Markmay leaned slowly to his side and crawled from the room. He left a trail of sweat on the wooden floor behind him. His home was not hot.
He hurried up a curving staircase to a circular room. This was the highest part of his home. Its walls flickered with the light from seventy-seven candles-one for each of the six-legged gods supposed to wander the desert, though Markmay held no allegiance to any such foolish superstitions-and when he closed the heavy door behind him, they danced like excited puppies. He sat in the center of the room and repeated his calming process from before: slower breathing, settled heart, motionless.
When he opened his eyes, the candles were still agitated. Those that danced the most burned with a purple flame, and Markmay knocked several over in his panic while leaving the room. He slammed the door shut behind him and knew he must refer to the book.
Back down the circular staircase, across an empty room, along a doorless corridor, down another twisting staircase that wrapped a Hanharan priest's home like a secretive snake, and in a wide, low-ceilinged room Markmay sat at a table and opened the huge book it held. He went to one page, back to another, forward almost to the end, and all the while he was making notes with a rockzard-spine pen on a pad of rough paper. Sweat dripped from his nose and chin onto the paper, and he wiped it away. It smudged the ink, but that did not matter. This was recording, not reading, and the next person to read this would not be concerned with smudges.
Markmay had the ear of Wendie Marcellan, one of the more senior members of the Council. She told him that none of the others knew of her predilection for Markmay's unusual readings-indeed, she had hinted more than once that some would find it blasphemous-but Markmay knew the Marcellans to be not quite so virtuous as they seemed. He was almost certain that there were other readers informing other Council members, but that did not concern him. He was the best, Wendie paid him well, and whenever he asked, she sent one of her whores to keep him company for the night.
When he finished his notes, he sat back and stared at the filled page. He was shaking his head.
"Not good," he whispered. He rarely spoke to himself, and his voice was loud in the normally silent dwelling. A feeling of dread had settled upon him, and his insides were in revolt-heart thundering, stomach churning, and a pain in his right side like a hot dagger driven between his ribs. It was as if his body and home were so closely linked that he mimicked the upset of swaying chimes, the heat of agitated flames…
And one more thing to check. If this read true, there was much to tell Wendie, and she would have to reveal his knowledge to the Council. How she would do this-tell the truth, make up lies-he did not care.
But they would have to be warned. Perhaps then they could prepare, plan, protect the city from what was about to befall it.
"Please, no," he said as he descended staircases, squeezed through small rooms he rarely frequented, and climbed down a vertical metal ladder. "Please, no. Please, no." He imagined the people living in the homes around which his rooms and corridors were wrapped, and what their reaction would be if they heard the faint echoes of his voice. Phantoms! they might say to one another. Or they might say nothing at all.
Finally he reached the deepest room in his dwelling, one that intruded into the first Echo beneath Hanharan Heights. He had been down here only three times before, and each time he had climbed those stairs again with a sense of relief that things had not gone badly. This time, lighting candles around the room and kicking out at several large sand spiders that had made this space their own, those relieved retreats inspired a nostalgia for good times past. Before even taken his final reading, Markmay knew that everything was going wrong.
"How in the name of Hanharan are the priests going to account for this?" he muttered. The last sand spider scuttled away, melted down, and flowed into an impossible crack, and Markmay set about making the marks.
He trailed handfuls of dust across the floor from a bag hanging on the wall, creating spirals, straight lines, and other patterns with distinct edges. A pile of dust here, a carefully scooped bowl there, and if he dripped sweat he removed the affected area. There must be nothing here that would mislead his reading. Nothing to skew results.
Before he announced the doom of Echo City, he had to be certain.
Several people sitting outside a tavern saw the panicked man burst from the doorway and dart out into the street. His eyes were wide, his hair standing on end, and his hands were clawing at the air as if to grab some down or to haul himself up into the sky.
"It's coming!" he shouted, and his voice was torn with terror.
"There's that reader, Markmay," one of the drinkers said. "I've heard he's mad."
"Coming! Rushing! Rising!"
"Well, he certainly looks-"
A combined gasp went up from the crowd of drinkers as the mad Markmay rushed headlong across the street, straight into the path of a runaway dray. Weighed down with thirty full barrels of fine Marcellan ale, the wagon was hauled by four tusked swine. One of them had died in its harness, and the other three were running in a blind panic, shit and blood streaking from the suspended dead beast as their hooves trampled it.
They ran Markmay down. Even as the dray's front left wheel rolled across his neck, he was still shouting, "Rising. It's-"
Such is Fate. The cruelest mistress. I can't be like this forever, Nophel thought. It's like living among phantoms. But, of course, here he was the phantom. And he had seen what had become of Alexia and the other Unseen.
Where do you live? he'd asked her as she led him out through the gaming room and back onto the streets.
Here. There. She'd seemed confused.
Where do you sleep? Eat?
Some of us… we don't need food. We're removed from the world.
You told me you weren't ghosts, he'd said.
She'd frowned at that, averted her eyes, but not before he saw her fear and doubt.
So he followed her as she weaved through the streets, avoiding people with an expertise that looked effortless but, Nophel discovered, was hard-won. Several times he breezed too close to someone, his arm brushing theirs or his hair stroking the exposed skin of their neck. These people would glance around, startled, and at least twice he was convinced that they saw him, their pupils dilating as they focused, their brows creasing as they tried to make sense of things. Then their eyes grew hazy and their frowns deepened as they turned and hurried away. Once, he walked right into an old woman carrying a basket of fresh silk snake eggs, knocking her to the ground. She cried out as the eggs spilled and broke, spewing their bright yellow innards across the pavement. Alexia glanced back and only smiled, and as Nophel rushed away, he saw the startled old woman's gaze focusing on the footprint he'd left in the yolks.
He caught up with Alexia and grabbed her arm. "How far?"
"Almost there," she said. She pulled her arm away and walked on. He raised his hand to his nose, smelling only himself. It's more than just the Blue Water, he thought. That started it, but she's moved on from there, disappeared some more.
Alexia marched from a street, through a narrow alleyway stinking of something dead, and into a courtyard enclosed on four sides by tall, windowed walls. None of these windows was open, and Nophel had a feeling that few people ever looked down into this place. She walked toward the far corner, skirting around a dry fountain erupting with purple knotweed, and opened a low wooden door set into the moss-covered wall. It creaked on rusted hinges, and Nophel caught a whiff of something stale and wet.
"We're going down," she said.
"The Echoes?"
"Not that far. Just down. These buildings are a warren, and the Unseen have the time and inclination to explore. We found this place after we caught…" She trailed off.