Tim Lebbon - Echo city

But the wounds on his arms still bled, and he could still touch her with his mind.

Sprawled on the floor, he looked at the bloodstains beneath him. He coughed again and added to them, and for a moment he panicked, thinking that perhaps this would be the last time he fell. But the Baker's ministrations had been skilled. His wound was a solid, burning pain in his chest, but still he managed to kneel, and then he took a deep breath before he turned back to the screen.

If the Scope was turned, its eye ruptured by flying debris, its mountings wrenched by the impact of that thing, I'll be blind until I draw my last breath. But the screen, though flickering, still showed an image of the city and the thing that had risen and fallen across it.

Nophel hauled himself back up into his seat, breath rattling in his chest. He kept glancing at the screen and away again, not quite believing, not able to acknowledge exactly what he had seen. But there was no denying the sight that awaited him.

He laid his hands across the controls and coaxed the best view from the ailing Scope.

Dust and smoke hazed the air, but he could focus through them, zooming in on the sprawled thing where it lay in a new valley of its own making. A thousand buildings had been crushed beneath it, along with untold thousands of people, and fires were spreading across the southern and western slopes of Marcellan Canton. Buildings folded, their walls exploding outward where the ground beneath them broke, and several fault lines progressed across the city like roaming monsters. One of them reached the tall Marcellan wall directly to the west and cleaved it in two.

Nophel grinned at the symbolism and wondered where the Marcellans and Hanharans were right then.

Two other shapes were rising slowly on either side of the massive fallen thing, pressing down against the ground and heaving, and he could barely believe that they were limbs.

The size of the thing was difficult to comprehend, because it was alive. So when Nophel saw the shapes parting from it-red dashing things that seemed to snake away from the fallen mass and steer themselves through the ruined streets-he tried to focus on one of them instead. He used the tracking ball to control the Scope, following one of the red things as it flowed along a sloping street like a globule of fresh blood. Nophel could only guess at its size-the girth of a tusked swine, perhaps-until it encountered a small group of people.

As it grasped them in its whipping appendages and pulled them toward itself and started to eat-then he could judge its size.

Nophel closed his eyes, and the Baker saw. He felt her fear and sadness, and that made him afraid and sad as well.

North, she whispered to him, and he urged the Scope to strain against its mounting, turning its eye toward the north as it had when the Dragarians first emerged. It did so more easily than he imagined, and he supposed it might be pleased to look away.

Working levers and dials, Nophel brought the northern extremes of Echo City closer. The domes of Dragar's Canton were as still as ever, but then the Baker whispered, Beyond, and he lifted the Scope's eye slightly and stretched it farther.

There was desert, the familiar bleached yellow of the Bonelands. And beyond the shadows of the domes, a tide of darkness washed out from Echo City.

"They're going," Nophel whispered. The Dragarians were leaving their retreat. He only wished he could coax the Scope to look farther, bring the distance in closer, because he wanted to see the Baker's other abandoned son one last time.

Back, Rose whispered gently. Not long left now, so one last look…

"I'm not afraid to die," Nophel said, hoping that she heard. And he drew the Scope back to the southwest, toward the risen mass of the Vex. Trying to shake the enormity of what he had seen to the north, he scanned slowly across the risen thing's surface. There seemed to be deep rents in its flesh, from which bubbled great gouts of blood-red fluid. And from these gouts manifested the dashing things, rolling and bubbling, crawling, and then running through the city's fallen streets.

The Baker could see, and Nophel felt her fear and resignation. But, with the sight of the Dragarians' flight, he could also sense her hope.

The building beneath him shuddered from a terrible impact. He almost slipped from the chair, such was the extreme of movement, and he heard the ominous crunching, cracking sounds of stone crumbling under tension. The image on the screen wavered, and then he heard a sound that was deeper and more terrible than the sound of the breaking city-a cry, a scream, and Nophel closed his eyes and felt blood dribble from his left ear.

The image shivered and veered up to the clear blue sky. For a moment all he saw was beauty, hazed by a thin skein of smoke that was all that indicated what was happening below. And he realized that the Scope had looked away because it was scared.

"One more look," he said, unsure whether he was talking to the Scope, or himself, or the child Baker. He touched the levers and dials and viewed the risen thing a final time.

Dust and smoke obscured much of it, and flames erupted here and there. It seemed unconcerned by the fires. It shifted and flexed, its countless appendages worming through the streets, destroying another hundred buildings with each movement. And then Nophel frowned. It was covered in… something.

He turned a dial and the Scope took him in.

The monster's hide was stippled, rough, and mostly pale. He focused in some more, stroking a guiding ball when the Scope began to shake with fear again, and then he realized what clothed the thing.

Bodies. Thousands of them, tens of thousands; skeletons and rotting corpses, some piled so deep that hundreds had sloughed off in drooping, skinlike jowls. They decorated the thing's hide like the pustules on his own, and Nophel put one hand to his face.

He could feel the Baker seeing through him, and her shock echoed back at him, a guilt that was not his own.

He coughed and blood flowed from his mouth, thick and dark. He guided the Scope to pan along the thing, moving inward all the time, sweeping its huge eye toward what he thought of as the Vex's head. He could sense that the Scope wanted to turn away, and he was sure that soon it would, denying his commands for the first time. And he would never blame it. But for now he had to see, because everything he saw, the Baker saw.

There were larger bodies pierced on huge spines lining the thing's hide. These were black and silver, and many-bladed, and looked fresh. Around them were dark, steaming scars on the leviathan's skin. And as Nophel moved on…

His breath stalled. He snapped a lever to freeze the image and saw a body that caught his attention. Surrounded by rot and bone, this body was new, pale and red in equal measure. He tried to push the Scope closer, unconcerned now at the discomfort he must be causing the wretched creature, ignoring the insistent prodding in his mind from the Baker to look away, look away… and then he saw the face, whose familial features he recognized. Its mouth was open wide in an endless scream. One arm was pinned high, as if waving.

The Scope died, Nophel's vision faded, and his body was lit by the mass of pain in his chest. He sat back in his chair, eyes closed. He welcomed the calming touch on his mind that did its best to see away the pain, though it was now beyond calming.

"Mother," he said.

And then he drove out that influence with a force of will, because he had no wish for her to feel his death.

Penler was standing on top of the ruined home next to his own. He was staring north while everyone else fled south, and for a moment Peer simply watched him. It felt as if she had been away from Skulk for years, not just days, and Penler's appearance lived up to that idea.