Time had pressed down on this place with irresistible weight. Buildings were crushed and toppled, and close to where they hid lay a pile of rubble. Some of the stones might have been carved with images or even words, but dust stole away any impression.
Beyond this was a structure the likes of which Gorham had never seen. Built from stone and at least three stories high, it seemed to defy many of the natural laws dictating size and shape, with walls leaning outward and floors supported on one end. Perhaps shadows gave false images. Some of its blank window openings retained a gentle glow after Nadielle had passed her torchlight across their surfaces, fading only slowly, as if the windows wanted to hold on to their memory of light. Around the window openings were dark impressions of hands with index fingers missing.
"Garthans?" he asked.
"No, they don't build. They tunnel." She aimed the torch around them, picking out remnants of this Echo from so long ago and, here and there, evidence of those ruins that were used to build something new.
"How do you know it's the Lost Man?"
"I can't imagine what else this means," she said.
"You know everything. But not this?"
"I don't know everything! I know hardly anything. But everyone else knows even less than me."
"We have to go back," Gorham said. "We can find another way up, past the Falls, where the water's carved its tunnels. Avoid this place altogether." He'd heard stories about the Lost Man and always believed them to be apocryphal. Nadielle's merest mention of his name had made Gorham reassess those tales, and they were all bad.
"No," Nadielle said. "There's no time."
"But he's…" A monster, Gorham thought. A killer. A ghost.
"Don't believe everything you hear," Nadielle said. "He'll probably only watch." But though her words held confidence, she sounded as afraid as Gorham felt.
Nadielle went, and he had to follow.
"How do you know this is his place?"
"No one knows where he exists," she said. "Even the Garthans don't interact with him. He's as much of a phantom to them as to us. I'm just…"
"What?"
"With what's happening, I'm not surprised that he's this close to the Falls."
"What is happening, Nadielle? What is rising?"
"The end of everything," she said. "Follow me."
They walked out into the Echo. Gorham tried to guess how old this place might be-five thousand years? Fifty thousand? There were many estimates of the age of the city, and none made any real sense. Now its age and combined history were a weight, crushing down on him as effectively as the surrounding rock, compressing his thoughts and making them almost alien things. He tried to consider what this place meant, but even for a Watcher it was difficult. If Hanharan really had existed, there might be evidence of him here. If he was the founder of the city and its one true god, would his time here really have fallen into such ruin? In awe and terror, Gorham eyed strange structures similar to the one they'd just seen, and he wondered how many more were spread through the Echo. Their torchlight picked out further faint images of a four-fingered hand-whether paint marks or impressions in the stone, he could not tell-and their randomness seemed to speak of ownership of this place. Whether Hanharan or the Lost Man had made these buildings from the rubble of history, there must have been a reason.
"I feel like I'm being watched," Gorham whispered, the sensation an itch on the back of his neck. Nadielle did not reply, and as he paused to look around, she kept walking. In the fading glow of her retreating torch, he thought he saw a face at a crumbled doorway.
He ran to catch up, heart racing.
"Keep moving," Nadielle said.
Another face, this time peering from a circular opening in one of the strange structures. Gorham wanted to point it out to the Baker, but between blinks it vanished. He was not certain it had been there at all.
Nadielle led them across this oldest Echo, and for the first time Gorham began to fear that she was lost. All the way down they had followed Neph, trusting his Garthan instincts from one Echo to the next. Ambiguous though these places might be, there still had to be set routes between one past landscape and another, and they were imprinted on a Garthan's memories. But going up was perhaps a different thing entirely. And now that Neph had been left behind, Nadielle was following some map that Gorham could neither see nor understand.
But he said nothing, because he did not want such a suspicion confirmed. To be lost down here on his own would be terrible; in some ways, being lost with Nadielle-whom he was trusting to get them from moment to moment-would be even worse.
They came to a place where the ruins were stacked high. Even in the weak torchlight, Gorham could see the smears of ancient fires across some of the rubble, and stones seemed to have been melted and reset under terrific heat. The dust of ages had settled here, but still the evidence of strife was clear.
"More wars?" he asked softly.
"Conflict is as old as the city."
