Rune Warrior

by Frank Morin

  The heat flowed down along her jaw just as it would if the facetakers were preparing to remove her soulmask. Instead of intensifying like it would in a full soul transfer, that heat dragged her mind down into darkness.

  Darkness abruptly changed to light.

  Sarah blinked against the illumination of an early afternoon sun. The awful helmet was gone along with the machines. Instead of sitting in a sealed basement room, she stood in an open square filled with people dressed like renaissance reenactors. In front of her reared an imposing, fortress-like building with a single, square tower that rose several stories above the roof. Near the building stood a statue she had longed to visit for years.

  David, by Michelangelo.

  The incredible marble statue stood a full seventeen feet high. From that height, David looked out over the square with a rather stern glare, as if warning them to behave.

  “Not bad, huh?” Tomas joined her.

  “Not bad? He’s amazing.”

  “You wouldn’t be so excited about him if he was wearing a loincloth.”

  Sarah gave Tomas a sly smile. “He’s gorgeous, but cold stone statues aren’t what get me excited.”

  She took his hand, and he actually blushed. She loved that puritan streak, but she did find it frustrating. She’d dropped several hints that it was past time they take their relationship to a much more physical level, but he’d always changed the subject or pretended not to understand.

  His initial hesitation made sense once she’d realized he was wearing another man’s body. After returning to his own spectacular form, he’d been far more comfortable around her, but hadn’t wanted to go any farther than a few passionate kisses. She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t commit. Her life had been shaken to its foundation when she’d stumbled into the secret world of facetakers and heka assassins. He was one of the few solid pillars she could cling to, and she feared losing him.

  Arm in arm, they joined Gregorios and Eirene at a small table outside a ristorante. Several plates of fruits, sweetbreads and breakfast meats awaited them, along with six different beverages. The two facetakers clinked glasses, looking like locals. Eirene wore a beautiful, red silk dress with puffy, blue sleeves that left her shoulders bare. It lacked the heavy, multi-layered look of many of the other women in the square, but still blended well. Gregorios wore a form-fitting, black doublet that laced up the front, and gray pants tucked into tall boots.

  They had dressed Tomas much the same as Gregorios but with a blue doublet. Sarah wore a cream-colored dress that hugged her torso and flared into a long skirt. She wished she could take it with her when they woke up.

  “I love this city,” Eirene said with a contented smile.

  “You had a good life here,” Gregorios said.

  She nodded. “The Medici were excellent patrons.”

  Alter joined them and dropped into a chair, already glaring at Gregorios. “Why do I get the ridiculous tights?”

  He did look ridiculous. He wore a pair of hugely flared pantaloons of a garish green, gray tights, and soft slippers of pale blue. He tossed his floppy hat onto the table.

  “Just going for some variety,” Gregorios said with a straight face before spearing a sausage and taking a huge bite.

  Eirene spoke before Alter could make an angry retort. “It appears the machine you repaired is working perfectly.”

  Gregorios nodded. “I was drawn to the joint memory without a hitch. Good work.”

  That mollified Alter a bit and Sarah hid her smile before he glanced at her. He did notice Tomas’ smirk, and that nearly started the argument all over again.

  Gregorios drew them back to the mission. “We’ve tested the single machine enough to have a pretty good idea of how to mess with physical laws inside a memory. That’s not the point today. Eirene and I are going to alternate taking over some of the memory details from each other to mimic an actual memory duel.”

  “Memory duel?” Sarah asked. That sounded exciting.

  “He always has to name things,” Eirene explained.

  “I like it,” Tomas said.

  Alter nodded in agreement.

  Men. Everything got simplified until it could be described in terms of a contest or, better yet, a fight.

  “You want to test the effects of losing details to another mind?” Sarah asked. “Won’t that generate monsters?”

  “It will,” Gregorios said.

  “Why bother? We own all the machines,” Tomas said.

  “All the ones we know about,” Eirene said. “It pays to understand the full extent of the technology.”

