He said, “What did you do to your face?”
“Long story,” she replied. “Jayr and” - her voice caught on the name - “Ress are here. And Amethea.” It sounded inane but she could think of nothing else. Her heart was in her throat and she struggled to form words past the ache in her cheek. “And Ecko...” She left the sentence hanging, changed tack. “How’s Syke? And Jade? What’s happening in Roviarath?” She got it out in a rush. “The blight in the grass...?”
“It’s some damned scary shit, is what it is.” In removing his shirt, he’d tangled the neck lacings in his hair. He tugged, and swore. “Poor bastards, they’re doing their best. But even so, when I left, Roviarath’s traders were starting to scatter, taking their tables outside the walls. By now, they’ll be all over the place and Jade’ll have no way to keep track of them.” He stopped to untangle the string, his muscled body prickling with cold. “The whole system’s broken, Triq. It’s too complicated, too fragile. Stuff from all directions is piling up because the hub just isn’t there any more.” He freed himself, looked up. “It’s all coming apart.”
Triq said, “So - what about the disease? The hole where -?”
“He’s got a watch on it,” Redlock told her. “That damned thing’s putting the wind up everybody, though it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. Dear Gods, why is it so cold in here?”
Three steps and he was wading manfully into the water, grimacing at the chill.
“I’ll go tell Nivvy - but I wanted to be at least halfway presentable before I went in there. Brrrrrrrr.” He shivered.
“Now who’s a girl?”
“Ha!” Then there was a splash and there were hands on her calves, trying to pull her under.
“Don’t - my face!” Suddenly giggling, she kicked away from him, took a breath, twisted out of his hands. The water was clear. The pool’s mosaics hinted at battles glorious and forgotten. With a hand on the rough-edged artwork, she knifed swiftly round the central pillar.
But he was already waiting for her.
She tried to turn; her own momentum carried her into his arms.
He caught her, grinning, leaned in to kiss her.
One kiss. One moment of weakness...
No!
Startling herself, she shoved away from him hard, her face and chest hurting. A moment later, she was hanging on to the central platform by her elbows, panting, her hair plastered down her back.
The rocklit air was cold on her skin.
What the rhez just happened? What...?
“Triq?” He exploded up beside her, took a gasp of air and shook his braid like a courier’s nartuk. His heavy shoulders bunched as he unconsciously copied her position. There was a tail of weed on his arm, reminding her suddenly and forcibly of the moss-grown mwenar. “You okay?”
No. Yes.
“Sure.” The answer was reflexive, though her thoughts were tumbling, panicked.
He was too close. Why was he too close?
“It’s good to see you, Triq.” He rested a hand on her back, smiled, eyes searching her face. “You look...”
“I know how I look.” With a rush of movement, water sheeting from her skin, she pulled herself onto the stone. Suddenly, acutely conscious of the changes in her face, in her body, she stood tall, turned to face him, arms crossed under her breasts. “Well?” she said.
She was shivering. Damn that water was cold!
“Triqueta.” He pulled himself onto the platform. Water ran down his face, dripped from his hair. “You’re Banned. You’re fierce, you’re proud - you’re as terrifying with a set of dice as you are with that damned lop-ended bow of yours.” A smile creased the suntan lines round his eyes. “Your beauty’s unchanged.”
She watched as the water ran down the sides of his throat, over his shoulders and scars.
Get back on the horse.
* * *
In the house of the burning beastie, Ecko had found a miracle.
A key. A fucking
sign.
He’d found it in the alchemy lab, guarded by the monster in proper traditional style, and now he was all bundled up with it, turning over what it was, and what it meant, and what it could do, and where it was gonna take him.
He knew one thing for sure - whatever Roderick believed, Nivrotar pleaded and Triqueta slapped him round the head with... he was going to find a way out of his trap.
His fucking Catch-22.
Around him, the city’s hospice was quiet. The open-sided corridors that surrounded the central quadrangle were empty, shaded with dusk. The sky was darkening and layers of cloud were sinking over the dark roofs of Amos, rain scattered. The first glimmers of rocklight lit the quad’s central sculpture into something ghoulish and ugly.
