by Tim Lebbon
“It’ll be a while yet,” she said. “But it climbs the water. It’s been climbing for …”
“For?”
“A long time.” She was staring into the darkness, and Gorham had no wish to see what she was seeing.
“Do you know?” he asked. “Is it something—”
“Something that shouldn’t be. Something that should have never been.” Then she looked directly at him for the first time. “We have to run.” She moved away, holding the torch before her to light the way.
Gorham went with her, because he had no choice. He could have held her back, perhaps, to demand more from her. But, in truth, he had always been afraid of the Baker, and this just scared him more.
Nadielle seemed very certain of their route. Even without Neph, she moved unerringly through the underground. Sometimes they seemed to be heading down instead of up, but that would never last for long, and Gorham thought it was to reach easier routes or avoid dangerous ones. There was so much here that he was still afraid of, but being with the Baker went some way toward lessening those fears, because he was more afraid of her than of anything else.
They might have been underground for two days or five; all time seemed to have lost itself to the shadows and eternal night. They had paused many times on the way down, eating dried meats and fruit from their backpacks and catching brief sleeps before moving on, and though it went against his better judgment, Gorham had taken drinks from some of the pools they found in the caves. The water tasted heavy and salty but never rank. He always smelled before tasting.
Now he was exhausted and hungry. His backpack was empty, Nadielle had abandoned hers at the Falls, and Caytlin and Neph were gone. Caytlin had fallen, and if the legends of the Falls were true, she was still falling. Could she be alive? It was a horrific idea, but it circled him and kept presenting itself, and he could not help but imagine what she might be seeing or feeling.
As for Neph, he was sitting back at the Falls, awaiting whatever rose from them.
They walked and climbed for some time, Nadielle saying nothing. Sometimes he tried to prompt her to talk about the Falls again or simply to say anything. But she was silent, brooding, apparently concentrating on the ascent, even though her eyes were far away.
Finally, just when Gorham was considering how he would face Nadielle and force her to tell him what had frightened her so much, she paused at the mouth of a tunnel. Before them lay a deep blackness, barely touched by the torch.
“We’ve climbed into the deepest Echo,” she said. “This is Echo City as it was in the beginning.”
Gorham felt chilled, as if his bones had been touched by something terrible. They had not seen this place on their descent, because Neph had led them down through the caves and caverns around the Falls. But Gorham had been wondering when they would encounter the roots of Echo City and what they might find.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Because there’s nothing deeper,” she said, as if explaining to a child.
“But this is …” Old, he thought. Ancient.
“What’s wrong, Gorham? Expecting Hanharan to welcome you?”
“No,” he said, but the darkness was thick and swallowed their voices. The depth of space before them felt immense, and he wondered how far he would see were this Echo to suddenly light up.
“We’d look for him if we had time,” she said. He could see the dreamy look in her eyes—mostly hidden by the urgency of their journey, but still there.
“Hanharan? A god?”
“He must have been someone,” Nadielle said. “Come on.” They started walking, the bubble of light around them flowing across the dusty, uneven floor, and then they started to pick out ghostly shapes in the darkness. Buildings, Gorham guessed, but age had smoothed their artificial edges.
“I don’t think I want to look for him,” Gorham said.
“An architect, perhaps,” Nadielle said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “A philosopher. A carpenter. An experimenter. My ancestors all had their own ideas about who or what he might have been.”
“None of them ever came down to explore?”
“No!” she snapped.
“Well, now you’re here; you can find out.”
“From so long ago?” Nadielle asked. She kicked along the ground, and a haze of dust weakened the torchlight. “Doesn’t matter what he was down here. Up there, he’s a god.” She snorted, then chuckled.
“What’s so—”
“Shh!” The sound was harsh and loud, and Gorham crouched, chill air cooling sweat across his body.
“What?” he whispered. He tried to peer into history-rich shadows, seeking those forgotten places where myths had been born.
But Nadielle had extinguished the torch. “We’re not alone.”
She was close enough to smell. He knew her scents, and some had always been mysterious to him, but he smelled them now and they were a comfort. If he held his own breath, he could hear hers. And, close enough to touch, he was sure he could feel the heat of her blood and skin passing across to his.
We’re not alone, she had said, but she had not yet told him how she knew. That would come soon.
He listened for sounds of movement or pursuit but heard neither. When he started to become restless, Nadielle’s hand closed around his arm and grabbed tight, then she pressed her face to his, sighing against him, and he felt the wetness of tears on her cheeks. He gasped in surprise but said nothing, and she turned his head with a hand beneath his chin so that she could talk into his ear.
“We have to survive,” she said. “We must reach the surface. I might be the only one who can affect what’s happening, so you have to help me in any way you can.”
Gorham nodded, unsettled.
“Any way, Gorham.”
She means me staying down here, he thought. She means sacrificing myself, if I have to, so that she can go on. He wondered if that was why she was crying but thought not. He nodded again, slower this time.
“First,” Nadielle said, “we have to get past the Lost Man.”
