The Path of Destruction (Rune Breaker) (12 page)

Guilt came as well when a new realization hit her: if she hadn't been wearing the ring, she would have known that those creatures were not spirit beasts.

The sounds of Ru engaging Bashurra reached her newly sensitive ears before she could sink too far into her fugue. There was work to be done. Once that was through, she could atone.

'There are three of us in my research group, not counting our students and support staff. Our charge is to delve into the nature of the so-called 'divinity sparks' that transform normal creatures into spirit beasts. The Emperor believes that unlocking this secret will allow us to replace or exceed the powers granted to priests by the gods. If we can do this, we will be rid of all dependance on the gods who abandoned this world to the tyranny of the Gold Nation and its allies during Draconic Control. We could finally be a truly free people.'

~ excerpt from the journal of Lena Hiddakko.

***

Spirit docents were accidents of birth, or so Brin had heard. They were children who, under other circumstances, would be born with the expanded energy capacity that made for talented wizards. But the old tales among her people went that if such a child came too close to death in the womb, a bit of the Well of Souls leaked into them, filling the place where a wizard would have a swirl of elemental forces with discarnate energy instead.

Whether that was true or not, it did make some sense to Brin. The afterlife had always been part of her normal life. Her mother had told her that she'd been looked after—even in the crib—by guardians from the other side of death.

Brin had never met another spirit docent in person. She only knew about them from news of their exploits and the occasional fictional account in a dime novel. There had been no one to teach her, so everything she had learned came from listening to the spirits and opening herself up to the in-between world they inhabited.

That was what she was doing now. With her disguise cast aside and her truths laid bare, she looked into the in-between space through the lens of the discarnate power inside of her.

All around her, throughout the ruined homestead, the spirits responded.

Lulled out of their fear of Bashurra, his stifling aura of
nekras
, and the maddened impressions left over from their murdered friends and neighbors, the undeparted dead of Idarian began to emerge from hiding; rising out of the ground, seeping out of the corporeal forms of tools, clothing and household items, and even dragging themselves out of what was left of their own slain bodies.

There was only just over a dozen of them compared to probably two score of the potentially dangerous remnants. They were all steadfast looking people, just as they had been in life; and they had died with a desperate piece of business left unfinished: to protect their loved ones. In failing to do so, they found themselves stuck, unable to pass on to the Afterworld. But instinctively, they knew Brin could undo the anchors they had chained themselves to and send them on their way.

All of them crowded in, jostling and sometimes overlapping one another in their rush to reach their salvation.

Brin looked up at them sadly. Men and women, young and old; they were all humans worn by hard lives on the frontier, no matter their age or gender. And yet even after living those lives and losing them in defense of those they cared about, they still couldn't get rest—not without her. And she knew that she couldn't take the time to send them on, not before sealing Bashurra's connection to the place.

It wasn't right, especially after she'd abandoned them the first time. She lowered her head in shame.

Something thrummed in her docent's sense like the strung of a harp plucked too hard. It wasn't just Brin that felt it, because the undeparted stopped their crush and turned in the direction it came from. Spirits began to step aside to form an aisle between a single figure and Brin.

Said figure was old, gray and bent; a man of the frontier through and through. His skin was leather, his eyes squinted from years in the bright sun, and though he was very old, he moved with power, confidence and pride. All of the spirits of Idarian turned to him and their expressions were of love and appreciation. They weren't respectful as such, and they certainly weren't reverent. It was an expression that people rarely wore because they rarely felt that specific emotion for a being.

If she'd been stripped of all of her docent powers, that expression alone could have told her who the figure was. It wasn't a ghost or a remnant. It had never been slain, and in fact, still lived. The people looked at it with such love because it was home—the spirit of their home.

It was something docents understood implicitly, but few others even entertained: anything the mortal races came into contact with on Ere could have a spirit. The Well of Souls infused everything on the planet with discarnate energy, and when discarnate energy met sapient thought, spirits formed.

