by Tim Lebbon
Nophel was the god of quiet things, and though cloaked in the Blue Water’s strange effect, he still kept to the shadows beside buildings, seeking out streets and alleys that were quieter than most. Once he slipped on some damp cobbles and went sprawling, crying out as his elbow struck the ground. He looked around to see who had noticed and rolled into the mouth of a recessed doorway. Breathing hard, his heart thumping, he rubbed his elbow as the tingling pain lessened.
Someone laughed.
Nophel caught his breath and looked around. The darkening street seemed deserted. It was lined with residential buildings with tall windows and closed doors, and there was a series of scaffold towers where these old places were being built over. The laughter came again, high and gleeful, and he leaned out of the doorway and looked along the street. Three children were playing catch a few houses along, bouncing the ball off a building’s façade and seeing who could catch it first. The smallest and youngest of the three laughed each time she threw or caught. The other two played silently.
Nophel did not understand children, but for a beat this sight gave him pause.
He moved on, the feeling of power subdued now, driven down by the force of expectation hanging over him. Dane had sent him out on his own—no one from the Council’s famed and brutal Inner Guard to accompany him, and no Scarlet Blades—and he’d done so because he trusted Nophel. You have their ear, Dane had once said, standing on the roof and watching Nophel tend and turn the Scopes. They’re my brothers and sisters, Nophel had replied, and that was one of the few times he’d ever seen a look of fear on the fat politician’s face. Cosseted from reality, such a man rarely had to confront such mystifying truths.
Nophel walked through the night, traversing the wealthy areas of Marcellan, where huge houses were surrounded by gardens so vast and lush that the buildings were almost invisible from the streets. Many Scarlet Blades patrolled these areas, their garb more refined than most Blades’ clothing, their weapons polished, their attitude one of reserved watchfulness rather than the casual superiority exuded by Blades elsewhere in Echo City. They walked in pairs, conversing quietly as they passed from one splash of oil-lamp light to the next. Nophel stood aside in the shadows, thrilling at the feeling of being so close. A couple of Blades paused in their stride and conversation, looking around with hands on the handles of their renowned weapons—the knowledge to cast and fold such swords was long-lost, though many attempted to re-create their qualities—but eventually their companions urged them on. You’re seeing shadows, they said, or, It’s just the breeze, the wind, a phantom. And Nophel passed through, the god of quiet things, still finding shadows to his liking, though he went unseen.
Close to dawn, nearing Marcellan Canton’s sheer outer wall, he waited patiently while a street trader set up his food stall and started cooking diced chickpig and pancakes for the breakfast trade. When the big man sauntered off to piss behind a tree, Nophel snapped up a pancake, smeared the steaming meat across its surface, spooned on dart-root sauce, folded it, and tucked it beneath his coat. He hurried past the pissing man, unsure whether the food would be visible. Rounding a corner, he saw the canton wall, and he climbed fifty-six steps to its ramparts to eat. Relishing the first hot mouthful, he sighed and took in the view.
Beyond the wall began the gorgeous green farmland of the northern arm of Crescent. Three miles away, beyond the haze already rising from the rashpoison canal the Dragarians had built hundreds of years before to protect their privacy, he could see the massive domes that made up Dragar’s Canton. They seemed to float above the haze, like giant stoneshrooms sprouting from the heart of the land. Just to the east, the rising sun glanced from the surface of the Northern Reservoir.
I saw something open, something come out, and it closed again, and what I saw …
He shook his head and took another bite, and that was when he noticed the woman sitting to his left. She was perhaps fifty steps away, seated on one of the many stone benches that littered the head of the great Marcellan wall. Long, loose hair, a pale face, the worn, tattered uniform of a Scarlet Blade who had seen one too many battles or drunk through one too many nights of decadence. She was alone. And she was looking directly at him.
Nophel paused with the last chunk of pancake held against his lips. He glanced in the other direction. No, fool, don’t pretend, she’s looking at you!
