by Tim Lebbon
But she was frowning again, distant, and Gorham wondered just how much of herself the Baker had left down at the Falls.
The land rose slightly, old farmland given over to the chaotic remains of wild forest, and soon Nadielle paused at a dip in the ground. There was a round metal hatch cast into the gulley’s wall. She glanced back at Gorham, smiling uncertainly, then touched a succession of bolts and dials. A hiss, and then the hatch clicked open. She and Gorham entered, pausing to pluck two torches from the wall.
We’re back, Gorham thought, and relief flushed through him. He climbed in after Nadielle and breathed in the familiar, mysterious scents of the Baker’s laboratories. He held her arm and tried pulling her to him. She resisted.
“Nadielle?”
“Not now,” she said, voice strained. “Don’t you see that it’s all changed? That I’m someone else?”
“No,” he said, but he could not keep the lie from his voice. For a while, Peer’s distant presence had been pulling him forward and upward, not Nadielle’s.
“I’ve never had much of a cause,” she said. “I’ve no memories of being a child. I don’t even know how old I was when I was chopped. My first recollection is of things carrying me through the Echoes—and I knew what the Echoes were, even then. What child deserves memories like that? When they know everything? Ever since, I’ve been trying to find my sense of wonder. Sometimes the work I do is … just because I’m the Baker. There’s never been much of a reason. But now I have to do what I can.” She was distracted, uncertain, and could not meet his eye. “It’s all that’s left.”
“And I’m here to help,” he said.
Nadielle froze for a moment, then slowly lifted her head until she was looking right at him. He had never seen such soul in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said. She turned from him and walked along the dusty corridor. “I hope you can.”
He followed her. As they came to the end of the short corridor and she started to open another metal door, she muttered a brief warning over her shoulder, which did nothing to prepare him for what was inside. “They won’t hurt you.” Then she opened the door.
Her laboratory was alight with flaring oil lamps. It was also alive with stalking, crawling things—multi-bladed, many-fanged, their bodies muscular and trim, heads thin, eyes dark and large to make the most of the light. They hunkered down when Nadielle and Gorham first entered, then rushed to her like eager pets welcoming their master home.
They won’t hurt me, they won’t hurt me, Gorham repeated in his mind, because he had never seen anything like this. Neph was similar, but it was humanoid, its origins obvious. These things were part insect, part lizard, as large as a man but so obviously inhuman that he found them less disturbing to look at than Neph. But, unlike with Neph, Gorham could not read them at all.
Some hissed, a few clicked toward him on gleaming claws. Nadielle spoke words in a language he had never heard, and they held back, but he sensed a constant readiness in them to leap at him. He touched his sword’s handle and almost laughed at how ineffectual it felt.
“Let’s eat and drink,” Nadielle said. “And you’ll be wanting to rest.”
“And you?” he asked, thinking of her bed, her warmth.
“No time for me,” she said.
“Then let me help?”
“You?” she asked. When she turned around, it was as if she did not know him at all.
“Me. I’m not just an inconvenience, Nadielle. I went down with you to help, and I’m here to help now.”
“I’m not sure what—”
“Don’t cast me aside!” he shouted. The huge vat room echoed with the scrape of claw on stone, and shadows tensed.
“Gorham, this is beyond you. You don’t know what I am.”
“Yet you’ve tried to make me understand. How many others have you tried telling?”
Nadielle sighed, nodded, and they walked across the vat room together.
None of the womb vats was ruptured, but several still seemed to be working. The creatures—he’d seen maybe twelve, though there might be that many again concealed—patrolled the chamber, and he felt their attention focused upon him. She’s their mother, he thought, and that realization led him to consider the convolutions of her strange, unnatural family history.
The more he knew, his fascination with her only increased. But the love he’d once claimed for her now felt different. Lessened. In the face of the Baker, such an idea felt almost childlike.
Speaking again in that strange language, Nadielle entered her rooms at the end of the vat chamber, and Gorham followed. The sense of familiarity enveloped him, and he sighed in relief when he closed the door behind him.
“It’s good to be home,” Nadielle said, surprising him.
“I was thinking the same.”
She looked at him quizzically, smiling. “You still …?”
she started, but words seemed to have left her.
“Trust you?” he finished.
Nadielle shrugged.
“Of course,” Gorham said softly. He went to her, desperately hoping that she would not pull away again, but she turned and headed for the door beyond her bed. The last time she’d entered that room had been with Peer and Rufus, and Gorham had felt a stab of jealousy—he’d been in her bed but not her most secret room. Now she beckoned him after her, and he supposed that was some form of intimacy, at least.
He could smell her rich body odor, stale breath, and the fear and trials of their time in the Echoes. He wanted to ask her how long they had been down there, but he was afraid her answer might frighten him more. Peer and Malia had not returned with Rufus—or, if they had, those chopped monsters had kept them away. For all they knew Rufus might be dead, caught by the Marcellans and nailed up on their cursed wall as an offering to their twisted, stubborn beliefs. Peer and Malia might have been caught, and the pale stonework of that ancient edifice could be soaked with their blood also. It had seen too much sacrifice for too few reasons.
