Ecko Burning (39 page)

She said, “If Phylos doesn’t kill me, the mob outside will blame me and tear me to pieces. If my father could see what we’ve become...” She raised her face to the grey sky, the roil and threat of the clouds. “I’m the smallest child of a diminishing name. It’s all a jest now, Mael. It’s all
over
-”

“I don’t think drama will help, my Lord.” His tone was light, but the reprimand was fully intended. If he had to fight this, then she had to damned well fight it with him. “We -”

“You’re a fool. You and Saravin both.” Her voice was gentle, but grief and anger were entwined under her words. “You have no idea what that man’s really capable of, or where this will end!”

“He wants to be Seneschal -”

“He wants to be
Foundersson!”
Selana turned her gaze on him, bright with grief. “Haven’t you got that yet? You and all your learning? He’s Archipelagan - he’s Saluvarith’s
blood
, his great-grand-nephew or something. I might be the Founder’s direct descendant, but Phylos has more pure Valiembor blood in his veins than I do. He’s got more damned right to rule the Varchinde...!” Her tone worked itself to a peak, and then subsided. She spread her hands helplessly as if striving for the rest of the thought. She said, “He’s been planning this for more returns than I’ve drawn breath.”

He’s been planning this...

What?

Mael stared, unseeing, at the statue in the centre of the flickering pond - a leaping beast, long and lean with a graceful tail, forever poised on the very edge of its potential. The thought hadn’t distilled, not yet, and the beast’s blank eyes seemed full of shadows. Amid the shock, he found himself asking,
But if you know that...?

He voiced it aloud, not caring for caution. “But if you know that, my Lord, then why are you letting him rule you? Perform acts in your name?”

“I didn’t know it,” she said, “not at first.” She offered no further explanation, but Mael’s mind had jumped - had followed a sudden and terrifying tangent.

By the Gods.

Jayr.

That
was why Phylos had bridled so strongly at the mention of his family,
that
was why Jayr was such a colossal lever. Jayr the one-time Kartian slave, she was blood Valiembor - and if Phylos did take the palace...

She would be his rightful heir.

Mael was beginning to wish he’d questioned Phylos more closely in the kitchen, poker or no poker. If Jayr was Phylos’s daughter, then how had she become a Kartian slave?

And if Phylos had wanted to deny her, surely he could have just strangled her at birth? Was there some Archipelagan superstition, some tradition or fear, that had stopped him? Or had he not known when she was born?

And, if that was the case, when had he found out?

Mael tried to think. Archipelagan culture was one of elitism, of high art and high ambition. They were a scattered people, extremely long-lived, arrogant by Varchinde standards, and there were only a handful of them in the grasslands - he knew no more than that. Frustrated now, his thoughts yanked him up off the bench and had him pacing the edge of the pond, the beast’s eyes seeming to watch him. He went back to the original question.

“If Phylos is blood Valiembor, my Lord, why doesn’t he just take control of the city? Have you killed?”

The way he killed your father.

Selana was watching him as though the sun had just risen in his face, was even now blazing from his eyesockets as if he were some kind of damned prophet.

She said, “What? What’re you thinking?” She was on her feet now. “He’s promised to make me his wife!”

Wife?

Oh, of course he has.
Mael could have kicked himself. If Phylos was her great-great-something uncle, their Valiembor blood was probably distant enough. And how better to buy her loyalty, to secure his own power and bloodline? The old scribe snorted, partially at her naïveté and partially at his own.

He said, “How do you know he won’t have you killed anyway, in the end?”

Her face paled, but any answer was halted by a sudden commotion in the colonnades. The angered Phylos, tailed by scuttling staff, now billowed out into the quad.

He barked, “Seal the doors. We must take shelter. Now!”

Selana was upright, and now Mael could smell smoke, the faintest hint of ash on the wind.

He thought,
Oh, my Gods...

Phylos answered his silent shock. “The riots have started.”

* * *

He strode through the corridors and they tumbled in his wake as if they could not help themselves.

