Ecko Endgame (13 page)

Waiting.

And there, in the square itself, was a figure – an older man, his silver hair tied back in a ring. He leaned against a headless pillar and he had the look of a fighter about him, but he was cricked in one shoulder and his face bore a recent, angry burn.

A scan showed nothing, no concealed monsters, no daemons lurking.

Yeah, an’ I trust that shit about as much as a suit with two lines of coke an’ a big fat smile…

The Bard stopped, his black horse stamping. The noise echoed dully back from the walls, making the air shudder. Ecko and Amethea pulled to an uneasy halt.

The man said, “Roderick of Avesyr. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you in Fhaveon. Your tavern’s missed, but you’re very welcome. We need your help.”

* * *

Rhan said, “And you’d be the ‘Ecko’ I’ve been hearing so much about.” It was a statement, not a question, and he raised an eyebrow in curiosity.

His temperature had fallen, was almost human-normal.

Ecko said, “Glad I didn’t hafta kick your ass there.”

The other eyebrow went up. “You think you can?”

“You wanna try it?”

“All right.” Roderick cut across both of them. “Ecko, make yourself useful and read this.” He lunged for the letter, then rolled it across the bench-top.

Rhan’s face flickered a faint, bitter smile. “I’ll save you the effort. The letter tells me to leave my city.” There was rubble in his tone – he hadn’t agreed, not yet. “To take what militia I can muster, and what of the population will follow me, and to retreat across the plains like an esphen with a pronounced
limp
.” The word was acid. “Nivrotar tells me there is one thing the Kas cannot resist, one thing that will lead them by their cock-ends into her choice of confrontation. And that thing,” his smile was grim, “is my personal downfall. So tell me, dark champion from another world,” his sardonic humour was a bass thrum of Ecko’s own, “do I look like
bait
to you?”

“Bait?” Ecko was scanning Nivrotar’s black writing. He rattled his fingertips on the table and grinned. “I know one thing: the bad guy always comes back. Bigger. An’ with more tentacles.”

Rhan gave a short, humourless snort. “And you, little priestess. Do you believe Vahl’s playing? That his greatest assault is yet to come?” His voice twisted. “That I must relinquish my city to the very enemy I’ve always guarded her against… having already
beaten
him?”

Amethea stared at him, her answer caught in her mouth.

“This is…” She swallowed, gave a faint shrug. “Look, I think… I think this is about more than just your city. What Nivrotar’s doing is about the Varchinde entire – everybody, every
thing
will die if we don’t get this right. It isn’t about what you want, or your mandate, or whom you’ve beaten. This is about
survival.
”

“What I want,” Rhan said. Something in the way he said the words told Ecko that Amethea had touched him to the core.

Hurt him.

Rhan spread his square white hands on the bench-top as if cuffed there. Ecko reached the bottom of the letter. Amethea continued to stare at Rhan, her face flushed, perhaps afraid she had overstepped her boundaries. Roderick leaned against the soot-stained wall, his face still mostly covered, unspeaking.

“Gods
damn
it!” With a detonation of heat and light and fury, Rhan was on his feet, turning the bench over, sending it smashing onto the flagstone floor. Then he took it by one end and hurled it bodily at the cold stone wall, shattering the wooden shelf, sending the candles tumbling. He turned, put a fist into the stonework at the side of the Bard’s head, cracking it hard enough to send dust billowing from the ceiling. Roderick didn’t flinch; one of his hands grabbed Rhan’s retreating wrist and for a moment they stood, eyes on eyes, close as lovers and seething with outrage.

“This is madness – and you know it,
she
knows it.” Rhan’s snarl was vicious. “If you want me to do this, then you’d better have some damned
proof.
”

* * *

“We’re glad you’ve come,” the silver-haired man said to the Bard.

Roderick handed back the rein of the black horse and stood like a streak of the fading darkness, silent.

The man gestured, as though searching. “You knew this was coming – you tried to tell us. Before.” It was a statement – a need to bestow responsibility. “The Council didn’t hear you—”

“Phylos was already in the hands of Vahl Zaxaar, even then. Why would he heed me when his victory was coming?” Roderick’s tone was soft, lethal. “What do you want?”

