Ecko Rising (11 page)

Too many surprises. He wasn’t being caught with his kacks down again.

Carefully draping the folds and curves of his cloak, he dissolved silently into the room’s darkness.

And he waited.

* * *

It was warm.

Locked into his stealth position, he remained still as the building slowly softened into silence around him. He heard doors opening and closing, voices laughing outside. After a while, feet moved up and down the creaking stairs and Ecko labelled them mentally – the implacable stamp that had to be Sera, Karine quick and light footed, Kale unhurried. The Bard’s boots were easy to identify – though heavier than he might have guessed.

Upstairs, doors banged. One by one, the tavern’s staff returned to their rooms and settled for the night.

As the quiet swelled, his throat started to close with rising pressure. He began to doubt, pointless fears dancing at the corners of his awareness.
Am I dreaming? Am I fucking dead?
He told himself it didn’t matter either way – he was here and he’d better just get on with it.

Food. Weapons.

Understanding.

The doubts laughed at him again, in the darkness they sounded like Eliza, like Lugan.
Chances of successful adjustment increasing: 34.74%

Would he even recognise what he needed? He was lost, betrayed, naked in the field once more. He was missing the cornerstones of his existence. No plastics, no metal. No communication, no information. No drugs, no pharmaceuticals. No branding, no packaging, no labels. Where did they get clean water? Where did they go to the john?

Mockery rang increasingly loud in the hush. The room’s very simplicity became unsettling. He clung to his beam as if everything else would fade into nothing around him.

Where the fuck was he?

A feminine voice cursing made him start. He heard the Bard’s rich, distinctive chuckle, and the faint glimmer of light beyond his room went out.

Sudden, utter blackness.

Silence.

He was swallowed by them, abruptly alone, so fucking alone – an illegal alien in a crappy backwater culture. He froze, stock-still. Childhood fears – he dare not move or speak or turn, because if he acknowledged the beast of the darkness, it would pounce...

He was holding his breath.

His heatseeker showed him only infinitesimal, subtle shifts that made the darkness deep as nightmare – there wasn’t enough illumination for his starlites.

He couldn’t even see himself. Only the wood under his fingertips told him he existed, that Eliza hadn’t flicked the big red switch marked “OFF”.

Was she watching him? Out there in the darkness? Could she feel what he felt? Was this... was this supposed to teach him a fucking
lesson
of some kind?

Yeah.

You.

Bitch.

The snarl of defiance was reflex, it rippled through him like the first whisper of the tsunami. His expression twisted, he inhaled and his adrenals kicked. The lightning thrill of energy slashed a sudden, whetted grin across his face. Challenge
him
, would she? The muscles through his back and legs coiled, anticipating.

Were you fucking laughing? At
me?

Sudden, sharp focus. Comprehension.
Sartori.

There was no fear here!

The blackness was home, it was his and he understood it – he
was
the beast in the fucking darkness. It had been his cover, his cloak, his friend, his best weapon. One more thing to add to the list of shit he’d left behind...

...ohhhh yeah, the fucking
light.

No streetlights, no aircars, no hoverdrones, no cameras, no fucking
electricity.

He found himself trembling, elation and adrenaline making the corners of his vision spark with realisation – a realisation of total, unmatched ability.

He was unique; he was all-powerful, superhuman. He could pull shit this world had never even fucking
heard
of. All the dark, Bogeyman dreams of his childhood were here. They were in the darkness round him.

Only waiting for him to take hold of them.

Oh yeah
.

As he dropped silently from the beam and carefully paced the distance to the unseen door, his blade-sharp grin cast a black reflection in his thoughts. This was it all fucking right.

This was Living The Nightmare.

* * *

Turning through an approximate L-shape of ground, The Wanderer was too simple to even offer him a challenge.

It slept oblivious – the only warmth a blur of feline, creeping on silent paws. The critter’s ignorance amused him. Navigating by heat, touch, simple mathematics, years of recon memorised the layout and brought him down to the bar.

Pub.

Taproom.

