Echo City

by Tim Lebbon

  “It’s monstrous,” Malia said. “Just …”

  “It’s genius,” Nophel said. “I hated her, but she was a genius.”

  “Hated?” Peer asked. He looked back at her, his face dark, the single eye glittering with what might have been anger, or tears, or both.

  “I told you,” he said, “she abandoned me.”

  Malia stepped forward past Nophel, her hand stretched out.

  “Malia!” Peer said, but Nophel shook his head.

  “It’s harmless,” he said. “And it’ll get us close to Dragar’s Canton quicker than any other way. I need to prime it.” He pointed to several thick pipes protruding from the wall on either side of the Bellower’s den. “While I work, ask your questions.”

  “What is it, and what does it do?” Malia said. “That’ll do for a start.” Peer could hear the awe in the Watcher woman’s voice, and she was glad. Malia projected the image of a hard, bitter woman, but it was good to know she still could wonder.

  “I don’t know the source of the Bellowers, other than who made them.”

  “More than one?” Peer asked.

  “Eight, all around the base of the Marcellan Canton wall. It’s a circuit. A transport system, designed for use by everyone, mothballed by the Marcellans after the Baker’s death.”

  “They didn’t trust her anymore,” Peer said.

  Nophel snorted. “Partly that. They knew she was allied to the Watchers, and—”

  “We know all about that,” Malia said quietly. “No politics here. Just this.” She was touching the Bellower’s face, laying her hand on softly, lifting it away, moving to another place to touch again.

  “They live much slower lives than we do,” Nophel said. He was connecting tubes to metal nozzles sunk into the ground, twisting connectors that squealed as they turned. “This one might have been asleep for many moons. I can tell you what they do, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. I’m not sure anyone does, now that she’s dead.”

  “Nadielle will know,” Peer said, and Nophel glanced at her sharply. “The new Baker.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, connecting another tube. “This is all done through fluids. The Bellower takes it in and expels it in a controlled motion. It’s called hydraulics.” He nodded back at the center of the large chamber. “We go in that pod, the pod goes in front of its mouth, and once the fluid is flowing, it pushes us along the route.”

  “All around the Marcellan wall,” Malia said.

  “From one Bellower to the next. At each junction we move to a new pod, into the mouth of a new Bellower.”

  “Amazing,” Peer said.

  “It’s horrible.” Malia stepped back from the face, wiping her hand against her trousers. “It’s monstrous, making something like this. Where’s its purpose? What are its thoughts?”

  “I’m not certain it has any,” Nophel said, pausing for a moment. “The Scopes seem content to do what they’re made to do.”

  “But they were people before, and now …”

  “I never said what she did was right,” Nophel said. “Only that she was a genius. This new Baker does things differently?”

  “Yes,” Peer said, but Malia only frowned, and Peer knew what she was thinking about. The Pserans, those flying things down there, others—all given purpose and form by Nadielle but denied the one thing that any living thing must naturally desire: freedom.

  “It’s connected,” Nophel said. “And it’s awake.” He backed away, and Peer saw the Bellower open its eyes.

  They were as black as soot, glittering with moisture. They rolled left and right, but such was their uniform darkness that she could not tell exactly where they looked.

  “It sees?” she asked.

  “I’ve never really known.” Nophel walked along the wall a little, until he reached a series of large metal wheels. As he turned the first, the sound of rushing fluid filled the chamber, and the first of the thick tubes sprang upright as it was filled. The Bellower shivered and rolled its eyes again, and its whole body shifted in its massive hole. The ground shook.

  It’s enjoying this, Peer thought. But as Nophel turned the other wheels and the rest of the tubes started to pump fluid, she could not decide whether the creature was shivering in pleasure or pain. Its inhuman eyes gave away nothing.

  Nophel moved to the pod and began to pull at a tall lever set in the floor beside it. Metal gears cranked, chains strained and buzzed with tension, and the pod shifted backward toward the creature.

