What?
He didn’t get time to register. Suddenly, the thing was moving. Fast.
And Ecko found he was moving after it, the moment gone, the test passed, the opportunity - if that’s what it had been - lost.
The critter was fast, low to the ground with its odd arc of tail lashing upwards over its back. It had heavy, curved claws, which scraped on roots and stones, the noises sending shudders down Ecko’s spine. He ran parallel, staying with it. Old walls loomed suddenly out of the darkness, but he was fast enough to miss them.
His adrenaline was pumping now: that familiar, glorious warmth, that flood-rush like a fix. The rain was slackening, the slippery ground was making him skid, but it no longer mattered. His telescopics spun, his oculars flickered to find targets - stonework, root-fork, monster’s head and claws. His dark grin spread until it almost took in his ears.
Hell, Triqueta was still out there ahead of him. Maybe he should let the beastie get its claws on her, and then leap in at the last minute...
Ta-dah!
Like, if he
had
to keep doin’ this hero shit...
The beast slowed, paused. It watched for a moment, then crouched, cat-like, tail quivering. As he closed on it, he could hear it breathing, a heavy, sensual sound, like a stalker’s phone call. It was damned smart for a predator - intellect as well as instinct.
Was this one of those “bweao” things that everyone talked about?
He eased closer still, nervousness flickering but his grin gleeful and unholy. And even closer, until the beast was right there in front of him, its rear claws splaying and flexing, digging into the mulch. It was bigger than he’d thought, its fur was clumped and matted with water.
The rain gusted, patchy and thinning to drizzle. Triqueta was low to the ground, bow in hand, doing her best to keep the string dry - but the thing was downwind and hunting the hunter.
For a moment, the fantasy played out - the rescue, the gratitude - then he got a fucking grip, for chrissakes, and closed in as tight as he could go.
It was only as the beast threw itself forwards and its rear claws spat dirt that Ecko realised what he’d found.
* * *
It had a name - he knew it had a name - but for the fucking life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was. As it left the ground, springing cat-like, the warning was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and Triqueta was turning, bringing up the bow.
But the thing was too close.
It was on her in a moment, slamming her to the muddy floor, its claws raking as it brought her down. Its tail was to Ecko, but he could see Triq’s expression as she fell - a look on her face that wasn’t fear, wasn’t her warriors’ focus, but something like pure horror - a look like she was trying not to chuck up.
It didn’t stop her though. Nauseous or not, she went for the weapons at her belt.
The beast was massive, oozing muscle. Ecko didn’t care - as Triq came back with both blades, he slammed a foot into the thing’s rear end, knocking its ass sideways and making it roll -
Its tail struck at him.
Like a snake, like a whip - it lashed across the side of his face with an impact that made him falter, pain shooting through his skull. He fell back, his right ocular seeming to spark - or was it just his vision? - and Triqueta was on her feet, a claw-slash in her shoulder but both blades out.
She snarled at it, “Come on then. Come on then!”
She crouched low, moved one way. Ecko, nerves singing, face throbbing, cloak tangled with rain, moved the other.
The beastie, shoulders low, swung round to track him.
And then he saw what was wrong with it.
It had a face. It had a fucking
face
, a human face. It had a face that had been stitched or stuck onto a head like a lion; a face contorted with hate or with some terrifying need to speak. Its teeth were bared like a cat’s, long and sharp, somehow too big for its mouth; they were yellow and bits of fuck-knows-what were caught in them.
For a moment, Ecko had a flash of the same piss-leaking terror that he’d felt in the House of Sarkhyn - that sickening sense of something wrong, something twisted, not only in body, but in brain.
Creature created.
Where the hell had that phrase come from?
He didn’t get time to think about it.
The tail lashed at Triq but she was too fast. A single cut of her blade severed it. It fell, thrashing like half a snake, knotting about itself just like Ecko’s guts were doing.
The human face contorted, tried to speak - mouth shaping word or cry...
Ecko shuddered.
Jesus Hairy Christ. Fuck this for a game of fucking soldiers!
