Ecko Endgame (14 page)

His clarity was sharp and painful; he
knew
everything more clearly than he ever had. Even as he breathed, he could feel the winter, could smell and taste it. The island’s air was cold and crisp, its scrub-grass was hardy, untouched by the blight; its health was tangible as Jayr’s. The creatures that watched them, wide-eyed and unafraid, their spiral horns impossible and beautiful, were tsaka, found only here on the island. About them, everything was beautiful, unscathed, clear as bright sunshine. Inhaling filled him with a vast and wordless ken, a feel of crackling wonder like the Powerflux itself.

Ramm-Outhe, the Island of the Accursed.

He was
here
!

Beside him, he could sense Jayr’s sheer strength; her scarred arms were still bared to the cold, but her scalplock was lost in her new hair. She seemed younger somehow, her face lit with a rare and delighted smile as she looked about them. The other one, Penya, was hard-nosed and wary – she prowled, hand on belt-blade, refusing to trust the beauty that surrounded them.

Beauty that should not have been here.

Ramm-Outhe, forbidden and forsaken. Untrodden by human feet since the Bard’s disastrous scouting, some forty returns before. By Fhaveonic legend, home to the exiled Kas Vahl Zaxaar.

And it was glorious.

“Look!” Ress would say, pointing at a tree behung with fronds like banners, at the bright mouth of a winter flower. “Can’t you see it?” But his words came out jumbled, and his arm would not point where he told it. He wished he could show them, tell them; wished he could wrest this incredible elation from his heart and say, “Can’t you feel what I feel, know what I know?” But though his mind was growing with every pace, his words were guttering as candle flame, lost in the winter sun.

Fhaveon, Ikira, Teale – they were all gone now, lost. If he turned, there was no route home – Rammouthe’s ring of cliffs obscured any view of the mainland. It had taken all of Penya’s skill to bring them safely through the rocks.

She had said it at the time – she was unlikely to be able to take them out again.

But Ress didn’t care – he didn’t
care
! What was behind him was gone; he was being pulled onwards, relentless as a lead-rein – he could go only forwards. There were words in his head, they were always in his head. Like a choir, like a chant. Like bells. From the lost depths of the Great Library in Amos where he’d first seen them, they now rung at him constantly, restless, in rounds, over and over.

“Time the Flux begins to crack.

To rage becomes a crime.

And Nothing is more powerful

At last, than Count of Time…”

So often he’d tried to give them voice, but they always came out the same, that single solemn toll…

“No time, no time, no time, no
time
…”

Ress found that he’d stopped, was plucking at the sleeve of his overshirt, at the place where he’d tried to write the thing down. Perhaps, he’d thought, if his mouth couldn’t form the words, then his fingers could. But like his mouth, his hand had betrayed him and in his determination – his desperation – he’d covered the garment in writing that the others couldn’t read, in drawings that made no sense to them.

Drawings of some peculiar, stylised imp, like a little man, with mottled skin and black-on-black eyes.

Ecko.

Thinking about Ecko was like pulling stitches from a wound – it thrilled and hurt and scared him. Meeting the man had been a shock, a flash of hope like black light, like the soul of dark itself. Ress could still feel Ecko’s colossal energy – but it made him unpredictable, terrifyingly so. He was just as likely to damn the world on a whim.

To guard him and guide him, Roderick needed to be strong, stronger than human. He needed to surpass himself. He needed to…

Needed to what?

A faint wisp of memory touched him – a taste of a thought not his own, of something bigger than he could grasp. He could see the Bard, younger, wearing the lamellar armour of Fhaveon, a tan of soldiers with him. They were there on the hillside pointing at the tsaka, laughing at their strange horns.

The image wavered and was gone.

Ress blinked.

Since their arrival upon Rammouthe, this was happening more and more frequently, like fog rolling back from some lost horizon, a dream returning to the dreamer. The images made him shudder – sometimes the memories weren’t clear, they were figments of figments that caught him for a moment and then were gone. They left him staring breathless at something that wasn’t there; they were the faintest after-echoes of a recurring nightmare that he knew would recur again.

