Echo City (51 page)

“You’ll want to stand back,” she said. She waited a moment longer atop the ladder, looking down into that one special vat before descending.

Gorham had witnessed Neph’s birth, and through the fascinated disgust he had felt privileged. But watching these new things born from Nadielle’s womb vats inspired only horror.

How she could have grown them so quickly, he had no clue. The talents handed down through the Baker’s generations were so arcane and mysterious that they’d be called magic by most, though he knew that she vehemently repudiated any such descriptions.
Magic’s for the frightened and the indoctrinated
, she’d told him once,
and for those without the imagination to see how amazing things can really be
. They’d been naked on her bed at the time, and recalling the conversation now, he recognized it as another moment when he had not really been there for her. She’d used his presence to talk to herself.

Perhaps the speed with which these things had been
chopped went some way to explaining the terrible screams as they were birthed. They came to the world in agony, three of them emerging from vats with the help of their many-bladed and spiked limbs, forcing their way out as if inside was torture, only to discover that outside was worse. They thrashed and rolled in the thick fluids that spilled around them. Gorham backed away, closer to the Baker’s rooms but unable to hide himself away entirely. He was shocked and afraid in equal measures but still certain that Nadielle would allow no harm to come to him.

Unless she’s rushed it. Unless, in her desperation, she’s made a mistake
.

But then she was walking among her new creations, and now Gorham could see just how large they were. He’d subconsciously been comparing them to the dozen bladed guards that slinked around the vat hall, but these things were at least five times the size of those, and there was nothing even vaguely humanoid about them at all. They were flesh, blood, and metal, monstrous mergings of soft and hard. Their blades glittered with sharpness, their spikes were slick with afterbirth, hands were heavy with studs, and what might have been their heads—he wasn’t sure, but he thought each creature had at least three—bore vicious white horns as protection around their mouths and eyes. In those mouths were silvery teeth that already had shredded their lips and tongues, the blood adding to the terrible mix smeared across the floor. And in those eyes was nothing he could recognize.

Nadielle spoke, and a bladed guard darted toward each of the newborns. The giant creatures lashed out, piercing the smaller chopped, picking them up with blades or fists, depositing them in mouths that opened up where Gorham had not noticed them before. The sound of chomping was appalling—crunching, crushing, splitting, bursting, and brief cries as three lives were snuffed out.

When the newborns had finished chewing, they were somewhat calmed, and Nadielle repeated those words. Three more guards walked in, a little slower than the first. They suffered the same fate.

She turned from her new creations and walked toward
Gorham, unconcerned, turning her back on monsters that would give him nightmares forever. Just before she reached him, her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and she collapsed to the floor.

As he rushed to her side, he saw her right eye suddenly flush red with blood. And the new monsters began to howl.

   Neph had been sitting for so long, listening to the sounds increasing in volume and frequency, that it could no longer feel its legs. When the time came, it lit its torch and shone it at the wall of water. At the place where the water fell beyond view, a shadow appeared. Neph had seen many shadows already, the dead from a city it would never know. But they were always falling.

This shadow rose.

Neph stood, legs burning as blood circulation returned. It took one step back, and the wounds on its arm began to bleed.

The shadow manifested into a mass of corpses, some quite fresh, others rotting. Chunks of their flesh had been torn away by the powerful flow, leaving only their bones behind. The impact of the falling water was brutalizing, and many of the corpses had flowed into one another, limbs punched through guts and bones embracing another’s insides. Punching through the bodies were heavy, thick spines …

Neph flexed its own spines, startled at the familiarity.

The shadow rose higher, pushing against the water. Huge flailing shapes swung into view, thrashing at the water and seeming to grab on to it, hauling the mass of bodies higher, higher …

Neph squatted in a fighting pose.

Beneath the piled bodies, a massive eye opened, regarding Neph without emotion. Water poured around and across it but washed away none of this thing’s menace. The thrashing things—arms with massive spade-shaped hands that hauled it upward against the shattering liquid weight—moved faster, lifting the shadow higher above the edge of the chasm.

The water roared, and the rising thing added its own voice.

When Neph found its legs and ran at the abomination, it did not even see the whipping thing that took out its right eye.

Neph fell, legs still pounding into the rock because it did not understand. Something felt wrong with its head. A thick tentacle hovered above it, and Neph lashed out with its right arm. But the arm would not obey its orders, and the tentacle thrashed down, crushing, breaking, spilling Neph across the rock and leaving its few lonely memories to be washed away forever.

   “It’s risen,” she whispered. “It’s here.”