Around them, the watchers closed tighter, listening. Ecko quelled a desire to shudder, to scratch at his sacking shirt as if the damn thing had fleas. He also made sure he stayed well clear of the sigil in the stonework – you never knew when the big nasty was going to erupt skywards out of one of those fucking things, propelled by farts of blue smoke and Armageddon.

Amethea stared all round them, her navy eyes wide.

“Baeru,” the Bard said, “what do you want?”

The man started at the sound of his name, but came forwards, his tied-tight hair shining like metal in the rising light.

“Your help,” he said. He gestured at the plaza behind him, at the wall at its far side, at the rise of the great city that still loomed over them. “This hasn’t ended, Roderick, the city hasn’t won, isn’t safe.” His voice rose, urgency and hope. “Rhan may’ve beaten Phylos, but they’re still here – the monsters, the things that came out of the walls. Ythalla gathers them, they rally to her flag and her cause – and not just the monsters…” He ended the sentence with a gesture indicating all around them. “Rhan can sit up there in the height of the city and pretend it’s all fine, but there’s been no end to it, not down here. We run and we hide and we die. No one knows who to trust, where to go. We live in the Rhez itself, Roderick, we’re damned in its very fire. Please, help us.”

Ecko watched the man intently as the crowd pressed closer. His scans were foiled by the mist’s lingering chill, but the speaker’s body temperature showed genuine passion, movements of emotion and colour in the skin of his face and hands. In the mist, shapes shifted, but he could barely see them.

We live in the Rhez itself…

Amethea said softly, “Monsters. Creatures that are half-beast, half-human? Crafted from flesh?”

“Some, yes.” Baeru turned to her, seemed to latch onto her words with something like relief. “And some are… golems, crafted from stone and soil. They’re old death, as if lost Swathe herself were rising from her past. And others are creatures that I have never seen, never dreamed of.”

“Tell me,” Roderick said.

“Sometimes, you can see them. If the day’s clear enough.” He pointed across the sigil to the far side of the plaza, but the mist was still lingering. “They’re down there, below us, past the city’s northern outskirt. If your eyes were long enough, you could watch them gather. They come across the water, from Ikira and Teale, from the towns that died.” He turned back to the Bard, his face burning. “I think… I think they’re
waiting
for something.”

“Christmas.” Ecko was beginning to wonder if this guy had a marble shortage – hell, there was a lot of it about. Baeru placed a hand on the Bard’s black-clad chest in appeal – or as if he would tear his heart out.

“You may be right.” Roderick placed a hand over Baeru’s, held it to his chest. He watched the man’s face with a peculiar intensity. “Tell me everything you know.”

If your eyes were long enough…

Sod waiting for a game of soldiers, Ecko had a quicker way to do this.

* * *

Ecko said to Rhan, “You wanna know? I’ll fucking show you. Whaddaya need? Scars? Dog-tags? Alchemical Haynes Manual? What?”

Rhan’s peridot gaze fastened on Ecko like he could turn the little man inside out.

“Numbers. Deployment. Proof. Show me.
Show
me why I should abandon my city.”

Roderick said softly, “Not abandon—”

“Don’t play your word games with me.” Rhan’s face flickered, but his voice was hard as rock. “You don’t get it, do you?” He glared from one to the other. “Does Nivrotar think I’m that weak, that foolish, that I wouldn’t fight to the last drop of light in my blood to hold this city and everything in it? We are the bastion, here, we hold the Varchinde in our walls! Roderick, please…” His voice cracked and he fell back, looking at the scattered pieces of bench across the floor. “I’ve never doubted you, never questioned your vision. But if you want me to do this, then I need more than a gamble – I need truth.”

The Bard rested a hand on the Seneschal’s back, and said, “Trust me.”

“Save it.” Rhan’s voice was age and weariness. He turned back, and his gaze was like a fucking laser, boring into Ecko’s head. “You said you had proof. Show me.”

* * *

At the plaza’s edge, Ecko peered into the last of the mist, spun his telescopics to see.

The hairpin-bend roadway dropped downwards from his vantage, skated around the lip of a slope of scree, and skidded into a sizeable drop to the next loop below. As the white shroud thinned, Ecko’s telescopics could just make out where the city’s scattered outskirt of manor and farmland met the barren expanse of the dead plain. Down there, he could see a long stretch of ruin, of buildings hollow and dark-eyed, of soil drained and grey.

