Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “Over here,” Malia said. Peer and her tall companion were edged toward the far wall, and there the Watchers set about tying them fast. At Gorham’s request, they sat Peer first, making her comfortable before securing her arms to the wall and her legs to the metal chair.

  “I came to you because I trusted you,” she said.

  “You still can.”

  “Yes?” She was glaring at him now, and he wondered, What the crap has she gone through these last three years? He had no idea.

  “You want me to start right away?” Malia asked. She was keen to begin. She’d already taken a folded leather pouch from her belt, and she was arranging its contents across an old mess table.

  Something whispered in a dark corner of the massive space, and Devin and the others shifted nervously.

  “Only phantoms,” Peer said. “Already seen several today.”

  “No,” Gorham said. “Not yet. I want to talk to her first.” And he knelt before his old lover as if seeking her blessing and forgiveness.

  But what he was about to tell her would surely damn him in her eyes forever.

  “We gave you up,” he said. “I was already higher in the Watchers’ echelons than you knew. The part you worked with, the political arm, had always been intended as dispensable. It was a useless gesture, trying to give our ideals a political voice. You know the Marcellans: They sometimes allow beliefs disparate from their own, but they’ll never grant them any sort of power. So your group was … expendable. A front. Ready to be given away to the Marcellans should they ever move on us. We hoped the time would never come.”

  Peer was staring at him wide-eyed. She said nothing.

  “We were nurturing you and the others. Preparing you. And the time did come, when they heard rumors that we’d started using the Baker again.”

  “The Baker’s dead!” Peer gasped, and Malia laughed bitterly.

  “This is the new Baker,” Gorham said. “She was killed twenty years ago, yes, but she chopped herself, knowing what was happening. It’s how generations of Bakers have continued their line. So now we deal with … well, her daughter. And her mother handed down all she knew.”

  “So you betrayed me for your cause,” Peer said, smiling. There was nothing behind the smile—no humor, no life. It was a rictus grin, and Gorham had to turn away.

  “They took you and the others in the political arm. We hoped that dismantling our public face would satisfy them, but they came further. Bad times, Peer. We lost so many. We never suspected the ruin would run so deep. There were betrayals that led to scores of deaths—the Marcellan Canton’s walls ran red for weeks afterward, and they announced a two-day feast to celebrate what they called the ‘defeat of heresy.’ But with you … we never knew—”

  “Of course you knew what they’d do!” she shouted, but then she sighed and hung her head. “They tortured me, Gorham,” she said, head still dipped.

  “Yes.”

  “They made me hurt, demanded that I renounce my beliefs and accept theirs. And when I didn’t, they smashed me.”

  “I know, Peer.”

  “You know?”

  He nodded. “The tortures were made public knowledge.”

  “Do you care?”

  How did he answer that? Of course he cared. “We need to make sure you haven’t come here meaning us harm.”

  “And that’s your answer?”

  “That, and I’m sorry.”

  “Going to torture me now, Gorham?”

  “No.” And because he could not face watching this, and because he hated himself for not being able to say everything that needed saying until it was over, he turned away and left them all. Devin gave him a torch as he passed, and Gorham found a shadowy doorway and aimed for it.

  “I came for you!” Peer shouted behind him. She sounded angry, but he still knew her well enough to hear the hurt.

  Gorham could answer only silently and to himself. When I’m sure that’s true, I’ll welcome you back. The corridor closed around him and he slipped into a room, leaning heavily against a wall, sobbing.

  From the large area he’d just left, he heard the hissing of Malia’s truthbugs.

  “My husband was one of those they crucified alive,” Malia said. “You remember Bren?”

  “Yes, Malia. I’m sorry.”

  Malia looked up from the table and stared at her, and Peer could see the sadness in her eyes. Anger tried to hide it, fury closed it in, but the sorrow was unmistakable.

