the roots had broken through the cavern wall in a slither, and the rich had built their homes in them.

The Caracassa mansions were a mountain of dimly glowing windows, fashioned in many shapes, tracing patterns along the length of the roots. Ceramic domes and stubby towers rose from the cradling grey arms of the mycora. Small gardens and courtyards were carefully integrated into the organic flow of the structure. The whole edifice appeared to have been poured rather than built, a towering cone fashioned from points of light, imposing and beautiful in the dark.

The tips of two roots formed an enclosure at the base of the mansions, framing gates of solid brass, their surface rich with detail. They stood open, attended by four guards in red-and-black Caracassa livery, carrying double-bladed pikes. The guards knew me by sight, and let me pass with a curt acknowledgement.

I made my way across the enclosure, where gardens of crystalline plants and multicoloured fungi were laid to either side of a driveway. A small block of stables lay off to one side. Servants were cleaning a rickshaw nearby, preparing it for departure.

Inside, the mansions were warm and snug in contrast to the unwaveringly cool temperature of Veya. The corridors were large and tunnel-like, lined with polished panels of rootwood and dimly lit with lamps that hung from the ceiling. Paintings and objects of art were everywhere, including several of Rynn's grandfather's smaller sculptures. Red-robed handmaidens whispered past me, their faces hidden by veils. It was too late for much of the household to be awake.

I headed through corridors and up spiral stairways to my family's chambers. When I got there, they were in darkness. I went to the large round window that overlooked the living area, and gazed through the swirling metalwork to the city below. We were high up here, and the view over Veya was mesmerising.

I thought about what I had just done. My duties for my master were manifold, but intimidation and punishment were the tasks I liked the least. Still, Ekan knew the rules.

Potions – tonics for all ills, in a society whose people ran on chemicals – were a relatively small part of Clan Caracassa's industry. Their usual business was the manufacture of medicines and unguents tailored for frontline troops: healing salves, anti-infection medication, hunger suppressants, painkillers, rage enhancers. But even so, Ekan had to be stopped. His little racket might have been insignificant now, but there was no space for tolerance or conscience in my line of work.

I was Cadre. I was selected for this task because I was the best at it. It was my duty to serve. That was all there was.

I went into our bedroom. Something massive shifted in the shadows. Rynn turning over beneath the sheets. He mumbled something in a register too low for me to hear.

'It's me,' I said.

He woke a little more.

'Where've you been?' he muttered.

I walked over to the bed, shedding clothes as I went, and slid in beside him. He encircled me drowsily.

'Out,' I replied, but he was already asleep.