It was only when he had to hunt, collect, and transport their victims down into the Echoes, then hand them over to the Garthans who manufactured the slash, knowing that the drug-addled underground dwellers would slow-roast them alive, tearing off cooked chunks of flesh to feed their babies… It was only then that Jon entertained an awareness of what he really was.

The white-haired man was lost, that much was obvious. He had been walking across the landscape in a vaguely northwesterly direction since they first spotted him, and for most of the afternoon they had been casually trailing him. They followed at a distance, and once he wandered beyond a small commune growing beans and lushfruit, Jon decided the time had come to close in. Their traps had been empty for the last few nights-not even a wandering wild horse or tusked swine to offer in lieu of the preferred long pork. It would bode well for the three of them if they could report a capture this evening.

"We'll wait until he's in the next valley," Jon said. "I know it well. There's a wide irrigation canal, no bridges for half a mile in either direction. Maybe he'll swim, or maybe he'll go for a bridge. Either way, we'll have him trapped."

"And then have time to take him," the woman said, her eyes wide with excitement. Jon knew that she'd suffered at the hands of the Mino Mont gang-she'd shown him her scars and injuries and where they had taken pieces of her away-and he was afraid that the mental wounds formed more-deadly scar tissue in her mind, places that could not be touched and tempered by slash. Sometimes, he thought she was mad.

"Can I take him down?" the boy asked. His eyes were wide as well, but this was a childish fear, not excitement. After each catch, the boy still cried. Jon always administered the slash to him first, and slowly he could see the drug working on the boy's concerns, burying and camouflaging them. But it always took some time.

"Well, it's daytime," Jon said. "We'll have to be fast. This is no time to let someone scream."

"I'm a good shot," the boy said, and Jon could not deny that. He'd once seen him take a rathawk out of the sky with his doonerang.

"Let the kid have a go," the woman said.

Jon smiled and nodded. "First shot, though," he warned, and the kid grinned and started forward.

They spread out and followed the white-haired man up a long, slow slope planted with countless rows of dart-root shrubs. The spicy smell hung heavy in the still air, warm and enticing. Jon brushed against leaves and sniffed at his fingers. He realized how hungry he was. After they caught this one and took him down-the Gagers maintained many hidden routes down to the exchange points in the Echoes, and he knew of one close by-it would be time to eat.

"Hey, kid," the woman said, and she started running.

"Wait!" Jon hissed. How could it have gone so wrong? The kid was darting through the plants, impressively stealthy and yet much too early. The man would hear him coming, turn and see him, and if he had a spit of self-preservation he'd be off, running into the endless miles of crops and making what should have been an easy catch hard. So Jon started to run as well, risking making more noise but offsetting that risk with the knowledge that they had to slow down. If he shouted after the kid now, all would be lost.

Something flew overhead. Jon stopped and looked around, but whatever it was must have been very low. The dart-root plants barely rose above his shoulders, but already the flying thing was lost to sight. Rathawk, he thought, but that felt wrong.

He moved on, keeping track of the kid and the woman. She was good, he had to admit, and he'd told her that many times. She was running faster than anyone and moving like a phantom.

Jon saw the tall man's outline as he reached the top of the hill. The man paused and looked around, lost but apparently searching for something. It wasn't often that Jon worried about what people were doing out in these fields-they rarely preyed on the farmers or pickers, because the Gagers knew how quickly suspicions and myth would spread among the farming communities-but this man had him intrigued. There was something strange about him, as if he'd taken a massive dose of slash and now was lost in the landscapes of his own mind. Jon had seen it happen before and had even experienced it once or twice himself. Just what are you seeing when you look around? he thought. He searched the memories of his own slashouts, but they were as vague as fleeting dreams.

Jon almost tripped on a ridge in the soil and looked down at his feet, and when he glanced up again the ground before him was red.

He should have stopped running, should have recognized what it was and what had happened, but he'd not taken slash for several days. His reactions were a little rusty, his perception skewed by thoughts of where and when the next smoke would come from. So he kept running, and it was the woman's uncoiled guts that tripped him.

Jon went sprawling, unable to contain the scream. Shock, disgust, grief, terror-they all came out in one piercing shout. He held out his hands and they pressed into something warm. It splashed his face and neck, and then he rolled, feeling things crunching and bursting beneath him.

Her head, I see her head, and she's screaming, and there's no sound because-

Because her head had rolled away, and he was in her body. When he saw the hand, he focused intently on it, because it was the only part of her not touched by spilled blood.

Steam rose, and everything he touched was warm.

He was trying to take in another breath, but shock had winded him. The boy, he thought, because he always thought of him as Boy, and now he wished he'd shouted the kid's name one last time before he'd run away.

Jon managed to stand. His feet sank into wet soil, but he looked away. When he'd found her beneath the mepple stack, the woman had tried to kiss him, hands stealing to his cock because, in her gang, that was the only way she'd known to survive. When she'd felt no stirring there, she frowned, and then Jon had kissed her forehead and told her to tell him her story and that everything would be fine. Now everything was no longer fine, and he had to Something else flew overhead, wingtips and limbs skimming the uppermost plants and sending leaves drifting down. Jon flinched downward, closer to the ruin of the woman, and then he found his voice and screamed.

He stood and sprinted uphill. The tall man was staring down at him, skin pale and eyes wide, and, closer, Jon could see the boy's bobbing head as he closed on their prey. Plants all around the boy shook, and he disappeared.

Jon was about to shout when he heard the boy's terrible wet scream. It was cut off quickly. The plants stopped moving.

So did Jon. He was staring at the white-haired man, and he realized the man was not afraid. Confused perhaps, and a little bewildered. But the boy's dying screech, piercing and awful, had not seemed to perturb the stranger.

Figures appeared all around. Gray shapes, stooped like the few Garthans Jon had seen over the years, and he thought, They've started hunting for themselves. But then the shapes stood tall, and he realized that these were not Garthans. He didn't know what they were, though he had his suspicions. He'd read books about the Dragarians-speculative stuff concerning what that hermitic society had been doing for the last few hundred years, why they never came out, and why no one who tried to enter their canton was ever seen again. There had been illustrations, but most were merely projections of what they might look like now. They'd been human when they shut themselves away.

"But you've changed," Jon whispered, and the tall man met his gaze again.

Jon started to back away. His increased heartbeat flushed some slash dregs into his system and he felt a curious calmness descending, the terrible fate they had been ready to subject this man to vague and ambiguous now. He almost tripped over a dart-root stem but resisted the temptation to look back. They're not looking for me, he thought. It's all him. Whatever this is about, whatever they want, it's all him.

His vision swam and he closed his eyes, willing away the wooziness that sometimes accompanied his first slash of the day. When he opened his eyes again, one of the things stood before him. A Dragarian. And the very fact that it was humanoid made its indigo eyes even more alien.

"Wait," Jon whispered, and something flashed before him. When he went to speak again, no sound emerged. And as the thing turned away and sprinted back up the slope, Jon felt the rush of blood and knew that his throat had been cut.

He went to his knees, then fell forward onto the rich soil. His blood would fertilize, his flesh rot and give goodness, and his dying thoughts were fueled by slash. Best way to go, a fellow Gage Gang member had once said, all slashed up. Jon almost agreed.

As the world grew dark, he heard the sound of songlike worship, and the pain came in at last.

"You made me name Neph, because it was not a suitable name," Gorham said. "So what about her?"

Nadielle was walking beside him in the deepest Echo he had ever seen. Neph was somewhere ahead, patrolling beyond the reach of their burning torches and already making Gorham feel safe. Behind them came the woman. She neither spoke nor responded when he spoke to her, and he'd caught Nadielle watching him in amusement when he tried.

The Baker seemed uninterested. "Choose a name, if it will make you happy."

"Don't you want to name her?"

"No," she said softly.

"Why?"

"Same reason I had no wish to name Neph: I left that for your amusement. Besides, she's going to die."

Gorham wanted her to say more, but Nadielle walked silently on, staring down at the sandy soil of this older Echo.

"I'll call her Caytlin." He looked back at the short, slight woman as he spoke the name, but there was no reaction. She was following them like a sad puppy, and he wondered where her impetus lay.

"Fine," Nadielle said. She kicked at a raised rut, and the loose stones and soil clumps hissed down before them.

Soon after heading away from the Baker's rooms, they had been in a district of the first Crescent Echo that Gorham had never seen before. He was used to the ruined farmsteads and dead fields, visible only as far as torchlight penetrated. And he had been down into the most recent Course Echoes as well, which resembled that canton's built-up appearance. But the lifeless forest had come as a shock. The trees were stark and gray, leafless, petrified remnants of a place once teeming with life. He could not identify any of the species, though that was likely due to the amount their bark had degraded, most of it drying and turning to dust. The soil around their bases had shrunk away, revealing the agonized poses of old roots. And in the hardened flesh of several trees, he saw the carved proclamations of long-forgotten love affairs.

A thousand steps later, they'd reached a place where the ceiling had tumbled and the ground had reared up, and Nadielle had led them down through a series of caverns and tunnels to the Second Echo.

Now Gorham followed her and realized that he was completely in her hands. She knew these places. She had walked them many times before. If he became lost down here, he might never find his way out.

In the distance, he saw lights.

"Nadielle!"

"I see them." She did not stop. Caytlin walked past him and followed the Baker, not acknowledging his presence.

"Neph?"

"He's much closer than that. Those are… maybe a mile away?"

Gorham hurried after Nadielle again, passing Caytlin and walking by the Baker's side. "A mile?"

"This Echo is very flat," she said. "It's from perhaps twelve hundred years ago. Where we are now, they used to grow grapes and mepple roots."

"Mepples are grown in orchards."

"They are now, yes."

"So those lights…?" he asked, but he already knew. He'd seen something like them before, but he was trying to shut the idea of phantoms from his mind. The deeper they went, the older the phantoms would be, and the more disturbing their existence.

"I think you know what they are," Nadielle said. "When we draw closer, they'll likely extinguish. Phantoms are only Echoes in themselves, but some have a strange awareness."

A shadow passed by on their right, moving quickly and confidently across the rutted landscape. Gorham caught sight of bladed hands and the sharp shadows of Neph's spines. If Nadielle noticed, she did not say.

"I never really considered the Echoes below Crescent," he said. "The fields up there now aren't too far above the Markoshi Desert levels. When you first took me to your rooms, it was the first time I'd been down, but now we're so much lower." He shook his head, unsettled by the implications.

"We're only in the Second Echo now, though they do become confused. There are more."

"You've been lower?"

"Much."

"But any lower than here must be beneath the level of the Bonelands."

"Maybe," Nadielle said.

"Maybe? What does that mean?"

"The Echoes are… nebulous. The deeper you go, the older the Echo, the more uncertain the geography becomes."

"But they're just levels." Gorham was becoming frustrated and a little angry, and he supposed it was due to fear.

"Just levels? Gorham, the past is a living place. The deeper you go, the further into history you travel. The city doesn't deal with history. It builds over its past, encloses it, shuts it off, and while tradition might persist, the real histories are soon forgotten. It's the present that matters to Echo City, while the past echoes below it, in some cases still alive. If you read the history books, one will contradict another, particularly as you go further back. So why should the Echoes be any different?"

The idea of landscape being altered by perceptions of the past was alien and disturbing, and yet it seemed to make sense. It could never be so simple as the city's past sinking beneath the weight of the present. Life was never that easy.

The lights in the distance-a weak and flickering blue, as if caused by cold fire-went out.

"How much farther?" Gorham asked.

"Not too far. The Marcellan wall is even thicker down here; we'll have to find one of the old gates."

"And then down to the Chasm."

"Does that scare you?"

"Of course!" he said, louder than he'd intended. His voice was swallowed by the space around them, even though the darkness and the knowledge that there was a solid ceiling somewhere high overhead made him feel very closed in. I could lose myself down here, he thought again, and his relationship with Nadielle had never felt so strange and strained. Then I'd be just like the Lost Man.

Behind them, Caytlin sneezed. Gorham jumped, and even Nadielle glanced back.

"It's a mythical place," Gorham said. "Unseen, unknown."

"And yet the city still drops its dead into the tributary of the Tharin that leads to the Falls."

"Just because something exists doesn't mean it can be understood."

Nadielle coughed a surprised laugh. "Gorham! You're a Watcher, someone who's supposed to appreciate reason above the irrational." She laughed again, shaking her head. "The Chasm is said to be bottomless. Doesn't that excite you? The idea that the river pours into it and that we're on our way to see it?"

"No," he said, "it terrifies me."

"Then why the crap did you come?"

"Because you asked me to." He knew that she was looking sidelong at him, but he did not want to give her the satisfaction. He stared at where the phantom light had just faded out, wondering what was there, what watched. He didn't want her thanks or her appreciation. But when she stroked gentle fingers across his cheek, he could not hold back the smile.

"It's some way yet," Nadielle said.

"Good."

"Yes, indeed. Plenty of other deadly places filled with monsters both known and unknown before we reach the Chasm."

"Thank you, Nadielle," he said, smiling.

"You're welcome."

They walked in silence, and for a while Gorham felt safer than he had for a long time. Up above, in Echo City, there was always the risk that the Marcellans would hear rumors of the Watchers' survival and regrouping after the purge. Whether they would stamp down on them as harshly as they had three years before, he was unsure, but the pressures were always there. There was the constant duty he felt as new leader of the Watchers and the stresses of maintaining an outwardly normal lifestyle-running a moderately successful domestic maintenance business, enjoying an unchallenging social life, and not doing anything to bring himself to the attention of the Scarlet Blades or their civilian spies.

Down here, it felt as though Nadielle knew exactly what she was doing.

It started to rain. The first few drops startled Gorham and he swept his torch above his head, the oil swilling in its small reservoir. Then he felt the water striking his upturned face, and when one drop entered his mouth, it burst sweet and fresh across his tongue.

"Rain," he said.

"Moisture condensing on the ceiling."

Gorham aimed his torch directly above them, Nadielle added her own illumination, and even combined the torches faded into a dull gray mist.

"How high?" he asked.

Nadielle shrugged. "I never really think about it when I'm down this far."

"More nebulousness."

"Yeah."

Gorham glanced back at Caytlin, and she was looking at Nadielle as if the Baker was the only focus of her life. Perhaps that was true, but Gorham could not forget what Nadielle had said about this small woman. She's going to die. He wondered what the Baker had planned for this particular chopping experiment of hers.

Neph appeared soundlessly before them. One beat there was only darkness, and the next there was Neph, large and sharp and covered with droplets of condensation.

"Near," it said, and its voice was like grit scraped underfoot.

Nadielle called a halt and they paused by the tumbled remains of an old roadside temple. Gorham could not tell which god or gods this place had been built to honor, and when he ventured through one of the ruptures caused by fallen walls, the insides consisted only of detritus from the roof and a few shreds of dried timber. There was no decoration and no signs of religious paraphernalia. Just as he turned to leave, a shadow moved.

He held his breath, then glanced back out to where Nadielle stood drinking from a water skin. Caytlin was close to her, as ever, and farther out at the limits of the lamplight crouched Neph, facing the darkness as if daring it.

The shadow moved again, and Gorham backed up against a cold stone wall.

A man emerged from a pile of rubble and shattered roofing tiles. He slipped through them rather than between them, the solid mass having no impact on his body. Phantom, Gorham thought, and the hairs on the back of his neck bristled. The man wore a simple robe tied around the waist, hood lowered, his bald head scarred across one side. Through his head and body, Gorham could see the far wall, but the splash of masonry seen through the phantom was different. More solid, more ordered, painted a subtle yellow and speckled here and there with small carved animals-offerings from long-dead worshippers to a god long forgotten.

He gasped, and the phantom paused.

