Ecko Rising

by Danie Ware

  Warm ooze down her spine.

  Maugrim tried to roll sideways, but her knee was in his way. She could move her leg, but her blood flow felt cut off mid-calf, her feet were weird, distant – somehow not her own. Her shoulders hurt like she’d shredded her skin; torn bits of her top were stuck to her.

  In increasing desperation, she craned to see past Maugrim’s body. She tried, really tried...

  They still wouldn’t move.

  “Maugrim...?” she said. “My feet...”

  “Thea.” The word was almost gentle. Frowning, he sat back on his heels and stared.

  Then he started to laugh.

  * * *

  “Vice!” Massively jubilant, Maugrim raced through the entranceway to the chamber he’d humorously named his “lock-up”. “Vice!”

  The Kartian had gone – his latest failure was a broken heap, glittering under the rocklights. Once again, the melding of flesh and metal had yielded only death. Maugrim dismissed it and cast his eyes over the bike, the stuff he’d stashed here, waiting.

  Now useless.

  Aftershocks of pleasure danced sparks in his blood. How could he have missed something so obvious?

  His old life had gone – the van a blackened carcass of steel. He’d been in the back – heard only the angry squeal of pressure brakes, shouting, the hoverdrone rebroadcasting orders.

  Then gunfire. The spang-spang-spang of rounds chewing metal.

  And the note changing as they penetrated the plating.

  He was untouched by enhancement – he’d spent his career treating too many messed-up fashion-icon wannabes. In that split second before the tank went, he’d just had time to wish –

  Mind and metal and flesh. He’d been trying to create, to re-create...!

  Metal’s lifeless.

  The intensity of his abandonment, the shuddering, osmotic feedback of pleasure... The alchemical fusion he’d been busting his balls to find wasn’t flesh and metal – it was flesh and stone. He wanted to bang his own head into the wall for being so bloody dumb. The time he’d wasted! He wasn’t sure what he’d done – not yet – but he did know the bloody teacher had managed to attune herself to the cycling of Elemental Powerflux, to the south, to fire. She’d managed what only existed in myth... she...

  ...Exultance. Vast might and passion. Overwhelming sensation – drowning in it. The sheer power of what lay beneath him...!

  ...had attuned herself to the Powerflux...?

  No, that couldn’t be right.

  Tightly controlling his thinking, he kicked at an old spray can. It was empty. It skittered across the floor scattering washers as it went.

  He had to focus!

  Stone. In the midst of her orgasm, her feet had turned to stone.

  Maugrim had uncovered the long-forgotten lore – the Elementalists, the priests of the people, were no more, their skills forgotten and abandoned like everything else. A few of them still lurked, way out in the farmlands and the ribbon-towns, but they wielded little more than herb lore and trickery. The Powerflux, the flowing of the elements through the grass and across the world’s surface, once the quintessential lifeblood, revered and trusted, had long since passed into humorous folklore – like fairies.

  But he, Maugrim, knew it was there. He knew that he could reach it, and he knew he could channel the sheer glory of what he found.

  No, the stone had grown through her flesh.

  This was the nexus, the Flux’s central point – the plug socket, if you like. Down here, beneath the Monument, real elemental energy was tangible: it hummed through the stone, he could taste it in the air. Here, an Elementalist could find and learn what this world hadn’t bothered to remember – how to take that strength and channel it, how to perform miracles.

  If he were strong enough to be a living capacitor – to stand the charge that surged in his blood.

  With sudden insight, he realised something fundamental.

  Metal’s lifeless!

  Maugrim was the world’s only Elementalist, as far as he was aware, the only true wielder of this forgotten and unseen might. He could attune himself to the great, electrical web of the Powerflux, the cyclic flow of the four compass-elements that controlled wave and weather and growth and season – the flow and balance of light and darkness, ice and fire. The energy he drew was a rush – heat and chill and lightning and thunderclouds. He’d always thought of the Powerflux like a matrix of taser wires, shocks constantly running from end to end...

  But this world was metal-poor, ferrous metal almost non-existent.

  As far as he could tell, the Powerflux existed in the very grass. Somehow, they were one and the same thing.

  He picked up a washer, held it on the tip of one dirt-ingrained index finger. The rocklights gleamed from the surface.

  The Powerflux’s energy was constant. It moved continuously between the four compass directions – the anchor points, the elements’ “souls”. In spite of the loss of lore, the knowledge was deep rooted – that everything from sunrise to weather to personal illness was caused by elemental cycling or imbalance.

  And so he’d begun to study.