When he glanced back, she was already walking toward him. She was tall and thin and ragged, but her stride was strong and confident. She paused a few steps away, staring directly at his disfigured face without reaction.
Nophel leaned to his left, and her eyes followed him. She frowned, then smiled slightly. Amused, but only a little.
“New?” she asked.
“What?”
“You. New? Yeah, a new one. So what did they tell you?”
“I’m sorry …” Nophel said, shaking his head.
“The Marcellans—what did they offer you if you drank that fucking stuff?”
They died, they all died, he thought, but already he knew that was wrong. No … they disappeared.
“Doesn’t matter,” the woman said. She held out her hand, and with a wry, cynical smile said, “I’m Alexia, of the other Echo City. Welcome to the world of the Unseen.”
He followed her along the head of the wall to a stone spiral staircase leading down to the street. A woman turned at the sound of footsteps, but Nophel was sure it was only his that she heard. Alexia was as silent as she was invisible.
At the foot of the wall, she headed back into the warren of Marcellan streets. There was no explanation, no glance over her shoulder. Nophel followed, and even if he decided to follow no more, he was not entirely sure he could simply stop. How many? he was wondering. How many have tried the Blue Water over the last twenty years? How many have been forced to try it?
They stopped outside a sunken door leading to a building all but subsumed beneath a new structure. Not yet an Echo, this was a place soon to be forgotten. He supposed it was an apt hiding place.
“Here we are,” Alexia said. “We go downstairs. Quietly.” She spoke in the clipped, brusque tones of the military, but though she still wore a tattered uniform, the dyed armbands of rank had either faded or been deliberately bleached away. As she pushed open a heavy wooden door and entered a large, low-ceilinged room, Nophel found himself facing a dozen frightened people.
“There’s no breeze,” one of them said. Nobody responded. They were all looking directly at Nophel, and he felt naked and insecure, baking in their regard.
Alexia walked into the room, between several seated people. They were playing a tabletop version of lob dice, the dice now abandoned. She paused at the head of a staircase, glanced back, and smiled. “Come on,” she said, and they didn’t even hear her. “You’ll get used to it.”
Suddenly I don’t want to, Nophel thought. He walked through the room, stepping lightly, careful not to nudge past anyone. The people remained staring at the opened front door, and as Nophel reached the staircase and started descending after Alexia, a man stood.
“I’ll do it, then,” he growled, striding to the door and slamming it shut. “You’re all chickpig cocks.”
“Yeah, and you’re so brave, Mart,” a woman said, snorting like a chickpig. The forced humor lifted the atmosphere a little. As Nophel went down the curved staircase out of sight, he heard the clatter of dice once more.
Alexia turned left and walked along a narrow, tatty corridor, then entered a doorless room where four other people sat. They looked up as Alexia entered, their eyes going wide when they saw Nophel.
“Got a new one,” Alexia said.
“That’s the dead Baker’s son!” one of the other Unseen gasped. “He’s the one that tends the Scopes.”
“I know who he is,” Alexia said.
Nophel paused in the doorway and looked around the room. There were a few broken chairs but no other furniture. No food. No water bottles. This was nowhere near a home, and he wondered what these peop
le were doing here.
“Are you dead?” he asked, the question unforced and unconscious.
They laughed, some more than others. Alexia smiled. “No,” she said.
“Yes,” someone else said. Another Unseen shrugged.
Nophel focused inward, sensing the solid part of himself that had never let go since his mother had abandoned him. It was strong, this part, and rooted in the real world, because even back then he’d known that he would need a solid foundation to survive. When he opened his one good eye again, the people were all looking at him.
“Still here,” Alexia said.
“You all drank the Blue Water?” he asked. They nodded. My mother’s Blue Water. He wondered if they knew, and if they’d blame him if they did. He hoped not.
“Did they force you?” Alexia asked.
Nophel shook his head. “I’m here to find something.”
“Something from out of Dragar’s.”
Nophel could only nod. How does she know so much?
“We’ve been watching,” she said. “Sometimes …” She trailed off, her thin face falling slack.
