by Danie Ware
For a second, a fragment of the dream came back to him – the last run he’d done, the one that’d gotten him the info on Grey. How it felt to be that powerful, to have that much skill at his fingertips...
Not like now, stuck out here weaponless and eating mulch, without even a fucking sleeping bag that he actually understood...
He watched the flames, trying to reach for more images, a fragment of home, something familiar. He almost felt like London was waning, getting less real as the plainland around him got more so.
Over him, the sky faded to grey, to deep blue, and at last to silver-accented night. Tarvi was still beside him.
The air became cold. He unrolled the strange bedding, pulled it round his shoulders. He missed London, Lugan; he missed the Bard. Hell, right now, he missed his fucking mom.
Both of them.
Over him, the moons shone insanity – one, silver body swollen, far too low and far too big, lit the plainland to alien freakishness. The other was a crescent, a golden fingernail. Above them, the black sky was completely devoid of stars.
The night noises were all-the-fuck wrong.
“What the hell am I doing out here?” He didn’t even realise he’d said it aloud until Tarvi turned to look at him, face warmed by the fire.
“Huh?”
He didn’t meet her gaze. “Out here. It’s all fucking wrong. Why don’t’cha have any stars?”
“They were cast down by Samiel, Godsfather.” In the night’s stillness, Tarvi’s voice was perfectly serious. “All except one.”
“How fucking literary.” He chuckled. “That’s right up there with your moons being gods, for chrissakes.”
“Of course the moons are Gods.” She laughed at him. “They’re brother and sister. The sagas say they committed a... ah... terrible indiscretion and they gaze in yearning upon one another, only to know it can never be, and so they turn away.”
Faced with her sincerity, her soft skin in the firelight, he lost the ability to be scathing.
“Impossible – and incestuous,” he said. Something about it made him grin. He glanced sideways at her, head tilted. “How’d you know that?”
“I read?” She shrugged. “The yellow moon is named for Samiel’s daughter Calarinde, she who not only tempted her brother, but also lay with the last of the stars – causing him, too, to be cast down. Yet because his crime was one of love, he was condemned only to loneliness – he was sent here, as our guardian and champion. Tales say he walks the mortal world to this day.”
He walks the mortal world...
“Yeah.” Ecko tucked the bedroll closer round his shoulders. “That guy. I gotta bone to pick with him.”
The fire was warm on his face and it left its colours in his skin. He didn’t speak again.
* * *
Ecko watched Tarvi watching the ruin.
She was small, round faced and round figured, though her fitness pressed tight muscle against the fabric of her garments. Her days on the trade-road had sunburned her nose, she scratched at loose skin at its edges.
Her hair was haphazardly tied back, though wisps escaped the leather band and drifted constantly into her face. She blew at them, stirring ash. Ecko stifled a sudden urge to push them back.
You can’t go there and you know it!
Flanking her, the two spearmen were sharp-eyed, covering her back and each other’s.
They ducked beside a wall. Tarvi slipped along its length to peer out...
...and stopped dead, hands gesturing.
Low to the ground, he raced rodent swift to stand almost behind her, crouched upon a fallen crossbeam.
Before them was a small and blasted square, flagstones cracked, buildings seared and crumbling to every side. It was close to the heart of the explosion and even the stone had melted. The ground was still hot, colours spiralled lazily into the darkening air.
Who could do this – what the hell had this kind of power?
On the far side of the square, there was motion.
On a crumbling upper floor, inside a black-edged window. Tarvi held her spear and waited. Ecko hugged what remained of the building sides, slipping round the edges of the destruction.
His telescopics spun, found nothing, spun again. Whatever it was, it was below the level of the windowledge. Blinking, he flicked back to his heatseeker but the thermals of the square defeated him.
He reached the base of the building.
Behind him, Tarvi hadn’t moved. She and the spearmen were crouched in the partial cover of the wall. She was flicking gestures at Pareus. Ecko saw the commander call the patrol to his side. Keeping to cover, they moved to the edge of the square.
Ecko touched his fingertips to the wall.
It was shaking – just enough for his sensitive touch to detect. Its foundations fucked, it was coming down – and whatever was up there was coming down with it.
Hell, he’d take that chance. He’d have to watch his ass – the wall was covered in ash and shit and if he failed to grip, he could bring it down on top of himself...
...but it would be so fucking cool – and she was right there.
With the ubiquitous prayer to the Bogeyman, he went up the wall.
* * *
Pareus skidded to a crouch beside where Tarvi waited.
“Movement,” she said. “Second window from the left. Whatever it was, I haven’t seen it again.”
“You’re sure?”
“There’s something up there.”
“Where’s Ecko?”
Her eloquent shrug made him snort – whatever that Ecko creature was, it was a royal pain in the arse. Skilled, doubtless, but he’d seen Banned with more discipline. Why the rhez he’d been landed with this...
Not the time.
His guys were young, but they knew the drill – they spread out to watch the area.
Pareus crouched with Tarvi, sword bared.
Then, shocking across the burned-out silence, he heard a sky-ripping, high-pitched shriek – a crumble of damaged stonework, a skittering of many claws...
...and a full-throated male scream.
