"With this? I trust Malia," Gorham said. "Devin. A few other Watchers." He looked around, stroking one cheek as if searching for someone else.
"The new Baker?" Peer asked.
Gorham did not answer.
"Her name's Nadielle," Malia said. "And we have to take Rufus to her now!"
No, Peer thought. But she knew they were right: Rufus might have come to the city as a lost, confused man, but circumstances she knew nothing about were turning him into a potential savior.
The three of them sat for a while, drinking their five-bean and relishing what was left of silence.
"We're taking you to see someone," Peer said. Rufus lifted his head, and he was still terrified. She saw the potential for further screams in his eyes, and he suddenly looked much older. I thought he was thirty, she thought. But now maybe sixty.
"Who?" he asked.
"Her name's Nadielle. I've never met her. She's… we call her a flesh artist. The Baker."
"Artist," he said softly.
"We think she might be able to help."
"Will she hurt me?" Rufus asked, and Peer felt her throat tighten, her eyes burn.
"No, she won't," she said. "But you must realize that my friends don't trust you yet. You killed Gerrett."
"But I thought he was-"
"I know, Rufus. I know." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "But I still haven't told anyone about the Border Spite."
"Why? I was… protecting us both."
Is he really so innocent? she thought. His eyes said so, and his voice, and the way he was almost cowered down before her, like a submissive hound. But she could not shake that poison gun from her mind, nor the way he'd swung into action so smoothly when he thought it necessary. As if he'd been prepared rather than aimless.
"I don't want them to see you as a killer," she said.
His face relaxed a little and he nodded.
Peer looked around the small cell where they were holding Rufus. They hadn't locked the door-the mechanism was rusted and jammed-and Malia told Peer they'd taken him there to recover. But Devin had been standing outside the cell ever since, a sword on his belt. He'd said nothing when she came to see the visitor, but Peer could feel his eyes on the back of her neck. I can hardly blame them for guarding him, she thought, and she remembered Gerrett and his easy laugh.
The cell wall was damp with moss, and in the corner the hole in the floor that had once been the latrine was filled with dead rats. A hundred years before, real murderers might have inhabited this cell. She wondered what these walls had absorbed-confessions, tears, shouts of rage. Now, perhaps, they were witness to the beginning of the end.
"When are we going?" Rufus asked.
"Soon," Peer said.
"Now," Gorham said as he entered the room. He glanced at Rufus, then fixed his attention on Peer. "There's no time to waste."
"Where is she?"
"She's in her laboratories. We'll take you."
"What are laboratories?" Rufus asked.
Gorham looked at him, and Peer could not tell whether Rufus's expression was expectation or fear. Probably a bit of both. "It's where she chops," Gorham said. "Where she makes things."
Malia came in behind him, crowding the small cell. "It'll be almost dark," she said. "Now's a good time."
"How far?" Peer asked.
"Just follow me." Gorham could not hold her gaze. He still doesn't trust why I came here, she thought, and she motioned to Rufus to follow them out, Malia bringing up the rear. A flush of anger hit Peer again, aching her head, driving her heart. The bastard had lied to her, had given her up to die! She shook her head to try to clear it, but that only seemed to confuse things more.
Maybe it wasn't that he mistrusted her. Maybe it was guilt. I forgive you, she thought, but she could not imagine saying it, could not mean it-not to this man who was so different from the one she thought she'd known. Perhaps given time. But if what the Watchers had been awaiting for generations really was coming true, time was something none of them had.
Sprote Felder went back down. He never spent more than a few days aboveground, because he found it claustrophobic and constricting, and the sky took his breath away. He discovered his greatest freedom belowground, where the undersides of later times formed the skies, and phantoms from the past whispered to him like the dregs of old dreams. Sometimes he understood what these whisperers were saying; other times their words formed exotic and unknown shapes, like vague mumblings of the mad. He had spent much of his life down in the Echoes, exploring and recording, and the histories of Crescent Canton especially were a source of constant pleasure and fascination. He was always cautious and alert, and occasionally he had been scared. But he had never been terrified-until now.
His father had once told him, To most people, history is a dead thing, but in reality it still exists-but is forgotten. Down in the underside of Echo City, he strove to remember.
His porters had fled. He hired them from the taverns and slash dens of Mino Mont's Southern Quarter-a place that many thought of as a stepping-stone to Skulk. Most people in the quarter were involved in crime in one way or another, be it as perpetrators or beneficiaries. It was a way of life there, with children introduced at a young age and given the only choice of their pitiful lives when they struck adulthood: which branch of crime to enter into. The possibilities were endless, the uptake huge, and few people escaped the circle of life that persisted in that place. The only reason the Marcellans allowed the quarter's existence was that it provided many things that they and their families and friends enjoyed. The city's best slash was refined in the quarter, in dens deep in Mino Mont's newer Echoes, where sunlight could not damage the stock. Some of the larger brothels ran schooling camps, where young girls were taught the ways of sex by an array of visiting dignitaries, Scarlet Blades, and Hanharan priests. And if a dirty deed needed performing that was below even the Marcellans' guard of Scarlet Blades, the quarter was the place to look. Countless taverns held countless shady corners, where killers beyond number drank and waited.