They're just Echoes, he thought, repeating everything he had ever heard about these flashes from the past. But this phantom turned and looked at him. Its eyes were blank and unfocused, and Gorham thought the old dead man was looking through rather than at him, just as Gorham was looking through him. Does he see me as a ghost a thousand years ago? he wondered, and then the phantom left the temple through an arched doorway filled with the remains of the fallen stone lintel.

Gorham filled his lungs, aware only now that he had been holding his breath, and darted back outside.

"Did you-" he began, but he could already see that the phantom had vanished. Nadielle stood almost directly outside the ruined doorway. She raised one eyebrow.

"They probably won't hurt you," she said.

"I know that." Gorham tried to calm his breathing, hoping that the weak lamplight did not shine from the sheen of sweat he felt on his face and neck. For a beat he thought he felt Caytlin looking at him, but when he glanced her way she was staring at the Baker once again. If she'd had the ghost of a smile on her face, perhaps she would have spooked him less.

"We're very near the wall into Marcellan Canton," Nadielle said. "Of course, it's not guarded down here, not by Scarlet Blades, at least. But there are…" She smiled.

"There are what?"

"The history of this canton is a stormy one. The wall's roots are often the focal point for some of the many soldiers who've died in service to the Marcellans."

"You said they won't hurt us," he said.

"No, they won't. But they sometimes like to try. Just stay close, and we'll be through soon enough. Then we go deeper."

I'm not sure I should have agreed to this, Gorham thought, but he had no desire to show his nervousness. He hated it when Nadielle offered him that smile, like a teacher humoring a small child. The only time she smiled without condescension was in her bed after they had made love, when she liked him to stroke her stomach and she twisted his hair in her fingers, and she talked about the past as if it could save them all.

There were architects a thousand years ago who built with bone, and they made such wonders. A thousand years earlier, philosophers from Mino Mont wrote a series of books that are long lost but that supposedly placed us in a world much easier to understand and much less cruel. And three thousand years before that, the musicians of what would become Dragar's Canton could beguile with a note and possess with a word. Their compositions were as close to magic as anything the city has ever seen.

But even that would not last for long. Those times never stretched, because the Baker always had something to do, places to go, monstrosities to tend in her vats. And perhaps she feared she had told him too much.

His lovemaking with Peer had been purer and more honest, though his memory of it was still shaded by the full, terrible three years that had passed. He remembered her laughing cruelly as she'd walked away from him, the dismissive wave over her shoulder. She had not even looked around at him, however grave their situation. If only he could believe that it was because she could not face saying goodbye again.

He followed Nadielle and Caytlin, content for now to bring up the rear. He caught glimpses of Neph ahead of them-a shadow within shadows-and in the distance the darkness soon started to coalesce into something more solid. He wondered who had observed the Marcellan wall from this angle so long ago and whether they'd viewed its inhabitants with as much disdain as he did. The Watchers had a long but disorganized history, and until relatively recently they'd consisted of casual gatherings of like-minded people eager to shed the superstitions of the past. It was a painful irony that organizing had almost been their downfall. So he cast himself back, becoming a traveler venturing to Marcellan for some unspecified business, and the folly of its rulers, then as now, sat like a vague threat before him.

The wall emerged out of the darkness, catching some of their lamplight across its sheer surface. Before it lay the remains of many ruined dwellings, much of the timber used in construction dried and crumbled away to almost nothing. Among these places were a few stone-built constructs that had withstood the time better. But even these displayed areas of damage. As they passed, Gorham could not help thinking that some of the damage was intentional.

"There," Nadielle said. She'd paused to wait for him and, as he drew level, he saw the glimmer of phantom lights along the wall. In perhaps a dozen places from left to right, the weak blue lights clung like algae to the ancient stone, shadowed from within recesses in the wall's height and nestled at its base in several places.

"They weren't there a while ago," Gorham said.

"The phantoms here keep watch."

"But they're Echoes."

"Yes, but they'll be more… noticeable than some phantoms you might have seen before. I believe the deeper we go, and the older the Echoes, the more time the phantoms have had to become used to their continued existence."

"I don't understand," he said, his skin crawling at the memory of that phantom priest staring through him.

"I don't think we're meant to. I think they're just Echoes living in Echoes, but we choose to build upon the past instead of destroying it. Maybe it's inevitable that the Echoes of past lives will survive as well." Nadielle led them toward the wall, and Gorham could see Neph ahead of them, scouting its base. He paused at an opening-an old gateway with the remains of several flagpoles protruding from the stone facade above-and a vague phantom light glowed in the deep, dark route to the other side. Nadielle headed for Neph, with Caytlin her usual several paces behind. Gorham had no choice but to follow. It was that or stay out here on his own.

Neph had gone by the time they reached the gate, venturing into the Marcellan Canton of old. He'd left the phantoms behind. They were more blurred than others, yet their lights burned brighter and they interacted more with the subterranean travelers. They never actually touched him-Gorham wasn't sure he could have taken that without going mad-but they came close, faces manifesting from the glare, eyes searching, mouths opening in silent exhortations to stop, show their papers, where were they going, what was their business. And in the stark, ancient distance, he heard the whisper of metal on leather as they drew their weapons. He concentrated on Nadielle's back to guide him through; she walked without pause and without allowing herself to be distracted. She's so strong, Gorham thought.

The wall was thick down here, perhaps fifty paces wide, and it took an eternity to reach the other side. When they did, the first of this deep Echo of Marcellan Canton was revealed to them. And it was a ruin.

"What…?" Gorham whispered, his question reverberating around the small square.

"War," Nadielle said. "Don't they say the history books are written by the winners?"

Gorham could not speak. These buildings had not fallen victim to the wearing effects of time but had been deliberately destroyed. Signs of ancient fires were still visible here and there, black soot stained across the pale gray stonework. Charred timbers poked broken ribs at the dark sky. And, close above the ruins, far lower than he'd been expecting, he could see the exposed underbelly of the Echo above this one.

"How deep?" he asked. "Two Echoes down?"

"More," Nadielle said. "As I said, there's no real judging of distance and time when you're down here."

"But a war between whom? How long ago?"

"I can tell you what little I know," she said softly, "but we need to keep walking. There's a place not far from here where we go deeper, and I want to reach it before…"

"Before?"

Nadielle gave him that annoying smile again-the one that said: You're only a child compared to me, what I am, what I know. And for a moment that shocked him with its intensity, Gorham thought of roughing that smile from her face.

"Let's just go," she said. "Neph will scout ahead and keep us safe." She turned her back on Gorham and started to walk. If he wanted to hear what she knew, he would have to keep up.

"There's no record of who fought this war, or why, anywhere for public consumption in Echo City," Nadielle began. "I suspect there might be writings buried deep in old Hanharan vaults or perhaps personal accounts handed down through the ages from Marcellan elders to their children. But what happened here is a whisper among shadows. Some of those phantoms we just passed might have been here when the fires came and went. Some probably died here. But even I couldn't ask them."

"Couldn't, or wouldn't want to?" Gorham asked, and Nadielle did not answer.

"All I know is what I read in my mother's books, and some of it she… passed down to me." Nadielle tapped her temple but looked only ahead, as if reassuring herself of something. "The Bakers might be the only line keeping some of the truth alive."

"But people come down here," Gorham protested.

"Not as many as you'd think. How deep do you travel into the Echoes?"

"Only to you," he admitted.

"And only because you have a reason to travel down. There aren't many who choose to venture into the Echoes. Criminals, perhaps, but they have only their own well-being at heart. Some explorers, yes. A few. But most who wish to explore history do so through their books. Actually visiting it-that's an experience any sane person would want to avoid."

Gorham had never thought of himself as any less than sane; he supposed his fear of being down there testified to that.

"So what happened?" he asked. They were walking between the ruined buildings now, following the route of what had once been a wide street. Ash, rubble, and other detritus littered the way, and protruding here and there above the mess Gorham made out the pale shapes of bones. The torchlight made them shift. He didn't look too closely or for too long.

"Have you ever heard of the Thanulians?"

"No."

"It's said they were watching long before the Watchers-an organized group who didn't believe any of the Hanharan teachings and who were waiting for the doom of Echo City. Their beliefs are shady and, much as I've looked, I've not been able to discover much about their outlook, their thoughts for the future, or what they intended doing should the end arrive. But one thing is clear: They claimed to have proof that Hanharan was not the city's firstborn but was a visitor from elsewhere."

"Proof?" Gorham asked, a thrill going through him. He'd always believed that Hanharan was a myth, but his conviction was founded only on what he thought of as his own good sense. The Hanharan story was wild and complex-a man born from a desert stone, shaping spit and sand to build, molding a wife from dusk's final rays, and founding the whole city. Gorham had always had trouble understanding how intelligent people could believe such stories, accept that one man had seeded and settled their whole world.

"Don't get excited. Whatever proof there may have been is long gone now."

"Destroyed in the war?"

"More like a massacre. The Marcellans at the time were mainly confined to the Hanharan priesthood-the city was a democracy then, and two main political parties juggled power back and forth as the years went by. But the Marcellans must have grown strong. There was a rout, the Thanulians were slaughtered, and all traces of their history were wiped away. Over time, with nothing written down, their existence faded."

"Left down here in the Echoes," Gorham said. Looking at the burned remains of ancient buildings, he could almost smell the fires. "They killed all of them? Every single one?"

"This is where the story gets interesting," Nadielle said. "Shall we stop for a drink?"

"No," Gorham said. He had never been anywhere like this. The surroundings felt so dead, but there was no stillness here at all. Things moved, and though any movement seemed to be just beyond the edge of perception, his senses were alight with evidence of activity. His skin was cooled by breaths of moving air, he heard shifting sand or dust, and he could smell something damp and old moving around.

Nadielle nodded, without offering him her smug smile. It appeared that even she was spooked. Gorham glanced back at Caytlin-still following, blank-faced and unresponsive.

"The Thanulians were peaceful. They wouldn't put their hands on a weapon, even when attacked. Perhaps they saw their slaughter as the beginning of the end, so to them death was inevitable. But the Hanharans and their soldiers still didn't get them all."

It took a moment for Gorham to recognize the importance of what Nadielle had said. He stopped, and that secretive movement around him stopped as well. Almost as if it's following.

"There are descendants?" he asked.

"The Garthans."

The Garthans! Living down here for so long, feared by some, almost mythical to others…

"Of course!" he said. "I've never even wondered where they came from. I just assumed they'd always been down here, as we've always been up there."

"They were chased out of Echo City and fled below," Nadielle said. "No one knows much about them anymore. Some speak to them-my mother conversed with them at times, though I can't make any sense of what she wrote about them in her journals. And I have limited contact with them, when the need arises."

"They don't try to eat you?"

"You've heard that too."

"Just a rumor."

"No rumor. There are those who trade human flesh for the Garthans' slash drug, which they refine from cave moss."

Gorham looked around at the ruined district they were still traveling through, trying to imagine the terror, the pain, as the Hanharan forces worked house by house, room by room. Piled against one burned-out building was what he thought at first was the tangled remains of a fallen tree. But it might also have been the twisted, broken remnants of a whole family, killed and piled together so that their flesh would rot and their bones would degrade down here in the dark. He looked away and started to walk on, because he didn't want to know for sure.

Nadielle stayed beside him, and her enthusiasm for sharing this story was refreshing. Usually she held knowledge to her chest, perhaps whispering random facts about her own strange experiments into his ear as sweat cooled between their naked bodies.

"And then the Marcellans took control of the city?"

"Perhaps their domination of the order of Hanharan was the beginning, and this massacre showed their strength."

"I've never seen a Garthan," Gorham said, suddenly feeling an affinity with those strange subterranean dwellers.

"You probably will," Nadielle said. "If they choose to reveal themselves, that is. They're very secretive."

"That surprises you?"

She smiled sadly, shook her head, and Gorham reached out for her hand. Nadielle held on for some time. The contact made him feel safe. And then later, after they'd walked into an ancient district of that deep Marcellan Echo untouched by fire and violence, she turned to him and pressed him into the wall of a house.

"Nadielle?"

She was shaking. She dropped her torch, reached around his hips, and pulled him close to her.

"Nadielle?" he asked again, but she did not reply with words. She used her hands, pressing up over his chest, down his sides, delving between them. She used her mouth, kissing him with a passion he had never felt from her before.

Peer, he thought, but his lost love seemed a world away. He watched Caytlin over the Baker's shoulder, but the chopped woman simply sat and stared off to one side. I can't, he thought. Not with her here.

But Nadielle's hands and mouth were insistent, and he soon found that he could.

"What was that?" he gasped. She leaned heavily against him, one leg still curved around his hip. Her breath was fast and shallow, and he thought he heard faint sobs. She'd pressed her face into his neck. He felt her teeth against his skin.

"It's been too long," she whispered at last. "I'm so alone, Gorham."

"No." He didn't like this Nadielle. Nadielle was strong and confident, not needy and sad. He was the sad one. He needed her, not the other way around.

"Yes! I spend my time making people that aren't people. I live down here, and sunlight-it's rare for me. You're my…" She trailed off, and Gorham held his breath, waiting for what she would say next. Though he did not like her this way, he was still hard inside her; Nadielle's confession kept him there.

"You're my sunlight," she said. "And everything's starting to feel so dark." She fell quiet then, and soon after she pulled away and rearranged her clothing, not meeting his eyes. Gorham remained standing against the wall, feeling warm from what had happened, what had been said.

Caytlin stared with her expressionless eyes, untouched.

I'm the needy one, Gorham thought again. He went to Nadielle, and she relaxed into his embrace with a sigh of relief. Neither spoke, and they stood that way for a while until the time was right to move on.


Just keep watch, Dane had said. That had been a message, as overt as any Marcellan could ever utter, even in the confines of his own rooms. He'd sent it with a stern look, and Nophel recognized the dreadful trust that had been placed in him. If he went to the authorities with the claim that one of the ruling Marcellan Council members was not a completely devout Hanharan, the resulting investigation would be long and damaging. It would be his word against Dane's-a deformed monster, who had attempted to betray his own mother, against a member of the greatest family the city had ever known. But once set in, the rot would be very difficult to expunge.

Nophel was starting to believe that he'd found a friend in Dane Marcellan. An ally. Even a fellow Watcher, though Nophel kept his beliefs to himself. And though a Watcher followed no gods, Nophel had always been a firm believer in Fate.

I have a sister, he thought. He paused again, leaning into the side of the circular stairwell and taking a deep breath. The news was almost too much. His mother-the bitch whore Baker who had abandoned him like a dog shunning a runt puppy-had chopped a child, and now that child had become the new Baker. He could barely conceive of such a thing, but Dane had assured him it was true. Time is short, he'd said, but once you have handed her the message, stay with her. She will spare the time to explain what happened to you, and why. The suspicion that Dane had not told him everything was rich, of course, because Dane was a politician. But Nophel could think of no reason why Dane should have lied about his having a sibling.

He pushed off and continued down the stairwell. He had far to go before he reached the first of Dane's contacts. The Marcellan had handed him a coded map, containing six places where Nophel might make contact with people who would be able to point him toward the Baker's rooms. And, after the map, came the vial containing the White Water.

"What is there between you and this new Baker?" Nophel had asked.

"A distant trust. An old understanding."

"Tell me."

"No, Nophel. I trust you as my messenger, but your mind is still corrupted with vengeful thoughts of your mother."

"But she's dead!"

"Yes, and I made the mistake of telling you that it wasn't your betrayal that led to that. Maybe you're angry. Unfulfilled. I need this message delivered, but I also need to trust that you won't harm her."

"Why would I harm my sister?"

Dane had stared toward him for a while, his eyes wavering slightly across the shadowy space that Nophel filled.

"Just go," the Marcellan had said. And he'd held out the sealed message tube for Nophel to take.

Descending from Hanharan Heights and making his way west, Nophel thought many times about breaking the tube and reading the message. But if the Marcellan had been in contact with this new Baker for so long, doubtless the message would be in a code or form known only to the two of them. Break the tube and he would shatter the trust Dane had placed in him.

