Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  Jon almost tripped on a ridge in the soil and looked down at his feet, and when he glanced up again the ground before him was red.

  He should have stopped running, should have recognized what it was and what had happened, but he’d not taken slash for several days. His reactions were a little rusty, his perception skewed by thoughts of where and when the next smoke would come from. So he kept running, and it was the woman’s uncoiled guts that tripped him.

  Jon went sprawling, unable to contain the scream. Shock, disgust, grief, terror—they all came out in one piercing shout. He held out his hands and they pressed into something warm. It splashed his face and neck, and then he rolled, feeling things crunching and bursting beneath him.

  Her head, I see her head, and she’s screaming, and there’s no sound because—

  Because her head had rolled away, and he was in her body. When he saw the hand, he focused intently on it, because it was the only part of her not touched by spilled blood.

  Steam rose, and everything he touched was warm.

  He was trying to take in another breath, but shock had winded him. The boy, he thought, because he always thought of him as Boy, and now he wished he’d shouted the kid’s name one last time before he’d run away.

  Jon managed to stand. His feet sank into wet soil, but he looked away. When he’d found her beneath the mepple stack, the woman had tried to kiss him, hands stealing to his cock because, in her gang, that was the only way she’d known to survive. When she’d felt no stirring there, she frowned, and then Jon had kissed her forehead and told her to tell him her story and that everything would be fine. Now everything was no longer fine, and he had to—

  Something else flew overhead, wingtips and limbs skimming the uppermost plants and sending leaves drifting down. Jon flinched downward, closer to the ruin of the woman, and then he found his voice and screamed.

  He stood and sprinted uphill. The tall man was staring down at him, skin pale and eyes wide, and, closer, Jon could see the boy’s bobbing head as he closed on their prey. Plants all around the boy shook, and he disappeared.

  Jon was about to shout when he heard the boy’s terrible wet scream. It was cut off quickly. The plants stopped moving.

  So did Jon. He was staring at the white-haired man, and he realized the man was not afraid. Confused perhaps, and a little bewildered. But the boy’s dying screech, piercing and awful, had not seemed to perturb the stranger.

  Figures appeared all around. Gray shapes, stooped like the few Garthans Jon had seen over the years, and he thought, They’ve started hunting for themselves. But then the shapes stood tall, and he realized that these were not Garthans. He didn’t know what they were, though he had his suspicions. He’d read books about the Dragarians—speculative stuff concerning what that hermitic society had been doing for the last few hundred years, why they never came out, and why no one who tried to enter their canton was ever seen again. There had been illustrations, but most were merely projections of what they might look like now. They’d been human when they shut themselves away.

  “But you’ve changed,” Jon whispered, and the tall man met his gaze again.

  Jon started to back away. His increased heartbeat flushed some slash dregs into his system and he felt a curious calmness descending, the terrible fate they had been ready to subject this man to vague and ambiguous now. He almost tripped over a dart-root stem but resisted the temptation to look back. They’re not looking for me, he thought. It’s all him. Whatever this is about, whatever they want, it’s all him.

  His vision swam and he closed his eyes, willing away the wooziness that sometimes accompanied his first slash of the day. When he opened his eyes again, one of the things stood before him. A Dragarian. And the very fact that it was humanoid made its indigo eyes even more alien.

  “Wait,” Jon whispered, and something flashed before him. When he went to speak again, no sound emerged. And as the thing turned away and sprinted back up the slope, Jon felt the rush of blood and knew that his throat had been cut.

  He went to his knees, then fell forward onto the rich soil. His blood would fertilize, his flesh rot and give goodness, and his dying thoughts were fueled by slash. Best way to go, a fellow Gage Gang member had once said, all slashed up. Jon almost agreed.

  As the world grew dark, he heard the sound of songlike worship, and the pain came in at last.

  “You made me name Neph, because it was not a suitable name,” Gorham said. “So what about her?”

  Nadielle was walking beside him in the deepest Echo he had ever seen. Neph was somewhere ahead, patrolling beyond the reach of their burning torches and already making Gorham feel safe. Behind them came the woman. She neither spoke nor responded when he spoke to her, and he’d caught Nadielle watching him in amusement when he tried.

  The Baker seemed uninterested. “Choose a name, if it will make you happy.”

  “Don’t you want to name her?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  “Why?”

  “Same reason I had no wish to name Neph: I left that for your amusement. Besides, she’s going to die.”

  Gorham wanted her to say more, but Nadielle walked silently on, staring down at the sandy soil of this older Echo.

  “I’ll call her Caytlin.” He looked back at the short, slight woman as he spoke the name, but there was no reaction. She was following them like a sad puppy, and he wondered where her impetus lay.

  “Fine,” Nadielle said. She kicked at a raised rut, and the loose stones and soil clumps hissed down before them.