Ancestral weapons, heirloom jewelry, and old ships could have spirits because of the thoughts people attached to them. And almost any place people actually lived was bound to have one. Strength, focus and level of coherency varied, but farming enclaves; where people all had a single goal and depended heavily on understanding and nurturing the land, often had very coherent and powerful spirits.

Brin looked up into the eyes of the spirit of Idarian Homestead and spoke softly. “Your people deserve to pass on.”

The spirit nodded. Probably a century of constant habitation had given it human mannerisms as well as form.

“But I must seal the
nekras
contamination first. If I don't, my friends will be killed by one of the monsters that defiled this place.”

An intensity entered Idarian Homestead's eyes and the undeparted ghosts mirrored it in their own. Every one of them now had reason to hate Kaydans in general and Bashurra especially.

Swallowing, Brin kept her gaze steady. “I can create the seal, but I need more power than I have. Will you help me?”

Somehow, spirits all knew what it meant to help a docent. Brin didn't know how and Reflair couldn't explain it to her, but they all did; even animal and plant spirits. The spirit of Idarian Homestead was no exception. It nodded and took a step forward that carried it into the same space Brin was already occupying.

Discarnate energy roared into her, a flood that enveloped her instantly. White light poured out of her eyes and mouth as she began the rite to create the seal.

***

Ru rolled to the side as Bashurra bore down on him with the edge of his shield in what would have been a decapitating stroke. He then answered the attack by snapping a heel into the demon's ribs.

Rolling with the blow, Bashurra came up whirling his hooked chain and cast it at Ru, wrapping one leg as the titan was rising to his feet.

“Becoming larger than me only means I have more weaknesses to capitalize on.” he hissed savagely before hauling on the chain. There wasn't enough friction in the grass, already made slick by the frosty mist that exuded from Ru's body, and his leg came out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground.

Bashurra wasted no time leaping upon his fallen foe and raining down crushing blows with his shield.

Ru put up an effort of defense, but his arms were soon battered aside, opening his face up to Bashurra's brutal punishment.

Back at the front lines of Solgrum's army, Taylin reached back and grasped the hilt of the Eastern Brand. She couldn't just stand by and bear witness to the beating Ru was taking, so she triggered the mechanical bolts along the length of the sheathe. With a series of
chunks
and
clacks
they slid free, leaving the sword free to be drawn.

Only she didn't.

Because in the link, Ru was still feeling no pain. Instead, anticipation was building in the link, the kind of impatient blood-lust she'd felt before when they were waiting for the arrival of the King of Flame and Steel's bandits, or for the hounds attacking her on the day they met.

He saw no disadvantage, only a window opening in which he could bring down oblivion on something. And he was still casting his spell.

“...heed my will. Focus and be transformed.” He was saying.

Beside Taylin, Tal Eserin suddenly looked up. “Someone is moving a great deal of
vin—
the air currents don't move that way naturally.”

She barely acknowledged his comment, as she was seeing memories flash in Ru's mind as he used the incantation to recall the complex spell pattern. She saw, as always in those memories, through Ru's eyes, looking at Gloryfall as a young woman. She was dressed in a plain tunic and breeches, both so rumpled that she'd likely slept in them for the past few days.

Gloryfall was hunched over a workbench, upon which lay a scythe. Only that scythe was neither a farming implement, nor a weapon. It was... art. The haft was constructed of a flawless piece of wood that was dark and smooth like the fine chocolates Raiteria bought by the bagful in Daire. There were indentations smoothed into the wood: hand grips that had fingerprints stylized into them in hematite. There were also elegant sigils flowing up the length in silver workings so fine that they only showed when the light caught them just right.

The blade was attached to the haft by a cap of seemingly tarnished silver, and the blade itself was similarly dark; not black, but dull in color while bearing a metallic sheen. There were sigils there too; entire magic circles in miniature.

“Gand made her for you,” the young Gloryfall was saying, “and asked me to strengthen it. Her name is Grace. And with her, you'll be able to do things you haven't imagined yet.”