He moved through the streets like a breeze or a whisper, turning heads here and there but never attracting real attention. He watched for more Unseen, but there were none. Perhaps they all congregated to the north.

North. What he had seen chilled Nophel like nothing ever before. The Dragarians streaming out of their canton, the way they had moved, and flown, and crawled… If it weren't for the Scopes, he would never have seen, and whatever fate was about to befall Echo City would have settled quietly upon him in his sleep.

Perhaps that would have been for the best. He'd always been plagued by the fact that he had no belief in anything but eventual doom. And he did not trust that a method to leave the city would ever be found, even if there were still those searching for one. Had he been the worshipping kind-had he a god-he would have prayed that the end did not arrive in his lifetime.

Why would I harm my sister? he'd asked. He wondered exactly what she was and what her relationship had been with their mother. She had taken on the dead bitch's mantle, after all. The new Baker.

Nophel slipped unchallenged through one of the western gates of Marcellan Canton's wall, then paused and looked out over Crescent Canton; though green and lush, it felt empty. And finding a hidden corner, he cracked the vial and drank the White Water, because he wanted to be a part of this world again.

"How do you find one person lost in the world?" Malia asked.

Peer shook her head and took another drink. They were sitting on the street in front of a small tavern, Devin, Bethy, and several other Watchers around them. She knew a couple of them from her time before her banishment, but she had forgotten their names. They glanced at her as if she were a ghost, and she shared their discomfort. She was nervous, uneasy, frustrated. The drink did nothing to temper her sprinting heartbeat. They should be moving and looking, not sitting and musing, but she understood Malia's strategy. They had to devise a plan; otherwise, they'd all be rushing around the city like wingless wisps.

"Do you still have anyone in Hanharan Heights?" Peer asked. One of the Watchers glared at her, and she wanted to say, I suffered too. Her arm and hip ached in sympathy with her memories.

"Not anymore," Malia said.

"What about the bat? You have ways of sending messages. There are doves and tailcoats. And can't you access the Web?" Peer's mother had used the Web several times for her tax collecting-a vast network of pipes and wires through which messages were screeched and passed along by the chopped. But they were inexpertly chopped-not products of the Baker-and the system was frequently flawed. A message could change with its retelling, mistakes made.

"The Scarlet Blades monitor it like rathawks," Devin said. He'd met them there earlier, arriving just before Bethy; neither of them brought news. Rufus might as well never have existed at all.

"Right," Malia said. "Even if we could access the Web, it's far too dangerous. We alert the Marcellans or Hanharans to Rufus's existence, and we might as well give him up for lost."

"Might as well anyway," a male Watcher muttered, and raised his ale.

"No!" Peer shouted. She stood and knocked his hand aside, mug and ale spilling across the table. He sat back in surprise, one hand slinking down to his thigh, but she was over the table before he could do anything more, her arm across his throat. "There's hope," she said quietly. Eyes were on her now, and not just the Watchers'. Several people had paused in the street, and a group sitting inside the tavern observed through the wide open doors. She'd drawn attention to them all, but right then she didn't give a crap.

"Peer," Malia said quietly.

"Do they all know?" she asked, looking around the group.

"Yes."

"They all know everything?"

Malia nodded. Watchers exchanged nervous glances, and then Peer sensed the loaded atmosphere she'd somehow missed before. Some of them were drinking too quickly; others did not touch their drinks at all. Feet shuffled, eyes flickered, and there was a dearth of conversation. This was not a group of people out for a drink. It was a gathering of Watchers aware that what they'd waited for all their lives might have arrived.

"There's hope," Peer said louder. "We just have to find it." She eased back from the man and he picked up his spilled mug, nodding softly at her.

This is when we grow weak, she thought, and suddenly Penler's unspoken beliefs in a deity or deities seemed to make sense. This is when faith in nothing makes us scared. We're rationalists and realists, but doesn't everyone need something to believe in?

"Where?" Devin said. "Show us the hope."

"The Baker," Peer said, and she pictured that strange young woman's confident smile.

"You've seen her, Peer," Malia said after an uncomfortable pause.

"Yes." She was uncertain what Malia meant, troubled by the stillness that had fallen over the group.

"Well… she's mad."

Mad. Peer raised her own drink and took a long draft, taking the time to think about Nadielle, Gorham, and what the Baker could possibly do to help any of them. While she was venturing down to assess the dangers rising from below, the city itself was suddenly filled with threats.

"Maybe," Peer said at last. "But who wouldn't be, knowing what she knows? We take Rufus to her, and she can still help us. She must."

Malia sighed. Devin swallowed more ale.

"We have to look!" Peer said. "Start searching, and if that brings the attention of the Scarlet Blades, then we have to fight."

"Now you're mad," someone muttered.

"So this is it? All this time wasted?" She looked around at them, and her voice rose into a shout. "You're giving up?"

"Hush!" someone said, but she had their attention. She looked pointedly at Malia, lowered her voice again. "All those dead Watchers, nailed to the wall for nothing?" She pulled up her right sleeve to expose the ugly purple scars around her elbow and biceps. "All those people tortured, so we can sit and drink fucking beer while our last hope is lost out there somewhere?"

"You've heard the whispers," Malia said. "The Dragarians are out. They probably have him already, and they'll take him back to their canton, and that will be it. We'll never see him again, and the next thing we know will be war with the Dragarians as they fulfill their own prophesies. And when they realize he's not their savior, they'll kill him."

"So it's hopeless," Peer said.

"Yes."

"Right." She stood and shoved her stool back. It fell onto its side on the pavement, and she glared around at them all. Those who knew her had believed she was banished to Skulk forever, and in some of their eyes she saw grudging respect for her escape. Those who did not know her saw only an intruder. It was sad that the Watchers' jealous protection of their outlawed beliefs inspired such paranoia. "Rufus is a friend of mine," she said. "I brought him into the city and exposed him to everything that's happened. So I'm going to go and find him."

"Into Dragar's Canton?" Devin scoffed.

"If I need to." There's no way I can, she thought. This really is madness. But it had gone too far for her to back down now, and she was too angry to even consider doing so.

"What about Gorham?" Malia asked.

"What about him?" She turned to leave, then glanced back. "At least I'll be doing something positive when the end comes." And their murmured conversation as she walked away could have been the distant echo of some subterranean thing coming for them all.

Rufus is moving, his body jarring against something solid, and when he opens his eyes he sees green.

He tries to sit up but he's bound. His arms are fixed tight to his sides, his head tilted to the left. When he attempts to move his legs, they are unresponsive. He tenses and flexes, but though he can feel a soft breeze against his naked skin, his entire body feels constrained.

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.

"While we're walking."

Neph led the way as they departed the cavern, and though shocked and confused, Gorham was glad for that. Their route led downward, and after a time of negotiating treacherous conditions, they reached a wide, flat area. Torchlight touched nothing in any direction, and he felt the frightening pressure of space.

"Next Echo," Nadielle said, and her voice sounded different.

"So what exactly happened back there?"

"Garthan trap. They don't like visitors. They breed those things from sand sprites and cave wasps."

"And Neph can speak to them?"

"Of course. I chopped him, and he's part Garthan."

Gorham tried to absorb what she'd told him, working it through, attempting to make out what it all meant without reaching the conclusions that clamored for attention. It was the most she'd ever suggested about the chopping processes she used, but it birthed more questions than answers.

"You used-" But she'd already turned away, and he knew her well enough to recognize the tension in her shoulders. Told me too much, he thought. Did she mean to? Perhaps. Or perhaps the deeper they came, the more she was reaching out.

This new Echo felt very different from those above. There were no buildings evident, for a start-strange, for an Echo of Marcellan Canton-but the darkness did not feel as empty as it once had. It was heavy and loaded, and it had Gorham looking over his shoulder as he followed Nadielle.

The ground was rough but even, vaguely soft underfoot, and each footstep crunched gently. He thought perhaps it was a layer of old dead plants, but the air smelled only of dust.

Nadielle led them unerringly onward, confident even though Gorham could not make out any landmarks. The mute and emotionless Caytlin followed the Baker like a shadow, and Neph was somewhere around them, flitting across their path occasionally without making a sound. He's part Garthan, Nadielle had said. Trying to imagine just how Nadielle chopped people in those womb vats made him shiver.

And if Neph was part Garthan, what were its other parts?

The shapes emerged quickly from the darkness-gray, motionless. Gorham's fear was held in check by Nadielle's confidence as she walked between them. They stood sentinel to the left and right, and Gorham recognized the forms of old statues. Around them the ground was more uneven but harder. We're in a park. He called Nadielle to a halt and went to one of the statues.

"We need to hurry," she said, standing by his side.

"A moment," he said, because he was trying to make out the statue's face. He held his torch higher, and the shadowy features jumped out at him. There was nothing unusual here-perhaps he'd been expecting something monstrous or unknown-but neither did he recognize the face from one of the many history books he'd read.

"Old city rulers before the Marcellans," Nadielle said. "This Echo might be from ten thousand years ago, when they used to have a park in every canton in honor of the rulers. As older ones died, they'd erect new statues to those who took their place."

"Sounds extravagant."

"Politicians have always liked attention. Nowadays they simply get it in differing ways."

Gorham looked around at the several other statues he could see, vaguer the farther away they were, and tried to imagine how many might be standing around them right now. They were perhaps the only surviving likenesses of many of these people, all part of the city's story and staring now into an eternal night.

"It really is the past down here," he said, as if that had struck him for the first time. The statues regarded him with nothing left to say.

The park seemed to go on forever. Gorham lost track of time, and when they heard the screaming man, they might have been walking for days.

The screams came from the distance just as Gorham became certain that he could hear something larger, and deeper. He'd been thinking that he could hear something for a while now, but Nadielle seemed unconcerned, and he hadn't wanted to mention it. If he ever stopped to listen, the noise did too, so he suspected it had something to do with walking through this Echo. Perhaps their footsteps reverberated through the dry ground, the land shaking in excitement at these first human visitors in an age. Or maybe whatever was making the sound stopped when he did and carried on to the rhythm of his pace. He opened his mouth to mention the noises to Nadielle, and then came the screams.

They were distant, their direction uncertain, and they sounded mad.

"Down," Nadielle said. Gorham knelt on the dry ground, and the Baker pushed Caytlin down and squatted by her head, protecting her.

"What the crap is that?" Gorham asked, but Nadielle did not turn around. The screams were coming from ahead of them. And they were drawing closer.

Just one person, he thought. The screams came in waves, pausing occasionally for an intake of breath, and as far as he could tell it was always the same voice.

Nadielle had drawn a knife from her belt, and in her other hand she nursed a round, flexible object. Gorham drew his short sword. It was keen and light, and he'd used it in anger only three times. He'd spent a lot of energy trying to forget those moments.

Something was running toward them. Their torches did not penetrate the darkness very far at all, but in the distance he could hear the steady thump thump of feet striking the soft ground, and he imagined lazy clouds of dust thrown up. As the thing ran, it continued to scream.

"Nadielle?"

"I don't know. Be ready."

"Where's Neph?" he asked, but the Baker did not have time to respond.

The shape that emerged from the darkness into shadows, then from shadows into light, was twisted and mutated, a bastardization of anything human, and the noise issuing from it was shattering. It slowed as it neared them and heaved itself up, growing even taller before it reared over Nadielle and Caytlin, twice their height and bristling with spiked weapons.

Nadielle lowered her knife and stood up, and then Gorham realized the truth.

Neph dropped the screaming man at Nadielle's feet. Dust coughed up around him, and shreds of ancient dried plants that had not seen sunlight for millennia drifted in lazy arcs. The impact drove the scream from him in a loud humph! and the sudden silence was shocking. He gasped in air. His face went from pale to white, and he writhed slightly as he tried to start his breathing again.

"Sprote Felder!" Nadielle gasped, and the man screamed again.

Gorham had to go close to the Baker to speak above the screams. "That's Sprote Felder?"

"Yes!" she shouted back. "I've met him a couple of times before, but… he's changed."

The man looked barely human. His clothes hung on a bony frame, his exposed arms so thin that Gorham could have encircled them with his thumb and index finger. His face was skeletal, eyes dim and sunken, and he was missing one shoe. There were remnants of finery about his clothes, but it seemed that he'd been soiling himself for some time. The stench was horrific.

He also had a broken leg. Gorham had missed it before, but now he saw the blood-soaked rip in his trousers and the glint of pale-white bone protruding.

Neph took several steps back, then turned to face the darkness.

Nadielle knelt beside the screaming man, and it took a while for Gorham to hear the soothing words. He could not make out what they meant, but the tone was obvious, and it became audible only when the explorer's screaming started to lessen. How can a man scream so much and for so long? Gorham thought, but then he saw the way that Sprote's head kept twisting to look at Neph. Each glance would ignite the screams again, and it took Nadielle some time to calm him into silence. She stroked his face and held his hand, and at her single sharp command, Neph disappeared once again into the darkness.

Sprote Felder twisted to look at Gorham, then pushed backward with his feet so that he was curled into Nadielle's grasp.

"Should I go as well?" Gorham asked, but Nadielle shook her head.

"You're going the wrong way," Sprote Felder said, and his voice was surprisingly calm. He was still shaking and grinding his teeth together, but Nadielle's hand on his face and arm across his chest seemed to have soothed him a little.

"Which way should we be going?" Gorham asked.

"Up!"

"We're going down to the Falls," he said. "There's something… I've been hearing something." Nadielle looked up at him at this, and she seemed pleased that he was hearing it as well.

"It'll be the end of everything," Felder said, his eyes growing wider in his ravaged face. They looked nowhere in particular but saw something terrible.

"You've been there?" Nadielle asked.

"Not that deep. But deep enough."

"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.

Nadielle glanced aside, then back at him. "We have to go all the way down," she said. "And the easiest way to descend through the Echoes here will be through the holes and tunnels the Falls themselves have forged over time."

Gorham nodded. He knew that. He'd studied the old books, and he knew the alleged geography of the Falls as well as anyone.

"You know what we'll see, don't you?"

He nodded again. "The dead."

"The dead. And then the Chasm." For a second she seemed vulnerable and scared again, and Gorham grabbed on to it. "We'll help each other," he said.

"I know we will." And Nadielle smiled. "But, Gorham-I'm not aware of anyone who's ever gone that deep and survived."

"Then why must we?"

"You know why. I have to know what's coming."

"So you can destroy it?"

She shrugged, such a hopeless gesture. "Just so that I know."

"Why don't you tell me?"

"I will. When I know."

"And Caytlin…" He trailed off. The chopped woman was going to die, Nadielle had said, and Gorham suspected it would be soon.

"Come on," Nadielle said. "It'll get louder. And you're right-at least it masks that other sound."

But as they ventured through this Echo toward the Falls that punched through them all, Gorham found that was not the case at all. The roar of water was thunderous, but the noises from below were insidious. The Falls sounded brutal and hard, but the thumps and whispers were defiant, secretive. Monstrous.

Closer to the Falls, the air was filled with a fine, foul-smelling moisture. The flames on their torches sputtered and flickered. Their clothes became damp. Exertion made Gorham sweat, but it was cool, and before long he was wishing for thicker clothing. I'm breathing from the Tharin, he thought, and took shallow, slow breaths.

They went down, still not within sight of the Falls themselves. Neph led the way, and Gorham thought about that a lot. He'd seen the chopped birthed from the womb vat in the Baker's laboratory, and so whatever knowledge it carried must have been implanted while it was… what? Growing? Brewing? Forming? Nadielle told Gorham little, and he did not have a scientific brain that could surmise. So had Neph's knowledge of where they now were come from the Garthan it was part chopped from, as Nadielle had suggested?

Or did it come from her?

