by Tim Lebbon
Its movements ceased, its eyes grew pale and dry, and its limited awareness of surroundings and purpose drifted away like dust on the breeze. Its only thought as things grew dark was that it had done its very best.
Hearing was the last to go, and the sound that accompanied it down into death was something tearing, and something wet.
The thing emerged from the giant corpse. It had been made with hooked claws and toes with which to rip, and it tore its way out through the weakened flesh. It had also been formed with a sharp ridge running down its forehead to the bridge of its nose, and it used this to saw and snap at the thick ribs that encircled its host’s upper half. As it emerged, a bloody violent birth, it also ate and drank. The meat was warm and the blood thick, and strength coursed through its body.
Free of its confines, it remained there for a while as it grew accustomed to its surroundings. It had filled itself with its mother’s flesh and blood, but already it could feel this desert’s rot.
Its maker had warned it of this. Time was passing, the desert was exerting its poisonous influence, and it knew it had far to go.
Standing naked beneath the sinking sun, it looked to the sky and felt a sense of release that it could not accurately identify or understand. It had little to do with being away from the body now lying beneath and around it, because it thought of that only as meat. It had nothing to do with being able to stretch its arms and flex its clawed fingers at the glittering points of light. Looking back across the desert, marking the bloody prints stretching off into the dusk, it saw a smudge of light low on the horizon. Freedom, release … it thought it had something to do with leaving whatever that light represented.
Yet it knew that its destination lay in the opposite direction. It gathered folds of leather around its naked body, filled rough pockets with handfuls of meat from the thing that had birthed it, and started walking.
Daylight came, and night once more, and when it saw the sunrise for the second time it realized that there were no longer bones. The last set of remains it had passed had been wrapped in several layers of thick leather, a chain-mail body shell, and something that resembled the chitinous outer layers of a beetle. The mummified corpse had been lying with its right hand stretched out and finger pointing southward, as if indicating the place it wanted to be. Its mouth had been wide, and it had carried three obsidian teeth. On the corpse’s skin, the creature had made out the dark smears of strange markings, and it wondered what that meant.
It had memories of something called Echo City, but they were very old, and they belonged somewhere else. It did not consider the strangeness of carrying such old memories when it had been born for only two days. It had a maker, and that maker’s voice was the sole loud, clear thing in its fresh mind. Walk, that voice said, avoid dangers, look south, and travel as far as you can. It spoke in suggestions rather than words. The creature obeyed.
Though nothing lived in the desert, there were dangers. Around noon of that third day, it entered an area where great holes breathed dark fumes of gas and nightmare. Drawing in these fumes for the first time, the thing fell to its knees as its immature brain was racked with onslaughts of images dredged from some past it did not know. It saw faces and death, madness and war, and the release of an appalling disease that made it open its eyes again to look down upon its own body. It could not see its face to make out whether it resembled those in its nightmare, but its body was the same—and the abuse it suffered clothed it in the same sadness. Skin was weakening, flesh was rotting, and its insides churned as something sought release.
Farther, its maker’s voice said, hardly audible through the nightmares. The creature stood and ran, ignoring the staggering pain that pummeled up from its legs as weakening bones crumbled. When they finally snapped, it crawled instead, hauling itself out of that region of holes and ventings, giving it the chance to breathe air that seemed clearer. Its mind settled, leaving it with the idea of its maker.
By dusk on that third day it could crawl no farther. Its fingers had worn away, and whatever ills the desert carried had turned its eyes to mush, its flesh to rotten stuff. It lay still as it birthed the thing it had been made to carry, and the maker had created it so that the pain was only slight.
As darkness came, it tried to imagine the maker saying, Good.
The smaller creature crawled from the remains of its mother. It had four legs and a hugely distended stomach, but the legs were long enough to lift it from contact with the sands and strong enough to carry it across the desert at startling speed.
It passed over a low range of hills, negotiating a dry ravine on the other side and continuing into the desert that lay beyond. Nothing lived here but it, though it did not find that strange. It carried vague and distant memories of life and plenty, but it did not suffer loneliness, because the maker was always there. It listened to the maker’s songs, poems, and words of wisdom and humor, and though it could not respond, it knew that the maker was pleased. It ran fast and far, avoiding patches of lighter-colored sand, which would have sucked it down to unknown depths, and places where flames twisted across the landscape in defiance of the breeze.
At last night came, and in the deceptive shadows of dusk the thing tripped over a rock and broke one of its legs.
It lay quietly as death approached, feeling the desert’s deadly influences now that it was down. It listened to the maker in memories, and even as its rounded stomach split and gushed forth innards, it did not feel the pain.
The thing that rose from the gore and steam walked on.
A day later, as noon scorched the sands and something slumped to the ground to die, the journey came to an end.
As the creature edged toward death, its legs fell apart and revealed the moist heart of itself. It growled as it obeyed what the maker had instructed it to do, defying the sun and the desert, the heat and the air, the dust and the winds. It felt its flesh withered and diseased, but it pushed harder as it birthed its son and willed itself to die, comforted that it was not the desert that had taken it in the end.
