by Tim Lebbon
For a few moments the Unseen stood there as if confused. They swapped a few words, looked around, and then Alexia pulled a knife. She stepped forward and pressed it tight beneath Rufus’s jaw.
He tensed in his seat, lifting himself upright from where he’d been slouched, eyes going wide and hands lifting toward his throat. The two Unseen men grabbed an arm each and held it down. And while they could not speak to him, Nophel knew for certain that Rufus understood the message.
The Dragarians had not noticed. But when the man they regarded as a god rose into the air before them, his wooden chair fading away to nothing, they started to shout. Some stood and backed away, tripping, sprawling, turning to run when they could. Others bowed down and pressed their faces into the grass. And several simply watched, their faces blank. The fearful, the devout, and the doubting. The last, Nophel knew, were the ones who might present problems.
The men used a shoulder each to carry Rufus through the crowd. Alexia kept a short sword pressed against his back, the point penetrating his clothing. To the Dragarians, he floated. They followed his progress, but no one pursued him.
Not yet.
Good, Nophel thought. That might give us a chance. But behind them lay two domes to cross and then the journey back through the Echo to the outside. And once the Dragarians realized where their god was heading, they would do everything they could to hold him back.
And maybe he won’t want to leave. Nophel had not considered that. Probably none of them had. But once he managed to speak to Rufus—talk about their mother—he was sure the Bonelands man would be on his side.
They did not stop when they reached Nophel, and he followed on behind, glancing back at the chattering Dragarians.
“Move faster,” he said. “This won’t last long.” And he was right. The observers who had only watched as their god levitated before them were leaving the crowd now, following slowly in their path. One of them had fine wings tucked around his arms and hips, another wore scaled skin, a third scurried through the grass, head raised and tongue flickering like a lizard’s. These were the doubters, unafraid and questioning, and they would be the most dangerous. The devout would be too amazed.
“Run,” Nophel said. “That’s all we can do. Fighting won’t be an option.”
“We need to speak to him,” Alexia said. She was still pressing her knife to Rufus’s back, but running like that was awkward, and as soon as she lost contact he might start to struggle.
“Not yet,” Nophel said. “We have to get completely lost first.”
“I can’t leave,” Rufus said into thin air, but none of them could reply.
They ran silently for a while, breathing hard, and Rufus did not struggle. He sat motionless on the men’s shoulders, looking straight ahead, neither helping nor hindering them in their flight.
Nophel kept to the rear, knife drawn. If it came to combat he would be lost, he knew that. And he was here for himself. If things went so wrong, he would flee alone, and perhaps later he would still be able to find the Baker on his own.
As they approached the huge arch leading into the cultivated dome, Alexia said, “By all the gods, how stupid we’ve been!”
“What?” Nophel asked. They were being followed by at least twenty Dragarians, and at present they were keeping a respectful distance, easily maintaining pace with the Unseen. If the time came when they decided to close in—even attack—there would be no easy escape.
“Your blood,” Alexia said. “Or even ours. The White Water in yours made us able to return to the world. But we all have Blue Water in our blood, and—”
“Yes!” Nophel said, cursing himself for not thinking of that. “And because he won’t even see it—”
“—it’ll be easy to make him drink it,” Alexia finished for him.
“But we have to get him out of sight first, somewhere we can stop and do it.”
“I have an idea,” she said. “Here, take my knife, keep watch, and do it as soon as you can.”
Why me again? Nophel thought, scratching at the wound on his arm. But Alexia’s Scarlet Blade training was already taking over. She threw him the knife as she ran past him toward the following Dragarians, and the two men carrying Rufus hardly broke pace. Nophel closed his eyes and plucked at the wound with the knife, and it did not take much to start the blood flowing again.
They passed beneath the arch and entered the huge green dome. Smells changed from the tang of water to the perfumes of plants and blooms, and the short grasses around their feet changed to a long, rough crop.
“Keep running,” Nophel said, and he paused and turned around.