Deeper they went, time blurred, and at some point they must have passed the deepest Echo and entered the bedrock of the city itself. Gorham did not notice the point where this occurred. They were descending through a chaos of fissures and crevasses, past walls smoothed when the Tharin's water had flowed before finding an easier route down. But there were no more phantoms, and he felt the weight of the world all around him. He paused to touch the rock, and it shook with the power of the Falls. Shining his torch around, he tried to make out marks or structures that might have been man-made, but there was nothing. For some reason, he found that even more unbelievable than the receding Echoes of the past through which they had been descending.

I'm standing in a place that existed before the city itself, he thought, and he felt alone and lost. Nadielle glanced back at him, up the steep slope of a cavern floor, and Gorham pressed his hand harder against the rock. It gave nothing back.

He went on, following Nadielle and Caytlin, Neph's torch casting spiked shadows back toward him, and everywhere he desperately sought signs of humanity. He had never felt so connected with the city as now, when he was way below its very earliest part. But he saw nothing. And with the sound of the Falls thundering in his head so that he could not even hear himself shout, and the feel of them strong enough to shake the foundations of his world, he knew that the only people who came down here were the dead.

Shadows danced against the walls, giving the impression of movement all around. Even when Gorham held his torch still, he saw things flickering in tunnel mouths and holes, as if the ground were a living thing following his progress. All the while, Neph led and Caytlin followed-Nadielle's strange children obeying her every command, spoken or unspoken.

And at last they emerged onto a wide, wet ledge, beyond which was nothing but the Echo City Falls.

It plunged before them, a wall of water that seemed to suck in their torchlight and amplify it as a glow from within. The noise was almost unbearable, but the sight was astonishing, and Gorham could not tear his eyes away. He wiped water from his face and smelled its foulness, but that ceased to concern him. His stomach lurched when drops touched his tongue, but he pressed his hand against his gut and stared at the water. Its violence was incredible, its beauty mesmerizing, and Gorham thought: All this is from beyond the city. This water had traveled over the Bonelands from places where no one had ever been, crossed the city, separated from the river's main flow, and found its way down through Echo City's past until it vented here-flowing no more, only falling.

Nadielle shouted something into his ear, but the Falls stole her voice.

Then he saw the first body flit by. It was a blur, but its waving limbs were unmistakable. He'd known he would see them, and he'd been preparing himself, but it still came as something of a shock. Someone's mother, someone's son, he thought, and somewhere far above, a funeral wake was now taking place, as people stared into an unseen distance and remembered the sight of their loved one plunging into the lifeless river.

Nadielle held his arm and pulled, and Gorham realized with horror that he'd been edging closer to the Falls. The ledge dropped off maybe twenty paces from where he stood, and he felt a burning tension in his knees and shins, urging him forward. She shouted in his ear again, but he shook his head, touched his ear, and shrugged.

The Baker pointed back at Caytlin. The woman was farther back in the tunnel they had emerged from, leaning against the wall with a torch dangling from her right hand. Her face was as unresponsive as ever, but her eyes seemed more expressive. Either that or the violent waters were reflected there.

Nadielle tapped Gorham's chest, pointed to his eyes, then gestured to herself and Caytlin. Watch us. Gorham nodded.

Back in the shadows of the tunnel, Neph stood guard. Against what? Gorham thought, but it was nothing he wished to dwell upon.

Nadielle guided Caytlin out from the narrow tunnel mouth and onto the ledge. The woman still had eyes only for the Baker, but there was a hesitancy about her now, and perhaps a slight tension against Nadielle's hand.

A sick feeling hit Gorham. This is where she dies, he thought, and he glanced back at the Falls. Another shadow fell past-another dead person plummeting down forever. Members of his own family had come this way. He closed his eyes and thought of his father, wished he could see him again. Was he still falling, as the legends suggested? Or had he found some unknown, unknowable fate somewhere far below?

Something nudged him, hard. Nadielle. She glared at him and frowned. This is important. Gorham held up his hands and nodded sharply. He knew that very well. His whole world was above them.

She eased Caytlin down to her knees and knelt before her. Then she took a long, thin knife from a sheath on her belt and stabbed Caytlin in the left forearm.

Gorham held his breath. The woman barely flinched, but she did close her eyes as Nadielle jabbed her several more times with the knife, leaving a trail of small puncture holes from wrist to elbow. Trickles of blood flowed from some of the holes, curling around her arm and then dripping to the ledge. When the drips hit the rock, they seemed to disappear, merging with the wetness already there.

Nadielle pulled up her left sleeve, glanced over her shoulder at Gorham, and then started jabbing at her own inner arm. She pricked six times in quick succession, leaving a line of wounds mimicking Caytlin's. Placing the knife on the ledge beside her, she squeezed a couple of the wounds as if to encourage the blood to flow.

Gorham knew that this was her talent, the Baker's work, but it still took everything he had not to try to stop her.

When her blood was dribbling from the wounds, she smeared her finger across the one closest to her wrist, then touched the corresponding wound on Caytlin's arm. She repeated this for the other five cuts. Then she rolled up the sleeve on her right arm.

Gorham stepped forward and slipped a hand beneath her armpit. He pulled, lifting her from her kneeling position, and noticed Caytlin's eyes flick open to stare at him. He shouted at Nadielle, voice lost to the roar of the dead river falls, but the sensation of venting his fear felt good. Her blood dripped onto his hand, warm and intimate.

She held the knife up in front of his face, shaking her head.

Gorham let go and stepped back. He bumped into Neph, and the chopped warrior's hands clasped around his biceps, squeezing hard. He struggled, but the grip was firm. And all he could do was watch as Nadielle repeated the process on Caytlin's right arm and then her own.

As Gorham wondered what would happen next, Neph released him. Gorham was relieved, but the last thing he expected was for Nadielle to drape two enclosed torches around Caytlin's shoulders, march her toward the Falls, and then shove her from the ledge. The water grabbed the chopped woman and snatched her away, faster than a blink, so fast that he wondered whether she'd ever been there at all.

Shadows fell with her. The dead welcoming her in.

Nadielle backed away, dropped to her knees, and fell sideways. If Neph had not been instantly by her side, she would have cracked her head against the rock. Gorham went to her and saw her eyes roll up in her head, and a terrible understanding began to dawn.

The world fell away above her because her mother was gone. But though she could no longer see her, Mother was still present in her mind, flowing through her body, and there was a warmth inside that meant this was closer than they had ever been before.

To begin with, the Falls smothered her senses. The water's roar was everything; the taste on her tongue was rotten and foul; it scoured her skin, it smelled of dead things, and all she could see was the dirty brown liquid. Battering her within its embrace, the water flipped the torches around her head, but their sheltered flames were tenacious. They flickered and wavered but never quite went out. And that was important. It was essential. Because she had been sent down here to see.

Surprisingly quickly, the thunder began to lessen. This startled her a little-more so than the incessant roar-because she didn't know what it meant. A sensation of floating changed into one of falling, and the waters around her started to part like torn curtains. Spreading out, she thought, and beyond the tears in the water she could see only blankness.

(That's the Chasm. She's fallen so far already. Caytlin has fallen into the Chasm and she's following the Falls down, and soon I'll be able to hear-)

She found that if she placed her arms and legs in just the right position, she could fall in a controlled manner. She reined in the torches and their brave flames and started aiming them about her. The Falls, darkness, and, through the veils of water, she saw a shadow matching her fall.

(A body, someone who died up in the city recently, and I hope it doesn't drift closer, and I hope if it does, Caytlin looks away… looks down, because what I need to see is still down there.)

She shifted again and looked down. She was suspended now, descending at the same rate as the water and therefore appearing not to fall at all. It was a strange sensation, sick and exhilarating, and it brought a brief flash of something she could barely recognize. Not fear, because Mother was still with her, and she could never fear anything with Mother there. Not even nervousness.

Regret?

She blinked that away and aimed the torches down, enjoying the fall, ignoring the stink and taste of this water and the knowledge that there was a corpse falling very close to her. There was a long moment of peace and comfort, disturbed only by the intimation of a shadow drifting closer and then away again. She knew about death, as any living thing did.

Time passed. She fell.

(Look down again, Caytlin, always down…)

She directed her attention downward again, frowning for a moment because it was becoming difficult to tell which way was down, or up, or sideways. And then she saw (What is that, what is that, oh, by all the fucking gods, what is that?)

– a place far below, where the falling water struck something and splashed outward, an interruption to the flow, and as she fell closer and the torches had more effect she saw (Corpses-it's so large and wide that it's covered with all the fallen bodies, and there's a darker opening there, something)

– something opening up. True fear hit her for the first time then, and she screamed for her mother-an unintelligible sound that was the first and last noise she ever made. But until the last, she remembered her reason for being, her duty to her mother, and although it was still a long way to fall, because the thing was so huge, she held both torches before her so that they could illuminate the (Teeth.)

Nadielle was screaming, Neph hauled her back into the tunnel, and Gorham tried to grab her kicking feet to help carry her, but she was screaming, screaming, her expression made more grotesque because the sound was completely lost to the Falls. Her arms were bleeding again. And in her eyes, a black terror that even Gorham's torch could never hope to touch.


What if it doesn't work? What if I'm like this forever, and the White Water is no cure at all? Nophel had been waiting for someone to see him and draw back, startled at his sudden appearance or fearful of his countenance. He could look down and see himself, but he was used to that now, his mind accustomed to his invisibility. Walking unseen, he so wanted to be a part of the world again. If it meant fear or disgust when people saw his blood-red eye and diseased face, so be it. He'd lived like that forever, and it was proof of his history.

He found the only address on Dane's coded map-an upper-class whorehouse close to the Marcellan Canton's walls. It displayed the scarlet wound sign on its name board, indicating that it served the Scarlet Blades, which Nophel knew meant that few others would use the place. He stood outside for a while, checking the map again to make sure he'd read it correctly. Invisible, he still felt a flush of embarrassment as he crossed the road and approached the front entrance.

"You're no Blade," the woman at the door said.

"What?"

She came closer, down the stone steps to his level, and even then she was a hand taller. "You. You're no Blade. Unless they kicked you out because of that." She pointed at his face, and Nophel felt the familiar, liberating flush of anger at what he was.

"You can see me," he said, smiling.

"My girls will suck a chickpig through a straw," the woman said, without an ounce of sexuality in her voice.

"But you can see me!"

"You'd have to pay extra if you want me to watch. For you, a lot extra."

It had been a long time since he'd been out into the city like this. If he ever had cause to leave Hanharan Heights, he usually wore a heavy robe with a wide, deep hood, and people seemed to understand that a person so clothed desired to remain hidden away. Perhaps some attributed the style to one of the lesser, more obscure cults, but that did not concern Nophel. Hiding away fueled his anger, which in turn held shame at bay. Just show yourself, he'd once thought, but he was unable to do so.

"I need to see Fat Andrea," Nophel said.

The woman-he thought perhaps she had been a Scarlet Blade once, and wondered what had happened to her-stepped aside, waved him in, and chuckled to herself as she closed the door behind him.

The corridor was poorly lit and strung with decorative flags from several chords of the Blade army. It opened into a large room where several women lounged, drinking wine and smoking slash from a communal pipe on the central table. They perked up a little at his arrival, posing and preening in their minimal clothes even though their faces remained impassive. Then they really saw him, and some winced.

"Fat Andrea?" he asked. A lithe, strong-looking woman stood and approached. She wore layers of fine material wound tight across her curves, and her red hair shone in the weak lamplight.

"What's your pleasure?"

"You're Fat Andrea?"

"What's in a name?" She shrugged, and she was avoiding his face-looking over his shoulder, at his throat, blinking slowly and alluringly so that she did not have to see his deformities.

"Where can we go?" Nophel asked. The woman turned and beckoned him after her, and already he perceived a relaxation in her pose. Perhaps she already knows why I'm here, he thought. Am I really that obvious? She led him through a warming steam curtain and into another corridor, this one curved and confusing. At its end she opened a door and welcomed him inside, standing back so that he could pass. Still she averted her eyes. The room was small-bed, chair, a bath in the corner, shelves adorned with all manner of oils and soaps. It stank of old sex.

"Dane Marcellan sent-" he began, but Fat Andrea cut him off.

"I was hoping. So?"

"Six wisps play their mepple strokes." He remembered it from the map, and speaking it aloud made it sound no less foolish.

The woman relaxed, sighed, and sat down on the bed. She held her head in her hands for a beat, then rubbed her face and looked up at him again. She had changed. She looked older, more weathered, and he knew he was seeing Fat Andrea for the first time.

"What does the fat old bastard want?" she asked.

"He said you could lead me on toward the Baker."

The woman smiled. "I can send you on your way, but I can't lead you. I'm too busy here. I need the money for…" She laid a hand on her stomach and looked away, but not before Nophel saw her skin fade to a painful gray. She looked sicker than sick.

"I have money," Nophel said.

"Good. Then pay me for your hour and I'll tell you the way to Ferner's Temple."

Nophel went to object-Dane had said these people would lead him, not send him-but the woman's pain was almost a heat in the room, the atmosphere redolent of wretchedness.

"I'll pay you for two hours," he said. Fat Andrea did not protest, and a few beats later he went back out through the gloomy corridors, past the ex-Blade, who sent him on his way with a few mocking remarks. At the end, Andrea had looked at him with those hooded, enticing eyes again, and perhaps she'd seen past his deformed face to the man inside. Or maybe his generosity had made that possible. But he'd felt no pangs of desire, and he had no wish to take anything from Andrea other than a way through the streets.

He followed that way, and by the time the street cafes were filling for lunch, he found himself at Ferner's Temple. He'd not expected to find a real temple. But the last thing he'd anticipated was a tavern.

Through the early part of that afternoon, Nophel was passed along a route of contacts and places that, if what Dane said was right, would lead eventually to his sister, the new Baker. Dane's message tube sat heavy in his pocket, and though he still felt moments of temptation, Nophel did not open it. There was a sense of loyalty to Dane and also the continuing belief-more proven with every contact he made and yet more confused as well-that Dane was more allied with the Watchers than with the Hanharan religion that had controlled the city for so long.

But there was also the alleged sister whom Nophel had never known about. He had spent a lot of time studying the Baker's long ancestry over the years, and everything he read made him more satisfied that his treachery had been a good thing. Always feared, rarely feted, the Bakers were an oddity in Echo City's history that had persisted despite the many factors standing against them: lack of fealty to any government, practitioners of arcane arts, blasphemers, loners, and wielders of powers that would intimidate the powerful. As with any family, their history was checkered, with criminals, philanthropists, and monsters all holding the name of Baker for a time. Across the space of twelve thousand years over which he had managed to trace their ancestry-and though there were large periods in that extensive span when their line had become untraceable-they went from publicly visible to rumored as dead. People loved some and hated others but were always fascinated.

And there was always someone calling for their eradication.

The more he researched, the more amazed he became that no one had killed off the Bakers' line long ago. Perhaps they're too hard to kill, he thought. I believed it had happened in my lifetime, but now…

One other factor-the decider for Nophel, the silver seal upon the casket of his betrayal-was that there were very, very few instances of a Baker's giving birth naturally. He was one such example, and she had thrown him away.

She's no sister of mine, he thought. Whoever this new Baker might be, however possessed of her mother's talent and knowledge handed down from the past, he had no doubt that she came from somewhere vastly different than he did. He was a Baker's child, and she little more than another chopped monster.

But that did not mean he had no wish to meet her. On the contrary, he was eager. Perhaps in her he would find an answer to the question that plagued him always: Why did she cast me aside?

He drove down self-pity. His bitterness toward his mother was rich, and though he had learned that it was not necessarily his betrayal that led to her death-the Dragarians had killed her, or so Dane claimed-the responsibility still sat well with him.

