by Tim Lebbon
But perhaps the Watchers had felt it safer keeping their true, deeper secrets to themselves. Having been banished and returned, she was now a part of something deeper and more covert. Being used even back then, she thought, but now was not the time for upset or recriminations. The past was past. The future had yet to be formed. And the higher the sun rose today, the more unsettled she feared their immediate future might be.
The woman was huge. Peer didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone this size in her life—a bulbous mass of sickly gray and yellow flesh, with rolls of fat spilling from between swaths of damp leather. Atop this gently shifting mass was the woman’s head, chinless and swollen, with a small tight mouth and eyes all but hidden in pits in her skull. Her arms and hands seemed unnaturally small compared to the rest of her body, and her legs were somewhere out of sight. The smells were rank and rich, and as the woman shifted to watch them enter, Peer heard wet and fluid sounds. It was disgusting, and it made her want to retch—but then she saw the woman’s eyes for the first time.
“Hello, child,” the woman said, staring directly at Peer. Her voice was high and light, lilting with harmonies that would have put a silk snake to shame. “Close the door behind you. It’s cold.”
Peer squeezed into the room behind Malia and closed the door. It snicked shut, and she had a moment of panic when she thought they might be locked in. But then she felt the warm, surprising touch of Malia’s hand pressed flat against her thigh, a light tap—
that’s the first time she’s touched me.
—and she knew the Watcher was doing her best to settle Peer’s fears.
“Peer, meet Blu. Ex-whore, ex-leader of the Bloodwork Gang in Mino Mont, ex-informer to the Scarlet Blades. Murderer, kidnapper, rapist, thief, and monster.”
“Fuck you too, Malia,” the huge woman said, and her body started to ripple as she giggled like a little girl.
“All that’s true?” Peer asked.
“All but one,” Malia said. She knelt beside Blu and smiled up at her, as though worshipping the fetid mass of flesh and bone this woman had become. She probably can’t even leave this room, Peer thought, and she realized how safe this house must be. Anyone entering through the front door and not knowing what to expect would likely be scared right back onto the street.
“I saw the bat,” Malia said. “I was coming to see you anyway, but the bat makes things so much more urgent.”
“You want me to read and tell you, Malia?”
“Yes.”
“And why should I do that?” Blu’s voice was still high and light, but Peer detected the first hint of tension between her and the Watcher.
“Because we keep you safe,” Malia whispered. Blu shook some more, but this time her laughter was silent.
“I’m only playing with you, Malia,” she said. “Peer. You’re very beautiful. I like beautiful women around me, but I … lose so many. I have my needs, you see. Places I can’t reach. Things I can’t do for myself.”
“She’s with me,” Malia said, and those three words were loaded. Blu sighed, and a ripple of dejection passed around her body and lost itself in the clothes piled around her frame.
“Well, it was worth a try.” Then the huge woman opened her hand, and curled in her warm, wet palm was a bat. Its wings were propped beside it, ears high, claws gripping lightly, and its nose twitched as its meaty prison unfurled.
“It flew in from the north,” Malia said. “We’re looking for someone, and I fear—” But Blu waved her words aside.
“Quiet, Malia. You’ve come to hear what I have to say, so don’t taint the air with supposition.”
Malia stood and backed away, standing close beside Peer where she leaned against the door.
“Now what?” Peer whispered.
“Watch and listen,” Malia said.
Peer breathed lightly through her mouth, because tasting the stench did not seem quite as bad as smelling it, and her heart beat with nervous expectation.
Blu brought the bat up before her eyes. The little creature shifted in her plump hand, but only enough to maintain its balance. It was looking directly at the obese woman’s face, and it seemed ridiculously small. She can’t reach her own head, Peer thought, as Blu seemed to stretch her nonexistent neck a little, puckering her lips, pressing her arm into her side in an effort to bring the bat closer. Should I offer to help? Peer was about to ask Malia, but then Blu flicked her wrist, flinging the bat toward her. It landed perfectly on her wide shoulder, fluttering its wings slightly as if to shake off the effort of its short flight.
