Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “They know they can never destroy our beliefs and aims,” Malia said, “and they suspect there are still Watchers in the city. They’d kill Rufus as a Pretender and proclaim a day of celebration the moment they laid hands on him.”

  “Aren’t there people you can trust?” Peer asked. Something seemed so wrong here—a visitor who had crossed the Markoshi Desert, one of the most incredible things ever to happen to Echo City, and they could tell no one.

  “With this? I trust Malia,” Gorham said. “Devin. A few other Watchers.” He looked around, stroking one cheek as if searching for someone else.

  “The new Baker?” Peer asked.

  Gorham did not answer.

  “Her name’s Nadielle,” Malia said. “And we have to take Rufus to her now!”

  No, Peer thought. But she knew they were right: Rufus might have come to the city as a lost, confused man, but circumstances she knew nothing about were turning him into a potential savior.

  The three of them sat for a while, drinking their five-bean and relishing what was left of silence.

  “We’re taking you to see someone,” Peer said. Rufus lifted his head, and he was still terrified. She saw the potential for further screams in his eyes, and he suddenly looked much older. I thought he was thirty, she thought. But now maybe sixty.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Her name’s Nadielle. I’ve never met her. She’s … we call her a flesh artist. The Baker.”

  “Artist,” he said softly.

  “We think she might be able to help.”

  “Will she hurt me?” Rufus asked, and Peer felt her throat tighten, her eyes burn.

  “No, she won’t,” she said. “But you must realize that my friends don’t trust you yet. You killed Gerrett.”

  “But I thought he was—”

  “I know, Rufus. I know.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I still haven’t told anyone about the Border Spite.”

  “Why? I was … protecting us both.”

  Is he really so innocent? she thought. His eyes said so, and his voice, and the way he was almost cowered down before her, like a submissive hound. But she could not shake that poison gun from her mind, nor the way he’d swung into action so smoothly when he thought it necessary. As if he’d been prepared rather than aimless.

  “I don’t want them to see you as a killer,” she said.

  His face relaxed a little and he nodded.

  Peer looked around the small cell where they were holding Rufus. They hadn’t locked the door—the mechanism was rusted and jammed—and Malia told Peer they’d taken him there to recover. But Devin had been standing outside the cell ever since, a sword on his belt. He’d said nothing when she came to see the visitor, but Peer could feel his eyes on the back of her neck. I can hardly blame them for guarding him, she thought, and she remembered Gerrett and his easy laugh.

  The cell wall was damp with moss, and in the corner the hole in the floor that had once been the latrine was filled with dead rats. A hundred years before, real murderers might have inhabited this cell. She wondered what these walls had absorbed—confessions, tears, shouts of rage. Now, perhaps, they were witness to the beginning of the end.

  “When are we going?” Rufus asked.

  “Soon,” Peer said.

  “Now,” Gorham said as he entered the room. He glanced at Rufus, then fixed his attention on Peer. “There’s no time to waste.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s in her laboratories. We’ll take you.”

  “What are laboratories?” Rufus asked.

  Gorham looked at him, and Peer could not tell whether Rufus’s expression was expectation or fear. Probably a bit of both. “It’s where she chops,” Gorham said. “Where she makes things.”

  Malia came in behind him, crowding the small cell. “It’ll be almost dark,” she said. “Now’s a good time.”

  “How far?” Peer asked.

  “Just follow me.” Gorham could not hold her gaze. He still doesn’t trust why I came here, she thought, and she motioned to Rufus to follow them out, Malia bringing up the rear. A flush of anger hit Peer again, aching her head, driving her heart. The bastard had lied to her, had given her up to die! She shook her head to try to clear it, but that only seemed to confuse things more.

  Maybe it wasn’t that he mistrusted her. Maybe it was guilt. I forgive you, she thought, but she could not imagine saying it, could not mean it—not to this man who was so different from the one she thought she’d known. Perhaps given time. But if what the Watchers had been awaiting for generations really was coming true, time was something none of them had.