Whatever the hell the statue was. Ecko didn’t really look, he was too busy roiling in the dark glee of his own thoughts. He’d disdained any kind of treatment, pulled his hood over his face and now skulked right into the wall, less than a shadow, less than a nightmare, less than a fragment of forgotten horror. He was himself again, he was
arta ekanta,
demon figment, that single image, forgotten upon awaking, that yet still haunts you throughout the day.
And he wasn’t really looking where he was going.
“Ecko...”
His name like a breath, too soft for alarm. For a moment, he thought it was in his head, that Eliza, Collator, Lugan,
some
one, was trying to reach him through the screen or the gap-between-the-worlds or whatever the fuck he was supposed to call it...
...and then he woke up and it was all a dream...
...but the voice was here, with him in the corridor.
He stopped dead, his heart pounding, shrank back. His oculars shifted options, searching.
Found a man crouched in the corner, filthy and stinking like some elderly London hobo. He had some sort of rotted hemp bag gripped in one hand.
The man was staring back at Ecko as if he was some dark and manifest archangel.
What the hell?
The guy looked in his sixties, weathered and lined but pallid under the rocklight. His beard was grey, his hair awry. There was a scarlet line from one corner of his mouth that crusted down toward his ear. Scans showed the massive, erratic flickerings of the man’s body temperature and Ecko had to make an effort not to back up even further.
They continued to stare, mutually compelled and horrified, and the world shrank round them, spiralled in on that meeting, that moment, that single laser-intense gaze. Then the man’s expression fluttered and twitched. He flinched, blinked, mouthed words of nothing. His temperature fluctuations redoubled, flashing through the front of his face and skull like flame on water. His empty hand batted querulously.
Ecko had no idea what he was supposed to do. Every instinct told him to get the fuck outta there before it all went to hell in a handcart, but some part of him was completely, utterly compelled. He dropped into a full crouch, studying the guy like some kind of specimen.
Or was
he
the fucking specimen?
The guy smelled like incense and old sheets, like wrong flesh and ill-health.
It was a scent that suddenly and forcibly reminded him of Slater Grey. Of home. Of Pilgrim. Of -
Don’t go there.
“Man, you fuckin’
reek.”
At Ecko’s rasp, the man’s temperature peaked, his gaze sharpened, and one wasted arm lashed out. His eyes were intense, demented, one pupil larger than the other in a way that screamed
lunatic.
His hand was fast as a whip - and even with his adrenals kicked, his oculars tracking, Ecko was too slow.
The man’s hand clamped round his upper arm like a manacle.
“Shit!” Really freaked now, Ecko jerked his shoulder, tried to back away, but the man’s fingertips were digging into his woven flesh like he’d sprung some fucking bear trap. Instead, his efforts nearly pulled the guy to his feet. “What d’you want? Small change? Meths? Get off of me, for chrissakes.”
“Change.” That made the madman smile. “Yes, change. I came... to tell you... something.” His words were spittle and desperation; he fought to focus.
Ecko had no idea who this fucker was - or why he’d been ambushed. His oculars scanned, but there was no one else in the cloister.
No cameras, no security, no Pilgrim...
Yeah, all right already. Joke’s on you, asshole...
Ecko smirked, kicking his adrenaline after all - the welcoming thrill that unrolled along his muscles like relief, like a cheap backstreet high. Swiftly, he glanced back and forth down the corridor again, turned his oculars on the quad.
Nothing.
Now I gotcha...
His hand clenched tighter round his prize.
“Tell me
what?”
Now, he crouched down, his oculars targeting - eyes, jaw, throat. “What the fuck -”
But the man was speaking, low and severe. He leaned forwards, words falling from his mouth like gobbets of blood, like spat lumps of tobacco. In the front of his face, heat ran like liquid through his forebrain. “You have no eyes... eyes like pits, like the pure element of dark. Smile like a blade of death. You’ve come... for me?”
What the hell...?
Ecko bared his teeth, trembled with the surge of blood through muscle. “What is this? What the fuck’re you doing?”
