by Danie Ware
Somewhere in her soul, doubts burrowed. They sent tremors through her slight figure. She needed more wine - needed the warmth and the blur.
So here I am: Amos. A city where I can indulge my every whim, gain anything wealth can buy...
...except ignorance, the world back the way it was.
Triqueta was desert-blooded, short-lived. She celebrated life and lived only for the moment... but now when she needed that celebration, that freedom, that innocence, needed to lose herself in it... she found it flaking through her fingers like soft ash.
Ash.
“My lady?”
She had stopped again. Her hands hurt where her fingernails were curled into her palms, cutting.
“Can’t breathe. Need air,” she murmured. Whoever they were, she pushed past them, shoving into the crowds and the smells and the noise, right through until she reached the outermost wharves, where the fisherboats were tied up and silent. There was room to think out here; the great coast-hugging triremes sat without judgement. The wind was soft and chill.
Triq leaned back against the wooden wall of a wharfside storehouse, still faintly warm from the autumn sun, and closed her eyes.
Damn that daemon bitch Tarvi - she took more than just my physical time.
In a flash of pique, she threw her goblet into the water, watched it shatter the sparking-bright moonlight. It almost collided with an oversized, muscular figure.
She challenged it, her blood rising.
“Hey, you! Watch where you’re walking!”
Elaborate, carved scars glittered where they caught the moons. Her friend Jayr, the girl they’d once dubbed the “Infamous”, grabbed her elbow and steadied her.
“Good thing about that frock,” Jayr said, “makes you an easy person to find.” Her grin was brief. “I didn’t want to leave him, but I had to find you.”
“Nice t’see you too,” Triq said. She didn’t want to see her friend - didn’t want the truth she’d brought or the pain that went with it. But they were Banned, and they were family, and that was all there was to it. “Where we going?”
Jayr snorted. “Where d’you think?”
* * *
It was late, the moons dying on the rocky slopes of the distant Kartiah.
In the dingy interior of a backwater tavern, Triqueta picked up a small pottery cup. She knocked the contents back in one, wanting the burn, welcoming it - but even the harsh spirit wasn’t enough.
Around her, layers of filth belied the bright moonlight outside - this was a place of hard eyes and hard liquor, a place she could come and drink herself, quite deliberately, under the table.
Wordless, Jayr filled her cup again.
“But how...” Triq was slurring. “You and Ress came here looking for answers, for help. How the rhez did he...?” Her elbow tumbled from the tabletop and she narrowly missed dropping her cup altogether. “How’d he end up like that?” Her voice cracked and she didn’t care.
The questions, she knew, had no answers. Triqueta had come downriver as an escort for Ecko, but she’d also come looking for her Banned family, her best friends - and she’d found Jayr changed, older somehow, calmer in spirit.
What had happened to Ress was beyond comprehension.
Madman, frothing and gibbering, a scrabbling figment of his former self. The horror that had crawled over Triqueta’s skin as she’d seen him...
Gods!
She shuddered, downed another cup.
Jayr had told her the tale - how she and Ress had been in the Amos Great Library. She’d told of the paper he’d found, how she’d watched the life and hope and mind just drain from his flesh and gaze, told of her helpless fury at Amos’s Lord. Even going over it again, in the thick, dark air of the tavern, it still made no cursed sense to either of them.
Triqueta emptied the carafe, called for another. While she drank the dismay and the hurt and the guilt to a dull sense of disbelief and a roiling core of anger, she struggled to make it all fit, somehow. To make it fit with the tales of the daemon Kas Vahl Zaxaar, with the blight, with the rumours of hostility to the north - but she was no damned scholar, by the rhez, and all she could think of was the empty look in his eyes, the disfocus of his pupils, the lax wet of his mouth...
The fact that she should’ve come sooner.
Ress had not even known her - he’d looked straight through her, barely noticed she was there. He’d scribbled on the wall, tried to cut himself, pissed his trews, screamed wordless and terrifying. She’d felt like nothing, a phantom; she’d felt like railing at the sky, like shaking Jayr until her teeth cursed-well rattled...
