Free Ecko Rising by Danie Ware

your strings. The Kartiah are just mountains – people live there.”
    “People.” Feren’s scepticism was typical Grasslander wariness. “They’re slavers.”
    “They’re craftsmen, Feren, metalworkers, part of the trade cycle. ‘People.’” Her voice held an edge. “Neither the Kartiah nor the Monument are saga-borne myths.”
    Feren, too, slid from his saddle. “So why don’t they know what it was for? Or what destroyed it?”
    “The Monument?” The chearl was slope-backed and carried her panniers on his withers. Amethea reached into one of them for a handful of dried fruit. “You want to know if all that hairy-scary ‘Souls of the Elements’ stuff has its feet in the truth? Only the Gods know that. It was probably just destroyed by the Count of Time.”
    “No one knows.” He accepted a piece of fruit.
    “No one cares,” Amethea told him. “Vilsara says we used to keep records, once – going back to Xenok’s builders. But they’re rotted, almost mush. Gods know what the real tale was.”
    “So... the mountains could be haunted – we’ve just forgotten?”
    Laughing, she threw fruit at him.
    “‘Haunted’! You’ve been listening to those idiots in the market. Come on, if the shadow’s bothering you that much we’ll stay ahead of it... that way the mountains’ twisted spirit can’t get us and turn us into something icky.” Swearing under her breath at stiffened muscles, she swung herself back into her saddle, settled against the back. “Besides, if we don’t catch the taer right the pollen’ll be all gone.”
    “Aye.” Feren returned her waterskin and mounted the broad back of his chearl.
    Soon, the two creatures were tirelessly running, broad hooves thrubbing on the baked soil, grasses dancing about their thick, muscled legs. They were heavier than horses, not as swift, but stronger over distance and steadier of nerve. Tales told that their ancestors had been crafted by some kind of alchemy; in the high days of Tusien, they rumoured, such crafting had been familiar. Amethea had sometimes wondered if those records were among the mouldering piles in Xenok’s hospice.
    Now, though, chearl were bred normally, and so common that people had long since forgotten the tale of their origin.
    Before them, their shadows lengthened; behind them, a greater shadow rose. As the sun sighed into the mountains, the creatures ran tireless, smooth gaited and placid in obedience. They had come a long way – following the ribbon-towns and trade-roads from the sprawled city of Xenok to the forested Irahlau, along the edges of the Rhamiriae to the huge Fayre at Roviarath. Following the growing swell of the Great Cemothen River, they had at last turned across the open plain – off the safety of the road to a place now known only to Deep Patrol beer-tales and reckless, almost-senior apothecaries.
    Apothecaries like Amethea, wondering what in the world she thought she was doing, bringing her ’prentice this far from home.
    She stole a sideways glance at Feren as the light faded. He was sitting upright, refusing to rest against the high back of the saddle – a position that strained his legs, as his feet were forwards in their stirrups. He was young, his soft beard new and a shade lighter than his shock of hair. Feren was freckled and a little wild-eyed. He’d given the chearl its head and his hand strayed often to the javelins slung down the side of his saddle. His cousin Redlock was famous – perhaps infamous – across half the world, a man of fearsome reputation who had abandoned his land, lady and daughter to become a warrior without peer. Was Feren a fighter? As a distant yammering made the ’prentice jump, Amethea chuckled. Feren was hardly warrior material, but road-pirates stayed where the pickings were rich – and the chearl were big enough to deter most predators.
    Like the bretir, the wide-winged flyers of messages, and the couriers’ companionable, guardian nartuk, now extinct, the