A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (13 page)

Taylin watched, stunned. “I thought...”

“They are.” Kaiel assured her, finally taking the flute away from his lips. The satisfied smile on his face was a sin unto itself. “But only to mundane fear. Those aren't bats, you see; each one of them is a minor fear spell in constructed form, doubled again and again by the pattern I was playing.”

She was going to comment on that, but at that moment, the lead horse in the charge went down with a terror-filled whinny. There wasn't any indication what made it fall, but the swirl of mist and guttural snarl followed a cessation of whinnying made it clear why it and its rider didn't get back up.

Soon, she was seeing evidence of the strength of the Clan of the Winter Willow all over the field. Here, a weighted chain wrapped the length of a spear and tore it from its owner's grasp. Elsewhere, a halfling wielding a pair of kurkis vaulted out of the boiling sea of mist and onto the back of a horse, plunging his blades into the rider's flank. Still elsewhere, two sets of chains were thrown in tandem, catching a woman across the neck and arm and pulling her off her horse and into the wolf haunted fog.

It wasn't all victory, however. In one part of the field, a trio of riders were riding close and watching each other's flanks. When a bounding warrior finally took the bait, he found himself with a saw-edged spearhead in his gut. In another, a huge black charger, a breed apart from most of the other horses in the bandits' number, seemed to be almost having fun; dishing out bone shattering kicks to both halflings and wolves that came too close while its rider warned others off with his sword.

For their numbers, less than a third of the force they were repelling, the White Willow was doing far more damage than the bandits. But even with their best and most brutal effort, a sizable number of raiders were still going to make the gap.

Taylin saw the first few win past the skirmish and make straight toward her. The part of her that was a soldier knew the situation immediately and she slipped into a stance for receiving the charge on foot: knees bent, weight ready for the side step, and sword low for an up-swing, or to bat aside a lance. Let them come. She knew exactly what to do.

***

By the time Ru finally ran out of immediate opponents and turned his attention to the archers, it was just in time to see the bat swarm descend on them in his stead. By virtue of a trained eye and a spare sense when it came to magic, he identified them as very simple spells expressed in a somewhat exotic form.

No one of them was an impressive feat for any but a novice, but they weren't what made him come to a halt mid-battle. It was that they were being generated; perfect copy after perfect copy, likely from the ambient emotional energy that surrounded the bandits. Not only that, but as with the screen earlier, and Kaiel's alleged endurance spells from their first meeting, Ru couldn't sense the array constructing the fear-bats. And that was inconceivable.

Since he was old enough to draw upon magic, he'd had a knack for identifying it. The natural magic of elements that existed all around, the pure energy from within himself, the overwhelming, but restricted forces portioned out from the gods; they were all different, but also the same fundamentally.

What the chronicler was tapping, while it must work on the same principles as magic in order to generate spell constructs, was something else entirely. Something Ru could not identify, or anticipate, or control. And that did not sit well with the Rune Breaker. Understanding was the core of his being, more than battle and death. Even spellwork was a means to an end and that end was understanding.

He hated the man even more now.

And had his mind not been on magic at that time, he might have sensed the oncoming attack and sidestepped. Green liquid, formed up into a fist-sized comet, hissed past him and spattered in a line along the ground some distance behind. Where it landed, it bubbled and steamed.

Acid. Ru realized. Green acid. Some things never changed.

Tutors of magic taught basic substance transmutation, starting with a very simple water-to-acid spell that inherently turned the resultant caustic green to distinguish it from the base water. The uncreative and ignorant never bothered removing the color change when building upon that.

He sneered at the amateur effort as he turned to face the source.

It was his first time seeing a riding spider. It was a huge beast; twice as tall as a horse with a central body larger than three, brown with spine-like hairs jutting out all over its body. The bandits had strapped a large platform to its thorax, replete with a railing and two hard seats, back to back. In front of that was a smaller platform, resting just behind the head with a single hard seat with standing space behind.