Selana called, “Where are we going? Where are we going?” But Mael knew all too well. The hospice had cellars, cool chambers of dried herbs and full kegs, places where the records had once been kept.

Where he’d once worked.

The corridors now were as familiar to the old scribe as his youth itself, places he’d loitered trying to get access to the more interesting ends of the herbery. There was the door to the gardens, carefully tended under a scatter of rain. There was the huge hanging banner that reminded all of them that the hospice both belonged and answered to the Fhaveon church. The fat old High Priest Gorinel never came here, but it was his nonetheless.

The banner shifted in the air from the doorway. The wind was picking up now and the smell of smoke was stronger. There were shouts coming from somewhere - doubtless the rioters had equipped themselves with torch-and-pitchfork and were on the doorstep at this very moment, demanding that their accusations be met, that various heads be served up on platters with suitable garnish.

“If they get in,” Phylos said, “they will kill you.”

Mael noted that he said “you” and not “us”.

Selana said, “What about my uncle?”

“He’s too sick to move.” The Merchant Master shook his head, a show of sadness that made Mael glance sideways at the hurrying girl. “The main doors are sealed, we can only hope. I’m sorry.”

Trust Phylos to turn the situation to his own advantage - he was leaving Mostak to die.

Selana’s face twisted into a worried frown, and she looked back along the corridors as if she, too, had reached the same conclusion.

I can’t do this for you, child,
Mael thought. Though something in him wished that he could.

They came to the head of the stone steps, steep and rocklit and worn low in their centres.

Selana said, “Stop... stop.” She put her hand on Phylos’s arm, seemed to gather herself. “I’m not going down there.”

“Yes, you are. My Lord.” The pause was infinitesimal, but spoke more than a scholar’s volume. “It’s for your own safety.”

“No,” Selana said, lifting her chin. “I’m not.”

Figures scurried past them, faces drawn with concern. There were flakes of ash drifting through the air and the shouts were growing nearer. Phylos’s grunts were nowhere to be seen.

Phylos turned. “You must.”

Mael watched her, willing her to security and strength.

She said, “No. I want to go and speak to” - she hesitated over the phrase but used it anyway - “to my people.”

Good girl.
Mael said, “She should do so, Merchant Master. If she can hold them...”

“Don’t be ridiculous, she’s a child.” Phylos’s face darkened for a moment like the roiling storm that blackened the sky above them, the city around them. Then it cleared and he found his cold smile. “I fear only for your -”

“That is my concern, not yours.” Selana took a step back. “You’ll open the doors to this building and you’ll allow the injured to be tended and helped. You’ll secure my uncle, and Brother Mael, and you’ll let me go.”

Phylos inhaled like he was striving for control. He glanced to and fro down the corridor, then leaned forwards.

“What did he say to you? Your uncle. What did he say?”

She lifted her chin. “My father’s blood is on your hands, Phylos Valiembor. Isn’t it?”

Startled, Mael could have cheered.

For the faintest moment, the Merchant Master’s jaw dropped - his face was etched in absolute and genuine surprise. Then the darkness and thunder rose in his skin and he lunged and grabbed her, slammed her back against the wall.

She smiled. “I’m the Lord Founderssdaughter of Fhaveon. You as much as touch me -”

But she was cut short as he bundled her down the first two steps, shoved, and sent her stumbling. He turned back for Mael.

“And as for you, you wily little bastard. I don’t know what rock you crawled out from, but you’re going straight back under it. In pieces, in a
sack.”
A second lunge grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and spun him through the door. “I’ll deal with you when I get back.” Mael stumbled at the top step and went down them sideways, hitting the bottom, shoulder-first, with a sickening crack.

He tried to get his hands under him and failed. The room spun. Selana was picking herself up, turning to help him. Phylos stood at the top of the steps, staring down at them like some accursed and avenging daemon come to rend them soul from flesh.

The herbery was small; there was only the one door.

Phylos slammed it on them, dropped the key.

The game, Mael figured, was over.

