Ecko spoke, a rasping mutter. “Know anything by BiFrost?”
“What?” The man paused, as if surprised at the interruption. He blinked for a moment at his specimen spread-eagled, hands and feet held fast in metal clasps that even Lugan couldn’t’ve busted his way out of.
Ecko bared his gap. “If you’re gonna try an’ torture me some more, I reckon I get to pick the music. Y’know, last wish an’ all that?”
The man stepped back. “Last wish?” The words seemed to puzzle him. “Ah, Ecko.” His voice was scholarly, objective and calm. “I’ve worked very hard to bring you here and you surpass everything I could have dreamed. The figments have shown you some interesting nightmares and they’ve taught me much - who you are, where you’re from. And what you want.” He flickered a smile. “Which is where I - we - can help.”
“Jesus.” Ecko groaned. “Spare me the cryptic willya? If you’re gonna peel my skin off” - he lifted his head, grinned - “go ahead. Give it your best shot.”
The man’s single eyebrow came up in surprise.
“Ecko, you once made a threat.” There was a yellow glitter, sunlight on stone, and the tiny sulphur crystal was in the man’s hand. It shone like a promise, like gold, like the opal stones in Triqueta’s cheeks. “And we’ve got the potential for you to fulfil that threat. You can own this world, or you can break it. You can do anything you wish.” His smile deepened. “And yes, if you want to, you can burn it all down.”
Burn it all down.
For a moment, his long outrage was there in the sunlight, real and immediate. He was thrumming with it, lost for a sharp comeback. The stone caught the light like a promise.
Burn it all down.
The man stepped forwards, laid a hand on his flank as if feeling his response. The gesture was paternal, possessive, oddly eager.
“We want to help you, Ecko. We want to help you make it burn.”
His voice was soft as blackening paper, as ash falling like snow. He was way too close and way too eager and his enticement was like flame, like the Sical. He was freaking Ecko the fuck out.
“You wanna help me?” Ecko snarled. “Let me the fuck up.”
The man laughed, a sound that had an odd, bass undertone - as though something else laughed with him and in him.
We.
He said, “You want to make people fear you, respect you, make them know you’re there, in the shadows, stalking the rooftops.” The laugh rolled around the walls, rose into the bizarrely blue sky. “You want music? We can turn your name into the single greatest legend the Varchinde has ever voiced.” The hand stroked him, predatory. “We can show you how to burn it all. If you’ll trust us.”
The thought was as bright as the little crystal, dancing with light, with tangible temptation. Ecko was caught by it, staring at it, his rage still clamouring in his head... Could he hear screaming?
But the sound was gone under the man’s thrum of enticement and power.
“You can help us, Ecko, help us recraft the Varchinde entire. Help us with madness, with war. With weapons.” His voice was oddly calm, though that throb of hunger was there, buried deep. “I talk of crafting the greatest creations of my long life, of watching them rise and fight with your help. I talk of taking control of all that your Eliza - our World Goddess - has made here. You can own it, Ecko, you can make it yours to do with as you wish. You can be free of your real tormentor.”
Your real tormentor.
Eliza. World Goddess.
The crystal turned, glittered. The hand was hot on his skin. Ecko shifted on the cold stone of the table, turned as best he could to look the man in his single eye. The tattoos writhed like familiars, sliding up his throat and into his face, sliding under the eye-patch like worms after a feast. The hidden eye was a ball of heat, like steam. Warmth seethed under the man’s skin. Whatever he was, he was no more fucking human than the chimera-thing from the woods.
Burn it, own it, anything.
In his head, it was already burning - the grass, the trade-roads, the markets and the cities. He could see it, he could smell the smoke as he had smelled Pareus’s melting flesh.
Struggling against the image, though not even sure still why, Ecko managed, “Who the hell are you?”
The man laughed again, his hands still exploring Ecko’s skin with a clinical interest that was somehow more chilling than any blades or threats.
“Me? I’m Amal, the Spectator, the Host, many other things. I was outcast from Amos in the days after Tusien fell, made exile and pariah for practices of forbidden alchemy.” The patting became a stroke, a fine touch that ran down the centre of Ecko’s chest. “I came here, to Aeona. And I struck a bargain so my learning would not be wasted.”
