Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  Gorham went first, chatting casually with Devin and Bethy, another Watcher. Behind them, Malia, Peer, and Rufus walked together. Malia had produced a bottle of wine and she passed it back and forth. Peer enjoyed the deep fruity taste. Rufus would lift it to his mouth, but she was certain he never drank; he just let the wine touch his lips, leaving a blush there afterward. Peer sensed the tension around them all but hoped that no one else would.

  I’m going to see the Baker’s daughter, she thought. Back before she was arrested, tortured, and banished, stories of the Baker had terrified her. The Baker had been hunted and killed by the Scarlet Blades when Peer was a teenager, but she was a legendary character throughout Echo City, and many of her chopped constructs could still be seen. There was the Scope that Peer and her mother had once seen, and the larger Scopes that watched from the top of Marcellan Canton. There were Funnelers that drew air into the tunnels and routes passing through the higher parts of Marcellan. And, as a child, Peer and her friends had delighted to rumors of a series of monstrous chopped that existed within the many water refineries dotted along the riverbank in Course and Mino Mont Cantons. They eventually came to learn that the refineries were driven by rather more mundane technologies, but the memory of that belief persisted, as did the sense it had imbued within her that anything was possible. Sometimes she dreamed of the dead Baker and her creations, and anything was a dangerous thing.

  They stopped for food and drink at a street restaurant close to the Western Reservoir. Lights bobbed out on the water as lantern fish leaped for night flies, and farther to the west they saw electrical storms out in the desert, lightning scratching out from places no living person had ever seen. Such displays had always disturbed Peer, because it made her realize that there was a land out there. Blank, featureless desert was easy to look at, because it was dead and barren and motionless. But a landscape where lightning struck was one in which something happened. She tried imagining the place where the lightning bolts hit, what they touched, whether they fused sand into glass.

  Rufus stared out across the water and said little. Gorham and Malia chatted with the other two Watchers, and Peer was left sitting alone, drinking imported Mino Mont ale and letting the taste flare a surprising nostalgia. Her mother had drunk this brew, and she’d given Peer her first glass when she was twelve. Lots of growing up to do yet, she’d said, but this is a good place to start. She died a year later.

  Peer was suddenly cold, and she laid a hand on her lower abdomen. Once, she had sensed Gorham’s seed taking life within her, but the next moon had proved her wrong. And now, watching him trying to affect casualness while his eyes and expression remained stone-serious, she wondered whether that would have changed anything at all.

  No, she thought. He’d have given me up despite that. She finished the ale and nudged Rufus, and they started walking away from the restaurant.

  Gorham and the others hurried to catch up, and Gorham fell in beside her.

  “What the crap are you doing?” he asked.

  “We’ve dawdled long enough,” she said. She had a headache from the pressure, and sweat coated her skin beneath the thick overshirt and coat.

  “Peer—”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You fucking bastard.”

  Gorham fell back, silence betraying his shock. But some things can never be forgiven, and Peer hoped he realized that. She hoped he understood.

  They crossed the border into Crescent soon after midnight, with the moon throwing their shadows before them. Gorham led the way, eyes darting left and right to ensure his peripheral vision scouted the route ahead. Since leaving the old jail, he’d had a sense of being watched and the idea that catastrophe was weighing heavily on all of them. With Peer following close behind, such a sensation brought back terrible memories.

  He’d shut her away. That realization was slowly dawning on him, and each time he looked at her, his guilt bit in harder. They’d taken her and tortured her, then sent her to Skulk, and deep down—maybe deeper than he knew, and perhaps in primeval places where his humanity held little sway—he really had thought of her as dead. It was simpler that way, and any other concept, he knew now, would have made it impossible for him to function. There was a void of loss within him, true, and he remembered her smile, and sometimes the taste of her flooded back to him and the sound of her groaning against his neck as she came. But if these memories manifested when he was asleep, her groan would turn into a cry of pain, and however hard he looked he would not be able to find her. And so, awake, he had tried to ignore the fact that she was still alive. Guilt and pain had fed his delusion: that Skulk was an afterlife, a place where people went when they were dead, and there was no way back. Souls as well as corpses fell into the Chasm, so it was said. But Peer had never taken that fall, and so he had created his own mythology surrounding her departure.

