Echo City (24 page)

“In case?” Peer prompted.

“In case he comes back.”

“She sent me out, in this. Made me drink something to … forget. But I’m remembering now.”

“I should be writing this down,” Nadielle said. She reached for a pencil and a sheaf of paper, starting making notes, but Rufus went on as if neither woman was there. His dreams were coalescing into memories, and Peer began to fear the reaction this seemed to be engendering. He was becoming more animated, though not with joy at the revelation of his genesis but with anger at something different.

“She
abandoned
me.”

“No, Rufus,” Nadielle said, setting down her pencil. She
reached for him and he waved her back, raising his arm to fend off her touch.
How quick he was with that venom weapon
, Peer thought, looking at the bag still hanging from his shoulder. Gorham had returned the weapon to him, and now she wondered why. It was clumsy of someone so used to secrecy and caution.

“Sent me into the desert … a place where people die … in this
thing.”

“What is it?” Peer asked, but neither answered her. She watched Rufus’s fingers tracing the lines and shapes on the paper, heard the grit of dust beneath his fingertips, and felt the temperature of that place rising.

“You were a hope she always had,” Nadielle said. “The hope
every
Baker has. The city changes and grows—a living thing—and, like all living things, Echo City’s time will come to die. We have always known that.”

“How
have you always known?” Peer asked. “What have you—”

“Because the Bakers have always lived one step back from the city,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? So many believe so many different things, but if you consider things from a distance, you can see all the foolishness and lies. They stink like rotten things, those lies, and people lap them up and live by them.”

“The Watchers don’t.”

“Not all of them, no. But even they live life under a cloud of superstitious prophesies and predictions. I see the fault in this, as did every Baker. Nothing lasts forever, the city least of all.”

“What did you bring us back here to show us?” Peer asked.

“This,” Nadielle said. “Her charts, her books. These designs. She chopped a construct to take Rufus out into the Bonelands. She knew he’d survive out there—”

“She
can’t
have known for sure,” Peer said softly, because Rufus’s anger was a palpable thing now. She tried to hold his hand, but he pulled away.

“Well … no, she wasn’t
sure
. That’s why she built this thing to carry him as far as possible, toward whatever
must
be out there. And she hoped he’d return in her lifetime.”

“She made me to return?” he asked.

“Of course. And whatever she did to ease your memories, perhaps she designed it to fade as soon as you came home.”

“Rufus is not my name,” he said. “This is not my home. What did she name me? Sister—Mother—what did she name me?” And in that
Mother
, Peer realized another staggering truth: Nadielle, chopped from the old Baker when death was stalking her, was as much a mother to Rufus as she was a sister.

“She …” Nadielle said. She touched a book, stroking dust from its surface. They had not been touched for a very long time.

“Nadielle?” Peer asked.

“She did not name you,” Nadielle said.

“But I grew into a young boy. With her. My mother. She
must
have given me a name.”

“She made you that age.” Nadielle kept her eyes averted, though her voice held little emotion. “You were with her for perhaps thirty days. The Dragarians provided material from Dragar’s remains, and she chopped you as a commission for them. But she never intended to hand you back. They wanted the Dragar of their prophesies, and she wanted the truth about that name.”

“She listened to myths?” Peer asked.

“Here,” Nadielle said, touching the other large old book. “There’s so much in here. It’s written that Dragar was born to illicit lovers, one tall with white hair, the other with the greenest of eyes. Their love was forbidden—they were from different Dragarian castes—and they chose to meet in the desert, where no one would see. The child was conceived out there, and when born he was immune to the desert’s effects. The Dragarians took him to themselves as a god,
named
him after their god, and soon after that the Marcellans killed him as a Pretender. So long ago, all of it so uncertain, unproven. But when they came to my mother with the commission, she saw the chance of discovering the truth. They offered a shred of Dragar, his essence.”

“I might have died,” Rufus said.

“But you didn’t,” Nadielle said. “You were her greatest experiment.”

“I’m
not
an experiment!”

“Rufus,” the Baker said, excited, “you have to—”

“That is not my name!”
he screamed. The sudden noise was shocking in that confined space, his fury startling. He swept the books from the table, and clouds of dust dimmed the air.

“Rufus,” Peer said softly, because she saw his tragic history.

He struck her. She fell against the wall, hand landing on one of the books. Its cover split from the spine; her arm shifted beneath her and spilled her to the floor, setting her hip aflame. She banged her head. The air darkened even more, ringing with shouts and a scream and the frantic shuffling of a struggle from somewhere beyond the room. Silence, the beating of her heart, and then another scream from much farther away, androgynous in its agony. It could only have been the cry of someone close to death.

Peer stood and swayed, closing her eyes to regain balance. She felt the warm trickle of blood down the back of her neck. Moving carefully, she left the small room and found the larger room beyond empty. Even in the disorganized chaos of that place, she saw that things were toppled across the floor, one smashed jar steaming as its strange contents spat and jumped as if to escape the cool touch of stone.

More shouts, raised voices, and two more screams filled with rage and grief. Peer rushed out into the womb-vat chamber, pausing to see where the cries came from. The vats bubbled softly, indifferent to the drama being played out around them.

Another cry—less a scream and more an exhalation of hopelessness. It had come from outside. She ran across the chamber and through the door that had been left ajar, into the wide dark Echo of fields and farmland from decades or centuries before, and highlighted before her in an oasis of torchlight she saw what had happened. One of the Pserans was dead, her hand clasped to her neck and bloody foam on her lips.
He killed her
, she thought, but she was not as surprised as she should have been. The two remaining triplets stood close to their sister, but not close enough to touch. They looked on as Nadielle knelt beside her creation and stroked the skin of her face, closing her eyes and weeping gently.

