The Fade

35

The lift from Veya to the surface wasn't built for comfort. It was a tall circular chamber of grimy black metal, with three levels stacked one on top of the other, connected by stairs. Each level was filled with seats in concentric circles, facing a central column which housed the enormous screw that the lift travelled up and down. By controlling geothermal pressure in the shaft, the chamber could be made to ascend or descend, slowly turning as it did.

I sat and listened to the screech and groan of metal on metal. The lights, resting in coiled iron sconces, dimmed and brightened fitfully without ever dispelling the gloom. They were a relatively new invention, powered by the motion of the lift itself. I didn't trust them. They seemed permanently on the edge of failing.

We rode the upper deck, of course. Though it was still too loud for easy conversation up here, it was the best available. The lowest level was a nightmarish swelter, where the heat from the shaft pulsed through the floor of the chamber. Our short vacation was Liss and Casta's treat, a moment of suspicious generosity on their parts, and they never did things by half measures.

'You must go! We insist! Spend some time with your family!'

'Our brother works you too hard. You and Rynn both. Between one thing and another you're hardly ever together.'

'We know how it hurts you.' This was Liss, fawningly sympathetic.

'We'll pay for everything.'

'Oh! Won't it be fun?'

'It's the least we can do for one so close to our hearts.'

I accepted, naturally. Turning them down would have led to consequences I didn't want to deal with. They got Rynn pulled from his escort duty – guarding a powerful friend of Caracassa, more for show than anything else – and persuaded Jai's tutors to give him a few turns' leave from military school. Then Jai asked if he could bring Reitha, and we said of course, and the twins said of course. So we were four.

I watched my son and his lover as we sat in the lift, surrounded by the din. Jai was fascinated by the lights. He hung on every sound, trying to understand the lift's mechanisms. He had such a wonderful mind, mystifyingly ordered and logical, endlessly interested in the way things worked and how to make them better. It was a compulsion; he couldn't stop himself tinkering with any device he laid his hands on. Our home in the Caracassa mansion had been full of disassembled lamps and clocks and spring-loaded toys until he went away. Without them, the place felt bare.

And yet, when Reitha touched his arm and leaned in to talk to him, I saw the other side to my son. The way he softened, the look in his eyes when he laughed. He worshipped and adored her. Beneath that rigid structure of thought there was an ocean of feeling. He was a sensitive child, prone to crying when young. Never really the physical sort. He learned to fake it around his father but nobody was fooled. Jai was always my child rather than Rynn's. The lift stopped several times on its journey to disgorge passengers and to take on new ones. It took hours to get to our stop, near the top of the shaft. Most of the passengers emptied out here. It was a small cavern, a junction from which a half-dozen tunnels led, and we walked into the middle of a bazaar. There were a multitude of hawkers, who had set up stalls beneath the glow-lamps in anticipation of the crowd. They sold the eggs of rare animals or offered cakes and drinks; they provided transport or sought to recruit labour; they displayed precious minerals from the surface. Some sold paintings of the night sky: depictions of the aurora, or of the mother-planet Beyl looming over the horizon, all purple and black streaks. Little groups of people waited to welcome associates or family. Militia crayl-riders patrolled the stalls, holding obsidian-bladed pikes. The air was stuffily warm and dry; the cavern echoed with voices.

Reitha fairly dragged Jai to the pens, where crayl were being sold for domestic use. I liked crayl. They were wonderful beasts of burden and tireless mounts, and if trained well they were also vicious and formidable fighters. Native to the surface, they were nevertheless well adapted to life underground. They spent Red Tide Season sheltering from the endless day in the subsurface cave networks that riddled Callespa, only emerging onto the surface when the nights began in Ebb Season.

Reitha was an animal-lover; it went with her job. She petted the crayl in the pens, and they turned their muzzles to nose her hand. I stood by her and joined in. She offered me a smile. I knew she valued these moments when she felt we made a connection, however small. Like Jai, she was sensitive, and she could see how I felt about my only son being taken by another woman, no matter how well I tried to hide it. She wanted me to like her, and I did like her, but nothing was going to erase that faint primal jealousy.

