Echo City (55 page)

Far too long
, she thought.

“We should go,” Peer said. “Make our own way in, look elsewhere. We can cover more ground than—”

“Than invisible people?” Malia asked without opening her eyes.

A distant wailing sound began—but this was different. The one they’d heard before had sounded like the cries of a wounded animal, but this was more regular. A continuous rise and fall.

Malia opened her eyes. “That’s an alarm.”

“They’ve been caught.”

“Or they have him.” Malia stood and approached the window beside Peer, sword in her hand. She was edgy, more animated than Peer had seen her in a while. Maybe she’d simply been preparing for this.

“We need to be ready to move as soon as they’re here,” Malia said. “We’ll go on ahead, make sure the route out’s clear.”

“What about Rufus?”

“They’ll be protecting him.” She nodded at Peer, then clasped her arm. “He’s more important to the city than to you, Peer.”

“I know that,” she said, but the truth hurt.

They watched the landscape outside, unable to see far because of the honeycomb structures filling the dome. And when the Unseen returned, it was not from the direction they expected.

“We need to move quickly,” a voice said. Peer spun around and raised her short sword, and Alexia stood behind them.

“You have him?” Malia asked.

Alexia leaned against the wall and took several deep breaths, fighting off a faint. “Yes. I came on ahead.”

“Is he …?” Peer began.

“He’s fine. Unconscious. I had to knock him out. I’m not sure he really wants to come.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Malia said. “So, you’re the soldier. What’s the best way to go from here?”

Alexia grinned. “Well, when I was a Blade, in situations such as this we’d usually resort to running like fuck.” The others entered behind her through a gap left by a fallen wall: Nophel, the two other Unseen … and, slung between them, Rufus.

“Back the way we came,” Alexia said. “But, to stay together, we all need to remain seen, unless you two—”

“You’ll have more of a chance on your own,” Peer said. “Fade out again, and go as fast as you can. Malia and I will remember the way on our own. And if we trail behind you …”

“Yes,” Malia said. “It’ll be us they catch first, and that will slow them down.”

“A drop of blood is all it takes,” Nophel said.

“No,” Peer said, and Malia also shook her head. It was no longer simply fear of the condition that made them refuse. It was the realization that they could provide a distraction.

“Fine,” Alexia said without argument, and the Unseen began to fade. She placed her hands on either side of the unconscious Rufus’s face and concentrated, and he, too, began to fade.

“What?” Malia gasped, surprised, and before Nophel flittered from visibility, he pointed at his bleeding arm.

They slipped from the building. Peer had never felt so naked and exposed. The dome sloped away above them, and without staring up it could have been just another expanse of gray sky. A thousand windows stared down at them, dark openings in the faces of incredible structures, and behind any one there could have been a Dragarian waiting for this moment.
Perhaps they’ve been playing us all along
, Peer thought, and it was an unsettling idea because …

Because she’d been thinking the same about Rufus. He’d killed the Border Spite and the Watcher easily enough, and he’d fled the Baker’s laboratory as soon as he heard the truth—almost as if he’d
known
the truth all along, and this was all just a ploy to get here.

But perhaps her imagination was running away with her. If there was any truth in that, he’d have forced them to let him stay. He might talk like a child, but she had a feeling he had a much wider understanding of things than any of them gave him credit for.

They approached the dome’s edge, dropped into the dried canal, and headed back down into the tunnels from which they’d emerged an unknown time ago. Sunlight still streamed through the hidden windows in the dome’s roof, but it had taken on a darker, deeper hue, and she suspected that dusk
was approaching outside. She wondered how much things would have changed when dawn next touched the city.

It was as they struck alight their oil torches that Peer first heard the sounds of pursuit.

She and Malia froze and stared at each other, heads tilted. The sound came again—a low, secretive grinding, like something dragging itself over the ground.

“You go on,” Malia said, and before Peer could protest, the Watcher woman was climbing back toward daylight.

