The Path of Destruction (Rune Breaker) (21 page)

When that other voice; hers and yet not, had shouted at him. At that point all the artistry had been torn away and replaced by savagery, survival instinct, and an all-consuming rage even the Rune Breaker could rarely muster.

Even knowing and understanding what Taylin was, just the memory of it made Ru give her a sidelong look across the camp as she spoke with Brin.

That voice, or the qualities in that voice, took him back a long, long time ago; to a teenaged boy shivering as he climbed down a rough hemp rope into a dank cavern. It recalled a shadowy
thing
there in the darkness, its vast body dragging on the stone.

In the darkness, a green eye larger than his head had opened, bathing him in verdant illumination as it examined him. A powerful, rough voice spoke to him: “And what is it you think you can learn from me, Gand's whelp? Do you truly believe that one such as you can become a shapeshifting master?”

Ru shook off the line of thought. It was too close to true memory and that was the last thing he needed or wanted. Instead, he looked around for Kaiel to let the chronicler know he was ready to depart.

'The artificial divinity spark is expressing in sixty percent of the test animals, but seems inert. Analysis of discarnate energy fluctuations shows that they are miniature conduits to the power of the Well of Souls, but they are incapable of using it.

I expected this. A sapient mind is needed to control such awesome power. The Emperor seems to agree. Experimentation on sapient subjects has been approved. To minimize damage to more valuable beings, the initial tests will be conducted on ang'hailene.'

~ excerpt from the journal of Lena Hiddakko.

***

As a final token of thanks to Taylin and her companions, the battlemagi of Solgrum's army conjured a causeway of ice across the river so that they could continue their journey to Rivenport.

It was a sturdy enough, and the skilled spellcrafting of
akua
shaped the ice so it wasn't slick in the least, but it creaked under the weight of the heavily laden Gaddigan and none of the animals was particularly happy to travel on it.

Kaiel dismounted and spoke in soothing tones to each, weaving discarnate power into his words until his own horse, Raiteria's pony, and Miser were all cautiously willing to cross. That left Gaddigan, who seemed to understand what he was trying to do and refused to make eye contact; responding instead with laid back ears, a tossing mane, and several attempts to bite the chronicler.

All the while, Ru floated nearby with an amused look on his face, clearly pleased that his mount was as belligerent and aggressive as he was.

Taylin was neither amused nor pleased, and after the third bite attempt, she stepped in. Grasping the warhorse's reins in one hand, she effortlessly swung his head around to put them nose to nose.

She was not the first to blink.

Gaddigan, for all his surly behavior and wild spirit, recalled Taylin as the one who threw him over like a child overturning a toy wagon and he wasn't so sure he could emerge from another conflict with her victorious. Or alive. After a half-hearted attempt at biting her, he trundled after the other mounts across the bridge, occasionally casting a hateful look back at her until they were halfway across the river and going back out of spite was worse than useless.

The rest of the day passed without incident, and by nightfall, they had left the unclaimed wilds between Torm Dondaire and its neighbors, and entered Khish proper. Along the way, the hills that had until then characterized Novrom for Taylin started sporting more and more trees and shrubbery until they were traversing scrub forest.

As Ola began to sink beneath the horizon, they crested a hill that descended on the other side into a sea of tall, straight trees that stretched on until it began to climb the foothills and mountains in the far distance.

Kaiel suggested camping inside the House, which Ru agreed with on the condition that the animals remained outside. And so the night was spent secure and warm inside the extra-dimensional space.

***

At midday on their second day out, Taylin and Raiteria were scouting ahead of the others. The later was on ground level, blazing the trail for the others while Taylin flew above, both keeping watch for anything that might try to ambush her sister, and for any Khishan settlements they would need to avoid.

Riding the air currents, her bright wings stretched wide beneath the warm rays of Ola, Taylin felt many of her earlier anxieties melt away.

None of the others had brought up what happened during the battle, nor had they started treating her any differently.

With her more relaxed mood, the constant itch of her scales (which seemed to have been lying in wait to spring up and protect her) finally ceased. This made her more relaxed still and allowed her to think on other things.

