"You don't need your little bugs for me to…" She frowned, feeling them on her, in her, and a terrible shiver ran through her body.
"Why?" Malia prompted.
"Because he's from beyond Echo City. I saw him walking in across the desert, and he doesn't know this place."
Malia's eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, then closed again, as though swallowing whatever she was trying to say. "That can't be…" she said at last.
Peer saw the others step forward, and all the attention moved onto Rufus. And then, below the terrible feeling of those bugs still shifting inside her, she realized the urgency of what Malia had to do next.
"Him," Peer said, shaking and feeling a terrible sickness rising.
"Devin, give her the drink," Malia said, and she returned to the table.
Devin came close to Peer and held a small goblet to her mouth, but he never took his eyes from Rufus. "Drink," he said. "It'll kill them. Is he really from the Bonelands?"
"I think so," Peer said weakly. The fluid tasted of rotten mepple, but it settled the rising vomit somehow, and she leaned back, exhausted, in her chair.
Malia was whispering to one of the other Watchers, and the woman ran off toward where Gorham had vanished.
"This is it," Peer said. "This is it, isn't it?"
Malia threw her a strange glance but then moved toward Rufus, her hand held out and swarming with a new batch of truthbugs.
"This is what we've all been waiting for," Peer said. "It's why I had to come." Rufus was looking at her, eyes wide and terrified, and she tried to offer him a reassuring smile, but it would not form. She was as fascinated as all of them in what he had to say, and she found herself wishing that Gorham was there to hear.
"There's more that you don't yet know," Malia said to Peer. Then she blew the bugs into the tall man's face.
And when she leaned forward to ask him her first question, he began to scream.
On the rooftop of the tallest building on the highest hill in Echo City, a Baker's child fed four Scopes and made sure their chains were secure. He liked these monsters, enjoyed the sickly wet sounds their mouths made when they opened, and breathed in the stink of them that even the stiff breeze up here could never completely carry away. He smoothed their thick, rough skin beneath their leathery covers. He scooped their shit and swept their piss to a far corner of the roof and into a chute that took it away. Sometimes he spoke to them, knowing that even if they heard they could never understand. His mother had made them well, while she had made him badly.
His name was Nophel, and he had named himself. She had never honored him with a name. He doubted she even gave him a glance before sending him to Bedmoil, the largest workhouse in Mino Mont. It had been the greatest moment of his life when he aided in her downfall twenty years before.
Nophel had taken his name from one of the six-legged gods of the Temple of the Seventy-seven Custodians. His Marcellan employers disliked that, and the Hanharan priests who occasionally visited him hated it. But these reactions interested him, and intellectually he knew that the name had become more than just a part of him. Nophel, so the temple's teachings went, was the god of quiet things, and he had spent his life keeping to the shadows, whispering while others shouted and ensuring that he could go where he pleased. Old Dane Marcellan had taken to using Nophel for some of his more covert activities, and Nophel liked that well enough. Even so, alone up here with the Scopes was the only time he would reveal his mutilation to the skies.
He fed the Western Scope, the last of the four, using a wide spoon to scoop the chickpig and mepple stew into its drooling mouth. It made small, satisfied grunting noises as it fed-the only one of the four that did-and he heard its stomach rumbling as it swallowed the food. A thick membrane slipped down and up across its massive eyeball, clearing dust and renewing its view. While it chewed its last mouthful, Nophel knelt to check its gears, mountings, and cogs. They were well greased. He pulled a lever, forcing the thing to shift its weight slightly. The complex support system moved and flexed, but he heard nothing. That was good. Next he ensured that the reading tube's entry point to its body was not sore or infected. It entered at the back of the Scope's neck, and Nophel hated the bristly pink junction of silk tube with rough skin, because it reminded him of his own deformed face in the mirror. There was no sign of inflammation and it was dry. That pleased him, because it meant he would not have to apply any soothing cream.
Soon the time would come to move the Scopes around the roof, changing their positions to avoid resting sores. But not yet. That was a task he disliked because it revealed their true genesis: humanity. Covered in leather shrouds, they were monsters to him. When he moved them, seeing them walk, holding their shriveled hands to guide them across the rooftop because their eyes could see only far away, not this close in-despite all that, they seemed almost as human as he did.
He walked one slow circuit of the roof and looked out and down over Echo City. In some directions he could just make out the pale hint of the Markoshi Desert on the horizon, but mostly it was only city he saw, the great sprawl of ages. Towers rose here and there, and the spires of temples. The arches of the failed skyride network-the metal rusting, some sections fallen into memory, as had the dozens of people killed on its first and last ride-pricked the sky to the west. But none of them was nearly as high as Hanharan Heights. It looked so timeless, yet in a thousand years this view would be completely different. The place where he now stood would have been subsumed beneath the steady march of progress, and whoever stood upon Hanharan Heights' summit might be five hundred steps higher. And what of forever? he thought. He often attempted to wonder that far ahead. The city could not rise endlessly, and though he did not fear it-Nophel feared little-eventual stagnation, then regression, was his prediction.
He stood longest next to the Northern Scope. It was the quietest of the four, the stillest, and there had been times when he thought it dead. But if he leaned over the roof parapet and looked at its eye, he could see the moisture there and the concentration as it looked past the spread of Crescent's farmland at Dragar's Canton.
Though ten miles distant, the pale curves of Dragar's six silent domes were clearly visible. Nophel appreciated a mystery, but this one troubled him.
"So let's see what's to be seen," he said, and the breeze stole his words away.
He always bade the Scopes farewell, though they never answered back. Deep down, the root of their humanity must still exist; the Baker bitch had seen to that. And he liked to think that, even if they did not hear or answer, they sensed that he cared for them.
He descended the winding staircase that led to the viewing room, fifty steps below the exposed roof. Halfway down, he tied his robe tight and lifted his hood, just in case one of the Marcellans or, gods help him, a Hanharan priest had found reason to pay him a visit. But the room was silent, other than the steady rumble of brewing five-bean and the crackle of the fire he'd set in the hearth. Warming already, mouth watering in anticipation of the brew, he glanced at the huge viewing mirror set in the center of the room. The four wide reading tubes hung down from a hole in the ceiling, and behind the viewing mirror stood the complex apparatus used to select tubes. The western tube was connected right now, and Nophel saw the glint of sun on the Tharin's surface. It made the river appear almost alive.
Nophel poured a large mug of five-bean and sat before the viewing mirror. As always prior to seeing what they could see, he needed to see himself. He pulled a lever and the western tube disconnected with a soft hiss, the living image on the mirror fading and then flickering to nothing.
Nophel lowered his hood and smiled at his image. The single pale eye, his other eye a blood-red ruin. The dark skin split and bubbled with fungal growths; they would need pricking and bathing again later. His teeth were good, bright and even, and that made his smile the most monstrous aspect of all.