How could he be so broken?
“Dear Gods.” In the thin light from the windows, Triq’s hands were cracked and dry and pale. Her words caught in her throat. She lowered the cup and blinked at it stupidly, her eyes almost as unseeing as Ress’s. “But Jayr. How could you let him...?”
“I didn’t let him.” Jayr seemed oddly subdued, in helplessness or guilt. She leaned forward over the filthy tabletop, her own cup still untouched. “I’ve told you, it was only bits, I could barely read it. It made no sense, time and light and this and that, I don’t even know what it said.”
“Ress taught you to read.” Triqueta blinked, confused.
Jayr glanced about them, lowered her voice. “Lord Nivvy’s done everything she can, but her lot can’t even touch him, they’re worse than hopeless. Unless your clever apothecary friend - Amethea - can pull an esphen out her arse, I don’t know what else to do. He’s screaming crazed, and if I didn’t force feed him, he’d be in the long ditch by now.”
“Gods.” Triqueta’s mouth shook, she put her head in her hands. “Poor Ress. Oh my Gods. I should’ve come sooner, I should’ve -!”
“Something I can help you ladies with?” The male speaker was casual, grinning and masculine, handsome and fully aware of it. His eyes flicked over Triqueta and her unlikely frock, dismissed her, moved to scan the breadth of Jayr’s heavy shoulders and the swell of her breasts under the leather vest she wore. “I’d be only too happy to... lend a hand.”
Jayr eyed him briefly and snorted, not even bothering with a response.
But something in his stance, his arrogance, in the way he’d spoken - or in the way he’d dismissed her - sparked a flash from Triqueta’s liquor-sodden temper.
“And how’s... how’s that your problem?” Drink-addled or not, she could still put a blade in her tone.
The man grinned. One of his back teeth was missing. Still addressing Jayr, he said, “You’re an odd pair, aren’t you? You together?” He met Triqueta’s gaze with a smirk. “Or does this ol’ lady just barter for you?”
Old lady.
The phrase caught, stuck. Around her, the noise of the tavern retreated to a dull buzz and she stared up at the confidently grinning, gap-toothed man. Her face was still streaked with tears, but her grief was rapidly congealing into something else entirely.
“What did you say?” she demanded.
Jayr hadn’t reacted - Triq could only guess the scarred girl hadn’t quite understood the implication. Moving through an odd, unreal fog, her motions unfolding before her eyes as if performed by someone else, Triqueta picked up the pottery carafe of spirit.
It was cold against her itching skin.
The man laughed outright at her. Her age. Her dress.
“Put that down, love.” There was a long terhnwood blade at his belt. “Before you hurt yourself.”
Jayr said, “Triq? What’re you doing?”
Triqueta stood up, swaying. She didn’t know quite what she was going to do, whether she was going to put the carafe down, or smash it into shards on the filthy floor, or slam it in the man’s smug face...
Jayr said, warning, “Triq...”
But the man’s hand had strayed to the blade at his belt. His voice tinged with mockery as he said, “C’mon love. Don’t embarrass yourself, hey?”
The phrase stung like a whip-strike, like a slap across her face. Her grief ig
niting now, burning into furious, white-focus temper, a necessary outrage and outlet, Triqueta dropped the carafe to shatter on the tabletop and slammed the heel of her hand, hard, into the man’s face.
“Fuck you!” Sometimes Ecko’s colourful language had exactly the impact she needed. “I’m losing a friend. What’s your excuse?”
The man rocked back, one hand to his nose, scarlet seeping between his fingers. From around them came the familiar rhythm of shouting and benches scraping, the ripple of impending violence.
“You cursthed bith!” The man’s other hand was drawing his belt-blade - there was no braided, peace-bonding string at this end of the Amos wharf. A moment later, it was in his hand, gleaming dully in the rocklight. The crowd closed round them, whether to watch or participate Triq had no idea.
Come on then. I can still do this... you just watch me...
Then, in a harsh scraping of bench, Jayr stood up.
