Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  Why would I harm my sister? he’d asked. He wondered exactly what she was and what her relationship had been with their mother. She had taken on the dead bitch’s mantle, after all. The new Baker.

  Nophel slipped unchallenged through one of the western gates of Marcellan Canton’s wall, then paused and looked out over Crescent Canton; though green and lush, it felt empty. And finding a hidden corner, he cracked the vial and drank the White Water, because he wanted to be a part of this world again.

  “How do you find one person lost in the world?” Malia asked.

  Peer shook her head and took another drink. They were sitting on the street in front of a small tavern, Devin, Bethy, and several other Watchers around them. She knew a couple of them from her time before her banishment, but she had forgotten their names. They glanced at her as if she were a ghost, and she shared their discomfort. She was nervous, uneasy, frustrated. The drink did nothing to temper her sprinting heartbeat. They should be moving and looking, not sitting and musing, but she understood Malia’s strategy. They had to devise a plan; otherwise, they’d all be rushing around the city like wingless wisps.

  “Do you still have anyone in Hanharan Heights?” Peer asked. One of the Watchers glared at her, and she wanted to say, I suffered too. Her arm and hip ached in sympathy with her memories.

  “Not anymore,” Malia said.

  “What about the bat? You have ways of sending messages. There are doves and tailcoats. And can’t you access the Web?” Peer’s mother had used the Web several times for her tax collecting—a vast network of pipes and wires through which messages were screeched and passed along by the chopped. But they were inexpertly chopped—not products of the Baker—and the system was frequently flawed. A message could change with its retelling, mistakes made.

  “The Scarlet Blades monitor it like rathawks,” Devin said. He’d met them there earlier, arriving just before Bethy; neither of them brought news. Rufus might as well never have existed at all.

  “Right,” Malia said. “Even if we could access the Web, it’s far too dangerous. We alert the Marcellans or Hanharans to Rufus’s existence, and we might as well give him up for lost.”

  “Might as well anyway,” a male Watcher muttered, and raised his ale.

  “No!” Peer shouted. She stood and knocked his hand aside, mug and ale spilling across the table. He sat back in surprise, one hand slinking down to his thigh, but she was over the table before he could do anything more, her arm across his throat. “There’s hope,” she said quietly. Eyes were on her now, and not just the Watchers’. Several people had paused in the street, and a group sitting inside the tavern observed through the wide open doors. She’d drawn attention to them all, but right then she didn’t give a crap.

  “Peer,” Malia said quietly.

  “Do they all know?” she asked, looking around the group.

  “Yes.”

  “They all know everything?”

  Malia nodded. Watchers exchanged nervous glances, and then Peer sensed the loaded atmosphere she’d somehow missed before. Some of them were drinking too quickly; others did not touch their drinks at all. Feet shuffled, eyes flickered, and there was a dearth of conversation. This was not a group of people out for a drink. It was a gathering of Watchers aware that what they’d waited for all their lives might have arrived.

  “There’s hope,” Peer said louder. “We just have to find it.” She eased back from the man and he picked up his spilled mug, nodding softly at her.

  This is when we grow weak, she thought, and suddenly Penler’s unspoken beliefs in a deity or deities seemed to make sense. This is when faith in nothing makes us scared. We’re rationalists and realists, but doesn’t everyone need something to believe in?

  “Where?” Devin said. “Show us the hope.”

  “The Baker,” Peer said, and she pictured that strange young woman’s confident smile.

  “You’ve seen her, Peer,” Malia said after an uncomfortable pause.

  “Yes.” She was uncertain what Malia meant, troubled by the stillness that had fallen over the group.

  “Well … she’s mad.”

  Mad. Peer raised her own drink and took a long draft, taking the time to think about Nadielle, Gorham, and what the Baker could possibly do to help any of them. While she was venturing down to assess the dangers rising from below, the city itself was suddenly filled with threats.

  “Maybe,” Peer said at last. “But who wouldn’t be, knowing what she knows? We take Rufus to her, and she can still help us. She must.”

