by Tim Lebbon
The Border Spite drew a short sword in her right hand, a triangular object in her left, and ran at them.
Peer unconsciously took a step back, nudging into Rufus. The sword handle felt cold and slippery in her grasp. “Hide!” she rasped.
The soldier brought the wooden object to her lips. Poison darts, Peer thought, but then a mournful whistling broke the loaded silence.
From behind her, a cough. She thought perhaps Rufus was gasping in fear, but then something struck the Border Spite’s face. The Spite dropped her sword and wooden horn, took in a shuddery, loud breath, and started raking at her eyes. She went to her knees less than a dozen steps away, and Peer saw every degree of agony on the young woman’s face. Her nails scratched ragged gashes across her eyelids and cheeks. Her mouth hung open, and pink foam bubbled from between her teeth. At last she fell forward, convulsing, hands now held just away from her face as if contact was too painful.
Peer turned. Rufus stood with his eyes and mouth open in shock, his arm held before him, and something in his hand. It was black and bulky, and a curl of smoke rose from its open end.
“Rufus, what did you …?” She looked at the weapon and had no idea what she saw.
The shock slowly fading from his face, Rufus lowered his hand, never taking his eyes from the fallen Spite. She was still now, her chest motionless. Deep-red blood had replaced the foam issuing from her mouth.
He pulled something on the object and a small lid hinged up, revealing a huddle of egglike objects inside. “Wrath-spider,” he said.
Shaking, Peer started to walk, passing the dead guard and trying not to look at the mess her face had become. But she could not help glancing down. Did her fingernails really do all that? she thought. Probably not. Beneath the stench of blood was something like burning.
She heard Rufus following her. When she’d first seen him coming across the desert, she was shocked, excited, and filled with a sense of hope. Now she was afraid.
They left the body behind and hurried into Course Canton. After passing through a small park where yellow wisps flitted through trees surrounding a lake, they saw a group of normal people. No swords were on show; no panic or surprise crossed their faces. One young woman smiled at Peer, and Peer found it easier than she’d suspected to find a smile to return. I’m free, she thought, but immediately following that came the idea that had been forming since bidding farewell to Penler.
Free, yes, but now her life had become a lie. And with Rufus walking beside her, she began to suspect that made two of them.
Since hearing the sounds from below, Bellia Ton had spent more time than ever reading the river. The Tharin was wide here, just a mile from where it passed out beneath the city wall and back into the desert from whence it came. It was as dead when it left the city as when it arrived, but water carried knowledge, picking up a little of the ground it passed through. Most people could not understand this, and many did not believe. That suited Bellia well. Dead the river might be, but she was its disciple.
She knew the river and its banks well, and now she was down on a rock that jutted into the waterway, bare feet dangling into the flow. It parted around her ankles, churning a soft white against her old skin.
Bellia took one more look around. There were no residential buildings here, the area given over mostly to the tall water-refinery towers and their attendant structures, pools, culverts, and canals. The tower closest to her was also the newest, rebuilt after the attacks thirty years before, and like a youngster among older friends, it puffed steam and churned its parts with more gusto than the others. Its base was invisible to Bellia, hidden by a fold in the land, but she had walked past it many times before. The mountains of rotting extract stank. After all this time, still no one knew exactly what it was they filtered from the water. The mountain grew, just as the city rose, and in the Echoes there were hardened piles of that extract, still as mysterious as history.
She breathed in deeply and smelled the river: stale and dead, light and fleeting. It took the Tharin a day to flow through the city, and the waters that made it this far smelled and looked even more alien than where they’d entered.
And that was why Bellia chose this place to read.
She took in a deep, calming breath and closed her eyes. Imagining the water scouring away the flesh from her ankles and feet, then abrading the bones themselves, she became one with the river, the stumps of her lower legs barely touching the water. Her blood flowed with the Tharin, still linked to her through memory. She read its course into the city, along the steepening valley formed by the built-up land surrounding it. She frowned through the darkness where the river passed underground into the Echoes beneath Marcellan Canton, pulling away from the sense of endless space that existed where it split and poured some of itself down the Falls. That place was always so dark …
She gasped and fell back, striking her head on the rock. Trying to lift her feet from the river, she found them held fast, the water pulling them down like wet sand.
“Something new!” she screeched, because she had felt a part of the city that should not be there. “Something wrong!” There was more to know, but she wanted to learn no more. That brief insight had been so cold, and through everything she had ever read of the city, its dark histories, its inhabitants, and the things that dwelled among them, she had never been so afraid.
Bellia managed to haul her feet from the river at last and scrambled up the bank, gathering her long skirts to her knees so that she could run. Craving the oblivion she would find in the End Wall Tavern, she sprinted through the deserted water districts of Mino Mont.
And all the while, an awful truth shouted something she had no desire to hear.
The thing that was coming is almost here.