Gorham knelt, Nadielle’s head resting in his lap, and he stroked her cheek. Her eye was bloodshot and blind, but she seemed unconcerned. The other eye stared off past the chopped creations, large and small, that had gathered around them. In the shadows past them, Gorham thought he saw the two remaining Pserans watching quietly, and he almost called to them. But other than Gorham, the Baker was the closest to human here, and even she was far from that.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“The Vex has reached the Echoes, clothed in the city’s dead.” She struggled into a sitting position, shrugging off Gorham’s helping hands. “Tens of thousands since it fell,
hundreds
of thousands. It fed on them, and it grew so large that they litter its skin. Perhaps they can no longer fall past it. Perhaps it
filled
the Chasm.” The Pserans came, shoving past the splayed blades and limbs of the chopped monsters as though they were tree branches blocking their way. They helped Nadielle stand. She swayed, then gently pushed their hands aside, staring down at the floor. She seemed physically lessened, but there was a strength about her that Gorham had never seen before. Previously she had been superior yet flawed, someone whose confidence went only so deep, he had always felt. He’d tried to touch her, but her front had held firm. Those insecurities had remained buried. Now she was the Baker, completely in control and self-assured, confident in what needed doing and how much she could do herself. When she looked up again, she had changed, in the blood of her dead eye and the power in the other.

“I must leave,” she said, and she started for the end of the vat room. She passed the special vat without a glance,
walking taller the farther she went, and Gorham ran after her.

“Nadielle! You can’t just leave. You have to tell me—”

“There’s no time. She’s your responsibility.” She paused and stood face-to-face with Gorham, almost close enough to kiss. “Water the vat regularly. Pay her attention; be here for her. I’ve put accelerant into the mix, so she won’t be long. Maybe even today.” She glanced past him at the vat, then turned quickly away.

“But what about us?” he asked, hating the pleading tone to his voice. He could not let her leave without another word.

“Goodbye, Gorham,” the Baker said without even turning around. She left the laboratory, with the Pserans following behind. One of them looked back at him, cold and hard, and in that stare was unveiled threat. The smaller bladed things followed, and those three larger monsters disappeared behind the rows of vats, heading for the wider curtained route he knew existed to the outside. In moments he was alone in the Baker’s rooms, left in charge of equipment, words, and deed that he could never hope to understand.

Three years earlier he had sat at a table in a friend’s home, knowing that Peer was being taken by the Scarlet Blades. The purge had not yet begun in full, and he and several others were preparing to melt away as Watchers, allowing the Marcellans to think they had shattered the outlawed organization. But for a while he had nursed a bottle of wine, staring into a candle’s flame and wishing he could be so consumed. The guilt was a hard thing that weighed him down. There had been a time when he had said goodbye to Peer, knowing that he would never see her again, and he’d done so without giving anything away. A monstrous deception, a brutal betrayal, and yet he’d believed it was all for the best. Every day since then, he’d wished that goodbye had been sweeter.

He wished the same now. But Nadielle had left his life as surely as if the door she’d passed through was a barrier between the living and the dead. She would not survive. And though cold in passing, she had left him with the greatest responsibility.

Soon the new Baker would be born. He would be here to
care for her. In the space of a day he had gone from lover to father, and his insides ached as if an age had been impressed upon him.

   He wandered the rooms for a time, watching the vat, watering, exploring. There was much about the laboratory that Nadielle had always refused to discuss, but looking on his own seemed an empty affair. He found small rooms he did not understand and corridors that seemingly led nowhere. He always returned to her living rooms, to lie in her bed and try to remember their good times. But already there was a bitterness, and strive though he did to shrug it off, he could not avoid feeling that he had been used.

And he could also not help thinking that he deserved it.

The rooms were silent but for the noises made by the vat. Sometimes he sang, but he could not find a tune to fit. He tried fighting songs from Mino Mont’s gangs, but the martial aspects did not seem to fit the shape of these rooms, their echoes sounding all wrong. He tried some love songs that his estranged sister used to write when she was young, but she had grown into a woman whose belief in love was vague, and his own experiences made the lyrics seem naïve. So he whistled instead—aimless tunes that matched the path of his wandering around the rooms. Sometimes shadows drew him, sometimes areas lit by the oil lamps. He wondered why the oil never ran out. He wondered why there was always food in the cold store when he wanted it, and where the dried and smoked meats came from, and how he could be sure that the water collected in several sacs lining the wall in one small room could be fresh. It was all Nadielle’s mystery. And more and more his attention was taken by the special vat from whence the new Baker would emerge. He spent more time sitting on its rim, watering when the levels fell and watching the thick fluid suck in the stream without a splash. Sometimes he reached out a hand to touch the surface but never quite got there. Fear, and respect for the Baker’s talents, kept him away. He had seen but a tenth of them, and the loss he felt at her leaving was amplified so much more.

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.