They had found it in his dead mother's rooms. She had already destroyed him by the time he was old enough to talk, so he had no fear of her now.
He opened the flask and sniffed at its contents. There was very little smell, only the sharp tang of metal. Taking one last look around his rooms, Nophel put the lip of the flask to his mouth and upended it.
His saliva drew back, something pushing it across his tongue and around the insides of his cheeks, and his mouth flooded with cold. He gasped and dropped the flask, leaning back in his metal-framed chair. When he breathed out, his breath misted before him, quickly dissipating in the warmth. Speckles of moisture clung on to his wispy mustache and beard. Blue Water, he thought, and when he tried to hold his hand up before his face, his arm would not work. There's something wrong, he thought, closing his eyes to hold down the panic. Death had never been a fear for Nophel, but he was no lover of pain.
He tried once more to lift his arm and hand, turn it before his face… but again it did not work. "Am I paralyzed?" he asked, and as his mouth opened to speak, the words came out. He tapped his feet against the floor, and the impacts were clearly audible. Leaning forward in the chair, he stood smoothly, feeling no impingement in any muscles or joints.
Lift again, he thought, and this time he knew he lifted his hand. He felt air moving against the tiny hairs on his forearm as it shifted position. Sending the command to bring his hand closer to his face so he could see, he slapped himself across the nose.
"I can't see my hand," he said. Nophel looked down, and he was no longer there. At least not completely, though there were shadows in the air where none should be cast, and when he moved those shadows shifted. He ran both hands across his chest and stomach, down across his groin, bending so that he could run them all the way down his legs to his feet. He felt the cool air touching his body and stirring at his movements, but he saw only a hint of himself.
Nophel laughed. His mother had touched him again, from the distance of twenty years and through the veil of death. He only hoped that wherever her body and soul were still falling into the bottomless Chasm, she felt his derision and hatred more strongly than ever before.
He shrugged on a long, heavy coat. For a moment it hung on nothing, then slowly it faded until it, too, was little more than shadow. He had not been sure, but he was pleased that he could go clothed, and armed, and ready to face whatever might be out there. It wasn't often that Nophel ventured into the city, and even unseen he felt danger pressing down on him already.
"Good," he said, standing before a tall mirror and not seeing himself. And he began to concentrate. I am there, he thought. That's me, I am there… It did not take very long. The Blue Water acted on the minds of those around him, rather than on his own physiology, and knowing that enabled him to control its effects upon his own mind. The initial shock had rendered him invisible to himself, and that had been comforting. It meant that the strange fluid was working. But now he focused upon those shadows in the mirror, shifting left and right so that he could see them becoming thicker, stronger, until the shadows had gone and he saw himself. It was unsettling, but Nophel had been ready for it. He manifested out of surprise, formed from nothing, and by the time he could look in the mirror and no longer see bookshelves through the back of his head, he knew that it was time to go.
He left his rooms and locked the door. Walking softly through the darkened corridors of Hanharan Heights, he headed down ramps and staircases toward the wide courtyards surrounding them. He passed a maid, a whore, and a group of Scarlet Blades playing nine-sided dice against a wall, and the only reaction he saw was from the whore. She paused before him, gathering her robes around her and pressing her forefinger across her tattooed lips in the familiar Hanharan blessing. Frowning, she moved quickly on.
Outside, the setting sun cast his shadow across ancient pavings as he started his journey north. He knew that few people would see that long shadow, and if they did they would run in the opposite direction.
I'm safe, he thought. My bitch mother has made me safe. The streets of Marcellan Canton were busy as dusk approached. People rode toward home in one of the seven giant steam wagons, their faces wan and tired from a day spent working in whichever bank, government office, or shop employed them. The wagons rolled on circular tracks around the canton, moving every hour except one each day, when their reservoirs were refilled and their engines rewound. Nophel stood beside the track as one passed by, and if anyone noticed the man-shaped hollow in the steam cloud, they made no sign.
