by Danie Ware
She stepped away, exhaled. Tried to stop her cracked hands from trembling.
“For Gods’ sakes.” She found a laugh, but it sounded more broken than humorous. “I’ve fought a cursed bweao on the way here, no jesting. Just… just give me a moment, will you?”
“Bweao?” Syke mouthed the word at Jade, who shrugged, then firmly handed her the tankard.
“Sit your backside down, and drink this. Roviarath isn’t going to fall to bits while you get your breath back. In fact,” he gave a brief grin, “she’s just about holding her guts in, which is more than can be said for most.”
“Did you pass the Monument – the hole – on your way in?” Syke was pacing now, a coil of energy – he wanted to know everything, every tale, every update. “By the Gods, Triq! What happened to Ress? To Jayr? That hefty grunt of a boyfriend of yours? And – a bweao?”
His restlessness was familiar – an old friend.
Family.
Kicking and spitting.
Overpowered by all of it, she found herself biting her lip, turning away, searching for words but unable to speak.
And Syke came to one knee on the floor, looking up at her. He said gently, “Triq. I’m glad you’re home. You look like you’ve been through a war.”
“You’ve got no idea.” It was barely a whisper. “Whole world’s gone loco.”
“Yeah, we know it.” He patted her arm. “We’ve been here trying to fix it.”
“Roviarath’s better than some,” Jade said gently. “On your way through the city, did you see—?”
“I saw queues,” she told him, “people with barrows laden with produce, some of it rotting. Bringing animals, livestock, Gods know what. They were in lines outside the tithehalls. I don’t—”
“They want terhnwood.” Jade shrugged, helpless. “Literally, they can’t last the winter without it. They bring everything they’ve got into the city in the hope of securing even a little. They can’t even craft it properly without help. The crafters I’ve got remaining, they’re here, with me. The terhnwood, the same – what little there is left. We craft, we ration, we distribute, but it’s hard to maintain control. The people clamour and riot for it, waves against the walls. Syke—”
“We’re keepin’ stuff balanced, much as we can.” His grin was cold and eager. “For as long as we can eat, we can hold.”
Jade added, “The blight hasn’t reached us – only the terhnwood shortage. And people without food get a lot angrier, a lot more quickly. In some ways, we’ve been lucky.”
Triqueta shook her head, inhaled steam. “You’ve had a harvest.” She looked up at them, her belly churning. “What about the…” She didn’t say it, but they knew what she meant.
The hole. The wound in the world. The place where the Monument had been, where we threw down Maugrim, but changed the world forever.
She’d passed it on her way, of course she had, but she’d not stopped or gone close – she’d not dared. The place was layered with memories of monsters, of the centaur stallion, of Feren and Redlock and Ecko and fire, of the Bard and The Wanderer – of a time when an enemy was a solid thing that could be faced and fought and defeated.
Syke and Jade exchanged a glance.
Jade said, “Yes, we had a harvest – just about. You really want to know?”
To give herself a moment to find her resolution, she rustled in a pannier for a leather message tube. It was sealed with Nivrotar’s craftmark, and she handed it over.
“Here. Read this while you tell me.”
Syke passed the tube back to Jade without even looking, said softly, “The hole’s all wrong, Triq, all wrong – the whole damn thing’s like some half-healed sore. Soil’s poisoned, black cracks spreading like – I don’t know – rot or something. It…” His hands reached for explanation, insight, a way to express some formless horror. “It’s like some cursed canker; it’s scabbed over like it’s trying to heal, but the infection’s still there. Eating away.”
“I didn’t go that close,” Triq said. She shrugged, admitted, “I was afraid.”
“Smart.” Syke patted her knee like an affectionate uncle. “So, tell me. You really kill a bweao?”
“No, I ran like the rhez.” She looked up, almost grinned for real. “But it didn’t kill me.”
“That’s good enough,” Syke told her, patting again. “Good enough. Now, are you drinking that or not?” He made a playful swipe for her tankard, and she snatched it back with a mock glare, splashed herbal on the floor, spreading the winter dust into a muddy pool.
There was a rustling as Jade pulled a roll of parchment from the leather sleeve, flattened it. He read, his face slowly congealing.