  It opened its mouth. The stench was horrendous, a stink so rich it was almost visible, and Peer pressed a hand over her mouth and nose.

  “Smells like some of the taverns I’ve been in,” Malia muttered.

  Peer laughed. She couldn’t help it, and it felt good. It came from deep in her gut, bending her over double, and it drove away circling memories of the dead Scarlet Blades, Gorham’s betrayal, the Baker and her monstrous creations. It sounded good as well, filling the chamber with something other than awed whispers. As she looked up at the Bellower, its eyes seemed to roll toward her, and its mouth opened that little bit wider.

  Malia stared at her with one eyebrow raised, one corner of her mouth lifted. Perhaps that was as close to laughter as she came.

  “Into the pod,” Nophel said, unaffected. “We don’t have long until it bellows.”

  Peer composed herself, wiping tears from her eyes and wondering exactly what she had been laughing at. Some madness in there, she thought, imagining how Penler would have looked at her, his old, wise eyes seeing the truth. Once more she wished he was there with her, and as she approached the pod she felt an aching loneliness.

  The pod was now positioned directly in front of the Bellower, its glass lid raised. Inside were nine flattened seats, footrests, and hand hoops; a series of small holes speckled every surface.

  “Hurry!” Nophel said. He was becoming impatient, glancing back and forth between pod and Bellower, and his edginess did away with the dregs of Peer’s humor. She felt flat and empty once again, and the future seemed darker still.

  Malia climbed into the front seat, reclining until her shoulders and head were supported by the upholstered wooden rests. Peer sat behind her and stretched back.

  “Press your feet hard against the supports,” Nophel said, climbing in behind them. “Hold the rings on either side, settle your head firmly against the rest. When we go, it will press you backward. It’ll be … strange.”

  “Have you done this before?” Peer asked, but Nophel ignored her.

  “I’ll hit the lever soon, but usually someone outside does it. The moment I hit it, the process begins, and I’ll have beats to get inside and close the lid.”

  “Nophel?” Peer prompted.

  “No,” he said, “never. Always looked too dangerous to me.” She thought perhaps she heard a smile in his voice, but she was already pressed against the seat. A staggering potential vibrated the air in the chamber.

  “Deep breath,” Nophel said. He shoved the lever and jumped into the pod behind Peer, setting it swaying. The glass lid closed on top of them, so close to her face that she thought she could stick out her tongue and touch it. It was dusty and gritty on the outside, obscuring her vision of the chamber. When she exhaled, her breath misted the glass.

  “If you did believe in any god, now would be the time to pray,” Nophel’s muffled voice said. And then he giggled.

  What the crap has he brought us into? Peer had time to wonder, and then her world was torn apart.

  Once, before the Hanharans had declared Mino Mont’s traveling fairgrounds blasphemous because of their artificial stimulation of ecstatic terror and awe, her mother had taken her to one. She was a child then, maybe ten years old, and the smells, sights, and sounds of the fair had remained with her ever since. She’d never seen anything like it. Men and women walked through the crowds on stilts a dozen steps high, dropping roasted nuts into willing hands, urging people to try this ride or that, or the phantom rooms, or the crushed-mirror swamp
. Huge creaking structures of wood, metal, and rope rose all around, with oil lamps burning different colored and scented oils and casting their soft light over the whole scene. And it was one of these structures that had grabbed Peer’s attention from the moment she first saw it.

  Her mother told her it was called a drop ship. People paid to be strapped into a metal-reinforced wooden cart, which was then hauled to the summit by means of an intricate system of pulleys, ropes, and chains. The pulling was carried out by three tusked swine, and even that process was made into an entertainment, with clowns leaping from one creature’s back to another and conducting a fake swordfight with silk snakes as they went. Once the cart was at the top, the clowns paused and began a countdown. Ten … nine … eight … When they reached one, a clown threw a lever in the hauling wheel’s hub, and the cart fell to the ground.

