Echo City Read Free Page B

would likely rain before noon. Great. Another day spent harvesting stoneshrooms in the wet.
    Peer watched the lizard for a while, preparing herself for the morning ritual of rising through the discomfort of old tortures. The lizard shifted so quickly that it seemed to slip from point to point without actually moving, and there were those who believed that ghourts really belonged in the Echoes below the city. Peer was not one of them. It was a foolish idea to believe that such simple creatures could become phantoms. And, besides, her parents had taught her stillness. Relaxed from sleep, she calmed her mind and watched each tiny movement of the lizard—its fluttering heartbeat, lifting toes, and the darting streak as it ran from one place to the next. She pitied the people who did not have the time to see such things, because shehad long ago stopped pitying herself. She had all the time in the world.
    She sighed and scratched an itch in her left armpit. The little lizard flitted back into its hole, startled at her sudden movement. Propping herself on her left elbow, she grimaced as she started to sit up.
    They’d used air shards to penetrate her right arm to the bone. Sharper than any blade made of stone or metal, the shards could never be removed, and they were a constant reminder of her crime. They were set in her bone and cast in her flesh, and it took a while each morning to warm them until they became bearable. That’s all they ever were—bearable. Some nights, and on the very worst of days, she could picture the torturer’s grin as he slid them in and see the virtuous expression on the Hanharan priest’s face as he stood beyond the torture table, praying for salvation for her errant soul. Of the two, it was always that fucking priest she wanted to kill.
    Grimacing, Peer sat up and started to gently massage her right arm. The pain from her left hip was flaring now, past the numbness of sleep. They hadn’t been so creative with that; the torturer had smashed it with a hammer when she refused to acknowledge Hanharan as the city’s firstborn. It was only thanks to Penler’s skill with medicines and the knife that she was able to walk at all.
    She closed her eyes and went through the pain, as she had every morning for the past three years. Each morning was the same, and yet she had never grown to accept it. She fought against what they had done even though the evidence was here, in pain and broken bones. Penler had asked her many times why she still fought when there was no hope of return, and she had never been able to provide an answer. Truthfully, she did not know.
    Gorham’s face flashed unbidden across her mind. Perhaps he was haunting her, though for all she knew, he was dead.
    Gradually the pain lessened and she sat there for a while, as always, looking around the small room in the house she had been lucky enough to find. It had two floors, and she always slept on the top one. There was a ledge beyond the windowthat led to other rooftops if she needed to escape, a system of alarms and traps built into the single staircase—that had been Penler’s doing as well—and if she stretched and stood just right, she could see the desert from her window. Some nights, if she could not sleep, she spent a long time simply looking.
    One of the downstairs rooms still contained several paintings of the family that had lived there before the salt plague a hundred years before. Peer had no idea what had happened to them other than they had died.
Everyone
in Skulk Canton had died, either from the plague or from the brutal purging that quickly followed, ordered by the Marcellans. But she liked keeping their images in the house. It had something to do with respect.
    “Time to leave,” she muttered. “Important places to go, powerful people to see. Stoneshrooms to pick.” She often spoke to herself when there was no one else to listen. In Skulk there were many who would understand, and probably many more who would consider