The Girl from the Rune Yard

by Eric Guindon

  The girl’s ungraceful evasion of the Terror’s attack had left her prone and on her side. She was out of energy, out of fight, out of everything. If the curtain did not do what she needed it to, she was doomed.

  The creature noticed it had swallowed something when the curtain reached its stomach. It surprised everyone by speaking.

  “You fed me?” it spoke with a deep sonorous voice, much too loud to be human. It sounded confused. Then, the timing runes finished their delay and the explosive runes were triggered. The runic bomb the Terror had swallowed exploded, tearing it apart from the inside out. The force of the explosion was such that Kyria was thrown away from the beast as it blew up. Her cloak protected her from much of the blunt force, but the vitality drain from it left her with too little energy to stay conscious any longer.

  The world around her faded to black.

  The last thing she heard was Haylem asking if she was okay. Kyria certainly hoped she was okay, but she did not have the strength to form even a mental response.

  Chapter Ten:

  They Will Pay

  Kyria woke only to partial consciousness. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. It felt like she was in a dream, but unlike a dream, she was more aware of herself and her surroundings. She was lying on her back, she thought, or her side, on the street where she had fallen. She heard a voice, dimly, but couldn’t focus on it or what it was saying.

  She tried to say a greeting, but couldn’t think of any. Kyria panicked, wondering if she had hurt her head.

  “Hey, in there,” the voice made sense that time. She even thought that she knew who it belonged to, though she was unsure of any details about the person. “Don’t try to think too hard, just rest. You’ve spent too much of your vitality, you’re overdrawn. You need to rest.”

  She had a hard time following what was being said, what it meant, but she did get the idea that she was safe, that the voice would look out for her. She tried to let go of the half-consciousness she possessed and, after a time, managed it.

  When she next surfaced, she was fully awake, but still quite groggy.

  “I had the weirdest dream,” she said. She knew she wasn’t speaking correctly, that the words coming out of her mouth were mumbled, but didn’t care; Haylem should be able to understand her regardless, she knew.

  “You went awfully close to the line between alive and dead, there, Kyria,” Haylem said, his concern for the girl flowing across their bond.

  “I’m all right,” she said, standing. She felt bone tired, like she could sleep for a month.

  “Sit back down, now!” commanded the rune-mind. Kyria had never heard him use such a tone of voice. She slowly lowered herself back down to the ground. “You are not all right, Kyria. You almost died. You lost more vitality than you had, girl! You do not come back from that easily.”

  “I almost died?” Kyria was genuinely surprised. “Really?”

  “Yes!” Haylem almost shouted it at her. “Now rest.”

  Kyria closed her eyes, lay back down in the street, and fell asleep almost immediately.

  The next time she woke up it was because of hunger pains in her stomach. Her lids felt heavy, but she managed to get her eyes open. It was dark, she saw.

  “Hunger is a good sign,” Haylem told Kyria. “You weren’t hungry when you woke up last time, but only because your soul was too depleted to notice such a trivial thing as hunger. Now eat.”

  A few seconds later, Kyria was wolfing down one of the ration packs from her backpack.

  “This is the best meal of my life,” she said with her mouth full when she was half-way finished. Haylem did not comment until she had eaten the entire meal, and then told her to eat another. Kyria devoured a second meal.

  With her appetite satiated, Kyria found herself tired again. It took no prodding from Haylem for her to decide to lie down once more and sleep.

  She woke to dazzling sunlight in her eyes next.

  “Okay, I think I’m all right now,” Kyria declared, still a bit tired, but feeling better than any of the times she had woken before. Haylem gave her his grudging assent. The girl ate a ration pack before trying to stand and was pleased to find that she was full after just one.

  “My appetite seems normal again, too,” she said.

  “I cannot tell you how worried I was for you, Kyria. You clearly don’t understand how precarious your situation was,” Haylem told the girl.

  “I know now,” she said. “Thank you for making me rest, Haylem. I really needed it. Um, how long has it been, by the way?”

  “You defeated the Terror the night before last.”

  “Any sign of the bandits?” she asked.

  “Not so far, thankfully.”

  “Do you think I could face them now? I mean, have I recovered enough?” the girl asked.

  “Possibly. Best to wait until tonight, anyway. You’ll want the cover of darkness, I imagine, and the extra rest wouldn’t hurt,” the rune-mind said. Kyria found a better place to rest in a nearby house, lying down on what turned out to be a surprisingly soft rug, and went back to sleep.

  Haylem woke her at sunset.

  The girl made her way silently, walking on air, to the edge of the city against which the bandits had built their outpost. She went to what was left of the top of the huge granite wall and crept forward until she could see the building. Lantern light shone from some of its windows.

  They’re home, Kyria sent to Haylem.

  Check the compass. Maybe they retrieved your mother since we last saw them, the rune-mind counselled. Kyria did as Haylem asked, but found that the compass’ needle still pointed to the south, away from Argantel altogether.

  Walking on air, making sure to stay out of sight, Kyria approached the building, heading for an unlit window.

