Ecko Burning (52 page)

On the clifftop, the small bright blaze that was Triqueta had faltered, fallen in the soft grass as though she couldn’t go on. Amethea turned to her friend. Nivrotar nudged the stone to focus closer, saw her extend a hand, her face torn with pity.

Ecko was saying, “C’mon, he musta gotten out.”

“‘He’?” Triqueta spat it at him. “You mean ‘it’.”

“We should keep moving.” Roderick’s voice made the ice in the bowl crackle. “If there’s anything still living here, it’ll be looking for us. You can do personal trauma when we’re out of the woods.”

Ecko muttered, “We’re not outta the woods yet.”

Triqueta eyed the pair of them, but seemed to think better of it. Amethea pulled her to her feet.

Nivrotar watched them.

Slowly, they stole through the woods and the air about them faded to a thick, haunted dusk. The trees began to gleam: that white nacre that lit faces to a pallor of ghostliness and fear. They pulled closer together; even Ecko stared about him as if he expected corpses to rise rotting from the ground.

Only the Bard walked apart, his face bleak. As the others drew tighter together, he seemed almost to disdain that contact, to flicker with an edge of contempt. He walked as though he dared the very woods to defy him...

They were being followed.

The Lord of Amos nudged the bowl again, and the image shifted across the ice, coming back into close focus.

The follower was not human - it was huge, a powerful horse-shape that loomed in the darkness, a mass of body and pain. It had a human toso, hair that shone red in the pale light - then the ice clouded and the beast was gone, a figment in the gleaming, a dream upon awakening, a nightmare begging to be denied.

Touching the bowl’s edges, looking for lost focus, Nivrotar heard Triqueta: “Redlock! Redlock!” The Banned woman caught her breath on a sob.

The Bard’s voice said, “Enough. This place is laden with nightmare. We walk until we’re clear - the trade-road is a long way.”

And Nivrotar leaned back from the stone, a cold smile flickering on the side of her face.

* * *

She had been staring out of the window, her mind filled with her own dark thoughts, when a scatter of light made her blink and turn back to the room.

A flicker like firelight but pale and distant was coming from the frozen surface. As she watched, the wide bowl filled with it and grew brighter, closer. The light danced from the stone walls and the forgotten apparatus of the tower.

She studied it for a moment, reached a hand for the stone bowl. But it was hot to the touch and the ice was sublimating straight into steam and she pulled back, startled, knocking the bowl’s focus. Carefully, hand wrapped in an end of her robe, she went to find it again, her heart suddenly trembling.

She’d no idea what the bowl - the steam - was showing her.

Images writhed. Not Fhaveon, though flickers and smoke remained. Not Roviarath, Larred held his city with strength. Not the Bard, nor Ecko. The images were much closer than all of that; they were...

It was the faint taste of ash on the air that made her realise that the fires were closer than she thought.

The images were Amos.

For a moment, Nivrotar was torn - part of her needed to chase down the long and spiral stairs and demand explanations of her useless court of philosophers... but they were sleeping, or thinking, or whatever such creatures did. This was immediate, and she needed to understand it now.

Hand still wrapped, she moved the focus of the bowl to her own city, its outskirts, the terhnwood-covered cliffs that flanked the mouth of the river valley. She blew the steam from the air, eddying, taunting, strained to focus through it.

There!

The fires were on the clifftops that flanked the city. They were in the terhnwood crop.

They were in
her
terhnwood crop.

Briefly, the Lord of Amos was floored - her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. Everything she had gambled upon was burning to ash in one realisation...

I am too late.

Had her wager failed at the last?

Fhaveon was in ruins, Roviarath still under threat. The Lord city’s soldiers were still scattered throughout the Varchinde, now leaderless and brutal. The blight crept inwards faster than any could have dreamed and the harvest had failed - destroying the delicate balance of the grasslands’ trade.

And Ecko...

In the smoke, Nivrotar could see the madman Ress as if he stood in the very room with her. From the moment she had found him and Jayr in the Library, this was what she had been piecing together, had been hoping for...