  Soon after heading away from the Baker’s rooms, they had been in a district of the first Crescent Echo that Gorham had never seen before. He was used to the ruined farmsteads and dead fields, visible only as far as torchlight penetrated. And he had been down into the most recent Course Echoes as well, which resembled that canton’s built-up appearance. But the lifeless forest had come as a shock. The trees were stark and gray, leafless, petrified remnants of a place once teeming with life. He could not identify any of the species, though that was likely due to the amount their bark had degraded, most of it drying and turning to dust. The soil around their bases had shrunk away, revealing the agonized poses of old roots. And in the hardened flesh of several trees, he saw the carved proclamations of long-forgotten love affairs.

  A thousand steps later, they’d reached a place where the ceiling had tumbled and the ground had reared up, and Nadielle had led them down through a series of caverns and tunnels to the Second Echo.

  Now Gorham followed her and realized that he was completely in her hands. She knew these places. She had walked them many times before. If he became lost down here, he might never find his way out.

  In the distance, he saw lights.

  “Nadielle!”

  “I see them.” She did not stop. Caytlin walked past him and followed the Baker, not acknowledging his presence.

  “Neph?”

  “He’s much closer than that. Those are … maybe a mile away?”

  Gorham hurried after Nadielle again, passing Caytlin and walking by the Baker’s side. “A mile?”

  “This Echo is very flat,” she said. “It’s from perhaps twelve hundred years ago. Where we are now, they used to grow grapes and mepple roots.”

  “Mepples are grown in orchards.”

  “They are now, yes.”

  “So those lights …?” he asked, but he already knew. He’d seen something like them before, but he was trying to shut the idea of phantoms from his mind. The deeper they went, the older the phantoms would be, and the more disturbing their existence.

  “I think you know what they are,” Nadielle said. “When we draw closer, they’ll likely extinguish. Phantoms are only Echoes in themselves, but some have a strange awareness.”

  A shadow passed by on their right, moving quickly and confidently across the rutted landscape. Gorham caught sight of bladed hands and the sharp shadows of Neph’s spines. If Nadielle noticed, she did not say.

&nb
sp; “I never really considered the Echoes below Crescent,” he said. “The fields up there now aren’t too far above the Markoshi Desert levels. When you first took me to your rooms, it was the first time I’d been down, but now we’re so much lower.” He shook his head, unsettled by the implications.

  “We’re only in the Second Echo now, though they do become confused. There are more.”

  “You’ve been lower?”

  “Much.”

  “But any lower than here must be beneath the level of the Bonelands.”

  “Maybe,” Nadielle said.

  “Maybe? What does that mean?”

  “The Echoes are … nebulous. The deeper you go, the older the Echo, the more uncertain the geography becomes.”

  “But they’re just levels.” Gorham was becoming frustrated and a little angry, and he supposed it was due to fear.

  “Just levels? Gorham, the past is a living place. The deeper you go, the further into history you travel. The city doesn’t deal with history. It builds over its past, encloses it, shuts it off, and while tradition might persist, the real histories are soon forgotten. It’s the present that matters to Echo City, while the past echoes below it, in some cases still alive. If you read the history books, one will contradict another, particularly as you go further back. So why should the Echoes be any different?”

  The idea of landscape being altered by perceptions of the past was alien and disturbing, and yet it seemed to make sense. It could never be so simple as the city’s past sinking beneath the weight of the present. Life was never that easy.

  The lights in the distance—a weak and flickering blue, as if caused by cold fire—went out.

  “How much farther?” Gorham asked.

  “Not too far. The Marcellan wall is even thicker down here; we’ll have to find one of the old gates.”

  “And then down to the Chasm.”

  “Does that scare you?”

  “Of course!” he said, louder than he’d intended. His voice was swallowed by the space around them, even though the darkness and the knowledge that there was a solid ceiling somewhere high overhead made him feel very closed in. I could lose myself down here, he thought again, and his relationship with Nadielle had never felt so strange and strained. Then I’d be just like the Lost Man.

  Behind them, Caytlin sneezed. Gorham jumped, and even Nadielle glanced back.

  “It’s a mythical place,” Gorham said. “Unseen, unknown.”

  “And yet the city still drops its dead into the tributary of the Tharin that leads to the Falls.”

  “Just because something exists doesn’t mean it can be understood.”

  Nadielle coughed a surprised laugh. “Gorham! You’re a Watcher, someone who’s supposed to appreciate reason above the irrational.” She laughed again, shaking her head. “The Chasm is said to be bottomless. Doesn’t that excite you? The idea that the river pours into it and that we’re on our way to see it?”

  “No,” he said, “it terrifies me.”

  “Then why the crap did you come?”

  “Because you asked me to.” He knew that she was looking sidelong at him, but he did not want to give her the satisfaction. He stared at where the phantom light had just faded out, wondering what was there, what watched. He didn’t want her thanks or her appreciation. But when she stroked gentle fingers across his cheek, he could not hold back the smile.

  “It’s some way yet,” Nadielle said.

  “Good.”

  “Yes, indeed. Plenty of other deadly places filled with monsters both known and unknown before we reach the Chasm.”

  “Thank you, Nadielle,” he said, smiling.

  “You’re welcome.”

