Tim Lebbon - Echo city

The Echo smelled of death, and it was no longer only from him.

The ground opened up before him. The statue park, part of an Echo he had explored many times, split from side to side, and from the new rift something rose up. It was huge, a shifting tower of the dead and rotting, bones and flesh falling from it. His meager vision was clouded with the dust of crushed bones. Clad in the dead of Echo City, the thing beneath the corpses was visible in places-swaths of deep-red hide with cracks that glowed like lava bubbling in the Echo pits beneath Skulk.

Huge limbs the length of a hundred human arms thrashed at things clinging to its sheer sides. And these things-two of them, joined now by the one Sprote had seen rushing across the Echo-were hacking at the monster. Their bladed limbs rose and fell, scattering more bones of the dead and flicking countless body parts into the darkness, digging deeper until they encountered the monster's skin, slashing, rending, and moving on when gouts of fiery blood erupted from the foul wounds they had made.

Sprote's torch faded out, but the scene was lit with the blaze of combat. Old corpses flamed as they fell past the monster's burning wounds, disintegrating across the ground and setting a thousand bonfires. Fires burned on its ridged back. Gases ignited around the fighting things.

And then, far to Sprote's left, another upheaval, and another huge mass broke through the rock from the Echoes buried below. It tipped over and smashed onto the ground, shattering the statues of people dead for thousands of years and spilling a hundred corpses across the soil. At first he thought there were two monsters rising. But when he realized what he was actually seeing, and the ground between the limbs started to bulge as the thing's colossal head forced through, his heart stopped beating for the final time.

The Echoes around the turmoil collapsed, history fell, and Sprote Felder was crushed before he could utter one final, dreadful cry.

"Man from Sand," the voice says, and Rufus opens his eyes. He is in his small room in his guardian's house. Sunrise is near, and the only sounds from beyond are the soft calls of birds waking around the village. Soon the place will be bustling, but there is always that gentle, almost mournful time between night and day when the village seems to be holding its breath. Sometimes Rufus is awake for this and he stares from the window, wondering who he really is. Mostly he sleeps through to daylight. He is becoming comfortable, though afraid that the dreams will never leave him be.

"Who are you?" he asks, and then he sees the flowing yellow robes. A Tender, from the valley of the Heart and Mind. He has never heard of these servants leaving the valley, and he has seen them only once before, one moon ago, when he made his pilgrimage.

"My name does not belong to me," the man says. He is exceedingly tall and thin, his arms almost as long as Rufus's body, his head elongated, his feet large and flat. His face is somber and pale, but his eyes are bright. They glitter in the light of the small lamp he has lit. He sits in the chair beside the bed, and his knees are almost as high as Rufus's head.

"You're… tall," Rufus says, but the man does not react. He is removing something from a pocket hidden within his robes. He settles, and when he seems comfortable he begins to speak.

"Long ago, long before history, at a time when people passed events through song instead of writing, the Heartlands' ancestors fought a war. The causes of the war are long forgotten, but even now there is evidence of its ferocity and inhumanity-both to scales beyond our comprehension-in the eternally toxic desert. And you have seen the dead city deeper in the Heartlands, where only the ghosts of the past reside. There are more like that."

"More? I thought-"

"Our ancestors lost the war. But not as much as their enemies. Half the world died, and the other half struggled on for many painful centuries until it became the Heartlands. The Heart and Mind believes that you are from the world that died."

"But I-"

The man lashes out with the thin stick he has produced from his robes, catching Rufus across the face. The impact is sharp, fast, and surprising. No one here has ever treated Rufus like this. There has been disbelief, and fear, and sometimes hostility. But never violence.

"Silence, Man from Sand!" the Tender snaps, and his voice carries so much more threat than before. "You must listen and do as I say. The Heart and Mind commands that you hear the truth and then obey." He arranges his robes again, shifting on the seat until he is comfortable once more. Then he stares at Rufus. "The Heartlands is the whole world. It stretches for a thousand miles south of here, and we are at its edge. The Heart and Mind was placed here long ago, at the edge of the rest of the world, formed and chopped by the Revered Artist. His was a tortured soul, and upon completion of the Heart and Mind, he let himself fade and die. He believed that he was not for the likes of us. But he will never fade from memory." The Tender looked sad, the first expression that had crossed its otherwise plain face.

"Why did he-"

"His arcane talents caused much suffering before the Heart and Mind emerged. But his purpose was finally achieved. It was based here to guard against future wars. That threat is… long past. But then there comes you."

The welt across his face is stinging, but Rufus holds back the tears. He is not weak. Confused, yes; often. Lonely… sometimes. But never weak.

"The Heart and Mind instructs that you are to return to the sands this coming night," the Tender said. "It senses deep, distant rumblings that trouble it and commands that you leave. No one must know. I will tell you where to meet me, close to the desert's edge. We will equip you, and you will go back to where you came from."

"Just because I'm not like you?" Rufus asks, flinching in expectation of another strike. But the man's face softens just a little, and he sighs.

"You are not like us, any of us. You're an upset that should not exist."

"I don't understand…" Rufus says, closing his eyes and seeing the city, and hearing a voice that might be his mother.

"And that is why you must return," the Tender says. "The Heart and Mind will touch you first, so that it can read you from afar. It is curious about you and where you came from. And it must know what the rumblings it senses forewarn. Knowledge gives it power, and it would have knowledge of your origins. What you see, it will see. What you experience, it will know. Thus it is with every Tender. You will become one."

"And my guardian?"

"She can never know." The man is sour and grim once again, staring at Rufus with a warning in his eyes.

"If I tell her, if I tell everyone-"

"You-will-not." The voice is like fire; the words spell death. Rufus shivers in his warm bed, and the man stands to leave. There is hardly any sound as he moves; no swish of his robes, no impact of feet upon the ground. He's almost a ghost, but Rufus knows for sure that he is real. He can smell a sickly-sweet odor coming from him that he knows has something to do with the Heart and Mind, and the man's shadow is cold.

"I'm afraid," Rufus says.

"Of going home?"

"I'm not sure…" he says, screwing up his eyes. He concentrates. "I'm not sure I really came from anywhere out there." The man bends down, looming over him like a carrion bird inspecting a victim as it slowly bleeds to death.

"But the Heart and Mind is sure," he says. "Sundown, by the Signal Rock."

Rufus nods, unable to speak. The man leaves. And as the sun rises soon after, and Rufus's last day in the Heartlands begins, the coolness of rejection settles over him.

There are no memories of that final day with the people of the Heartlands, because it must have been a happy one. Later, he is standing by the Signal Rock, its flanks scorched black by the hundreds of fires lit and doused there over the years. The Tender is there, as promised, and at his feet is a sled with several covered packages-water, food, the weapons he's been taught to use, a tent.