The Fade

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.'