Ecko Burning (2 page)

Its scorn was like a blade, it severed his consciousness, thought from thought. Under the full onslaught of its presence, he could barely remember who he was - even as it spoke, it pried into his mind with hot, curious fingers, baring his innermost weaknesses, laughing at his doubts and fears. One day, it would tear his soul to screaming shreds.

But not today.

Tell me what you have seen!
he demanded.

I know that the world has found eyes,
it said, sounding faintly amused.
But they’re crazed and broken, and she struggles to focus - to mesh thought and memory once more.

It paused. He found he had to stare at the girl, blood congealing on her skin.

And I have seen something new, something different.
It was piqued - he had never heard it sound so... curious.
Something that had might enough to thwart Maugrim’s growth. Something dark, cruel, tortured. Something insane. Something that walks as though in a maze of its own mind - and something that -

The creature caught itself.

Something you’ll want, my estavah. Something that may hold the key to the greatest knowledge of all.

The creature could not suppress its hunger: it flooded the man’s mouth like warm red wine. He swallowed.

You can’t fool me, my creature. The want is yours. What are you withholding from me?
He pushed back, demanding.
How does the world find her vision? Seek her memory? What has happened to the Bard?

It laughed at him then, displaying a cruelty and power so vast he found himself shuddering physically, backing away from the torn-open corpse of the girl.

Ah, my old friend
, it said.
Do you not trust me, even now?

The girl’s head turned. He thought he saw her exposed lungs inflate, her bloodied lips make words.
Trust me
, she mouthed silently.
Trust -

He dropped the covering over the eye.

The girl was still, ripped open like a bweao’s uneaten kill. She had not moved.

You seek ultimate comprehension
, the creature said, its tone enticing, a dark charisma that teased sweat from his shoulders.
This - man - believes he has it. You should bring him to us, my friend; my captor.

Struggling, he said nothing, thought nothing. Mind empty, he stared down at the girl. Her eyes were open, that look of shock still on her face. She’d given them answers, but raised only more questions.

Sea birds cried as if in mourning; the breeze rattled the shutters. He shivered.

The creature was hiding something, something he couldn’t touch. It was laughing at him. And yet he needed to know,
had
to know.

Aloud, he said, “‘...that walks as though in a maze of its own mind.’”

The words echoed hollow in the silence between them. The girl cooled on the floor.

Bring him,
it said.
Coax him; make him come to us. He cannot be broken, but he is in need of a mentor, a father, and you can make him trust you.

Why do you care, creature? What do you want?

I?
The creature was grinning - a white slash of savagery in the darkness. Somewhere, embers smouldered in yellow eyes.
Trust me, my estavah, my brother. The greatest knowledge requires the greatest risk. Bring Ecko to Aeona, tear him wide, and you will craft the greatest creations of your life.

The Great Fayre, the trading heart of the grasslands, lay ruined.

In the long light of evening, the fading sun stretched red fingers between the ruined stalls, touching at the remnants of lives that had been. Though the surrounding grass burned a thousand glorious shades of autumn, here the ground was churned to muddy ruts, the pathways littered with wreckage.

Scavenger birds circled, their cries harsh.

Surrounding two-thirds of the walls of Roviarath, the plains’ central city, the bright jumble of the bazaar had been shattered to fragments. Gone now were the traders and the tellers and the tricksters, the fakirs and the forgers, the bullies and the beggars. Gone were the creatures that had assailed the Fayre’s vulnerability, that had been assaulted and thrown back by the city’s rallied forces. And gone too were the opportunists, the looters and the pirates that had followed in the wake of the fighting.

About its edges, there remained a scatter of unbroken stalls - now home to the displaced and the desperate. Figures loitered silent, watching through eyes that were hard, or broken, or expectant. They watched the lines of workers that combed the devastation.

Ribald and vocal, the workers paid them no attention - instead, they called jests to each other across the debris. Steadily, they picked over the Fayre’s wreckage - strewn trade-goods, pieces of blackened, superheated stone. Through-routes were cleared, neat stacks were piled, orders were barked and passed along. Bookkeepers noted trade-routes and craftmarks, and took careful tallies of what little remained.

