The Path of Destruction (Rune Breaker) (3 page)

When they weren't eating or sleeping, Taylin stayed in the air, riding lazy thermals to keep up with the group with minimal effort. Her increasing silence over the past few days hadn't escaped Kaiel's notice, but every time he tried to talk to her, she said that she was still thinking.

The only person who could fly to reach her had fallen similarly quiet, but for easier to deduce reasons.

Ru floated along behind the mounts, legs crossed, robes dragging the grass. The artifact held his complete attention. The day Issacor was laid to rest, Ru told Kaiel that he'd made a breakthrough, and over the past few days, he'd grown increasingly excited and bizarre. He muttered nonsense phrases at the bauble, shook it, and at one point, poured the blood from a rabbit onto it. Such bouts of irrationality were short lived and followed by longer periods of sulking.

Kaiel found both their behavior increasingly concerning, but there was nothing he could do about it while they were on the move. Instead, he tried to fulfill his promise to Rai and do his best to keep the rest of the group's spirits up.

Brin had asked earlier what life at the College was like, and so the bulk of the morning was given to his more entertaining anecdotes from his earlier years.

“...so I come to Sovemeya's office and she tells me to sit down. The entire time, she's looking at me over those thick spectacles as if she were looking at a clown who was seconds away from shenanigans.”

Rai, riding in a makeshift howda constructed from their supplies secured to Gaddigan's back rather than her own pony, snickered at the imagery.

“She takes a second, composes herself and says 'Arunsteadeles, I have reviewed your first offering for publication'. I have no idea why she's looking at me like that, so I ask her if I was going to fail the first segment of her class. She lets out a long, drawn out sigh and says, “I cannot mark it a failure, as it is acceptable. You have a proficient grasp of language, your style is nascent, but within the requirements, and the story is reasonable for publication.

“At this point, I'm very confused, so I ask her what's wrong with what I wrote. Sovemeya looks me right in the eye—and no one stares you down like a native Chordini. They have more types of glare than words for 'love'. She says, 'The problem is that your main character is named after yourself, easily wields powers not even known to the greatest wizards of the Age, and the love interest is clearly meant to be me.'”

Rai laughed raucously and almost slipped from her perch in the process. “You didn't!”

Kaiel suppressed a grin. “Actually, no, I didn't. The love interest was meant to be Cellion Zhai, this gorgeous half-elf that sat across from me in Sovemeya's class. But I thought maybe I was only passing because she was flattered and kept my mouth shut. To this day, whenever I'm in the Court of Written Arts, she gives me odd looks.”

Again, Rai was in stitches, but Kaiel's own mirth was tempered when he noticed the Brin wasn't joining in. He looked to see that she was still atop Miser, riding at his right hand. Her attention, however, was the landscape around them.

“Something on your mind, Brin?” He asked, voice still jovial from his story.

At the sound of his voice, her head whipped around, sending her golden mane flying messily about her face and over her pointed ears. Once more, tiny suspicions planted by Ru forced Kaiel to take note of the little differences between Brin and the elves he knew from back home, or Chordin. Complete nonsense, but damn the dark mage all the same for putting it in his head.

“Sorry” Brin said, more gently than she normally spoke, as if some of her inner strength had been sapped. “But I just realized what track the army is taking. If we keep following it, we'll be passing Idarian Homestead before nightfall.”

Behind Kaiel, Rai's laughter subsided. The halfling woman gave the elf a sympathetic look. “Where Layaka was from?”

“Where she
said
she was from.” Brin said with deep bitterness. “I don't even know if Layaka was ever a real person.”

Kaiel gazed ahead of them. The tail end of the army was cresting the next hill and there was nothing of the Homestead or the farmland it once controlled yet. “Did you perform any of your docent duties over the dead there? Check for lingering spirits? Because if they died by violence...”

“There wasn't time. Lay... Partha made it sound like I easily won the day against those spirit beasts—or demons, I suppose—but that's not true. I killed more than my share only because I merged with Reflair, and when I couldn't hold the merge anymore, we had to run.”