And suddenly, Taylin found herself in Ru's head. Not in a dream or memory, but in the present, seeing through his eyes and using his other senses.

The first realization was that Ru was
not
on the ground receiving Bashurra's savagery. He was in the air above the fray, fists gripped around the haft of a much less elegant scythe and his mind aflame with spells.

In one corner of his mind, he controlled the titan, a simulacrum made of
akua;
willing it to react to Bashurra's attacks, keeping the demon focused on it instead of allowing him room to attack the army or discover that Ru wasn't where he was supposed to be. In another, he wielded still more
akua
, pulling it around himself in a more complex veil than the one he erected to give Taylin privacy earlier. This one made him fully invisible to Bashurra's senses.

Front and center, he was gathering, manipulating and transforming
vin
on a massive scale and channeling it all into the honed edge of the scythe until the weapon seemed to be cleaving the air itself.

Down below, the titan construct tried to squirm out from under Bashurra to no avail. All it managed was to change its position so that Bashurra's back was fully toward Ru and partially toward the gathered army. In a burst of strength, it caught Bashurra's shield and ripped it away, hurling it as far away as it could before struggling to sit up.

“That won't save you.” Bashurra grinned hideously, showing his ranks of mismatched teeth. “I was only using the shield to prolong your suffering. But if you insist...” He raised his now free hand. Each thick finger had a brass ring on it that extended a wickedly sharp blade out from his knuckle. As he clenched the hand into a fist, he called on his god's bottomless pool of
nekras
and converted it to
flaer
, surrounding his hand and the bladed rings in dark, intense fire.

“And so dies the Rune Breaker. Immurai will be saddened he didn't get to do it himself.” And with that, he drove his fist into the titan's face.

But instead of gore and charred bone fragments, the titan's head exploded into a cloud of fresh, powdery snow that let the punch pass right through it. This was followed by the rest of the titan's bulk transforming, from the neck and working its way downward, into a gigantic, vaguely humanoid drift of snow and ice.

Bashurra stared a for a moment, then let out a bellow of unequaled rage. He punched the snow twice more with his burning fist as if he might find Ru hidden inside, then rose briskly to his feet.

He didn't get a chance to piece anything more together.

Ru released his veil, adding another small cascade of falling snow to the wind. “Let those who stand in my way be torn asunder!” The vortex of
vin
concentrated on the scythe blade as Ru brought it up, then began to sweep it downward in a vertical slash.

And Taylin realized that the blade really
was
cutting the air as it met resistance and began to sheer through it. Fire blazed into being around the blade; blue and pink and white, all swirling around one another, boiling out of the rift in the air the scythe was cutting.

She felt the tautness in his muscles as he applied brute force in driving the blade through the summoned wind. And for a moment, she felt triumph swell inside him as the spell took shape, knew the frustration born from the number of times he'd failed at it, and felt it melt away.

Then there was the creak, a small, quiet snap. Ru knew from experience what the meant and in their state of synchronicity, Taylin knew too: the scythe wasn't strong enough. There was a spike in the apprehension, for Ru knew that what came next was pain. Then that collapsed into resignation as he continued to muscle forward, trying to complete the spell before the scythe failed.

The link itself took notice and suddenly, Taylin was out of Ru's head and in her own again. The sudden change made her rock on her heels, and she didn't get time to recover before it happened:

A scream came from the sky, nothing human, or even organic. It was a noise of matter brought to the edge of annihilation. The sound lasted only a moment before a ribbon of light, all the same boiling colors that had danced on the end of the scythe, fell from the rent Ru had torn in the air like a bucket of water being poured out into the bright sunlight.

It struck the earth several yards from Bashurra, and where it touched, the grass and dirt were churned up and thrown violently aside. With astounding speed, the ribbon tore a path toward Bashurra, striking the demon across the back and ripping it open down to the bone and horrible ichors. The demon was pounded into the icy remains of the titan like someone had dropped a ship on him.