What-
ever.

Yeah, like whoever designed this should’ve left neat, clearly labelled ration packs laying in obscure corners, plus hard cash and some sorta silent missile weapon that didn’t involve
feathers.

Hey – and how about a couple of handy medikits and a ten-foot fucking
pole
?

He emerged through a door behind the bar and his antidaz flicked nanosecond irises. The taproom was bright, cross-hatched moonlight streamed through two front windows like the Bard had parked slap-bang in the middle of Leicester Square.

His crouch was instinctive, but the room was empty.

Motionless, he scanned.

Wood. More fucking wood than a hot first date. Barrels, tables, benches, wine racks, floor. This place’d go up like a fucking Fawkes’ Night party. For a second, temptation gibbered at him, dancing like a lighted match... Then he got a fucking grip and shut the door.

His adrenals were waning, unused by fight or flight, their fading left him cold and hollow. Shivers twitched his shoulders. The colours of his skin squirmed under the light and he swallowed nausea.

The taproom was silent, flanked by a gazillion alcoves you could hide a fucking army in – but his heatseeker picked up only the fading warmth in the fireplace. Next to its faint glow, a table was scattered with paper, curled into rolls or weighted with oddments. His telescopics picked out tiny, intricately detailed brown writing – sketches, even – but no map.

Remote sounds tickled the outer ranges of his hearing. Voices? Feet? Horses’ hooves again, somehow sounding wrong... Shouting and a sudden clatter that might’ve been a fight. More feet in a pounding and familiar rhythm.

Oddly reassured, he checked quickly for currency – gold, surely! When he found nothing, he snaked onto the bar top and crouched there, gargoyle still.

But there was no cash, no glitter of coinage. No pumps or optics, but hey, that one was obvious.
Still
no fucking metal.

He found wooden barrels and racks of pottery. And he found papers, loose rolls in differing colours of ribbon – they were off-white and rough to his touch. When he unrolled one, he found it was etched with some kind of tally marks, an elaborate record system he couldn’t begin to fathom. And under them, there was a squat, locked box – a box that his agile fingers took less than six seconds to prise open.

Whaddaya know. I hit the Vegas jackpot.

It was full of
stuff
.

Fragments of bright stone, ceramics and wood, pinches of powder in twists of fabric, white stuff that might’ve been horn or bone, jewellery braided from thread and colour. And most common of all, a kind of solid resin that looked almost like amber, almost like plastic. It was oddly smooth to the touch.

It wasn’t the only thing that he didn’t understand.

He went through the box, carefully.

Some of the resin was carved, or dyed, or both; some of it was just loose chunks. Some of it was crafted into more jewellery, or tools. Some of it had fibres running through it in eleborate patterns.

Laying a pendant thing back in the box, Ecko looked up and around the room, a realisation suddenly crystallising.

Jesus shit...

Hung on the walls and pillars was a half-ton of local swag – swords, scythes, tools, big ol’ spears with heads like half moons and axes the size of his head. Reaching out, he took one of the smaller blades down.

And it was the
same.

It was the same resinous, wood-warm, glass-smooth, metal-hard stuff that was in the box, incredibly light with a pattern of fibres running up its centre – reinforcement or decoration. It wasn’t sharp, though his sensitive fingers found old notches.

What the hell was this stuff? Was it like their gold, or steel? Or both? Now he looked round properly, he could see that it made everything from weapons to rivets to cutlery – whatever the fuck this stuff was, it was critical.

Curious, he took hold of the blade with both hands and applied a little pressure.

With a sharp retort in the still air, it shattered, fragments flying, but fibres holding the two halves crazily together like a snapped limb.

Over his head, there was the scraping of furniture.

Which room?

You stupid fucking –

Kale.

Cursing Eliza as the great-grandmother of all head-fucking bitches, he threw the busted sword back onto its hooks, closed the box, aimed a savage axe-kick at the pillar, then picked up the bits – all of them – and evaporated like a nightmare in the glare of a halogen torch.

