Ecko Rising (57 page)

Startled, he backed away. “Who are you? Who’s there?”

The crack opened wider, and the light blinded him after days in the gloom. Raising an arm to shield his eyes, he saw that the incoming figure was a soldier, a young woman, pale and furtive.

And the last, cold shock doused him.

They have come for me. No Ecko, no Rhan, no hope.

He found himself shrinking back against the wall, sudden fear robbing him of breath.

It was over.

The after-images of his dreaming broke loose, spilled free and made the hairs on his arms prickle. Faced by the soldier that had come to take him to his death, he was still shaking at fragments unnamed – something about a creature of crystal and fire?

The shattered-window image came again – through it, he could see the waters of the Ryll clearer than he had ever done, clearer than even the Guardians had ever witnessed. It was as though there was something in the way, some conduit or device, something that both enhanced and defended his flawed mortal vision –

A cold, hard object was being pressed into his hand.

Startled, he looked down.

The door had opened enough to let the soldier slide through and pull it almost-closed behind her. She was pressing a weapon into the Bard’s anxious grip, a long, narrow poignard, real white-metal, with a nasty-looking point. For a moment, Roderick blinked at it, baffled – was the city offering him another way out?

A way to end his own life with dignity?

Love of the
Gods...

The first spark of rebellion ignited somewhere in his heart. He said, “No...”

But the soldier was speaking, low and urgent.

“They’re coming for you. Any minute now.” The woman looked back at the door and spoke quickly. “Everything’s changed. Demisarr is dead, Rhan has been cast down. Phylos closes his fist around the city, and around the Varchinde.” She was sweating. “I bear you a message, brought by bretir from the Lord Nivrotar in Amos. She says you must go to her. And she says to tell you, “The world’s fear comes.”

“What?”

Ice shivered through the Bard’s skin. Demisarr, Rhan, Nivrotar. The world’s fear. The Monument, blazing. Ecko. Death in the grass.

It was too much to take in.

But the soldier was panicking now.

“You have to get out of here! They’re coming!”

“How do you know this?” Roderick gripped the woman’s shoulder, striving for stability. “How do you...?”

“I don’t. I’m just a message bearer. The Wanderer’s still here. If you hurry...” The soldier glanced back again as other feet sounded further down the passageway.

“For the Gods’ sakes, get out of here.” The Bard gave her a shove. “I’ll work it out as I go.” His heart was really pounding now – fear and freedom and elation and questions and an almost-understanding that he would reach for as soon as he had a moment in which to think. “And – thank you!”

Thank you... for another chance.

The young woman nodded at him, slid out of the door, and was gone.

They’re coming.

In his mind, perhaps a part of the dream, perhaps just a sharp stab of his own conscience, Roderick heard Ecko’s voice.
You’re a coward and a fucking liar!

The Bard left his boots where they were. They were clumsy and noisy, and he needed to be quiet.

But his hand tightened around the cold metal grip of the poignard.

* * *

The great cliff upon which Fhaveon stood sentinel was a warren of tunnels. Smugglers’ tunnels, miners’ tunnels, tunnels of stealth and opportunity.

Stinking of cold rock and rimed salt and drying wrack, the tunnels’ existence made the Lord city seem hollow, oddly unstable.

Roderick had been down here before, many returns ago, seeking rumours of Swathe – but, like the outcome of his hunt for Kas Vahl Zaxaar upon Rammouthe Island, he had found nothing.

If the legendary Swathe had ever existed, it had been obliterated utterly – down to the last seared and moulding fragments of its residents’ bones.

Demisarr is dead. Rhan has been cast down.

Phylos closes his fist around the city, and around the Varchinde...

Mother of the Gods
, Roderick thought.
What has happened to Fhaveon?

From ahead of him, he could hear voices, a burst of coarse laughter. On chilled but silent feet, he pulled back into a side passage and waited.

He was trembling – cold, dread and anticipation.

