Ecko Rising (18 page)

He growled at her pleasure, drank it in through his skin. Beneath her, around her, the rock was alive, burning with the heat in the chamber. She was caught between flesh and stone...

As she crested the wave – hips high, back arched, colours flashing through her vision – she was vaguely, oddly, aware of intense sensation in her feet. Maugrim came moments after she did, head back, eyes closed, teeth bared. Then his relieved weight fell forwards on top of her, strangely comforting, secure. For a moment, she rested under him, feeling the stone beneath her slowly cooling.

The thrum faded from her bones.

After a minute, he propped himself upright, looked down at her with an odd smile. He looked – young, almost confused.

She had no idea what to say, what to do – no idea what had just happened. The stone was only warm; it was hard under her shoulder blades.

And her feet...

...her feet felt strange, like she’d been sat on them too long and they’d gone to sleep. She tried to move them – half expecting the pin-ripple of returning feeling...

...and couldn’t.

Sudden alarm pushed the languor from her body. She pushed him back, tried to sit up. There was tearing across her shoulders, a rush of ripping skin and fabric, a sudden flash of pain.

Warm ooze down her spine.

Maugrim tried to roll sideways, but her knee was in his way. She could move her leg, but her blood flow felt cut off mid-calf, her feet were weird, distant – somehow not her own. Her shoulders hurt like she’d shredded her skin; torn bits of her top were stuck to her.

In increasing desperation, she craned to see past Maugrim’s body. She tried, really tried...

They still wouldn’t move.

“Maugrim...?” she said. “My feet...”

“Thea.” The word was almost gentle. Frowning, he sat back on his heels and stared.

Then he started to laugh.

* * *

“Vice!” Massively jubilant, Maugrim raced through the entranceway to the chamber he’d humorously named his “lock-up”. “
Vice!
”

The Kartian had gone – his latest failure was a broken heap, glittering under the rocklights. Once again, the melding of flesh and metal had yielded only death. Maugrim dismissed it and cast his eyes over the bike, the stuff he’d stashed here, waiting.

Now useless.

Aftershocks of pleasure danced sparks in his blood.
How
could he have missed something so obvious?

His old life had gone – the van a blackened carcass of steel. He’d been in the back – heard only the angry squeal of pressure brakes, shouting, the hoverdrone rebroadcasting orders.

Then gunfire. The
spang-spang-spang
of rounds chewing metal.

And the note changing as they penetrated the plating.

He was untouched by enhancement – he’d spent his career treating too many messed-up fashion-icon wannabes. In that split second before the tank went, he’d just had time to wish –

Mind and metal and flesh. He’d been trying to create, to
re
-create...!

Metal’s lifeless.

The intensity of his abandonment, the shuddering, osmotic feedback of pleasure... The alchemical fusion he’d been busting his balls to find wasn’t flesh and metal – it was flesh and
stone.
He wanted to bang his own head into the wall for being so bloody dumb. The time he’d wasted! He wasn’t sure what he’d done – not yet – but he did know the bloody teacher had managed to attune herself to the cycling of Elemental Powerflux, to the south, to fire. She’d managed what only existed in myth... she...

...Exultance. Vast might and passion. Overwhelming sensation – drowning in it. The sheer power of what lay beneath him...!

...had attuned herself to the Powerflux...?

No, that couldn’t be right.

Tightly controlling his thinking, he kicked at an old spray can. It was empty. It skittered across the floor scattering washers as it went.

He had to focus!

Stone. In the midst of her orgasm, her feet had turned to stone.

Maugrim had uncovered the long-forgotten lore – the Elementalists, the priests of the people, were no more, their skills forgotten and abandoned like everything else. A few of them still lurked, way out in the farmlands and the ribbon-towns, but they wielded little more than herb lore and trickery. The Powerflux, the flowing of the elements through the grass and across the world’s surface, once the quintessential lifeblood, revered and trusted, had long since passed into humorous folklore – like fairies.

