Ecko Rising (24 page)

His grin grew, black and wicked in the half-light.

Where was the secret fucking door?

In fact – sod that – where was the thing that made the tavern work? The control room? The magical whosit? He’d give his carbon-black eyeteeth to know how to drive this thing.

Deeper.

Creeping in silence and wordless hope – there was so gonna be treasure down here somewhere.

What Ecko found, before he’d gone much further, was a wall.

Flat and cold and absolute, it cut his progress dead.

So much for White Rabbits.

Now
what was he gonna do?

It wasn’t just bricks: the wall had been covered – painted? – with something and it was filthy, stained with browns and greens and streaks of rot. In places, it was cracked and crumbling. A hefty whack with a sledgehammer would knock the bricks loose like teeth.

He wondered what the hell was on the other side – which bit moved with the sunrise, which bit didn’t. What would happen if something was half in and half out?

Cursing the absence of heavy-duty steel – a crowbar’d be good about now – Ecko flicked his oculars to scan for an alternative.

And he noticed something weird.

He was crouched at the edge of a small, open area that seemed to face the wall itself as there was a slight downward dip in the floor. The only other thing down here was a single, monster barrel that he could’ve used to boat up the Thames.

Hell, what’d he been saying about dynamite? Or was the Bard just ageing one motherlode of killer whisky?

The barrel was unlabelled, and covered in crap.

Great.

Around him, the shadows fell in layers of grey, like phantoms. The air was chill and old and smelled only of rot. It was quiet, motionless, even the crawlies had packed their little crawly bags and fled. He shuddered, carefully scanning the tottering piles of shelving.

No crowbar.

No monster.

He crept out to the centre of the dip, the middle of the wall. The shelves rose round him like an audience.

Yeah? Well watch
this.

With a grin of defiance to the silent fears that lurked taunting in the darkness,
his
darkness, he spun hard and slammed one foot sideways into the mouldering paint.

Don’t ever use a spin-kick in combat... but they’re great for kicking shit down.

The impact was tremendous: it rippled almost tangibly through the air. The wall cracked, flaked, dust trickled to the floor. He exposed brick like bruised flesh.

Vulnerable.

His grin set, a black slash of pure, elated fury.
Now what? Huh? What happens if I make a damned
hole
in your reality? Does it let through monsters from another dimension? Hey, like Lugan?

He caught the thought, and swore at himself.

A second, savage slam sent a spiderweb of lines though the paintwork; a third made the wall judder, a river of dust trickling to the floor.

Or maybe I’m the monster, already here?

A fourth kick, a fifth. The paint was cracking now – broken flakes drifting to the floor like paper...

One of them had letters on.

Huh?

Ecko slammed the anchors on, his heart suddenly thundering in his chest. He recoiled, his targeters recalibrating, and he crouched down among the fragmented ruins, almost cowering.

The shelves rose, looming, round him.

He picked the flake up.

It was thin, cold. It crumbled even as he touched it, like some fucking forgotten relic, but his telescopics were enough. Upon it was a spider scrawl – barely a word, faint and faded.

It said, “...ien”.

What the...

His momentum had been interrupted. His adrenaline was shifting, changing from confrontation and gleeful fury to a skin-crawling prickle that crept up into his shoulders and the back of his neck. Barely daring to breathe, he crouched by the damage he’d made, extended a fingertip.

And he realised what he’d just done.

Fuck me ragged...

The paint – stucco? – was a collage of colour. It wasn’t mould he’d been kicking down – well not all of it – it was some sort of mural. As he backed up, looked up and around him, he realised that it was fucking huge. It covered the whole wall from one side of the dip to the other.

His scalp crawled.

He made a grab for nearest rocklight, sent the shadows gibbering round him. Then he crouched again and, carefully, took a corner of his cloak, brushed where he’d cracked the artwork through to the bricks.

There, the tiny faded lettering said, “Tus...”.

Tusien.

He shivered. His flake fit one edge of the hole perfectly.

What’d the Bard said?

The high days of Tusien.

Trembling now, he picked up other fragments, turned them over to study them, but they were dust, their wisdom lost.

Shit...