Gorham and Malia stood to one side, their torches lowered and turned off. Peer wondered why. She went to them, trying not to make a noise, and Gorham looked up at her approach.

“He’s mad,” he whispered.

“What happened?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Malia asked. Even this stern, harsh woman spoke quietly. She was no stranger to grief.

“What did she tell you in there?” Gorham demanded. He grabbed Peer’s arm, the potential violence almost surreal in the silent shadows. She owed him nothing.

“That Rufus has come home,” she said. She pulled her arm from Gorham’s grip, fisting her hand, ready to punch. And she could have punched him, happily. She could have swung her fist into his mouth and felt his teeth loosen beneath knuckles hardened by years of stoneshroom picking.

But Gorham sighed, looking back at the dead woman—the dead
thing
—as her sisters picked her up at last.

Nadielle stood back as the Pserans carried the body into the darkness.

“Which way did he go?” Peer asked.

“Does it matter?” Malia said. “He’s gone, and even if we find him again, he’ll be no help. How can he?”

“He holds this city’s future in his hands,” the Baker said, walking toward them.

“You think you can …?” Gorham trailed off.

“Maybe,” the Baker whispered, looking past them all at places none of them could know. “It’s been tried before, with rackflies, spreading a harmless germ. But that was long ago, and …” She blinked, snapping back to the present. “You have to bring him to me.”

“We
have
to?” Malia asked, attitude spilling from her.

“Yes, Malia,” Nadielle said.

“Can’t you help—” Gorham began, but the Baker was already walking away.

“I have work to do,” she said. “Find him. Bring him. Nice to meet you, Peer.”

Peer almost laughed out loud.
Nice to meet you
. But she smelled blood, and the air was still thick with the violence perpetrated there.

He was ready to run
, she thought.
As soon as the moment came, he was ready to run
. And as she, Gorham, and Malia began the lonely journey back up from the darkness and into the night, Peer knew that there was so much more to Rufus Kyuss.

He went back into Hanharan Heights as he always did: silently, discreetly, slipping through shadows and pools of light without disturbing either, and all the way Nophel tried convincing himself that it was his stealth that kept him unseen. He knew that was not the case—it was a nightmarish kind of knowing, like the certainty that when you woke up you would find yourself dead—but all the way up the urbanized hillsides of Marcellan Canton, through the well-guarded gates of the Heights, and into the warren of corridors and staircases that led to Dane Marcellan’s rooms, he maintained the illusion.

Standing before Dane made it all real.

The fat man squinted as Nophel entered his huge bedroom. There were no nubile young women on his bed this time, but the table of slash in the corner still exuded its sweet fumes, and Dane was piled naked on his bed like a heap of bled swine meat. He sat up and turned his head this way and that, frowning. Then he nodded and waved in Nophel’s general direction.

“Even knowing you’re there, I see only shadow.”

Nophel stood silently, wondering.

“Don’t mess with me, Nophel.” His tone was serious, and his eyes were no longer out of focus.

“Make me whole again,” Nophel whispered.

Dane laughed. It shivered his rolls of fat and set him coughing, which shook his body even more. Nophel wondered
how long it would take him to stop moving. He might have laughed, had he not felt so wretched.

“You
are
whole!” Dane said. “Touch yourself. Feel!”

Obeying Dane’s words was almost a subconscious act—Nophel touched and felt. His skin was slick and cool with sweat. He held his hand in front of his face and barely saw it.

“I met the Unseen,” he said.

Dane’s laughter drifted away, and he was serious again. Shuffling to the edge of the bed, he slipped his feet into leather sandals and shrugged on a robe, tying the cord with a surprising dexterity. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Nophel smiled and wondered whether Dane could sense it.

“Everyone who has ever tried the Blue Water,” he said. “They exist—like me. And some are more invisible.”

“More
invisible?”

“They watch you, Dane,” Nophel said, feeling a thrill of power and danger.
This is a Marcellan
, he thought, but Dane stood amazed before him. “They watch all of you. Perhaps they’re too far gone for revenge, or maybe not. I couldn’t tell.”

“But they died. They went away and died, and you’re the one it was always meant for. Your
mother
made that stuff!”

“I don’t believe she knew the real power of it,” Nophel said. He walked across the room and sat on the end of Dane’s bed. The fat Marcellan took a step back, looking down at where the bedclothes were dipped beneath Nophel’s weight.

“You really can’t see me,” Nophel said.

“It seems not.”

“I can’t … I don’t want to be Unseen,” he said. “There are the Scopes to consider, my duty to them, and—”

“Let me think,” Dane said, and already the command was back in his voice. He turned his back on Nophel and walked to the slash table, picking up a flexible pipe with a bone tip and breathing in a huge draw of the drug’s smoke.
That’s how you think?
thought Nophel. But he knew that Dane had a good mind, and whether or not the drug improved that seemed unimportant now.

For a few moments Nophel looked down at himself and
concentrated, and the shadow of his limbs and body slowly faded. He closed his eyes and focused, and when he looked again he could see the shine of metal buttons on his shirt. They seemed to wink at him. When he looked up, Dane was walking back and forth before the wide window. Beyond, Nophel could see only sky, but if he went closer he could look out over Marcellan Canton and the hazy Course beyond.

I should tell him everything
, he thought. But news of the Baker felt like power.

“Do they scheme?” Dane asked at last.

Yes
, Nophel wanted to say, because a frightened Dane would be easier to manipulate. But he suddenly saw real fear in this man, and he felt something he usually felt only in the presence of the Scopes: pity.