Nadielle stood and took his hands. The move surprised him, but there was no affection or warmth to her touch. Just because she thinks she needs to, he thought.
"What I'm about to ask you is a true responsibility," she said. "Not like leading some underground political group or trying to take on the guilt for bad decisions you might have made. A real responsibility. My mother chopped me before she died and birthed me herself, and virtually every new Baker is welcomed into the world by the old Baker that chopped her. That's part of our duty and part of the way we cope with how and what we are. But I'm handing this duty to you. Because I must, and I trust you, and trust that you want the best for Echo City."
"I do," he said. "I always have."
"And this is for the best, believe me. I know what I'm doing." She glanced aside at one of the bladed things sitting against the wall. "Here, at least."
"And down there?" Gorham asked.
"Down there, I'll do whatever I can."
"To right a wrong."
"Bakers never make mistakes, Gorham. They simply explore too far." She smiled softly, let go of his hands, and grabbed the glass mixing pot by her feet. Climbing the ladder, she nursed the pot carefully against her chest, then emptied it into the vat as soon as she reached the top. She dropped the glass pot and bit at the cut on her hand, squeezing out more blood.
"Is it happening now?" Gorham asked, because he felt a sudden change in the chamber's air. The bladed things had gone from relaxed to alert and expectant, and it was as if their blades were held at attention, a potential of violence almost unbearable in its intensity. Some formed a wide circle around the womb vat, several more stayed back, going to the doors that led to the Echo outside. Guarding. Though guarding against someone coming in or something going out, Gorham was not sure.
"New weapons," Nadielle said. "My daughter will take a while longer." She was staring lovingly into the vat, her face softer than he had seen for some time. Not vulnerable, as she had been down in the Echoes when she demanded his intimacy, but strangely content, even with everything she had done and what she was about to face. Right then she was beautiful, and Gorham mourned for the woman she might have been.
Three other vats began to bulge. Some unseen, unheard message must have been relayed to them, and they started to spout steam and gas, sides cracking, fluids gushing from the ruptures.
"Nadielle," Gorham said.
"You'll want to stand back," she said. She waited a moment longer atop the ladder, looking down into that one special vat before descending.
Gorham had witnessed Neph's birth, and through the fascinated disgust he had felt privileged. But watching these new things born from Nadielle's womb vats inspired only horror.
How she could have grown them so quickly, he had no clue. The talents handed down through the Baker's generations were so arcane and mysterious that they'd be called magic by most, though he knew that she vehemently repudiated any such descriptions. Magic's for the frightened and the indoctrinated, she'd told him once, and for those without the imagination to see how amazing things can really be. They'd been naked on her bed at the time, and recalling the conversation now, he recognized it as another moment when he had not really been there for her. She'd used his presence to talk to herself.
Perhaps the speed with which these things had been chopped went some way to explaining the terrible screams as they were birthed. They came to the world in agony, three of them emerging from vats with the help of their many-bladed and spiked limbs, forcing their way out as if inside was torture, only to discover that outside was worse. They thrashed and rolled in the thick fluids that spilled around them. Gorham backed away, closer to the Baker's rooms but unable to hide himself away entirely. He was shocked and afraid in equal measures but still certain that Nadielle would allow no harm to come to him.
Unless she's rushed it. Unless, in her desperation, she's made a mistake.
But then she was walking among her new creations, and now Gorham could see just how large they were. He'd subconsciously been comparing them to the dozen bladed guards that slinked around the vat hall, but these things were at least five times the size of those, and there was nothing even vaguely humanoid about them at all. They were flesh, blood, and metal, monstrous mergings of soft and hard. Their blades glittered with sharpness, their spikes were slick with afterbirth, hands were heavy with studs, and what might have been their heads-he wasn't sure, but he thought each creature had at least three-bore vicious white horns as protection around their mouths and eyes. In those mouths were silvery teeth that already had shredded their lips and tongues, the blood adding to the terrible mix smeared across the floor. And in those eyes was nothing he could recognize.
Nadielle spoke, and a bladed guard darted toward each of the newborns. The giant creatures lashed out, piercing the smaller chopped, picking them up with blades or fists, depositing them in mouths that opened up where Gorham had not noticed them before. The sound of chomping was appalling-crunching, crushing, splitting, bursting, and brief cries as three lives were snuffed out.
When the newborns had finished chewing, they were somewhat calmed, and Nadielle repeated those words. Three more guards walked in, a little slower than the first. They suffered the same fate.
She turned from her new creations and walked toward Gorham, unconcerned, turning her back on monsters that would give him nightmares forever. Just before she reached him, her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and she collapsed to the floor.
As he rushed to her side, he saw her right eye suddenly flush red with blood. And the new monsters began to howl.
Neph had been sitting for so long, listening to the sounds increasing in volume and frequency, that it could no longer feel its legs. When the time came, it lit its torch and shone it at the wall of water. At the place where the water fell beyond view, a shadow appeared. Neph had seen many shadows already, the dead from a city it would never know. But they were always falling.
This shadow rose.
Neph stood, legs burning as blood circulation returned. It took one step back, and the wounds on its arm began to bleed.
The shadow manifested into a mass of corpses, some quite fresh, others rotting. Chunks of their flesh had been torn away by the powerful flow, leaving only their bones behind. The impact of the falling water was brutalizing, and many of the corpses had flowed into one another, limbs punched through guts and bones embracing another's insides. Punching through the bodies were heavy, thick spines…
Neph flexed its own spines, startled at the familiarity.
The shadow rose higher, pushing against the water. Huge flailing shapes swung into view, thrashing at the water and seeming to grab on to it, hauling the mass of bodies higher, higher…
Neph squatted in a fighting pose.
Beneath the piled bodies, a massive eye opened, regarding Neph without emotion. Water poured around and across it but washed away none of this thing's menace. The thrashing things-arms with massive spade-shaped hands that hauled it upward against the shattering liquid weight-moved faster, lifting the shadow higher above the edge of the chasm.
The water roared, and the rising thing added its own voice.
When Neph found its legs and ran at the abomination, it did not even see the whipping thing that took out its right eye.
Neph fell, legs still pounding into the rock because it did not understand. Something felt wrong with its head. A thick tentacle hovered above it, and Neph lashed out with its right arm. But the arm would not obey its orders, and the tentacle thrashed down, crushing, breaking, spilling Neph across the rock and leaving its few lonely memories to be washed away forever.
"It's risen," she whispered. "It's here."
Gorham knelt, Nadielle's head resting in his lap, and he stroked her cheek. Her eye was bloodshot and blind, but she seemed unconcerned. The other eye stared off past the chopped creations, large and small, that had gathered around them. In the shadows past them, Gorham thought he saw the two remaining Pserans watching quietly, and he almost called to them. But other than Gorham, the Baker was the closest to human here, and even she was far from that.