The Path of Destruction (Rune Breaker) (6 page)

She felt Gloryfall's hand touch the side of her face, heard her asking for forgiveness, and saw her lean forward for one last kiss. Except in that moment, the gold and orange light flared and some unseen force pulled Gloryfall away.

The earth erupted in pillars of etched rock, which trailed chains of many metals skyward. Taylin had seen those from the other direction back in the chamber where she found Ru before. Only now, as she watched, the stones dripped blood.

She started to become aware of other shapes littering the ground around her, but suddenly, she herself was pulled back from it all and thrust back into the present, standing across the counter from Ru.

The dark mage looked drawn and wizened for a heartbeat before he reasserted his shapeshifting, but the troubled expression remained on his face.

“That wasn't my doing.” He said absently. “The link made that happen. It's never acted that way before. Probably still adjusting to you refusing to give me orders—finding new means to torment me.”

Taylin's wings quivered and she folded her arms. “Ru? Can we talk about something else?”

Relief spilling through the link was a refreshing change from Ru's usual mindset. “Anything, Miss Taylin.”

She nodded and pointed to the thing he'd been creating. “What exactly are you making here?”

“Allow me to be completely forthright with you, Miss Taylin: I am sick to the verge of violence of taking my meals sitting on the ground in the wretched out of doors. Daire reminded me of the things I much prefer: food prepared in a kitchen; a place to dine with a table and seats not strewn with pine nettles, small stones and insects; baths not gotten by means of spell or taken in a tin tub. Civilization, Miss Taylin. I spent the first thirty years of my life in a city, after all. Discovery of this artifact house allows me to create all of those amenities, and more besides.”

Taylin nodded slowly. She had very little experience to compare it to, but she missed Daire City already. Camping at night didn't really bother her, but she couldn't deny that all the things Ru missed were pleasant. Then she gestured to the indentation and the spike poised over it. “What's this then?”

Instead of telling her, Ru cupped a hand above the two prongs that faced one another and spoke, “
Akua
” Blue sparks raced up the prongs and between them, a blue, glowing mist formed. Moments later, a thin, cool stream of water began to pour forth from that mist to collect in the basin formed by the depression below.

“It's like the purifying basins at the stone house.” Taylin recalled the permanent magic structures employed in the halfling way stations.

“Except this creates the water.” Ru agreed, “That is part of the standard arrays already inside the house. I added something else to make baths, tea and coffee easier to have.” Again, he cupped a hand over the prongs. “
Flaer ni Akua.
” The sparks turned red and now as the water fell, it threw up a cloud of steam.

Taylin's eyes lit with delight and she immediately put her hand under the scalding spray. “Ru, that's wonderful!” What remained of her emergent scales receded completely.

Ru spoke another short command to shut off the flow and looked around the empty room, a light in his eyes that Taylin knew well from whenever the promise of spellcraft presented itself to Ru. “I have not even begun. This room, individual rooms, a proper spellcrafter's laboratory, a library... there is much to do.”

Still relaxed from the water's heat, Taylin frowned lightly in sympathy. “There is. But not now.”

“What?” He glared.

“We have to catch up to the others.” She explained, making sure he could feel her sympathy as well as hear it. “You'll have plenty of time to work while Brin purifies the enclave.”

Ru conceded silently, but groused aloud, “Or turn on us all there.”

“I asked that we not talk about this. Any of it.” Taylin said firmly.

“What I need is for you to promise me that you won't let 'any of this’ get in the way of our bringing a lifetime of pain to Immurai.” he said.

A resolute nod, and Taylin straightened herself up to her full height. “He still has Motsey. That's what's important to me. Whatever might happen with Brin, and whatever I
might
have felt for Issacor won't change that I need to rescue my nephew, find Immurai, and make sure that demon can never hurt my family again.”

Ru floated around the counter as she started back to the main room. “The link enforces my loyalty. But from here until Immurai is burned from this world, Miss Taylin, you now have my cooperation.”

