by Tim Lebbon
Sometimes Sprote Felder believed that the statues spoke to him. He did his best to listen, but their words were distorted by time and confused by languages he had never known. He thought he’d researched all the old dialects, reading them on inscriptions hidden from the sun for countless years, but perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps there was so much more that he could never know.
The noise in his head was constant. Sometimes he screamed until he could no longer draw breath past the rawness in his throat, but that did nothing to cover the impact noises he heard from below. Other times he stuffed dust and dirt into his ears, wetting his finger and shoving it in as far as he could in the hope that it would solidify, cementing out the terrible truth. But then he’d slump to the ground and bang his head, and the plugs would fall out.
The tall statue before him was regal and aloof, missing one arm that might have been torn off by Garthans. They sometimes came and vandalized these higher Echoes, poor revenge upon the memories of those long-ago Marcellans who had wronged them when they were proud Thanulians. He had often suspected that one day they would marshal their forces, gather their anger, and rise up to exact true vengeance. It seemed that he’d been wrong.
Something else would be the end of Echo City.
He screamed again, raging at the pains in his throat and head. It had been a long time since he’d had a drink. Crawling from the small tomb beneath one of the statues where the Baker woman had dragged him, he’d cracked the water flask she’d left behind, spilling its contents into the dry dust of history. He’d lit his torch and watched it soaking in, amazed that things could still happen when there was no one here to see. That’s proof of the city’s soul, he’d thought. That it continues on without us, and it’ll move on, and on, even when this is all over. Even when we’re all dead.
Crawling, pulling with his hands, pushing with his one good leg, smelling the stench of his other leg, where the bone had ruptured flesh and set it to rot, he had no destination in sight. His only purpose was to move, because he had never stayed still.
Creatures ran past him, heading back the way he had come. A mass of small insectlike animals first, antennae waving at the air, ten legs scuttling across the uneven ground. They parted around him—smelling him, perhaps—though a couple came close and chewed chunks from his rotting leg. Larger creatures followed them, some flying, most crawling or running. He knew some of them from his long journeys down here, but there were shining diamondlike creatures that moved on cushions of gas that he had never seen before. Even now the wonder was there, and he reached out to grab one as it drifted by. His hand was slashed in a dozen places. It hissed as it passed by, absorbing his blood and glowing red for a few brief moments.
“Running from something,” he said, and he started to crawl faster. Whatever they were running from, he had to see. He was dead but not yet finished, and curiosity and the search for knowledge were his prime motivators even now.
The ground thumped up at his chest and stomach, the regular rhythm of the impacts now ended. “Turning to chaos,” he said into the shadows. They did not reply, because there was nothing left down there to hear. Even the maddest of the Garthans had gone—he’d seen no sign of them for what felt like days. “Chaos rising, and the city’s reaping what it’s sown.” Crawl … crawl …
Something moved in the distance. Sprote paused and aimed his torch, but the oil had almost run out now, and the light beam was weak. Shadows shifted again and then dashed across the Echo before him—a huge, flailing thing that ran so fast he could not track its progress. Light reflected from lashing metal objects, and between them was only the darkness of a body built to hide.
This time Sprote did not scream, because he knew this was not the rising thing. This was something that had come down.
“Mounting a defense,” he said, but this was not a creation of the Marcellans, and the Hanharans would not allow such bastardization. He knew who had made this, and why, and when he shouted this time, it was a cry of encouragement and defiance.
The impacts increased, the ground now shaking so much that each thump punched him into the air, and each fall drove lances of pain all through his body. From the far distance, across this Echo and from those much deeper, he heard and felt the steady rumble of roofs caving in, columns crushing, history imploding. The noise was immense, and at last, through the incredible volume, he started to distinguish one facet of the cacophony from another: here, the clash of metal against other hard things; there, the cry of something in pain; and elsewhere, a roar fractured by the teeth it was driven past.
The Echo smelled of death, and it was no longer only from him.
