Ecko Burning (7 page)

“Fuck you!” Sometimes Ecko’s colourful language had exactly the impact she needed. “I’m losing a friend. What’s your excuse?”

The man rocked back, one hand to his nose, scarlet seeping between his fingers. From around them came the familiar rhythm of shouting and benches scraping, the ripple of impending violence.

“You cursthed bith!” The man’s other hand was drawing his belt-blade - there was no braided, peace-bonding string at this end of the Amos wharf. A moment later, it was in his hand, gleaming dully in the rocklight. The crowd closed round them, whether to watch or participate Triq had no idea.

Come on then. I can still do this... you just watch me...

Then, in a harsh scraping of bench, Jayr stood up.

The noise ground across the room, made people cringe. There was a moment of complete stillness.

Triqueta blinked. Swallowed.

When Syke, Banned commander, had named the girl “Infamous” it had been a jest - a tongue-in-cheek comment on her pit-fighter past. Many a wager had come in its wake - in two returns with the Banned, Jayr had fought just about every soldiery and Range Patrol champion from Amos to the Kartiah Mountains and back.

Now, she filled the room like a shadow, like a bared threat. Her Archipelagan features had an odd, haughty beauty, her scalplock was exotic, her shoulders carved with flat muscle, her Kartian slave-scars shining white - in this tavern, there would be no damned doubt as to what they meant. She was a crossbreed of cultures, exotic and impossible. She folded her arms, said nothing.

She didn’t need to.

The man fell back, garbling an apology, resheathing the blade and pressing his other hand to his nose.

After a few rustles and mutters, the rest of the surrounding drinkers returned to their seats.

Apparently, the show was over.

* * *

Triqueta wiped her bloody knuckles with the silken fabric of her skirt.

Her head was pounding now - the booze-fuelled flare of anger had left her, and she felt empty and cold. She struggled to focus through vision and thought that blurred. Everything swayed, and she felt sick.

Jayr was sitting quietly, her face troubled. Something about her little display had bothered her, but Triq was too sozzled to quite get her head round it.

Jayr said, “We should get back. Don’t like leaving him for long.”

But Triq couldn’t face the wreckage of her friend - not yet, not like this - the thought of it brought a rush of tension to her blood that woke her up faster than a well-placed bucket of water.

She said, managing to enunciate clearly, “Did you ever take him back to the Library?”

“Gods, no. Never want to set foot in the place again. I’d burn it down if I could.”

“Maybe we should look? Maybe we’d find something to -?”

“To make him better?” Jayr gave a short, humourless laugh. “There isn’t anything. We should just put him the rhez out of his misery.”

Triq blinked. “You said you were fighting to keep him alive.”

“I am. But what’s the point?” The girl bit at her nails, spat out tiny, bitter fragments of white. “He can’t tell us what he saw, he can’t help us fight the bad guys; he can’t wipe his own arse. We’re
Banned
- we ride free, trade free, no one tells us what to do. If he was a horse -”

“He couldn’t wipe his arse if he was a horse, Jayr.” Triqueta said it with a straight face, but Jayr stared at her as though she was screaming loco.

Then Triq cracked a smile and they both chuckled, a shared warmth and relief that eased the tension. On an obscure impulse, Triqueta gave the younger woman an awkward hug. “You’d never abandon him. You stupid mare.”

Then someone by their table cleared his throat.

Suspecting another idiot, they parted, ready for trouble, but this man was older, thinner, his hair greying and his face weathered by long returns in the sun. He shot furtive glances to either side and bobbed an apology for interrupting.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhear you. You’re Banned? You’ve come from Syke, from Roviarath?”

The last whispering remnant of booze thrilled out of Triqueta’s blood. She was trembling, and had no idea why.

“What’s it to you?” she snapped.

The man glanced round again, then held something out to them.

“I need help. With something. I found this, I...” He swallowed. “I’ve come south, from Teale. I found this on the edges of the town, and I wondered if you knew... if you knew what it was.”

Teale was a small, northern outpost of Fhaveon, the Varchinde’s Lord city. It offered the capital a harbour, trade of fish and shell and salt and scrimshaw. It also supervised the growth of much of Fhaveon’s terhnwood crop - the quintessential trade- and craft-material that provided the plains with everything from tools to weapons to jewellery.

