Ecko Rising (60 page)

The table was still, captivated. Maugrim could do anything he wanted with them.

Except Kale.

In the freeze-frame, in the centre of the tableau, the cook came out of his seat, hands on the table. His voice was a concentrated husk of withheld fury as he said, “And what about me?” His grin was widening as though his mouth were full of knives. “What welcome do you have for me?”

The swing of the light paused.

Kale’s hands clenched on the tabletop. With a splintering of wood, there were claws embedded in its surface, dragging savage chunks out of its solidity. He was trembling, crouching, hair rippling across his skin – slowly, so slowly.

Maugrim stared. “You...” he said. “You’re new here. I don’t know you...”

“You will.”

And the beast was over the table in a scatter of mugs, a scrabble of talons, a bubbling snarl of pure hate. Burning, asymmetrical green eyes fixed on the light; claws ripped it from Maugrim’s gasp. Startled, the Elementalist held his hands up to shield his face and his chair went over backwards, crashing to the floor. In a moment, the beast pounced after him, lashing tail, dripping teeth, slavering death.

Roderick shouted, “Kale,
no
!”

Around him, the others were shaking themselves to consciousness, questions, shock.
What had he done to them?

Sera bellowed, “Redlock! He fears white-metal!”

Snarling and struggling came from under the table. Maugrim was swearing.

“Get your bloody animal off me!”

“Don’t hurt him!” Karine cried. “Not if you can help it!”

In the midst of the commotion, Ecko hadn’t moved.

Redlock skidded round the table’s end, grabbed the beast by the scruff and dragged it back from worrying at Maugrim’s bloodied throat. As it growled and thrashed, tail sending scattered mugs in all directions, he held one axe right under its nose.

“Kale. I don’t want to hurt you. Back off.”

The beast turned to him and snarled.

“Back off!” He thumped its nose with the back of the axe. It slashed randomly at him, rear claws raking the floor. “Now!”

“Kale.” The Bard’s voice was steady, strong. “You have never hurt a guest. Please – not even this one. His blood is not worth your soul.”

“Now!”

With a shudder that seemed to wrench flesh from bone, the beast was gone.

And Kale the cook was falling back, blood across his mouth and chin, pushing the axe from his face. His was white, shaking violently.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He wiped his face, looked at his hands, grimaced. “Sorry about that... I guess he annoyed me...”

“No shit.” Redlock hadn’t put the axe away. “You calm now?”

“Yes, I...” Still wiping, spitting, he scrambled backwards from where Maugrim lay, blood soaking his chest. “Yes. Yes.” He started to scratch like a man infected.

Karine was by him. “It’s all right, it’s all right. It’s over.”

“It is indeed.” In an unconscious parody, Roderick placed one foot on Maugrim’s chest. He said bleakly, “Tell me about Phylos.”

Ecko muttered, “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”

Maugrim spat blood, blood stained his teeth and ran from his throat in rivulets, soaking the sawdust, staining the floor.

Roderick’s voice was cold steel. “Tell me, Ralph, or I shall throw you in the midden and leave you to die.”

“You pick a fine time to find your balls, Rick.” Maugrim laughed bloody bubbles.

Ecko said, “This isn’t fucking real.”

The Bard’s voice slashed back from the walls.
“Tell me about Phylos!”

“I don’t know, guv. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“Enough head games. Tell me!”

Head games.

The phrase crystallised Ecko’s fury like the shine of the Sical itself.

Head games.

The final trick: the final test.

Profile.

This fucker was Eliza made manifest:
Maugrim
was his in-situ shrink. Rummaging around in Ecko’s head, building lock-ups like familiarity, loosing fire-beasties that touched him to the very soul... playing hypno-the-rapist with a fucking hexidecimal pocket watch...

Head games. All of it. Fucking head games.

In the echoes of Roderick’s anger, Ecko felt the relief of the fiction closing back in about him – and this time, he took refuge in it. He needed it and it made sense to him.

He’d started in a teleporting tavern, for chrissakes. He’d gone down a dungeon and splatted a Big McNasty. He was a bit short on the treasure front, but he had saved the girl. Of
course
it was a fucking program – it had to be – who the hell did this asshole think he was kidding?

Yeah, I got this now.

