Chris Wooding - The Fade

'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.'

At least he's honest. And I don't miss the implied threat. Stay cooperative, or join the experiments.

'Your turn,' he prompts.

I pause for a time, thinking. 'I don't speak to the other prisoners because I don't care about them. I don't care what they have to say. I don't care about this place.'

'Is there anything you do care about?'

My son. My son, whom I'll never see again. Out there somewhere, fighting this fucking war.

'No,' I reply. 'There's nothing I care about.' They put me back into my cell. The other prisoners watch me climb down the ladder. As I descend I can see Charn glaring through the muddle of bruises and cuts that constitute his face. His paralysed arm is in a sling. I can feel his hate, but it's impotent. Even battered as I am, I've sent a message to everyone here. Nobody will fuck with me now.

The ladder is pulled up and the grille overhead slams shut. I walk to my corner to sit down, saying nothing. As I go I notice the SunChild boy. He's watching me, like the others. As far as I can tell, he hasn't been harmed.

I don't know why that's important to me, it just is.

Each turn, after our second shift in the forge, they lead us to a small cave glistening with milk-veined stalactites, where hot water drizzles from the ceiling into a steaming pool. The men strip and sink into it with languid sighs and barks of approval. I sit on the edge, back against a stalactite, and savour the agony in my muscles. Better not to undress at all. I may have seen off one assailant, but I'm still the only woman among a dozen men who've been confined here for the Abyss knows how long. I'm not stupid.

Everyone still wears the clothes they were captured in, or in the case of those who were armoured, their underclothes. Most have dissolved into rags by now, so the prisoners work in a tattered motley or strip to the waist in the sweltering heat. The Gurta aren't concerned with prison uniform.

At least my clothing suits the temperature. I wear a sleeveless black top, to display the red and black skinmarking down my arms: the Cadre insignia on my left shoulder and Rynn's family sigil on my right, to indicate our marriage. Baggy black trousers end below my knee, with crisscrossed straps leading down to the sandals on my feet.

They took away the tools of my trade, though. The flash bombs, lockpicks, garrotte, throwing knives, all that stuff. And they took my blades, obviously. But I don't need blades to kill people.

I gather from the comments of the other prisoners that bathing is a blessing recently bestowed. Those who've been here longest say it's a privilege that's removed and restored with no apparent pattern. Randomness seems to infest our routine here. Sometimes we're led into the food hall but there's no food. Sometimes we have to work double or triple shifts at the forge. Once we were left alone in our cells for several turns, with silent guards dropping in bundles of sporebread every so often as the stench became steadily more unbearable.

There's a hollow we use for a latrine in the corner of the cave, which they make one of us muck out with a shovel whenever they come to release us. The unfortunate chosen has to clamber up the ladder with a seeping sack of human shit on their shoulder, after which they're escorted away to get rid of it.

I've been lucky so far, and I've not been picked. Gurta have a strange attitude towards females. They treat their own women with an odd mixture of adoration and brutal repression. But as a foreigner, too old for enslavement, I should have been killed by now. Perhaps my Cadre status confuses them. They don't have woman warriors.

Whatever. I don't care what they think, as long as it spares me from hauling the contents of twelve men's bowels up that ladder.

There must be a purpose to this constant shifting of schedules. It occurs to me that I could simply ask another prisoner and see if they knew, but I don't want to break my silence. To do so would be to accept that life is still going on for me, and I have to keep living it. It's a step I won't be able to take back.

After the bathing they take us to the quad. We travel up through the guts of the building to get there, and things grow fractionally cooler. There are no more caves but corridors, cut from local stone without any of the frills and flourishes for which Gurta architecture is famed. I've no idea of the layout of this place; I was drugged when we came in. But from what I've overheard, it's garrisoned, making me think that we're inside a fort of some kind.

We're allowed to see very little. The corridors are tight and dark, and the glimpses we catch of the rest of the prison only show other prisoners engaged in slave labour, as we are. In addition to the forge there are kitchens, a laundry, a mill and a reeking tannery.

And then there's the quad, which is the part I find strange. Here, they simply leave us alone. It's open to the air; we can see the cavern roof and feel the stirring of the hot breeze. The walls are sheer and windowless for twelve spans or so, and then there's an inset balcony where archers wander, alert for trouble from the prisoners below.

There are other people up there watching us too, dressed in grey robes heavy with ornamentation. They are predominately old, their white hair yellowing with age, and some have their eyes hidden behind the round brass goggles they use to correct their sight when it begins to fail. Their Elders don't practise body alteration like our chthonomancers do; it's against their beliefs. They'd rather let their children die of entirely preventable conditions. Thoughts like that used to cheer me up when all else failed.

The prisoners gather and gossip and play games for exercise. Fights break out, unchecked by the guards. Then a ring of chanting men surrounds the combatants, goading them on. The quad is where many scores are settled. Here, we're allowed free rein as long as we don't try to leave. A man was beaten to death here not so very long ago. The guards did nothing to intervene. But a similar incident occurred several turns later, and this time they were quick to come to the victim's defence. It appears some of us are more valuable than others.

Rynn is dead. Jai is beyond my reach. From the depths of my grief, the distance between us seems unfathomable.

I'm in a prison, but not one made of walls and gates. It's another period in the quad. The prisoners are in high spirits after their bath. They play-fight and tussle and tell jokes. Nereith and Charn murmur among a group of flint-eyed men; Nereith grins and I see his sharp Khaadu teeth, fang-like incisors for ripping meat. I sit, as I always do, against a wall. Left alone, as I wish to be. Sometimes I look up, a brief moment of animation; but most of the time I gaze at the flagstone floor, disconnected. I'm exhausted from the forge, too tired to think.