Blu settled again, and Peer had not realized how much Blu had been tensing her unnaturally large body until it slumped and regained its former, resting position. The huge woman sighed, belched, then tilted her head toward the bat.
Peer’s stomach lurched and rolled, her eyes watered, and she could not understand how anyone could bear to be in here for very long. I have my needs, you see, the woman had said, and whenever Peer blinked she had brief flashes of what those needs must be. Her right arm ached in tortured sympathy with whoever had to fulfill them.
She saw Blu’s lips shifting a little, and the bat’s head tilting, and the woman muttered words and sounds almost too high for Peer to hear. In return the bat flapped its small leathery wings and squealed back. She felt rather than heard the conversation, and she was thankful that it did not take too long.
As the bat seemed to settle again, clawing its way down from Blu’s shoulder to her expansive bosom, the woman’s head snapped to one side and she grabbed the bat between her teeth.
Peer gasped. Blu bit. The bat squealed, its cries more than audible this time as its body popped. Blood streamed down the woman’s wide neck. She bit again, jerking her head back like a wild dog as she drew the bat deeper into her mouth.
“Malia!” Peer said, an expression of disgust rather than a plea for action.
Blu chewed, crunching bone, dribbling blood, and her frown seemed distant and preoccupied. She started swallowing pieces of the bat, and each swallow made a revolting gurgling sound. She chewed some more, glancing at Peer and then away again, her frown deepening.
“What?” Malia said, but Blu ignored her.
When she had finished chewing, Blu opened her mouth and let a glob of glistening, blood-covered fur roll from her mouth. It struck her chest and rested there, spreading a pool of diluted blood across the cloth of her voluminous dress. She stared at it, unseeing.
“Blu, what?”
“Dragarians,” the bat-eater muttered. “Many of them, streaming out of their canton. Some fly. Others crawl, run, and slither.”
Dragarians! Peer had never seen one, other than in paintings and drawings. They were not quite as mythical as the deep-living Garthans—they were known to exist, beneath the cover of their massive domes—yet they were further beyond the reach of normal Echo City inhabitants. And Penler had respected, even honored them.
“What does that mean?” Malia said.
Blu looked at Malia, then at Peer. Any underlying humor had vanished, and the blood smearing her chin and bloated throat made her look monstrous. “That’s for you to know,” she said. “I’m just the reader.”
“Rufus,” Peer said.
“What about him?”
And though she needed to talk with Malia, she did not wish to do so here. Blu was still staring at her, those sunken, strange eyes piercing and animalistic at the same time. She was not chopped, Peer was certain of that. This staggering size was naturally wrought. But such a condition must have also affected her mind, giving her the ability to do what she had just done and perhaps also warping her in other ways. Malia might trust her, but Peer did not.
“Why did you eat the bat?” she asked.
Blu stared at her for a long moment before saying, “Evidence.”
“But how did you—”
“Thank you, Blu,” Malia said, and she turned to leave.
“But wait, Malia, what about …? When do we …?”
“Th
ank you.” Malia reached around Peer to open the door, shoving her out into the corridor. She slammed the door behind her, closed her eyes, and leaned against the wood, sighing, then opened them again and stared at Peer. “Rufus arrives, and the Dragarians emerge from their canton overtly for the first time in centuries. Is there any chance that this could be a coincidence?”
Is she just going to ignore what we saw? Peer thought, and she felt dizzy with confusion. “Malia—”
“He comes in from the desert, and they stream out from their canton.” She was staring at the floor now, where rotten skirtings were punctured with ghourt-lizard holes. “They’ve spent generations awaiting the return of Dragar. From out of the Bonelands are the words they used, before shutting themselves away from everything else. How the crap do they even know he’s here?”
“Spies?” Peer said, shrugging. “People have all but forgotten them—it must be easy for them to watch.”
