Lighter Days, Darker Nights (Rune Breaker)

by Porter, Landon

  “Slowing down, swordsman? You've exerted yourself so much now that there's no way a middling priestess like that halfling can save you.”

  Bringing Faith-Be-Forgiven on guard, Issacor looked none the worse for wear save for the festering wound seen through the rent in his armor. “I don't need her to.” His voice was steady and confident. “I'm held up by the power of a god.”

  Somehow, his assertion and his confidence only made Taylin more frantic. Whatever power he was tapping to survive would eventually run out. The fight had to end so that she could get him to Grandmother, or one of the Dice Priests to draw out the poison before that happened.

  No longer questioning where the second sword came from, she drew both. The new blade was straight and as wide as her palm, its metal black except for its double edges, which held a silvery sheen. Instead of a point, the razor-shaped edge was lopped off at a blunted diagonal. The blue stone in its pommel flared to brilliance the second her hand closed around it, causing the link to thrum with shock and confusion from Ru.

  “How did you do that?” He asked, more to himself than to her.

  She ignored him, except to nod her thanks. Swords in hand, she folded her wings and rushed at Layaka.

  Already dodging a swing from Issacor, Partha bent with inhuman agility to curve her spine away from Taylin's first attack as well. Then she turned the dodge into a backward handspring, and landed a good three yards from them with a prideful smile on her face.

  “I was waiting for you to get involved.” She mocked. “I wanted to thank both you and Brin for taking me to the baths so often this past week. It did an old man good to... soak.”

  At that, Brin threw herself at Partha with a wordless scream. Her thrust went wide and a smirking Layaka once again stepped into it, trapping the goad under one arm while lashing out with a snap kick. Only Brin's attack was more calculated than it first appeared.

  As Partha bought her leg up, Brin hauled against her weight on the goad, snapping the wood so that she now had a jagged half spear with which to intercept. The force of the kick turned against Layaka as Brin used it to drive the broken shaft into her shin.

  Partha shrieked and fell, leaving Brin holding both halves of the goad ready to skewer her.

  “Was she even a real person?” She demanded. Her hair had come unbound and fell wild around her head and in her eyes where it clung wetly to tears. “Or was she nothing but fiction? Tell me why!? And be quick about it, because I swear on the name of the Goodly Morn that I will end you if you try and make sport of this again.” Her voice rung out into the night and suddenly became a scream.

  Blood exploded from her right arm, mixed with torn flesh and the fabric of her dress. The sheer shock hitting her system made her topple to the ground, eyes wide.

  In the light of halfling camp fires, something silver glittered and retreated into the sky.

  “I cannot allow that.” The voice was feminine, filtered through a metallic buzz and an echo like from the bottom of a clay pot. It showed a hint of amusement in an otherwise passionless delivery. “Layaka-who-was-Partha may yet prove of use to us.”

  Descending from on high was an abomination. Like Immurai, she dressed in rich, colorful robes; a riot of orange and blue and yellow. However they couldn't hide that her skin was fired clay, cracking in places and flaking continually. Nor could it conceal that instead of legs, she had a thrashing flagella that flicked out from under the robes as she moved. Her eyes were black hollows and she had no mouth at all. Hair, long, white and thin, whipped around the crown of her head. In her clawed hands, she wielded war fans of corroded iron.

  She lighted near Partha and the downed Brin, hovering because her flagella wouldn't allow her to stand. Her hollow eyes fell on Taylin. The fan in her right hand snapped closed and she pointed with it. “Lord Immurai has sent me to deliver a message.”

  Now do you see why you should have let me kill him? Ru demanded in Taylin's mind.

  For her part, Taylin stayed silent, trying to gauge this new enemy.

  Throughout it all, Kaiel had been intoning the spell from the scroll. Finally, he finished, though aiming at a target other than the one he intended it for.

  Vin gathered and warped around a framework of vox and ere-a, manifesting as a net of force that sprang from his outstretched palm.

