by Tim Lebbon
Mechanical things slid across that massive space on fine wires, clouds of smoke hanging behind them and dispersing slowly to the air. Peer could hear the gently clasping wheels that must drag them along the cables and the rattle of cogs and springs.
On the way in, she’d had time to wonder what she would see. A continuation of what was outside, perhaps, an echo of Echo City yet on its own level. And there were some who believed that this society must have gone to ruin, that after the construction of these incredible domes, the Dragarians’ isolation would have caused strife, war, and regression. These people expected the domes to be inhabited by the animallike descendants of Dragar’s believers, and the ruins themselves would be a wild hunting ground.
Surely no one could have anticipated this.
“Where are they all?” Malia whispered, and Peer gasped. She’d been so amazed by the scenery that she had not yet noticed it was uninhabited.
“I don’t know,” Nophel said. “Alexia, will you …?” She was already fading in again, her mouth open in surprise. The other two Unseen followed suit. They leaned against the canal bank with the others, looking pale and exhausted but most of all amazed.
“I’ve never seen it deserted,” Alexia said. “It’s always … alive.”
“I don’t like it,” the thin man said, and to Peer he sounded like a frightened child.
“So if they’ve all gone,” Malia said, “how the fuck are we going to find Rufus?”
Peer closed her eyes, breathing deeply and yet unable to drive down the burgeoning fear. “It’s obvious,” she said. “Don’t you see?”
“No,” Malia said angrily.
“You know who they think Rufus is. They think he’s Dragar. We find where all the Dragarians have gone, and there we’ll find him.”
“Oh,” Alexia said.
Malia snorted. “Right. That’ll be easy.”
“Easy or not, we have to do it,” Peer said. “If we can’t, we might as well decide now: die in here, or die outside.”
Gorham watched Nadielle work. Having a plan in mind and an end in sight seemed to have settled her a little, and she moved about the vat room with a sense of purpose.
Gorham sometimes followed Nadielle and sometimes explored on his own. Those many-bladed things remained motionless in shadowy corners. He avoided them but felt no threat from them anymore. She’d told him they would not hurt him. It was amazing how quickly he could get used to something like that.
And perhaps over time he had become too used to the Baker. Because, watching her work, he realized once again just how incredible she was.
On occasion he fetched food from her rooms—chopped fruit and salads and dried meats—and they would eat and sit on some of the boxes and benches set around the perimeter of the vat room. If she spoke, it was to comment on the meat’s taste, the fruit’s ripeness. She said nothing about what she was doing, and he guessed it was because she was uncomfortable being observed.
But this is the last time, he thought. Soon she’ll go, and I’ll never see her again.
She climbed a ladder beside the womb vat she was working on most diligently. Others were steaming and hissing, popping and scraping, and she tended them quickly and efficiently. But this particular vat—she put her body and soul into tending it. Gorham’s seed had gone in there, and something of Nadielle as well. He dreaded the times she asked him to climb and water, because he did not wish to see.
Soon, she had told him several times already. She was thin and pale, her face seemingly shrunken, and he wondered whether, by giving life to the thing in that vat, she was dying a little in the process.
When Nadielle descended the ladder and hurried through the door into her rooms, he dashed after her. At first he could not see her and he began to panic. Is there another way out? Has she gone without even saying—
But then there was movement in the corner of the room, and she emerged from the shadows carrying another book.
“I can’t trust myself,” she said. “My memory is … haunted.”
“Haunted by what?”
“What I’ve seen.” She dropped the book onto the table, and it fell open in a cloud of dust. “What I have to face.”
Gorham coughed, wiping dust from his eyes. The dust of her ancestors, he thought.
“When will you go?” he asked softly.
“Soon.” She did not even glance at him. The pages of the book were too important to her, and he left her to them, closing the door to the toilet room and leaning against the door as he pissed in the pot. His piss stank; he needed a drink. We’re trying so hard to look after everyone else, we’ve forgotten to look after ourselves.
He wondered where Peer was right then and hoped that she was safe. Since last seeing her, he had been down to the deepest Echo of the city, seen things that few living people had ever seen, and discovered a monster that might mean the end of everything they knew. But if he saw her right then, his first inclination would not be to tell her these things. It would be to hold her.
Nadielle had never just let him hold her. There always had to be something else.
Outside again, Nadielle was leaning over the book, scanning its pages. She did not look up when he approached.
“I’m not sure I can let you do this,” he said.
Now Nadielle looked up, expressionless. “You’d try to stop me?”
Gorham did not reply. Though there was no threat to her voice, she’d sounded so cold.
“No choice,” she said. “It’s happening now, and I can’t turn it back.” She returned to her book, and Gorham slapped his hand onto the table. The anger was sudden and unexpected, and it shocked him as much as it did her.
“Then include me, at least!” he shouted. “I’m wandering these rooms like a lost puppy, and you’re working as if I’m not even here. As if I was never here.”
“Are you serious?” she asked, smiling in surprise.
Gorham already felt cowed and embarrassed. He looked away.