The ground opened up before him. The statue park, part of an Echo he had explored many times, split from side to side, and from the new rift something rose up. It was huge, a shifting tower of the dead and rotting, bones and flesh falling from it. His meager vision was clouded with the dust of crushed bones. Clad in the dead of Echo City, the thing beneath the corpses was visible in places—swaths of deep-red hide with cracks that glowed like lava bubbling in the Echo pits beneath Skulk.
Huge limbs the length of a hundred human arms thrashed at things clinging to its sheer sides. And these things—two of them, joined now by the one Sprote had seen rushing across the Echo—were hacking at the monster. Their bladed limbs rose and fell, scattering more bones of the dead and flicking countless body parts into the darkness, digging deeper until they encountered the monster’s skin, slashing, rending, and moving on when gouts of fiery blood erupted from the foul wounds they had made.
Sprote’s torch faded out, but the scene was lit with the blaze of combat. Old corpses flamed as they fell past the monster’s burning wounds, disintegrating across the ground and setting a thousand bonfires. Fires burned on its ridged back. Gases ignited around the fighting things.
And then, far to Sprote’s left, another upheaval, and another huge mass broke through the rock from the Echoes buried below. It tipped over and smashed onto the ground, shattering the statues of people dead for thousands of years and spilling a hundred corpses across the soil. At first he thought there were two monsters rising. But when he realized what he was actually seeing, and the ground between the limbs started to bulge as the thing’s colossal head forced through, his heart stopped beating for the final time.
The Echoes around the turmoil collapsed, history fell, and Sprote Felder was crushed before he could utter one final, dreadful cry.
“Man from Sand,” the voice says, and Rufus opens his eyes. He is in his small room in his guardian’s house. Sunrise is near, and the only sounds from beyond are the soft calls of birds waking around the village. Soon the place will be bustling, but there is always that gentle, almost mournful time between night and day when the village seems to be holding its breath. Sometimes Rufus is awake for this and he stares from the window, wondering who he really is. Mostly he sleeps through to daylight. He is becoming comfortable, though afraid that the dreams will never leave him be.
“Who are you?” he asks, and then he sees the flowing yellow robes. A Tender, from the valley of the Heart and Mind. He has never heard of these servants leaving the valley, and he has seen them only once before, one moon ago, when he made his pilgrimage.
“My name does not belong to me,” the man says. He is exceedingly tall and thin, his arms almost as long as Rufus’s body, his head elongated, his feet large and flat. His face is somber and pale, but his eyes are bright. They glitter in the light of the small lamp he has lit. He sits in the chair beside the bed, and his knees are almost as high as Rufus’s head.
“You’re … tall,” Rufus says, but the man does not react. He is removing something from a pocket hidden within his robes. He settles, and when he seems comfortable he begins to speak.
“Long ago, long before history, at a time when people passed events through song instead of writing, the Heartlands’ ancestors fought a war. The causes of the war are long forgotten, but even now there is evidence of its ferocity and in
humanity—both to scales beyond our comprehension—in the eternally toxic desert. And you have seen the dead city deeper in the Heartlands, where only the ghosts of the past reside. There are more like that.”
“More? I thought—”
“Our ancestors lost the war. But not as much as their enemies. Half the world died, and the other half struggled on for many painful centuries until it became the Heartlands. The Heart and Mind believes that you are from the world that died.”
“But I—”
The man lashes out with the thin stick he has produced from his robes, catching Rufus across the face. The impact is sharp, fast, and surprising. No one here has ever treated Rufus like this. There has been disbelief, and fear, and sometimes hostility. But never violence.