Time the Flux begins to crack…

In the Amos Library Ress had found the pieces of the world’s forgotten puzzle – they rang bells in his head, wrote words on his shirt. All he needed to know – to
remember
– was how they went together.

Time the Flux begins to crack…

“Ress.” Jayr’s hand on his arm. “Pen says we need to move – it’ll get dark soon. Ress. Did you hear me? We need to move.”

“Move.” He blinked. Jayr’s face was a blur, he could only really see her out of one eye at a time – but that was all right, her solidity was like the rock itself, straightforward and utterly dependable. “Movement?”

“Yes, movement. Us. Now.”

The black-eyed sprite on his sleeve winked at him and he found himself in motion, hands under his elbows. The air was darker now and the landscape was changing as they headed uphill, further inland. As they moved, Jayr’s delight slowly evaporated into wariness; Penya grew more and more concerned. Ress could feel their tension like a shout. Could you feel a shout? He supposed you could, if it were loud enough.

Time the Flux…

Behind them the sun slowly tumbled, dying in red light upon unseen mountains. Clouds rose against the wind, streaked with darkness and fire. Around them, there was stillness; the mad-horned tsaka had faded into the dusk. And Rammouthe became stark and bleak. Rain began to scatter across rocks scoured harsh by the wind, across high moors and scree slopes.

It began to patter onto the sleeve of Ress’s overshirt, making the ink spread to a blur. The black-eyed sprite, the words of Amos, dissolved slowly into the warp and weft of the fabric.

No. He must remember. He must
remember
!

He freed a hand, tried to cover his sleeve – only to see the other sleeve was also fading. Panicked, he tried to pull himself out of the hands that held him. He couldn’t let this go, he had to keep this!

The Amos Library had told that the island was the home of the Ilfe, the Well of the World’s Memory, sister to the Ryll, the waterfall of her thoughts…

Yes. The Ilfe, the thing that will make all of this make sense. And I’ll find it – as soon as I remember where it is!

The irony of the thought made him laugh, high and brittle. He struggled against his captors. The sound split on the loose stones and echoed, jagged, in the half-light.

The rain grew heavier, cold across the wind.

“Shut up dammit!” Jayr put one hand over his mouth. His breath was hot on her fingers; moisture glittered like ice on her skin. She tasted like pure, clean might. He tried to tell her about the ink on his sleeve, but she wasn’t listening. They picked him bodily off the ground and carried him, his feet kicking.

But now, Ress could remember more – as if the images were dissolving into his very skin…

At the island’s heart, a labyrinth of rock – a citadel. The home of the Kas. He could hear Roderick’s voice, that fragment of saga that had brought the Bard here, forty returns before:
…carved into the island’s living stone, delved and built into gullies and walls. The street-maze gleams. The Count of Time beats through the rock, granting the citadel life. Supplicants beg upon its streets, traders call wares in its shadows. The people of this city age swiftly. Vialer pace the towers.

Nothing is more powerful…

But there was only the rain, the high moor. As Roderick had witnessed once before, Vahl Zaxaar had never been here. There was no citadel, no maze, no ruin.

The sky lowered to darker grey.

Jayr said, “Where the rhez are we going anyway? There’s nothing here.”

“Yes.” In Ress’s madness and clarity, failure had no place – endless moors or not, he would find what he sought. Would remember. Ignoring Jayr’s question, Penya’s shrug and mumble, he kept walking uphill, the scree of the slope now sliding under his boots. His feet were sinking into it, and it was becoming harder to move.

“Yes
what
, for Gods’ sakes?” Jayr was tired and petulant. The rain had scattered and stopped, but the wind was cold. “Yes, you know, or yes, there’s nothing here?”

He paused to blink at her, to show her his sleeves, now a smudged blur of everything he’d needed to know. She rolled her eyes.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” The joke made him laugh again, high and shrill. It wasn’t really his voice, but it was all he had.

“Shut up!” Penya had her blade out now and she prowled the gathering dark, bristling with suspicion. The stones skidded under her and she lost her footing then steadied herself, legs parted and knees bent.

