Echo City (26 page)

“Take care of her,” he whispered. Malia nodded. She knew about grief and loss, and as Gorham watched them crossing the bridge, he felt comforted knowing that Peer was in good hands.

“Thank you,” Nadielle said when the others were out of earshot. He had never heard her sound so vulnerable, and when she slipped an arm around his waist and kissed his cheek, he wanted to push her away, hear her say something cutting or derisive. He needed her back to how she always was, because weakness did not sit well with the Baker.

“What the crap is this, Nadielle?”

“I’m not sure. I have suspicions.” She shivered, hugging her arms across her chest and nodding at the short woman. “She’ll help us find out, one way or another.”

“You say we’re going deep. To talk to the Garthans? Is she chopped from one of them?”

“I’ve already spoken with the Garthans,” Nadielle said. “And you’re right, they’re scared. That’s why we’re going deeper than that.”

Gorham felt his stomach drop, and the hairs on his arms prickled. “Deeper …”

“Down past the deepest Echo. Deeper than history.”

“To the Chasm,” Gorham whispered.

“Something is rising from there. I have to know what.”

Something is rising
 … Gorham looked at the chopped woman, her wide, dulled eyes, and wondered what in the name of every god true or false she could know.

   They returned to the Baker’s laboratories to gather equipment and so that Nadielle could secure her rooms against intruders. She went about things with a distracted air, and several times Gorham tried to speak to her. But events had taken on a weight of their own, and she remained silent and distant.

The two surviving Pserans were nowhere to be seen. The thin, slick man who sometimes welcomed Gorham was also absent, and as the Baker’s womb vats bubbled and scratched into the stillness, it resembled a very lonely place.

The small woman sat on a metal chair close to one of the vats, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. Her eyes were wide. She appeared to be listening.

Nadielle called Gorham through to her rooms, then opened a trapdoor he had never seen before. “Go down,” she said. “Fetch ropes, climbing equipment, and weapons.”

He went to Nadielle and reached out to touch her face. She pulled back.

“Go,” she said. Then she turned away and slipped out into the vast womb-vat hall.

Gorham glanced around, remembering sweeter times he had spent in here with Nadielle. She had always been a demanding lover, and it crossed his mind now that he had sometimes mistaken a base desperation for passion. All those times he had felt were keen and honest were now taking on a sheen of betrayal. He closed his eyes and tried to remember making love with Peer, but too much time had passed and it was like recalling the memories of a friend.

Cursing, he descended through the trapdoor. The room at the bottom of the short ladder contained a hoard of objects from the city above. He shook his head in wonder at what Nadielle could achieve and went about gathering equipment for their journey.

We’re going down
, he thought, and once again he shut off the terror that held for him. There were phantoms and Garthans down there, and other creatures less known. Places unseen, old histories built upon, pressed down, hidden away for many eons …

He found a rope, good and strong. He shouldered it and picked up a wire ring of crampons and a hammer. The most he’d ever climbed was the side of a two-story building.

The Echoes were places of darkness and forgotten things, and anything could exist in their blackest depths. There were tales of giant sightless lizards and serpents formed entirely from shadows that made the old buried places their homes; it was said that packs of wild dogs had gone blind in the darkness and found their way by smell and sound alone. And then there was the Lost Man. Some said he was a phantom craving the luxury of flesh once more. Others claimed he was an outcast from the earliest rule of the Marcellans, adhering to some ancient religion long since dead in the city above. Sent down, he had lost track of time, and time had lost him, his body adjusting to eternal night and eschewing the passing of days to give him a vastly extended life. This version of the story claimed that he was
happy
to live here—and that he delighted when an occasional meal got lost in the Echoes and wandered into his domain.

“Shit!” Gorham cursed as he dropped the hammer on his foot. He hopped several times, then retrieved the hammer and took some deep breaths.

Farther down, deep at the ancient root of the city, was the Chasm—bottomless, the place where the Falls and the city’s dead found their end, and—

Something is rising!

