by Tim Lebbon
“It will stop the pain.” She averted her eyes.
“I’m dying.” There was a weight in his chest, as if his heart had been replaced with a lump of rock.
“The bolt split a main vein. You’ve been bleeding into your chest cavity. I’ve seared the split, but it will reopen.” The girl looked at him again, and there was something about her eyes that took his breath away. One of them could be mine, he thought. “Please, come with me,” she repeated.
“Why?”
“Because you came down here for a reason.”
Something thudded through the room, and a swath of spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling swayed. Scurrying shadows hurried across them, looking for prey that had not landed. The bed shifted, and by his side Nophel saw Peer and the man, both asleep. She looked exhausted and at peace. He only looked sad.
When Nophel held out one hand, the Baker took it and helped him up.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“I think I have something to show you.” She led him across the room, which was redolent with signs of the mother he had never known. The girl paused when he stopped, letting him lean against her as a faint passed through him. He bit his lip, and she pressed a small flattened nut into his hand.
“Sniff.”
He sniffed, and the sharp scent brought his senses back.
In the corner of the room she opened a door, and they entered a much smaller room with a table, scattered charts, and a broken book on the floor. He leaned on the table as she opened another, lower door, and when she started to go down a small set of steps, he did not move.
“You abandoned me,” he said, and though it was strange talking like this to a little girl, he could see that she understood every word. “I came here to … kill you.”
“I know,” she said softly. “Please, come and see what I have to show you.” And she descended out of sight.
She’s luring me down to kill me, he thought. And when the others wake, she’ll tell them I ran raving into the Echoes. But that was not the truth. She’s got my mother’s corpse down there, hollow and dead with her mind passed down the generations, and she’ll ask me to forgive it. But that also seemed unlikely.
The Baker’s face appeared in the small doorway again, pale and sad in the poor light. “Come.”
I’m dying anyway, Nophel thought, and he went.
The staircase was carved roughly into rock. It curved out of sight, and it was only the sound of the Baker’s footsteps that drew him on. Where the staircase ended, the darkness opened up around him. The girl stood a few steps away, but her oil torch could not penetrate the gloom.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“An old Echo. Hidden.” She aimed the torch to their left, and Nophel saw a crumbling gray façade. “It was diseased, so they cut it off from the rest of the city.”
“And this is about me?” he asked, anger rising. Diseased … cut off … forgotten. Could it really be that simple? He’d heard of wealthy parents in Marcellan Canton giving their children away to workhouses or chop shops if they were deformed, or simple-minded, or did not live up to their expectations in some other way—eyes too close, hair too dark. Was his story really that pitiful?
“My name is Rose,” the Baker said, “and I am your mother only by blood. In memory, I am less so. So I’ve brought you here, because this is the Baker’s place. No one has ever been down here, not even Gorham, who perhaps … perhaps I once loved. And there’s something here for you to see.”
The girl Rose led him through a doorless opening and into a dark room, placing her torch on a table and indicating a chair. Nophel sat, closing his eyes as another faint came over him. Something wet rattled inside as he sniffed the nut again, and he pressed one hand across the wound on his bare chest. It was blazing hot.
There was some basic furniture in this room, and Rose opened a wooden cupboard. She took out some objects and replaced them again, then moved to another cupboard.
“Lost something?” he asked softly.
“I was born only recently.” She found what she was looking for and placed it on the table before him. It was a stark wooden box, rough-edged, undecorated. The lid above the simple hook-and-eye catch was smooth, as if it had been opened and closed many, many times.
“What’s this?”
“This is your mother’s real memory of you.” She turned to leave, and Nophel experienced a moment of complete, encompassing panic.
“Please don’t go!” he said. “I’ve been alone all my life, and now I’m dying.”
The girl nodded, sat down on a chair close to the door, and rested her chin on her chest.
Nophel turned to the box and opened it without hesitation. Though he was a stranger to his own childhood, he knew that these things related to him. There was a shriveled, wormlike object in a fold of tissue—his umbilical cord, perhaps. A lock of fine hair. A tiny knitted boot—just one—snagged and dusty but still smelling fresh. Fingernail clippings. A simple but effective charcoal sketch of a baby, unrelenting in its honesty—one eye closed and, even then, growths on his face around his mouth and nose. As he examined the sketch, the charcoal darkened and smudged, and he realized that he was crying. He sniffed and wiped his eye, then started to take out other things.
Everything had a worn look, as if it had been viewed countless times. And when he finally piled it all back into the box—proof of his childhood, testament to his creation and existence—he closed the lid and sat back in the chair.
“So?” he said softly.
“Your mother loved you. That’s good enough, surely?”
“She gave me away.”
The girl nodded, then looked at her hands as if truly seeing them for the first time. They were not the hands of a child. “It’s the fate of every new Baker to lose everything,” she said. “She was incapable of looking after you, because of the things she did. She was dangerous, as am I. And she did what she thought was best.”
“She gave me to a workhouse,” he said, but he could no longer summon the anger that had always driven him. It had given way to sorrow, a hollowness inside being slowly filled with his own leaking blood.
