A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (15 page)

A second star awoke just above the sword's guard, tracing the fuller's length as it rotated. The bandit king brought his weapon down as if to slash an unseen foe from clavicle to hip and in doing so, unleashed the burning whirlwind. It tore through the air, kicking up the dust with the wind of its passing until it collided with the wagon directly in the king's path.

The explosion tore it apart and ignited everything flammable within, including the line crews lying in wait for a charge. Bits of burning wood scattered from the epicenter and into the space between wagons and houses.

“By order of the King of Flame and Steel: no one in or around this village lives to see the setting of the sun!” The king bellowed, raising his sword on high. His warriors roared their agreement and threw themselves at the burning breech in the Winter Willow's defenses. The spider skittered ahead, it's long legs eating more ground than any soldier. It and by extension, the king, bypassed the nearest houses and entered the center of the village unopposed before any defenders could even attempt to fill the gap.

The spider's handler wheeled the giant arachnid around, sighting it on the village storehouse by unspoken agreement.

“Bear witness before you die.” A simple spellworking of
vin
caused his speech to roll out over the square. “For you were warned and you have earned the full wrath of the King of Flame and Steel.” He thrust the sword skyward. “This is Dóttir Logi, the Eastern Brand. It is the instrument of your ultimate punishment!” In a lower voice, he commanded the sword, activating a spell within, “Ignite.”

From somewhere near the Eastern Brand's guard, two tongues of flame erupted; one crimson, one pale yellow. They chased one another through the air around the length of the blade, becoming a blazing double helix around it.

He reared back to swing as he did before, but at the last minute, twitched the blade to the side. At the same time, a shot echoed across the square and something struck the sword, kicking up a burst of sparks obviously generated by one of the spells laid down within the weapon.

The King of Flame and Steel glared in the direction it came from, finding Raiteria kneeling at the corner of one of the houses, already reloading her rifle. With a snarl of rage, he once more lifted and swung his sword, sending his hell-storm in her direction.

It detonated on contact with something ten feet in front of her, which then surged forward like an earthbound meteor. That something was soon revealed, with the dying of the flames, to be a rapidly disintegrating wagon wheel wrapped in hide, which was utterly annihilated in the conflagration.

Taylin shook the remains of her makeshift shield from her arm as she continued forward. Her long stride quickly removed the distance between her and the king and before he could bring the Eastern Brand's deadly attack to bear again, she threw all of her considerable strength into a fantastic leap.

Clothes smoldering, bloodied and with an intense look carved upon her face, she looked an avenging angel even without wings. Her bound brought her right up to the King's level and her razor met his brand with a clang and a burst of orange sparks before the force of their meeting drove both of them off the opposite edge of the howdah.

Both hit the ground in practiced combat rolls, coming up to a knee almost as one. The King beat her in getting to his feet and charged with an overhand strike that she blocked almost without looking. The Eastern Brand spat sparks in her face, a deliberate design to put melee opponents either off balance or set them on fire.

Taylin was susceptible to neither and easily found her feet without disengaging her locked blade. Once she did, she pushed him back with ease, opening the distance of a sword length between them.

The King dropped into a classically trained stance. “So these ashing dirt eaters really were holding out on me. When I saw they were so desperate that they threw themselves upon the charity of caravan halflings, I thought perhaps they really were as poor as they professed to be.”

“I'm not being paid a single coin.” She replied automatically. Not a lie, but she surprised herself in the act of replying to his barb. Accusations she'd been holding in since she first heard of his plot bubbled to the surface. “But that didn't matter at all to you, did it? You were going to kill all these people no matter what; for no good reason.”

“Power is always a good reason.” The King rushed in to lock blades with her again and this time, when she tried to push him back, he countered with equal strength, then greater, driving her back instead. “And I offer a correction: I am in the
process
of killing them all. Even if you stall me, I've brought only my best to exterminate the village
and
their halfling 'saviors' now that my irregulars have worn them down.”

Taylin glanced upward for a fraction of a second and then gave in to the feeling she was getting through the link, allowing it to twist her mouth into an uncharacteristic lupine grin. “You think so?” The appreciation of the irony was entirely her own.

Something dropped from the sky into the midst of the bandit elite force. It was larger than even an ogre and its shape was most akin to a badger with a blunted muzzle. Gray-brown fur covered several tons of muscle, but did nothing to hide the massive, curved claws on its forepaws.

Its incredible weight crushed one man flat on impact before the creature rose up on its hind legs and really set to work. Claws meant for stripping bark from the largest of trees splintered tower shields as if they were made of matchsticks and went on to tear the arms that held them from their bodies. Four of the King of Flame and Steel's best were dead or completely out of the fight in an instant.

In the next, Bromun and a detachment of hunters arrived from the rear with their wolves and bullets began to hammer into armor and shields from an adjacent rooftop. The opposing force was small, but with Ru's destabilizing presence at the center of the enemy, they were fighting groups of three of four instead of a massed shield wall backed with polearms.

The King set his jaw. “The battle isn't over.” This time, he didn't go into the dramatic flourish that conjured the wheel of flames. Instead, he merely pointed the tip of it at Ru's hulking form and let loose a narrow, but concentrated column of fire. It raked the mage's furry shoulders and elicited an agonized bellow.

Taylin faltered at the sound and the flurry of emotions in the link. Pain didn't translate to the master end of the link, but the associated burst of confusion, anger and desperate bargaining for that pain to end came through with perfect clarity.

