Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"Before?"

Nadielle gave him that annoying smile again-the one that said: You're only a child compared to me, what I am, what I know. And for a moment that shocked him with its intensity, Gorham thought of roughing that smile from her face.

"Let's just go," she said. "Neph will scout ahead and keep us safe." She turned her back on Gorham and started to walk. If he wanted to hear what she knew, he would have to keep up.

"There's no record of who fought this war, or why, anywhere for public consumption in Echo City," Nadielle began. "I suspect there might be writings buried deep in old Hanharan vaults or perhaps personal accounts handed down through the ages from Marcellan elders to their children. But what happened here is a whisper among shadows. Some of those phantoms we just passed might have been here when the fires came and went. Some probably died here. But even I couldn't ask them."

"Couldn't, or wouldn't want to?" Gorham asked, and Nadielle did not answer.

"All I know is what I read in my mother's books, and some of it she… passed down to me." Nadielle tapped her temple but looked only ahead, as if reassuring herself of something. "The Bakers might be the only line keeping some of the truth alive."

"But people come down here," Gorham protested.

"Not as many as you'd think. How deep do you travel into the Echoes?"

"Only to you," he admitted.

"And only because you have a reason to travel down. There aren't many who choose to venture into the Echoes. Criminals, perhaps, but they have only their own well-being at heart. Some explorers, yes. A few. But most who wish to explore history do so through their books. Actually visiting it-that's an experience any sane person would want to avoid."

Gorham had never thought of himself as any less than sane; he supposed his fear of being down there testified to that.

"So what happened?" he asked. They were walking between the ruined buildings now, following the route of what had once been a wide street. Ash, rubble, and other detritus littered the way, and protruding here and there above the mess Gorham made out the pale shapes of bones. The torchlight made them shift. He didn't look too closely or for too long.

"Have you ever heard of the Thanulians?"

"No."

"It's said they were watching long before the Watchers-an organized group who didn't believe any of the Hanharan teachings and who were waiting for the doom of Echo City. Their beliefs are shady and, much as I've looked, I've not been able to discover much about their outlook, their thoughts for the future, or what they intended doing should the end arrive. But one thing is clear: They claimed to have proof that Hanharan was not the city's firstborn but was a visitor from elsewhere."

"Proof?" Gorham asked, a thrill going through him. He'd always believed that Hanharan was a myth, but his conviction was founded only on what he thought of as his own good sense. The Hanharan story was wild and complex-a man born from a desert stone, shaping spit and sand to build, molding a wife from dusk's final rays, and founding the whole city. Gorham had always had trouble understanding how intelligent people could believe such stories, accept that one man had seeded and settled their whole world.

"Don't get excited. Whatever proof there may have been is long gone now."

"Destroyed in the war?"

"More like a massacre. The Marcellans at the time were mainly confined to the Hanharan priesthood-the city was a democracy then, and two main political parties juggled power back and forth as the years went by. But the Marcellans must have grown strong. There was a rout, the Thanulians were slaughtered, and all traces of their history were wiped away. Over time, with nothing written down, their existence faded."

"Left down here in the Echoes," Gorham said. Looking at the burned remains of ancient buildings, he could almost smell the fires. "They killed all of them? Every single one?"

"This is where the story gets interesting," Nadielle said. "Shall we stop for a drink?"

"No," Gorham said. He had never been anywhere like this. The surroundings felt so dead, but there was no stillness here at all. Things moved, and though any movement seemed to be just beyond the edge of perception, his senses were alight with evidence of activity. His skin was cooled by breaths of moving air, he heard shifting sand or dust, and he could smell something damp and old moving around.

Nadielle nodded, without offering him her smug smile. It appeared that even she was spooked. Gorham glanced back at Caytlin-still following, blank-faced and unresponsive.

"The Thanulians were peaceful. They wouldn't put their hands on a weapon, even when attacked. Perhaps they saw their slaughter as the beginning of the end, so to them death was inevitable. But the Hanharans and their soldiers still didn't get them all."

It took a moment for Gorham to recognize the importance of what Nadielle had said. He stopped, and that secretive movement around him stopped as well. Almost as if it's following.

"There are descendants?" he asked.

"The Garthans."

The Garthans! Living down here for so long, feared by some, almost mythical to others…

"Of course!" he said. "I've never even wondered where they came from. I just assumed they'd always been down here, as we've always been up there."

"They were chased out of Echo City and fled below," Nadielle said. "No one knows much about them anymore. Some speak to them-my mother conversed with them at times, though I can't make any sense of what she wrote about them in her journals. And I have limited contact with them, when the need arises."

"They don't try to eat you?"

"You've heard that too."

"Just a rumor."

"No rumor. There are those who trade human flesh for the Garthans' slash drug, which they refine from cave moss."

Gorham looked around at the ruined district they were still traveling through, trying to imagine the terror, the pain, as the Hanharan forces worked house by house, room by room. Piled against one burned-out building was what he thought at first was the tangled remains of a fallen tree. But it might also have been the twisted, broken remnants of a whole family, killed and piled together so that their flesh would rot and their bones would degrade down here in the dark. He looked away and started to walk on, because he didn't want to know for sure.

Nadielle stayed beside him, and her enthusiasm for sharing this story was refreshing. Usually she held knowledge to her chest, perhaps whispering random facts about her own strange experiments into his ear as sweat cooled between their naked bodies.

"And then the Marcellans took control of the city?"

"Perhaps their domination of the order of Hanharan was the beginning, and this massacre showed their strength."

"I've never seen a Garthan," Gorham said, suddenly feeling an affinity with those strange subterranean dwellers.

"You probably will," Nadielle said. "If they choose to reveal themselves, that is. They're very secretive."

"That surprises you?"

She smiled sadly, shook her head, and Gorham reached out for her hand. Nadielle held on for some time. The contact made him feel safe. And then later, after they'd walked into an ancient district of that deep Marcellan Echo untouched by fire and violence, she turned to him and pressed him into the wall of a house.

"Nadielle?"

She was shaking. She dropped her torch, reached around his hips, and pulled him close to her.

"Nadielle?" he asked again, but she did not reply with words. She used her hands, pressing up over his chest, down his sides, delving between them. She used her mouth, kissing him with a passion he had never felt from her before.

Peer, he thought, but his lost love seemed a world away. He watched Caytlin over the Baker's shoulder, but the chopped woman simply sat and stared off to one side. I can't, he thought. Not with her here.