by Danie Ware
Before this entranceway, like a towering guard, was the biggest fucking wind chime he’d ever seen. Suspended from the ceiling, it was taller than he was – hell, it was taller than Lugan – it was more than an artwork, more than some fucked-up chiming-crystal mobile... The rocklight at its centre was trapped to loose crazed rave-party shafts of brilliance across the entranceway, out across the cave and deep into the darkness of whatever lay beyond.
He flicked out his starlites and stared, stunned.
Ecko had never been one for nightclubs – even before Pilgrim had gotten a hold of them. Now, though, he stood as if he were the last fucker left on the dance floor – alone amid a spangled kaleidoscope of reds, blues, purples. Dark lights surrounded him, like a promise – or a threat. The thing lit the walls to a hundred shades of insane goth.
As he looked, he could see that it was damaged – it was half hanging, crystals split and darkened, smeared in soot.
An ancient light show, shattered by the heat of the sortie?
Experimentally, he let out the faintest, audible breath.
And it answered him, a struggling discord of warning.
Echo, Ecko. It was a security system, for chrissakes, guarding the doorway. If the cave out there condensed noise, it must’ve been placed in exactly the right position to go off like an aural claymore the second someone coughed...
Fuck knows how long it had hung here, singing gently to the drip-drip-drip of the water and waiting for something to set it off... Then the stone beasties had kicked the door down and thundered past it like Lugan’s old Harley. Whumph – exit one doorbell.
So – this “Maugrim” not only left a “bad guy this way” trail for the city authorities to follow... but he disabled his own defences?
He was either a prize asshole or he knew something they didn’t.
Maybe both.
Bollocks.
Telling himself he was only going to take a little look – who knows, maybe it had a switch? – he slipped over and past the broken remnants of the door.
* * *
Redlock was sweating.
The air was close and still. He was uneasy, dry mouthed, aware of the reek of dried blood and the itch of his now-stiffened garments. There was a stone in his boot.
Behind him, Tarvi twitched constantly, hands fidgeting with her neckline, her belt. He was perturbed by her inexperience, concerned about some explosive delayed reaction to the horrors she’d seen. Behind her, Triqueta twisted her ankle and cursed under her breath – she felt like rising tension. He trusted her combat instincts, her courage and reliability... but she didn’t like enclosed spaces and he knew the rock was pressing down on her chest and throat. She wasn’t one to scream – but she may well loose the Banned’s battle cry purely to defy her own fear.
As for the other one...
Trust me or don’t.
Redlock had been riding the trade-roads nearly twenty returns. He knew the Varchinde, its cities and markets, its trade and its predators. He trusted his instincts as much as his axes... and this whole damned thing stank like last week’s fish.
Despite Tarvi’s assurances, he trusted that... thing... about as much as he trusted his one-time wife.
Damned crusaders and damned kids – he worked alone for a reason.
Whatever that “Ecko” thing was, when it turned, he’d be ready for it.
* * *
Past the busted door, Ecko slunk through a tight neck of stone and paused at the edge of a broad, flat-floored chamber. A scent teased his nostrils – something familiar – oh for chrissakes so familiar...
He stopped, breathed it in like a fragrance.
It was overwhelming, so good, so missed. A scent that breached walls, worlds and memories and brought his past into his forebrain with a crash.
This is the Bike Lodge, mate. We’ll find some work for ya, gotta pull your weight round ’ere.
For a moment, he clung insanely to the hope that he was home. That he’d passed his fucking test, that she’d taken pity on him – that he’d stumbled through some fucking interdimensional rift – and he was there, waking up in his own sleeping bag. That it was all over; that tomorrow, the only thing that awaited him was a twist of solder and Lugan’s battered old arc welder...
The scent caught in his throat, it made his breathing ragged, like a sob.
Please...!
Between one shaft of crystal light and the next, he tumbled down the crack between realities – and the closeness was too much, he couldn’t bear it. He had no idea how much he’d missed it until it was shoved right in his face. His own denial shattered, standing in its fragments, he found himself almost in tears.
