A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (14 page)

Three bandits littered the ground at her feet and three panicked horses bolted past the gap and into the town proper. Taylin resumed her stance only just in time to see the black charger break through the mist with a trio of outriders at its back. Blood stained the horse's hooves and its rider's sword as they came on, intent on simply overrunning her.

A flash of brilliant light flared past the lead rider and took one of the followers in the shoulder. It should have been a glancing blow, but the injured man spasmed, then slumped in the saddle. Taylin risked a glance toward the source to the light to find that in the initial frenzy, Kaiel and Grandmother had scaled the wagon to her right.

Kaiel had his flute gripped tightly in the middle and it was easy to see why, as a gout of silver-white flame poured out of either end, arching back in a shape reminiscent of a bow. Which was exactly what it was, as evidenced by Kaiel miming drawing that bow, which caused an arrow of the same coalesced energy to form and then streak toward the horsemen when released. That shot missed and by then, the group was at the gap.

The lead rider reared his horse as they reached the lines, aiming the animal's huge hooves in Taylin's direction. Unless she wanted the boys behind her to suffer her fate, there was nowhere to dodge. So she didn't. With a snarl that no demi-human could mimic, she stepped forward and caught the flailing hooves on her shield.

Immediately, the wood strained and the tendons in her arm felt as if they were on fire. But she braced the length of the sword beneath it and pushed with both hands; her strength against the mass of the horse. There was a moment of incredible tension, and then suddenly the horse was too far back on its rear legs. It danced a moment more before Taylin angled her shield and threw it over into the horse passing on its right side.

Both beasts shrieked with fear and rage as they went over, colliding hard with the wagon on that side. The rider of the smaller horse never had a chance as he was caught and crushed between the two masses. The smaller horse didn't fair any better as its right front leg shattered.

The rider of the charger, however, leapt from his mount as it fell, rolling expertly and coming up before Taylin could drop her shield. His saw-edged sword tore easily through the blacksmith's apron and rasped as it slid along the outside of her ribs. Her borrowed white robes soon became stained with blood.

How
dare
he.
Her voice and yet, not her voice snarled in her head. She brought the shield down to break his arm and would have, were he not swift in freeing his sword and pulling back into a stance. He wasn’t fast enough, however, to raise his sword to block the blow she whipped at his head, removing it from his shoulders.

There was movement to her right and she remembered the other rider. Fueled by her mounting anger and the heady feeling of battle, she pivoted cleanly and brought her sword around.

She saw a corpse with its chest pierced through by almost a half dozen black spikes astride the horse moments before a scythe intercepted her strike.

“Yes, Ms. Taylin?” Ru quirked an eyebrow at her.

She blinked blood from her forehead wound out of her eye and it took a moment to register the face and voice through his blood-lust in the link and her own howling rage. “Oh, Ru! I almost...”

“It would have been a small inconvenience to me, yes.” He said, and pointed just past the gap where the savvy bandits that made it that far were dismounting so as not to find their mounts become the hindrance they had to those before them. “But I am not the one who should experience it.”

She nodded, resolving to apologize properly later, and put her sword into a ready position. “Right.”

“Do you require healing?”

She gave that a sliver of a moment's thought. Her side hurt, but it was more shallow than it looked. The wound on her head, however, was dripping into her eyes. Plus, the ecstasy that came with healing was.... distracting, especially the full powered variety.

“Just stop the bleeding.” She instructed.

Ru didn't even look at her as he channeled a minute spark of healing magic,
vitae
, to her through the air. Job done, he looked up and counted at least eight bandits approaching, chest deep in the mist. There were other skirmishes going on all down the line and in the mists, but at the moment, those eight were his intended target.

He let his imagination run wild and grinned a most feral grin.

May I kill them all, Ms Taylin?
The question was entirely rhetorical.

To his surprise, he felt her own rage pressing up against his, coupled with a willingness for battle he didn't think she was capable of. She lunged forward before he did.