“Silence, Man from Sand!” the Tender snaps, and his voice carries so much more threat than before. “You must listen and do as I say. The Heart and Mind commands that you hear the truth and then obey.” He arranges his robes again, shifting on the seat until he is comfortable once more. Then he stares at Rufus. “The Heartlands is the whole world. It stretches for a thousand miles south of here, and we are at its edge. The Heart and Mind was placed here long ago, at the edge of the rest of the world, formed and chopped by the Revered Artist. His was a tortured soul, and upon completion of the Heart and Mind, he let himself fade and die. He believed that he was not for the likes of us. But he will never fade from memory.” The Tender looked sad, the first expression that had crossed its otherwise plain face.
“Why did he—”
“His arcane talents caused much suffering before the Heart and Mind emerged. But his purpose was finally achieved. It was based here to guard against future wars. That threat is … long past. But then there comes you.”
The welt across his face is stinging, but Rufus holds back the tears. He is not weak. Confused, yes; often. Lonely … sometimes. But never weak.
“The Heart and Mind instructs that you are to return to the sands this coming night,” the Tender said. “It senses deep, distant rumblings that trouble it and commands that you leave. No one must know. I will tell you where to meet me, close to the desert’s edge. We will equip you, and you will go back to where you came from.”
“Just because I’m not like you?” Rufus asks, flinching in expectation of another strike. But the man’s face softens just a little, and he sighs.
“You are not like us, any of us. You’re an upset that should not exist.”
“I don’t understand …” Rufus says, closing his eyes and seeing the city, and hearing a voice that might be his mother.
“And that is why you must return,” the Tender says. “The Heart and Mind will touch you first, so that it can read you from afar. It is curious about you and where you came from. And it must know what the rumblings it senses forewarn. Knowledge gives it power, and it would have knowledge of your origins. What you see, it will see. What you experience, it will know. Thus it is with every Tender. You will become one.”
“And my guardian?”
“She can never know.” The man is sour and grim once again, staring at Rufus with a warning in his eyes.
“If I tell her, if I tell everyone—”
“You—will—not.” The voice is like fire; the words spell death. Rufus shivers in his warm bed, and the man stands to leave. There is hardly any sound as he moves; no swish of his robes, no impact of feet upon the ground. He’s almost a ghost, but Rufus knows for sure that he is real. He can smell a sickly-sweet odor coming from him that he knows has something to do with the Heart and Mind, and the man’s shadow is cold.
“I’m afraid,” Rufus says.
“Of going home?”
“I’m not sure …” he says, screwing up his eyes. He concentrates. “I’m not sure I really came from anywhere out there.” The man bends down, looming over him like a carrion bird inspecting a victim as it slowly bleeds to death.
“But the Heart and Mind is sure,” he says. “Sundown, by the Signal Rock.”
Rufus nods, unable to speak. The man leaves. And as the sun rises soon after, and Rufus’s last day in the Heartlands begins, the coolness of rejection settles over him.
There are no memories of that final day with the people of the Heartlands, because it must have been a happy one. Later, he is standing by the Signal Rock, its flanks scorched black by the hundreds of fires lit and doused there over the years. The Tender is there, as promised, and at his feet is a sled with several covered packages—water, food, the weapons he’s been taught to use, a tent.
“I thought the Heart and Mind …” he began, and the ground at his feet began to stir.
“… is everywhere,” the Tender says. The tall man steps back, moving gracefully as the gritty ground breaks open. A shape appears, nosing from the soil, lengthening, its mottled red appendage seeming to sniff this way and that before steadying in front of Rufus. It moves in close, then becomes utterly motionless.
Rufus can hardly breathe. He glances at the Tender, but the man’s eyes are closed, hands clasped before his chest.
The thing darts forward and touches Rufus’s forehead. It spreads. Though terrified, he cannot move, can barely even breathe, as the Heart and Mind touches him outside and in.
Eyes still squeezed shut, he feels the weight of a yellow Tender’s robe slung around his shoulders.
Later, when he starts out into the desert from which no living thing has ever emerged, he knows that the tall Tender is watching. But as Rufus pulls the sled and leaves the Heartlands, he does not once look back.