“Weapons,” he said, standing before the wall where all manner of martial equipment hung. He chose two small crossbows and several racks of bolts, a bag of poisoned dust globes, and some throwing knives. He carried his own short sword and gutting knife, neither of which he’d ever had to use, though he remembered drawing the sword one evening in a tavern three years before, just after Peer had gone and he drank each night to try to forget.

Something is
rising!

“That’s enough,” he said. The room was darker than it had been, wasn’t it? The atmosphere heavier? He glanced around and saw two doors he hadn’t noticed before, one in each of the room’s far corners, and without opening them he knew they led somewhere deeper, to rooms stacked with more things that Nadielle had stolen from somewhere in the city above. But right then he had no desire to discover those things.

“Nadielle?” He went back up into her room, looking at the unmade bed and remembering her chuckling against his neck, and from the vat chamber beyond he heard a sound unlike anything he had ever heard in his life. Perhaps babies being fed alive to rockzards would screech like this, or someone having their bones eaten from the inside, or people dipped into boiling oil—the terrible sound echoed and reverberated, gripping on to his mind with tenacious claws, though he would never want such a memory. He dropped the ropes and weapons and clapped his hands over his ears, screaming to try to drown the noise but succeeding only in adding to it.

Shoving through the door, the first thing he saw was the small woman still sitting on her chair, staring into the distance as if all were quiet. She blinked her heavy eyelids and licked her lips.

The sound was fading, and the room was filling with a haze that carried the rancid stench of innards. Gasping, swallowing hard to try to pop his ears, Gorham hurried to the side wall and looked along at the womb vats.

“Nadielle!”

“Here, Gorham,” she replied, and he saw movement on top of the third vat. She raised one hand in a slow greeting, then waved at him. “You might want to stand back.”

A hundred questions could find no release, because time would not allow them. There
was
no time; Gorham realized that now. He felt the urgency of the Baker’s every action and movement, which had surely been translated to him much earlier but only now made itself known. Something was rising, and Rufus had arrived, and
of course
the two were connected.

The vat upon which the Baker sat began to change.
Though Gorham had never dared touch one, he’d always assumed them to be cast from some metal—thick and heavy and strong. The rough wooden buttresses holding them upright supported that supposition. Now the vat began to flex and crack.

Nadielle looked down into the womb vat, and Gorham wondered what she saw.

He blinked, convinced at first that his eyes were blurring from the stinking mist in the air. But then the vat deformed, something inside pushing out, extending the shell, and finally bursting through in a spray of foul fluid. An arm first, longer than a normal human’s arm and tipped with an array of spiked bone protuberances. Its skin was milky and translucent and streaked with globs of thick red matter. The second arm slipped through the gap and worked at widening it, slicing with those bony blades. And then that terrible screeching came again, bursting up from the vat in another pressurized spray. Nadielle held her hands in front of her eyes, but she did not change position. As the cry died away, she looked down, and in her eyes Gorham saw the love of a mother for her child.

He pressed back against the wall, and when he looked at the small woman sitting farther along the room, she was looking at him at last. Her wide eyes were still blank, her hair framing her long narrow face, and a streak of spurted fluid had plastered her dress to her hip. But she seemed not to notice.

“Don’t be afraid,” Nadielle said, her voice carrying over the wet sounds from the tearing vat.

“If you say so,” Gorham muttered, and he watched one of the Baker’s creations being birthed. The vat opened, thick rips in its side spreading and allowing the thing inside to emerge. Both of its arms were in the open now, grasping at the air as if trying to gain purchase. Its head followed, then its body, hips, and legs. It fell to the solid ground with a wet thump, screaming again as it tried to stand. Fluid spilled out around it. The air steamed and stank. The vat spewed a thick flow of afterbirth, spattering down around the emerged shape.

