Chris Wooding - The Fade

In his early adolescence Feyn left his coterie and joined another, taking the book with him as a gift. SunChild coteries meet occasionally in great fairs during the Season Of Nights, he says, and it's not uncommon for members to swap groups. Some did it for the change, or to find new friends or partners, or to get away from someone they disliked. Feyn did it to travel with Siaw.

Under his tutelage, Feyn began training to be a Loremaster, and he learned Eskaran. Though Siaw's own knowledge was imperfect – picked up from sporadic contact with Eskaran traders on the fringes of society, the source of what few tales we have of the SunChildren – he knew enough to show Feyn how to read his book.

I've never heard of The Light In The High Tower. By Feyn's account it seems to be a cheap romantic novel, of the kind you might find circulating among the handmaidens in any aristocratic court. I don't have the heart to offer my opinion. To him, it's a stunning piece of literature, a window into a society he can only imagine. To me, it sounds like something I'd use to wedge a door open.

'I became excited by an idea which said: go underground,' he tells me. 'I wanted to go to this place, Bry Athka, where the book speaks of. They have a University, a great place of learning. That is true?'

'It's true. My son went to the military school there.'

'You have been to the University?'

'A few times,' I say, not mentioning that my longest visit was to murder a respected academic who was about to publish his treatise on the dangers of foreign conflict to a merchant society. Caracassa's enemies would have wielded it over the Turnward Claw Alliance for years to come if it reached general circulation. He'd been repeatedly warned, but he was too stubborn to listen. I wasn't proud of myself for killing an old man for what seemed such a small thing, but neither did I feel guilty. I was under lifedebt: I was Ledo's weapon. Conscience was a luxury I gave away when I skinmarked my cheek with the sign of a Bondswoman.

Then he tells me the story of a girl, who treated him kindly and whom he fell in love with, but who would not accept him in the end. Her heart was with the hunters, not a quiet Loremaster-in-training. Knowledge and learning did not keep a girl warm at night, or make her feel safe.

It was an achingly familiar story. I almost began to tell him how my son had gone through the same thing more than once, but I felt it would cheapen Feyn's experience, and by the way he spoke of this girl, the wounds were still fresh.

So he left that coterie and travelled alone for a time. It was a dangerous thing to do, but SunChildren sometimes took such journeys of self-reflection. Feyn felt he had to examine himself and decide if his life was on the right path.

'My sorrow drove me away,' he says. 'I felt I had no worth. What worth was it to read a book? What worth was it to know the words of a society I would never be with? Tradition had kept the a'Sura'Sao at a distance from the Eskarans. Our meetings with your people were brief, and in far places. So I decided I would meet with the Pathfinders of many coteries at our next gathering and persuade them that I should go to Eskara and learn your ways, and teach you of us.' His eyes come alive at the thought. 'I would go to the University at Bry Athka and return an explorer! Braver than any hunter!'

'You did this for a girl?'

'At first I thought that was true, but it was not for her. It was to be done for me.'

'What happened?'

'When I had made to decide, I travelled to meet a coterie I knew of. We travel certain routes, you understand? We leave markers and trails for a'Sura'Sao, who know how to read them. Our lands are full of secrets for our kind, hoards of food and equipment, buried sunsuits, maps to hidden places. It is necessary for us to help one another to survive. I could pick up their trail and follow.'

'But you never got there.'

'I could not catch them before… mmm… you call it ''big wind''?'

'Hurricane,' I say. I remember Reitha telling me about the storms that sometimes engulfed our moon, blanketing all the known lands and probably far beyond, laying waste to anything not hardy enough to stand up to them.

'Yes. It comes sometimes at a certain time of year. I took shelter in the caves, and I had many supplies, but it blew for seven days and it did not seem as if it would stop. So I began to think… now is the time I must go underground. Why should I ask permission? The Pathfinders might say no, and then my life is worthless.' He's fidgeting now, embarrassed by his impatience, ashamed.

'So I went underground. Gurta caught me. They took me to Farakza. I think they had never seen a SunChild, so they thought I was a… freak?' I nod as he looks to me for approval of the word. 'But the scholars know I was a SunChild. Otherwise, the chirurgeons would cut me up. So they try to learn my language, but it is not easy, and I think they forgot about me.'

'You were lucky,' I say.

'What is luck? This is twice time you said it.'

I'm about to reply, but suddenly it feels as if the world has plunged away from me. My head starts to pound, my body feels simultaneously lighter than air and heavy as lead. It feels like an attack, like poison flooding through me. Feyn sees it.

'It is beginning. The Shadow Death.'

I can feel the pain growing, rising, inexorable as the dawn that did this to me. I grab Feyn's hand and hold it tight.

'Don't leave me.'

'One way or another,' he says, 'you soon will be free.'

There's a stabbing like a rusty blade in my guts which drives the breath from me. All sense flees in the oncoming panic. I can't face what's coming. I crush his hand as if I could break the bones there, lessen the pain by sharing it. Feyn sits and watches me as my vision clouds and my body arches and delirium clamps icy fingers around my head.

I'm dying. Nothing can stop that now.

'Jai, I'm sorry…' I mutter through clenched teeth, and they're the last words I'm capable of saying before my throat begins to seize.

Of all the final thoughts I could have had, why an apology?

The cave mouth opens a short way up a barren mountainside. At the foot of the mountain is a great flat stretch of scarred yellow-brown rock, which terminates suddenly at the edge of a sheer cliff. Beyond it is a sunken basin, bordered on all sides by steep escarpments and distant peaks.

Mist hangs thick in the basin, broken by the caps of colossal fungi. Mycora. The Caracassa mansions are built into the roots of one of these, many thousandspans underground. They emerge from the drifting vapour like humped islands, or tower above it, swollen discs spreading outward from their massive stems. The jagged tips of sandstone pillars are dimly visible down there, hazy shadows in the whiteness.

And above it all, the sky. The terrible sky.

The horizon is dominated by the colossal presence of Beyl, the mother-planet, looming before us as we burst from the cave and begin to slide and scramble down the mountainside. She's a vast orb of black and purple and green, banded with darkly glowing clouds of poison, flickering with storms the size of continents. She dwarfs our little moon, so massive that she snuffs out the risen sun. The last vestiges of the sun's light are dwindling as her enormous bulk slides across it.

Halflight. The false night brought on when the mother-planet eclipses one or both of our suns. But it won't last long: further along the horizon, the sky is brightening, heralding the arrival of another sun. A second dawn is coming, and if we're not under cover by then, we'll not live to see another.

I can't think straight. My mind is a mess of conflicting fears and instincts, foremost of which is the sheer wrongness of being outside. The idea that there is nothing above me, an endless emptiness, forever… I feel like I might just float into the sky and disappear. My body is seizing up with fear. It senses the day, lurking in sullen abeyance. It knows how slender the window of night is. It knows what will happen if the sun catches us in the open.