Ecko Endgame (8 page)

“Yes… yes.” Mael’s cold hands pulled a series of knotted cords from a pouch. He pushed up his glasses and peered at the building. It could have been anything – a church, an old tithehall – its sides were decorated with angled mosaics now shattered like the city herself. He could have leaned forwards and picked at the individual tiles.

At a nod, the closest of the guards eased a heavy, fibrous bar down the side of the door and applied pressure, pushing his shoulder into the lever and grunting with the effort. The lintel was heavy over him; upon it, a sightless beast raised a clawed foot in salute.

As the remainder of the tan closed tighter to defend them, Rhan stepped back to Mael. “We’ve been speaking to Scythe,” he said, conversationally. “He’s proven very… helpful.”

His skin crawling, Mael stammered something and made himself stay where he was.

The door creaked, the protest loud in white stillness. The soldier swore. It creaked again, then gave way with a sudden sharp bang, a spit of soured dust. The soldier staggered back, his fellows coming forwards with spear points ready. But even as Rhan’s bass voice sounded the warning, Mael knew it was too late.

He’s proven very… helpful…

The guard had something on his face, something at his throat. Something that wriggled in a crazed, half-starved frenzy; something with big claws and yellow teeth and a fleshy tail. A roll of stink followed it out of the door.

The smell was familiar.

“Down!” Mael’s guard hit him like a bweao and he found himself on his face and in the wet and the cold, coughing, his glasses lost, a knee in his back. Struggling to see, he was aware of guards at the doorway, ordered boots as four of them skirmished carefully into the building.

He saw the injured guard stagger back, his hands still clawing at his face. He was shouting, half-muffled, pained and furious; the creature squealed and clawed. Then Rhan blocked Mael’s view. The guard gave a brief cry, and there was the slam of something living hitting stone, cracking and screaming with the impact.

Hitting stone again, with a sickening crunch.

The injured guard swore, shook himself. He was bleeding profusely, deep scratches in his face, but he was moving, going for weapons.

“Esphen,” he called, “big one! And pretty damned angry!”

Mael rummaged for his glasses, couldn’t find them. He tried to push himself up. Scents eddied in the air: terhnwood, rich rot, dying moss, things that had perished from fear. He still couldn’t place that smell.

Saravin. Something…?

Then, the guard commander: “The building’s secure, my Lord. Scythe was telling the truth. There’s terhnwood here, though perhaps not as much as we’d thought.” Beneath his disciplined tone, his voice was oddly tense. “My Lord, some of it’s… tainted.”

“Tainted?” Rhan’s question was barbed. He shoved past the guards into the building.

Mael’s guard let him up, and he scrambled after the Seneschal, needing to see…

Tainted.

He still hadn’t found his glasses, and the light in the space was slanted and dusty though boarded windows. He could see the terhnwood, long canes in regular stacks, piles of worked strips, great furry rolls of fibre. Some of it was darker in tone where it had been steamed. But the stacks were stained, blotched with lichens like rot, flowering with blemishes. And that
smell…

From somewhere outside, there came shouting.

Ahead of Mael in the dim storeroom, Rhan cursed and turned, but the commander’s voice came from outside, calm and clear.

“Seems we’ve woken the watchers.” He barked orders. “Give me a defensive ring. If anything moves, I want to know. Now! No, not you, Ghar. Stay where you are, and take this.”

The air tightened, went quiet.

Inside the storeroom, it was thick and cold. Murky with undefined threat.

You old fool
, Mael cursed himself.
What are you even doing out here?

In the gloom, Rhan was a heavy, square shape, his cloak thrown back. He picked up a cane and turned it over. “The Gods and their damned sense of humour.” He dropped it with a clatter, picked up another. “This… I know this smell. North of here, Foriath… Samiel’s
bollocks
!” Frustration slammed from his movements. “Look at this. Look at it!” He spun on Mael, brandishing the long cane like a weapon, and Mael blinked, still not understanding. “What the rhez am I supposed to do with this?”

And then the smell hit him like a fist, and the memory with it. It was so sudden, so real, that it robbed him of breath. He trembled and his face flushed – Saravin, the market, the woman in the ale tent. It seemed to come from another Count of Time, and yet the memory was as precise as if he’d drawn it.

