Chris Wooding - The Fade

I can't shake the terrible feeling I have about this. Like something huge and dark and infinitely, chokingly empty is rushing towards me.

I can't shake it, and I'm scared.

The buildings are made from dark stone and wood, low and ugly. They were put together with whatever was to hand: a shambolic longhouse; a grim inn; soulless administration buildings and warehouses. All shattered by the previous Gurta assault.

I skirt close to the walls; enemy archers would pick off anyone gung-ho enough to be running out in the open. As I watch, a soldier takes a shaft square in the chest. It punches right through him and halfway out of his back. I try not to think about the amount of force that must have taken. Gurta bows are legendarily deadly.

'Where's Rynn?' I ask a soldier who I find crouching in a doorway. He jumps out of his skin and tries to stab me, but I catch his wrist and shake my head, and he realises who I am. I repeat myself. He tells me. Everyone knows Rynn. He's hard to miss.

The thick of the fighting is in a yard between several of the largest buildings, just turnward of the docks. The Gurta have made their stand there, behind a barricade of rubble. Seems a stupid idea, to try and defend a position that's open on all sides, but a lot of things the Gurta do are incomprehensible. Even to me, and I know them better than most.

It's almost over when I arrive. The archers in the surrounding buildings have been taken out and the Eskaran swordsmen have gone in. Rynn towers over them, his enormous presence a rallying point for the troops. An axe in each hand, swinging left and right. He's not the fastest of the Cadre by a long shot, but there's something in his fighting style that makes him seem untouchable. He takes his swings with all the time in the world and still nobody gets close. The man's like a landslide.

It brings a smile to see him, just for a moment. Then I remember why I'm here, and the smile fades.

I go in. There's hardly anyone left for me to fight. The barricade has been all but overwhelmed. The Gurta are naturally small anyway, but Rynn dwarfs them, and they're afraid to engage him. I dart through the press of Eskaran soldiers and I've almost reached him when he spots me. A grin spreads, white teeth amid the bristling black of his beard- -the next thing I know I'm on the ground and my ears are singing with a high, pure note. Sheer disorientation prevents me from doing anything more than blinking. I'm caked with something damp. Faculties shuffle themselves gradually into order and I remember a sensation like being slapped by a giant's hand. An instant of chaos, of flailing limbs and a bright light.

I raise my head. It feels like my neck muscles have been replaced by wood. Everything is stiff, everything aches at once, so much that I can't tell if I'm hurt or not. There's someone lying on top of me, his face on my chest. What's left of his face, anyway.

Suddenly my only desire is to stop that yawning, jawless thing from touching me. To get out from beneath the blank gaze of those dead eyes, which stare up, pleading, as if I could reverse what has happened. I push at the soldier, frantic with disgust. Scramble away backwards, bump into something else. I know it's a corpse, so I don't look. The shrill whine in my ears is making everything seem very far away and disconnected.

I get my knees under me and raise myself a little. The buildings are gone. The ground is strewn with corpses. One or two, like me, are stirring; but otherwise everything is still. At first, I'm not sure if I'm even in the same place as I was before the explosion and it falls into place in one cruel tumble. Why the Gurta were defending the yard rather than retreating. They booby-trapped the buildings. They crammed as many of us in as possible and then decimated us with explosives.

I can see our forces in the distance, falling into disarray. They daren't enter the town now, for fear of more bombs, and they can't retreat. Gurta reinforcements are charging down the slope towards them. The enemy ships are clearly visible now, powering towards the shore.

We've been outclassed. It's going to be a massacre.

And with that thought I remember why I'm here and not still up on the high ground. Fear drives me to my feet, and I stagger through the tangled carpet of limbs and bodies until I see him.

He's lying on his back, eyes sightless, his massive bulk emptied of that burning vitality that I've known ever since I was an adolescent. I can't even see a wound. But he's dead.

I have no strength in my body. Something is dragging me down and it's too insistent to resist. I sink on top of him, my head on his chest, but the heartbeat I know like my own isn't there. My eyes are fluttering closed, and I realise I'm hurt worse than I thought. I think I'm dying too. But that's alright. I don't want to be alive any more.

Rynn.

He's dead.

My husband.

The graduation ceremony was a grand event, staged in the port city of Bry Athka on the turnward coast of the Eskaran Ocean. I hadn't been looking forward to it. Even as we arrived I was still hoping my son would change his mind and refuse his commission. It made me feel unworthy to think that way, but while I could feign happiness easily for the sake of others, I couldn't lie to myself.

Still, you can never get too many chances to dress up. Naturally, Liss and Casta had demanded that I premiere my outfit to them before anyone else saw it. They made politely uncertain comments, then took me out and bought me a riotously expensive alternative. Something in black and dark green, hugging me in all the right places. I'd allowed myself a little narcissistic pleasure in front of the seamstress's mirror while the twins drowned me in praise. Not bad at all, considering.

The hall was magnificent, its cream-coloured roof scalloped in gold and scooped like the inside of a clam shell. The sloping floor was broken up into tiers, enclosures and balconies linked by gentle stairs and crowded with guests. Colourful fungi grew from rockeries babbling with tiny streams.

Aristocrats hove this way and that, murmuring poisonous comments about their rivals and hunting for gossip. They glided from group to group, a slow dance of social manipulation, currying favour here and snubbing a former ally there. They wore elaborate head-dresses, gowns made of jewels and exotic scales, tight uniforms and ripped, faux-poor attire. Most of them had been chthonomantically altered in some way: their skin coloured or patterned, pupils changed to crosses, breasts honed. Many were skinmarked with artful designs, safe in the knowledge that their chthonomancers could erase them when fashions moved on. And for each style there was a counter-style, like the Purists, who refused to wear any decoration and dressed in strict black clothes, with their heads shaved to give the appearance of receding hairlines.

Even Rynn looked halfway to respectable, though he clearly felt uneasy. Social events weren't his forte. He'd trimmed his beard and allowed me to pick his outfit. I'd kept it simple and subtle, out of mercy. He stuck by my side as if fearing I'd cast him adrift in the sea of eccentricity that surrounded us. He'd always viewed the aristocracy as unfathomably weird, and this display was doing nothing to alter his opinion.

I'd never found their little quirks threatening like Rynn did. They upset his sense of decency. For myself, I thought them rather charming, though I never let my fondness cloud my perception. It was easy to see the Plutarchs and their Clans as silly children with too much money, but the truth was that they played a different game to the rest of us, for altogether higher and deadlier stakes.

'Can you see him?' I asked my husband, who was taller than most people in the room.

'They're just coming out now,' he replied, his voice a deep rumble. He slid his arm around me as he said it and I leaned into him automatically. I didn't know whether he was sharing his pride or reassuring me against the nagging vestiges of guilt that I felt. Maybe he was thanking me for my decision not to oppose him on this. But in the end, I didn't care. There was a certain primal safety in his arms, in his smell and the warmth and the bulk of him.