Angered, excited, frustrated, fighting to hold his adrenaline, he carefully, carefully, uncovered a little more, blinking at it like some fucking ageing Tech. After a moment, his oculars made out the remains of a tiny image – some sort of earthwork, stylised ruins.

It said, “The Barrow at Tusien”.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shitweasel.

The wall was a
map.

Shaking now, he brushed more dirt aside, and more. Getting his mitts on proper cartography had been pretty high on his list of wants – and he’d found nada. Now the whole world was laid out in front of him...

Or would be, as soon as he’d called in the cleaners.

He propped the rocklight on the barrel, cleared more of the dirt. Slowly, the colours and the imagery became easier to see. There was a distinct lack of scale – artists’ rendition might’ve been more to the point – but it did the job, all right.

Chrissakes, where’s a camera when I fucking need one?

There was Roviarath, lynchpin city. There was Amos at the mouth of some huge mofo river, and further north there was Fhaveon, the Lord City the Bard had mentioned, on some kind of rock promontory, and watching a big old island across a surprisingly narrow straight. There was all the green shit – the hills and forests and mountains and lakes and the empty acres of grass... the faded colours made it seem brownish, rotten.

With a scrabble, he was stood on the barrel-top, holding up the rocklight to find the blip that’d tell him where the tavern was, the
X
he’d been waiting for. But apparently it wasn’t gonna be quite that easy.

Great. The one thing I needed to find...

Scowling, he dropped back into his cowled crouch, steadying himself with the tips of his fingers, and covering his skin against the light.

He had to remember this, burn it into his forebrain somehow. If he was ever gonna to go any-sodding-where, he had to learn this stuff.

Some fucking joke, to put a map where he couldn’t move it. What he wouldn’t give for Lugan’s monosharp pocket knife, then he could
peel
the damn thing off the wall.

Yeah, no chance of that. They didn’t even have steel. Iron. Coinage. Everything that should’ve been metal...

Metal.

Oh. Jesus Harry Christ on a fucking motor scooter...

...two and two, you asshole. Usually make four.

The rocklight shimmered faintly as if it agreed with him.

Still crouched there, riding the barrel like Bilbo sodding Bigshot, he rummaged through his pouch for the piece of the blade he’d snapped, and held it up like a talisman. It shone the same deep orange, almost bronze, just like the goldie girl’s –

Never mind that.

Ecko stared at the fragment, turning it in the rocklight so its broken edges glittered.

C’mon, think...

Ecko was recon – he was smart as fuck, when he could be bothered. And right now, he had that shiver in his skin that meant he was onto something – that there was a mystery, right here, right now, that was just begging him to kick it open.

Like the night he’d taken out Bob Pilgrim, like his stealth-run on Grey’s facility, this was what he fucking lived for.

And the fragment of resin gleamed.

This shit grew on the
coast.
His eyes tracked the map, the colours of the paint.

What’d the Bard said? Something about “ever-cycling trade” – about the flow of this stuff balancing the flow of wood and stone that came the other way, from the mountains. The roads followed the rivers, both ran west to east, that much was pretty damned straightforward.

But he was
missing
something.

The fragment glittered, teasing.

Ecko knew jack and shit about agriculture. But he did know when he was on to something – his adrenaline was sparking and he was down from the barrel and pacing, a small, tight figure of shadow and gloom and sharp, hard focus.

What was it he’d missed?

He spun, closed his hand round the tiny resin shard and felt its edges nip his fingers.

Think!

His brain was firing, ricocheting from one idea and theory to the next. The terhnwood grew at the three coastal cities – Annondor in the south, Amos and the capital city Fhaveon – there.

He tracked the map, the rivers, the roads.

Then it hit him, just as if the Lord of Motivation had planted a boot clean up his ass...

It was
empty.

Vast, open plainland. Scattered habitation. No stars in the sky; no metal in the rock. No lore. A horizon that gave every fucking appearance of being
flat.

How in the name of everything that was unholy did they
navigate
? Just by the sun?

The thought brought a rush of thrill in his skin.

Was that why they didn’t, or couldn’t, travel across the grass? It had to be more than just superstition.