But he, Maugrim, knew it was there. He knew that he could reach it, and he knew he could channel the sheer glory of what he found.

No, the stone had grown
through
her flesh.

This was the nexus, the Flux’s central point – the plug socket, if you like. Down here, beneath the Monument,
real
elemental energy was tangible: it hummed through the stone, he could taste it in the air. Here, an Elementalist could find and learn what this world hadn’t bothered to remember – how to take that strength and channel it, how to perform miracles.

If he were strong enough to be a living capacitor – to stand the charge that surged in his blood.

With sudden insight, he realised something fundamental.

Metal’s lifeless!

Maugrim was the world’s only Elementalist, as far as he was aware, the only true wielder of this forgotten and unseen might. He could attune himself to the great, electrical web of the Powerflux, the cyclic flow of the four compass-elements that controlled wave and weather and growth and season – the flow and balance of light and darkness, ice and fire. The energy he drew was a rush – heat and chill and lightning and thunderclouds. He’d always thought of the Powerflux like a matrix of taser wires, shocks constantly running from end to end...

But this world was metal-poor, ferrous metal almost non-existent.

As far as he could tell, the Powerflux existed in the very
grass.
Somehow, they were one and the same thing.

He picked up a washer, held it on the tip of one dirt-ingrained index finger. The rocklights gleamed from the surface.

The Powerflux’s energy was constant. It moved continuously between the four compass directions – the anchor points, the elements’ “souls”. In spite of the loss of lore, the knowledge was deep rooted – that everything from sunrise to weather to personal illness was caused by elemental cycling or imbalance.

And so he’d begun to study.

Flesh could harbour energy, like a capacitor – a properly trained Elementalist could attune himself to the Flux and he could, literally, charge himself up. The term “Elementalism” described the pure, raw energy – fire, darkness, light, cold... There were varying degrees of potence and skill that were largely encompassed by the word “focus”. The better your attunement, the more power you could absorb; the better your focus, the more discipline you had when throwing it about.

His eyes went to the rocklight, gleaming smugly in the corner.

Its illumination laughed at him. Like flesh, it was a capacitor – it absorbed and held sunlight, then slowly released it when in darkness.

He couldn’t believe he’d never realised something so simple.

Stone and flesh; flesh and stone. Both capacitor, both conductor.
Metal’s lifeless! His fire
–
his
strength and power! The attunement he had been taught, attunement that no other mortal human had access to –
his
attunement had called the elemental current from the site, through stone and through skin – that bloody teacher had conducted like a gold bar. Somehow, he’d called to the very core of the Powerflux.

And it had answered him.

Amethea had been his fuse – his dead man switch. She’d absorbed and taken the damage of the supercharge he’d summoned.

Saved his arse. Shown him the glaring bloody truth.

Elementalism was emotional – rage and glory like throwing an electrical paddy. Alchemy – putting those elements to scientific use – now that was a different and far more clinical matter. Creations like the centaurs – that took a huge amount of skill and learning.

“Vice!”

The Kartian must’ve heard him – but the chamber remained still.

Maugrim flicked the washer onto the floor.
Tink!
He was planning, thinking, possibilities unfolding. This had been a beginning, a hint of what he could achieve if he focused his energy correctly. He needed to move his workroom closer to the heart of the site, the nexus of the Flux itself. He needed to plug himself in, to understand
exactly
what he’d done.

And he needed a new subject – a conductor, a dead man switch he could afford to sacrifice for the increased might they would bring. There’d been a woman, strange blooded, not bloody Range Patrol. Vice had brought her in – said something about a Kartian half-blood.

He had to recreate the experiment. Once he understood what he’d done, he could to take control. If he could summon that kind of power, he could
electroshock
this complacent, indulgent world into alertness.

And that was what he really wanted, why he had been recruited, why he had been given the centaurs as his guardians, why he had been taught the lore of this world in which he’d found himself...