He rounded on Maugrim, on the Bard. “All right, fuckwit, that’s it. You’ve seen my profile? You so know I don’t like having people fuck with my
head.
” He stood to his full height, looked down at the still-defiant Maugrim with his head cocked sideways, his teeth bared. “Nice try with the pocket watch routine.”

Around him, the others were tense, watching him.

“You know what? I
am
insane. I’m a pyrophile and a madman and a fucking megalomaniac. And Eliza designed a whole Virtual Rorschach just for me. And you? Are just a figment of her code, of my imagination. And you know what that means?

Maugrim was laughing at him.

“You came back to fuck us up – hand us over. You filthy bag of shit.”

Ecko jumped at him, adrenals kicking, faster than the taproom could react. He was on the floor, his hands were wrapped in the front of Maugrim’s cut down, the smooth slide of long-oiled denim under his fingers.

“That means I don’t have a conscience.” His grin was unholy. “It means I can do anything the fuck I want to you. It means I can peel off your skin an inch at a time – you wanna know what that feels like? It means I can cover you in burns, let them heal, and then burn you all over again. It means I can melt your flesh into a blistered puddle on the floor. It means –”

“Ecko.” The Bard’s eyebrows were almost comical. “Please.”

“It means you’re fucked. That’s what it means.” His grin was jaunty. “Now, I think the man had a question?”

Maugrim was trying to back away from Ecko’s grip. His defiance was fading, there was fear growing in his gaze, his expression.

He said, “You wouldn’t dare. I’m not afraid of you!”

“That,” Roderick commented, “may be a mistake.”

Maugrim squirmed, tried to get away from the Bard’s foot, Ecko’s fists. He was shouting now, shouting up at the ring of faces that surrounded him.

“I’m telling you nothing! Nothing, you hear me! I was told that the world was mine – that I could save it, that all I had to do –”

His speech cut suddenly dead. He gagged, his eyes bulging, his hands flailing. His body jacked, his feet hammered the floor, drumming a tattoo that could only mean one thing.

Ecko said, “Well, shit.”

He sat back. The Bard moved his foot.

On the floor of the tavern, Maugrim was frothing like a rabies victim, foaming at his mouth, blood leaking from his ears. His eyes were filled with darkness, his body jerking manically from side to side. A final, thin scream came from his throat.

Ecko stood up, wiped his hands on his cloak.

Karine said, pointedly, “The mop’s in the kitchen.”

And Roderick swore with more viciousness than Ecko had ever heard.

* * *

In the faint, pale glimmer of the pre-dawn, a tail of smoke rose from The Wanderer’s chimney.

And a corpse, foam flecked and bloodied, lay on a fallen stone altar.

From their collective refuge on the henge’s bank, they could see the glow of The Wanderer and, beside it, the rock upon which Maugrim had been laid. Watching him to ensure that he didn’t jump back to life, or rise as a beastie, or anything else, Ecko was mentally totalling his points on the sanity scoreboard – wondering what Collator would have to say for itself.

Success of scenario: 53.78%.
Could do better.

But hell, he was still Ecko. Whatever Eliza had wanted to do to his personality, his code of ethics, what
ever
-the-fuck her brief had been... he’d beaten it. He was himself, unchanged.

Wasn’t he?

For a moment, he saw Pareus, burning. He saw the warm windows of The Wanderer, and the light of the love of its staff. Redlock’s courage and Triqueta’s vibrant life. Kale’s pain and his fight for his soul.

I’m s’posed to think this shit is real?

I’m supposed to think it’s not?

It means I don’t have a conscience. It means I can do anything I want...

In the moonlight, he could see Amethea’s face, beside him on the bank. He had no idea what she’d been through, but she too, had bravery he couldn’t even find words for.

And somewhere in the back of his head he knew that they had touched him. All of them.

No matter how he tried to deny it.

He wondered if that meant that Eliza was winning.

Then a tremor in the ground made him start.

He shifted, glanced at Redlock beside him on the bank. The axeman was frowning, scrabbling to his feet, flicking weapons into hands – looking for the threat. Amethea stared round her, wild-eyed.

Triqueta said, “There! Oh my Gods!”

Below them, as Maugrim’s seeping blood finally touched the soil, the stones of the Monument were shifting, settling. On his feet now, Ecko spun his telescopics. He could see the ground was slipping, concave, crumbling... Slowly, the great, grey stones were sinking, like flooded barges drowning in the soil.