He was tired, afraid of everything he had discovered and everything that was to come, and as he passed through that door behind Nadielle, emotion took him. He tried to stifle a sob, but it burst out. His chest felt heavy, his eyes wet. He coughed, surprised, trying to disguise what had happened with a further coughing fit.
Nadielle did not turn around. But she knows, he thought, and that was the moment he realized she was beyond him forever.
The room was small and dusty, its corners soft with cobwebs. A table was pushed against a wall, one large book and a pile of loose sheets splayed across its surface. On the floor was another book, the cover ripped from its spine like a bird’s broken wing.
“The thing my mother made to send Rufus into the Bonelands,” Nadielle said, indicating the papers on the table, but she was not interested in this room. She went to the far corner and used her knife to scratch at the wall. She soon found what she was looking for and scraped the blade across the jambs and head of a door shape set into the wall.
“This,” she said, “is my real library.” She tugged at the door. It groaned, not eager to open, and Gorham went to help. The door ground across grit and its hinges squealed, and Gorham caught a breath of old books, hidden things, and something else. He’d never believed that eternal darkness could have a smell, but his time in the Echoes had told him otherwise.
“I’ll bring them out,” Nadielle said. “You go into my rooms and clear the table. Just sweep everything onto the floor; this is all that matters now.”
“I’ll come in and help,” he said, but she looked back at him, close enough to kiss but so far away.
“Only me,” she said. “This is Baker stuff.”
Gorham left the small room and found breathing much easier in her bedroom. He’d never before felt claustrophobic; perhaps it was another way the Echoes had changed him forever.
He pushed everything from the table as she’d instructed, enjoying the brashness of it, liking the sound of crockery smashing when it hit the floor and the haze of dust
thrown up by protesting books and sheafs of unsorted papers. He caught sight of some of what was written on the papers and recognized her writing. Numbers and formulae, sketches of things he had never seen, notes in some sort of personal code, and he realized once again just how far removed from the normal world she was. Perhaps genius was enough to do that to someone.
“Cleared a space?” She emerged carrying several large old books and twitching her nose as if trying to hold back a sneeze. “Take them, will you?” As Gorham lifted the books from her arms, the sneeze came, and she held both hands to her nose.
The door crashed open against the wall, and a black creature streaked in with bladed arms raised.
“No!” Nadielle shouted, and the creature settled like a cowed dog. It shuffled from the room without turning its back to her, and its long, waving tail caught the door and gently closed it.
“Remind me not to make you laugh,” Gorham said, heart thundering. “Or cough. Or fart.”
She chuckled, and it was a good sound.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
She instructed Gorham to spread the books flat on the table. They were bound in old, cracked leather, but they did not look damaged or fragile. To Gorham they appeared timeless.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I could eat a spitted swine and drink a vineyard.”
So they sat together, eating cheese, dried meats, and stale bread, drinking good wine like water, and Gorham felt tiredness closing over him. Fear grew distant, held back behind veils of drunkenness. Nadielle drank at his pace, but she became more morose as time went on, talking less and spending more time paging through the books.
“I need to start,” she said at last. “Need to look, understand. Find something.”
“A way to kill it,” Gorham said, nodding. Nadielle stared at him, her face a blank.
“Perhaps a way to slow it down,” she said. She stared past him into a dusty corner, and beyond. “I think that’s all we can hope for.”
Gorham closed his eyes to blink, saw images of teeth and swimming things, and then exhaustion took him away for a long while.
When he awoke, Nadielle was slumped over the table. Her head rested on one of the old open books, hair hiding her face. One arm was slung across the table, the other hanging down beside her, and in that hand she clasped a pen. She breathed deeply and steadily, and her sleep seemed to be peaceful.
Gorham stood and stretched. He needed to urinate, his head thumped from the wine he’d drunk, and there was no way of telling how much time had passed. How can she live down here in the dark? he thought. He craved sunlight and vowed that, when she awoke, he would try to take her up, just for a while.
Then he remembered what she was doing and why, and he paused and closed his eyes to listen and feel. He could hear no sounds from below and feel no vibration. The Vex must still be climbing the Falls.
Nadielle stirred and sat up quickly, splaying her fingers over the page she had been writing on and glaring at Gorham.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Bad dreams.”
“How long have—”
“I don’t know. I drifted off, and … I can’t sleep. There’s too much to do. Too much! I’ve started, but we don’t have any time at all. None!”
“Calm down; I’ll help.”
“Then go and help. Outside. Three vats need watering.”
“Vats?”
“I was busy while you slept.” She leafed through the book, her face made ugly by a deep frown. She muttered to herself, “I was looking for the seed, the root, the fucking root of it all.”
“Nadielle?”
She looked up as if surprised he was still there. “Water. That’s all. There’s a pipe coiled beneath each vat.” And she returned to her book and notes, effectively dismissing him.
When he opened the door, one of the blade creatures was standing there. It scuttled aside slowly, watching him with several sets of alien black eyes. He counted ten blades at least, stabbing things—spikes, thorns—and a sickly gleam to its dark skin that might have been poison. And teeth.
