Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “And he gave it to you so you could get this message to the Baker?” Malia asked.

  “No, before that. Something came out of Dragar’s Canton, and he wanted to know what.”

  “Did you find out?”

  “Yes. And then I killed it.”

  Peer held her head in her hands, rubbing at her eyes. She’s been through a lot in a short time, Nophel thought. Malia, the other woman, was harder and more dangerous. But even she was in a state of shock. For all their posturing, the Watchers had never been fighters. He was at an advantage here, and he had to remember that.

  “I know who the visitor is,” Peer said, staring Nophel in the eye.

  “Who?”

  “We’re asking the questions!” Malia roared, but Peer held out both hands, as if warding the two away from each other.

  Nophel looked at his hands, willed the Blue Water to act again. I did it myself, he thought, but however much he tried convincing himself of that, it did not ring true. It had been fear and danger that had forced the change, not a message from his own consciousness. Perhaps if Malia came at him with a knife … but he was not sure if even then it could happen fast enough. He didn’t know how many people, if any, had ever been given the White Water antidote, but he possessed something amazing. Perhaps soon he would gain some control over it.

  “A friend,” Peer said, putting herself between Nophel and Malia. “A good friend of ours and the Baker. But we think the Dragarians have taken him.”

  “The Dragarian said he would go to the Baker,” Nophel said.

  Neither woman answered.

  “So where is the new Baker?”

  “Gone somewhere,” Malia said, quieter now. “She’ll be back soon.”

  “She knows about your friend?”

  “Yes,” Peer said. “But she also knows that things are stirring in the Echoes.”

  “What are you going to do with me?” Nophel asked. He was looking at Peer, but it was Malia who answered, wincing as she pressed the paste into a gash across her left forearm.

  “I can’t trust you,” Malia said. “You’re Marcellan, and—”

  “I’m not Marcellan!”

  “You work for them. You come from Hanharan Heights with a message tube, snooping around our business, and you can turn fucking invisible!”

  “So you’ll kill me, then?” Nophel asked.

  “No!” Peer snapped, and when Malia looked at her, Nophel did not like the look in her eye.

  “I’m with the Marcellans only because of the dead Baker,” Nophel said, and the old bitterness burned at the back of his throat. “She was my mother and she abandoned me; the Marcellan I serve took me in. It has been the place where I’ve been safest. But I’ve always worked only for myself.”

  “Your mother?” Peer asked, aghast.

  “Mother,” he said, nodding. “So this new Baker is something to me as well.”

  Malia snorted, then returned to the window. There was a barely suppressed panic about her, the sense that she could unravel at any minute. She carried such an aura of violence that Nophel did not want to be near her when that happened.

  “You say you’re a Watcher,” Peer said.

  “It’s my outlook, yes.”

  “The man we seek, our friend—”

  “Peer!” Malia shouted, but Peer turned to face Nophel.

  “He came in from beyond Echo City.”

  “No!” the Watcher woman said. But she did not come closer, did not interfere.

  “Now I fear the Dragarians might have him, and there’s something happening deep down beneath the city, and the Hanharans will do nothing to prevent what might come next.”

  Nophel gasped, the breath knocked from him. Beyond the city? Dane knew … In his message, it’s clear. But there was no bitterness that Dane had not shared his knowledge with him. And then Nophel thought of the Unseen and their fading ways, and he knew what he could do. Helping the Watchers might be the only sure way to get him closer to this new Baker. Closer to true vengeance.

  If only they would believe him.

  “I can help,” he said. “You might not trust me, but my convictions are strong. First, though, will you tell me about this visitor?”

  Malia remained by the window, not as horrified as she had sounded. She’s in shock, Nophel thought. She lost friends today. He could not imagine what she felt, because he had never had a friend. And what did that make him? Stronger than they were, or weaker?

  “Malia?” Peer asked.

  The Watcher woman shrugged. “You’ve told him too much already. See what he has.” She coughed a harsh, humorless laugh. “Can’t put us in a worse position than we’re in.”

