Ecko Endgame (48 page)

Roderick said, “No…” but the word was barely a breath. A wisp of horror that was gone as the wind began to pick up. “No…”

Ecko stared at the hole.

We come almost to the final hand.

Almost.

But it wasn’t cigar time yet.

Around him, the others were fading, weakened by comedown. Angel and daemon, mortal and immortal – their elation and energy were spent. Perhaps the Kazyen had lured it out of them, Ecko didn’t know, but they had nothing left, and now it was returning, soft and grey and insidious. Ecko watched as Roderick slumped, staring at his hands as if he’d trashed the damn Wanderer himself, watched as Rhan tumbled down beside Amethea, Vahl with him as vast hatred and equally vast love both faded to nothing. The Kas were gone, smoke on the wind.

Comedown.

No, you’re not doin’ it to me, you fucker, you’re
so
not doin’ it to
me…

But he could feel it, like the effects of Grey’s drugs in Amal’s vision.

Give up
, it said,
just let it go. You’ll be so much happier. There’s no need to worry about anything now, no need for passion. Love and hate, elation and despair, they’re all spent, all gone. Just let go…

No I will
not
!

Swearing, fighting, refusing to be fucking damned, he came to his feet and walked to the edge of the hole.

It yawned for him, a mouth wide and grinning.

It beckoned.

The Monument had fallen here, The Wanderer. This was the place where all this had fucking started.

And hell, if that wasn’t a goddamned message, then he didn’t know what was.

Turn to 500.

Remembering how he’d once fallen from the roof of a South Bank tower, an age and a world before, Ecko turned and took a last look at his friends. He had no words for them, no soggy goodbyes, but he wanted to hold them in his oculars like a photograph, wanted to remember this moment, all of them, always.

Rhan, Amethea, the Bard…

Triqueta.

He swallowed, blinked.

But he couldn’t manage the goodbye, it was too much.

As he’d once done on London’s South Bank, a world and an eternity away, he stepped over the edge.

Ecko drifted through layers of consciousness.

“…a fascinating journey.” The speaker was male, familiar, though Ecko couldn’t place where from. His head was clouded with fug; as the voice hazed into focus, he groped for a name. “Watching your slow loss of self has been… enlightening.”

Soft footsteps moved somewhere behind where Ecko lay. The voice was faintly amused, oddly paternal. “All that rage, all that passion, and in the end, you got… shall we say, ‘nothing’ out of it?”

Ecko couldn’t think. His head and limbs felt heavy; he’d been sleeping very deeply. The last thing he remembered…

Shall we say… nothing?

The word was a shiver of unease. His mind offered images, pieces of memories; his body flickered with tension. Breathing still slow, he strove to focus, to put the images together and to remember what’d happened.

Had there been a hit?

Bloody handprints across a shattered wall?

The voice was on his other side, now, disorienting. “You failed, Mister Gabriel. It was a brave attempt, don’t misunderstand. You did manage to reach the final confrontation, and with all of the correct pieces in place – and that in itself was no mean feat. You saw it through to the end, and you gave it everything you had.” His voice held a soft smile, gently patronising. “But that last confrontation proved too much for you.” It was right over him, now. “The program is over, Ecko. It’s time to wake up.”

The program is over…

Program.

The word was like a download – a deluge of memory that blurred into a single, blazing comprehension…

Grey.

The man speaking was Doctor Slater Grey.

Program.

It’s time to wake up.

He’d fallen – he remembered it now – the ’bot and the weather. They’d scraped him off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam. But that wasn’t all – there were other memories, bright and poignant, somehow interwoven. The Wanderer, the Bard, the ruins at Tusien, Triqueta…

Gone.

And then he woke up and it was all a dream.

Stupidly, his first conscious thought was that he’d let them down.

But as the memories came stronger, faces and voices, their loss left him breathless and doubled over, a fist in the gut. His denial was reflexive –
No, it’s impossible
. There was no way that they could all just be gone.

Program.

He’d lost them, failed them.

They’d never existed.

