Ecko Endgame Read Free

rage northward to Fhaveon, Lord city.
    And now, Triq was afraid.
    Afraid that their time was up, afraid the aftermath of Aeona would prove too much, afraid that the blight and the rising winter would finish them all.
    Another gust caught her, and she shivered. It was cold as pure frost, sending tumbles of the dead grass across the hilltop. Though the Varchinde’s “little death” was a natural thing, a normal part of the cycling of elements and seasons, somehow it still all seemed like some Gods-damned portent.
    Like the grass would die for good, and there would be no spring.
    The mare shook her mane, snorted steam and scorn like some saga charger. The shadow, whatever it was, had gone.
    The shadow had never even been there, for the Gods’ sakes, had never been more than Triqueta’s own hair, scudding across her vision. She pulled the mass back, retied it.
    The mare was agitated now, ears flicking.
    “Come on then.” She stroked the creature’s neck. “We’ll go home.”
    They turned back to the city. Out over the sea, the sky had sunk to an ominous glower. The cloud was thick and flat, almost metallic. Even as they moved, the mass was flash-lit, and the grey water ignited to an instant of glittering fire.
    The rumble reached them a moment later.
    Triq gave one last look southward, but there was nothing there – by the rhez, there was never going to
be
anything there. Telling herself she wouldn’t come here again, she tightened her knees and urged the horse onwards – to the city, and to shelter.
    And as she went, she raised her face to the wind – was surprised to find it ice-cold on her cheeks, as if it dried water she hadn’t even known was there.
    * * *
    A dark sprawl between rising hillsides, Amos was a city changed.
    With the onslaught of the blight, the Varchinde’s quintessential terhnwood crop had been devastated, and its absence damned the plains’ trade cycle and the lives of the cities that depended upon it. In Amos, Lord CityWarden Nivrotar had no intention of letting the resulting chaos assault the streets of her home, to gut Amos as it had done Fhaveon.
    When the blight had first browned the crops and grasses that surrounded her, Nivrotar had sent teams to help the harvest and to tally and stockpile everything they could, to defend or burn where necessary, and to teach calm to the farmers and workers. Trust in your city, the Lord told her people, your city will hold her word to care for you.
    And she did.
    At the Lord’s insistence, her bazaars and tithehalls remained open – and guarded – while her craftmasters and bookkeepers were kept recompensed and busy, vital to the continued cycle. Terhnwood still came into the city, rationed and managed. A portion of it was still stored, and its equivalent weight and value in goods was still traded back to the farmlands, and beyond. Where Fhaveon had slammed shut her trade-borders and hoarded what crop she still had, so Amos tallied the absolute minimums she’d need to maintain herself and her farmlands, and then sent bretir outwards on various carefully plotted routes with offers of what little remained.
    Around Amos, the trade cycle limped into motion once more. Control was merciless, violence inevitable, justice savage and swift. Local freemen and warriors were recompensed in food and kit, and they defended the city to her last.
    The system was shaky, but it held. Perhaps due to Nivrotar’s power and reputation, perhaps to her ruthless Tundran intellect, Amos was still in business.
    Seeking the work, more warriors came.
    And more traders came.
    And after them, in a steady trail of hope, came the refugees.
    * * *
    Amos was a city changed.
    Her inherent darkness had become a beacon, a flag of stained hope. About her walls a new life had grown, a patchwork of fabric slum, swollen with life and colour. Here, gathering for shelter against the blight and the fear and the “little death”, had come the people who had nowhere else to go.
    When