  Peer dragged her chair over and sat before Nophel.

  “How can you help?” she asked.

  “I know people who can get into Dragar’s. People like me. Unseen.”

  “Good,” Peer said, and Malia watched with interest. “Our friend’s name is Rufus Kyuss, and the old Baker—your mother—chopped him just before she died.”

  She told him everything she knew. It did not take very long and, as she spoke, Peer felt the unreality of events washing over her. Nophel sat quiet and still as she talked, and his emotions were difficult for her to discern through the growths on his face. Yet what he had said was as confusing as what she was telling him, and trying to absorb it all gave her a headache.

  Penler should be here for this, she thought, and thinking of her friend gave her a hankering for those simpler times in Skulk. An outcast she might have been, but at least her days there had rhythms and her nights had been for sleeping, not planning.

  “So you can help?” she asked at last. Nophel sighed and rested his head back against the wall.

  “We have to go north,” he said. “Just the three of us. There are people I know in the north of Marcellan Canton who might be able to get us inside Dragar’s. Once in there …” He shrugged.

  “What?” Malia demanded.

  “I’ve seen them,” he said. “Through the Scopes. I saw them swarming out, and they were … changed. No longer human.”

  “They’ve only been shut away for five hundred years,” Peer said.

  “Many in the city try to mimic the Bakers,” he said, shrugging. “They must have been practicing their own chopping. Preparing for when their Dragar returned, ready to fight anywhere to regain him—in the air, on land, in the water.”

  “But none can match the Baker,” Peer said, thinking of the three-legged whores she had seen, the soldiers with blade limbs, the builders with four arms. With their strange attributes was always infection and pain.

  “Maybe not out here, no,” Nophel said.

  “Then we go north,” Malia said. “Sitting here frigging ourselves won’t get anything done.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell someone?” Peer asked, then she realized what she sounded like: a scared little girl.

  “Devin’s dead,” Malia said. “I’ll leave a message here for Bethy, but there’s no saying she’ll find it. And we can’t wait for Gorham.”

  “Can’t we?”

  “Who’s to say they’ll ever come up again?” Malia said.

  Peer knew she was right. They had to go, and now. Into Dragar’s Canton with Nophel, this man who claimed to be the old Baker’s abandoned, shunned child and who now worked for a Marcellan who, he claimed, was actually a Watcher. How dangerous could it be?

  “It’s a long walk,” Peer said, “and we’ll need a reason to be traveling through Marcellan.”

  “I can also help with that,” Nophel said. And for the first time since they had arrived there from the bloodied and burning barge, he smiled. It was grotesque.

  “You’d better not be fucking with us,” Malia said. “I mean it, ugly man.”

  Peer offered Nophel a smile, but he was looking down at his hands, turning them slowly in his lap as if willing them to disappear again. There was blood beneath his fingernails.

  Nophel walked with his hood up, hiding away from the world, a
nd thought: If this doesn’t work, Malia the Watcher will kill me.

  He took them east toward Marcellan Canton, the gentle slope rising closer and closer to the place he’d called home for so many years. The wall was visible in the distance—a pale façade catching the setting sun and unmarred today by crucifixions—and beyond that the hill rose steeper toward Hanharan Heights. The Heights themselves were visible only as a thin sliver pointing at the sky, and, as he looked that way, he thought of the Scopes up there and hoped that Dane was taking good care of them.

  I’m never going back, he thought suddenly, and though he was unsure where the certainty came from, it hit him hard. He paused in the street and stared ahead, hoping that perhaps the Western Scope was looking back at him right now. He almost dropped his hood—but that would have been foolish. Without him to direct them, the Scopes would be all but mindless.

  “If you give us away—” Malia whispered at Nophel’s shoulder, and he spun around, right hand up before his face with fingers splayed.

  “Do you see the blood?” he said softly. “Dry now. But I can still feel its warmth.”

