Ecko Burning

by Danie Ware

  Frankly, Jayr reckoned, looking round them, it might just cursed-well do that.

  Unease breathed cold across her skin, prickling chillflesh. She rubbed at her scarred arms, bit into a nail, spat out the shred. She was looking for a sheltered place to stop, somewhere to get Ress out of the scattering threat of the rain while she went to look for signs of life...

  ...or of anything else.

  But this place was deader than an overworked slave. The paint on the closed shutters was peeling, faded with salt and light.

  Ress said, quite clearly, “Kazyen. No time, no time, no time, no time...”

  Jayr ignored him.

  Facing the weary buildings, the harbour was cradled in two long, curving stone arms, one ending in a lighthouse, the other in some crumbling grey statue, now a rain-misted blur against the grey. The fishercraft sat high in the water, patiently waiting; a row of houseboats offered faded, painted signs and sprawlingly untended plants.

  In Fhaveon, the old scribe had said they’d find passage here, a boatmaster or fishercraft prepared to take them where they needed to go.

  But it looked pretty cursed unlikely from here.

  Unable to help herself, Jayr looked out across the water, eastwards at the faintly dark stripe along the horizon. It had been there, shadowing them, all the way over the wooded hills that separated Teale from Fhaveon.

  Ress followed her gaze and his agitation increased. He shook her shoulder, his mouth working round words of urgency and fear. “No time, no time, no time...”

  “We’ll get there somehow, I promise,” Jayr told him. “If I have to row you all the damned way.”

  “Kazyen,” Ress said, now sounding on the verge of tears. He looked round at the harbour, shook his head. Then he brightened, pointing. “Look! The crustaceans are safe!”

  “What?”

  He pointed again, his face lit with wonder, a child’s gentle smile. There, at the edge of the harbour’s wall, the hanging wicker-woven cages were door-loose and empty. Whatever beasties had been caught in there had long gone.

  “Gods’ sakes.” Jayr was scanning the harbour, wondering if any of the boats would take them across the strait, if she could handle one without help. She knew less than nothing about water - currents and double-tides, something stupidly complicated about the moons. For a moment, fears clamoured at her, reaching with cold hands and trying to bring her down, but she stood, fists clenched and solid, until they subsided to resentful muttering and left her alone.

  She was Jayr the -

  Oh for Gods’ sakes, Syke and his nicknames. The Banned were long gone. They would never go home, she understood that now. She was Jayr the Damned, or Jayr the Damned Fool.

  “One of us is howling loco, you know that?” She grabbed Ress’s elbow and pulled them both under the front of a building, out of the wet. “Didn’t the scribe say there was another fishing town, further north?”

  “Must go. Now.” Ress yearned out over the harbour, out towards that ever-present shadow. “Please!”

  His mouth contorted as if he was trying not to cry.

  Then, in the corner of her vision, movement caught Jayr’s eye.

  What the rhez?

  Up there, high above them on the wooded slopes overlooking the small town - there was something moving, shifting oddly in the half-light. There was some kind of empty stone theatre up there, rocklit against the darkening sky - but the motion was an uneasy seethe, and lower down.

  Was there something in the woods?

  Several times as they’d followed the roadway, Jayr had felt that they were being trailed, or watched - but she’d seen nothing. Even the pirates had packed their little pirate bags and gone home.

  No, she wasn’t jumping at figments, there was something up there, something that roiled through the trees like...

  Her heart lurched in her chest - a sudden spike of nervousness that sent her body thrumming, ready. She was tensed, staring.

  “Ress,” she said carefully. “Can you see -?”

  He ignored her, still staring out at the water. “Must. Go!”

  “Ress...” Jayr pulled back into the shelter of the building’s doorway as the rain came in harder, slicing sideways across the harbourfront. Ress looked up at it, blinked, opened his mouth to catch it and then gave a sudden, odd laugh as his hair soaked through and darkened, plastering back from his face.

  Jayr pulled him back out of the deluge, swearing. She was struggling to make out the hillside through the shining grey blur.

