"What the crap is that?" Alexia asked.
"Alarm," Nophel said. "There are similar ones set up on Hanharan Heights. It's a call to arms."
"War," Alexia said.
"Unless we get out of here quickly, yes."
"He could stop it," the tall Unseen said, nodding at the man they'd dropped to the ground. "Leave him here… let them find him-"
"No," Nophel said. "He's too important." To me, he almost said, but he bit his tongue. Too important to me.
"And we're not?" Alexia said.
Nophel smiled. His face was not used to the expression, and several of his sores split.
Sweating, exhausted, they ran again, hunted by a people who had found and lost their savior almost in the same breath. Nophel knew that if they were caught, there could be no mercy.
And Rufus Kyuss, unconscious, remained an enigma.
Echo City awoke that morning to a glorious day. There was hardly a cloud in the slate-blue sky, and the sun climbed from out of the Bonelands in the east with the promise of warmth and comfort for those who sought it. The sunlight illuminated the urban sprawl of Mino Mont, sending the slum gangs back into their shadows and splashing against the stark wall of Marcellan Canton. At the pinnacle of Hanharan Heights, the Eastern Scope stared wanly across the city, directly into the sunlight. Its enlarged eye did not water or smart from the brightness, and it did not lower the faceted lid that usually protected it from such glare. There was a small crater in the bottom curve of its eye, and the sun failed to scare away the ghourt lizard that picked at the organ's jelly.
In Course and Crescent, Marcellan's huge shadow was thrown as far as the city limits, its elongated spires and towers slowly crawling back across the city as the sun rose, like the retreating fingers of some vast phantom. In Crescent, blooms turned their heads to the sun and prepared to watch it cross the sky once again, while in Course Canton, the squares, courtyards, and parks bustled with early-morning traders, food purveyors, and people on their way to work or school. The smell of cooking soon drifted on the air, wafting away the sewer scents of nighttime and the metallic fumes from the smaller industrialized areas.
On the tall walls of Marcellan Canton, Scarlet Blades drifted to and fro in preparation for the changing of their guard. It would be achieved in shifts, so that there was never a time when the canton was not protected. Some of them were drunk, and not only those leaving their shift. There had not been a war for a long time. Soldiers grew bored.
At the end of one street in Course, a body was dragged into the shadows by three pairs of hands, its jewelry already stolen, its flesh and bones destined for the swine pits.
In the southern quarter of Mino Mont, nine corpses lay strewn across the steps of an old Hanharan temple, victims of a gang feud that had lasted for three generations. Such deaths were commonplace and barely merited a second glance from passersby. The feud was also expected, and expectation was one of the reasons it still existed. One gang would party all day in celebration, and tomorrow they would be the ones spilling blood and then seeking new recruits from the youngsters of that canton.
In Skulk, people drifted westward toward the stoneshroom fields. Others closed their doors for the day, preferring to sleep when the sun was up so that they could not look north and see the city that reminded them of lost times.
In Marcellan Canton, a group of old people passed laws that would mean nothing.
In Crescent, a farmer sowed crops that would never be harvested.
It was, all in all, a normal dawning to what seemed a normal day in Echo City.
But there were also those in the city who awoke to a painful truth-that things had changed, were still changing, and might never be the same again.
In Shute Fields, in the southwest corner of Course, shapes rose from places where the sunlight never touched. They were sleek, pale, and gray, and they raised their hands to protect their faces from the painful glare. Most remained in the shadows, hiding away from the sun behind walls, shivering in the growing heat of the day because they were so scared. Up was somewhere most of them had never been, but they could never go back down. Several were murdered by terrified people who thought they were monsters. Some fought back and killed their attackers, eating the fresh meat because it reminded them of home. Hunts proceeded, with the Garthans running through unfamiliar streets and existing for the first time in a place that was not an Echo. Though they were fewer than their pursuers, and disoriented, their custom of eating their victims meant that fear was on their side.