Grey’s soft laugh smothered his thoughts, silenced them. A warm hand touched his face, and his eyelids flickered, he couldn’t stop them. Inwardly, he cursed.

“Ah,” Grey said. The touch withdrew, the feet moved again. “All that defiance, and rage, and angst, and bad language – and yet still you came to understand love.” He chuckled. “How poetic.”

“Fuck you.” Knowing the game was up, Ecko opened his eyes. Bad language – he sounded like some fucking social skills counsellor. Ecko was fucking gonna tell this fucking asshole where he could fucking shove his fucking—

But the words died in his throat.

He stared at his surroundings in wordless bewilderment, his mind clamouring, panicked.

What the…?

He was in The Wanderer.

Or what was left of it.

* * *

He didn’t understand, didn’t
understand
!

This was some kinda mind game, for chrissakes – this was the same fucking
couch.
He’d woken up here, in this exact spot, when the Bard and Karine had first come to speak to him. That memory pulled at him now, like lost friendship and forgotten warmth.

For just a moment, he wanted to cry like a kid, just throw himself down and give up.

But The Wanderer itself was not the same.

The couch under him was broken, its back fractured and seats sagging. Straw stuffing spilled across stained and faded rugs. The table he’d shattered was still there, its pieces split and ageing, the wood rotten. The walls were patched with damp, their white peeling and their beams cracked. The mica windows were shot through with glittering splits, several had fallen out completely and the curtains had tumbled, forgotten and mouldering, to the floor. Dark mouths of decay ate through everything, as if the building had stood abandoned for a very, very long time.

The floor blew cold with debris.

Holy shit.

Ecko looked upwards, maybe for light, maybe for help, but the roof, too, was blotched and sagging. At one side of the room, it had fallen in completely and a hollow darkness spilled through the gap.

Horror settled over him like a shroud.

No, no, no, no, no…

His throat was tight, his eyes prickling. He blinked, breathed hard. The Wanderer’s warmth, its welcome and homecoming, was something that’d once touched him to the core, something he’d missed almost as much as the Bike Lodge. How could it…?

“How long?” The question was all he could manage, but Grey understood.

He said, “There’s no time here.”

Ecko sat up, turned round.

Doc Grey was stood almost exactly where the Bard had once been. He’d put aside his white coat and wore faded jeans, a battered leather, a prog-rock tee so old it was more hole than fabric. With his flesh-tunnels and his long black ponytail, he looked like a direct mockery of Roderick – the old Roderick – like this whole thing was some fucking send-up of Ecko’s first awakening.

Another layer of the game.

Was this what Nivrotar had meant when she’d said,
Almost to the final hand
?

Hell, maybe he
wasn’t
unplugged. Maybe that was why he could still think, could
feel
, why Grey hadn’t just dosed him. Maybe…

The insight brought him properly awake, adrenaline sparking, thrilled and curious. His oculars were kicked now. He needed answers, needed to understand.

He said, black teeth bared, “Whaddaya mean ‘no time’?” Hell, maybe this was the Dark Castle, and Grey was the Final Boss, the Evil Sorcerer, the End-of-Level Mega-nasty… It did have a kinda symmetry to it.

Yeah. Whatever the hell he was, Ecko was gonna kick his fucking head clean off his fucking shoulders.

“The Count of Time is gone. Defeated at the last.” Grey spread his arms, revealing vertical scars up the insides of both wrists. “Only you and I can exist on its outside.” His face was calm, but his expression was oddly eager, almost whetted. “The world created for you is gone, Ecko, it died because you failed to save it. I was its first God, and its last, its forgotten God, its empty window.” He gave a faint bow, gestured to the ruin around them. “This is the void.”

“This is the
pub
, you asshole.”

Grey shrugged and spread his hands further, inviting Ecko to see for himself.

“Dickhead.” Kicking free of couch straw, Ecko stood up to look.

And as he did so, he became very aware of the darkness outside the hole in the roof – a darkness completely unlike his previous experience. This was not the starless night of the Varchinde, or living soul of dark, or the rich life and history of Mom’s Underground.

This was Kazyen – true emptiness. It was an absence of all things, all passion, all feeling, all life and time.