Alexia stood just downhill from the arch, silhouetted against sunlight reflecting from the wide lake, and something about her outline was changing. There was a shimmer to her, as though she vibrated against reality. And then the Dragarians rushing up the slope stopped and stared.
Alexia ran at them with her short sword drawn. She was screaming—a murderous wail that set Nophel’s skin tingling—swirling the sword around her head, and uttering promises of pain in those unintelligible words.
Some of the Dragarians turned and fled this vision they had witnessed emerging from nowhere. One of them took to the air. It was a clumsy take-off, and his left wing caught on an item of clothing, pitching him heavily to the left. He emitted a cry not unlike one uttered by a rathawk and drifted low across the ground, the slope saving him from an ignominious landing. Another fell on all fours and loped back down toward the lake.
Three more picked up their pace and charged straight for Alexia.
“Not much time!” Nophel hissed. The two Unseen lowered Rufus to the ground, and while one of them grasped his arms to his sides, the other held his lower jaw and forced his mouth open. Rufus struggled, looking around wide-eyed and seeing nothing but green and the dome’s roof. He must be petrified, Nophel thought, but there was no time for pity. He paused for a moment, taking a good look at this other abandoned child for the first time, this person chopped and cast out by the bitch Baker. Then he squeezed blood from his wound into the man’s mouth.
Rufus could not see the blood, but he surely tasted it, gagging and coughing. The tall man forced his mouth closed and he swallowed reflexively, blinking hard as his eyes started to water. Then, somewhere in his fluid vision, he started to see the Unseen.
“We’re here to help you,” Nophel said, hoping the man could hear him already.
Nophel heard the clash of metal on metal and spun around. Alexia was fighting two Dragarians, while a third held back. They were soldiers, evidently, their muscled arms heavy and long, and the swords they carried were twice the length of the woman’s. But though she had been Unseen for some time, she still retained her Scarlet Blade training. Fighting was what she had been bred for since childhood.
The first Dragarian went down, clasping a vicious cut across his chest, blooding spewing between his fingers. The second faltered, and Alexia drove in with her sword. Its tip pierced his shoulder and she twisted, eliciting a cry of agony and terror from the man’s many-toothed mouth.
Alexia backed away from the wounded men and faced the third soldier—a woman with four arms and a blade in each. She looked vicious, but her lower two arms seemed weaker than the others, and there were wet, open sores where they joined her body. Badly chopped, Nophel thought. Not as good as my mother.
Alexia darted at her, and the woman turned and fled.
As she ran toward them, Alexia phased back to Unseen. She staggered a little as she came, blinking rapidly as if fighting off a faint. It hurts her, Nophel thought. Maybe she was too far gone.
“Let’s go,” she said as she reached them.
“Are you well?” Nophel asked.
“Fine, but we need to go.”
Rufus Kyuss was staring at them now, the tall Unseen’s long arms still wrapped around him. Though still visible, the differences in Nophel’s blood—the White Water and the Blue Water—had worked on the Dragarians’ god. He now had the potential
to be Unseen, should they instruct him in its use, as well as the ability to see them in whichever state they existed. “Who …?” he asked.
“Friends of Peer,” Nophel said.
“Is she still with that Baker?” Rufus seethed, his hatred obvious, and Nophel felt his insides glow. He could not hold back a smile.
“Come with us,” he said. “We’ve got plenty to talk about.”
“I don’t need rescuing,” Rufus said. “They need me here.”
“But this isn’t all about you,” Alexia said. “Come, or there’ll be no Echo City left to take you to.”
Rufus stood up straight and shook his head. “I belong here,” I said. “Whoever you are, I can’t leave with you. Rufus is not my name. My name—”
“Fuck this,” Alexia said, and she struck Rufus across the back of the head. He fell, moaning, and rolled, and she hit him twice more before he grew still.