  Malia sighed. Devin swallowed more ale.

  “We have to look!” Peer said. “Start searching, and if that brings the attention of the Scarlet Blades, then we have to fight.”

  “Now you’re mad,” someone muttered.

  “So this is it? All this time wasted?” She looked around at them, and her voice rose into a shout. “You’re giving up?”

  “Hush!” someone said, but she had their attention. She looked pointedly at Malia, lowered her voice again. “All those dead Watchers, nailed to the wall for nothing?” She pulled up her right sleeve to expose the ugly purple scars around her elbow and biceps. “All those people tortured, so we can sit and drink fucking beer while our last hope is lost out there somewhere?”

  “You’ve heard the whispers,” Malia said. “The Dragarians are out. They probably have him already, and they’ll take him back to their canton, and that will be it. We’ll never see him again, and the next thing we know will be war with the Dragarians as they fulfill their own prophesies. And when they realize he’s not their savior, they’ll kill him.”

  “So it’s hopeless,” Peer said.

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” She stood and shoved her stool back. It fell onto its side on the pavement, and she glared around at them all. Those who knew her had believed she was banished to Skulk forever, and in some of their eyes she saw grudging respect for her escape. Those who did not know her saw only an intruder. It was sad that the Watchers’ jealous protection of their outlawed beliefs inspired such paranoia. “Rufus is a friend of mine,” she said. “I brought him into the city and exposed him to everything that’s happened. So I’m going to go and find him.”

  “Into Dragar’s Canton?” Devin scoffed.

  “If I need to.” There’s no way I can, she thought. This really is madness. But it had gone too far for her to back down now, and she was too angry to even consider doing so.

  “What about Gorham?” Malia asked.

  “What about him?” She turned to leave, then glanced back. “At least I’ll be doing something positive when the end comes.” And their murmured conversation as she walked away could have been the distant echo of some subterranean thing coming for them all.

  Rufus is moving, his body jarring against something solid, and when he opens his eyes he sees green.

  He tries to sit up but he’s bound. His arms are fixed tight to his sides, his head tilted to the left. When he attempts to move his legs, they are unresponsive. He tenses and flexes, but though he can feel a soft breeze against his naked skin, his entire body feels constrained.

  The sky above the green is a burning blue, but this is no desert.

  Then he opens his mouth to draw in a breath, and that’s when he feels the film across his face.

  For a moment he panics. He blinks rapidly, and though there’s no impediment to his eyelids, he can feel his lashes brushing against something. He smiles and frowns, shifting his expression and feeling the film tightening and loosening across and around his face.

  I can breathe, he thinks, but the panic is still there. Air moves in and out through his nostrils, but he’s suddenly enclosed and cut off from the world, sensing that everything on the outside is dangerous, and all there is on the inside is him. Am I dreaming? he wonders, but then he realizes that this is a memory, and that when this happened he had no name.

  He tries to lift himself to see where he is and what is happening, but he can barely move. He re
members the woman who found him, and that strange webbed mask she had been wearing. She’s wrapped me up in that, he thinks, and starts to relax until he remembers what happened.

  I showed her where I came from … across the desert … out of the sun and heat and Bonelands … and then she did something to me.

  As if summoned by his vague memories, the woman’s face appears above him. She touches his cheek, and the feel and heat of her skin are unimpeded by the constraining film. Those rumbles, clicks, and hisses come again, and there’s something in their tone that comforts him. Her fingers do not scratch his face but soothe. Her eyes are wrinkled with a smile, not a frown. If she had meant him harm, he would be dead on those baking sands.

  He can see green, and in his sudden rush of excitement he manages to sit up against his bonds.

  The woman moves back a little but retains her uncertain smile. He sees her hand resting on the thing on her belt—

  she did something to me with that

  —but he looks around, shocked, amazed, and his delighted laughter seems to convince her that he means no harm.