  And now here she was, as alive as he was, and in as much peril as all of them. He wanted to hug her and whisper that he was sorry—she had returned expecting to find her lover, not a man who had betrayed her—but that would never do. Worse than giving her up to the Marcellans and their Hanharan torturer, worse than sacrificing his love for what everyone told him was the greater good, was persuading himself to think of her as dead—and he was becoming more and more certain that she knew exactly what he had done.

  And now they were going to see the Baker. If his overwhelming guilt could have a name, he would call it Nadielle.

  The fields of Crescent were mostly deserted at night, home only to the wildlife that hid away during the day. As they followed the road that he had walked so recently toward the Baker’s laboratories, cries and howls drifted across the fields, crops wavered and whispered where things passed by, and an expectant silence accompanied them from very close by. Things fell quiet when humans were near.

  They met only a few people coming from the other direction, mostly traders hauling wagons laden with fruit and vegetables. One man walked alone with only a tall staff in one hand, a small bag in the other, and he did not glance at them as they passed on the narrow road. Peer tried to offer him a greeting—Gorham smiled at that, because she had always been garrulous and friendly—but the man did not even turn his head. Looking back as the stroller passed them by, Gorham caught Peer’s eye and offered a tentative smile. She looked down at her feet. Garrulous once, yes, but now there was a caution to her that he had never seen before.

  Of course, you fool. You caused that. He sighed angrily and marched on, picking up speed so that the others had to hurry to catch up.

  A mile before the abandoned farm complex that hid their route down to the Baker, Gorham called a halt. To the west towered several mepple orchards, dark smudges against the moon- and starlit sky, and the vague lights from night wisps drifted in and around them as the creatures patrolled against fruit eaters. Other than the glow of Marcellan Canton to the east, theirs were the only lights visible in any direction. The landscape here was completely given to farmland, and the scattered farmsteads were shut down for the night, families resting for the next day of toil.

  Gorham sat on a low stone wall at the side of the road, ignoring Malia’s questioning glance.

  “What is it?” Peer asked. Rufus sat on the ground against the wall, head rested back and eyes filled with moonlight.

  “Not too far from here,” he said, frowning slightly at Malia. Say nothing, that frown said. Malia looked away, taking a pipe from her pocket and thumbing it full of tobacco.

  “So why are we stopping?”

  “Because this way down to the Baker is a secret,” he said. “It’s the Watchers’ way. Maybe she sees other people—with Nadielle, nothing would surprise me—but if she does, they’ll have their own route to her laboratories.”

  Peer sat beside him on the wall. Not close enough for contact, but they could talk without having to raise their voices. On the ground beside her, Rufus had closed his eyes.

  “I am a Watcher,” she said.

  “Peer—”


  “You want to blindfold me? In case I’m caught and tortured and—”

  “Please!” he said, and his voice sounded more beseeching than he’d intended.

  She offered a weak smile that the starlight barely illuminated.

  “Not you,” he said. “Rufus. I don’t want him seeing where we’re going, and if you think about it for a minute you’ll understand. Don’t you understand?”

  Peer looked at the tall man—he seemed to be dozing now, the rise and fall of his chest even and calm, even though he frowned deeply—and then rubbed her hands across her face. Gorham saw her wince as her right elbow bent, aggravating the air shards buried there.

  “Of course,” she said. “None of us really knows …” She rested a hand on Rufus’s shoulder. He mumbled something and leaned against her leg.