Things like the mysterious Soul Battery.

It bothered her that Immurai would set a one month deadline to bring it to him, and then not tell them what it was. Moreover, the trip to Rivenport and the sea voyage would eat much of the time allotted to them. If the demon wanted the Soul Battery, whatever it was, he wasn't doing a very good job of making certain he got it.

Unless that was the point; that the Soul Battery
wasn't
what he wanted and instead, the whole thing was a charade or decoy. They had slain his previous pawn: the King of Flame and Steel. Perhaps taking Motsey and issuing a vague quest was his way of taking them out of the picture for his next plot in Taunaun.

That would also explain why Bashurra seemed perfectly willing to kill them.

Below, she saw Raiteria appearing and disappearing through breaks in the tree cover.

Nir-lumos
scouts were adept at moving quickly over all sorts of terrain, leaving as little trace of their passing as possible. Rai was making a study of it by nimbly hopping from branch to branch, occasionally using her chain to lash a tree too far to jump to so she could swing across.

Taylin decided to swallow her doubts about Immurai's intentions then and there. For if the search for the Soul Battery and trip to the Kimean Isles was all a diversion, then there was no reason for him to keep Motsey alive.

One thing Raiteria didn't need was to have her hope taken away. For that matter, Taylin didn't either. In only a short time, she'd come to adore the boy and the thought of Immurai and his ilk harming him... Ruminating on it was enough to make that part of her that she'd been trying to ignore rumble with the fury of a mother bear seeing her cubs disturbed.

The scent of something burning tingled in her nose and for a moment, she thought she was bringing up more burning gel. But then something flashed in her vision: Raiteria's signal mirror.

Lost in her thoughts, Taylin had also lost track of Raiteria and the forest below. Looking down now, she found her adoptive sister standing on a fallen log, mirror held high. Not far from her, some of the trees sported heat-withered leaves and scorched branches. The fire had not come from her.

Taylin leaned back and flapped her wings to halt her forward progress, pumping slightly harder to check her fall. Most hailene could do so easily. Serving on the foraging crews of ships, she'd seen them. They would flutter down with the greatest of ease and light on tree branches, because while they were taller than humans, hailene had hollow bones and less dense muscle, causing them to weight significantly less.

Not matter what her hailene instincts told her, there was nothing hollow about Taylin. She was as solid as a brick, and fell exactly like one if she tried to follow those instincts while trying to land. Instead, she had to fight against generations of hailene to replace the traditional fluttering with slow, powerful strokes of the wings to bring her down safely.

Even then, she hit the ground with a thud and had to drop into a crouch to absorb the last of the fall.

“Sorry if you were trying to signal me for long.” She said, trying to maintain some dignity as she straightened herself, “My head was else...”

She trailed off, because beyond Raiteria, she could see the damage in its entirety.

The undergrowth in the area was gone, burned to the dirt so there was nothing but a coating of soot. Smaller saplings were blackened staves of char that still smoldered, and the larger trees had their bark scorched or blistered off. In the midst of it was the skeleton of... something.

Whatever it
had
been, it was only a bit larger than Gaddigan, with a low-slung body. Most of it had burned down to a skeleton, but here and there, matted hair survived along with quills. Massive quills. The smallest were three feet long, while some were nearly five. All of them were nastily barbed.

“What was that thing?” Taylin asked, awed in spite of herself at the ruined body. Without meaning to, she started to walk slowly toward it.

Rai slipped the mirror back into its pocket on her leather scout's vest and hopped off the log to investigate with Taylin. “The caravan's passed by more than enough for me to know that much: It's an
erethizon
; a kind of spirit beast porcupine.”

She frowned at the charred corpse. “This was unnecessary.
Erethizon
are peaceful as spirit beasts go. They only attack if they're spooked and even then, they do enough false charges to give you the idea to run
before
they launch those quills.”

Taylin looked around slowly, then asked, “You talk like you think someone did this on purpose. Couldn't it have been something that breathes fire? The fire burned this whole area in a cone shape.”