Rhan shook the cane, pulling at his attention. The thing was caked in moss, in moss that was already dying. It had grown in the cracks, furred the outer edges, but it was brown, flaking into the dust even as Rhan spun the thing like a staff and threw it back on the pile. It rolled down the edge and struck the stone floor, rattling as it settled.

Outside, the injured guard swore.

Mael went cold. His heart laboured in his chest, scaring him. His previous, nebulous nervousness had been replaced by a sharp tang of real fear…

I know this smell.

North of here… Foriath.

But the guard commander’s voice came sharply through the doorway. “Whatever you’re doing, make it quick.”

“We’re coming now,” Rhan called. Then to Mael, “We need to secure this store. We need the Cartel down here, Merchant Master, get this counted and moved. More guards, porters, whatever you’ll need. Take it to the Priest Gorinel, the Cathedral, and the catacombs. It should be safe enough—”

“Wait,
wait
,” Mael muttered almost to himself, trying to catch up with his thoughts. “We can’t just—”

“We don’t have a choice,” Rhan said. “We’ll take what there is and sort through it.” He touched Mael’s arm. Caught off-guard, Mael snatched the limb back like he’d been stung. “We still have a long way to go, and we need everything we can find. Now, let’s move.”

They stepped out of the store, blinking in the rising morning light. The street was quiet, and the mist had thinned, slipping back down towards the water. The injured guard stood back from his fellows, ruefully holding a folded piece of tunic to his face. His skin was reddening, already swelling with infection, and one of the claws had rasped dangerously close to an eye.

“Ghar,” Rhan said. “Let me see it.”

“My Lord.” The guard lowered the fabric, lifted his chin.

Coming close, Rhan placed a hand on the man’s sweating face, looked at him with a peculiar, familiar intensity.

An intensity that Mael knew only too well.

Like being lit up from the inside out.

He
knew
how that felt. Mael was not a believer in Gods, but the Count of Time had come for him, his heart had been squeezed in that long, chill hand. He’d known it was over, and it had been all right.

He was an old man, he missed his friend, and he’d done enough.

Lit up from the inside out.

Rhan’s inhuman touch had healed him – but had left no part of him secret. It was the light of a truth unwilling, of a whole life revealed in an instant. It had driven that chill hand from him, brought him from death, back to Fhaveon… but what else had it done?

Ghar was shaking, flushed. The wounds in his face were gone – red scars in his tanned skin. He was spluttering, trying to voice incomprehension, thanks, disbelief, but Rhan said only, “Your tan bade you guard the perimeter.”

With a fist-on-chest salute, the soldier obeyed the order.

Mael shuddered. “You can do that with a touch.” The question was painfully curious, like tonguing a sore tooth. “Why can you not just—?”

“Not just what?” Rhan snapped back at him, sounding oddly stung. “Cure the blight? Make it go away? Wave my hand and just… conjure it all better?” He snorted, bitterly humorous. “Samiel’s balls, Mael, you think I haven’t tried?” He made a noise of frustration and disgust. “I wish I could! But I can’t even understand it – it’s too big, somehow, too much. I can’t see its origins or its edges. Even the fragments – it’s like they’re a part of something else, something huge.” He shook his head. “I’ve touched only its outside, and by the Gods, it terrifies me.” He tailed into a frown, looking at the pile of canes. “I can’t cure a… a disease when I don’t even know what it is.”

Mael nodded. He had no more comprehension than Rhan as to the blight’s cause or content – it ate its way inwards from the Varchinde’s outer edges, destroying the terhnwood at the coast and the forests at the feet of distant Kartiah. And they had nothing – no hope, no cure.

“Enough talking.” The guard commander was edgy now, and the shouting was closer. “We need to move.”

The sunrise swelled around them. If Mael turned, he would see the rising zigzag of streets climbing the hill; the ascending rocklights, glittering with the hopes the city had lost. At the city’s zenith, the sky was streaked with pink.

The shouts grew louder. Hands tightened on weapons.

The guard commander said, “My Lord Seneschal, you shouldn’t be here. Take the Merchant Master to safety. We’ll stay. When the area’s secure, I’ll send a runner for you.”

Rhan tensed for a moment, then acquiesced. To Mael, it seemed like he was ashamed.

