Chris Wooding - The Fade

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 Eskaran 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.

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.