Tim Lebbon - Echo city

Peer felt a thrill of fear and excitement, and Rufus nodded. He did not appear at all concerned.

When Gorham stood and chatted to Devin and Bethy, Peer leaned in to Rufus to help him up. "What did you dream?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he said. "A nightmare, I think. I don't like nightmares."

"Something from the desert?"

For a while he said nothing. They stood together against the wall, and he was still clasping her hand, like a frightened child hanging on to its mother.

"No," he said at last. "The desert is still a blank to me."

"Come on!" Gorham called. "A short walk this way, a short wait, and then say goodbye to the stars."

"Nice way of putting it," she mumbled, and, when she looked up, Gorham was looking at her as if he'd heard. Once, lying naked on the rooftop of her old family home in Mino Mont, the sweat of sex drying on their skin, they had each chosen and named a shape in the stars. She could remember neither shapes nor names-too much had happened since, her desire to forget too strong-but that sense of contentment and peace washed over her briefly now, surprising and powerful.

Then Gorham turned away, and she remembered what he had done. And even that memory felt as though he had abused her, not loved her, on that long-ago roof.

Markmay believed in that cruel mistress Fate, and he also believed that she could be read and predicted-translated from the meanderings of a beetle in a maze, the viscous drip of poison from a wisp's leg bladder, the sway of hanging chimes in a breezeless place. He traced the veins in a rubber plant's waxy leaves, then drew maps with the tracings, applying them to a book of shapes and shades handed down from his great-great-great-grandmother. By the time he reached the end of a mug of five-bean, he felt ready to read its message, discerning truths in the spatter of bean dregs. His mother had taught him how to do that, and he had many fond memories of sitting with her before a roaring fire, reading Fate's path in cooling bean shells. Some called him fool, but he would merely pass them by and content himself with seeing their deaths in a slab of shattered ice.

Today, Fate was telling him that something was coming.

Markmay's home was in the lower levels of Hanharan Heights-a complex of rooms, corridors, and staircases that wound around, above, and below other dwellings. He had no windows in his home and only one doorway, but the places where he ate, slept, and fucked were twisted around and through the daily life of Echo City. Those around him were not aware of the shape of his home. They put occasional scrapings and thumps down to the mass of buildings around them expanding and settling with the sun. But Markmay knew better. His home was a maze, and when he watched those beetles in their smaller mazes, he saw himself. At the end, when he killed them and took them apart to read the truth of their insides, his own guts ached in sympathy.

In one room, seven heavy bone chimes hung from knots of chickpig hair cast into the plaster ceiling. He sat among them for a while, trying to still his thumping heart lest it transfer to the chimes and spoil his reading. He closed his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply, but the excitement was there. Something coming, he kept thinking, because as yet he had no idea what. Stilled at last, he opened his eyes slowly and looked around.

Six of the bone chimes were swaying, too slightly to set their parts colliding and singing but moving nonetheless. There was never any air movement in Markmay's home-that would spoil so many readings-other than when he moved. He watched the chimes, then looked closer at the bone that did not move. It was the longest of them, its knuckle weight closest to the floor.

Markmay leaned slowly to his side and crawled from the room. He left a trail of sweat on the wooden floor behind him. His home was not hot.

He hurried up a curving staircase to a circular room. This was the highest part of his home. Its walls flickered with the light from seventy-seven candles-one for each of the six-legged gods supposed to wander the desert, though Markmay held no allegiance to any such foolish superstitions-and when he closed the heavy door behind him, they danced like excited puppies. He sat in the center of the room and repeated his calming process from before: slower breathing, settled heart, motionless.

When he opened his eyes, the candles were still agitated. Those that danced the most burned with a purple flame, and Markmay knocked several over in his panic while leaving the room. He slammed the door shut behind him and knew he must refer to the book.

Back down the circular staircase, across an empty room, along a doorless corridor, down another twisting staircase that wrapped a Hanharan priest's home like a secretive snake, and in a wide, low-ceilinged room Markmay sat at a table and opened the huge book it held. He went to one page, back to another, forward almost to the end, and all the while he was making notes with a rockzard-spine pen on a pad of rough paper. Sweat dripped from his nose and chin onto the paper, and he wiped it away. It smudged the ink, but that did not matter. This was recording, not reading, and the next person to read this would not be concerned with smudges.

Markmay had the ear of Wendie Marcellan, one of the more senior members of the Council. She told him that none of the others knew of her predilection for Markmay's unusual readings-indeed, she had hinted more than once that some would find it blasphemous-but Markmay knew the Marcellans to be not quite so virtuous as they seemed. He was almost certain that there were other readers informing other Council members, but that did not concern him. He was the best, Wendie paid him well, and whenever he asked, she sent one of her whores to keep him company for the night.

When he finished his notes, he sat back and stared at the filled page. He was shaking his head.

"Not good," he whispered. He rarely spoke to himself, and his voice was loud in the normally silent dwelling. A feeling of dread had settled upon him, and his insides were in revolt-heart thundering, stomach churning, and a pain in his right side like a hot dagger driven between his ribs. It was as if his body and home were so closely linked that he mimicked the upset of swaying chimes, the heat of agitated flames…

And one more thing to check. If this read true, there was much to tell Wendie, and she would have to reveal his knowledge to the Council. How she would do this-tell the truth, make up lies-he did not care.

But they would have to be warned. Perhaps then they could prepare, plan, protect the city from what was about to befall it.

"Please, no," he said as he descended staircases, squeezed through small rooms he rarely frequented, and climbed down a vertical metal ladder. "Please, no. Please, no." He imagined the people living in the homes around which his rooms and corridors were wrapped, and what their reaction would be if they heard the faint echoes of his voice. Phantoms! they might say to one another. Or they might say nothing at all.

Finally he reached the deepest room in his dwelling, one that intruded into the first Echo beneath Hanharan Heights. He had been down here only three times before, and each time he had climbed those stairs again with a sense of relief that things had not gone badly. This time, lighting candles around the room and kicking out at several large sand spiders that had made this space their own, those relieved retreats inspired a nostalgia for good times past. Before even taken his final reading, Markmay knew that everything was going wrong.

"How in the name of Hanharan are the priests going to account for this?" he muttered. The last sand spider scuttled away, melted down, and flowed into an impossible crack, and Markmay set about making the marks.