by Tim Lebbon
“You really believe that?” They were approaching the route up out of the Echo now, and Rose was walking faster. This girl’s never even seen the daylight, Peer realized.
“I hope that,” he said. “This is everything the Watchers have waited for.”
“Feared.”
“That too, but it’s been a practical fear. We’ve fought our concerns by trying to discover a way to move past them. The Marcellans, the Hanharans—they surround their fear with more fear, hoping to smother it. Those bastard priests think up more ways to make people feel crap about themselves, and we’re persecuted for realism.”
“All religions are real to someone.”
Gorham scoffed.
“Really,” she said. “You should have seen the Dragarians with Rufus.”
“Let’s see which one saves us from the Vex,” he said.
“I don’t want to see it,” Peer replied. Gorham had described his and Nadielle’s journey down, what had happened at the Falls, and how that had changed Nadielle. The Baker had not been able to truly convey what she had seen, but her fear had been enough. That and the guilt that bound generations of Bakers together.
Now Rose was feeling it too. That was why she fought against whatever weakness was trying to strike her down.
“Maybe we won’t have to,” he said. “By the end of today we’ll be away from the city.”
“And by tomorrow we might be dead.”
“It’s all just possibilities.” Gorham reached out to take her hand. He squeezed, she squeezed back, and she saw the gratitude in his eyes.
“Isn’t that all the future can be?” she asked. Gorham did not reply, and as they climbed up through the ruins of the old farmhouse, she wondered what possibilities were about to be realized.
At first she thought the Vex had risen and they were too late. Crescent was deserted, but to the east and south, smoke hung above the slopes and hillsides of Echo City. It drifted toward the west, blown by the familiar easterly breezes of late summer, and she could see a dozen flaming sources on the high slopes of Marcellan. She and Alexia had left fires behind, but now it looked as if the whole city was ablaze.
“Are we too late?” Alexia asked.
“No,” Rose said, but she was not looking at the fires. Her eyes were aimed at the pale-blue sky, streaked here and there with wisps of white cloud. The sun was above the city, barely obscured by the smoke this far out. To the northeast, the pale ghost of the moon hung low to the horizon, biding its time. Red sparrows flitted here and there just above the grass, plucking insects from the air. A family of rathawks rode the thermals high above. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and for the first time Peer heard something human in the girl’s voice.
“It’s burning,” Alexia said.
“Anarchy,” Gorham said. “From what you described, the Marcellans will be doing their best to halt the migration. At times like this, there are always those who’ll take the opportunity to …” He drifted off, shrugged.
“Settle scores?” Alexia asked.
“Maybe. Some just have chaos in their hearts.”
“Peer and I saw plenty on our way here,” Alexia said.
“Can we release them yet?” Peer asked. The bags strung over her shoulders were bulging and shifting more as the sunlight warmed them. The bloodflies were excited. Peer was revolted, and yet she knew that each insect contained the essence of Rufus’s chopped blood. He was as close to her now as he ever had been.
“No,” Rose said. “Closer to the people. When we reach Skulk.”
“That’s almost ten miles,” Alexia said.
“Then we should walk quickly,” Rose said. “And we’ll soon have help.” She looked at Hanharan Heights through the drifting smoke, and for a moment she closed her eyes.
The smell of smoke hung in the air, and the farther south they went, the worse it would become. Then there was Course Canton to negotiate, the Border Spites, the Levels … and all the while, the city would shake with terror at the thing rising beneath it.
“How long until this Vex arrives?” Peer asked. “Where will it rise? What will it do?”
Rose turned to her, then glanced at Gorham and Alexia to include them in her reply. “I’m no god,” she said. “There’s plenty I don’t know.”
“But you made it,” Gorham said, his voice cool with accusation.
“A Baker long before me—” Rose stopped when she saw Gorham’s growing anger. In that instant, Peer loved him a little more. “But, yes. She made it, and then she threw it away, because it was imperfect and dangerous. She just didn’t throw it far enough. Please, we need to hurry. We’ll know when it arrives, and we must reach Skulk before then.”