Another Baker creation with teeth.
The thing let him pass and he moved out into the vat room, enjoying the feel of the wide illuminated space. Three of the vats were dripping with condensation and issuing a hazy steam from their unseen upper surfaces. He heard faint scratching and something smoother, like thick fur stroking against the insides. Remembering what he had seen when Neph was birthed, he looked at these womb vats now with different eyes. They appeared solid, but they could flex and shift to the Baker’s desires.
Shadows moved around the hall, most of them sharp.
He approached the first working womb vat, found the pipe curled at its base like a sleeping snake, slung it over his shoulder, and began to climb the wooden ladder strapped to the side. Something thumped against the vat’s insides—a strangely intimate sound that transmitted through the ladder as a stroke across his palms. The air was becoming damp as he breathed in the haze of steam and mist, and it left a familiarly arousing taste on his tongue. It grew warmer, and though he did his best not to touch the vat’s walls, he could feel the heat exuding from them.
He stood on the third rung from the ladder’s top. Before him lay the surface of the vat’s innards. It seemed innocuous and unremarkable—an undisturbed fluid whose level was an arm’s reach below the vat’s lip. It was dark, heavy, and slick, and small bubbles rose and popped with thick, slow explosions. Whatever gas formed the bubbles was noxious, but the smell quickly dispersed to the air.
Gorham aimed the pipe’s nozzle and turned it on. The water barely caused a ripple where it hit, as if something deep below the surface was drawing it down. He aimed it elsewhere, trying to cause splashes but seeing little disturbance.
“What the crap are you doing here, Nadielle?” he muttered.
He repeated the procedure for the other two active vats, where the water had the same effect. When he’d finished descending the third ladder, several bladed creatures were waiting for him. They were relaxed, close to the ground with their blades averted, and he felt no threat from them. But one of them licked its thin lips, another seemed to be staring at the pipe, and when Gorham raised it they instantly became animated.
He opened the nozzle and they drank the water down.
“Making friends?” Nadielle asked. She’d appeared silently behind him, and something about her had changed. The watering had calmed him a little, giving him time to think, and he’d hoped that the Baker would be more composed when he next saw her. Her work was in progress, after all. And being home must surely make her feel safe.
But when he turned to Nadielle, he was shocked. It was as if days, not mere moments, had passed since he’d seen her last; she looked older, more tired, and her skin had taken on a pale gray hue he had never noticed before. Her eyes flittered left and right. She had always been strong, superior in her position of greater knowledge—though he wasn’t sure whether he’d placed her on a pedestal or if she’d climbed there herself—but now she looked like a lost soul.
“Nadielle …”
“It’s all too much,” she said. “Gorham, I can’t do it on my own. Some of it, but not all. I need your help.” She frowned and started talking almost to herself again. “There’s so much to do. We’ll need the seed, and then the ingredients, the formulae, and then …” She paused and glanced up at Gorham.
Did she really forgot I’m here? he thought. Or did she forget where she is?
“I’m here to help you, Nadielle. What do you need? I’ve watered the vats, and I’ll do whatever else you want. They’ll come back with Rufus soon, and—”
“Too late to wait for that,” she said. She looked around at her vats, her chamber, her sharp creations. “Come with me.”
He followed her to her rooms, closing the door behind him, and she went straight to her table. Books and papers were strewn across its surface, and at the mess’s center la
y one of the big books she’d brought in from that deeper room. Torn paper bookmarks protruded from it, and he caught sight of a smear of words and numbers where it lay open. It looked as if someone had passed their hand across wet ink, smudging the information across both pages.
“I can’t do both,” she said. “I can’t fight the Vex and plan how to use Rufus, look at him, find out about him. It’s too much for one person. My mother, perhaps … her mother … but not me, Gorham. I don’t have it in me. Not with this happening. Not with the Vex.”
“So what do you need from me?” he asked, sitting down across the table from her.
“Your seed,” Nadielle said.
Gorham caught his breath. Her eyes glittered in her pale face. He smelled those vats, saw the strange surface sucking water down, heard and felt the gentle impacts against their sides as he climbed the ladder. And he knew what she wanted to do.
“How can another me help us?”
“It can’t. But another me can.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, but in truth he did. He simply did not want to acknowledge what she was thinking.
“I need to go back down now,” she said. “I’m the Baker, and I might be able to slow it. There are ways and means.” She waved generally toward the vat hall. “And maybe I can even reason with it.” She ran her hand across the books again. “But I also need to be here, and to take advantage of the time I make by slowing the Vex to think of Rufus, and how we might escape.”
He nodded slowly, her intentions dawning. I’ve already lost one woman I love, he thought, but the selfishness of that hit him hard, and he felt himself blush.
Nadielle must have thought the flush was because of something else.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, smiling wanly. “I’ve done it before. Don’t you remember?”
He did remember. Before there had been passion and lust, heavy breathing from both of them, a need and a desire, and her stroking of his cock had been a preamble, a tender massage ensuring his hardness before she rode him or he rode her, and sometimes she’d kept going because she could feel how primed he was, how ready and desperate for the release.