Kaiel did his best to maintain eye contact with the beast wrapped around his right forearm. Whenever the koshi orm tried to turn its attention elsewhere, he moved his head in the same direction and redirected it back to him with a low, resonant hum.

It might have reeked with the scent of bug ichor thanks to its diet, but up close, the creature was beautiful, with jewel-like, green scales, shifting to black under just the right light. The tiny claws on its wings, which dug into the sleeve of the chronicler's coat, were opalescent, and its four eyes (two smaller and set forward with two larger ones on either side of its head), a vivid gold. What was beautiful to the sentient races were a warning sign in nature, broadcasting that this little beast was poisonous and not to be handled lightly.

“So you're a mesmer now too.” Rai was sitting facing him, outside of lunging range of the orm. Very few things actually attacked halfling caravans in groups, (as rumor had it, this was the result of deep history with both Pandemos and Sylph) but that protection didn't extend to accidents brought about by a foolish lack of caution.

Not breaking his gaze with the orm, Kaiel said, “I'll tell you a bit of a secret—but neither of you can ever, ever let Ru know.” He included Brin even though he knew her mind was elsewhere. There was no need to look up, he knew she was still at the top of the hill, watching what was on the other side. Nothing to do for it at the moment, they'd all agreed to wait on Taylin and Ru before deciding what to do about it.

“Deal.” Rai said without stopping to think. She had no personal grudge with Ru, but there was nothing more than an acquaintanceship between the two.

Kaiel chose to take Brin's agreement as implicit. Unlike Rai, she bluntly hated Ru. “Alright, the secret,” he paused to draw the orm's attention back to him. It wouldn't be long now, the creature was growing less willful by the minute. “Is that there are many specialties in the Bardic tradition. Pure bards just use the Song; they have songbooks and lyrical tomes full of magical music that taps the Well of Souls to have varying effects. Storyspinners—real ones, not just storytellers—use just the Word. They make up or embellish stories and weave it with power from the Well. All of them are different; you can't copy a person's stories exactly. Chroniclers like me don't have a magical tradition of our own; we study the past and the lessons that can be taken from it and might dabble in magic.”

He was interrupted as the orm started to get restless and had to take a few moments to wrangle it back into his control and settle it comfortably on his arm. It was a surprisingly willful little creature, but that was expected when one knew that they were supposedly to dragons what apes were to humanity, and the races derived from their stock.

“And that's just the edge of the blade when it comes to the paths the College offers, but to make a long story short, you then have the Loreman path. You start it after your fourth year and it might take a lifetime to get your first knot. That's the path I'm on now, and we need to know a bit of everything even if I'll always be a better chronicler than bard. And there's a benefit to that approach: we can use the Word and the Song, and the knowledge of centuries, from Saint's Landing to the lost secrets of the dragons. It lets us take advantage of one simple truth: the world is built on the Well of Souls and everything is based on it. So the power discarnate, if you know how to use it correctly, with the Word and Song, can do anything the other energies can.”

He locked eyes with the orm and felt a spark leap between them. The hum he'd been maintaining, even under his speech, was rapidly changing, expanding into a pattern of discarnate energy on its own. No longer afraid of a deadly bite, he reached out and brushed his fingertips across the creature's brow.

“Give me your will.” He whispered and closed one eye. Instead of darkness, he found himself looking back up into his own face. After a moment of making sure that the orm looked in the directions he wanted it to look, he turned back to Rai.

“That's why back in the old days, before the College was formed, and Loremen were just people who stumbled into this strange ability to mimic the abilities of your average middling wizard, no matter what energies were in ebb or flow in the area; the real wizards took to calling them charlatans.”

Rai took only a handful of seconds to staring at him as he jostled the orm on his arm, testing the strength of command before bursting into laughter. “Gods above! You mean Ru was right?”

Rather than rise to the bait, Kaiel instead concentrated on the orm. “Technically. But the term hasn't been dusted off in anywhere but the most isolated backwaters in centuries. It's as much of an antique as he i—“ He stopped and turned an eye toward Brin, hoping she hadn't heard that.

He really wished Taylin would just take the time to explain the situation to the elven woman, but she hadn't and it wouldn't be right for him to.

