The Fade

'Laundry room. I'm working on it.'

'Let me do it. I know people in the laundry room. They launder the slaves' clothes with the soldiers'. If one goes missing, the slave won't dare to raise a fuss, in case they're blamed and punished for losing it.'

I'm faintly surprised. He's proving to be very useful. 'When can you get one in my size?'

'Next turn. Maybe the one after that. There are a several dozen slaves here, each with several sets of clothes. They dress their slaves well, as a reflection of their own status. More are arriving every turn in advance of the Elder's visit.'

He's thought this through. It suddenly occurs to me that he's been planning to escape for a long time, but the opportunity only came with me. I'm the only one with the skills and, more importantly, the gender to make this work.

'The Elder gets here in eight turns' time,' I tell them. I've learned as much from the guards. 'The whole fort will be in turmoil. That's when we leave.'

'But there's a problem with your disguise,' he says. 'They only take very young girls as slaves. So they can grow up in the Gurta way, learn not to be rebellious and to accept their position. Too much trouble otherwise.'

'I know that,' I say. 'What's your point?'

'The slaves speak Gurtan, that's my point.'

'I'll deal with it,' I reply.

'Not only that, but they speak a certain dialect of Gurtan. It identifies them as slaves. They have complex rituals, gestures: things that takes years to be taught. Even the greetings are formalised. Gurta love ceremony; they demand a lot from their slaves.' He rolls his shoulders, stretching his neck. 'They'll see through you in an instant.'

'I'll deal with it.'

He shrugs, decides it's not worth saying anything more. The warning has been given, and he doesn't have any better ideas. It's a risk we have no choice but to take. Getting out of Farakza was never going to be easy.

'What then?' Charn asks. We've already talked about this, but I think he just wants reassuring.

I don't have much reassurance to give. 'I scout the fort, and I find some way for the four of us to get out without being seen.'

'See, that's where the plan starts to come apart for me,' he says.

'We can't plan an escape when we don't know what's outside,' I say. 'We go step by step. I'll find a way. Then I'll come back for you, and we all go together.'

He snorts. That's the real crux of Charn's problem. He doesn't believe that I will come back. And if it weren't for Feyn, I probably wouldn't.

'You either believe me or you don't,' I say. 'Makes no odds to me.'

'I think you need us, besides,' says Nereith. Charn looks at him. 'After all, what happens after we escape? Are you going to make it back to Veya on your own? Do you even know the way?'

'I could find the way,' I say.

'But here we have a SunChild, whose people have lived off the land for uncountable generations and is an expert survivalist by birth; and you have a Khaadu who knows exactly how to get back to Veya from here, because he has travelled this way before in more peaceful times, when Khaadu and Gurta were not enemies.'

I hadn't even thought about Feyn's potential usefulness until now. It gives me a jolt of surprise. I'm usually so mercenary as well. It's very uncharacteristic.

'You remember the way?'

'I'm Khaadu. We remember everything.'

I don't give him the opportunity to gloat over my lack of knowledge of Khaadu abilities. I have a vague memory of Keren and I getting drunk in a bar, and his recounting some rumour about how the Khaadu had perfect recall. But in the same conversation he told me how they ate their own young if they were deformed or sickly. That was much more interesting.

'What about me?' Charn blusters. 'You'll need me too.' He's sore that Nereith hasn't counted him as an asset. The two of them have been tense since Nereith learned Charn was plotting an escape without letting him in on it. They're not so close any more, I suspect.

'You've done your part,' Nereith says dismissively, and that shuts him up.

I raise my hands to placate them both. 'We're all going,' I tell them. 'So let's work together. We'll concentrate on getting away from the fort for now.'

'I was awake on the way in,' says Nereith. 'They drugged me, but it doesn't work so well on my kind.' He hunkers forward. 'I only saw the main entrance, but I think it's the only one. I've never heard the guards talk about another.'

'Wait, you know Gurtan?' I ask.

'And Banchu, and Craggen, only in the Child's Tongue though: I can't make the booming sounds the adults do. I can understand a bit of Umbra if they're not whispering too quietly. And some Ya'yeen too, although that's trickier because you can't just memorise it. They keep changing the rules. Shifting meanings and all that shit; I can't handle it too well.'

'I'm impressed.'

'Don't be. It's easy for my kind. We only have to hear something once and we remember it forever.'

I find myself becoming faintly jealous of the Khaadu's natural advantages. They'd come in useful in my line of work. But then I remember laying my head on my husband's dead chest and hearing the stillness of his heart. Forgetfulness can sometimes be a blessing.

'There's two gates to get through on the main road,' he says. 'One at the entrance to the fort, and one before the bridge. I saw them searching an outbound cart on the bridge, so we can assume they always do that. Checking for contraband, I'd say.'

'What does this bridge go over?' Feyn asked.

Charn scoffs. 'How long have you been here?'

'I have not talked to other prisoners many.'

'Much,' I correct him. We've been having a few lessons in the cell, just talking really, but he keeps making elementary mistakes.

Nereith elaborates. 'Farakza stands on an island in the middle of a river of spume rock. You know what that is?'

'I do not recognise that word.'

'It's like lava, but it melts at lower temperatures, solidifies rapidly. The river around Farakza moves slow. On top is a kind of brittle crust, that breaks and moves as the river flows. It's been cooled by the cavern air and turned solid. Beneath it's still molten. Still very hot.'

'Is that why we are so hot in these lower places?' Feyn asks, indicating the cave around us.

'Exactly. These cells are underground, and we're surrounded by molten spume rock.'

I start to imagine the burning, sluggish flow oozing past beyond the damp walls of black stone.

'So once we're out, how do we get over the river?' Charn asks.

'This brittle crust,' I say to Nereith. 'How brittle is it?'

24

The first thing I do concerning my newfound and tentative friendship with Juth is to exploit it for a favour I don't intend to pay back. It feels bad, but I reason that if I fuck this up then having to bear the disappointment of a lame publisher is going to be the least of my worries. I think he'll understand.

Juth works in the salvage dump. Here, quantities of scrap metal scavenged from battlefields and left over from other construction jobs are deposited into a long trench, where they are sorted through for parts that can be reused. Then the trench is tipped up and the remainder slides into a mine cart, to be taken away and melted down.

The salvage dump is one of the first ports of call on Overseer Arachi's rounds. For my plan to have any chance of success, I need as much time as possible between stealing the key from him and returning it. If he completes his inspection before I get back, it's all over.

Juth is a pushover really; he's eager to please, and he sees my coming to him for help as an affirmation of trust. I ask him to swap with me for a shift, and to find someone to swap with Feyn too. It's not a big ask, really, though working the screens on the slurry-trough is much harder than sorting through the salvage dump. But it's only one shift. I tell him that we're hoping to steal some special components to trade with another prisoner. He points out that people who work the salvage dump are always searched on our way out; I tell him not to worry and give him a conspiratorial wink. I don't know where he imagines I'll hide these mythical components, but he accepts the story.