Many other people chose to walk or ride in tusked-swine-pulled trailers. The streets smelled of cooking food, dust-tainted steam, ale and wine from one of the taverns doing a brisk dusk trade, and swine shit. Nophel walked confidently, enjoying the looks of befuddlement as he passed people by. Perhaps some glimpsed a flicker of what he was, but then the Blue Water influence would work its mystery upon their senses, and he'd be gone before they knew why they felt so confused or unsettled. More than one person stopped in their tracks and started to talk to him-but found themselves muttering into thin air. Some blushed and hurried on, heads bowed so that they did not have to see any observers' smiles or looks of concern. Others headed straight into taverns or restaurants, where the food and drink would divert them. Only a few turned and watched him leave, not seeing, not knowing, but watching nonetheless. These, Nophel guessed, were the ones most likely to suffer nightmares.
He had no wish to inspire nightmares. He bore no ill will toward anyone alive. But this disguise would soon become a necessity, and he kept that in mind as he walked on. And there was that subtle feeling of power that he had experienced only once before.
Then, he'd been alone in his rooms. The walls had been lined with fewer books, the furniture slightly less worn and shaped to his bones and flesh, and he'd waited while they went to find his mother.
Nophel was the god of quiet things, and though cloaked in the Blue Water's strange effect, he still kept to the shadows beside buildings, seeking out streets and alleys that were quieter than most. Once he slipped on some damp cobbles and went sprawling, crying out as his elbow struck the ground. He looked around to see who had noticed and rolled into the mouth of a recessed doorway. Breathing hard, his heart thumping, he rubbed his elbow as the tingling pain lessened.
Someone laughed.
Nophel caught his breath and looked around. The darkening street seemed deserted. It was lined with residential buildings with tall windows and closed doors, and there was a series of scaffold towers where these old places were being built over. The laughter came again, high and gleeful, and he leaned out of the doorway and looked along the street. Three children were playing catch a few houses along, bouncing the ball off a building's facade and seeing who could catch it first. The smallest and youngest of the three laughed each time she threw or caught. The other two played silently.
Nophel did not understand children, but for a beat this sight gave him pause.
He moved on, the feeling of power subdued now, driven down by the force of expectation hanging over him. Dane had sent him out on his own-no one from the Council's famed and brutal Inner Guard to accompany him, and no Scarlet Blades-and he'd done so because he trusted Nophel. You have their ear, Dane had once said, standing on the roof and watching Nophel tend and turn the Scopes. They're my brothers and sisters, Nophel had replied, and that was one of the few times he'd ever seen a look of fear on the fat politician's face. Cosseted from reality, such a man rarely had to confront such mystifying truths.
Nophel walked through the night, traversing the wealthy areas of Marcellan, where huge houses were surrounded by gardens so vast and lush that the buildings were almost invisible from the streets. Many Scarlet Blades patrolled these areas, their garb more refined than most Blades' clothing, their weapons polished, their attitude one of reserved watchfulness rather than the casual superiority exuded by Blades elsewhere in Echo City. They walked in pairs, conversing quietly as they passed from one splash of oil-lamp light to the next. Nophel stood aside in the shadows, thrilling at the feeling of being so close. A couple of Blades paused in their stride and conversation, looking around with hands on the handles of their renowned weapons-the knowledge to cast and fold such swords was long-lost, though many attempted to re-create their qualities-but eventually their companions urged them on. You're seeing shadows, they said, or, It's just the breeze, the wind, a phantom. And Nophel passed through, the god of quiet things, still finding shadows to his liking, though he went unseen.
Close to dawn, nearing Marcellan Canton's sheer outer wall, he waited patiently while a street trader set up his food stall and started cooking diced chickpig and pancakes for the breakfast trade. When the big man sauntered off to piss behind a tree, Nophel snapped up a pancake, smeared the steaming meat across its surface, spooned on dart-root sauce, folded it, and tucked it beneath his coat. He hurried past the pissing man, unsure whether the food would be visible. Rounding a corner, he saw the canton wall, and he climbed fifty-six steps to its ramparts to eat. Relishing the first hot mouthful, he sighed and took in the view.