And
movement.

We live in the Rhez itself…

His adrenaline shivered.

They were down there, all of them, waiting. They laid among the buildings as if they’d been crafted there – Amal’s monsters, creations of nightmare flesh. The centaurs, the mwenar, the vialer – half human, half creature, half nightmare. They seethed among the stone as if eager to begin their assault.

But there was more beyond.

Holy fucking shit.

There were other things down there, further back. Things that looked like ancient stone, blunt-faced and overgrown, crumbling at their edges but with hands that could crush buildings. Smaller things, swift and almost unseen in the mist; things that had blind eyes and curved claws, that turned on each other in frustration and restlessness.

Trying for a headcount, for some sort of calculation, he remembered the army that had been crafted by Maugrim, deep under the Monument – had that, too, been destined for this fight? If it had assailed Roviarath, and Roviarath had fallen, then Maugrim would have left enough troops to garrison, and the rest of them would have been here.

And if they hadn’t stopped Amal…

Jesus Harry Christ in a bloody fucking bucket – he remembered what Nivrotar had said about their successes. If they hadn’t fought Maugrim and Amal, would the Grasslands already have fallen – would they already have failed?

He stared over the drop, his adrenaline shimmering.

Patterns, always patterns, everything affected by everything else… tiny ripples that change everything around us…

Chrissakes, maybe we really
haven’t
fucked this up!

The insight was a tiny one, but it burned very bright. Ecko suddenly realised that he understood the choice that Nivrotar had made, the gamble she was taking…

…and fuck him ragged if he didn’t actually believe they could do it.

But he didn’t have time to dwell on the fact.

The thing that came over the lip of the drop, right in his face, was a sudden and pixelated blur to his distant ocular focus – small and fast, teeth and eyes and reaching, stretching claws. His adrenaline was boosted, his reflexes kicked so hard he didn’t even know he was moving; his hands caught the thing, but not before the gash in his throat spewed breath and scarlet onto the stone.

* * *

Ecko pulled down the neckline of his stupid hairy shirt, showed where the creature’s claw had slashed at windpipe and collarbone – a mark straight across the scar that Amal had given him. Only his speed and reinforced skin had saved him from a gasping death; only his increased healing rate had stopped the gush of blood from finishing what the fucking clawbeast had started.

“This what you want?” he demanded.

The mark was a white flash like his insight, another line in his mottled skin.

“The critter was some sorta scout – fuckin’ fast and gone before I got it. But I saw enough about where it came from.”

Rhan watched him.

“You gotta party on your northern border, dude. You got monsters, crossbreeds, stone beasties from times past – you fuckin’ name it, it’s gotten an invite. It’s a muster point – an’ it’s gettin’ bigger.”

“Prove it,” Rhan said.

Ecko grinned at him. “That’s not all. You wanna know what’s happenin’ to your population? Your homeless, your jobless, your dispossessed? Someone down there is handin’ out hope.
Purpose.
I saw
people
down there, asshole,
your
people, an’ they’re queuin’ to get in.”

“This is some sort of jest.” Rhan reached to touch the scar and Ecko pulled back. “Why would they—?”

“Take your fuckin’ paws offa me and listen.” Ecko jabbed a rigid finger. “You’re done here. You stay here, an’ all them people who lost their homes and loves and jobs an’ little kitty cats, they’ll find a flag to wave. They’ll find themselves a cause. They’ll go join that army – you familiar with the phrase ‘cannon fodder’? You’re fucked six ways from sundown and all the big shiny noble hero shit in the world ain’t gonna save your ass this time. You gotta get the fuck outta here. Take your people with you, rally what forces you can, and git.” He grinned, black as the starless night. “I’ve met your brother, asshole. Let him have the fucking city – that way he hasta clean it up.”

Rhan stared at Ecko for a minute, pale green eyes blazing. Ecko had no idea if he was gonna laugh, or punch his fucking lights out.

Or try to.

Then he turned and swore, and slammed one fist into the wall hard enough to make the little house shudder.

“I need to know everything,” he said.

Ecko grinned at him. “That’s kinda what I do.”

Ress was not crazed.