Danie Ware - Ecko Rising

What Ecko found, before he’d gone much further, was a wall.

Flat and cold and absolute, it cut his progress dead.

So much for White Rabbits.

Now what was he gonna do?

It wasn’t just bricks: the wall had been covered – painted? – with something and it was filthy, stained with browns and greens and streaks of rot. In places, it was cracked and crumbling. A hefty whack with a sledgehammer would knock the bricks loose like teeth.

He wondered what the hell was on the other side – which bit moved with the sunrise, which bit didn’t. What would happen if something was half in and half out?

Cursing the absence of heavy-duty steel – a crowbar’d be good about now – Ecko flicked his oculars to scan for an alternative.

And he noticed something weird.

He was crouched at the edge of a small, open area that seemed to face the wall itself as there was a slight downward dip in the floor. The only other thing down here was a single, monster barrel that he could’ve used to boat up the Thames.

Hell, what’d he been saying about dynamite? Or was the Bard just ageing one motherlode of killer whisky?

The barrel was unlabelled, and covered in crap.

Great.

Around him, the shadows fell in layers of grey, like phantoms. The air was chill and old and smelled only of rot. It was quiet, motionless, even the crawlies had packed their little crawly bags and fled. He shuddered, carefully scanning the tottering piles of shelving.

No crowbar.

No monster.

He crept out to the centre of the dip, the middle of the wall. The shelves rose round him like an audience.

Yeah? Well watch this.

With a grin of defiance to the silent fears that lurked taunting in the darkness, his darkness, he spun hard and slammed one foot sideways into the mouldering paint.

Don’t ever use a spin-kick in combat... but they’re great for kicking shit down.

The impact was tremendous: it rippled almost tangibly through the air. The wall cracked, flaked, dust trickled to the floor. He exposed brick like bruised flesh.

Vulnerable.

His grin set, a black slash of pure, elated fury. Now what? Huh? What happens if I make a damned hole in your reality? Does it let through monsters from another dimension? Hey, like Lugan?

He caught the thought, and swore at himself.

A second, savage slam sent a spiderweb of lines though the paintwork; a third made the wall judder, a river of dust trickling to the floor.

Or maybe I’m the monster, already here?

A fourth kick, a fifth. The paint was cracking now – broken flakes drifting to the floor like paper...

One of them had letters on.

Huh?

Ecko slammed the anchors on, his heart suddenly thundering in his chest. He recoiled, his targeters recalibrating, and he crouched down among the fragmented ruins, almost cowering.

The shelves rose, looming, round him.

He picked the flake up.

It was thin, cold. It crumbled even as he touched it, like some fucking forgotten relic, but his telescopics were enough. Upon it was a spider scrawl – barely a word, faint and faded.

It said, “...ien”.

What the...

His momentum had been interrupted. His adrenaline was shifting, changing from confrontation and gleeful fury to a skin-crawling prickle that crept up into his shoulders and the back of his neck. Barely daring to breathe, he crouched by the damage he’d made, extended a fingertip.

And he realised what he’d just done.

Fuck me ragged...

The paint – stucco? – was a collage of colour. It wasn’t mould he’d been kicking down – well not all of it – it was some sort of mural. As he backed up, looked up and around him, he realised that it was fucking huge. It covered the whole wall from one side of the dip to the other.

His scalp crawled.

He made a grab for nearest rocklight, sent the shadows gibbering round him. Then he crouched again and, carefully, took a corner of his cloak, brushed where he’d cracked the artwork through to the bricks.

There, the tiny faded lettering said, “Tus...”.

Tusien.

He shivered. His flake fit one edge of the hole perfectly.

What’d the Bard said?

The high days of Tusien.

Trembling now, he picked up other fragments, turned them over to study them, but they were dust, their wisdom lost.

Shit...

Angered, excited, frustrated, fighting to hold his adrenaline, he carefully, carefully, uncovered a little more, blinking at it like some fucking ageing Tech. After a moment, his oculars made out the remains of a tiny image – some sort of earthwork, stylised ruins.

It said, “The Barrow at Tusien”.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shitweasel.

The wall was a map.

Shaking now, he brushed more dirt aside, and more. Getting his mitts on proper cartography had been pretty high on his list of wants – and he’d found nada. Now the whole world was laid out in front of him...

Or would be, as soon as he’d called in the cleaners.

He propped the rocklight on the barrel, cleared more of the dirt. Slowly, the colours and the imagery became easier to see. There was a distinct lack of scale – artists’ rendition might’ve been more to the point – but it did the job, all right.

Chrissakes, where’s a camera when I fucking need one?

There was Roviarath, lynchpin city. There was Amos at the mouth of some huge mofo river, and further north there was Fhaveon, the Lord City the Bard had mentioned, on some kind of rock promontory, and watching a big old island across a surprisingly narrow straight. There was all the green shit – the hills and forests and mountains and lakes and the empty acres of grass... the faded colours made it seem brownish, rotten.

With a scrabble, he was stood on the barrel-top, holding up the rocklight to find the blip that’d tell him where the tavern was, the X he’d been waiting for. But apparently it wasn’t gonna be quite that easy.

Great. The one thing I needed to find...

Scowling, he dropped back into his cowled crouch, steadying himself with the tips of his fingers, and covering his skin against the light.

He had to remember this, burn it into his forebrain somehow. If he was ever gonna to go any-sodding-where, he had to learn this stuff.

Some fucking joke, to put a map where he couldn’t move it. What he wouldn’t give for Lugan’s monosharp pocket knife, then he could peel the damn thing off the wall.

Yeah, no chance of that. They didn’t even have steel. Iron. Coinage. Everything that should’ve been metal...

Metal.

Oh. Jesus Harry Christ on a fucking motor scooter...

...two and two, you asshole. Usually make four.

The rocklight shimmered faintly as if it agreed with him.

Still crouched there, riding the barrel like Bilbo sodding Bigshot, he rummaged through his pouch for the piece of the blade he’d snapped, and held it up like a talisman. It shone the same deep orange, almost bronze, just like the goldie girl’s –

Never mind that.

Ecko stared at the fragment, turning it in the rocklight so its broken edges glittered.

C’mon, think...

Ecko was recon – he was smart as fuck, when he could be bothered. And right now, he had that shiver in his skin that meant he was onto something – that there was a mystery, right here, right now, that was just begging him to kick it open.

Like the night he’d taken out Bob Pilgrim, like his stealth-run on Grey’s facility, this was what he fucking lived for.

And the fragment of resin gleamed.