Ecko Endgame

by Danie Ware

  PRAISE FOR THE ECKO SERIES

  “Danie Ware’s first novel is not so much assured as explosive. This is science fiction with the safety catch off. I hope she never runs out of ammunition.” ADAM NEVILL, AUTHOR OF APARTMENT 16

  “Ecko Rising explodes onto the page with the manic energy of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novels before taking a surprise turn into Thomas Convenant territory. It is strange, surprising, haunting and exceedingly well written. Not to be missed.” LAVIE TIDHAR, AUTHOR OF THE VIOLENT CENTURY

  “Ecko Rising messes with your head in unexpected and exciting ways.” MIKE CAREY, AUTHOR OF THE FELIX CASTOR SERIES

  “I motored through this book. It’s a page turner and I’ll be getting hold of the next one.” NEAL ASHER, AUTHOR OF THE AGENT CORMAC SERIES

  “The best debut novel I’ve read in years.” ANDY REMIC, AUTHOR OF SPIRAL

  “One of the most intriguing and original blends of fantasy and science fiction I’ve read in a long time.” ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY, AUTHOR OF EMPIRE IN BLACK AND GOLD

  “This may be Ware’s first novel, but she’s been intimately tied to the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres for years through her publicity work. That exposure and experience come to the fore with Ecko Rising, a novel that blends fantasy and science fiction together into an epic story about the titular anti-hero who aims to do nothing less than save the entire world from extinction.” KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “A curious genre-bender that thrusts its anti-hero from a dystopian future into a traditional, Tolkienesque fantasy world… marks Ware as one to watch.” INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  “The sci-fi debut of the year… Ware writes fearlessly and Ecko is a magnificent creation.” FINANCIAL TIMES

  “Ecko Rising is grimy and crazy, and so action-centric, it should have an explosion on every page. It’s crammed with sci-fi cuss words, real cuss words, monsters, and violence. In other words: Buy me.” REVOLUTION SF

  “Ware has successfully blended elements of science fiction and epic fantasy to create a unique story in a landscape that has just enough of a modern, dark edge to elevate it from a traditional fantasy journey to something new and compelling. Ware writes with an eloquence that is not often encountered in genre fiction… with a language almost of his own, and a witty inner monologue to match, Ecko is a captivating hero… A successfully fresh ‘something for everyone’ approach to genre fiction.” THE BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY

  “Ecko Rising is an incredible read, with completely unexpected twists and turns… The cliff-hanger at the end has left this reader aching for more.” GEEK SYNDICATE

  “Ingenious… The story itself is engaging and totally unique, a plot that pushes the boundaries not for the sake of it but clearly to offer something different.” SFBOOK

  “This is a strong debut; I suspect Ware will be a name to watch out for in future.” SCI-FI BULLETIN

  “Ecko Rising mixes science fiction à la early years Michael Marshall with the comedic fantasy of Terry Pratchett and the sprawling authenticity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth… staggeringly impressive in both its richness and detail… A hugely enjoyable genre mash-up that promises great things to come from first-time author Danie Ware.” ALTERNATIVE MAGAZINE ONLINE

  “Danie Ware has created an amazing world for her characters that truly envelops the fantasy genre while also adding in enough elements to allow the story to fit within the science fiction genre as well. Ultimately, fans will enjoy Ecko Burning just as much or more than the original.” BGG AFTER DARK

  “This is a dense and engaging read which keeps the reader hooked by stacking up one amazing thing after the other. Ecko Burning is not a subtle novel; it’s violent, sarcastic, filled with nods and references to all things geeky and fun, and features perhaps one of the most scenery-chewing, over-the-top bad guys that we’ve seen in some time.” STARBURST

  “I found Ecko Burning impossible to put down. Like the previous book, it’s very nearly non-stop action. And once I got to the end, I wanted more” FANGIRL CONFESSIONS

  Also by Danie Ware and available from Titan Books:

  ECKO RISING

  ECKO BURNING

  Ecko Endgame

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783294558

  E-book ISBN: 9781783294565

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2015

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Danie Ware asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  © 2015 by Danie Ware.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  FOR TWO PEOPLE WHOSE

  PATIENCE HAS BEEN LIMITLESS,

  AND WHO HAVE MADE ECKO POSSIBLE

  FOR JAN, MY MUM,

  AND ISAAC, MY SON,

  WITH ALL MY LOVE

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  PRAISE FOR THE ECKO SERIES

  ALSO BY DANIE WARE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1: MUSTER

  THE COUNT OF TIME

  HEAL AND HARM

  NIVROTAR’S GAMBLE

  MERCHANT MASTER

  SAVE POINT

  MONSTERS

  BLOOD AND RUINS

  ACCURSED

  ANSWERS

  MUSTER

  PART 2: WAR

  THE DECISIONS OF LARRED JADE

  FOUNDERSDAUGHTER

  MARCH

  HUNTERS

  TUSIEN

  LAST RIDE

  FIRST ATTACK

  SCOUT

  KHAMSIN

  THE RED RAGE

  PART 3: FRACTAL REALISATION

  THE ILFE

  MASTER APOTHECARY

  ELEMENTAL

  SOUL OF LIGHT

  POWERFLUX

  VISION QUEST

  PART 4: FADE TO GREY

  KAZYEN

  VAHL

  NIVROTAR

  CATALYST

  AWAKE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  PROLOGUE

  THE KUANNE, WEST OF THE KARTIAH

  Mountains.