There were no more of those strange structures. But the feeling of being observed did not go away, and every now and then Gorham caught sight of a pale face peering at them from atop a pile of tumbled stones or from the shadows beneath a fallen wall. It never lasted for long, but that somehow made it worse. If he had something on which to focus his fear, it would perhaps lessen it.
"Why won't he come out?" Gorham asked.
"He's been down here a long time. I doubt he knows how to communicate anymore."
"They say he craves flesh in which to return to the surface."
"And how could anyone know what he craves?" Nadielle said. "Even I have no idea. They're rumors and stories. Keep walking, Gorham. I know where I'm going."
"How?"
But she did not answer that.
The Lost Man watched them all the way through that ancient Echo. Sometimes he was blatant, his face appearing all around them as if he could flit through the space between breaths. And sometimes his observation was more sly, little more than a feeling. But he was always there, and when Nadielle started to scale a sheer rock face, torch slung around one shoulder, Gorham followed willingly. He could not see how tall the cliff was or where it led, but it meant leaving that haunted place. For that, he would have willingly climbed all the way up to daylight.
After ascending for a while, Gorham felt something grab the nape of his neck. It was a subtle, intimate touch, and he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. But the feeling remained-and suddenly it was going deeper, as if an invisible hand were forgoing the physical contact to close its fingers around his mind. It drew him away from the cliff face.
"Nadielle!" he whispered, looking up. But she was hanging with one hand, waving the other around her head as if she felt the same. "No," he said, as he felt himself pulled farther from the rough rock wall. "No!"
He held on tight with his right hand and swept the left across the back of his neck. There was nothing there, but the feeling remained. It lured him, easing him away and tugging him down, gentle but insistent, and when he blinked he saw the Lost Man's image imprinted on the backs of his eyelids.
He had never seen an expression so wretched, hopeless, and lost.
"Leave us!" he roared. In this oldest of places, which had until now known only their cautious whispers and the hush of their footfalls, his shout was shocking. In the distance someone screamed, or perhaps it was the echo of his own cry. The deep darkness seemed to come alive, and there was movement all around. But in his struggles, Gorham sensed no life to the movement and no real purpose. It was as if the shadows themselves-settled down here for so many thousands of years and disturbed only by ghosts-were writhing awake at the sound of a living voice.
"Climb!" Nadielle said, and he needed no further prompting. Ignoring the sense of being pulled, straining against it, Gorham climbed hand over hand, trying to catch up with Nadielle so that he was closer to their single torch. Somehow his hands found handholds, his feet found footrests, and his panicked breathing became the only sound.
Slowly, the touch faded, washed away by sweat. Perhaps it was the altitude that lessened the contact, or their determination to shake it off. But, though relieved, Gorham also felt a terrible sadness at leaving that poor thing behind. It only wants company, he thought, and he let out a single loud sob. How often could history trap souls such as this? He was a traveler down here, an ignorant, an invader in the past who did not know his place. He felt a sudden overwhelming need to reach the surface again-however dangerous the present was becoming-and to find Peer, seek her forgiveness, and hold her tightly to him. They were alive, and they should revel in that. There was no saying how long it would last.
Nadielle climbed above him, but hers was a different touch. Desperation instead of passion. Convenience in place of love. She was as lonely as the thing they were leaving behind.
At the top of the cliff face, Nadielle did not pause for breath. She started to run again, not responding when Gorham spoke to her, and he had to save his breath just to keep up. She never seemed to tire, and he wondered whether she was secretly taking some unknown drug to keep her muscles warm and loose. They rose from one Echo to the next, and they might have been moving for a whole day without pause before she finally slumped against a wall. Above her, a painted portrait of an old Marcellan stared down, his eyes smeared over with black paint to give him a monstrous demeanor. Fangs had been added to his mouth. The defiler and the Marcellan were both long dead, but something about the defiance pleased Gorham.
He sat next to Nadielle without trying to speak. He drank water from his water bottle, realizing that he would have to find somewhere to refill it again soon. And then Nadielle broke her silence.
"I'm sorry," she said, voice breaking, tears starting to flow. "We're away. I can tell you what's rising." She took his water bottle and drained it before she began. "The Bakers have been here as long as history…"
Nophel stared down at his hands. I went away again, for a while. When Malia came back she looked right at him, seeing him for the flesh and blood he was.