The man held out a terhnwood belt-blade, the resin cracked and the fibrous centre somehow swelling, splitting its way free. The wooden grip was smoothed, the leather sheath rotted and moss-grown, the stitching tearing. As he put it on to the table, Jayr said, “What the rhez happened to that?”

Triqueta blinked at it, trying to focus.

“Please.” The man was self-conscious, as though worried they’d think he was loco, send him packing with a bloody nose. “You said about trading, about Roviarath, and I thought... I thought you might know about terhnwood, about...” He let the request hang. Triqueta and Jayr exchanged a baffled glance. “Please - can you just look at it?” He extended a hand, pushed the thing towards them like an appeal.

Jayr picked it up, turned it over looking for a craftsman’s mark.

Triqueta said, “Where did you - ?”

“I told you: Teale. There’s disease there, the harvest’s been poor, grass and terhnwood both. There were people who went out to the farmlands, to try and help...” The man was shaking. “I found a... a woman. She was asleep, I think. She was all - I don’t know - overgrown, like the roots had pulled her down. She... was carrying that.”

“What?” Triqueta stared at the shuddering man. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head, wrung his hands one over the other.

“I don’t know. I wanted to find someone who’d help me, who’d understand.”

“This is messed right up.” Jayr had taken the little blade from its sheath and was holding it up to the dirty moonlight that filtered through the shutters, turning it this way and that. “You ever seen terhnwood do this?”

The man shrugged, helpless to explain. “I only found it, I don’t know what it means.”

“Nope,” Triqueta said. There was an odd shiver in her skin. She eyed the blade for a moment, then said, with a crawl of nervousness, “It’s craftmarked.”

Jayr glanced at the mark and shook her head. The man looked from one face to the other and shrugged, wordlessly pleading.

“Not a clue,” Jayr said. “But whatever it is, I’m betting Nivvy can tell us the full story.”

* * *

Roderick the Bard had once described Amos to Ecko as the “City of Darkness”.

Hell, every fantasyscape had to have one.

This one, though, wasn’t populated by a load of Gothic architecture and tentacled dominatrices in unlikely armour. Like Vanksraat, like Roviarath, the other cities he’d seen, Amos was a seethe of muck and noise and people and poverty, ludicrously tiny compared to the vast conurbations of home.

Now Ecko was here, though, walking the city’s streets and looking up at her above him, he found that she’d grown and swallowed him whole, sucked him down into the warm and dirty closeness of her belly.

Amos was the closest thing he’d seen to proper urban sprawl: she was twisted and dissolute, rotted and ancient, archaic and ornate. She was tumbledown in some places, overgrown in others. The buildings were tall and cramped and irregular, they seemed to lean upon one another as though wearied by time. The streets were narrow and meandering, the alleyways seemed woven one through another as if they’d been born in a tangle -twisted and wrong - as if they’d never had builders, had never been new or full of hope.

Poetry?
Ecko administered himself a mental slap.
Okay, now I’ve really lost the plot...

It kinda piqued him that he was at home here. As he turned around to look up at the narrow buildings over him, at the endless statues and sculptures, at the random artworks that seemed to lurk at every corner, loom in every archway, he wondered what Eliza was playing at.

But hell, after five days on a fucking
boat
and a view of nothing but patchwork grass, Ecko would’ve been happy to get off the water at Westminster Bridge, security and all. Some huge part of his rotted soul wanted to just
go,
to say “fuck it all” and piss off through the streets, leave everything and climb up the side of the nearest building, run the rooftops, free...

Sod Eliza and her fucking cunning plan, he’d stay here, stay Ecko...

Like, who the hell’d miss him if he really ran away?

Yeah, an’ I bet I don’t have even
that
choice...

A crumpled harvest-banner caught for a moment on a stone, then whirled away in the rush-flood of rainwater.

People splashed, cursing, down the main thoroughfare behind him.

Damn you, Eliza, damn you an’ your fucking program. I’m not gonna just give in to this.