  Malia glanced away uncertainly, but by the time she had gathered herself, Nophel was walking again. Foolish woman, he thought, and terrified. His heart was beating hard, though not from exertion—ascending and descending the viewing tower’s steps had kept him fit over the years—but from nervousness.

  If the entrance has been sealed … if the Blades are guarding it … if word has spread already of the deaths at the canal and there’s a clampdown …

  There was so much that could go wrong, and in Malia’s eyes any fault would be his. But it was all he had left. His drive now—his aim, his reason for being—was to meet this new Baker and ask her for answers that her mother had never offered. And then …

  The Bakers were freaks, monstrosities, more deformed than his simple physical differences. Their deformities were on the inside. To kill her would be everything he had lived for.

  As they walked—Nophel in the lead, Malia a threatening presence at his back, and Peer, a gentle woman, bringing up the rear—Nophel considered just how much and how quickly everything had changed. After years as an outcast orphan, he had discovered that his mother’s line was not ended as he had believed. And not only that, but—

  —there’s another of my mother’s monsters loose in the city!

  He looked forward to meeting this Rufus Kyuss—a man who, if what Peer claimed was true, had spent years living out in the Bonelands. And how could he have done that, if not for my mother’s weird magic? The Blue Water sang in his veins, a thrumming potential kept at bay for now by its antidote. In time, perhaps, he would learn to master it himself.

  Closing on the Marcellan Canton wall, he sensed Malia growing ever more nervous behind him. Her hand grabbed his shoulder at last.

  “Where are you taking us?” she asked, moving close. He was not used to such proximity; most people shied away from him. He smelled her breath, stale and spicy.

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’s around the next corner. You’ll both know it, though you might have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten what?” Peer asked.

  “Just another part of the city passed into Echo,” he said.

  The streets were busy here. A market was set up in the center of the wide road, with food stalls hawking their produce to those trying to make their way home before the sun set. The smells that vied for supremacy were mouthwatering, and Nophel realized that he had not eaten since leaving Dane Marcellan early that morning. But though his stomach rumbled, now was not the time. He walked past the food vendors and breathed in their promise.

  The building on the street corner was a tavern, its drinkers spilling out onto the sidewalks, where they sat at rickety tables talking loudly about fighting and fucking. Occasionally there were whispers of Dragarians. Two women were arguing, four men watched, and a tall fat man seemed to be asleep in the middle of it all. He wore the Scarlet Blades uniform, but he’d removed his sword and laid it across the table before him. Drunk though he was, scruffy, pathetic, and apparently sleeping, still no one dared approach. The Blades were truly respected, and Nophel felt a frisson of fear over what he had done.

  They’ll hunt me, he thought. They’ll find out who lived in the barge, and they’re probably already hunting all of us. But as they passed the tavern and he saw the entrance to the alley farther along the street, he realized the truth: The Scarlet Blades were the least of their worries.

  He turned down the alley and walked quickly into the shadows between two buildings, one a three-story rooming house, the other a shop selling jewelry and trinkets. Malia and Peer followed without question, and that was good. They had to act quickly.

  “Follow me,” Nophel said. “We can’t be seen, and these entrances are checked by special troops within the Scarlet Blades.”

  “What entrances?” Peer asked.

  “Follow.” Farther along the alley, Nophel kicked aside burst trash bags, spilling rotten food and thousands of broken and crushed trinket beads. They skittered across the alley floor, some dropping into drains, others gathering in cracks in the paving. Beneath the bags was a metal cover, and Nophel curled his fingers into the recessed handles. He pulled hard, straining, then the cover broke free from its surroundings with a wet sucking sound.

  “Down,” he said.

  “The Echoes?” Malia asked. “You’re taking us north through the Marcellan Echoes?”

  “Nowhere near as deep,” Nophel said, and he almost smiled. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

  Malia and Peer swapped glances, and he saw an acceptance there, though unwilling on Malia’s part. I have them, he thought. The sense of power was not altogether unpleasant.

  “What’s down there?” Peer asked.

