Echo City (42 page)

“Climb!” Nadielle said, and he needed no further prompting. Ignoring the sense of being pulled, straining against it, Gorham climbed hand over hand, trying to catch up with Nadielle so that he was closer to their single torch. Somehow his hands found handholds, his feet found footrests, and his panicked breathing became the only sound.

Slowly, the touch faded, washed away by sweat. Perhaps it was the altitude that lessened the contact, or their determination to shake it off. But, though relieved, Gorham also felt a terrible sadness at leaving that poor thing behind.
It only wants company
, he thought, and he let out a single loud sob. How often could history trap souls such as this? He was a traveler down here, an ignorant, an invader in the past who did not know his place. He felt a sudden overwhelming need to reach the surface again—however dangerous the present was becoming—and to find Peer, seek her forgiveness, and hold her tightly to him. They were alive, and they should revel in that. There was no saying how long it would last.

Nadielle climbed above him, but hers was a different touch. Desperation instead of passion. Convenience in place of love. She was as lonely as the thing they were leaving behind.

At the top of the cliff face, Nadielle did not pause for breath. She started to run again, not responding when Gorham spoke to her, and he had to save his breath just to keep up. She never seemed to tire, and he wondered whether she was secretly taking some unknown drug to keep her muscles warm and loose. They rose from one Echo to the next, and they might have been moving for a whole day without pause before she finally slumped against a wall. Above her, a painted portrait of an old Marcellan stared down, his eyes smeared over with black paint to give him a monstrous demeanor. Fangs had been added to his mouth. The defiler and the Marcellan were both long dead, but something about the defiance pleased Gorham.

He sat next to Nadielle without trying to speak. He drank water from his water bottle, realizing that he would have to find somewhere to refill it again soon. And then Nadielle broke her silence.

“I’m sorry,” she said, voice breaking, tears starting to flow. “We’re away. I can tell you what’s rising.” She took his water bottle and drained it before she began. “The Bakers have been here as long as history …”

Nophel stared down at his hands.
I went away again, for a while
. When Malia came back she looked right at him, seeing him for the flesh and blood he was.

“You need to tell me everything,” she said, “and quickly. Time’s running out.”

Nophel glanced at the woman, Peer, who had been left with him while Malia went for medicines. She had not spoken, though he’d felt the pressure of her questions.

“I can tell you only what I know.”

“Peer, I’m sure you want to begin,” Malia said. She closed the door and stood by the window, looking out onto the street, chewing herbs and pressing paste into wounds on her left hand and forearm. But Nophel felt all of her attention focused on him.

“You disappeared,” Peer said. “When I was untying you, you … faded. Then you were gone.”

“A potion from the Baker,” Nophel said. “The
old
Baker. I told you, Dane Marcellan and she were friends.”

“A potion to make you invisible?” Peer said. Disbelief rang through her words, and yet Nophel smiled, because she could not deny what she had seen.

“It’s called Blue Water,” he said. He closed his eyes, the good and the bad, and in doing so he brought back the images of those Scarlet Blades dying at his hand. It had been horrible, feeling his knife part their skin and flesh, seeing their eyes as they knew death had come for them. And yet he
could not feel sorry. He thought of their families and friends, who would be told of their deaths today, and the people who had lost a father or brother, mother, or sister. But pity was something he had so rarely been shown that, when it did present itself, he hated it. Pity was for the weak and useless and those who had no aims.

“And he gave it to you so you could get this message to the Baker?” Malia asked.

“No, before that. Something came out of Dragar’s Canton, and he wanted to know what.”

“Did you find out?”

“Yes. And then I killed it.”

Peer held her head in her hands, rubbing at her eyes.
She’s been through a lot in a short time
, Nophel thought. Malia, the other woman, was harder and more dangerous. But even she was in a state of shock. For all their posturing, the Watchers had never been fighters. He was at an advantage here, and he had to remember that.

“I know who the visitor is,” Peer said, staring Nophel in the eye.

“Who?”

“We’re
asking the questions!” Malia roared, but Peer held out both hands, as if warding the two away from each other.

Nophel looked at his hands, willed the Blue Water to act again.
I did it myself
, he thought, but however much he tried convincing himself of that, it did not ring true. It had been fear and danger that had forced the change, not a message from his own consciousness. Perhaps if Malia came at him with a knife … but he was not sure if even then it could happen fast enough. He didn’t know how many people, if any, had ever been given the White Water antidote, but he possessed something amazing. Perhaps soon he would gain some control over it.

“A friend,” Peer said, putting herself between Nophel and Malia. “A good friend of ours and the Baker. But we think the Dragarians have taken him.”

“The Dragarian said he would go to the Baker,” Nophel said.

Neither woman answered.

“So where is the new Baker?”

“Gone somewhere,” Malia said, quieter now. “She’ll be back soon.”

“She knows about your friend?”

“Yes,” Peer said. “But she also knows that things are stirring in the Echoes.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Nophel asked. He was looking at Peer, but it was Malia who answered, wincing as she pressed the paste into a gash across her left forearm.

“I can’t trust you,” Malia said. “You’re Marcellan, and—”

“I’m
not
Marcellan!”

“You work for them. You come from Hanharan Heights with a message tube, snooping around our business, and you can turn fucking
invisible!”

“So you’ll kill me, then?” Nophel asked.

“No!” Peer snapped, and when Malia looked at her, Nophel did not like the look in her eye.

“I’m with the Marcellans only because of the dead Baker,” Nophel said, and the old bitterness burned at the back of his throat. “She was my mother and she abandoned me; the Marcellan I serve took me in. It has been the place where I’ve been safest. But I’ve always worked only for myself.”

