Echo City (3 page)

And it imagined its maker growing sad, because there truly was nothing beyond the Bonelands.

   Later, perhaps only hours before the child would have died, a shadow fell across it.

“This is not my home,” Peer Nadawa whispered as she came awake. They were the words with which she had comforted herself on the afternoon she arrived in Skulk Canton, and now their recitation was a natural part of welcoming a new day. They had started as defiance but quickly became a mantra necessary for her survival. And they were never spoken lightly.

She opened her eyes to see what sort of day it would be. The ghourt lizard that lived in a crack between her bedroom wall and ceiling was scampering across the wall in a series of short sprints. It was gathering flies and spiders early today, and that meant it would likely rain before noon. Great. Another day spent harvesting stoneshrooms in the wet.

Peer watched the lizard for a while, preparing herself for the morning ritual of rising through the discomfort of old tortures. The lizard shifted so quickly that it seemed to slip from point to point without actually moving, and there were those who believed that ghourts really belonged in the Echoes below the city. Peer was not one of them. It was a foolish idea to believe that such simple creatures could become phantoms. And, besides, her parents had taught her stillness. Relaxed from sleep, she calmed her mind and watched each tiny movement of the lizard—its fluttering heartbeat, lifting toes, and the darting streak as it ran from one place to the next. She pitied the people who did not have the time to see such things, because she
had long ago stopped pitying herself. She had all the time in the world.

She sighed and scratched an itch in her left armpit. The little lizard flitted back into its hole, startled at her sudden movement. Propping herself on her left elbow, she grimaced as she started to sit up.

They’d used air shards to penetrate her right arm to the bone. Sharper than any blade made of stone or metal, the shards could never be removed, and they were a constant reminder of her crime. They were set in her bone and cast in her flesh, and it took a while each morning to warm them until they became bearable. That’s all they ever were—bearable. Some nights, and on the very worst of days, she could picture the torturer’s grin as he slid them in and see the virtuous expression on the Hanharan priest’s face as he stood beyond the torture table, praying for salvation for her errant soul. Of the two, it was always that fucking priest she wanted to kill.

Grimacing, Peer sat up and started to gently massage her right arm. The pain from her left hip was flaring now, past the numbness of sleep. They hadn’t been so creative with that; the torturer had smashed it with a hammer when she refused to acknowledge Hanharan as the city’s firstborn. It was only thanks to Penler’s skill with medicines and the knife that she was able to walk at all.

She closed her eyes and went through the pain, as she had every morning for the past three years. Each morning was the same, and yet she had never grown to accept it. She fought against what they had done even though the evidence was here, in pain and broken bones. Penler had asked her many times why she still fought when there was no hope of return, and she had never been able to provide an answer. Truthfully, she did not know.

Gorham’s face flashed unbidden across her mind. Perhaps he was haunting her, though for all she knew, he was dead.

Gradually the pain lessened and she sat there for a while, as always, looking around the small room in the house she had been lucky enough to find. It had two floors, and she always slept on the top one. There was a ledge beyond the window
that led to other rooftops if she needed to escape, a system of alarms and traps built into the single staircase—that had been Penler’s doing as well—and if she stretched and stood just right, she could see the desert from her window. Some nights, if she could not sleep, she spent a long time simply looking.

One of the downstairs rooms still contained several paintings of the family that had lived there before the salt plague a hundred years before. Peer had no idea what had happened to them other than they had died.
Everyone
in Skulk Canton had died, either from the plague or from the brutal purging that quickly followed, ordered by the Marcellans. But she liked keeping their images in the house. It had something to do with respect.

“Time to leave,” she muttered. “Important places to go, powerful people to see. Stoneshrooms to pick.” She often spoke to herself when there was no one else to listen. In Skulk there were many who would understand, and probably many more who would consider her mad. There were also those who viewed her as fair game; Echo City’s criminals were a varied breed.

After washing in a bowl of cold water and eating a quick breakfast, she set about arming herself. A knife in her belt, three soft widowgas balls in her pocket, and the wide, short sword on view. She had never grown used to the sword, but Penler assured her that it would scare off any casual aggressors. Up to now, it had seemed to work.

He often chided her for living on her own.
A woman on her own here in Skulk …
he’d say, shaking his head, then pursing his lips because he knew exactly what she thought of such attitudes. Still, she knew that he had only her safety at heart. After berating him with a playful punch, she’d argue that most criminals here weren’t really criminals at all.
They execute the really bad ones
, she would say.
Some always slip through
, he’d counter. And so their little play went on.

Today, she and Penler were meeting for lunch down by the city wall. He said that he had something to tell her. As always for Penler, the mystery was the thrill.

   When the sun was up and birdsong filled the air, and Peer was feeling sharper and brighter than usual, she often
considered Skulk Canton as evidence of the basic goodness in people.

Since the devastating plague, it had become the place to which criminals and undesirables were banished by the ruling Marcellans. Murderers, rapists, and pedophiles were still crucified on the vast walls of the central Marcellan Canton, but lesser criminals—pickpockets, violent drunks, and political dissidents—now had a new place to be sent. The vast underground prisons in the Echoes below the city had been closed, because the abandoned Skulk was far easier and less dangerous to police. It was a city unto itself, and the criminals were left to make it their own.

Over the past few decades, they had done just that. It could hardly be called thriving—they still relied on regular food deliveries from Crescent Canton, and a new canal had been built from the Southern Reservoir in Course Canton to ration their water—but the majority of people in Skulk lived a reasonable life, and most contributed to making their community a bearable place to live.

