Ecko Burning

by Danie Ware

  She had done enough.

  * * *

  It had all happened exactly as he had designed it.

  Rage carefully crafted and built, now ignited and channelled into the ash-and-blood streets of the city, where it broke against the walls and tore down the crystal trees. It had been stoked to the point of detonation, and now it had its outlet.

  Above it all, celebrating in its eruption, Phylos stood upon the palace balcony, his red robe blazing and his arms outstretched. Behind him rose the white wall of the Valiembor building, rose the sky, rose the blazing sun; before him, the zig-zag streets of the city roared with fury as though their people had climbed from the very rhez itself.

  Yes. Witness what I have crafted. What I have done!

  In his mind, Phylos could feel Vahl’s presence stronger than it had ever been, massive and exultant. The Count of Time was upon them both, and Phylos had brought the city to exactly where they needed her to be.

  So many returns, scheming. Waiting.

  Fhaveon was in the grip of her own death.

  To his left, Phylos could see the remnant of the central market blazing, filling the air with ash and shrieks and smoke, could see the destruction wrought by the cavalry and the struggling, failing people. The great mosaic was covered with blood and vomit and garbage. Above it, Rakanne’s imperious face stared outwards, insensible, as if she couldn’t find it in her stone heart to care.

  And somewhere, still out of his reach but getting stronger, Vahl was laughing.

  Phylos knew that down there, somewhere loose in the morass, was Ythalla, armed and brutal, her soldiery given leave to do anything they pleased. They had been force-fed with their own might and righteousness, and now they were off their rein, given their freedom. They were savage and gleeful, exalting in their brutality - the death toll was rising, and the injured were left to rot where they lay. Even as Phylos stood, so the mob was shattering under their force - anywhere the people of the city rallied, the soldiers broke them like wooden uprights, burned them and cast them down. Until there was no protest any more, just scattered groups and odd individuals, stumbling and coughing, hoping only to flee with their lives.

  The city was a mass of destruction and any sense of unity or defiance among her people was hunted down and cut out, an infection to be exterminated.

  Vahl’s laughter was as rich as the spilled blood of the people.

  Yes! See what we have brought to pass!

  Phylos wanted his forces to be feared. He wanted the riots to be put down. The contest at the harvest, the arrest of Fletcher Wyll - all of this had brought the city to this moment.

  What we have brought to pass!

  On the edge of the mosaic, where the last of the market burned, there was a gathering growing - the final massing of the city’s people, the rioters that had found themselves so utterly outmatched. They knew they were dead, but they didn’t care, they were fighting fierce, taking on all comers and savagely defending the burning market as if it were a symbol, some icon of their lost livelihoods.

  Phylos shouted his scorn at the pure blue sky.

  And they came to him, Amal’s inhuman fighters - twisting themselves from the very walls, falling free and rising up, monstrosities, creatures of power and beauty, bare-chested and wild-haired, centaurs and mwenar and vialer. They came to smash the last of the resistance and run rampage, deal death through the streets. They bore burning brands and chased and tortured the survivors as if in sport. They assailed the soldiers indiscriminately, trampled any human in their way, dismembered screaming victims. And Phylos let them, watched them, revelled in their strength. He let the chaos reign, let Vahl enjoy the last blaze of the city that had been built solely to defy him.

  The single point of regret - Maugrim had failed and Roviarath still stood firm. But Vahl’s joy was high and Phylos knew that the death of Fhaveon would be enough.

  So many returns of planning.

  And this was perfect.

  Perfect.

  It was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  The final moments were almost upon them. As the chaos became too much for the city to bear, as she teetered on the brink of death, so he would step forth and control the violence. He would free the people, establish his absolute leadership, be hailed as hero and deliverer. He would buy the city’s soul, and wed its legitimacy.

  The Varchinde would belong to the true son of House Valiembor.

  And to the lingering eagerness of Kas Vahl Zaxaar.