He wondered what this new Baker looked like, how she spoke, what her young life had been. Dane had told him little, feigning ignorance, but Nophel sensed in the Marcellan a wealth of knowledge that he was simply unwilling to share. Such was the prerogative of a Marcellan. Most of all, he wondered whether this sister knew of his existence. If she had known about him all this time, then she must have chosen to not trace him or contact him. He did not care. That only made things easier.

The day was hot, his mind was abuzz, the past was becoming a shady, misunderstood place. And with every step Nophel took, the future came closer, more exciting than he had ever hoped and perhaps offering the chance for some sort of revenge.

Ferner, landlord of Ferner's Temple, was a thin man with an abnormally large head, and he carried the veined tracework of a drunk across his cheeks and nose. He seemed not to notice Nophel's disfigurement, and he sent him to a chocolate shop close to Course's western extreme. It took Nophel a while to walk there, and, in the end, tiredness overcame him and he bought a carriage ride. The two small horses walked slowly, breaking wind and generally ignoring orders shouted at them by the driver, until finally the western wall of the city came into view. Nophel muttered his thanks and disembarked, walking ahead of the horses toward the wall.

The chocolate-maker was an incredibly thin woman with a huge nose and a chopped third limb protruding from her hip. Her right hand gathered samples to sniff and taste, while her two left hands measured, stirred, and poured into a vat of new chocolate. She said nothing when Nophel entered her shop, simply staring at his disfigured face and continuing to work. When he told her that Ferner had sent him, then repeated the code words Ferner had whispered into his ear, the woman halted in her stirring for a beat. Then she carried on, using her third limb to stir while her two natural hands carved something onto the back of a slab of dark chocolate. She wrapped it, handed it to Nophel, and, when he offered some money, shook her head and waved him away.

He left her shop and read what she had carved.

By late afternoon he had visited three more places, imparting code phrases to six people, and he was convinced that he was being followed.

It was surprising how quickly he became used to being seen again. People stared at him and steered their children out of his path, and some of them offered uncertain smiles of sympathy. Those he respected most were the ones who either ignored him or treated him as they would anyone else-trying to con him out of money, overcharging him for food or services, or shoving past him in the street with little more than a mumbled apology. They made him feel human, while the frightened ones and the smilers turned him into a monster.

The last person he was directed to was an old man sitting on a bench by the main canal leading from the refineries to the Western Reservoir. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and heavy coat, even in the heat. Beside him on the bench were a fishing rod broken into three pieces, fishing paraphernalia, and a wooden bucket filled with water, in which a single fish swam in tight, slow circles. The woman who'd sent Nophel here had told him that Brunley Bronk sat on the same bench every day between the hours of noon and sunset, and most other times few people were able to find him. She said it was an old man's habit, but to Nophel it sounded like someone making himself available.

Nophel had doubled back several times on his walk along the canal, leaving the overgrown towpath and slinking between buildings, trying to make out who was following him. There was never any sign, but that only served to unsettle him even more. He felt eyes on the back of his neck. And since his experience with the Blue Water, he knew that not seeing someone did not mean no one was there.

So if the Unseen followed him, what of it? He did not know the rules and capabilities of his mother's potions, whether he would still be able to see the Unseen after taking the White Water. But he was also sure that such people would know of the Baker's continued existence, because they could sit in any shadow in the city and see, hear, and smell every secret.

Besides, caution was good, but paranoia would not serve him well.

He sat beside the man and looked down at the fish.

"You're from Dane Marcellan," the old man said.

"How did you know that?"

"Tell me."

Nophel muttered the code that the woman who'd sent him this way had written down for him. The old man nodded and scratched at his ear.

"Eat the paper," he said. "Don't want you dropping it so that just anyone can use those words. They have power. See this?" He held out his hand.

"What am I looking at?" Nophel asked.

"My reaction. Those words. They stop the shakes, because they make me excited. Something's happening. And you've come to ask me how to find the Baker."

He knows! Nophel thought. I'm close now, so close! The weight of Dane's message tube made itself obvious in his jacket pocket, as if aware that the end of its journey was near. He glanced back along the canal path, but the only movement was the splash of ducks and the scamperings of canal rats. They were twice the size of normal city rats, fattened on birds and frogs and water mice.

"What you looking for?" the old man said.

"Nothing."

"You thought you were being followed. You should have said." The man had turned to him now, and any lightness was gone from his voice. Nophel saw the seriousness in this man's eyes, and the startling intelligence, and he berated himself for forming foolish opinions. I thought he was feeble.

"So what do you want with the Baker?"

"It's not me, it's Dane Marcellan." I hope he can't hear my lie, he thought.

"Why?"

Nophel snorted. "I can't tell you anything like that! You expect me to-"

The cool touch of keen metal pressed against his throat. A hand curved around him from behind and clamped across his forehead. And, in the center of his back, he felt the bulky heat of a knee.

"One wrong move," a woman's voice said.

"So who the crap is he, Malia?" a man's voice whispered.

Nophel felt the woman lean in close and sniff at him. There was something animalistic about it, something brutal, and her voice purred like a serrated knife through flesh.

"Marcellan pet."

They took them farther along the canal to Malia's boat. It wasn't the safest place, but it was the closest. Malia and Devin guided Nophel, an arm each and a knife pressed into each side. They let Peer bring the old man Brunley. Brunley complained that he'd have to leave his fishing gear behind, but Peer assured him that they wouldn't be long. She could not inject any certainty into her voice. For all she knew, Malia was going to kill them both.

Inside the moored canal barge, Malia quickly drew curtains across the windows, while Devin tied Nophel into a chair. Brunley sat on a comfortable bench behind a small table, crossing his hands before him and watching the proceedings with a sharp eye.

"What are you mixed up with now, Brunley?" Malia asked.

"Fishing," he said.

Peer glanced from one to the other, and she could sense the long relationship between these two. Malia spoke to the old man without looking at him, bustling at a cupboard, and he answered in a lazy voice. They've been here before, Peer thought. The questions, the deceits.

"Fishing with the Marcellans' Scope keeper?"

"Is that who he is? I've never seen him before."

"Tell him," Malia said, standing before Nophel. Devin had tied his bonds good and tight and retreated outside, sitting on the barge's roof to keep watch.

"I'm thirsty," Nophel said.

"I'll throw you in the canal later." Malia turned back to the cupboard, and an uncomfortable silence descended.

This isn't finding Rufus, Peer thought. They'd been sitting in the tavern, dividing Course and Crescent into search districts on a large sheaf of paper, when the whore Andrea had arrived. She'd been running, she stank, and she'd grasped Malia's arm and dragged her into the toilets before any of them knew what was happening. Peer had not seen Malia controlled like this by anyone before. As she'd looked around at the others, eyebrows raised awaiting an explanation, Malia had come storming from the toilets, violence in her stride.

From there, to the canal, to here, and still Peer was as confused as she'd been at the beginning.

"What's the Marcellans' Scope keeper doing here?" Peer asked. Nophel looked at her-one good eye, and a face ravaged by growths. He stared, perhaps expecting her to look away, but she'd seen a lot worse in Skulk.

"Looking for the Baker," Malia said. And that was when Peer knew Malia meant to kill the Scope keeper. Talking about the Baker so freely before him-even mentioning her in his presence-meant that he would not leave.

"Who are you?" Nophel asked.

"I'm the one with questions." Malia turned from the cupboard at last, a bottle of cheap wine in one hand, a small velvet bag in the other. The bag moved. Truthbugs. Peer shivered at the memory.

"Do you know where she is?" Nophel asked. "I have to see her."

"So you can kill her?" Malia said.

"Why would I want to kill her?" Nophel's eye was wide, but his expression was hard to read; his was not a normal face.

"Because you work for the Marcellans." Malia squatted before him and placed the bag flat on her palm.

"Who are you?" Nophel asked.

"That's none of your-"

"They're Watchers," Brunley said, and Malia glanced at him, annoyed.

"So am I!" Nophel said. "A true Watcher, watching from the highest roof."

Malia placed the bag gently on the floor before her, drew her short sword, and pointed its tip at Nophel's good eye. He strained back in the chair, holding his breath, tensing, and several large boils across his jawline burst. Malia leaned forward, following him. The sword was never more than a finger's width from his eye.

"You've got only one good one," she said. "Choose your lies carefully, you fucking Hanharan pet."

Peer could feel the air in the small barge cabin thrumming with tension. Brunley was motionless, and Malia and the deformed man looked more like statues than like living people.

"I'm not lying," Nophel said at last. "And the Marcellan I serve-"

"Even whisper that name in here, and I'll cut its taste from your tongue!" Malia shouted. Peer stood, hesitant, but one quick glance from Malia told her to stay back.

There were times in Peer's life when she became very aware of the potential routes the future might take. One of them had been when she was fifteen years old, and three men in Mino Mont had approached her with a proposition: Work for us, and your family will never be poor again. Even that fifteen-year-old girl had been wise enough to see the gang markings on the men's ears, and her refusal had been a brave moment-but for a beat, she'd felt her life being squeezed into places she had no wish to go. Another time had been when the Scarlet Blades came knocking at her door. There were four of them, two holding back in fighting positions, and for a time after opening her door to them, she'd wondered whether she was going to be raped and killed.

This was another such moment. So many things hung in the balance that she felt faint, as if a series of waves had suddenly set the barge dipping and rising. Rufus was lost; Gorham and Nadielle were somewhere unknown; there were rumors of Dragarians abroad. The city was whispering with fear, from couples huddled in cafe corners to crowds gathered on the street listening to doomsayers. The world was changing, and she was at its fulcrum.

"Stand back, Malia," Peer said. "Killing's no good here."

"It was good enough for Bren," Malia said, not taking her eyes from Nophel's face.

"You think he hammered the nails into Bren's wrists?"

The Watcher breathed heavily for a while, muscles visibly tensed as if she were about to push.

Nophel could strain back no farther.

And then Malia eased, lowering the sword until its tip touched her trouser leg.

"What of the one you serve?" Peer asked.

Nophel closed his eye, trying to compose himself. She could actually see his shirt shift with the fluttering of his heart.

"He's not a Hanharan devout," Nophel said.

"I should believe you?"

"Yes." Nophel's hand massaged something in his lap.

"Peer, you've been out of this for too long," Malia said. "He can only be a spy, and as for Brunley-"

"I'd do nothing to harm you, Malia," the old man said, hurt in his voice. "We're friends."

Malia blinked at him but said nothing. Nophel squeezed the thing in his lap again. Peer caught Malia's attention, then looked down at Nophel's hands, and with a flash of movement Malia had the sword at the man's throat again.

Now what is this? Peer thought, hating the fact that she might have been wrong. Perhaps this man was a spy after all. Maybe he was an assassin.

"Enjoying yourself?" Malia asked. She pulled his hands aside, keeping the sword pressed to his throat, and delved into his pocket. Pausing, she smiled. "Is this a message tube in your pocket or are you pleased to see me, ugly man?" She pulled out the tube and lowered her sword once again.

"That's not for you," Nophel said. "It's private."

"If it's for the Baker, she'd want me to read it."

Peer wasn't sure if that was the case. The tension between Nadielle and Malia had been palpable, and if the Baker knew this Watcher was reading messages meant for her… But there was little Peer could do. This was Malia's home, Malia's situation, and the Baker was somewhere far away. And Peer was just as curious to know what was in the tube as she was.

"Nophel-" Brunley began, but Nophel shook his head.

"I'm the messenger, that's all. I serve Dane Marcellan, not because of his name but because of his beliefs."

Malia threw the tube at Peer. She caught it, surprised, and held it before her, aware that everyone was watching.

"Open it," Malia said.

Peer broke the wax seal and dropped it to the floor. Inside was a single piece of rolled paper, smooth and expensive. And on the paper, three lines. She read them aloud.

"Dragarians are abroad. The visitor might have arrived. I'm ready to help." She blinked at the sheet for a beat, scanning the words several more times to make sure she'd read them right. The visitor might have arrived? When she looked up, Malia was staring at her wide-eyed, and Nophel was glancing back and forth between them.

"A visitor?" he asked.

"Way ahead of you, Marcellan," Malia muttered.

And then, between the hastily drawn curtains, Peer saw a face pressed at the window. A face within a scarlet hood.

Dane Marcellan had watched many times as Nophel adjusted the Scopes' attitude and focus, shifted the viewing-mirror feed from one to the next, and aimed their monstrous eyes, but he had been only an observer. Sitting now with the control panel before him, he cursed his inexpert hands.

He thought he had connected the viewing mirror into the North Scope, but something must have gone wrong. The image on the mirror was blurred, out of focus, and gray shapes exploded across the screen in bilious, almost fleshy blooms. Does it know I'm not Nophel? he wondered, but that was absurd. He'd never ventured up to the roof on his own-those things spooked him, as had much that the old Baker worked on-and there was no way they could know simply through the remote touch of his hands on metal.

He caught glimpses but needed to see more. Needed to make sure, because if what he thought he'd seen was proven right, then the message he'd sent with Nophel-that risky message, sent with an unstable, perhaps mad man-was already too late.

"Curse you, Nophel, you'd better carry that message tube well!" He picked up his slash pipe and inhaled once more, closing his eyes to weather the rush. His blood was thick with decades of slash use, and the more he took, the more he needed to feel its effect. It was akin to breathing-a necessity, not a pleasure. He tried to present the acceptable face of addiction, and mostly he succeeded. But it was during these private moments that he hankered after the unbridled drug rush he no longer felt. He inhaled again, sucking deeply, and his lungs were like rocks in his chest.

When he opened his eyes, the image had clarified a little. Whatever had upset the Scope seemed to have settled, and Dane sat motionless for a while with his hand on the focus ball, afraid to shift in case the Scope sensed him again.

Dragar's Canton looked silent and still. The Scope was aimed at the shadowy junction between two massive domes, curving up to the left and right with the dark gulf at the screen's center. Dane could not imagine these shells ever breaking open-doors slipping aside, Dragarians streaming out. And there lay their deception, in the stillness they had presented over the centuries and the way they had removed themselves from the currents of Echo City. Dragarians were a thing of the past, beyond the memory of anyone alive today. Forgotten, they had become phantoms.

Dane blinked, breathed in more slash, and then something moved across the screen. He gasped and shifted his hand, edging the Scope to the right. It moved too far and blurred, but he corrected the movement, not thinking too hard about which levers and slides he touched, simply relying on instinct. He'd seen Nophel at work here often enough; all he had to do was…

There. He stroked the focusing ball, the picture cleared, and a doorway was open in the left dome's shadow. Several shapes streaked inside, crawling across the surface of the dome like ghourt lizards on a dawn ceiling, and the doorway closed behind them.

"They're going home," Dane whispered, a haze of slash smoke obscuring his view. He turned away from the mirror and closed his eyes, hand clasping tight around the pipe in his right hand. It had once been the hip bone of a tusked swine, carved and smoothed by one of the most talented bone artists in Marcellan Canton, and it was only the quality of its manufacture that prevented it from crumbling in his hand. His heart thundered, sweat ran across his expansive body, and he tried to rein in his darting thoughts. His mind was rich and strong, but sometimes it went too wild. Sometimes, the slash took it that way.

They're going home, so they must already have what they wanted. That poor, wretched thing my love the Baker made and sent out-he's back, and they have him.

"We're too late," he muttered, and if he'd been able he would have gone to the new Baker then and there and cried at her feet. The Dragarians have found the visitor already, and if he's who I hope-who I fear-they'll remain silent no more. And we have no idea what they've been doing under their domes all this time. The Marcellans had sent spies, of course, hundreds over the centuries. But none of them ever came back.

Dane stood from the chair and staggered a few steps from the viewing mirror and controls. His legs shook. He felt sick. If the Dragarians believed they had their savior, they would do whatever was in their power the bring about the end of Echo City and usher in their prophesies of Honored Darkness. "We have to prepare for war," he said, and that word was beyond belief. "I have to see the Council, persuade those blinkered old bastards to go to war."

