Ecko Endgame (38 page)

She didn’t get time to follow the thought through.

The first wave of incoming hit the shieldwall with a crash of wood and flesh and shouting.

The warriors’ response was well-drilled, commanded clearly by the drums. The attackers were all over them, hands like claws and teeth bared and bloody. They were sweating and age-lined and seething and angry, scratching and fighting weaponless, or struggling to bring their blades to bear, and cutting at each other in the process.

Facing them, the defending wall hit back, and hard. And then it parted, very briefly, letting just a few of the attackers through and cutting them off. Behind the wall, the skirmishers made short work of them, grinding them into the blighted cobbles. They did this time and time again. If the attackers faltered or fell back for long enough, Triqueta would despatch the cavalry and counterattack, hammering out from the flanks and into their lines, then racing back before they had time to fully react.

Sometimes, a voice would cry out in the heave of the melee – a name, a plea, a call to someone they had known from their youth, or from the street where they had lived.

But Ythalla’s forces were beyond human and there was no recognition.

Nothing left.

They were like Maugrim’s stone creatures, they just came onwards, relentless, pushed blindly by those behind. Injuries seemed not to slow them – to put each one down, they had to be hacked to pieces, their legs kicked or cut from under them, their eyes removed, their hands severed at the wrists. Even then they came on; the heat that burned from them was that of the rhez itself.

Triqueta saw more than one defender quail and try to fall back, only to be caught between the press behind them, and the press in front. The wounded and the terrified had no way to leave the crush – they simply fell where they stood and were trampled.

She thought:
I can still do this.

She lifted her chin.

Oh, she could still do this, all right. For Redlock. For Amethea. For Roviarath. For the wound in the world. Triq was furious and fearless; she shouted defiance back at the incoming force.

Sunlight slid down the hillside.

The line was too spread, not tight enough, and there were too many of them coming. For every attack she anticipated and countered, another would come, further away, eager and unstoppable. And the shieldwall itself, already devastated by Ythalla’s cavalry, was heavily outnumbered, outflanked at both edges.

Their discipline was good – they were striving to hold. Archers still shot from the walltops, carefully picking their targets. Many of them shot at the vialer, and the tattooed creatures yowled and laughed and snapped the shafts as they struck.

But there were just too many of them.

And the arrows were running out.

The shieldwall held, but it was being pushed back, and back, and back towards the rear wall of the ruin – warriors’ boots could get no traction on the cobbles as the press of bodies in front of them forced their way forwards. From somewhere, Triq could hear a strong and even rhythm, a stamp-stamp-stamp that was making all the attackers stamp in time, a heavy pressure of ruthless forward motion.

Triqueta held the cavalry back, waiting for the chance to get in behind the push of the attackers… if it came…

Then she heard the drums. Somewhere she could hear the Bard’s voice, a jarring arrhythmic disruption that was hard on her ears, but was making the stamping slacken, confused. The drummers hammered out a loud and obvious tattoo, a second.

She remembered what Mostak had said about the drumming, just as the pressure of the attackers slowed. Whatever the order had been, the enemy had understood and anticipated it.

And then the big kettledrum hit a single bass note. It echoed from the walls as if Tusien would ripple and fall. And the shieldwall abruptly shifted formation – from the long flat line of the wall itself into an arrowhead, the strongest warrior at the point and every shield locked behind his, slanting backwards towards the flanks.

At the edges of the formation, the shieldmen had suddenly pulled back and the attackers staggered, bereft of resistance. At the formation’s point, the warriors leaned hard into the heavy man at the very front and they pushed forwards, aggressive and shouting, moving faster and faster as they gained ground.

Behind them, the skirmishers came to clean up the edges.

Belatedly realising their mistake, the attackers faltered, tried to react but they were confused and too slow – their line was cut clean in half and each half spun sideways, its back to the incoming skirmishers.

Triq wasted no time. Her war cry loud in her throat and ears, she slung her bow, drew her blades and hit them clean in the back, riding them down – warrior and monster and non-combatant alike.

