Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “But what about us?” he asked, hating the pleading tone to his voice. He could not let her leave without another word.

  “Goodbye, Gorham,” the Baker said without even turning around. She left the laboratory, with the Pserans following behind. One of them looked back at him, cold and hard, and in that stare was unveiled threat. The smaller bladed things followed, and those three larger monsters disappeared behind the rows of vats, heading for the wider curtained route he knew existed to the outside. In moments he was alone in the Baker’s rooms, left in charge of equipment, words, and deed that he could never hope to understand.

  Three years earlier he had sat at a table in a friend’s home, knowing that Peer was being taken by the Scarlet Blades. The purge had not yet begun in full, and he and several others were preparing to melt away as Watchers, allowing the Marcellans to think they had shattered the outlawed organization. But for a while he had nursed a bottle of wine, staring into a candle’s flame and wishing he could be so consumed. The guilt was a hard thing that weighed him down. There had been a time when he had said goodbye to Peer, knowing that he would never see her again, and he’d done so without giving anything away. A monstrous deception, a brutal betrayal, and yet he’d believed it was all for the best. Every day since then, he’d wished that goodbye had been sweeter.

  He wished the same now. But Nadielle had left his life as surely as if the door she’d passed through was a barrier between the living and the dead. She would not survive. And though cold in passing, she had left him with the greatest responsibility.

  Soon the new Baker would be born. He would be here to care for her. In the space of a day he had gone from lover to father, and his insides ached as if an age had been impressed upon him.

  He wandered the rooms for a time, watching the vat, watering, exploring. There was much about the laboratory that Nadielle had always refused to discuss, but looking on his own seemed an empty affair. He found small rooms he did not understand and corridors that seemingly led nowhere. He always returned to her living rooms, to lie in her bed and try to remember their good times. But already there was a bitterness, and strive though he did to shrug it off, he could not avoid feeling that he had been used.

  And he could also not help thinking that he deserved it.

  The rooms were silent but for the noises made by the vat. Sometimes he sang, but he could not find a tune to fit. He tried fighting songs from Mino Mont’s gangs, but the martial aspects did not seem to fit the shape of these rooms, their echoes sounding all wrong. He tried some love songs that his estranged sister used to write when she was young, but she had grown into a woman whose belief in love was vague, and his own experiences made the lyrics seem naïve. So he whistled instead—aimless tunes that matched the path of his wandering around the rooms. Sometimes shadows drew him, sometimes areas lit by the oil lamps. He wondered why the oil never ran out. He wondered why there was always food in the cold store when he wanted it, and where the dried and smoked meats came from, and how he could be sure that the water collected in several sacs lining the wall in one small room could be fresh. It was all Nadielle’s mystery. And more and more his attention was taken by the special vat from whence the new Baker would emerge. He spent more time sitting on its rim, watering when the levels fell and watching the thick fluid suck in the stream without a splash. Sometimes he reached out a hand to touch the surface but never quite got there. Fear, and respect for the Baker’s talents, kept him away. He had seen but a tenth of them, and the loss he felt at her leaving was amplified so much more.

  There were no timepieces in the Baker’s rooms, and in truth his concept of time had been shattered. He could not tell whether he had been belowground for days or weeks. His perception of day and night was gone, replaced with a need for food, sleep, and toilet, and that was how he tried to regulate his time waiting for the birthing. But there was no time for routine to form. It seemed an age since Nadielle had left, but in reality he guessed it was no more than half a day before the sounds from the vat began to change.

  She told me nothing, he thought in a panic. He climbed the ladder fixed to the vat’s side, and the liquid’s surface was in turmoil. I don’t know what to do, or what this means, or whether I should be watching or running away. Soon the vat began to shake and flex and the ladder’s uprights cracked, sending several rungs spinning to the floor. He climbed carefully down and retreated from the vat, looking at the remains of the others, which had not repaired themselves after birthing those huge chopped warriors.

  Helpless, terrified, he could only watch as Nadielle became the old Baker, and her descendant was born into a time of chaos.

  The birth was not as violent as the others he had witnessed. The vat bulged and split, and the pale shape inside reached through with delicate hands, grabbing the vat’s outside and pulling itself through. It gasped in a first lungful of air and vomited purple solids. As the rupture spewed the vat’s innards, the shape fell and went with the flow, striking the floor softly and sliding a little until it came to a stop.

  Gorham approached wide-eyed and amazed, because this was something of his. I made that, he thought, the idea ridiculous yet insistent.

  Nadielle had told him nothing about what the new Baker would be like, how old, how possessed of knowledge, instinct, or fear. As he approached, he saw the body of a child approaching her teens. And when she squirmed around to look at him, he saw that she had his eyes.

  Peer and Malia waited in a small abandoned building close to where the dome met the ground. They did not like it, but Nophel and Alexia convinced them it would be the safest option. After all, they weren’t invisible and had refused any suggestion that they sample Nophel’s blood, insisting that they remain part of the world they were determined to help.