“This is so much more than us,” she whispered.
“Was there ever ‘us’?”
For a moment so brief he wasn’t sure he saw it at all, Nadielle’s eyes softened and her lips trembled. Then she was hard again, flipping a page in the book and running her finger along the lines as she read.
“You told me I was your sunlight.”
“It’s dark!” she shouted. “Darker than ever. Get off your own ass and wake up!” She ran both hands through her hair, then turned the book on the table so that it faced him, spilling loose sheets and another book to the floor. “Here. You want me to include you? I need the chemicals listed on the top half of this page, in those exact amounts. Bottles and measuring jars are in my cupboards. All labeled.” She leaned in close and he smelled her breath, knowing that she was already becoming a memory. “Don’t spill a drop. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t mess it up, Gorham.”
She left the room and he glanced down at the book, her family history written in a hand the Baker could call her own. Closing his eyes, breathing deeply, he wondered whether the next Baker could be so cold.
It took Gorham a while to collect the powders, fluids, and carefully weighed tablets. Carrying them all on a wooden tray, he went out into the vat room and spotted Nadielle tending the special vat once more. She sat on its rim, both feet on the ladder’s highest rung, and she seemed to be whispering. She glanced at him, then pricked at her hand with a small knife. She squeezed several drops of her blood into the vat and then sheathed the knife, climbing down the ladder mindless of the blood smearing its wooden rungs.
“You should bind that,” he said.
“I’ll be needing it again. Thank you.” She took the tray from him and placed it on the ground, mixing and stirring, careful not to spill or waste.
“How long will it be?” he asked.
“No time,” she said. “I’ll be leaving soon.”
“So this new Baker …” he began, but it was too confusing.
Nadielle stood and took his
hands. The move surprised him, but there was no affection or warmth to her touch. Just because she thinks she needs to, he thought.
“What I’m about to ask you is a true responsibility,” she said. “Not like leading some underground political group or trying to take on the guilt for bad decisions you might have made. A real responsibility. My mother chopped me before she died and birthed me herself, and virtually every new Baker is welcomed into the world by the old Baker that chopped her. That’s part of our duty and part of the way we cope with how and what we are. But I’m handing this duty to you. Because I must, and I trust you, and trust that you want the best for Echo City.”
“I do,” he said. “I always have.”
“And this is for the best, believe me. I know what I’m doing.” She glanced aside at one of the bladed things sitting against the wall. “Here, at least.”
“And down there?” Gorham asked.
“Down there, I’ll do whatever I can.”
“To right a wrong.”
“Bakers never make mistakes, Gorham. They simply explore too far.” She smiled softly, let go of his hands, and grabbed the glass mixing pot by her feet. Climbing the ladder, she nursed the pot carefully against her chest, then emptied it into the vat as soon as she reached the top. She dropped the glass pot and bit at the cut on her hand, squeezing out more blood.
“Is it happening now?” Gorham asked, because he felt a sudden change in the chamber’s air. The bladed things had gone from relaxed to alert and expectant, and it was as if their blades were held at attention, a potential of violence almost unbearable in its intensity. Some formed a wide circle around the womb vat, several more stayed back, going to the doors that led to the Echo outside. Guarding. Though guarding against someone coming in or something going out, Gorham was not sure.
“New weapons,” Nadielle said. “My daughter will take a while longer.” She was staring lovingly into the vat, her face softer than he had seen for some time. Not vulnerable, as she had been down in the Echoes when she demanded his intimacy, but strangely content, even with everything she had done and what she was about to face. Right then she was beautiful, and Gorham mourned for the woman she might have been.
Three other vats began to bulge. Some unseen, unheard message must have been relayed to them, and they started to spout steam and gas, sides cracking, fluids gushing from the ruptures.
“Nadielle,” Gorham said.
“You’ll want to stand back,” she said. She waited a moment longer atop the ladder, looking down into that one special vat before descending.
Gorham had witnessed Neph’s birth, and through the fascinated disgust he had felt privileged. But watching these new things born from Nadielle’s womb vats inspired only horror.
How she could have grown them so quickly, he had no clue. The talents handed down through the Baker’s generations were so arcane and mysterious that they’d be called magic by most, though he knew that she vehemently repudiated any such descriptions. Magic’s for the frightened and the indoctrinated, she’d told him once, and for those without the imagination to see how amazing things can really be. They’d been naked on her bed at the time, and recalling the conversation now, he recognized it as another moment when he had not really been there for her. She’d used his presence to talk to herself.
Perhaps the speed with which these things had been chopped went some way to explaining the terrible screams as they were birthed. They came to the world in agony, three of them emerging from vats with the help of their many-bladed and spiked limbs, forcing their way out as if inside was torture, only to discover that outside was worse. They thrashed and rolled in the thick fluids that spilled around them. Gorham backed away, closer to the Baker’s rooms but unable to hide himself away entirely. He was shocked and afraid in equal measures but still certain that Nadielle would allow no harm to come to him.
Unless she’s rushed it. Unless, in her desperation, she’s made a mistake.
