Ecko Burning (6 page)

Saravin muttered, “What are you
doing?”

The woman cocked her head to one side, gave a second, open-mouthed hiss. In the still air, it stank like a farmer’s compost pile.

“There are herbs for that,” Mael said.

In response, she gave a plaintive whine and stretched one hand slowly towards his mouth. Yearning.

Now
that
was creepy.

“Mael,” Saravin said. “Come away. Come away
now.”

The hiss became an inhalation, a sucking of air, a seeking. The woman coiled back, watched them through crazed, unblinking eyes. Then she hurled herself forwards, tugging frantically, struggling, shredding her own skin. Ripping the bramble clean from the dark, city soil.

Wearing it like a blood-garland.

Mael backed up sharply, tripped over his heels and went down on his arse. The woman threw herself at his face, clawing to reach his jaw and mouth, inhaling, her lips parted as though to drain his very breath. And Saravin was there to meet her, punching his blade’s quillons straight into her eyes and grappling for Mael’s collar with the other hand.

“I said, come away!” he gasped.

One eye popped in a splash of darkness but her hands caught Mael’s shoulders. They clung, clawed - she was trying to pull him into her embrace. Her other eye was fixed, glaring-chill.

Viciously, Saravin slammed the blade into her ribs, undercutting. She keened, a horribly human noise.

But she opened her mouth anyway.

The sweet, lush stench was overpowering, a grass-harvest pile left too long on a hot day, a farmer’s vegetables rotting by the roadside. The stench smothered Mael’s breathing, breakfast and fear roiled in his belly - he was going to throw up.

And Saravin was there, blade discarded, hands closing on the woman’s shoulders, bodily dragging her from Mael. With a vicious shudder, he threw her down to the overgrown path and slammed his boot into the side of her head.

A wet, cracking sound.

Again.

For a second, she seemed confused. The tension left her body, the crazed blue light faded from her eye. She blinked, tried to focus, her mouth worked as if to say something, but only a flood of dark fluid came from her ears and lips.

Kneeling, Saravin punched his oversized and hairy fist clean through the front of her skull. Almost unwittingly, Mael rolled to the side to throw up.

And he saw.

The young woman, now faceless and broken, was still in the regulation garments of a Fhaveon city servitor.

Amos, largest and oldest city of the Varchinde, a dark sprawl about the mouth of the Great Cemothen River.

Over the jumble of her tiled and tessellated roofs, the yellow moon had shrunk to half-full, liquid and gleaming; her smaller, higher brother now faced away from her as if sulking, glittering white in the starless sky. Melding with the moonlight, torchlight pooled across the cobbles, flickering, and bright rocklights glinted from shadowed doorways. Grass-garlands danced from window to window, fluttering, beckoning the milling crowd down toward the river and the heart of the city - then onwards to the broad, bustling spread of the Estuary Wharf.

Over the river’s myriad mouths, music skirled like night wind. Carried by its promise, the people laughed and danced.

Somewhere among them, hemmed in by tight and gleeful bodies, the slim, bright figure of a woman caught a toe in the hem of her skirt and half-tripped, splashing wine down her embroidered bodice. The movement was almost clumsy, as though she was unused to fine dress.

About her, ale and humour ran freely - the accident was greeted with cheers.

She did not acknowledge them.

Triqueta blinked as the streets seemed to waver in her vision, then downed the last of her wine. Staggering, she found herself caught in the centre of a great crowd, laughter all round her, buoyed tidal through widening roadways. Pressed close, the people of Amos drank carefree, their hair woven with coloured grass.

From somewhere, a hand produced a pottery carafe, and refilled her goblet.

Rumour raced round her; boasts and dares. The Lord Nivrotar, CityWarden of Amos, had herself been seen dancing in the streets. She was unarmoured, they said, jesting with those who came close. Her prowling bodyguards were few and seemed unworried by the masses. As Triq was carried forward to the huge swath of the Estuary Wharf, the mood around her was expansive, and lavish.

Yet some part of her was withheld, and unable to let go.

She should be revelling in it, she knew that, she had every reason. She had success and fortune. She had notoriety. She had wealth to squander and no reason to withhold. She was a cursed hero, for the Gods’ sakes, reunited with family she’d missed and now carried high on their shoulders...

