A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (12 page)

He gave it an appraising look before tossing it back to her. She caught it easily by the hilt, her look of confusion only growing. “Thank you?”

Ru disguised his satisfaction at changing the subject with indifference. “The link requires I do what I can to prevent you from coming to harm. As it was, I wouldn't have been surprised if the blade simply shattered the first time you used it.”

“Oh. Well I still appreciate it.” the former slave offered him a careful smile, knowing full well that he wouldn't return it.

Instead, he only nodded. “I believe I will see if the Grandmother requires any more assistance with spellwork.” And without giving her a chance to reply, he was gone.

Taylin looked down at the re-forged sword in her hand. It was shorter than she would have liked, but that had been true even before Ru worked his power on it. There was nothing for it at the moment but to try and get used to the new balance in the weapon. Today was going to be a long and bloody one.

***

The bandit king must have roused his men early, or driven them hard in his anticipation of putting the village to the torch. The dark line of horses, backed by three irregular forms that must have been spiders, arrived a little over an hour early, a small cloud of dust forming behind.

Lookouts atop the wagons spotted them the moment they appeared and sounded the general alarm. The Clan of the White Willow swarmed to life like a hornet nest struck by a stone. Harnesses were secured to wolves. Long rifles, sized for halfling hands and strength, were distributed to scouts, who would be playing the role of sniper in the battle. The children were bundled off into the second white wagon, which was pulled out of the town center and into the barn by a pair of ponies. Those among the villagers that couldn't fight were tasked with a bucket of water or dirt and pressed into fire teams.

Within a score of minutes, the advancing horde was closing within arrow shot, but the defensive positions were ready for them.

Taylin stood in the forward gap, just behind the trip lines. When the charge came, the bulk of the force would meet her first, directly after negotiating the final traps. Behind her, just over a dozen villagers, mostly teenaged boys, stood with heavy spears, backed up with nothing more than a hunting knife, or even a fish scaler. Earlier, there had been bravado and boasts about how many bandits they would kill. Now that it was setting in that the fight was very real, they grew quiet.

On either side of her were Ru and Kaiel.

The chronicler was in yet another outfit; heavy, darkly tanned duster, crimson shirt with flamboyant ruffles, and light, canvas pants the same color as the duster. He wore the same hat, the one with the metal plates that he'd worn when they met. The rifle was back on its strap slung over one shoulder and it was joined by smaller firearms ('six-shot pistols' as he'd explained when she'd asked. It seemed to be another thing he couldn't believe she didn't know.) at his hips. His eyes were focused on the approaching line.

“Atra-co gunne!” Came a shout from one of the lookouts from her post atop one of the houses.

“They're within range for a good rifle.” Kaiel translated for her and the others around her. The flute came out from a pocket in his duster. “I'm about to raise a screen.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the snipers stationed atop the wagons on either side of them. There were only six of them, Grandfather and Raiteria, wife of Bromun, among them.

“Wait for it to resolve, then fire at will. Archers and men with rifles first, but it you can pick out a mage, take the shot.” He placed the flute to his lips and blew out a low, throbbing tune.

On the other side of Taylin, Ru sneered. He didn't sense any magic. There wasn't even an attempt at using alchemy or other practical trick to produce an effect. He was confident that he'd been quite correct to peg the other man as a charlatan.

Then the air began to ripple and distort like clear oil poured on glass. Still, there was no discernible magic. Ru's sneer faded. “Odds bobs.” He muttered. It was one of the newer oaths in his repertoire; he'd learned it only two masters ago, but he liked the way it rolled off the tongue. It made Taylin give him another of her confused looks.

That expression did not last into your time?

No... I've heard it, but I don't remember where...

The ripple in the air slowed and stabilized until it was only evidenced by a slight blur. At the same time, telltale wisps of smoke started to rise from the rearmost ranks of riders. Pitch arrows were being lit. Kaiel stopped playing and made the flute disappear with some mundane sleight of hand before raising his own rifle.

“Fire!” He cried. Seven rifles cracked in a staggered cacophony and Ru learned what rifles did.