  Sprote Felder went back down. He never spent more than a few days aboveground, because he found it claustrophobic and constricting, and the sky took his breath away. He discovered his greatest freedom belowground, where the undersides of later times formed the skies, and phantoms from the past whispered to him like the dregs of old dreams. Sometimes he understood what these whisperers were saying; other times their words formed exotic and unknown shapes, like vague mumblings of the mad. He had spent much of his life down in the Echoes, exploring and recording, and the histories of Crescent Canton especially were a source of constant pleasure and fascination. He was always cautious and alert, and occasionally he had been scared. But he had never been terrified—until now.

  His father had once told him, To most people, history is a dead thing, but in reality it still exists—but is forgotten. Down in the underside of Echo City, he strove to remember.

  His porters had fled. He hired them from the taverns and slash dens of Mino Mont’s Southern Quarter—a place that many thought of as a stepping-stone to Skulk. Most people in the quarter were involved in crime in one way or another, be it as perpetrators or beneficiaries. It was a way of life there, with children introduced at a young age and given the only choice of their pitiful lives when they struck adulthood: which branch of crime to enter into. The possibilities were endless, the uptake huge, and few people escaped the circle of life that persisted in that place. The only reason the Marcellans allowed the quarter’s existence was that it provided many things that they and their families and friends enjoyed. The city’s best slash was refined in the quarter, in dens deep in Mino Mont’s newer Echoes, where sunlight could not damage the stock. Some of the larger brothels ran schooling camps, where young girls were taught the ways of sex by an array of visiting dignitaries, Scarlet Blades, and Hanharan priests. And if a dirty deed needed performing that was below even the Marcellans’ guard of Scarlet Blades, the quarter was the place to look. Countless taverns held countless shady corners, where killers beyond number drank and waited.

  It had not always been that way. Seven hundred years before, Mino Mont had produced some of the finest musicians, artists, and writers that the city had ever known, and there was still no consensus on why the area had become so corrupt and violent. Some said it was creativity driven back to its basic, wild core. Others suggested that creativity and insanity went hand in hand, and the Mino Mont of today was certainly a product of some sort of madness. Whatever the reason, Sprote found that the people of the quarter produced the best porters. In almost twenty years of exploring the Echoes and employing hundreds of people from Mino Mont, he’d had only one turn on him. That man was way down in the Echoes, his eyes put out by his companions, and sometimes Sprote had nightmares that he was still alive.

  But now his helpers had gone. Strong men, hard women—only half of those who had come down with him previously had returned on this journey. And of those, only three had crossed the deep Echo border between Crescent and Marcellan Cantons. They had all heard what the Garthans had to say last time, though Sprote was not convinced that anyone but him could speak Garthan well enough to truly understand. And when they had felt the first distant vibrations, like the secret heartbeat of the city itself, those remaining had turned and fled.

  “You should come with us,” the last woman had said.

  “I can’t,” Sprot
e Felder had replied. “This is where I live.”

  He’d watched them leave, walking along a dusty street buried beneath progress for maybe five thousand years, then he’d entered an old dwelling and lit a fire in the hearth. For a long time he had sat there, feeding the fire, snaring ghourt lizards and spitting them over the flames, and thinking about where he was going and what he might find. Shadows moved where there had been no movement for a hundred generations. In another room in the house, a phantom whispered in an old language. And Sprote had known that the only way for him to go was down.

  He knew the Echoes, and the sounds that reverberated there, as no one else did. Heading deep beneath Marcellan, passing through Echoes that were still talked about in hushed tones—sometimes awed, sometimes feared—he heard the sound of the River Tharin. It was the city’s endless sigh. He was used to the sound from his times beneath Course Canton, but there the river was still on the surface, where some of its power was expended to the sky and the water refineries added their own booming accompaniment to the river’s whisper. Here, where the river itself had been built over, its power was contained. Its voice echoed. And as he finally left that dwelling and started deeper, memories of his one and only visit to Echo City Falls began to surface.