Peer moved deeper into the tunnels, alone and terrified, and looked for a place to wait. She could not simply leave Malia behind and flee, much as every part of her wanted to. And neither could she move on; even now she was unsure of whether she was going in the right direction. So she hunkered down behind the remains of a tumbled wall, wondered what the building had been, and soon heard footsteps pounding toward her from the direction of the dome. She thought of extinguishing the torch but decided to keep it alight. If the person running at her was not Malia, she’d need to see what she was fighting.

“We can’t stay here,” Malia said, rushing past. “Come on.”

Peer ran after her, handing Malia the torch and trusting the Watcher’s instinct. Malia moved this way and that without any apparent hesitation, and Peer only hoped she remembered the way correctly.

“Lots of them,” Malia said. “We could wait and fight, but we wouldn’t hold them up for long. Useless.”

“So what?” Peer panted.

“We find somewhere narrow and try to hold them back.”

“Just you and me?”

“Yeah. Narrow enough for one or two, and we’ll do what we can.”

We’ll do what we can
. That meant die. Peer felt curiously detached from the possibility, as if she’d already died once before and knew it was not so bad. Yet her will to live was strong—to see Rufus and help him as much as she could. To see Gorham again. He’d been afraid when she left him with the Baker, and the manner of their parting …

I could have said goodbye
, she thought.
I could have given him some inkling of forgiveness, at least
. But that would have been a betrayal of herself. She had not forgiven him,
could
not. But that didn’t mean they could not still be friends, of a sort.

And Penler. She’d made herself a promise to see him one more time. Failing in that would feel like letting him, not herself, down.

Behind them in the tunnels, echoes drifted in: growls and scrapes, the flapping of wings, the slithering of things across the ground. They merged with the sounds of their own footfalls. The sounds were growing louder, even though Peer and Malia were running as fast as they could. Whether they reached a suitable place of ambush or not, the choice to run or fight would soon be made for them.

Peer drew her sword, and it felt pathetic in her hand. Not long now. Not long until she discovered the truth about death and what lay beyond. Would she be taken down to Hanharan, in whom she did not believe, and welcomed into his shadowed embrace? Or would her senses blink out one by one until there was nothing to comprehend and no comprehension at all?

A Watcher all her life, right then Peer was no longer sure what she believed.

An arrow flicked past her ear and struck Malia in the neck. She grunted and fell, and Peer tripped over her flailing limbs. And then redness rose around them, and the sound of fighting and dying filled that subterranean place.

   Sometimes Sprote Felder believed that the statues spoke to him. He did his best to listen, but their words were distorted by time and confused by languages he had never known. He thought he’d researched all the old dialects, reading them on inscriptions hidden from the sun for countless years, but perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps there was so much more that he could never know.

The noise in his head was constant. Sometimes he screamed until he could no longer draw breath past the rawness in his throat, but that did nothing to cover the impact noises he
heard from below. Other times he stuffed dust and dirt into his ears, wetting his finger and shoving it in as far as he could in the hope that it would solidify, cementing out the terrible truth. But then he’d slump to the ground and bang his head, and the plugs would fall out.

The tall statue before him was regal and aloof, missing one arm that might have been torn off by Garthans. They sometimes came and vandalized these higher Echoes, poor revenge upon the memories of those long-ago Marcellans who had wronged them when they were proud Thanulians. He had often suspected that one day they would marshal their forces, gather their anger, and rise up to exact true vengeance. It seemed that he’d been wrong.

Something else would be the end of Echo City.

He screamed again, raging at the pains in his throat and head. It had been a long time since he’d had a drink. Crawling from the small tomb beneath one of the statues where the Baker woman had dragged him, he’d cracked the water flask she’d left behind, spilling its contents into the dry dust of history. He’d lit his torch and watched it soaking in, amazed that things could still happen when there was no one here to see.
That’s proof of the city’s soul
, he’d thought.
That it continues on without us, and it’ll move on, and on, even when this is all over. Even when we’re all dead
.

