Ecko Burning (37 page)

The Banned woman halted. Arms crossed, she glared.

“That isn’t funny.”

“Like you said, I’m not jesting. Look.” Amethea held out the skull.

“He’s dead, Thea. Been dead a while.”

“No, he hasn’t.” Amethea brandished the thing as evidence, though Triqueta had no idea what she was supposed to look for. “He’s probably been dead for less than a return. Quite a lot less. Nothing’s eaten the flesh off him, it’s like it
shrivelled
-”

“So?”

“Will you listen? Something drained him, Triq, sucked the life right out of his skin -”

“How can you tell?” Triqueta was out of patience.

“His bones are a young man’s,” she said. “But his skin - it’s desiccated. It’s like he rotted.”

Arms still folded, Triq eyed her friend, looking at her filth-streaked face and crazed, pale hair. Then she held out a hand, took the skull, dropped it and put her boot down on it, shattering it to pieces.

“Whatever it is” - she kicked the door again - “I hope it’s out there
waiting
for us.”

And she kicked again, and again, shouting defiance as she did so.

“You hear me, soul sucker? We’re coming for you!”

Rolling her eyes, Amethea groaned.

And the door splintered, shook under the heavy blows. It took the shocks, but every one was breaking it further, every one telling as the wood split under the sheer force of Triqueta’s boots.

She kicked it again. It juddered against the drop-key, but bounced back. She was sweating now, giving a hard, furious shout with every blow. This door was everything in her path and it was going to
break.

Ha! Come on, you bastard! Ha! I’ll get you! Ha!

It shuddered, twisted on a hinge, sprang back. She kicked it again, and it held as if it were taunting her.

Exhausted, infuriated, Triq paused to swear in frustration.

Amethea looked up. “Triq, stop. You’re crazed. You can’t break -”

“I can damned well do this!” Her back was hurting, but she bit down on the pain and turned to kick again at the door.

This time, she heard the splinter of the drop-key housing.

“By the Goddess.” Amethea’s words were awed.

“No. By my feet.” Triq’s teeth clenched, her face reddened, contorted. She kicked and kicked and
kicked
- not caring about the noise, not caring about anything other than getting out of here.

And then it gave, suddenly and completely: the drop-key housing came away from the frame and the whole thing slammed open like she’d ridden a horse into it. She staggered, almost fell. The door smacked back against the outside wall and then hung there, broken.

Amethea was on her feet, speechless.

Triq wanted to say something, but her knees went and she was on the floor among the bones, her back twinging with shocks of white agony. She couldn’t move, couldn’t...

“Calm,” Amethea said. “You’ve gone into spasm, try and breathe...”

“I
am
breathing!” The words were barely a gasp as she hauled cold, damp air into her hurting lungs, uncramped her side and back. “No time. We need to get out of here before” - she smacked the brown and broken remnants away from her and looked up - “that soul-sucking monster of yours gets hungry.”

“And go where?” Amethea eyed the doorway as if she didn’t dare step through it.

Finding her breath, Triqueta said, “Thea, are you just going to sit in here and be tragic and wait to be rescued? You stood up to Maugrim in The Wanderer, right at the end, you spat in his face. You kicked that damned bandit. Well, find your balls ’cause we’re getting the rhez out of here, and we’re rescuing the boys on the way.”

Mustering an effort she would never show, setting her expression against the hurt, Triqueta stood up.

I can still do this.

You damned well watch me!

Outside the door lay a sunken courtyard, silent and circular. It was brilliant with sunlight, open to the sky and all crafted from the same odd, striated stone. The creeper grew more thickly here, sliding over everything and upward towards the light. About the edge of the circle, there were more friezes, though these ones were carven. In the bright sun, they were picked out in shadows, more spirals, or dancing figures crafted into the wall.

In the courtyard’s centre was a round pool, cracked and long dry.

There were other doors, four, five, six of them, spaced at odd intervals about the wall. Several of them were broken, or overgrown.

The heat was oppressive. There was no wind. Nothing moved.