It was the size of a big man, its hair dark, long, and matted across its shoulders and back. When it lifted its head and mewled, Gorham saw its face for the first time. It was a very
human face, he thought, with an expression of startled delight at being free. He saw the fully formed teeth in its mouth, some of them longer and sharper than normal, and he concentrated on its eyes, because the rest of its body was far from human. Very far. It looked at him and smiled, dribbling slightly, and Gorham looked away.

“Gorham, don’t be afraid,” Nadielle said again. She slid down the side of the vat and landed with a splash. The vat hung open and steaming, but already the gap the thing had emerged through seemed to be shrinking. The huge container was repairing itself, as walls lifted and wooden buttresses shoved upward.

When Gorham looked at the newborn again, it was already on its feet. It was using its bladed hands to scrape the wet stuff from its hairless skin. Its legs were long and thin, ending in feet that sprouted thick spines. There were also spines projecting an arm’s length along its backbone, flexing and spiking at the air as they stretched. Even as he watched, Gorham saw its skin darkening and hardening. The sound its blades made as they slicked moisture from skin turned from a clean, soft hiss to a harder scraping. In contact with the air at last, it was developing armor before his eyes.

Nadielle stood before her newly chopped creation. It was more than a head taller than she was. Gorham watched, fascinated and appalled, as the thing knelt on bony knees and rested its head on Nadielle’s shoulder. She stroked its hair and kissed its head, glancing over its shoulder at Gorham and waving him closer.

He shook his head, but she persisted. “Come here, Gorham,” she said. “Meet my new child. It’s strong and hard, and it knows how to fight and kill. But more than that, it knows how to protect. I want to teach it who to protect, so come here.”

As he went, fear was slowly merging with wonder. He’d just witnessed something incredible. “You’ve chopped a warrior?”

“I’ve been working on him for some time. Will you name him?”

The thing was looking at Gorham now, its eyes wide and dark.
Does it see me as a human?
he wondered.
Is there real intelligence in there?

“He thinks,” Nadielle said, perhaps seeing the questions and doubt in his eyes, “but it’s a different kind of intelligence. You’ll not discuss the finest points of philosophy and religion with him, but he could take a dozen Scarlet Blades and wear their scalps for hats.”

“And you want me to name it?”

“Unless
it
is a suitable name.”

“No,” Gorham said. He paused a few steps away, and Nadielle leaned in and started whispering in its ear, all the while looking at Gorham. The thing never took its eyes from him. Even when it blinked, it did so with one eye at a time, so that he was always in its view.

“He knows you now,” she said. “He’ll never turn against you, and his life is dedicated to your protection.”

“And you?”

“I’m his mother. Now, a name.” She smiled sweetly, and Gorham thought she was enjoying this display of her strange, wonderful, terrible talent.

“How about Neph?”

“God of sharp things,” Nadielle said. “Appropriate.” She whispered to the thing again, and Gorham heard the name
Neph
mentioned several times. It closed its eyes, Nadielle pulled back, and it was named.

“So when we go down,” he said, “what are you expecting?”

Nadielle’s smile slipped a little. She touched Neph’s face as it pressed against her like a hound twisting against an owner’s hand. “Not knowing the answer to that is why we need him.”

Neph keened softly, and as it stretched, its blades scored lines in the floor.

“So now we go?” Gorham asked.

“Yes, now we go. You leave first with Neph and the woman, and I’ll catch up. I have to make sure no one can enter my rooms while I’m away. It’s time to open another vat.”

   Later, with Neph stalking ahead as silent as night, Gorham asked what the second vat had contained. Nadielle would not tell him. She averted her eyes and smiled at the woman, and when he asked once more, Nadielle walked quickly ahead.

Gorham followed, brooding. He and Nadielle carried food,
climbing equipment, and other supplies, leaving Neph free to protect them, and already his shoulders were chafing from the straps. The thought that he would not see the sky again for days was harsh. The idea that Peer and Malia were up there now, searching for perhaps the most important person the city had ever seen, inspired a heavy sense of dread.

And Nadielle’s strange woman watched him with her wide blank eyes.