Tim Lebbon: Echo city

"A priest from the Temple of the Seventy-seven Custodians," Gorham said.

Nadielle glanced back and forth between Gorham and Malia as if expecting a joke.

"They're harmless enough," Malia said. "And the Hanharans accept them."

"They allow them. It's different."

Malia shrugged.

"I trust him," Gorham said. "He's a good man, if misguided. And just because he thinks his beliefs are right, he doesn't insist that we are wrong."

"How magnanimous of him," Nadielle said.

"His elders are learned men and women. Intellectuals, not fanatics. Not mad. So I trust him, and he trusts them. And they say that something is coming."

Nadielle was silent for a while, blinking softly in the gentle glow of candlelight. She sipped her wine, picked at the remains of a loaf of bread, and hummed a tuneless melody.

"And the third source?" she said at last.

Gorham looked sidelong at Malia. They'd disputed whether or not to reveal their third source, not because of her privacy but because… well, because she was mad.

"Bellia Ton."

Nadielle laughed-a deep, throaty cough that did worrying things to Gorham's composure. She chuckled like that just after she came.

"The river reader?" the Baker asked. "You claim two sources that aren't mad but I say may be. And then you bring her into the tale? She's as mad as ten rockzards fucking a chickpig."

"Nicely put," Malia muttered.

Gorham held out his hands, palms up, and stood from the table. "Hear us," he said. "She's unreliable, but when she tells a story that meshes with others we've heard, we have to consider its veracity."

"And what story does the mad old hag tell you, Gorham?" Nadielle asked. Her eyes had grown icy, and he didn't like that. Neither did he understand it. He looked to Malia for support, but she was pouting as she picked the flesh from a slice of dried mepple.

"She holds court in a tavern in Mino Mont, right out by the city wall, close to where the River Tharin flows out into the desert."

"I know where she spouts her tales."

"One of our people was there."

"A Watcher?"

Gorham shook his head.

"A mercenary, then."

"Someone who sells us information," Malia said. "That doesn't mean it's false."

Nadielle was shaking her head, but Gorham went on, angry at her for dismissing something before she'd even heard it.

"She listens to the river, claims she can judge the health of the city by reading the waters that have flowed through it."

"The dead waters," Nadielle said. "Nothing lives in the river. It's as dead, and deadly, as the desert it comes from and goes to again."

"Maybe… but she heard sounds in the waters," Gorham said. "Noises from below, she said. Deeper than the Echoes, deeper than where any Garthans live, beneath Marcellan Canton where the Falls are, and-"

Nadielle stood quickly, her eyes growing wide and her glass tipping over. Wine flowed onto the bread platter and soaked in like spilled blood. "Do you know how she claims to read the river?" she asked, and Gorham thought he had never seen her so animated. "She dips her hands and feet in. She sits on the riverbank among the water refineries and touches the water. Sometimes she stays that way for half a day. So her madness isn't a weakness, really, but a strength. Do you know anyone else who could survive those poisoned waters for so long?"

"No," Gorham said.

"And have you any idea what that must do to her?"

"Why are you angry?" Malia asked.

Nadielle turned away, but not before Gorham saw that dark look in her eyes again. This time, he was certain it was fear.

"Because you're wasting my time," she said. "You've come here for what exactly?"

"To ask you to work faster," Gorham said. "The time might come soon when we have to attempt travel across the Bonelands."

The Baker laughed, and this time there was nothing orgasmic about it at all. This laughter was harsh, cruel, and tinged with a note of hysteria.

"You have no idea what I do here, so how can you ask something like that?"

Gorham glanced at Malia, who raised one eyebrow in an expression of defeat.

"We should go," Malia whispered, quiet enough so that Nadielle did not hear. "I've never liked this fucking place."

Gorham looked across the room at the large rumpled bed again, confused at why the Baker should act like this. Hadn't they secured her services for just such an occasion? Hadn't many people suffered because of this?

He closed his eyes, thought of Peer and that she would never be dead to him, even when one day she truly died.

"Nadielle, we're all sure that something is happening."

The Baker had reached the curtained doorway now, and she turned back to them, her face softening slightly. But there was still something very different about her. When they'd arrived, she seemed composed and perhaps amused at their discomfort; now there was a disturbing edge to her movements and voice. A sharp edge. "I'm busy, Gorham. I am working as fast as I can." And when she lifted the curtain aside, they both knew it was an invitation to leave.

Malia stood and walked to the door, glancing back at Gorham before stepping through. Does she know? Gorham thought, but right then it no longer seemed to matter. He was leaving again, and his heart thundered.

"Nadielle," he pleaded. She stood just beyond his reach.

"Gorham, now isn't the time," she said. She smiled sadly, and again he saw that strain behind her eyes, dulling them like the accumulated dust of generations on the finest oil painting.

He nodded, wished he could say more, wished he could touch her. And then the Pserans appeared from nowhere and stood around him, ready to guide him and Malia away from the Baker's laboratory.

"See you soon," he said, but Nadielle did not answer. He left without looking at her again, and Malia gripped his arm-a friendly touch that meant the world.

By the time evening arrived, Peer knew that she could no longer remain in Skulk Canton. She might have been banished there, excluded from the rest of Echo City in its entirety, guilty of sedition in the eyes of the ruling Marcellans and blasphemy according to their Hanharan priests, and certain to be caught and executed should she attempt to return-but this was just too important. She could not place her own safety ahead of what this man's arrival might mean. So she would sit with the stranger through the night, nursing him as best she could, and come morning she would tell Penler goodbye.

Since helping the stranger up into the city from the cursed desert, Peer had tried hard to make sense of anything he had to say. The storm had intensified, and as she'd guided him through the streets, she was grateful because it kept most people under cover. The rain and lightning had stopped soon after she closed her door on the weather and offered him her bed to rest.

For a moment this afternoon, she'd believed that the stranger was stirring. He'd sat up on her bed, staring at the window and lifting his hands as if to push them through the glass. But then he'd looked around slowly, his wide eyes relaxing slightly as he saw her, and he'd rested again. He had been asleep ever since.

The man muttered in his sleep. He spoke broken, heavily accented Echoian, and that troubled her, because if he was from beyond, then where was his alien language? She could decipher little of what he said-random words, mumblings, and sometimes cries-but still she tried, because it gave her something to concentrate on, something to occupy her mind…

This is the most amazing thing ever to happen to Echo City! she thought. She sat beside the bed, looking down at the frowning man, and in him she saw every hope the Watchers had ever expressed and every doubt that had ever been aimed at the Hanharans. He was special, and precious. If the Marcellans learned of his existence, they would execute him like every other Pretender they had caught-anyone who claimed an ability to travel the desert was treated the same way-and declare a day of feasting and celebration for the city. Peer closed her eyes, wondering whether any of those past Pretenders had been from the same place as this man.