Echo City (34 page)

His own guilt over Peer was richer than ever. He’d not felt it before when making love with Nadielle—but then Peer had been somewhere else. Now she was back in the city and his life, and he had betrayed her one more time.

Having passed the ruins of the Thanulian purge, Gorham was surprised to find much of the Echo still relatively intact. The buildings were of an older style, their construction rougher, and the materials used were more basic. There was a lot more wood, some of it dried and crumbled but much still standing. The stone blocks had been roughly cut, giving every building an irregular appearance, and nowhere did he see any glass. He checked several old window openings,
always keeping one eye on Nadielle and Caytlin, but there was no evidence of these windows having ever been glazed.

Sometimes he shone his torch inside the rooms and saw the remains of what they had once been. Furniture was mostly crumbled away, but many of the houses still retained rusted wood-burning stoves on heavy granite hearths. He was surprised that these precious metal objects had been left down here and not recycled during the construction of the level above. Maybe after the slaughter, the Marcellans had represented the Thanulians as diseased.

“Here’s where we start going down,” Nadielle said, when they reached an open square. At its center stood a long-dried water fountain, and an entire row of buildings beyond had disappeared. They shone both lamps toward where they had been, and a gaping maw was revealed.

“What happened here?” Gorham asked.

“Who knows?” Nadielle started across the square.

“Nadielle.” She’d hardly spoken since disentangling herself from him; perhaps she’d lowered her defenses too far. But he needed her to acknowledge what had changed between them. He felt like a fool, but her averted eyes were not good enough for him. After everything that had happened—after he’d sought some sort of self-forgiveness in her arms after Peer had gone—he wanted to hear her say that she needed him, as much as he’d once needed her.

His
needs were becoming more complex as every moment passed.

“Can you hear it?” she asked softly, and her face had suddenly changed. Her mouth was open, head tilted as she listened, and her eyes glittered with wonder—and fear.

So Gorham listened. It was like blood rushing through his ears, but bad blood. Like the breathing of some far-off thing, but if so it was a series of final breaths. In truth, he wasn’t sure whether he heard or felt it.

“What is that?” he asked.

Nadielle looked at him as if he wasn’t there. Then she blinked and saw him, and nodded ahead. “We need to go and find out.”

Caytlin followed her, and Gorham saw Neph’s shadow
ahead of them, descending into the hole. He was fixing crampons and stringing the rope they’d brought, marking their safest way down. Gorham had no choice but to follow.
Sometime soon she’ll have to talk to me
, he thought. But as Nadielle had already said, in the Echoes, time was ambiguous.

A while after they’d started down into the caverns, he realized that Nadielle was following Neph. The chopped fighter carried a torch now, and it was never so far ahead that they lost its glow. They passed through the tumbled ruins of homes first of all, slipping beneath slanted ceilings, scurrying through debris-filled basements, descending a set of stone stairs that had remained remarkably intact. Then down, between massive stone beams that must have been laid many thousands of years before. Neph kept moving, and whatever means it used to navigate, Gorham was impressed. Here was a chopped he had witnessed being birthed only recently, and now it was negotiating its way into the bowels of the city. They passed old sewers, long since dry, and then a sunken street that flowed with stinking water.

“Don’t get wet,” Nadielle said, but Gorham did not need telling. He could already smell the sickly stench from the underground stream; this was a small tributary of the Tharin. The flow was minimal, and he saw no signs of objects floating in it, so it could not have been the main tributary that led down into the Chasm. When they found that, it would be heavy with the city’s dead.

Neph steered them beside the water for a while, then they crossed a narrow rock formation that might have been natural. Past the small underground river, they entered a series of catacombs that seemed to have been hollowed out by some ancient cataclysm. Many of the walls and ceilings showed the shorn ends of massive beams and columns, metal rusted, stone shattered, and the walls themselves were pocked with thousands of fist-sized holes.

“Those look like—” Gorham began, and as he was about to say
sand-spider holes
, the things came.