By the Gods, she was beginning to believe that they might even win this…

And then she saw what was coming.

* * *

Watching from the hilltop, Rhan knew it the moment it manifested.

It shivered his skin and his soul. Its presence was in the Powerflux itself, in the light and the air. Even as it sparked into being, it was lust and energy and rage. It was growing by the moment, and by every God it was
moving.

No one on the hilltop had a hope in the rhez of facing this thing. It would char them all to a smoking pile of ash and hopelessness.

Samiel’s bollocks.

Scared and angry, Rhan pushed past his drummer, his message-bearer. He shouted for Mostak, abandoning his post to shove his way through to the command tent. They could discipline him later, if anyone lived that long.

Around him, warriors were craning to see.

“What the rhez is that?”

“Do you see it?”

“Too much of the good stuff last night, mate.”

No
, Rhan thought,
you probably didn’t have enough.

Above him, the sun was setting. It stretched the shadows of the walls long down the hillside. But that light –
there
– that wasn’t the sun.

That was the one he could
feel.

The smoulder was distinctive – it rose and it hungered, pulling energy and life from round it, from flux and from flesh. The Kas were building it, fanning its flames, flattering it, offering it the time it needed…

“
No!
”

He found he was shouting, incoherent and livid. He could hear them still, laughing at him, calling to him,
E Rhan…

Fuel for the Kas, fuel for the monster, fuel for this Sical, the rising life of the Gods-almighty fire elemental that was going to burn Tusien and everything in it to the ground.

There was no way he could face this thing.

It ended here.

All of it.

Ash and hopelessness.

His soul raged, deep in his chest. He wanted to shout at them, cry denial and helpless fury, but there was nothing he could do. He didn’t have the strength. Vahl had played him well, and he was beyond shattered – and with all of his brothers behind it…

He wondered if maybe, just maybe, Samiel would take him home after all.

But the Sical was still growing. As high as the sky, clouds now massing around it. The ground under it parched and cracked. He felt it swell and flicker. He could feel the time, the lives that were thinning and faltering, though he could do nothing to stop them. He saw them in flux-flashes – terrified, crying, burning, watching each other stumble and fail. He could hear their voices calling for help, and family.

And then, suddenly, his anger was ablaze like the Sical itself.

He entered the command tent, calling to Mostak, words falling over themselves.

“You’ll need a strike force – the best vets you’ve got. Older warriors, all of them. They’d better be good, or this is over.”

But Mostak was signalling the drummers, shouting warnings, shouting for water, for the reserve to reach and hold the old well. He had his own tactics for the fire-beast.

Rhan could hear them laughing at him.
E Rhan Khavaghakke. You can stop us, all you need is time. You have kine all about you, why do you not use them? Feed, little brother. Sacrifice the few to save the many. Is that not what your “strike force” already is? Feed…

“
No!
”

He threw himself open, yet again, to the surge of the Powerflux. To the sunken Soul of Light ever-lost below the eastern horizon. Like throwing himself in the Ryll, this was a last moment, a gesture of the end.

If he had but one spark of energy left, just enough to find his focus…

He could hear them mocking him.
Ah, the endless melodrama, little brother. Throwing yourself off the edge of this, and into the pit of that – you don’t lose well, do you?
Laughter bubbled, like molten rock.
Your forfeiture is almost complete. Join us, at last. All you need is time…

And then, he could hear the liquid and crystal voice of the Sical, crackling from one horizon to the other…

Hunger, I.

* * *

Triqueta knew what it was – knew as it rose against the winter sky. It was huge, far, far bigger than the one Maugrim had called. This damned thing grew to the size of Tusien’s walls, and still higher. She could feel the heat on her face, blistering. Under her, her mustang snorted and plunged, fighting to flee. Skilled though she was, she was struggling to hold him – and she wasn’t the only one.

In the shieldwall, the warriors had paused to stare, to shout questions – but the incoming force paid the thing no mind. They kept hammering, demented.