Opposite them, however, on the far side of the circle, there was a set of long steps, wide and decorous, rising upwards towards some high and roofless plateau. A second circle stood above them, walled like a lookout platform - it rose against the sunlight and cast its shadow back across the empty pool, a long blur of grey.

Amethea said softly, a catch in her voice, “I don’t like this. It’s too hot, I can’t breathe...”

She was right, it was close, as still as death, airless despite the open sky above. Triqueta’s skin itched with tension. She felt the loss of her blades more with every moment. Yet there was nothing here, no flicker of life, no monster, no Redlock, no Ecko, no soul suckers, no creatures wounded and bleeding. There was only the ancient stone, a haven for the sunshine and flowers.

Flowers, for Gods’ sakes.

The edge of the sunken yard was too high to climb easily, the tall steps were the only way out.

But there was no cover. If there was anything up there, it could spike the pair of them full of arrows before they’d passed the doorway.

“Hang on.” Triqueta eyed the edges of the yard, crept out towards the lip of the pool. She remembered Redlock in water, laughing with her despite her increased returns, laughing even in celebration of them, and the memory gave her a sharp twist of real fear.

Red. Where are you?

If anything had happened to him. To Ecko...

By the rhez! How had they even come to be here? Following Ecko, following Nivrotar? Following some haphazard trail that seemed to have no sense, no meaning?

“Triq, look!” Amethea was pointing. “The mwenar! Look!”

She didn’t see what her friend meant right away. Behind the creeper, one of the friezes in the wall was a creature like the human-faced predator, powerfully muscled, its snake-tail curved upwards over its back. The carving was old, blurred with time, but there was another beside it, another creature, a beast like the one they’d seen in the alchemist’s house, the mwenar with its four arms -

By the rhez!

Understanding went through her like a shock - suddenly their haphazard trail seemed oddly, frighteningly deliberate. Triqueta didn’t know if they’d been led or sent - she tried to think through a tumble of connections to work out how they’d come to be here. Nivrotar had wanted a weapon. And Ecko had found that yellow brimstone crystal...

...in the alchemist’s house.

Dear Gods.

She shivered, her skin suddenly prickling despite the heat. “The alchemist - Sarkhyn.” The words were no more than a breath, an exhalation of shock. “Thea...”

But Amethea was pointing at another frieze. She was trembling and pale, her navy eyes wide, sharing Triqueta’s shock.

“Triq, look! Can you see what it is! Saint and Goddess!” Her hands went to her mouth as if to hold back a torrent of shock and words.

Triq almost didn’t want to know.

The wall was overgrown, the creeper sliding across it as if trying to hide its secrets. She reached out with a flaking, itching hand and pulled it away.

Then she stopped dead, her heart screaming in her ears. She felt sick.

I know what that is.

Centaur.

Rearing and powerful, its claws splayed as if to tear the stone asunder - the damned thing was huge, like the stallion, like the creatures that had fought them at the Monument, Maugrim’s watch-beasts...

Amethea was talking, words falling over themselves. “How could we have been this stupid?” She was looking about around her, eyes wide, the sunlight glimmering from her pale hair. “Maugrim
told
us he didn’t make them. He said -”

“We’re damned fools, the lot of us. It all
fits.
Whoever -whatever - this CityWarden is -”

“Whoever’s here, they made all of this. The centaurs, the mwenar, the chearl. Everything.” Amethea brushed her fingers over the friezes, turned to look at her friend. “But then... we can’t be here by chance, surely? How did we...?”

Her shock was visible, a reflection of Triq’s own.

“I’m starting to wonder,” Triqueta said grimly. “Pieces of a story, all suddenly fitting into place. We came here following Ecko, following Nivrotar’s need for
weapons.”

Amethea stared. “You think she sent us -?”

“I don’t know what to think, not yet,” Triq told her. “But by the rhez, I’m going to get to the bottom of this, and I’m going to find the others before the Gods alone know what happens to them.” She yanked up another bunch of creeper, pale flowers wide open, like bright eyes. “Before they get made into something, for Gods’ sakes.”

Amethea said, softly, “Or before we do.”

The remainder of the rooms that surrounded the courtyard were empty, their occupants the same scattered and broken remains. Despite Triqueta’s fears, they found no black eyes or teeth among the scattered bones of the Varchinde’s lost, no red hair.