They started walking, Rose in the lead, the others strung out behind. It surprised none of them that a girl whose skin the sunlight had never touched knew exactly which direction to take.
Nophel thought about becoming Unseen, but that would have been no help. Whether people saw him or not, the streets were chaotic, and he would be moving against the flow. So he took a deep breath from the nut clasped in his hand and forged ahead.
As he saw the chaos and destruction, the bodies in the streets and the burning buildings, the fear on people’s faces and the useless efforts by Scarlet Blades to temper the flow of fleeing humanity, his mind was on the contents of that old, worn box. They signified a pain in his mother’s heart that he had never considered—he had always imagined her filled with hate and inhumanity, not sadness and loss. And they drove him on now, because he was doing this partly for her.
She’s a little girl with an old woman’s eyes, he thought of Rose, and in some ways she was the living memory of the city. Constantly reborn, her knowledge handed down, she was the echo of Echo City in blood and flesh.
Bleeding, coughing, Nophel made his way uphill toward Hanharan Heights. He passed dead people and fallen buildings, but they were invisible to him. He felt the city’s doom constantly transmitted through his heels, and at one point, when a dreadful roar came from somewhere to the south, the ground shook so much that he believed this was the end. But the tremors settled, people picked themselves up, and Nophel started to climb again.
He cast his face upward in case the Scopes were watching for him. He would be with them soon. His breath bubbled and blood ran from the corner of his mouth, but after everything that had happened, he could not even consider failure. That would be the cruelest joke that Fate could ever play.
While much of the city fled, he climbed, and it was only as he reached the Marcellan wall that he went Unseen.
The first half of their journey was easy and fast. They crossed the southern border of Crescent into Course, passing the waterfront areas by the Western Reservoir where thousands once spent their leisure time eating, drinking, and sailing; the area was all but abandoned. There were some who had stayed behind, ignoring the strange warnings they’d received or heard from someone else. Several taverns were full to bursting with drunks. The overflow sprawled on the streets outside, fighting, sleeping, some of them fucking under the sunlight as if this was the last day they’d ever see. Perhaps some of them truly believed that, Gorham thought, but it never took much for a drunk to drink like the world was about to end.
There were bodies in the streets. Not many, but enough to show that the relative silence was far from normal. A mother and daughter lay dead beneath a second-story window, and a sprinkling of mepple blooms had fallen across their bloodied clothing. Several Scarlet Blades had been killed and stripped outside a large, faceless building that had once stored produce from Crescent. The warehouse now stank of fruit turning to rot, and the dead Blades were adding to the smell. Each of them had a sword handle protruding from the mouth. Farther on, in a small square where a water fountain still gurgled cheerily, at least thirty people lay dead, with hands tied behind their backs and throats slit.
“Bastards!” Peer said, and Gorham shared her rage. He’d seen this before, three years ago when the Marcellans were cracking down on
the Watchers and needed the city to know how serious they were. Back then, most of those killed had been Watchers and their families. Here, he suspected those executed had nothing in common other than a wish to follow their instincts south.
“Why didn’t the Blades get the message?” Gorham asked. He thought of those moths, lizards, and bats, drifting or running through the city and spreading the word he had given them.
“Maybe some did,” Rose said.
“Not enough.” He breathed deeply, taking some comfort from the fact that the Blades had been fed their own swords.
“We can’t stop every time,” Alexia said. “The city’s in turmoil, and there’ll be more. Peer and I saw the start of it, and it’ll only have grown worse.”
“You’re right,” Gorham said. I’m not sure how much of this I can see without going mad.
The ground shook. Things fell. They walked on.
Rose paused now and then and closed her eyes, frowning. After a couple of these occasions, Gorham asked her about Nophel, but she shook her head sharply and they moved on. Not there yet, he thought. Maybe he’s dead. He had no idea what had passed between Rose and the deformed man, and right now he had no wish to find out. They all bore the weight of their own past; he knew that better than most.