  This moment had been so long in the crafting, that he almost did not want it to come to pass, did not know what would fill his life when it had. He stood upon its edge, waiting.

  And below, the city burned.

  24: KAS VAHL ZAXAAR FHAVEON

  The palace seemed immune to the madness, a rock in a blood-sea tossed by storm.

  Upon the balcony, Phylos still stood like a god, his laughter thrown skyward. In his heart, he could feel Vahl’s awareness and glory meshing with his own, feel the creature’s seethe of pleasure.

  He could also feel it rising - it was coming closer.

  Vahl had only ever spared a shred of his awareness for Phylos - the Merchant Master did not know where Vahl was hidden, but had been promised, long ago, that Vahl would come when the Count of Time was ready. When Fhaveon was prepared, when the way was clear, when his place of hiding had outlived its usefulness, then Vahl would manifest in the city and finally win his war.

  He would rule through Phylos’s arm and might.

  Blood Valiembor would be all.

  His heart trembling now with fierce anticipation, Phylos could see Ythalla, riding a man down, the hooves of her heavy chearl hammering him, screaming, into the gore-slick mosaic. She turned the creature, raised her metal blade in circular gesture, commanding her tan of elite cavalry to follow her lead.

  Behind her, a grinning, wild-haired vialer pulled a shrieking lad down to the floor and gutted him, swift as a butcher. Then it stood, arms crossed, and watched its victim thrash in his own intestines until he died.

  But the Merchant Master’s attention was not fully on the fighting below. The images were there, but he barely saw them. Instead, his attention was increasingly turned inwards, towards the tremble in his chest, to the rise of adrenaline in his muscles, to the fulfilment of the bargain he had made so long ago...

  Come to me, he said. Fhaveon is ready and I am waiting for you. Come.

  And he knew that Vahl could hear him.

  * * *

  On the other side of the mosaic, a new knot of resistance had gathered - someone had enough of a voice to rally the loose and panicked people. But somehow, through the scream and the smoke and the clangour, Phylos could see another place, the top of a faraway tower, gargoyles perched with fangs bared at the scene below. There were figures - a small, strange man clasped to a stone table, a woman of the Banned lined with long returns, a man with one eye...

  The vision eddied like smoke on the air. Ythalla’s cavalry exploded through it, shattering the resistance, fragmenting Phylos’s image and blowing it away. He struggled to keep track of where it had gone. One thing he sought, one thing - the man with the eye-patch...

  There! I know you, I can see you!

  Screams of outrage rang somewhere in his head. He heard a chearl bellow as it fell, heard the deep thunderous rumble of the cavalry. And in an odd moment of billowing quiet, he heard the snapping of a single, overstrained terhnwood weapon, a loud retort in the air. The Count of Time slowed round him, and he met the man’s single eye.

  And he could see where the daemon had been hiding.

  * * *

  In the city’s lower streets, the creatures of stone ranged free. Hurt, confused, bewildered, they raged in pain and tore at anything that came close.

  They roared. They slammed through buildings, bringing them down in avalanches of stone. They destroyed the city’s parks and tore down her crystal trees. They ripped the people one from another and limb from limb. When they came across
pockets of resistance, they simply raised their heads and called like the rolling of great rocks down a hillside and more of their kind came, ripping themselves out from the walls.

  Upon one roadway, down in the lowest tiers of the city, a great stone creature faced a block of resistance, a massing of the people who would not fear, would not retreat from the monster that confronted them. Goaded by the viciousness and chaos of the vialer at their flanks, they hurled themselves at the lumbering stone thing with death-wish ferocity - hammering at it with terhnwood weapons that shattered, but each one taking a chip, a chunk, and then finally an arm from the shoulder, causing the thing to stagger, confused, to cry aloud in pain.

  The sound of it shook the very sky.

  It grabbed at them with blunt hands, human and vialer alike, uncaring or unseeing, then it collapsed like a crumbling wall, its almighty roar replaced with a keening like the splitting of stone.