  Alter spoke up. “I’ve discussed what we witnessed in the Berlin conflict with my father. The clan runesmiths have expanded our original theories about why we saw those monsters in the memory.”

  “We talked about that,” Gregorios said. He didn’t look happy that Alter had discussed the memory battle in such detail with his family. “Bad things.”

  “It’s more than that,” Alter said. “They suggested that the root of the issue is that everyone remembers the same memory differently. In complex memories, hundreds of details may be different. As two minds struggle to control a joint memory, they win by degrees, by applying details of the moment as they remember it.”

  “That’s about what we figured,” Eirene said. “That’s exactly what we were going to test.”

  “I know. Hear me out. It’s when you lose some of those details that cause problems.”

  “How?” Sarah asked. She was intrigued and wanted to understand how to limit the likelihood of running into monsters. Walking a pleasant dream like this was fun. Walking with nightmares, not so much.

  Alter was happy to talk directly to her. “Say Eirene loses a detail of the memory today.”

  “Fat chance,” Eirene said, throwing a challenging look at Gregorios.

  “Just imagine,” Alter said. “That bit of your memory is ripped loose. It becomes a fragment that latches onto your subconscious and takes a new form.”

  “It’s an angry bit of memory, is that what you’re saying?” Tomas asked, looking amused.

  “Wouldn’t you be?” Sarah asked. “Getting stomped like that?”

  “Correct,” Alter said. “That’s why those fragments generally manifest as monsters. They are inherently the product of trauma so they latch onto nightmares and fears from your subconscious.”

  “That’s why some of the monsters in Berlin were ones I recognized right away,” Gregorios said. “Others were different, things I wouldn’t have thought about. Those had to come from Asoka.”

  “Exactly. And in our example, since the broken fragment came from Eirene’s mind, its anger would be directed toward the one who broke it.”

  “So the more we win control over the memory,” Tomas said. “The more monsters appear to fight us from the losing mind?”

  “That doesn’t sound fair,” Sarah said.

  “Actually, it presents some interesting opportunities,” Eirene said. “In an actual memory duel, we could purposefully cede portions of the memory to our opponent in order to trigger more monsters to help fight them.”

  “I like that idea,” Tomas said.

  “But wouldn’t that just mean we’d have to fight another monster once we took that detail back later?” Sarah asked.

  Eirene shrugged. “If it’s unimportant, we don’t necessarily have to take it back.”

  “We’ll test it,” Gregorios said. “We’ll have to pay more attention to what details we choose to fight over. It’s not just a mental arm wrestle.”

  This was sounding complicated and more than a little dangerous. The thought of facing more monsters dredged up the terror of the bunker battle against Mai Luan. Sarah wouldn’t willingly join a conflict like that again.

  Eirene glanced up at the fortress-like building towering above them. “Change the color of the Palazzo Vecchio there, love.”

  The huge structure changed from brown stone to pink marble in a blink.

  “Wow, tha
t’s ugly,” Tomas said.

  A bronze statue set back under one of the archways of a nearby building behind Gregorios began to move. It was another nude sculpture, but held a sword in its right hand and decapitated head of a defeated enemy in its left. It dropped the head and jumped down from its pedestal. Its eyes burned with amber fire and it charged Gregorios, sword raised.

  Sarah blinked in surprise as she struggled to accept what she was seeing.

  “Incoming!” Tomas vaulted the table to intercept the onrushing statue of living bronze. He covered the thirty feet in two seconds.

  The statue swiped at his neck with its sword, apparently intending to add his head to its collection. Tomas ducked and threw his weight into its midsection. Even though he was flesh and blood against bronze, his strength and speed were enhanced to superhuman levels by his bonded enhancement runes.

  Bronze lost. The statue tumbled backward, crashing into the facade of a nearby building. It landed on its feet and resumed its charge.

  Gregorios was already standing, a grenade launcher appearing in his hands.

