Now he was breaking his own promise to himself and returning. Fascination, and also a vague sense of duty, drew him. He'd made himself the authority on these deep places, and now that something was here, he felt that he should be the first to know.
He was deep and had to go much deeper. And already, as well as the whisper of the dead River Tharin far above and the rumbling of the Falls a mile or two to the west, he could hear something else.
Something rising.
Nophel sat naked in his rooms and looked around at what he had. Each book held worlds, but all those worlds were aspects of Echo City. Some volumes could be construed as Watcher material-highly imaginative texts concerning what might be beyond. He had an illicit copy of Benjermen Daxia's Truth-An Exhortation to Revolt. But even these were inextricably bound to the city. Nophel had read nothing of their persuasion that made him believe anything other than that they were written by good fictionalists. If the Council knew he had these tomes, he would likely be in trouble. But that was what Dane was for. Protection.
Other books and objects concerned his mother and those generations of Bakers before her. Reading them was an exquisite torture.
He rolled the small metal flask back and forth across the fingers of his right hand. He felt the liquid in there shifting with the flask and played with its weight. I won't see that water, he thought. I'll barely even feel it. Nophel breathed deeply. He loved the smell of his rooms. If he drank Blue Water and disappeared, like everyone else who had ever tried it, he would miss the scent of books and maps and olden times.
But he had to try.
They had found it in his dead mother's rooms. She had already destroyed him by the time he was old enough to talk, so he had no fear of her now.
He opened the flask and sniffed at its contents. There was very little smell, only the sharp tang of metal. Taking one last look around his rooms, Nophel put the lip of the flask to his mouth and upended it.
His saliva drew back, something pushing it across his tongue and around the insides of his cheeks, and his mouth flooded with cold. He gasped and dropped the flask, leaning back in his metal-framed chair. When he breathed out, his breath misted before him, quickly dissipating in the warmth. Speckles of moisture clung on to his wispy mustache and beard. Blue Water, he thought, and when he tried to hold his hand up before his face, his arm would not work. There's something wrong, he thought, closing his eyes to hold down the panic. Death had never been a fear for Nophel, but he was no lover of pain.
He tried once more to lift his arm and hand, turn it before his face… but again it did not work. "Am I paralyzed?" he asked, and as his mouth opened to speak, the words came out. He tapped his feet against the floor, and the impacts were clearly audible. Leaning forward in the chair, he stood smoothly, feeling no impingement in any muscles or joints.
Lift again, he thought, and this time he knew he lifted his hand. He felt air moving against the tiny hairs on his forearm as it shifted position. Sending the command to bring his hand closer to his face so he could see, he slapped himself across the nose.
"I can't see my hand," he said. Nophel looked down, and he was no longer there. At least not completely, though there were shadows in the air where none should be cast, and when he moved those shadows shifted. He ran both hands across his chest and stomach, down across his groin, bending so that he could run them all the way down his legs to his feet. He felt the cool air touching his body and stirring at his movements, but he saw only a hint of himself.
Nophel laughed. His mother had touched him again, from the distance of twenty years and through the veil of death. He only hoped that wherever her body and soul were still falling into the bottomless Chasm, she felt his derision and hatred more strongly than ever before.
He shrugged on a long, heavy coat. For a moment it hung on nothing, then slowly it faded until it, too, was little more than shadow. He had not been sure, but he was pleased that he could go clothed, and armed, and ready to face whatever might be out there. It wasn't often that Nophel ventured into the city, and even unseen he felt danger pressing down on him already.
"Good," he said, standing before a tall mirror and not seeing himself. And he began to concentrate. I am there, he thought. That's me, I am there… It did not take very long. The Blue Water acted on the minds of those around him, rather than on his own physiology, and knowing that enabled him to control its effects upon his own mind. The initial shock had rendered him invisible to himself, and that had been comforting. It meant that the strange fluid was working. But now he focused upon those shadows in the mirror, shifting left and right so that he could see them becoming thicker, stronger, until the shadows had gone and he saw himself. It was unsettling, but Nophel had been ready for it. He manifested out of surprise, formed from nothing, and by the time he could look in the mirror and no longer see bookshelves through the back of his head, he knew that it was time to go.
He left his rooms and locked the door. Walking softly through the darkened corridors of Hanharan Heights, he headed down ramps and staircases toward the wide courtyards surrounding them. He passed a maid, a whore, and a group of Scarlet Blades playing nine-sided dice against a wall, and the only reaction he saw was from the whore. She paused before him, gathering her robes around her and pressing her forefinger across her tattooed lips in the familiar Hanharan blessing. Frowning, she moved quickly on.
Outside, the setting sun cast his shadow across ancient pavings as he started his journey north. He knew that few people would see that long shadow, and if they did they would run in the opposite direction.
I'm safe, he thought. My bitch mother has made me safe. The streets of Marcellan Canton were busy as dusk approached. People rode toward home in one of the seven giant steam wagons, their faces wan and tired from a day spent working in whichever bank, government office, or shop employed them. The wagons rolled on circular tracks around the canton, moving every hour except one each day, when their reservoirs were refilled and their engines rewound. Nophel stood beside the track as one passed by, and if anyone noticed the man-shaped hollow in the steam cloud, they made no sign.
Many other people chose to walk or ride in tusked-swine-pulled trailers. The streets smelled of cooking food, dust-tainted steam, ale and wine from one of the taverns doing a brisk dusk trade, and swine shit. Nophel walked confidently, enjoying the looks of befuddlement as he passed people by. Perhaps some glimpsed a flicker of what he was, but then the Blue Water influence would work its mystery upon their senses, and he'd be gone before they knew why they felt so confused or unsettled. More than one person stopped in their tracks and started to talk to him-but found themselves muttering into thin air. Some blushed and hurried on, heads bowed so that they did not have to see any observers' smiles or looks of concern. Others headed straight into taverns or restaurants, where the food and drink would divert them. Only a few turned and watched him leave, not seeing, not knowing, but watching nonetheless. These, Nophel guessed, were the ones most likely to suffer nightmares.
He had no wish to inspire nightmares. He bore no ill will toward anyone alive. But this disguise would soon become a necessity, and he kept that in mind as he walked on. And there was that subtle feeling of power that he had experienced only once before.
Then, he'd been alone in his rooms. The walls had been lined with fewer books, the furniture slightly less worn and shaped to his bones and flesh, and he'd waited while they went to find his mother.
Nophel was the god of quiet things, and though cloaked in the Blue Water's strange effect, he still kept to the shadows beside buildings, seeking out streets and alleys that were quieter than most. Once he slipped on some damp cobbles and went sprawling, crying out as his elbow struck the ground. He looked around to see who had noticed and rolled into the mouth of a recessed doorway. Breathing hard, his heart thumping, he rubbed his elbow as the tingling pain lessened.