I wasn't an animal person by nature, but it gave me a faint thrill to touch them. They were several times my weight and easily capable of ripping me apart. Shaggy four-legged beasts, high as my shoulder but able to rear up to twice that height. Retractable claws like knives. Broad, flat muzzles with wide nostrils, and small eyes buried under fringes of thick fur. The merchant nearby watched us closely, while pretending not to. He had already decided we weren't going to buy, so now we were just a nuisance.

'She appreciates them, I can tell,' Jai said to Reitha. 'She has an attraction to anything hairy and brutish.'

Reitha gasped, appalled at his cheek. She brought out a wicked streak in him which I was rather fond of. I aimed to clip him but he dodged away, laughing. 'And slow, too! What's the Cadre coming to?'

'You're very cocky for someone who can still be beaten up by his mother,' Reitha said, swatting his arm.

'She'd never hit me. I'm Ledo's property. It's more than she's worth to damage this chassis.'

I wasn't rising to it any more; I was too preoccupied with the animals. Jai gave up teasing, content with a victory.

'What do you like about them?' Reitha asked me, genuine interest in her tone.

I looked over at her. Small, even features, brown hair, dusky skin unlined by age or care. Intelligence in her eyes. I always admired her daring, her determination to work on the surface no matter what the risks. It had warmed me to her immediately.

'I like that they're survivors,' I replied, after a moment's thought. 'Not too many animals made it through when the tribes went underground. But these held on. They're tough. Adaptable.' I thumbed at the ceiling of the cavern, indicating what was beyond. 'I like that they can live up there.'

She smiled again, wider this time, and went back to petting a crayl that was butting her arm.

I left them alone and joined Rynn, who was casting a critical eye over a rack of swords on another stall. He had one out and was turning it over in his hand.

'That's a good choice! All of these are forged from the finest metals, mined near the surface!' the stall-holder was enthusing. He was young, and hadn't yet learned to spot a disinterested customer. He'd noticed the Cadre emblem on Rynn's shoulder and was desperate for the prestige of selling a blade to him. 'You can't get this kind of thing down below! You could plunge this into a Craggen's shoulder and it wouldn't break!'

Rynn put the sword back and turned to me without even acknowledging the seller's furious efforts.

'Are we going?' he asked. Impatient to get on, as ever. He wouldn't relax until we arrived at the hotel.

'Give them a while,' I said, taking his arm and leading him away.

'I'll sell it to you for half price!' the stall-holder shouted after us, flailing now.

'It'd still be too expensive,' Rynn murmured under his breath.

The lift ride had made him cranky. I found him adorable when he was in a grump, but I'd long since learned not to show it. It somewhat undermined his gravitas when his wife told him how cute he was when he was angry.

We walked idly around the stalls, looking at this and that.

'You think he's happy?' Rynn asked suddenly.

'With her? I think he's in love.'

'I mean, at the school.'

I thought about that for a moment. I knew the answer, of course; but I had to choose my words.

'He did it for you, you know,' I said eventually.

A pause. His eyes roved, like they always did when he was on the spot. He wasn't comfortable talking about things like this. 'I know,' he said.

It was only two words, but it was a momentous admission from him. A chink in the armour. I saw at that moment a chance, no matter how slim, to change his mind. I didn't want our son at that school. But by the time I'd realised that, he was already there. And I couldn't go against both my husband's wishes and my son's. Jai would protest till his dying hour that he wanted to be an officer in the Eskaran Army, and he'd hate me for robbing him of the chance.

But all three of us knew it was not what he really wanted, and all three of us knew why he was doing it.

We stopped and bought enamelled cups of liquor, then sat on a low table outside the stall. Rynn was still inwardly squirming. The cavern bustled with life. We were surrounded by the smells of cooking and cakes and the jostle of sellers and buyers and animals. But amidst all that, we were alone, in a little island to ourselves.