  “You can’t fire that thing at such close range,” Eirene said.

  “Good point.” The launcher disappeared, replaced by a backpack holding three green canisters. A long nozzle dropped into his hands, connected to the pack by a hose.

  “Stand back,” he called as he pulled the trigger.

  A stream of super-heated flames gushed out the end of the nozzle, shot across the twenty feet to the charging statue, and enveloped it with liquid flame. The air grew hot and Sarah covered her face with one hand to block some of the brimstone-like stench.

  The statue kept coming despite the continuous stream of fire that turned its upper chest and neck red hot.

  Alter shouted, “I need an axe!”

  A huge, double-bladed monstrosity appeared in his hands.

  As the statue closed on Gregorios, sword held high, Alter shouted, “Clear!”

  Gregorios cut off the stream of fire and the flamethrower disappeared, replaced by a heavy shield. He caught the statue’s sword on the shield, but the impact drove him back three steps.

  Alter struck from the side and his heavy-bladed axe sheared right through the softened metal of the statue’s neck. As soon as the head left the statue’s body, it crumbled to dust.

  Low growling spun Sarah around. A wolf-like creature stood barely ten feet away, already crouched to spring.

  She had seen something similar in the Berlin nightmare so she knew what to do with it. Tomas’ forty-five caliber pistol appeared in her hand.

  The beast launched into the air at her. She raised the gun, and for a split second, she felt strangely light, just like she had when she had fought Mai Luan. In that memory battle, her body had turned partially insubstantial, allowing her to pass through things. She hadn’t managed to replicate the feeling in their memory walks since then, and she didn’t want to lose it. She needed to understand how it worked.

  She decided to let the monster dive right through her.

  Before she could see if it would work, Alter’s axe spun past her shoulder and smashed the beast out of the air. It fell to the ground as a pile of sand.

  “I had that under control,” she complained, giving Alter a vexed look.

  “Didn’t look like it,” Alter said.

  Tomas joined her, not even breathing hard. “Are you all right?”

  “Are you kidding me?” She turned to Gregorios. “What was that all about?”

  The table full of food disappeared along with evidence of the statue turning to life. Its pedestal was still empty, though.

  “I guess we just proved Alter’s theory,” Eirene said.

  “Let’s think that through a little more next time,” Sarah said.

  “A bronze statue though, really?” Gregorios said. “I thought we were starting small.”

  Eirene shrugged. “I can’t control what the memory fragment manifests as, love.”

  “It wasn’t a monster though,” Alter said. “This is the first time we’ve seen the fragments manifest as something not nightmarish.”

  “It think it was pretty scary,” Sarah muttered.

  “Perhaps it was because I don’t hate Gregorios,” Eirene said. “I’ve always thought Perseus a particularly fine hero.”

  “The second beast was nightmarish,” Tomas pointed out.

  “Smaller too,” Alter said. “Probably appeared in response to the weapons we summoned. Those were small breaks.”

  “But important ones,” Eirene pointed out. “No one in these times had flame throwers or pistols.”

  “All good points,” Gregorios said with more good cheer than Sarah felt was appropriate. He rubbed his hands together, a look of anticipation on his face. “Let’s test the limits.”

  Chapter Seven

  For so many years, the ultimate desire that fueled all my industry, every success, was acquiring enough wealth to secure a second life. I’ve gained everything I ever wanted, but have nothing that really matters. Why did I never see that lingering beyond the short span of years of everyone I love is a burden my heart was not prepared to bear? How others manage the transition, I cannot understand. Please help me learn to live this new life with peace of mind.

  ~Cosimo I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in a letter to Eirene, 1575

  Over the next twenty minutes, they crisscrossed Florence, exploring the limits of the memory duel. They left the Piazza della Signoria and the fantastic statue of David. Eirene never did restore the color and facade of the towering Palazzo Vecchio. Instead, Sarah was happy to see they started with small changes.

