Sheer primal panic claws at me like some frenzied beast trapped inside my ribs. I hear myself scream but it doesn't feel like me. My arm is thrown up in front of my face and I don't know which way is forward any more. My heart wants to burst; it beats so hard that I feel it's about to split. I stagger, flailing, shrieking.
Feyn, shouting at me. I can't hear the words. Somehow, I'm running. Sunlight surrounds me like flame. I'm stumbling through an inferno, my skin shrivelling at its touch.
I know nothing but the need to get out of the gaze of that cruel blue star. My lungs ache and my head swims. I fall, but Feyn has me, dragging me on.
'Keep going!' he cries, and I understand this time. 'Keep going!'
Then, shadow. Wonderful shadow. Somehow the fissure has swallowed me, somehow enfolded me in its protective sheath of dense rock. I'm crammed inward, borne on by Feyn. The arrow in my shoulder catches against the rock and the pain almost makes me pass out, but it's pain and it's real and I hold on to it. I'm barely aware of my surroundings, only that we are crushed together, sandwiched between stone, and Feyn has his arms around me, holding me close to him.
The Gurta are screaming. The sound comes to me through the haze. Somehow I raise my head, pulled by a savage need to watch them suffer. Consciousness hovers just close enough to permit it.
My eyes adjust quickly, bringing more detail with every passing moment. I see them fall to the ground, pawing at their faces, their high-pitched cries raw with desperation. Their pallid cheeks blister and rupture, oozing. Their movements become spastic as their brains scramble with sun-madness. Hair comes away beneath their hands. They scratch at the skin of their arms, tormented by furious itching, and the skin rips under their nails, wounds seeping with blood that instantly cooks black. Gore and bile drool from their noses, their mouths, and stains the crotches of their armour. Their cries become strangled, their white eyes yellowing and turning blind. One by one, they collapse and are still, but the deadly light of the sun is relentless, corrupting them. They boil with foulness from the inside out.
I can't take my eyes away from them. Mesmerised with horror. There's no satisfaction in this. Even they don't deserve this.
It takes some time before they cease to draw breath, by which time they are charred and sundered. Were it not for their armour and clothing, it would be hard to tell what they once were.
Gradually, I come back to myself. My skin is burning, itching. My shoulder is pulsing with pain where the arrow rests. I'm exhausted almost to the point of collapse. But overwhelming it all is the relief, the pure and incredible relief of shadow after light.
I'm alive. Even if only for this moment, even though I know in my heart that I've been sentenced to death by the touch of the sun, I'm alive. The sensation is dizzying. I feel desperate, eager to touch and taste and see and experience every tiny thing. Swept up, carried away, I have no idea why I do what I do next but I do it anyway.
With my good hand, I grab Feyn's head by his hair, tip his mouth up to mine, and I kiss him, hard.
The moment – and it's only a moment – is strange. There's no beard and his lips are so thin and soft, not like Rynn's. There's the taste of him, foreign, not like any Eskaran I've ever kissed. Everything is unfamiliar, and everything is wrong, and even before I notice that he's not responding I know it was a mistake but I still couldn't help it.
He pulls gently away, his hand between our lips. His eyes are sad, brimming with that soulful and fatherly understanding that I hate so much.
'No,' he says quietly. It's not long before the sickness sets in.
Feyn allows me a short rest before we move deeper into the fissure. I could stop here and sleep forever but we have to get the arrow out of me and find a safe place before I'm too weak to stand. The fissure – the legacy of a long-dried stream – is wide enough for us to squeeze through and Feyn is confident it will take us to the floor of the basin, but I know that I'll never make it down with the arrow sticking through my shoulder so we break off the head and I pass out for a few moments. Then he breaks off the flight, which is worse, because I stay conscious.
I've become suddenly very cold, mentally as well as physically. Logical. No time for despair. One foot in front of the other. Survive.
Feyn is right; he'd read the land well. The fissure runs down to the sloped sides of the basin. He doesn't seem any the worse for the brief exposure to sunlight, nor does he waste time on sympathy for me. Every fibre of my body wants to give up. Everything seems pointless now. But he just won't stop.
