by Tim Lebbon
Gorham grabbed her arm and shook it, and she raised one hand to point. Around them, the sound of panicked flight and frightened conversation subdued.
Something was rising out of Marcellan. Blurred and disfigured by the smoke and dust still hanging above the collapsed area, the shape was gigantic, pushing through the pale clouds and glittering as though wet. It was difficult to judge size from this distance, and Peer did not want to. She could not. It was unbelievable, terrible, and to try to judge the magnitude of the thing wavering above that hole …
“Oh,” Gorham said, and it broke through her muffled terror. He held her hand and squeezed.
Now people were screaming and running. Some fell, others trampled them. Peer and Gorham just stood. They’d been expecting something, but nothing could have prepared them for this.
The thing protruded above the city, shifting back and forth in the dust and smoke cloud, fires erupting around its base, a great column of flame spewing up and out from the hole in the shoulder of Marcellan Canton, and nothing of it was identifiable. For that, Peer was glad. It was a gray, glittering edifice, larger than any building, taller than Marcellan Canton’s tallest spires, and if a great eye, or a mouth, had opened somewhere across its girth, she thought perhaps she would never recover from the madness that would bring.
“We need to find Penler,” she said, amazed at how calm her voice sounded. Perhaps grabbing on to something rooted and certain was all she had.
Just before she turned to drag Gorham away, the thing tilted sideways. It fell with surprising slowness, but when it struck the ground, the violence was terrible. Buildings shattered, fire billowed, dust exploded in pressurized twisting torrents, and then the sound rolled in across the Levels, testament to the terrible destruction.
The shock wave came next. It knocked them off balance, and Gorham went down. Peer knelt next to him and covered her head with her hands. People cried, buildings fell, some screaming ceased.
As the rumble lessened, Peer said, “Gorham.”
“Yeah. Penler.”
They entered the rush of panicked humanity. Penler’s home lay to the south, so they let the tide take them. But it was not long before Peer realized that they were just another part of the tide.
Nophel had watched them for as long as he could—as long as the Scope could extend itself that far, and the smoke did not obscure his view, and the rush of fleeing humanity did not swallow them. But then, inevitably, they were lost to him. And his last sight of the small girl who had once been his mother was as she leaned on the man’s arm and let him help her along.
But the wounds on his arms still bled, and he could still touch her with his mind.
Sprawled on the floor, he looked at the bloodstains beneath him. He coughed again and added to them, and for a moment he panicked, thinking that perhaps this would be the last time he fell. But the Baker’s ministrations had been skilled. His wound was a solid, burning pain in his chest, but still he managed to kneel, and then he took a deep breath before he turned back to the screen.
If the Scope was turned, its eye ruptured by flying debris, its mountings wrenched by the impact of that thing, I’ll be blind until I draw my last breath. But the screen, though flickering, still showed an image of the city and the thing that had risen and fallen across it.
Nophel hauled himself back up into his seat, breath rattling in his chest. He kept glancing at the screen and away again, not quite believing, not able to acknowledge exactly what he had seen. But there was no denying the sight that awaited him.
He laid his hands across the controls and coaxed the best view from the ailing Scope.
Dust and smoke hazed the air, but he could focus through them, zooming in on the sprawled thing where it lay in a new valley of its own making. A thousand buildings had been crushed beneath it, along with untold thousands of people, and fires were spreading across the southern and western slopes of Marcellan Canton. Buildings folded, their walls exploding outward where the ground beneath them broke, and several fault lines progressed across the city like roaming monsters. One of them reached the tall Marcellan wall directly to the west and cleaved it in two.
Nophel grinned at the symbolism and wondered where the Marcellans and Hanharans were right then.
Two other shapes were rising slowly on either side of the massive fallen thing, pressing down against the ground and heaving, and he could barely believe that they were limbs.
The size of the thing was difficult to comprehend, because it was alive. So when Nophel saw the shapes parting from it—red dashing things that seemed to snake away from the fallen mass and steer themselves through the ruined streets—he tried to focus on one of them instead. He used the tracking ball to control the Scope, following one of the red things as it flowed along a sloping street like a globule of fresh blood. Nophel could only guess at its size—the girth of a tusked swine, perhaps—until it encountered a small group of people.
As it grasped them in its whipping appendages and pulled them toward itself and started to eat—then he could judge its size.
Nophel closed his eyes, and the Baker saw. He felt her fear and sadness, and that made him afraid and sad as well.
North, she whispered to him, and he urged the Scope to strain against its mounting, turning its eye toward the north as it had when the Dragarians first emerged. It did so more easily than he imagined, and he supposed it might be pleased to look away.
Working levers and dials, Nophel brought the northern extremes of Echo City closer. The domes of Dragar’s Canton were as still as ever, but then the Baker whispered, Beyond, and he lifted the Scope’s eye slightly and stretched it farther.
There was desert, the familiar bleached yellow of the Bonelands. And beyond the shadows of the domes, a tide of darkness washed out from Echo City.
