Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"Somewhere nobody can go," she says.

"You never told me," he says. "It's never been mentioned. All those drawings, my dreams, my visions of the place I came-"

"Because it is nothing like your drawings!" she snaps. "That is…" She waves one hand, eyes averted. "It's a skeleton of old times. There's only disease there, and death."

"Have you ever been?"

"Why would I?" she asks, and there's an innocence about her. "Why would anyone? The land around it is left unfarmed and wild, so that its badness can be locked in. And even from this far away, it's death. Look what we have here!" She indicates the beautiful countryside around them. "Why would anyone want to go there?" And they carry on walking without once looking back.

That place disturbs him for some time. A cancer in the Heartlands, a blank spot in the landscape's lush presence-and also in the consciousness of those living there-its solidity is a terrifying thing. He can understand the Heartlanders subconsciously steering clear of somewhere like that, but their denial is a conscious decision.

That's not my city, he thinks, and though it is often on his mind, he never speaks of it again.

Days later, sitting beside a campfire watching children from a small village putting on a dance show for them, he feels another pain, this one in the back of his hand. He cries out and raises his hand, but that confuses him, because it never actually happened -and there was darkness once more, and the distant whisper of Dragarians in wonder, and more memory.

"This is it," she says. "Last time I came here I was not much older than you." There are travelers and traders in the Heartlands, and he has spent enjoyable days back in the village mingling with them. But there are also those who choose not to travel, and his guardian is such a person. Her life is full and rich, she is contented, and other than her pilgrimage to the Heart and Mind-the single journey that everyone must take at some time-she has hardly ever been far beyond her own valley.

This valley is very different. From a hilltop, he looks down and is amazed. On the floor of the valley is a giant structure-except when he looks closer, he sees irregularities and anomalies that indicate that it's something natural, not man-made. It is dome-shaped, its surface a deep red with darker, almost black striations webbing out from the center. Steam or gas is emitting from openings around its edge, and it is these rising and dispersing clouds that bring into context just how large the thing is. They drift slowly, their movement minute compared to the red dome, and because he's concentrating on one such steam column, he does not see the eyes.

"It sees you," she whispers. "It always recognizes a new visitor."

"It's amazing," he says, because even though she has told him about the Heart and Mind, nothing could prepare him for this.

It is the heart of our land, she'd said, bearing the weight of the Heartland's health and well-being. And it is the mind of the land, our conscience. It keeps us well and safe. It is a physical thing, something we can see and touch. Dig deep enough and you will touch it, because its breadth and influence underpin the ground itself.

It's your god, he'd said in wonder, because he could think of no other word to describe it. She had seemed amused, perhaps confused, but she had not confirmed or denied his observation.

Where does it come from? he'd asked another time.

There is history, she'd replied, and he'd seen the concentration on her face as she tried to answer his question while keeping back knowledge that must yet be forbidden to him. And deep in history there is before and after… and the Heart and Mind was created at the point when before became after. One of the Heartlanders' saviors was called the Artist, and he created the Heart and Mind to ensure our survival. He was the only Artist. But his influence lives on.

Artist?

A sculptor of natural things. She'd shaken her head then, left him to his thoughts, and he'd wondered how and when she had told him too much.

"Don't you feel it?" she asks now. "Don't you sense its interest? It knows me, and I can feel that too, but you…" Then she trails off and gasps, going to her knees and grabbing his arm to prevent herself from tumbling over.

"What do you…?" he begins, and then he, too, gasps, because he can feel it, and he sees it as well. There are dozens of openings across the dome's gentle concave surface, each of them housing something that glitters and blinks.

Eyes. They're looking at him. He feels their interest, their consideration, their shattering intellect. He's being analyzed and assessed, and they are seeing much further than his skin. He feels something deep inside, rooting gently in places he does not know or understand, opening doors in his mind he has never seen, feeling their way to consider what these hidden places might contain. And he shouts, not through shock or a sense of invasion, because both of those are gentle things… but from the sense that he can never look into these rooms himself. They're buried away so deep that to uncover them could well make him mad.

"The Heart and Mind is knowing you," she says. "Now you're part of its world and part of ours."

"When do we go down?" he asks.

She stands uncertainly, still holding on to his arm to support herself, and he can feel the cool slickness of her sweaty hands.

"We don't," she says. "Only the Tenders ever approach closer than this."

He scans the slopes of the shallow valley, but there are no signs of any other living things.

"They hide unless they're needed," she says. "They're its servants." The stress she put on that word leads him to wonder whether she really means slaves.

She gasps and staggers again, short nails scraping the skin across his wrist and hand as she tries to hang on. "Ohhh…" she says, not really a word at all.

He goes to his knees as well.

The Heart and Mind surges with a rush of surprise at what it has found inside him. Several columns of steam vent, the landscape viewed through them stained red. The valley is no longer still and peaceful. There's no difference in the sounds and smells of that place, but the air is now loaded with a potential previously absent.

From several points across the slopes, yellow-clad men and women appear, hurrying toward the valley floor, stumbling as if awakened from a long slumber. None of them looks up toward the ridges; they only have eyes for the Heart and Mind.

But his guardian is staring at him. He has never seen an expression like that before, and she will never look at him the same way again.

They sat on the wall until dawn, and Peer was already starting to suspect that Nophel was mad. He had brought them here in those sickening Bellower transports, twisting their stomachs, crushing their insides, bruising their limbs, and promising that his Unseen friends could get them into Dragar's Canton. And while it was true that she had seen him fade away, she thought perhaps that was a madness rather than a gift.

He talked to himself as the sun rose across the Northern Reservoir to their right, and what he said never made any sense.

Malia was seated beside Peer on the bench, asleep. Her head tilted forward, chin resting on her chest, and every now and then she snored gently, startling herself into a new position. Since the journey through the Bellower tubes, she had been quiet and withdrawn, not the hard, forthright woman Peer had grown to know in a few short days. Tiredness was some of it, but there was also a quiet shock about the Watcher woman now. She had been shown things about the city that she had never suspected.

The rising sun splashed from the reservoir and smeared across Dragar's Canton's domes. They were perfectly engineered, and looked almost impossible rising beyond the northern finger of Crescent. There was little detail to them that enabled her to judge their size, but the things around them gave scale: flocks of red sparrows fleeting here and there, almost lost against the structures; trees sprouting around their bases where rainwater runoff made the ground particularly fertile; and the dry canal marking the canton's southern perimeter, little more than a vague line from here yet reputedly filled with all manner of traps and stinging things. The Dragarian domes were the most astonishing things in Echo City, and yet, lifeless and still, they were all but ignored.