The first shot, he realized it was from Grandfather, went straight through the eye of an archer, killing the man instantly. Another, Kaiel's, tore cleanly through armor and ruined another man's arm, while still another gave a female archer a stinging wound across her ribs. Raiteria's bullet found the gut of one of the torch runners, who was lighting arrows along the line.

He fell, doubled over, and accidentally ignited the saddle blanket of the next horse in line. The animal shrieked and reared, trying to get away from the flame. None of the other horses reacted.

“Why aren't they panicking?” Ru rumbled disapprovingly. In his day, horses were skittish and fearful.

“Fear-bred.” Kaiel explained, chambering another bullet. “From birth, they're kept in a special corral inside the spider cages. They live every second in abject terror until they're numb to it.”

“Heh.” Ru grinned with all the malevolence in his being. “Then I will simply have to strike fear into the riders instead.” In a rush of air, he soared straight up. His cloak and robes billowed and the blade of his scythe gleamed even under the overcast sky.

That's when he got to
feel
what rifles did.

The tiny chunk of lead went right through his robe and bored into his thigh until it struck and splintered bone. The flash of pain caused him to falter. It was like being stung by an insect, but his impeccable awareness of his body; born of centuries of shape-changing, told him just how much damage had been done.

At the same time, he sharpened his senses and picked out exactly where the shot had come from. The man, astride his horse, was reaching into a bag at his side for another bullet.

Suddenly the pain and damage were forgotten. They would heal when he next changed shape anyway. Instead of tending the wound, he teleported. One moment, he was still high above the forward gap, the next he was six feet off the ground, and less distance than that from the man who shot him.

The scythe swept in an upward motion, piercing through a weak point in the shooter's armor; the armpit he exposed while reaching for his next projectile. The spellwork Ru placed on it allowed it to cleave cleanly through rib and sternum, bisecting both heart and one lung along the way. It was over so quickly that the shooter never knew Ru was there.

A scream of surprise and rage caused Ru to turn in the air to see the woman who had been riding beside the shooter drawing her sword. He let her, then turned the scythe to swing it downward for her head. Her sword caught it inches from splitting her scalp, but a twist allowed the curved blade to trap the sword and rip it from her one handed grasp.

Ru took one hand off the scythe's handle and transformed it into a hammer, swinging it laterally and hard enough to both cave in her chest and launch her off the back of her horse.

Almost immediately, a spear drove into his side and its wielder tried to use it to force him to ground.

He succeeded in that Ru dismissed the scythe with a spell and became an ogre; landing heavily before sending the spear user flying with a massive backhand.

By now, the entire bandit contingent knew he was there in their ranks. Someone was sounding a charge and someone else was issuing orders to concentrate on him. Confusion reigned and the charge started off haphazardly.

Another fool with a spear charged him and he became a dire wolf, bounding over both the spear and the horse's shoulder to lock jaws around the rider's neck. He dragged the man screaming from his horse and worried him like an oversized rabbit until his neck snapped.

Attack. Counter. Response. Counter-response. It was a game he knew how to play and he was enjoying it. Probably too much. He shifted from a wolf and into an ankyl—the club-tailed, armor-backed form he used when he fought the hounds, and used a precise swing of his tail to send a man flying off the side of his horse with a thoroughly mangled arm.

He didn't even care if they were dying or not. It wasn’t the point. The point was countering and humiliating them for even daring to try and meet the Rune Breaker in battle.

The sound of many bow-strings snapping reminded him that there was another, possibly more important, point to all this. He was supposed to be disrupting the attack. And that probably included the flight of flaming arrows he looked up to see arcing into the sky, set to land on the village's dry, reed roofs.

Kaiel watched the first two victims of Ru's rampage fall. The line around him faltered as riders alternately attempted to flee, or charged forward to end it. The ones that chose the later charged into an increasingly creative meat grinder.

All the while, the snipers took shots as they found them. Here an archer clutched at a wounded limb, there one fell dead. Whoever was directing the bandit force managed to catch that in spite of Ru's distraction and ordered the charge before the archers were prepared to cover.

