Ecko Rising (54 page)

He
was
a fucking hero.

One foot, a powered kick that sent the first shambling attacker staggering backwards, its chest cracked like the rotting stonework of the walls. His own shout echoed back to him. He crouched, his fists before his chest and face, switched feet and kicked again, his targeters leading him, plotting trajectory and weak point. His blood sang with oxygen. A second impact, a second stone critter halted in its tracks – and it simply crumbled, a rumble of rubble crashing to the floor.

With a spin, he took out a third, a lashing piston kick that dropped it, crashing backwards and shattering into pieces.

They came on, closing around him, almost closer than he could take out – but he was on fire. One foot struck under the chin of a fourth and took its stone head clean off its shoulders.

Their eyes glowed sullen, they were walling him in, reaching for him with pitted grey hands – they ground as they moved, stone zombies from a forgotten graveyard. A savage spin-kick took out a fifth, axed back for a sixth. The rubble was building round him.

You see me now, Eliza? Huh?

He had
so
been waiting for this.

* * *

At the cathedral’s heart, still trapped by the brazier, the Sical raged livid – imprisoned and furious. It spoke now, crying out in its own liquid-and-crystal tongue, but it could not get free.

Beside it, Redlock and Maugrim fought back and forth, savage and desperate.

Amethea had denied the elemental the last of its fuel. She was weak, battered, burned and bloodless – but she was on her feet, and the stone resolution in her heart was at last set. No more fear.

Beside her, the Banned woman was arrow nocked, guarding her charge, but watching Redlock for an opening, watching the shadow thing – whatever it was – spinning like a daemon in the midst of the incoming shamblers.

Stone splintered and shattered as it struck. It had a grace and fighting style she’d never seen – its feet slammed like weapons and the shamblers exploded into dust.

She had dreamed about it – black eyed and fierce.

“Thank you,” she said, belatedly. Stupid, unnecessary, inadequate. “Feren, did he – ?”

“He died – but he found us first. He was braver than I’ve ever seen. I’m Triqueta.” She gave a weary grin. “I’m no apothecary, but I did nab this off the girl that was.”

Died.
Amethea was numb: there was an odd hollow where her grief should have been.

She stared at the pouch, scattering contents across the blood-spiral stone.

And in it, at last, after everything: the taer. The pollen they’d left Xenok to find.

Something in her heart found it funny, bitter, outrageous. She was laughing, hurting, crying – Feren was dead, but Redlock was here. The nightmare was over.

Relief choked her. It was so long unlooked for – and it fought like a daemon almost within her reach.

Triqueta thumped her shoulder gently, awkwardly affectionate. Amethea smiled, striving for control – but then her eyes were drawn to the dark length of the stalactite, slithering still towards the fire, striving to complete the conduit.

She had started this. Her inability to resist Maugrim’s charm had ended in this madness, in this rising promise of destruction.

“We have to stop this,” she said. Redlock and Maugrim were fighting, fighting. The Sical’s blaze was roasting hot. “
I
have to stop it.”

I started it.

Triqueta rubbed the stone in her cheek against her shoulder – easing an itch.

“Then you’re going to need a really big bucket of water.”

* * *

Maugrim danced his chain, battering Redlock backwards as the warrior tried to regain the control of the fight.

Keeping track of the chain-ends was pure instinct: he didn’t see them, just reacted. Redlock was dodging, dancing and lunging, the call of his blood pounding in his ears, his focus as sharp as a knife. He was backing, aware of the hollows of the sarcophagi behind him, but making Maugrim move in the hope of tearing his wound. A dark stain spread down the Elementalist’s odd garments.

Redlock saw his opportunity. He dropped the axes, dove between the chain-ends, seized its centre and pushed Maugrim backwards. A foot around the back of his ankle, and he fell, cracking his head on the stone.

* * *

Redlock was on top of him, the taut stretch of the chain across his throat. The warrior’s shattered face was gruesome, his brown eyes held no mercy. He was as much stone as the cathedral’s walls around him, as the stalagmite pillar that held the blaze of the Sical’s prison.