  Stark and cold, bitter as blades. They slant like a crooked spine, from southern slopes of rough grey scree to a northern winter, proud and jagged. Here, they throw out a backwards angle, a tumble of ground forgotten, as raw as the stone itself. Beneath it, the forests are pale and sharp, the rivers white with rage.

  Nothing moves here, only the water.

  But down there – there! – a black speck, shifting.

  The motion is tiny, alone. It seems improbable, some lost mote, and yet it’s as loud as a shout, the only thing living in the stillness. It scrabbles insect-like
up into the foothills and then higher, but it falters often and seeks about itself for understanding, or direction. It’s too small for the mountains to notice, too small for the winter, and yet it’s somehow indomitable.

  It refuses to stop.

  As the speck scuttles onwards, the sun slowly dies on the peaks before it, stretching their shadow long across the ground and striping the high clouds with vivid shades of threat and promise. Darkness rises, as if it spreads from the broken castle, now long since left behind. It steals west until it swallows the tiny figure, swallows the land entire. The sun’s last farewell is a sullen red, and then it is gone, and the cold really begins.

  The figure stops.

  Its arms are wrapped about itself now, its heavy shoulders hunched and its hands shoved clumsily into its sleeves, seeking warmth. Its breath plumes. It pauses to search its pockets, looks at its findings with confusion.

  “Alexander,” the figure says, its voice creaking with cold. “Alexander David Eastermann.”

  But the words fall frozen; they make no sense.

  The man’s belongings scatter from his shaking hands, and he kneels to pick them up. In among them, there is a tiny red light that bathes his bearded face in a sudden flash of glare. He holds it up, pointing it in the direction he’s been walking.

  “Yeah, yeah all right, I know. Dunno where you’re takin’ me, mate, but you’re the only thing that makes any fuckin’ sense round ’ere. You an’ me, we’re goin’ places.”

  He looks through the remainder of his things, his bafflement apparent. He swigs from a small flask, puts everything back in the pockets of his battered leather jacket. Then he sighs, pulls the zip as high as it will go, pushes his hands back into his sleeves, and keeps walking.

  The night deepens.

  The mountains rise savage, teeth bared at black sky – no stars, no moons. The man stumbles on, crossing chasms that radiate cold nacre, lighting his way and blinding him, bright from below. One stops him completely, too wide to step across, and he sways on its edge a long time before he jumps.

  He walks on. His progress becomes erratic and he falls often. Several times, he stops and coughs, harsh in the silence, doubled over with the violence of it. Then he swigs from the flask and keeps walking.

  The cold becomes bitter, frosting his breath and beard.

  After a time, he becomes aware of a sound, a liquid and crystal chiming, and he breaks into a shambling run. He crosses into a maze. Stone pillars, carved into fabulous shapes by wind and dust, rise tall round him, but he pays them no heed as he reaches the river. Here, he throws himself flat and drinks, ice-cold swallows that make him shudder and wrap his hands over his skull in sudden pain.

  And then he curls in upon himself, hoarding heat, and sleeps.

  * * *

  Sunlight seeps across dead ground, touching the sleeping figure with tendrils of warmth.

  He stirs, shuddering, dangerously cold.

  As he turns over, groaning with stiffness and flexing numb fingers, he comes to focus on the bizarre shapes of the pillars that stand over him, tips now gleaming with the rising light. Blinking, sitting up and coughing a dark, splattering phlegm, he struggles to see them clearly.

  “’Oo the ’ell are you? Some fuckin’ army?” Still blinking, he gouges a thumb and forefinger into his eyes, refocuses. “What you doin’ out ’ere? Turned to stone – like, I dunno, trolls or summin’.”

  He looks at the mountains, the water, his hands. They hurt with returning circulation. Confused, he flexes them into claws and back, then turns them over to stare at the dry palms, the old burns, the heavy calluses.

  “I remember… I was a kid, and me ’ands were turnin’ into dragons. Sky fulla colour. Bleedin’ bonkers. Where was I? What the ’ell was I doin’?”

  Then he says, in a voice like an engine starting, “Oh fuck me bloody ragged.”

  He palms himself in the forehead, groaning.

  The pillars don’t respond, but he tells them anyway, “I’m trippin’. I’m trippin’ me bleedin’ nuts off. Alex bastard Eastermann bollocks, I’m Lugan – an’ I was… I was…”

  A flood of images, jumbled like traffic, noisy – he pounds his forehand with the palm of his hand, jarring them. The Bike Lodge, the tavern, the Bard, Ecko gone missing, the pitch darkness of the old Underground, Thera’s lights, Mom… He’d left Roderick there, and had gone seeking answers, seeking Ecko – gone all the way to the offices of Mortimer, Hiner and Thompson…

  And then what?