Peer was exhausted. The sun had yet to touch the western desert, but she could go no farther, and she craved food. They had crossed several canals already, and when they reached the river valley she called a halt to their progress. No one who had seen them had called for the Scarlet Blades, and within sight of Marcellan Canton’s walls she risked believing that they had got away.
Two miles to the east, the great dead River Tharin roared through Marcellan’s wall and entered the city’s Echoes. In her time with the Watchers, Peer had been down among the Echoes several times, though not too deep. It had always been a disturbing experience for her, leaving the world she knew and traveling through areas—streets, buildings, parks, and landscapes—where the city’s past had played out. These Echoes were all but silent now, though history still hung heavy in their darkness. Once, in Mino Mont, she had descended with a woman who had known her mother, and the woman showed her a house where Peer’s ancestors had once lived. They had been engravers, recording history on marble tablets for rich families, but that ruin had been empty of all but dust and dark things.
She knew others who had gone deeper. Some could not sleep for days after returning to daylight; a few wanted only to go back down.
“We’ll stop here to eat,” she said to Rufus. “Hungry?”
“Yes,” he said, rubbing his stomach. He was looking around wide-eyed, and Peer was afraid that in itself would attract attention. But it was hardly surprising. The river valley was an amazing place—as newer layers of the city had been built upon older structures, the valley had both deepened and widened, its sides sloping back from the waterway. Looking down at the valley sides should have been like viewing the city’s histories laid out in strata, but weathering and the actions of humankind had landscaped the slopes into something different. Here and there, evidence of architecture still remained, but mostly the steep slopes were either smothered with razorplant or oxomanlia, or had become refuse slicks where the city vented its waste.
This was especially prevalent beneath and around several bridges that spanned the Tharin’s man-made valley. Most of the bridges were quite old—although there were rumors, no one knew for sure how the leg piles had been sunk through the poisonous river—and they had been built up alon
g with the surrounding urbanized landscape, their own older Echoes on full view and deserted but for the occasional disoriented phantom. They were well maintained, and for some reason they had become centers of commerce and entertainment, wide enough to house all manner of shops and eating places. Each bridge had its own marshal, whose job it was to ensure the bridge’s safety and success, and each marshal had his or her own gang of aides. The crossings were small towns in themselves, and in the past there had been skirmishes between rival bridges.
The one thing never permitted was bridge tolls. The Marcellan rulers insisted that the people of Echo City must be free to cross the River Tharin at any point and at any time, thereby defying the dead river with their own busy lives.
Peer had been to Six Step Bridge many times before, and she knew it to be a lively, cheerful place. Every second building was a tavern or restaurant, and its commerce was built around wine, ale, and good food. No one knew where its name came from, and few bothered to descend its structure to try to find out. The past is below us, the popular saying went, a statement of attitude as well as geography. The bridge was a place where people could remain anonymous, and Peer looked forward to a few moments of calm.
She also wanted to talk with Rufus. Since crossing the Levels and killing the Border Spite, he had not once asked where she was taking him or who they were going to see. His amazement at this place was obvious, but he was also an intelligent man—she could see that in his eyes, sense it in his bearing. He might be a visitor to Echo City, but she was certain he would never let himself be led blind.
They started across the bridge, the Tharin a pale snaking shadow far below, and Peer realized just how much she had missed the city. There were areas like this in Skulk, yes—places where people gathered to drink and party or to sip and discuss all the bad things in the world. But she realized now that, in Skulk, there had always been an undercurrent of exclusion. They had been partying in spite of no longer being part of the city. They had talked of the bad things, knowing that countless fellow Echoians thought of them as the bad things. They’d had something taken away from them—true criminals or offenders of the mind alike—and that fact was ever-present in that old place of disease and death.
Peer found a free table outside a bar called Hestige’s. Sitting there exposed, starting to relax, the memory of the dying Border Spite shoved to one side—or at least smothered beneath the sights and sounds presented to her on Six Step Bridge—she ordered a bottle of cheap wine, and she and Rufus sat drinking it in sight of Marcellan Canton’s distant wall.
Traders traded, drinkers drank, and people walked back and forth across the bridge. It had an air of bustle that no number of sedentary drinkers and eaters could dampen, and a whole selection of street performers added to the buzz. A woman juggled baby rockzards, her hands and forearms a network of scars old and new. A man seemed to be walking on stilts, until Peer saw that he’d been inexpertly chopped. His long legs were bony and bleeding, his desperate smile verging on madness. Three children performed an ever-shifting play, a huge old woman following them and providing sound effects and prompts if they forgot their lines. They told of marriage and celebration among the ruling Marcellans, and ribald jokes and dangerous insinuations surprised the audience as they were muttered by the innocent-looking girls. Jokers told their amusing stories, painters strolled from table to table offering to capture moments in perpetuity, charm sellers preyed on maudlin drunks, and food stalls fought covert battles of smell and sense.
Peer lifted a glass and toasted Penler, and Rufus sat silently beside her, waiting for what would come.
“So who are you really?” she asked, and Rufus refilled her glass.