  Nophel left the building with the three Unseen, and he was one of them more than ever before. Alexia had taught him the concentration required to control the White Water—it had given them more power than the Blue Water ever could, because fading away to nothing was no power at all. Now they could be seen or, with a little concentration, choose to be Unseen again. With that choice came salvation. Alexia and the others were ebullient, and Nophel enjoyed watching them rush invisibly across the base of this first Dragarian dome. They were like trapped animals set free, or confined prisoners given the run of the city. He only hoped they would fulfill their promise and help. Rufus was another of the Baker’s victims and Nophel’s only way to reach her.

  The dome was all but silent. It was incredible—a whole city built to fill that massive space and yet resounding only with distant thumping. Nophel could not tell what caused this noise, but there was a regularity to it that suggested it was mechanical rather than man-made. It was like a massive heartbeat.

  They made their way across the first dome without seeing any Dragarians. There were obvious signs of recent habitation—lights were burning in some homes, and the smell of food hung as a heavy background to the dome’s atmosphere—but they saw not one living thing. No Dragarians, but no animals either. If there were birds within these walls, they roosted now. If there were hounds or rats, they hid. The silence was haunting and intimidating, and Nophel was pleased when they passed out of that dome and through a huge, rose-encrusted arch leading into the second.

  They had emerged on the rim of a vast, gently sloping bowl, in which everything in sight was lush with plant growth—fields of green and yellow, clumped trees with heavy canopies, large areas of shrubs bearing all manner of berries and fruit. The roof was similar to areas they had seen in the first dome, letting in blazing sunlight and yet from outside apparently made from solid stone. The engineering marvels were astonishing, and Nophel found a sense of true wonder dissipating his bitterness and drive for revenge.

  “This could feed the whole of Echo City,” Alexia said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Nophel said, “but it’s more fertile than Crescent. Do you see the color of those trees? The lushness?” He shook his head, marveling at what the Drag
arians had achieved in such secrecy. There were some outside who believed they had all died out, but the opposite was true. They were flourishing.

  Then the first Dragarians came into view.

  For a moment, Nophel was terrified. The Baker had made Blue Water to work on the minds and perceptions of Echo City inhabitants, but there was no way of telling whether the Dragarians would be similarly affected and fooled. Alexia said they had caught that flying Dragarian through stealth, but maybe it had been injured when it landed, or disoriented …

  Or perhaps it had wanted to be caught.

  He stood with his breath held, face itching in the sunlight, and realized that if they were not invisible to those approaching, they would soon be dead. Because the natives of this place were no longer people.

  They were all humanoid, in the same way the flying thing had been. They retained their human basis, with torso, limbs, and head in roughly the correct locations. But they were altered in ways that made them amazing and terrifying to behold. Some walked on hands and feet, their necks curved upward to allow them to see ahead. Others flew, drifting above on wide membranous wings. A few crawled. And here and there some Dragarians slithered, their arms withered to useless dangling limbs, legs almost melded together, stomach and hips strengthened by musculature whose only purpose was to drag them forward across the ground.

  “They’re monsters!” the tall Unseen said, but Nophel could see the truth.

  “No,” he said, “they’re chopped. No race could adapt like this in just five hundred years.”

  “Why would they want to be able to fly?” Alexia asked. “In this dome, perhaps. But in the one behind us, there’s hardly any space. They’ve filled it.”

  “And why slither like a serpent?” the skinny man asked. “Strange.”

  The Dragarians passed within thirty paces of them. They headed down the gentle slope toward the grasslands below, mostly walking and talking together in a strange language. They seemed relaxed, not alert. And excited.

  “Chopping of a different kind, perhaps,” Nophel said. “Their own methods, their own aims. They’ve been isolated for so long, who knows what that can do to a race?” He shrugged. “We’re not here to find out. We want the visitor, that’s all.”

  Alexia nudged him and said, “Something tells me if we follow them, we’ll find him.”

  Nophel nodded, then stepped ahead so that the Unseen were behind him. He wished he was on his own. This place was somewhere new, and these ignorants did not seem to realize that. Former Blades all of them, trained killers who’d turned bitterness into a disease instead of a driving force; he would happily have done without them if possible. But he admitted with regret that was not possible. Their task was huge, and, even Unseen, he had no idea how they would smuggle Rufus out of this place.

  How do you possibly steal a god?

  “So let’s follow for a while,” he said.

  The grass felt good around his legs, cool and long and strong, and the ground below was soft but not muddy. A gentle breeze blew through the dome, carrying the scents of blooms familiar and unknown. The group of Dragarians was about one hundred strong, and they seemed to be moving with purpose across the bowl of this dome. Urgency pressed on Nophel, but he also enjoyed the walk. There was a sense of wildness to these manufactured fields.

  The Dragarians passed a large lake at the dome’s center and started up the far slope, heading for a distant arch that must lead into a third dome. The Unseen followed, and Nophel remained alert. There was no sign that they had been sensed at all, but in such a strange place …

  Anything was possible. It was a rich, powerful feeling, which he was doing his best to shed. He hated it. Long had he denied the part of him—the part inherited from his mother—that saw wonder in the smallest of things. It made him believe he had her in his mind, and he could not live like that. It gave the impression that he had her sense of the wonderful, and so he had spent much of his life searching only for the mundane. The Scopes were amazing creations, but to him they were monsters, and he used their mutated lenses to spy on the rawest denizens of the city—the criminals, whores, slash sellers, and thieves, the lowest dirt in the crawling gutters of filth that he knew existed out there. For Nophel there was no wonder in Echo City, and when any sense of awe did creep in, from whatever quarter, he would close his eyes and not look again.

