Tim Lebbon - Echo city

The soldier brought the wooden object to her lips. Poison darts, Peer thought, but then a mournful whistling broke the loaded silence.

From behind her, a cough. She thought perhaps Rufus was gasping in fear, but then something struck the Border Spite's face. The Spite dropped her sword and wooden horn, took in a shuddery, loud breath, and started raking at her eyes. She went to her knees less than a dozen steps away, and Peer saw every degree of agony on the young woman's face. Her nails scratched ragged gashes across her eyelids and cheeks. Her mouth hung open, and pink foam bubbled from between her teeth. At last she fell forward, convulsing, hands now held just away from her face as if contact was too painful.

Peer turned. Rufus stood with his eyes and mouth open in shock, his arm held before him, and something in his hand. It was black and bulky, and a curl of smoke rose from its open end.

"Rufus, what did you…?" She looked at the weapon and had no idea what she saw.

The shock slowly fading from his face, Rufus lowered his hand, never taking his eyes from the fallen Spite. She was still now, her chest motionless. Deep-red blood had replaced the foam issuing from her mouth.

He pulled something on the object and a small lid hinged up, revealing a huddle of egglike objects inside. "Wrath-spider," he said.

Shaking, Peer started to walk, passing the dead guard and trying not to look at the mess her face had become. But she could not help glancing down. Did her fingernails really do all that? she thought. Probably not. Beneath the stench of blood was something like burning.

She heard Rufus following her. When she'd first seen him coming across the desert, she was shocked, excited, and filled with a sense of hope. Now she was afraid.

They left the body behind and hurried into Course Canton. After passing through a small park where yellow wisps flitted through trees surrounding a lake, they saw a group of normal people. No swords were on show; no panic or surprise crossed their faces. One young woman smiled at Peer, and Peer found it easier than she'd suspected to find a smile to return. I'm free, she thought, but immediately following that came the idea that had been forming since bidding farewell to Penler.

Free, yes, but now her life had become a lie. And with Rufus walking beside her, she began to suspect that made two of them.

Since hearing the sounds from below, Bellia Ton had spent more time than ever reading the river. The Tharin was wide here, just a mile from where it passed out beneath the city wall and back into the desert from whence it came. It was as dead when it left the city as when it arrived, but water carried knowledge, picking up a little of the ground it passed through. Most people could not understand this, and many did not believe. That suited Bellia well. Dead the river might be, but she was its disciple.

She knew the river and its banks well, and now she was down on a rock that jutted into the waterway, bare feet dangling into the flow. It parted around her ankles, churning a soft white against her old skin.

Bellia took one more look around. There were no residential buildings here, the area given over mostly to the tall water-refinery towers and their attendant structures, pools, culverts, and canals. The tower closest to her was also the newest, rebuilt after the attacks thirty years before, and like a youngster among older friends, it puffed steam and churned its parts with more gusto than the others. Its base was invisible to Bellia, hidden by a fold in the land, but she had walked past it many times before. The mountains of rotting extract stank. After all this time, still no one knew exactly what it was they filtered from the water. The mountain grew, just as the city rose, and in the Echoes there were hardened piles of that extract, still as mysterious as history.

She breathed in deeply and smelled the river: stale and dead, light and fleeting. It took the Tharin a day to flow through the city, and the waters that made it this far smelled and looked even more alien than where they'd entered.

And that was why Bellia chose this place to read.

She took in a deep, calming breath and closed her eyes. Imagining the water scouring away the flesh from her ankles and feet, then abrading the bones themselves, she became one with the river, the stumps of her lower legs barely touching the water. Her blood flowed with the Tharin, still linked to her through memory. She read its course into the city, along the steepening valley formed by the built-up land surrounding it. She frowned through the darkness where the river passed underground into the Echoes beneath Marcellan Canton, pulling away from the sense of endless space that existed where it split and poured some of itself down the Falls. That place was always so dark…

She gasped and fell back, striking her head on the rock. Trying to lift her feet from the river, she found them held fast, the water pulling them down like wet sand.

"Something new!" she screeched, because she had felt a part of the city that should not be there. "Something wrong!" There was more to know, but she wanted to learn no more. That brief insight had been so cold, and through everything she had ever read of the city, its dark histories, its inhabitants, and the things that dwelled among them, she had never been so afraid.

Bellia managed to haul her feet from the river at last and scrambled up the bank, gathering her long skirts to her knees so that she could run. Craving the oblivion she would find in the End Wall Tavern, she sprinted through the deserted water districts of Mino Mont.

And all the while, an awful truth shouted something she had no desire to hear.

The thing that was coming is almost here.

Peer was exhausted. The sun had yet to touch the western desert, but she could go no farther, and she craved food. They had crossed several canals already, and when they reached the river valley she called a halt to their progress. No one who had seen them had called for the Scarlet Blades, and within sight of Marcellan Canton's walls she risked believing that they had got away.

Two miles to the east, the great dead River Tharin roared through Marcellan's wall and entered the city's Echoes. In her time with the Watchers, Peer had been down among the Echoes several times, though not too deep. It had always been a disturbing experience for her, leaving the world she knew and traveling through areas-streets, buildings, parks, and landscapes-where the city's past had played out. These Echoes were all but silent now, though history still hung heavy in their darkness. Once, in Mino Mont, she had descended with a woman who had known her mother, and the woman showed her a house where Peer's ancestors had once lived. They had been engravers, recording history on marble tablets for rich families, but that ruin had been empty of all but dust and dark things.

She knew others who had gone deeper. Some could not sleep for days after returning to daylight; a few wanted only to go back down.

"We'll stop here to eat," she said to Rufus. "Hungry?"

"Yes," he said, rubbing his stomach. He was looking around wide-eyed, and Peer was afraid that in itself would attract attention. But it was hardly surprising. The river valley was an amazing place-as newer layers of the city had been built upon older structures, the valley had both deepened and widened, its sides sloping back from the waterway. Looking down at the valley sides should have been like viewing the city's histories laid out in strata, but weathering and the actions of humankind had landscaped the slopes into something different. Here and there, evidence of architecture still remained, but mostly the steep slopes were either smothered with razorplant or oxomanlia, or had become refuse slicks where the city vented its waste.