The Fade kj-2

by Chris Wooding

  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.'

  36

  I never was very domestic, but I liked to try. Every so often I was seized by the urge to be like a storybook mother, the kind of strange being that relished cleaning and cooking and ensuring that the cupboards were full. The urge never lasted long, and usually ended in a vague suspicion that I was the victim of some vast conspiracy, that these people only pretended to enjoy their lives in order to fool me into copying them. I just didn't have the temperament. It all seemed so pointless.

  But still the urge would come back, and when I awoke this particular turn I was seized by a feeling of immense gratitude towards my husband and son, for no other reason than that they existed. In thanks, I would make them an elaborate breakfast. Just because.

  Rynn ambled dozily out of the bedroom to find me cursing at the stove, surrounded by piles of chopped spores and attending to several spitting pans. He wandered over to the huge round window that dominated our living-space, yawned and scratched himself as he looked out over the Tangles from our vantage point high up in the Caracassa Mansions. His little routine. Then he came over to me, slid his arms around me from behind, and all my frustration faded away for a moment as I melted into him with a murmur of pleasure.

  'Smells like another disaster,' he rumbled in my ear, voice deep from sleep.

  It was a risky ploy, but this time it made me smile.

  'You'll shut up and like it,' I replied, turning to kiss his grizzled cheek.

  He gave me a squeeze and disengaged. 'Make me extra. I don't know when I'll get to eat this turn.'

  'Your will is my purpose,' I said, with a flourish.

  'That's the spirit, wife!'

  Any reply I might have made was forestalled by a particularly violent eruption of oil from one of the pans, making me flinch and suck my breath in through my teeth.

  'Watch that pan,' Rynn said helpfully as he slumped down on the settee. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and groaned. Waking up was a dreadful experience for him. It took him most of the turn to get over it.

  I went back to my cooking. Voids, how did people find satisfaction in this?

  'When do you have to go?'

  'On the tenhour. They'll pick me up out front.'

  'You have any idea how long?'

  He made a negative grunt. It was a stupid question anyway; he would be as long as it took. He'd only received the message late last turn. The usual thing: Clan Caracassa requires your services. This time he was acting as an escort for a trainload of medical supplies heading for the Borderlands. That was as much as either of us knew. No doubt there would be several other Cadre on board. Maybe it would be a straight there-and-back job, or maybe it was a cover to move them to the front so they could be employed on some secret mission or another. We both knew the score. It wasn't our place to question.

  In two turns' time I was also being sent away, and I hadn't even been told my destination yet. They just said I was needed. Clan Caracassa requires your services.

  'I'll square it with the minder before I leave,' I said, and felt suddenly sad. It took some of the momentum out of my temporary drive towards good motherhood. The Clan provided somebody to look after Jai while we were away, of course; but I worried that his solitary, introverted nature was our fault. So much of his life was spent under the care of nannies and minders. Would he have been more vivacious, more playful, a happier child if his parents had always been around? Or would he have turned out this way no matter what?

  'There's another one of your little notes here,' Rynn said, as I tipped a pile of diced mushrooms into some egg mixture. Perhaps it was just weariness, but I thought I heard a slightly disparaging edge to his voice.

  I walked over and took it from his outstretched hand. 'Found it behind one of the cushions.' he said. He wasn't looking at me.

  I returned to the stove and read it while watching the breakfast with half an eye. The content was fairly banal: a short summary of what Jai had done at school the previous turn. But the real message was hidden inside. It was written in code. Our code, the secret language that existed between Jai and I. I had a dream last turn. I was in a battle. I was fighting the White-skins. There were explosions and shard-cannons. I was scared and I hid in a hole, but the White-skins were coming. Then a moth came, but the moth was you. And you said something, but it didn't mean anything. Then I realised you were talking in our code. And you said you were always wi
th me, but you were being blown away by the wind and you couldn't stay, so in the end you weren't with me at all. I read the note again while the omelette stiffened in the pan. No telling how long ago he'd written it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked behind the cushions of the settee. But then, I did recall one morning when he'd woken up agitated and more distant than usual. He wouldn't talk about it then. Perhaps this was the reason.

  He'd taught me the code on the condition of absolute secrecy. Of course I agreed to his terms. I was pleased that he wanted to share this with me alone. It made me feel special to be singled out this way, and proud that he had come up with something so clever. It was an impressively complex system for a twelve-year-old to devise.

  Ever since, we had been leaving notes for each other around our chambers. Usually they were entirely pointless, phrases and poems and little stories that meant nothing out of context. As we got better, the notes got longer, and so did the coded messages beneath.

  At first they were simple phrases, created only for the satisfaction of having the other decode them: How are you this turn?; My name is Jai, what's yours?; There is a hole in my shirt. Please fix it. Later, we actually started to make meaningful communications through the notes. He would write long letters about things he wouldn't say verbally. As if the medium of code had opened a channel through the defences he had erected around himself. There's a girl in my class I really like…

  Rynn had asked about the notes, of course, but I told him they were just a game we were playing. He wasn't convinced. He pretended not to be bothered by it, but I could see he felt annoyed at being excluded. He felt he was being laughed at, perhaps.

  It gave me a small and uncharitable sense of triumph to see his reaction. Cheap, but there all the same. Maybe if he'd been more understanding with Jai when he was ten, he wouldn't be shut out of our son's inner world now he was twelve.

  It was only natural that Jai should choose me for his partner in this. I had always been the one who encouraged his inventiveness, whereas Rynn had barely praised him at all these past two years, since he failed the Cadre tests.