Echo City (27 page)

Rufus is not his name—he
has
no name, because as far as he remembers she did not give him one—but in memory, this is now how he thinks of himself. So Rufus, his younger self, is lying in the sand, and all there is for him to see is the low baking desert and the pale-blue sky, as if even that is scorched by the sun. And though only just born, Rufus feels that death is very close. There is no food, and the heat is burning the fluid from his body.
She’ll be sad
, he thinks, not quite certain who
she
is. He swallows a mouthful of saliva, and the vague thought of
her
passes away entirely, replaced by a taste that brings a brief but intense recollection of a dark, cold stone wall. Then even that is gone, and Rufus thinks only of himself.

A long time passes, and then the shadow comes. Its touch seems to soothe his burning skin. He sighs, and his throat hurts. His tongue is swollen.
I’m almost dead
, he thinks, and those words feel strange in his mind. He knows how they are used and what they mean, but he is lost.

Rufus looks up into the shadow that blocks the sun, and the shape is unfamiliar to him. It comes closer, kneeling before him. It makes a guttural, deep rumble interspersed with clicks and hisses, and he realizes that it is talking.

“I’m lost,” he says past his swollen tongue, and it’s like talking through a mouthful of food. The corners of his mouth are split, and he winces, feeling blood flowing across his face.

The shape inclines its head, and now his eyes are becoming used to the shadow. He blinks a few times to moisten
them some more. The shape smiles. It’s a whole new experience for Rufus, and he wonders whether he can ever look like this.

It removes part of its face as it reaches for him, and his shock is tempered by the feel of something cool and wet pressed against his lips. He half-closes his eyes and sucks, and water flows into his mouth. He sighs and swallows, closing one hand around the hand of his helper.

Drinking, enjoying the contact of his skin on someone else’s, Rufus searches his thoughts and shallow memories for something to relate this to. But though he feels something deep down begging to be released and revealed, his recollection is blank. This is all new.

His helper’s face is dark and smooth, eyes deep and protected behind a transparent film stretched across a network of fine wire filaments. It’s a woman—he can see the swell of breasts against the thin white gown she wears—and her full lips are moist and shiny. Her hair is long and glinting with bulbs of water. He’s entranced by these droplets, because they seem to slip and flow as the woman moves, catching and casting tiny rainbows and shedding them again just as quickly. He lifts his hand from his helper’s wrist and reaches up. She smiles—her eyes behind the film crease at the corners—and leans forward some more. Rufus takes in a deep breath and smells the woman for the first time. His child’s brain is almost overwhelmed by the barrage of scents, and though his memory is not rich, he can still identify a sweetness and the heat of spices and warmth. He touches her hair, thick yet smooth, and one bulb of water makes contact with his forefinger. It breaks and flows across Rufus’s skin. He sighs with pleasure as another burn is soothed.

The woman speaks again, but Rufus shakes his head. He cannot understand her. And then he sees that, though smiling, her eyes are also flickering this way and that as she examines his body. He’s naked, and the relentless sun has scorched him terribly, stretching and reddening the skin all across his shoulders, back, and stomach. His legs and groin have escaped the worst of it, hidden as they have been by his stooped shadow for much of the time, but his ankles and feet
are blistered and weeping. He sees sympathy in his helper’s eyes, but also confusion.

He releases the wet thing in his mouth and lies back, careful to keep his face within her shadow. As he examines her some more, the rush of sensory input is exhilarating. Instinct gives him the ability to acknowledge and understand certain aspects, though there is little beyond that understanding—no reference points, no historical benchmarks. He recognizes much about his helper without recalling ever having seen anything like her before.

(my mother wiped my mind, she made me a blank, and was it for me or …?)

The woman’s robe is light and thin but looks strong. It is tied around her waist, wrists, and ankles with fine silver wire, similar to that which frames the clear film covering her eyes and face. Her skin is dark against the white robe, speckled here and there with pearls of perspiration, and the fine hairs on the back of her hands shine with the remains of some cream or salve. She wears boots with heavy bottoms, and around her waist hangs a loose belt. There are knives here and other things that Rufus does not recognize.