This hadn’t happened to him!
Tell me this whole thing’s a fucking dream, please! Grey plugged me in, didn’t he? And you’ve found me? You finally fucking found me! Tell me this bullshit ride is over!
The smell was engine oil. Rich and dark, filling his senses with images of a home he may never have left. He could smell metal, the faint tang of fuel. He inhaled it, filled his lungs and his soul with it. He could picture the Bike Lodge in his head, Lugan’s battered desk, the fridge for the endless beers, the frames and the tanks and the engines scattered across the floor...
...the rain, silver on black windows.
It was so real – so real – that if he held onto it hard enough everything else would be gone, a total-immersion game that was just playing on the headset in his hands. He could see it, that tiny screen – on it, distant now, grass and moons and air and cities of white and endless unrolling fucking roads...
He could drop it.
And he could stand on it. Feel it shatter. Gone.
But the maddened, broken searchlights of the crystal hanging were lurching through the chamber, passing over his skin and leaving tiny twists of colour in their wake.
In amongst the smells of his home, there was another scent, equally familiar, but not one that belonged in the ferrocrete walls of the Bike Lodge.
He could smell death – the sickly sweet stench of rotting flesh.
The real world cracked, crisped and was gone in a flash of flame, burned by the exiting critters, by the Monument’s fire. The fiction rose to swallow him, back into the caverns of the Varchinde plains.
There was no escape from his own head.
You fucking wuss. Get a grip. Deal with it.
He dried his oculars on a corner of his cloak. Took Lugan’s lighter out of a pouch and crushed it until his fingers hurt.
And he was angry: sick of being taunted, of being jerked around while she laughed at him. Of being led by the fucking nose. Of understanding one minute – and being at a total fucking loss the next. Of hearing voices, of having dreams. Of Tarvi’s...
Don’t think about it!
He was walking into a trap – she’d laid out a trail he couldn’t help but follow... and everything he passed told him Maugrim was waiting for him. For them.
Yeah? Well bring it on.
Wherever she was, he made her a promise – a promise of what he’d fucking do to her when he got out of here.
“You hear me? ELI-ZAH! You hear me?”
And the crystal detonated.
* * *
“Shit!”
Triqueta was weapons on the floor, hands over her ears.
Around her, the cave exploded in a single, terrible scream. The sound was impossible, multilayered, discordant and crystalline. It smashed into her like shards of broken stone. It was the death shriek of a thousand thin, wild voices that slammed back from every rockface, lashed from every leering tooth.
Redlock’s boots spat dirt as he broke into a run.
Tarvi was after him, calling Ecko’s name.
Retrieving her bow – and relieved that Syke hadn’t seen that lapse – Triq moved more slowly, watching the cave around them.
The sound ended in a single, Gods-almighty smash.
Disharmonic echoes reverberated, jangling her teeth, but the scream had gone.
>
And the quiet was deafening.
Nothing moved. The crazed lights had died. The water drip-drip-dripped as though it hadn’t even noticed.
She heard Redlock call her, his voice a crack of precision through lingering layers of resonance. He didn’t sound like he was fighting.
He sounded...
The last of the crash flowed back from the walls and was gone, a dying wave of sound.
In it, she could hear Ecko laughing.
* * *
Ecko said, “You motherfucker.”
In her hands, Tarvi held the rocklight. It lit her face to ardour and wonder.
And it lit the chamber – rock walls more regular, a lower ceiling. This one looked like it’d been hewn, indiscriminately pickaxed out of the stone. In places, the semi-regular brickwork showed again – but that wasn’t what Ecko was looking at.
Around him, an oil-stained stone floor, rags and old papers, scatters of nuts and washers, fuel cans, spray cans, demijohns. The tarp in one corner covered the bike – he hadn’t yet gone that way. He was cackling like his mind had finally fucking snapped.