The chronicler saw what they were trying to do; screening the archers with the bodies and dust of the advance group. It worked, but only where the charge managed to get started.

Except for where Grandfather aimed. The aged halfling had grown up in Rizen, where the long rifle was born and popularized, and he was good enough that three archers could testify to it already; two dead and missing eyes, one whose middle and fourth fingers had been blown off. In spite of the charge, he carefully waited for a shot and removed the kneecap of the other torch runner.

“He's not even bothering with the archers.” Kaiel observed of Ru.

Taylin was fighting hard not to chew her lip or show any fear, lest she spook the villagers. “I think he's enjoying himself too much to think much about it.” She replied in a tight voice.

“Fire arrows coming.” They both looked down to find that Grandmother had sidled up between them without their noticing. She was dressed in full vestments as a servant of the nature goddess, Sylph: a mud-brown robe with a belt woven with living grass and a cord of the same, from which hung a live, perpetually ripe strawberry. At her side sat the urn. The halfling matriarch didn't allow either of them to waste time talking, simply pointing out on the field.

Out of some thirty archers, a bit less than half were able to both survive the snipers
and
manage to get an arrow lit. On a desperate order, they let fly. Thirteen blazing shafts leapt skyward, accompanied by half that many that weren't lit.

Warning came from the lookouts, who raised their leather shields. The villagers on the line and in the fire crews had no such cover and many of them broke for the houses.

Grandmother ignored it all and took the lid off her urn. Red, etched sigils flashed around the lip of the vessel and a geyser of mist issued forth from it to a height of thirty feet before spreading out like a parasol. It blocked out what little of the sun there was, but more importantly, when the flaming arrows met it, their deadly payload hissed out.

Unfortunately, it did nothing to actually stop the arrows, which pelted down behind the wagons and onto the nearest roofs. The snipers hastily rolled backward off the side of the wagons, crawling to their second position beneath them.

A wolf yelped and began to whine, an arrow just missing it's spine by the grace of its harness deflecting it. One of the young men behind Taylin went down screaming, pierced through the forearm. It took two of his friends to drag him back away from the line, drastically reducing the numbers at her back. She wasn't sure if that was good or bad. None of those boys, in her opinion, had any business there. Hopefully, the other two would take the excuse to stay with their friend.

“Ru Brakar is not going to deal with their archers.” Grandmother informed Kaiel. He nodded his understanding before letting the rifle hang again and putting the flute to his lips. As he started to play, Grandmother shouted something in the halfling language and gestured over the urn.

Two things happened immediately. First, the cloud formed from the urn suddenly dropped to ground level, spreading out in an impenetrable mist bank about four feet high. Second, the halfling warriors took up a deep, undulating cry that Taylin couldn't believe halfling voices would produce. A moment later and the wolves responded with howls; the two sounds becoming a monster all its own. Then both warriors and wolves hurled themselves into the mists.

The tune Kaiel was playing on the flute was oddly apropos. With all the howling, the war cries, and even the cries of the injured young man, it was the music that made gooseflesh break out on the back of Taylin's neck. Kaiel noticed her expression, and without stopping, pointed out over the field with his free hand.

Without being directed to it, Taylin might not have noticed, but a patch of sky above the rear line of the bandit force was oddly dim, as if someone was holding a piece of delicately smoked glass in front of it. And it was getting darker by the moment.

Some of the bandits noticed too. But by then, it was too late. Suddenly, the dim spot in the air erupted into a great swarm of bats. In the hundreds, the creatures poured out of the dark aether and swooped down upon the line of archers that were preparing to loose a second volley. Tiny claws latched on, minute teeth nipped and scratched, and leathery wings filled the air so thickly that breathing seemed impossible.

The 'fearless' horses went instantly mad. Inhuman screams burst out from all quarters along the line as they bucked and kicked and threw themselves on the ground in desperation to be rid of the vermin. And where they did, their riders were thrown, slammed, and crushed by their own mounts.