Ecko Endgame (2 page)

As he turns over, groaning with stiffness and flexing numb fingers, he comes to focus on the bizarre shapes of the pillars that stand over him, tips now gleaming with the rising light. Blinking, sitting up and coughing a dark, splattering phlegm, he struggles to see them clearly.

“’Oo the ’ell are you? Some fuckin’ army?” Still blinking, he gouges a thumb and forefinger into his eyes, refocuses. “What you doin’ out ’ere? Turned to stone – like, I dunno, trolls or summin’.”

He looks at the mountains, the water, his hands. They hurt with returning circulation. Confused, he flexes them into claws and back, then turns them over to stare at the dry palms, the old burns, the heavy calluses.

“I remember… I was a kid, and me ’ands were turnin’ into dragons. Sky fulla colour. Bleedin’ bonkers. Where was I? What the ’ell was I doin’?”

Then he says, in a voice like an engine starting, “Oh fuck me bloody
ragged.
”

He palms himself in the forehead, groaning.

The pillars don’t respond, but he tells them anyway, “I’m
trippin’.
I’m trippin’ me bleedin’
nuts
off. Alex bastard Eastermann bollocks, I’m Lugan – an’ I was… I was…”

A flood of images, jumbled like traffic, noisy – he pounds his forehand with the palm of his hand, jarring them. The Bike Lodge, the tavern, the Bard, Ecko gone missing, the pitch darkness of the old Underground, Thera’s lights, Mom… He’d left Roderick there, and had gone seeking answers, seeking Ecko – gone all the way to the offices of Mortimer, Hiner and Thompson…

And then what?

“So, what the ’ell ’appened to me? What did they…?”

The stones say nothing.

“Bugger me. Was the ’ole bloody
thing
even real – the tavern, the tunnels, any of it? Some fucktard’s fuckin’
spiked
me!
Tell
me I ain’t been that bleedin’ stupid?”

His voice falls on empty winter – but the realisation makes everything fit.

“
Fuck
it.”

Angry now, he kicks at a pile of stones with his big black boot, making it tumble over. Then he stands up straight, winces, and looks back at the little red light.

“Right then,” he says, “guess you’re the only answer I got.”

With a back-cracking stretch, he lumbers into motion, heading for the angled whiteness of the rising mountains.

Behind him, the pillars stand watch.

The grass was dead.

Across the huge emptiness of the Varchinde plain, the bright colours of autumn had faded and blown away, and the soil and stone were scoured clean, bared to a bleak sky. The trees were stark, hard angles against a rising bank of cloud; the wind was harsh, spiralling the last stalks into tiny tornado whirls. The chill made Triqueta huddle in her saddle, her hood drawn up and her heavy cloak wrapped tight. Desert-blooded as she was, she’d never felt the season bite this deep before. She found herself shuddering as the early winter seemed to crawl under her skin, sinking cold claws into muscle and bone.

Beneath the cloak her hands itched and she held them still, refusing to scratch them. She could feel her age this morning, whatever the rhez it was; feel the curse that the daemon Tarvi had laid upon her, and the weight of the whole damned Count of Time.

…dunno why she took your time and not mine…

Ecko’s words were in the wind, taunting her lean, lined face, her chapped hands. Tarvi’s kiss had taken ten – fifteen? – returns from her life. It had left her aged and self-conscious, bitter with regret.

By the rhez. Enough!

Beneath her, the mare snuffled and shifted. The horse was a city creature, spraddle-legged and hang-bellied, lacking in spirit. She didn’t like the empty plainland, or the cold, and her ears were flat-back, expressing her disapproval.

But Triq held the beast between her knees. They’d come out here, just as they did every morning, to look for something – hope, answers – and she wasn’t done searching. She tightened her thighs and the horse started forward reluctantly, her wide hooves dragging at the muck.

The wind gusted, blew Triq’s hood back and her hair across her face, white strands among the yellow. She freed a hand to hold it back, and there – there! – just for a moment, she saw it: a horizon shadow, dark against the southern sky. Her heart thundered. She was up in the stirrups, craning to see something, anything, even as her rational mind berated her for being so foolish. She’d seen the shadow before, half-man and half-creature; she’d dreamed it and danced with it over and again. It was the hallucination she’d brought from the horrors they’d faced at Aeona, the hope that ghosted constantly at the corners of her vision. Like her memory of Tarvi’s curse, it wouldn’t damned well leave her be…

Redlock.