  Since none of these windows had glass in them, she was able to simply walk in. She kept off the ground again, making no sound as she glided through the room. Haylem warned her that someone was asleep in one of the bunk beds. She wanted to shoot the sleeping bandit, but decided against it when she considered how loud the zat sound was. She made a mental note of the bandit’s location and headed on out of the room, looking for wakeful bandits.

  The next room contained two more sleeping bandits on cots. She snuck past them and headed upstairs. The room at the top occupied the entire floor and, listening to the men in it as she approached, Kyria guessed it held three drunken bandits.

  “I’m telling you, the girl’s gotta be dead,” said one.

  “Then why haven’t we been hearing the monster at night? Tell me that Horace,” countered another.

  “Because it’s full?” Suggested the third man. The three laughed at this. Kyria used this distraction to burst into the room, both her weapons drawn. She shot the moment she could see the men. All three were sitting at a table with a half-empty bottle of spirits and three glasses on it. She split her shots, aiming at two different men, but only managed to hit one. That bandit upset the table with his jerking movements, causing the bottle to fall and break on the floor. The two remaining men in the room dove for cover.

  None of them had crossbows, Kyria had checked. Haylem heard them draw knives as she waited for one of them to peek out from cover. She heard movement in the stairs behind her and decided she needed to deal with the two ahead of her before more enemies piled in from behind.

  The girl ran forward and up, her weapons aiming down. The bandits, now below her, had expected nothing of the sort and likely never knew how they were shot down. Kyria descended and used the cover her opponents had occupied just a second before. She was ready for the two men with crossbows that crept carefully up the stairs: they both fell to her weapon’s bolts, tumbling backward down the stairs they had just climbed, unconscious.

  Kyria knew she had to go on the offensive and hunt down the others. For one thing, they might try to run away, for another, they might be getting the runic staff weapon to use against her.

  When she reached the bottom of the stai
rs, she surprised the leader of the bandits by bursting out of from the stairs as he was about to enter them. Her silent descent had left him unaware of her approach. She bowled into him and shot him while he tried to keep his footing. She snatched the runic staff from his spastic hands.

  As she was straightening up, she was hit in the back by a blade. Kyria’s cloak did its job perfectly, hardening and blocking the attack. She spun around, sweeping the area behind her with the runic staff. She hit the knees of the bandit and he danced away, yowling in pain. It was one of the two that had survived the massacre at the Rune Yard.

  “Okay, I surrender, okay?” he said as he backed away from her, his hands raised in the air.

  “Die!” Kyria screamed and shot him with both of her weapons at once. She would have hit with both shots, she was sure, if Haylem hadn’t burst into her body to stop one of her arms. The bandit fell to the ground, twitching and unconscious, but not dead.

  “Why?” She yelled at the rune-mind in frustration. “Why did you do that?”

  “After. If you still want to kill him, do it after, in cold blood,” Haylem demanded.

  Kyria almost shot the defenceless man a second time right then and there, but decided she’d do it Haylem’s way. She wouldn’t murder the man. If he was to die, it would be at the hands of a proper executioner.

  The girl carefully searched the rest of the house, looking for more bandits, but she found none. She could have sworn there was another man she had seen the day she had first fought them, but he had either fled the place tonight or left this company of bandits since the day of the fight.

  “How long are they out for?” Kyria asked Haylem.

  “It varies, not everyone reacts to the bolts the same, but you can count on at least an hour, possibly as long as three or four.”

  Kyria found rope in the ground floor storage room and tied each of them up securely and separately, keeping each man in a different room. She couldn’t watch them all, which she would have liked to do, but they couldn’t talk to each other or know what happened to their compatriots this way. Better, they couldn’t try to help each other.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Asked Haylem.

  “I’m not sure,” Kyria admitted. “I can’t just kill them, not the new ones. I’m not even sure what crimes they’re guilty of, if any.”

  “You can’t use the weapons on them again within the next day or so, or you will kill them,” Haylem informed her. “They have to have a chance to recover, or the next shot will still be the second shot.”

  Kyria nodded her understanding. This meant she couldn’t simply keep the men knocked out either. She decided to put off any decision until after she had a chance to talk to the bandits.

  Haylem heard the first of them waking, thanks to his exceptional listening. The man was groaning as he came to full awareness. When Kyria walked into the room where he was tied up, he cursed at the sight of her.

  “You again?” He sighed.

  “Do you know me?” Kyria asked.

  “Just what Fellin told us! You’re the girl from the Rune Yard.”

  “Did he tell you he and his friends killed my father and his workers, my friends?” Kyria drew her eating knife and held it the way she assumed interrogators held their implements.

  “Y-yes. But I had nothing to do with that! I’m just a retriever, me.”

  “Tell me about that, then,” she demanded.

  “I make runs into the city with our gang. We get stuff with runes on it and bring it back here, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Another gang of workers comes and gets the stuff from us for the boss.”

  “Who’s this boss, then?” Kyria asked, squatting closer to where the man sat, tied up.

  “I don’t know. I swear!” The man declared. “Really!”

  “How can you not know who you work for?” Kyria thought this a stupid lie.

  “We get paid by the men who come for the metal. We never see anyone else in the organization,” Kyria’s prisoner protested.