I broke your doorbell, Maugie. Come and get me why don’tcha?
Around him, the spiralling fairground lights had gone. Occasional, now-stilled refractions lit the walls, colours surreal. The smell was still there – the smell of home, the smell of death – but he was looking for something.
He unclamped his fingers. Lugan’s lighter was still in his hand.
Fuel.
Refilling his tanks would be ten kinds of fucking awkward – but if he’d just woken up every major cave-dwelling nasty from here to the doors of Hell, well, he kinda needed a weapon.
He searched.
Behind him, Redlock was picking up washers like they were the gold coins of some fucking dragonhorde... letting the steel tumble through his fingers, jingle as it hit the floor. His expression was wary. He kept one axe in his hand and one eye on the entranceway.
Tarvi held the light high and looked wider. She picked things up and stared at them as if they would hiss into steam and be gone. She moved gracefully, light on her feet and her hair...
Stop it.
Triqueta appeared in the doorway, patches of light on her skin, her mouth gaped round speechless shock. Chuckling, Redlock threw a handful of washers at her and she caught a couple, opened her hand to stare at them.
“White-metal? How...?”
“How much luxury d’you want?” He laughed at her. She stopped to pick up another handful, stared at them – then lunged to stuff them down the front of his shirt. While he swore, laughing, she ran for it, feet skidding on rusting metal. Grinning, he picked up a random gear and spun it at her like a discus. It didn’t fly very well.
Kinda freaked that’d found the treasure before they’d actually mashed the bad guy, Ecko picked up another can, shaking it to hear the sloshing of –
Tarvi screamed.
His boosting lurched – now, which was verging on annoying. It spluttered, coughed into life like an old engine, carried him to her side even as he wondered where the bad guy was at.
He couldn’t keep fucking doing this – his endocrine system wasn’t getting time to reboot for chrissakes. Was she trying to wear him out?
But she was backing out of a corner of the chamber, clinging to the rocklight as if to draw its warmth.
She said something, cleared her throat and said it again, “I know this man.” Redlock had stopped fooling. He stood by the chamber wall – by the soot marks that told where the beasties had blundered through. Stuffing a handful of washers in a pouch, Triq crouched by entrance to the broken crystal, the light glittering from the stone in her cheek.
Tarvi backed into Ecko, small, soft frame, hair – again – in his nose. He half expected her to turn round, bury her face in his shoulder – was wanting it and dreading it and working out how he could push her away – but she was staring, transfixed, at the source of the reek.
Ecko said softly, “Fuck.” He’d found where the death smell was coming from.
Three corpses, twisted and broken. He’d seen such things before.
But they were metal.
A plated hide, an exquisitely fine insect carapace, covered each one – eyelids, fingertips, genitals. Like one of his Tech’s, Mom’s, more fucked up experiments...
...trusst me, Tamarlaine. I can make you the besst. Hold your faith in me, my little one, my child, my obssession and creation. You wissh ssuperpowerss? I can make your dreamss come true...
...they’d been enhanced, a botch-job that’d gone terrifyingly off the rails – and he knew how it felt to have your skin delicately peeled back, your flesh exposed, the naked and intimate secrets of muscle and fibre and joint, all bared to eyes unseen in the darkness. He knew the screaming and the savagery of the pain, knew the terror of being that utterly helpless and vulnerable. He knew the hope, the struggle to retain self and sanity as you were remade, transformed into something more than human...
He’d survived. Through trial by blood and terror and nightmare and painstaking reconstruction, he’d survived. He’d survived by sheer motherfucking will.
And he was unbreakable. Nothing could ever torture him like that again.
These fuckers hadn’t been so lucky.
He found he was shaking, nausea in his throat from too much adrenaline. Against him, Tarvi was steady and warm.
“Ecko?”
His hand was on her shoulder, a grip like steel, but she didn’t wince or pull away. Her hand went over his, pale skin against the mottle his Mom had given him.
An anchor.
He said, “Maugrim did this?”