She was out here looking for Redlock – on some damned fool quest for her lost lover.

Or what was left of him.

She knew how crazed it was, but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t leave it alone. Every night, she saw those last moments: Aeona’s collapse as its alchemist master perished, the freed Kas, the daemon, as it fled north to its new host, the twisted red-maned monstrosity they’d glimpsed in the shattered tower. And every morning, she came up here to stare southeast along the coastline at the distant and unseen Gleam Wood, at the destruction they’d left behind them. They had won their fight, saved Ecko’s life, perhaps the life of the world entire – but the
cost…

Her hopes were folly and she knew it, but she came anyway, unable to let go of the hope, the fear, the shreds of denial that such a thing could have happened to him, to them. Day after day, she rode through Amos’s ramshackle outskirts and out into the chill; day after day, she returned to the taverns on the wharves and drowned herself in a blur of ales and spirits, and in the heated embraces of those whose names and faces she didn’t even care to remember.

She knew, she
knew
, how loco this was. Some part of her mind asked what the rhez she thought she was doing. Even if Redlock had survived Aeona’s collapse, there was no way he’d be –
it
would be – out here, when it had the whole dead Varchinde to run in. No way it’d know she was here and…

…and
what
?

Aeona had been a disaster. Its master had twisted Redlock into a beast, speechless and mindless and horrified, and he’d come within a moment of sacrificing Ecko and damning them all. They’d freed Ecko, but not swiftly enough – and the damage had been done. Kas Vahl Zaxaar, daemon possessor and the Varchinde’s long-feared foe, had loosed himself from the alchemist’s flesh to rage northward to Fhaveon, Lord city.

And now, Triq was afraid.

Afraid that their time was up, afraid the aftermath of Aeona would prove too much, afraid that the blight and the rising winter would finish them all.

Another gust caught her, and she shivered. It was cold as pure frost, sending tumbles of the dead grass across the hilltop. Though the Varchinde’s “little death” was a natural thing, a normal part of the cycling of elements and seasons, somehow it still all seemed like some Gods-damned portent.

Like the grass would die for good, and there would be no spring.

The mare shook her mane, snorted steam and scorn like some saga charger. The shadow, whatever it was, had gone.

The shadow had never even been there, for the Gods’ sakes, had never been more than Triqueta’s own hair, scudding across her vision. She pulled the mass back, retied it.

The mare was agitated now, ears flicking.

“Come on then.” She stroked the creature’s neck. “We’ll go home.”

They turned back to the city. Out over the sea, the sky had sunk to an ominous glower. The cloud was thick and flat, almost metallic. Even as they moved, the mass was flash-lit, and the grey water ignited to an instant of glittering fire.

The rumble reached them a moment later.

Triq gave one last look southward, but there was nothing there – by the rhez, there was never going to
be
anything there. Telling herself she wouldn’t come here again, she tightened her knees and urged the horse onwards – to the city, and to shelter.

And as she went, she raised her face to the wind – was surprised to find it ice-cold on her cheeks, as if it dried water she hadn’t even known was there.

* * *

A dark sprawl between rising hillsides, Amos was a city changed.

With the onslaught of the blight, the Varchinde’s quintessential terhnwood crop had been devastated, and its absence damned the plains’ trade cycle and the lives of the cities that depended upon it. In Amos, Lord CityWarden Nivrotar had no intention of letting the resulting chaos assault the streets of her home, to gut Amos as it had done Fhaveon.

When the blight had first browned the crops and grasses that surrounded her, Nivrotar had sent teams to help the harvest and to tally and stockpile everything they could, to defend or burn where necessary, and to teach calm to the farmers and workers. Trust in your city, the Lord told her people, your city will hold her word to care for you.

And she did.