  The figure that came round the front of the doorway to speak to her almost made her jump out of her skin.

  It was a woman, a woollen shawl over her head and clutched under her chin, though she was soaked through. Long lines of age and grief cut down the sides of her nose and mouth. She glanced back, beckoned to them.

  “Come with me.” Her tone was low and urgent.

  “Why?” Jayr asked her.

  “The town...” She shook her head, drops flying, pushed a wet strand of greying hair out of her eyes. “Whole place has gone to the rhez. You need to come with me. And quickly before they get down here. You can’t stay outside any more -you’re lucky Tawkarn spotted you.”

  As Jayr watched her, trying to understand the threat, the woman clicked her tongue in exasperation. “Quickly!”

  Ress blinked. “No. We have to go. Have to...” He started to walk out of the doorway, towards the harbour. Jayr lunged and caught him.

  She said, “We’re not going anywhere...”

  He turned on her, furious, his face suddenly contorting, his voice lifting into a thin, frustrated shriek.

  “No time! We have to go!” He lifted a hand, went to grab at the front of her tunic. “We must!”

  Startled, Jayr stepped back, blocked the reach, but the movement was awkward in the tiny space and it unbalanced her footing. She twisted an ankle, swore, and stumbled hard against the cracked wood of the door.

  The door was too battered to take her weight. It creaked, pivoted on a shattered hinge and twisted sideways into the room behind.

  And Jayr went over it, crashing clumsy into the dirt and the dust and darkness. Ress, still screaming, still grappling for her throat, threw himself straight in after her, his hands grappling for her face. She caught his wrists, but his knee came down in her belly and the air coughed out of her lungs.

  “What the rhez are you doing? Get off me!”

  Ress was still shrieking.

  In the doorway, the shawled woman peered after them, a startled shape against the rain.

  “Is he okay? Are you? We need to shift - and now.”

  “Shut up!” Jayr’s Kartian-trained ears could hear movement. Close movement.

  Movement in the room with them.

  Ress was still shrieking, but Jayr was focusing now - tight and sharp, more alert than she’d been in days. She was out from under him, flicking him to the floor with a deft twist of hip and shoulder, then flipping herself to her feet and moving into the room, ensuring he was behind her.

  “I said shut up!” she hissed.

  Ress’s shrieking stopped as though she’d torn it out of the air. Its echoes rang in her ears and she shook her head to clear them.

  The woman, no fool, was reaching for the nearest light.

  And then the movement came again, soft. A rustling, a breathing, a wakening.

  The woman said, “Oh my Gods. Get out of there, get out of there!” Her voice was soft with crushed horror.

  But the air was shattered into ringing fragments by the sound of wooden poles tumbling, rolling, clattering across a stone floor. Jayr crouched still in the dimness, heart thumping, her fingers splayed and her eyes and ears and skin all searching.

  Under the clangour of the falling poles, the movement came again.

  Closer.

  Then there was a thin, almost plaintive wail from somewhere in the back of the gloom. The air smelled faintly of terhnwood, of husk and dirt and fibre. Jayr turned slowly, her skin alive, waiting f
or the assault.

  Come on then!

  By the Gods, she was looking forward to this, wanting it...

  From somewhere in front of her, there came a faint slightly uneven footstep. Another echoed it, further back. The woman in the doorway was lifting the rocklight, still telling them to get out, to get out now.

  And then, in the dusty tumble of the light, Jayr could see them.

  There was a huddle of people down by where the poles had fallen, a ragged bundle of faces and eyes and hands. They were gazing at her, stretching their hands out, opening their mouth and their breath was wrong, wet and somehow -

  Again, Ress began shrieking, splitting the air with inarticulate rage and frustration, with a howl that sounded like a man helpless as his friend or lover died. He strove to get past her, but she held him back.

  The huddle of people uncoiled to meet him. In the dirty light, they were somehow eager.

  And then Jayr saw the real horror.

  Jayr the Infamous had been a Kartian slave. Had spent a childhood in darkness and violence. Few things in the Varchinde scared her - but this, though, this was Gods-damned wrong.