“Back!” Nadielle shouted. She backed up, Caytlin behind her, and Gorham staggered as he almost lost his footing.

It couldn’t have been more than a hundred heartbeats, but to
Gorham it felt as though he and the others were huddled there for much longer. The things flitted through the shadows, uneven torchlight distorting their appearance even more. He saw wings, and long, trailing legs, and other protuberances whose uses were far less familiar. At first he thought the strange sound he heard was coming from them, and he covered his ears to keep out the high-pitched whine. But then, when several of the flying things swished past close enough to stroke or scrape his cheeks and forearms, he noticed that they were converging on Neph.

The chopped warrior held one arm in front of its mouth, and it was hooting through hollows formed in its bladed hands. The flying things spiraled around it in the constricted cavern, and Gorham perceived no collisions at all. Fast but controlled, these things were intelligent. Neph continued its hooting, drawing in more of the creatures. It lowered its head slowly, lowering the tone at the same time, and the things followed it down, settling finally on the uneven stone floor. Neph reduced the hooting and stood straight again. The sound stopped, echoing away into the darkness. Gorham held his breath. He could see the things more clearly now that they were still—insectile, spiked, glimmering.

Several of them flapped their opaque wings and rose. One darted at Neph’s head, and the warrior leaned back and sliced it in two with its right hand. Two more went at Neph’s groin, and it turned sideways and emitted spines from its hip. The things fell dead. Neph waved its arms several times, kicked out, and the remains of those that had dared attack fell among their cousins.

The carpet of creatures around Neph grew still and respectful.

Nadielle breathed in Gorham’s ear, startling him. “Don’t … move.”

Neph was motionless again, torchlight glinting from the wet patches across its bladed arms. One of the attackers was spiked on Neph’s left foot, writhing slowly as it bled to death. The warrior started hooting again, and this time the call was higher and more varied.
Almost like a language
, Gorham thought, and his skin prickled. The remaining things rose as
one, the gentle flapping of many wings barely a breath through the cavern. Then they flew directly at the pocked walls, and Gorham gasped as every one of them disappeared.

Neph stood motionless for a while, then gently lowered its arm and turned to face them.

“What were they?” Gorham whispered.

“You can talk normally now,” Nadielle said. She stood and brushed herself down, and Caytlin followed.

Gorham stayed down for a moment, eyeing the dark holes nervously. He aimed his light at some of them, but the only movement he saw was caused by the light. Whatever they were, they’d gone deep.

“We should move on,” he heard Nadielle saying to Neph. “Some rebelled, which means others will follow.”

“Nadielle?” Gorham asked.

“While we’re walking.”

Neph led the way as they departed the cavern, and though shocked and confused, Gorham was glad for that. Their route led downward, and after a time of negotiating treacherous conditions, they reached a wide, flat area. Torchlight touched nothing in any direction, and he felt the frightening pressure of space.

“Next Echo,” Nadielle said, and her voice sounded different.

“So what exactly happened back there?”

“Garthan trap. They don’t like visitors. They breed those things from sand sprites and cave wasps.”

“And Neph can speak to them?”

“Of course. I chopped him, and he’s part Garthan.”

Gorham tried to absorb what she’d told him, working it through, attempting to make out what it all meant without reaching the conclusions that clamored for attention. It was the most she’d ever suggested about the chopping processes she used, but it birthed more questions than answers.

“You used—” But she’d already turned away, and he knew her well enough to recognize the tension in her shoulders.
Told me too much
, he thought.
Did she mean to?
Perhaps. Or perhaps the deeper they came, the more she was reaching out.

This new Echo felt very different from those above. There
were no buildings evident, for a start—strange, for an Echo of Marcellan Canton—but the darkness did not feel as empty as it once had. It was heavy and loaded, and it had Gorham looking over his shoulder as he followed Nadielle.

The ground was rough but even, vaguely soft underfoot, and each footstep crunched gently. He thought perhaps it was a layer of old dead plants, but the air smelled only of dust.