The scent of Grey’s experimentations was tangling his brain in horrific knots of nostalgia and resentment. Images tumbled and he pushed them away.
The steel hand ground into his bicep. “I can see myself in your black eyes.” The man was looking straight through him, his pupils were blood-dark, haunted; his forebrain was on fucking
fire.
“Myself and myself and myself, like mirrors, going back into the Count of Time. Pattern endless and repeated.” He cocked his head to one side, a motion almost mechanical. “What does that mean?”
“You totally snatch today’s prize for the cryptic mystic visionary mad dude.” The grip on his arm was hurting. “Now get the hell offa me.”
“Time. You’re outside the Count of Time, he can’t
touch
you!” The sentence ended in almost a laugh, a flood of realisation. “He has no power over you!” The bear trap released and the hand rose between them, reaching forwards as if it expected to pass through him, to find that he was some kind of phantom. In the guy’s skull, the colours calmed, muted.
“‘Time the Flux begins to crack’! You!”
The word was cry, a paean of elation. “You’re the cat... the cat...” The word fragmented into physical shaking. Ecko’s skin was shuddering with adrenaline.
Catapault? Catamite? Catatonic? Catalytic fucking converter?
He pressed his lips together to keep quiet.
“...catalyst!”
The madman was grinning with absolute wonder, like the sun coming up, like Ecko’s baby sisters, long ago, with a favourite toy. “You... it was written for
you!”
He was nearly crying. “Are you even here at all?”
Are you even here at all?
Here at all?
You think this world is real?
You think that it’s not?
Incense and old sheets. The stink of unwashed flesh. Grey’s base. The people eaten from the inside out by the tablets, by Nothing, by... What did they call it here?
The word came from Ecko though he wasn’t even sure what it meant. “Kaz...
Kazyen.
”
“Yes!” The madman was in tears, now. “You understand, you
understand
!” He was like some abandoned creature meeting a friend for the first time, overcome with more than he could express. “You don’t
need
to remember - you
know!”
“I know shit.” Ecko was fascinated and appalled.
“I can see now! Time doesn’t touch you - and I can see myself, over and over and over and over and over and over...” He tailed into muttering, tears streaming down his face. “I know... I know what I must do. I can fix this... I can... I can help you fix this...” He cried, tears glittering in the rocklight like shattered glass. “Roderick was right all along...” The last words were a whisper. The madman lifted his face to the pattern of light and let it bless him; lift him. Whatever his revelation, it was profound enough to leave him sobbing like a child. “It all fits. And it’s going to be all right!”
Then he started to laugh.
His laughter was demented, high-pitched and half-scream - it was elated, it was grieving, it was celebratory, it was downright fucking terrifying. Ecko’s targeters flashed again; his muscles were absolutely
bunching
to play soccer with this fucker’s head...
But.
“Shut the hell up! Shut up! What the fuck is so funny?” he demanded.
The laughter faded, the madman collapsed into gulps as like crying. One hand ferretted beneath his blanket and emerged in a tight clench.
When he opened it, it was empty.
“Figments!” he said. “Maybe that’s how we win!” His cackle began again, demented. “Win, lose, sane, insane. Inside and outside. You understand, you
understand
!”
“Understand this, mofo.” Ecko shook him, hard, held the treasure right in his face. “This is a building block; it’s a first step. You want figments? This is the One Thing that I’m gonna drop in the Ass-Crack of Doom and ker-blooey!” Right in his face. “Bitch can’t force me to change.”
The old man’s face crumpled. He cocked his head to one side, looked quizzical, almost fatherly. He said, quite clearly, “So you’ll just break it, if you can’t have your own way?” This seemed to make him think for a minute. Then he laid a calming hand on the side of Ecko’s face. “When you go home, what happens to us?”
What happens to us?
You think this shit is real?
For just a moment, the impossibly gentle needle of the question slid under Ecko’s skin and injected him with sharp, cold horror. His stomach lurched with nebulous terror; his knees went. He was on the floor, nauseous and shaking, crouched at the old man’s feet like some sort of acolyte, his cloak mottled the colour of rocklight and dread.
You’re not real. You’re not fucking real.