Echo City (10 page)

Crawling to the mouth of the alley, she looked east and saw several plumes of smoke about a mile away. They did not seem to be rooted to the ground but floated on the breeze.

Three more explosions came, bursting in the air like rapidly blooming roses, spewing sparks followed by thin limbs of smoke. The colors were bright and varied, and each explosion flowered and spread differently. She had seen skyfires before many times, during street parties to celebrate an important Marcellan’s birthday or to mark the execution of another Pretender. But they were always a weak, sputtering affair. Never anything like this. These filled the sky.

“What?” Rufus said behind her. He’d crawled up close, and now he clung on to the leg of her trousers, shaking.

“Penler,” Peer said. “Full of surprises.”

She looked across the Levels at the three guard towers. Two of them were abuzz with activity as Border Spites climbed or
slid down the rope ladders splayed around their legs. Atop the third tower—the farthest to the west—she could see three guards shielding their eyes as they watched the skyfires.

Go
, she thought.
Relieve your boredom. See what’s happening
.

“We’ll give it a few moments,” she said. “Then we go.” Some of the guards started along the northern boundary of the Levels, the sun glinting from their weapons.
This is madness
, she thought, but she shoved that idea aside. Penler was doing this for her, and if he’d thought there was a chance of her being caught, he’d have suggested otherwise.

It was up to her to make sure his trust was not mislaid.

“Follow me,” she said, turning to make sure Rufus understood. He nodded. “Stay close behind me. Stay low.” She indicated what she meant with her hand. He nodded again.
He understands more than he says, or can say
. But that was another mystery to unravel later.
One breath at a time
, as her poor dead mother used to say. Peer took in a deep breath and left the cover of the buildings.

There were several heavy coughs to the east, and Peer saw smoke trails lifting objects high above the Levels. Upon exploding, they splashed a palette of colors across the sky, and the falling flames twisted around one another like dancing silk snakes. They were unlike any skyfires she had ever seen or heard of before. The sparks did not extinguish but kept spitting and dancing in the air, each one seemingly in concert with those around it. Shapes were formed and dispersed again, as if teasing—fighting rockzards, a diving rathawk plucking its prey from the air, wisps swooping toward and around one another without ever actually touching. For a second she stood amazed, before realizing that this display was not meant for her.

There was more movement way across the Levels, as guards streamed along the border.

Keeping low, Peer headed across, with Rufus following. She had been right about the rains—her boots quickly sank in thick mud. She felt it oozing over the boots’ lips and touching her shins, her ankles, and she imagined it as the
dust of history. So much was mixed up in this wet, rancid stew. The ruins of whole districts, the pulverized remains of neighborhoods where people had once lived, loved, and died on their own terms.

She heard Rufus behind her, his own boots sucking at the muck as he walked.

Of the three towers in sight, she aimed for the one in the middle. She’d seen the guards abandon that one, and though there were still Border Spites manning the tower to their left, she hoped they would be able to slip past unseen.
Keep them firing
, she thought, hoping that Penler had a long supply of whatever he was using. Hardly magic, but it was close enough.

They passed tumbled walls, where weeds had grown out of the dust and smothered a building’s remains. Peer saw movement among the plants and kept her distance, in case they were biting or stinging things.

Penler’s skyfires continued to dance. She stole occasional glances their way, awed and thankful.
He’s not like us
, a woman had once told Peer about Penler, soon after she’d arrived in Skulk. They were drinking together in a tavern, watching the old man buying a fresh bottle of wine.
He’s got something about him
. Peer had smiled at the time, not sure what the woman meant, and over the next couple of years she had mostly forgotten those words. But now the woman’s voice rang back to her. It was how the most superstitious among them described someone who dipped into what were considered the darkest of arts.

Halfway across the Levels, she squatted behind a mound of weed-choked rubble, and Rufus did the same. He was following quietly and calmly, keeping low, and she wondered how terrified he must be.