  The noise was tremendous. Ropes whipped around wooden spools, sending smoke hissing out of the ride. The people inside screamed. And as it reached the bottom, a high, whining shriek was emitted from the complex braking system. The riders emerged laughing and pale, shaking and whooping, and Peer had insisted that she have a turn. Her mother refused at first but soon relented. She’d been wearing a smile that day, and Peer was the center of her life.

  The feeling Peer had in the pod as it was gushed from the mouth of the Bellower was similar—at least to begin with. Then it grew a hundred times more terrifying.

  She closed her eyes and held her breath, but it went on too long and she had to breathe. She heard screaming and wondered if it was her own. Her body was both hot and cold, skin scorched or frozen in a hundred places, and she had never felt so sick without actually being able to vomit. The screams were swallowed as the terrible grinding, screeching sound from outside increased, shuddering through the pod with impacts that came so often it was difficult to discern one from the next.

  Peer opened her mouth to shout, but something flooded in. She gagged. Drowning, she thought, choking, dying. But she did not vomit, and she did not die. The pod slowed, the noise lessened, and it took her a long while to realize they had come to a halt.

  When she opened her eyes, Nophel was leaning over her, wiping a thick gelatinous substance from her eyes.

  “Just scoop it away,” he said, sounding as terrified as she felt. “It’s exuded to buffer the body. There. That wasn’t so bad.”

  “I’m going to kill you.” Malia spoke from out of Peer’s view. “Soon as I can feel my hands again, I’m going to kill you.”

  Peer sat up slowly, dizzy, closing her eyes until she found balance. When she opened them again, she saw another underground chamber lit by several oil lamps, another curtain lining an entire wall, and Nophel dragging coiled tubes across the floor. Malia turned in her seat.

  “I think I shit myself.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nophel said, and he seemed cheerier the more terrified Peer and Malia became. “Two more like that and we’ll be there.”

  Gorham was beginning to understand Nadielle’s terror. It was a fear born partly from knowledge and partly from the factors she still did not understand. But mostly it was composed of guilt.

  He’d told her that she was not to blame. The mistakes of an ancestor born thousands of years before could hardly be laid at Nadielle’s door. But then she tried to explain some of the background of the Bakers—information that, he was sure, was rarely imparted—and his own doubts had started to grow. All Bakers carried the successes and failures, and the triumphs and tragedies, of their predecessors. And though they were perceived as different people, in some ways their minds were one and the same. Imagine being born with such knowledge, he thought. What could that do to a person? But Nadielle, he was coming to realize, was more than a person. She was the culmination of her line. And everything she did, all her rights and wrongs, would also be passed on.

  Such responsibility. Such weight.

  Now he was following Nadielle again, up through the Echoes in a desperate rush to reach the present, see the sky, and make their way back to her laboratories. She was unsure whether there was anything that could be done, but she had to try. She had to.

  All the time she’d told him her story, she never raised her voice above a whisper. He thought maybe the Lost Man’s desperation had held a mirror up to her own.

  “You’ve seen my mother’s old books, Gorham, and many of them were handed down from generation to generation, hundreds or even thousands of years old. But you haven’t seen all of them. Only I’ve seen them all, because I’m the Baker right now. I keep them hidden away. I add to them sometimes, when I improve the chopping processes or … something else. But some of the things my ancestors achieved put me in their shadows. They were explorers in arcane arts I can barely conceive of. I’m a nothing at the end of a long line of wonders. The Pserans are my greatest triumph, but I’m not sure they’ll even merit an entry in the Bakers’ diaries.

  “I’ve always been aware of the Vex. It was legend thousands of years ago, something from the oldest times of the Bakers written in the oldest Baker diary. I’ve never questioned whether it was true. It was so old, it didn’t seem to matter. The Vex was a creature created by the first Baker. Chopped, though I’m sure back then the processes were vastly different. The first Baker wrote about the Vex only briefly. I read the account just once, and that’s all that was needed. I never forgot:

  “The Vex was bad, and it would grow worse, so I threw it into the Falls.