Beyond the wall began the gorgeous green farmland of the northern arm of Crescent. Three miles away, beyond the haze already rising from the rashpoison canal the Dragarians had built hundreds of years before to protect their privacy, he could see the massive domes that made up Dragar's Canton. They seemed to float above the haze, like giant stoneshrooms sprouting from the heart of the land. Just to the east, the rising sun glanced from the surface of the Northern Reservoir.
I saw something open, something come out, and it closed again, and what I saw…
He shook his head and took another bite, and that was when he noticed the woman sitting to his left. She was perhaps fifty steps away, seated on one of the many stone benches that littered the head of the great Marcellan wall. Long, loose hair, a pale face, the worn, tattered uniform of a Scarlet Blade who had seen one too many battles or drunk through one too many nights of decadence. She was alone. And she was looking directly at him.
Nophel paused with the last chunk of pancake held against his lips. He glanced in the other direction. No, fool, don't pretend, she's looking at you!
When he glanced back, she was already walking toward him. She was tall and thin and ragged, but her stride was strong and confident. She paused a few steps away, staring directly at his disfigured face without reaction.
Nophel leaned to his left, and her eyes followed him. She frowned, then smiled slightly. Amused, but only a little.
"New?" she asked.
"What?"
"You. New? Yeah, a new one. So what did they tell you?"
"I'm sorry…" Nophel said, shaking his head.
"The Marcellans-what did they offer you if you drank that fucking stuff?"
They died, they all died, he thought, but already he knew that was wrong. No… they disappeared.
"Doesn't matter," the woman said. She held out her hand, and with a wry, cynical smile said, "I'm Alexia, of the other Echo City. Welcome to the world of the Unseen."
He followed her along the head of the wall to a stone spiral staircase leading down to the street. A woman turned at the sound of footsteps, but Nophel was sure it was only his that she heard. Alexia was as silent as she was invisible.
At the foot of the wall, she headed back into the warren of Marcellan streets. There was no explanation, no glance over her shoulder. Nophel followed, and even if he decided to follow no more, he was not entirely sure he could simply stop. How many? he was wondering. How many have tried the Blue Water over the last twenty years? How many have been forced to try it?
They stopped outside a sunken door leading to a building all but subsumed beneath a new structure. Not yet an Echo, this was a place soon to be forgotten. He supposed it was an apt hiding place.
"Here we are," Alexia said. "We go downstairs. Quietly." She spoke in the clipped, brusque tones of the military, but though she still wore a tattered uniform, the dyed armbands of rank had either faded or been deliberately bleached away. As she pushed open a heavy wooden door and entered a large, low-ceilinged room, Nophel found himself facing a dozen frightened people.
"There's no breeze," one of them said. Nobody responded. They were all looking directly at Nophel, and he felt naked and insecure, baking in their regard.
Alexia walked into the room, between several seated people. They were playing a tabletop version of lob dice, the dice now abandoned. She paused at the head of a staircase, glanced back, and smiled. "Come on," she said, and they didn't even hear her. "You'll get used to it."
Suddenly I don't want to, Nophel thought. He walked through the room, stepping lightly, careful not to nudge past anyone. The people remained staring at the opened front door, and as Nophel reached the staircase and started descending after Alexia, a man stood.
"I'll do it, then," he growled, striding to the door and slamming it shut. "You're all chickpig cocks."
"Yeah, and you're so brave, Mart," a woman said, snorting like a chickpig. The forced humor lifted the atmosphere a little. As Nophel went down the curved staircase out of sight, he heard the clatter of dice once more.
Alexia turned left and walked along a narrow, tatty corridor, then entered a doorless room where four other people sat. They looked up as Alexia entered, their eyes going wide when they saw Nophel.
"Got a new one," Alexia said.
"That's the dead Baker's son!" one of the other Unseen gasped. "He's the one that tends the Scopes."
"I know who he is," Alexia said.
Nophel paused in the doorway and looked around the room. There were a few broken chairs but no other furniture. No food. No water bottles. This was nowhere near a home, and he wondered what these people were doing here.