Oh, now I’ve got you...

Could this possibly, possibly, be making some kind of sense? He was staring like a man demented, his hand still curled round the tiny piece of resin. What if they had no effective way to cross open distances? Then their entire culture was restricted to the trade-ways that it knew.

One part of his brain was laughing at him – jeering while he tried to apply reason to a world that had two opposing moons and a werewolf in the kitchen – but he smothered the fuck out of it and kept going.

He was still missing loads of stuff. If they struggled to navigate, who’d built the roads in the first place? If the society was peaceful and prosperous, then why was the population so fucking small? So hugely spread out? It wasn’t like they were short of food.

Was there some other factor here, something he’d not seen yet? Threat issues? Beasties clawing down city walls and chewing up farmland? Insane weather systems tearing the plains to dust and shreds?

Or was the Big McNasty already on the move?

More than that though – maybe the Bard
himself
was restricted in the same way? What had he said about landing in populated places?

Was he, too, unable or unwilling to cross the open grass?

Was
that
why he was missing so much learning?

Oh yeah, I’ve fucking cracked this.

In the fading rocklight, Ecko’s grin was like a curving slice of nightmare, the new glimmer of a pure black moon. He was shivering with something between adrenaline and anxiety – something that felt like cold anticipation.

There’s something that fucker hasn’t told me.

Something he’s avoiding – something he’s afraid of?

Well, whatever the fuck it was, Ecko was going back up there to kick it out of him, if that was what it took.

* * *

When Ecko came back up to the taproom, he found the Bard sitting alone.

It was utterly, swallowing dark; the only light came from the white feather that Roderick held in his fingers. He was spinning it, and its pale illumination played over his face like the teasing of a ghost.

In that faint light, he looked old. His eyes were shattered, sparking insane. The lines around them were carved into his flesh, the shadows beneath were as deep as the shadows that lurked like spectres round the room. His lips were moving as though he prayed.

As Ecko crept closer, he could hear the words.

“...Searching almost a hundred returns – I have dug every ruin, I have found every treasure, I have told every tale, I have faced every foe. Wherever these creatures are coming from...”
The shadows scudded, this way and that, as the feather spun forwards and back.

“Just this time, please; just this time...” Roderick swallowed hard, almost as if he were choking. “If my will can infest this wood, this brick, this life – please give me the choice...!” His other hand was flat on the table as if it was scanning his fingerprints or something. “I need to understand. I
must
–”

“Jeez,” Ecko said. “What crawled up your ass and died? You look like shit.”

Roderick didn’t even start. He looked up, listless, his face drawn and lined. He looked like he’d spent the night writing mournful poetry in something thoughtfully entitled “My Diary”.

“I feel like it,” he said.

A moment later, he straightened his shoulders and pinned his grin back in place, his wicked expression that made the lines both mischievous and youthful. The light returned to his eyes. Ecko had an uncanny feeling that the man’s mask had slipped, just for a moment.

But the face he’d seen was gone.

“All right, asshole,” Ecko said. “I reckon it’s time you ’fessed up.”

“What? What do you mean?” Roderick laid the feather on the table and his grin broadened, just as if he’d never been without it.

“Why a sudden need to drive?” Ecko grinned at him, cold. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna get off your ass an’ make a decision.”

“And what ‘decision’ would you suggest?” The Bard’s eyes flickered with echoes, though he didn’t voice them. “I’ve always trusted the world herself to move this building as she needs; trusted it to manifest itself in places of wisdom and necessity. The Wanderer is wiser than I.” He picked up the feather and began, again, to turn it in his fingers. “But tonight... Ecko, I wish you had been here to bear witness. The Banned found an injured boy, and our every fear is manifest. This is bigger and more terrifying that I have words to even frame. Not just the nartuk, a true tale of monsters – crazed beasts crafted from human flesh and will...” His knuckles were white. “How can I give words to my fear? I feel the gathering of the Count of Time. The vision I cannot remember pierces me as a sliver of ice and I feel figments like wings at my back. The Banned must rouse Larred Jade at Roviarath, and I... I have to take this to Fhaveon.”