  They swarmed over it, putting out its crystal eyes, and then they surged outwards and upwards towards the heart of the city, leaving the thing behind them, lopsided and blind and broken.

  The incoming vialer, celebratory and indiscriminate, tore it to pieces and laughed as they did so.

  * * *

  “Follow me. Stay close and stay quiet.”

  Tan Commander Mostak was shaky on his feet and clad in only an undershirt, but his courage was severe, cold as stone. He had acquired a short belt-blade from the hospice staff, and he held it hard in his hand like it was a rock for his sanity - the only thing that made sense in a world gone crazed.

  Mael and Selana followed him like errant children. They waited as he opened the side-gate and peered out into a high-walled stone alley, a strip of bright sky above.

  “Clear,” he said softly. “Now, stay with me, and do everything you’re told, without question. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Commander.” The old man and the girl spoke together, both of them too overwhelmed by what spun around them, by what the city had become.

  Somehow!

  Mael desperately wanted to ask him questions, to plug the holes in his own understanding - how had Mostak known that Phylos had killed Demisarr, assaulted Valicia? - but now was not the time. Carefully, his old heart trembling in his chest, he followed the commander out into the alleyway.

  The air was hot, too hot, and it left him breathless.

  Silly old fool. Saravin was shaking his head, grinning through his beard. How do you get yourself into these things?

  Shut up! Mael told the figment firmly. It’s the getting out of it again that’s the problem.

  The smoke was heavier out here; the thick sense of storm that hung tense in the air. Fragments of madness went past them at the alley’s end - tiny frames of life struggling to survive before being swept out of view. Here was a man with a child clutched to his chest, hunched and panicking; here a woman with a woodcutter’s axe, red faced and screaming with fury. Here was a rearing monster, four arms and a bow, laughing at the madness raging round it. Here was an old soldier - Mael flinched at the sight - with a bloodied blade rammed to the hilt in his shoulder.

  Mostak said, “We’ll stick close to the wall, I know how to get from here to the palace kitchens. If you’re a praying man, Brother -”

  “Actually, I’m not -”

  “Fair enough, then. We depend upon ourselves. Let’s go.”

  They came to the alley’s end and paused, afraid of what they might find ahead. Then they slid out along the wall, into the smoke, into the noise, into the blood. Above them, the city’s fabulous carvings snarled, threatened them with ash-stained and helpless teeth. The confusion was incredible; the onslaught of smells terrifying. They passed the dead and the dying, people trampled and abandoned, people looting the fallen, or helping them, or ending their lives with a blade that might mean either mercy or greed. Briefly, Mael thought he saw a face he knew, but it was hooded and gone in a moment.

  He was sweating. He felt sick.

  But they crept on, cautious, and as swift as they dared to be.

  Selana was shaking. He heard her say, “My people...” for the second time, as if she struggled to understand the words.

  “Not now,” Mostak said, with a harshness that could have been compassion. “Do this when you’re safe.”

  She nodded, white-faced. They came to a corner and halted.

  And then they saw the horror.

  * * *

  It wasn’t very big.

  It was belly-low on four clawed feet, a long tail lashing whip-like behind it. Its fur was matted and patchy, carved with old scars, its face was animal and savage, twisted round yellow teeth as long as Mael’s fingers. A bubbling snarl came from deep in its stomach and pink froth fizzed on its jaws.

  Selana drew back, pulling Mael with her.

  Mostak’s hand tightened on his blade.

  As the commander closed, watching the thing, circling slowly, Mael had the oddest impression that the beast was familiar -that he’d drawn it or seen something like it somewhere before. But his old memory was flickering faint and he stared at it, trying to sketch its features in his mind, trying to remember...

  Where had he seen something like this before?

  It crouched, its hind end quivering. As it sprang, Selana squealed though it was nowhere near them, but the commander, even straight from his sick-bed, was far too fast for it.