The bottom of the basin is marshy and dank. Thick creepers straggle out of scummed pools to wrap around the trunks of lichen trees. Huge fungus-flowers sit like veined and spotted cauldrons, enticing in unsuspecting insects. Gnarled mycora roots arch overhead, long chains of algae hanging from them. The hoots and cackles of the animals are loud. I catch sight of something slithering rapidly along the arm of a lichen tree, but it corkscrews away before I can identify it.
The mist is thin down here, like a grey membrane across our sight. Above us is a bright haze of blinding cloud. I can only assume that the mist protects us to some degree, or that the uneclipsed sun hasn't risen high enough to shine directly down into the basin. Either way, I just don't care any more. I stagger, limbs like stone, following my dark guide through the murk.
One foot in front of the other.
Survive.
Feyn finds a shelf of dirt and rock high up on a slope, overhung with vines like a curtain. He checks it expertly for signs of occupation, scans the surrounding foliage, and then ushers me inside. I'm shivering. I want to scratch myself to relieve the awful itching but I can't stop thinking of the Gurta, how their skin came away beneath their nails. Will that happen to me? Maybe Feyn knows. I daren't ask.
I slide under the low roof of the overhang and lie down on the soft, loamy soil. It smells of freshness and moisture and a vegetable kind of scent that I don't recognise. My eyes are beginning to sting and water. My shoulder is going numb where the length of arrow is lodged in it. I'm afraid, not of the pain that I believe is coming, nor the horrible death that will follow, but of my helplessness to prevent it. The waiting is always the worst.
Feyn checks me over swiftly. His expression is remarkably unconcerned. At first I find it reassuring, but later I realise that it's just his way. I know what he's thinking. If I die, I die. Nothing can be done. He'll move on. The SunChildren don't really do mourning.
'Stay here,' he says, with a swift grin.
'Was that a joke?' I ask weakly, through parched lips. 'You'd better keep me alive if you want to learn some better ones.'
'I will do what things I can,' he says, and then he's gone, disappearing through the curtain of vines.
I sleep. Even through the pain in every part of me, exhaustion demands its due. Feyn returns with water in a funnel-shaped fungus bloom, and he makes me drink even though swallowing hurts like blazing fuck. Then he positions himself behind my head and gives me a stick to bite on. I know what's coming but neither of us say a word. The stick tastes like dirt, bitter and acid. I nearly bite through it when he pulls out the arrow shaft.
He salves and dresses the wound with ripped sections of his shirt, then makes me eat a sweet paste folded inside a bland-tasting mushroom the size of my hand. He grinds up some spores and spreads them on my exposed skin, which calms the itching a little. He has the quiet, efficient manner of a physician, and I submit because I have no choice. Never in my life have I felt so bad, never in the depths of the worst illness in all my turns.
'It is done,' he says.
I look up at him, my eyes asking the question that my lips won't.
'It will pass within three days, or it will not pass,' he says. 'Your skin is not like mine. I do not know if the sickness got deep.'
'What if it did?'
'Then you will die. There will be very much pain. I will make poison for you, if it is that way.'
I cough feebly in surprise at his bluntness. 'Do you know what the Es
karan word ''tact'' means?'
'It means ''to lie.'' Is that right?'
I smile. It hurts my face. 'Yes, that's right,' I croak, and then I go back to sleep.
15
We hear the ululations of the raka. The caverns foil sound, jagged walls fracturing the echoes, making it hard to pinpoint their distance. But the Gurta are behind us, with their hunting-beasts, and they're coming fast.
'The blood,' Feyn says, panting as he climbs. All of us know it but none of us wanted to say it. 'It is me they are following.'
It didn't take them long to equate the three missing prisoners with the disappearance of the yard-worker. Or maybe they found the bodies of the guards we hastily stashed, or the Overseer discovered the door to his office was unlocked when he'd locked it earlier, or Charn ran to the guards when he realised we'd double-crossed him, or someone smelt that poor slave girl I left rotting in a trunk. Considering how sloppy the whole operation was, it's a miracle we made it out.