The first man to meet Taylin beyond the trip lines didn't have time to even bring his weapon on guard. She smashed him in the face with the edge of her shield, sending him stumbling back into his fellows, spitting out teeth and blood.

She followed him, shield raised and forced him back into two others while her sword crossed with that of another who tried to move to flank her. In five steps, she had fully engaged a good half of the incoming force.

The other half found worse. A great, tawny lion bounded into their midst, ignoring a spear that skewered its shoulder to drag its wielder to the ground and savage him.

Two of his comrades rushed to help with their swords drawn, only for the lion to rise up and resume Ru's human form, complete with readied scythe. “Come and die.” He taunted, showing them his teeth and making a rude gesture too archaic for them to understand. The pair glanced at one another, then let out a rallying cry, charging as one.

Ru laughed harshly and prepared his scythe for the harvest. The cry of the man in the lead was cut off into a yelp as his leg suddenly became useless and he fell, rolling in the dust.

Ru shot a glare in Taylin's direction. The former slave had sliced the tendon in the back of his prey's leg as he passed and went right back to what was now a trio fighting her. She didn't even notice the glare or the discontent he radiated into the link. She was fully engaged in more ways than one.

There was no time to upbraid her further, as the second man was inside his guard. Ru let go of the scythe with one hand to dispatch him with a flesh-sculpted weapon, but a bright flash came from above and the man dropped, shivering uncontrollably.

He blinked down at the prone form before him in confusion. But he wasn't out of potential victims just yet. A low growl formed in his throat as he made eye contact with the fourth man before him, telegraphing a litany of injuries in store with a single look.

It happened again, and this time, Ru saw exactly what transpired: an arrow of white fire streaked down and passed through the terrified bandit. Whatever it was, it made the man instantly convulse and collapse. Frustrated beyond measure, Ru followed the path of its flight backward to find Kaiel atop a wagon, grasping a blazing bow.

With a thought, he found himself almost nose to nose with the chronicler. “Never do that again.”

Kaiel stepped back to open some space between them. “We're all working together here, Ru. This line has to hold. Besides, if you're so hungry for murder, you could at least finish them off.”

“What?” Ru glanced back down at the battlefield. Taylin had felled another opponent, but he was replaced by two women, both wielding hand axes instead of the standard sword or spear, while the two men that fell from the white-fire arrows continued to writhe on the ground. “You interrupted me in battle and you didn't even succeed in killing
one man
?” his eyes narrowed at the bow. “What is that thing anyhow?”

“Fell-light bow.” Kaiel stepped to one side to clear his aim and fired another brilliant shot at a rider approaching in the mist. It missed, but panicked the horse. He scowled at the mistake, but couldn't argue with the result. “Believe it or not, it uses healing magic, in a poorly controlled burst, to disrupt the body temporarily.”

Ru continued glaring at him and he felt the need to add, “Shouldn't you be helping Taylin?”

The dark mage gestured to the skirmish below. Taylin sidestepped an ax blow and replied with a heavy chop to the woman's knee before bulling her sideways into the path of one of her compatriot's sword strokes. The blade only drove into her arm, but her collapsing weight pulled the weapon from its holder's grasp.

“Why bother? In any event, as she is now, she would likely lay my belly open the moment I moved out of her blind spot. That would be most unpleasant.”

Kaiel paused in his shooting to watch as Taylin turned a quick circle to block both an ax coming from her front and the sword from a hopeful flanker coming up on her sword side without once leaving any real opening to either.

“Is she possessed of some sort of berserker spirit?” He marveled.

Ru laughed mildly. The chronicler might have the same vantage on the battle as him, but the link offered him a much more clear perspective. “It seems like it, doesn't it? And mark you, there is rage in her; but observe how precise and controlled her attacks are. Look at the blocks and feints. She is in total control. She isn't using the rage to enhance the battle, she's using her focus on the battle to quell her rage.”

Taylin blocked a falling ax with her sword, but her strength worked against her and the ax's haft snapped, allowing the head to tumble free and bite into her shoulder on the way down. Blood flowed, but the injury was too shallow to stop her. She slammed with her shield and the force snapped the ax-woman's neck.