Gorham held his breath, and Nadielle’s torch flared once more. She pulled away from him and shone the light ahead, out into the Echo that contained Echo City’s earliest remnants.
Time had pressed down on this place with irresistible weight. Buildings were crushed and toppled, and close to where they hid lay a pile of rubble. Some of the stones might have been carved with images or even words, but dust stole away any impression.
Beyond this was a structure the likes of which Gorham had never seen. Built from stone and at least three stories high, it seemed to defy many of the natural laws dictating size and shape, with walls leaning outward and floors supported on one end. Perhaps shadows gave false images. Some of its blank window openings retained a gentle glow after Nadielle had passed her torchlight across their surfaces, fading only slowly, as if the windows wanted to hold on to their memory of light. Around the window openings were dark impressions of hands with index fingers missing.
“Garthans?” he asked.
“No, they don’t build. They tunnel.” She aimed the torch around them, picking out remnants of this Echo from so long ago and, here and there, evidence of those ruins that were used to build something new.
“How do you know it’s the Lost Man?”
“I can’t imagine what else this means,” she said.
“You know everything. But not this?”
“I don’t know everything! I know hardly anything. But everyone else knows even less than me.”
“We have to go back,” Gorham said. “We can find another way up, past the Falls, where the water’s carved its tunnels. Avoid this place altogether.” He’d heard stories about the Lost Man and always believed them to be apocryphal. Nadielle’s merest mention of his name had made Gorham reassess those tales, and they were all bad.
“No,” Nadielle said. “There’s no time.”
“But he’s …” A monster, Gorham thought. A killer. A ghost.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Nadielle said. “He’ll probably only watch.” But though her words held confidence, she sounded as afraid as Gorham felt.
Nadielle went, and he had to follow.
“How do you know this is his place?”
“No one knows where he exists,” she said. “Even the Garthans don’t interact with him. He’s as much of a phantom to them as to us. I’m just …”
“What?”
“With what’s happening, I’m not surprised that he’s this close to the Falls.”
“What is happening, Nadielle? What is rising?”
“The end of everything,” she said. “Follow me.”
They walked out into the Echo. Gorham tried to guess how old this place might be—five thousand years? Fifty thousand? There were many estimates of the age of the city, and none made any real sense. Now its age and combined history were a weight, crushing down on him as effectively as the surrounding rock, compressing his thoughts and making them almost alien things. He tried to consider what this place meant, but even for a Watcher it was difficult. If Hanharan really had existed, there might be evidence of him here. If he was the founder of the city and its one true god, would his time here really have fallen into such ruin? In awe and terror, Gorham eyed strange structures similar to the one they’d just seen, and he wondered how many more were spread through the Echo. Their torchlight picked out further faint images of a four-fingered hand—whether paint marks or impressions in the stone, he could not tell—and their randomness seemed to speak of ownership of this place. Whether Hanharan or the Lost Man had made these buildings from the rubble of history, there must have been a reason.
“I feel like I’m being watched,” Gorham whispered, the sensation an itch on the back of his neck. Nadielle did not reply, and as he paused to look around, she kept walking. In the fading glow of her retreating torch, he thought he saw a face at a crumbled doorway.
He ran to catch up, heart racing.
“Keep moving,” Nadielle said.
Another face, this time peering from a circular opening in one of the strange structures. Gorham wanted to point it out to the Baker, but between blinks it vanished. He was not certain it had been there at all.
Nadielle led them across this oldest Echo, and for the first time Gorham began to fear that she was lost. All the way down they had followed Neph, trusting his Garthan instincts from one Echo to the next. Ambiguous though these places might be, there still had to be set routes between one past landscape and another, and they were imprinted on a Garthan’s memories. But going up was perhaps a different thing entirely. And now that Neph had been left behind, Nadielle was following some map that Gorham could neither see nor understand.
But he said nothing, because he did not want such a suspicion confirmed. To be lost down here on his own would be terrible; in some ways, being lost with Nadielle—whom he was trusting to get them from moment to moment—would be even worse.
They came to a place where the ruins were stacked high. Even in the weak torchlight, Gorham could see the smears of ancient fires across some of the rubble, and stones seemed to have been melted and reset under terrific heat. The dust of ages had settled here, but still the evidence of strife was clear.
“More wars?” he asked softly.
“Conflict is as old as the city.”
There were no more of those strange structures. But the feeling of being observed did not go away, and every now and then Gorham caught sight of a pale face peering at them from atop a pile of tumbled stones or from the shadows beneath a fallen wall. It never lasted for long, but that somehow made it worse. If he had something on which to focus his fear, it would perhaps lessen it.
“Why won’t he come out?” Gorham asked.
“He’s been down here a long time. I doubt he knows how to communicate anymore.”
“They say he craves flesh in which to return to the surface.”
“And how could anyone know what he craves?” Nadielle said. “Even I have no idea. They’re rumors and stories. Keep walking, Gorham. I know where I’m going.”
“How?”