  “So, what the ’ell ’appened to me? What did they…?”

  The stones say nothing.

  “Bugger me. Was the ’ole bloody thing even real – the tavern, the tunnels, any of it? Some fucktard’s fuckin’ spiked me! Tell me I ain’t been that bleedin’ stupid?”

  His voice falls on empty winter – but the realisation makes everything fit.

  “Fuck it.”

  Angry now, he kicks at a pile of stones with his big black boot, making it tumble over. Then he stands up straight, winces, and looks back at the little red light.

  “Right then,” he says, “guess you’re the only answer I got.”

  With a back-cracking stretch, he lumbers into motion, heading for the angled whiteness of the rising mountains.

  Behind him, the pillars stand watch.

  PART 1: MUSTER

  1: THE COUNT OF TIME

  AMOS

  The grass was dead.

  Across the huge emptiness of the Varchinde plain, the bright colours of autumn had faded and blown away, and the soil and stone were scoured clean, bared to a bleak sky. The trees were stark, hard angles against a rising bank of cloud; the wind was harsh, spiralling the last stalks into tiny tornado whirls. The chill made Triqueta huddle in her saddle, her hood drawn up and her heavy cloak wrapped tight. Desert-blooded as she was, she’d never felt the season bite this deep before. She found herself shuddering as the early winter seemed to crawl under her skin, sinking cold claws into muscle and bone.

  Beneath the cloak her hands itched and she held them still, refusing to scratch them. She could feel her age this morning, whatever the rhez it was; feel the curse that the daemon Tarvi had laid upon her, and the weight of the whole damned Count of Time.

  …dunno why she took your time and not mine…

  Ecko’s words were in the wind, taunting her lean, lined face, her chapped hands. Tarvi’s kiss had taken ten – fifteen? – returns from her life. It had left her aged and self-conscious, bitter with regret.

  By the rhez. Enough!

  Beneath her, the mare snuffled and shifted. The horse was a city creature, spraddle-legged and hang-bellied, lacking in spirit. She didn’t like the empty plainland, or the cold, and her ears were flat-back, expressing her disapproval.

  But Triq held the beast between her knees. They’d come out here, just as they did every morning, to look for something – hope, answers – and she wasn’t done searching. She tightened her thighs and the horse started forward reluctantly, her wide hooves dragging at the muck.

  The wind gusted, blew Triq’s hood back and her hair across her face, white strands among the yellow. She freed a hand to hold it back, and there – there! – just for a moment, she saw it: a horizon shadow, dark against the southern sky. Her heart thundered. She was up in the stirrups, craning to see something, anything, even as her rational mind berated her for being so foolish. She’d seen the shadow before, half-man and half-creature; she’d dreamed it and danced with it over and again. It was the hallucination she’d brought from the horrors they’d faced at Aeona, the hope that ghosted constantly at the corners of her vision. Like her memory of Tarvi’s curse, it wouldn’t damned well leave her be…

  Redlock.

  She was out here looking for Redlock – on some damned fool quest for her lost lover.

  Or what was left of him.

  She knew how crazed it was, but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t leave it alone. Every night, she saw those last moments: Aeona’s collapse
as its alchemist master perished, the freed Kas, the daemon, as it fled north to its new host, the twisted red-maned monstrosity they’d glimpsed in the shattered tower. And every morning, she came up here to stare southeast along the coastline at the distant and unseen Gleam Wood, at the destruction they’d left behind them. They had won their fight, saved Ecko’s life, perhaps the life of the world entire – but the cost…

  Her hopes were folly and she knew it, but she came anyway, unable to let go of the hope, the fear, the shreds of denial that such a thing could have happened to him, to them. Day after day, she rode through Amos’s ramshackle outskirts and out into the chill; day after day, she returned to the taverns on the wharves and drowned herself in a blur of ales and spirits, and in the heated embraces of those whose names and faces she didn’t even care to remember.

  She knew, she knew, how loco this was. Some part of her mind asked what the rhez she thought she was doing. Even if Redlock had survived Aeona’s collapse, there was no way he’d be – it would be – out here, when it had the whole dead Varchinde to run in. No way it’d know she was here and…

  …and what?

  Aeona had been a disaster. Its master had twisted Redlock into a beast, speechless and mindless and horrified, and he’d come within a moment of sacrificing Ecko and damning them all. They’d freed Ecko, but not swiftly enough – and the damage had been done. Kas Vahl Zaxaar, daemon possessor and the Varchinde’s long-feared foe, had loosed himself from the alchemist’s flesh to rage northward to Fhaveon, Lord city.

  And now, Triq was afraid.

  Afraid that their time was up, afraid the aftermath of Aeona would prove too much, afraid that the blight and the rising winter would finish them all.

  Another gust caught her, and she shivered. It was cold as pure frost, sending tumbles of the dead grass across the hilltop. Though the Varchinde’s “little death” was a natural thing, a normal part of the cycling of elements and seasons, somehow it still all seemed like some Gods-damned portent.

  Like the grass would die for good, and there would be no spring.

  The mare shook her mane, snorted steam and scorn like some saga charger. The shadow, whatever it was, had gone.