Kazyen. The impossible foe. What Roderick had seen and forgotten, what Ress had seen and what had driven him loco. The void, the nothing, the death of the terhnwood and the grass.

Patterns. Games and ploys. The steam wafted and thinned, fading into the moonlight from the window. Turning back to the bowl, she nudged it again, looking back down at the Gleam Wood, at the haunted edge of the world.

But the bowl was still hot and her hand slipped, she jerked back too fast. The ice had melted and water slopped on the floor, wetting the hem of her black skirts. She snatched her fingers back, shaking them, biting her lip with the sudden pain. Even though it was only a touch, it seemed to sting like the touch of Vahl himself.

With the ice melted, her focus was not as good - but she could see the rising coastline of an island, jagged against twin moons. It took her a moment to realise where the island was - it took her a moment longer to see the tiny dark shape of a boat, resting almost motionless on the swell of the glittering water.

A boat? At Rammouthe?

Urgency gathered in her chest. She knew who was in that boat before she even looked. Bringing the focus closer, she could see Jayr, her scalplock all but lost in a new growth of hair; she could see another woman, older, curled and asleep. And she could see...

Ress!

All her attempts at finding him had failed - her spies and soldiers had reported, wide-eyed, that he had simply vanished. Even those who had been on duty at the palace itself had seen nothing.

But she could see him now.

He was huddled beneath a blanket, rocking, looking up at the vast shadow of Rammouthe over him. There was a resignation about him, a swelling of courage and inevitability - as if he knew he was going to die, but it was as it had to be, and he had made his peace with himself.

Rammouthe!

The Island of the Accursed. The one place no mortal might set foot. Roderick had tried, some forty returns previously, and barely escaped with his life - he had been laughed out of the Fhaveon Council when he tried to speak of great enemies.

But Vahl had not been on Rammouthe, had never been on Rammouthe. The legend had been a part of the creature’s vast deception.

So why...?

Nivrotar had a strong image of Ress and Jayr in the Library - it seemed so long ago. The books they had been reading, the great work of foretelling they had found.

The Ilfe. The Well of the World’s Memory. Sister to the Ryll now guarded only by the deserted Avesyr. Truly, Roderick really was her Final Guardian.

Her heart trembling in her chest, Nivrotar turned to look out of the window, back up at the flames, a tiny shred of hope burning even as the fires torched her crops and her future.

Memory.

If Ress’s madness was insight, if Jayr’s strength was enough, then the world could really remember.

Her gamble had paid off - all of it - and in a way she could never have anticipated.

Nivrotar shivered - a feeling crawling over her skin that all of this had somehow been orchestrated. Not by Phylos’s games, not by Vahl’s, not even by her own, but by something far, far larger - almost as if the pattern had no limit, no end. She was not a woman of faith - certainly she knew the Gods existed, but she also knew that they had long since grown bored of their plaything and had simply abandoned it to fend for itself. Now, she wondered if that belief was simply a convenience, a shield.

Something that had let her believe in her own power.

Patterns. All patterns.

Nodes of strength that wove together to make the full picture -Rhan, the Bard, Ecko. Herself. Vahl Zaxaar, in his own way.

The little boat that bobbed on the water.

And as the moons rose high over the island, let their rays fall on the huddle of hope that was gathered under the gunwales, Nivrotar of Amos wondered what could come next.

The man in leathers walked alone through a sunless world of decay.

The air was chill and dry, it caught in his lungs like cobwebs. Emptiness surrounded him, mocking his footsteps, telling an echoing tale of desolation. Carved stone walls, their pictures worn down by touching hands, now seemed forsaken in the silence - abandoned but for the crawling fingers of long-dead creeper.

The few tiny windows were splintered into fragments by the ivy’s clinging corpse, putting out the panes as though they were eyes. Amid the breath and smell of crumbling stonework no light could reach him, no hope would dawn.

The man did not know who he was, or what he was doing in this deserted place. Existing only to go forwards, to pursue this dream path, he came through a carved stone archway into a cathedral-vast hollow. A tower, rearing over him as if he were a trapped rat.