Images still haunted him. Fighting and fire. The Great Fayre, burning. Demisarr Valimbor, Lord of Fhaveon, plummeting, screaming into the gorge. Phylos on the clifftop, and an unholy heat that blazed from his skin...

Roderick knew that heat.

The voices were coming closer.

Pulling back as far as he could, the Bard stopped, striving to reach for the memory – to piece it together from the scatter of images that he’d seen, this time so clearly, in the Ryll.

Demisarr’s wife, Valicia, thrown down and struggling, that same heat savage and penetrating and unwelcome.

Dear
Gods.

And the realisation was there – the understanding. Kas Vahl Zaxaar, once Dæl, cast down to the great halls of the Rhez below the world...

...and so,
so
like Rhan.

Vahl Zaxaar was
stirring.

Even as the Bard was incorporating the thought, in the passageway outside, the voices were coming closer. They were soldiers’ voices, relaxed and bantering. One voice broke into ribald laughter, and one of the sets of boots broke away.

The laughing voice said, “Don’t get lost mate. We’ll never find you!”

Never find you...

Oh.

Dear.

Gods.

Never find you!

And the understanding of what he’d seen crystallised, shone brilliant, and shattered with spectacular force.

Of course!

That
was what he’d been missing! All this time, all these many returns of searching! He could still hear the terrible, screaming deaths of his tan upon the grassy hills of Rammouthe, feel the rip and shred of his own wounds and scars, the taint of his hopelessness...

But Vahl Zaxaar was
not there
, he was not
on
Rammouthe!

He never had been.

Fhaveon was built to guard against a tale. A fiction, a saga, a legend so carefully spun to keep her attention from the real game...

To keep Rhan distracted, bored and inattentive...

While the real assault came in, slowly and stealthily, like soft boots in the night.

The boots of the soldier were coming closer.

In that one moment before the soldier was upon him, everything in Roderick’s mind was snapping into place. His clarity was almost making him laugh with the shock of it. It
was
connected – it was
all
connected – by the Gods, he’d been right all along. Everything he’d seen and sought and found – the fires, the creatures, the alchemy, the Elementalism – it had all spun from the same source, it all came, ultimately, from the now-awakening Vahl.

And
Phylos...
!

Again, the image of the Merchant Master on the clifftop. Demisarr, screaming. Valicia, fighting. Rhan, hands bound and falling. The tumultuous splash with which the city’s defender hit the surging white water...

Phylos was the avatar, the harbinger, and he’d insinuated Vahl into Fhaveon like a disease –

“Oi!”

Gods!

Roderick started like a novice – his hand tightening on the blade. The soldier was right there, hand halfway to the drawstring of his breeches as through about to go for a piss.

“You reek! What the rhez...?”

The poignard was very heavy, very cold, and very sharp.

He didn’t have a choice.

The Bard’s free hand went to the soldier’s shoulder, spun him, staggering, into the wall. The other hand inserted the metal blade, cleanly and nearly, up and under the point of his chin.

Straight into his brain.

The man’s eyes widened. They were blue, clear as the dawn sky.

His mouth opened, but he made no sound.

Leaving the poignard where it was, the Bard caught him as he fell and lowered him carefully to the floor.

It was all over in a second, and he felt sick.

But also oddly, strangely elated.

For a moment, Roderick stood there. He contemplated the body – the man was young, small and slight – then he bent to remove the blade and wipe it on the soldier’s wet breeches.

The man had pissed himself as he’d died. Urine and gore seeped across the stone.

Roderick swallowed bile, and stood up.

Somehow, he felt stronger – as though he had defeated some nightmare figment, some lingering taunt of Ecko’s accusation of cowardice...

I had no choice.

And I have no choice now.

Now, he needed to head downwards, west and quickly, away from the sea and towards the rear of the city’s skirts – down to where The Wanderer had last been.

In his mind, he could still feel Vahl Zaxaar’s heat.

Demisarr is dead. Rhan has been cast down.

As the faint flickers of rocklight moved like the monsters of his mind, more fragments were coming to the surface, more realisation and insight. He moved swiftly now, picking up his pace until he was almost running.

