"What does that mean?" Malia said.
Blu looked at Malia, then at Peer. Any underlying humor had vanished, and the blood smearing her chin and bloated throat made her look monstrous. "That's for you to know," she said. "I'm just the reader."
"Rufus," Peer said.
"What about him?"
And though she needed to talk with Malia, she did not wish to do so here. Blu was still staring at her, those sunken, strange eyes piercing and animalistic at the same time. She was not chopped, Peer was certain of that. This staggering size was naturally wrought. But such a condition must have also affected her mind, giving her the ability to do what she had just done and perhaps also warping her in other ways. Malia might trust her, but Peer did not.
"Why did you eat the bat?" she asked.
Blu stared at her for a long moment before saying, "Evidence."
"But how did you-"
"Thank you, Blu," Malia said, and she turned to leave.
"But wait, Malia, what about…? When do we…?"
"Thank you." Malia reached around Peer to open the door, shoving her out into the corridor. She slammed the door behind her, closed her eyes, and leaned against the wood, sighing, then opened them again and stared at Peer. "Rufus arrives, and the Dragarians emerge from their canton overtly for the first time in centuries. Is there any chance that this could be a coincidence?"
Is she just going to ignore what we saw? Peer thought, and she felt dizzy with confusion. "Malia-"
"He comes in from the desert, and they stream out from their canton." She was staring at the floor now, where rotten skirtings were punctured with ghourt-lizard holes. "They've spent generations awaiting the return of Dragar. From out of the Bonelands are the words they used, before shutting themselves away from everything else. How the crap do they even know he's here?"
"Spies?" Peer said, shrugging. "People have all but forgotten them-it must be easy for them to watch."
"And now Rufus is lost in the city," Malia said, "and we have to find him before the Marcellans do, because they'll execute him as a Pretender. And we have to find him before the Dragarians do, because if they seriously believe him to be their damned prophet returned to them from the Bonelands…" She shook her head.
"If they believe…" Peer prompted.
"The Watchers know that the end is coming, and we strive to prepare for it. But to the Dragarians, their doomsday belief is a religion. They crave the end of Echo City, because according to their philosophies that's when Dragar returns to take them into Honored Darkness-whatever the fuck that means."
"It's the north," Peer said.
"The north?"
"Honored Darkness. A man I know was sent to Skulk because of his writings about the Dragarians. He respected their aims and their religion. Most think that 'Honored Darkness' means death, but Penler thinks it's the north, where the sun never shines and time stands still. And the Baker told me that Dragar, murdered five hundred years ago, was conceived in the desert and was immune to its effects."
"They think that Rufus is Dragar and he'll lead them north from the city," Malia said softly.
Peer nodded, and her stomach dropped. "And if they think he's returned early…"
"They'll do their best to fulfill the end-days prophecy themselves. Something might well be rising, but the Dragarians could be the immediate threat." Malia pushed herself away from the wall. "Flying things, Blu said. Crawling things. Who knows what the crap they've been doing under those domes for the past five centuries."
"Oh, by all the false gods," Peer muttered. "He's not just important anymore, is he? Rufus?"
"Not just important, no. He's dangerous."
I thought that the moment he killed the Border Spite, Peer thought. But Malia grabbed her arm and pulled her from the house, and events swept around her, dragging her onward, tugging at her fears and hopes, her pains and traumas from the past, and steering her toward some destiny she could not understand and would never have believed had she known.
As they ran back along the street, Peer asked about Blu.
"Believe me," Malia said, "it's better that you never know."
The sun was bright above Hanharan Heights, and the sky held only a few innocuous clouds. But Echo City suddenly felt darker than ever before.
The three Gage Gang members usually worked only at night, but today they made an exception. They'd been following the tall man since sunup. He looked such easy prey.
Jon Gage-all gang captains took the gang's name in lieu of their family name-enjoyed working with the boy and woman he was with today. The boy was respectful, even reverential, and often in awe at some of the stories Jon told him about his last few years as a Gager. Most of these stories were embellished, and some were outright lies, but for Jon that was half the point. Slash took away parts of their lives that they didn't desire anymore or that caused them pain and left openings in memory and intention that could then be filled. The woman used to work as a whore in Mino Mont and was owned by one of the most vicious gangs there, though she had always refused to name which one. She'd escaped underground in a long journey through the Marcellan Echoes and ended up in Crescent, amazed at the intense farming that occurred there, letting her wounds and bruises heal, though her mind never had. Jon had found her one night shivering beneath a huge mepple stack, and they'd been friends ever since. She was comfortable with him, felt protected, and because Jon's preferences went the other way, there were never any sexual tensions.
So the three of them were friends, and this friendship worked well when they were hunting. They were a tight unit, a small part of a much larger organization whose main aim was the procurement of slash. A very particular drug, slash stimulated imagination and awareness, encouraging hallucinations in the user, depending upon the grade of drug taken and the concentration. Small amounts could be procured by anyone in the city apprised of where to look for it, but the addicts forming the Gage Gang had realized years ago that the more money they moved in bulk, the greater the amount of drugs they could buy. They had shifted from being concerted users to organized distributors. And there were those in the gang whose aims were now edging even higher; they wanted to make a play for the subterranean manufacturing plants.
But Jon had never been that ambitious. He was happy with his daily fixes and the comforts that Gage membership brought. The unpleasant side of such a business-the transporting of meat offerings down to the rogue Garthan tribe that ran the production plants-was something he thought about only when he had to. He and the others would spend some days sitting outside one of the rural cafes scattered across Crescent, talking inconsequentialities, enjoying sunlight on their skin and the feeling of slash massaging their minds, and sometimes he even thought himself a moral man. Decent, hardworking, he had certain values, and he let the slash construct and reinforce those beliefs as much as he could.
It was only when he had to hunt, collect, and transport their victims down into the Echoes, then hand them over to the Garthans who manufactured the slash, knowing that the drug-addled underground dwellers would slow-roast them alive, tearing off cooked chunks of flesh to feed their babies… It was only then that Jon entertained an awareness of what he really was.
The white-haired man was lost, that much was obvious. He had been walking across the landscape in a vaguely northwesterly direction since they first spotted him, and for most of the afternoon they had been casually trailing him. They followed at a distance, and once he wandered beyond a small commune growing beans and lushfruit, Jon decided the time had come to close in. Their traps had been empty for the last few nights-not even a wandering wild horse or tusked swine to offer in lieu of the preferred long pork. It would bode well for the three of them if they could report a capture this evening.
"We'll wait until he's in the next valley," Jon said. "I know it well. There's a wide irrigation canal, no bridges for half a mile in either direction. Maybe he'll swim, or maybe he'll go for a bridge. Either way, we'll have him trapped."