There was a boat, a metal-hulled antique some forty feet long.

Shadrapar was its birthplace, as it is mine, but it took us east down the river into the unmappable and hungry jungles. The thump of its engine was a constant companion to all of us aboard her. We dreamed in time to its artificial heartbeat.

I take you to the point in time when that indefatigable engine proved mortal after all, and was stilled.

…The boat was listing as the current took it gently towards the bank behind us, and the river – my first sight of it – was wider than I had expected. It was opaque, brown with silt, loose vegetation and the reflection of the jungle.

I had never seen it before, this vast living thing in whose guts we were stewing. It had been a constant idea on the fringes of my mind: the wild eastern marches, festering in the heat of their own decay. The jungle was life, ravenous and abundant.

“Weeds have choked the prop”

…said the captain. He was a solid, brutal-looking man. Anyone would have to be half-mad to start with, to make a living shipping into those fetid stews.

“Good,” his questioner said, and then, after some reflection, “And that means what?”

“It means this batch of the cargo gets to go down there and cut it loose.”

Whether the eyeless creature took him, or some other unseen river horror, I never knew, but it was just as I imagined. The sudden break in the man’s swimming, the moment of confusion, and then he was gone and there were only the ripples.

Stefan Advani

I’d have you picture a man of aristocratic feature, as of a good family: a long face, dark straight hair and brown-olive skin. A high forehead – a sign of intellect and not just, as Helman always claimed, receding hairline. The nose is finely shaped but, even in the owner’s opinion, a trifle long. Eternally clean-shaven, a gift from my genes, my loose, ill-fitting clothing is dirty grey and does not flatter. This is your narrator contemplating the fate that was so nearly his, something I have made a career of.

Peter Drachmar

…seen there on deck, is quite a different sight. His hair is the colour of wet sand and there are laughter lines on his face even when he is not laughing. He has broader shoulders than I and wears clothes from a far better tailor. Luckily for his future employment, black is his preferred hue for a shirt. His trousers are of mustard colour and he has a short half-cloak of burgundy red that was the height of fashion the year before last. It is edged with gold trim that has faded slightly. If my description of him is more accurate, remember that, from this point on, I seldom crossed paths with a mirror.

So, in the aftermath of that, picture those same two men sitting across a small table, playing chess, I thinking only that if I so much as displeased the man across from me I would be back in the company of my fellow prisoners.

“They call them web-children,” the captain told us shortly.

“Who calls what web-children?” Peter asked.

“Them things that built that,” the captain explained. “They live out here.”

“People live in this jungle?” Peter wondered.

“Ain’t people.”

They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.

The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island.

Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together.

There was a small boat coming round the side of the Island, a wide-beamed dinghy without oars or sail, but I heard nothing of the engine. At first I assumed that it was hidden beneath the sullen growl of our own but, as the craft drew nearer, I saw that there were crooked arms that reached into the water at sides and rear. A constant play of droplets hung in a mist about these devices, and every so often a fish would leap up out of the water and away from them. It stirred vague memories in me of things learned once and long forgotten, but by then my attention was taken with the craft’s occupants. There were three, including the steersman.

Our prison boat cut its engines a hundred yards or so from the Island and coasted most of the rest of the way. When it was close enough, a few men in convict grey threw ropes to the crew, who made them fast. We watched our fellows on the Island haul with aching arms to drag us the last few feet until the blunt nose of the boat touched the splintered timber. There was a kind of dock there, a wooden platform ringed with cane, with another handful of black-clad Wardens watching suspiciously. One of them was armed with some kind of gun that I did not recognise.

“Get your worthless hides off the boat!”

…the Marshal screamed at us, and the captain backed him up with, “You heard him, bastards! Move!” After a few blows from the clubs of the rivermen we began heading forward in a reluctant, uncooperative mass.

“I am the Marshal”

“I command here. I am the Governor’s right hand. This is the Island. You will spend the rest of your lives here,”

his voice rang out flatly. “In order for the rest of your lives to be any length you will need to understand the One Rule.” I could hear the capital letters. “The One Rule is this,” he continued implacably. “You will always obey. If we tell you to work, you will work. If we tell you to sleep, you will sleep. If we tell you to bend over then you will get buggered. This is the only way it will be.”

“I will show you why this rule is obeyed here,” the Marshal resumed.

He held out a hand to one of his subordinates, who passed him a stick perhaps three feet long, sheathed in metal to the midpoint and wrapped in layered leather below that. The men either side of me tensed instinctively, but the Marshal would have to take a good few steps forward before he could strike anyone. I noticed that Shon had changed his pose: from a loose acceptance of his situation he was abruptly like a taut wire. The few inmates still present after loading up the boat were rigid. They knew what was coming.

The Marshal stared at us with his lack of expression sitting heavy on his face, and then pointed the lance in a lazy kind of way. I thought I saw the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth before it went off. There was a crack, although perhaps it was just a light so bright and sudden that it seemed like a sound. The man on Shon’s other side was thrown backwards into the men behind, and when they got out of his way he was just a limp corpse on the floor. His face and chest were charred black. In the aftermath of that strike the air between us and the Marshal boiled and sizzled. That was the second time that random chance passed me by when there was a death to be doled out.

“I do not know who he was, nor do I care,”