  It should be terrifying. But something about the lush green rolling landscape that is unlike anything he has ever seen is so natural that it holds no fear. The thing that carries him is moving along a rutted track, which runs along the bottom of a valley. The track side is speckled with swaths of blue bell-shaped flowers, and they spread out into the wide, wild fields beyond. He struggles to see order in the landscape but there is none, only randomness, and that amazes him even more. No farming, he thinks. It’s so bountiful here that they harvest from the wild! In one place, the flowers give way to a low, thick plant spotted with a million yellow blooms. To his right, a woodland begins a hundred steps from the track, the trees short and squat, the canopy wild and untended—an uneven carpet crawling up the hillside toward its high, bare summit. Up there he can see the gray stains of rocky outcrops and a few white specks that seem to move slowly. There’s a stream bordering the track to the left. It gurgles merrily, following his direction of travel, twisting and turning past rocks and through dips in the land. Bees buzz the flowers in abundance. Web strands drift on the breeze. Butterflies flutter across the fields, in colors and varieties that amaze him. Birds hurry through the air, taking insects on the wing, and high above he sees several larger, more-graceful birds drifting on the air without once flapping their wings. They circle, and he wonders what they must think when they look down upon him.

  The woman is walking by his side, far enough back to allow him to see the view. And she’s watching him carefully. The smile is still there, but so is a frown of concentration, wrinkling skin darker than any he has ever seen. The beads of water seem to have vanished from her hair. He is something amazing to her as well.

  And then he sees so much more. The thing carrying him turns onto another track and heads up a gentle slope, revealing a fold in the land that previously hid the foot of another valley. As that valley opens up to his view, the things built across its floor and up its sides present themselves to him, and he catches his breath. Even if I could remember everything from before, this would be something new.

  He snapped awake, shouting. Something pressed down over his mouth. He opened his lips, pushed with his tongue against the film, but there was something more solid there, tasting salty and stale, and when he opened his eyes he saw the face staring down at him in wonder.

  Rufus sat up and looked around at the things carrying him. Ahead, across a canal spiked with spears of metal and wood around which sickly-looking plants grew, a gray stone wall rose before him. It curved into the sky, and to his left and right it curved away from the canal as well.

  After they crossed a narrow bridge, they waited for only a moment before a section of wall slid open, and he saw inside.

  They walked through the dead city with movement all around. Gorham had never expected this. The phantoms usually kept their distance, but now and then he thought he saw someone rushing at him from the corner of his eye, and he’d spin around to be confronted by nothing. His only comfort was that Nadielle appeared almost as jumpy as he was.

  Caytlin walked, and watched, and reacted to nothing.

  Sometimes Neph came close and listened as Nadielle whispered to it. Gorham could never quite make out what she said, and perhaps she intended it that way. She had not mentioned their lovemaking since it happened. She was quiet. Something significant between them had changed, and Gorham was trying to decide exactly what it was.

  His own guilt over Peer was richer than ever. He’d not felt it before when making love with Nadielle—but then Peer had been somewhere else. Now she was back in the city and his life, and he had betrayed her one more time.

  Having passed the ruins of the Thanulian purge, Gorham was surprised to find much of the Echo still relatively intact. The buildings were of an older style, their construction rougher, and the materials used were more basic. There was a lot more wood, some of it dried and crumbled but much still standing. The stone blocks had been roughly cut, giving every building an irregular appearance, and nowhere did he see any glass. He checked several old window openings, always keeping one eye on Nadielle and Caytlin, but there was no evidence of these windows having ever been glazed.

  Sometimes he shone his torch inside the rooms and saw the remains of what they had once been. Furniture was mostly crumbled away, but many of the houses still retained rusted wood-burning stoves on heavy granite hearths. He was surprised that these precious metal objects had been left down here and not recycled during the construction of the level above. Maybe after the slaughter, the Marcellans had represented the Thanulians as diseased.

  “Here’s where we start going down,” Nadielle said, when they reached an open square. At its center stood a long-dried water fountain, and an entire row of buildings beyond had disappeared. They shone both lamps toward where they had been, and a gaping maw was revealed.

