The sky above the green is a burning blue, but this is no desert.
Then he opens his mouth to draw in a breath, and that's when he feels the film across his face.
For a moment he panics. He blinks rapidly, and though there's no impediment to his eyelids, he can feel his lashes brushing against something. He smiles and frowns, shifting his expression and feeling the film tightening and loosening across and around his face.
I can breathe, he thinks, but the panic is still there. Air moves in and out through his nostrils, but he's suddenly enclosed and cut off from the world, sensing that everything on the outside is dangerous, and all there is on the inside is him. Am I dreaming? he wonders, but then he realizes that this is a memory, and that when this happened he had no name.
He tries to lift himself to see where he is and what is happening, but he can barely move. He remembers the woman who found him, and that strange webbed mask she had been wearing. She's wrapped me up in that, he thinks, and starts to relax until he remembers what happened.
I showed her where I came from… across the desert… out of the sun and heat and Bonelands… and then she did something to me.
As if summoned by his vague memories, the woman's face appears above him. She touches his cheek, and the feel and heat of her skin are unimpeded by the constraining film. Those rumbles, clicks, and hisses come again, and there's something in their tone that comforts him. Her fingers do not scratch his face but soothe. Her eyes are wrinkled with a smile, not a frown. If she had meant him harm, he would be dead on those baking sands.
He can see green, and in his sudden rush of excitement he manages to sit up against his bonds.
The woman moves back a little but retains her uncertain smile. He sees her hand resting on the thing on her belt she did something to me with that
– but he looks around, shocked, amazed, and his delighted laughter seems to convince her that he means no harm.
It should be terrifying. But something about the lush green rolling landscape that is unlike anything he has ever seen is so natural that it holds no fear. The thing that carries him is moving along a rutted track, which runs along the bottom of a valley. The track side is speckled with swaths of blue bell-shaped flowers, and they spread out into the wide, wild fields beyond. He struggles to see order in the landscape but there is none, only randomness, and that amazes him even more. No farming, he thinks. It's so bountiful here that they harvest from the wild! In one place, the flowers give way to a low, thick plant spotted with a million yellow blooms. To his right, a woodland begins a hundred steps from the track, the trees short and squat, the canopy wild and untended-an uneven carpet crawling up the hillside toward its high, bare summit. Up there he can see the gray stains of rocky outcrops and a few white specks that seem to move slowly. There's a stream bordering the track to the left. It gurgles merrily, following his direction of travel, twisting and turning past rocks and through dips in the land. Bees buzz the flowers in abundance. Web strands drift on the breeze. Butterflies flutter across the fields, in colors and varieties that amaze him. Birds hurry through the air, taking insects on the wing, and high above he sees several larger, more-graceful birds drifting on the air without once flapping their wings. They circle, and he wonders what they must think when they look down upon him.
The woman is walking by his side, far enough back to allow him to see the view. And she's watching him carefully. The smile is still there, but so is a frown of concentration, wrinkling skin darker than any he has ever seen. The beads of water seem to have vanished from her hair. He is something amazing to her as well.
And then he sees so much more. The thing carrying him turns onto another track and heads up a gentle slope, revealing a fold in the land that previously hid the foot of another valley. As that valley opens up to his view, the things built across its floor and up its sides present themselves to him, and he catches his breath. Even if I could remember everything from before, this would be something new.
He snapped awake, shouting. Something pressed down over his mouth. He opened his lips, pushed with his tongue against the film, but there was something more solid there, tasting salty and stale, and when he opened his eyes he saw the face staring down at him in wonder.
Rufus sat up and looked around at the things carrying him. Ahead, across a canal spiked with spears of metal and wood around which sickly-looking plants grew, a gray stone wall rose before him. It curved into the sky, and to his left and right it curved away from the canal as well.
After they crossed a narrow bridge, they waited for only a moment before a section of wall slid open, and he saw inside.
They walked through the dead city with movement all around. Gorham had never expected this. The phantoms usually kept their distance, but now and then he thought he saw someone rushing at him from the corner of his eye, and he'd spin around to be confronted by nothing. His only comfort was that Nadielle appeared almost as jumpy as he was.
Caytlin walked, and watched, and reacted to nothing.
Sometimes Neph came close and listened as Nadielle whispered to it. Gorham could never quite make out what she said, and perhaps she intended it that way. She had not mentioned their lovemaking since it happened. She was quiet. Something significant between them had changed, and Gorham was trying to decide exactly what it was.
His own guilt over Peer was richer than ever. He'd not felt it before when making love with Nadielle-but then Peer had been somewhere else. Now she was back in the city and his life, and he had betrayed her one more time.
Having passed the ruins of the Thanulian purge, Gorham was surprised to find much of the Echo still relatively intact. The buildings were of an older style, their construction rougher, and the materials used were more basic. There was a lot more wood, some of it dried and crumbled but much still standing. The stone blocks had been roughly cut, giving every building an irregular appearance, and nowhere did he see any glass. He checked several old window openings, always keeping one eye on Nadielle and Caytlin, but there was no evidence of these windows having ever been glazed.
Sometimes he shone his torch inside the rooms and saw the remains of what they had once been. Furniture was mostly crumbled away, but many of the houses still retained rusted wood-burning stoves on heavy granite hearths. He was surprised that these precious metal objects had been left down here and not recycled during the construction of the level above. Maybe after the slaughter, the Marcellans had represented the Thanulians as diseased.