But she did not answer that.
The Lost Man watched them all the way through that ancient Echo. Sometimes he was blatant, his face appearing all around them as if he could flit through the space between breaths. And sometimes his observation was more sly, little more than a feeling. But he was always there, and when Nadielle started to scale a sheer rock face, torch slung around one shoulder, Gorham followed willingly. He could not see how tall the cliff was or where it led, but it meant leaving that haunted place. For that, he would have willingly climbed all the way up to daylight.
After ascending for a while, Gorham felt something grab the nape of his neck. It was a subtle, intimate touch, and he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. But the feeling remained—and suddenly it was going deeper, as if an invisible hand were forgoing the physical contact to close its fingers around his mind. It drew him away from the cliff face.
“Nadielle!” he whispered, looking up. But she was hanging with one hand, waving the other around her head as if she felt the same. “No,” he said, as he felt himself pulled farther from the rough rock wall. “No!”
He held on tight with his right hand and swept the left across the back of his neck. There was nothing there, but the feeling remained. It lured him, easing him away and tugging him down, gentle but insistent, and when he blinked he saw the Lost Man’s image imprinted on the backs of his eyelids.
He had never seen an expression so wretched, hopeless, and lost.
“Leave us!” he roared. In this oldest of places, which had until now known only their cautious whispers and the hush of their footfalls, his shout was shocking. In the distance someone screamed, or perhaps it was the echo of his own cry. The deep darkness seemed to come alive, and there was movement all around. But in his struggles, Gorham sensed no life to the movement and no real purpose. It was as if the shadows themselves—settled down here for so many thousands of years and disturbed only by ghosts—were writhing awake at the sound of a living voice.
“Climb!” Nadielle said, and he needed no further prompting. Ignoring the sense of being pulled, straining against it, Gorham climbed hand over hand, trying to catch up with Nadielle so that he was closer to their single torch. Somehow his hands found handholds, his feet found footrests, and his panicked breathing became the only sound.
Slowly, the touch faded, washed away by sweat. Perhaps it was the altitude that lessened the contact, or their determination to shake it off. But, though relieved, Gorham also felt a terrible sadness at leaving that poor thing behind. It only wants company, he thought, and he let out a single loud sob. How often could history trap souls such as this? He was a traveler down here, an ignorant, an invader in the past who did not know his place. He felt a sudden overwhelming need to reach the surface again—however dangerous the present was becoming—and to find Peer, seek her forgiveness, and hold her tightly to him. They were alive, and they should revel in that. There was no saying how long it would last.
Nadielle climbed above him, but hers was a different touch. Desperation instead of passion. Convenience in place of love. She was as lonely as the thing they were leaving behind.
At the top of the cliff face, Nadielle did not pause for breath. She started to run again, not responding when Gorham spoke to her, and he had to save his breath just to keep up. She never seemed to tire, and he wondered whether she was secretly taking some unknown drug to keep her muscles warm and loose. They rose from one Echo to the next, and they might have been moving for a whole day without pause before she finally slumped against a wall. Above her, a painted portrait of an old Marcellan stared down, his eyes smeared over with black paint to give him a monstrous demeanor. Fangs had been added to his mouth. The defiler and the Marcellan were both long dead, but something about the defiance pleased Gorham.
He sat next to Nadielle without trying to speak. He drank water from his water bo
ttle, realizing that he would have to find somewhere to refill it again soon. And then Nadielle broke her silence.
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice breaking, tears starting to flow. “We’re away. I can tell you what’s rising.” She took his water bottle and drained it before she began. “The Bakers have been here as long as history …”
Nophel stared down at his hands. I went away again, for a while. When Malia came back she looked right at him, seeing him for the flesh and blood he was.
“You need to tell me everything,” she said, “and quickly. Time’s running out.”
Nophel glanced at the woman, Peer, who had been left with him while Malia went for medicines. She had not spoken, though he’d felt the pressure of her questions.
“I can tell you only what I know.”
“Peer, I’m sure you want to begin,” Malia said. She closed the door and stood by the window, looking out onto the street, chewing herbs and pressing paste into wounds on her left hand and forearm. But Nophel felt all of her attention focused on him.
“You disappeared,” Peer said. “When I was untying you, you … faded. Then you were gone.”
“A potion from the Baker,” Nophel said. “The old Baker. I told you, Dane Marcellan and she were friends.”
“A potion to make you invisible?” Peer said. Disbelief rang through her words, and yet Nophel smiled, because she could not deny what she had seen.
“It’s called Blue Water,” he said. He closed his eyes, the good and the bad, and in doing so he brought back the images of those Scarlet Blades dying at his hand. It had been horrible, feeling his knife part their skin and flesh, seeing their eyes as they knew death had come for them. And yet he could not feel sorry. He thought of their families and friends, who would be told of their deaths today, and the people who had lost a father or brother, mother, or sister. But pity was something he had so rarely been shown that, when it did present itself, he hated it. Pity was for the weak and useless and those who had no aims.