He turned in time to see Rift go down under a mass of slither, a dull gleam of sunset from scales, a grey puff of ash cloud, a shredding of claws and teeth. The spearman scrabbled for a hopeless second – trying to fight a seething mass of them off him – then he tumbled, screaming, thrashing, to the broken stone floor, the flesh literally being stripped from his bones. Charcoaled wood shattered, dark fluid exploded up the wall as he simply vanished, ripped into pieces, flesh from bone.
Tarvi was on her feet, hands over her mouth. Her face white to the lips.
And the ripple of death came onwards.
Magharta. A whole nest of them.
“To me!” he called. They needed no urging, the nine remaining members of his tan were already moving, scrambling over obstacles to where he stood. They reached him in a jostle, wild-eyed and ash blackened – they stank of fear.
But they held shoulder to shoulder, facing out.
The magharta had momentarily paused. Each one was barely the size of his hand, but there was a teeming mass of them, all snarling and tearing at Rift’s shredded remains. Bones rattled against the stonework. Now they came on, undulating like water, flowing over the intervening debris.
They were claws, scrabbling at broken timbers. They were teeth, bared and stained with the flesh of the spearman.
Tarvi was whispering, “Oh my Gods oh my Gods oh my Gods...”
Pareus slapped her in the face.
She blinked at him for a second, staring almost straight through him, then began to breathe again, heavily as if she were about to throw up.
Pareus snapped sharply at her, “Don’t lose it now!”
The magharta came on, swift and implacable. They grinned eyeless like figments, their faces were knife-toothed grins.
Edge shot one shaft, two. He pinned the lead creature, and its companions immediately turned on it, gleefully tearing into its flesh. As th
ey paused, he shot another, and a fourth.
He was starting to panic.
Pareus watched, horrified, as frenzy ensued. The creatures became a roiling knot of scales and sinew and teeth and claws. They screamed as they tore into each other, sky-splitting shrieks that set teeth on edge and made the patrol want to cower, block their ears.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Edge muttered. He was loosing so fast his shafts were going wide, clattering among the wreckage.
“Enough.” Pareus stopped him, hand on his arm. “You’re wasting them – you’ll never make a difference.”
“What do we do?” Edge’s voice was high with terror. “Rift didn’t even see them! We should run – !”
“We’d never make it – not over this ground.”
“Wait,” Tarvi said. She was white faced; her hands shook. “Cover me.”
Pareus gave a sharp nod.
Whatever she was doing – it’d better be fast.
* * *
Ecko heard the inhuman screech, heard the ripping death of the spearman.
Halfway up the wall, hung there like a fucking ornament, he craned back over his own cloaked shoulder to see a running carpet of fang-toothed beasties converging on the terrified patrol.
Behind them, they left the shredded and scattered remains of the poor fucker they’d hit. Some of them were still eating him.
Scrabbling haphazardly down the wall-side, he felt the masonry judder as he moved his weight, but he wasn’t going to hang the fuck about. His feet hit the floor and he was running across the square, stealth-cloak flapping gracelessly behind him.
He heard the wall groan.
And he ran.
It collapsed with a rumble. There was a wash of ash, an exhalation of dust; the ground shook as the wall fell. Ecko kept his feet and didn’t look back.
He saw the archer – loosing hopeless, panicked shots into the midst of a spiralling ouroboros of tearing, ripping creatures, saw him hold his fire as if they stood on the Thin Red fucking Line.
He saw the critters uncurl themselves; turn back to the patrol.
Then he realised what the wall had been hiding...
...as another almighty seethe of them came out the building, and over the crashed masonry at his heels.
* * *
They had time.
Under Pareus’s sharp, steady command, the tan held together. As the magharta feasted on each other, the patrol threw together a barricade – bricks, beams, anything heavy they could drag.
Crouched behind the makeshift, flame-blackened wall, Tarvi threw bags and vials out of her apothecary’s kit.
“I don’t have much,” she said, “but it’s pretty savage.” As the wall grew higher, she scattered drops of liquid over the top – liquid that crystallised on contact with the air.
When the pouch was empty, she drew her belt-blade with a rasp and came to stand by Pareus.
“Ecko’ll come back,” she said. “He will.”
“Of course he will.” Pareus slapped her shoulder.
They both knew he was lying.
* * *
“Holy fucking shit!”
They were fast, flowing over remnants of shattered masonry. Ecko cursed the Bogeyman’s luck for not ensuring the wall had fallen after the fuckers had started running, but didn’t waste breath. His adrenals were fully kicked, the flood of heat and strength and elation slashed a grin across his face, made him turn. He picked up a sizeable lump of stone, flashed his targeters and turned the lead critter into a pink smear.
Its closest buddies paused. Their mistake – a hailstorm of savagely accurate, hard-thrown wreckage and the wave disintegrated into shrieking, boiling cannibalism.
He heard Tarvi, her shout loud across the plaza.
“Ecko! Ecko!”
As he turned, he saw the wave of critters hit the base of the patrol’s shambolic defence wall. Some went through, claws tearing holes in burned timber. He saw the spearmen, clumsy at close range, trying to jab down at the beasties as they flowed up the outside of the debris.