The noise ground across the room, made people cringe. There was a moment of complete stillness.
Triqueta blinked. Swallowed.
When Syke, Banned commander, had named the girl “Infamous” it had been a jest - a tongue-in-cheek comment on her pit-fighter past. Many a wager had come in its wake - in two returns with the Banned, Jayr had fought just about every soldiery and Range Patrol champion from Amos to the Kartiah Mountains and back.
Now, she filled the room like a shadow, like a bared threat. Her Archipelagan features had an odd, haughty beauty, her scalplock was exotic, her shoulders carved with flat muscle, her Kartian slave-scars shining white - in this tavern, there would be no damned doubt as to what they meant. She was a crossbreed of cultures, exotic and impossible. She folded her arms, said nothing.
She didn’t need to.
The man fell back, garbling an apology, resheathing the blade and pressing his other hand to his nose.
After a few rustles and mutters, the rest of the surrounding drinkers returned to their seats.
Apparently, the show was over.
* * *
Triqueta wiped her bloody knuckles with the silken fabric of her skirt.
Her head was pounding now - the booze-fuelled flare of anger had left her, and she felt empty and cold. She struggled to focus through vision and thought that blurred. Everything swayed, and she felt sick.
Jayr was sitting quietly, her face troubled. Something about her little display had bothered her, but Triq was too sozzled to quite get her head round it.
Jayr said, “We should get back. Don’t like leaving him for long.”
But Triq couldn’t face the wreckage of her friend - not yet, not like this - the thought of it brought a rush of tension to her blood that woke her up faster than a well-placed bucket of water.
She said, managing to enunciate clearly, “Did you ever take him back to the Library?”
“Gods, no. Never want to set foot in the place again. I’d burn it down if I could.”
“Maybe we should look? Maybe we’d find something to -?”
“To make him better?” Jayr gave a short, humourless laugh. “There isn’t anything. We should just put him the rhez out of his misery.”
Triq blinked. “You said you were fighting to keep him alive.”
“I am. But what’s the point?” The girl bit at her nails, spat out tiny, bitter fragments of white. “He can’t tell us what he saw, he can’t help us fight the bad guys; he can’t wipe his own arse. We’re Banned - we ride free, trade free, no one tells us what to do. If he was a horse -”
“He couldn’t wipe his arse if he was a horse, Jayr.” Triqueta said it with a straight face, but Jayr stared at her as though she was screaming loco.
Then Triq cracked a smile and they both chuckled, a shared warmth and relief that eased the tension. On an obscure impulse, Triqueta gave the younger woman an awkward hug. “You’d never abandon him. You stupid mare.”
Then someone by their table cleared his throat.
Suspecting another idiot, they parted, ready for trouble, but this man was older, thinner, his hair greying and his face weathered by long returns in the sun. He shot furtive glances to either side and bobbed an apology for interrupting.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhear you. You’re Banned? You’ve come from Syke, from Roviarath?”
The last whispering remnant of booze thrilled out of Triqueta’s blood. She was trembling, and had no idea why.
“What’s it to you?” she snapped.
The man glanced round again, then held something out to them.
“I need help. With something. I found this, I...” He swallowed. “I’ve come south, from Teale. I found this on the edges of the town, and I wondered if you knew... if you knew what it was.”
Teale was a small, northern outpost of Fhaveon, the Varchinde’s Lord city. It offered the capital a harbour, trade of fish and shell and salt and scrimshaw. It also supervised the growth of much of Fhaveon’s terhnwood crop - the quintessential trade- and craft-material that provided the plains with everything from tools to weapons to jewellery.
The man held out a terhnwood belt-blade, the resin cracked and the fibrous centre somehow swelling, splitting its way free. The wooden grip was smoothed, the leather sheath rotted and moss-grown, the stitching tearing. As he put it on to the table, Jayr said, “What the rhez happened to that?”
Triqueta blinked at it, trying to focus.
