Ecko Burning (15 page)

He wanted, he wanted...

Then he remembered who the fuck he was and what he was doing. He’d found the fucking
answer
, dammit. He found his snarl, his anger. Right under the madman’s nose, he opened his hand.

Showed the old man his prize, the thing he’d found in the crafthouse.

The solution, the key, the “One Goddamn Thing”.

Sulphur.

* * *

Frankly, Triqueta thought, they could’ve chosen a more comfortable location.

Resting along the line of the axeman’s body, head on his shoulder, hand on his dented chest, she was realising that the stone under her was cold and slippery, that her hip hurt and that her back was twisted at a painfully funny angle.

The dressing on her wound had come loose - but the healing skin was cool, it no longer itched like dust and fire.

Her grin was wicked, tight at one side.
Romance, love of the Gods. These are the bits they never tell you!

Suppressing a chuckle, she reluctantly sat up to stretch the kinks from her spine.

“You okay?” Redlock was grinning too, amused at himself, her, or the loco circumstances, she didn’t know.

She peeled the dressing completely off, wincing, and threw it at him.

“Not as young as I was,” she told him, her tone half humorous, half dare. For the first time, the phrase didn’t hurt quite so much.

“Me either.” Ruefully, he rubbed at the dent in his ribs, then shot her an evil smirk. “Race you.”

As she stood up, his foot lashed out and snagged her ankle, tipping her with a shriek into the water.

Shit!

She came up blowing swearwords, just in time to watch him arc over her head and dive clean into the pool.

“Show off,” she muttered.

The ripples reflected on the stone roof, dancing rocklight across the arches. She watched as Redlock pulled himself once more out of the water, dried himself with his shirt, then caught a wet foot in the leg of his trews and hopped suddenly sideways, swearing.

Master Warrior, for the Gods’ sakes!
Her laughter was clear and real.

It felt good.

“I should see Nivvy,” he said, when he’d found his balance and secured his drawstring. “When I left Roviarath, Jade was still holding it together, but I’ve been five days on the river and I’ve got no idea what’s happened since.” He sat down to reach for his boots. “The restlessness isn’t organised - it’s quiet, got no leader, and no real teeth. If we’re lucky -”

“The people
like
Jade,” Triq said, her teeth chattering. “He’s smart.”

“True enough.” Redlock tipped a stone out of a boot. “But think about it - all those smugglers’ hubs and illegal bazaars. The Cartel in Fhaveon won’t be able to track anything once it’s reached the city - they’ll have no way of knowing where anything goes, they won’t get their expected returns. And then -”

“They’ll blame Jade.” It was a statement, not a question. She stared at him. “Oh dear Gods.
That’ll
be his excuse!”

“Whose excuse? For what?” Redlock raised an eyebrow. “What did I miss?”

“It’s too complicated to explain. But if Phylos gains power, he won’t stop with Fhaveon -”

“Then Jade’s screwed,” Redlock said. “He’s fighting on two fronts already - not only the loss of the Fayre, but the city’s manors now scared that the harvest’ll fail. If they’ve got nothing to tithe for the stuff that they need...” He tailed off to a shrug, glanced at her. “And if they hoard, then what does the city do? Whole thing’s a cursed disaster.”

“Can’t he help them?”

“You know how the cycle works - it’s all wheels. And if Jade doesn’t have the trade coming in from outside, or the tithes coming in from the manors, Roviarath will be gutted like a clean kill. If Jade’s lucky, the people will just
leave.”

“You said the traders were already -”

“It was happening when I left, Triq. Roviarath will be as a big a damned hole as her next-door neighbour.”

“And Syke? Taure?”

“Worried about the grass.” Redlock gave a rueful grin. “They miss you.”

“I miss them. I miss... I miss all of it. Simpler times.”

“Aye,” Redlock said softly. “Sometimes, I wonder if this warrior business isn’t just getting too much.” His grin was faintly rueful and he covered a cough. “Even for me.”

She had no idea how to answer him - but turned as she heard her name, a scatter of hasty boots on the steps.

“Triq!” Amethea was wide-eyed, out of breath. Her blonde hair caught the rocklight. “You’re needed...” She took in the half-naked Redlock at a glance. “Both of you.”