The first one crested the wall, parted its needle teeth and shrieked.
Ecko was still running. He saw the critter begin to sizzle, steam rising into the dust from supercooking flesh. He heard its shriek redouble, saw its scales crisp and flake, its skin slough from its sides. It was steaming from the eye sockets, still shrieking.
Then it shuddered and collapsed, tumbled sideways into the eager fangs of its mates.
Another crested the wall, another. They, too, flash-fried like Lugan’s fucking breakfast... Spearmen jabbed at them, shoving them away even as they burned.
One critter swarmed through a hole, dropped to the ground, another followed it. Another. Ecko watched as a spearman screamed and fell, hands beating at something ripping the calf muscle clean from the back of his leg. The other was in his face, ravening into his eye, its body curling in glee as its teeth tore. He was trying to scream, beat the thing off him, but it carved straight through the bone and into his skull, claws shredding the skin.
For a moment, his heels hammered the ground.
Then he was still.
Round where he’d fallen, there was chaos.
A heaving storm of the creatures fought to reach the downed patrolman, and turned on each other.
Pareus was yelling, his blade was fast, flicking the things from the wall top back into the oncoming slither.
The patrolman shot his last shaft into a creature that tumbled from the top of the wall – but one had got round behind him.
It sank its foreclaws into his leg and its teeth into the back of his knee. He stumbled, fell hard onto the bow and it shattered, splinters hitting his face and hands. The critter was still shredding. The fucking things were like piranhas, all teeth and ravenous, ripping hunger.
Piranhas.
“My tan perished round me. I escaped only because Rhan bore me home.”
Jesus.
With a sudden, flash memory of Roderick’s scar, Ecko went over the barricade.
His targeters flashed, his foot moved. The beast on the archer’s leg was sent smash into the wall behind them – but there were two more, three, four.
They were all over the last patrolman, claws raking huge gashes, teeth pulling chunks of flesh from his face and chest and arms. He flailed, got his hands on one and tried to yank it free but it was claws embedded and ripping out his throat and ear, his blood-matted hair was tangling round its legs.
He was trying to scream – but one was over his mouth, eating its way into his jaw.
Ecko took one long breath.
And exhaled.
The creatures roasted, shrieking, blackened and cracking, crisping scales. Beneath them, the archer gave one, shocked gasp. He inhaled flame and his face was just gone, the flesh of his shoulders cooked under charred wisps of fabric.
Ecko had been dreaming – he remembered...
Tarvi was staring at him, open-mouthed.
But Pareus gave a rallying cry, defiant and enraged. He was bleeding from gashes in his sword arm. As Ecko glanced, he slammed his boot down on another beast, smashing it against the broken stone.
There were too many of them.
Ecko saw another of the patrol go down, screaming, under a welter of sinew and scale. More and more of them were breaching the barricade. His targeters were half blinding him, tracking movement too fast to follow. A spearwoman fell and they were all over her. She struggled to sit up but they flowed up her back and into her hair. He heard her skull crack under the pressure of needle-sharp teeth.
The critters’ shrieks rose to a crescendo. Frenzied, they tore at each other in an effort to reach the prize.
“To me!” Pareus called again, but his patrol had been torn to pieces round him – there was almost no one left to hear his courage.
Ecko slammed a foot down on one, kicked another off the top of the wall – but they were still coming.
If he exhaled again, he’d empty the tanks – his little flamer was n
ever meant to be used...
Fuck!
He snatched a lump of stone from the floor and slammed it down on the wall top, crushing the beasts to a smear.
In answer to Pareus’s cry, one of the shieldmen fell back, came to stand beside the commander, defend them both. Pareus’s flicker-fast blade was clearing the wall before him – between he and Ecko they were holding their side of the defence.
The other remaining shieldman unbuckled his shield and threw it from him, unable to bear the weight of the creatures upon it, claws fastened in the wood. He tried to rally, but they dragged him down, their ecstatic shrieks ripping the sky.
They flowed over him like a scaled death shroud, flashing with teeth and claws.
This is game-the-fuck over, Ecko suddenly realised. Himself, Pareus, Tarvi, the white-faced shieldman... We’re not getting out of this.
For just an instant, he was tempted to let it go. Yeah, so I fucked up, so what? It’s not like it matters. Reboot, let’s go again...
...then one of the critters swarmed under Pareus’s foot and closed on Tarvi; shreds of flesh still caught between its teeth.
She screamed, shrill and furious, as it ran up the front of her leg. Its teeth were bared, it grinned up at her.
Instinctively, the shieldman turned.
And they were on him.
Pareus cried horrified denial as if he’d never been so scared in his life. As his shout rose into the darkening air, the shieldman’s turn spiralled into a delicate slump, down onto to the stone.
The creatures had torn out his lower legs. They flowed upwards as he fell, raking his flesh, tearing muscle from bone, worrying at him like street dogs. Blood slashed the fire-damaged stone.
The shield hit the ground, spun for a moment, and lay still, Fhaveonic device glinting in the setting sun.
Holy shit.
Ecko had one shot at this.
“Get behind me,” he said. “MOVE!”