Ecko Endgame

by Danie Ware

  No, that was one thing he still wasn’t ready to think about. It creeped his damn skin every time he remembered it.

  More shouting came from outside, faint with distance; the leaves eddied in the roadway.

  Mael looked back at the long page of numbers, blew the moisture from his doodle and closed the page. Try as he might, he could not balance the figures and there was real fear coiling in his heart like some smirking, sliding creature.

  You’re not going to do it, the creature said.

  Fhaveon was facing another battle – and there would be no blazing and heroic win to get them out of this one.

  No food, no grass, no terhnwood, no trade. The city’s in ruins. We won’t last the winter.

  We’re going to starve.

  Mael put the book away. They would be coming for him at the birth of the sun, and he had to be ready. Knight of the Whatever-it-was or not, the streets were not a safe place to be alone.

  * * *

  Since Phylos’s fall, Fhaveon had become almost nocturnal – the pirates had coalesced into factions, they worked from hit-and-run night markets, heavy with muscle, and they warred merciless beneath the broken awareness of both soldiery and Cartel. The lower levels of the city had disintegrated into rages and ruins and raids. With his still-limited strength, Tan Commander Mostak had little hope of re-establishing control. His forces were split – many had sympathised with Ythalla and Phylos, and many more had simply fled.

  Selana’s illness worsened, and she lacked both authority and experience. The Council had been disbanded; many of its members fled or vanished. Of those who remained, Rhan was too tainted by Phylos’s pedagogue might, Valicia, Selana’s mother, wouldn’t leave her daughter and Mael, new to his robe, had the mind but not the presence. Mostak had his hands full already, and, lacking leadership, Fhaveon convulsed like a headless serpent.

  “Nervous?” Mael’s despatched guard grinned at him. “You don’t need to come for this.”

  “I know.” The guard had not offered him his title, but it was too heavy for both of them. Mael shrugged, tripping over the hem of the robe and reaching for his winter cloak. “I want to.”

  “Course you do.” The guard winked. “You’ve got a sack on you, that’s for sure. Hope this works.”

  They crept noiseless into the soft grey light. The air was sharp and cold and their breath steamed.

  About them, the street noise had faded to a tense quiet; echoes of shouts hung in the air like figments. A soft mist stole silent from the empty plain and the rocklights hung spectral and sinister, pale blurs of white.

  Mael tightened his fists, nails biting his palms. He peered from doorway to archway to corner, from darkness to darkness. They moved cautiously, sensing unseen eyes sliding over them like wet fingers, voices almost heard, lost somewhere in the mist.

  Mael coughed, smothered it, offered, “We’ve made a real mess of this, haven’t we?”

  A rustle made him start – a hungry creature, grey fur and sinew, fleeing from the unexpected visitors. Under a pile of crafthall debris, several discoloured, swollen bodies lay stinking. One of them twitched, though Mael suspected it had more to do with scavengers than it did with a struggle for life.

  He swallowed.

  “The fighting here’s almost constant,” the guard said, voice soft. “Every area has its own petty Lord, and they scrap like greedy children.” He nodded at the rotting pile. “This is the result. Keep your eyes open, Merchant Master.”

  Mael shoved his glasses higher up his nose, then he stilled his heart, covered his mouth and moved on.

  They turned a corner, another. The city’s striated stonework offered holes, maws of darkness and damage; its carvings were shattered, and piles of rubble loomed peculiar through the mist. The skeletal trees angled like claw shadows, distorted. The guard had drawn his blade and was poised, tight as a bowstring.

  Merchant Master.

  If this guard chose to kill him, they’d never find what was left.

  Then Mael felt a draught, a breath of open air. The white fog eddied, thinned, and for a moment he could see, through a gap where a building had been, and still far below him the dawn-lit plain, brown and black and grey and vast. A bird cried like a skirl of laughter.

  He shivered, and shrank his nose into the collar of his cloak.

  “Mael.”

  In the mist, Rhan was there, too much and too close; his presence made the old man uneasy and he drew back. The Seneschal was huddled in some great grey cloak, his head bare, his face drawn and worried. A tan of guards formed a loose ring, all of them spear-armed and watchful.

