Tim Lebbon - Echo city

It was as they struck alight their oil torches that Peer first heard the sounds of pursuit.

She and Malia froze and stared at each other, heads tilted. The sound came again-a low, secretive grinding, like something dragging itself over the ground.

"You go on," Malia said, and before Peer could protest, the Watcher woman was climbing back toward daylight.

Peer moved deeper into the tunnels, alone and terrified, and looked for a place to wait. She could not simply leave Malia behind and flee, much as every part of her wanted to. And neither could she move on; even now she was unsure of whether she was going in the right direction. So she hunkered down behind the remains of a tumbled wall, wondered what the building had been, and soon heard footsteps pounding toward her from the direction of the dome. She thought of extinguishing the torch but decided to keep it alight. If the person running at her was not Malia, she'd need to see what she was fighting.

"We can't stay here," Malia said, rushing past. "Come on."

Peer ran after her, handing Malia the torch and trusting the Watcher's instinct. Malia moved this way and that without any apparent hesitation, and Peer only hoped she remembered the way correctly.

"Lots of them," Malia said. "We could wait and fight, but we wouldn't hold them up for long. Useless."

"So what?" Peer panted.

"We find somewhere narrow and try to hold them back."

"Just you and me?"

"Yeah. Narrow enough for one or two, and we'll do what we can."

We'll do what we can. That meant die. Peer felt curiously detached from the possibility, as if she'd already died once before and knew it was not so bad. Yet her will to live was strong-to see Rufus and help him as much as she could. To see Gorham again. He'd been afraid when she left him with the Baker, and the manner of their parting…

I could have said goodbye, she thought. I could have given him some inkling of forgiveness, at least. But that would have been a betrayal of herself. She had not forgiven him, could not. But that didn't mean they could not still be friends, of a sort.

And Penler. She'd made herself a promise to see him one more time. Failing in that would feel like letting him, not herself, down.

Behind them in the tunnels, echoes drifted in: growls and scrapes, the flapping of wings, the slithering of things across the ground. They merged with the sounds of their own footfalls. The sounds were growing louder, even though Peer and Malia were running as fast as they could. Whether they reached a suitable place of ambush or not, the choice to run or fight would soon be made for them.

Peer drew her sword, and it felt pathetic in her hand. Not long now. Not long until she discovered the truth about death and what lay beyond. Would she be taken down to Hanharan, in whom she did not believe, and welcomed into his shadowed embrace? Or would her senses blink out one by one until there was nothing to comprehend and no comprehension at all?

A Watcher all her life, right then Peer was no longer sure what she believed.

An arrow flicked past her ear and struck Malia in the neck. She grunted and fell, and Peer tripped over her flailing limbs. And then redness rose around them, and the sound of fighting and dying filled that subterranean place.

Sometimes Sprote Felder believed that the statues spoke to him. He did his best to listen, but their words were distorted by time and confused by languages he had never known. He thought he'd researched all the old dialects, reading them on inscriptions hidden from the sun for countless years, but perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps there was so much more that he could never know.

The noise in his head was constant. Sometimes he screamed until he could no longer draw breath past the rawness in his throat, but that did nothing to cover the impact noises he heard from below. Other times he stuffed dust and dirt into his ears, wetting his finger and shoving it in as far as he could in the hope that it would solidify, cementing out the terrible truth. But then he'd slump to the ground and bang his head, and the plugs would fall out.

The tall statue before him was regal and aloof, missing one arm that might have been torn off by Garthans. They sometimes came and vandalized these higher Echoes, poor revenge upon the memories of those long-ago Marcellans who had wronged them when they were proud Thanulians. He had often suspected that one day they would marshal their forces, gather their anger, and rise up to exact true vengeance. It seemed that he'd been wrong.

Something else would be the end of Echo City.

He screamed again, raging at the pains in his throat and head. It had been a long time since he'd had a drink. Crawling from the small tomb beneath one of the statues where the Baker woman had dragged him, he'd cracked the water flask she'd left behind, spilling its contents into the dry dust of history. He'd lit his torch and watched it soaking in, amazed that things could still happen when there was no one here to see. That's proof of the city's soul, he'd thought. That it continues on without us, and it'll move on, and on, even when this is all over. Even when we're all dead.

Crawling, pulling with his hands, pushing with his one good leg, smelling the stench of his other leg, where the bone had ruptured flesh and set it to rot, he had no destination in sight. His only purpose was to move, because he had never stayed still.

Creatures ran past him, heading back the way he had come. A mass of small insectlike animals first, antennae waving at the air, ten legs scuttling across the uneven ground. They parted around him-smelling him, perhaps-though a couple came close and chewed chunks from his rotting leg. Larger creatures followed them, some flying, most crawling or running. He knew some of them from his long journeys down here, but there were shining diamondlike creatures that moved on cushions of gas that he had never seen before. Even now the wonder was there, and he reached out to grab one as it drifted by. His hand was slashed in a dozen places. It hissed as it passed by, absorbing his blood and glowing red for a few brief moments.

"Running from something," he said, and he started to crawl faster. Whatever they were running from, he had to see. He was dead but not yet finished, and curiosity and the search for knowledge were his prime motivators even now.

The ground thumped up at his chest and stomach, the regular rhythm of the impacts now ended. "Turning to chaos," he said into the shadows. They did not reply, because there was nothing left down there to hear. Even the maddest of the Garthans had gone-he'd seen no sign of them for what felt like days. "Chaos rising, and the city's reaping what it's sown." Crawl… crawl…

Something moved in the distance. Sprote paused and aimed his torch, but the oil had almost run out now, and the light beam was weak. Shadows shifted again and then dashed across the Echo before him-a huge, flailing thing that ran so fast he could not track its progress. Light reflected from lashing metal objects, and between them was only the darkness of a body built to hide.

This time Sprote did not scream, because he knew this was not the rising thing. This was something that had come down.

"Mounting a defense," he said, but this was not a creation of the Marcellans, and the Hanharans would not allow such bastardization. He knew who had made this, and why, and when he shouted this time, it was a cry of encouragement and defiance.

The impacts increased, the ground now shaking so much that each thump punched him into the air, and each fall drove lances of pain all through his body. From the far distance, across this Echo and from those much deeper, he heard and felt the steady rumble of roofs caving in, columns crushing, history imploding. The noise was immense, and at last, through the incredible volume, he started to distinguish one facet of the cacophony from another: here, the clash of metal against other hard things; there, the cry of something in pain; and elsewhere, a roar fractured by the teeth it was driven past.