Syke leaned in, dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m glad you’re back, Triq, I need you, we need you here. We’re holding Roviarath – but with no trade and the Great Fayre destroyed, we haven’t got long. There’s been one assassination attempt already – messed it right up, as it turned out – and out on the trade-roads, people’re claiming that Jade’s withholding goods, arming up. If the tide of the people turns, we’ll have nothing – no terhnwood and no damned food either.”
Triqueta watched his expression, drawn and weary. She’d never seen him look old but there were white threads in his dark hair, scattered through his beard. The skin under his eyes was shadowed with uncertainty. He flickered a frown, his face furrowing at nothing.
In the sudden lines, she saw Karine.
She shuddered.
“Triqueta.” Jade dropped her name hard onto the wooden floor – its impact seemed to sound from the rafters. “This message – it’s genuine?”
“Nivvy handed it to me herself. Ecko…” she stumbled over his name, but recovered “…Ecko took one like it to Fhaveon.”
“Then she’s serious.” The CityWarden lowered the papers, still stubbornly rolling into a tube around his hand. He rubbed his other hand across his eyebrows. “Do you know what this message contains?”
Something in his voice made her stare, made Syke turn and come back to his feet. They spoke almost together, “What? What’s—?”
Jade held up his hand, cutting them dead. “You fought Vahl Zaxaar?”
“It’s a bit of a saga, but—”
“Yes, all right, I’ve got the basics – but Vahl Zaxaar himself – itself. By the Gods, this whole world becomes more damned crazed by the day. You really fought—?”
“Yes.” Triqueta stood. “Remember, we came to you before, asking you to believe in something and you wouldn’t – didn’t – and your city—”
“All right, don’t rub my snout in it.” Jade paced the floor, tapping the rolled parchment in his hand like some sort of baton. “Fhaveon was attacked, but she beat the monster?”
“Make sense, for Gods’ sakes.” Syke was watching the parchment like a hungry…
Like a hungry bweao.
But Jade seemed not to notice; he pointed it at Triqueta. “I’ve got my hands full. I cling to my city by wit and will alone. I throw back dissenters every day, rumours, voices spreading lies – and, frankly, spreading truths I’d rather not have known. The blight’s crippled us, Triq – we’re out of terhnwood and we’ve got no fighting force to speak of. Without Syke and the Banned, I’d be a corpse many times over. I can’t spare… I can’t…” With a curse that sounded more helpless than angry, he threw the parchment down, and it rolled in sheaves across the filthy floor. “You read it, you tell me what the rhez the Lord of Amos is playing at.”
Syke gathered a handful of the rolls together, tried to make sense of the markings, passed them to Triqueta. She shrugged. “What do they say?”
Jade looked at his filthy, plains-stained floor.
“They call me to a winter muster, Triq. Amos calls Roviarath to war.”
7: BLOOD AND RUINS
FHAVEON
Rhan.
The Uber-Nasty. The Promise of Samiel. Captain Greasy Smear. The ready-built-in superhero that’d led Ecko to flee The Wanderer
rather than face the Council. Reflexively, Ecko had been expecting the old guy with the long white beard, but if this bloke was a superwizard, then Ecko was a fucking ballerina.
Rhan had the white hair, but that was where it ended. Rather than a beard and a long and manky robe, he had a jaw that would cut glass and shoulders like a museum statue. His face was carved in lines like long years of severity, and though he didn’t have the Bard’s height, he looked like he could pulverise rocks with his grip alone. Chrissakes, he didn’t look real – not that that was ironic or anything – he was some sorta bodysculpt, or he’d walked off of a plinth in the fucking V&A.
And if all of that wasn’t shock enough… it fucking happened again.
Ecko recognised him, recognised him. The light was poor and the air thick with smoke, but it was like being jabbed with a taser-baton. Just like Roderick, just like the earlier flash with Amethea, Rhan was already there, neatly pre-programmed into the back of Ecko’s head. He was a phantom familiar, the residue of a half-watched movie, a brain-rig performer whose name he couldn’t quite remember…
Eliza must be pissing herself.
Bitch.
But Rhan wasn’t looking at Ecko. He was staring at the Bard.