'Jai is strong,' I said slowly. 'But not in the way you think of strength. He's driven, he's ambitious, and he's got talent. If we give him his head, he'll be a great engineer, or an architect, or an inventor. He'll be a great man.' I leaned across the table and wrapped both my hands around one of his. 'I can see that. His tutors see that too. But he doesn't. He's too busy trying to please you.'

Rynn sipped the liquor, thought about that for a time. The struggle in him was plain in the frown on his face. He was a simple man, and I wouldn't have had him any other way. He wouldn't have been the man I married without his temper, his gruffness, his unwillingness to socialise and the fact that he'd never danced with me since our wedding. But he had stubborn cut deep into his bones, and getting him to reverse a decision once it was made was like trying to divert an ocean.

'It was his idea,' Rynn said. 'The school.'

'Of course it was. He wanted to prove himself. He was fourteen years old, and he wanted to get your attention. You'd barely said one word of encouragement to him since he failed the Cadre tests.'

'You're making this my fault,' he said.

'No, it's my fault too,' I said. 'But it is a fault.'

'He won't back out now.'

'He won't do it because he thinks it'll be a worse failure in your eyes than if he'd never started. Make him feel it's okay and he will.'

'I don't want him to,' Rynn murmured, clutching his thick beard. It was something he often did when agitated.

'I know,' I said, quietly. 'You want a son who's a warrior. Someone feared and revered: Cadre, like us. But Jai isn't a warrior and he never will be, no matter how hard he tries to make himself one.'

Rynn was silent for a long while, but I was used to that. I knew better than to bombard him with further pleas. It would only make him annoyed.

'How can I make him believe I don't mind him leaving the school, when I do?' he said eventually.

And there was the problem we'd never be able to get over. Rynn was honest: utterly, entirely straight down the line. He was literally incapable of deception. He didn't understand how it worked. Jai would see through him unless Rynn absolutely believed in pulling Jai out of that school. And he just didn't.

'Try,' I asked. 'For him.'

'I'll try,' he promised, and he would try; but right then we both knew he'd fail. Later, we ambled through a sea of golden lichen stalks, our hotel behind us, a ridged brown dome rising among a forest of dwarf mycora. The mycora this close to the surface grew twenty or thirty spans high, which was still tiny compared to the monsters that grew in the sunlight. Some sprouted shelf-like discs and had flat or inverted tops; some had rounded, helmet-like ends and were brightly coloured. Some were like enormous anemones; others hung in translucent veils. The variety was endless.

I was walking with Reitha and Jai, admiring the scenery. Colourful fungal blooms waved in the gentle wind; small chitinous animals darted around the thick mycora stalks. Streams wound over rockeries of mimetite and amethyst and snowflake obsidian. Gau-gaus jagged through the air, their strange cries echoing their names, quick flurries of scale and tail and wing. We watched them pick the insects out of the sky with their small, needle-toothed jaws.

But what set this place apart from other areas of natural beauty down below was the light. There was a quality to it unlike any other. I had seen grottoes lit by luminescent fungi and translucent, glowing stalagmites, greens and blues in breathtaking harmony. I had visited a Ya'yeen installation where shinestones and flame refracted through gemstone lenses to create light patterns so beautiful I almost cried. But at home, light was muted, controlled, refracted and maximised. Light was our life. If ever it was entirely gone, we were lost.

This place glowed with the wild light of the world: the crazed, maddening, lethal fire of the suns. It was hard on the eyes, but it stirred old, old instincts, a cocktail of fear and desire. We had once lived in that light and been betrayed by it. Somewhere inside, deeper than thought could go, I wanted to feel those rays on my skin like my ancestors had. To turn my face up to sky and stand naked to the day.

Only naturalists and explorers and cartographers ever got to go up there with any regularity. It wasn't the kind of place that the untrained should wander in. But occasionally there were military skirmishes on the surface, and they were getting more frequent as the war dragged on. The generals on both sides were realising that a tortuous journey through bottleneck caverns underground might easily be circumvented by going over the top, if only they could learn to deal with the dangers. War on Callespa had always been a three-dimensional affair.