  “It was left to succeeding Bakers to write down what they knew. Some of it must have been word of mouth, though most of it is inherited memory. Gorham, I can’t tell you, can’t explain, how I know most of the things I know. It was in my head from the beginning. It’s passed down, but not in the way your name is passed from your parents to you or the color of your hair. This is knowledge, as certain as the color of my hair or the build of my bones. And buried in that mass of handed-down knowledge, I see why that first Baker should have written so much more.

  “The Vex was one of the first attempts at chopping—a new process, untested, the Baker ignorant of its power. She was attempting to create something that would watch over the city, be its heart and mind, its health and conscience, and take care of things, because the city back then was young and still in turmoil. But for reasons that are long lost to time, it went wrong. The Vex killed many people. It rampaged. In the vast scope of its slaughter, it wiped out so many potential family lines. Echo City would be a very different place if the first Baker had been more careful.

  “So, yes, the Vex was bad. And it would have grown worse had she not thrown it into the Falls. It’s been down there in the Chasm for tens of thousands of years. Feeding on the city’s dead, perhaps. Absorbing the city’s history of death, disease, and murder. Brooding, maybe, and from the glimpse I caught … it’s been growing. And now it’s climbing back up.”

  “Climbing?” he’d asked.

  “Swimming up the Falls from the Chasm. And I saw … It has …” The tears had come then, surprising him. When he’d hugged her, she accepted his comforting, and he had wondered ever since just who she really was.

  “I’m a monster,” she’d said, gasping into his neck, the same way she had when they’d made love and she’d called him her sunlight.

  “No.”

  “Yes. I was chopped, not born. No love made me, Gorham. Only a need to survive. The same need that makes every Baker—a determination for our line to continue. Whatever accident of nature made the first Baker is resounding through the ages.”

  “What did make her?”

  “That’s knowledge that was never handed down. Why would a monster recall the key to its existence?” she asked bitterly. “Someone could use it against us.”

  “You’re just like me,” he’d said.

  “No. My predecessor knew she would die, and she needed to go on. Carry all our knowledge forward. In here!” She’d slapped her own head.

  I’m a monster, she had said, taking on the blame for the Vex. And thinking
of the Pserans and Neph, Gorham’s uncertainty about this woman grew even more.

  Now, the two of them close together as they climbed through the buried histories of Echo City, she was becoming more of a stranger to him than ever before. She was the Baker, not Nadielle. In her mind, memories of old. In her heart, knowledge handed down through the ages. Behind and below them, rising from the unimaginable Chasm with the bones of millennia of the city’s dead in its gut, came the Baker family’s greatest mistake.

  Nadielle was changing so much, and her fear was Gorham’s terror.

  Up through the Echoes, and Gorham felt eyes upon them all the way. Sometimes he thought he saw movement in old buildings and ruined streets, but when he looked, lights would blink out and darkness would stalk there once again. Other times he saw nothing but sensed things following them, slinking through shadows only just touched by Nadielle’s oil torchlight, sniffing after them like hungry hounds. The feeling would go and then return, but he never mentioned it to Nadielle. She was very far away, and he was afraid to disturb her haunting thoughts.

  And he wondered what would happen should her torch’s fuel reservoir dry up.

  Whatever observed and followed did nothing to interfere with their journey, and an unknown time after fleeing the thunderous Falls, Gorham thought that he recognized the Echo around them. Nadielle paused several times—from tiredness, he thought at first, but then he saw the alertness on her face—and all at once she seemed to relax.

  “The laboratory is safe,” she said. “Not far now.”

  “I recognize this place. These old fields.”

  “We’ll approach from a different direction, but, yes. My rooms are guarded, Gorham.”

  “Guarded by what?”