  Flesh could harbour energy, like a capacitor – a properly trained Elementalist could attune himself to the Flux and he could, literally, charge himself up. The term “Elementalism” described the pure, raw energy – fire, darkness, light, cold... There were varying degrees of potence and skill that were largely encompassed by the word “focus”. The better your attunement, the more power you could absorb; the better your focus, the more discipline you had when throwing it about.

  His eyes went to the rocklight, gleaming smugly in the corner.

  Its illumination laughed at him. Like flesh, it was a capacitor – it absorbed and held sunlight, then slowly released it when in darkness.

  He couldn’t believe he’d never realised something so simple.

  Stone and flesh; flesh and stone. Both capacitor, both conductor. Metal’s lifeless! His fire – his strength and power! The attunement he had been taught, attunement that no other mortal human had access to – his attunement had called the elemental current from the site, through stone and through skin – that bloody teacher had conducted like a gold bar. Somehow, he’d called to the very core of the Powerflux.

  And it had answered him.

  Amethea had been his fuse – his dead man switch. She’d absorbed and taken the damage of the supercharge he’d summoned.

  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, e
ither 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!

  The faster her blood flowed, it seemed, the faster the stone receded – after a few more moments, she found she could stand up, legs shaky but capable.

  The needle sting reached her heels. It itched.

  She leaned forwards, hands against the rock, tried to lift one foot, then the other. Come on, come on!

  They still wouldn’t budge.

  Her finger brushed a mark, carved in the stone.

  A smile etched on the metal plate that covered his mouth.

  No. She told herself. Stop it.

  She’d noticed the marking before, but the shimmer of Maugrim’s flame had blurred her vision and she’d not seen anything clearly. Now, as the itch strayed over the soles of her feet and agonisingly into her toes, she crouched and leaned to reach the rocklight.

  Held it up to the wall.

  Light glittering from a carapace of scales.

  The mark was old, shallow and faded – a spiral curve, elegant and ancient. It spoke wordless of the vast age and might that dwelled within these stones, these passageways. She traced the spiral with a fingertip, wondering what it meant – who had put it there.

  What had she said to Feren? Maybe it once was some celebration, some ancient elemental temple; maybe the stones just observed the Count of Time. Maybe it was a memorial, or a tomb. I heard once that the hill we’re standing on is a passage grave, commemorating some lord or hero...

  The realisation was so obvious: she was under the Monument. She was stood within forgotten stones, on the outermost edge of a site so ancient it was lost to lore, abandoned for thousands of returns.

  Oh Goddess.

  Two sharp, bright points of fear – one for herself, caught down here with no idea as to what really lay outside this dim, dry chamber. The other for Maugrim, for the might he’d touched...

  ...and for what he’d do with it.

  Skin peeling, strip by strip, layer by layer. Metal in muscle, shuddering, jerking
nerves.

  Not again!

  Leaning her weight on her wrists, she found she could lift her heels. One side then the other, she could reach down to scratch and scratch and scratch them. She could almost feel flakes of stone coming away under her fingers. She could flex her toes, just. Mastering the urge to just rip the ball of her foot clean away from the floor, she threw the rocklight to the pallet and scrabbled for the rest of her kit. Belt, knife, pouches, neck-thongs – as soon as she could move, she was trousers and boots on and out of this chamber.

  And then what?

  She traced the spiral again. The fading of the stone through her flesh had left only memories of its touch in her soul. Its vast awareness had gone from her heart – but she was herself, at last, she was Amethea. The spiral was comforting, as though the stone had not forgotten her.

  She was no warrior, no scout, she had been raised by the church, parentless – but never purposeless. As her feet came at last away from the rock and she stamped on them, hard, fighting the pain of returning feeling, she remembered her determination.

  He had looked down at her, and he had laughed.

  Triumph and realisation.

  Whatever he wanted to do with his flesh-and-metal minions, she had no doubt that flesh and stone would be his next step – that, somehow, he would seek to tap consciously into the awareness they’d awakened.

  Into the sheer Gods-power of whatever lay beneath.

  She threw her legs into her trousers, her feet into her boots, laced them both shut. There was a twinge of loss as her feet finally lost their skin contact.

  Settling her belt at her hips, she faced the chamber door.

  She’d only ever travelled one way – but had seen enough to realise the size of the maze that lay down here, forgotten by all but Maugrim himself. There was no way out through the treasure chamber – and besides, she found she wanted to stay with the stone.

  Alone, her feet stinging raw with the return of circulation to bloodless muscles, she drew a long breath and rolled back the door.

  He was smiling at her, a smile of victory.

  “Going somewhere, sweetheart?”

  * * *