“So - what?” The man was back to using “I” not “we” -and Ecko was trying to clear his thoughts and focus. He so wasn’t thinking about the crystal, about the rise of the Sical, about the burning Monument, wasn’t thinking about any of it. He strove to concentrate, to find his voice, remember who he was. “Why do you wanna let me burn stuff, anyway? You the bad guy?”
Amal smiled. “The ‘bad guy’? I’m just a craftsman, Ecko, I need to learn. I create things - just to prove they can be made. The burning,” he shrugged, academic and careless, “is inevitable.”
Inevitable.
The flame in Ecko’s head was higher now, the glitter of the sulphur crystal, the roar of the Fawkes’ night fire, the rage and hunger and glory of the Sical. He had to blink to focus, to see the sun and the sky.
Fighting to keep his mind clear, he said, like a last hand clutching the windowsill of sanity, “Maugrim -”
“Maugrim was a visionary, a wielder of an ancient art not entirely unlike my alchemy, in its own way. He ’prenticed to me, when first he came here. He would have cleansed the Varchinde, Ecko, if you’d let him. He would have ushered in the new age it so desperately craves, the new age that Phylos now heralds from the high walls of Fhaveon.” Amal shook his head, sorrowful. “And you killed him - you brought the blight upon us all. Kazyen is come, the nothing, the death of emptiness - and we will all die” - he leaned forward to whisper - “unless we burn first.”
Crops, burning. Grass, burning. His own flesh, burning under the sun. The Varchinde, wildfires across the plains.
Inevitable.
Held there, skin to the stone, that stroking touch still travelling down the centre of his chest and his mind full of fire, Ecko said, “Tell me. Tell me how to burn it down.”
The hospice in Fhaveon embraced Mael like an old friend.
As the scent of the place filled his nostrils, herbal incense and astringent cleaners never quite masking the melted-together taint of blood and pain and hope, he remembered being a younger man, bucking his responsibilities and playing hookey over the back wall. Those had been days of too much ale and not enough study - as he looked around the calm quiet of the colonnades, they seemed suddenly very close.
He smiled, momentarily uncaring of the red robes of the Merchant Master, of Selana’s pale hair that gleamed gently in the rocklight, uncaring of the heavily armed pair of goons that followed them.
Simpler times,
he thought to himself,
when the great city of Fhaveon seemed all sea air and sunshine.
Now, the city simmered with outrage and fear, a rising fury that boiled just under her rattling lid, threatened to detonate and tear the very rock asunder, to rive the city down to her stone foundations.
With the closing of the market, the people had had enough. Their livelihoods had gone, they could not trade - and they could not secure what they needed to survive. Haphazard kitchens had sprung up on street corners and were doing their best to feed the city’s roving and restless, but they, too, struggled with the lack of trade-space and with the threatened withdrawal of farm-tithes. Mael knew little about the convolutes of the trade-cycle, but he knew that it was falling to pieces.
In the city, there were voices on every corner, calling for uprise and retribution. They were too many for Ythalla and her forces to counter - as she rode after one, it would melt into the stone around it and another would rise, somewhere else, sounding the same rally. For the moment, they had no cohesion - but Mael knew that the time was coming when they would muster. All they needed was the right voice.
All around them, bloodshed lurked, circling the island calm of the hospice. And it seemed that the apothecaries and herbalists of the building knew this all too well.
Phylos’s presence brought tension to the cool air of the healing house.
“My Lord.” The senior apothecary, younger than Mael and his face unknown, ignored the Merchant Master completely and responded instead to Selana’s slightly hesitant authority. “You’ve come to see your uncle?”
There was an edge in his voice that might have been hope.
“I trust he’s well?” Phylos’s voice was cold. The young apothecary gave him a look of dislike.
“As well as can be expected.”
Had Mael imagined it, or had that comment been laden with implication? As Phylos took the lead, striding down the corridor, the others almost tumbling in his flowing red wake, Mael caught the eye of the young man and gave him a barely perceptible wink. The man started, stared, then looked away.