6: FLESH

                    
UNKNOWN

Feren!

Her skull was coming apart, Amethea lifted shaking hands to her face and found crusted pain under her fingers.

Her hair was matted with it, it was gritted in her eyes.

Feren?

She tried to move; her legs betrayed her. She fell hard to a stone floor, heat and darkness clanging loud in her head.

The impact had split her eyebrow. She was wobbly – the gash was wide and shallow; it had bled profusely, but was not serious.

With each clatter of pain, images came like echoes: the plains, the Monument, the...
creature...

The tears came too, as they had to. She let herself cry for a few moments, then, irritated, she scrubbed at her wet face with her palms. Her tears washed the blood from her eyes and face.

“Feren?”

She ground her gaze into focus and looked about her.

“’Fraid not, love.”

The voice startled her – she’d no idea that there was anyone else in the room. It had come from behind her, deep and masculine, the accent utterly strange. Stumbling up to her knees and wiping her face she turned to see who it was.

Her head hammered like her chearl’s thudding hooves and she remembered...

Leave the male to die, bring this one... There is need of a healer.

“Who...? What happened to...?” She stumbled over her words.

Heavy shoulders shrugged, uninterested in the question. Above them, a tangle of dark hair framed tanned, work-roughened skin, spotted with ingrained dirt like that of a miner, or a drover walking too long at the end of a column of beasts.

“Nice of you to drop in,” the man said.

She stared. Short beard, full mouth, half-smile; eyes as dark as that creature’s had been, but flecked with fire. Nervousness shivered her skin. She had no idea who he was, but he compelled her for reasons she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Unconsciously, she raised a hand to her blood-streaked hair.
Who was he?

He made her heart tremble in her chest.

Other realisations tolled through the clangour – a tiny chamber, floor and walls of worn rock slabs, but air tense with unidentified heat; pack and belt-knife gone, but pouches and neck thongs untouched; hair and garments, sticking uncomfortably with sweat, blood and fear.

There is need of a healer.

“Who are you? What happened to Feren?”

“He flew to the moon, sweetheart.” One callused hand extended to help her to her feet. The fingers were hot and strong, several had been broken at some time; he wore heavy, white-metal rings. There was old dirt under his nails. “C’mon, love, you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

His tone was gentle, but those
eyes...

“Hold on... hold on a moment.” She held up her hands to ward him off. “I’m leech and apothecary to the hospice in Xenok, Feren’s my ’prentice. I – we – came out to the Monument for taer and there was this... thing –”

“The stallion? Don’t let him upset you, he’s just my – ah – watchdog.” He lifted her chin, made her look up at him, smiled. “Like all fanatics – more ideal than intellect.”

“He shot – !”

“I’m sorry about your mate... but he didn’t suffer. You, little lady – you’re important.”

He didn’t suffer.
For a moment, Feren’s death held her poised and breathless, disbelieving – but this man, whoever he was, was looking at her, into her, holding her heart and soul in his gaze. The fecks of fire in his eyes were warming. She sniffed, like a child, and his callused thumb stroked a stray tear from her face.

“It’s all over, love, all over. No need to worry now. Let’s get you a wash, and some clean kit – look at those big blue eyes and all that pale hair, you’re too pretty to be this much of a mess.”

Feren had fallen to the grasses, his hand gone from hers. “No...” She shook her head, breaking the contact – the thud of renewed pain helped her focus. “And... anyway... get
off
me.”

For a moment, it seemed the man chewed the side of his mouth. Then he caught her eyes again and smiled at her.

“Poor love, bloody stallion hit you like a wrecking ball – you’re confused.”

She was backing away – but the chamber was eerie, too close, too small. The sweat on her skin was like a glaze. “And why’s it so hot in here?”

“All right, all right, look.” He reached to close the gap between them, but she twitched back further – the stone in the wall was warm. “Baythunder – that great beastie you met outside – is barking, right? He shot your mate, liberated your chearl and left you with a dirty great clonk on your skull. You can’t get home to Xenok like you are.”