Kaiel ducked his head. Now he understood why she took such care and measures when sealing and cleansing Issacor's grave.

He opened his mouth to express his sympathy, but Rai beat him to it.

“The demons should all be dead or gone now.” the halfling pointed out. “You could do... whatever you're meant to do there now.”

Brin's face brightened, but then she shook her head. “I couldn't waste your time. Not with what's at stake, especially for you.”

Rai scratched her neck and looked down. She worked hard to maintain the light attitude expected of her kind, but confronted with the threat to her son directly, she had to fight for it. She finally spoke, eyes still low. “We'll be passing it at nightfall, you said. We can't move at night anyway. You can perform your exorcism then.”

Graciously not attempting to correct the idea that docents performed exorcisms like priests and druids, Brin murmured her thanks.

Again, Kaiel was about to plunge into another attempt to make the two women feel better when he was interrupted by a string of profanity so old that he only identified it as such by the simmering anger in the speaker's voice.

“What is it now?” The chronicler tossed over his shoulder without even bothering to look at Ru.

Ru rumbled a growl low in his throat as he flew closer to the others, still in his cross-legged posture. He clapped the book on his lap shut and waved the artifact in the air as if to shake the secrets from it. “This thrice-cursed device! I have toiled for days to divine its mysteries. And divine, I have. But now, on the cusp of success, I find that whoever created it (may his corpse fester in the bellies of a thousand diseased rats) tied its function to a command word.”

Giving Brin an apologetic look for her crisis being interrupted, Kaiel turned to diffuse things as quickly as possible so they could get back to discussing the Homestead. “Is that what has you hissing and growling so? Many spellworks require command words. They're rarely difficult to bypass.”

The dark mage gave him an icy glare. “Do you believe that I, with
my
skill in the art, would be perturbed by something so simple? Basic command words are just trigger phrases. You can easily fool one of those. This... the word is used as a word of power to complete the primary array to make the device function. I would be impressed at the intricacy and creativity if I weren't imagining the spellcrafter responsible being drawn and quartered.”

Kaiel rolled his eyes and shrugged. “It's still just a pass phrase.” He regarded the draconic character painted on the artifact a moment, then said, “Why don't you try 'home'?”

“'Home'?” Ru made a sour face at him and looked almost triumphant when nothing happened. “That would be dangerously stupid.”

“Not 'home', it's written in
graphur
.” said Kaiel, “Try the draconic word for home
ura-la
.”

Ru looked at the device warily, weighing the reward of finally activating the artifact against the disdainful idea of Kaiel being right about something. At length, curiosity won out and he raised the device. “
Ura-la
.”

The uneven disk of stone warmed in his hand and the yellow paint that formed the
graphur
character became golden. There was no other outward indication that it was now in an active state, but Ru's senses felt the surge of
vox
that was being marshaled as the long dormant array engaged.

Satisfaction curled his lip as he thrust the device before him. The air rippled from it like the surface of a pond, but those ripples didn't go very far before rebounding from unseen edges, their passage and return outlining a rectangle in the air, five feet wide and eight feet high.

The ripples continued to move back and forth in the air from the other side, but on Ru's side, they slowly ebbed, giving way to a door of stained wood, carved with patterns of vines and leaves with dragonflies, birds and small bats lurking behind them.

Seeing only that
something
had come of Ru's attempts at activating the device, Kaiel wheeled his horse around, intent on putting a stop to any ill deeds the Rune Breaker might have planned with it. Brin wasn't far behind, though she had to catch Gaddigan's reigns to bring him around, as Rai knew nothing of guiding a horse. The well-trained pony only plodded along behind them.

They rode around to Ru's side and found themselves facing an open door and no Ru. The space beyond was cast in shadows, illuminated only by a sickly white light that bobbed and weaved somewhere within.

“Blood be stilled.” Kaiel muttered, dismounting.

“What is that?” Rai hopped nimbly down from Gaddigan's back. She hadn't taken the time to pull out her rifle, but she did have a pair of kukri drawn. “Has he finally turned on us, or did he get himself killed?”