Naturally, there were those who viewed it as their own private playground. Thieves ran rampant in certain areas; gangs formed, fought, and dispersed; and there were a dozen men and women that Peer could name who considered themselves rulers of Skulk. But as with elsewhere in Echo City, these gangs and gang leaders ruled only those who were at their own level. Violence was frequent but usually confined to rival factions.

Those who kept to themselves were mostly left alone.

Upon her arrival, Peer had been convinced that she would be raped and killed within days. Terribly injured, traumatized from the tortures she had endured and the fact that she was no longer considered an inhabitant of Echo City, she had scampered into a building close to the razed area of ground that marked Skulk’s northern boundary with the rest of the city, and there she had waited to die. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Time lost itself. Day and night seemed to juggle randomly with her senses. And one day after passing out, she woke up in Penler’s rooms.

He told her that three men had brought her to him and then left. He did not even know their names.

Walking along the street toward the stoneshroom fields where she spent most of her mornings, Peer tried to deny the sense of contentment that threatened. She’d been feeling it for a while, as it sought to put down roots in a place that she had never believed she could call home. There was so much she missed—her friends, her small canal-side home in Mino Mont Canton, and Gorham most of all—that it felt wrong to be happy here. She had been banished from the world she knew, escaping execution only because the Marcellans knew it would be dangerous should she become a martyr. In Skulk she could fade away. She was a prisoner who was growing to like her prison, an exiled victim of an insidious dictatorship who was forgetting the fire and rage that had fueled her past. Often she would strive to reignite that fire, but it never felt the same.
Just let it come
, Penler would say to her, referring to the gentle contentment and not the righteous passion she had once felt. She hated him and loved him for that, the infuriating old man. He was trying to save her, and she was determined to convince herself that she did not want to be saved.

This is not my home
, she thought again as she walked through the narrow streets, but this morning Skulk Canton felt just fine.

She passed through a small square and saw familiar figures setting up stalls for breakfast. She bought a lemon pancake and had her mug filled with rich five-bean, and she dallied for a while, enjoying the sights and smells of cooking, the sound of bartering, and the good-natured air of the place.

“You’ll be late!” a big man called as he stirred soup in a huge pot.

“The ’shrooms will wait, Maff,” she said. “What’s cooking?”

He motioned her over, and Peer smiled as she negotiated her way through a throng of hungry people. Maff always enjoyed revealing the recipes to his top-secret brews.

“Tell no one,” he whispered as she drew close, his breath smelling of beer and pipe smoke, his big hand closing around her long, tied hair. “I had a consignment of dart root delivered yesterday. I’m mixing it with rockzard legs, some sweet potatoes from Course, and my own special ingredient.” He tapped
the side of her nose and glanced around, as if they were discussing a coup against the Marcellans themselves.

Peer raised an eyebrow, waiting for the great revelation.

“Electric-eel hearts,” he whispered into her ear. “Fresh. Still charged.” She felt his bead-bedecked beard tickling her neck and pulled away, laughing softly. When she looked at him, Maff was nodding seriously, pearls of sweat standing out on his suntanned skin. He touched her nose again. “Tell no one.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Maff.”

“So …?” he asked, lifting a deep spoon of the soup toward a bowl.

Peer held up both hands. “I’d like to wake up in the morning.”

Maff shrugged and continued stirring the soup, and even as she bade him farewell, he called over a short, ratlike man. He whispered in the man’s ear, nodded down at the soup, and his secret was told again.

In her early days here, Peer would have wondered what crimes Maff had committed to deserve banishment. Such thoughts rarely crossed her mind anymore. She left the square and weaved her way through narrow streets, the buildings overhead seeming to lean in and almost touch. The sun shone, though she still thought it would likely rain that afternoon, and Skulk Canton was buzzing with life.

She passed a group of men and women lounging on the front steps of a large building. They wore knives and swords on show, and all bore identical scars on their left cheeks—the unmistakable arc of a rathawk’s wing. They observed her with lazy eyes and full purple lips, displaying the signs of subtle slash addiction, and one of them called to her softly. Laughter followed. She ignored the call and walked on, maintaining the same pace. She didn’t want them to think she was running because of them, but slowing could have been seen as a reaction to the voice. They were part of the Rage gang—slash dealers and sex vendors—and she had no wish to be involved with them in any way.

She soon reached the first of the stoneshroom fields. There were already dozens of people at work, scrambling across the spread of ruined buildings in their search for the prized fungi.
Much of the wild plant growth had been cleared from the rubble, making the stoneshrooms easier to spot and giving them space in which to grow, and the ruins were stark and depressing in the morning sun. Some areas still bore the dark evidence of fire, even after so long, and to Peer the ruin seemed recent, not a hundred years old. She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes, smiled as she tried to drive down the dark thoughts that always haunted her, then went to work.

She knew most of the stoneshroom gatherers, and they were a friendly group to work with. They were all out for themselves—picking the ’shrooms was only the first part of the process, the next being their cleaning, preparation, and sale—but often, if a good spread was found, word would filter quietly to the several other harvesters in the vicinity. They were a prized plant because of their heavy meatiness, and they were one of the few foodstuffs harvested within Skulk Canton.
If ever we claim independence
, Penler had once quipped,
we’ll all turn into stoneshrooms
.