Tim Lebbon - Echo city

But now his helpers had gone. Strong men, hard women-only half of those who had come down with him previously had returned on this journey. And of those, only three had crossed the deep Echo border between Crescent and Marcellan Cantons. They had all heard what the Garthans had to say last time, though Sprote was not convinced that anyone but him could speak Garthan well enough to truly understand. And when they had felt the first distant vibrations, like the secret heartbeat of the city itself, those remaining had turned and fled.

"You should come with us," the last woman had said.

"I can't," Sprote Felder had replied. "This is where I live."

He'd watched them leave, walking along a dusty street buried beneath progress for maybe five thousand years, then he'd entered an old dwelling and lit a fire in the hearth. For a long time he had sat there, feeding the fire, snaring ghourt lizards and spitting them over the flames, and thinking about where he was going and what he might find. Shadows moved where there had been no movement for a hundred generations. In another room in the house, a phantom whispered in an old language. And Sprote had known that the only way for him to go was down.

He knew the Echoes, and the sounds that reverberated there, as no one else did. Heading deep beneath Marcellan, passing through Echoes that were still talked about in hushed tones-sometimes awed, sometimes feared-he heard the sound of the River Tharin. It was the city's endless sigh. He was used to the sound from his times beneath Course Canton, but there the river was still on the surface, where some of its power was expended to the sky and the water refineries added their own booming accompaniment to the river's whisper. Here, where the river itself had been built over, its power was contained. Its voice echoed. And as he finally left that dwelling and started deeper, memories of his one and only visit to Echo City Falls began to surface.

He'd been there fifteen years before and vowed never to go again. The Falls carved their way through the rock of the land, the foundation of the place that had become Echo City, and those caves and caverns had been a stark reminder to Sprote that there was a time before the city. He had never been a great believer in Hanharan and the associated creation myths, but during that time down by the Falls, he had understood where some might find comfort in such beliefs. It was a basic, wild place, where the only sign of the city and its Echoes was the steady stream of bodies that the Falls carried away. He'd seen dozens in the short time he was close-the dead swept away by those dead waters, arms and legs waving goodbye to someone who should never have been watching. His porters at the time had been terrified, and the torches they carried had cast dancing reflections across the Falls as they shook in fear.

Below the Falls… even Sprote had not gone that deep. He'd heard tales of the bottomless pit-the Chasm-swallowing the river and its grisly cargo into a darkness that was home to a thousand fearful myths. Some said that the city was built on nothing, and that one day the Chasm would consume it whole. Others claimed that the Echoes made up some vast, mindless creature's face and that the Falls carried the city's dead down into its endless gullet. But explorer though he was, some things were best left unseen. Sprote believed that the sight of this Chasm would swallow his sanity, sucking it down like the countless dead of Echo City over the eons.

Now he was breaking his own promise to himself and returning. Fascination, and also a vague sense of duty, drew him. He'd made himself the authority on these deep places, and now that something was here, he felt that he should be the first to know.

He was deep and had to go much deeper. And already, as well as the whisper of the dead River Tharin far above and the rumbling of the Falls a mile or two to the west, he could hear something else.

Something rising.

Nophel sat naked in his rooms and looked around at what he had. Each book held worlds, but all those worlds were aspects of Echo City. Some volumes could be construed as Watcher material-highly imaginative texts concerning what might be beyond. He had an illicit copy of Benjermen Daxia's Truth-An Exhortation to Revolt. But even these were inextricably bound to the city. Nophel had read nothing of their persuasion that made him believe anything other than that they were written by good fictionalists. If the Council knew he had these tomes, he would likely be in trouble. But that was what Dane was for. Protection.

Other books and objects concerned his mother and those generations of Bakers before her. Reading them was an exquisite torture.

He rolled the small metal flask back and forth across the fingers of his right hand. He felt the liquid in there shifting with the flask and played with its weight. I won't see that water, he thought. I'll barely even feel it. Nophel breathed deeply. He loved the smell of his rooms. If he drank Blue Water and disappeared, like everyone else who had ever tried it, he would miss the scent of books and maps and olden times.

But he had to try.

They had found it in his dead mother's rooms. She had already destroyed him by the time he was old enough to talk, so he had no fear of her now.

He opened the flask and sniffed at its contents. There was very little smell, only the sharp tang of metal. Taking one last look around his rooms, Nophel put the lip of the flask to his mouth and upended it.

His saliva drew back, something pushing it across his tongue and around the insides of his cheeks, and his mouth flooded with cold. He gasped and dropped the flask, leaning back in his metal-framed chair. When he breathed out, his breath misted before him, quickly dissipating in the warmth. Speckles of moisture clung on to his wispy mustache and beard. Blue Water, he thought, and when he tried to hold his hand up before his face, his arm would not work. There's something wrong, he thought, closing his eyes to hold down the panic. Death had never been a fear for Nophel, but he was no lover of pain.

He tried once more to lift his arm and hand, turn it before his face… but again it did not work. "Am I paralyzed?" he asked, and as his mouth opened to speak, the words came out. He tapped his feet against the floor, and the impacts were clearly audible. Leaning forward in the chair, he stood smoothly, feeling no impingement in any muscles or joints.

Lift again, he thought, and this time he knew he lifted his hand. He felt air moving against the tiny hairs on his forearm as it shifted position. Sending the command to bring his hand closer to his face so he could see, he slapped himself across the nose.

"I can't see my hand," he said. Nophel looked down, and he was no longer there. At least not completely, though there were shadows in the air where none should be cast, and when he moved those shadows shifted. He ran both hands across his chest and stomach, down across his groin, bending so that he could run them all the way down his legs to his feet. He felt the cool air touching his body and stirring at his movements, but he saw only a hint of himself.

Nophel laughed. His mother had touched him again, from the distance of twenty years and through the veil of death. He only hoped that wherever her body and soul were still falling into the bottomless Chasm, she felt his derision and hatred more strongly than ever before.

He shrugged on a long, heavy coat. For a moment it hung on nothing, then slowly it faded until it, too, was little more than shadow. He had not been sure, but he was pleased that he could go clothed, and armed, and ready to face whatever might be out there. It wasn't often that Nophel ventured into the city, and even unseen he felt danger pressing down on him already.

"Good," he said, standing before a tall mirror and not seeing himself. And he began to concentrate. I am there, he thought. That's me, I am there… It did not take very long. The Blue Water acted on the minds of those around him, rather than on his own physiology, and knowing that enabled him to control its effects upon his own mind. The initial shock had rendered him invisible to himself, and that had been comforting. It meant that the strange fluid was working. But now he focused upon those shadows in the mirror, shifting left and right so that he could see them becoming thicker, stronger, until the shadows had gone and he saw himself. It was unsettling, but Nophel had been ready for it. He manifested out of surprise, formed from nothing, and by the time he could look in the mirror and no longer see bookshelves through the back of his head, he knew that it was time to go.