But then she was walking among her new creations, and now Gorham could see just how large they were. He’d subconsciously been comparing them to the dozen bladed guards that slinked around the vat hall, but these things were at least five times the size of those, and there was nothing even vaguely humanoid about them at all. They were flesh, blood, and metal, monstrous mergings of soft and hard. Their blades glittered with sharpness, their spikes were slick with afterbirth, hands were heavy with studs, and what might have been their heads—he wasn’t sure, but he thought each creature had at least three—bore vicious white horns as protection around their mouths and eyes. In those mouths were silvery teeth that already had shredded their lips and tongues, the blood adding to the terrible mix smeared across the floor. And in those eyes was nothing he could recognize.
Nadielle spoke, and a bladed guard darted toward each of the newborns. The giant creatures lashed out, piercing the smaller chopped, picking them up with blades or fists, depositing them in mouths that opened up where Gorham had not noticed them before. The sound of chomping was appalling—crunching, crushing, splitting, bursting, and brief cries as three lives were snuffed out.
When the newborns had finished chewing, they were somewhat calmed, and Nadielle repeated those words. Three more guards walked in, a little slower than the first. They suffered the same fate.
She turned from her new creations and walked toward Gorham, unconcerned, turning her back on monsters that would give him nightmares forever. Just before she reached him, her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and she collapsed to the floor.
As he rushed to her side, he saw her right eye suddenly flush red with blood. And the new monsters began to howl.
Neph had been sitting for so long, listening to the sounds increasing in volume and frequency, that it could no longer feel its legs. When the time came, it lit its torch and shone it at the wall of water. At the place where the water fell beyond view, a shadow appeared. Neph had seen many shadows already, the dead from a city it would never know. But they were always falling.
This shadow rose.
Neph stood, legs burning as blood circulation returned. It took one step back, and the wounds on its arm began to bleed.
The shadow manifested into a mass of corpses, some quite fresh, others rotting. Chunks of their flesh had been torn away by the powerful flow, leaving only their bones behind. The impact of the falling water was brutalizing, and many of the corpses had flowed into one another, limbs punched through guts and bones embracing another’s insides. Punching through the bodies were heavy, thick spines …
Neph flexed its own spines, startled at the familiarity.
The shadow rose higher, pushing against the water. Huge flailing shapes swung into view, thrashing at the water and seeming to grab on to it, hauling the mass of bodies higher, higher …
Neph squatted in a fighting pose.
Beneath the piled bodies, a massive eye opened, regarding Neph without emotion. Water poured around and across it but washed away none of this thing’s menace. The thrashing things—arms with massive spade-shaped hands that hauled it upward against the shattering liquid weight—moved faster, lifting the shadow higher above the edge of the chasm.
The water roared, and the rising thing added its own voice.
When Neph found its legs and ran at the abomination, it did not even see the whipping thing that took out its right eye.
Neph fell, legs still pounding into the rock because it did not understand. Something felt wrong with its head. A thick tentacle hovered above it, and Neph lashed out with its right arm. But the arm would not obey its orders, and the tentacle thrashed down, crushing, breaking, spilling Neph across the rock and leaving its few lonely memories to be washed away forever.
“It’s risen,” she whispered. “It’s here.”
Gorham knelt, Nadielle’s head resting in his lap, and he stroked her cheek. Her eye was bloodshot and blind, but she seemed unconcerned. The other eye stared off past the chopped creations, large and small, that had gathered around them. In
the shadows past them, Gorham thought he saw the two remaining Pserans watching quietly, and he almost called to them. But other than Gorham, the Baker was the closest to human here, and even she was far from that.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“The Vex has reached the Echoes, clothed in the city’s dead.” She struggled into a sitting position, shrugging off Gorham’s helping hands. “Tens of thousands since it fell, hundreds of thousands. It fed on them, and it grew so large that they litter its skin. Perhaps they can no longer fall past it. Perhaps it filled the Chasm.” The Pserans came, shoving past the splayed blades and limbs of the chopped monsters as though they were tree branches blocking their way. They helped Nadielle stand. She swayed, then gently pushed their hands aside, staring down at the floor. She seemed physically lessened, but there was a strength about her that Gorham had never seen before. Previously she had been superior yet flawed, someone whose confidence went only so deep, he had always felt. He’d tried to touch her, but her front had held firm. Those insecurities had remained buried. Now she was the Baker, completely in control and self-assured, confident in what needed doing and how much she could do herself. When she looked up again, she had changed, in the blood of her dead eye and the power in the other.
“I must leave,” she said, and she started for the end of the vat room. She passed the special vat without a glance, walking taller the farther she went, and Gorham ran after her.
“Nadielle! You can’t just leave. You have to tell me—”
“There’s no time. She’s your responsibility.” She paused and stood face-to-face with Gorham, almost close enough to kiss. “Water the vat regularly. Pay her attention; be here for her. I’ve put accelerant into the mix, so she won’t be long. Maybe even today.” She glanced past him at the vat, then turned quickly away.