“No,” Rai tapped her nose, “You smell that? The chemical twinge?”

Now that she was being asked, the answer was 'no'. All Taylin could smell at that point was burnt flesh. She shook her head to that effect.

Rai shrugged as if to concede that maybe Taylin didn't have the proper nasal training that a
nir-lumos
scout did. “It's lamp oil. A lot of it burned at incredible heat. Someone doused the
erethizon
and lit it on fire.”

“Or sprayed it.” Taylin said, keeping in mind the shape of the burn pattern. She really wanted to venture that it could have been a dragon that did this; a fire-breathing one. After all, the burning substance she spat two nights ago had been some sort of chemical rather than the billowing gout of flames depicted in Brin's dime novels, so it stood to reason that real dragons did something similar.

Rai scratched the back of her head and surveyed the same pattern Taylin had. “Maybe it's some kind of new weapon.” She knelt and placed her palm flat on the ground. After a moment, she straightened and dusted her sooty hand off on her pants. “This happened last night, I'd wager. Whoever did it is nowhere near here now.”

“Should we look around a bit more? Try and figure it out?” asked Taylin.

“I'm not sure what good that would do us.” said Rai. “Even if
erethizons
are less dangerous than other spirit beasts, they can still be deadly. This is a net good thing for us and the worse that can come of it would be upsetting the locals. Apparently, they like keeping the spirit beasts around as deterrents.”

When she looked up, however, she saw that her much bigger sister's eyes glimmered with the fires of curiosity. Taylin had spent much of their time in Daire lost in books when she wasn't being dragged out shopping with Brin, or sparring with Issacor. Now she had something in real life she wanted to look closer into and she wasn't going to be so easily deterred.

“Just another quick look around?” Taylin suggested hopefully.

Rai sighed. “Fine, fine. Go back up and see if there's any more burned-out spots. I'll mark the trail here for the others.” She looked back at the husk of the
erethizon
. A dead spirit beast, particularly one killed by immolation (the only other option, short of ash chalk, was beheading), tended to frighten off the local wildlife for a few days in the immediate area. She would be fine without Taylin keeping an eye out for her for a while.

A broad smile and the wind of powerful wings carrying her sister back up beyond the treetops were her reward.

***

Taylin did find another burned out spot, but not until later that evening after the group had rendezvoused for the midday meal, and Kaiel and Brin had done some orienteering to make sure they were still on course to reach the road leading to the Passage of Conquerors as soon as possible.

There were several burn patterns over an area about a quarter of a mile to a side. There was no evidence of what had been burned, but the large conical patterns were joined by smaller, round scorches that burned down stands of brush and places where clods of earth had been dug up or pieces of trees gouged out by explosion.

As it was coming near to the time to break camp, she and Raiteria scouted out a place nearby to tie the animals and waited for the others to arrive.

In the last hour of Ola's light, Kaiel, Brin and Ru all spent some time looking about at the destruction.

“No
flaer
.” Ru declared shortly after his arrival. “Whatever did this was not magical in origin.” He looked to Kaiel. “You have devices that mimic basic battle magic; firearms and grenades. Is there one that can explain this?”

Kaiel shook his head slowly. “Many alchemists are interested in replicating the ability to breathe fire, but the designs I've seen in Novrom and Chordin shoot narrow streams of flammable liquid and don't have anything near the capacity for this. And the only thing I know that could blast out a cone of heat like this is a dwarven steamjack.”

“Any chance...” Taylin started, intrigued by whatever a steamjack might be.

“No, we're nowhere near Genmide and the elders there levy a sentence of death on anyone that takes a steamjack or any of the components across the border.”

“Besides,” Added Brin, “A steamjack runs on a mystic steam engine. Anything that can detect energies would have picked up
flaer
and
akua
from one having been here.”

She was referring to Ru without actually saying his name, but he wasn't paying attention. Instead, he floated over to where one of the smaller blasts had blown a hole twice the size of a fist in an elderly larch. Stooping without actually touching the ground, he examined the spray of burned splinters from the point of impact.