He took Lugan’s lighter - now refilled from Maugrim’s stash - out of a pouch and began to spin it over the backs of his knuckles like a road-trickster’s coin. Raindrops hit it and shattered. The lighter was too heavy to move with any skill, and when it fell, his targeters sparked and crossed and he grabbed it before it hit the cobbles.

He was caught between impossibilities - knowing he had to capitulate, but refusing to be led. Knowing he cared about his friends, but refusing to let them touch or weaken him. He was fucked, whichever way he chose.

I’m so not gonna do this. You’re not gonna make me play splat-the-bad-guy again. Not demon-summoner 101, not dungeon-bash, not dragon-flight, not save-the-maiden, not fight-the-fucking-final-war. There’s gonna be a way outta this.

“Angry, Ecko? There’s a change.” Triqueta was a leaning wall-shadow, stark in silhouette like some sort of film-noir poster.

“Shit!” Preoccupied, startled, he found himself boosted and shaking, combat-poised to take her head clean off with a squarely placed foot. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Your dreams.” Her expression was perfectly blank.

He said nothing. What the hell was he supposed to say to
that,
for chrissakes?

The rain was thinning to a gusty drizzle. The wind was cold, bundling wet garbage in whirlwinds down the empty street. Over tall buildings, the gold moon was so close he could’ve reached up and gutted it with a slash, watched molten metal flood down the buildingsides.

Triq stepped further into the light - she smelled of spirits, of tar and tallow smoke.

“Good to see you’re awake.” Her words blurred at the edges. “Got me now?”

“My early-warning system’s kinda fucked. So what?”

His
friends.

She grinned at him. “I thought you’d be out here - though you’re a hard man to find.” She glanced down the side street, the clawing tree-fingers, the high walls. “Going to tell me what you’ve been up to?”

“No.” His cloak writhed, swelling and billowing like a live thing. “Whatever you want, I ain’t got it. Now -”

“You’re supposed to be seeing Nivvy, remember? Did you get distracted?”

“An’ what’re you now, city militia?” He snorted, only half in humour. “Sell-out.”

His accusation set her expression like drying ferrocrete. The moonlight left deep gouges in her face - lines under her eyes, down the sides of her nose and mouth. There were shadows beneath the gems in her cheeks where the flesh was softer, beginning to drop.

The image was as sudden as a flash-projector, footage burning white-hot into his retinae...

Tarvi.

Hot lush flesh, gasping, hand reaching behind her to pull him closer, hair in his face, turning to look back at him, her profile in the moonlight soft through the -

Stop it!

His adrenaline had redoubled, screamed silent in his throat, choking him. For a moment, his insight, his defiance, his realisation - all of it - were swamped by a rush of very real physical need.

“Say that again.” Triq was glowering at him, belligerent with booze. “I’ll strip the skin off your body one limb at a time.”

Inexplicably trembling, Ecko curled his lip.

“Been there, done that.” The words came out like a challenge, daring her to touch him.

“Yeah?” She swayed slightly. “Then you’ll know just how much fun it is when I start sharpening the
blades.”

“I don’t have time for this.” He shook himself, bared his teeth. “I delivered the message, already, dropped it at the gate. Tell Lord Whatsit you never found me, an’ crawl back into your bottle. Carafe. Whatever the fuck.” Then he forced himself to turn away. The memory of Tarvi kissing her, feeding from her, draining the very time from her skin, was pounding too hard in his blood. “I’m done here.”

Startling him, she said, “You fucked her, didn’t you?” It caught him, hooked into him like a grapple and held him fast. There was a twinge of bitterness to her tone, a need to understand something.

“‘Fucked’?” The word sounded odd in her mouth.

“You use the word often enough. I know you fucked her.”

“I think she fucked me.”

“I think she fucked everybody.”

“I think you’re right.” He snorted mirthlessly, understood what she was asking. “An’ no, I dunno why she took your time and not mine.” Glancing back past the edge of the cowl he could see that she was watching him, waiting.

Blood and adrenaline raced under his skin. He didn’t move.

Then she dropped her gaze, looked at the cobbles, the pooled moonlight. His chest was tightening, just like she’d wrapped her thighs around him and squeezed.

“I’m done here,” he said again. It was softer than he’d intended, he’d no idea if he was telling her, or himself. He searched for his defiance, made an effort to snipe. “No more games.”