  “Bellowers,” Nophel said. “Quickly now. I’ll explain on the way.” He glanced back at the alleyway’s entrance, expecting at any moment to see the scarlet blur of soldiers rushing them. His heart thumped, and he followed Peer into the hole.

  Nophel heaved the cover back over them and shut out the last of the light. It was as black as the Chasm. They waited for a minute, breathing heavily in the darkness, until Malia spoke.

  “So I suppose you can see in the dark as well?”

  “No. I can only turn invisible. Behind you to the left, there should be oil torches on a wooden shelf.” He heard Malia rustling and then the sound of metal against stone. Moments later a flint sparked several times and a torch came alight, its diffused glow filling the small corridor. Malia passed torches to Peer and Nophel, then stared him in the eye.

  “This way,” he said. She’s staring at me. What does she see? But he knew what she saw: a deformed man with pustulating growths on his face and one good eye, who had worked for the Marcellans most of his life. She saw someone whose arrival had led to the death of her friends Devin and Brunley, the destruction of her home, and her being on the run from the Scarlet Blades. The only thing she can’t see is who I really am.

  He had not been down here for more than a decade, yet the corridor still felt familiar to him. It was dark and hidden, damp and musty, and it smelled of older times; most of the places he had spent his life were like that. It curved left and down, and though they passed several doors standing ajar, he knew to continue onward. These doors led to empty rooms, where once people were supposed to wait while the Bellowers were primed. I hope they’re still alive, he thought. After all this, if we find them dead and the pods smashed, the women will not be pleased. Displeasing Malia was not something he wished to do.

  The corridor ended at a wide metal door. Nophel worked the handle, pleased to feel it move. It squealed open.

  “There’s a lamp system,” he said. “I’ll try to fire it up.” That also worked. With a series of soft pops, seventeen lamps fixed to the walls of the large chamber came alight one after another, each giving off thick black smoke for the first few beats as the flames scorched away dried oil. That worried Nophel, because
it meant that no one had been down here for a while. But as long as the fluid tubes and distribution systems had maintained their integrity, he hoped that the Bellowers would still be alive.

  “I’m not feeling happy about this,” Peer said. “What is this place?”

  “Yeah,” Malia said, “enough of the fucking mystery.”

  “It was built while my mother was still alive,” Nophel said. He headed across to a wide channel in the floor in which a large tubelike apparatus sat. “You’re aware of the Scopes?”

  “Of course,” Peer said softly.

  “They weren’t the only commissions the Marcellans gave the Baker. There are other things in this city even now, and many more that have died out. I know most of them. I’ve visited some. They … interest me. And these are called the Bellowers.” He pointed at the wall behind them, glad that the heavy curtains were still in place. “I’ll show you one.”

  Malia and Peer stood behind Nophel as he drew the curtains open. He sensed their fascination and their fear; he still felt both those things himself. It would be unnatural not to in the presence of such a creature.

  As the curtains slid aside, the Bellower awoke.

  Peer gasped and stepped back into Malia, desperate to run but not wishing to turn her back. The Watcher woman grasped her arms and held her tight.

  “Wait,” she whispered into Peer’s ear. “Let’s give the ugly man a chance.”

  It was huge. Perhaps it had once been human, but all facets of humanity had been chopped away by the Baker. The Baker’s mother, Peer thought, not the Baker I’ve met. But she was becoming confused over such matters, wondering whether there had ever been any real distinction between the two.

  “It looks like it’s been dormant for some time,” Nophel said.

  The thing’s face was huge, the height of three people and just as wide. Shadows around its bristly head indicated a deep hollow behind it. And how large is the body on a thing like this? Peer thought. Do I really want to know? Could I even comprehend? It had two small eyes—perhaps the size of her fist—which remained closed, though she could see their leathery lids moving as its eyeballs rolled in dreamy sleep. Its skin was wrinkled and hard like old dried mud, and small creatures dashed across it, trying to escape the light in crevices or up the several large nostrils that dripped slick fluid to the floor. Its mouth was a wide closed seam, almost as wide as the head. Peer dreaded to know what was inside.