  It moved like a bweao, low and swift. Mostak moved sideways, turning with a lightning swiftness, cutting round his own back to bite his blade into the thing. Its snarling redoubled and it spun with him, ignoring both Mael and Selana completely. There was something oddly human about its face, its burning eyes - something that fascinated the old scribe. He watched the creature as though he were rifling through every sketch he’d ever done, every patient he’d ever studied, every moment of his past, ’prentice and master and retired market artist.

  Selana clung to his arm. “What is that thing? What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Look at it, you old fool! He didn’t need Saravin to tell him that one.

  Around them, chaos raged. Eddies of smoke curled through the air. Mael could hear screaming, the clatter of hooves. From somewhere else, a tirade of anger in a high female voice.

  In front of him, the beast was on its hind legs, as easy on two feet as it had been on four. It lashed at Mostak with its foreclaws, almost manlike. The commander evaded each slash, drawing the thing forwards as he retreated. Mael wasn’t much of a warrior, but he could see the commander was a calculated fighter - watching and carefully weighing his options. The beast missed its footing, just for a moment, and Mostak took the opening, cutting a slash down the thing’s odd, almost-human face.

  Feet raced behind them. Selana turned, turned back with a shudder, but Mael was intent on the creature with a fascination that bordered on -

  Did it have a mark on it? Some sort of...?

  Dear Gods.

  Just for a moment, he had seen the scarred fur in its shoulder, the matting seeming almost to make a sigil, some sort of craftmark. He wasn’t sure, but -

  The beast had seen him looking.

  Its head suddenly swung, low and lethal and its eyes fixed their smoulder on him, upon Selana. Mostak paused, watching it, waiting to see which way it would go. As it crouched to pounce on the old scribe and the girl, he was after it, blade biting its flank, and again, and again.

  But as it came, Mael could see that the wound in its face was shallower than it had been, that the cuts in its flank were not so much as slowing it down. He backed up, shoved Selana behind him - though what good that was going to do he frankly had no idea.

  The beast watched him, teeth bared.

  Where had he seen something like this before?

  And then, as it sprang, he had a moment of absolute clarity, a flash like it had come from the very Gods themselves. He had seen a beast like this - in the most unlikely of places. He and Saravin had been drinking in The Wanderer, perhaps only a cycle or two before, a
nd it had been in the kitchen...

  He didn’t get time to ponder the significance of this. The beast was moving, faster than a thought, than a whip. Mostak was moving after it. Discarding the blade, the commander had his arms outstretched and his knees forwards. As the beast came at Mael so the commander landed on its back, his fibre-strong arms wrapped about its neck.

  There was a ghastly snapping noise.

  For a moment, the Count of Time seemed to stop. The beast’s eyes were on Mael, Mael was watching it in return, Selana’s hand was to her mouth and the commander was knees first, dragging the creature’s head right back, snapping its back, its neck...

  Then creature and commander hit the stone together, skidded in old blood.

  The light went from the beast’s smouldering eyes, the tension in its body faded.

  And then it began to shimmer, its form twisting in the air.

  As Mostak struggled back to his feet, Mael stared, trying not to be sick, and Selana swore under her breath with more creativity than the old scribe would have given her credit for...

  The creature shimmered and became a normal human man, naked and dirty and wild-haired, lying with his neck broken in the middle of the road.

  And the symbol was still there, its ink tattooed in his shoulder.

  “What...?” Selana began helplessly. “Why...?”

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter,” Mostak said. “Run!”

  Mael ran, but something in his memory made the sketch of that craftmark - it was something he didn’t want to forget.

  They ran through the destruction of the city’s wealth and power, through the collapse of her masonry and the crumbling of everything she had ever been. They saw the vandals gaud the front of Garland House; saw the soldiery slam into the great doors of the High Cathedral, apparently seeking those who had found sanctuary inside.

  They saw Phylos upon his balcony like a blood-fleck, burning in the sunlight. He stood like a daemon manifest, his glory blazing eager.

  As they came at last towards the palace, thanking every God and their own strength that they had made it unscathed, the noise of hooves made them look up.