* * *

The closest safe house was a dark and tiny cellar, cold and damp. The building above was little more than a shell, but the refuge beneath was untouched; in moments, it became layered with tallow-smoke and tension.

Rhan paced the stone floor, four paces one way, four the other, setting the candle flames to flickering as he passed. His shoulders seemed to fill the room; his face was a thundercloud. Mael ran his tally markers though his fingers and tried to do the maths.

Whatever else one could say about the departed Phylos, the bastard had been truly gifted with managing numbers.

But Mael thought he was getting the hang of it.

Rhan stopped, spun, paced back the other way, the tiny flames tracking him. He said, “Well?”

Mael had so many things he wanted to ask – the smell, the woman in the market, the tainted terhnwood, the vastness that was the encroaching blight…

He cleared his throat. “I didn’t really get a proper look. But if the figures Scythe… ah… Scythe gave you are close, then…” he halted, then finished tentatively, “…we may even manage. If it’s not too badly damaged.”

Rhan stopped his pacing, raised an eyebrow.

“Is there enough? Merchant Master?”

“There’s enough terhnwood to equip Mostak’s command.” Mael took a breath, could almost feel the hulking shape of Saravin behind him, there in the dark, strong and oddly comforting. “But not enough to trade. And the food situation is dire—”

“Dire?” The word was a jab.

Mael wanted to protest – this wasn’t his task, wasn’t his life, wasn’t what he wished to do, or what he had ever trained for – but this was where he’d found himself and he’d better damn well make the best of it.

He owed Rhan his life.

Mael’s hands tightened on the string, feeling the knots.

He said, “Even with rationing, and even if we can enforce that rationing…” He shook his head. For a moment, he could visualise it like a picture, the layers of complexity to the decision – what to cut, what to keep, the juggling of priorities. Panic clamoured, but he held himself still.

Rhan said softly, “Can we last the winter?”

Mael sighed. “It’s a little more complex than that, my Lord. We’ll need to be careful. Once we equip the soldiery, the Cathedral’s the right place for the rest of this – at least what we have will be safe.”

The Seneschal exhaled, sagged, clapped Mael’s shoulder. The old scribe forced himself not to flinch.

“Sorry,” he said. “All this – it’s outside my experience as well. I need your eyes and your ears, your insight. Whatever happens, we must hold the city.”

Any answer was interrupted by a rap on the trapdoor above them. There was a creak, and Mael’s guard ducked his head downwards.

“My Lord. Sorry for the intrusion, but—”

“What?” Rhan said. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s the Bard, my Lord. He’s at the outskirts of the city. And he’s asking for you.”

There was a stray, furry thing, all big eyes and radar ears, huddled alone in the winter cold. There was a black blade, carbon fibre and mono-edged, a silent and accurate throw that downed the puffed-up critter without a squeak.

Ecko shivered. He eyed the Bard’s knife as it peeled the furry thing and spilled its guts – his own stomach turned over. Chrissakes, this shit he still hadn’t gotten used to – food came in sealed packages, processed, labelled, barcoded, unrecognisable. It had safety information, corporate caveats, logos. This thing? This thing still had eyeballs.

Nope – he really wasn’t fucking hungry.

Unfazed by the skinless thing, Amethea offered suggestions on herbs and flavours. Christ on a shovel, outbound fucking cookery class was just taking the piss, okay?

Eliza? You even listening anymore?

The Bard cleaned the blade. He banked down the fire, then carved strips of muscle off the dead thing and laid them out on long stones. Slowly the raw meat blackened, fibres breaking and peeling back. Rich smells writhed in the evening air.

Ecko huddled closer to the fire.

Over him, the sky drew in low. The wind was cold down his back. He had a sore ass and stiff legs, his shoulders were damp, and there was a crick in his neck where his fool fucking horse had started at some burrowing critter. Watching strips of beastie slowly char, he found himself in a foul mood that was getting uglier by the minute. He wanted nothing more than to ditch this Adventuring Party shit, an’…

An’
what
?

Strike out alone? Save the world? Win the war? Cure the blight? Pull a white rabbit out his butthole?

Ta-dah!

He couldn’t be a hero; he’d lost his fucking cape.

Yeah. I’m funny.