The tiny cellar shrank round them, stinking and airless. There were black smoke stains on the beamed ceiling; the cold air was thick with panic and tallow.
None of that mattered.
Consumed by the Bard’s arrival, Rhan had come half to his feet, his expression changing from a friend’s greeting into something else, something transfixed, horrified and unnameable.
His deep voice barely a whisper, laden with a complex grief, he said, “Roderick?” He shook his head, disbelief or denial. “Dear Gods. What did you do?”
The Bard lifted his scarved chin, stepped back.
“What I had to.” His voice was pure power.
For just a moment, the look on Rhan’s carved face was so confused, so utterly lost, that it broadsided Ecko completely. Something in him had wanted to hate this fucker – this overpowered-fallen-angel-whatever-the-hell – but he found himself oddly and unexpectedly touched. The look was so broken, the expression of a man who’d lost a friend, something he needed and loved.
A man shaken to the core of his soul.
What’s this, now? Empathy? Fucksake!
That another level-up skill?
Rhan said, his voice soft with horror, “Samiel’s teeth.”
As Ecko found a corner of the small room, the colours in his skin were blotching with a pale, sourceless light. Amethea had stopped almost halfway down the steps from the trapdoor – she was staring at Rhan as if trying to see the superbeing that lurked under his skin.
“Your city’s in blood and ruins,” Roderick said, cold as a blade. “And worse is to come. I bear you a message from Nivrotar in Amos. And you need to listen.”
* * *
Still guarded by the scruffy tan of soldiers, Ecko’s first sight of Fhaveon, Lord city, ruling might of the Varchinde, yadda yadda, had been a bit of a fucking let-down.
He and the Bard and Amethea had trailed all the way across the plains in the freezing, fucking cold, carrying their message like good little children, and they’d fetched up at the city’s outer walls, being eyed like bugs by a scatter of archers. Here, their self-appointed escort had left them, apparently satisfied with duty done.
Long since pissed with winter travel, Ecko had been bored, and hurting, and quite a lot of other things. He’d been thinking only of food and heat, of shelter from the relentless and glacial plainland wind. His butt ached like hell. Once, long ago, Pareus had taught him the trail trick of sitting on one ass cheek and then the other, but he’d still been sat on both of them for far too long. Stiff as a corpse, he’d cursed the Bard for losing the tavern, cursed the cold ground and the hard wind, cursed the beast under him for a lumpy spine that threatened to saw him in half… He’d so been looking forward to a smoky, stinky pub, a bowl of lukewarm mulch and a bit of petty larceny…
Christ, he’d been looking forward to a fucking wash.
Apparently, though, what they’d found was a warzone.
Great. Just what we needed – a fuckin’ bonding vacation.
The morning air was bone-deep cold, ribboned with a thin mist that crept soft up the city’s flanks. Through it, he could see the broken buildings, the empty streets – and this so wasn’t the picture he’d carried. Hell, this was some sorta post-apocalypse fantasyscape – could there even be such a thing? Where was the star city, the striated stone, the rising roadways lined with crystal trees? Where were the statues, the falling waters, the glittering pools? And where was the handy fucking merchant with the end-of-level restock?
This… this reminded him of Aeona.
Pits of fire and mountains of ash.
Above the mist, Fhaveon’s heights were untouched – a stark tessellation of roofing, black against the paling sky. The sun was behind the city’s rise and from somewhere there came a pinpoint gleam of deep colour.
Roderick paused, a wraith in the white. “The Cathedral.” He pointed at the tiny colour mote, even as it faded and was gone, lost as the sun moved. “Beside it, the Palace, the main tithehall of the Cartel, and Garland House. It seems the rioting has not yet reached that far.”
“Rioting?” Amethea looked along the grim, dark line of the Bard’s outstretched arm, though there was no longer anything to see. “How do we get up there?” The mist swallowed the fear in her voice.
Ecko gave a sulky snort. “Why can’t you people just teleport, for chrissakes? They do it in all the—” The Bard shot him a glance, cold as stone. “Yeah, all right, whatever.” Silenced, Ecko seethed. How the hell had this fucker gotten so powerful? He could just look, now?
