"We found a Garthan trap but no Garthans."
"Some are still here," he said, "but most have fled. Out toward the city limits."
"Aboveground?" Gorham asked.
"Not yet."
"You say some are still here?" Nadielle asked.
"The old ones. The sick."
"Did they do this to you?" Nadielle asked gently.
Sprote shook his head, reaching around with his hand and touching her arm. The more contact he felt, the more he seemed comforted. "I fell," he said. "I was fleeing and I fell."
"Fleeing what?" Gorham asked.
"The Falls. What is rising." He shivered again, closing his eyes and trying to stop his teeth from chattering together. "You know," he said quietly, words meant for Nadielle. His hair seemed to stand on end and Nadielle held him tight, rocking him slightly while she looked at Gorham. He could not read her eyes. They seemed empty, as if she were waiting for him to say something to fill them.
"What?" he asked. But Nadielle shook her head.
"Every Echo is singing with its voice," Sprote said quietly. "You only need to know how to listen. Hear… can you hear? Low, like heavy footsteps over gravel. Can you hear?"
"I hear it," Gorham said, and Sprote fixed him with his gaze.
"That's the end coming for all of us, boy."
Gorham turned away and looked at Neph, a shadow standing against the darkness.
"Go on with him," Nadielle said. "Take Caytlin."
Gorham turned around, confused. Go on with Sprote? But then he saw that Nadielle was looking at Neph, and the wounded man in her arms looked smaller and weaker than ever. She'd put her knife back into her belt but had not fastened the clasp.
"How will you catch us?"
"I'll know where you are."
"How?"
"Really, Gorham, now is not the time."
Sprote Felder was looking at him. There was madness in those eyes but also a heavy knowledge that seemed to give the surrounding darkness weight. We should listen to what he says, Gorham thought, but then Nadielle frowned at him, nodded toward Neph, and Caytlin stood and came to Gorham's side. Her eyes were big and wide and empty. He'd rather stare into Sprote's madness.
"I won't be long," Nadielle said, her voice softening.
Gorham took one last look at the famed Echoes explorer, his broken leg, his drained face and mournful eyes, and then he turned away. They left one torch with Nadielle and took the other two themselves, but Gorham did not look back. Neph led the way-the chopped seemed to know where they were going, and he did not once hesitate-and Caytlin followed, never seeming to move quickly but always there behind him.
Without Nadielle, Gorham was colder and more afraid than ever. She'd called him her sun, and now he wondered what she was to him. He was unsettled that she was not walking beside him. He was nervous that he could not see her, acknowledge her control over what they were doing down here. But Nadielle was an absence, whereas Peer was still a warm, heavy influence inside. Time was running out for him to gain her forgiveness.
Later, when Nadielle caught up with them, she did not catch Gorham's eye.
"Did he say anything else?" he asked.
"No."
"Did you kill him?"
"No!" she said, aghast, but still she would not look at him. "No. I took him somewhere safe and told him we'd get him on the way back."
"He said you knew what was coming. You."
"He's mad, Gorham. And you're the Watcher. Don't you know?" She looked at him then, and the hard, derisory Baker had returned.
Gorham could only follow her. He stared at her back as they walked-the way her hips moved, the long, clipped hair hanging between her shoulder blades. He definitely preferred her in need of comfort.
The noises continued and grew. Faraway sounds, echoing through the Echoes, heavy and hard, and they carried about them a shattering sense of distance. The darkness became more oppressive than ever, now that it was no longer filled with nothing. Sometimes, the air itself seemed to shake in fear.
Gorham was fascinated with every breath he took. There were no living plants down here to make clean air, and yet it smelled and tasted as good as any he'd breathed up in the city. There were hints of age to it and sometimes a grittiness caused by their kicking up dust. But it seemed like good air, and it gave him strength. He wondered where it came from. It was something else that he would ask Nadielle, given time.
The huge park ended eventually, and they entered a built-up area. By his estimate they must be very close to the heart of this Marcellan Canton Echo, and yet the buildings were humble and small, not the gaudy sky-scratching spires and towers he was used to seeing. Nadielle pointed out several structures that bore signs of recent use, and in one place they found dozens of skins spread and pinned on timber frames to dry.
"Human," Nadielle said softly, and she told Gorham that they were passing through a Garthan settlement. He tried not to think about what they'd seen and who they might have been. The settlement seemed deserted. Gorham wondered what they knew that he and Nadielle did not.
Later, Nadielle called a halt and Neph built them a fire. The Baker produced some rolled bread from her backpack and started to warm it, and the smell of herbed butter wafted around them. Neph stood guard somewhere unseen. Caytlin sat. Gorham felt totally excluded, and when he tried talking with Nadielle, she shut him out.
"I thought you needed me," he said.
"I do."
"Doesn't seem like it."
"Don't be a child, Gorham," she said, and they did not speak again for some time.
Soon after the meal, they moved on and started heading down. Gorham caught the hint of moisture in the air, and as they descended through a series of narrow tunnels and crumbling stairways and emerged into the next Echo, he heard a steady, distant roar. It was a frightening sound, but it masked the mysterious noises that had been growing ever louder all around them-the sound of the rising thing.
What the fuck are we doing down here? he wondered more than once, but Nadielle's determination drew him on.
The roar was water, the tributary of the dead River Tharin that plummeted through the Echoes beneath Marcellan Canton and eventually, it was said, vented into the Echo City Falls. Though possessing such a grand name, the Falls was a hidden thing, buried deep where the roots of the city bound it to the land and where old history made way for even older. As recently as a hundred years ago, there were those who believed that the Echoes went on forever-buried histories and past times that not only should be forgotten but that could never truly be accessed. People went down into the Echoes then as now, but some in the city-followers of Hanharan, mostly, their religion tied inextricably to the city's lifeline-had believed that all they found were caves. Gases down there, they claimed, made people imagine streets and buildings, buried parks and the ruins of older times. And while explorers tried and failed to find them, the Echoes stretched back, and down, forever.
But Gorham liked to think that he lived in more enlightened times. There were still isolated pockets of believers who clung to outdated, more extreme dogmas, but now even the Order of Hanharan and their Marcellan politicians acknowledged that their new city was built upon the old, and the older, and so on. And this acknowledgment could never come without the understanding that there was a point, somewhere deep in the past, where the original city must lie.
This was the reason that deep exploring was strictly forbidden. Hanharan's birthplace would be way down there, if he had ever existed. But what anyone would have been able to tell from a ruined, rotting, crumbled wreck thousands of years old, he had no idea.
"That's the Falls," Nadielle said, and Gorham was unreasonably pleased to see a light in her eyes. He could not tell exactly what it meant, but it took away her expression of lifelessness.
"At least it masks the other noises," Gorham said.