As a youth, Roderick had craved knowledge – and the staid rituals of the aged Guardians had bored him. He was restless: he wanted so much more than he was permitted to see.

And, in his adolescence and rebellion, he had done what mortal man was forbidden to do.

He had touched his human flesh to the waters of the Ryll.

In that moment, he had seen the mind of the Goddess, he had seen her fear, her ultimate nightmare, and it had burned a hole in his mind. He knew it was still there, but neither he, nor the world herself, could remember it.

Yet now, in that hole, there was light. There was a broken mirror, a cracked window. A reflection. There was a man, huddled on a floor with his hands wrapped around his head. He was screaming, thin and piteous and desperate.

Roderick knew who he was.

Ress.

The light flashed rainbow, sunshine through spray. And though the broken gaze of the madman, Roderick saw Rhan, pulled under by the raging of the eastern sea. He saw Ecko, fighting in firelight, and the Monument, shining with a ghastly nacre of stolen power. He saw a rising creature of flame and crystal. He saw the Great Fayre, abandoned and sweeping with flame. He saw Demisarr, falling, and he saw Larred Jade, fighting for the heart of the Varchinde.

And he saw the madman on the floor, writhing like a shattered thing, words forced from twisted lips. He was trying to communicate something imperative, trying to tell him...

Ress’s eyes opened. They were disfocused, one pupil larger than the other, but they sought Roderick’s own as if there was no distance, no time. For just a moment, across the Powerflux and the open grass of the Varchinde, there came a shock like a contact, a moment of absolute clarity.

The world’s fear comes!

Roderick stopped, staring at the image even as it faded.

You! You are the mirror that shows me!

But the image was gone, and the hole in his mind contained only the darkness.

He shook his head to clear the after-echoes. Around him, there was sweet, clear air.

He’d come to the end of the tunnels.

And there, ahead of him, was The Wanderer, warm and home and welcome. It stood in silhouette against the sunset, but the lights in its windows glowed – and they outlined the shapes of the soldiery that stood around it.

The world’s fear comes!

Ress of the Banned. Insane. Yet somehow in possession of the ultimate truth, the truth had the Bard had forgotten.

The world’s fear comes!

Kas Vahl Zaxaar was rising, certainly – the blood-red robes of the Merchant Master heralded a new dawn for the Varchinde. But that was not what Ress meant. In his warning cry, Roderick could hear something more.

Her fear – her real fear – was not Vahl Zaxaar.

It was something else.

And it was that something else that Roderick needed to know.

The man with the vision has no power – and the man with the power has no vision.

As the sun sank towards its death on the tips of the far-distant Kartiah, as the shadows grew long and golden across the Varchinde and the last of the daylight made Fhaveon shine like a gem...

...so Roderick the Bard went to reclaim The Wanderer.

* * *

It all happened so quickly.

As he came out into the sun, his bare feet itching on the weed-grown road, so the door of the tavern opened.

As if they had been waiting for him.

Merciless and soundless, a swift, capable shape emerged and broke the neck of the nearest soldier. The body slumped sideways, hit the wall, slid broken to the ground. Behind Sera’s chill efficiency, Karine took up a defensive stance. In her hand was the short wooden cosh that normally lived behind the bar, she was grinning like a hunting bwaeo.

The tan of soldiers never knew what hit them.

The Bard knew Sera’s history, but had never seen him fight – he was tight, controlled and utterly brutal, his precision was as sharp and cold as the finest weapon. Fhaveon-trained skirmishers, three of the soldiers moved towards him, each one wielding a short, one-handed spear and a small buckler, embossed with the device of the city.

But he was ready for them.

His expression calm, Sera moved to anticipate their strike. Rather than let himself be surrounded, he took the fight to the first one – grabbing his spear and pulling him off balance, then bringing his other fist straight into the man’s face. Swiftly reversing the spear, he turned on the second one, parried the first jab, then kicked the outside of the buckler, spinning it wide of the woman’s body. She gasped as the spear-point went clean through her belly.