  “Nadielle will know what to do,” Gorham said. She has to, he thought. And for a moment he almost told Peer about Nadielle and him, their confused and confusing relationship, but perhaps right then that would be a betrayal too far. I left a man in Skulk, she had told him, but he didn’t believe she was talking about a lover. For all he knew, she had waited for him and there had been no one since her torture and banishment. He hoped there had, but it was a selfish hope, seeking only to assuage his own guilt.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting her,” Peer said. Gorham could not make out how honest his old lover was being. Her eyes, silvered by pale starlight, betrayed nothing.

  He hears them talking, and then the feeling of the cold wall against his back is replaced by warm sheets, and blankets cover him against the cold coming off the womb vats in waves.

  He sits up, stretching the sleep from his limbs and rubbing his eyes. Dawn peers in the row of high windows along the eastern face of the old warehouse. Dust motes dance in the sunlight, and several small birds flit back and forth between metal bracings high in the open roof space. Rufus stands from the bed—

  (that’s not my name, this is not my home)

  —and looks around for his mother. As far as he can remember, he has never woken before she has. Even in the night, when screaming nightmares rouse him or illness shivers him awake with fever and sweats, she is already sitting on the edge of his bed, offering comfort. He is used to always having her with him, and whenever she is not in sight, he grows nervous.

  There are no memories older than a few months, and the absence is one of his greatest fears. It is also the fear his mother does least to calm. There, there, she says when he talks about his lost years, it doesn’t matter, only the now matters.

  He dresses quickly and descends the ladder from the raised sleeping platform at one end of the warehouse. The stone floor below is cold, even though he wears thick-bottomed sandals, and a light mist plays around his ankles. If he concentrates, he can feel the cold mist kissing his skin. His mother will never tell him what she is working on next. Sometimes, the things she makes scare him. And sometimes they scare her as well. Once he asked why she did what she did, on an evening when tiredness seemed ready to wither her to nothing and tears hung suspended in her eyes—held back, he knew, only by her love and concern for him. Because it’s all I can do, she had replied, and he had never heard her so low. The next day she’d been bright and cheery, as if the sun had reignited her optimism.

  “Mother?” he calls. His voice echoes around the cavernous warehouse. It was once home to produce brought from Crescent on vast barges across the Western Reservoir, but when more people started crossing the border to select their own, the barges ceased sailing. Sometimes the room still stinks of rotten mepple and dart-root leaves. “Mother?”

  There is no answer. He walks toward the vats, keeping close to the wall and sunlight because he never likes going too close. They’re strange. Sometimes they vibrate as if something is turning around inside too fast to see; other times they drip water and tick, expanding and contracting as the processes work away. And occasionally he hears sounds. The scraping of bony, sharp things across their inner surfaces. Bubbles breaking surface. Whispers.

  There are four large vats and then eight smaller ones, and by the time he’s passed them all, Rufus is aching for a pee. This end of the warehouse is home to his mother’s workrooms, several smaller areas partitioned off from the main hall by timber walls barely higher than her head. In one there is a toilet and a huge iron bath, and he heads there now to relieve himself and wash sleep and dreams from his skin.

  “He’s not yours yet,” his mother’s voice says. That’s all. The silence that follows is heavy, like a bubble ready to burst or a claw about to scrape up the inside of a vat. Rufus—

  (what is my name, what does she call me other than son …?)

  —freezes, breath held and one foot raised. He lowers it gently, glancing down to avoid stepping on anything—grit, paper, an insect—that might make the slightest sound. He lets out his held breath, then opens his mouth to slowly draw in another.

  And then the voice comes, and it sets his skin tingling.

  “All for us, Baker. Our commission, Baker.” It’s a horrible voice, wet and guttural, and each word is formed by someone or something that does not usually speak the language. And though awkward and forced, its disdain for his mother is palpable.

  “He’s not quite ready,” his mother says. She sounds weak. Rufus is not used to that.