There was a body slumped in the forward facing chair on the large platform, dressed in robes and a hark hood. A decoy meant to die on behalf of the real mage, who stood on the back of the smaller platform, just in front of a harried looking woman who controlled the spider's movements by way of a hook-tipped goad.

From a distance, it was probably hard to tell the mage from his fellows, him being in a shirt and trousers, but up close, he stood out clearly. The trousers were cotton instead of rough hide or canvas and the shirt was dark red, like blood, and made from fine silk with polished enamel toggles. His hair was long, wild and unbound so that it fell in a black mane.

The spider moved within a slowly shifting cage of green lightening which erupted from flaring points on the ground and earthed themselves in the mage's open palm.

Ru recognized it as a persistent gathering array, using the energies
akua
and
ere-a
to constantly transmute water vapor in the air into the caustic substance that was magical acid. That moved the man out of the ignorant category and into the uncreative. Something else Ru loathed, but at least he might be an interesting opponent.

His sneer grew into a cocky grin that bared one set of incisors. “That is a very nice shirt.” He observed. The compliment drew the other mage up short in the middle of casting. Ru just kept talking. He could have snapped up a shield without a thought and blocked such meager acid blasts, but that wouldn't have been creative.

“I've been told about the halfling way of battlefield spoils: that if you kill a man in battle, you get to take everything he owns. I fancy the shirt. What else do you have to make yourself worth killing?”

The mage responded by hurling a larger blast of acid than the first, which Ru caught with a spellwork shield of
vin
, energy of air, which followed the motion of his palm.

“Fool! Do you know who you're trying to threaten?” He demanded of Ru, “I am Hurden: flesh melter, bone dissolver. When I'm done with you, even the crows will starve on what little of your remains.”

He sneered down from his perch atop the spider. “I've been watching you and your shape-changing. Such a low form of magic is almost below me to engage. But if you insist, I will show you how a
real
wizard fights!” With that, he drew power from the gathering array around him and flung an acid bolt as large as a human head at Ru.

“Heh.” The spellwork over Ru's hand blocked and consumed it as easily as it did the previous one. Tension built up on his wrist and forearm. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the link registered pain on Taylin's part and tugged at him to act to aid her. But the pain was a fraction of a fraction of what she'd suffered in the battle with the hounds. She would be fine. And the link seemed to agree.

He glanced down to see visible black lines tracing a maze pattern across the skin there. Trapping and storing spells usually required an object to act as the vessel and an hour or more of preparation, not to mention knowledge of the spell before hand. If one wasn't adverse to risking great personal injury should a spell prove more powerful than expected, and were capable of changing shape to mimic a prepared array on one’s own body on the fly, however, there was another option.

“Is that all you've got?” A barking laugh escaped him and his yellow eyes flashed madness. “That isn't how real mages fight. This is.” He shifted subtly to alter the spell and whipped the spell trapping arm laterally. A tentacle of vivid, blue acid writhed out of the aether in the wake of the gesture and crashed down heavily across all four legs on the spider's left side.

The hairs in the affected area melted instantly and the chitin wasn't far behind, filling the air with a most repulsive stench. Finding itself in sudden agony, the spider let out a sound like hundreds of thin, taunt wires being drawn across one another and tried to shift off its injured legs. Its frantic motion almost dislodged its handler and pitched Hurden the flesh melter into the dust.

Rolling with the fall, Hurden was swift to dodge out of the path of the berserking spider and impressed Ru by managing to maintain the persistent array.

Not enough to let him live of course.

The bandit mage skidded to a stop as Ru appeared in front of him. “Normally, I would skewer you through the belly and let you enjoy the slow death of a gut wound.” he informed Hurden. “But I don't want to ruin my prize. Do you really want to know how mages fight?”

Fear gripped the bandit and he turned to flee.

“Nightmare Syndrome.” Ru's voice said behind him, becoming deep and rumbling like a far off storm.