We're still in the cavern where Farakza lies. We've a good head start, but the Gurta are relentless and I knew the moment they hit upon Feyn's blood-trail they'd be unshakable. Even though the wound isn't bad, it's going to keep reopening until he gets to rest. Without weapons, outnumbered, we don't stand a chance if they catch us. I'm the only warrior here; I don't rate my chances against six or seven armoured monsters, each three times my weight, with beaked muzzles that can shear through bone.
The only choice is to run, but I know Gurta: they'll never give up the pursuit. It's a question of whose strength fails first. And it's likely to be ours.
We clamber along paths carved long ago by underground cataclysms, water erosion, magma flows and the efforts of geophagic fungi, lichen and stone-burrowing insects, which, given millennia, can eat through anything. On Callespa, life evolved beneath the ground long before it appeared above. Rockworms the size of cities cored the crust of the world while the surface was still a poisonous, unformed wasteland.
Following a faint breeze, I find us an enormous lava trench, long cold, running out of the main cavern. We take it, reasoning that it will slow the raka: four-legged creatures don't deal with steep, uneven trench-side rock as well as we do. But I'm not sure any terrain is likely to slow our pursuers for long.
We clamber over black stone, making our way up a slope of sharp edges and horn-like overhangs. Colourful minerals have grown in the wake of the flow, in bubbled humps and great crystals. It's hard to see here, but a distant crop of raw shinestone provides a dim glow. Around it have grown photovore lichens and tiny plants, some of them with a luminescence of their own to attract insects. Light multiplies in the dark.
Feyn is struggling. His eyes aren't as good as ours, and the roof of the trench oppresses him. I can see it in the way he hunches his shoulders. The trench must be forty spans high and three times that wide, but it's still crushing him.
'Stop,' Feyn says, and we stop, chests heaving, looking back at him.
'It is me they are following,' he says again, his face bearing an expression of helpless honesty. 'I will go another way.'
Nereith turns to me. It's what he's been thinking for some while. I know he's already agreed, but he's waiting to see what my reaction is.
'You go,' I tell him. 'I'll go with Feyn.'
'No!' Feyn protests. 'Go with him. You will not be followed.'
I ignore him. 'You can find your way back?' I ask Nereith.
'I told you I could,' he replies. His eyes flick from me to Feyn and back again. 'What do you think you're doing?' he asks me.
I don't answer that. He wouldn't understand.
The raka howl somewhere down the trench. Nereith shakes his head in despair. 'I hope you make it,' he says, but it's empty. He already believes we won't.
He heads along the slope at an angle, but before he gets five steps I say his name one last time. He gazes back at me inquiringly.
'I have a son,' I tell him.
'I know.'
'How?'
'Massima Leithka Orna, married to Venya Ethken Rynn. I hadn't heard you had a child, but considering the state you were in when you arrived, I guessed someone close to you had been killed and I assumed it was your husband. In light of events since-' he looks at Feyn, '-I put two and two together.'
Of course. With a Khaadu's memory, it's not so surprising, even if I find myself resenting his insight.
'Last I heard he was stationed at Caralla,' I say. The words don't come easily. They have to be forced through a knot in my throat. I don't know why it's so difficult to talk about Jai. 'If you could tell him…'
Tell him what? Your mother was alive last time I saw her, but by now she's probably not? Tell him I love him? I'm not entrusting that to Nereith. Abyss, I don't even know if he's heard his father is dead yet.
I just want to see him. The words will come then, I'm sure of it.
'Tell him there's a letter,' I say. 'There's a letter, from the Dean of Engineers of Bry Athka University, in a drawer in my room. Have him send someone to collect it. If I don't make it back… he needs to know about the letter.'
'I'll pass near Caralla,' Nereith says. 'If the Gurta haven't taken it yet… well, I'll do what I can to get there.'
I smile sadly. He turns away, pauses, turns back.