It had not always been that way. Seven hundred years before, Mino Mont had produced some of the finest musicians, artists, and writers that the city had ever known, and there was still no consensus on why the area had become so corrupt and violent. Some said it was creativity driven back to its basic, wild core. Others suggested that creativity and insanity went hand in hand, and the Mino Mont of today was certainly a product of some sort of madness. Whatever the reason, Sprote found that the people of the quarter produced the best porters. In almost twenty years of exploring the Echoes and employing hundreds of people from Mino Mont, he'd had only one turn on him. That man was way down in the Echoes, his eyes put out by his companions, and sometimes Sprote had nightmares that he was still alive.
But now his helpers had gone. Strong men, hard women-only half of those who had come down with him previously had returned on this journey. And of those, only three had crossed the deep Echo border between Crescent and Marcellan Cantons. They had all heard what the Garthans had to say last time, though Sprote was not convinced that anyone but him could speak Garthan well enough to truly understand. And when they had felt the first distant vibrations, like the secret heartbeat of the city itself, those remaining had turned and fled.
"You should come with us," the last woman had said.
"I can't," Sprote Felder had replied. "This is where I live."
He'd watched them leave, walking along a dusty street buried beneath progress for maybe five thousand years, then he'd entered an old dwelling and lit a fire in the hearth. For a long time he had sat there, feeding the fire, snaring ghourt lizards and spitting them over the flames, and thinking about where he was going and what he might find. Shadows moved where there had been no movement for a hundred generations. In another room in the house, a phantom whispered in an old language. And Sprote had known that the only way for him to go was down.
He knew the Echoes, and the sounds that reverberated there, as no one else did. Heading deep beneath Marcellan, passing through Echoes that were still talked about in hushed tones-sometimes awed, sometimes feared-he heard the sound of the River Tharin. It was the city's endless sigh. He was used to the sound from his times beneath Course Canton, but there the river was still on the surface, where some of its power was expended to the sky and the water refineries added their own booming accompaniment to the river's whisper. Here, where the river itself had been built over, its power was contained. Its voice echoed. And as he finally left that dwelling and started deeper, memories of his one and only visit to Echo City Falls began to surface.
He'd been there fifteen years before and vowed never to go again. The Falls carved their way through the rock of the land, the foundation of the place that had become Echo City, and those caves and caverns had been a stark reminder to Sprote that there was a time before the city. He had never been a great believer in Hanharan and the associated creation myths, but during that time down by the Falls, he had understood where some might find comfort in such beliefs. It was a basic, wild place, where the only sign of the city and its Echoes was the steady stream of bodies that the Falls carried away. He'd seen dozens in the short time he was close-the dead swept away by those dead waters, arms and legs waving goodbye to someone who should never have been watching. His porters at the time had been terrified, and the torches they carried had cast dancing reflections across the Falls as they shook in fear.
Below the Falls… even Sprote had not gone that deep. He'd heard tales of the bottomless pit-the Chasm-swallowing the river and its grisly cargo into a darkness that was home to a thousand fearful myths. Some said that the city was built on nothing, and that one day the Chasm would consume it whole. Others claimed that the Echoes made up some vast, mindless creature's face and that the Falls carried the city's dead down into its endless gullet. But explorer though he was, some things were best left unseen. Sprote believed that the sight of this Chasm would swallow his sanity, sucking it down like the countless dead of Echo City over the eons.
Now he was breaking his own promise to himself and returning. Fascination, and also a vague sense of duty, drew him. He'd made himself the authority on these deep places, and now that something was here, he felt that he should be the first to know.
He was deep and had to go much deeper. And already, as well as the whisper of the dead River Tharin far above and the rumbling of the Falls a mile or two to the west, he could hear something else.
Something rising.
Nophel sat naked in his rooms and looked around at what he had. Each book held worlds, but all those worlds were aspects of Echo City. Some volumes could be construed as Watcher material-highly imaginative texts concerning what might be beyond. He had an illicit copy of Benjermen Daxia's Truth-An Exhortation to Revolt. But even these were inextricably bound to the city. Nophel had read nothing of their persuasion that made him believe anything other than that they were written by good fictionalists. If the Council knew he had these tomes, he would likely be in trouble. But that was what Dane was for. Protection.
Other books and objects concerned his mother and those generations of Bakers before her. Reading them was an exquisite torture.
He rolled the small metal flask back and forth across the fingers of his right hand. He felt the liquid in there shifting with the flask and played with its weight. I won't see that water, he thought. I'll barely even feel it. Nophel breathed deeply. He loved the smell of his rooms. If he drank Blue Water and disappeared, like everyone else who had ever tried it, he would miss the scent of books and maps and olden times.