Garthans down here, and their traps, those things bred from sprites and cave wisps… The Lost Man and his quest for a return to flesh… Other things, myths, monsters… There were a thousand ways for him to die down here and only one way to survive.
"Nadielle!" he shouted again, and hated that his voice broke.
The light ahead stopped once more, but he did not pause to look. He moved on across the smooth, sloping floor of a cave, into a wide crack in its wall, splashing through a puddle that felt too thick to be water and too warm to be natural, and all the while he drew closer to the light.
"Please wait!" He could see her now, her pale face yellow beside the oily flame. She was looking his way. He hoped her fear had calmed enough for her to be aware of him once more. As he approached, he heard her heavy breathing-part exertion, part terror. Her eyes flickered left and right, never quite centering on him. She stood in coiled readiness, ready to spring away at the slightest provocation.
"Teeth," she said, and that single word chilled Gorham to the core.
"Nadielle, please, just wait. Let me catch… my breath." He reached her at last, close enough to touch but careful not to do so. His breathing matched hers, but though exhausted she still looked ready to run through these caverns for another day, then up into the Echoes, toward sunlight. You're my sunlight, she'd told him, but she was now lighting the way for him.
"We have to go together," he said softly, shivering. He had no idea how he had not broken an ankle, twisted his leg, dropped through a crack in the world. She held the light between them as if to share, but it could also have been a barrier. "Nadielle, what did you see?"
"Its teeth," she said, trembling, not quite catching his eye. "Neph will tell me when it arrives." Her voice was flat, dead. Her skin was pale and slick. He had never seen her like this.
In the distance, a low rumble ground through the caverns. Gorham closed his eyes but could not tell the direction from which it originated. Behind us and down, he thought, because that was the most obvious. He looked at Nadielle, raising his eyebrows. She looked sick.
"It'll be a while yet," she said. "But it climbs the water. It's been climbing for…"
"For?"
"A long time." She was staring into the darkness, and Gorham had no wish to see what she was seeing.
"Do you know?" he asked. "Is it something-"
"Something that shouldn't be. Something that should have never been." Then she looked directly at him for the first time. "We have to run." She moved away, holding the torch before her to light the way.
Gorham went with her, because he had no choice. He could have held her back, perhaps, to demand more from her. But, in truth, he had always been afraid of the Baker, and this just scared him more.
Nadielle seemed very certain of their route. Even without Neph, she moved unerringly through the underground. Sometimes they seemed to be heading down instead of up, but that would never last for long, and Gorham thought it was to reach easier routes or avoid dangerous ones. There was so much here that he was still afraid of, but being with the Baker went some way toward lessening those fears, because he was more afraid of her than of anything else.
They might have been underground for two days or five; all time seemed to have lost itself to the shadows and eternal night. They had paused many times on the way down, eating dried meats and fruit from their backpacks and catching brief sleeps before moving on, and though it went against his better judgment, Gorham had taken drinks from some of the pools they found in the caves. The water tasted heavy and salty but never rank. He always smelled before tasting.
Now he was exhausted and hungry. His backpack was empty, Nadielle had abandoned hers at the Falls, and Caytlin and Neph were gone. Caytlin had fallen, and if the legends of the Falls were true, she was still falling. Could she be alive? It was a horrific idea, but it circled him and kept presenting itself, and he could not help but imagine what she might be seeing or feeling.
As for Neph, he was sitting back at the Falls, awaiting whatever rose from them.
They walked and climbed for some time, Nadielle saying nothing. Sometimes he tried to prompt her to talk about the Falls again or simply to say anything. But she was silent, brooding, apparently concentrating on the ascent, even though her eyes were far away.
Finally, just when Gorham was considering how he would face Nadielle and force her to tell him what had frightened her so much, she paused at the mouth of a tunnel. Before them lay a deep blackness, barely touched by the torch.
"We've climbed into the deepest Echo," she said. "This is Echo City as it was in the beginning."
Gorham felt chilled, as if his bones had been touched by something terrible. They had not seen this place on their descent, because Neph had led them down through the caves and caverns around the Falls. But Gorham had been wondering when they would encounter the roots of Echo City and what they might find.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Because there's nothing deeper," she said, as if explaining to a child.
"But this is…" Old, he thought. Ancient.
"What's wrong, Gorham? Expecting Hanharan to welcome you?"
"No," he said, but the darkness was thick and swallowed their voices. The depth of space before them felt immense, and he wondered how far he would see were this Echo to suddenly light up.
"We'd look for him if we had time," she said. He could see the dreamy look in her eyes-mostly hidden by the urgency of their journey, but still there.
"Hanharan? A god?"
"He must have been someone," Nadielle said. "Come on." They started walking, the bubble of light around them flowing across the dusty, uneven floor, and then they started to pick out ghostly shapes in the darkness. Buildings, Gorham guessed, but age had smoothed their artificial edges.
"I don't think I want to look for him," Gorham said.
"An architect, perhaps," Nadielle said, as if she hadn't heard him. "A philosopher. A carpenter. An experimenter. My ancestors all had their own ideas about who or what he might have been."
"None of them ever came down to explore?"
"No!" she snapped.
"Well, now you're here; you can find out."
"From so long ago?" Nadielle asked. She kicked along the ground, and a haze of dust weakened the torchlight. "Doesn't matter what he was down here. Up there, he's a god." She snorted, then chuckled.
"What's so-"
"Shh!" The sound was harsh and loud, and Gorham crouched, chill air cooling sweat across his body.
"What?" he whispered. He tried to peer into history-rich shadows, seeking those forgotten places where myths had been born.
But Nadielle had extinguished the torch. "We're not alone."
She was close enough to smell. He knew her scents, and some had always been mysterious to him, but he smelled them now and they were a comfort. If he held his own breath, he could hear hers. And, close enough to touch, he was sure he could feel the heat of her blood and skin passing across to his.
We're not alone, she had said, but she had not yet told him how she knew. That would come soon.
He listened for sounds of movement or pursuit but heard neither. When he started to become restless, Nadielle's hand closed around his arm and grabbed tight, then she pressed her face to his, sighing against him, and he felt the wetness of tears on her cheeks. He gasped in surprise but said nothing, and she turned his head with a hand beneath his chin so that she could talk into his ear.
"We have to survive," she said. "We must reach the surface. I might be the only one who can affect what's happening, so you have to help me in any way you can."
Gorham nodded, unsettled.
"Any way, Gorham."
She means me staying down here, he thought. She means sacrificing myself, if I have to, so that she can go on. He wondered if that was why she was crying but thought not. He nodded again, slower this time.
"First," Nadielle said, "we have to get past the Lost Man."