  “Ha!” The demon's laugh was throaty and boisterous like a noblewoman's. Casually, she flicked open the fan she'd been pointing with and waved it in the direction of the net, sending up a powerful gale of vin that tore the incoming spell apart. “Unwise, larval loreman. One does not use air magic against Matasume the Wind. There will be a penalty for arrogance.”

  She waved both fans now and conjured a force that threw up a dust squall strong enough to nearly knock them off their feet. Suddenly she was among them. A crumbling elbow struck Taylin in the chest, a war fan raked open a new hole in Issacor's breastplate, and somewhere in the chaos, silver strands glittered and Kaiel let out an agonized scream.

  And just as suddenly as it was summoned, the squall ended. The dust fell back to the ground as if the air could no longer support a single grain any longer. Kaiel was on the ground. Like Brin's arm, his shins had both been flayed by an impossibly sharp edge. Matasume hovered above. Held tightly in one of her arms was Motsey.

  “Do I have your complete attention now?” The demon asked smoothly.

  Taylin gripped her swords so tightly, she might have broken them. The rage roared within, causing the world to gain sharper focus and the telltale itch of growing scales to run up and down her arms. “Let him go. Now.” There was zero uncertainty and no end to the lethality in her voice.

  “My message.” Matasume said without concern. “Lord Immurai instructs that if you want the child returned hale and whole, you will bring the Soul Battery to the Isle of Nhan-Raduul on the night when all three moons are full. Fail and the child will suffer.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she turned and flew with incredible speed back toward the Murderyard, which was now alight with flames. Little Motsey, previously rendered silent by fear and the drug, screamed.

  Taylin flared her wings, but realized that she could never catch up. The sound of the child she'd come to love as her own family pricked her ears and her soul. Cold settled into the pit of her stomach and became a solid mass as she realized that no other options were left to her.

  “Ru.” She said, trying to keep her breathing steady. She couldn't feel guilty about this. Not if it was to save Motsey.

  “Yes, Miss Taylin?” He was near at hand, the link humming with cruel anticipation.

  “Go after them. Bring Motsey back safe no matter what. Do whatever is in your power to make sure of it.” Her voice was steel, but on the edge of breaking. “We'll be right behind.” She added for her own benefit.

  She didn't have to say it was an order. The link knew, and she could feel parts and protocols falling into place along its length. More than an order, she realized. Her command had unlocked something. Something that made the dark pride and ferocity rise in Ru.

  “At last.” Ru rumbled. It seemed that every bone in his body cracked and swelled at once. His back hunched and a pair of wings tore free, fingers twisted and sharpened into claws, bones reconfiguring and fusing as he rapidly grew to tower over and then dwarf her.

  Deep inside Taylin, a part of her, the same part that envied Brin and Kaiel at the ball, strangely enough, found itself breathless as where once was a man, Ru Brakar, now stood an eighty foot long obsidian scaled dragon. He opened his great wings, easily hiding the sky, and raised his head, bristling with dozens of curved horns after the fleeing form of Matasume.

  He roared a challenge and used a single beat of his wings, almost as powerful by itself as the demon's summoned squall, to get airborne. Taylin was rooted for the spot for a long moment, watching him go.

  But then a clatter of armor snapped her back to reality; back to a place where most of her friends were direly wounded.

  By the time
she turned back to them, Issacor was on one knee, levering himself up by planting Faith-Be-Forgiven's point in the ground. His breath was becoming ragged and his eyes were glassy.

  Taylin was by his side instantly. “Issacor! Stay still. We need to...” She was at a loss. “Signateria! We need you over here!”

  “Don't bother.” said Issacor, straining to be loud enough for Signateria to get the hint.

  “What do you mean 'don't bother'? You can still be... I don't know. But magic can do it. If Signa can't do it, we'll get Grandmother. Just stop moving around, you'll spread it in your blood.”

  Issacor fought to keep his eyes open. “It's already spread. My heart, my liver. I can feel it there. It's been there since before you got here, Taylin. I was dead by the time you got here.”

  “That's fever talk.” Taylin rambled desperately. She moved to take the flechettes out of his wound, but stopped, wondering how close they came to his spine.