  They walked in silence, and for a while Gorham felt safer than he had for a long time. Up above, in Echo City, there was always the risk that the Marcellans would hear rumors of the Watchers’ survival and regrouping after the purge. Whether they would stamp down on them as harshly as they had three years before, he was unsure, but the pressures were always there. There was the constant duty he felt as new leader of the Watchers and the stresses of maintaining an outwardly normal lifestyle—running a moderately successful domestic maintenance business, enjoying an unchallenging social life, and not doing anything to bring himself to the attention of the Scarlet Blades or their civilian spies.

  Down here, it felt as though Nadielle knew exactly what she was doing.

  It started to rain. The first few drops startled Gorham and he swept his torch above his head, the oil swilling in its small reservoir. Then he felt the water striking his upturned face, and when one drop entered his mouth, it burst sweet and fresh across his tongue.

  “Rain,” he said.

  “Moisture condensing on the ceiling.”

  Gorham aimed his torch directly above them, Nadielle added her own illumination, and even combined the torches faded into a dull gray mist.

  “How high?” he asked.

  Nadielle shrugged. “I never really think about it when I’m down this far.”

  “More nebulousness.”

  “Yeah.”

  Gorham glanced back at Caytlin, and she was looking at Nadielle as if the Baker was the only focus of her life. Perhaps that was true, but Gorham could not forget what Nadielle had said about this small woman. She’s going to die. He wondered what the Baker had planned for this particular chopping experiment of hers.

  Neph appeared soundlessly before them. One beat there was only darkness, and the next there was Neph, large and sharp and covered with droplets of condensation.

  “Near,” it said, and its voice was like grit scraped underfoot.

  Nadielle called a halt and they paused by the tumbled remains of an old roadside temple. Gorham could not tell which god or gods this place had been built to honor, and when he ventured through one of the ruptures caused by fallen walls, the insides consisted only of detritus from the roof and a few shreds of dried timber. There was no decoration and no signs of religious paraphernalia. Just as he turned to leave, a shadow moved.

  He held his breath, then glanced back out to where Nadielle stood drinking from a water skin. Caytlin was close to her, as ever, and farther out at the limits of the lamplight crouched Neph, facing the darkness as if daring it.

  The shadow moved again, and Gorham backed up against a cold stone wall.

  A man emerged from a pile of rubble and shattered roofing tiles. He slipped through them rather than between them, the solid mass having no impact on his body. Phantom, Gorham thought, and the hairs on the back of his neck bristled. The man wore a simple robe tied around the waist, hood lowered, his bald head scarred across one side. Through his head and body, Gorham could see the far wall, but the splash of masonry seen through the phantom was different. More solid, more ordered, painted a subtle yellow and speckled here and there with small carved animals—offerings from long-dead worshippers to a god long forgotten.

  He gasped, and the phantom paused.

  They’re just Echoes, he thought, repeating everything he had ever heard about these flashes from the past. But this phantom turned and looked at him. Its eyes were blank and unfocused, and Gorham thought the old dead man was looking through rather than at him, just as Gorham was looking through him. Does he see me as a ghost a thousand years ago? he wondered, and then the phantom left the temple through an arched doorway filled with the remains of the fallen stone lintel.

  Gorham filled his lungs, aware only now that he had been holding his breath, and darted back outside.

  “Did you—” he began, but he could already see that the phantom had vanished. Nadielle stood almost directly outside the ruined doorway. She raised one eyebrow.

  “They probably won’t hurt you,” she said.

  “I know that.” Gorham tried to calm his breathing, hoping that the weak lamplight did not shine from the sheen of sweat he felt on his face and neck. For a beat he thought he felt Caytlin looking at him, but when he glanced her way she was staring at the Baker once again. If she’d
had the ghost of a smile on her face, perhaps she would have spooked him less.

  “We’re very near the wall into Marcellan Canton,” Nadielle said. “Of course, it’s not guarded down here, not by Scarlet Blades, at least. But there are …” She smiled.

  “There are what?”

  “The history of this canton is a stormy one. The wall’s roots are often the focal point for some of the many soldiers who’ve died in service to the Marcellans.”

  “You said they won’t hurt us,” he said.

  “No, they won’t. But they sometimes like to try. Just stay close, and we’ll be through soon enough. Then we go deeper.”

  I’m not sure I should have agreed to this, Gorham thought, but he had no desire to show his nervousness. He hated it when Nadielle offered him that smile, like a teacher humoring a small child. The only time she smiled without condescension was in her bed after they had made love, when she liked him to stroke her stomach and she twisted his hair in her fingers, and she talked about the past as if it could save them all.

  There were architects a thousand years ago who built with bone, and they made such wonders. A thousand years earlier, philosophers from Mino Mont wrote a series of books that are long lost but that supposedly placed us in a world much easier to understand and much less cruel. And three thousand years before that, the musicians of what would become Dragar’s Canton could beguile with a note and possess with a word. Their compositions were as close to magic as anything the city has ever seen.

  But even that would not last for long. Those times never stretched, because the Baker always had something to do, places to go, monstrosities to tend in her vats. And perhaps she feared she had told him too much.