Sometimes, there would be a flicker of fur and shadow, and a skulking creature would steal through the ruins. Then the workers would stamp their feet and throw things - but their archers did not shoot, though they were arrows nocked and heads turning, aware of the rising dark.

Watching them, Ecko had kinda guessed their targets had two feet, not four.

But that was fine - like they could see him anyhow.

Slipping through the debris, his chameleon skin shifting to the colours of sunset and shadow, he was a tattered ghost, unseen, unheard. He’d been out here before, helping himself to the good shit - hell, he had a whole stash to replace - and knew full well that he’d be a porcupine if they saw him. But face it, these guys had about as much chance of seeing him as they did of booking him a ticket back to London Heathrow.

Bring it on, guys; give it your best Robin Hood...

Stranger in a strange world, Ecko had come to realise one thing about this medieval mudbath - no one had seen anything like him before. Might even go as far as saying the culture shock was theirs, not his.

He watched the workers’ progress, grinning.

Over them, the evening light faded, and died. The sunset glow deepened to darkness, and eventually the crews withdrew. The city’s lighthouse tower swelled slowly to a white star of hope.

This is Roviarath,
it said,
central and victorious. This is the heart of the Varchinde plain.

Yeah,
thought Ecko,
this is the city whose ass I just saved. Call me “Child of Prophecy”, tick the “Dungeon” box, an’ gimme my fuckin’ gold coins, already.

Yet when the final horn-call sounded and the gate swung closed, he was still outside its walls.

* * *

The great wooden doors gave their final thudding, a reverberation like a heart’s last beat.

Orphaned now, the Fayre looked like some derelict carnival, garish and spooky - a perfect playground for the rising, brain-hungry shamble of the recently deceased.

But this was Ecko’s third night out here, and he’d not yet found a single zombie, shambling or otherwise. He hadn’t quit hoping though - and, hell, if he was gonna hope for zombies, he might as well hope for shotguns and baseball bats while he was at it. He prowled the ruin, his enhanced vision flicking lowlite and heatseeker, his super-charged adrenaline poised, eager, right on the edge. If he couldn’t have zombies, then he’d settle for the local alternatives: for beasties and bad guys, for the Thing-style stone mcnasties that had assaulted the city from the depths of Maugrim’s tunnels...

His hovering adrenaline spiked as he glanced up at the warriors on the walls.

Yeah, Maugrim whose bad-guy ass I kicked.

An’ did I even get a thank-you card? Flowers?

Over the rocklit defences, the sky was starless-black. One moon, full and gold and far too big, hung fat like some Christmas bauble - it streaked the mud with piss-bright yellow and made the garbage hunker like a nightmare. Higher up, its smaller, silver brother shone cold and distant.

Together, they made the moonlight bizarre, cross-hatched and entirely fucking impossible.

Chrissakes.
Ecko aimed the thought at the silent city.
I did your Noble Quest. I mushed your bad guy an’ saved your world. I found your treasure and got your hot girl - well, kinda. I saw the truth, whatever the hell that was. An’ I get what? A pat on the back?
The ends of his stealth-cloak fluttered, laughing at him.
Where’s my level-up, for chrissakes? My weapons upgrade? My skills package? My unlocked achievements?
He wanted to rail at the impossible moons.
An’ why the hell didn’t I score my ticket home?

The cloak billowed harder, agitating. It was a soft mass of folds and layers; had covered him from allies and foes alike, from eyes unwanted. For a moment, the flap was intolerable and he was tempted to tear it off, throw it down amid the garbage... but it was part of him, a shielding layer, something quintessential. He could no more tear it free than he could lose his own skin...

Again.

Chrissakes, enough. Get a fucking grip.

London, the tech he called Mom, who’d undone and rebuilt him, they were a world away, unreachable. Whatever the hell he had to do to get outta this program, this reality, this whatever-it-was they’d plugged him into... apparently kicking bad-guy butt wasn’t it.

