Mockery rang increasingly loud in the hush. The room’s very simplicity became unsettling. He clung to his beam as if everything else would fade into nothing around him.
Where the fuck was he?
A feminine voice cursing made him start. He heard the Bard’s rich, distinctive chuckle, and the faint glimmer of light beyond his room went out.
Sudden, utter blackness.
Silence.
He was swallowed by them, abruptly alone, so fucking alone – an illegal alien in a crappy backwater culture. He froze, stock-still. Childhood fears – he dare not move or speak or turn, because if he acknowledged the beast of the darkness, it would pounce...
He was holding his breath.
His heatseeker showed him only infinitesimal, subtle shifts that made the darkness deep as nightmare – there wasn’t enough illumination for his starlites.
He couldn’t even see himself. Only the wood under his fingertips told him he existed, that Eliza hadn’t flicked the big red switch marked “OFF”.
Was she watching him? Out there in the darkness? Could she feel what he felt? Was this... was this supposed to teach him a fucking lesson of some kind?
Yeah.
You.
Bitch.
The snarl of defiance was reflex, it rippled through him like the first whisper of the tsunami. His expression twisted, he inhaled and his adrenals kicked. The lightning thrill of energy slashed a sudden, whetted grin across his face. Challenge him, would she? The muscles through his back and legs coiled, anticipating.
Were you fucking laughing? At me?
Sudden, sharp focus. Comprehension. Sartori.
There was no fear here!
The blackness was home, it was his and he understood it – he was the beast in the fucking darkness. It had been his cover, his cloak, his friend, his best weapon. One more thing to add to the list of shit he’d left behind...
...ohhhh yeah, the fucking light.
No streetlights, no aircars, no hoverdrones, no cameras, no fucking electricity.
He found himself trembling, elation and adrenaline making the corners of his vision spark with realisation – a realisation of total, unmatched ability.
He was unique; he was all-powerful, superhuman. He could pull shit this world had never even fucking heard of. All the dark, Bogeyman dreams of his childhood were here. They were in the darkness round him.
Only waiting for him to take hold of them.
Oh yeah.
As he dropped silently from the beam and carefully paced the distance to the unseen door, his blade-sharp grin cast a black reflection in his thoughts. This was it all fucking right.
This was Living The Nightmare.
* * *
Turning through an approximate L-shape of ground, The Wanderer was too simple to even offer him a challenge.
It slept oblivious – the only warmth a blur of feline, creeping on silent paws. The critter’s ignorance amused him. Navigating by heat, touch, simple mathematics, years of recon memorised the layout and brought him down to the bar.
Pub.
Taproom.
What-ever.
Yeah, like whoever designed this should’ve left neat, clearly labelled ration packs laying in obscure corners, plus hard cash and some sorta silent missile weapon that didn’t involve feathers.
Hey – and how about a couple of handy medikits and a ten-foot fucking pole?
He emerged through a door behind the bar and his antidaz flicked nanosecond irises. The taproom was bright, cross-hatched moonlight streamed through two front windows like the Bard had parked slap-bang in the middle of Leicester Square.
His crouch was instinctive, but the room was empty.
Motionless, he scanned.
Wood. More fucking wood than a hot first date. Barrels, tables, benches, wine racks, floor. This place’d go up like a fucking Fawkes’ Night party. For a second, temptation gibbered at him, dancing like a lighted match... Then he got a fucking grip and shut the door.
His adrenals were waning, unused by fight or flight, their fading left him cold and hollow. Shivers twitched his shoulders. The colours of his skin squirmed under the light and he swallowed nausea.
The taproom was silent, flanked by a gazillion alcoves you could hide a fucking army in – but his heatseeker picked up only the fading warmth in the fireplace. Next to its faint glow, a table was scattered with paper, curled into rolls or weighted with oddments. His telescopics picked out tiny, intricately detailed brown writing – sketches, even – but no map.
Remote sounds tickled the outer ranges of his hearing. Voices? Feet? Horses’ hooves again, somehow sounding wrong... Shouting and a sudden clatter that might’ve been a fight. More feet in a pounding and familiar rhythm.
Oddly reassured, he checked quickly for currency – gold, surely! When he found nothing, he snaked onto the bar top and crouched there, gargoyle still.
But there was no cash, no glitter of coinage. No pumps or optics, but hey, that one was obvious. Still no fucking metal.
He found wooden barrels and racks of pottery. And he found papers, loose rolls in differing colours of ribbon – they were off-white and rough to his touch. When he unrolled one, he found it was etched with some kind of tally marks, an elaborate record system he couldn’t begin to fathom. And under them, there was a squat, locked box – a box that his agile fingers took less than six seconds to prise open.
Whaddaya know. I hit the Vegas jackpot.
It was full of stuff.
Fragments of bright stone, ceramics and wood, pinches of powder in twists of fabric, white stuff that might’ve been horn or bone, jewellery braided from thread and colour. And most common of all, a kind of solid resin that looked almost like amber, almost like plastic. It was oddly smooth to the touch.
It wasn’t the only thing that he didn’t understand.
He went through the box, carefully.
Some of the resin was carved, or dyed, or both; some of it was just loose chunks. Some of it was crafted into more jewellery, or tools. Some of it had fibres running through it in eleborate patterns.
Laying a pendant thing back in the box, Ecko looked up and around the room, a realisation suddenly crystallising.
Jesus shit...
Hung on the walls and pillars was a half-ton of local swag – swords, scythes, tools, big ol’ spears with heads like half moons and axes the size of his head. Reaching out, he took one of the smaller blades down.
And it was the same.
It was the same resinous, wood-warm, glass-smooth, metal-hard stuff that was in the box, incredibly light with a pattern of fibres running up its centre – reinforcement or decoration. It wasn’t sharp, though his sensitive fingers found old notches.
What the hell was this stuff? Was it like their gold, or steel? Or both? Now he looked round properly, he could see that it made everything from weapons to rivets to cutlery – whatever the fuck this stuff was, it was critical.
Curious, he took hold of the blade with both hands and applied a little pressure.
With a sharp retort in the still air, it shattered, fragments flying, but fibres holding the two halves crazily together like a snapped limb.
Over his head, there was the scraping of furniture.
Which room?
You stupid fucking –
Kale.
Cursing Eliza as the great-grandmother of all head-fucking bitches, he threw the busted sword back onto its hooks, closed the box, aimed a savage axe-kick at the pillar, then picked up the bits – all of them – and evaporated like a nightmare in the glare of a halogen torch.