Yeah, you wait ’til I get you home…
“Fhaveon is changed, certainly.” As Roderick turned back, his grin was a fleeting impression of Ecko’s own. “But I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”
* * *
“You’re jesting.”
In the tiny, smoky room, Rhan was reading Nivrotar’s letter; black ink like squashed spiders crawled across its surface. His other hand pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger – fighting incredulity, or detonation.
“This is crazed.” His deep voice was a full bass-boom, heavy with disbelief. “You even dare bring this to me? You even dare ask?” He threw the letter down and rounded on Roderick with a speed that made it flutter like a dying thing. “I ought to pull your damned insides out.”
The Bard’s tone was flat. “It isn’t a request.”
Rhan spun back, picked up the curl of paper, brandished it at him. “You know where you can shove this.”
Roderick shrugged. “You’ll do as she says.”
“You’re barking loco.” It was a statement, hard as nails. “You can’t begin to imagine what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, what I’ve fought, what I’ve killed, to regain my city. I’ve braved the waters of the Ryll, defeated Phylos, thrown down my brother not a stone from where you’re stood.” There was no irony in his voice; he wielded words like weapons. “We’ve got food, terhnwood – enough to stabilise. You don’t tell me what to do, and neither does Nivrotar. I’ve cast down Kas before and I’ll do it again. Whatever you think you’ve become.”
The barb made the Bard smirk, brief and humourless.
Ecko made that one-all. His adrenaline was boosted, his targetters kicked. His oculars cycled scanning modes. If this fucker kicked off, Ecko was gonna hit him there, there and there before he could start flinging lightning bolts or whatever—
Rhan’s body temperature was noticeably rising.
A blink and a second reading showed the same thing – this joker had a core temperature that’d melt gold fillings and he was emitting a hefty whack of UV.
What the…?
Lacking a bucket of ice, Ecko shifted, eased fractionally away. He had no plans to wind up as an ash pile and a pair of smoking shoes.
He repeated, “You’ll do as she says.”
“Oh, will I?” Rhan snorted, his temperature spiking. “This is ego. You just want your predictions to have been true. All that time waiting, searching, moping and you weren’t even here – your final foe manifested in Fhaveon, and you missed it. And now, what, you want to play it again, just to prove that you were right?”
“Vahl is not the—”
“Shove it.”
Ecko changed position – reflex, keeping in stealth. Without reading the letter, he wasn’t entirely clear as to what was going on.
Roderick said, “Rhan, you know the truth of the world’s enemy. You’ve fought a battle, and a brave one, but this isn’t over—”
“You patronising bastard!” Rhan’s words were white, aflame. “I won.”
“Did you? Games are Vahl’s lifeblood, manipulations and betrayals.” Ecko could hear in the Bard’s voice the death of Karine, his grief. “Did you think it would be that easy? We’ll lose everything unless you listen to me.”
“I’ve beaten Vahl once, I can do it again, army or no army. As many times as it takes. Nivrotar has no hold over Fhaveon – no hold over me. This is my city, my purpose, my family, my Gods-given charge. You know all of this. Dammit, Roderick—” Overcome, Rhan seemed almost to be fighting tears of sheer fury. His temperature continued to climb, and Ecko wondered what the hell he was going to do – explode, or manifest as Something the Fuck Else…
Daemon. Dragon. Slumming-it Deity. Oh c’mon, give us a clue here…
Amethea, unnoticed by all, had reached for the letter. A frown ghosted across her pale, dirty face as she read down the page.
Then she said, “It does make sense, if you think about it.” The knell of inevitability in her soft voice brought stillness to the room.
Rhan turned; his voice was a whisper, incredulous. “Samiel himself charged me—! I’ve never relinquished—!”
“You don’t have a choice,” Roderick told him. “Think about it, Rhan, think about the city.” His voice was strong, but there was none of the force that he could have put behind it. Ecko realised that he was withholding whatever coercive might he had – Rhan’s agreement had to be genuine. “Think about what you’ve been left with. Even with the terhnwood you’ve found – can you fix this? Can you make Fhaveon live again? Arm her for war? Enough to face the Kas? I understand your pride, Gods know you know that,” his hand rested on Rhan’s arm, “but please, for the sake of the world herself, please at least think this through.”