Echo City by Tim Lebbon Page B

Bridge had a chute, through which all manner of garbage and waste wasejected, falling into the river or spattering the bridge’s exposed Echoes below. Food, broken furniture, construction waste, ruined clothing—once ejected from the chutes, it was forgotten and cast aside. He had once seen a living man thrown into the river, and sometimes at night he remembered the weight of that man’s left leg in his hand heartbeats before he fell.
    Dead though the river was, in many ways it cleansed the city.
    He edged through the chute, looking at the dark line of the Tharin way below. Then he started climbing down, from strut to support to crossbeam, until he hung wedged between two vertical timbers. Above him, he could hear the impact of countless feet and hooves on the bridge’s surface. Around him, the dusty, abandoned structures of yesteryear.
    Then he heard the squeals.
    He took a small bag of powder from his pocket and spread some along a moldy timber beam. He also extracted a roll of paper and a charcoal, and while he waited, he wrote.
    It never took long. He sensed the rats closing on him, hidden away for now but tempted by the bone powder. He’d once tasted the stuff himself—extracted and crushed from the skeletons of dead Garthans, so he was told—and he’d been sick for a week. Others often chided him about his sensitive stomach, and he berated them, claiming Marcellan blood. Bitterness and humor made good companions.
    He watched from the corner of his eye as a rat the size of his forearm started licking up the powder. He waited a moment until its eyes started turning with the food frenzy, then he clasped the creature and tied the rolled note to its leathery tail. He splashed the fur on its back with rose stoneshroom extract—very rare, and visible only to certain creatures—whispered a few words into the creature’s ear, then let it go.
    It disappeared, jumping, running, and dropping its way north through the bridge’s most recent Echoes, and his work was done. He climbed back up to watch the woman again, pleased to be among people once more.
       The rat moved quickly, familiar with this underside and driven by the compulsion only recently planted within it.Leaving the bridge behind, it stayed with the drains and sewers. Other rats saw it and cowered away, because there was something about it that smelled of death. It passed different creatures down there in the dark, and most of them also moved aside, though some sniffed after it, curious at the message it might carry.
    It did not go
too
deep. It never went
too
deep—especially now.
    It came to a place where the sewers vented, and here it left cover and ventured out into the open. It moved in slow, hesitant sprints, looking around for danger but forgetting where the worst threat actually dwelled.
    The rathawk had a nest in the high walls of Marcellan Canton. It had nested in the same place for thirty years, mating with the same female, and together they had raised nineteen chicks that had survived to adulthood. It flew, ate, and slept, but implanted deep within its mind was some other compulsion that was fed only at the rarest of times. One of those times was today. Riding a thermal high above the walls, it spotted a glint in the shadows far below. Without thinking, simply following a set of instructions implanted when it was very young, the rathawk folded its wings and plummeted. For a few beats, it was the fastest thing in Echo City, other than thought. At the last moment it spread its wings to brake its descent, extended its claws, and the rat died so quickly that it uttered no sound.
    Usually the rathawk would take such bounty back to its nest. It would rip off the head, tear out the poisonous innards, and throw them away for ghourt lizards to snap up from the wall’s surface. The remaining dark meat would feed its chicks for another day. Sometimes it would even take some of the meat for itself. But today it clasped the rodent in its claws and did not