The desert had always been this way, and such a terrible place attracted its myths and legends. There were the Dragarians, shut away and isolated in their canton for more than five hundred years now, who believed that their savior, Dragar, would emerge from the desert at the city's final hour to lead them into their mysterious Honored Darkness. There was the Temple of the Seventy-seven Custodians, who claimed that the desert was home to six-legged gods that watched over Echo City. But the Markoshi Desert-commonly known as the Bonelands-was the end of the world. And there were the Watchers, her people. They believed that there was something beyond and that their future lay in countering the desert's terrible effects.
She never grew bored of this. As the rain came down heavier, Peer leaned on the wall and watched.
At first, she thought it was a breeze blowing through the rain. The shadow shifted far out in the desert-a slightly more solid shape amid the unremitting downpour. She frowned and shielded her eyes, blinking away moisture. The day had grown dim, and the cold was making her hip ache.
The top of the wall remained deserted. Most people were sheltering from the rain or doing whatever it was they did to make their lives easier. Penler had probably reached the place he was happy enough to call home. Peer was alone… and the chill that hit her when she next saw the shifting shape made that loneliness even more intense.
There's something out there, she thought, and the idea was shocking. Nothing lived in the desert, because it was a place of death. She strained to see farther, leaning on the parapet in a vain attempt to take her closer. Curtains of rain blew from east to west, wiping the movement from view, but between gusts the shape was always there. Something out there, and it's coming this way.
She glanced frantically left and right. To her left, a tower protruded above the wall, but she knew that the staircase in there led only up, not down. She knew of a small breach to her right, maybe half a mile away, that had collapsed a hundred years before, during the purging of Skulk Canton. Many fires had been set back then, and it was said that a pile of thousands of bodies had been thrown from the wall and burned. The intensity of the flames had made the stonework brittle, bringing down a section of wall.
Peer ran. She paused every few heartbeats to glance out over the desert; the shape was definitely there, closing, resolving, and her heart started to pummel from more than exertion, because it looked like a person. The way it moved, the way it shifted behind the veils of rain, seeming to hunch over as if trying to protect its face from the unrelenting storm, gave it all the characteristics of a human being.
And then she saw something strange. The figure stopped, and perhaps it was the first time it had looked up in a long while, because it paused where it was and leaned back, looking at the great wall before it and the city beyond.
Even though it was impossible through the rain and over this distance, Peer felt that she met the person's eyes.
She ran on, finding it difficult to tear her gaze away, and tripped and went down. Right arm, she thought, left hip, and she fell awkwardly so that she jarred both. She cried out, then looked around to see if anyone had heard her. In the street below, a couple of people dashed from one building to another, but they seemed unaware of her presence, and she was happy to leave them to themselves. Biting her lip, standing, she concentrated on the cool rain instead of the heat of her old injuries.
When she looked again, the figure had started running.
It was a man in a yellow robe.
And past the hushing rain, past her thundering heartbeat, she heard his scream.
Peer reached the breach in the wall and worked her way down the precarious slope. The rain made the tumbled blocks slippery, but that shouting still reverberated in her ears, driving her. She stumbled once or twice, jarring her right arm again, but then she reached the bottom.
She paused on the final block, feet a handbreadth above the ground. The desert is death. This was drummed into everyone in Echo City, from birth to the moment they died, and though she was exiled for sedition and still in possession of her own inquiring mind, it was difficult to deny such teaching. She stared at her heavy boots, then past them at the sodden ground. It was muddy. Sand flowed in rivulets, shallow puddles were forming, and for the thousandth time she wondered where the death dwelled. In the sand? In the air she was breathing even now? Many had written and spoken of the Bonelands, but none had derived a definitive answer.
And then she heard a shout, and, looking to her left, she saw a man kneeling in the mud at the base of the city wall.
She stepped down onto the sand and ran. She slowed only when she neared him, then paused a dozen steps away. He looked up, his eyes wide and fearful, his face gaunt, and he seemed as terrified as she was.
Who? she wanted to ask, but she could not form words. His clothes were of a style she had never seen before, his robe a dirty yellow. Over one shoulder he carried a bag, and strange things protruded from it. The rain ran from his white hair and down across his face. And then he opened his mouth.
"Who…?" Peer managed, because she felt it was important to say something first.
"You're not her," the man said. Then he fell onto his face and, somewhere over the city, lightning thrashed.
Gorham stood at the border of two cantons and smelled the sweetness of freshwater. The rain had ceased, the storm passing to the south, and before him lay the Western Reservoir, three miles across and speckled with boats and canoes. He heard laughter from the beach, where a group of people were eating rock crabs cooked over a huge fire pit dug into the sands. One of them glanced his way. The young woman smiled, and Gorham tried to smile back, wishing only that he could abandon himself to such casual actions. But his life was far removed from this.
"Gorham. We need to go." Malia plucked at his sleeve and walked toward the border post, glancing back to make sure he was following. He smiled at her but did not receive a smile in return. Stern face, short severe hair, Malia was a widow who had never finished grieving, and though she was reliable in a fight, Gorham had never found her to be the most scintillating company.
"One more moment," he said, and leaned on the metal railing to look across the beach one last time. The picnickers were arranging themselves into three small teams now for a game of searchball, and the woman who had smiled at him skipped in the sand, hair floating, breasts moving heavily beneath her light shirt. Her joyous expression was absolute. She did not look his way again.
"For fuck's sake," Malia muttered.
Gorham turned and rested his back against the railing, looking east at the imposing hills of Marcellan Canton. Echo City's rulers' huge home district had been built upon so frequently that it was much higher than the rest of the city, its Echoes below-those old places, forgotten streets, emptied buildings, and past times-deeper and more complex than elsewhere. Each successive generation of Marcellans seemed to want to stamp their own mark on the city, and they did that by building and naming a series of structures after themselves. Why they could not simply rename older places, Gorham did not know. He supposed it was all to do with ego.
But he heard Malia's impatience, so he nodded and started walking.
The lakefront was bustling. A waterfood restaurant was doing brisk business, the smell of cooking emanating from its open doors and windows and enticing people in. Gorham felt a rumble of hunger. Several taverns had opened their front shutters so that patrons could spill onto the street, and some raucous songs were already under way. The songs changed as Gorham and Malia passed each successive tavern, past tunes fading, newer ones increasing in volume, and it seemed they were fighting for dominance. Later there might be real fighting, but for now the revelers seemed good-natured.