Ecko Rising

But they held shoulder to shoulder, facing out.

The magharta had momentarily paused. Each one was barely the size of his hand, but there was a teeming mass of them, all snarling and tearing at Rift’s shredded remains. Bones rattled against the stonework. Now they came on, undulating like water, flowing over the intervening debris.

They were claws, scrabbling at broken timbers. They were teeth, bared and stained with the flesh of the spearman.

Tarvi was whispering, “Oh my Gods oh my Gods oh my Gods...”

Pareus slapped her in the face.

She blinked at him for a second, staring almost straight through him, then began to breathe again, heavily as if she were about to throw up.

Pareus snapped sharply at her, “Don’t lose it now!”

The magharta came on, swift and implacable. They grinned eyeless like figments, their faces were knife- toothed grins.

Edge shot one shaft, two. He pinned the lead creature, and its companions immediately turned on it, gleefully tearing into its flesh. As they paused, he shot another, and a fourth.

He was starting to panic.

Pareus watched, horrified, as frenzy ensued. The creatures became a roiling knot of scales and sinew and teeth and claws. They screamed as they tore into each other, sky-splitting shrieks that set teeth on edge and made the patrol want to cower, block their ears.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Edge muttered. He was loosing so fast his shafts were going wide, clattering among the wreckage.

“Enough.” Pareus stopped him, hand on his arm. “You’re wasting them – you’ll never make a difference.”

“What do we do?” Edge’s voice was high with terror. “Rift didn’t even see them! We should run – !”

“We’d never make it – not over this ground.”

“Wait,” Tarvi said. She was white faced; her hands shook. “Cover me.”

Pareus gave a sharp nod.

Whatever she was doing – it’d better be fast.

* * *

Ecko heard the inhuman screech, heard the ripping death of the spearman.

Halfway up the wall, hung there like a fucking ornament, he craned back over his own cloaked shoulder to see a running carpet of fang-toothed beasties converging on the terrified patrol.

Behind them, they left the shredded and scattered remains of the poor fucker they’d hit. Some of them were still eating him.

Scrabbling haphazardly down the wall-side, he felt the masonry judder as he moved his weight, but he wasn’t going to hang the fuck about. His feet hit the floor and he was running across the square, stealth-cloak flapping gracelessly behind him.

He heard the wall groan.

And he ran.

It collapsed with a rumble. There was a wash of ash, an exhalation of dust; the ground shook as the wall fell. Ecko kept his feet and didn’t look back.

He saw the archer – loosing hopeless, panicked shots into the midst of a spiralling ouroboros of tearing, ripping creatures, saw him hold his fire as if they stood on the Thin Red fucking Line.

He saw the critters uncurl themselves; turn back to the patrol.

Then he realised what the wall had been hiding...

...as another almighty seethe of them came out the building, and over the crashed masonry at his heels.

* * *

They had time.

Under Pareus’s sharp, steady command, the tan held together. As the magharta feasted on each other, the patrol threw together a barricade – bricks, beams, anything heavy they could drag.

Crouched behind the makeshift, flame-blackened wall, Tarvi threw bags and vials out of her apothecary’s kit.

“I don’t have much,” she said, “but it’s pretty savage.” As the wall grew higher, she scattered drops of liquid over the top – liquid that crystallised on contact with the air.

When the pouch was empty, she drew her belt-blade with a rasp and came to stand by Pareus.

“Ecko’ll come back,” she said. “He will.”

“Of course he will.” Pareus slapped her shoulder.

They both knew he was lying.

* * *

“Holy fucking shit!”

They were fast, flowing over remnants of shattered masonry. Ecko cursed the Bogeyman’s luck for not ensuring the wall had fallen after the fuckers had started running, but didn’t waste breath. His adrenals were fully kicked, the flood of heat and strength and elation slashed a grin across his face, made him turn. He picked up a sizeable lump of stone, flashed his targeters and turned the lead critter into a pink smear.

Its closest buddies paused. Their mistake – a hailstorm of savagely accurate, hard-thrown wreckage and the wave disintegrated into shrieking, boiling cannibalism.

He heard Tarvi, her shout loud across the plaza.

“Ecko! Ecko!”

As he turned, he saw the wave of critters hit the base of the patrol’s shambolic defence wall. Some went through, claws tearing holes in burned timber. He saw the spearmen, clumsy at close range, trying to jab down at the beasties as they flowed up the outside of the debris.

The first one crested the wall, parted its needle teeth and shrieked.

Ecko was still running. He saw the critter begin to sizzle, steam rising into the dust from supercooking flesh. He heard its shriek redouble, saw its scales crisp and flake, its skin slough from its sides. It was steaming from the eye sockets, still shrieking.

Then it shuddered and collapsed, tumbled sideways into the eager fangs of its mates.

Another crested the wall, another. They, too, flash-fried like Lugan’s fucking breakfast... Spearmen jabbed at them, shoving them away even as they burned.

One critter swarmed through a hole, dropped to the ground, another followed it. Another. Ecko watched as a spearman screamed and fell, hands beating at something ripping the calf muscle clean from the back of his leg. The other was in his face, ravening into his eye, its body curling in glee as its teeth tore. He was trying to scream, beat the thing off him, but it carved straight through the bone and into his skull, claws shredding the skin.

For a moment, his heels hammered the ground.

Then he was still.

Round where he’d fallen, there was chaos.

A heaving storm of the creatures fought to reach the downed patrolman, and turned on each other.

Pareus was yelling, his blade was fast, flicking the things from the wall top back into the oncoming slither.

The patrolman shot his last shaft into a creature that tumbled from the top of the wall – but one had got round behind him.

It sank its foreclaws into his leg and its teeth into the back of his knee. He stumbled, fell hard onto the bow and it shattered, splinters hitting his face and hands. The critter was still shredding. The fucking things were like piranhas, all teeth and ravenous, ripping hunger.

Piranhas.

“My tan perished round me. I escaped only because Rhan bore me home.”

Jesus.

With a sudden, flash memory of Roderick’s scar, Ecko went over the barricade.