Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “The rulers of the city will kill you if they know about you,” Gorham said. “Reason enough?”

  Rufus nodded, smiled, and touched his forehead—a curious gesture that none of them recognized. “Sorry,” he said.

  “No need to apologize.” Gorham stood. “We’ll go down soon. Malia and I will go first. We know what to expect.”

  “And what’s that?” Peer asked.

  “Nadielle protects herself well. We’ll meet chopped people on the way down. Just warning you.”

  Peer felt a thrill of fear and excitement, and Rufus nodded. He did not appear at all concerned.

  When Gorham stood and chatted to Devin and Bethy, Peer leaned in to Rufus to help him up. “What did you dream?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A nightmare, I think. I don’t like nightmares.”

  “Something from the desert?”

  For a while he said nothing. They stood together against the wall, and he was still clasping her hand, like a frightened child hanging on to its mother.

  “No,” he said at last. “The desert is still a blank to me.”

  “Come on!” Gorham called. “A short walk this way, a short wait, and then say goodbye to the stars.”

  “Nice way of putting it,” she mumbled, and, when she looked up, Gorham was looking at her as if he’d heard. Once, lying naked on the rooftop of her old family home in Mino Mont, the sweat of sex drying on their skin, they had each chosen and named a shape in the stars. She could remember neither shapes nor names—too much had happened since, her desire to forget too strong—but that sense of contentment and peace washed over her briefly now, surprising and powerful.

  Then Gorham turned away, and she remembered what he had done. And even that memory felt as though he had abused her, not loved her, on that long-ago roof.

  Markmay believed in that cruel mistress Fate, and he also believed that she could be read and predicted—translated from the meanderings of a beetle in a maze, the viscous drip of poison from a wisp’s leg bladder, the sway of hanging chimes in a breezeless place. He traced the veins in a rubber plant’s waxy leaves, then drew maps with the tracings, applying them to a book of shapes and shades handed down from his great-great-great-grandmother. By the time he reached the end of a mug of five-bean, he felt ready to read its message, discerning truths in the spatter of bean dregs. His mother had taught him how to do that, and he had many fond memories of sitting with her before a roaring fire, reading Fate’s path in cooling bean shells. Some called him fool, but he would merely pass them by and content himself with seeing their deaths in a slab of shattered ice.

  Today, Fate was telling him that something was coming.

  Markmay’s home was in the lower levels of Hanharan Heights—a complex of rooms, corridors, and staircases that wound around, above, and below other dwellings. He had no windows in his home and only one doorway, but the places where he ate, slept, and fucked were twisted around and through the daily life of Echo City. Those around him were not aware of the shape of his home. They put occasional scrapings and thumps down to the mass of buildings around them expanding and settling with the sun. But Markmay knew better. His home was a maze, and when he watched those beetles in their smaller mazes, he saw himself. At the end, when he killed them and took them apart to read the truth of their insides, his own guts ached in sympathy.

  In one room, seven heavy bone chimes hung from knots of chickpig hair cast into the plaster ceiling. He sat among them for a while, trying to still his thumping heart lest it transfer to the chimes and spoil his reading. He closed his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply, but the excitement was there. Something coming, he kept thinking, because as yet he had no idea what. Stilled at last, he opened his eyes slowly and looked around.

  Six of the bone chimes were swaying, too slightly to set their parts colliding and singing but moving nonetheless. There was never any air movement in Markmay’s home—that would spoil so many readings—other than when he moved. He watched the chimes, then looked closer at the bone that did not move. It was the longest of them, its knuckle weight closest to the floor.

  Markmay leaned slowly to his side and crawled from the room. He left a trail of sweat on the wooden floor behind him. His home was not hot.

  He hurried up a curving staircase to a circular room. This was the highest part of his home. Its walls flickered with the light from seventy-seven candles—one for each of the six-legged gods supposed to wander the desert, though Markmay held no allegiance to any such foolish superstitions—and when he closed the heavy door behind him, they danced like excited puppies. He sat in the center of the room and repeated his calming process from before: slower breathing, settled heart, motionless.