  Mael tried to peer past them.

  “You found it. Did you find it?” He tried to be calm, but his voice squeaked with tension.

  Rhan jutted his chin at the building beside him, a looming square shape in the fog.

  “We know Phylos was hoarding food and terhnwood.” His deep voice was quiet, a rumble of threat. “Now we know where. Let’s hope this is good information – there might just be enough here to make the difference.” The sentence ended in a shrug that spoke for itself. The cool air from the plain shifted the mist about them, confusing. “Ready with the tally markers, Merchant Master?”

  “Yes… yes.” Mael’s cold hands pulled a series of knotted cords from a pouch. He pushed up his glasses and peered at the building. It could have been anything – a church, an old tithehall – its sides were decorated with angled mosaics now shattered like the city herself. He could have leaned forwards and picked at the individual tiles.

  At a nod, the closest of the guards eased a heavy, fibrous bar down the side of the door and applied pressure, pushing his shoulder into the lever and grunting with the effort. The lintel was heavy over him; upon it, a sightless beast raised a clawed foot in salute.

  As the remainder of the tan closed tighter to defend them, Rhan stepped back to Mael. “We’ve been speaking to Scythe,” he said, conversationally. “He’s proven very… helpful.”

  His skin crawling, Mael stammered something and made himself stay where he was.

  The door creaked, the protest loud in white stillness. The soldier swore. It creaked again, then gave way with a sudden sharp bang, a spit of soured dust. The soldier staggered back, his fellows coming forwards with spear points ready. But even as Rhan’s bass voice sounded the warning, Mael knew it was too late.

  He’s proven very… helpful…

  The guard had something on his face, something at his throat. Something that wriggled in a crazed, half-starved frenzy; something with big claws and yellow teeth and a fleshy tail. A roll of stink followed it out of the door.

  The smell was familiar.

  “Down!” Mael’s guard hit him like a bweao and he found himself on his face and in the wet and the cold, coughing, his glasses lost, a knee in his back. Struggling to see, he was aware of guards at the doorway, ordered boots as four of them skirmished carefully into the building.

  He saw the injured guard stagger back, his hands still clawing at his face. He was shouting, half-muffled, pained and furious; the creature squealed and clawed. Then Rhan blocked Mael’s view. The guard gave a brief cry, and there was the slam of something living hitting stone, cracking and screaming with the impact.

  Hitting stone again, with a sickening crunch.

  The injured guard swore, shook himself. He was bleeding profusely, deep scratches in his face, but he was moving, going for weapons.

  “Esphen,” he called, “big one! And pretty damned angry!”

  Mael rummaged for his glasses, couldn’t find them. He tried to push himself up. Scents eddied in the air: terhnwood, rich rot, dying moss, things that had perished from fear. He still couldn’t place that smell.

  Saravin. Something…?

  Then, the guard commander: “The building’s secure, my Lord. Scythe was telling the truth. There’s terhnwood here, though perhaps not as much as we’d thought.” Beneath his disciplined tone, his voice was oddly tense. “My Lord, some of it’s�
� tainted.”

  “Tainted?” Rhan’s question was barbed. He shoved past the guards into the building.

  Mael’s guard let him up, and he scrambled after the Seneschal, needing to see…

  Tainted.

  He still hadn’t found his glasses, and the light in the space was slanted and dusty though boarded windows. He could see the terhnwood, long canes in regular stacks, piles of worked strips, great furry rolls of fibre. Some of it was darker in tone where it had been steamed. But the stacks were stained, blotched with lichens like rot, flowering with blemishes. And that smell…

  From somewhere outside, there came shouting.

  Ahead of Mael in the dim storeroom, Rhan cursed and turned, but the commander’s voice came from outside, calm and clear.

  “Seems we’ve woken the watchers.” He barked orders. “Give me a defensive ring. If anything moves, I want to know. Now! No, not you, Ghar. Stay where you are, and take this.”

  The air tightened, went quiet.

  Inside the storeroom, it was thick and cold. Murky with undefined threat.

  You old fool, Mael cursed himself. What are you even doing out here?

