Tim Lebbon - Echo city

There were no timepieces in the Baker's rooms, and in truth his concept of time had been shattered. He could not tell whether he had been belowground for days or weeks. His perception of day and night was gone, replaced with a need for food, sleep, and toilet, and that was how he tried to regulate his time waiting for the birthing. But there was no time for routine to form. It seemed an age since Nadielle had left, but in reality he guessed it was no more than half a day before the sounds from the vat began to change.

She told me nothing, he thought in a panic. He climbed the ladder fixed to the vat's side, and the liquid's surface was in turmoil. I don't know what to do, or what this means, or whether I should be watching or running away. Soon the vat began to shake and flex and the ladder's uprights cracked, sending several rungs spinning to the floor. He climbed carefully down and retreated from the vat, looking at the remains of the others, which had not repaired themselves after birthing those huge chopped warriors.

Helpless, terrified, he could only watch as Nadielle became the old Baker, and her descendant was born into a time of chaos.

The birth was not as violent as the others he had witnessed. The vat bulged and split, and the pale shape inside reached through with delicate hands, grabbing the vat's outside and pulling itself through. It gasped in a first lungful of air and vomited purple solids. As the rupture spewed the vat's innards, the shape fell and went with the flow, striking the floor softly and sliding a little until it came to a stop.

Gorham approached wide-eyed and amazed, because this was something of his. I made that, he thought, the idea ridiculous yet insistent.

Nadielle had told him nothing about what the new Baker would be like, how old, how possessed of knowledge, instinct, or fear. As he approached, he saw the body of a child approaching her teens. And when she squirmed around to look at him, he saw that she had his eyes.

Peer and Malia waited in a small abandoned building close to where the dome met the ground. They did not like it, but Nophel and Alexia convinced them it would be the safest option. After all, they weren't invisible and had refused any suggestion that they sample Nophel's blood, insisting that they remain part of the world they were determined to help.

Nophel left the building with the three Unseen, and he was one of them more than ever before. Alexia had taught him the concentration required to control the White Water-it had given them more power than the Blue Water ever could, because fading away to nothing was no power at all. Now they could be seen or, with a little concentration, choose to be Unseen again. With that choice came salvation. Alexia and the others were ebullient, and Nophel enjoyed watching them rush invisibly across the base of this first Dragarian dome. They were like trapped animals set free, or confined prisoners given the run of the city. He only hoped they would fulfill their promise and help. Rufus was another of the Baker's victims and Nophel's only way to reach her.

The dome was all but silent. It was incredible-a whole city built to fill that massive space and yet resounding only with distant thumping. Nophel could not tell what caused this noise, but there was a regularity to it that suggested it was mechanical rather than man-made. It was like a massive heartbeat.

They made their way across the first dome without seeing any Dragarians. There were obvious signs of recent habitation-lights were burning in some homes, and the smell of food hung as a heavy background to the dome's atmosphere-but they saw not one living thing. No Dragarians, but no animals either. If there were birds within these walls, they roosted now. If there were hounds or rats, they hid. The silence was haunting and intimidating, and Nophel was pleased when they passed out of that dome and through a huge, rose-encrusted arch leading into the second.

They had emerged on the rim of a vast, gently sloping bowl, in which everything in sight was lush with plant growth-fields of green and yellow, clumped trees with heavy canopies, large areas of shrubs bearing all manner of berries and fruit. The roof was similar to areas they had seen in the first dome, letting in blazing sunlight and yet from outside apparently made from solid stone. The engineering marvels were astonishing, and Nophel found a sense of true wonder dissipating his bitterness and drive for revenge.

"This could feed the whole of Echo City," Alexia said.

"Maybe, maybe not," Nophel said, "but it's more fertile than Crescent. Do you see the color of those trees? The lushness?" He shook his head, marveling at what the Dragarians had achieved in such secrecy. There were some outside who believed they had all died out, but the opposite was true. They were flourishing.

Then the first Dragarians came into view.

For a moment, Nophel was terrified. The Baker had made Blue Water to work on the minds and perceptions of Echo City inhabitants, but there was no way of telling whether the Dragarians would be similarly affected and fooled. Alexia said they had caught that flying Dragarian through stealth, but maybe it had been injured when it landed, or disoriented…

Or perhaps it had wanted to be caught.

He stood with his breath held, face itching in the sunlight, and realized that if they were not invisible to those approaching, they would soon be dead. Because the natives of this place were no longer people.

They were all humanoid, in the same way the flying thing had been. They retained their human basis, with torso, limbs, and head in roughly the correct locations. But they were altered in ways that made them amazing and terrifying to behold. Some walked on hands and feet, their necks curved upward to allow them to see ahead. Others flew, drifting above on wide membranous wings. A few crawled. And here and there some Dragarians slithered, their arms withered to useless dangling limbs, legs almost melded together, stomach and hips strengthened by musculature whose only purpose was to drag them forward across the ground.

"They're monsters!" the tall Unseen said, but Nophel could see the truth.

"No," he said, "they're chopped. No race could adapt like this in just five hundred years."

"Why would they want to be able to fly?" Alexia asked. "In this dome, perhaps. But in the one behind us, there's hardly any space. They've filled it."

"And why slither like a serpent?" the skinny man asked. "Strange."

The Dragarians passed within thirty paces of them. They headed down the gentle slope toward the grasslands below, mostly walking and talking together in a strange language. They seemed relaxed, not alert. And excited.

"Chopping of a different kind, perhaps," Nophel said. "Their own methods, their own aims. They've been isolated for so long, who knows what that can do to a race?" He shrugged. "We're not here to find out. We want the visitor, that's all."

Alexia nudged him and said, "Something tells me if we follow them, we'll find him."

Nophel nodded, then stepped ahead so that the Unseen were behind him. He wished he was on his own. This place was somewhere new, and these ignorants did not seem to realize that. Former Blades all of them, trained killers who'd turned bitterness into a disease instead of a driving force; he would happily have done without them if possible. But he admitted with regret that was not possible. Their task was huge, and, even Unseen, he had no idea how they would smuggle Rufus out of this place.

How do you possibly steal a god?

"So let's follow for a while," he said.

The grass felt good around his legs, cool and long and strong, and the ground below was soft but not muddy. A gentle breeze blew through the dome, carrying the scents of blooms familiar and unknown. The group of Dragarians was about one hundred strong, and they seemed to be moving with purpose across the bowl of this dome. Urgency pressed on Nophel, but he also enjoyed the walk. There was a sense of wildness to these manufactured fields.