  Several blocks north, they stopped to gaze at the incredible Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo, as Gregorios called it.

  Eirene said, “Don’t mess with the Duomo. It’s too important a landmark.”

  “As you wish,” Gregorios replied with a grand bow. The gesture would have looked sarcastic in modern clothing, but seemed perfectly appropriate in medieval attire.

  Sarah, Tomas, and Gregorios faced off against Alter and Eirene in a game of capture the flag. Eirene set her flag somewhere near the Duomo. Gregorios’ team headed south, crossed the beautiful bridge of the Ponte Vecchio that crossed the Arno River, and set theirs in the Boboli Gardens behind the magnificent Palazzo Pitti.

  Sarah loved every minute they spent exploring the beautiful city. Florence was in the midst of its heyday. Gregorios said they were walking in the year 1570. Everywhere she looked, she spied another incredible building, statue, or fountain.

  “We need to visit here in real life,” she gushed to Tomas.

  “Then we’d have to worry about not breaking things.”

  “Don’t you dare. At least not the David.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a memory. Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.”

  “I’ll try.” He actually sounded sincere.

  Then Eirene and Alter launched their first assault for the flag and his promise evaporated in the face of a heated running battle. They fought their mock confrontations back and forth across the Ponte Vecchio, with both sides using the unique parameters of the memoryscape to their advantage. Bending the laws of physics didn’t seem to adversely affect the integrity of the memoryscape. Sarah could easily vault thirty feet to rooftops and break right through solid stone walls. None of that triggered the rise of nightmarish creatures.

  Tomas and Alter pushed the limits even further, their repeated encounters growing more and more intense as they both fought to outmaneuver the other. The rules of the game gave advantage to the defending side, but the aggressor did not have to relent and return to his side until the defender landed three solid strikes.

  At one point, Sarah paused to admire the grand statue of Neptune in the Piazza della Signoria. Without warning, Alter landed atop the huge, white statue, a longsword in his hand. Tomas jumped off the roof of the still-pink Pallazzo Vecchio, firing a pump shotgun as he fell. Alter leaped away in a graceful arc tha
t covered most of the square. Slugs shattered part of the statue, while buckshot ricocheted off the surrounding bronze sculptures.

  “No modern weapons,” Alter shouted before racing away around the corner.

  Tomas blew the head off a long, scaly serpent that exploded out of the waters of the fountain. “Have to test the limits, right?”

  “So you proved summoning modern weapons breaks the integrity of the memory,” Sarah said. “What about not breaking anything?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Then they both had to race for cover as Alter returned to the square carrying a belt-fed machine gun.

  “This thing triggered an actual vampire,” Alter shouted above the roar of his gun.

  “He takes research too seriously sometimes,” Sarah muttered.

  “I’ve got this,” Tomas grinned while they hid behind yet another statue that was getting chewed apart by Alter’s bullets. “You go for the flag.”

  He leaped away and crossed the square in a flash, with bullets sparking off paving stones behind him the entire way.

  Sarah left them to the duel and ran north toward the Duomo. She tried not to worry they would take things too far. Minor injuries in the dream world could be ignored, and Gregorios and Eirene had the ability to heal severe wounds. The drain on the facetakers running the machine would grow exponentially, and if not healed immediately, injuries sustained in the memoryscape radiated back up to their sleeping bodies. She didn’t want to wake up to find everyone covered in blood and needing a hospital.

  Also, the locals that inhabited historical Florence were starting to take notice. At first, the dream people had ignored them, but they were starting to look hostile as the damage to the city grew.

  Through their memory journeys, they had learned that the more dramatic the changes to the remembered locale, the more response from the locals. Syncing the memories of multiple facetakers through different machines appeared to work similarly. So if they changed only small details, the locals didn’t seem to care, and the monsters that appeared from the splintered memory fragments were tiny. If they made dramatic changes or called up modern weapons or equipment inconsistent with the time period, bigger monsters challenged them and the locals soon got upset.