Echo City (35 page)

“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.