But the vision was not his.
He sat up, understanding flooding him like a chill.
It brought him more awake. He found that he was shivering, almost as though he had been in cold water. Pieces of the images still floated at the edges of his mind. They were strong – there was a cry of pain still in his ears and fear in every layer of the darkness around him.
For a moment, he was still, didn’t move. As if more motion would disturb the last of the images, make them evaporate in the darkness, he sat poised – but they were fading even as he reached for them.
Was there flame – was there anger?
The shiver became a shudder, a tease across his skin. A certainty, though he still wasn’t sure what it was.
As a youth, the Guardians had welcomed him – the first of his kind to be born in the Ryll’s home city of Avesyr in a hundred generations, hailed as the hope of his people. There were few of them left, even then, scattered watchers of a myth forgotten, adhering only to their own history and a mandate more ancient than they had words to recall.
They had taught him many things – to watch the water and to comprehend the tumble of the images within. They had taught him to fight and to run, to understand letters and music, to craft a story to entrance an audience.
They had also taught him to think.
In the darkness about him, the dream fragments were thinning to nothing. They left only isolated images, echoes that made no sense – but one thing remained as clear as Tundran ice...
He
Someone
Someone else had seen the thing they’d called heresy, the blasphemy he had committed.
The thought brought him fully awake and he was on his feet in the darkness, thinking, thinking. He was still shivering, as through the cold had sunk into his bones. He needed Rhan, he needed Ecko, he needed The Wanderer, he needed...
He needed to understand what he’d seen. It was the closest he had come to the world’s nightmare, the closest in more returns than he could recall – and the feeling that time was closing in upon him was suddenly exhilarating and dreadful and powerful.
He placed his hands against the cool of Fhaveon’s core-stone, and tried to remember.
...and he was standing upon a solitary rock tower. He was alone, utterly alone – as if he were the last mortal, or the first one...
His vision cleared, and Roderick knew – he knew where Ecko had gone.
He also knew something else, the thing that he had feared from the beginning.
Under the Bard’s skin, horror crawled like panic. The knowledge was absolute, but he was completely helpless to do anything about it – he barely realised that he was hammering the wall until pain curled his hands into claws.
Everything was connected – and Ecko had left without the full information.
Ecko was wrong. His impulsive, chaotic nature had taken him too soon, and without the right information.
And he might just make everything worse.
23: AMETHEA
THE MONUMENT
They had incoming.
From the chamber that Ecko’d named the “lock-up”, the passageways had changed. As though the open caves were only the entrance hall, they’d become somehow more formal – tighter, twisted and narrow. A feeling of age and tension had grown here, it watched them pass, skulking behind the shoulder-to-shoulder stones that sternly walled them in. The air was breathlessly warm.
Redlock resisted the need to cough, dry mouthed, the urge to hunch his shoulders as though he were trespassing. He felt like this whole damned thing was so ancient it’d cave in at the touch of his boots.
Before him, Ecko was almost impossible to see – a figment that flickered from wall to wall, curve to corner to side passage, a grinning, black-eyed shade. He didn’t trust it, had no idea what it – he – was capable of. He could feel Tarvi’s nervousness, Triqueta’s rising sense of panic – worrying about other people slowed him down.
But Triq was strong: he knew her bravery and was glad to have her at his back.
The fading rocklight still showed char marks, faint dustings of scattered soot that lured them onwards. Hanging roots were scorched and shrivelled, smaller stones cracked clean through, or fallen in pieces to the floor. At points, there were old carvings in the walls, softened by time, their meanings long-lost.
The axeman had the peculiar certainty they were going in a circle.
Ecko’s eyes flashed as he turned. Instantly, the axeman was alert.
Ahead of them came the beat of heavy footsteps, swift and regular – distant, but quickly becoming louder. There was an almost-flicker of light.
Redlock whistled softly. The passageway was a long, narrow curve, silent stones walled them in.
Tarvi answered him, “Seems we’ve got a patrol.”
“Then we stop them,” he said. “We need to find a side turning. Whatever they are, they’re not catching us with our breeches down.”
“They’ll come at us single file,” Tarvi murmured. “If you can hold...”
“And if I can ambush the damned things, I won’t have to.” He gave her a brief grin, glad she was able to focus. “I don’t know what they taught you in Roviarath, but never be afraid to fight dirty.”
She chuckled wickedly, seemed to like his audacity.
He spared her an additional glance – she was cute, but the same age as his daughter – then noted Triqueta’s expression and set his face to grim certainty.
“Let’s go – we’ll have to move quick.”
With Ecko before them like a dark harbinger, they ran.
* * *
“You don’t need to do this, please...”
In the flicker of the brazier’s flame, she’d seen the image of the trade-road, the bustle of the little township. Dirty streets and wooden walls, traders and grifters, beggars and families – it was a swell of population on the water’s edge, as though the unrolling ribbon-town had been dammed by the shoreline. Carts moved, making ruts in the mud, chearl plodded, tails flicking, children ran underfoot, chasing and wide mouthed.