  When he opened his eyes, the candles were still agitated. Those that danced the most burned with a purple flame, and Markmay knocked several over in his panic while leaving the room. He slammed the door shut behind him and knew he must refer to the book.

  Back down the circular staircase, across an empty room, along a doorless corridor, down another twisting staircase that wrapped a Hanharan priest’s home like a secretive snake, and in a wide, low-ceilinged room Markmay sat at a table and opened the huge book it held. He went to one page, back to another, forward almost to the end, and all the while he was making notes with a rockzard-spine pen on a pad of rough paper. Sweat dripped from his nose and chin onto the paper, and he wiped it away. It smudged the ink, but that did not matter. This was recording, not reading, and the next person to read this would not be concerned with smudges.

  Markmay had the ear of Wendie Marcellan, one of the more senior members of the Council. She told him that none of the others knew of her predilection for Markmay’s unusual readings—indeed, she had hinted more than once that some would find it blasphemous—but Markmay knew the Marcellans to be not quite so virtuous as they seemed. He was almost certain that there were other readers informing other Council members, but that did not concern him. He was the best, Wendie paid him well, and whenever he asked, she sent one of her whores to keep him company for the night.

  When he finished his notes, he sat back and stared at the filled page. He was shaking his head.

  “Not good,” he whispered. He rarely spoke to himself, and his voice was loud in the normally silent dwelling. A feeling of dread had settled upon him, and his insides were in revolt—heart thundering, stomach churning, and a pain in his right side like a hot dagger driven between his ribs. It was as if his body and home were so closely linked that he mimicked the upset of swaying chimes, the heat of agitated flames …

  And one more thing to check. If this read true, there was much to tell Wendie, and she would have to reveal his knowledge to the Council. How she would do this—tell the truth, make up lies—he did not care.

  But they would have to be warned. Perhaps then they could prepare, plan, protect the city from what was about to befall it.

  “Please, no,” he said as he descended staircases, squeezed through small rooms he rarely frequented, and climbed down a vertical metal ladder. “Please, no. Please, no.” He imagined the people living in the homes around which his rooms and corridors were wrapped, and what their reaction would be if they heard the faint echoes of his voice. Phantoms! they might say to one another. Or they might say nothing at all.

  Finally he reached the deepest room in his dwelling, one that intruded into the first Echo beneath Hanharan Heights. He had been down here only three times before, and each time he had climbed those stairs again with a sense of relief that things had not gone badly. This time, lighting candles around the room and kicking out at several large sand spiders that had made this space their own, those relieved retreats inspired a nostalgia for good times past. Before even taken his final reading, Markmay knew that everything was going wrong.

  “How in the name of Hanharan are the priests going to account for this?” he muttered. The last sand spider scuttled away, melted down, and flowed into an impossible crack, and Markmay set about m
aking the marks.

  He trailed handfuls of dust across the floor from a bag hanging on the wall, creating spirals, straight lines, and other patterns with distinct edges. A pile of dust here, a carefully scooped bowl there, and if he dripped sweat he removed the affected area. There must be nothing here that would mislead his reading. Nothing to skew results.

  Before he announced the doom of Echo City, he had to be certain.

  Several people sitting outside a tavern saw the panicked man burst from the doorway and dart out into the street. His eyes were wide, his hair standing on end, and his hands were clawing at the air as if to grab some down or to haul himself up into the sky.

  “It’s coming!” he shouted, and his voice was torn with terror.

  “There’s that reader, Markmay,” one of the drinkers said. “I’ve heard he’s mad.”

  “Coming! Rushing! Rising!”