“Death is a lady plain, who sits beside the path. She offers to sit with you and drink in your last hours. But when she dons her gown and she dances, sings and laughs, she is become Lady War, and her beauty blinds and destroys.”

Kaiel gave him an odd look. “Poetry? At a time like this?”

Ru shook his head. “Here and now, I suppose so. But in its time? Religion. Of course, I insult Olera, Lady Death, wife of the Void, Farth Olein to compare her to this timid and squeamish girl. And this rabble is hardly a thing to test her. I find it to be a damning shame on this entire era that they could hold a farmhouse, much less a region of lawless land.”

Another fell-light arrow streaked across the battlefield to strike down another rider. “I agree.” Kaiel found himself saying. “They're more than enough to take a village like this, but to terrorize places with permanent defenders? They're highly trained and poorly commanded. This bandit king must be all smoke and mirrors.”

Ru's eyes narrowed again. “The man on the actual warhorse: was that this king?”

“I don't imagine so. His death didn't seem to effect the charge at all.”

“He was one of the ones giving orders when I hit the line.” Ru said in a low voice. “But there was more than one and no one seemed sure whose orders to follow. Certainly no one who could call himself a king and not get knifed in his sleep.” A thought struck him. “How many spiders did you say they had?”

“Four.” Kaiel replied instantly. “And six score horses...”

“I saw only three when the attack began.”

“And only five score horses at best.”

Ru snarled at the idea of someone else thinking they could outsmart him. “Enough to hide under a woodling cloak if they move slowly.” Before the chronicler could say another word, he launched himself into the air. He reached a height that put the entire village and surrounding it in view and turned a slow circle.

A woodling cloak moved light and sound, preventing the most obvious methods of detection, but the wider it was (and thus, the more people it covered), the more difficult it was to move without leaving a visible distortion where light bent unnaturally. The limit of such a cloak was based on the skill of the caster and the quality of the power source; but one thing the cloak didn't do was cover tracks.

And with the amount of dust in and around the tiny hamlet, it wasn't long before he spotted a mass disturbance in it. And it was within sprinting distance of the northeastern segment of the wagon line.

“To hell with Taylin's compassion for horses.” He muttered, visualizing the basic pattern for an explosive fireball and filling it with his personal stores of
flaer
. He sent it hurtling toward the center of the dusty disturbance.

In answer, a small, yellow star flared into being below, rotating as it rose to meet the fireball and kindling into a conflagration of its own, only in the shape of a hurricane in miniature instead of a sphere. The two spells collided fifty feet in the air and exploded with a deafening eruption.

The lookouts instantly pinpointed the source of the second flame and relayed it to the lines. A howl went up that was soon answered by the wolves and their hunter partners out in the mists. The battle line began to shift, but all too slowly.

With no more reason to hide, whoever was maintaining the cloak released it and the secondary fighting force of the bandit king's army was revealed. Twenty-five men strong, these were no mounted rabble in worn leathers. Their armor was piecemeal, but here and there, were full shirts of chain. They were augmented by quality hardened leather, odds and ends of steel plate, and segments of chitin from enormous insects. Every man and woman was helmeted and carried a tower shield of reinforced wood to complement their fine steel tridents, bill hooks and spears.

At the fore was another spider, it's hairy body doused in red dye, with a black lacquered howdah strapped to it. Behind the spider's handler stood, presumably, another decoy mage. But behind him, on the main platform, stood a figure in fine black leather with iron greaves and gauntlets. His face was unhidden by any helmet, allowing him to sneer proudly and likely to show off his clean shaven face and long, unbound, brown hair. One ear was weighted down with rings of silver and gold; the other was missing.

The bandit king.

He held in both hands a fine, two-handed sword; its double bladed length dull, but for the fuller running down its center length, which shone silver. Still sneering, he raised the sword and the silver began to glow dull orange, then intensified to the brilliance of flame.