  He sees most of the people his mother works for, and though he does not really understand the forces of commerce when applied to his mother’s gifts and talents, he likes the fact that they have visitors. Smiling Hanharan priests with their soft hands and ready smiles, Scarlet Blade soldiers wearing smart uniforms and swords, businessmen from Marcellan Canton with strange ideas that his mother nods at, adapts, and re-creates; they all provide color and variety to the days, now that …

  Now that she no longer takes him out. It’s too dangerous, she said recently, and that was after she’d been drinking wine and sinking lower and lower in her wide seat. Since then she’d forbidden him to ask why.

  Rufus moves softly, slowly, heading for the door leading to a small storeroom. It is always left open because his mother says, Stuff in there needs to air. He touches the cool wood and waits for that deep, strange voice to come again before pushing it open. He cannot quite hear the words this time—the voice is lower and quieter, a burgeoning threat. In the room, he breathes easier and looks around.

  None of these partitioned rooms has a ceiling. He looks at where the sloping ceiling of the great hall meets the outside wall at the far end of the storeroom. There are shadows there, and heavy spiderwebs. And, piled in the corner, wooden boxes that he can never recall seeing opened, moved, or touched.

  The conversation continues, his mother’s voice steady but afraid, the stranger’s deep and difficult. Neither voice is raised, but Rufus has seen enough to know that there is nothing friendly here. It’s too dangerous, his mother said, and he wonders whether, after this, staying inside will be too dangerous as well.

  He climbs the boxes, taking his time. They creak and groan, but no one seems to hear. On the highest box, lying almost flat, he lifts his head slowly to peer over the top of the partition, and when he sees the thing talking to his mother, he draws in a sharp breath, ignoring the spider that is crawling across his forehead toward his left eye, not seeing his mother’s startled look as she spots him … seeing nothing but the thing turning its head and fixing him with its piercing indigo eyes, then lowering slowly to its knees and stretching out its spidery hands for him—

  “Rufus!” Peer was shaking him, slapping him softly around the face.

  “What is it?” Malia asked.

  “Nothing.” She shook some more and Rufus started awake, pushing away from the wall and wiping at his left eye, his right hand held out before him to ward off something none of them could see. “It’s fine,” she said softly, grasping his seeking hand and squeezing tight.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Gorham demanded. “He was acting strange back in Course, and now this?”

&
nbsp; “He’s confused,” Peer said. She resisted talking slowly, as to a child, because that would be petty. “He’s overwhelmed and afraid.”

  “Well, try to calm him,” Gorham said. “If he’s worried now, when we go down to the Baker …” He trailed off, but the implication was clear.

  “What’s down there?” she asked, looking up at Gorham. He liked to stand that way, she remembered, while I took him in my mouth. Maybe it always was about dominance with him.

  Gorham squatted close to her, glancing up at the Watchers and nodding along the road. Keep watch, that look said. Peer had yet to ask him how many Watchers there were left, and whether they all ever met, and what exactly he was now leading.

  “She’s careful,” he said, glancing back and forth between Rufus and Peer. “She has to be. Not many people know about her, and as far as she’s aware, the Marcellans think her mother died and left nothing. They think they ended the ancient line of Bakers, and she likes it that way.”

  “What happened to her work?” Rufus asked, and there was something more than curiosity in his voice.

  “The old Baker? After she was killed, they destroyed everything. I can still remember the fire, though I was a teenager then. Didn’t know what any of it meant, only that the Scarlet Blades had caught and executed … I think they called her a ‘threat to the city.’ The fire burned for three days, and by the time it started dwindling, they’d set up food stalls and ale wagons for the curious.”

  Rufus nodded, still holding Peer’s hand. His own was slick with sweat.

  “Why?” Gorham asked.

  “I’m interested,” Rufus said. “You’re taking me to see this important woman, whom the rest of the city knows little about. The rulers of your city killed her mother. I’m wondering …” He looked away, and Peer thought, Just what is he wondering?