Echo City (17 page)

Many other people chose to walk or ride in tusked-swine-pulled trailers. The streets smelled of cooking food, dust-tainted steam, ale and wine from one of the taverns doing a
brisk dusk trade, and swine shit. Nophel walked confidently, enjoying the looks of befuddlement as he passed people by. Perhaps some glimpsed a flicker of what he was, but then the Blue Water influence would work its mystery upon their senses, and he’d be gone before they knew why they felt so confused or unsettled. More than one person stopped in their tracks and started to talk to him—but found themselves muttering into thin air. Some blushed and hurried on, heads bowed so that they did not have to see any observers’ smiles or looks of concern. Others headed straight into taverns or restaurants, where the food and drink would divert them. Only a few turned and watched him leave, not seeing, not knowing, but watching nonetheless. These, Nophel guessed, were the ones most likely to suffer nightmares.

He had no wish to inspire nightmares. He bore no ill will toward anyone alive. But this disguise would soon become a necessity, and he kept that in mind as he walked on. And there
was
that subtle feeling of power that he had experienced only once before.

Then, he’d been alone in his rooms. The walls had been lined with fewer books, the furniture slightly less worn and shaped to his bones and flesh, and he’d waited while they went to find his mother.

Nophel was the god of quiet things, and though cloaked in the Blue Water’s strange effect, he still kept to the shadows beside buildings, seeking out streets and alleys that were quieter than most. Once he slipped on some damp cobbles and went sprawling, crying out as his elbow struck the ground. He looked around to see who had noticed and rolled into the mouth of a recessed doorway. Breathing hard, his heart thumping, he rubbed his elbow as the tingling pain lessened.

Someone laughed.

Nophel caught his breath and looked around. The darkening street seemed deserted. It was lined with residential buildings with tall windows and closed doors, and there was a series of scaffold towers where these old places were being built over. The laughter came again, high and gleeful, and he leaned out of the doorway and looked along the street. Three
children were playing catch a few houses along, bouncing the ball off a building’s façade and seeing who could catch it first. The smallest and youngest of the three laughed each time she threw or caught. The other two played silently.

Nophel did not understand children, but for a beat this sight gave him pause.

He moved on, the feeling of power subdued now, driven down by the force of expectation hanging over him. Dane had sent him out on his own—no one from the Council’s famed and brutal Inner Guard to accompany him, and no Scarlet Blades—and he’d done so because he trusted Nophel.
You have their ear
, Dane had once said, standing on the roof and watching Nophel tend and turn the Scopes.
They’re my brothers and sisters
, Nophel had replied, and that was one of the few times he’d ever seen a look of fear on the fat politician’s face. Cosseted from reality, such a man rarely had to confront such mystifying truths.

Nophel walked through the night, traversing the wealthy areas of Marcellan, where huge houses were surrounded by gardens so vast and lush that the buildings were almost invisible from the streets. Many Scarlet Blades patrolled these areas, their garb more refined than most Blades’ clothing, their weapons polished, their attitude one of reserved watchfulness rather than the casual superiority exuded by Blades elsewhere in Echo City. They walked in pairs, conversing quietly as they passed from one splash of oil-lamp light to the next. Nophel stood aside in the shadows, thrilling at the feeling of being so close. A couple of Blades paused in their stride and conversation, looking around with hands on the handles of their renowned weapons—the knowledge to cast and fold such swords was long-lost, though many attempted to re-create their qualities—but eventually their companions urged them on.
You’re seeing shadows
, they said, or,
It’s just the breeze, the wind, a phantom
. And Nophel passed through, the god of quiet things, still finding shadows to his liking, though he went unseen.

Close to dawn, nearing Marcellan Canton’s sheer outer wall, he waited patiently while a street trader set up his food stall
and started cooking diced chickpig and pancakes for the breakfast trade. When the big man sauntered off to piss behind a tree, Nophel snapped up a pancake, smeared the steaming meat across its surface, spooned on dart-root sauce, folded it, and tucked it beneath his coat. He hurried past the pissing man, unsure whether the food would be visible. Rounding a corner, he saw the canton wall, and he climbed fifty-six steps to its ramparts to eat. Relishing the first hot mouthful, he sighed and took in the view.

Beyond the wall began the gorgeous green farmland of the northern arm of Crescent. Three miles away, beyond the haze already rising from the rashpoison canal the Dragarians had built hundreds of years before to protect their privacy, he could see the massive domes that made up Dragar’s Canton. They seemed to float above the haze, like giant stoneshrooms sprouting from the heart of the land. Just to the east, the rising sun glanced from the surface of the Northern Reservoir.

I saw something open, something come out, and it closed again, and what I saw …

He shook his head and took another bite, and that was when he noticed the woman sitting to his left. She was perhaps fifty steps away, seated on one of the many stone benches that littered the head of the great Marcellan wall. Long, loose hair, a pale face, the worn, tattered uniform of a Scarlet Blade who had seen one too many battles or drunk through one too many nights of decadence. She was alone. And she was looking directly at him.

Nophel paused with the last chunk of pancake held against his lips. He glanced in the other direction.
No, fool, don’t pretend, she’s looking at you!

When he glanced back, she was already walking toward him. She was tall and thin and ragged, but her stride was strong and confident. She paused a few steps away, staring directly at his disfigured face without reaction.

Nophel leaned to his left, and her eyes followed him. She frowned, then smiled slightly. Amused, but only a little.

“New?” she asked.

“What?”

“You. New? Yeah, a new one. So what did they tell you?”

“I’m sorry …” Nophel said, shaking his head.

“The Marcellans—what did they offer you if you drank that fucking stuff?”

They died, they all died
, he thought, but already he knew that was wrong.
No … they
disappeared.