At the southern extremes of Mino Mont, where the canton narrowed down with the Marcellan wall on one side and the city wall, with the Bonelands beyond, on the other, the Bloodwork Gang was bettered for the first time in years. One of their main slash distribution centers had existed beneath an old abandoned workhouse for more than a year, storing enough of the drug to feed most of Mino Mont's addicts and a few of the more powerful devotees in Marcellan Canton. It was well hidden, its entrances and exits spread among neighboring buildings, and the Bloodworks had striven to keep it safe. Most knew not to interfere with them, and a thousand corpses could attest to this.
Protected and guarded against intrusion from above, the gang met doom from below. Fleeting pale shapes swarmed through the warehouse's rooms, spilling containers and setting fires. Perhaps it was surprise at finding the product that they made stored in such quantities. Or maybe it was panic. No one would ever know.
After the initial shock, the Bloodwork members guarding the den fought back, but it was a short, brutal combat. The Garthans had no need of weapons; they hunted through stealth, stillness, and then fury. They killed anyone who stood in their way, chewing on human hearts as they charged onward. And the gang member who chose to hide-and who, later that day, would brag that he'd fought off a dozen attackers but instead had pissed himself as he watched his friends gutted and eaten-swore that these strange humans were terrified. They screeched as they attacked, but not in rage. It was fear that had driven them up, terror that gave them speed and strength. They rose into the streets and remained in shadows.
The Garthans emerged in many other places around the city. Sometimes there were large groups of them, but more often there were only a handful, and in places just one or two. In their terrified climb up through the city's Echoes and into its present, some had died, and many had lost track of their family and friends. The survivors did not care. All that mattered was escaping the thing rising from the deep.
Close to where the River Tharin vented into the desert, Bellia Ton had slept with her feet dangling in that dead river's flow. Her nightmares were monstrous, and as she woke to the sunlight burning her eyelids, the memory of them was rich. She could no longer discern whether what she heard, saw, and smelled were products of the fears already implanted in her or given to her afresh by the river. Bodies flowed past. Some of them were Garthans, and others had scarlet cloaks billowing around them like blood slicks. She tried to hear their voices, but there was one sound drowning out everything she needed to know: an insistent, throbbing impact on her soul. She heard and smelled it, felt and tasted it, and it was rising from somewhere deep-though not as deep as before.
She rolled from the river and her legs beneath the knees were white, skin and flesh soft as soaked mud. When she tried to stand, her legs gave way. There was no longer any feeling in them at all. She screamed instead, crying out all the things she thought she knew, but the only people to hear were the dead floating by. She always chose the deserted areas around the refineries to read the river. And hers were not the only screams sounding across Echo City that morning.
Readers across the city cried out, or ran, and some of them died where they worked, hearts riven with shock. Whatever the source of their knowledge-water, air, tea leaves, mepple flesh, stoneshroom visions, or rockzard-liver trails-their warnings were the same: Something is rising. They heard the sounds from below and spread word of them through the streets. Their warning dispersed, and no one who heard them could deny the sense of panic overlying the city. It started in the darkness and continued into the day, and sunlight brought no calming touch.
In Marcellan, a fat man approached the city wall, hoping that he still held power in his given name. Behind him trailed a small army of faithful soldiers, a score of Scarlet Blades whom he had been nurturing for years so that, when the time came, they would put the name Dane ahead of Marcellan. He tried to exude confidence and authority, yet he picked up the sense pervading the city that morning, and it was a wilder place. The wall guards stepped in front of the gate, and the fear in their eyes when they saw him gave him hope.
Where the Garthans rose-quietly and secretively in places, yet also interacting with the citizens in violent, startled ways that they never had before-word quickly spread of cannibalistic invasion from below. Many residents panicked and fled their homes, carrying their children and weapons and nothing else, and soon the streets were awash with people. The population spread out from those areas touched by the Garthans like ripples fleeing a stone's impact.
Scarlet Blades tried to contain the panic, and sometimes they succeeded. But here and there fights broke out and blood was spilled, not always the blood of civilians.