  In the gloom, Rhan was a heavy, square shape, his cloak thrown back. He picked up a cane and turned it over. “The Gods and their damned sense of humour.” He dropped it with a clatter, picked up another. “This… I know this smell. North of here, Foriath… Samiel’s bollocks!” Frustration slammed from his movements. “Look at this. Look at it!” He spun on Mael, brandishing the long cane like a weapon, and Mael blinked, still not understanding. “What the rhez am I supposed to do with this?”

  And then the smell hit him like a fist, and the memory with it. It was so sudden, so real, that it robbed him of breath. He trembled and his face flushed – Saravin, the market, the woman in the ale tent. It seemed to come from another Count of Time, and yet the memory was as precise as if he’d drawn it.

  Rhan shook the cane, pulling at his attention. The thing was caked in moss, in moss that was already dying. It had grown in the cracks, furred the outer edges, but it was brown, flaking into the dust even as Rhan spun the thing like a staff and threw it back on the pile. It rolled down the edge and struck the stone floor, rattling as it settled.

  Outside, the injured guard swore.

  Mael went cold. His heart laboured in his chest, scaring him. His previous, nebulous nervousness had been replaced by a sharp tang of real fear…

  I know this smell.

  North of here… Foriath.

  But the guard commander’s voice came sharply through the doorway. “Whatever you’re doing, make it quick.”

  “We’re coming now,” Rhan called. Then to Mael, “We need to secure this store. We need the Cartel down here, Merchant Master, get this counted and moved. More guards, porters, whatever you’ll need. Take it to the Priest Gorinel, the Cathedral, and the catacombs. It should be safe enough—”

  “Wait, wait,” Mael muttered almost to himself, trying to catch up with his thoughts. “We can’t just—”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Rhan said. “We’ll take what there is and sort through it.” He touched Mael’s arm. Caught off-guard, Mael snatched the limb back like he’d been stung. “We still have a long way to go, and we need everything we can find. Now, let’s move.”

  They stepped out of the store, blinking in the rising morning light. The street was quiet, and the mist had thinned, slipping back down towards the water. The injured guard stood back from his fellows, ruefully holding a folded piece of tunic to his face. His skin was reddening, already swelling with infection, and one of the claws had rasped dangerously close to an eye.

  “Ghar,” Rhan said. “Let me see it.”

  “My Lord.” The guard lowered the fabric, lifted his chin.

  Coming close, Rhan placed a hand on the man’s sweating face, looked at him with a peculiar, familiar intensity.

  An intensity that Mael knew only too well.

  Like being lit up from the inside out.

  He knew how that felt. Mael was not a believer in Gods, but the Count of Time had come for him, his heart had been squeezed in that long, chill hand. He’d known it was over, and it had been all right.

  He was an old man, he missed his friend, and he’d done enough.

  Lit up from the inside out.

  Rhan’s inhuman touch had healed him – but had left no part of him secret. It was the light of a truth unwilling, of a whole life revealed in an instant. It had driven that chill hand from him, brought him from death, back to Fhaveon… but what else had it done?

  Ghar was shaking, flushed. The wounds in his face were gone – red scars in his tanned skin. He was spluttering, trying to voice incomprehension, thanks, disbelief, but Rhan said only, “Your tan bade you guard the perimeter.”

  With a fist-on-chest salute, the soldier obeyed the order.

  Mael shuddered. “You can do that with a touch.” The question was painfully curious, like tonguing a sore tooth. “Why can you not just—?”

  “Not just what?” Rhan snapped back at him, sounding oddly stung. “Cure the blight? Make it go away? Wave my hand and just… conjure it all better?” He snorted, bitterly humorous. “Samiel’s balls, Mael, you think I haven’t tried?” He made a noise of frustration and disgust. “I wish I could! But I can’t even understand it – it’s too big, somehow, too much. I can’t see its origins or its edges. Even the fragments – it’s like they’re a part of something else, something huge.” He shook his head. “I’ve touched only its outside, and by the Gods, it terrifies me.” He tailed into a frown, looking at the pile of canes. “I can’t cure a… a disease when I don’t even know what it is.”

