At the end of one street in Course, a body was dragged into the shadows by three pairs of hands, its jewelry already stolen, its flesh and bones destined for the swine pits.
In the southern quarter of Mino Mont, nine corpses lay strewn across the steps of an old Hanharan temple, victims of a gang feud that had lasted for three generations. Such deaths were commonplace and barely merited a second glance from passersby. The feud was also expected, and expectation was one of the reasons it still existed. One gang would party all day in celebration, and tomorrow they would be the ones spilling blood and then seeking new recruits from the youngsters of that canton.
In Skulk, people drifted westward toward the stoneshroom fields. Others closed their doors for the day, preferring to sleep when the sun was up so that they could not look north and see the city that reminded them of lost times.
In Marcellan Canton, a group of old people passed laws that would mean nothing.
In Crescent, a farmer sowed crops that would never be harvested.
It was, all in all, a normal dawning to what seemed a normal day in Echo City.
But there were also those in the city who awoke to a painful truth-that things had changed, were still changing, and might never be the same again.
In Shute Fields, in the southwest corner of Course, shapes rose from places where the sunlight never touched. They were sleek, pale, and gray, and they raised their hands to protect their faces from the painful glare. Most remained in the shadows, hiding away from the sun behind walls, shivering in the growing heat of the day because they were so scared. Up was somewhere most of them had never been, but they could never go back down. Several were murdered by terrified people who thought they were monsters. Some fought back and killed their attackers, eating the fresh meat because it reminded them of home. Hunts proceeded, with the Garthans running through unfamiliar streets and existing for the first time in a place that was not an Echo. Though they were fewer than their pursuers, and disoriented, their custom of eating their victims meant that fear was on their side.
At the southern extremes of Mino Mont, where the canton narrowed down with the Marcellan wall on one side and the city wall, with the Bonelands beyond, on the other, the Bloodwork Gang was bettered for the first time in years. One of their main slash distribution centers had existed beneath an old abandoned workhouse for more than a year, storing enough of the drug to feed most of Mino Mont's addicts and a few of the more powerful devotees in Marcellan Canton. It was well hidden, its entrances and exits spread among neighboring buildings, and the Bloodworks had striven to keep it safe. Most knew not to interfere with them, and a thousand corpses could attest to this.
Protected and guarded against intrusion from above, the gang met doom from below. Fleeting pale shapes swarmed through the warehouse's rooms, spilling containers and setting fires. Perhaps it was surprise at finding the product that they made stored in such quantities. Or maybe it was panic. No one would ever know.
After the initial shock, the Bloodwork members guarding the den fought back, but it was a short, brutal combat. The Garthans had no need of weapons; they hunted through stealth, stillness, and then fury. They killed anyone who stood in their way, chewing on human hearts as they charged onward. And the gang member who chose to hide-and who, later that day, would brag that he'd fought off a dozen attackers but instead had pissed himself as he watched his friends gutted and eaten-swore that these strange humans were terrified. They screeched as they attacked, but not in rage. It was fear that had driven them up, terror that gave them speed and strength. They rose into the streets and remained in shadows.
The Garthans emerged in many other places around the city. Sometimes there were large groups of them, but more often there were only a handful, and in places just one or two. In their terrified climb up through the city's Echoes and into its present, some had died, and many had lost track of their family and friends. The survivors did not care. All that mattered was escaping the thing rising from the deep.
Close to where the River Tharin vented into the desert, Bellia Ton had slept with her feet dangling in that dead river's flow. Her nightmares were monstrous, and as she woke to the sunlight burning her eyelids, the memory of them was rich. She could no longer discern whether what she heard, saw, and smelled were products of the fears already implanted in her or given to her afresh by the river. Bodies flowed past. Some of them were Garthans, and others had scarlet cloaks billowing around them like blood slicks. She tried to hear their voices, but there was one sound drowning out everything she needed to know: an insistent, throbbing impact on her soul. She heard and smelled it, felt and tasted it, and it was rising from somewhere deep-though not as deep as before.
She rolled from the river and her legs beneath the knees were white, skin and flesh soft as soaked mud. When she tried to stand, her legs gave way. There was no longer any feeling in them at all. She screamed instead, crying out all the things she thought she knew, but the only people to hear were the dead floating by. She always chose the deserted areas around the refineries to read the river. And hers were not the only screams sounding across Echo City that morning.
Readers across the city cried out, or ran, and some of them died where they worked, hearts riven with shock. Whatever the source of their knowledge-water, air, tea leaves, mepple flesh, stoneshroom visions, or rockzard-liver trails-their warnings were the same: Something is rising. They heard the sounds from below and spread word of them through the streets. Their warning dispersed, and no one who heard them could deny the sense of panic overlying the city. It started in the darkness and continued into the day, and sunlight brought no calming touch.
In Marcellan, a fat man approached the city wall, hoping that he still held power in his given name. Behind him trailed a small army of faithful soldiers, a score of Scarlet Blades whom he had been nurturing for years so that, when the time came, they would put the name Dane ahead of Marcellan. He tried to exude confidence and authority, yet he picked up the sense pervading the city that morning, and it was a wilder place. The wall guards stepped in front of the gate, and the fear in their eyes when they saw him gave him hope.
Where the Garthans rose-quietly and secretively in places, yet also interacting with the citizens in violent, startled ways that they never had before-word quickly spread of cannibalistic invasion from below. Many residents panicked and fled their homes, carrying their children and weapons and nothing else, and soon the streets were awash with people. The population spread out from those areas touched by the Garthans like ripples fleeing a stone's impact.
Scarlet Blades tried to contain the panic, and sometimes they succeeded. But here and there fights broke out and blood was spilled, not always the blood of civilians.
The Marcellan Council debated the news they were hearing from across the city. Hanharan priests advised the government, and their advice concerning the Echoes was always the same-Hanharan lives down there, and he exhales only goodness. They blamed the Garthans, and official word went out that an invasion was under way. Across the city, Garthan and Scarlet Blade blood mingled in short, brutal combats.
In the many places where news was vague and panic had not yet reached, and where people sat quietly eating breakfast or watching the sunrise, perhaps holding hands with their loved ones or smiling softly as their children readied for school, they heard a quiet, insistent noise from below: thud… thud… thud.
They frowned and wondered what it could be.
Gorham sat and watched the girl come to life before him. There is my daughter, he thought, and yet she could never be. She was chopped, as much a monster as the Pserans or the Scopes, and she would not know him as Father.