Yeah, all right already, like it was
ever
gonna be that simple...

In his dark heart he knew it: This whole thing wasn’t just about completing some scenario. It was Virtual Rorschach, too complex to be solved that easily. Around him, his reality was an expanding fractal, based on his thought patterns. With every decision he made, every reaction and movement, he shifted those patterns and changed his possible futures. And every one of those futures was projected by the algorithm of Collator’s AI, watched by the therapist Eliza. Put simply, every new pattern was a multicoloured rebroadcast of his tiniest thought, no matter how subconscious or dark or humble. Eliza could see every single thing his mind was doing.

Every. Single.
Thing.

Machine, mathematics and medic, in perfect harmony, twining through his brain like some inescapable hangman’s knot.

The city stood silent, not offering an answer.

From somewhere, there was a rising
yip-yip-yip
of a critter, loose in the Fayre’s ruins.

Ecko flicked out his cloak and began to move again, scanning the wreckage for loot. This fucking program wasn’t just about beating up bad guys, he kinda knew that already. To get outta here, he was gonna hafta tick Eliza’s boxes, prove he was
sane.

And he couldn’t even fake it.

Looking at the moonlit ruin of the grasslands’ central market, Ecko wondered if that was even fucking possible.

Or if he was gonna be in here forever.

* * *

The moons slowly dissolved, tumbling under their own weight down towards the waiting mountains.

Cycling his oculars, Ecko was systematically ransacking the debris - with the loss of The Wanderer, down the hole into the Pit of Doom, he’d lost his hoarded stash. He was out of kit, weapons, and food.

The Fayre, though, was just about out of swag, place’d been picked cleaner than a nightclub drunk. He was finding almost nothing, now - fragments of broken pottery and ceramic, edges of fabric, rotting into the mud. The half-eaten corpse of some rodent-thing, its skull gleaming golden in the light. There were pieces of seashell, long since shattered; there was half of some tiki-type carving that seemed to have been made from bone.

As he picked up the tiki-thing, something shuddered in his skin, a subtle creeping, like fungus, a crawling sensation that spread across his shoulders...

And he knew
exactly
what the fuck that meant.

Shit.

He dropped the carving, pulled out of the thoroughfare and found cover - the remains of the nearest stall. He pulled his cloak tighter, kicked his oculars into the brilliant grey-green of starlites and turned to look for the predator.

Come on then. Heeeeeere kitty, kitty, kitty...

The dawn light was failing. The grey clouds thickened, closing over the fading moons and the city’s lighthouse tower.

The first spits of rain were cold, like gravel.

But Ecko didn’t care. His adrenals had kicked, elation and eagerness; their tremble spread slowly through his system, lifting and charging him, making him shiver. He felt faintly sick - and he fucking
loved
it.

Trembling with anticipation, he waited.

Just as he was creating the wave, teetering on the very tip, beginning to tell himself there was nothing the fuck there, for chrissakes... there came the sudden crash of toppling garbage.

The sound made his heart hammer, nearly scream straight out through his ribcage. He held his breath for a moment, throttling the immediate need to lash out, that instinctive knee-jerk adrenal reaction...

But damn, it felt so good...

He stayed as still as he could.

A moment later, there was a sharp snarl, close. This wasn’t Yippy, it was bigger - sounded more like a bear than a dog.

Did you get bears in artificial realities? Surely, they’d be in the woods? Or maybe this was gonna be His Greatest Fear Made Manifest.

Yeah, like I did that one already.

Ecko found his grin had spread wider, a slash of darkness.

He looked over the front of the stall.

Though the clouds were really massing now, a rising army of grey, his oculars could still see them clearly - two rangy, bone-thin critters, four-legged and taller than his hip, with heavy, protruding lower jaws. They fought for a discarded horse skull, shredding the last of the flesh from the bones of its nose. Its teeth clattered as they shook their heads, worrying at it.