  “Thank you,” Malia said. “I apologize, Peer. This won’t hurt. But what Gorham said is right: We need to know. A lot has changed since you …”

  “Since I was sacrificed?”

  Malia sighed and came forward, several small bugs flitting across the palm of her hand.

  Peer looked after Gorham, but he had not reappeared. Devin and the other two Watchers stood back, glancing around nervously as a whisper passed through the subterranean room once again. “I’ll tell you the truth,” she said.

  Malia nodded, then held her hand flat in front of Peer’s face and blew.

  Peer felt the bugs strike her skin. They stuck for a while, speckling her face, and then they started moving. Some went for her mouth, some her nose, and one wormed into the corner of her eye. She opened her mouth to scream but could not. The breath was frozen in her throat.

  “No,” she heard Rufus say beside her, but she could not turn to comfort him. He’d better be what I think he is, she thought, and then something changed abruptly. The pain in her right arm grew distant, the ache in her hip faded, and the coolness of the air misted away into a comfortable warmth. Everything felt fine, and she relaxed down into the chair, her body taking the weight of her tied arms.

  “Why have you come here?” Malia asked.

  “To see Gorham.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Rufus.”

  “Who’s Rufus?”

  Peer glanced sideways at the bound man.

  “Why do you think Gorham wants to see Rufus?”

  “You don’t need your little bugs for me to …” She frowned, feeling them on her, in her, and a terrible shiver ran through her body.

  “Why?” Malia prompted.

  “Because he’s from beyond Echo City. I saw him walking in across the desert, and he doesn’t know this place.”

  Malia’s eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, then closed again, as though swallowing whatever she was trying to say. “That can’t be …” she said at last.

  Peer saw the others step forward, and all the attention moved onto Rufus. And then, below the terrible feeling of those bugs still shifting inside her, she realized the urgency of what Malia had to do next.

  “Him,” Peer said, shaking and feeling a terrible sickness rising.

  “Devin, give her the drink,” Malia said, and she returned to the table.

  Devin came close to Peer and held a small goblet to her mouth, but he never took his eyes from Rufus. “Drink,” he said. “It’ll kill them. Is he really from the Bonelands?”

  “I think so,” Peer said weakly. The fluid tasted of rotten mepple, but it settled the rising vomit somehow, and she leaned back, exhausted, in her chair.

  Malia was whispering to one of the other Watchers, and the woman ran off toward where Gorham had vanished.

  “This is it,” Peer said. “This is it, isn’t it?”

  Malia threw her a strange glance but then moved toward Rufus, her hand held out and swarming with a new batch of truthbugs.

  “This is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Peer said. “It’s why I had to come.” Rufus was looking at her, eyes wide and terrified, and she tried to offer him a reassuring smile, but it would not form. She was as fascinated as all of them in what he had to say, and she found herself wishing that Gorham was there to hear.

  “There’s more that you don’t yet know,” Malia said to Peer. Then she blew the bugs into the tall man’s face.

  And when she leaned forward to ask him her first question, he began to scr
eam.

  On the rooftop of the tallest building on the highest hill in Echo City, a Baker’s child fed four Scopes and made sure their chains were secure. He liked these monsters, enjoyed the sickly wet sounds their mouths made when they opened, and breathed in the stink of them that even the stiff breeze up here could never completely carry away. He smoothed their thick, rough skin beneath their leathery covers. He scooped their shit and swept their piss to a far corner of the roof and into a chute that took it away. Sometimes he spoke to them, knowing that even if they heard they could never understand. His mother had made them well, while she had made him badly.

  His name was Nophel, and he had named himself. She had never honored him with a name. He doubted she even gave him a glance before sending him to Bedmoil, the largest workhouse in Mino Mont. It had been the greatest moment of his life when he aided in her downfall twenty years before.

