Danie Ware - Ecko Rising

Saved his arse. Shown him the glaring bloody truth.

Elementalism was emotional – rage and glory like throwing an electrical paddy. Alchemy – putting those elements to scientific use – now that was a different and far more clinical matter. Creations like the centaurs – that took a huge amount of skill and learning.

“Vice!”

The Kartian must’ve heard him – but the chamber remained still.

Maugrim flicked the washer onto the floor. Tink! He was planning, thinking, possibilities unfolding. This had been a beginning, a hint of what he could achieve if he focused his energy correctly. He needed to move his workroom closer to the heart of the site, the nexus of the Flux itself. He needed to plug himself in, to understand exactly what he’d done.

And he needed a new subject – a conductor, a dead man switch he could afford to sacrifice for the increased might they would bring. There’d been a woman, strange blooded, not bloody Range Patrol. Vice had brought her in – said something about a Kartian half-blood.

He had to recreate the experiment. Once he understood what he’d done, he could to take control. If he could summon that kind of power, he could electroshock this complacent, indulgent world into alertness.

And that was what he really wanted, why he had been recruited, why he had been given the centaurs as his guardians, why he had been taught the lore of this world in which he’d found himself...

This world was stagnating, just like his own. It was in stasis; it learned nothing new, had forgotten its own legends. Its population wasn’t growing, either in number or in enlightenment. In short, it had its collective head up its arse. Like a patient in his old life, he needed to make it wake up, change, kick over – that’s what his teacher wanted, why he’d been trained and taught. Why he’d been working so hard to make that timeless vision manifest...

Remembering what the half-Kartian woman had looked like, Maugrim began to grin.

This time, there would be no half measures. He was going to understand this new power he’d awakened – the skill it had brought him. And then he was going to let it blaze across the Varchinde.

* * *

Amethea looked at a pair of stone feet.

They were beautiful, perfect, the most exquisite carved stone feet she’d ever seen.

But they were hers.

She was lost, still trembling with the aftermath of extreme passion. She felt strange, empty, abandoned – not only by Maugrim, but by the stone.

The memory of her exultation was bizarre – frightening.

What had happened?

If she tapped her toe, she could feel it – sort of. She flicked it, then banged it – the sensation was oddly nebulous, like her skin was half numb. Half numb – and gracefully smoothed rock.

If she traced her fingers up the front of her shinbone, she could see where stone crystallised into flesh, where her skin solidified, where the creeping calcification had paused. For a long time, she stared at it, touching it, horrified and morbidly fascinated.

Was it getting worse?

Gradually, she became more aware of herself. She was uncomfortable, damp between her thighs, stiff backed. When she explored her shoulders with her hands, she found she’d – literally – left the top layer of skin from her shoulder blades stuck to the floor. Part of the floor.

As though the growth had started, but...

Her fingers found fragments of ripped fabric. Her feet had been – were – bare, but her garments had covered her back. Somehow, they’d got in the way.

Of what?

With an effort, she swallowed a mouthful of horror and tried to sit up straighter.

Okay – that wasn’t so bad. Neither her feet nor her ankles would move, but she could reach the palette and drag it towards her. She could sit on it, easing the pressure on her tailbone and freeing herself of the shredded remains of the ludicrous frock he’d liked.

His hands, tearing it from her, oh dear Gods...

Shaking herself sternly free of the memory, of the rush that came with it, she tore a length of the fabric and tied it round her calf – marking the fusion point. Then she ran her hands over her shoulders to find out how badly she’d torn her skin.

Apothecary, heal yourself.

Who used to say that?

Her hands paused. Again, the sensation that she’d lost something. Closer this time – a bowshot, a sense of grief, a hand gone from hers. A creature, massive and masculine and wrong, screaming insanity in the plainland night.

Mighty stones, fallen and gleaming faintly iridescent, like grandfathers of rocklights.

She struggled to focus; a boy with a shock of orange –

Oh Goddess.

Feren.

Like the stone in her feet, her thoughts were suddenly solid, her memories as certain as pebbles in her hand.

She’d been riding from Vilsara in Xenok, taking her ’prentice to fetch taer from the Monument. They’d been attacked – horses with the bodies of men, beautiful, crazed. Monstrous. Feren had been shot...

He flew to the moon, sweetheart.

Killed?

There is need of a healer.

As through the creeping stone had driven Maugrim’s fire from her flesh and heart, given her gravity, she focused clearly for the first time. She didn’t know what had happened, but she’d felt consciousness under her – in her – skin. Vast, slow, beyond her ken or her comprehension... something had been awake.

It had driven Maugrim from her body.

And in the crucible it had provided, there was a hardening crystal of focus.

Alert now, determined, her first instinct was to break up the palette, find herself a chisel or lever – but she’d no idea what damage she’d do if she tried to separate her feet from the floor. Systematically, she tried to tense one calf muscle, the other. Move one ankle, the other. Wiggle her toes.

There had to be a way out of this.

She was tensed, watching the door, heart thumping now with adrenaline and purpose. She scanned the room for clothes and kit, almost wanting to pile them up so she’d know where they were. She needed to move. Needed to move now !

And gradually, as though it heard her plea, the calcification withdrew.

Elation fired her. It was slow, so slow, and it left a cold, numb emptiness in her flesh; an emptiness filled by screaming needles of returning sensation, by dripping, caustic blood. It hurt like the rhez, but the pain was cleansing, cleared her head, chased the last tails of lust from her body. She became impatient, hammered at her skin to make the transition faster – she had to be out of this before he came back!

Oddly, she found herself cold. As her legs were freed, she could stretch to reach her old garments – the shirt and overshirt she’d worn from Roviarath. They didn’t warm her, but their familiarity was comforting. Pressed to her face, they smelled of chearl and grass and woodsmoke. With them on, she knew who she was.

How many people had she refused to heal? Stood by and watched die in agony?

Without Maugrim’s heat haze, there was no way to soften, rationalise – or to forgive. Metal embedded in skin, each a vast, raw, open wound, unable even to plead for their own death. For one horrified moment, she wondered if she deserved everything that Maugrim had done to her.

Then she was angry. Angry for herself, for Feren, for the people who had died in pain unspeakable, for the ones yet to come. With her hands under her knees, she tugged at her feet until she felt they’d tear at the fusion point.

One way or another, she was going to pay him back for every wound he’d inflicted, every liberty he’d taken. For every touch !