Nophel sensed him coming before he saw him: Dane Marcellan, the man who had saved and doomed him, one of the city’s dictators and also a Watcher. A man of complex contradictions, and now he was beneath the ground where no one ever came.
“Wait,” Nophel said, and the others heard the urgency in his voice. How can I know he’s here? How can I? “There’s something …”
“What?” Alexia asked urgently.
He’s close, Nophel thought. And he’s not alone. However much he might trust the fat man, this felt wrong.
“We have to hide,” he said.
“We have to go on!” the tall Unseen said. “We’re through the soul-fire, but there’s plenty of time for them to catch us yet.”
“And why would the likes of us need to hide?” Alexia asked.
“You don’t understand,” Nophel said, and then lights danced in the Echo before them. Oh, no, he thought, partly because he had been right.
The Scarlet Blades streamed toward them, moving almost silently across the Echo, finding cover even when none seemed to exist. They were phantoms, their heavy red cloaks billowing around and behind them and deadening any small noise they did make.
“Move aside,” Alexia said, and the band of Unseen left the rough trail they had been following south. She had relieved one of the men carrying Rufus. He’d awakened and struggled again, and Nophel had watched his every move, listened to his every word. There’s plenty going on inside that head, Nophel thought. Can he harbor such bitterness as I do?
Following behind the Scarlet Blades came Dane Marcellan, with three soldiers surrounding him. The fat man was panting, but still he kept up with his soldiers, jogging comfortably in his finery. And something about him had changed. Perhaps it was seeing him in these strange surroundings instead of in the well-appointed Marcellan rooms back in Hanharan Heights. Or maybe it was because Nophel had spent more time out in the city than ever before, and his home and the Scopes seemed far away. But Dane looked different, lessened somehow, and Nophel smiled softly as his old master ran by.
And then stopped.
“Wait!” Dane said. His Blades obeyed. He looked around, shining his torch into the shadows, playing it across the Unseen without pause … and then holding it on Nophel, because Nophel had let himself be seen.
“Nophel!” he gasped.
“Dane.”
The Scarlet Blades hovered uncertainly.
“Do you have him?” Dane asked, gl
ancing left and right.
“Take them all,” Alexia said quietly, and Nophel acted almost without thinking. He stood between Dane and Alexia, hands held up in both directions.
“We have him,” Nophel said. “But the Dragarians are following, and if they catch us—”
“They won’t,” Dane said. “He’s with your friends?” He nodded at the darkness where he could see nothing, knowing for sure that something was there.
“Yes,” Nophel said. “Alexia, he’s here to help!”
“Dane Marcellan,” Alexia snarled, cursing the man who had doomed her and the other Unseen—and yet Nophel heard the hesitation in her voice.
“He’s not like all the others,” Nophel said, focusing on Rufus. And he’ll give us more time, he thought. More time to talk with Rufus Kyuss. To discuss. And to decide which of us will kill the Baker bitch.
“Go fast,” Dane said, waving his Blades forward. “Defensive line.”
Alexia manifested, sighing and almost slumping to her knees. “Marcellan!” she growled, and Dane turned. A flash of recognition crossed his eyes. “There are two more behind us,” she said. “Not Unseen. They’ll not be expecting you.”
“We’ll watch for them.” He glanced back and forth between Nophel and Alexia, eyebrows raised in surprise.
“We’ll … move on,” Alexia said, sensing the loaded air between the two men. She retreated into the shadows, fading again, and Nophel heard her and the others carrying Rufus between them.
“Why did you come?” Nophel asked.
Dane sighed, continuing to look for the retreating Unseen and the amazing man they took with them, but it was a distraction. Nophel saw the Marcellan’s mind working, and he seemed to be at conflict with himself. Finally he lowered the torch and stepped forward, looking Nophel in the eye.
“To help you,” he said.
“Why would you—”
“To help …” He seemed to struggle, chewing on words that might or might not come. “The Watchers,” he said at last, but his voice was flat and unconvincing.