He snap-kicked it in the teeth, kicked it again. Triq’s blades bit into its hind end, slashed at tendons. It lashed its half a tail at her, bared its teeth at Ecko, reached for him with dinner-plate paws, with hooked claws that shone in the glow of the trees.
As he kicked it again, kicked it and kicked it and
kicked
it as if he couldn’t shove the fucking thing too far away from him, as if he needed it to die at his feet, as if the fear that it generated could only be faced by the surge of adrenaline and blood and violence...
He could see that its mouth was moving - it was trying to cry out, to say something.
It was trying to speak to him.
He stopped, panting. Still shuddering with horror, he dropped to one knee in front of the thing’s now-broken face, the blood that oozed from its too-human shattered nose, eyes swelling and blackening...
He said, “What the fuck are you? What the fuck...?”
Its mouth tried to form words with swollen lips, with broken, jagged teeth. It lashed its half a tail over its back, dropping gore into its patched fur. It said, carefully enunciating the symbols, “Eck... Oh... Eck... Oh...”
What the hell?
Shuddering, he kicked it as hard as he could, shattering its jaw and making it flop loose from its broken face. Even as Triqueta slammed both blades to the hilt between its ribs, even as its face pulped under the force of the blow, it was laughing.
Human, mocking, cold.
It was laughing at
him.
Saravin finally died in the early hours of the morning, his last words lost. The wound in his belly had become infected, and his consciousness had been wandering. Whatever that final breath that passed his lips, if it uttered his greatest dreams or life’s regrets, there was no one to care.
Almost no one.
A runner from the hospice brought the news to Mael, his tent closed now and his drawings increasingly rare and sombre. He nodded at the messenger, the news strangely unreal, not really sinking home.
For a while afterwards, the old scribe sat at his unshuttered window, staring out at the street. Mael did not have a magnificent view of the vast Varchinde, the descending slope of the city’s wonder did not drop away beneath him like the decorous chasubles of the priests; instead, he could see a small and narrow roadway, these days almost empty of people.
A new power had taken Fhaveon. And it was fear.
The raid on the Angel had been one of many on that day -the city’s military, now purely an extension of Phylos’s might, had had little trouble locating the somewhat haphazard pockets of resistance and destroying them. Some were calling it “The Day of Reckoning”. Others were calling it progress. Mael had few words for anything.
How did that old Range Patrol axiom go? “All that is necessary for evil to triumph...”?
But he didn’t really believe in evil, nothing so prosaic. Many returns of studying people’s faces had made him understand that things were more complex than that - in order to draw a caricature, you needed to understand how all the features fitted together.
People were complex things, made up of many different parts.
For a moment, he regretted not being at the bedside of his old friend, not reminding him of the crazed antics of their younger days, not holding his hand to the end - but his listlessness had sunk home now, and he simply stared out of the window, grey in the sky, grey in his heart.
Saravin was
dead.
His friend had been a game piece, used and cast aside. And he had not been the only one.
Was there even any point to resistance? Mael was not a man for a wager, but he could have bet that he would end the same way.
Long ago, in his hospice days, he’d had a word for this mood - this dejection, this pointlessness. It was not a black mood, not the savagery of depression or fear; it was a grey mood, an emptiness, an uncaring. The city could have crumbled around him and he would not have mustered the energy or decisiveness to actually get up and flee.
Once, he had found an old text that listed it as a malady. The faded inks had named it “Kasien”, an old word, almost akin to the more modern Kazyen, the sort-of manifest nothingness that was somehow a part of the most ancient sagas.
For a moment, his mind turned to the madman and to Jayr, the strange Kartian-scarred Archipelagan woman that had come with him. He wondered where they had gone, if they had ever found their way to Teale or Ikira, then onwards to their destination.
What they needed to do.
But his eyes were still on the road, the birds wheeling under a sullen sky, and he couldn’t find it in his heart to care. His beautiful city was rotting at the core. In Fhaveon, “nothing” seemed not only possible, but preferable.