  “Oor-oorze. The Seal of Purpose.” Mumbled Issacor.

  “Don't talk.” Taylin begged, forcing the tears in her eyes not to come. “Don't talk. Signa!”

  “I unlocked it. Three of the virtues. It means something to my order. Need someone to tell them.”

  “You can tell them yourself.” She said, but he ignored her.

  “And bring Faith-Be-Forgiven back.”

  “Stop!” She screamed at him. “Stop it right now. You're not dying!”

  Issacor shook his head and let himself slump forward. “The seal's power is to let a disciple fight on even if he should be dead. The Mother of Blades herself takes the place of your blood and strength so that you can keep fighting for what matters. Most of us... only get to use it once.”

  “No.” Taylin groaned. The pain only intensified as she realized that the others were probably in just as bad a shape. Brin. Kaiel. Motsey. Issacor, gone in a night. Everything that was bright and hopeful in her life torn away.

  Issacor must have sensed it, because he opened his eyes fully to look her in the eye. “Don't be sad for me. I made Her proud here. I'll be able to enter Her house in the afterworld and study at Her feet. Just promise me that you'll get the boy back.”

  She had already promised herself that, but she nodded and then bowed her head.

  He smiled. “Thank you. Now please. Go. The others need you and... I don't want you to see the end of me.” Gently, he lowered himself to the ground, lying on his stomach to avoid the blades in his back.

  In deference to his wishes, she closed her eyes and tried not to hear that all too familiar death rattle. She'd heard it too many times on the battlefield and in the ships' holds to mistake it. Suddenly, something warm wrapped around her.

  Startled too thoroughly even to react violently, Taylin looked up to find that it was Brin's good arm, embracing her. The other was ensconced in a tight band of rolling mist that didn't hide the savagery of the injury. Tears flowed openly from the other woman's eyes as she looked down at Issacor

  “I'm sorry.” she murmured. And then, with guilt clear on her face, she added. “Layaka's gone. Escaped in the dust storm.”

  Taylin's hands clenched into fists. That traitor, that monster was still at large too. But she knew it meant something even more to Brin, who had become something of an older sister to Layaka before the terrible truth came out. Contact still made her cringe, but she would accept it to comfort her friend after that. And so she put her arm around the other woman in turn.

  “Kaiel?” She asked, hopeful that Brin wasn't the only survivor.

  “In incredible pain.” The chronicler's voice was pinched as Signateria worked to heal him. Having been poisoned and revived plus the stress of the moment was slowing the halfling down.

  But if he was being witty, he would be alright. Everyone was alright except... For the first time, she let herself look at him and felt sick. Why him? She felt hollow and cheated that he was taken, more than any of the many other deaths she'd witnessed had affected her.

  “I need to go." She finally said. “I told Ru--”

  The pain hit her hard and fast. Blinding torment surged through her like a thunderbolt. Only the pain wasn't hers. And on the other side of the city, a black dragon fell from the sky.

  Chapter 14 – Taylin's Order

  The great black dragon rose up and Matasume turned in air to face him. Motsey thrashed and squealed in her grasp, but her grip remained firm and her focus remained on Ru.

  “Lord Immurai told me that you were predictable. Unoriginal. Clumsy. I had hoped that he was wrong." With Motsey secure in one arm, she snapped open a war fan with the other. When fully open, and up close, a pattern was revealed to be lightly etched on the thin metal stretched between the fan's ribs: a complex array of vin and the more rarely seen ferif: the energy of elemental metal.

  Like all Kaydan demons, Matasume had not only her personal well of power, but a connection to her master to tap; which she did. Silver threads, so thin that they were only visible when the firelight from the Murderyard struck them, emerged from the fan's ribs and wafted on a breeze she controlled.

  “Let us see if he was also correct about your immortality.” She intoned before sweeping the fan down in Ru's general direction. Borne on her fell wind, the strands extended and gained rigidity. Ru couldn't see them to avoid them.

  The first cut into his wing, slicing the membrane as cleanly as the finest blade and continued just as easily through blood vessels and muscle. Another slashed through his arm, nearly taking it off. More and more slashed him; and the more he tried to escape, the more impossibly thin strands he ended up flying into.