“Rufus Kyuss,” he said.
“That’s what I named you, but you have a name I don’t know. A life I don’t know.”
Rufus nodded, looking around the busy street. “Will you help me find it?”
“I’ll try,” she said. “And if you tell me who you’re looking for, I’ll help you find her as well.”
“I’m … not sure.”
“But I’m not her!” Peer said, perhaps too loudly. After their flight from Skulk, this wine was quickly going to her head. She laughed over her embarrassment, then drank some more. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s someone who’ll help us both.”
“Who?”
“An old friend.” Peer thought again of Gorham, and the air shards in her arm drove pain through her bones, reminding her again who she was.
As soon as he saw her, he left the street, pushing through a hustle of drinking men and women and entering a small waterfood eatery. The smell of boiling fish and the crack of shells being ruptured grated—he hated fish—but he swallowed hard and went to the window to make sure. He had to lean over a small table, nudging a woman’s arm as she brought a shrimp stick to her mouth. She mumbled, her companion bristled, and the man apologized. They quieted quickly. Perhaps they saw the knife in his belt and the scars on his face.
He wiped condensation from the window and looked across the bridge at Hestige’s. He must have been wrong, it could never be her … but there she sat, sipping from a large glass, speaking to the weird white-haired man seated beside her.
He gasped, clouding the window again with his breath, then stood back from the table, staring at the wall.
“Are you …?” the woman diner asked.
He looked down at her and the remains of her meal. His stomach rolled. “This is going to be interesting,” he said. Then he turned and made his way back through the eatery.
People moved aside for him. He had that effect, but usually he did not notice. Today was different. In the kitchens, the sour reek of fish more intense than ever, he nodded at the two chefs and then kicked open the chute door.
Most buildings clinging to the edges of Six Step Bridge had a chute, through which all manner of garbage and waste was ejected, falling into the river or spattering the bridge’s exposed Echoes below. Food, broken furniture, construction waste, ruined clothing—once ejected from the chutes, it was forgotten and cast aside. He had once seen a living man thrown into the river, and sometimes at night he remembered the weight of that man’s left leg in his hand heartbeats before he fell.
Dead though the river was, in many ways it cleansed the city.
He edged through the chute, looking at the dark line of the Tharin way below. Then he started climbing down, from strut to support to crossbeam, until he hung wedged between two vertical timbers. Above him, he could hear the impact of countless feet and hooves on the bridge’s surface. Around him, the dusty, abandoned structures of yesteryear.
Then he heard the squeals.
He took a small bag of powder from his pocket and spread some along a moldy timber beam. He also extracted a roll of paper and a charcoal, and while he waited, he wrote.
It never took long. He sensed the rats closing on him, hidden away for now but tempted by the bone powder. He’d once tasted the stuff himself—extracted and crushed from the skeletons of dead Garthans, so he was told—and he’d been sick for a week. Others often chided him about his sensitive stomach, and he berated them, claiming Marcellan blood. Bitterness and humor made good companions.
He watched from the corner of his eye as a rat the size of his forearm started licking up the powder. He waited a moment until its eyes started turning with the food frenzy, then he clasped the creature and tied the rolled note to its leathery tail. He splashed the fur on its back with rose stoneshroom extract—very rare, and visible only to certain creatures—whispered a few words into the creature’s ear, then let it go.
It disappeared, jumping, running, and dropping its way north through the bridge’s most recent Echoes, and his work was done. He climbed back up to watch the woman again, pleased to be among people once more.
The rat moved quickly, familiar with this underside and driven by the compulsion only recently planted within it. Leaving the bridge behind, it stayed with the drains and sewers. Other rats saw it and co
wered away, because there was something about it that smelled of death. It passed different creatures down there in the dark, and most of them also moved aside, though some sniffed after it, curious at the message it might carry.
It did not go too deep. It never went too deep—especially now.
It came to a place where the sewers vented, and here it left cover and ventured out into the open. It moved in slow, hesitant sprints, looking around for danger but forgetting where the worst threat actually dwelled.
The rathawk had a nest in the high walls of Marcellan Canton. It had nested in the same place for thirty years, mating with the same female, and together they had raised nineteen chicks that had survived to adulthood. It flew, ate, and slept, but implanted deep within its mind was some other compulsion that was fed only at the rarest of times. One of those times was today. Riding a thermal high above the walls, it spotted a glint in the shadows far below. Without thinking, simply following a set of instructions implanted when it was very young, the rathawk folded its wings and plummeted. For a few beats, it was the fastest thing in Echo City, other than thought. At the last moment it spread its wings to brake its descent, extended its claws, and the rat died so quickly that it uttered no sound.
Usually the rathawk would take such bounty back to its nest. It would rip off the head, tear out the poisonous innards, and throw them away for ghourt lizards to snap up from the wall’s surface. The remaining dark meat would feed its chicks for another day. Sometimes it would even take some of the meat for itself. But today it clasped the rodent in its claws and did not rip.