Kaiel shook his head that he didn't know and crept cautiously toward the hole in the air created by the open door. He forced himself to breath more deeply and more evenly, preparing to make use of Word and Song if things went wrong. Steady, careful fingers reached down to check to make sure his rifle was still at his side on its strap.

There was a resounding thud behind them and he turned, raising his weapon to confront whatever it was. Rai and Brin had evidently been similarly spooked, as both of Rai's kukris and the Barratta had both been brought to bear on the figure that landed behind them.

To their relief, it was Taylin.

Kaiel breathed a sigh of relief and admonished himself. He should have known her arrival by sound alone. He would bet everything he owned or would own that nothing landed the way Taylin did.

Birds and bats and orms did their best to soften their landings, fluttering to the ground and touching down lightly. Hailene landed the same way, and not unlike many animals, it was almost impossible for them to land without a very audible fluttering.

Taylin on the other hand, dropped like a stone the last ten feet or so and landed solidly; often having to put one hand down to keep balanced. Such an act would break a normal hailene's ankles, but Taylin was never hurt. Kaiel suspected her of being dragonsired from what he'd seen the day after they first met, but she never talked about it, and from experience, most dragonsired wanted to talk on nothing more than their parentage.

But as recent as a generation ago, dragonsired were hunted as a menace. Being from a much earlier period in history, he could lay most of it at the feet of prudence on her part. He would have to talk with her about that—provided she wouldn't avoid that as she avoided the subject of Issacor, or explaining the nature of her relationship with Ru to Brin.

She had landed in a crouch with both hands on the ground and her wings flared out for stability, and now she was straightening herself back to standing. At no point did her eyes meet those of the others. “Is everyone alright? I saw that you stopped, and the...” She tried to come up with a word for it and failed, finally just nodding toward the door.

“The House, Miss Taylin.” Everyone looked to find Ru at the door, a sphere of light hovering just over his shoulder and the artifact in hand. “It is like the chronicler's portable library, only more advanced by far: a spellcrafted domicile that exists outside of normal space.”

Kaiel finally lowered his rifle and looked to Ru in exasperation. “That's what you were so excited about and desperate to see in action?”

Beside him, Brin planted the butt of the Barratta and leaned on it. “Most wizards of middling power can create something like that. They use them instead of tents.”

Ru sneered at them. “Children playing with sticks and calling them swords. I've seen
vox-
spaces before and this is to them what a clock made of ice is to a casting of
akua crea
.” He gestured sharply for them to come and disappeared back into the doorway.

“Do you think it's safe?” Brin asked Kaiel while keeping her eye on the entrance as if she expected something nasty to come back through.

The chronicler wished he could say no, but there was curiosity in her eyes, behind the natural wariness, and he was glad to see her pain delayed. “He couldn't have altered it, I've been keeping an eye on him. And it takes weeks to collapse one of these, so he can't trap us there. Let's have a look.”

With that, he hummed deep and a ball of multi-hued lights sprang into being before him. He held out a hand to her. “Shall we?”

She smiled, but it was a small smile of mischief. “Reflair. Illumination, if you would.” She called and the ghostly mist began to rise from her reliquary and up to the head of the spear. The metal let out a barely discernible, high-pitched tone and began to emit a steady, blue-white light. Leading with the glowing weapon, she nodded to Kaiel and proceeded with him through the door.

In the space of one stride, they went from the full sun of the plains to the comparative darkness of the House. The air was still and cool, but not stuffy, as it should have been after being unused for decades.

The entrance took a sharp turn to the right a few paces inside, presumably to break line of sight or attacks directed into the door. From there, it opened up into a room with a floor of highly polished wood. There was a huge, stone hearth along one wall with a mantle, above which was mounted a bronze shield with a scene of a man with an ax and shield being attacked from all side by giants painted on it.

There were two chairs: sturdy, wooden and un-upholstered, arrayed in front of the hearth with a long, low table between them. Together, these three items accounted for all of the furnishings, save a bear skin hung in an arch between that room and the one beyond; seemingly the only other room there.