(I
know
now,
but I didn’t know
then,
because even my mother could never have guessed at the wonders of the Heartlands.)

While he examines his helper, Rufus is aware that she is drawing in the sand before him. He looks past her and sees the thing she brought with her. It is large and wide, steaming and breathing, and he cannot conceive of what it might be.

She taps her finger on the back of his hand until he meets her gaze again. Then she points down at what she has drawn. There are two marks in the sand; she points at them, then at him and her alternately. Rufus nods. The woman shuffles back, smoothing the sand she has disturbed until it is blank. She quickly makes marks and slashes, mounds and dips, creating a landscape before his eyes and marking it here and there with landmarks only she can know.

She draws something from her belt and whips it at the air—a long thin stick, appearing as if from nowhere. It’s hollow and pierced at regular intervals with oval holes, and
though Rufus cannot guess at its true use, his savior uses it now as a pointer. Again she indicates two small shapes, and then she moves back a little, thrusting the stick into the ground between a range of low sand humps she has made. A series of grumbled sounds comes from her mouth, which Rufus assumes to be a name.

A stab of pain slashes at his stomach. Thirst scorches his throat just as the sun burns his skin. He yearns to touch those water bulbs in her long hair again and for the wet thing she held to his mouth while he sucked the moisture from it. But her face has grown stern now, and he can sense a rising disquiet in her manner.

(she took away my memories but left all my senses, all my human knowledge. She wanted me to survive … but turned me into nothing.)

She holds the long pointer across the impromptu map, and Rufus knows what he has to do.

Taking the end of the proffered pointer, he climbs slowly to his feet. He knows he can be healed; he knows this strange woman will take him and do that. But first she wants to know where he has come from.

She is looking down at the rough landscape around her feet as he takes the first few steps. She glances up and freezes. Even her loose robe seems to catch the sunlight and pause, motionless in the still desert heat.

Rufus takes more steps back, eye on the map she has made, and he’s aware of the drag marks his feet are making in that desert landscape. Soon he is walking across the marks he left coming here moments or days before, and the woman—his rescuer, his savior—has taken one of the several metal and bone things from her belt. She’s holding it in both hands before her, raised as if to gather the heat of the sun, and something glints in the object’s concave well.

She starts talking, and though he does not know the words, he recognizes the raised inflection of questions.

Back some more, back, way beyond what he can judge to be distance in the out-of-scale map she has made. But he knows that there’s something staggeringly important about where he is,
who
he is, and what he has done, and suddenly
he needs to make an impression. He’s not just a young, naked boy dying in a desert. He is something far more.

(if she’d told me I would still have come. If she’d trusted me …)

He stops and plants the pointer in the sand between his feet.

His savior is shouting now, her strange guttural words stumbling over one another as she steps forward, stamping out her map as she moves closer.

(she made me what I am … she sent me out to this …)

Rufus turns and points his skinny arm out into the desert, back the way he has come.

(whatever happens now is all her fault.)

The shouting ceases, and now his savior is muttering again. He feels a sudden charge to the air. Every hair on his head stands on end. A thrill passes through him, aggravating every nerve and setting his whole body spasming, kicking up sand. As he turns fully to face her, there’s an intense flash that is, for the blink of an eye, brighter and hotter than the sun.

And then a darkness and silence he has never known before.

   Nophel soothed the Scopes, lifting their leather shrouds, rubbing ointment into their unnatural joints and creases, and his condition did not seem to bother them at all. Perhaps they did not even know that he could not be seen; their giant eyes, after all, were aimed out at the city. Or maybe this strange curse left in one of his mother’s sample gourds did not affect their chopped, inhuman minds. Dogs and rathawks did not see him, but they were natural things whose minds worked in very defined ways. These Scopes were not conceived in the eyes or minds of gods known or unknown.

Just like me
, Nophel thought. Though born a very natural birth, he considered himself offspring of a monster.