As Phylos turned through an archway and down a short flight of stone steps, the apothecary recollected himself and addressed him accordingly. “It’s well to see you back here, Merchant Master. We have concerns -”
With a gesture, Phylos cut him short. He turned through another archway and Mael saw a plaque on the overhead wall inscribed with an old sigil, ten-sided like the High Cathedral itself.
Many times, as a young man, he had wondered at that correlation. He wished he had the leisure to wonder now.
Selana ventured, “My uncle...?”
“He’s resting,” the apothecary said. “Though I fear he’s less than himself. His... heart is troubling him and he’s very weak.”
His heart,
Mael wondered, as they passed under the archway and the sigil and kept walking. Mostak had been training from when he was old enough to hold a spear. There was still Archipelagan blood in Valiembor veins - they were strong, there was no history of a weakness to the heart in the family.
“Poor man.” Phylos’s comment was bleak. He turned through several corners, came to stop by a door. “Brother Mael, you will wait here.” He caught the eyes of the goons and they nodded, unspeaking.
But as the door opened slowly into the small, quiet room, as Selana ran forward with a cry, Mael saw exactly what he’d needed to see.
Even sleeping, Mostak’s face was white, sheened with sweat in the rocklight. His rest was erratic, his hands and jawline twitched, shadows moved under his eyelids and his limbs fidgeted as though he dreamed of running, of fleeing as far from this crazed city as he could. His covers were pushed down, and his limbs were sinew-thin.
Mael was no apothecary, but by the Gods he knew the symptoms well enough.
The man had been poisoned. And by a dosage heavy enough to drop a chearl. But how did the apothecary not know? If Mael could see it...?
Or did Phylos now control the church as well as the soldiery?
Mael glanced at the young apothecary, but the man refused to meet his gaze. He was looking at his feet as if his shame was bunched on his shoulders.
The old scribe felt a momentary sense of panic. This game had moved board, and while he understood the plays that had been made - that were still being made - he still wasn’t sure what the rules would and would not let them do.
Behind him, the goons stood silent.
Selana was gently shaking her uncle’s shoulder.
“Please. You have to wake up. It’s me, Selana. I need to speak to you. Please...”
Mostak stirred and muttered. Mael shot the apothecary a sharp look.
“Get Phylos out of there,” he said. “Let the Lord speak to her uncle alone.”
The apothecary looked back at him as though he were crazed. “I can’t -!”
“Phylos, you may go.” Selana had spoken to the Merchant Master as if he were a minion, giving Mael a sudden, hot rush of hope. For the smallest moment, Phylos stiffened, the tension in his huge frame flickered through the room and reached Mael where he stood in the doorway. The goons shifted.
The apothecary was holding his breath - in anticipation or fear.
The moment tilted, shifted, and was gone.
“Very well, my Lord.” His expression schooled to a thunderous calm as he turned, the Merchant Master came back through the small door, a snapping rage of scarlet. He shut the door behind him, eyed Mael, then beckoned to the apothecary. “I need to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.”
The apothecary bowed and scuttled.
Mael could have guessed at the content of the conversation, would have given his eye-teeth to go after them, but he didn’t dare. As talks happened around him that could decide the fate of the Varchinde entire, he twisted his hands in the hem of his shirt and wondered if he could stay ahead of this crazed and carnival gaming, just a little longer.
* * *
When the hospice offered them food and water, Mael refused. It was too simple, too obvious - he had no intention of ending up in the cell next to Mostak’s with a matching facial sheen. Beside him on the stone bench, Selana sat studying her perfect nails, her face troubled.
One of Phylos’s grunts stood over them like some damned guardian statue; the other had accompanied the Merchant Master out into the elaborate walkways and plantings of the formal hospice gardens. Around them the little quadrangle was open to the storm-grey sky and the central pond ruffled slightly with the wind.
This was an opportunity - and Mael knew that he had better take it.
“My Lord,” he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. “How is your uncle?”
Selana said nothing. He glanced sideways at her and saw her swallow, blink.
After a moment, she managed, “You’ve killed us both, you know that, don’t you?”
Mael wasn’t sure if her “both” meant Selana and Mostak, or Selana and himself. He opened his mouth to ask, but her shoulders rounded and she collapsed in on herself with a deep sigh that should have brought the colonnades tumbling down in rows.