Ecko Rising

“For the Gods’ sakes, get out of here.” The Bard gave her a shove. “I’ll work it out as I go.” His heart was really pounding now – fear and freedom and elation and questions and an almost-understanding that he would reach for as soon as he had a moment in which to think. “And – thank you!”

Thank you... for another chance.

The young woman nodded at him, slid out of the door, and was gone.

They’re coming.

In his mind, perhaps a part of the dream, perhaps just a sharp stab of his own conscience, Roderick heard Ecko’s voice. You’re a coward and a fucking liar!

The Bard left his boots where they were. They were clumsy and noisy, and he needed to be quiet.

But his hand tightened around the cold metal grip of the poignard.

* * *

The great cliff upon which Fhaveon stood sentinel was a warren of tunnels. Smugglers’ tunnels, miners’ tunnels, tunnels of stealth and opportunity.

Stinking of cold rock and rimed salt and drying wrack, the tunnels’ existence made the Lord city seem hollow, oddly unstable.

Roderick had been down here before, many returns ago, seeking rumours of Swathe – but, like the outcome of his hunt for Kas Vahl Zaxaar upon Rammouthe Island, he had found nothing.

If the legendary Swathe had ever existed, it had been obliterated utterly – down to the last seared and moulding fragments of its residents’ bones.

Demisarr is dead. Rhan has been cast down.

Phylos closes his fist around the city, and around the Varchinde...

Mother of the Gods, Roderick thought. What has happened to Fhaveon?

From ahead of him, he could hear voices, a burst of coarse laughter. On chilled but silent feet, he pulled back into a side passage and waited.

He was trembling – cold, dread and anticipation.

Images still haunted him. Fighting and fire. The Great Fayre, burning. Demisarr Valimbor, Lord of Fhaveon, plummeting, screaming into the gorge. Phylos on the clifftop, and an unholy heat that blazed from his skin...

Roderick knew that heat.

The voices were coming closer.

Pulling back as far as he could, the Bard stopped, striving to reach for the memory – to piece it together from the scatter of images that he’d seen, this time so clearly, in the Ryll.

Demisarr’s wife, Valicia, thrown down and struggling, that same heat savage and penetrating and unwelcome.

Dear Gods.

And the realisation was there – the understanding. Kas Vahl Zaxaar, once D?l, cast down to the great halls of the Rhez below the world...

...and so, so like Rhan.

Vahl Zaxaar was stirring.

Even as the Bard was incorporating the thought, in the passageway outside, the voices were coming closer. They were soldiers’ voices, relaxed and bantering. One voice broke into ribald laughter, and one of the sets of boots broke away.

The laughing voice said, “Don’t get lost mate. We’ll never find you!”

Never find you...

Oh.

Dear.

Gods.

Never find you!

And the understanding of what he’d seen crystallised, shone brilliant, and shattered with spectacular force.

Of course!

That was what he’d been missing! All this time, all these many returns of searching! He could still hear the terrible, screaming deaths of his tan upon the grassy hills of Rammouthe, feel the rip and shred of his own wounds and scars, the taint of his hopelessness...

But Vahl Zaxaar was not there, he was not on Rammouthe!

He never had been.

Fhaveon was built to guard against a tale. A fiction, a saga, a legend so carefully spun to keep her attention from the real game...

To keep Rhan distracted, bored and inattentive...

While the real assault came in, slowly and stealthily, like soft boots in the night.

The boots of the soldier were coming closer.

In that one moment before the soldier was upon him, everything in Roderick’s mind was snapping into place. His clarity was almost making him laugh with the shock of it. It was connected – it was all connected – by the Gods, he’d been right all along. Everything he’d seen and sought and found – the fires, the creatures, the alchemy, the Elementalism – it had all spun from the same source, it all came, ultimately, from the now-awakening Vahl.

And Phylos...!

Again, the image of the Merchant Master on the clifftop. Demisarr, screaming. Valicia, fighting. Rhan, hands bound and falling. The tumultuous splash with which the city’s defender hit the surging white water...

Phylos was the avatar, the harbinger, and he’d insinuated Vahl into Fhaveon like a disease –

“Oi!”

Gods!

Roderick started like a novice – his hand tightening on the blade. The soldier was right there, hand halfway to the drawstring of his breeches as through about to go for a piss.

“You reek! What the rhez...?”

The poignard was very heavy, very cold, and very sharp.

He didn’t have a choice.

The Bard’s free hand went to the soldier’s shoulder, spun him, staggering, into the wall. The other hand inserted the metal blade, cleanly and nearly, up and under the point of his chin.

Straight into his brain.

The man’s eyes widened. They were blue, clear as the dawn sky.

His mouth opened, but he made no sound.

Leaving the poignard where it was, the Bard caught him as he fell and lowered him carefully to the floor.

It was all over in a second, and he felt sick.

But also oddly, strangely elated.

For a moment, Roderick stood there. He contemplated the body – the man was young, small and slight – then he bent to remove the blade and wipe it on the soldier’s wet breeches.

The man had pissed himself as he’d died. Urine and gore seeped across the stone.

Roderick swallowed bile, and stood up.

Somehow, he felt stronger – as though he had defeated some nightmare figment, some lingering taunt of Ecko’s accusation of cowardice...

I had no choice.

And I have no choice now.

Now, he needed to head downwards, west and quickly, away from the sea and towards the rear of the city’s skirts – down to where The Wanderer had last been.

In his mind, he could still feel Vahl Zaxaar’s heat.

Demisarr is dead. Rhan has been cast down.

As the faint flickers of rocklight moved like the monsters of his mind, more fragments were coming to the