  “Well, he certainly looks—”

  A combined gasp went up from the crowd of drinkers as the mad Markmay rushed headlong across the street, straight into the path of a runaway dray. Weighed down with thirty full barrels of fine Marcellan ale, the wagon was hauled by four tusked swine. One of them had died in its harness, and the other three were running in a blind panic, shit and blood streaking from the suspended dead beast as their hooves trampled it.

  They ran Markmay down. Even as the dray’s front left wheel rolled across his neck, he was still shouting, “Rising. It’s—”

  Such is Fate. The cruelest mistress.

  I can’t be like this forever, Nophel thought. It’s like living among phantoms. But, of course, here he was the phantom. And he had seen what had become of Alexia and the other Unseen.

  Where do you live? he’d asked her as she led him out through the gaming room and back onto the streets.

  Here. There. She’d seemed confused.

  Where do you sleep? Eat?

  Some of us … we don’t need food. We’re removed from the world.

  You told me you weren’t ghosts, he’d said.

  She’d frowned at that, averted her eyes, but not before he saw her fear and doubt.

  So he followed her as she weaved through the streets, avoiding people with an expertise that looked effortless but, Nophel discovered, was hard-won. Several times he breezed too close to someone, his arm brushing theirs or his hair stroking the exposed skin of their neck. These people would glance around, startled, and at least twice he was convinced that they saw him, their pupils dilating as they focused, their brows creasing as they tried to make sense of things. Then their eyes grew hazy and their frowns deepened as they turned and hurried away. Once, he walked right into an old woman carrying a basket of fresh silk snake eggs, knocking her to the ground. She cried out as the eggs spilled and broke, spewing their bright yellow innards across the pavement. Alexia glanced back and only smiled, and as Nophel rushed away, he saw the startled old woman’s gaze focusing on the footprint he’d left in the yolks.

  He caught up with Alexia and grabbed her arm. “How far?”

  “Almost there,” she said. She pulled her arm away and walked on. He raised his hand to his nose, smelling only himself. It’s more than just the Blue Water, he thought. That started it, but she’s moved on from there, disappeared some more.

  Alexia marched from a street, through a narrow alleyway stinking of something dead, and into a courtyard enclosed on four sides by tall, windowed walls. None of these windows was open, and Nophel had a feeling that few people ever looked down into this place. She walked toward the far corner, skirting around a dry fountain erupting with purple knotweed, and opened a low wooden door set into the moss-covered wall. It creaked on rusted hinges, and Nophel caught a whiff of something stale and wet.

  “We’re going down,” she said.

  “The Echoes?”

  “Not that far. Just down. These buildings are a warren, and the Unseen have the time and inclination to explore. We found this place after we caught …” She trailed off.

  “Caught what?”

  She stared over Nophel’s shoulder and into the distance, and for an instant she seemed to fade from his view.

  “Alexia!” He reached out to grab her, his hand slipping from her arm. Then she grew more visible again, smiling uncertainly.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “You were going to show me.” He felt a cold chill at what he had seen, what she had become. Are there deeper levels? he thought. Do they fade, and fade again, until they’re little more than memories wandering these streets?

  “Yes,” she said, nodding slowly. “Oh, yes.” She turned and entered the dark doorway, and immediately Nophel saw her dropping out of sight.

  The steps were steep and slick, turning tightly around their central column, treads worn by use. He counted twenty before the first sounds reached him—the clank of metal, and the sniffle of something sobbing.

  “It’s awake,” Alexia said.

  The descent ended, the stairway opening into a small low-ceilinged room. One wall was lined with empty wine racks, the wood rotten and slumped toward the ground. In a corner lay a pile of roughly folded canvas that could have hidden anything. In the center of the room, a creature was fixed to the floor with a series of heavy chains.

  It growled at their approach. It looked almost human.

  It sees us, Nophel thought, but the idea did not surprise him. What did surprise him was what he saw on the creature’s back.

  “It has wings,” he said.

  “We tied them folded shut.”

  “But … it’s a Dragarian. With wings.”

  “Surprised me too,” Alexia said softly.

