No streetlights, no aircars, no hoverdrones, no cameras, no fucking
He found himself trembling, elation and adrenaline making the corners of his vision spark with realisation – a realisation of total, unmatched ability.
He was unique; he was all-powerful, superhuman. He could pull shit this world had never even fucking
Only waiting for him to take hold of them.
As he dropped silently from the beam and carefully paced the distance to the unseen door, his blade-sharp grin cast a black reflection in his thoughts. This was it all fucking right.
This was Living The Nightmare.
* * *
Turning through an approximate L-shape of ground, The Wanderer was too simple to even offer him a challenge.
It slept oblivious – the only warmth a blur of feline, creeping on silent paws. The critter’s ignorance amused him. Navigating by heat, touch, simple mathematics, years of recon memorised the layout and brought him down to the bar.
Pub.
Taproom.
What-
Yeah, like whoever designed this should’ve left neat, clearly labelled ration packs laying in obscure corners, plus hard cash and some sorta silent missile weapon that didn’t involve
Hey – and how about a couple of handy medikits and a ten-foot fucking
He emerged through a door behind the bar and his antidaz flicked nanosecond irises. The taproom was bright, cross-hatched moonlight streamed through two front windows like the Bard had parked slap-bang in the middle of Leicester Square.
His crouch was instinctive, but the room was empty.
Motionless, he scanned.
Wood. More fucking wood than a hot first date. Barrels, tables, benches, wine racks, floor. This place’d go up like a fucking Fawkes’ Night party. For a second, temptation gibbered at him, dancing like a lighted match... Then he got a fucking grip and shut the door.
His adrenals were waning, unused by fight or flight, their fading left him cold and hollow. Shivers twitched his shoulders. The colours of his skin squirmed under the light and he swallowed nausea.
The taproom was silent, flanked by a gazillion alcoves you could hide a fucking army in – but his heatseeker picked up only the fading warmth in the fireplace. Next to its faint glow, a table was scattered with paper, curled into rolls or weighted with oddments. His telescopics picked out tiny, intricately detailed brown writing – sketches, even – but no map.
Remote sounds tickled the outer ranges of his hearing. Voices? Feet? Horses’ hooves again, somehow sounding wrong... Shouting and a sudden clatter that might’ve been a fight. More feet in a pounding and familiar rhythm.
Oddly reassured, he checked quickly for currency – gold, surely! When he found nothing, he snaked onto the bar top and crouched there, gargoyle still.
But there was no cash, no glitter of coinage. No pumps or optics, but hey, that one was obvious.
He found wooden barrels and racks of pottery. And he found papers, loose rolls in differing colours of ribbon – they were off-white and rough to his touch. When he unrolled one, he found it was etched with some kind of tally marks, an elaborate record system he couldn’t begin to fathom. And under them, there was a squat, locked box – a box that his agile fingers took less than six seconds to prise open.
It was full of
Fragments of bright stone, ceramics and wood, pinches of powder in twists of fabric, white stuff that might’ve been horn or bone, jewellery braided from thread and colour. And most common of all, a kind of solid resin that looked almost like amber, almost like plastic. It was oddly smooth to the touch.
It wasn’t the only thing that he didn’t understand.
He went through the box, carefully.
Some of the resin was carved, or dyed, or both; some of it was just loose chunks. Some of it was crafted into more jewellery, or tools. Some of it had fibres running through it in eleborate patterns.
Laying a pendant thing back in the box, Ecko looked up and around the room, a realisation suddenly crystallising.
Hung on the walls and pillars was a half-ton of local swag – swords, scythes, tools, big ol’ spears with heads like half moons and axes the size of his head. Reaching out, he took one of the smaller blades down.
And it was the
It was the same resinous, wood-warm, glass-smooth, metal-hard stuff that was in the box, incredibly light with a pattern of fibres running up its centre – reinforcement or decoration. It wasn’t sharp, though his sensitive fingers found old notches.
What the hell was this stuff? Was it like their gold, or steel? Or both? Now he looked round properly, he could see that it made everything from weapons to rivets to cutlery – whatever the fuck this stuff was, it was critical.
Curious, he took hold of the blade with both hands and applied a little pressure.
With a sharp retort in the still air, it shattered, fragments flying, but fibres holding the two halves crazily together like a snapped limb.
Over his head, there was the scraping of furniture.
Which room?
Kale.
Cursing Eliza as the great-grandmother of all head-fucking bitches, he threw the busted sword back onto its hooks, closed the box, aimed a savage axe-kick at the pillar, then picked up the bits – all of them – and evaporated like a nightmare in the glare of a halogen torch.
6: FLESH
UNKNOWN
Feren!
Her skull was coming apart, Amethea lifted shaking hands to her face and found crusted pain under her fingers.
Her hair was matted with it, it was gritted in her eyes.
Feren?
She tried to move; her legs betrayed her. She fell hard to a stone floor, heat and darkness clanging loud in her head.
The impact had split her eyebrow. She was wobbly – the gash was wide and shallow; it had bled profusely, but was not serious.
With each clatter of pain, images came like echoes: the plains, the Monument, the...
The tears came too, as they had to. She let herself cry for a few moments, then, irritated, she scrubbed at her wet face with her palms. Her tears washed the blood from her eyes and face.
“Feren?”