“And now Rufus is lost in the city,” Malia said, “and we have to find him before the Marcellans do, because they’ll execute him as a Pretender. And we have to find him before the Dragarians do, because if they seriously believe him to be their damned prophet returned to them from the Bonelands …” She shook her head.
“If they believe …” Peer prompted.
“The Watchers know that the end is coming, and we strive to prepare for it. But to the Dragarians, their doomsday belief is a religion. They crave the end of Echo City, because according to their philosophies that’s when Dragar returns to take them into Honored Darkness—whatever the fuck that means.”
“It’s the north,” Peer said.
“The north?”
“Honored Darkness. A man I know was sent to Skulk because of his writings about the Dragarians. He respected their aims and their religion. Most think that ‘Honored Darkness’ means death, but Penler thinks it’s the north, where the sun never shines and time stands still. And the Baker told me that Dragar, murdered five hundred years ago, was conceived in the desert and was immune to its effects.”
“They think that Rufus is Dragar and he’ll lead them north from the city,” Malia said softly.
Peer nodded, and her stomach dropped. “And if they think he’s returned early …”
“They’ll do their best to fulfill the end-days prophecy themselves. Something might well be rising, but the Dragarians could be the immediate threat.” Malia pushed herself away from the wall. “Flying things, Blu said. Crawling things. Who knows what the crap they’ve been doing under those domes for the past five centuries.”
“Oh, by all the false gods,” Peer muttered. “He’s not just important anymore, is he? Rufus?”
“Not just important, no. He’s dangerous.”
I thought that the moment he killed the Border Spite, Peer thought. But Malia grabbed her arm and pulled her from the house, and events swept around her, dragging her onward, tugging at her fears and hopes, her pains and traumas from the past, and steering her toward some destiny she could not understand and would never have believed had she known.
As they ran back along the street, Peer asked about Blu.
“Believe me,” Malia said, “it’s better that you never know.”
The sun was bright above Hanharan Heights, and the sky held only a few innocuous clouds. But Echo City suddenly felt darker than ever before.
The three Gage Gang members usually worked only at night, but today they made an exception. They’d been following the tall man since sunup. He looked such easy prey.
Jon Gage—all gang captains took the gang’s name in lieu of their family name—enjoyed working with the boy and woman he was with today. The boy was respectful, even reverential, and often in awe at some of the stories Jon told him about his last few years as a Gager. Most of these stories were embellished, and some were outright lies, but for Jon that was half the point. Slash took away parts of their lives that they didn’t desire anymore or that caused them pain and left openings in memory and intention that could then be filled. The woman used to work as a whore in Mino Mont and was owned by one of the most vicious gangs there, though she had always refused to name which one. She’d escaped underground in a long journey through the Marcellan Echoes and ended up in Crescent, amazed at the intense farming that occurred there, letting her wounds and bruises heal, though her mind never had. Jon had found her one night shivering beneath a huge mepple stack, and they’d been friends ever since. She was comfortable with him, felt protected, and because Jon’s preferences went the other way, there were never any sexual tensions.
So the three of them were friends, and this friendship worked well when they were hunting. They were a tight unit, a small part of a much larger organization whose main aim was the procurement of slash. A very particular drug, slash stimulated imagination and awareness, encouraging hallucinations in the user, depending upon the grade of drug taken and the concentration. Small amounts could be procured by anyone in the city apprised of where to look for it, but the addicts forming the Gage Gang had realized years ago that the more money they moved in bulk, the greater the amount of drugs they could buy. They had shifted from being concerted users to organized distributors. And there were those in the gang whose aims were now edging even higher; they wanted to make a play for the subterranean manufacturing plants.
But Jon had never been that ambitious. He was happy with his daily fixes and the comforts that Gage membership brought. The unpleasant side of such a business—the transporting of meat offerings down to the rogue Garthan tribe that ran the production plants—was something he thought about only when he had to. He and the others would spend some days sitting outside one of the rural cafés scattered across Crescent, talking inconsequentialities, enjoying sunlight on their skin and the feeling of slash massaging their minds, and sometimes he even thought himself a moral man. Decent, hardworking, he had certain values, and he let the slash construct and reinforce those beliefs as much as he could.
