Danie Ware - Ecko Rising

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.