  “Now there’s an organization?” Kyria asked.

  The man closed his eyes, evidently regretting his choice of words. “Yes. I guess. We all have these coins that we show each other to prove we work for the boss, to show we’re part of his organization.”

  “Like this one?” Kyria showed the man one of the hexagonal pieces of metal she had taken from the dead bandits at the Yard.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Why did your organization attack my family?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that,” the man protested. “They were a tax collection gang, honest.”

  “But they killed my father and friends, took my mother,” Kyria said through clenched teeth.

  “They weren’t supposed to do any of that. That’s why your mother’s not here. We sent them to the boss with that mess, I swear.”

  “One of the tax collectors was part of your gang here,” Kyria corrected him.

  “He had only gone with them because they wanted more men, to look more impressive. He’s one of us, really.”

  “He helped kill my father and my friends,” Kyria pointed out in a dangerous tone.

  “Please. I had nothing to do with that . . . honest.” The man’s protests grew weaker when he saw they had no effect on the girl.

  “The tax collector, the guy your gang sent on to the boss, where did he go? Where is this boss?” Kyria showed her prisoner one of her weapons. “It doesn’t look like much, but it will kill you if I shoot you with it again. So don’t try to tell me you don’t know . . .” Haylem could sense the bravado behind the girl’s words, but the bandit was genuinely afraid of her. His eyes followed the weapon as she held it casually in her hand, its cylindrical end pointing at him. He swallowed hard before speaking.

  “There’s a contact in the city, that’s where he’ll have gone to get orders from the organization.”

  Kyria brought the weapon very close to the man’s face.

  “Give me the details of this contact place,” she demanded.

  Two exhausting hours later, the girl had interrogated all the bandits save the one who had taken part in the attack on the Rune Yard. All of them except for the gang leader gave mostly the same answers as the first prisoner. She took that information as reliable.

  The leader had refused to speak, no matter how much she threatened him.

  “I’m more afraid of my bosses than I am of you, little girl,” he’d said.

  Kyria had found she couldn’t follow through on any bluff of harming the man, not with her weapons, not with her knife. She gave up interrogating him and moved on to the others.

  It seemed her path was clear from this place: she would head to the city. They meant Groandel, she knew, the only city less than a month away. Her compass pointed south, toward Groandel. It all checked out, making the next step easy to decide upon. Kyria’s only difficulty was what to do with the bandits she had captured.

  She knew she couldn’t kill them in cold blood, not the ones who hadn’t attacked the Rune Yard.

  “What do you think, Haylem?” She asked the rune-mind.

  “It’s a difficult decision and yours to make, but I would advocate against killing any of these men,” Haylem answered.

  “The one has to pay, Haylem” the girl said with venom.

  “If you take his life, you’ll be a killer too,” Haylem pointed out.

  “It will be justice,” she countered.

  “You are no official, Kyria. What right do you have to take this man’s life in the name of justice?”

  “He killed my father!” The girl shouted at the rune-mind.

  “Did he? How could you know that? Did you see him deal a killing blow to anyone? Perhaps he fought only to defend himself during the battle. You don’t know, Kyria.”

  “He has to pay, Haylem.”

  “Be careful. Dealing out justice is a weighty task, Kyria. What you do to that man will stay with you for the rest of you
r life,” the rune-mind counselled.

  “Did you ever kill anyone, Haylem?” the girl asked, speaking more softly now.

  “Not while I lived, no. But I had to give testimony against a worker at the facility once, after I became a rune-mind. He had been selling the secrets of our work to another world power. This was deemed treason and he was executed. I still feel responsible for his death.”

  The bandits claimed no new retrieval gang was expected for days, so Kyria decided she could afford to sleep on the problem. She chose a cot in an empty room and went to sleep; counting on Haylem to keep watch through her hearing.

  The girl’s rest was fitful, full of disturbing dreams of bandits, Terrors, violence, and blood. She woke up hours later when the sun rose, only to find herself more tired than before she went to bed.

  “The decision weighs heavily on you,” Haylem suggested. Kyria nodded, it did.

  She gave each of the prisoners water, letting them drink their fill. The last she tended to was the man named Fellin, the bandit from the attack on her family. She let him drink his fill too, and then put away the water skin.

  “You were part of the attack on the Rune Yard,” she stated it as a fact, not a question.

  “I didn’t want any part of that!” the prisoner objected. “I ain’t no killer, I didn’t want to fight!”

  “What would you consider a fair punishment for your part in the fight?” She asked the man. He considered the question for a moment then sighed and looked Kyria in the eyes.

  “I helped fight your men . . . your father, little girl. I didn’t want to, but I did it. I swung my sabre like the rest, aiming to kill. I wouldn’t blame you for killing me,” he said and hung his head. “I’ve lived a bad life and now it comes to a bad end,” he added.

  Kyria couldn’t kill the man; she knew it then, deep in her heart. She almost wished Haylem had let her double-shoot him, it would have been done then, she would just have had to live with the death of the man. Now she couldn’t kill him and would have to live with having broken her promise to her father and his workers.