Crawling, pulling with his hands, pushing with his one good leg, smelling the stench of his other leg, where the bone had ruptured flesh and set it to rot, he had no destination in sight. His only purpose was to move, because he had never stayed still.

Creatures ran past him, heading back the way he had come. A mass of small insectlike animals first, antennae waving at the air, ten legs scuttling across the uneven ground. They parted around him—smelling him, perhaps—though a couple came close and chewed chunks from his rotting leg. Larger creatures followed them, some flying, most crawling or running. He knew some of them from his long journeys down here, but there were shining diamondlike creatures that moved on cushions of gas that he had never seen before. Even now the wonder was there, and he reached out to grab one as it
drifted by. His hand was slashed in a dozen places. It hissed as it passed by, absorbing his blood and glowing red for a few brief moments.

“Running from something,” he said, and he started to crawl faster. Whatever they were running from, he had to see. He was dead but not yet finished, and curiosity and the search for knowledge were his prime motivators even now.

The ground thumped up at his chest and stomach, the regular rhythm of the impacts now ended. “Turning to chaos,” he said into the shadows. They did not reply, because there was nothing left down there to hear. Even the maddest of the Garthans had gone—he’d seen no sign of them for what felt like days. “Chaos rising, and the city’s reaping what it’s sown.” Crawl … crawl …

Something moved in the distance. Sprote paused and aimed his torch, but the oil had almost run out now, and the light beam was weak. Shadows shifted again and then dashed across the Echo before him—a huge, flailing thing that ran so fast he could not track its progress. Light reflected from lashing metal objects, and between them was only the darkness of a body built to hide.

This time Sprote did not scream, because he knew this was not the rising thing. This was something that had come down.

“Mounting a defense,” he said, but this was not a creation of the Marcellans, and the Hanharans would not allow such bastardization. He knew who had made this, and why, and when he shouted this time, it was a cry of encouragement and defiance.

The impacts increased, the ground now shaking so much that each thump punched him into the air, and each fall drove lances of pain all through his body. From the far distance, across this Echo and from those much deeper, he heard and felt the steady rumble of roofs caving in, columns crushing, history imploding. The noise was immense, and at last, through the incredible volume, he started to distinguish one facet of the cacophony from another: here, the clash of metal against other hard things; there, the cry of something in pain; and elsewhere, a roar fractured by the teeth it was driven past.

The Echo smelled of death, and it was no longer only from him.

The ground opened up before him. The statue park, part of an Echo he had explored many times, split from side to side, and from the new rift something rose up. It was huge, a shifting tower of the dead and rotting, bones and flesh falling from it. His meager vision was clouded with the dust of crushed bones. Clad in the dead of Echo City, the thing beneath the corpses was visible in places—swaths of deep-red hide with cracks that glowed like lava bubbling in the Echo pits beneath Skulk.

Huge limbs the length of a hundred human arms thrashed at things clinging to its sheer sides. And these things—two of them, joined now by the one Sprote had seen rushing across the Echo—were hacking at the monster. Their bladed limbs rose and fell, scattering more bones of the dead and flicking countless body parts into the darkness, digging deeper until they encountered the monster’s skin, slashing, rending, and moving on when gouts of fiery blood erupted from the foul wounds they had made.

Sprote’s torch faded out, but the scene was lit with the blaze of combat. Old corpses flamed as they fell past the monster’s burning wounds, disintegrating across the ground and setting a thousand bonfires. Fires burned on its ridged back. Gases ignited around the fighting things.

And then, far to Sprote’s left, another upheaval, and another huge mass broke through the rock from the Echoes buried below. It tipped over and smashed onto the ground, shattering the statues of people dead for thousands of years and spilling a hundred corpses across the soil. At first he thought there were two monsters rising. But when he realized what he was actually seeing, and the ground between the limbs started to bulge as the thing’s colossal head forced through, his heart stopped beating for the final time.

The Echoes around the turmoil collapsed, history fell, and Sprote Felder was crushed before he could utter one final, dreadful cry.