  Now he could not close his eyes. His quarry might be close, so he viewed this place with the eyes of someone else—a new Nophel, given invisibility and thus the chance of a new life. He admitted the marvels here, and it was liberating.

  He wondered if his mother had known.

  They followed the Dragarians through to the next dome. This was almost entirely filled with a huge reservoir; several canals led off in various directions, and a network of refining rigs was set at regular spacings across the surface. The sound of water falling echoed through the dome, and Nophel could see pure water tumbling from the refineries’ highest points. Birds swooped through the air, and flocks of ducks had made the lake their own. There were also many boats; close to the shore, down the small slope from where they’d emerged, a handful of craft were moored to a jetty. Smoke rose from several chimneys on the boats, and the scent of cooking fish was mouthwatering.

  The Dragarians they had followed in were spreading out along the shore, joining hundreds of others already there. Many sat on the short grass covering the lakefront; others rushed through the crowds to hug people they had seen, gushing greetings and gesticulating wildly.

  “I’m guessing that’s our man,” Alexia said, pointing toward the lake, and at first Nophel could not see. He scanned the crowd, glancing out at the moored boats and then back again. He followed a fat man, his webbed hands closed around a glass bowl containing something steaming. The man left the jetty and walked up the slight slope, and when he knelt before a seated shape, Nophel saw him.

  Rufus Kyuss. He sat in a simple wooden seat, surrounded by a group of what must have been guards. They, too, sat, but were alert. They looked anywhere but at Rufus. And they wore long cloaks, beneath which glinted sharp things.

  Nophel smiled, pleased to witness imperfection. It seemed that the Dragarians had made a successful contained society, but still there was a need for security.

  “That has to be him,” he said, and then Alexia fell on him, shoving him to the ground and flipping him onto his back.

  “Nophel!”

  “What?” She was fading from view! “Alexia, what are you—”

  “Nophel, concentrate. You’re showing yourself!”

  Shocked, he closed his eyes and focused, slowing his breathing and imagining his flesh fading, his shadow brightening. Alexia’s grip on his arms lessened and she stood away from him, and when he sat up, the others were looking at him. Though still ecstatic at what he had given them, now they appeared gray and wan.

  “I …” But he didn’t know what had happened. He glanced down the slope and saw no one looking their way.

  “You’ll have to stay here,” Alexia said. “Keep low.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “While we go to get him, of course.”

  Nophel stood, still shaken. “But we need a plan.”

  “No time,” she said. “What, you want to go and hide somewhere, plan and scheme, and when we get back find he’s gone?”

  He looked at Rufus Kyuss, the visitor from beyond Echo City, survivor of the Bonelands, another creation of his mother’s that she had simply let go. From this distance, it was difficult to make out the man’s expression, but he seemed to be accepting the offerings presented to him—eating the food, drinking the wine. He did not appear to acknowledge those who prostrated themselves at his feet.

  “He seems in no danger,” he said softly.

  “But those Watchers told us how urgent everything is,” Alexia replied. “There’s no time to waste.”

  “Maybe,” Nophel said.

  “Maybe? Are you …?” She shook her head, snorting. “It�
��s just as likely that they’ll string him up and feed him his own balls as keep serving him. This could all be part of some sacrificial ceremony.”

  “You Blades should know,” Nophel said coldly.

  Alexia pressed her gray lips together. None of the Unseen looked like living people, and Nophel had to glance away.

  “Stay here,” Alexia said. “Keep watch for us. You have a good field of view. If there’s any trouble, shout as loud as you can. They won’t hear, but we will.”

  “Hopefully,” the tall man said. “If he doesn’t fade in again. Shouldn’t one of us stay with him?”

  “No,” Nophel and Alexia said at the same time.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I must have been … drifting. I’ll concentrate.” I haven’t come this far to lose out now. I have to meet him, talk with him. I have to know what he knows, and make sure he knows what I do.

  “You’re sure?” Alexia said, and her voice was more friendly this time.

  Nophel nodded. She smiled. And then the three Unseen started down the hillside.

  It was strange watching Alexia and the other two pass unnoticed into the ranks of the Dragarians. When he’d followed Alexia through the streets of Marcellan Canton, she had moved with grace and ease, nudging or startling people only intentionally. Now that stealth had to come to the fore. The Dragarians were worshipping their returned god, and any suspicion that something untoward was happening could result in chaos.

  Maybe that would help us, he thought, and for a moment he considered manifesting. Who would they bow down to then? But Alexia and the two men had already weaved their way through the Dragarian soldiers to stand before Rufus’s wooden chair, and Nophel had an idea. He hoped that Alexia would be thinking along the same lines: use their fears against them. But the fact that none of them could communicate with Rufus without manifesting before the Dragarians and giving themselves away—therein lay the problem.