Its height alone was giddying. If he looked up, he could see light - a lifetime above him. It struck a poignant chord, he had to reach it, but to do so he must unravel and climb the dizzying network of stairways, ledges and platforms that lined the walls above him.

Some seemed to defy his senses, standing out from the wall too far to be stable, or seemingly unattached; silently existing outside everything the man understood.

He looked back down as the room’s whirling grew too much, but his boots were still upon the broken-tiled floor - the air was unmoving. It was his mind that was spinning upwards to join the distant sun.

Struggling for something to focus upon, he was mildly surprised to find that he was carrying an electronic device in his hand. He recognised it as a “phantom”, a radio-beacon tuned in to track a particular signal, but he did not know why he carried it, or what signal it was tracking. He examined the display, the light emitting diode lighting his face to a wash of green.

It pulled him east, a call he could not ignore. He understood that it was important, although he could not explain why, or how he knew. This filled him with a faint sense of unease, and he went through the pockets of leather and cut-off, trying to find an answer.

A spanner, a screwdriver, a handful of steel washers. A policeman-style pen and pad. A pocket full of dog-ends and a pouch of tobacco. A hip flask and a leather wallet. A small box of ammunition for the weapon he carried under his right arm.

In the wallet, a card with a face on it, his face perhaps, which identified him as “Alexander David Eastermann”, Personal Ident Code 0998-127-4806-9R, Status Rating G12.

Alex,
he thought,
Alexander David.
Reason told him that it should be his name, but it sparked no memories. It bothered him faintly, but reaching the light was far more important. He was trapped in a lifeless stone cell, amid the dead weed and the forgotten remains of a decaying city. He started up the first of the flights of stairs, striving to find the air.

The man had no way to measure the time but by the strain in his hands as he swung from an upper ledge above a slavering fall, and by the dead ends and frustrated attempts that forced him to retrace his steps. Here, the creeper was his friend, providing him with handholds and secure footing, almost as if it wanted him to find the light at last.

As he climbed painstakingly higher, the carved façades of the rising walls seemed to mock his impossible attempt, coaxing him to look down to the floor, now far below, or to despair that he would ever climb away from their silent oppression.

His breathing was harsh in the stillness. Shaking now with sweat and fear, the man stopped upon a ledge and sat still. He did not lean against the wall - he did not trust the carving. Instead, he sat cross-legged in the ledge’s centre, looking out across the mad, plunging view of the tower’s inside.

How high had he climbed? He did not know, but his shoulders throbbed with the effort it had taken, the muscles in his legs shivered with strain. He looked at his hands, flexed his fingers.

Gloved hands, cold hands. Hands numb from gripping handlebars...

The image was gone as fast as a thought, but the man stayed still, not daring to breathe, as if trying to grasp it back. A fragment of a life washed up, like garbage on the riverbank...

Who...?

His unease struggled to find a focus, to ask the questions that needed answers, and the towering, rotting maze about him pulled his concentration away from such idle thoughts. He was over two-thirds of the way up the inside of the tower. Above him the light was closer, and the stairways and archways seemed to challenge him to reach the top.

Below him was a drop into darkness. One slip, one misjudged leap...

He stood up, a tiny, upright figure in the maze that spiralled outwards from him. In two steps, he reached the limit of his ledge and tensed his body for the leap that would take him to the next platform, above him and a chasm away. The lip of the stonework was crumbling under the toes of his boots.

He tensed like a spring, and threw himself forwards.

His hands caught the lip of the ledge, and his feet swung over the drop for an instant, then he pulled himself, trembling, onto the tiles.

From here, he could climb the creeper to a ledge high over his head.

A little closer to the only thing that mattered - the light.

The man had no past, and no future. He accepted this present time as all he had. For all his existence, all he had done was climb the tower to seek the sunlight.

Secure in the inside pocket of his now dusty leather jacket, the phantom device struggled to track its signal across wide miles of forest and mountains, and empty grassland.