It was only when he had to hunt, collect, and transport their victims down into the Echoes, then hand them over to the Garthans who manufactured the slash, knowing that the drug-addled underground dwellers would slow-roast them alive, tearing off cooked chunks of flesh to feed their babies … It was only then that Jon entertained an awareness of what he really was.
The white-haired man was lost, that much was obvious. He had been walking across the landscape in a vaguely northwesterly direction since they first spotted him, and for most of the afternoon they had been casually trailing him. They followed at a distance, and once he wandered beyond a small commune growing beans and lushfruit, Jon decided the time had come to close in. Their traps had been empty for the last few nights—not even a wandering wild horse or tusked swine to offer in lieu of the preferred long pork. It would bode well for the three of them if they could report a capture this evening.
“We’ll wait until he’s in the next valley,” Jon said. “I know it well. There’s a wide irrigation canal, no bridges for half a mile in either direction. Maybe he’ll swim, or maybe he’ll go for a bridge. Either way, we’ll have him trapped.”
“And then have time to take him,” the woman said, her eyes wide with excitement. Jon knew that she’d suffered at the hands of the Mino Mont gang—she’d shown him her scars and injuries and where they had taken pieces of her away—and he was afraid that the mental wounds formed more-deadly scar tissue in her mind, places that could not be touched and tempered by slash. Sometimes, he thought she was mad.
“Can I take him down?” the boy asked. His eyes were wide as well, but this was a childish fear, not excitement. After each catch, the boy still cried. Jon always administered the slash to him first, and slowly he could see the drug working on the boy’s concerns, burying and camouflaging them. But it always took some time.
“Well, it’s daytime,” Jon said. “We’ll have to be fast. This is no time to let someone scream.”
“I’m a good shot,” the boy said, and Jon could not deny that. He’d once seen h
im take a rathawk out of the sky with his doonerang.
“Let the kid have a go,” the woman said.
Jon smiled and nodded. “First shot, though,” he warned, and the kid grinned and started forward.
They spread out and followed the white-haired man up a long, slow slope planted with countless rows of dart-root shrubs. The spicy smell hung heavy in the still air, warm and enticing. Jon brushed against leaves and sniffed at his fingers. He realized how hungry he was. After they caught this one and took him down—the Gagers maintained many hidden routes down to the exchange points in the Echoes, and he knew of one close by—it would be time to eat.
“Hey, kid,” the woman said, and she started running.
“Wait!” Jon hissed. How could it have gone so wrong? The kid was darting through the plants, impressively stealthy and yet much too early. The man would hear him coming, turn and see him, and if he had a spit of self-preservation he’d be off, running into the endless miles of crops and making what should have been an easy catch hard. So Jon started to run as well, risking making more noise but offsetting that risk with the knowledge that they had to slow down. If he shouted after the kid now, all would be lost.
Something flew overhead. Jon stopped and looked around, but whatever it was must have been very low. The dart-root plants barely rose above his shoulders, but already the flying thing was lost to sight. Rathawk, he thought, but that felt wrong.
He moved on, keeping track of the kid and the woman. She was good, he had to admit, and he’d told her that many times. She was running faster than anyone and moving like a phantom.
Jon saw the tall man’s outline as he reached the top of the hill. The man paused and looked around, lost but apparently searching for something. It wasn’t often that Jon worried about what people were doing out in these fields—they rarely preyed on the farmers or pickers, because the Gagers knew how quickly suspicions and myth would spread among the farming communities—but this man had him intrigued. There was something strange about him, as if he’d taken a massive dose of slash and now was lost in the landscapes of his own mind. Jon had seen it happen before and had even experienced it once or twice himself. Just what are you seeing when you look around? he thought. He searched the memories of his own slashouts, but they were as vague as fleeting dreams.