"Not all so blinkered, Dane," a voice whispered in the shadows. "Though most are bastards."

Dane caught his breath, looked around, and the darkness resolved into several swishing red cloaks. The Scarlet Blades came forward-two men and two women-and each of them looked terrified. They must have known already that they were here to kill someone they had served all their lives.

It was that more than the voice that convinced Dane he was discovered. Jan Ray Marcellan was there, and that was bad enough. But he had never seen a Blade look so afraid. "Jan Ray," he said, trying to level his voice. I'm not afraid of her. "I never thought to see you in this place."

Jan Ray came forward out of the shadows, tall and old and still as graceful as when she'd been a beautiful young woman. There were those who claimed that the Hanharan priestess was pure and unsullied, maintaining her birth-day innocence in deference to Hanharan and to better aid her total devotion to his cause. And there were also those who would whisper, given assurances of anonymity, that on occasion Jan Ray procured young girls from some of the worst rut-houses in Mino Mont and made them fuck her with chickpig hooves.

"I'm no great advocate of it," she said, looking around with distaste. "Hanharan guides our vision; we have no need of the Baker's… monsters. But it gives comfort to my kin. To see the city, they believe, is to own it."

"Haven't we always owned it?" Dane asked, offering a half smile in the vain, evaporating hope that her visit was innocent.

"We?"

The Scarlet Blades had spread around Dane, boxing him in against the viewing mirror and controls. They were not yet disrespectfully close, but neither were they too far away. Any one of them could be on him in a blink.

"I was just about to leave," he said. "I have grave news for the Council-"

"I can relay that news, Dane," she said. She paused before him, and once again he was amazed at her grace. When she moved she seemed to flow, the loose black clothing of a Hanharan priestess a flock of shadows making her their home. And when motionless, as now, there was a stillness to her that was almost unnatural. Her expression never shifted; her mouth barely moved when she spoke. Such economy of movement was the mark of someone in complete control of herself.

And of the four Blades as well. He should not forget them. Inner Guard, highly trained, unendingly loyal to the Marcellans, these soldiers would nevertheless obey priestesses over politicians at any time of the day or night. That was the fruit of their indoctrination.

"It's news I should take myself," he said.

Jan Ray smiled. He rarely saw that. It was horrible. "Where is your deformed bastard today?"

How dare she? Insolent bitch!

"I'm not certain where Nophel is. I'll be reprimanding him when I find him; he should have been here, especially today, when-"

"I suspect he's been reprimanded already." Another of her habits-interrupting. It gave her control over any conversation.

"The Dragarians have emerged," he said. Truth is best right now, just… be sparing with it. "I'm not sure why, or what they've come for, but we should send-"

"Should we?"

"Send the Scarlet Blades north immediately. To protect us."

"Protect us from those unbelievers? They've hidden themselves away from Hanharan's smile for five hundred years, Dane. What could we possibly have to fear from them?"

Dane glanced at the Blades, each of them with one hand on their sword. Ready to draw; ready to move. He breathed deeply, wondering at his chances. I'm fat and they think I'm slow. They know me as a slash user. That's all I have.

"The ones I saw looked like warriors," he said. "Some flew, others crawled. They've been chopping in there for centuries. They were all heavily armed." One Blade fidgeted slightly, another glanced at her companions. That was exactly what he wanted. To unnerve them. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again he knew that his life was changing, here and now. This was when he paid for his beliefs, his passion, and his shunning of the god that had ruled his family and directed their actions for generations.

Doubt came, and he let it flow away once again. It was good to see it go. Its departure made him strong.

"You're a monster," Jan Ray said, voice filled with bitterness and distaste. "A traitorous, stinking, fat, disgusting monster. I've sensed your unbelief for years, Dane, but I never wanted to admit it, even to myself. Never wished to acknowledge that my second cousin could shun the god Hanharan, who made him."

"My parents made me," he whispered.

"And who made them?"

"Who?" Dane said, drawing strength into his voice. "Hanharan? Don't make me laugh." The Blades gasped, and he saw more ways to unsettle them.

He brushed his hand against his jacket pocket, uttered a subtle, deep hum, and something in there began to move.

"You'll be arrested. I sent men after your bastard, and I told them to bring back his ugly head for the wall. They'll follow until he reaches his destination and will kill whoever they find. So who is it, Dane? Watchers? There are many left, we know that for sure."

Dane scoffed. "Watchers? They're harmless ass-gazers. Why should I mix with the likes of them?"

"Because they're enemies of Hanharan. And when someone like you, Dane Marcellan, betrays his blood, any enemy will do. You can't do things on your own, because you're weak, and Hanharan has shunned your treacherous flesh. You need friends. You need accomplices."

"Jan Ray, there's no truth to any of this," he said, feeling the movement in his pocket, glancing at the Blades, and smiling inwardly when they averted their eyes. "Nophel is missing and will be punished."

"You think I don't know you've been feeding him that juice from the dead Baker witch?" she whispered.

Dane shook his head and slipped his hand into his pocket. The contents were wet and warm, and he had maybe a dozen heartbeats before they would kill him. He closed his eyes and summoned his hate and rage, and he was pleased to find it close.

"You'll suffer, Dane," Jan Ray said, "and it will all be in the dark. Your name will be wiped from the family, and no one will ever-"

"You can suck Hanharan's cock while your bitches pig-fuck you," he said, closing his hand around the eggs, "and I'll happily hold my cock and watch."

The priestess opened her eyes in surprise, but it was the Blades' reactions he was watching. They stepped back, averting their eyes from such blasphemy and muttering prayers, and Dane pulled his hand from his pocket. Whatever the outcome of this moment, his time as a Marcellan was over.

He flung the scarepion eggs, flicking his wrist in four motions, letting one egg slip away each time. The first two found their targets, breaking across a Blade's chest and throat and spewing their screeching contents. The third bounced away and broke on the floor at a female Blade's feet, and the fourth missed altogether, disappearing into the darkness.

Jan Ray stumbled back from Dane, leaning against the viewing-mirror controls. The angle on the screen flickered and tilted crazily, and, high above, one of the Scopes would be screaming in pain.

The scarepion young-dozens to an egg-sought blood with their staggering sense of smell. They used their birthing horns to penetrate skin and inject venom, then clawed their way inside. In heartbeats the first two Blades were on their knees, screaming as they scratched and tore at their own flesh. The third Blade made the fatal error of leaning forward to look at the ruptured egg rather than stepping back. Scarepions could jump.

The fourth Blade came at him. His sword was drawn-a deadly weapon that had been handed down through his generations, scored with a record of kills, each scoring filled with dried oxomanlia extract that would turn toxic on contact with blood-and the man's eyes were wide with fear and disbelief that he was going against a Marcellan.

Dane had to turn that disbelief quickly to his advantage. If the fight began, the Blade's training would take over, and Dane would be cut down.

"How dare you!" he thundered. The Scarlet Blade faltered and blinked in confusion, his blade dipping toward the floor.

Dane stepped lithely into the soldier's killing field-his weight and build, as ever, belying his grace-and slid his knife between the man's ribs. The soldier's mouth fell open and Dane twisted, pulling left and right, wanting to kill quickly. The soldier groaned, and, as he fell away, warmth gushed across Dane's hand.

Dane kept hold of the knife and turned, looking for Jan Ray. She was going for the door. If she got away, the Scope tower would be crawling with Blades in moments, and Dane's only escape would be up and off the tower-an ignominious end, but at least one that would be in his control. He thought of Nophel, the poor bastard he had misled for so long, and hoped that his death would be quick and clean. And he thought of the old dead Baker-his friend, his lover, and the mother of his only child, whom Dane had taken under his wing and protected, bitter though the child had remained against the mother who had abandoned him to the workhouse.

"I'm so sorry, Nophel," he said, and he felt wretched now that they would never know each other as father and son. He should have told him the truth, but doing so would have doomed them both.

He could not take a blade to a Marcellan, though, not even this Hanharan priestess who had tried to kill him. He could not punish her for her foolish beliefs.

Jan Ray screamed. Dane looked toward the shadowed corner where she had fled, expecting to see the opened door but instead seeing nothing. And when her scream came again, he knew that fate had steered her to the fourth scarepion egg. And though he had spent his life consciously not believing in such things as gods, he closed his eyes and gave thanks to something, anything, for his fortune.

Dane Marcellan closed the door to the viewing room and descended the staircase. He had sprayed the room with barch oil first, hoping that it would kill most of the scarepion young before anyone else entered. That was the best he could do. He felt wretched at the deaths and sick to his heart at the betrayal.

But, in truth, the betrayal had been a part of him for decades. The Baker, his love, had opened his eyes to the folly of Hanharan beliefs. And when she'd had her own eyes closed at the hands of the Dragarians, he had vowed to see his way forward in the way she would have desired-as a disciple of science and truth. That vow had only now come to action, and it was Jan Ray's fanaticism that had led to those deaths. If only she could have let him walk away.

Now it was Nadielle, his old love's chopped replacement, whom he had to find. The Hanharan priestess said she had sent Scarlet Blades after Nophel. If what the old woman claimed was true, Dane doubted Nophel had a chance of reaching Nadielle at all. But his options were suddenly more limited than he had ever planned for. And Nophel was the only family he had left.

Traitor though he was, for a while he would still be a Marcellan in a city that feared his name. He would use that fear for as long as he could.

Beyond that, fate would decide.


"You led them here!" the woman said, and Nophel shook his head.

They must have followed me all the way from Hanharan Heights, all day, keeping out of view and watching and waiting until…

"Malia, he's terrified!" the other woman, Peer, said.

Nophel could not look at either of them. He was staring at the window where the face had been, and he knew what would come next.

"Stop bickering if you want to live," he said. "They've come to kill us all."

Malia took control. Nophel had seen women like her in the Blades-harsh and cruel but with a discipline that meant they could focus under pressure and fight when the time came. And as she whispered orders to Peer, he started to work at his bonds.

"Back there, in the bedroom, under the bed. Weapons. Bring them all, and give one to Brunley."

"I'm not mixed up in-" the old man began, but Malia cut him off with a short, harsh laugh.

"You've been seen with us, old man. Tough shit."

Peer pushed past Nophel, glancing at him as she went by. Soon he heard the clink of metal as she rummaged under a bed in the barge's next room.

"How many are there?" Malia asked, and Nophel realized she was asking him.

"I don't know."

"How many?"

"Usually they work in fours," he said, and she glanced back at him. Was that grudging belief he saw in her? Right now it didn't matter. "They must have followed me, and whoever sent them wouldn't have risked them being seen. So, four. Any more and I'd have seen them for sure."

"What sort of a spy are you if you can't-"

"I'm not a spy, woman!" Nophel spat. With the immediate threat from Malia abating, their true position was only just dawning on him. Whoever had sent these Blades must want the people-or the person-Dane had sent Nophel to meet. The Baker. Who were they to know she was not here? Maybe they thought she was Malia, or Peer, or…

"Are you the Baker?" he asked Malia, and his heart skipped a beat. I could watch her die, and then I'd die with a smile.

Malia actually laughed. "I'm fun to be with, compared to her."

"They'll try to kill us all," he said softly.

"Yes, that's what I'm assuming."

Peer appeared with her arms full of weapons-several swords, knives, throwing stars, a crossbow, and a rack of bolts.

"They won't be heavily armed," Nophel said.

"Don't need to be with those blades of theirs," Brunley said.

"And I doubt they're wearing armor. Not if they were sent to track me. They'd have been running. Tired." He was thinking, trying to recollect anything about the Blades he saw every single day that might help them all survive this.

"Anything else?" Peer asked. She was hefting the crossbow, but it was obvious she had never fired one in her life. Her face was pale and slack, a fine film of sweat across her upper lip.

"Pull back, click, lock in a bolt," Malia said. Then she snapped up a short knife and squatted down three steps from the door, sword in her other hand, listening. "Here they come," she whispered.

"They're all right-handed," Nophel said.

As the door crashed inward, Malia dropped the knife and lobbed her sword into her other hand.

"Window!" Malia shouted, darting at the shape shouldering through the remains of the wooden door.

Peer ducked and turned, bringing the crossbow up, hoping she'd primed it and fitted the bolt correctly. Suddenly she was certain she had not, that it would misfire, and the woman shattering her way through the window-face flushed, teeth gritted, eyes glittering with a fury Peer could not fathom-would roll and bury her sword in Peer's stomach. She'd feel the warm rush of blood and see her guts spill, and before the poison on the sword killed her, she'd die of shock. So she pulled the trigger, fully expecting that breath to be her last, and someone other than her screamed.

The woman in the window slumped down and dropped her sword. Her face had changed. The fury had gone, and so had one of her eyes; in its place protruded the last third of a crossbow bolt. One of her arms flapped, thudding against the bulkhead. Her head lowered slowly and thick fluid dribbled from her face, pattering onto the wooden floor, and Peer knew it was the Blade's brains.

Peer had never killed anyone in her life. She heard the chaos around her but none of it registered. Her focus was narrowed and aimed entirely at the woman-the woman she had killed.

Malia shouted. Metal clashed on metal, and Peer was shoved aside as the Watcher backed into her. The Scarlet Blade who had come through the door pushed his way forward. Malia stabbed at him again, holding her sword left-handed so that it sliced in under his defenses. In the confines of the barge's small room, already filled with people, there was no finesse to the swordplay, only brutality. As Peer scrabbled backward and pulled herself upright against the table, Malia kicked out at the man's crotch. He turned sideways and took the kick in his thigh, punched her in the face, forced forward as he brought his sword around toward her unprotected neck.

"Malia!" Peer shouted, and then the soldier cried out as he tripped. Nophel jerked in his chair, kicking up and out with the foot he'd worked free of his bindings, shoving against the man's hip and tipping him over.

Malia drew back her sword arm, but Brunley had already buried a knife in the nape of the man's neck. The Blade hammered his feet against the floor, dropping his sword and reaching behind with both hands.

"Back," Malia said. Brunley did as told, and she thrust her own knife through the Blade's heart. "Two more." She went for the door.

"They'll be waiting for you!" Nophel hissed.

"Well I'm not getting trapped in here," Malia said. As if conjured by her words, a round smoking object smashed through another window. The curtain held it back against the sill, but a beat later it erupted in flames, fire splashing sideways and down across the wall. The flames spread too fast and gave off a pungent chemical stink.

"Flush-fire!" Nophel said, his eyes wide. Though his legs were free, his arms were still firmly tied to the chair.

Peer heard a shout outside and the clang of metal on metal. Brunley had followed Malia up through the door.

"Help me!" Nophel pleaded. Peer pulled her knife and started to cut the ropes binding him, the heat from the fire already shriveling hairs on her arm and stretching the skin on the back of her legs. As Nophel's first arm came free and she started working on the second, Peer thought she could see the wood of the chair through his wrist.

She paused, shook her head, and he grasped at her. "Cut!"

Fire flowed and wood started to crack.

She could see through his head now-the puddle of blood from the dead Scarlet Blade and Brunley's discarded knife.

"Cut!" he shouted.

"You're going," she said, still cutting.

Nophel looked at his hands, paused, then grinned. "Good." As the last rope fell away, he grabbed Peer's knife and shoved her toward the door. She crawled through and out into coolness, gasping in the fresh air. And when she looked around, Nophel was gone.

Malia was standing atop the barge, fighting a female Scarlet Blade. Their swords threw off sparks, feet thumped on the barge roof, and they punched and kicked and bit, trying to get each other off balance. It was a vicious confrontation that could not last for long.

Peer stepped across onto the bank and looked around frantically, fearing the impact of sharp metal against her neck at any moment. But then she saw the fourth Blade. He was sitting astride a struggling shape beneath a spread of bushes a dozen steps along the canal bank, right hand rising and falling, painting a bloody splash on the air. Beneath him, Brunley lay on his stomach, hands fisted into wet mud.