Maugrim fought to breathe as his vision blackened. He fought to call aloud, to his mentor and protector, his teacher and rescuer.

Vahl! Vahl! Help me!

He had known all along that the daemon wouldn’t tolerate failure.

* * *

Ecko was being swamped.

Stone hands tore at his cloak, his flesh, his face. They pressed into him, grabbing for his limbs, cadaverous stone faces and eyes of the Sical’s fire. He dropped a circular, sweeping kick, took two of them off their feet, but the press came on, stamping the fallen into fragments and dust.

They were too close packed, he couldn’t breakroll through them to change position. He lashed a low kick, broke the base of another and sent it toppling backwards – but the press behind it was too close, it didn’t fall. It teetered, rocked, and then smashed downwards towards him.

He slammed himself sideways – it missed, crashed into pieces.

But he was too close now. Hands reached for his shoulders and gripped him, grinding into his reinforced skin, into his collarbone. Fingers wound round his upper arms, cutting off the bloodflow, crushing muscle painfully against bone.

He still had his feet – in front of him, the creatures broke like pottery, but there were too many of them.

And they were pulling him down.

* * *

Redlock pushed down on the chain with a strength born of anger and exhaustion, focus and fury, pushed until Maugrim stopped struggling, pushed until his face blackened, until his tongue swelled from his lips and his eyes bulged with horror. Then he let go and stood, the adrenaline still pounding, his chest heaving, his sight dazed and scarlet. There were tears of anger running down his face, sweat sheeting his body, but he did not care. He picked up the axes and the chain, and looked up at the huge might of the Sical.

It didn’t care that Maugrim lay twisted. It was reaching for the cavern roof, for the twist of dark rock that stretched down towards it. Beside it, shadows against its flame, Triqueta defended the injured teacher. The elemental paid them no attention – perhaps they were all too small for it to notice.

He had no way to face that thing, no weapons to touch it.

Slinging both axes and spinning the chain for momentum, he ran the stone tightrope between the open sarcophagi and raced for the stone wall that was closing round Ecko.

* * *

They were clawing at him now, sharp stone fingers ripping his skin. Their silence was eerie. He kicked and thrashed, but he was held down like a scrawny street kid by a bunch of gangland bullies. He was yowling abuse, had no idea what he was saying – could Eliza see this? Was this how this fucking fiasco would end – shredded by a bunch of animate fucking
statues
?

Then there was a ripple of impact, a harsh ringing of metal on stone. He could hear Redlock swearing vengeance and warfare. Behind him, the claws slackened.

Again. They swayed at the blow, their attention turning from him.

With a twist and a shove, a furious flailing of feet, he was free. Shreds of his flesh clung to their fingers, blood slid over his skin.

Fuckers.

For a moment, he was on his back on the stone, doing the fucking dying fly, then he flipped himself to his feet and lashed a kick at the closest shambler.

The hard
jang
of metal rang again. The things staggered at the impact.

He heard the axeman shout, “Ecko!”

“Still breathing!” He spun back. One kick, another, repeated and savage, against the press of stone that separated him from Redlock’s vicious, slamming, chain onslaught.

He saw the axeman spin the chain over his head – once, twice – then crash it into them full force.

They shattered like glass under the impact, pulverised, fucking
dust.

There was a gap – his targeters didn’t need to tell him. He was through it like a rat.

And they were still coming, ranks of them.

“I won’t stop them all!” Redlock was shouting. “We have to get out of here!”

Amethea shouted back at him, “We have to stop the Sical!”

“With what?” Ecko was shaking now, the comedown was hitting him and he felt sick, weak. The shamblers were still coming, there seemed no end to their silent, stone determination.

“We stop them now,” Triqueta said. “Or they’ll tear Roviarath to the ground. Everything dies!”

Maugrim lay sprawled, eyes bulbous and grotesque. He stared sightless up at the Sical as though shocked by its power.

Feed, I!

“Oh my Goddess,” Amethea said. “Look.”

Blood had seeped, dark and slow, from the axe wound in Maugrim’s belly.