When they reached the River Tharin and started across Six Step Bridge, the going became tougher. A group of Scarlet Blades had set up a checkpoint on the bridge, and they were charging people to cross. They were drunk and smashed on slash, and two of the female Blades wore what appeared to be male genitals on strings around their necks.
There were maybe a hundred people sitting across the bridge, some in front of the cafés lining each side, and others apparently camped on the road. Many were drunk. A couple appeared to be asleep, or dead.
Gorham sat down and the others followed.
“We can’t let them slow us down,” Rose said.
“No pay, no way,” a teenaged girl a few steps from them said. She held an empty wine bottle in one hand and a bag of slash in the other. Yet her eyes were clear and her voice strong. She had been crying.
“What’s the price of passage?” Peer asked.
“For you …” the girl said, lips pressing together. “Can’t you guess?” She pretended to drink from the bottle, wiping her dry lips. Tears streaked her flushed face. “Bommy tried to protect me. He … stood in their way.”
“They killed him,” Alexia said.
“Threw him in the river. The river! They cut off his … They didn’t even have the decency to cut his throat first.”
Gorham closed his eyes, trying not to imagine Bommy’s final moments.
“I’m waiting,” the girl said, leaning forward. “They’ve been drinking all morning. One of them fell down drunk just now; the others dragged him away. So I’m waiting.”
“If you try—” Gorham said.
“I’m not going to try anything. I’m going to do every one of them—with this.” She pulled her jacket open, displaying rips in her shirt, scratches across her neck, and, in her belt, the cheap, dull sword she must have found in one of the taverns.
“Come with us,” Gorham said. “We’re going south.”
“Your women going to give in peacefully, then?” the girl asked.
“Fuck them,” Alexia said. “Watch this.” Lying down behind Peer and Gorham so that she was blocked from the Blades’ view, she started to fade away.
“What the—!” the girl shouted, stumbling backward.
Rose was by her side almost instantly, easing her to the ground and whispering, “You’re drunk.”
The girl—wide-eyed, scared, in pain and mourning—seemed to react to Rose’s touch. She looked up into the young Baker’s eyes and smiled.
Gorham did not even hear Alexia stand, but he felt a nudge on the shoulder as she passed him by.
“Come on,” he said to Peer. “She’ll need some help.”
“I can’t kill anyone else, Gorham,” Peer said, almost manically.
“You won’t need to.” And he smiled at her, because he thought he knew what Alexia intended.
They walked up the slight rise of the bridge toward the roadblock, and the smell of bad wine and burning slash became much stronger. Gorham was careful to keep his hands away from the sword in his belt—in the shadows of a tavern’s canopy, he could see a Blade resting a crossbow on a wooden privacy screen—and he tried to offer an appeasing smile. They’ll think I’m coming to offer Peer as our crossing fee, he thought, and his smile suddenly felt like a grimace. Relax … relax …
“I don’t like this,” Peer said.
“When I point, just look that way.” He hoped that Alexia was as serious as he thought. He hoped that she was still a soldier. And, most of all, he hoped that these murdering bastards were as superstitious as most Blades he had met.
One of the women with genitals strung around her neck staggered forward. She stopped ten steps from him, drawing her sword and pointing it. It had blood smeared across the blade.
“You wanna cross, she’s gonna pay,” she drawled, and Gorham saw a fleeting shadow appear and then disappear again behind the woman.
He raised his hand and pointed at the woman. “You pay first,” he said, and her head tilted back and her throat opened up. The string bearing her trophies parted and they fell. Blood sprayed up and out from the slash across her neck. Alexia turned her so that the struggling Blade sprayed her companions.
Then the woman fell heavily, and several steps away Gorham caught another brief glimpse as Alexia manifested for a beat.
“He pays too,” he said, pointing at the man closest to Alexia. His eyes widened and then his throat opened as well. He raised his hands and flipped quickly onto his back, gurgling as the front of his tunic turned red.
