Ecko Endgame Read Free Page B

Alarmed now, Triq’s heart was thumping, echoing anxious like the distant, thunderous rumble. “Thea. Make sense.”
    The teacher shook her head. “Look, Taegh’ll take the horse.” She nodded at a sodden, tow-haired lad, his own shirt spattered with the Gods-alone-knew-what. “I’ve… Gods, I didn’t know what else… I’ve had to put her right at the back of the tent ’til I can work out what to do with her.” Amethea was striving not to cry, but whether from panic or horror or pure exhaustion, Triq couldn’t tell. “We have to get her to the Palace. To the Bard. He was her
friend
, he has to see what happened to her—”
    “Amethea.” Triqueta put the other hand on the other shoulder. “What the rhez are you talking about?”
    “Come on. You have to see.”
    * * *
    Amos was a city that would never be the same again.
    The two women splashed through the mud, then ducked under the swollen awning.
    And Triqueta stopped dead, her hands covering her face.
    Dear Gods.
    The tent was closeness and reek, layers of blood and rot and shit and panic, of herbs and horror and hope. Over their heads, the rain faded to a steady drumming, claustrophobic and ominous; under their boots, the mud was covered in old matting that was mouldering in the wet, stamped into mulch.
    And the
people…
    Triqueta didn’t deal well with illness – like her hard-jesting Banned family, she faced incapacity with a bravado that picked despair up by the throat and shook it, daring it to do its worst.
    This clustered mess of hurt, this helplessness – it scared her to the core of her soul.
    By the rhez.
    Closest to her, almost under her feet, was a young man, a soldier by the look of him – pale-haired and pale-skinned, his face contorted round a harm she couldn’t bear to witness, but couldn’t tear herself away from. As she watched him, he bunched, folding in on himself, knees to his chest, and began to shudder, spasms racking his body. Triq looked for help, for someone to come to him, but Amethea shook her head.
    She turned away. Drew Triqueta with her.
    Something in that movement was fatal, final – whatever was the matter with him, there was nothing she could do.
    And she knew it.
    For no reason, Triqueta saw the dying Feren, Redlock’s kinsman slain by the centaurs. It seemed like a lifetime ago, when the Varchinde still blazed with both hope and summer, when she and Ress had ridden from the Bard’s fears in The Wanderer to Maugrim’s swelling power at the centre of the plains. The boy’s memory was shadowed like a figment, deep in the skin of the soldier’s face.
    The thunder sounded again, laughing at her.
    Helpless, she followed Amethea’s tug, picking her way carefully to one of the tent’s long, rounded ends. As they came though the crush to a makeshift curtain, Amethea paused and glanced back.
    “I hope you skipped breakfast.”
    “Skipped…?”
    The question died as the curtain came back and Triqueta saw who – what – Amethea had found.
    No.
    The denial was inevitable, reflexive. Triqueta found herself backing away. The thing in the tent was shrivelled and shrunken, lined and cracked; its face was a hollow, and it was curled in upon itself as if it had tried to carry the entire Count of Time upon its thin shoulders.
    It –
she
– was dead.
    Dead of vast age, of returns beyond number.
    Unspeaking, tense with a nauseous roil of memory and horror, Triqueta stared, her hands to her mouth and her mind roaring wordless. Refusal knotted in her belly, rose in her throat, burned hot at the backs of her eyes. She couldn’t pull her gaze away; the woman’s face was a mapwork of life’s experience, now stilled.
    Skipped breakfast.
    It took a moment for Triqueta to realise – she knew who this was.
    Had been.
    Dear Gods.
    As the full understanding hit her, she was on her knees in the mulch, swallowing hard, burning her throat with bile. Shocked tears were hot on her skin. She knew exactly what she was seeing – knew