An arrow flicked past her ear and struck Malia in the neck. She grunted and fell, and Peer tripped over her flailing limbs. And then redness rose around them, and the sound of fighting and dying filled that subterranean place.
Sometimes Sprote Felder believed that the statues spoke to him. He did his best to listen, but their words were distorted by time and confused by languages he had never known. He thought he'd researched all the old dialects, reading them on inscriptions hidden from the sun for countless years, but perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps there was so much more that he could never know.
The noise in his head was constant. Sometimes he screamed until he could no longer draw breath past the rawness in his throat, but that did nothing to cover the impact noises he heard from below. Other times he stuffed dust and dirt into his ears, wetting his finger and shoving it in as far as he could in the hope that it would solidify, cementing out the terrible truth. But then he'd slump to the ground and bang his head, and the plugs would fall out.
The tall statue before him was regal and aloof, missing one arm that might have been torn off by Garthans. They sometimes came and vandalized these higher Echoes, poor revenge upon the memories of those long-ago Marcellans who had wronged them when they were proud Thanulians. He had often suspected that one day they would marshal their forces, gather their anger, and rise up to exact true vengeance. It seemed that he'd been wrong.
Something else would be the end of Echo City.
He screamed again, raging at the pains in his throat and head. It had been a long time since he'd had a drink. Crawling from the small tomb beneath one of the statues where the Baker woman had dragged him, he'd cracked the water flask she'd left behind, spilling its contents into the dry dust of history. He'd lit his torch and watched it soaking in, amazed that things could still happen when there was no one here to see. That's proof of the city's soul, he'd thought. That it continues on without us, and it'll move on, and on, even when this is all over. Even when we're all dead.
Crawling, pulling with his hands, pushing with his one good leg, smelling the stench of his other leg, where the bone had ruptured flesh and set it to rot, he had no destination in sight. His only purpose was to move, because he had never stayed still.
Creatures ran past him, heading back the way he had come. A mass of small insectlike animals first, antennae waving at the air, ten legs scuttling across the uneven ground. They parted around him-smelling him, perhaps-though a couple came close and chewed chunks from his rotting leg. Larger creatures followed them, some flying, most crawling or running. He knew some of them from his long journeys down here, but there were shining diamondlike creatures that moved on cushions of gas that he had never seen before. Even now the wonder was there, and he reached out to grab one as it drifted by. His hand was slashed in a dozen places. It hissed as it passed by, absorbing his blood and glowing red for a few brief moments.
"Running from something," he said, and he started to crawl faster. Whatever they were running from, he had to see. He was dead but not yet finished, and curiosity and the search for knowledge were his prime motivators even now.
The ground thumped up at his chest and stomach, the regular rhythm of the impacts now ended. "Turning to chaos," he said into the shadows. They did not reply, because there was nothing left down there to hear. Even the maddest of the Garthans had gone-he'd seen no sign of them for what felt like days. "Chaos rising, and the city's reaping what it's sown." Crawl… crawl…
Something moved in the distance. Sprote paused and aimed his torch, but the oil had almost run out now, and the light beam was weak. Shadows shifted again and then dashed across the Echo before him-a huge, flailing thing that ran so fast he could not track its progress. Light reflected from lashing metal objects, and between them was only the darkness of a body built to hide.
This time Sprote did not scream, because he knew this was not the rising thing. This was something that had come down.
"Mounting a defense," he said, but this was not a creation of the Marcellans, and the Hanharans would not allow such bastardization. He knew who had made this, and why, and when he shouted this time, it was a cry of encouragement and defiance.
The impacts increased, the ground now shaking so much that each thump punched him into the air, and each fall drove lances of pain all through his body. From the far distance, across this Echo and from those much deeper, he heard and felt the steady rumble of roofs caving in, columns crushing, history imploding. The noise was immense, and at last, through the incredible volume, he started to distinguish one facet of the cacophony from another: here, the clash of metal against other hard things; there, the cry of something in pain; and elsewhere, a roar fractured by the teeth it was driven past.
The Echo smelled of death, and it was no longer only from him.
The ground opened up before him. The statue park, part of an Echo he had explored many times, split from side to side, and from the new rift something rose up. It was huge, a shifting tower of the dead and rotting, bones and flesh falling from it. His meager vision was clouded with the dust of crushed bones. Clad in the dead of Echo City, the thing beneath the corpses was visible in places-swaths of deep-red hide with cracks that glowed like lava bubbling in the Echo pits beneath Skulk.
Huge limbs the length of a hundred human arms thrashed at things clinging to its sheer sides. And these things-two of them, joined now by the one Sprote had seen rushing across the Echo-were hacking at the monster. Their bladed limbs rose and fell, scattering more bones of the dead and flicking countless body parts into the darkness, digging deeper until they encountered the monster's skin, slashing, rending, and moving on when gouts of fiery blood erupted from the foul wounds they had made.
Sprote's torch faded out, but the scene was lit with the blaze of combat. Old corpses flamed as they fell past the monster's burning wounds, disintegrating across the ground and setting a thousand bonfires. Fires burned on its ridged back. Gases ignited around the fighting things.
And then, far to Sprote's left, another upheaval, and another huge mass broke through the rock from the Echoes buried below. It tipped over and smashed onto the ground, shattering the statues of people dead for thousands of years and spilling a hundred corpses across the soil. At first he thought there were two monsters rising. But when he realized what he was actually seeing, and the ground between the limbs started to bulge as the thing's colossal head forced through, his heart stopped beating for the final time.
The Echoes around the turmoil collapsed, history fell, and Sprote Felder was crushed before he could utter one final, dreadful cry.
"Man from Sand," the voice says, and Rufus opens his eyes. He is in his small room in his guardian's house. Sunrise is near, and the only sounds from beyond are the soft calls of birds waking around the village. Soon the place will be bustling, but there is always that gentle, almost mournful time between night and day when the village seems to be holding its breath. Sometimes Rufus is awake for this and he stares from the window, wondering who he really is. Mostly he sleeps through to daylight. He is becoming comfortable, though afraid that the dreams will never leave him be.
"Who are you?" he asks, and then he sees the flowing yellow robes. A Tender, from the valley of the Heart and Mind. He has never heard of these servants leaving the valley, and he has seen them only once before, one moon ago, when he made his pilgrimage.
"My name does not belong to me," the man says. He is exceedingly tall and thin, his arms almost as long as Rufus's body, his head elongated, his feet large and flat. His face is somber and pale, but his eyes are bright. They glitter in the light of the small lamp he has lit. He sits in the chair beside the bed, and his knees are almost as high as Rufus's head.