Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"Oh," Rufus said.

"You weren't supposed to remember at all," Nadielle said softly. "It's not like my mother to make mistakes."

Peer closed her eyes, absorbing what had been said and realizing that it all made sense. Perhaps she'd even known it for a while now but had been unable to come to terms with what it meant.

"Maybe it was no mistake," Rufus said.

"You remember her?" Nadielle asked, with a passion and need that she obviously rarely displayed.

"Yes," Rufus said.

"Your mother made Rufus," Peer whispered.

"The previous Baker, yes. Who chopped me when she knew she was being hunted, using essence from her own body, growing me in a hidden womb vat, nurturing me with as much care as if I was in her own womb."

"So how did she…?" Peer asked, looking at Rufus. His eyes were wide, but she also sensed a growing anger about him. Where is that from? she thought. What is it for?

"The same way," the Baker said. "Which makes us, Rufus Kyuss, brother and sister."

Rufus did not react. He moved one of the books aside and traced his fingers over the images on the large sheets. He's seen those shapes before, Peer thought, and she wondered where and when.

"She sent me out."

"Yes," Nadielle said. "She left me many books, and these are the ones I've always kept hidden away. No one can see them, in case…"

"In case?" Peer prompted.

"In case he comes back."

"She sent me out, in this. Made me drink something to… forget. But I'm remembering now."

"I should be writing this down," Nadielle said. She reached for a pencil and a sheaf of paper, starting making notes, but Rufus went on as if neither woman was there. His dreams were coalescing into memories, and Peer began to fear the reaction this seemed to be engendering. He was becoming more animated, though not with joy at the revelation of his genesis but with anger at something different.

"She abandoned me."

"No, Rufus," Nadielle said, setting down her pencil. She reached for him and he waved her back, raising his arm to fend off her touch. How quick he was with that venom weapon, Peer thought, looking at the bag still hanging from his shoulder. Gorham had returned the weapon to him, and now she wondered why. It was clumsy of someone so used to secrecy and caution.

"Sent me into the desert… a place where people die… in this thing."

"What is it?" Peer asked, but neither answered her. She watched Rufus's fingers tracing the lines and shapes on the paper, heard the grit of dust beneath his fingertips, and felt the temperature of that place rising.

"You were a hope she always had," Nadielle said. "The hope every Baker has. The city changes and grows-a living thing-and, like all living things, Echo City's time will come to die. We have always known that."

"How have you always known?" Peer asked. "What have you-"

"Because the Bakers have always lived one step back from the city," she said. "Isn't it obvious? So many believe so many different things, but if you consider things from a distance, you can see all the foolishness and lies. They stink like rotten things, those lies, and people lap them up and live by them."

"The Watchers don't."

"Not all of them, no. But even they live life under a cloud of superstitious prophesies and predictions. I see the fault in this, as did every Baker. Nothing lasts forever, the city least of all."

"What did you bring us back here to show us?" Peer asked.

"This," Nadielle said. "Her charts, her books. These designs. She chopped a construct to take Rufus out into the Bonelands. She knew he'd survive out there-"

"She can't have known for sure," Peer said softly, because Rufus's anger was a palpable thing now. She tried to hold his hand, but he pulled away.

"Well… no, she wasn't sure. That's why she built this thing to carry him as far as possible, toward whatever must be out there. And she hoped he'd return in her lifetime."

"She made me to return?" he asked.

"Of course. And whatever she did to ease your memories, perhaps she designed it to fade as soon as you came home."

"Rufus is not my name," he said. "This is not my home. What did she name me? Sister-Mother-what did she name me?" And in that Mother, Peer realized another staggering truth: Nadielle, chopped from the old Baker when death was stalking her, was as much a mother to Rufus as she was a sister.

"She…" Nadielle said. She touched a book, stroking dust from its surface. They had not been touched for a very long time.

"Nadielle?" Peer asked.

"She did not name you," Nadielle said.

"But I grew into a young boy. With her. My mother. She must have given me a name."

"She made you that age." Nadielle kept her eyes averted, though her voice held little emotion. "You were with her for perhaps thirty days. The Dragarians provided material from Dragar's remains, and she chopped you as a commission for them. But she never intended to hand you back. They wanted the Dragar of their prophesies, and she wanted the truth about that name."

"She listened to myths?" Peer asked.

"Here," Nadielle said, touching the other large old book. "There's so much in here. It's written that Dragar was born to illicit lovers, one tall with white hair, the other with the greenest of eyes. Their love was forbidden-they were from different Dragarian castes-and they chose to meet in the desert, where no one would see. The child was conceived out there, and when born he was immune to the desert's effects. The Dragarians took him to themselves as a god, named him after their god, and soon after that the Marcellans killed him as a Pretender. So long ago, all of it so uncertain, unproven. But when they came to my mother with the commission, she saw the chance of discovering the truth. They offered a shred of Dragar, his essence."

"I might have died," Rufus said.

"But you didn't," Nadielle said. "You were her greatest experiment."

"I'm not an experiment!"

"Rufus," the Baker said, excited, "you have to-"

"That is not my name!" he screamed. The sudden noise was shocking in that confined space, his fury startling. He swept the books from the table, and clouds of dust dimmed the air.

"Rufus," Peer said softly, because she saw his tragic history.

He struck her. She fell against the wall, hand landing on one of the books. Its cover split from the spine; her arm shifted beneath her and spilled her to the floor, setting her hip aflame. She banged her head. The air darkened even more, ringing with shouts and a scream and the frantic shuffling of a struggle from somewhere beyond the room. Silence, the beating of her heart, and then another scream from much farther away, androgynous in its agony. It could only have been the cry of someone close to death.

Peer stood and swayed, closing her eyes to regain balance. She felt the warm trickle of blood down the back of her neck. Moving carefully, she left the small room and found the larger room beyond empty. Even in the disorganized chaos of that place, she saw that things were toppled across the floor, one smashed jar steaming as its strange contents spat and jumped as if to escape the cool touch of stone.

More shouts, raised voices, and two more screams filled with rage and grief. Peer rushed out into the womb-vat chamber, pausing to see where the cries came from. The vats bubbled softly, indifferent to the drama being played out around them.

Another cry-less a scream and more an exhalation of hopelessness. It had come from outside. She ran across the chamber and through the door that had been left ajar, into the wide dark Echo of fields and farmland from decades or centuries before, and highlighted before her in an oasis of torchlight she saw what had happened. One of the Pserans was dead, her hand clasped to her neck and bloody foam on her lips. He killed her, she thought, but she was not as surprised as she should have been. The two remaining triplets stood close to their sister, but not close enough to touch. They looked on as Nadielle knelt beside her creation and stroked the skin of her face, closing her eyes and weeping gently.