“She did what she thought was best,” the girl said again. She stood and left, and Nophel followed her back across the long-buried Echo and up the staircase into her laboratories once again. He felt drowsy, and sniffing the strange nut helped only so much. His chest was heavy and hot. And by the time he reached the room where Gorham, Peer, and Alexia still slept, his confusion was settling. As Rufus had said, he had found a trace of love in his father. Perhaps, in some way, there was some in his mother as well.
He asked how he could help.
Nadielle appeared above him, smiling what he had always thought of as a wry smile but what was probably just knowing. She reached down and tried to shake him awake, and when she spoke it did not exactly match the words her lips were forming. You were always braver than you think, he wanted to hear her say, but what she really said made Gorham sit upright.
“We have to leave,” Rose said, her face and voice changed. “I’ve done all I can, but everything is getting worse.”
“How do you—” he began, but then he noticed the constant shaking. Dust hazed the room, books slid from shelves, and it was only because he’d been asleep on the soft bed that the vibration had not woken him. He looked down at Peer, where she held his left arm, and across at where Alexia had slept. The Unseen was no longer there.
“She’s helping,” Rose said.
“And Nophel?”
“He’s just left. And, yes, he’s helping too.”
“On his own?”
“He has a while, perhaps.”
A harder jolt, and Peer stirred, mumbling Malia’s name.
“Is it all the way up yet?” Gorham asked. “Is it risen?”
“I don’t know!” the girl said, and it was the first time he’d heard her raise her voice. A glimmer of panic flitted across her face, then she was in control again, calm and efficien
t. “I don’t know, but we can’t wait to find out. I think I have enough.”
“Enough what?”
“I’ll show you. I hope you got plenty of rest. There’s lots to carry.”
Gorham gently shook Peer awake. She sat up quickly and looked around, then her shoulders slumped when realization hit her. Her eyes flooded with the knowledge of what was happening and the memories of what they had been through.
“It’s time to leave,” he said. “Rose needs our help.”
Peer nodded and stood without speaking. He told her about Nophel, and they left the room and went out into the womb-vat hall, where Rose and Alexia were standing beside the vat.
What the crap is going to come out of this one? Gorham wondered. But there were no messy processes this time, and the girl Baker climbed the wooden ladder to sit once again on the vat’s lip.
Alexia nodded at them as they approached, smiling slightly at Peer. Gorham liked that they were friends. That might not help a lot against that bastard thing rising against them, but in reality it meant the world. Arrayed around Alexia’s feet were piles of a thin, wrinkled material, with string ties strewn like dead worms. At a signal from Rose, Alexia picked up one sack and threw it up to the Baker.
Rose leaned over the top of the vat and swept her arm down and up again. The bag came up bulging, throwing vague shadows that seemed to flit away into the darkness. Gorham was sure he heard a whispering, and he frowned and tilted his head to hear it better.
“Catch,” Rose said, tying and dropping the bag without even looking. Alexia was there. She caught the bag, tested the drawstring, and lowered it gently to the ground. It looked oddly weightless.
Next time, Gorham caught the bag. He tweaked the drawstring and gasped as several small shapes flew from the bag’s mouth, circling in tight circles before fluttering off into the darkness.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Bloodflies,” Rose said. “Another.” Alexia lobbed the bags up to her, Rose filled them, and when she dropped them someone was always there to catch.
“Do you really think these will work?” Peer asked.
“It’s the best I could do,” Rose said. She grunted each time she reached down into the vat now, and each time Gorham thought she was going to fall.
But he caught and tied the bags, and realization hit him—release the flies, hope they bite, and in their bites would be traces of Rufus’s chopped blood. There was a terrible randomness to it and a reliance on the untested idea that Rufus survived the Bonelands because of something that ran in his veins. But Gorham also knew that Rose was right. It really was the best she could have done.
“Is this like the moths, bats, and lizards?” Gorham asked.
“They were proven,” Rose said. “Used before, though on a much smaller scale. These …” She grunted, dropped another bag. “Bakers have tried things like this before, to spread cures in time of plague. But I have no firm memory of something like this ever working.”
“Marvelous,” Alexia said.
The sounds resonating through the Echoes were now constant. They were accompanied by those staggering impacts, and Gorham feared that the ceilings would fall and crush them flat. He heard what might have been distant cave-ins, but he could not let them concern him. Their route was set, they were on their way, and it would take death to stop them.
They stacked the filled bags away from the vat. There were twenty in all, and they writhed and flexed with their insectile contents.
“So that’s it?” Peer asked. “That’s the hope of Echo City?”
“If Nadielle was right about Rufus’s blood,” Gorham said.
“She was right,” Rose said, as she climbed back down the wooden ladder. “She made him, after all. She’d have known.”
“But it was still a guess!” Gorham said, frustrated by Rose’s pronouncements. “Nothing more.”
“Lots of what the Bakers do is derived from best guesses,” Rose replied, shrugging. “That’s the basis of experimentation. It’s all theory. We’re just good at putting it into practice.” She walked toward the main doors leading out into the Echoes, and when she turned and saw them standing there, she seemed surprised. “It’s time to leave.”