“They’re going,” Nophel whispered. The Dragarians were leaving their retreat. He only wished he could coax the Scope to look farther, bring the distance in closer, because he wanted to see the Baker’s other abandoned son one last time.
Back, Rose whispered gently. Not long left now, so one last look …
“I’m not afraid to die,” Nophel said, hoping that she heard. And he drew the Scope back to the southwest, toward the risen mass of the Vex. Trying to shake the enormity of what he had seen to the north, he scanned slowly across the risen thing’s surface. There seemed to be deep rents in its flesh, from which bubbled great gouts of blood-red fluid. And from these gouts manifested the dashing things, rolling and bubbling, crawling, and then running through the city’s fallen streets.
The Baker could see, and Nophel felt her fear and resignation. But, with the sight of the Dragarians’ flight, he could also sense her hope.
The building beneath him shuddered from a terrible impact. He almost slipped from the chair, such was the extreme of movement, and he heard the ominous crunching, cracking sounds of stone crumbling under tension. The image on the screen wavered, and then he heard a sound that was deeper and more terrible than the sound of the breaking city—a cry, a scream, and Nophel closed his eyes and felt blood dribble from his left ear.
The image shivered and veered up to the clear blue sky. For a moment all he saw was beauty, hazed by a thin skein of smoke that was all that indicated what was happening below. And he realized that the Scope had looked away because it was scared.
“One more look,” he said, unsure whether he was talking to the Scope, or himself, or the child Baker. He touched the levers and dials and viewed the risen thing a final time.
Dust and smoke obscured much of it, and flames erupted here and there. It seemed unconcerned by the fires. It shifted and flexed, its countless appendages worming through the streets, destroying another hundred buildings with each movement. And then Nophel frowned. It was covered in … something.
He turned a dial and the Scope took him in.
The monster’s hide was stippled, rough, and mostly pale. He focused in some more, stroking a guiding ball when the Scope began to
shake with fear again, and then he realized what clothed the thing.
Bodies. Thousands of them, tens of thousands; skeletons and rotting corpses, some piled so deep that hundreds had sloughed off in drooping, skinlike jowls. They decorated the thing’s hide like the pustules on his own, and Nophel put one hand to his face.
He could feel the Baker seeing through him, and her shock echoed back at him, a guilt that was not his own.
He coughed and blood flowed from his mouth, thick and dark. He guided the Scope to pan along the thing, moving inward all the time, sweeping its huge eye toward what he thought of as the Vex’s head. He could sense that the Scope wanted to turn away, and he was sure that soon it would, denying his commands for the first time. And he would never blame it. But for now he had to see, because everything he saw, the Baker saw.
There were larger bodies pierced on huge spines lining the thing’s hide. These were black and silver, and many-bladed, and looked fresh. Around them were dark, steaming scars on the leviathan’s skin. And as Nophel moved on …
His breath stalled. He snapped a lever to freeze the image and saw a body that caught his attention. Surrounded by rot and bone, this body was new, pale and red in equal measure. He tried to push the Scope closer, unconcerned now at the discomfort he must be causing the wretched creature, ignoring the insistent prodding in his mind from the Baker to look away, look away … and then he saw the face, whose familial features he recognized. Its mouth was open wide in an endless scream. One arm was pinned high, as if waving.
The Scope died, Nophel’s vision faded, and his body was lit by the mass of pain in his chest. He sat back in his chair, eyes closed. He welcomed the calming touch on his mind that did its best to see away the pain, though it was now beyond calming.
“Mother,” he said.
And then he drove out that influence with a force of will, because he had no wish for her to feel his death.
Penler was standing on top of the ruined home next to his own. He was staring north while everyone else fled south, and for a moment Peer simply watched him. It felt as if she had been away from Skulk for years, not just days, and Penler’s appearance lived up to that idea.
He stood like an old man. His thinning hair waved behind his head in the warm breeze washing down from the north, and she could see that he was squinting. He can’t quite see, she thought, and she knew there was much to tell him.
Gorham stood close to her, one hand pressed against the small of her back. If she’d felt a shred of possessiveness there, she would have shrugged him away, but he was as scared as she was. Contact was something they both needed. That, and friendship.
Penler froze, then slowly turned. “Peer,” he said, and grinned as if the world was no longer ending.
“Penler,” she said. “I hoped I’d find you still here.”
He took a final, long look north, then worked his way down the slope of rubble. Old he might be, but he was still sure-footed from half a lifetime of living among the ruins.
“Nowhere else to go, it seems,” he said.
“This is Gorham,” she said, and perhaps Penler heard a whole history in her voice, because his smile was uncertain.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” Gorham said. “I think you saved Peer’s life.”
“She’s a strong woman,” Penler said.
“Here.” Peer ripped her fly bag open and a handful of flies escaped, circling up into the air, darting left and right. Several landed on Penler, and one bit. He did not wince or make a noise. When the fly lifted away, he looked closely at the small speck of blood, touching it gently with one finger.