  “What happened here?” Gorham asked.

  “Who knows?” Nadielle started across the square.

  “Nadielle.” She’d hardly spoken since disentangling herself from him; perhaps she’d lowered her defenses too far. But he needed her to acknowledge what had changed between them. He felt like a fool, but her averted eyes were not good enough for him. After everything that had happened—after he’d sought some sort of self-forgiveness in her arms after Peer had gone—he wanted to hear her say that she needed him, as much as he’d once needed her.

  His needs were becoming more complex as every moment passed.

  “Can you hear it?” she asked softly, and her face had suddenly changed. Her mouth was open, head tilted as she listened, and her eyes glittered with wonder—and fear.

  So Gorham listened. It was like blood rushing through his ears, but bad blood. Like the breathing of some far-off thing, but if so it was a series of final breaths. In truth, he wasn’t sure whether he heard or felt it.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Nadielle looked at him as if he wasn’t there. Then she blinked and saw him, and nodded ahead. “We need to go and find out.”

  Caytlin followed her, and Gorham saw Neph’s shadow ahead of them, descending into the hole. He was fixing crampons and stringing the rope they’d brought, marking their safest way down. Gorham had no choice but to follow. Sometime soon she’ll have to talk to me, he thought. But as Nadielle had already said, in the Echoes, time was ambiguous.

  A while after they’d started down into the caverns, he realized that Nadielle was following Neph. The chopped fighter carried a torch now, and it was never so far ahead that they lost its glow. They passed through the tumbled ruins of homes first of all, slipping beneath slanted ceilings, scurrying through debris-filled basements, descending a set of stone stairs that had remained remarkably intact. Then down, between massive stone beams that must have been laid many thousands of years before. Neph kept moving, and whatever means it used to navigate, Gorham was impressed. Here was a chopped he had witnessed being birthed only r
ecently, and now it was negotiating its way into the bowels of the city. They passed old sewers, long since dry, and then a sunken street that flowed with stinking water.

  “Don’t get wet,” Nadielle said, but Gorham did not need telling. He could already smell the sickly stench from the underground stream; this was a small tributary of the Tharin. The flow was minimal, and he saw no signs of objects floating in it, so it could not have been the main tributary that led down into the Chasm. When they found that, it would be heavy with the city’s dead.

  Neph steered them beside the water for a while, then they crossed a narrow rock formation that might have been natural. Past the small underground river, they entered a series of catacombs that seemed to have been hollowed out by some ancient cataclysm. Many of the walls and ceilings showed the shorn ends of massive beams and columns, metal rusted, stone shattered, and the walls themselves were pocked with thousands of fist-sized holes.

  “Those look like—” Gorham began, and as he was about to say sand-spider holes, the things came.

  “Back!” Nadielle shouted. She backed up, Caytlin behind her, and Gorham staggered as he almost lost his footing.

  It couldn’t have been more than a hundred heartbeats, but to Gorham it felt as though he and the others were huddled there for much longer. The things flitted through the shadows, uneven torchlight distorting their appearance even more. He saw wings, and long, trailing legs, and other protuberances whose uses were far less familiar. At first he thought the strange sound he heard was coming from them, and he covered his ears to keep out the high-pitched whine. But then, when several of the flying things swished past close enough to stroke or scrape his cheeks and forearms, he noticed that they were converging on Neph.

  The chopped warrior held one arm in front of its mouth, and it was hooting through hollows formed in its bladed hands. The flying things spiraled around it in the constricted cavern, and Gorham perceived no collisions at all. Fast but controlled, these things were intelligent. Neph continued its hooting, drawing in more of the creatures. It lowered its head slowly, lowering the tone at the same time, and the things followed it down, settling finally on the uneven stone floor. Neph reduced the hooting and stood straight again. The sound stopped, echoing away into the darkness. Gorham held his breath. He could see the things more clearly now that they were still—insectile, spiked, glimmering.