The two men picked up Rufus between them. Then they ran, crashing through the foliage, ducking beneath trees’ low canopies, aiming for the other side of the dome and taking the most direct path they could. That Baker, Rufus had said. What did he know? Everything? Nophel kept looking at the mysterious man slung between the Unseen, and again he thought, He looks nothing like me.
They were halfway across the green dome, heading for the archway leading to the first dome, when a loud wailing noise filled the air. They paused beside a small pond, brushing flies and bees away from their faces.
“What the crap is that?” Alexia asked.
“Alarm,” Nophel said. “There are similar ones set up on Hanharan Heights. It’s a call to arms.”
“War,” Alexia said.
“Unless we get out of here quickly, yes.”
“He could stop it,” the tall Unseen said, nodding at the man they’d dropped to the ground. “Leave him here … let them find him—”
“No,” Nophel said. “He’s too important.” To me, he almost said, but he bit his tongue. Too important to me.
“And we’re not?” Alexia said.
Nophel smiled. His face was not used to the expression, and several of his sores split.
Sweating, exhausted, they ran again, hunted by a people who had found and lost their savior almost in the same breath. Nophel knew that if they were caught, there could be no mercy.
And Rufus Kyuss, unconscious, remained an enigma.
Echo City awoke that morning to a glorious day. There was hardly a cloud in the slate-blue sky, and the sun climbed from out of the Bonelands in the east with the promise of warmth and comfort for those who sought it. The sunlight illuminated the urban sprawl of Mino Mont, sending the slum gangs back into their shadows and splashing against the stark wall of Marcellan Canton. At the pinnacle of Hanharan Heights, the Eastern Scope stared wanly across the city, directly into the sunlight. Its enlarged eye did not water or smart from the brightness, and it did not lower the faceted lid that usually protected it from such glare. There was a small crater in the bottom curve of its eye, and the sun failed to scare away the ghourt lizard that picked at the organ’s jelly.
In Course and Crescent, Marcellan’s huge shadow was thrown as far as the city limits, its elongated spires and towers slowly crawling back across the city as the sun rose, like the retreating fingers of some vast phantom. In Crescent, blooms turned their heads to the sun and prepared to watch it cross the sky once again, while in Course Canton, the squares, courtyards, and parks bustled with early-morning traders, food purveyors, and people on their way to work or school. The smell of cooking soon drifted on the air, wafting away the sewer scents of nighttime and the metallic fumes from the smaller industrialized areas.
On the tall walls of Marcellan Canton, Scarlet Blades drifted to and fro in preparation for the changing of their guard. It would be achieved in shifts, so that there was never a time when the canton was not protected. Some of them were drunk, and not only those leaving their shift. There had not been a war for a long time. Soldiers grew bored.
At the end of one street in Course, a body was dragged into the shadows by three pairs of hands, its jewelry already stolen, its flesh and bones destined for the swine pits.
In the southern quarter of Mino Mont, nine corpses lay strewn across the steps of an old Hanharan temple, victims of a gang feud that had lasted for three generations. Such deaths were commonplace and barely merited a second glance from passersby. The feud was also expected, and expectation was one of the reasons it still existed. One gang would party all day in celebration, and tomorrow they would be the ones spilling blood and then seeking new recruits from the youngsters of that canton.
In Skulk, people drifted westward toward the stoneshroom fields. Others closed their doors for the day, preferring to sleep when the sun was up so that they could not look north and see the city that reminded them of lost times.
In Marcellan Canton, a group of old people passed laws that would mean nothing.
In Crescent, a farmer sowed crops that would never be harvested.
It was, all in all, a normal dawning to what seemed a normal day in Echo City.
But there were also those in the city who awoke to a painful truth—that things had changed, were still changing, and might never be the same again.