This world was stagnating, just like his own. It was in stasis; it learned nothing new, had forgotten its own legends. Its population wasn’t growing, either in number or in enlightenment. In short, it had its collective head up its arse. Like a patient in his old life, he needed to make it wake up, change, kick over – that’s what his teacher wanted, why he’d been trained and taught. Why he’d been working so hard to make that timeless vision manifest...

Remembering what the half-Kartian woman had looked like, Maugrim began to grin.

This time, there would be no half measures. He was going to understand this new power he’d awakened – the skill it had brought him. And then he was going to let it blaze across the Varchinde.

* * *

Amethea looked at a pair of stone feet.

They were beautiful, perfect, the most exquisite carved stone feet she’d ever seen.

But they were hers.

She was lost, still trembling with the aftermath of extreme passion. She felt strange, empty, abandoned – not only by Maugrim, but by the stone.

The memory of her exultation was bizarre – frightening.

What had happened?

If she tapped her toe, she could feel it – sort of. She flicked it, then banged it – the sensation was oddly nebulous, like her skin was half numb. Half numb – and gracefully smoothed rock.

If she traced her fingers up the front of her shinbone, she could see where stone crystallised into flesh, where her skin solidified, where the creeping calcification had paused. For a long time, she stared at it, touching it, horrified and morbidly fascinated.

Was it getting worse?

Gradually, she became more aware of herself. She was uncomfortable, damp between her thighs, stiff backed. When she explored her shoulders with her hands, she found she’d – literally – left the top layer of skin from her shoulder blades stuck to the floor.
Part
of the floor.

As though the growth had started, but...

Her fingers found fragments of ripped fabric. Her feet had been – were – bare, but her garments had covered her back. Somehow, they’d got in the way.

Of what?

With an effort, she swallowed a mouthful of horror and tried to sit up straighter.

Okay – that wasn’t so bad. Neither her feet nor her ankles would move, but she could reach the palette and drag it towards her. She could sit on it, easing the pressure on her tailbone and freeing herself of the shredded remains of the ludicrous frock he’d liked.

His hands, tearing it from her, oh dear Gods...

Shaking herself sternly free of the memory, of the rush that came with it, she tore a length of the fabric and tied it round her calf – marking the fusion point. Then she ran her hands over her shoulders to find out how badly she’d torn her skin.

Apothecary, heal yourself.

Who used to say that?

Her hands paused. Again, the sensation that she’d lost something. Closer this time – a bowshot, a sense of grief, a hand gone from hers. A creature, massive and masculine and wrong, screaming insanity in the plainland night.

Mighty stones, fallen and gleaming faintly iridescent, like grandfathers of rocklights.

She struggled to focus; a boy with a shock of orange –

Oh Goddess.

Feren.

Like the stone in her feet, her thoughts were suddenly solid, her memories as certain as pebbles in her hand.

She’d been riding from Vilsara in Xenok, taking her ’prentice to fetch taer from the Monument. They’d been attacked – horses with the bodies of men, beautiful, crazed. Monstrous. Feren had been
shot...

He flew to the moon, sweetheart.

Killed?

There is need of a healer.

As through the creeping stone had driven Maugrim’s fire from her flesh and heart, given her gravity, she focused clearly for the first time. She didn’t know what had happened, but she’d felt consciousness under her –
in
her – skin. Vast, slow, beyond her ken or her comprehension... something had been
awake.

It had driven Maugrim from her body.

And in the crucible it had provided, there was a hardening crystal of focus.

Alert now, determined, her first instinct was to break up the palette, find herself a chisel or lever – but she’d no idea what damage she’d do if she tried to separate her feet from the floor. Systematically, she tried to tense one calf muscle, the other. Move one ankle, the other. Wiggle her toes.

There had to be a way out of this.

She was tensed, watching the door, heart thumping now with adrenaline and purpose. She scanned the room for clothes and kit, almost wanting to pile them up so she’d know where they were. She needed to move. Needed to move
now
!