“Sometimes what?” Nophel asked. Alexia stared at him.
“New?” she asked.
“You’ve already asked me that.”
“I have?”
Nophel took a step back into the corridor. The walls were rotting here, the plaster damp and weak, and the joints between floorboards were wide and decayed. Small insects crawled in and out of the space between floors, appearing, disappearing again, and most of them had probably never been seen.
“We’ve seen what you want,” Alexia said from the room. There was no plea to her voice, and no hint of threat. Simply a statement of fact.
“Who are you all?” Nophel asked.
“The Unseen,” Alexia said. “I told you that. We’re like you.”
“No, I can go back. I can—”
“Is that what they told you?” She came and stood at the doorway, the others shifting slightly behind her, moving in a strange, fluid way.
“I know it,” Nophel said.
Alexia only nodded. “It’s how most of us thought, to begin with. It’s a way to try to handle it.”
“You are dead,” Nophel said, and Alexia chuckled at that.
“Sometimes we wish,” she said, “but no. Not dead. Just … faded.”
Nophel leaned against the door frame and looked into the room. The other Unseen were still there, but the room seemed hazy, incomplete.
“And we fade more and more,” Alexia whispered. “Some become invisible even to the Unseen, and who’s to say …?” She shrugged, as though loath to consider her future.
Dane would never have lied to me, Nophel thought. Not if he’d known about this. “My mother made the Blue Water,” he said.
“We know.” For the first time, there was a sliver of ice in the Unseen woman’s eye.
“So you’ll know that she was my mother only in blood. In every other way, she was nothing to me.”
“Defending yourself?” Alexia asked, then offered a humorless smile. “It’s widely known you helped kill her.”
Nophel nodded. “So, Dragar’s Canton. Tell me what you saw.”
“I can do better than that,” Alexia said. “We captured it. Come with me and I’ll show you.”
When they reach the surface, the sun casts its light on the sheer tiled steeple of a Hanharan temple. A man is standing on the precarious iron balustrade around the temple’s summit. He’s reaching up for the stone birthshard—Echo City’s outline balanced in the palm of an outstretched hand—which is the eternal symbol of Hanharan’s birth and continuing love for the city. He’s stretching, and Rufus—
(that’s not my name, not here, not now, but it’s all I know it will do it will suffice)
—can see the slashes and cuts on the man’s back as his shirt rides up. And even from this distance—the birthshard stands proud on the steeple’s summit, perhaps a hundred steps above the street—Rufus sees that they are still bleeding. The man is raging.
People in the crowd around Rufus are shaking their fists at the man, throwing stones that barely reach halfway and cursing his and his family’s name to the pits of the Chasm. Four Scarlet Blades are battering at the temple’s main door, but though they have it open and Rufus can see a sliver of flickering light from the thousands of candles always burning inside, the man must have barricaded it. So the soldiers push, and soon other people join them in attempting to break in.
But Rufus has eyes for only the man. He’s going to die, he thinks. He might fall, or if he doesn’t they’ll get in and shoot him down with a crossbow. Or if he grabs the birthshard and gets back into the temple, they’ll stab him to death when he’s on his way down the staircases.…
The man stands on the edge of the balustrade and leans against the spire, gaining himself a vital extra reach. He shouts in triumph as he closes his hand around one of Hanharan’s fingers, and the street crowd gasps at such blasphemy.
It’s only a statue, Rufus whispers, and he looks up at his mother. She smiles down at him, and he sees surprise in her eyes, and pride. And something else. Sadness? He’s not sure, but it’s something he’ll ask her about later. There’s always something to ask later, because Rufus is an inquisitive little boy.
The man tugs, his blood spatters onto the temple spire—red rosettes on the spread of familiar pale gray pigeon shit—and Hanharan’s index finger snaps off in his hand.