“Right now?” Peer asked.
“The Vex won’t wait for us,” Rose said. She looked like a corpse. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks hollowed, and the shattering idea hit Gorham that she was only temporary. Nadielle hadn’t had long, and she had chopped Rose to serve a purpose, nothing more. Where will the next Baker originate? he wondered. It was not something he wanted to dwell upon.
So they followed her from the womb-vat hall, each of them carrying several of the light, flexing bags. Gorham left last, and Rose was waiting for him outside the doors. She smiled softly and looked back into the rooms.
Leftover flies were rising from the vat in a swirling cloud, moving in beautiful synchronicity.
“We’ll never return,” Gorham said. This is the first of many places I’ll be leaving forever, he thought, and he was as scared and excited as a little boy on his first trip out of his canton.
“No,” Rose said. “But we’ll leave the doors open for anyone else who might.” She scratched at her arm, and he suddenly noticed the fresh blood speckled there. He grabbed her hand and twisted—the knife cuts were plain, on both underarms, and he had seen their like before.
“Nophel?” he asked.
“Yes. The city streets will be dangerous.”
Gorham understood. “And who better to guide our way than the keeper of the Scopes.”
Rose nodded, smiled, and seemed to be about to say something about the disfigured man. But Gorham guessed there was nothing left to be said.
They set off through the Echo, heading for the closest door that would take them to the surface. Their world shook around them, flinching away from the terrible roars and rumbles that echoed through the darkness.
And Gorham thought, There’s no way we can win.
They looked at him strangely, almost as if they knew. Perhaps they do, he thought. Perhaps they were there. There’s no telling how old they are.
She’d called them the Pserans, and they were guiding him across the Echoes. He’d only recently come this way with Peer and Alexia, but he’d been spitting blood then, in terrible pain and hovering on the boundaries of consciousness. Now he felt stronger, buoyed by the Baker’s medicines, though he knew that he was dying. His senses were sharper and his purpose more defined, yet his breathing bubbled and he tasted blood when he coughed.
He’d be returning to Hanharan Heights a new man.
Nophel’s arms stung where Rose had pricked them, but the pains had been offset by the touch he had been granted of her mind. The depth of that place had shocked him, the shattering extent of her knowledge exposed to him in a flash faster than thought, and he’d been left reeling. But then Rose had held his face in her hands and looked him in the eye, and he had seen the pain that went with such knowledge. She is never a child, never carefree, and can never truly love. In that, he found a closer tie to his mother than he had ever believed possible.
The two Pserans moved quickly, checking frequently to make sure he was keeping pace. They seemed unafraid but sad, and he guessed it was because this was the last task they would perform for the Baker. They passed a small group of Garthans, but the subterranean dwellers pulled back at the sight of the Pserans. Other things large and small approached in the darkness, fleeing the sounds reverberating through the Echoes rather than stalking prey, and the Pserans were always there to ensure his safety. At last they watched him up into daylight, holding back in the shadows, and retreating without a sound when he turned to give them thanks.
Nophel, Scope keeper for the Marcellans, bastard son of the Baker and Dane Marcellan, rose from the shaking Echoes of the past into a chaotic present.
Four people walked quickly through the Echo. Peer, feeling more fragile with every step they took, remained close to Gorham. Gorham, the leader of an
organization whose worst fears were coming true, felt more lost than ever. Alexia, raised a Hanharan but whose beliefs had been taken advantage of, was now bitter and adrift. And Rose, who was mere days in this world but nonetheless possessed a mind almost as old as Echo City itself. They walked in silence because there was little left to be said. They walked with purpose. And, in all of them, doubt worried and bit, closing gentle fingers around their hearts and threatening to crush.
Peer had never been afraid of feeling insignificant. Even when she worked with the Watchers’ political arm, she’d believed that most of what she did was trivial. It had implications, she knew, but hers was not a name that would ever be remembered. Then, in Skulk, banished and in pain, she had existed day by day on her own. Penler had been there, and his guidance, help, and support had seen her through many lonely times. But she had been one of many sent to that ruined place.
Now she was afraid, and some of that stemmed from loss of control. She had spent days doing everything she could to help a city unaware of its impending doom, but whatever might happen was out of her hands. She walked toward the culmination not only of the last few days but of everything. The city had been here for longer than anyone knew, and it was all about to change.
The ground shook. The air vibrated with potential. Something roared. Rose gave nothing away, and in that Peer recognized their true danger.
All she wanted to do was sit with Gorham and talk about old times, because events were far outpacing the differences between them. Though she still felt the physical pains of his betrayal, he was the last solid rock she thought she could hold on to, a love from her past who was so much more now. There was desire, but that was a gentle feeling compared to the depth of connection she felt to him. And it was in the intensity of his obvious guilt that she found her own capacity for forgiveness.
This has always been way beyond the two of us, she thought, and that made them so much more important to each other.
“What are you thinking?” Gorham asked.
“That we’re close to the end,” she said.
“Or a new beginning.”