She took a couple of steps forward, hand going to her belt, but the knife was gone. Nophel took it! she thought. She backed toward the barge-there were weapons in there-but then a window blew out, gushing flame. Something inside exploded with a dull thud. Malia grunted behind her, and something heavy dropped onto the barge's wooden roof. Peer glanced back; the Watcher stood over the soldier, sword raised to deliver the final blow.

Peer heard the impact of booted feet on gravel.

Malia glanced up. The woman beneath her kicked, catching Malia in the crotch, and she gasped and fell sideways, trying to grab on to something but finding nothing. She splashed into the canal.

Peer was already turning back to the other Blade, ducking down as she did so, but she saw in a beat that she had no more time. The soldier was coming for her. His face was streaked with Brunley's blood, eyes wide, and he wanted her blood as well.

Peer froze. She wanted to roll to the right, stand, and try to run, but her body would not obey her brain's commands. I killed someone, she thought, and everything felt so hopeless and hollow.

The Scarlet Blade gasped and fell at her feet, hand reaching for his groin. He glared at her, frowning. Then his head tipped back and his throat opened, eyes going wide as blood sprayed and made the muddy path muddier.

Peer fell onto her rump and scrabbled backward, feeling the fire's intensifying heat stretch the skin on her face and singe her hair. The soldier thrashed for a while, his arms waving but his body hardly moving at all, as if a weight sat on his stomach.

She heard splashing and the unmistakable thunk! of a crossbow firing. Then laughter.

As she stood and faced the burning barge, the Scarlet Blade still standing on its roof was turned toward her, priming her small crossbow and raising it in one practiced motion.

The boat dipped and creaked, fire crackling through rents opening in its roof. Flames licked at the soldier's feet, but she did not seem to notice. She was aiming at Peer, the shining tip of the bolt pointing directly at her chest.

Peer dashed sideways, tripping over the dead Blade and splashing down into his blood. She cried out and then thought she heard her voice echoing somewhere-but this was a different cry. The woman on the boat had her legs swept from beneath her and landed heavily on the barge's roof. Then she was thumped down into it, some invisible force pummeling her head and chest again and again; her waving arms were knocked aside and slashed open. When the flames erupted through the roof and enfolded her like grasping arms, Peer saw a shape jumping through the flames, a hollow where nothing burned. And then it was gone, and the soldier blazed. Her screams were terrible.

Peer moved quickly along the canal. Malia was swimming away from the barge. She seemed unwounded, pulling strongly with both arms.

"Here!" Peer called.

"Be careful!" Malia shouted.

"They're dead, Malia." She squatted by the canal and reached down, beckoning the Watcher to her. Malia swam in and Peer helped her up onto the bank. They fell together, gasping and wet, and then Peer noticed the wound on Malia's arm for the first time. It was dark, her clothing soaked with blood that still flowed.

"Crap shot," Malia said. She stood and stared at the barge-her home, burning now, popping and cracking and sending billowing smoke to the sky. That would attract the wrong sort of attention. The body of the Blade Peer had killed was still visible hanging through one window, fire dancing along her trousers and licking at her boots. The stench of cooking meat tainted the air.

Brunley and the other soldier lay dead on the canal path.

"Nophel," Malia said, nodding at the boat.

"No. I cut him loose, he got out, and… I didn't see him."

"He ran?"

"No. I didn't see him." Peer was shaking her head, because she didn't know how to say what had happened and was not sure herself. Something impossible, something unbelievable. When she blinked to clear her vision, she saw that soldier falling and his throat opening up as if sliced by sunlight.

"I'm here," Nophel said from behind them. They both spun around, and he was standing ten steps along the path. For an instant Peer thought he was a shadow, because she saw through him. She heard Malia gasp. Then she shielded her eyes against the sun and he was whole, both hands wet and the knife in his right hand still dripping, sticky and bloodied. He was shaking, and fire from the barge reflected from his wet clothes. Been in the canal as well, Peer thought. Then she realized the wetness was blood.

"We need to get away from here now," Malia said, then called, "Devin!" There was no answer.

"They must have followed me," Nophel said.

"Doesn't matter. Come on." Malia grabbed Peer's arm and pulled, still looking around for Devin. But for a moment Peer could not move. The fire's roar was growing, and the associated sounds of things cracking and breaking startled her. Still, she could not take her eyes from the dead soldier in the window. I killed her.

"Peer?" Malia said more gently.

"I shot her in the eye."

"And it was a good shot. If you'd missed and she got in, I don't know-"

"But I shot her."

Malia stood before Peer, blocking her view. "This is the first time I've killed anyone as well," she said. And the pain on her face was obvious now, the glitter of the open wound on her shoulder starkly colorful against her drab clothing.

"They came to kill us," Peer said. That's our strength. That's how we'll get past this. And then Malia said, "Oh, no," and Peer turned to where Malia was looking. She could just see the pair of legs protruding from beneath a clump of shrubs along the canal path. Devin.

"He never had a chance," Peer said.

"He and Bethy were…" Malia said.

"At least she wasn't here as well."

"So what happened to you?" Malia asked Nophel. Her voice suddenly had a cold edge, and Peer feared that the killing was not yet over.

"I…" Nophel dropped the knife. Looked at his hands.

"A first for all of us," Malia said bitterly. "Come on. There's somewhere nearby where we can lick our wounds and decide what to do next."

As they pushed through undergrowth and started to weave their way between some of the canal-side storage buildings, Peer felt a strange calm settling over her. Leaving the scene helped, the retreating fire and stink of burning flesh a fading reminder of what had happened. And there was also an irrational yet gratifying sense of satisfaction about what she had done. They had tortured her, and now she had killed one of them. It was illogical and brutal, but she held on to it for now.

"Nophel saved us," she said to Malia.

"I'll thank him later."

As they hurried away from the blood and the bodies and the rising pillar of greasy smoke, Peer vowed to make sure Malia kept her word. And she also promised herself an answer to what had happened back there. If Nophel doesn't tell us, he's not on our side, she thought.

The disfigured man followed, bringing all his mysteries with him.

The noise of the Falls had receded behind and below them, a distant rumble that still shook the ground, but Gorham was certain the sound was implanted forever in his ears. Around them were the caverns and crevasses of Echo City's roots, but he saw little, because he was concentrating on Nadielle's light bobbing ahead, which sometimes slipped from view entirely as the Baker turned a corner. They were heading in two distinct directions-away from the Falls, and up.

He was sweating, even though some of these caverns were ice cold. Only some of them-others were quite warm, as if they'd been home to something warm-blooded until very recently. That worried him, but he had no one to ask about it. They'd left Neph back at the Falls after Nadielle had shouted something into its ear and stabbed at its arms. And Nadielle herself was moving much too fast for Gorham to catch. He'd seen her fall a couple of times, and once he thought she'd broken a bone. But every now and then he heard her voice, an unconscious cry that ripped at his heart and set his skin tingling. He'd given up calling after her. He thought perhaps she'd gone mad.

After the screaming and the thrashing, she'd stared wide-eyed at the thundering Falls for a few beats, not even blinking when a knot of bodies shadowed by. Then she'd shouted to Neph, cut its arms, and left. Gorham had stared at Neph, hands held out in a what's happening gesture. But the chopped had only looked at Gorham dismissively before sitting down to face the Falls.

If Gorham had waited a dozen heartbeats longer, he might never have found Nadielle's light smeared across the darkness ahead of him. And if he'd followed her the second she darted away, perhaps he could have caught her and held her down, hugged the truth from her, shared his warmth to let her know she was not alone. You're my sunlight, she had told him, and he so wished to share his heat with her now.

Another scream. He looked ahead, panting hard, and saw Nadielle's shadow thrown back toward him from the narrow mouth of a smooth tunnel. She was staring away from him, head tilted up, but as he opened his mouth to call, she ran on.

I've got to catch her, he thought. We're deeper than the oldest times down here, and if I lose her I'll never find my way out. It didn't help that Neph and Nadielle had the only two remaining torches. When she was out of sight, he could not see his hand in front of his face. Every moment took her farther ahead-and closer to losing him. With her torch, she could scout her route over rocks and around potholes, while he relied mostly on touch. He could not become too careful, could not let fear make him any slower than he was now. The thought of being lost and alone…

"Nadielle!" he shouted, wasting a breath and a moment to pause and catch another. But his voice echoed strangely, swallowed by the darkness in one direction and sounding off to the deep in another. Nadielle's light flickered as though paused, but then she was away again.

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."

Gorham held his breath, and Nadielle's torch flared once more. She pulled away from him and shone the light ahead, out into the Echo that contained Echo City's earliest remnants.

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.

"You need to tell me everything," she said, "and quickly. Time's running out."

Nophel glanced at the woman, Peer, who had been left with him while Malia went for medicines. She had not spoken, though he'd felt the pressure of her questions.

"I can tell you only what I know."

"Peer, I'm sure you want to begin," Malia said. She closed the door and stood by the window, looking out onto the street, chewing herbs and pressing paste into wounds on her left hand and forearm. But Nophel felt all of her attention focused on him.

"You disappeared," Peer said. "When I was untying you, you… faded. Then you were gone."

"A potion from the Baker," Nophel said. "The old Baker. I told you, Dane Marcellan and she were friends."

"A potion to make you invisible?" Peer said. Disbelief rang through her words, and yet Nophel smiled, because she could not deny what she had seen.

"It's called Blue Water," he said. He closed his eyes, the good and the bad, and in doing so he brought back the images of those Scarlet Blades dying at his hand. It had been horrible, feeling his knife part their skin and flesh, seeing their eyes as they knew death had come for them. And yet he could not feel sorry. He thought of their families and friends, who would be told of their deaths today, and the people who had lost a father or brother, mother, or sister. But pity was something he had so rarely been shown that, when it did present itself, he hated it. Pity was for the weak and useless and those who had no aims.

"And he gave it to you so you could get this message to the Baker?" Malia asked.

"No, before that. Something came out of Dragar's Canton, and he wanted to know what."

"Did you find out?"

"Yes. And then I killed it."

Peer held her head in her hands, rubbing at her eyes. She's been through a lot in a short time, Nophel thought. Malia, the other woman, was harder and more dangerous. But even she was in a state of shock. For all their posturing, the Watchers had never been fighters. He was at an advantage here, and he had to remember that.

"I know who the visitor is," Peer said, staring Nophel in the eye.

"Who?"

"We're asking the questions!" Malia roared, but Peer held out both hands, as if warding the two away from each other.

Nophel looked at his hands, willed the Blue Water to act again. I did it myself, he thought, but however much he tried convincing himself of that, it did not ring true. It had been fear and danger that had forced the change, not a message from his own consciousness. Perhaps if Malia came at him with a knife… but he was not sure if even then it could happen fast enough. He didn't know how many people, if any, had ever been given the White Water antidote, but he possessed something amazing. Perhaps soon he would gain some control over it.

"A friend," Peer said, putting herself between Nophel and Malia. "A good friend of ours and the Baker. But we think the Dragarians have taken him."

"The Dragarian said he would go to the Baker," Nophel said.

Neither woman answered.

"So where is the new Baker?"

"Gone somewhere," Malia said, quieter now. "She'll be back soon."

"She knows about your friend?"

"Yes," Peer said. "But she also knows that things are stirring in the Echoes."

"What are you going to do with me?" Nophel asked. He was looking at Peer, but it was Malia who answered, wincing as she pressed the paste into a gash across her left forearm.

"I can't trust you," Malia said. "You're Marcellan, and-"

"I'm not Marcellan!"

"You work for them. You come from Hanharan Heights with a message tube, snooping around our business, and you can turn fucking invisible!"

"So you'll kill me, then?" Nophel asked.

"No!" Peer snapped, and when Malia looked at her, Nophel did not like the look in her eye.

"I'm with the Marcellans only because of the dead Baker," Nophel said, and the old bitterness burned at the back of his throat. "She was my mother and she abandoned me; the Marcellan I serve took me in. It has been the place where I've been safest. But I've always worked only for myself."

"Your mother?" Peer asked, aghast.

"Mother," he said, nodding. "So this new Baker is something to me as well."

Malia snorted, then returned to the window. There was a barely suppressed panic about her, the sense that she could unravel at any minute. She carried such an aura of violence that Nophel did not want to be near her when that happened.

"You say you're a Watcher," Peer said.

"It's my outlook, yes."

"The man we seek, our friend-"

"Peer!" Malia shouted, but Peer turned to face Nophel.

"He came in from beyond Echo City."

"No!" the Watcher woman said. But she did not come closer, did not interfere.

"Now I fear the Dragarians might have him, and there's something happening deep down beneath the city, and the Hanharans will do nothing to prevent what might come next."

Nophel gasped, the breath knocked from him. Beyond the city? Dane knew… In his message, it's clear. But there was no bitterness that Dane had not shared his knowledge with him. And then Nophel thought of the Unseen and their fading ways, and he knew what he could do. Helping the Watchers might be the only sure way to get him closer to this new Baker. Closer to true vengeance.

If only they would believe him.

"I can help," he said. "You might not trust me, but my convictions are strong. First, though, will you tell me about this visitor?"

Malia remained by the window, not as horrified as she had sounded. She's in shock, Nophel thought. She lost friends today. He could not imagine what she felt, because he had never had a friend. And what did that make him? Stronger than they were, or weaker?

"Malia?" Peer asked.

The Watcher woman shrugged. "You've told him too much already. See what he has." She coughed a harsh, humorless laugh. "Can't put us in a worse position than we're in."

Peer dragged her chair over and sat before Nophel.

"How can you help?" she asked.

"I know people who can get into Dragar's. People like me. Unseen."

"Good," Peer said, and Malia watched with interest. "Our friend's name is Rufus Kyuss, and the old Baker-your mother-chopped him just before she died."

She told him everything she knew. It did not take very long and, as she spoke, Peer felt the unreality of events washing over her. Nophel sat quiet and still as she talked, and his emotions were difficult for her to discern through the growths on his face. Yet what he had said was as confusing as what she was telling him, and trying to absorb it all gave her a headache.

Penler should be here for this, she thought, and thinking of her friend gave her a hankering for those simpler times in Skulk. An outcast she might have been, but at least her days there had rhythms and her nights had been for sleeping, not planning.

"So you can help?" she asked at last. Nophel sighed and rested his head back against the wall.

"We have to go north," he said. "Just the three of us. There are people I know in the north of Marcellan Canton who might be able to get us inside Dragar's. Once in there…" He shrugged.

"What?" Malia demanded.

"I've seen them," he said. "Through the Scopes. I saw them swarming out, and they were… changed. No longer human."

"They've only been shut away for five hundred years," Peer said.

"Many in the city try to mimic the Bakers," he said, shrugging. "They must have been practicing their own chopping. Preparing for when their Dragar returned, ready to fight anywhere to regain him-in the air, on land, in the water."

"But none can match the Baker," Peer said, thinking of the three-legged whores she had seen, the soldiers with blade limbs, the builders with four arms. With their strange attributes was always infection and pain.

"Maybe not out here, no," Nophel said.

"Then we go north," Malia said. "Sitting here frigging ourselves won't get anything done."

"Shouldn't we tell someone?" Peer asked, then she realized what she sounded like: a scared little girl.

"Devin's dead," Malia said. "I'll leave a message here for Bethy, but there's no saying she'll find it. And we can't wait for Gorham."

"Can't we?"

"Who's to say they'll ever come up again?" Malia said.

Peer knew she was right. They had to go, and now. Into Dragar's Canton with Nophel, this man who claimed to be the old Baker's abandoned, shunned child and who now worked for a Marcellan who, he claimed, was actually a Watcher. How dangerous could it be?

"It's a long walk," Peer said, "and we'll need a reason to be traveling through Marcellan."