  He’d been there fifteen years before and vowed never to go again. The Falls carved their way through the rock of the land, the foundation of the place that had become Echo City, and those caves and caverns had been a stark reminder to Sprote that there was a time before the city. He had never been a great believer in Hanharan and the associated creation myths, but during that time down by the Falls, he had understood where some might find comfort in such beliefs. It was a basic, wild place, where the only sign of the city and its Echoes was the steady stream of bodies that the Falls carried away. He’d seen dozens in the short time he was close—the dead swept away by those dead waters, arms and legs waving goodbye to someone who should never have been watching. His porters at the time had been terrified, and the torches they carried had cast dancing reflections across the Falls as they shook in fear.

  Below the Falls … even Sprote had not gone that deep. He’d heard tales of the bottomless pit—the Chasm—swallowing the river and its grisly cargo into a darkness that was home to a thousand fearful myths. Some said that the city was built on nothing, and that one day the Chasm would consume it whole. Others claimed that the Echoes made up some vast, mindless creature’s face and that the Falls carried the city’s dead down into its endless gullet. But explorer though he was, some things were best left unseen. Sprote believed that the sight of this Chasm would swallow his sanity, sucking it down like the countless dead of Echo City over the eons.

  Now he was breaking his own promise to himself and returning. Fascination, and also a vague sense of duty, drew him. He’d made himself the authority on these deep places, and now that something was here, he felt that he should be the first to know.

  He was deep and had to go much deeper. And already, as well as the whisper of the dead River Tharin far above and the rumbling of the Falls a mile or two to the west, he could hear something else.

  Something rising.

  Nophel sat naked in his rooms and looked around at what he had. Each book held worlds, but all those worlds were aspects of Echo City. Some volumes could be construed as Watcher material—highly imaginative texts concerning what might be beyond. He had an illicit copy of Benjermen Daxia’s Truth—An Exhortation to Revolt. But even these were inextricably bound to the city. Nophel had read nothing of their persuasion that made him believe anything other than that they were written by good fictionalists. If the Council knew he had these tomes, he would likely be in trouble. But that was what Dane was for. Protection.

  Other books and objects concerned his mother and those generations of Bakers before her. Reading them was an exquisite torture.

  He rolled the small metal flask back and forth across the fingers of his right hand. He felt the liquid in there shifting with the flask and played with its weight. I won’t see that water, he thought. I’ll barely even feel it. Nophel breathed deeply. He loved the smell of his rooms. If he drank Blue Water and disappeared, like everyone else who had ever tried it, he would miss the scent of books and maps and olden times.

  But he had to try.

  They had found it in his dead mother’s rooms. She had already destroyed him by the time he was old enough to talk, so he had no fear of her now.

  He opened the flask and sniffed at its contents. There was very little smell, only the sharp tang of metal. Taking one last look around his rooms, Nophel put the lip of the flask to his mouth and upended it.

  His saliva drew back, something pushing it across his tongue and around the insides of his cheeks, and his mouth flooded with cold. He gasped and dropped the flask, leaning back in his metal-framed chair. When he breathed out, his breath misted before him, quickly dissipating in the warmth. Speckles of moisture clung on to his wispy mustache and beard. Blue Water, he thought, and when he tried to hold his hand up before his face, his arm would not work. There’s something wrong, he thought, closing his eyes to hold down the panic. Death had never been a fear for Nophel, but he was no lover of pain.

  He tried once more to lift his arm and hand, turn it before his face … but again it did not work. “Am I paralyzed?” he asked, and as his mouth opened to speak, the words came out. He tapped his feet against the floor, and the impacts were clearly audible. Leaning forward in the chair, he stood smoothly, feeling no impingement in any muscles or joints.

  Lift again, he thought, and this time he knew he lifted his hand. He felt air moving against the tiny hairs on his forearm as it shifted position. Sending the command to bring his hand closer to his face so he could see, he slapped himself across the nose.