“Your
mother?”
Peer asked, aghast.

“Mother,” he said, nodding. “So this new Baker is something to me as well.”

Malia snorted, then returned to the window. There was a barely suppressed panic about her, the sense that she could unravel at any minute. She carried such an aura of violence that Nophel did not want to be near her when that happened.

“You say you’re a Watcher,” Peer said.

“It’s my outlook, yes.”

“The man we seek, our friend—”

“Peer!” Malia shouted, but Peer turned to face Nophel.

“He came in from beyond Echo City.”

“No!” the Watcher woman said. But she did not come closer, did not interfere.

“Now I fear the Dragarians might have him, and there’s something happening deep down beneath the city, and the Hanharans will do nothing to prevent what might come next.”

Nophel gasped, the breath knocked from him.
Beyond the city? Dane knew … In his message, it’s clear
. But there was no bitterness that Dane had not shared his knowledge with him. And then Nophel thought of the Unseen and their fading ways, and he knew what he could do. Helping the Watchers might be the only sure way to get him closer to this new Baker. Closer to true vengeance.

If only they would believe him.

“I can help,” he said. “You might not trust me, but my convictions are strong. First, though, will you tell me about this visitor?”

Malia remained by the window, not as horrified as she had sounded.
She’s in shock
, Nophel thought.
She lost friends today
. He could not imagine what she felt, because he had never had a friend. And what did that make him? Stronger than they were, or weaker?

“Malia?” Peer asked.

The Watcher woman shrugged. “You’ve told him too much already. See what he has.” She coughed a harsh, humorless laugh. “Can’t put us in a worse position than we’re in.”

Peer dragged her chair over and sat before Nophel.

“How can you help?” she asked.

“I know people who can get into Dragar’s. People like me. Unseen.”

“Good,” Peer said, and Malia watched with interest. “Our friend’s name is Rufus Kyuss, and the old Baker—your mother—chopped him just before she died.”

   She told him everything she knew. It did not take very long and, as she spoke, Peer felt the unreality of events washing over her. Nophel sat quiet and still as she talked, and his emotions were difficult for her to discern through the growths on his face. Yet what he had said was as confusing as what she was telling him, and trying to absorb it all gave her a headache.

Penler should be here for this
, she thought, and thinking of her friend gave her a hankering for those simpler times in Skulk. An outcast she might have been, but at least her days there had rhythms and her nights had been for sleeping, not planning.

“So you can help?” she asked at last. Nophel sighed and rested his head back against the wall.

“We have to go north,” he said. “Just the three of us. There are people I know in the north of Marcellan Canton who might be able to get us inside Dragar’s. Once in there …” He shrugged.

“What?” Malia demanded.

“I’ve seen them,” he said. “Through the Scopes. I saw them swarming out, and they were … changed. No longer human.”

“They’ve only been shut away for five hundred years,” Peer said.

“Many in the city try to mimic the Bakers,” he said, shrugging. “They must have been practicing their own chopping. Preparing for when their Dragar returned, ready to fight anywhere to regain him—in the air, on land, in the water.”

“But none can match the Baker,” Peer said, thinking of the three-legged whores she had seen, the soldiers with blade limbs, the builders with four arms. With their strange attributes was always infection and pain.

“Maybe not out here, no,” Nophel said.

“Then we go north,” Malia said. “Sitting here frigging ourselves won’t get anything done.”

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?” Peer asked, then she realized what she sounded like: a scared little girl.

“Devin’s dead,” Malia said. “I’ll leave a message here for Bethy, but there’s no saying she’ll find it. And we can’t wait for Gorham.”

“Can’t we?”

“Who’s to say they’ll ever come up again?” Malia said.

Peer knew she was right. They had to go, and now. Into Dragar’s Canton with Nophel, this man who claimed to be the old Baker’s abandoned, shunned child and who now worked for a Marcellan who, he claimed, was actually a Watcher. How dangerous could it be?

“It’s a long walk,” Peer said, “and we’ll need a reason to be traveling through Marcellan.”

“I can also help with that,” Nophel said. And for the first time since they had arrived there from the bloodied and burning barge, he smiled. It was grotesque.

“You’d better not be fucking with us,” Malia said. “I mean it, ugly man.”

Peer offered Nophel a smile, but he was looking down at his hands, turning them slowly in his lap as if willing them to disappear again. There was blood beneath his fingernails.

   Nophel walked with his hood up, hiding away from the world, and thought:
If this doesn’t work, Malia the Watcher will kill me
.

He took them east toward Marcellan Canton, the gentle slope rising closer and closer to the place he’d called home for so many years. The wall was visible in the distance—a pale façade catching the setting sun and unmarred today by crucifixions—and beyond that the hill rose steeper toward Hanharan Heights. The Heights themselves were visible only as a thin sliver pointing at the sky, and, as he looked that way, he thought of the Scopes up there and hoped that Dane was taking good care of them.

I’m never going back
, he thought suddenly, and though he was unsure where the certainty came from, it hit him hard. He paused in the street and stared ahead, hoping that perhaps the Western Scope was looking back at him right now. He almost dropped his hood—but that would have been foolish. Without him to direct them, the Scopes would be all but mindless.

“If you give us away—” Malia whispered at Nophel’s shoulder, and he spun around, right hand up before his face with fingers splayed.

“Do you see the blood?” he said softly. “Dry now. But I can still feel its warmth.”

Malia glanced away uncertainly, but by the time she had gathered herself, Nophel was walking again.
Foolish woman
, he thought,
and terrified
. His heart was beating hard, though not from exertion—ascending and descending the viewing tower’s steps had kept him fit over the years—but from nervousness.