Family.

The word was bitter.

Triqueta found she’d stopped. The crowd tutted and pushed to get round her, heady smells of scented flesh and spiced food, but she didn’t move. She had a shadow in her heart, something that hurt like a bruise. She had seen things she could never unsee.

She had family hurt, and no idea how to help them.

With a gesture like need, she threw back the wine. It was sharp, almost made her splutter. She shook herself, shrugged the shock away, started to move - and tripped again on the hem of her ridiculous, whimsical finery.

What in the rhez had she been thinking, wearing this?

That she was some great lady, some cursed champion? Going to some carefree revel?

She was Banned, body and bone, born to the saddle and the free grass of the Varchinde.

But the tide still carried her forwards.

Below her, scattered through the awnings and lights of the Estuary Wharf, the taverns had overspilled, and drinkers crowded shouting. Songs grew in volume and then scattered into laughing fragments. Yet from up here, crushed in flesh and festivity, the party seemed oddly hollow, the laughter forced, the colours fake - like shadow-puppets.

Somewhere in her soul, doubts burrowed. They sent tremors through her slight figure. She needed more wine - needed the warmth and the blur.

So here I am: Amos. A city where I can indulge my every whim, gain anything wealth can buy...

...except ignorance, the world back the way it was.

Triqueta was desert-blooded, short-lived. She celebrated life and lived only for the moment... but now when she needed that celebration, that freedom, that innocence, needed to lose herself in it... she found it flaking through her fingers like soft ash.

Ash.

“My lady?”

She had stopped again. Her hands hurt where her fingernails were curled into her palms, cutting.

“Can’t breathe. Need air,” she murmured. Whoever they were, she pushed past them, shoving into the crowds and the smells and the noise, right through until she reached the outermost wharves, where the fisherboats were tied up and silent. There was room to think out here; the great coast-hugging triremes sat without judgement. The wind was soft and chill.

Triq leaned back against the wooden wall of a wharfside storehouse, still faintly warm from the autumn sun, and closed her eyes.

Damn that daemon bitch Tarvi - she took more than just my physical time.

In a flash of pique, she threw her goblet into the water, watched it shatter the sparking-bright moonlight. It almost collided with an oversized, muscular figure.

She challenged it, her blood rising.

“Hey, you! Watch where you’re walking!”

Elaborate, carved scars glittered where they caught the moons. Her friend Jayr, the girl they’d once dubbed the “Infamous”, grabbed her elbow and steadied her.

“Good thing about that frock,” Jayr said, “makes you an easy person to find.” Her grin was brief. “I didn’t want to leave him, but I had to find you.”

“Nice t’see you too,” Triq said. She didn’t want to see her friend - didn’t want the truth she’d brought or the pain that went with it. But they were Banned, and they were family, and that was all there was to it. “Where we going?”

Jayr snorted. “Where d’you think?”

* * *

It was late, the moons dying on the rocky slopes of the distant Kartiah.

In the dingy interior of a backwater tavern, Triqueta picked up a small pottery cup. She knocked the contents back in one, wanting the burn, welcoming it - but even the harsh spirit wasn’t enough.

Around her, layers of filth belied the bright moonlight outside - this was a place of hard eyes and hard liquor, a place she could come and drink herself, quite deliberately, under the table.

Wordless, Jayr filled her cup again.

“But how...” Triq was slurring. “You and Ress came here looking for answers, for help. How the rhez did he...?” Her elbow tumbled from the tabletop and she narrowly missed dropping her cup altogether. “How’d he end up like that?” Her voice cracked and she didn’t care.

The questions, she knew, had no answers. Triqueta had come downriver as an escort for Ecko, but she’d also come looking for her Banned family, her best friends - and she’d found Jayr changed, older somehow, calmer in spirit.

What had happened to Ress was beyond comprehension.

Madman, frothing and gibbering, a scrabbling figment of his former self. The horror that had crawled over Triqueta’s skin as she’d seen him...

Gods!

She shuddered, downed another cup.

Jayr had told her the tale - how she and Ress had been in the Amos Great Library. She’d told of the paper he’d found, how she’d watched the life and hope and mind just drain from his flesh and gaze, told of her helpless fury at Amos’s Lord. Even going over it again, in the thick, dark air of the tavern, it still made no cursed sense to either of them.