  “I can’t see my hand,” he said. Nophel looked down, and he was no longer there. At least not completely, though there were shadows in the air where none should be cast, and when he moved those shadows shifted. He ran both hands across his chest and stomach, down across his groin, bending so that he could run them all the way down his legs to his feet. He felt the cool air touching his body and stirring at his movements, but he saw only a hint of himself.

  Nophel laughed. His mother had touched him again, from the distance of twenty years and through the veil of death. He only hoped that wherever her body and soul were still falling into the bottomless Chasm, she felt his derision and hatred more strongly than ever before.

  He shrugged on a long, heavy coat. For a moment it hung on nothing, then slowly it faded until it, too, was little more than shadow. He had not been sure, but he was pleased that he could go clothed, and armed, and ready to face whatever might be out there. It wasn’t often that Nophel ventured into the city, and even unseen he felt danger pressing down on him already.

  “Good,” he said, standing before a tall mirror and not seeing himself. And he began to concentrate. I am there, he thought. That’s me, I am there … It did not take very long. The Blue Water acted on the minds of those around him, rather than on his own physiology, and knowing that enabled him to control its effects upon his own mind. The initial shock had rendered him invisible to himself, and that had been comforting. It meant that the strange fluid was working. But now he focused upon those shadows in the mirror, shifting left and right so that he could see them becoming thicker, stronger, until the shadows had gone and he saw himself. It was unsettling, but Nophel had been ready for it. He manifested out of surprise, formed from nothing, and by the time he could look in the mirror and no longer see bookshelves through the back of his head, he knew that it was time to go.

  He left his rooms and locked the door. Walking softly through the darkened corridors of Hanharan Heights, he headed down ramps and staircases toward the wide courtyards surrounding them. He passed a maid, a whore, and a group of Scarlet Blades playing nine-sided dice against a wall, and the only reaction he saw was from the whore. She paused before him, gathering her robes around her and pressing he
r forefinger across her tattooed lips in the familiar Hanharan blessing. Frowning, she moved quickly on.

  Outside, the setting sun cast his shadow across ancient pavings as he started his journey north. He knew that few people would see that long shadow, and if they did they would run in the opposite direction.

  I’m safe, he thought. My bitch mother has made me safe. The streets of Marcellan Canton were busy as dusk approached. People rode toward home in one of the seven giant steam wagons, their faces wan and tired from a day spent working in whichever bank, government office, or shop employed them. The wagons rolled on circular tracks around the canton, moving every hour except one each day, when their reservoirs were refilled and their engines rewound. Nophel stood beside the track as one passed by, and if anyone noticed the man-shaped hollow in the steam cloud, they made no sign.

  Many other people chose to walk or ride in tusked-swine-pulled trailers. The streets smelled of cooking food, dust-tainted steam, ale and wine from one of the taverns doing a brisk dusk trade, and swine shit. Nophel walked confidently, enjoying the looks of befuddlement as he passed people by. Perhaps some glimpsed a flicker of what he was, but then the Blue Water influence would work its mystery upon their senses, and he’d be gone before they knew why they felt so confused or unsettled. More than one person stopped in their tracks and started to talk to him—but found themselves muttering into thin air. Some blushed and hurried on, heads bowed so that they did not have to see any observers’ smiles or looks of concern. Others headed straight into taverns or restaurants, where the food and drink would divert them. Only a few turned and watched him leave, not seeing, not knowing, but watching nonetheless. These, Nophel guessed, were the ones most likely to suffer nightmares.

  He had no wish to inspire nightmares. He bore no ill will toward anyone alive. But this disguise would soon become a necessity, and he kept that in mind as he walked on. And there was that subtle feeling of power that he had experienced only once before.

  Then, he’d been alone in his rooms. The walls had been lined with fewer books, the furniture slightly less worn and shaped to his bones and flesh, and he’d waited while they went to find his mother.