In Shute Fields, in the southwest corner of Course, shapes rose from places where the sunlight never touched. They were sleek, pale, and gray, and they raised their hands to protect their faces from the painful glare. Most remained in the shadows, hiding away from the sun behind walls, shivering in the growing heat of the day because they were so scared. Up was somewhere most of them had never been, but they could never go back down. Several were murdered by terrified people who thought they were monsters. Some fought back and killed their attackers, eating the fresh meat because it reminded them of home. Hunts proceeded, with the Garthans running through unfamiliar streets and existing for the first time in a place that was not an Echo. Though they were fewer than their pursuers, and disoriented, their custom of eating their victims meant that fear was on their side.
At the southern extremes of Mino Mont, where the canton narrowed down with the Marcellan wall on one side and the city wall, with the Bonelands beyond, on the other, the Bloodwork Gang was bettered for the first time in years. One of their main slash distribution centers had existed beneath an old abandoned workhouse for more than a year, storing enough of the drug to feed most of Mino Mont’s addicts and a few of the more powerful devotees in Marcellan Canton. It was well hidden, its entrances and exits spread among neighboring buildings, and the Bloodworks had striven to keep it safe. Most knew not to interfere with them, and a thousand corpses could attest to this.
Protected and guarded against intrusion from above, the gang met doom from below. Fleeting pale shapes swarmed through the warehouse’s rooms, spilling containers and setting fires. Perhaps it was surprise at finding the product that they made stored in such quantities. Or maybe it was panic. No one would ever know.
After the initial shock, the Bloodwork members guarding the den fought back, but it was a short, brutal combat. The Garthans had no need of weapons; they hunted through stealth, stillness, and then fury. They killed anyone who stood in their way, chewing on human hearts as they charged onward. And the gang member who chose to hide—and who, later that day, would brag that he’d fought off a dozen attackers but instead had pissed himself as he watched his friends gutted and eaten—swore that these strange humans were terrified. They screeched as they attacked, but not in rage. It was fear that had driven them up, terror that gave them speed and strength. They rose into the streets and remained in shadows.
The Garthans emerged in many other places around the city. Sometimes there were large groups of them, but more often there were only a handful, and in places just one or two. In their terrified climb up through the city’s Echoes and into its present, some had died, and many had lost track of their family and friends. The survivors did not care. All that mattered was escaping the thing rising from the deep.
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br /> Close to where the River Tharin vented into the desert, Bellia Ton had slept with her feet dangling in that dead river’s flow. Her nightmares were monstrous, and as she woke to the sunlight burning her eyelids, the memory of them was rich. She could no longer discern whether what she heard, saw, and smelled were products of the fears already implanted in her or given to her afresh by the river. Bodies flowed past. Some of them were Garthans, and others had scarlet cloaks billowing around them like blood slicks. She tried to hear their voices, but there was one sound drowning out everything she needed to know: an insistent, throbbing impact on her soul. She heard and smelled it, felt and tasted it, and it was rising from somewhere deep—though not as deep as before.
She rolled from the river and her legs beneath the knees were white, skin and flesh soft as soaked mud. When she tried to stand, her legs gave way. There was no longer any feeling in them at all. She screamed instead, crying out all the things she thought she knew, but the only people to hear were the dead floating by. She always chose the deserted areas around the refineries to read the river. And hers were not the only screams sounding across Echo City that morning.
Readers across the city cried out, or ran, and some of them died where they worked, hearts riven with shock. Whatever the source of their knowledge—water, air, tea leaves, mepple flesh, stoneshroom visions, or rockzard-liver trails—their warnings were the same: Something is rising. They heard the sounds from below and spread word of them through the streets. Their warning dispersed, and no one who heard them could deny the sense of panic overlying the city. It started in the darkness and continued into the day, and sunlight brought no calming touch.
In Marcellan, a fat man approached the city wall, hoping that he still held power in his given name. Behind him trailed a small army of faithful soldiers, a score of Scarlet Blades whom he had been nurturing for years so that, when the time came, they would put the name Dane ahead of Marcellan. He tried to exude confidence and authority, yet he picked up the sense pervading the city that morning, and it was a wilder place. The wall guards stepped in front of the gate, and the fear in their eyes when they saw him gave him hope.