And so was the tavern.

“Roderick! Shit, Roderick!”

From far below them, there was a distant, ominous rumble. The ground shook. They could only watch as the stone bearing Maugrim’s corpse upended like the fucking
Titanic
and was gone, the soil round it falling away. It was sliding into nothing, spilling the body and tumbling free into capacitor-stone and the ruined cathedral, far, far below.

From where it fell, cracks grew through the ground, reached like hands for the walls of The Wanderer. Another stone hung over the limit, teetered, and was gone.

For a second, Ecko was poised to race down the bank, but Redlock’s hand on his arm held him. Aghast, they could only watch.

Triq said, hushed, “Did we just do that?”

The tavern garden was hazy, slued. It twisted sideways in the soft grey light, as if to follow some invisible magnetism in the fallen stones. It shook, the stone embedded in the front wall sank without trace, a black maw remaining to suck at the tavern’s life.

He could see – just – Roderick throwing open the door, the Bard was shouting but his voice was snatched away by the brain-fucking, plughole twist of The Wanderer’s movement. Kale was in the garden itself, and Sera and Karine stared out of the windows.

“What in the name of the Gods?” Amethea had her hands over her mouth.

With a scrabble, they were all on their feet, grabbing each other and staring.

“The whole world’s gone loco,” Redlock said.

With a rumble, the entire Monument gave way, grass and soil and stones plummeting gracefully into a huge, yawning darkness.

And The Wanderer was gone, white faces and screaming and horror, downwards into the dark.

“Fuck,” Ecko said.

EPILOGUE
_{LUGAN’S OFFICE, LONDON}

Her name was Tarquinne Magdalene Gabriel. Her friends called her “Maggie”, her employees called her Ma’am. Pilgrim had called her a miracle.

Like her brother, she was extremely bright, afraid of very little and strongly individualistic – unlike her brother, she was worth in excess of three hundred million eurobucks.

She was twenty-eight years of age and one of the greatest financial minds of her generation.

So they said, anyhow.

Lugan could see Ecko in the woman that paced, agitated, across the stained ferrocrete floor of his office – hints of his restlessness, his face shape, his mannerisms and speech. Ms Gabriel was not beautiful – she was a little too thin, a little too chill. But her skin was like porcelain, her hair flawless and her overlarge brown eyes hinted at a familiar fanaticism. She had poise, she was difficult to ignore.

And she was already annoying the shit out of him.

Ms Hotshot Gabriel eyed the grubby glass of the dividing wall, and the workshop beyond, with disdain.

“Beer?” Lugan asked her, not bothering to mask his sarcasm. “Cuppa tea?”

The tan coat she wore was real leather, kevlar reinforced. He had bikes worth less.

“I want my brother, Mr Eastermann.” She paused in front of the crouching, glowering desk, arms folded.

“An’ I’ve told ya, I dunno where ’e is.” Lugan leaned right back in his chair. He took a drag on his dog-end, squinting at her through the smoke. “Don’t let the door ’it you in the arse on the way out.”

Tarquinne leaned one soft and delicate hand on the desktop and smiled. “Tam vanished, Mr Eastermann. He was working for you. You either know where he is – or you need to find him. Kindly don’t try and intimidate me.”

He pushed the chair onto its back legs. It creaked.

“He’s the Ecko, vanishin’ is what ’e does best.” Smoke curled free with the words. “This isn’t your fuckin’ boardroom, luv, and I get cranky takin’
orders.
Whether you’re ’is sister or you ain’t – you can get the fuck out my face.”

Close by, bike engines coughed into life, slammed down the gears as they roared away. The blue light of a hoverdrone shone briefly through the window then was gone.

Tarquinne pulled a colour-washed titanium needle from an inside pocket.

“One hundred thousand eurodollars, Mr Eastermann. Half now, half when I have my brother.”

Lugan snorted. “Fuckin’ suit. You’re lucky I don’t break both your –”

“I need you to do a job for me.” Tarquinne said. “And I ask you to bear something in mind. If you don’t find my brother, Mr Eastermann, and someone else does, I’ll hold you responsible for anything that... may fall into the wrong hands.”