Nadielle led them unerringly onward, confident even though Gorham could not make out any landmarks. The mute and emotionless Caytlin followed the Baker like a shadow, and Neph was somewhere around them, flitting across their path occasionally without making a sound.
He’s part Garthan
, Nadielle had said. Trying to imagine just how Nadielle chopped people in those womb vats made him shiver.

And if Neph was part Garthan, what were its other parts?

The shapes emerged quickly from the darkness—gray, motionless. Gorham’s fear was held in check by Nadielle’s confidence as she walked between them. They stood sentinel to the left and right, and Gorham recognized the forms of old statues. Around them the ground was more uneven but harder.
We’re in a park
. He called Nadielle to a halt and went to one of the statues.

“We need to hurry,” she said, standing by his side.

“A moment,” he said, because he was trying to make out the statue’s face. He held his torch higher, and the shadowy features jumped out at him. There was nothing unusual here—perhaps he’d been expecting something monstrous or unknown—but neither did he recognize the face from one of the many history books he’d read.

“Old city rulers before the Marcellans,” Nadielle said. “This Echo might be from ten thousand years ago, when they used to have a park in every canton in honor of the rulers. As older ones died, they’d erect new statues to those who took their place.”

“Sounds extravagant.”

“Politicians have always liked attention. Nowadays they simply get it in differing ways.”

Gorham looked around at the several other statues he could see, vaguer the farther away they were, and tried to imagine
how many might be standing around them right now. They were perhaps the only surviving likenesses of many of these people, all part of the city’s story and staring now into an eternal night.

“It really is the past down here,” he said, as if that had struck him for the first time. The statues regarded him with nothing left to say.

   The park seemed to go on forever. Gorham lost track of time, and when they heard the screaming man, they might have been walking for days.

The screams came from the distance just as Gorham became certain that he could hear something larger, and deeper. He’d been thinking that he could hear something for a while now, but Nadielle seemed unconcerned, and he hadn’t wanted to mention it. If he ever stopped to listen, the noise did too, so he suspected it had something to do with walking through this Echo. Perhaps their footsteps reverberated through the dry ground, the land shaking in excitement at these first human visitors in an age. Or maybe whatever was making the sound stopped when he did and carried on to the rhythm of his pace. He opened his mouth to mention the noises to Nadielle, and then came the screams.

They were distant, their direction uncertain, and they sounded mad.

“Down,” Nadielle said. Gorham knelt on the dry ground, and the Baker pushed Caytlin down and squatted by her head, protecting her.

“What the crap is that?” Gorham asked, but Nadielle did not turn around. The screams were coming from ahead of them. And they were drawing closer.

Just one person
, he thought. The screams came in waves, pausing occasionally for an intake of breath, and as far as he could tell it was always the same voice.

Nadielle had drawn a knife from her belt, and in her other hand she nursed a round, flexible object. Gorham drew his short sword. It was keen and light, and he’d used it in anger only three times. He’d spent a lot of energy trying to forget those moments.

Something was running toward them. Their torches did not penetrate the darkness very far at all, but in the distance he could hear the steady
thump thump
of feet striking the soft ground, and he imagined lazy clouds of dust thrown up. As the thing ran, it continued to scream.

“Nadielle?”

“I don’t know. Be ready.”

“Where’s Neph?” he asked, but the Baker did not have time to respond.

The shape that emerged from the darkness into shadows, then from shadows into light, was twisted and mutated, a bastardization of anything human, and the noise issuing from it was shattering. It slowed as it neared them and heaved itself up, growing even taller before it reared over Nadielle and Caytlin, twice their height and bristling with spiked weapons.

Nadielle lowered her knife and stood up, and then Gorham realized the truth.

Neph dropped the screaming man at Nadielle’s feet. Dust coughed up around him, and shreds of ancient dried plants that had not seen sunlight for millennia drifted in lazy arcs. The impact drove the scream from him in a loud
humph!
and the sudden silence was shocking. He gasped in air. His face went from pale to white, and he writhed slightly as he tried to start his breathing again.