"Here's where we start going down," Nadielle said, when they reached an open square. At its center stood a long-dried water fountain, and an entire row of buildings beyond had disappeared. They shone both lamps toward where they had been, and a gaping maw was revealed.
"What happened here?" Gorham asked.
"Who knows?" Nadielle started across the square.
"Nadielle." She'd hardly spoken since disentangling herself from him; perhaps she'd lowered her defenses too far. But he needed her to acknowledge what had changed between them. He felt like a fool, but her averted eyes were not good enough for him. After everything that had happened-after he'd sought some sort of self-forgiveness in her arms after Peer had gone-he wanted to hear her say that she needed him, as much as he'd once needed her.
His needs were becoming more complex as every moment passed.
"Can you hear it?" she asked softly, and her face had suddenly changed. Her mouth was open, head tilted as she listened, and her eyes glittered with wonder-and fear.
So Gorham listened. It was like blood rushing through his ears, but bad blood. Like the breathing of some far-off thing, but if so it was a series of final breaths. In truth, he wasn't sure whether he heard or felt it.
"What is that?" he asked.
Nadielle looked at him as if he wasn't there. Then she blinked and saw him, and nodded ahead. "We need to go and find out."
Caytlin followed her, and Gorham saw Neph's shadow ahead of them, descending into the hole. He was fixing crampons and stringing the rope they'd brought, marking their safest way down. Gorham had no choice but to follow. Sometime soon she'll have to talk to me, he thought. But as Nadielle had already said, in the Echoes, time was ambiguous.
A while after they'd started down into the caverns, he realized that Nadielle was following Neph. The chopped fighter carried a torch now, and it was never so far ahead that they lost its glow. They passed through the tumbled ruins of homes first of all, slipping beneath slanted ceilings, scurrying through debris-filled basements, descending a set of stone stairs that had remained remarkably intact. Then down, between massive stone beams that must have been laid many thousands of years before. Neph kept moving, and whatever means it used to navigate, Gorham was impressed. Here was a chopped he had witnessed being birthed only recently, and now it was negotiating its way into the bowels of the city. They passed old sewers, long since dry, and then a sunken street that flowed with stinking water.
"Don't get wet," Nadielle said, but Gorham did not need telling. He could already smell the sickly stench from the underground stream; this was a small tributary of the Tharin. The flow was minimal, and he saw no signs of objects floating in it, so it could not have been the main tributary that led down into the Chasm. When they found that, it would be heavy with the city's dead.
Neph steered them beside the water for a while, then they crossed a narrow rock formation that might have been natural. Past the small underground river, they entered a series of catacombs that seemed to have been hollowed out by some ancient cataclysm. Many of the walls and ceilings showed the shorn ends of massive beams and columns, metal rusted, stone shattered, and the walls themselves were pocked with thousands of fist-sized holes.
"Those look like-" Gorham began, and as he was about to say sand-spider holes, the things came.
"Back!" Nadielle shouted. She backed up, Caytlin behind her, and Gorham staggered as he almost lost his footing.
It couldn't have been more than a hundred heartbeats, but to Gorham it felt as though he and the others were huddled there for much longer. The things flitted through the shadows, uneven torchlight distorting their appearance even more. He saw wings, and long, trailing legs, and other protuberances whose uses were far less familiar. At first he thought the strange sound he heard was coming from them, and he covered his ears to keep out the high-pitched whine. But then, when several of the flying things swished past close enough to stroke or scrape his cheeks and forearms, he noticed that they were converging on Neph.
The chopped warrior held one arm in front of its mouth, and it was hooting through hollows formed in its bladed hands. The flying things spiraled around it in the constricted cavern, and Gorham perceived no collisions at all. Fast but controlled, these things were intelligent. Neph continued its hooting, drawing in more of the creatures. It lowered its head slowly, lowering the tone at the same time, and the things followed it down, settling finally on the uneven stone floor. Neph reduced the hooting and stood straight again. The sound stopped, echoing away into the darkness. Gorham held his breath. He could see the things more clearly now that they were still-insectile, spiked, glimmering.
Several of them flapped their opaque wings and rose. One darted at Neph's head, and the warrior leaned back and sliced it in two with its right hand. Two more went at Neph's groin, and it turned sideways and emitted spines from its hip. The things fell dead. Neph waved its arms several times, kicked out, and the remains of those that had dared attack fell among their cousins.
The carpet of creatures around Neph grew still and respectful.
Nadielle breathed in Gorham's ear, startling him. "Don't… move."
Neph was motionless again, torchlight glinting from the wet patches across its bladed arms. One of the attackers was spiked on Neph's left foot, writhing slowly as it bled to death. The warrior started hooting again, and this time the call was higher and more varied. Almost like a language, Gorham thought, and his skin prickled. The remaining things rose as one, the gentle flapping of many wings barely a breath through the cavern. Then they flew directly at the pocked walls, and Gorham gasped as every one of them disappeared.
Neph stood motionless for a while, then gently lowered its arm and turned to face them.
"What were they?" Gorham whispered.
"You can talk normally now," Nadielle said. She stood and brushed herself down, and Caytlin followed.
Gorham stayed down for a moment, eyeing the dark holes nervously. He aimed his light at some of them, but the only movement he saw was caused by the light. Whatever they were, they'd gone deep.
"We should move on," he heard Nadielle saying to Neph. "Some rebelled, which means others will follow."
"Nadielle?" Gorham asked.