He had been watching for half a day, and Dane had not returned. He’d said that he needed to speak to the Council and, ever since he’d left, Nophel had sat in fear of what might come. His life had changed so much: the Blue Water, meeting the Unseen, and then the revelation that the Dragarians—not
the Marcellans and their Scarlet Blades, as he’d always assumed—had killed his mother more than twenty years before. That disclosure had stolen some of the comforting satisfaction that playing a part in his bitch mother’s death had always afforded him. Absorbing such changes was hard enough, but awaiting the inevitability of more change now was almost unbearable.
If he sends them to kill me, they won’t be able to see me
, he thought. But Dane was not foolish. If he sought Nophel’s death, he would lull him first. Unseen he might be, but he was as far from safe as ever before.

And then the Dragarian shouting,
Baker!
What did that mean?

Watching the viewing mirror for hours on end, his eyes had become sore and his mind jaded by some of the secret minutiae of Echo City’s existence. Although guilty of matricide—at least, he’d once believed that was the case, and that belief had made him sleep easier—that had been an honorable murder, revenge for being shunned by the one woman who should have held his deformed face to her bosom and loved him unconditionally. The petty, sordid acts he sometimes witnessed from up here, and the resulting waves of effect that spread out from these acts, had planted a sickness in his soul. Most days he could purge that sickness by watching for only short periods at a time and then cleansing himself by longer moments of contemplation or study. But today he had been looking for too long. A visit to the roof, tending the Scopes, being among his own kind—though he was unchopped, they were products of the dead Baker, and bastard children to her—was already serving to erase some of those sights.

There was good, of course. Kind gestures, signs of benevolence, like the porridge kitchens set up around the many entrances and exits through the wall around Marcellan Canton, run by volunteers and renowned for the quality of the free food they gave away to the homeless, dispossessed, and streetwalkers of the great city. Such signs comforted Nophel immensely, and yet they sometimes troubled him as well. He could not watch a family playing in one of Marcellan’s many lush parks—father and mother throwing catchballs, children scampering after them—without musing upon how his own
childhood should have been. His life was missing a great part, a pivotal slice of existence. She had sent him away. He had been a bitter and angry child, and no one in the workhouse had ever thrown a catchball for him.

He had finished creaming the Western Scope, working the oil-based soothing gel into the heavy creases around its elongated skull and eye socket, when it stiffened and grew still. He’d never seen anything like it before. The Scopes, he thought, were always static unless instructed to extend or divert their focus, but West’s sudden reaction illustrated that motionlessness did not necessarily mean stillness. He’d not been aware of it moving, but as it stilled, the world around Nophel seemed to sway and flex.

The Scope turned to the north. He stumbled back, lest he be knocked to the ground by its enlarged and deformed skull. Gears and joints groaned and creaked in protest, old unoiled wheels shed rust and dirt as they traversed the uneven rooftop beneath the Scope’s massive eye, and its body shuddered under the stress of moving so far, stretching too much in a direction it had not looked for years.

“What is it?” Nophel asked, almost as if expecting a reply. He crawled sideways and stood in the center of the roof, and it was only then that he realized the Eastern Scope was also diverting its attention to the north. Its complex support structure was not handling the shifting quite as well, and metal groaned and cracked as several bolted junctions gave way. Chains swung and clanged against supports, and Nophel saw the creature shifting its balance to compensate for the damage.

He turned around and stared into the glaring, flexing eye of the Southern Scope. “Do you see me?” he muttered, and then he felt the stirring dislocation of vertigo as its intricate lens shifted and changed. Perhaps if he’d seen his own reflection in there, it would have rooted him to the world, but he was looking at nothing, and he fell.

They’ve all seen something!
he thought, closing his eyes and resting on his hands and knees for a moment. Never had he known the Scopes to act like this. They obeyed his instructions from the viewing room, turning slightly this way
and that, extending and closing their vision, and projecting what they saw down to the viewing mirror. But this sheer act of will shocked him.