“What? Why?” Triqueta’s heart stopped cold in her chest. Ice spread across her skin, frosting the sparkling drops of water. “What’s happened?”

“Nivrotar wants us. All of us. Now.”

* * *

In the corridor, the air was tight as stretched paper.

Waiting.

The old man was hunched and mumbling, one dirty hand smothering his nose and mouth. He was curled in on himself, shaking like an old hippie on a happy-pill crash-down. His shoulders were sunk into his blanket, and his breath was catching wet in his palm.

Whatever mind the poor fucktard had left was leaking out his ears like so much brain fluid.

His other hand was gripped round Ecko’s tiny, yellow sulphur crystal - so white-knuckled hard that Ecko expected to see claret seeping from the clench. He was desperately trying to keep it, hold it, to huddle it to his chest.

But Ecko was right over him, black eyes burning, mottle-skin seeping with the dappled rocklight of the corridor. One burn-scarred, hyper-sensitive hand was locked over the old man’s own, the other was round the madman’s skinny wrist, fingertips digging into the bones. He was fighting the madman’s strength, was twisting his arm, this way and that, trying to make him let go. The old man was rocking with the force of the motion, but his fingers were absurdly powerful and his hand was locked tight.

As though that tiny piece of sulphur was the future of the world itself, he fought to keep it out of Ecko’s grasp.

Ecko bared his teeth, stupidly, angrily, feeling like some picked-on street kid trying to get his music pod back.

“Gimme that... chrissakes,
give
me...” His voice was a husk in the quiet. “Leave
go,
you asshole!”

Looking up through the splayed fingers of his other hand, the madman began to snigger, a high, horribly nasal sound. His grip was like a steel fucking pincer and he was not letting go.

Yeah, you fight me for it. I got you on your ass now, bitch, and you know it. How you gonna get back at me this time, huh?

He had to fucking ask.

Absolutely on cue, the door at the corridor’s end slammed open to the sound of feet. Not releasing his grip, Ecko shot a glance.

Double-took.

The woman was like bad temper made manifest - she was almost Lugan’s size, powerfully muscled, with a shaven head and an awkward, aggressive attitude. As she came into the cloisters’ rocklights, Ecko saw that she was young - incongruously so -and that she was carven with elaborate, deliberate, heavy white scars. Kartian scars. She was a shout of contradiction, a full-on bona fide freak.

She was also stampeding towards him at a fairly terrifying rate.

“Get off him!” she bawled. “Get off him, you little shit, or I’ll break you like a
stick
!”

Yeah, whatever.

Ecko turned his back on her and twisted the struggling lunatic into a knot.

“Come on, you fucker, come
on.”

But the old man was looking back at him through his filthy, splayed fingers, his pupils maniacal - all wrong, the wrong sizes, the wrong directions. He was twisted all sideways now, and still sniggering like a horror-story clown. He raked his other hand down his face, leaving four nail-weals of hurt, dragging the skin of his eyes and mouth into some batshit comedy mask.

“Jesus shit. You are shot
away.”
With a wrench, Ecko finally secured his prize, turned back to check on the incoming woman.

“Jayr,” the madman said, quite distinctly. “The world is going to change now. Fast. We have to go.”

Ecko would have asked him what the hell he was talking about, but cowardice being the better part of discretion, he’d already fled.

The camp looked like a gale had torn through it, shredding its contents to grief and destruction.

No matter that it was not a Range Patrol campsite - that it had been set up a way back from the road by smugglers who’d had no interest in Phylos tracking their cargo or whereabouts. No matter that it was now silent, seeming abandoned by the pirates that had built it.

Those that had survived.

The walker was long past concern for Phylos’s power, or for the irony of coincidental minutiae.

His world had shrunk to the grey cloud that wrapped him.

No matter that the site was devastated, or that it was scattered with bodies. No matter that the predator, human or animal, that had ripped through here may still be nearby.

Whatever it was, it could not harm him - not for long.

He was cursed, more than any creature living.