I was its first God, and its last.

Its empty window.

There was – literally – Nothing outside the ruin of the shattered Wanderer.

The Count of Time is gone.

This is the void.

Cold crept across Ecko’s skin like frost up a window. He groped for something, a key, a weapon. A magick fucking ring.

What had the Bard said?

He heard the words as if Roderick was there with him – and now he wasn’t fucking laughing at them.

At the prophecy, the memory they’d only found at the very end.

Time Nothing is more powerful, at last, than Count of Time. Then Time you bid your world farewell, your Gods, tonight, they sleep in Hell.

Oh my fucking God.

Ecko’s adrenaline stopped, his breathing halted. He was too tense even to shiver – and he looked slowly down to his feet and then across the ruined rug to where the void seeped down from the broken roof.

And they were there, all of them, just as if they’d fallen down the fissure after him.

Roderick, lost in his own building.
The Final Guardian, defeated at the last.
Rhan and Vahl, in Selana’s skin, as inseparable as they’d always been.
Then shall the mastery of light, give up…
Amethea, cured of her growth of moss – and the others were there too. Redlock as he had been, master warrior, Triqueta, younger, curled on his shoulder, her hand on his chest as if to deliberately taunt Ecko with their closeness. The stones in her skin gleamed and her eyes were open. And at the far end, Nivrotar herself, as helpless as the others, staring empty at the sagging roof.

Time when passion cannot sing, and everything held fast. Time your world farewell be kissed…

They were motionless, still as death, yet he could still see the faint misted warmth of their breathing.

“Christ.” He was moving before he realised, falling to his knees beside Triqueta and looking back at Grey.
Passion cannot sing.
“What the hell did you
do
?”

“They’re mine,” Grey told him. He walked the length of them like some fucking sergeant, inspecting beds. “Like the first denizens of Rammouthe, so long ago, they failed to resist me, and their wills and lives are gone. Like The Wanderer itself, they rest peaceful, contented, lost to Kazyen.
Happy.
” He stopped to look down at Ecko, contemplative. “Now, there only remains the question of what I’m going to do with you.”

Ecko turned his head, looked at Grey out of the corner of one eye. “You can kiss my mottled ass, is what you can do. Wake them up, or I’m gonna pull out your lungs and
feed
them to you.”

“Why?” Grey lifted his arms, wrists out, showing the scars. His gaze was open, eager. “They cannot live without time. Their world is gone. No one wishes to live in despair. They’re
comfortable
.”

Fury blazed in Ecko’s heart. “They don’t
want
comfort, you fuckwit. They want life, feeling, freedom, love, hate, the good, the bad an’ the fuckin’ ugly. They want—!”

“Really?” Grey’s response was sharp. “Given the choice between suffering and happiness, which would anyone prefer?” His smile was sharp as a cut.

“They’d prefer to
live
, warts an’ all!” Ecko came to his feet. “I’m so gonna rip your head clean off—”

“And shit down my neck, yes, of course you are,” Grey said, “but before you do, consider this.” He and Ecko were face to face, yet somehow Grey was larger than he had been – the Nothing above him framed him like an aura, made him into some damned avatar, more than human. “You penetrated my base, Ecko. You outwitted my staff. You eluded both Salva and my
Takeshimi
’bot. Yet you fell from my roof – and I found you.” His smile flickered. “I found you
first
.”

Ecko sneered, unintimidated. “What the hell does that mean? You gonna explain the plot before you kill me?”

“I’m not going to kill you, Gabriel.” Gaze brutal, Grey went on, “Finding you on the pavement allowed me to send you back to your boss with a little
gift
. Allowed me to introduce your Collator to a virus. A very subtle and unique virus. I call it,” and now, his smile was beatific, “Kazyen.”

“
What?
”

The inside and the outside, the reality and the program, overlapped, intertwined; his brain staggered back from the impact point. London was real, The Wanderer was real, his friends were real, Grey was real, Collator was real, all of it was fucking real. Chrissakes, he’d no idea where one stopped and the other one started…

“What the hell’re you talkin’ about?”