Where the lids of sarchopagi had lifted, they’d left the very inside of the spiral intact – the closest point to the brazier, the platform upon which Redlock and Maugrim had been fighting.

Maugrim’s blood had spilled upon it, it spiralled where Amethea’s had done, mingling with hers.

And the Sical grew bigger.

* * *

For a moment, the horror of the mistake held them all completely still.

Around them, the shamblers advanced. Before them the elemental reached for the surface, for the air and the sky.

Its crystal celebration chimed in their heads – Roviarath would burn, and with it, the rest of the grass.

Fuck
, Ecko thought.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!

He was out of options. What the hell did he do, chuck a fucking blanket on it?

Chuck...

The pressure in his webbing-pouch gave him the answer.

And he started to laugh.

* * *

Amethea looked at the dark jester, chilled by the demented cackle of its humour. She was barely keeping her feet – Triqueta’s taer had sealed the wound in her gut, but it was a patch, she could feel the blackness on the edges of her vision, just waiting to crowd in and close over her.

Maugrim was dead. Throttled, broken. She should feel relief, she should be celebrating, kicking his swollen-faced corpse and spitting on his memory.

But the creature he – they – had set in motion was rising like the sun.

She watched as the lean, dark-mottled figure unclipped something from a strange belt.

“Guys?” he said. “Remember this?”

“What...?”

The question was drowned out by Triqueta’s “Oh
shit
...!”

And he threw the pouch on the fire.

* * *

The initial detonation tore through the building.

Walls rocked, masonry tumbled and smashed. The first ranks of the stone warriors were blasted backwards and shattered, scattering their followers with dust.

“With me,” Redlock roared. “Run!”

The pomegranate grenades blasted open in every direction, one after another, each one filling the Sical’s form with sparks and scattering pottery shards and hot coals to the bloodied, spiral floor.

But then the brazier started to rumble, the pillars of the stalagmite shook.

The floor quivered. The light in the cavern walls flickered and dimmed. From overhead, a loose stalactite smashed to the floor, then a second.

The writhing of the pillar stopped.

And the Sical shrieked, crystalline and furious – they heard it in the bones behind their ears, in their skin and in their thoughts.

“Yeah,” Ecko shouted, “and fuck you, too!”

The walls about them trembled, dust billowed. The axeman was coughing, coughing, wiping his lips as he ran. Triqueta was half carrying the injured teacher. Ecko, running with them, turned back to see what was happening to the Sical.

It was screaming in his head, livid and shining, brighter, brighter.

Over it, stones were tumbling from the cavern roof. Water was starting to hiss through the gaps, spraying wide like an office failsafe.

“Run, dammit!” Redlock’s hand closed around Ecko’s ripped, skin-shredded arm and dragged him away from the spectacle. “The char path will take us out! That way!”

Ecko stumbled on his cloak hem, but kept moving.

Amethea said, “What did you do? What did you throw...?”

“I was tryin’ to make gunpowder,” he said. “Made a helluva bang.”

The cavern roof juddered, rocks fell and smashed, stone shrapnel slashed outwards.

The great, black capacitor stone cracked from end to end, its lightning shivered and faded.

And the elemental
screamed.

Then the brazier under it collapsed.

The last thing they heard as they fled into the crazed garden was the piercing, mind-shredding shriek of its detonation.

* * *

Dust settled, drifting across a faint breeze.

Water dripped slowly from the cavern roof, a slow rainfall onto devastation – the destroyed remnants of the garden, the shell of the cathedral, now a scattering of low walls, mud and rubble.

The brazier had been drowned, destroyed, fallen stones cracking as they cooled. The Sical was gone.

In the quiet, Maugrim’s first breath was a rip of noise – a rasp of harshness and debris on his ruined throat. His face hurt, his tongue was swollen against his teeth. He swallowed, rubbing a ringed hand over the bruise across his neck.

Then he began to cough, eyes watering, clearing himself of pain and dust. He inhaled another rasping breath, tried to sit up.

“What a waste.”

The voice was male, as familiar to him as his dreams. It was calm, almost scholarly, but the threat was naked and razor-sharp, its edge under his chin.