Rynn had stayed in the hotel; he had little interest in our excursion. If he felt the same pull as I did, he didn't show it. I had never been up to the surface, though I had been close several times. I didn't know if I had it in me to stand beneath a roofless sky, but I couldn't deny that I had a desire to find out.

We saw animals on our way, roaming free. Slender quadrupeds with long, delicate legs, covered head to foot in beige chitin. Squat things with domed silver exoskeletons that looked like smooth rocks when they retracted their feet and hid. Reitha pointed them out to Jai and named them. They were surface-dwelling species, made to weather the intolerable light of the suns.

I had drifted off into a peaceful daze, lulled by the scenery and the temperature, when Reitha cried out ahead of us. She had been following a small, hopping creature which rattled its carapace noisily whenever she got too near.

'Come here and see this!'

Jai responded to the delight in her voice. He was smiling even before he saw what it was. If it made her happy, it made him happy. I'd never seen him so besotted.

Reitha had found flowers. Small, delicate flowers, nodding in the breeze. They were huddled at the foot of a green and grey mycora. Tiny insects were flitting between the white cups.

'Can you believe it?'

I really couldn't. Flowers. I'd never seen them growing wild.

'They must have just enough light here to survive, but not enough to kill them. Do you know how delicate that kind of balance is?'

'They're beautiful,' Jai said, and by the reverence in his voice I knew he meant it.

'They've held on somehow,' she murmured.

It was hard to beat that, but Reitha and I had a surprise in store for Jai. Like me, he had never been to the surface; but unlike me, he had never even been near it. So when we were done with the flowers, we took him to the edge of the hotel grounds, where a sheer cliff dropped away, overlooking the chasm-fields. And there we showed him.

There was daylight here. Raw daylight, cutting down in blazing white beams through the cracks and fissures in the roof of the cavern. Sharp islands of illumination moved slowly across the floor and slid up the walls, inching their way over vineyards and fields and irrigation channels. Hundreds of men and women in sunsuits worked the vast expanse of cropland that had been cultivated at the bottom of the chasm. They kept to the shade, staying clear of the direct sun, tending fruits and other foods that could only be grown in ambient sunlight, but were too fragile to survive the unshielded rays for long. The air was heavy with drifting motes, feathery spores that glowed furiously in the light and suffused the atmosphere with a dreamlike haze. And it was warm: not the warmth of a fire or the warmth of deep, grumbling magma but the warmth of a star.

Jai was stunned. Not only by the scale of the chasm-fields, but because he had never seen the light of the suns until now. I watched him as he laid eyes on true light for the first time in his life, and I saw the tears gather and his throat close. There was nothing that could prepare you for it: millennia of instinct suddenly awakened by the sight, like a dam-burst inside. We were built to live beneath the sky, and our bodies remembered.

Reitha smiled and hugged herself to him. She appreciated his sensitivity, and I loved her for that. Maybe, just maybe, she could give him the confidence to step out of his father's shadow.

As if summoned by the thought, I saw Rynn striding over from the hotel, waving at me. There was another man with him.

'Stay here,' I told them. 'I won't be long.'

I headed back to meet Rynn and the newcomer half-way. By the time I got there I had already resigned myself to what was to come. He was a Caracassa man.

'Clan Caracassa requires your services,' he said, without preamble. It was the standard phrase they used. Never mentioning which member of Clan Caracassa required my services. No need to give away unnecessary information. A wise habit in the cut-throat world of the aristocracy.

I looked at Jai and Reitha, standing together, arm in arm in the glow of the light from the chasm-fields, lost in the vista. I really wanted this time with them, with Rynn. I really wanted it, and now I was being robbed, and that was the way life was.

I turned back to the agent, my eyes flat. 'What's the job?'

'There's a man in Mal Eista. His name is Gorak Jespyn. Your masters want him dead.'