“That one – there – he trained with me. I didn’t know him well, but –” her voice shook “– name of the Gods, what happened to him?”
Anger, fear, outrage, heat in his face indicating a rising need to throw up.
“Seems someone likes to play.” His rasp was like a broken saw, as rusted as the steel that was scattered across the floor. Steel that this bastard had been using to create some fucking superbeing. “And got it wrong.”
The rocklight shone from the tiny plates, each one crafted with an expert touch that even Ecko couldn’t match. Beneath them, the flesh was beginning to decompose, to swell, blackening, through the cracks. Their eyes were open, death masks twisted with the kind of exquisite agony he fucking understood.
He understood.
There were marks on the stone where the cave-critters had come, but they’d turned away, empty bellied. The guy Tarvi knew had a plate across his mouth, carved with a ghastly impression of a smile.
Someone had not only done this, they’d enjoyed it. Found humour in it.
Ecko retched, controlled himself. His mouth tasted of bile. Jesus, looking at this, he was beginning to think it was Eliza who needed the fucking shrink already...
In the back of his mind, he heard his conversation with the Bard.
I’m s’posed to think this is real?
I’m supposed to think it’s not?
Kale, talking about pain. Pareus, burning to death...
Tarvi turned round, wrapped herself in his arms.
Looking over her shoulder, Ecko found his rage blazing uncontainable, his own pity and helplessness and snarling frustration mocking him. Dance, Ecko, daaaaaaance! To be that close to home – and then to face his own most terrible and most elating memory...
Eliza was taunting him, making him feel.
And, even against his will and better judgement, he knew that those feelings were growing stronger.
21: CRAZED
THE GREAT LIBRARY, AMOS
The air was thick and shadowed, soft with age and decay.
In the gloom, Jayr the Infamous shivered uneasily, absently rubbing her scarred arms. Chill breaths of draft exhaled rot and damp stone. Her boots sank in softness, a carpet of age across a broken floor. In places, curious creeper had forced itself through the wall and then died from the lack of light.
; At one end of the long hallway, the Great Library had crumbled into collapse and pale sunlight slanted through the dust, touching delicate fingers to the rubble below. She could see the faded corners of books protruding, as if they still sought rescue.
She shuddered.
Over her, rising ringed balconies led up to a once-bright, real-glass dome, now dark with bird droppings and age. One pane was cracked, others missing, and the balcony edges beneath were fallen away with returns of invading weather. Their remnants covered the central mosaic in rubble and fragments of once-carved woodwork.
If she held up her rocklight, she could see only shadows. They hung in the dust between bookshelf and wall, balcony and branch and empty doorway, they lurked as though they were waiting.
Jayr could take a Range Patrol champion to pieces in shorter time than it took to tell it. And this place was giving her the creeps.
Ress sat cross-legged by a small scatter of books. He wore old pince-nez and he squinted at faded scribblings, words and pages that dissolved to nothing at his touch. Occasionally, he reached to scrawl something on a fresh page to his other side. He was frowning intently, rubbing his short beard and blinking in the poor light.
Jayr kicked out a clean place and sat by him, back to the wall, scarred shoulders crawling with tension. She reached to pick up a book – and the thing fell through her hands like sand.
Suppressing another shudder, she rubbed her palms on her breeches and picked up the next one.
“Careful.” Ress’s whisper was instinctive, the gloom swallowed it whole.
“Like one more dead thing’s going to matter.” Her callused fingers were covered in old webs, her lap was full of dust. She, too, was voice lowered, almost fearing what she’d disturb in this forgotten place. “This is loco. Five days on a downriver barge – why did I have to come? You know I should’ve –”
“Jayr.” The apothecary grinned briefly. “Change of focus won’t kill you.”
“What’re you even looking for?”
“Alchemy,” Ress told her. “Half man, half horse. Monsters. Where they came from, who made them. Why.” He crooked an eyebrow. “Seems the Bard isn’t so crazed after all.”