The child mewled as it squirmed in the sand. It poked strong fingers through the translucent film that enveloped it and blinked wet, intelligent eyes at the heat and sunlight that rushed in to bathe its soft skin. It tried to stand, but its legs were still shaky. It looked around, seeing only endless sand and sky.
And it imagined its maker growing sad, because there truly was nothing beyond the Bonelands.
Later, perhaps only hours before the child would have died, a shadow fell across it.
“This is not my home,” Peer Nadawa whispered as she came awake. They were the words with which she had comforted herself on the afternoon she arrived in Skulk Canton, and now their recitation was a natural part of welcoming a new day. They had started as defiance but quickly became a mantra necessary for her survival. And they were never spoken lightly.
She opened her eyes to see what sort of day it would be. The ghourt lizard that lived in a crack between her bedroom wall and ceiling was scampering across the wall in a series of short sprints. It was gathering flies and spiders early today, and that meant it would likely rain before noon. Great. Another day spent harvesting stoneshrooms in the wet.
Peer watched the lizard for a while, preparing herself for the morning ritual of rising through the discomfort of old tortures. The lizard shifted so quickly that it seemed to slip from point to point without actually moving, and there were those who believed that ghourts really belonged in the Echoes below the city. Peer was not one of them. It was a foolish idea to believe that such simple creatures could become phantoms. And, besides, her parents had taught her stillness. Relaxed from sleep, she calmed her mind and watched each tiny movement of the lizard—its fluttering heartbeat, lifting toes, and the darting streak as it ran from one place to the next. She pitied the people who did not have the time to see such things, because she had long ago stopped pitying herself. She had all the time in the world.
She sighed and scratched an itch in her l
eft armpit. The little lizard flitted back into its hole, startled at her sudden movement. Propping herself on her left elbow, she grimaced as she started to sit up.
They’d used air shards to penetrate her right arm to the bone. Sharper than any blade made of stone or metal, the shards could never be removed, and they were a constant reminder of her crime. They were set in her bone and cast in her flesh, and it took a while each morning to warm them until they became bearable. That’s all they ever were—bearable. Some nights, and on the very worst of days, she could picture the torturer’s grin as he slid them in and see the virtuous expression on the Hanharan priest’s face as he stood beyond the torture table, praying for salvation for her errant soul. Of the two, it was always that fucking priest she wanted to kill.
Grimacing, Peer sat up and started to gently massage her right arm. The pain from her left hip was flaring now, past the numbness of sleep. They hadn’t been so creative with that; the torturer had smashed it with a hammer when she refused to acknowledge Hanharan as the city’s firstborn. It was only thanks to Penler’s skill with medicines and the knife that she was able to walk at all.
She closed her eyes and went through the pain, as she had every morning for the past three years. Each morning was the same, and yet she had never grown to accept it. She fought against what they had done even though the evidence was here, in pain and broken bones. Penler had asked her many times why she still fought when there was no hope of return, and she had never been able to provide an answer. Truthfully, she did not know.
Gorham’s face flashed unbidden across her mind. Perhaps he was haunting her, though for all she knew, he was dead.
Gradually the pain lessened and she sat there for a while, as always, looking around the small room in the house she had been lucky enough to find. It had two floors, and she always slept on the top one. There was a ledge beyond the window that led to other rooftops if she needed to escape, a system of alarms and traps built into the single staircase—that had been Penler’s doing as well—and if she stretched and stood just right, she could see the desert from her window. Some nights, if she could not sleep, she spent a long time simply looking.
One of the downstairs rooms still contained several paintings of the family that had lived there before the salt plague a hundred years before. Peer had no idea what had happened to them other than they had died. Everyone in Skulk Canton had died, either from the plague or from the brutal purging that quickly followed, ordered by the Marcellans. But she liked keeping their images in the house. It had something to do with respect.
“Time to leave,” she muttered. “Important places to go, powerful people to see. Stoneshrooms to pick.” She often spoke to herself when there was no one else to listen. In Skulk there were many who would understand, and probably many more who would consider her mad. There were also those who viewed her as fair game; Echo City’s criminals were a varied breed.
After washing in a bowl of cold water and eating a quick breakfast, she set about arming herself. A knife in her belt, three soft widowgas balls in her pocket, and the wide, short sword on view. She had never grown used to the sword, but Penler assured her that it would scare off any casual aggressors. Up to now, it had seemed to work.
He often chided her for living on her own. A woman on her own here in Skulk … he’d say, shaking his head, then pursing his lips because he knew exactly what she thought of such attitudes. Still, she knew that he had only her safety at heart. After berating him with a playful punch, she’d argue that most criminals here weren’t really criminals at all. They execute the really bad ones, she would say. Some always slip through, he’d counter. And so their little play went on.
Today, she and Penler were meeting for lunch down by the city wall. He said that he had something to tell her. As always for Penler, the mystery was the thrill.
When the sun was up and birdsong filled the air, and Peer was feeling sharper and brighter than usual, she often considered Skulk Canton as evidence of the basic goodness in people.