The heat grew worse, searing. Triq raised an arm to shield her eyes and the horse backed up, resisting the pressure of her knees and barging hard into the animals behind him. He was sweating, frothing at the mouth.

Another animal lashed a bite at him and a moment later, the assembled cavalry was chaos, the horses barging and kicking. The shieldwall was crumbling in spite of itself and still the Sical was growing.

Orders were shouted, ignored. Drums sounded. Archers shot, but the shafts flashed to ashes and kindling. Triqueta saw the catapults being loaded with buckets of water but knew even before they threw that they’d do no good.

And still, the heat rose.

* * *

Ecko stared at the thing in the sky. All he could see was the flame-beast from Maugrim’s cathedral, only this one was as high as the zenith, as wide as the horizon.

Hunger, I.

Need, I.

The words and the heat made his head spin.

Tell me. Tell me how to burn it down.

It was the option Amal had offered him, the route out, the way home. It was the chance he’d longed for, to fuck Eliza once and for all, to trash the program and protest his freedom, his will and his independence. It was Vahl, it was Maugrim. It was Tarvi. It was lust and flame and—

He blinked, and tore himself away, after-echoes of light leaving coloured flares in his vision. The heat was making him remember something, something about the cathedral, about Maugrim, about…?

About what they’d done last time.

* * *

E Rhan Khavaghakke!

The call was distant now, unreal. But the Powerflux was close and alive, its energy flaring and powerful, right under his skin. No Elementalist could wield more than one element – to open your mind and heart to more than one was suicide, it would char you to a smoking ruin.

But Rhan would have taken all of them and more, if he could.

To focus his attunement, he needed energy – and it came from his fury at himself, at all the mistakes he’d made, and everything he’d been, and lost, and lain down. It was his fury at his brothers, at their cruelty and their games. It was his grief, manifested as pure white anger. It was the Bard’s music, and Calarinde’s touch from the previous evening, giving him the spark he needed to catch light. And it all blazed together, crystallising into something like the purest focus he’d ever known, into an absolute vision of the Powerflux itself.

He could
see
it!

It was everywhere, in everything!

In the sky and in the sun and the shadows; in the ruins and the dead ground and the hillside. It was a crackling mesh of spark and pulse and flame. He could see the elemental souls, the Flux’s anchor points – the Taes volcanoes that housed the Soul of Fire, the white crystal cave in the Khavan Circle, the home of the Soul of Ice. He could feel the pure darkness at the heart of the Kartian culture, that same darkness that lived in Ecko’s black eyes. And he could see the glitter of the water where the Soul of Light had once been cursed.

And he could see something else.

The Monument, a vision or a recollection. The stone below it, like strength; the sky above, like inspiration. And the Flux was there too, flowing element to element across the world.

The force of all things.

Power crackled in his skin. He could feel it now as if he were a node himself and able to throw all of that Gods-might wherever he wished.

Now, my brothers.
His laugh was as wide as the sky.
Face me now.

But they had no fear of his attunement, his light. It was flawed, always had been – Vahl had cursed the Soul of Light and he would never reach it.

Their might would remain unchallenged.

And then… Rhan saw something else.

Something soulless and savage, governed by chaos and passion. It was pure dark, but it was not Kartian, it was something smaller, and closer. It, too, could see the Sical, and it knew no fear.

In a flash like a heartbeat, Rhan realised he saw Ecko – tiny in silhouette against the might of the monster. His rasping shout was pure defiance, and he was throwing something at the fire.

Two things.

Two sealed pottery cases.

Rhan had an instant of utter disbelief:
What?

Two shapes arced into the flame, momentarily silhouetted. Then two detonations rocked the elemental, one after another. They made it flare and scream, begin to eat itself from the inside out.

Fire alchemy!

They
hurt
it, they made it flicker. And then they started it burning even brighter – almost burning through. The whole sky flashed with fire, the horizon blazed glorious.