At the Lord’s insistence, her bazaars and tithehalls remained open – and guarded – while her craftmasters and bookkeepers were kept recompensed and busy, vital to the continued cycle. Terhnwood still came into the city, rationed and managed. A portion of it was still stored, and its equivalent weight and value in goods was still traded back to the farmlands, and beyond. Where Fhaveon had slammed shut her trade-borders and hoarded what crop she still had, so Amos tallied the absolute minimums she’d need to maintain herself and her farmlands, and then sent bretir outwards on various carefully plotted routes with offers of what little remained.

Around Amos, the trade cycle limped into motion once more. Control was merciless, violence inevitable, justice savage and swift. Local freemen and warriors were recompensed in food and kit, and they defended the city to her last.

The system was shaky, but it held. Perhaps due to Nivrotar’s power and reputation, perhaps to her ruthless Tundran intellect, Amos was still in business.

Seeking the work, more warriors came.

And more traders came.

And after them, in a steady trail of hope, came the refugees.

* * *

Amos was a city changed.

Her inherent darkness had become a beacon, a flag of stained hope. About her walls a new life had grown, a patchwork of fabric slum, swollen with life and colour. Here, gathering for shelter against the blight and the fear and the “little death”, had come the people who had nowhere else to go.

When Triqueta had first ridden from the city’s southernmost gate, the area had been a trade-road bazaar, loud and rough and muddy, a haven for smugglers and pirates. Now, it was a crazed tessellation of scents and shouts and smoke, tents and lean-tos, all growing one into another like lichens in the wet. There were old hangings and tacked-together cloaks, scavenged parts of stalls, salvaged pieces of wood and stone, all carbuncled against the buttresses, or collaged in corners as if they had been flung there.

The main roadway was puddled and rutted, strewn with garbage – and seething with people, some directionless and underfoot, others purposeful and frustrated. As Triq tried to shoulder the mare through the mass, beggars crowded about her, held out dirty bowls and dirtier hands; they owned only what they stood in and crying children clung to their legs. In a moment, she and the horse were surrounded by voices and pleas, by the stink of piss and urgency.

She dismounted, found herself walled in by flesh – the refugee village seemed to have swelled even since the birth of the sun. For a moment, she thought of her own crazed wealth – the hoarded metal from the Elementalist Maugrim’s peculiar treasure chamber. Even if she’d had it with her, it would have been useless – some ludicrous jest of the Gods.

The rain grew heavier, cold from the sea, and the lightning flashed again. As she came closer to the dark rise of the gate itself, the roadway grew clearer and the crowd began to drift away, back towards their makeshift homes, and whatever hope they could find.

She wished she had some of her own to spare for them.

* * *

Amos was a city changed.

At the open southernmost gate, Triq found a cluster of freemen and women gathered round a firebox. Their weapons were close but not in hand, and they bore their colours with the casual attitude of soldiers who’d not worn them in training. They eyed her as she came near but they seemed unworried, grumbling among themselves with affable discontent.

“Breakfast?” She grinned at them, and they grunted in return.

To the landward of where they stood, spreading all the way back to the city wall, there was a cleared plaza, thick with caking mud. Here, there was a square of more regular tents – a hospice, a foodhall, a tithehall – all makeshift but functioning. Smoke curled into the air, and cloaked figures scurried.

Above them, the black wall rose like the end of the world.

“Triq!”

Through the scattering rain, the sound of her name startled her – it had come from the front of one of the tents.

“
Triq!
”

There – was that someone waving?

At the far side of the square there was a wide sprawl of greenish tent, its awning bulging with water and its guy-lines strained tight. Triqueta blinked, wiped her eyes. Under the awning was a slim, pale-haired figure.

Amethea.

Friend and apothecary, with a resilience that had faced down Aeona’s nightmare figments, she was tired and filthy-faced, stained with mud and fluids. Her pale skin was flecked with darkness like the missing pieces of lives.

As she saw Triqueta look, she ducked out of the doorway and ran, the mud clinging thickly to her boots. It was sheltered from the wind here, and Triq could hear her shouting, words falling over themselves.

“Triq! Oh, thank the Goddess you’re here! She’s – Gods! – you have to see her for yourself. I can’t even think… been awake for a day and half…” She caught up, panting, and stopped to speak, stroking the walking horse’s nose. The mare snorted at her smell. “Gods, this is so
crazed—
!”