He was immortal, was not permitted to die - there could never be so simple an end, not for him. He had failed, his people, his city, the Varchinde entire - he had failed utterly and in everything, and there was no way out. No release, no conclusion. No “enough”.

Several times, he had tried to take his own life and failed - his injuries healed, his consciousness gasped anew and then limped slowly onwards through the grey.

The metal fetter that Phylos had put upon him still cramped his wrist, and he was bereft.

The fetter was a prison, a barrier.

With it upon his skin, he was bereft of the Powerflux, the world’s shifting, cycling, elemental field. It was like being blinded, deafened, having his fingers burned away and his tongue cut out - with its cold touch upon him, he was without senses, trapped within his own skin. Without the ebb and flow of the world’s elements, surrounding and carrying him, his defeat and misery and weariness had multiplied, self-perpetuating and closing off his awareness of the world that surrounded him. His depressive inertia had sealed him within himself, hopeless.

And so he’d walked, directionless and endless, because it was the only thing that kept the hollow at bay; a repetitive, unthinking action that brought him something resembling peace.

It was the last barrier between himself and that dreadful lethargy, that depressive listlessness that sucks the will and the spirit and leaves just the grey, the empty soul, the “Nothing”, the very essence of Kazyen.

He walked on.

He did not notice the passing of the Count of Time, did not notice that the traffic on the trade-roads was lessening with every day and halfcycle; that widening swathes of rot marred the spectacular burning of the Varchinde’s autumnal colours. He did not notice or care in which direction he was heading; he did not respond as other travellers hailed him, or eyed him warily and moved to keep out of his way.

He did not notice the rain or the wind, the wondrous skies of the dusk and dawn, the night movements of the moons over his head.

The skies were forever denied him. He had been created to be a creature free, yet Samiel had held him out over the edge of paradise...

And had let him go.

From this time forth, you are “rhan”, homeless. You are charged with the care of the mortal world. If you fail me again, you will be nothing.

Yet now, even that no longer mattered.

Nothing.

He walked like a blind man, oblivious.

* * *

Rhan Elensiel, once Seneschal of Fhaveon, First Voice of the Council of Nine, Foundersson’s Champion, was a broken thing. Four hundred returns he had stood beside the family Valiembor, mother and son, father and daughter, guarded and guided them and upheld the strength of the Lord city. Four hundred returns he had secured the grasslands against foes and strife and warfare, had watched the terhnwood grow, and the trade become the Varchinde’s lifeblood, buoying the comfort of all.

Four hundred returns - until the plains were so secure that he had grown bored.

Taken that comfort - and his own - for granted.

Four hundred returns, and he had failed in his Gods-given duty - grown too lazy, too complacent, too downright
smug
to even notice the danger until it was upon him. Until the enemy was manifest - and by then it was too late.

Phylos had taken control of Fhaveon. He had cast Rhan down, thrown him from the very walls. Rhan had murdered the Lord Foundersson, had forced his wife, Phylos claimed. Rhan had lost city, legacy and purpose to a man who would destroy the Varchinde entire.

But what could he do? Why fight when he had already lost? There was no point.

Grey. Kazyen.

He walked not because he was looking for anything. He walked because there was nothing else to do.

* * *

What stopped him, he did not know - but he stumbled to an unsteady halt as if becoming aware of the world for the first time in cycles.

He ached, in knees and in belly. There was no hurt, exactly, he wasn’t hungry - like the peculiar, nebulous pain of his selfinflicted injuries, such things were mortal danger signs that he understood only academically. But the endless walking had taken its toll on this bland and slender body. He was... he was
tired.

He also had no idea where he was.

The air was bright and crisp and chill. The newborn sun was behind him, throwing his long shadow forwards over misted ground. His own gloom loomed ahead of him to touch this small abandoned camp, this mess of rubbish and fear and discarded mortality.

In the east, the sky was dawn-pale, streaked with a blush of pink. Ahead of him, the glowering dark loomed low, making the mist seethe on the cold ground. A small cart lay shattered, one wheel struck from its axle; a livestock pen had fencing damaged and strewn wide. The scatters of bodies were overgrown with moss and rotting with rain; some were gnawed to the bone in places, or missing eyes where the inevitable aperios had spiralled down upon them.