"Neph?"
"He's much closer than that. Those are… maybe a mile away?"
Gorham hurried after Nadielle again, passing Caytlin and walking by the Baker's side. "A mile?"
"This Echo is very flat," she said. "It's from perhaps twelve hundred years ago. Where we are now, they used to grow grapes and mepple roots."
"Mepples are grown in orchards."
"They are now, yes."
"So those lights…?" he asked, but he already knew. He'd seen something like them before, but he was trying to shut the idea of phantoms from his mind. The deeper they went, the older the phantoms would be, and the more disturbing their existence.
"I think you know what they are," Nadielle said. "When we draw closer, they'll likely extinguish. Phantoms are only Echoes in themselves, but some have a strange awareness."
A shadow passed by on their right, moving quickly and confidently across the rutted landscape. Gorham caught sight of bladed hands and the sharp shadows of Neph's spines. If Nadielle noticed, she did not say.
"I never really considered the Echoes below Crescent," he said. "The fields up there now aren't too far above the Markoshi Desert levels. When you first took me to your rooms, it was the first time I'd been down, but now we're so much lower." He shook his head, unsettled by the implications.
"We're only in the Second Echo now, though they do become confused. There are more."
"You've been lower?"
"Much."
"But any lower than here must be beneath the level of the Bonelands."
"Maybe," Nadielle said.
"Maybe? What does that mean?"
"The Echoes are… nebulous. The deeper you go, the older the Echo, the more uncertain the geography becomes."
"But they're just levels." Gorham was becoming frustrated and a little angry, and he supposed it was due to fear.
"Just levels? Gorham, the past is a living place. The deeper you go, the further into history you travel. The city doesn't deal with history. It builds over its past, encloses it, shuts it off, and while tradition might persist, the real histories are soon forgotten. It's the present that matters to Echo City, while the past echoes below it, in some cases still alive. If you read the history books, one will contradict another, particularly as you go further back. So why should the Echoes be any different?"
The idea of landscape being altered by perceptions of the past was alien and disturbing, and yet it seemed to make sense. It could never be so simple as the city's past sinking beneath the weight of the present. Life was never that easy.
The lights in the distance-a weak and flickering blue, as if caused by cold fire-went out.
"How much farther?" Gorham asked.
"Not too far. The Marcellan wall is even thicker down here; we'll have to find one of the old gates."
"And then down to the Chasm."
"Does that scare you?"
"Of course!" he said, louder than he'd intended. His voice was swallowed by the space around them, even though the darkness and the knowledge that there was a solid ceiling somewhere high overhead made him feel very closed in. I could lose myself down here, he thought again, and his relationship with Nadielle had never felt so strange and strained. Then I'd be just like the Lost Man.
Behind them, Caytlin sneezed. Gorham jumped, and even Nadielle glanced back.
"It's a mythical place," Gorham said. "Unseen, unknown."
"And yet the city still drops its dead into the tributary of the Tharin that leads to the Falls."
"Just because something exists doesn't mean it can be understood."
Nadielle coughed a surprised laugh. "Gorham! You're a Watcher, someone who's supposed to appreciate reason above the irrational." She laughed again, shaking her head. "The Chasm is said to be bottomless. Doesn't that excite you? The idea that the river pours into it and that we're on our way to see it?"
"No," he said, "it terrifies me."
"Then why the crap did you come?"
"Because you asked me to." He knew that she was looking sidelong at him, but he did not want to give her the satisfaction. He stared at where the phantom light had just faded out, wondering what was there, what watched. He didn't want her thanks or her appreciation. But when she stroked gentle fingers across his cheek, he could not hold back the smile.
"It's some way yet," Nadielle said.
"Good."
"Yes, indeed. Plenty of other deadly places filled with monsters both known and unknown before we reach the Chasm."
"Thank you, Nadielle," he said, smiling.
"You're welcome."
They walked in silence, and for a while Gorham felt safer than he had for a long time. Up above, in Echo City, there was always the risk that the Marcellans would hear rumors of the Watchers' survival and regrouping after the purge. Whether they would stamp down on them as harshly as they had three years before, he was unsure, but the pressures were always there. There was the constant duty he felt as new leader of the Watchers and the stresses of maintaining an outwardly normal lifestyle-running a moderately successful domestic maintenance business, enjoying an unchallenging social life, and not doing anything to bring himself to the attention of the Scarlet Blades or their civilian spies.
Down here, it felt as though Nadielle knew exactly what she was doing.
It started to rain. The first few drops startled Gorham and he swept his torch above his head, the oil swilling in its small reservoir. Then he felt the water striking his upturned face, and when one drop entered his mouth, it burst sweet and fresh across his tongue.
"Rain," he said.
"Moisture condensing on the ceiling."
Gorham aimed his torch directly above them, Nadielle added her own illumination, and even combined the torches faded into a dull gray mist.
"How high?" he asked.
Nadielle shrugged. "I never really think about it when I'm down this far."
"More nebulousness."
"Yeah."