Tim Lebbon - Echo city

They died, they all died, he thought, but already he knew that was wrong. No… they disappeared.

"Doesn't matter," the woman said. She held out her hand, and with a wry, cynical smile said, "I'm Alexia, of the other Echo City. Welcome to the world of the Unseen."

He followed her along the head of the wall to a stone spiral staircase leading down to the street. A woman turned at the sound of footsteps, but Nophel was sure it was only his that she heard. Alexia was as silent as she was invisible.

At the foot of the wall, she headed back into the warren of Marcellan streets. There was no explanation, no glance over her shoulder. Nophel followed, and even if he decided to follow no more, he was not entirely sure he could simply stop. How many? he was wondering. How many have tried the Blue Water over the last twenty years? How many have been forced to try it?

They stopped outside a sunken door leading to a building all but subsumed beneath a new structure. Not yet an Echo, this was a place soon to be forgotten. He supposed it was an apt hiding place.

"Here we are," Alexia said. "We go downstairs. Quietly." She spoke in the clipped, brusque tones of the military, but though she still wore a tattered uniform, the dyed armbands of rank had either faded or been deliberately bleached away. As she pushed open a heavy wooden door and entered a large, low-ceilinged room, Nophel found himself facing a dozen frightened people.

"There's no breeze," one of them said. Nobody responded. They were all looking directly at Nophel, and he felt naked and insecure, baking in their regard.

Alexia walked into the room, between several seated people. They were playing a tabletop version of lob dice, the dice now abandoned. She paused at the head of a staircase, glanced back, and smiled. "Come on," she said, and they didn't even hear her. "You'll get used to it."

Suddenly I don't want to, Nophel thought. He walked through the room, stepping lightly, careful not to nudge past anyone. The people remained staring at the opened front door, and as Nophel reached the staircase and started descending after Alexia, a man stood.

"I'll do it, then," he growled, striding to the door and slamming it shut. "You're all chickpig cocks."

"Yeah, and you're so brave, Mart," a woman said, snorting like a chickpig. The forced humor lifted the atmosphere a little. As Nophel went down the curved staircase out of sight, he heard the clatter of dice once more.

Alexia turned left and walked along a narrow, tatty corridor, then entered a doorless room where four other people sat. They looked up as Alexia entered, their eyes going wide when they saw Nophel.

"Got a new one," Alexia said.

"That's the dead Baker's son!" one of the other Unseen gasped. "He's the one that tends the Scopes."

"I know who he is," Alexia said.

Nophel paused in the doorway and looked around the room. There were a few broken chairs but no other furniture. No food. No water bottles. This was nowhere near a home, and he wondered what these people were doing here.

"Are you dead?" he asked, the question unforced and unconscious.

They laughed, some more than others. Alexia smiled. "No," she said.

"Yes," someone else said. Another Unseen shrugged.

Nophel focused inward, sensing the solid part of himself that had never let go since his mother had abandoned him. It was strong, this part, and rooted in the real world, because even back then he'd known that he would need a solid foundation to survive. When he opened his one good eye again, the people were all looking at him.

"Still here," Alexia said.

"You all drank the Blue Water?" he asked. They nodded. My mother's Blue Water. He wondered if they knew, and if they'd blame him if they did. He hoped not.

"Did they force you?" Alexia asked.

Nophel shook his head. "I'm here to find something."

"Something from out of Dragar's."

Nophel could only nod. How does she know so much?

"We've been watching," she said. "Sometimes…" She trailed off, her thin face falling slack.

"Sometimes what?" Nophel asked. Alexia stared at him.

"New?" she asked.

"You've already asked me that."

"I have?"

Nophel took a step back into the corridor. The walls were rotting here, the plaster damp and weak, and the joints between floorboards were wide and decayed. Small insects crawled in and out of the space between floors, appearing, disappearing again, and most of them had probably never been seen.

"We've seen what you want," Alexia said from the room. There was no plea to her voice, and no hint of threat. Simply a statement of fact.

"Who are you all?" Nophel asked.

"The Unseen," Alexia said. "I told you that. We're like you."

"No, I can go back. I can-"

"Is that what they told you?" She came and stood at the doorway, the others shifting slightly behind her, moving in a strange, fluid way.

"I know it," Nophel said.

Alexia only nodded. "It's how most of us thought, to begin with. It's a way to try to handle it."

"You are dead," Nophel said, and Alexia chuckled at that.

"Sometimes we wish," she said, "but no. Not dead. Just… faded."

Nophel leaned against the door frame and looked into the room. The other Unseen were still there, but the room seemed hazy, incomplete.

"And we fade more and more," Alexia whispered. "Some become invisible even to the Unseen, and who's to say…?" She shrugged, as though loath to consider her future.

Dane would never have lied to me, Nophel thought. Not if he'd known about this. "My mother made the Blue Water," he said.

"We know." For the first time, there was a sliver of ice in the Unseen woman's eye.

"So you'll know that she was my mother only in blood. In every other way, she was nothing to me."

"Defending yourself?" Alexia asked, then offered a humorless smile. "It's widely known you helped kill her."

Nophel nodded. "So, Dragar's Canton. Tell me what you saw."

"I can do better than that," Alexia said. "We captured it. Come with me and I'll show you."

When they reach the surface, the sun casts its light on the sheer tiled steeple of a Hanharan temple. A man is standing on the precarious iron balustrade around the temple's summit. He's reaching up for the stone birthshard-Echo City's outline balanced in the palm of an outstretched hand-which is the eternal symbol of Hanharan's birth and continuing love for the city. He's stretching, and Rufus (that's not my name, not here, not now, but it's all I know it will do it will suffice)

– can see the slashes and cuts on the man's back as his shirt rides up. And even from this distance-the birthshard stands proud on the steeple's summit, perhaps a hundred steps above the street-Rufus sees that they are still bleeding. The man is raging.

People in the crowd around Rufus are shaking their fists at the man, throwing stones that barely reach halfway and cursing his and his family's name to the pits of the Chasm. Four Scarlet Blades are battering at the temple's main door, but though they have it open and Rufus can see a sliver of flickering light from the thousands of candles always burning inside, the man must have barricaded it. So the soldiers push, and soon other people join them in attempting to break in.

But Rufus has eyes for only the man. He's going to die, he thinks. He might fall, or if he doesn't they'll get in and shoot him down with a crossbow. Or if he grabs the birthshard and gets back into the temple, they'll stab him to death when he's on his way down the staircases…

The man stands on the edge of the balustrade and leans against the spire, gaining himself a vital extra reach. He shouts in triumph as he closes his hand around one of Hanharan's fingers, and the street crowd gasps at such blasphemy.

It's only a statue, Rufus whispers, and he looks up at his mother. She smiles down at him, and he sees surprise in her eyes, and pride. And something else. Sadness? He's not sure, but it's something he'll ask her about later. There's always something to ask later, because Rufus is an inquisitive little boy.