Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"Your mother?" Peer asked, aghast.

"Mother," he said, nodding. "So this new Baker is something to me as well."

Malia snorted, then returned to the window. There was a barely suppressed panic about her, the sense that she could unravel at any minute. She carried such an aura of violence that Nophel did not want to be near her when that happened.

"You say you're a Watcher," Peer said.

"It's my outlook, yes."

"The man we seek, our friend-"

"Peer!" Malia shouted, but Peer turned to face Nophel.

"He came in from beyond Echo City."

"No!" the Watcher woman said. But she did not come closer, did not interfere.

"Now I fear the Dragarians might have him, and there's something happening deep down beneath the city, and the Hanharans will do nothing to prevent what might come next."

Nophel gasped, the breath knocked from him. Beyond the city? Dane knew… In his message, it's clear. But there was no bitterness that Dane had not shared his knowledge with him. And then Nophel thought of the Unseen and their fading ways, and he knew what he could do. Helping the Watchers might be the only sure way to get him closer to this new Baker. Closer to true vengeance.

If only they would believe him.

"I can help," he said. "You might not trust me, but my convictions are strong. First, though, will you tell me about this visitor?"

Malia remained by the window, not as horrified as she had sounded. She's in shock, Nophel thought. She lost friends today. He could not imagine what she felt, because he had never had a friend. And what did that make him? Stronger than they were, or weaker?

"Malia?" Peer asked.

The Watcher woman shrugged. "You've told him too much already. See what he has." She coughed a harsh, humorless laugh. "Can't put us in a worse position than we're in."

Peer dragged her chair over and sat before Nophel.

"How can you help?" she asked.

"I know people who can get into Dragar's. People like me. Unseen."

"Good," Peer said, and Malia watched with interest. "Our friend's name is Rufus Kyuss, and the old Baker-your mother-chopped him just before she died."

She told him everything she knew. It did not take very long and, as she spoke, Peer felt the unreality of events washing over her. Nophel sat quiet and still as she talked, and his emotions were difficult for her to discern through the growths on his face. Yet what he had said was as confusing as what she was telling him, and trying to absorb it all gave her a headache.

Penler should be here for this, she thought, and thinking of her friend gave her a hankering for those simpler times in Skulk. An outcast she might have been, but at least her days there had rhythms and her nights had been for sleeping, not planning.

"So you can help?" she asked at last. Nophel sighed and rested his head back against the wall.

"We have to go north," he said. "Just the three of us. There are people I know in the north of Marcellan Canton who might be able to get us inside Dragar's. Once in there…" He shrugged.

"What?" Malia demanded.

"I've seen them," he said. "Through the Scopes. I saw them swarming out, and they were… changed. No longer human."

"They've only been shut away for five hundred years," Peer said.

"Many in the city try to mimic the Bakers," he said, shrugging. "They must have been practicing their own chopping. Preparing for when their Dragar returned, ready to fight anywhere to regain him-in the air, on land, in the water."

"But none can match the Baker," Peer said, thinking of the three-legged whores she had seen, the soldiers with blade limbs, the builders with four arms. With their strange attributes was always infection and pain.

"Maybe not out here, no," Nophel said.

"Then we go north," Malia said. "Sitting here frigging ourselves won't get anything done."

"Shouldn't we tell someone?" Peer asked, then she realized what she sounded like: a scared little girl.

"Devin's dead," Malia said. "I'll leave a message here for Bethy, but there's no saying she'll find it. And we can't wait for Gorham."

"Can't we?"

"Who's to say they'll ever come up again?" Malia said.

Peer knew she was right. They had to go, and now. Into Dragar's Canton with Nophel, this man who claimed to be the old Baker's abandoned, shunned child and who now worked for a Marcellan who, he claimed, was actually a Watcher. How dangerous could it be?

"It's a long walk," Peer said, "and we'll need a reason to be traveling through Marcellan."

"I can also help with that," Nophel said. And for the first time since they had arrived there from the bloodied and burning barge, he smiled. It was grotesque.

"You'd better not be fucking with us," Malia said. "I mean it, ugly man."

Peer offered Nophel a smile, but he was looking down at his hands, turning them slowly in his lap as if willing them to disappear again. There was blood beneath his fingernails.

Nophel walked with his hood up, hiding away from the world, and thought: If this doesn't work, Malia the Watcher will kill me.

He took them east toward Marcellan Canton, the gentle slope rising closer and closer to the place he'd called home for so many years. The wall was visible in the distance-a pale facade catching the setting sun and unmarred today by crucifixions-and beyond that the hill rose steeper toward Hanharan Heights. The Heights themselves were visible only as a thin sliver pointing at the sky, and, as he looked that way, he thought of the Scopes up there and hoped that Dane was taking good care of them.

I'm never going back, he thought suddenly, and though he was unsure where the certainty came from, it hit him hard. He paused in the street and stared ahead, hoping that perhaps the Western Scope was looking back at him right now. He almost dropped his hood-but that would have been foolish. Without him to direct them, the Scopes would be all but mindless.

"If you give us away-" Malia whispered at Nophel's shoulder, and he spun around, right hand up before his face with fingers splayed.

"Do you see the blood?" he said softly. "Dry now. But I can still feel its warmth."

Malia glanced away uncertainly, but by the time she had gathered herself, Nophel was walking again. Foolish woman, he thought, and terrified. His heart was beating hard, though not from exertion-ascending and descending the viewing tower's steps had kept him fit over the years-but from nervousness.

If the entrance has been sealed… if the Blades are guarding it… if word has spread already of the deaths at the canal and there's a clampdown…

There was so much that could go wrong, and in Malia's eyes any fault would be his. But it was all he had left. His drive now-his aim, his reason for being-was to meet this new Baker and ask her for answers that her mother had never offered. And then…

The Bakers were freaks, monstrosities, more deformed than his simple physical differences. Their deformities were on the inside. To kill her would be everything he had lived for.

As they walked-Nophel in the lead, Malia a threatening presence at his back, and Peer, a gentle woman, bringing up the rear-Nophel considered just how much and how quickly everything had changed. After years as an outcast orphan, he had discovered that his mother's line was not ended as he had believed. And not only that, but -there's another of my mother's monsters loose in the city!

He looked forward to meeting this Rufus Kyuss-a man who, if what Peer claimed was true, had spent years living out in the Bonelands. And how could he have done that, if not for my mother's weird magic? The Blue Water sang in his veins, a thrumming potential kept at bay for now by its antidote. In time, perhaps, he would learn to master it himself.

Closing on the Marcellan Canton wall, he sensed Malia growing ever more nervous behind him. Her hand grabbed his shoulder at last.