This time, the crowd cannot even gasp. It holds its breath, and for a moment that congested scene is utterly silent. It terrifies Rufus, and he has the staggering idea that he is seeing a moment between moments, as if time itself has been stretched to the breaking point by this man’s blasphemy and Rufus is the only one to exist in and through that moment. It’s something else he will ask his mother about later, and when he does she will stare at him for a long, long time and then shake her head and whisper to herself that he has to go.
The man breaks the silence and moves time on. After climbing so far and dooming himself to perform such a useless protest, his trust in the strength of Hanharan is his downfall. Still clasping the stone forefinger in his fist, he tilts backward and falls.
Around Rufus, people turn away or cover their children’s eyes. He and his mother watch. Learning never ends, she said to him once, and watching feeds knowledge.
Rufus notices that the Scarlet Blades have disappeared inside the temple. Too late, he thinks, and he takes confused delight in the fact that the man has denied them their kill.
The blasphemer strikes the steeply sloping spire on his back, then slides to its edge. Several tiles come with him as he falls, and he turns slowly so that he strikes the cobbled street on his front. The sound is heavy and wet, and Rufus hears snapping. People pull away, but he and his mother stand still. The man spasms.
Someone from the crowd—Rufus knows him as a baker from three streets over, a cheery man with bright white teeth and rosy cheeks—runs to the body, pulling a huge knife from his belt. He hacks off the dying man’s arm and shifts it aside with his boot, careful not to touch the blood-soaked stone finger still clasped in the hand.
Why did he do that? Rufus asks.
Because he’s a fool, his mother says. And later she will tell him about false gods and idolatry, all the while watching him with her sad, tragic eyes.
“Rufus?” Peer said. “Rufus?” She grabbed the tall man’s arm as he leaned against her, pushing her back against the wall. He raised one hand and pointed up at the temple roof.
“Finger …” he whispered.
“Yeah, it’s gone.” She’d noticed the birthshard’s fault years before, but no one could tell her how it happened. Entropy, Gorham had suggested, and, progress. Now she looked at Rufus’s startled expression and wondered.
“What is it?” Malia asked. They’d only just emerged onto the street, and the last thing they wanted was to draw attention. They had to cross the border into Crescent at night, and they wanted t
o be in the Baker’s labs by dawn. A holdup now would be a bad start.
“He’s fine,” Peer said. She grabbed Rufus’s upper arm and squeezed hard, and his head snapped around.
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then said, “He fell.”
“Fine, but we have to go.” She moved off, still holding his arm, and Rufus followed. As they left the street, Peer glanced back up at the temple spire and the damaged birthshard; the moon cast a weak red glow across the tiles, like the smudge of old blood. He fell, Rufus said. She shook her head and decided to ask him about it later.
Few built-up districts of Echo City were completely quiet at night—if they did not sing to the tune of revelers, they groaned to the sound of streets and buildings settling into their foundations, as if enticed down by the past beneath them. But here was less bustle, because most of the businesses in shop areas were closed, and much of the manufacturing trade worked mainly during daylight hours. Nighttime walkers were also more relaxed, because generally they were out for enjoyment or leisure, eating and drinking at some of the hundreds of taverns and restaurants dotted around the city. Different areas specialized in disparate food and drink, and it was not uncommon for dusk to see a vast emigration of people from one canton to another.
But the night also brought dangers. Peer was Mino Mont born and bred, and she knew that the Southern Quarter of that canton was a no-go area after dark unless you wanted drugs, illegal drink, or had a mind to sell your sex. There were gangs that made the Rage gang back in Skulk look like an orchid-arranging class, and she’d heard many stories in her youth of youngsters who ventured there searching for adventure, never to be seen again. She’d asked her mother why the Marcellans allowed the quarter’s continued existence, and her mother’s reply had been pointed: Do you think they have any choice? For a young Peer, that idea—that the Marcellans were not as all-powerful as the image they liked to project—had been a revelation. She wasn’t sure that her interest in the Watchers had begun at that point, but she had always credited her long-dead mother with planting in her mind the concept of doubt and the inclination to interrogate rather than accept blindly.