Slowly, he became aware of a woman walking along the road. She was alone, discreetly furtive, peering at the doors and then scurrying on. As his eyes focused on her, the unlikeliness of her presence gradually crystallised through his grey. He wondered who she was looking for.
On another day, he might have gone out to help her, but his Kazyen, his nothing, had soaked into his skin and blood and bone and he could not find a reason to move.
She came closer.
In the roadway, the birds took flight as she walked.
She stopped outside Mael’s small home, his own chamber a small part of the communal building that rose around him. The beams were low, but his scattering of drawings and herbal lore allowed him to live here securely. No one ever came to see him.
But the woman approached his door and raised a hand. She paused, tentative, took a breath, and knocked.
Stunned, though he had seen her coming, Mael was stuck to the spot, his heart thumping as if he had been caught in a crime. Like a child scared of the dark, he was absolutely unable to move. He stared out past the shutter, as if expecting her to fade away like a figment in the daylight.
But the woman took a step back, and looked in through the window.
She met his gaze, and his heart nearly came out through his chest.
Upon his front yardway stood Selana Valiembor, only child of the murdered Demisarr, last descendant of Saluvarith, and Lord Foundersdaughter of Fhaveon. And she was alone.
When he rallied his wits, Mael threw open the door and almost yanked the girl in off the road. Not even thinking to apologise, he slammed the door behind her and turned back to the window, slamming the shutters and then peering through them as though he harboured a fugitive.
Putting back her hood and dusting her - somewhat oversized - trader’s garments, the Lord of the City watched him carefully.
She said, “Why did he die?”
The question caught Mael off-guard, but he knew whom she meant.
Saravin.
Turning back from the street, he bit down on a faint desire to be acerbic about the consequences of a blade in the belly. Instead, he said, “My Lord.” The words were ludicrous and awkward. “Saravin... was very fond of you.” He studied her, her pale and drawn features. “He was concerned for the future of the city.”
“Why did he enter that contest?” She didn’t meet his gaze. She was looking around her, and Mael realised that he should probably offer her a seat, a drink, his knee.
Instead, he managed a cautious shrug. “I don’t know, my Lord.”
“I think you do.”
Now, she fixed him with a look. Something in her face reminded him, not of her dead father, but of her uncle, Mostak, the now-disgraced commander of the soldiery. She was young and out of her depth, but she was Valiembor to her fingertips.
He answered, not entirely honestly, “Rhan.”
The name made her colour, high spots of violence in her cheeks. She bit her lip as if trying not to weep, but Mael took a risk and hammered the point home. “With the loss of the Seneschal, Saravin felt you needed a friend on the Council.”
A frown touched her face. “I have Phylos.”
Mael’s silence was more eloquent than any response he could have made. They stood in that tiny room, the young Lord and the old scribe, staring each other while an entire conversation floated between them, unspoken. When the girl turned away, Mael knew that every silent word had struck her, and that she was not as naïve as she appeared.
He was faintly surprised to hear himself say softly, “He died for you, my Lord. He died for Fhaveon.”
He had meant Saravin, but Rhan’s inclusion was both tacit and obvious.
The words made her falter. Her hands went to the tie-fastening on the front of her cloak and she dropped it in a puddle of fabric, threw herself onto one of the scribe’s hard wooden seats. They had belonged to the hospice, long ago, and he’d become used to them.
Selana winced. “How do you sit on these things?”
Her flash of petulance made her suddenly girlish, out of her depth and struggling.
“Selana,” he said. “My Lord.” And this time, he bent his knee as he should, looked up into her face. “Saravin is... was my friend -”
His words choked off as she met his gaze. There was something in her look, some moment of the Count of Time, some taste to the air that made him stare with realisation. This girl, this woman, this daughter of Lord and niece of warrior - she was the city’s future. Young as she was, she was the lynchpin of all of this - she was Phylos’s ultimate gamepiece, the cover he still operated behind, at least in name - and she was sitting in his
home.