“Doesn’t matter,” the woman said. She held out her hand, and with a wry, cynical smile said, “I’m Alexia, of the
other
Echo City. Welcome to the world of the Unseen.”

   He followed her along the head of the wall to a stone spiral staircase leading down to the street. A woman turned at the sound of footsteps, but Nophel was sure it was only his that she heard. Alexia was as silent as she was invisible.

At the foot of the wall, she headed back into the warren of Marcellan streets. There was no explanation, no glance over her shoulder. Nophel followed, and even if he decided to follow no more, he was not entirely sure he could simply stop.
How many?
he was wondering.
How many have tried the Blue Water over the last twenty years? How many have been
forced
to try it?

They stopped outside a sunken door leading to a building all but subsumed beneath a new structure. Not yet an Echo, this was a place soon to be forgotten. He supposed it was an apt hiding place.

“Here we are,” Alexia said. “We go downstairs. Quietly.” She spoke in the clipped, brusque tones of the military, but though she still wore a tattered uniform, the dyed armbands of rank had either faded or been deliberately bleached away. As she pushed open a heavy wooden door and entered a large, low-ceilinged room, Nophel found himself facing a dozen frightened people.

“There’s no breeze,” one of them said. Nobody responded. They were all looking directly at Nophel, and he felt naked and insecure, baking in their regard.

Alexia walked into the room, between several seated people. They were playing a tabletop version of lob dice, the dice now abandoned. She paused at the head of a staircase, glanced back, and smiled. “Come on,” she said, and they didn’t even hear her. “You’ll get used to it.”

Suddenly I don’t want to
, Nophel thought. He walked through the room, stepping lightly, careful not to nudge past anyone. The people remained staring at the opened front door, and as Nophel reached the staircase and started descending after Alexia, a man stood.

“I’ll do it, then,” he growled, striding to the door and slamming it shut. “You’re all chickpig cocks.”

“Yeah, and you’re so brave, Mart,” a woman said, snorting like a chickpig. The forced humor lifted the atmosphere a little. As Nophel went down the curved staircase out of sight, he heard the clatter of dice once more.

Alexia turned left and walked along a narrow, tatty corridor, then entered a doorless room where four other people sat. They looked up as Alexia entered, their eyes going wide when they saw Nophel.

“Got a new one,” Alexia said.

“That’s the dead Baker’s son!” one of the other Unseen gasped. “He’s the one that tends the Scopes.”

“I know who he is,” Alexia said.

Nophel paused in the doorway and looked around the room. There were a few broken chairs but no other furniture. No food. No water bottles. This was nowhere near a home, and he wondered what these people were doing here.

“Are you dead?” he asked, the question unforced and unconscious.

They laughed, some more than others. Alexia smiled. “No,” she said.

“Yes,” someone else said. Another Unseen shrugged.

Nophel focused inward, sensing the solid part of himself that had never let go since his mother had abandoned him. It was strong, this part, and rooted in the real world, because even back then he’d known that he would need a solid foundation to survive. When he opened his one good eye again, the people were all looking at him.

“Still here,” Alexia said.

“You all drank the Blue Water?” he asked. They nodded.
My mother’s Blue Water
. He wondered if they knew, and if they’d blame him if they did. He hoped not.

“Did they force you?” Alexia asked.

Nophel shook his head. “I’m here to find something.”

“Something from out of Dragar’s.”

Nophel could only nod.
How does she know so much?

“We’ve been watching,” she said. “Sometimes …” She trailed off, her thin face falling slack.

“Sometimes what?” Nophel asked. Alexia stared at him.

“New?” she asked.

“You’ve already asked me that.”

“I have?”

Nophel took a step back into the corridor. The walls were rotting here, the plaster damp and weak, and the joints between floorboards were wide and decayed. Small insects crawled in and out of the space between floors, appearing, disappearing again, and most of them had probably never been seen.

“We’ve seen what you want,” Alexia said from the room. There was no plea to her voice, and no hint of threat. Simply a statement of fact.

“Who are you all?” Nophel asked.

“The Unseen,” Alexia said. “I told you that. We’re like you.”

“No, I can go back. I can—”

“Is that what they told you?” She came and stood at the doorway, the others shifting slightly behind her, moving in a strange, fluid way.

“I know it,” Nophel said.

Alexia only nodded. “It’s how most of us thought, to begin with. It’s a way to try to handle it.”

“You
are
dead,” Nophel said, and Alexia chuckled at that.

“Sometimes we wish,” she said, “but no. Not dead. Just … faded.”

Nophel leaned against the door frame and looked into the room. The other Unseen were still there, but the room seemed hazy, incomplete.

“And we fade more and more,” Alexia whispered. “Some become invisible even to the Unseen, and who’s to say …?” She shrugged, as though loath to consider her future.

Dane would never have lied to me
, Nophel thought.
Not if he’d known about this
. “My mother made the Blue Water,” he said.

“We know.” For the first time, there was a sliver of ice in the Unseen woman’s eye.

“So you’ll know that she was my mother only in blood. In every other way, she was nothing to me.”

“Defending yourself?” Alexia asked, then offered a humorless smile. “It’s widely known you helped kill her.”

Nophel nodded. “So, Dragar’s Canton. Tell me what you saw.”

“I can do better than that,” Alexia said. “We captured it. Come with me and I’ll show you.”

When they reach the surface, the sun casts its light on the sheer tiled steeple of a Hanharan temple. A man is standing on the precarious iron balustrade around the temple’s summit. He’s reaching up for the stone birthshard—Echo City’s outline balanced in the palm of an outstretched hand—which is the eternal symbol of Hanharan’s birth and continuing love for the city. He’s stretching, and Rufus—