Even if she might have cared about his slip, Rai continued to laugh uproariously, temporarily transformed into the image traditionally held in cities where few halflings were in evidence, that they were all mirthful and mischievous. It made him feel better for a bit, seeing her in good spirits, even at his expense. They all needed those moments, especially if the endgame was to have them pitted against one of the most prominent demons of the Threefold Moon.

A great thud sounded behind them, heralding Taylin's return. There wasn't a second thud; Ru didn't touch the ground if he didn't have to.

“Why are you all here? I thought you were continuing on to Idarian.” Taylin looked on edge and it showed in the fact that she'd offered no greeting. “And why is the army stopped? There's still a few hours of light left.”

Kaiel rose, as did Rai. Their lightness dissolved as they were forced to return to the matter at hand. “You should take a second look for yourself.”

Together, the group gained the top of the hill, where Brin was holding her vigil. Below was a wide river valley, thick with verdant splendor up and down the floodplain. The Nya Rynthian river formed a broad slash that flowed west and south from the craggy and broken mountains far to the east in Taunaun.

Brin's gaze was fixed on the eastern side of the valley where a swathe of the plain was cut off by a stand of trees too dense and too broad to be natural. A rough, dirt road wound out of a split in that grove, where a fortified, wooden gate once spanned from one tree's thick bole to another. Only now, that gate was battered flat from the outside, the magically grown wall of wood was slowly dying, and in places, boughs had broken off, revealing glimpses of similarly atrophied farmland and village buildings.

The blight was no more natural than the wall was, but the more immediate problem stood directly ahead of the party, to the southwest. There, the army assembled to avenge King Solgrum was spread out and beginning to put up camp for the night, partially in the shadow of an ancient bridge tower.

The tower itself had seen far better days. It was riddled with moss and slime from proximity to the damp. Some stones had tumbled down despite still-active magic in place to maintain its integrity. Even in that shape, however, it should have withstood many more years, barring outside interference.

Outside interference had found it, however. Just mere yards beyond the arch in the tower meant to allow passage onto the bridge, the bridge ended in a blackened mess of scorched, melted and splintered stone. A powerful magical attack had blasted the bridge apart, and that breech had started a cascading failure of the magic holding the span up over the river. The entire thing had collapsed into the swift waters of the Nya Rynthian.

“Looks like that monster destroyed the bridge after him to stop pursuit.” Rai said, drawing upon her knowledge as a scout. “A bridge that big, over a river that fast—they'll never be able to rebuild it strong enough to carry those ceratos without sending back to the city for some architectural spellcrafters. Military engineers wouldn't be enough even if they had them.”

“And with Daire now in a succession crisis, an army loyal to the old king will be decidedly disfavored in terms of funding and favors.” Kaiel added. Then he pointed to where lines of soldiers were busy digging an expansive hole in the rich soil. “Percival means business though; they're digging for stone to build a smaller bridge for the lighter mounts.”

Taylin frowned at what looked to her own experienced eye like an inefficient set of actions. “Why not have the mages dig if they have them? They need those shovels for latrines and defensive works.”

“Same reason they can't just raise the old bridge.” Said Kaiel. “The river. All that
akua
moving along with it scatters
ere-a
and makes it harder to gather and use spells that require it—like all stone manipulations for example. It would be too much of a strain on their mages to dig down to usable rock
and
build a bridge out of it. The bridge is going to be a near enough thing.”

Taylin nodded slowly. “They'll be here a long time then. I guess this is where we go on our own—after Brin visits the homestead.”

“We'd be heading on alone along the path we know a demon took.” Kaiel pointed out.

Rai folded her arms and looked down with some misplaced disdain at the army. “There's nothing for it though. We have to get to Rivenport and get to Motsey. There's no time to waste, demon or no demon.”

“Heh.” Ru got everyone's attention with his usual cruel vocalization. He'd summoned his scythe and was balancing the weapon on the flats of both hands in front of him as he surveyed the scene below them. “If we cross the river, there will be no demon before us at all.”