  Nophel had taken his name from one of the six-legged gods of the Temple of the Seventy-seven Custodians. His Marcellan employers disliked that, and the Hanharan priests who occasionally visited him hated it. But these reactions interested him, and intellectually he knew that the name had become more than just a part of him. Nophel, so the temple’s teachings went, was the god of quiet things, and he had spent his life keeping to the shadows, whispering while others shouted and ensuring that he could go where he pleased. Old Dane Marcellan had taken to using Nophel for some of his more covert activities, and Nophel liked that well enough. Even so, alone up here with the Scopes was the only time he would reveal his mutilation to the skies.

  He fed the Western Scope, the last of the four, using a wide spoon to scoop the chickpig and mepple stew into its drooling mouth. It made small, satisfied grunting noises as it fed—the only one of the four that did—and he heard its stomach rumbling as it swallowed the food. A thick membrane slipped down and up across its massive eyeball, clearing dust and renewing its view. While it chewed its last mouthful, Nophel knelt to check its gears, mountings, and cogs. They were well greased. He pulled a lever, forcing the thing to shift its weight slightly. The complex support system moved and flexed, but he heard nothing. That was good. Next he ensured that the reading tube’s entry point to its body was not sore or infected. It entered at the back of the Scope’s neck, and Nophel hated the bristly pink junction of silk tube with rough skin, because it reminded him of his own deformed face in the mirror. There was no sign of inflammation and it was dry. That pleased him, because it meant he would not have to apply any soothing cream.

  Soon the time would come to move the Scopes around the roof, changing their positions to avoid resting sores. But not yet. That was a task he disliked because it revealed their true genesis: humanity. Covered in leather shrouds, they were monsters to him. When he moved them, seeing them walk, holding their shriveled hands to guide them across the rooftop because their eyes could see only far away, not this close in—despite all that, they seemed almost as human as he did.

  He walked one slow circuit of the roof and looked out and down over Echo City. In some directions he could just make out the pale hint of the Markoshi Desert on the horizon, but mostly it was only city he saw, the great sprawl of ages. Towers rose here and there, and the spires of temples. The arches of the failed skyride network—the metal rusting, some sections fallen into memory, as had the dozens of people killed on its first and last ride—pricked the sky to the west. But none of them was nearly as high as Hanharan Heights. It looked so timeless, yet in a thousand years this view would be completely different. The place where he now stood would have been subsumed beneath the steady march of progress, and whoever stood upon Hanharan Heights’ summit might be five hundred steps higher. And what of forever? he thought. He often attempted to wonder that far ahead. The city could not rise endlessly, and though he did not fear it—Nophel feared little—eventual stagnation, then regression, was his prediction.

  He stood longest next to the Northern Scope. It was the quietest of the four, the stillest, and there had been times when he thought it dead. But if he leaned over the roof parapet and looked at its eye, he could see the moisture there and the concentration as it looked past the spread of Crescent’s farmland at Dragar’s Canton.

  Though ten miles distant, the pale curves of Dragar’s six silent domes were clearly visible. Nophel appreciated a mystery, but this one troubled him.

  “So let’s see what’s to be seen,” he said, and the breeze stole his words away.

  He always bade the Scopes farewell, though they never answered back. Deep down, the root of their humanity must still exist; the Baker bitch had seen to that. And he liked to think that, even if they did not hear or answer, they sensed that he cared for them.

  He descended the winding staircase that led to the viewing room, fifty steps below the exposed roof. Halfway down, he tied his robe tight and lifted his hood, just in case one of the Marcellans or, gods help him, a Hanharan priest had found reason to pay him a visit. But the room was silent, other than the steady rumble of brewing five-bean and the crackle of the fire he’d set in the hearth. Warming already, mouth watering in anticipation of the brew, he glanced at the huge viewing mirror set in the center of the room. The four wide reading tubes hung down from a hole in the ceiling, and behind the viewing mirror stood the complex apparatus used to select tubes. The western tube was connected right now, and Nophel saw the glint of sun on the Tharin’s surface. It made the river appear almost alive.