"I can also help with that," Nophel said. And for the first time since they had arrived there from the bloodied and burning barge, he smiled. It was grotesque.

"You'd better not be fucking with us," Malia said. "I mean it, ugly man."

Peer offered Nophel a smile, but he was looking down at his hands, turning them slowly in his lap as if willing them to disappear again. There was blood beneath his fingernails.

Nophel walked with his hood up, hiding away from the world, and thought: If this doesn't work, Malia the Watcher will kill me.

He took them east toward Marcellan Canton, the gentle slope rising closer and closer to the place he'd called home for so many years. The wall was visible in the distance-a pale facade catching the setting sun and unmarred today by crucifixions-and beyond that the hill rose steeper toward Hanharan Heights. The Heights themselves were visible only as a thin sliver pointing at the sky, and, as he looked that way, he thought of the Scopes up there and hoped that Dane was taking good care of them.

I'm never going back, he thought suddenly, and though he was unsure where the certainty came from, it hit him hard. He paused in the street and stared ahead, hoping that perhaps the Western Scope was looking back at him right now. He almost dropped his hood-but that would have been foolish. Without him to direct them, the Scopes would be all but mindless.

"If you give us away-" Malia whispered at Nophel's shoulder, and he spun around, right hand up before his face with fingers splayed.

"Do you see the blood?" he said softly. "Dry now. But I can still feel its warmth."

Malia glanced away uncertainly, but by the time she had gathered herself, Nophel was walking again. Foolish woman, he thought, and terrified. His heart was beating hard, though not from exertion-ascending and descending the viewing tower's steps had kept him fit over the years-but from nervousness.

If the entrance has been sealed… if the Blades are guarding it… if word has spread already of the deaths at the canal and there's a clampdown…

There was so much that could go wrong, and in Malia's eyes any fault would be his. But it was all he had left. His drive now-his aim, his reason for being-was to meet this new Baker and ask her for answers that her mother had never offered. And then…

The Bakers were freaks, monstrosities, more deformed than his simple physical differences. Their deformities were on the inside. To kill her would be everything he had lived for.

As they walked-Nophel in the lead, Malia a threatening presence at his back, and Peer, a gentle woman, bringing up the rear-Nophel considered just how much and how quickly everything had changed. After years as an outcast orphan, he had discovered that his mother's line was not ended as he had believed. And not only that, but -there's another of my mother's monsters loose in the city!

He looked forward to meeting this Rufus Kyuss-a man who, if what Peer claimed was true, had spent years living out in the Bonelands. And how could he have done that, if not for my mother's weird magic? The Blue Water sang in his veins, a thrumming potential kept at bay for now by its antidote. In time, perhaps, he would learn to master it himself.

Closing on the Marcellan Canton wall, he sensed Malia growing ever more nervous behind him. Her hand grabbed his shoulder at last.

"Where are you taking us?" she asked, moving close. He was not used to such proximity; most people shied away from him. He smelled her breath, stale and spicy.

"Trust me," he said. "It's around the next corner. You'll both know it, though you might have forgotten."

"Forgotten what?" Peer asked.

"Just another part of the city passed into Echo," he said.

The streets were busy here. A market was set up in the center of the wide road, with food stalls hawking their produce to those trying to make their way home before the sun set. The smells that vied for supremacy were mouthwatering, and Nophel realized that he had not eaten since leaving Dane Marcellan early that morning. But though his stomach rumbled, now was not the time. He walked past the food vendors and breathed in their promise.

The building on the street corner was a tavern, its drinkers spilling out onto the sidewalks, where they sat at rickety tables talking loudly about fighting and fucking. Occasionally there were whispers of Dragarians. Two women were arguing, four men watched, and a tall fat man seemed to be asleep in the middle of it all. He wore the Scarlet Blades uniform, but he'd removed his sword and laid it across the table before him. Drunk though he was, scruffy, pathetic, and apparently sleeping, still no one dared approach. The Blades were truly respected, and Nophel felt a frisson of fear over what he had done.

They'll hunt me, he thought. They'll find out who lived in the barge, and they're probably already hunting all of us. But as they passed the tavern and he saw the entrance to the alley farther along the street, he realized the truth: The Scarlet Blades were the least of their worries.

He turned down the alley and walked quickly into the shadows between two buildings, one a three-story rooming house, the other a shop selling jewelry and trinkets. Malia and Peer followed without question, and that was good. They had to act quickly.

"Follow me," Nophel said. "We can't be seen, and these entrances are checked by special troops within the Scarlet Blades."

"What entrances?" Peer asked.

"Follow." Farther along the alley, Nophel kicked aside burst trash bags, spilling rotten food and thousands of broken and crushed trinket beads. They skittered across the alley floor, some dropping into drains, others gathering in cracks in the paving. Beneath the bags was a metal cover, and Nophel curled his fingers into the recessed handles. He pulled hard, straining, then the cover broke free from its surroundings with a wet sucking sound.

"Down," he said.

"The Echoes?" Malia asked. "You're taking us north through the Marcellan Echoes?"

"Nowhere near as deep," Nophel said, and he almost smiled. "Trust me, I know what I'm doing."

Malia and Peer swapped glances, and he saw an acceptance there, though unwilling on Malia's part. I have them, he thought. The sense of power was not altogether unpleasant.

"What's down there?" Peer asked.

"Bellowers," Nophel said. "Quickly now. I'll explain on the way." He glanced back at the alleyway's entrance, expecting at any moment to see the scarlet blur of soldiers rushing them. His heart thumped, and he followed Peer into the hole.

Nophel heaved the cover back over them and shut out the last of the light. It was as black as the Chasm. They waited for a minute, breathing heavily in the darkness, until Malia spoke.

"So I suppose you can see in the dark as well?"

"No. I can only turn invisible. Behind you to the left, there should be oil torches on a wooden shelf." He heard Malia rustling and then the sound of metal against stone. Moments later a flint sparked several times and a torch came alight, its diffused glow filling the small corridor. Malia passed torches to Peer and Nophel, then stared him in the eye.

"This way," he said. She's staring at me. What does she see? But he knew what she saw: a deformed man with pustulating growths on his face and one good eye, who had worked for the Marcellans most of his life. She saw someone whose arrival had led to the death of her friends Devin and Brunley, the destruction of her home, and her being on the run from the Scarlet Blades. The only thing she can't see is who I really am.

He had not been down here for more than a decade, yet the corridor still felt familiar to him. It was dark and hidden, damp and musty, and it smelled of older times; most of the places he had spent his life were like that. It curved left and down, and though they passed several doors standing ajar, he knew to continue onward. These doors led to empty rooms, where once people were supposed to wait while the Bellowers were primed. I hope they're still alive, he thought. After all this, if we find them dead and the pods smashed, the women will not be pleased. Displeasing Malia was not something he wished to do.

The corridor ended at a wide metal door. Nophel worked the handle, pleased to feel it move. It squealed open.

"There's a lamp system," he said. "I'll try to fire it up." That also worked. With a series of soft pops, seventeen lamps fixed to the walls of the large chamber came alight one after another, each giving off thick black smoke for the first few beats as the flames scorched away dried oil. That worried Nophel, because it meant that no one had been down here for a while. But as long as the fluid tubes and distribution systems had maintained their integrity, he hoped that the Bellowers would still be alive.

"I'm not feeling happy about this," Peer said. "What is this place?"

"Yeah," Malia said, "enough of the fucking mystery."

"It was built while my mother was still alive," Nophel said. He headed across to a wide channel in the floor in which a large tubelike apparatus sat. "You're aware of the Scopes?"

"Of course," Peer said softly.

"They weren't the only commissions the Marcellans gave the Baker. There are other things in this city even now, and many more that have died out. I know most of them. I've visited some. They… interest me. And these are called the Bellowers." He pointed at the wall behind them, glad that the heavy curtains were still in place. "I'll show you one."

Malia and Peer stood behind Nophel as he drew the curtains open. He sensed their fascination and their fear; he still felt both those things himself. It would be unnatural not to in the presence of such a creature.

As the curtains slid aside, the Bellower awoke.

Peer gasped and stepped back into Malia, desperate to run but not wishing to turn her back. The Watcher woman grasped her arms and held her tight.

"Wait," she whispered into Peer's ear. "Let's give the ugly man a chance."

It was huge. Perhaps it had once been human, but all facets of humanity had been chopped away by the Baker. The Baker's mother, Peer thought, not the Baker I've met. But she was becoming confused over such matters, wondering whether there had ever been any real distinction between the two.

"It looks like it's been dormant for some time," Nophel said.

The thing's face was huge, the height of three people and just as wide. Shadows around its bristly head indicated a deep hollow behind it. And how large is the body on a thing like this? Peer thought. Do I really want to know? Could I even comprehend? It had two small eyes-perhaps the size of her fist-which remained closed, though she could see their leathery lids moving as its eyeballs rolled in dreamy sleep. Its skin was wrinkled and hard like old dried mud, and small creatures dashed across it, trying to escape the light in crevices or up the several large nostrils that dripped slick fluid to the floor. Its mouth was a wide closed seam, almost as wide as the head. Peer dreaded to know what was inside.

"It's monstrous," Malia said. "Just…"

"It's genius," Nophel said. "I hated her, but she was a genius."

"Hated?" Peer asked. He looked back at her, his face dark, the single eye glittering with what might have been anger, or tears, or both.

"I told you," he said, "she abandoned me."

Malia stepped forward past Nophel, her hand stretched out.

"Malia!" Peer said, but Nophel shook his head.

"It's harmless," he said. "And it'll get us close to Dragar's Canton quicker than any other way. I need to prime it." He pointed to several thick pipes protruding from the wall on either side of the Bellower's den. "While I work, ask your questions."

"What is it, and what does it do?" Malia said. "That'll do for a start." Peer could hear the awe in the Watcher woman's voice, and she was glad. Malia projected the image of a hard, bitter woman, but it was good to know she still could wonder.

"I don't know the source of the Bellowers, other than who made them."

"More than one?" Peer asked.

"Eight, all around the base of the Marcellan Canton wall. It's a circuit. A transport system, designed for use by everyone, mothballed by the Marcellans after the Baker's death."

"They didn't trust her anymore," Peer said.

Nophel snorted. "Partly that. They knew she was allied to the Watchers, and-"

"We know all about that," Malia said quietly. "No politics here. Just this." She was touching the Bellower's face, laying her hand on softly, lifting it away, moving to another place to touch again.

"They live much slower lives than we do," Nophel said. He was connecting tubes to metal nozzles sunk into the ground, twisting connectors that squealed as they turned. "This one might have been asleep for many moons. I can tell you what they do, but that doesn't mean I understand it. I'm not sure anyone does, now that she's dead."

"Nadielle will know," Peer said, and Nophel glanced at her sharply. "The new Baker."

"Perhaps," he said, connecting another tube. "This is all done through fluids. The Bellower takes it in and expels it in a controlled motion. It's called hydraulics." He nodded back at the center of the large chamber. "We go in that pod, the pod goes in front of its mouth, and once the fluid is flowing, it pushes us along the route."

"All around the Marcellan wall," Malia said.

"From one Bellower to the next. At each junction we move to a new pod, into the mouth of a new Bellower."

"Amazing," Peer said.

"It's horrible." Malia stepped back from the face, wiping her hand against her trousers. "It's monstrous, making something like this. Where's its purpose? What are its thoughts?"

"I'm not certain it has any," Nophel said, pausing for a moment. "The Scopes seem content to do what they're made to do."

"But they were people before, and now…"

"I never said what she did was right," Nophel said. "Only that she was a genius. This new Baker does things differently?"

"Yes," Peer said, but Malia only frowned, and Peer knew what she was thinking about. The Pserans, those flying things down there, others-all given purpose and form by Nadielle but denied the one thing that any living thing must naturally desire: freedom.

"It's connected," Nophel said. "And it's awake." He backed away, and Peer saw the Bellower open its eyes.

They were as black as soot, glittering with moisture. They rolled left and right, but such was their uniform darkness that she could not tell exactly where they looked.

"It sees?" she asked.

"I've never really known." Nophel walked along the wall a little, until he reached a series of large metal wheels. As he turned the first, the sound of rushing fluid filled the chamber, and the first of the thick tubes sprang upright as it was filled. The Bellower shivered and rolled its eyes again, and its whole body shifted in its massive hole. The ground shook.

It's enjoying this, Peer thought. But as Nophel turned the other wheels and the rest of the tubes started to pump fluid, she could not decide whether the creature was shivering in pleasure or pain. Its inhuman eyes gave away nothing.

Nophel moved to the pod and began to pull at a tall lever set in the floor beside it. Metal gears cranked, chains strained and buzzed with tension, and the pod shifted backward toward the creature.

It opened its mouth. The stench was horrendous, a stink so rich it was almost visible, and Peer pressed a hand over her mouth and nose.

"Smells like some of the taverns I've been in," Malia muttered.

Peer laughed. She couldn't help it, and it felt good. It came from deep in her gut, bending her over double, and it drove away circling memories of the dead Scarlet Blades, Gorham's betrayal, the Baker and her monstrous creations. It sounded good as well, filling the chamber with something other than awed whispers. As she looked up at the Bellower, its eyes seemed to roll toward her, and its mouth opened that little bit wider.

Malia stared at her with one eyebrow raised, one corner of her mouth lifted. Perhaps that was as close to laughter as she came.

"Into the pod," Nophel said, unaffected. "We don't have long until it bellows."

Peer composed herself, wiping tears from her eyes and wondering exactly what she had been laughing at. Some madness in there, she thought, imagining how Penler would have looked at her, his old, wise eyes seeing the truth. Once more she wished he was there with her, and as she approached the pod she felt an aching loneliness.

The pod was now positioned directly in front of the Bellower, its glass lid raised. Inside were nine flattened seats, footrests, and hand hoops; a series of small holes speckled every surface.

"Hurry!" Nophel said. He was becoming impatient, glancing back and forth between pod and Bellower, and his edginess did away with the dregs of Peer's humor. She felt flat and empty once again, and the future seemed darker still.

Malia climbed into the front seat, reclining until her shoulders and head were supported by the upholstered wooden rests. Peer sat behind her and stretched back.

"Press your feet hard against the supports," Nophel said, climbing in behind them. "Hold the rings on either side, settle your head firmly against the rest. When we go, it will press you backward. It'll be… strange."

"Have you done this before?" Peer asked, but Nophel ignored her.

"I'll hit the lever soon, but usually someone outside does it. The moment I hit it, the process begins, and I'll have beats to get inside and close the lid."

"Nophel?" Peer prompted.

"No," he said, "never. Always looked too dangerous to me." She thought perhaps she heard a smile in his voice, but she was already pressed against the seat. A staggering potential vibrated the air in the chamber.

"Deep breath," Nophel said. He shoved the lever and jumped into the pod behind Peer, setting it swaying. The glass lid closed on top of them, so close to her face that she thought she could stick out her tongue and touch it. It was dusty and gritty on the outside, obscuring her vision of the chamber. When she exhaled, her breath misted the glass.

"If you did believe in any god, now would be the time to pray," Nophel's muffled voice said. And then he giggled.

What the crap has he brought us into? Peer had time to wonder, and then her world was torn apart.

Once, before the Hanharans had declared Mino Mont's traveling fairgrounds blasphemous because of their artificial stimulation of ecstatic terror and awe, her mother had taken her to one. She was a child then, maybe ten years old, and the smells, sights, and sounds of the fair had remained with her ever since. She'd never seen anything like it. Men and women walked through the crowds on stilts a dozen steps high, dropping roasted nuts into willing hands, urging people to try this ride or that, or the phantom rooms, or the crushed-mirror swamp. Huge creaking structures of wood, metal, and rope rose all around, with oil lamps burning different colored and scented oils and casting their soft light over the whole scene. And it was one of these structures that had grabbed Peer's attention from the moment she first saw it.

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