'Should you reach Veya… should you ever come across a problem without a solution…' He trails off, his face grave. 'Remember who I am.'
I remember alright. He's one of Silverfish's men. And he's offering to be a contact for me: a connection to the faceless legend of the Veyan underworld.
In all the years I've spent trawling the murky depths of the city, trading information and digging out secrets in the service of my master, I've never even got close to Silverfish. He's a whisper in the dives and cut-joints, his name steeped in paranoia. A ghost of the alleyways.
I've run across his trail many times, though. His secretive network of operatives wields enormous influence in the underworld, but unlike the other gangs you never know who's working for Silverfish and who isn't. There's a good deal of doubt as to whether Silverfish exists at all, or whether he's the mythical head of an organisation without a leader. Nobody knows. I have to admire that.
And now here's Nereith, telling me he can put me in touch, if ever I have the need. If ever I make it home.
It's as close to a thank-you as I'll get from him, I suppose.
He begins to climb down toward the bottom of the trench, branching off in a different direction from us. I watch him depart with the feeling that I'll never see him again, and there's a small part of me that regrets it. I respect him. I wish I'd known him longer.
'Ready?' I say to Feyn.
He nods, but he holds my gaze for a long time, and I just can't tell what he's thinking. 'We will not escape them this way,' he says.
'No,' I say. 'We probably won't.'
'Then we must go where they will not follow.'
'There's nowhere they won't follow us. They'll chase us till they drop. It's the Gurta way.'
'Will they follow us to the surface?' I don't know how long it is before we find an upward-slanting channel. I know that we're both light-headed and weak from exertion and hunger, and I know every muscle in my body aches from climbing and running. If only we could find water we'd stand a chance of throwing them off the scent, but there's nothing.
We're in the trackless barrens of the Borderlands, a webwork of inhospitable caverns and chasms that have separated Gurta and Eskara for as long as our civilisations can remember. A war-torn, disputed wilderness crawling with troops and bandits of all kinds. Neither side wants it but neither will let the other have it. Why is it only now that I can see how utterly ludicrous that is, in the face of the thousands upon thousands who die over this wasteland? I suppose I never had to care until now. I hadn't known what it was to lose someone to the Borderlands, to be faced with the threat of losing another.
Feyn has gathered several clumps of fungi that he pronounces edible, and we chew them whenever our h
ands are free. They're vile and bitter but he assures me that they're safe.
'A SunChild must be sheltered from the sun, like you,' he says. 'When the Season of Days is, we are in the high caves. These grow there, like here.'
I trust him, because I'm not going to make it otherwise. I have to fight to keep the fungi down, but it eases the worst of the hunger.
We take the way up, following the breeze. The upward tunnel becomes a shaft, ten spans across at its widest part, a slanting, near-vertical crevice. Water trickles down its folds. Feyn tastes it, pronounces it clear – though clear of what I don't like to ask – and we drink.
The Gurta are close. As we haul ourselves up the teeth of the shaft, I'm comforted only by the fact that the raka won't be able to make it up an ascent this steep. The soldiers will have to follow on their own. If we can get ahead of them, we can lose them.
I want to lie down and sleep and not care if I never wake up again. But I've come so far. I'm not stopping now.
I have to slow my pace for Feyn, but his endurance is surprising. Perhaps his kind are tougher than they look. I'd thought him fragile, because he's so slender and passive, and because he wept when he was beaten. But then I remember how he never complained or flagged at the slurry-trough. He comes from a race of travellers who live in a world deadlier than mine, hardened by generations of life on the surface. He's strong enough.
I don't think about how far we have to go. I think only of the next handhold, the next shelf, the next upward lunge. I concentrate on the tapping of the water as it runs from pool to pool, trying to solve its rhythm. I think of the way the chaotic surface of the pools reflect the light of the phosphorescent patches that have grown beneath them, and how its eddies and impacts have never stilled for thousands of years. I meditate as I climb, and reality becomes elastic.
The pain in me dims. It's only physical pain. I've known much worse.
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