The Marcellan Council debated the news they were hearing from across the city. Hanharan priests advised the government, and their advice concerning the Echoes was always the same-Hanharan lives down there, and he exhales only goodness. They blamed the Garthans, and official word went out that an invasion was under way. Across the city, Garthan and Scarlet Blade blood mingled in short, brutal combats.
In the many places where news was vague and panic had not yet reached, and where people sat quietly eating breakfast or watching the sunrise, perhaps holding hands with their loved ones or smiling softly as their children readied for school, they heard a quiet, insistent noise from below: thud… thud… thud.
They frowned and wondered what it could be.
Gorham sat and watched the girl come to life before him. There is my daughter, he thought, and yet she could never be. She was chopped, as much a monster as the Pserans or the Scopes, and she would not know him as Father.
He had carried her from the womb-vat room into Nadielle's bedroom. Naked, slick from the fluids that had nurtured her to such a size so quickly, she had already been looking around with those wide, curious eyes. Yet she had nestled into him, arms around his neck and head pressed against his chest. He'd felt her heartbeat, and that had given him pause. She really is alive.
Now he watched and waited, and it was amazing. He would never understand exactly what Nadielle had done here and certainly not how. But as the girl's awareness grew and her knowledge seemed to expand in her head like a balloon, so he believed he was coming more to terms with what she was.
The urgency was still there, crushing him like a giant hand bearing down on both shoulders. But Nadielle had left the girl here to prepare for Rufus's return. In a way Gorham felt useless, but he was also thankful that he could watch as the Baker's processes continued outside the vat.
She's the new Baker, he thought. She had the body of a girl maybe ten or eleven years old, but her eyes were already those of an adult. There was still confusion there and traces of fear, but at times Gorham also saw a striking wisdom and a depth of experience that would have been impossible in anyone else her age.
And yet her true age was measured only in hours.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to settle the feeling that he should never have been here. He was a pragmatist-that had driven him since his early years, and it continued to guide him through his adult life as a Watcher. Yet what he watched here could not be real. Nadielle scoffed at the word magic, and Gorham had always allied it with the beliefs of Hanharans and the other, smaller religious sects throughout Echo City. Yet what more suitable word was there? If an act such as the Baker's chopping used talents, forces, and knowledge far beyond the understanding of anyone else in the city, wasn't that magic? It consisted of processes rather than spells or hexes, but he suspected they were processes that no one else but the Baker could perform, on the very edge of any science it was possible to understand. Nadielle had told him that much was passed down from chopped Baker to chopped Baker-he could see the stark evidence of that in the burgeoning knowledge before him now-but she had never explained how she did what she did. The Bakers had been practicing like this through the centuries, and that lent power to the concept of their own particular magic.
The girl was sitting on the Baker's bed, a gown tied tight around her waist, with Nadielle's books spread around her. There were sheafs of paper piled everywhere, notebooks, and those ancient books the Baker had brought from her secret rooms. The girl read as she ate-she had been eating ever since the birth-and she never once glanced at Gorham. He might as well not have been there, but he continued to bring her food and drink, and he knew that she was more than aware of his presence. Her hair was long and tangled. Her skin was pink as a newborn baby's. Yet it was her eyes-his eyes-that made his breath catch each time he saw them.
She ran her hands across one of the oldest books, turned a page, and touched the ancient words. She read and gasped. She can read, Gorham thought. She's been in this world for mere hours and she can read, comprehend, understand. Crumbs fell from her mouth as she chewed, and she brushed them from the books with a gentle reverence. She understands the value of knowledge, and that's something some people don't realize in a lifetime. The girl was more amazing with every moment, and Gorham found himself observing from a greater distance. The first time she spoke, he was so startled that he thought he'd been woken from a dream.
"There should be another book," she said.
Gorham stood from his chair and backed away. He nudged against the wall, knocking something from a shelf. It smashed on the floor, but neither man nor girl averted their gaze.
"No," he croaked.
"She would have left it with you to hand to me."
"No," he said, firmer this time. "Not with me. She left nothing with me." That bitterness burned, and the girl's knowing smile stunned him.
She glanced around at the scattered books again, as if looking for one she had not yet seen.