“A rest,” she said, rubbing her aching hip. Rufus nodded. She peered around the mound, and now that the other side of the Levels was close, she could scan it for movement. There was nothing. Gray buildings faced them, most of them low but a few consisting of several stories. The architecture here was sparse and functional, but the buildings all contained the familiar arched windows of old Course design.
There could
be anyone watching from behind those
, Peer thought, but that way lay defeat. If she became overcautious, they’d never move again.

She was still quite certain that two of the towers were deserted, but she was no longer sure about the third. She’d seen no movement there for a while. It could be that the Border Spites had gone to witness the fantastical skyfires after all, or maybe they were hunkered down even now, scrutinizing the Levels for the movement one of them swore he’d just seen. If that was the case, they’d do their best not to be seen themselves.

Peer’s heart raced, blood thumping in her ears. She’d heard stories about what the guards did to anyone caught trying to flee Skulk. She stretched her right arm, wincing as the air shards twisted against flesh, muscle, and bone. At least her hip was not too painful. Penler had been right; he’d done a good job with that.

“Follow me,” she said, and without looking back she started again for the other side.

It did not take long but felt like forever. Three years before, Peer had been forced to watch as a Marcellan torturer shoved a selection of air shards through her arm, and the eyes she felt upon her now hurt almost as much. Whether they were real or imaginary she did not know, but that mattered little.

Panting, sweating, her heart racing at the certainty that they would be caught, she pressed up against the side of a building in Course Canton.
Three years
, she thought, but the stone beneath her skin felt no different.

The last of Penler’s skyfires was fading as it floated slowly to the ground. Crimson sparks turned to a deep, rich blue, landing across the Levels and remaining lit for a while. Blue was Peer’s favorite color. Penler knew that.

Her breathing slowing, Peer spent a moment looking back across at Skulk. She felt a curious sense of loss. Among the true criminals over there were wonderful people, whose imaginations and intellects had steered them to beliefs that resulted in banishment. She had been herself in Skulk. Now, back in Echo City, deception was to rule her life.

She nodded to Rufus, smiled, and led the way cautiously into a wide, empty street. And it was only as she began to believe they had escaped that they were caught.

   The stupid thing was, she smelled the piss from thirty steps away. An hour earlier, she would have known what that meant and hidden. But her body could take only so much tension, and her sense of caution had given way to a sloppy belief in their good fortune.

We make it back
, she thought,
and the first thing I smell is chickpig piss
. But it was not a chickpig pissing, and as the Border Spite stepped from a doorway farther along the street, still pulling up her trousers, Peer reached for her sword.

She had never killed or stabbed anyone in her life. The nearest she’d come to a fight had been with a drunken fat man, a year after arriving in Skulk, when he’d stumbled into her as she sat on the city wall. He’d drawn a sword and she’d pulled her knife, but he dropped his blade and started laughing before vomiting on her shoes. Leaving him in his own puke, trailing the stink behind her as she walked home, she’d wondered what the outcome would have been had he been not quite so drunk.

The Border Spite drew a short sword in her right hand, a triangular object in her left, and ran at them.

Peer unconsciously took a step back, nudging into Rufus. The sword handle felt cold and slippery in her grasp. “Hide!” she rasped.

The soldier brought the wooden object to her lips.
Poison darts
, Peer thought, but then a mournful whistling broke the loaded silence.

From behind her, a cough. She thought perhaps Rufus was gasping in fear, but then something struck the Border Spite’s face. The Spite dropped her sword and wooden horn, took in a shuddery, loud breath, and started raking at her eyes. She went to her knees less than a dozen steps away, and Peer saw every degree of agony on the young woman’s face. Her nails scratched ragged gashes across her eyelids and cheeks. Her mouth hung open, and pink foam bubbled from between her teeth. At last she fell forward, convulsing, hands now held just away from her face as if contact was too painful.