  The poles on the floor were cut lengths of old terhnwood, and somehow they were still growing. Green shoots came from their ends and from the rings in the bark; even in the darkness, they strove for new life.

  In among them, the coil of people were reaching hands towards Ress as though they sought to welcome him, as though they wanted to embrace him and close over him and bring him down among them.

  And they, too, were alive with growth.

  Shoots of terhnwood came from eye sockets and mouths, came from fingernails and coiled under and through skin, bursting forth and burrowing back. The nested horde had a sense of hunger to them, an overpowering sensation of need that was suffocating in the dusty air of the small warehouse.

  The woman in the doorway was shouting still, but Jayr couldn’t hear her over Ress’s fury, over the drumbeat of her own blood in her ears. As Ress reached the huddle of people, they stood up to welcome him, to hold him to them until he too, became woven with the growth of the terhnwood...

  Jayr shuddered to the very core of her soul.

  Then she picked up one of the wood-lengths, lunged past Ress to ram the first figure hard in its overgrown mouth, send it slumping back into the heap. She spun the staff, back end upwards, slamming the second one over and back, came back with the off-swing to take Ress’s feet out from under him and send him skidding across the floor in a rattle of poles.

  Ress was shouting something, outraged, indignant. She didn’t understand - and she didn’t care. An upper-cut fourth blow caught a third figure in the jaw and cracked its head back, sending it sprawling back into the morass of its friends.

  For the moment, the horrible, crawling, keening, prowling eagerness paused in confusion.

  And Jayr could feel something prickling against her palms.

  What?

  It felt like tiny, soft teeth, like some sort of rash. Like something nosing at her skin as if trying to gain entry. Not letting go of the makeshift staff, she opened one hand, turned it over, peering at it in the dirty light. Her palm was itching, there were marks in her skin where -

  Where the growth of the terhnwood was trying to penetrate her flesh?

  She looked back at the huddle, at the suffocating knots of plant that wove through them from the inside. Had these people...?

  Jayr swallowed, suppressed the urge to throw the staff as far from her as possible.

  “Ress,” she said, backing up, “don’t touch the...”

  “No.” He was staring up at her, still crumpled where he’d fallen, staring at the terhnwood in her hands. “She’s only trying to heal,” he told her. “Kazyen empties her - she’s only trying to heal.” He blinked, his eyes glinting oddly in the rocklight. “Jayr.” His voice caught, cracked, sobbed. “If she doesn’t, everything... will die. We have to go!”

  The people had closed in a cluster about their injured. They were probably eating them or something ghastly, Jayr reckoned, but at least they were no longer a threat. They curled about themselves and occasionally looked up into the rocklight, their green-woven flesh pale and sweating.

  Jayr glanced back at the woman in the doorway. “We need a boat.”

  “A what? To go where?” The woman’s voice was startled. “Ikira’s even worse than here, the blight tore through the crops like black fire. Everyone” - her voice caught as she waved a hand at the huddle - “everyone who tried to help...”

  “She’s trying to heal!” Ress was scrabbling to his feet, one of the lengths of terhnwood in his hands, he was shaking it like some prophet’s staff. “The blight, the nothing, the Kazyen!” He pointed the staff at the coiling knot of people. Jayr half-expected him to blast them with the same awful force he’d used to kill Jemara, but he only shouted, “Look! She’s trying to heal!”

  “What is he on?” The woman stared at him.

  “The world. The world is trying to -” Ress broke off, exasperated, shaking with the effort of control. “It’s here, can’t you see it? The nightmare is come!”

  The knot of people was still, watching him now, a glimmer of many eyes. They seemed oddly intent.

  Jayr took her hands from her staff, one at a time, rubbed them down her trews.

  The blight, the nothing, the Kazyen.

  She’s trying to heal. The nightmare is come.

  It was the same thing he’d seen in the library. The thing that had cost him his mind. It had something to do with the blight, something...

  ...something he’s trying to remember.

  “He’s fine,” Jayr said shortly. She was watching the huddle watching Ress. “He had a problem with some poetry. I said, we need a boat.”