“Please.” The man was self-conscious, as though worried they’d think he was loco, send him packing with a bloody nose. “You said about trading, about Roviarath, and I thought... I thought you might know about terhnwood, about...” He let the request hang. Triqueta and Jayr exchanged a baffled glance. “Please - can you just look at it?” He extended a hand, pushed the thing towards them like an appeal.
Jayr picked it up, turned it over looking for a craftsman’s mark.
Triqueta said, “Where did you - ?”
“I told you: Teale. There’s disease there, the harvest’s been poor, grass and terhnwood both. There were people who went out to the farmlands, to try and help...” The man was shaking. “I found a... a woman. She was asleep, I think. She was all - I don’t know - overgrown, like the roots had pulled her down. She... was carrying that.”
“What?” Triqueta stared at the shuddering man. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head, wrung his hands one over the other.
“I don’t know. I wanted to find someone who’d help me, who’d understand.”
“This is messed right up.” Jayr had taken the little blade from its sheath and was holding it up to the dirty moonlight that filtered through the shutters, turning it this way and that. “You ever seen terhnwood do this?”
The man shrugged, helpless to explain. “I only found it, I don’t know what it means.”
“Nope,” Triqueta said. There was an odd shiver in her skin. She eyed the blade for a moment, then said, with a crawl of nervousness, “It’s craftmarked.”
Jayr glanced at the mark and shook her head. The man looked from one face to the other and shrugged, wordlessly pleading.
“Not a clue,” Jayr said. “But whatever it is, I’m betting Nivvy can tell us the full story.”
* * *
Roderick the Bard had once described Amos to Ecko as the “City of Darkness”.
Hell, every fantasyscape had to have one.
This one, though, wasn’t populated by a load of Gothic architecture and tentacled dominatrices in unlikely armour. Like Vanksraat, like Roviarath, the other cities he’d seen, Amos was a seethe of muck and noise and people and poverty, ludicrously tiny compared to the vast conurbations of home.
Now Ecko was here, though, walking the city’s streets and looking up at her above him, he found that she’d grown and swallowed him whole, sucked him down into the warm and dirty closeness of her belly.
Amos was the closest thing he’d seen to proper urban sprawl: she was twisted and dissolute, rotted and ancient, archaic and ornate. She was tumbledown in some places, ove
rgrown in others. The buildings were tall and cramped and irregular, they seemed to lean upon one another as though wearied by time. The streets were narrow and meandering, the alleyways seemed woven one through another as if they’d been born in a tangle -twisted and wrong - as if they’d never had builders, had never been new or full of hope.
Poetry? Ecko administered himself a mental slap. Okay, now I’ve really lost the plot...
It kinda piqued him that he was at home here. As he turned around to look up at the narrow buildings over him, at the endless statues and sculptures, at the random artworks that seemed to lurk at every corner, loom in every archway, he wondered what Eliza was playing at.
But hell, after five days on a fucking boat and a view of nothing but patchwork grass, Ecko would’ve been happy to get off the water at Westminster Bridge, security and all. Some huge part of his rotted soul wanted to just go, to say “fuck it all” and piss off through the streets, leave everything and climb up the side of the nearest building, run the rooftops, free...
Sod Eliza and her fucking cunning plan, he’d stay here, stay Ecko...
Like, who the hell’d miss him if he really ran away?
Yeah, an’ I bet I don’t have even that choice...
A crumpled harvest-banner caught for a moment on a stone, then whirled away in the rush-flood of rainwater.
People splashed, cursing, down the main thoroughfare behind him.
Damn you, Eliza, damn you an’ your fucking program. I’m not gonna just give in to this.
He took Lugan’s lighter - now refilled from Maugrim’s stash - out of a pouch and began to spin it over the backs of his knuckles like a road-trickster’s coin. Raindrops hit it and shattered. The lighter was too heavy to move with any skill, and when it fell, his targeters sparked and crossed and he grabbed it before it hit the cobbles.
He was caught between impossibilities - knowing he had to capitulate, but refusing to be led. Knowing he cared about his friends, but refusing to let them touch or weaken him. He was fucked, whichever way he chose.