Peer turned. Rufus stood with his eyes and mouth open in shock, his arm held before him, and something in his hand. It was black and bulky, and a curl of smoke rose from its open end.

“Rufus, what did you …?” She looked at the weapon and had no idea what she saw.

The shock slowly fading from his face, Rufus lowered his hand, never taking his eyes from the fallen Spite. She was still now, her chest motionless. Deep-red blood had replaced the foam issuing from her mouth.

He pulled something on the object and a small lid hinged up, revealing a huddle of egglike objects inside. “Wrath-spider,” he said.

Shaking, Peer started to walk, passing the dead guard and trying not to look at the mess her face had become. But she could not help glancing down.
Did her fingernails really do all that?
she thought. Probably not. Beneath the stench of blood was something like burning.

She heard Rufus following her. When she’d first seen him coming across the desert, she was shocked, excited, and filled with a sense of hope. Now she was afraid.

They left the body behind and hurried into Course Canton. After passing through a small park where yellow wisps flitted through trees surrounding a lake, they saw a group of normal people. No swords were on show; no panic or surprise crossed their faces. One young woman smiled at Peer, and Peer found it easier than she’d suspected to find a smile to return.
I’m free
, she thought, but immediately following that came the idea that had been forming since bidding farewell to Penler.

Free, yes, but now her life had become a lie. And with Rufus walking beside her, she began to suspect that made two of them.

   Since hearing the sounds from below, Bellia Ton had spent more time than ever reading the river. The Tharin was wide here, just a mile from where it passed out beneath the city wall and back into the desert from whence it came. It was as dead when it left the city as when it arrived, but water carried
knowledge, picking up a little of the ground it passed through. Most people could not understand this, and many did not believe. That suited Bellia well. Dead the river might be, but she was its disciple.

She knew the river and its banks well, and now she was down on a rock that jutted into the waterway, bare feet dangling into the flow. It parted around her ankles, churning a soft white against her old skin.

Bellia took one more look around. There were no residential buildings here, the area given over mostly to the tall water-refinery towers and their attendant structures, pools, culverts, and canals. The tower closest to her was also the newest, rebuilt after the attacks thirty years before, and like a youngster among older friends, it puffed steam and churned its parts with more gusto than the others. Its base was invisible to Bellia, hidden by a fold in the land, but she had walked past it many times before. The mountains of rotting extract stank. After all this time, still no one knew exactly what it was they filtered from the water. The mountain grew, just as the city rose, and in the Echoes there were hardened piles of that extract, still as mysterious as history.

She breathed in deeply and smelled the river: stale and dead, light and fleeting. It took the Tharin a day to flow through the city, and the waters that made it this far smelled and looked even more alien than where they’d entered.

And that was why Bellia chose this place to read.

She took in a deep, calming breath and closed her eyes. Imagining the water scouring away the flesh from her ankles and feet, then abrading the bones themselves, she became one with the river, the stumps of her lower legs barely touching the water. Her blood flowed with the Tharin, still linked to her through memory. She read its course into the city, along the steepening valley formed by the built-up land surrounding it. She frowned through the darkness where the river passed underground into the Echoes beneath Marcellan Canton, pulling away from the sense of endless space that existed where it split and poured some of itself down the Falls. That place was always so dark …

She gasped and fell back, striking her head on the rock.
Trying to lift her feet from the river, she found them held fast, the water pulling them down like wet sand.

“Something new!” she screeched, because she had felt a part of the city that should not be there. “Something
wrong!”
There was more to know, but she wanted to learn no more. That brief insight had been so cold, and through everything she had ever read of the city, its dark histories, its inhabitants, and the things that dwelled among them, she had never been so afraid.

Bellia managed to haul her feet from the river at last and scrambled up the bank, gathering her long skirts to her knees so that she could run. Craving the oblivion she would find in the End Wall Tavern, she sprinted through the deserted water districts of Mino Mont.