* * *

Outside, a tide of anger was rising against the tall walls of the city - passionate and riled and flowing, roaring, from building to building almost undiscriminating as to its targets. There were those who had felt the bite of hunger, of despair, the loss of their livelihoods and crafts and trade. There were those who had felt Ythalla’s brutality and her hard, mailed fist, those who had felt the Merchant Master’s cutbacks and harsh limitations of tithe. The farmers had refused to relinquish what crop they had remaining, the hay and the terhnwood that they needed for themselves - the manors stood helpless and the tithehalls’ stored resources were all but empty.

Now, the voice of the city was demanding explanation and recompense. It was demanding a solution that Phylos did not know how to give. One thing remained true - whatever his scheming, and however many returns he had planned and built for this, laid the foundations and carefully chipped away at the walls, the blight had not been his doing.

He had only played it, turned it to work for him.

Now, it seemed, he could make that turn again.

The wide-eyed apothecary met him in the corridor.

“Merchant Master. My Lord Selana is secure?”

“Have the door to the herbery watched. What of her uncle?”

“Merchant Master. I -”

“Execute the contingency.”

The apothecary stuttered again, “I -”

“The poor man’s heart will finally fail him. A tragic loss.”

“Please -”

“Are you
deficient?”
Phylos rounded on the man, snarling. “I’d not intended to do this now, but if the rioters want something to hang, why don’t we give them exactly that? Rid us of Mostak and
hold
the door to the herbery until I tell you to bring the girl forth.”

The apothecary nodded and fell silent. His hands twisted one about the other. Phylos reached the main door.

Outside, rage and chaos burned as bright as the light of the city itself.

“Now,” he said, and deep in his heart the slow steam of the other, coiled presence heard him, “we finish this.”

Yes. You have done better than I could have believed. The Varchinde is yours, Phylos Valiembor.

Utterly unafraid of the howling horrors beyond, Phylos, the last true-blooded son of the Founder, threw open the doors of the hospice to face the crowd.

It came running, head-down and snorting, on hooves inhuman and with a speed that stole the breath from Triqueta’s lungs. It was agile, swift of movement - it was animal, and crazed.

Swearing, Triqueta instinctively went for weapons, but she had no arms, no armour - only her agility and wit. And her luck, if she still had some left.

The creature was big, its shoulders shone with muscle; it had a spear, shaft patterned and decorated with feathers at the tip. Somehow, it suited the spirals in its skin, the layers of decorous thongs about its throat.

Something about it reminded her of the centaurs.

“Triq...” Amethea’s voice was tense with complex warning. The girl hung back, watching, wary.

Triqueta stepped in front of her, swallowed hard.

I can still do this.

The beast slowed and looked up, met her eyes, raised the spear. For a moment Triq hoped the creature would throw it, but it wasn’t that damned stupid. As it closed, it slowed and took the weapon in a two-handed grip - gave it a deft spin more like that of a staff-user. Triq drew in a long breath like courage and came forwards to face it, hands outstretched, to pace round it in a careful circle.

You want to dance? Come on then.

“Watch the parapet!” She barked the instruction at Amethea, didn’t take her eyes off the creature to see the girl nod her response.

The creature grinned. Its eye-teeth were pointed, its hair a mass of tangle and darkness. She could see a short, irate tail. Something about it felt savage, elated and wild.

Triq beckoned it.
Come on, then.

And it came fast, the spear point feinting at her throat and then the opposite end cutting round and under and slamming upwards towards her hip. She was quick enough still - it missed, and they circled again.

It said something, a word of angles and threat. She had no idea what it meant, but she bared her own teeth in a snarl of response. She didn’t care what this thing was, or where it had come from, or what it was
armed
with, by the rhez - her blood was warming to this now and her snarl spread into a grin, an outright warning.

This, she knew. She’d been raised fighting the trade-roads and, even unarmed, she would take this thing to bloodied pieces.

Watching its gaze, its shoulders, she moved quickly, aiming to get her hands on the spear shaft and twist it out of the creature’s grip. But it saw the move and stepped back, bringing the point to level at her belly.