  Soon he was bleeding all over, one eye ruined, scales and flesh flayed. Only then did he finally give in to the pain and lose consciousness. The great black dragon, sluicing blood all across the Murderyard, began to plummet. As he did, his form began to change; shrinking and becoming more man-shaped.

  By the time he met the ground with bone-crunching impact, he was once more in the shape of Ru Brakar.

  Immurai watched it all happen while seated serenely on the edge of the stone seal commemorating Kalueth-Nor with a flute of sparkling wine in hand. He raised the glass in salute to Matasume. “My dear, I do so envy you sometimes.”

  “You!”

  “How rude.” Immurai turned his masked visage toward the guard that was barging in on the one sided conversation. His eye slits were narrowed. “You do not address a guest as 'you'.”

  The guard lowered his spear threateningly. “You're one of the ones that started it. I'm bringing you in for disturbance.”

  Immurai laughed a short, dry and humorless laugh. “I don't believe that I am your priority at this point.”

  To his credit, the guard didn't shy away. “Seven hells you're not! Surrender, or I'll spit you through and through.” His spear's blade glinted in the light of surrounding fires as if to back up his claim.

  One of the eye-slits in the demon's mask expanded in a strange parody of a raised eyebrow. “Or...” He snapped his long fingers and channeled the last bit of energy needed to kindle the array behind him. The air over the monument stone heated rapidly, throwing out a wall of searing wind from its center. A leg that ended in a sharp hoof emerged from a heat shimmer at that same center.

  The rest of Bashurra the Crevasse followed shortly after. Over twenty feet in height, he made none of the overtures of civilization that Immurai or Matasume did. Where they dressed in finery, he wore the whole skin—head and all—of a massive reptile draped off one shoulder, brass fittings on his thick fingers that added jagged blades to his knuckles and nothing else.

  His skin was red, his eyes pure white with no visible pupil. A massive rack of black antlers swept out from the head of a stag, but for the mouth, which couldn't even fully close for the mismatched chaos of teeth within. In one barrel sized fist, he gripped an ancient, beaten bronze ax.

  As the wave of heat dissipated, he rolled his neck, and stretched his muscle-bound arms. “Immurai.” His voice was loud and deep, lacking
any hint of gravel or rasp. “The time has come for me to subdue the Rune Breaker?”

  Immurai didn't answer immediately, too concerned with watching the look of horror in the guard's eyes as he stared up at the hulking demon. His gaze never left the man as he took one step back, then another, then broke and ran.

  With casual cruelty, he raised one hand. “Icicle Lancet.” A puff of frosty air issued from his palm, preceding a two-foot-long spear of ice, which leapt through the air almost faster than the eye could track toward the fleeing guard. It took him in the back, punching through his armor and exiting from his chest. The man tumbled to the ground in mid-stride; silent from the shock.

  “Not exactly.” said Immurai. “I have located what I want, but it remains untested. You will provide that test. Now listen closely...”

  ***

  Taylin ground her teeth against the link's broadcasting of Ru's injuries. Even though they didn't share pain, she took his as her own because in this case, she was the cause of it. “We have to get to him. He's hurt. Badly.”

  Kaiel got to his feet with Signateria's help. His legs were only partly healed and he winced when he put pressure on them. “He can't just heal that? I saw him take similar wounds during the battle with the King of Flame and Steel.”

  Taylin shook her head and made a sound of frustration. “Ru usually heals by shifting his injuries away, but he needs spells to heal damage from magic—only right now, he can't think to cast.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Brin, looking between the two.

  “Later.” Taylin said, more terse than she would have been normally. “We need to go right now. I can't let anyone else die. Even if it's him.”

  “Peace, Taylin. We'll get to him.” Still needing Signateria's help, Kaiel hobbled to the still-open portable library. “Just let me find a scroll of teleportation and a healing scroll. I don't have enough left in me to do anything without assistance right now. Besides, if he is what he says, there's no danger of him dying.”