Since the devastating plague, it had become the place to which criminals and undesirables were banished by the ruling Marcellans. Murderers, rapists, and pedophiles were still crucified on the vast walls of the central Marcellan Canton, but lesser criminals—pickpockets, violent drunks, and political dissidents—now had a new place to be sent. The vast underground prisons in the Echoes below the city had been closed, because the abandoned Skulk was far easier and less dangerous to police. It was a city unto itself, and the criminals were left to make it their own.
Over the past few decades, they had done just that. It could hardly be called thriving—they still relied on regular food deliveries from Crescent Canton, and a new canal had been built from the Southern Reservoir in Course Canton to ration their water—but the majority of people in Skulk lived a reasonable life, and most contributed to making their community a bearable place to live.
Naturally, there were those who viewed it as their own private playground. Thieves ran rampant in certain areas; gangs formed, fought, and dispersed; and there were a dozen men and women that Peer could name who considered themselves rulers of Skulk. But as with elsewhere in Echo City, these gangs and gang leaders ruled only those who were at their own level. Violence was frequent but usually confined to rival factions.
Those who kept to themselves were mostly left alone.
Upon her arrival, Peer had been convinced that she would be raped and killed within days. Terribly injured, traumatized from the tortures she had endured and the fact that she was no longer considered an inhabitant of Echo City, she had scampered into a building close to the razed area of ground that marked Skulk’s northern boundary with the rest of the city, and there she had waited to die. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Time lost itself. Day and night seemed to juggle randomly with her senses. And one day after passing out, she woke up in Penler’s rooms.
He told her that three men had brought her to him and then left. He did not even know their names.
Walking along the street toward the stoneshroom fields where she spent most of her mornings, Peer tried to deny the sense of contentment that threatened. She’d been feeling it for a while, as it sought to put down roots in a place that she had never believed she could call home. There was so much she missed—her friends, her small canal-side home in Mino Mont Canton, and Gorham most of all—that it felt wrong to be happy here. She had been banished from the world she knew, escaping execution only because the Marcellans knew it would be dangerous should she become a martyr. In Skulk she could fade away. She was a prisoner who was growing to like her prison, an exiled victim of an insidious dictatorship who was forgetting the fire and rage that had fueled her past. Often she would strive to reignite that fire, but it never felt the same. Just let it come, Penler would say to her, referring to the gentle contentment and not the righteous passion she had once felt. She hated him and loved him for that, the infuriating old man. He was trying to save her, and she was determined to convince herself that she did not want to be saved.
This is not my home, she thought again as she walked through the narrow streets, but this morning Skulk Canton felt just fine.
She passed through a small square and saw familiar figures setting up stalls for breakfast. She bought a lemon pancake and had her mug filled with rich five-bean, and she dallied for a while, enjoying the sights and smells of cooking, the sound of bartering, and the good-natured air of the place.
“You’ll be late!” a big man called as he stirred soup in a huge pot.
“The ’shrooms will wait, Maff,” she said. “What’s cooking?”
He motioned her over, and Peer smiled as she negotiated her way through a throng of hungry people. Maff always enjoyed revealing the recipes to his top-secret brews.
“Tell no one,” he whispered as she drew close, his breath smelling of beer and pipe smoke, his big hand closing around her long, tied hair. “I had a consignment of dart root delivered yesterday. I’m mixing it with rockzard le
gs, some sweet potatoes from Course, and my own special ingredient.” He tapped the side of her nose and glanced around, as if they were discussing a coup against the Marcellans themselves.
Peer raised an eyebrow, waiting for the great revelation.
“Electric-eel hearts,” he whispered into her ear. “Fresh. Still charged.” She felt his bead-bedecked beard tickling her neck and pulled away, laughing softly. When she looked at him, Maff was nodding seriously, pearls of sweat standing out on his suntanned skin. He touched her nose again. “Tell no one.”
“Your secret’s safe with me, Maff.”
“So …?” he asked, lifting a deep spoon of the soup toward a bowl.
Peer held up both hands. “I’d like to wake up in the morning.”
Maff shrugged and continued stirring the soup, and even as she bade him farewell, he called over a short, ratlike man. He whispered in the man’s ear, nodded down at the soup, and his secret was told again.
In her early days here, Peer would have wondered what crimes Maff had committed to deserve banishment. Such thoughts rarely crossed her mind anymore. She left the square and weaved her way through narrow streets, the buildings overhead seeming to lean in and almost touch. The sun shone, though she still thought it would likely rain that afternoon, and Skulk Canton was buzzing with life.
She passed a group of men and women lounging on the front steps of a large building. They wore knives and swords on show, and all bore identical scars on their left cheeks—the unmistakable arc of a rathawk’s wing. They observed her with lazy eyes and full purple lips, displaying the signs of subtle slash addiction, and one of them called to her softly. Laughter followed. She ignored the call and walked on, maintaining the same pace. She didn’t want them to think she was running because of them, but slowing could have been seen as a reaction to the voice. They were part of the Rage gang—slash dealers and sex vendors—and she had no wish to be involved with them in any way.