Triqueta emptied the carafe, called for another. While she drank the dismay and the hurt and the guilt to a dull sense of disbelief and a roiling core of anger, she struggled to make it all fit, somehow. To make it fit with the tales of the daemon Kas Vahl Zaxaar, with the blight, with the rumours of hostility to the north - but she was no damned scholar, by the rhez, and all she could think of was the empty look in his eyes, the disfocus of his pupils, the lax wet of his mouth...

The fact that she should’ve come sooner.

Ress had not even known her - he’d looked straight through her, barely noticed she was there. He’d scribbled on the wall, tried to cut himself, pissed his trews, screamed wordless and terrifying. She’d felt like nothing, a phantom; she’d felt like railing at the sky, like shaking Jayr until her teeth cursed-well rattled...

How could he be so broken?

“Dear Gods.” In the thin light from the windows, Triq’s hands were cracked and dry and pale. Her words caught in her throat. She lowered the cup and blinked at it stupidly, her eyes almost as unseeing as Ress’s. “But Jayr. How could you
let
him...?”

“I didn’t
let
him.” Jayr seemed oddly subdued, in helplessness or guilt. She leaned forward over the filthy tabletop, her own cup still untouched. “I’ve told you, it was only bits, I could barely read it. It made no sense, time and light and this and that, I don’t even know what it said.”

“Ress taught you to read.” Triqueta blinked, confused.

Jayr glanced about them, lowered her voice. “Lord Nivvy’s done everything she can, but her lot can’t even touch him, they’re worse than hopeless. Unless your clever apothecary friend - Amethea - can pull an esphen out her arse, I don’t know what else to do. He’s screaming crazed, and if I didn’t force feed him, he’d be in the long ditch by now.”

“Gods.” Triqueta’s mouth shook, she put her head in her hands. “Poor Ress. Oh my Gods. I should’ve come sooner, I should’ve -!”

“Something I can help you ladies with?” The male speaker was casual, grinning and masculine, handsome and fully aware of it. His eyes flicked over Triqueta and her unlikely frock, dismissed her, moved to scan the breadth of Jayr’s heavy shoulders and the swell of her breasts under the leather vest she wore. “I’d be only too happy to... lend a hand.”

Jayr eyed him briefly and snorted, not even bothering with a response.

But something in his stance, his arrogance, in the way he’d spoken - or in the way he’d dismissed her - sparked a flash from Triqueta’s liquor-sodden temper.

“And how’s... how’s that your problem?” Drink-addled or not, she could still put a blade in her tone.

The man grinned. One of his back teeth was missing. Still addressing Jayr, he said, “You’re an odd pair, aren’t you? You together?” He met Triqueta’s gaze with a smirk. “Or does this ol’ lady just barter for you?”

Old lady.

The phrase caught, stuck. Around her, the noise of the tavern retreated to a dull buzz and she stared up at the confidently grinning, gap-toothed man. Her face was still streaked with tears, but her grief was rapidly congealing into something else entirely.

“What
did you say?” she demanded.

Jayr hadn’t reacted - Triq could only guess the scarred girl hadn’t quite understood the implication. Moving through an odd, unreal fog, her motions unfolding before her eyes as if performed by someone else, Triqueta picked up the pottery carafe of spirit.

It was cold against her itching skin.

The man laughed outright at her. Her age. Her dress.

“Put that down, love.” There was a long terhnwood blade at his belt. “Before you hurt yourself.”

Jayr said, “Triq? What’re you doing?”

Triqueta stood up, swaying. She didn’t know quite what she was going to do, whether she was going to put the carafe down, or smash it into shards on the filthy floor, or slam it in the man’s smug face...

Jayr said, warning, “Triq...”

But the man’s hand had strayed to the blade at his belt. His voice tinged with mockery as he said, “C’mon love. Don’t embarrass yourself, hey?”

The phrase stung like a whip-strike, like a slap across her face. Her grief igniting now, burning into furious, white-focus temper, a necessary outrage and outlet, Triqueta dropped the carafe to shatter on the tabletop and slammed the heel of her hand, hard, into the man’s face.