Hurden didn't get more than three steps before there was a sound of metal whistling through the air and the curved blade of a scythe tore his arm cleanly off at the shoulder joint. He gasped and tried to stagger on through the pain. Another slash, this one drew a white hot line of agony across his shoulders. Crying out in pain, he didn't hear the next one coming until it tore through his lower back. Barely a moment passed before another cut hamstrung him and sent him sprawling face down in the dust. One last slash came, aimed cleanly at his neck and darkness followed.

In the real world, Hurden hadn't even managed to turn. He was still standing directly in front of Ru as his body jerked with each imaginary wound Ru inflicted within the psychic world conjured by the Nightmare Syndrome. Finally, his head snapped back and with a tiny, strangled sound, he collapsed in a heap.

Ru looked down at him disdainfully, then started to bend down in order to claim the silk shirt. It was then that he registered real pain on Taylin's part, something the link simply wouldn't allow him to ignore. He swore death upon anyone who might claim or ruin his prize before his return and mentally reached into the link.

Somewhere in those dozens of interlinked arrays and spell structures, there was a specialized teleportation spell. It was unidirectional; only capable of sending him to a point within a ten foot radius of the holder of the other end, but it required no energy on his part and activated at the speed of thought.

He triggered it and vanished from the field of battle.

***

Taylin's instincts kicked in as she fell into her stance and the world suddenly became much simpler. In that moment, she was no longer awkward in her newly won freedom, or ignorant of the world she found herself in. Some things did not change, even in the span of centuries: there was a man with a sword, he was on a horse, and he was bearing down on her. For once in the past two days of confusion and strangeness, she knew exactly what to do.

Then the halflings concealed in the wagons on either side of her turned the winches that raised the trip lines. Man and mount suddenly became hundreds of pounds of screaming metal and horse flesh.

She shouted a warning to the boys behind her, hoping that Kaiel and Grandmother could care for themselves, and side-stepped as the horse slid past her in the dust. Its rider pinned helpless with his leg beneath it. Seconds passed until three of the village boys simultaneously reached the conclusion that this was their chance to safely make a 'kill' in battle.

Without any knowledge of how to strike a proper killing blow, they simply set to stabbing wildly until the man lay still.

Taylin might have felt sorry for him if two more riders weren't thundering in behind. Both saw what happened the first time and spurred their mounts to jump the trip lines. The woman on Taylin's left thrust with her spear as they came, while the man to her right swept his sword for her head.

She parried the sword with her own and made to catch the spear on her shield, but the piercing weapon punched right through the leather covering the wagon wheel. Before it could come close enough to strike her, Taylin rolled her arm, catching it by the haft on the spokes and snapping it with her superior strength. Undeterred, the former spear wielder reared back and slashed at her with the broken haft, opening a cut across her forehead that began oozing blood into her eyes.

On the other side, one of the village boys thrust his own spear at the swordsman, but failed to penetrate his armor. The swordsman batted the spear away and answered the young man with a terrible wound across his neck. He never got the chance to celebrate it.

In warding off more rakes with the other rider's broken spear, Taylin saw the vicious attack out of the corner of her eye and rewarded the murderer with a backhanded stroke through the ribs. Keen, magically sharpened steel sheered easily through his leather armor, along the rib line, and back out again, bisecting organs as if it was cutting cloth. The swordsman reflexively curled around the wound, over-balanced and tipped himself off his horse, into the fury of the late young man's friends.

This time, Taylin did not feel sorry as she turned her attention back to the other rider. In fact, her blood felt hot in her veins and she could feel the telltale itch of the scales on her arms, just moments from emerging on her skin. Instead of trying to calm the rage, she harnessed it, using it to slam the broken haft out of the way so she was open to cut the belly band of the other woman's saddle.

With the cut made, she let the haft slip past her defense so that the other woman lurched forward and was dumped off her horse atop the trip lines. Undaunted, the woman sprang to her feet and drew a short sword. Unfortunately for her, she was facing away from Taylin as she did and the former slave laid her back open before she could turn and fight.