They panicked. Of the six left, five backed away from Gorham, swords forgotten, wine bottles slipping from their hands and smashing on the road. The last Blade stalked toward him but stared at Peer. He had hungry, mad eyes and an ugly lolling tongue. This time, Peer pointed, and the Blade’s eyes burst as an invisible knife was drawn quickly across them.
“I’m blind!” he shouted, holding his hands before his face but not quite touching. “Help me, I’m blind!”
The drunk girl raced past Gorham and struck the man around the head with the wine bottle. It shattered, and he fell. Gorham was going to reach for her, pull her back, but then Peer grabbed his arm, and when he looked at her he could see the pain of memory scarring her face.
As the girl set upon the screaming man with the smashed bottle, they ran, Gorham trying to snort out the stench of blood. Rose was with them, along with a crowd of others, given the opportunity at last to cross the bridge and flee south.
“The terror is rising; go south to Skulk!” someone shouted, and Gorham gasped at hearing the words he had sent out.
Alexia was waiting for them at the other end of the bridge, manifested again and wiping blood from her hand. When she looked up at them, Gorham knew that nothing needed to be said.
“Not far to go,” Rose said mildly. “And not long left.”
It was not an easy journey. Being Unseen did nothing to ease Nophel’s pain or prevent his wound from gushing blood again. The nut pressed almost constantly to his nose, he became light-headed with its effect, but he was convinced that he would fall without it. A mass of Scarlet Blades were stationed at the entrance to Marcellan Canton, standing close to one another as they stared south and west. In their eyes he glimpsed the reflection of chaos, but he did not want to look too closely.
If I glance back, I might lose all hope. So he crept between them. Some turned and frowned, as if at a memory. Others stepped back and raised their swords, and if they’d taken a swipe at the thin air before them, his head would have rolled.
He passed through the guarded gate into Hanharan Heights when it was opened to allow a group of Marcellans to exit. He recognized them—three members of the Council—and none of them had ever spoken to him. He’d always
been a subject of their disdain. It was good to see terror in their eyes.
His journey from the gates to the viewing room was a blur of pain and darkness. Many oil lamps in the Heights had been extinguished, and the halls and corridors were all but deserted. They’ll be in the Inner Halls, he thought. Praying to their Hanharan god, hiding in his First Echo, begging for help, mercy, and salvation. Lot of good that will do them.
In his viewing room, the mirror was cracked but not shattered. There were bloodstains across the floor where a body had been dragged. His father’s actions, perhaps, but he no longer cared. All he cared about was seeing that small group on their way and seeing his mother one more time. His offer of help had been quickly accepted, and he had shushed her concerns about him remaining in the city. I’ll soon be gone, he’d said; I’d rather the time I have left is well spent.
He tweaked the controls, but there was no reaction—no views of the city and no signs of life. Nophel groaned and went on, heading for the fifty stairs that would take him to the roof. Don’t stop, he thought, keep moving on, and he felt the fresh slick of warm blood across his chest.
The Scopes were silent, awaiting his return and his tender touch. He went to the Western Scope and looked out over the city, scanning the tumultuous streets and wondering where Rose and the others were now. His arms itched, and when he scratched, he reopened the shallow wounds.
“Not long now,” he said. “Not long, and I’ll be able to help.” He shooed away birds that were pecking at the Scope’s eyes, washed fluid from its tense body, eased chains, and scooped handfuls of balm, working it into the folds around the Scope’s head and neck. Leaving the roof, he looked back at the other three Scopes and felt a pang of deep guilt at not tending them as well. But the city had ceased being his concern. There was only one way left for him to look.
Back in the viewing room, he relaxed in his chair with a gasp, his vision swimming, arms and chest bleeding. And then he laid his hands on the controls and started his search.
Rose paused and closed her eyes again, and this time she smiled softly. “South of Six Step Bridge,” she whispered, “at the junction of two roads.”