Amethea had picked up a loose fingerbone, was turning it in her grip as if she sought an answer, needed to follow a thought through to its ending. Something about the deaths of these people was bothering her, something that didn’t yet fit the emerging pattern - but she didn’t seem to know what it was.

Triqueta, keeping an eye on the tower above them, only knew that this was all damned crazed. She understood her share of city politics and gaming - and here she was, beginning to wonder how they’d really come here, whom she could trust, what dice were being rolled - and by whose hands. This place was crawling her flesh, taunting and worrying her. There were figments still in her mind; still lurking in the creeper-grown spirals that seemed to be everywhere she looked.

Creatures created.

Amethea said, “There’s nothing still living down here. If I had to guess, I’d say this was the reject pile. Those that the CityWarden didn’t want to... to make into anything.” She was still frowning at the fingerbone.

“Meaning the ones on the clifftop were - what? The failures?” Triqueta shuddered.

Amethea shrugged, grimaced. “It makes sense.”

In several places clumsy marks had been scraped into the wall - forgotten sigils made by the desperate and the dying, last messages that would never be read, or understood.

Amethea touched a fingertip to one of them, said, “This place is old, Tusienic probably.” She glanced at Triqueta from the corner of her eye. “What did he show you? In your nightmare I mean? What did you see?”

Not meeting the look, Triq was scanning the high stairs, looking for the ambush, the creatures that guarded the exit -or the entrance.

“Whoever rules here, I think he likes to make people victims.”

Amethea dropped her gaze back to her bone.

“And
no one
is doing that to me,” Triq said. “Or to you. I want to find this CityWarden and have a little word in his ear. Assuming he has ears. Maybe I’ll carve him some more, just to be on the safe side.”

She thought that Amethea would say something more, comment on her lack of sharp objects, ask her how she, of all people, could have been made to feel like a victim, but the girl only nodded.

Then, at the bottom of the wide steps, there was movement.

* * *

Ecko was not home.

This was not the Bike Lodge, not a hospital bed, not some mass of ’trodes and scanning gear. It wasn’t Grey’s base - he wasn’t plugged into the world of anywhere-but-here. There wasn’t a fractal fucking algorithm in sight.

Instead, Ecko could see sky.

He expected a rush of dejection, a momentary flash of outrage that he hadn’t managed to bust and bullshit his way outta here, that he hadn’t broken the program.

But all he managed was a certain wry lack of surprise.
Nah. Too many layers for that shit.

Ok, let’s do this. Let’s see whatcha got.

He was flat on his back, his wrists and ankles now held in metal, his skin against cold stone. Over him, the sky was bright and blue, incongruously summer; the air was stifling-still. Around this platform, whatever it was, there rose some sort of wall or parapet, and from it reared carved creatures - gargoyles clawed and fanged, but worn and ragged with age. They peered over at him, casting odd shadows.

Behind them, birds wheeled in the sky.

Chrissakes, if they didn’t come to life and try and eat him before all this was over, then Ecko was a monkey’s fucking cross-dressing uncle.

But the stone creatures didn’t articulate, manifest or puke; their blind eyes continued to stare at nothing, pointless and without end.

Then movement made him turn his head.

There was someone up here with him - but that someone, thank fuck, was not Eliza. Instead, he could see the calm, thoughtful face of an older man, one of his eyes covered by an embroidered patch. He was greying at the temples, his hair tied back, and a series of leather thongs hung about his throat. Tattoos covered his face, they moved lazily under his skin, shifting as he advanced through sunlight and shadow.

He looked like an old hippie - and Ecko had seen him before.

Yeah, I know you...

Younger but still with the eye-patch, he’d been on the silk hanging in the house where they’d found the burning dead McBeastie with the four arms - and the sulphur.

Coincidence, apparently, had packed its bags and gone on vacation.

Great, so I walked into a fucking trap.

Now what?

But the man showed no response to Ecko’s curiosity, he only walked around where he lay. He was in no hurry, humming tuneless snatches of something between thoughtfully pursed lips.