Monsters. The idea made him laugh, and he lurched onward through the deepening shale, his head thrown back and the strange, angular laugh still cutting free from his throat.

“I swear,” Penya muttered, “if he doesn’t shut the rhez up I’m going to drug him into the middle of next halfcycle.”

But Ress walked on, drawn by certainty. As each foot sunk into the shale, so the memories came to him from the island itself – they seemed to rise from the sliding stones, as if they’d lain there, waiting for his feet to release them.

He could remember now: on the mainland, the ancient city of Swathe, overlooking Rammouthe itself and burning with the wrath of Vahl’s victory. He could remember: the bargain Vahl had struck with the grass of the Varchinde – if he allowed it to grow in the spring, then it would die in the winter and offer him its time.

He could remember: the almighty rocklight, the soul of light and the eastern point of the Powerflux, cursed to sink beneath the sea. The Flux had been critically damaged by the imbalance, and its power and memory waned.

And something…?

He groped after a realisation, but it faded even as he reached for it – a wish denied, a dream forgotten. Vahl had cursed the Flux so he could not be challenged, but there was something more, something he’d not yet remembered…

Ress held up his sleeve, pulled out the front of the overshirt to look down at it, but the images there were as lost as everything else. The ink had smudged into his skin.

Beside him, Jayr spat a sudden curse, staggered, went to one knee on the stones. Studying his stained flesh, it took a moment for Ress to realise – the ground was moving, the whole slope was sliding from under them. Penya lost her footing and fell, swearing.

“Go sideways.” She was shouting at them, even as the stones began to slide faster, to roar with their own increasing motion. “Go across!”

But it was too late. As though the very rocks had heard Ress’s thoughts, the ground beneath them opened like a mouth. The entire slope slid downwards with a rumble and a rise of dust.

And the island swallowed them whole.

* * *

They slid.

Swearing and tumbling and bruising, garments tearing, noise deafening, they slid down into confusion and cold, down into a rock-pale glitter that made their skin white as nightmare.

Jayr was on her feet in a moment, crouched and tight, scratched and scarred, bristling with the need for combat. Penya lay still, her temple bloodied.

Ress had skidded helpless. He had bruises at his knees, blood in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue. He came to an untidy and hurting stop at the bottom of the slope.

Panting.

Time the Flux…?

His smudged shirt was in tatters. Above him was only a tiny strip of almost-dark sky and the faint light of the yellow moon. His hands bled where he’d tried to slow his descent, but it had all happened so fast. They had been eaten alive by Ramm-Outhe.

He thought about this for a moment, then looked at Penya.

“She sleeps. Why?” They had to move; they had no time, no time, no—

“You’re the damned apothecary.” Jayr’s tone was affectionate, but she didn’t take her attention from the ghost-lit gloom that surrounded them.

Apothecary.

Yes, he knew that – he was supposed to make her better.

Ress’s knees were water, his stomach churned. He couldn’t stand. So he shuffled on his backside over to the fallen woman, the stones scraping, sliding. The line of blood came from a contusion on her temple; it seeped in among the roots of her hair, spreading to a crust. The pale light made it black as despair.

He reached out a finger, touched it.

Nothing is more powerful…

Another memory flash. Ramm-Outhe. Island of the Accursed. In blood and wraithlight, he could see the ink smudged on his forearms and it spread into images – the citadel, black against the sky, rage like fire across its crenulations. He could see the people huddled beneath it in fear, their time draining like rainwater down the gutters of the streets…

And he understood something.

There
had
been Kas here. Not Vahl himself – his punishment had been more subtle – but others, his kin. Cast down by Samiel…

Damned.

Time the Flux begins to crack…

He touched Penya’s blood again and he shivered – elation, terror, hope – he was so close, he was bright with real urgency, his clarity stronger with every breath.

He said, “Must… get up… walk…”

But Jayr hissed at him. “Shhh. Let me listen. We’re not the only things down here.”

At last, than Count of Time…

Ress laughed, a softer echo of his previous shrill humour. The sound was garish in the gloom. He should be afraid, afraid of the Kas, of what lurked here in the dark, but his focus was pure, and he had got only one answer – they must go forward.