“What have you just done to me?” he asked, though with curiosity rather than suspicion.
“Hopefully saved your life,” Peer said. “We have to go out into the desert, and—”
“And then we’ll die.”
“No,” Gorham said, but he did not sound convinced.
“We think not,” Peer said. “The Baker—”
“I thought the Baker was dead!”
“Oh, Penler,” Peer said, and there was so much to tell. She closed her eyes, and fatigue hit her then, the darkness behind her eyelids luring her down to sleep. “I have some stories for you, my friend. So many. And there’s plenty I think you’ll be able to help us explain. But first …” She opened her eyes again, and Penler was staring at her in a way he never had before. I really broke his heart, she thought. I shouldn’t have brought Gorham with me.
“First?” Penler asked.
“You’ve seen what’s happening,” Gorham said.
“I’ve seen something.”
“The doom of Echo City,” Gorham continued. “Rising from the Chasm below the Falls.” He shook his head, and Peer knew that none of them could adequately express what they had witnessed and experienced.
“Where’s the visitor?” Penler asked.
“With the Dragarians,” she said, and Penler’s eyes opened wider.
“He came from the Bonelands,” he said softly.
“There’s going to be plenty of time to explain.” A rush of enthusiasm almost overwhelmed Peer. “But right now we have to leave and take as many people with us as we can.” She grabbed his hands and pulled him closer, then wrapped her own hands around his and put them to her chest. He felt her heartbeat, and she saw that familiar twinkle of humor and intelligence. She was glad it was still there. She’d feared her leaving might have extinguished it forever.
“And you think they’ll follow me into the desert,” he said.
“I know they will.”
“You think they’d follow me?” Gorham asked, eyebrows raised.
“No,” Penler said, and his smile seemed genuine. “Though they might line the walls to watch you die.”
“Nice,” Gorham muttered.
“Don’t mind him,” Peer laughed, “the old bastard has a way with words.”
“Words are all we have,” Penler said, and his smile turned sad as they all recognized the truth in that. “Is it really the end?”
“You saw what came up,” Peer said.
“I saw something. I don’t know what.”
“The Bakers are to blame. But the latest is also to thank.” She touched the swollen fly bite on his hand. “For this.”
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Out there somewhere,” Peer said, nodding into an uncertain distance.
“With an invisible person,” Gorham said. Penler glanced at him, smile unsure, and then turned back to Peer.
“And this all began because of Rufus?”
“In truth, it began generations ago. I’ll tell you everything.”
“When we’re away,” he said, and Peer nodded.
“We’ll need food and water,” she said.
Penler stared at his house, unmoving.
“I’ll go,” Gorham said, and he dashed inside. They waited in companionable silence, staying close as they watched people rushing southward. Gorham emerged moments later with a water sack and a bulging backpack.
“Ah, stoneshrooms,” Peer said.
Penler grinned and took Peer’s hand. They turned south and headed for the city wall a mile distant, and Peer felt tears threatening. Penler had turned his back on his home, his maps, his studies, his books and projects and writings, and all because of what she had told him. All because of her. She felt a warm, rich love emanating from him that she had never felt from Gorham, and she realized he was the father she had never known, holding her hand and leading her away from danger.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come back,” he said.
“Liar.”
“No, really.” He raised an eyebrow, maintaining his seriousness. “I always knew you found me irresistible.”
Peer laughed out loud, and people around them stared at this madwoman amused by the end-times.
Sheltering along the base of the city’s southern wall were several hundred Garthans. They shook in the heat of the summer day, shielding their eyes against the unbearab
le light, and people kept a good distance from them. They scratched at vivid red bites across their naked bodies. Peer hoped they would follow everyone else out into the desert but hated to think what effect the unrelenting sun would have on skin so used to darkness.
Gorham stared at them strangely, and Peer knew he would have a story to tell her later.
Penler led them to an open stone staircase, and they climbed to the top of the wall. It was wide here, arranged with seating that looked mostly inward, and she remembered sitting here many times with Penler, discussing, debating, and arguing. She felt an odd nostalgia for such good times.
The place where she’d first seen Rufus was a mile to the east. She looked along the wall in that direction, and the mass of humanity stunned her. The wall was packed with people, and below them in the streets and roads that led along the wall’s base were many more.
“So many,” Penler said. “This used to be a nice quiet place.”
“They’re lost,” Gorham said. “They’re looking for someone to tell them what to do.”
“Aren’t we all?” Penler asked.
“No,” Gorham said. “Not everyone needs that.”
Peer raised her hands and smiled at both men. “Now’s not the time for a religious debate.”
“If not now, when?” Penler asked.
From the north came continuing sounds of destruction. A column of smoke and dust rose high above the city, thick and textured at its base, spreading and dispersing higher up where the desert breezes grabbed hold. It was rooted on the southwestern slopes of Marcellan Canton, but fires were apparent at many other sites across the city, from eastern Mino Mont to western Course. At the base of the cloud of dust and smoke—even from this distance—they could see movement.