Free Echo City by Tim Lebbon Page B

wares. Usually she ignored them. Now she caught their eyes, smiled, and more than once she was dragged into a conversation about certain species of stoneshrooms, the best spices in which to marinate a chickpig’s hooves, or the styles of silk scarves being worn in Skulk this season. Rufus watched and listened, smiling delightedly, and usually it was Penler who took his arm and guided him gently away.
    Peer realized that she was saying goodbye to Skulk Canton, and the sadness in her came as a shock. She’d been forced here by banishment, tortured and wronged by the Marcellans, and everything she had ever considered home had been stripped away. Left alone and naked of hope, she sometimes wondered how the crap she had made anything of a life for herself at all.
    Penler
, she thought, and she looked at the old man’s back. Yes, Penler. If it wasn’t for him, she would likely have died, and her arm and hip ached in memory of the care he had given her. “And now I’m leaving him behind,” she whispered. An old woman selling mummified wisps—considered lucky charms by some, though Peer knew that their stings often remained—heard what she said and reached out to her with a thin yellow wisp.
    “It’s yours,” the woman croaked, the beginnings of negotiation.
    Peer shook her head and walked on, and behind her the woman called, “Don’t take it and you’ll lose him for sure.”
    Penler turned at that, one hand still on Rufus’s arm, and Peer had never seen such an expression on the old man’s face. He looked like a young boy determined not to cry—cheeks puffed out, eyes swollen. She turned away because she was starting to realize what it all meant.
    They moved away from the market districts and into an area of Skulk known as Pool. It was a relatively low area, its buildings ancient and not built over for many centuries, but no one had lived here since the salt plague. It was a haunted place. Peer had always poured scorn on those who let phantoms steer their decisions, but the fact that no one banished to Skulk chose to live there spoke volumes. Penler had said it would be a good place from which to approach the border.
    Pool was a warren of streets, squares, and courtyards. Many of them were scattered with detritus from the decaying buildings—rotten window shutters, the glint of colored glass, chimney pots and clay bricks crumbled by decades of frost and sun—and here and there they found the bones of dead things. Most of the bones were animal, the cause of their demise always hidden. Some were human.
    “Bones,” Rufus said, and the sight of a fleshless skull seemed to terrify him. Penler and Peer calmed him, guiding him past, and Peer saw the ragged hole smashed into the skull by whatever weapon had killed its owner.
    Around the next corner, bathed in sunlight and the melodious sound of red-finch song, they saw their first phantom.
    It was a young woman, so faint that Peer could see right through her. She wore the formal silk attire favored by Skulkians before the plague, and she was kneeling by the side of the path, looking down at the ground. She reached with translucent hands and touched something, then sat back again and considered what she had done. She repeated the action, straightened once more, and never once did she appear to see them. Most phantoms did not.
    Rufus caught his breath and backed up a step, but Peer stood fast, holding on to his hips and feeling the shiver going through him. “Beautiful,” he breathed. It was a strange reaction to seeing a ghost.
    “She won’t harm us,” Penler said. Rufus seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the young woman and her continuing attempt to arrange something none of them could see. The ground beneath her fingers bore only dust, and her fingers left no trails. “There’ll be more, but phantoms won’t give us away.”
    They walked by the hollow girl, leaving her to her past. Rufus kept glancing back until they turned a corner and continued across a