“Now!”
With a shudder that seemed to wrench flesh from bone, the beast was gone.
And Kale the cook was falling back, blood across his mouth and chin, pushing the axe from his face. His was white, shaking violently.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He wiped his face, looked at his hands, grimaced. “Sorry about that... I guess he annoyed me...”
“No shit.” Redlock hadn’t put the axe away. “You calm now?”
“Yes, I...” Still wiping, spitting, he scrambled backwards from where Maugrim lay, blood soaking his chest. “Yes. Yes.” He started to scratch like a man infected.
Karine was by him. “It’s all right, it’s all right. It’s over.”
“It is indeed.” In an unconscious parody, Roderick placed one foot on Maugrim’s chest. He said bleakly, “Tell me about Phylos.”
Ecko muttered, “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”
Maugrim spat blood, blood stained his teeth and ran from his throat in rivulets, soaking the sawdust, staining the floor.
Roderick’s voice was cold steel. “Tell me, Ralph, or I shall throw you in the midden and leave you to die.”
“You pick a fine time to find your balls, Rick.” Maugrim laughed bloody bubbles.
Ecko said, “This isn’t fucking real.”
The Bard’s voice slashed back from the walls. “Tell me about Phylos!”
“I don’t know, guv. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“Enough head games. Tell me!”
Head games.
The phrase crystallised Ecko’s fury like the shine of the Sical itself.
Head games.
The final trick: the final test.
Profile.
This fucker was Eliza made manifest: Maugrim was his in-situ shrink. Rummaging around in Ecko’s head, building lock-ups like familiarity, loosing fire-beasties that touched him to the very soul... playing hypno-the-rapist with a fucking hexidecimal pocket watch...
Head games. All of it. Fucking head games.
In the echoes of Roderick’s anger, Ecko felt the relief of the fiction closing back in about him – and this time, he took refuge in it. He needed it and it made sense to him.
He’d started in a teleporting tavern, for chrissakes. He’d gone down a dungeon and splatted a Big McNasty. He was a bit short on the treasure front, but he had saved the girl. Of course it was a fucking program – it had to be – who the hell did this asshole think he was kidding?
Yeah, I got this now.
He rounded on Maugrim, on the Bard. “All right, fuckwit, that’s it. You’ve seen my profile? You so know I don’t like having people fuck with my head.” He stood to his full height, looked down at the still-defiant Maugrim with his head cocked sideways, his teeth bared. “Nice try with the pocket watch routine.”
Around him, the others were tense, watching him.
“You know what? I am insane. I’m a pyrophile and a madman and a fucking megalomaniac. And Eliza designed a whole Virtual Rorschach just for me. And you? Are just a figment of her code, of my imagination. And you know what that means?
Maugrim was laughing at him.
“You came back to fuck us up – hand us over. You filthy bag of shit.”
Ecko jumped at him, adrenals kicking, faster than the taproom could react. He was on the floor, his hands were wrapped in the front of Maugrim’s cut down, the smooth slide of long-oiled denim under his fingers.
“That means I don’t have a conscience.” His grin was unholy. “It means I can do anything the fuck I want to you. It means I can peel off your skin an inch at a time – you wanna know what that feels like? It means I can cover you in burns, let them heal, and then burn you all over again. It means I can melt your flesh into a blistered puddle on the floor. It means –”
“Ecko.” The Bard’s eyebrows were almost comical. “Please.”
“It means you’re fucked. That’s what it means.” His grin was jaunty. “Now, I think the man had a question?”
Maugrim was trying to back away from Ecko’s grip. His defiance was fading, there was fear growing in his gaze, his expression.
He said, “You wouldn’t dare. I’m not afraid of you!”
“That,” Roderick commented, “may be a mistake.”
Maugrim squirmed, tried to get away from the Bard’s foot, Ecko’s fists. He was shouting now, shouting up at the ring of faces that surrounded him.
“I’m telling you nothing! Nothing, you hear me! I was told that the world was mine – that I could save it, that all I had to do –”
His speech cut suddenly dead. He gagged, his eyes bulging, his hands flailing. His body jacked, his feet hammered the floor, drumming a tattoo that could only mean one thing.
Ecko said, “Well, shit.”
He sat back. The Bard moved his foot.
On the floor of the tavern, Maugrim was frothing like a rabies victim, foaming at his mouth, blood leaking from his ears. His eyes were filled with darkness, his body jerking manically from side to side. A final, thin scream came from his throat.
Ecko stood up, wiped his hands on his cloak.
Karine said, pointedly, “The mop’s in the kitchen.”
And Roderick swore with more viciousness than Ecko had ever heard.
* * *
In the faint, pale glimmer of the pre-dawn, a tail of smoke rose from The Wanderer’s chimney.
And a corpse, foam flecked and bloodied, lay on a fallen stone altar.
From their collective refuge on the henge’s bank, they could see the glow of The Wanderer and, beside it, the rock upon which Maugrim had been laid. Watching him to ensure that he didn’t jump back to life, or rise as a beastie, or anything else, Ecko was mentally totalling his points on the sanity scoreboard – wondering what Collator would have to say for itself.
Success of scenario: 53.78%. Could do better.
But hell, he was still Ecko. Whatever Eliza had wanted to do to his personality, his code of ethics, whatever-the-fuck her brief had been... he’d beaten it. He was himself, unchanged.
Wasn’t he?
For a moment, he saw Pareus, burning. He saw the warm windows of The Wanderer, and the light of the love of its staff. Redlock’s courage and Triqueta’s vibrant life. Kale’s pain and his fight for his soul.
I’m s’posed to think this shit is real?
I’m supposed to think it’s not?
It means I don’t have a conscience. It means I can do anything I want...
In the moonlight, he could see Amethea’s face, beside him on the bank. He had no idea what she’d been through, but she too, had bravery he couldn’t even find words for.
And somewhere in the back of his head he knew that they had touched him. All of them.
No matter how he tried to deny it.
He wondered if that meant that Eliza was winning.
Then a tremor in the ground made him start.
He shifted, glanced at Redlock beside him on the bank. The axeman was frowning, scrabbling to his feet, flicking weapons into hands – looking for the threat. Amethea stared round her, wild-eyed.
Triqueta said, “There! Oh my Gods!”
Below them, as Maugrim’s seeping blood finally touched the soil, the stones of the Monument were shifting, settling. On his feet now, Ecko spun his telescopics. He could see the ground was slipping, concave, crumbling... Slowly, the great, grey stones were sinking, like flooded barges drowning in the soil.
And so was the tavern.
“Roderick! Shit, Roderick!”
From far below them, there was a distant, ominous rumble. The ground shook. They could only watch as the stone bearing Maugrim’s corpse upended like the fucking Titanic and was gone, the soil round it falling away. It was sliding into nothing, spilling the body and tumbling free into capacitor-stone and the ruined cathedral, far, far below.