  Nophel had heard so much about the Dragarians, but he had never thought he’d see one. They were apart from the world, the six giant domes enclosing their canton simply part of the landscape now for most Echoians. When they’d withdrawn five hundred years before, they were human. Now …

  The thing before him was humanoid, though it was thinner than most people, and its piercing indigo eyes were disconcerting. Its broader facial features, body shape, all but the wings marked it out as a human being. Nophel thought it wore leather clothing before realizing the wings folded around its torso gave that impression.

  “How did you catch it?” Nophel asked.

  “It didn’t see us,” she said. “Now it does. It learned of us when we brought it down, and the Blue Water has a different effect on its mind. It doesn’t forget.”

  “Brought it down?”

  Alexia pointed, and then Nophel saw the dark slick beneath the Dragarian’s chest.

  “Crossbow?” he asked. She nodded.

  The thing stared at Nophel, its eyes blazing in the weak oil lamplight as if focused upon him.

  “It’s concentrating,” Alexia said. “Bringing you into being.”

  I need to talk with this, he thought. I need to find out why it came out, where it was going, and what it was looking for. He looked at the Unseen, in her faded and stained Scarlet Blade uniform, and wondered at her allegiances. She’d faded into invisibility, and some of those she waited with seemed to have gone further. He had heard many stories about the phantoms inhabiting the Echoes and how they could not be relied on to know anything but the exposure of moments from the past. Could he really trust such a thing?

  “Why did you catch it?” he asked.

  “Sport,” the Dragarian said. Its voice was a growl, like flesh across grit. It ended with a grunt of pain, and for the first time Nophel considered it as a living thing.

  “You didn’t tell me it speaks Echoian,” Nophel muttered.

  Alexia chuckled darkly. “Sometimes we can’t get it to stop.”

  “They shot me down for sport,” the Dragarian said. “And because it’s in the nature of humanity to destroy what it does not know.”

  “And what do you know?” Nophel asked.

  The Dragarian averted its eyes, wincing slightly as it shifted position. Chains clanked, its wings flexed against their bonds. “More than you, ghost
.”

  Dane charged me with bringing this thing back to him, Nophel thought. But it had teeth, and its fingers and toes ended in claws, and even its wingtips were bony and sharp, glittering with moistness that could have been poison. He looked to Alexia, considering asking her for help. But her eyes had taken that faraway look again, and she seemed even less substantial than before.

  The Dragarian looked at him and grinned, exposing too many teeth for a human.

  “What are you?” Nophel asked. The Dragarian did not respond, but Nophel already knew. He was one of their soldiers. The Marcellans had their Scarlet Blades and the specially trained units within their ranks used to infiltrate, kidnap, or murder. The Dragarians had this. Before they had built their domes and retreated, they vowed that the prophesied return of the murdered boy they had proclaimed their god would bring war. It seemed that under cover of their domes, they had been preparing.

  “You’ve come to spy,” Nophel said.

  “No,” the Dragarian replied.

  “Then why?”

  “Seeing the sights.” The thing sniggered, shifting position again to move weight from its punctured chest.

  “What has it told you?” Nophel asked Alexia, but she frowned, appearing not to have heard or understood the question. She looked at Nophel as if she had never seen him before, and when he stepped forward and reached for her, she shrank away, fading as she moved. “Alexia!”

  The flying thing laughed some more. Nophel glanced at it, anger seething, and when he looked back, Alexia was climbing the stairs. He grabbed for her leg but missed. As he ascended, she faded from view completely, and he knew then that she was climbing these stairs somewhere else, seeing a different view, and perhaps he was nothing in her memory at all.

  He paused on that tightly curving staircase, leaning on a step and catching his breath, trying to work out what to do. Dane would expect him to return with something—and Nophel could not help feeling that there was more to the Blue Water than Dane had told him. It had been easy drinking it down, but perhaps the antidote would be more difficult to procure.