  Nophel poured a large mug of five-bean and sat before the viewing mirror. As always prior to seeing what they could see, he needed to see himself. He pulled a lever and the western tube disconnected with a soft hiss, the living image on the mirror fading and then flickering to nothing.

  Nophel lowered his hood and smiled at his image. The single pale eye, his other eye a blood-red ruin. The dark skin split and bubbled with fungal growths; they would need pricking and bathing again later. His teeth were good, bright and even, and that made his smile the most monstrous aspect of all.

  “Nophel, king of all the city,” he muttered, laughing as he reconnected the western tube. Echo City’s last king had been quartered and sent to the far corners fifteen hundred years before, and Nophel’s utterance was an amusement only to himself.

  For the next hour he controlled the Western Scope with a series of levers and dials. Rising within the reading tubes were the thin pipes that carried Nophel’s hydraulic commands, and from his seat he could spur the Scope to turn its head left and right, up and down, and to extend its neck, thereby turning the great lens of its eye and bringing distant things in close. He imagined the chopped creature grunting as he turned dials and pulled or pushed levers, and perhaps it still had the taste of chickpig in its mouth as it obeyed promptings it did not understand. The Marcellans viewed the Scopes as little more than machines; Nophel alone acknowledged their spark of life.

  From the expansive farmland of Crescent Canton to the water refineries of Course, he focused in and out, enjoying the sense of flying across the city. Smoke rose from tall chimneys close to the western wall, steam drifted southward from the refineries, canals flowed, streets bustled, rathawks drifted and swooped. He could see straight along the river from here, and he tweaked a lever, commanding the Scope to close along the Tharin as far as it could. The image on the viewing mirror grew, quickly passing the city walls and reaching far out into the haze of the desert. The image paused, Nophel nudged the lever impatiently, and the Scope stretched farther. The view was now simply a mass of hazy air and pale desert landscape, but he sat staring at it for some time. The Marcellans said there was nothing beyond the city, yet here he was. He reveled in this slight rebellion, realizing that it was foolish yet enjoying it nonetheless. If the Marcellans knew where he looked, he would be in trouble—yet nothing like that worried him. He sometimes believed that Dane Marcellan—the one who had taken it upon himself to look after Nophel—was even a little scared of him. One day that fear might serve him well, but for now he simply toyed with it.

/>   Nophel worked for the Marcellans, but he lived for himself.

  The image began to waver as the Scope grew tired, and he stroked the dial that gave it permission to draw back into itself. As it did so, its sight passed across the area to the north of Course where the Baker had practiced her monstrous arts until two decades before. Nophel smiled grimly and went about switching Scopes.

  A hiss of escaping gas, the soft click of well-oiled gears, and he pumped the footrest that boosted pressure in the hydraulic systems. Draining his five-bean and going to pour more, Nophel felt the familiar thrill at what he would see next. Dragar’s Canton was always motionless, quiet, enigmatic, yet he could watch its stillness for hours. They’re down there, he would think, or maybe not, and both stark possibilities held him enraptured. The streets were full of rumors, of course, but there had been no verified sighting of a Dragarian for almost forty years.

  When he returned to the viewing mirror and turned a dial, he dropped his mug of five-bean. He barely sensed the pain as the liquid scalded his foot.

  Then he lifted his hood, closed his robe, and rushed from the room, heading down.

  There were several Scarlet Blades in the corridor outside the Marcellans’ rooms. They were lounging in wide leather seats, playing lob dice and laughing as one unfortunate lost more and more shillings. They glanced up at Nophel’s approach, and the laughter chilled.

  “I need to see Dane Marcellan,” he said.

  “Dane’s busy,” one of the tall female soldiers replied. Someone chuckled.

  “Then I’ll fucking un-busy him!” Nophel roared. One Blade stood and drew his knife; another took a step back. Nophel shook, his surprise at how he’d raged at them smothered by the fear and excitement that had taken hold.