  Mael nodded. He had no more comprehension than Rhan as to the blight’s cause or content – it ate its way inwards from the Varchinde’s outer edges, destroying the terhnwood at the coast and the forests at the feet of distant Kartiah. And they had nothing – no hope, no cure.

  “Enough talking.” The guard commander was edgy now, and the shouting was closer. “We need to move.”

  The sunrise swelled around them. If Mael turned, he would see the rising zigzag of streets climbing the hill; the ascending rocklights, glittering with the hopes the city had lost. At the city’s zenith, the sky was streaked with pink.

  The shouts grew louder. Hands tightened on weapons.

  The guard commander said, “My Lord Seneschal, you shouldn’t be here. Take the Merchant Master to safety. We’ll stay. When the area’s secure, I’ll send a runner for you.”

  Rhan tensed for a moment, then acquiesced. To Mael, it seemed like he was ashamed.

  * * *

  The closest safe house was a dark and tiny cellar, cold and damp. The building above was little more than a shell, but the refuge beneath was untouched; in moments, it became layered with tallow-smoke and tension.

  Rhan paced the stone floor, four paces one way, four the other, setting the candle flames to flickering as he passed. His shoulders seemed to fill the room; his face was a thundercloud. Mael ran his tally markers though his fingers and tried to do the maths.

  Whatever else one could say about the departed Phylos, the bastard had been truly gifted with managing numbers.

  But Mael thought he was getting the hang of it.

  Rhan stopped, spun, paced back the other way, the tiny flames tracking him. He said, “Well?”

  Mael had so many things he wanted to ask – the smell, the woman in the market, the tainted terhnwood, the vastness that was the encroaching blight…

  He cleared his throat. “I didn’t really get a proper look. But if the figures Scythe… ah… Scythe gave you are close, then…” he halted, then finished tentatively, “…we may even manage. If it’s not too badly damaged.”

  Rhan stopped his pacing, raised an eyebrow.

  “Is there enough? Merchant Master?”

  “There’s enough terhnwood to equip Mostak’s command.” Mael took a breath, could almost feel the hulking shape of Saravin behind him
, there in the dark, strong and oddly comforting. “But not enough to trade. And the food situation is dire—”

  “Dire?” The word was a jab.

  Mael wanted to protest – this wasn’t his task, wasn’t his life, wasn’t what he wished to do, or what he had ever trained for – but this was where he’d found himself and he’d better damn well make the best of it.

  He owed Rhan his life.

  Mael’s hands tightened on the string, feeling the knots.

  He said, “Even with rationing, and even if we can enforce that rationing…” He shook his head. For a moment, he could visualise it like a picture, the layers of complexity to the decision – what to cut, what to keep, the juggling of priorities. Panic clamoured, but he held himself still.

  Rhan said softly, “Can we last the winter?”

  Mael sighed. “It’s a little more complex than that, my Lord. We’ll need to be careful. Once we equip the soldiery, the Cathedral’s the right place for the rest of this – at least what we have will be safe.”

  The Seneschal exhaled, sagged, clapped Mael’s shoulder. The old scribe forced himself not to flinch.

  “Sorry,” he said. “All this – it’s outside my experience as well. I need your eyes and your ears, your insight. Whatever happens, we must hold the city.”

  Any answer was interrupted by a rap on the trapdoor above them. There was a creak, and Mael’s guard ducked his head downwards.

  “My Lord. Sorry for the intrusion, but—”

  “What?” Rhan said. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s the Bard, my Lord. He’s at the outskirts of the city. And he’s asking for you.”

  5: SAVE POINT

  TRADE-ROAD, FHAVEON

  There was a stray, furry thing, all big eyes and radar ears, huddled alone in the winter cold. There was a black blade, carbon fibre and mono-edged, a silent and accurate throw that downed the puffed-up critter without a squeak.

  Ecko shivered. He eyed the Bard’s knife as it peeled the furry thing and spilled its guts – his own stomach turned over. Chrissakes, this shit he still hadn’t gotten used to – food came in sealed packages, processed, labelled, barcoded, unrecognisable. It had safety information, corporate caveats, logos. This thing? This thing still had eyeballs.