  “Poetry,” Ress said. He was ducking in some strange dance, trying to dodge or weave through the gazes that had fixed upon him. “The Final Guardian; the Master of Light. Ecko. They’re not enough, the pattern’s incomplete. We must remember. Or everything will die.”

  “The Master of Light,” the woman said. She glanced at them, eyes sharp as blades. “Did you say, The Master of Light?” Something in her voice had an edge, a flicker of pain, of understanding.

  “Yes,” Ress held out a hand to her. “He touched you, didn’t he? Loved you once. I can see his light in your face.”

  But this was all damned loco and Jayr wasn’t really listening.

  Slowly, the people were beginning to unknot themselves once more, to creep forwards, hands open as if begging for scraps or mercy. The keening had stopped, now they were completely silent, but they were fixed upon Ress as if he was their saviour - or their cursed dinner.

  “Come on then, you sonsofmares.” Jayr turned to face them, staff still in her hands. “You just bring it over here.”

  The woman said, “Where are you going?” The peculiar, indistinct tension was still in her tone.

  “Why? Coming with us?” As the huddle came on, Jayr wasn’t in the mood to guess.

  “Yes, I am.” She gave a short, humourless laugh. “I can pilot the boat, if you need it. You might say I’ve... seen the light.”

  Jayr spared a glance, saw the woman’s expression was sombre, absolutely serious. She looked older, suddenly, like she’d seen some sort of figment, some tragedy, some risen shade of her past. Ress, too, had stopped and his head was cocked to one side as he watched her.

  “We’re going to Rammouthe,” Jayr said. “We’re not expecting to come back.”

  “Memory,” Ress told her. “We need the Ilfe. We have to remember.”

  “Maybe we do.” The woman’s acceptance was calm, the tension in her voice had gone - their destination seemed to have offered her some sort of personal resolution. “I’m Penya. If you want me to, I’ll do my damned best to take you.”

  * * *

  Rhan stood at the edge of the water.

  Flecks of ice-cold teased the skin on his face, rainbows danced crystal and shimmer, but he stood motionless,
watching the froth that seethed below him, the tumble and surge of the current at the foot of the huge falls. This was the Ryll, the thoughts of the world, the waterfall at the northernmost tip of the Varchinde.

  This was his absolution, and his answer.

  He’d wanted Roderick with him - but the Bard was gone, long gone, even more lost than Rhan himself. They had made such an almighty mess of this, both of them... so much for being champions. Faced by the world’s woes, they’d had trouble finding their backsides with a map.

  The water thundered, filling his head and chest with noise. He shook with it. It was in the bones behind his ears, in his skin. And it shouted fury, elation, power, just for him.

  The cry with which Phylos had sealed his execution, had branded him a traitor to four hundred returns of service: He is a lodestone and a drain upon us, a figure of indolence and luxury. Who can know what takes place under the roofs of his home? I say, that if there is a daemon, it is the daemon sloth, it is the daemon idleness, it is the daemon that keeps us from our crafthalls and tithehalls and farmlands and markets! This -creature - has believed that he is above the laws of this city! He has traded in substances we abhor, he has corrupted our youth, he has murdered the loved Lord of this city and taken his wife by force...

  Over him, the water thundered with power, filled his ears, his chest. You are an infection! You have sat in this very room and pulled our strings like puppets! Moisture stained his face like tears.

  He watched the roar of the falls, the constant shattering of the water’s surface before him, the carving of whirls and surges that could pull life from flesh and flesh from bone.

  No man, no woman, no mortal, had ever touched these waters. Only Roderick, daring with the very tip of his finger - and he had seen the world’s nightmare made manifest and been crazed ever since, convinced of a truth that no one else could understand.

  Rhan knew it now: he did not have the Bard’s courage.

  He was afraid.

  Above him, mountains towered, holding the sky upon their whitened shoulders. Below them, he was nothing, a tiny fragment of life, squeaking in protest at a fate he could have avoided. Away beyond him, the mountains tumbled into the