Ru? How badly are you hurt?

She didn't have time to parse the string of ancient oaths and curses that cascaded into her mind before the King charged her again and drove her back. She almost stumbled and fell, which would have been fatal. Just as fatal as the jaws of the spider as its handler drove it forward from behind her.

Taylin danced to the side and ducked beneath the creature's first legs, putting it between her and the King while earning valuable breathing space. It had been a while since she'd been matched strength for strength in singular combat. Even her old masters had given up attempting to handle her in singular situations, save the blessed fool whose mistake led to her freedom.

She was not, however, the equal of a two ton arachnid, which proved a problem as the huge thing wheeled around at its handler's behest. The 'decoy' mage still astride it muttered an incantation and gestured toward her.

The mystery of if he was really a wizard or not went with him to the grave as Ru, in his normal form, appeared between him and the spider's handler and split his rib cage open with his scythe. On the return stroke, he clouted the handler in the head with the butt of the weapon, pitching him off.

Ru didn't even glance at Taylin as he put his hand to the spider's head and muttered to himself “Let's see how much of a mind you have...” Whatever the answer, the monstrous creature suddenly veered past Taylin and skittered toward the battle behind her, jaws seeking the men who once rode behind it.

Taylin's view was cleared just in time for her to see the King of Flame and Steel let loose yet another hell-storm. This one aimed at the village's barn.

The barn where the children were being concealed.

She held her breath, fighting the feeling of helplessness as it hit the roof of the building and exploded, instantly engulfing the entire roof in flames. The rage began to boil over. The itching on her arms and back returned.

“There are children in there!” She screamed.

A serpent-swift blow struck the sword from her hand. “So my scouts said.” sneered the King, raising his sword for a death blow.

Steel struck flesh, but with a hollow, solid sound instead of a wet thump. Now was the King's turn to widen his eyes in shock. A hand had caught his blade, and though it bled, it held tight, despite the helix of flames engulfing it. Orange-red scales covered that hand, which was tipped with three-inch, black claws.

“You.” The word was a hiss and a growl in one and when the King met his opponent's eyes, he saw the green irises constrict around the pupil until it became a catlike slit.

Taylin tore the Eastern Brand from his grip with casual ease. It tumbled away in the dust, its flames guttering out. They were no longer strength for strength, and she was no longer ignoring the echoing roar of her anger.

Her first clawed swipe, the King dodged only with luck. They came heart-stoppingly close to tearing out his eyes. Then he threw himself back from her as two more desperate swipes came at his ribs and throat. He tapped the source of his strength, visualizing the pattern of it, and shifted
ere-a
and
vin
subtly, just as he'd been taught. Suddenly, a portion of his strength became celerity and he found himself having an easier time dancing away from Taylin's murderous claws.

Using that time wisely, he reached into the only other power source he knew: That finite well within every mortal from which they summoned the strength to press on through pain and fatigue. The King was one of those born with a naturally more expansive reserve and with training and some external help, possessed a respectable reservoir suitable for using in spellwork without driving himself into a coma.

With no time for a complex pattern, he opted for simple, but effective. He formed tension, once again with
ere-a
and
vin
, aimed it directly away, and released.

A bolt of force caught Taylin squarely in the chest and hurled her back. She rolled seemingly endlessly in the dust until she finally came to rest on her back with dizziness in her head and a new soreness in her chest. All around her, she heard the sounds of battle and, glancing aside, caught a glimpse of the rogue spider stampeding through the battle with a man dangling in its jaws by his head.

And then there were the shouts of a fire crew trying to put the barn out, or at least get the children to safety. From the urgency of the cries, it didn't sound like they were doing well.

Closer than either the fire, or the battle, there was a sound of metal scraping the bare ground not far from her. She turned to see the King of Flame and Steel lifting the hilt of her sword on his boot, before flipping it neatly into his hand like a carnival trick.

Thus armed, he approached her with grim satisfaction in his eyes. “Even that last little trick was useless and predictable.” He mocked. “This village is going to die. And I'm sending you along into the Well of Souls ahead of them so you can greet them as they arrive; one by one.”

Another hissing growl emerged from her. She hated this man more than almost anyone she'd ever met. He was a vile, terrible thing and she would not let someone like him be the end of her. Not now that she was free and certainly not if it meant that he would go on to kill the Clan of the Winter Willow or the people they'd risked their lives to protect. Even unarmed, she'd find a way to survive, or at least buy time for someone to put a blade or a bullet in him.

When the killing blow came, she rolled to the side, allowing it to chop crudely into the dust where she'd previously lain. And she didn't stop there; as the King moved to strike again, she rocked her shoulders and hips and kept moving. Twice more, the razor sword cut only dust and earth instead of the flesh it sought.

Then something hard and painful jabbed into the small of her back, completely breaking her momentum. She warded off the next blow with her arm. Her scales saved her from having her muscles severed, but this time the King had leverage, and the magically honed steel laid the back of her arm open from elbow to mid-wrist.

Pain blossomed, and through the haze, time seemed to stretch and distort. Taylin's mind wandered, and in wandering, she suddenly realized what it was that jabbed her in the back. The Eastern Brand.

Again living up to her name, she took stock of what she had and what she needed to do to make use of it. Before the King could take his next swing, she pushed off the ground with all her might and put her strength behind a hard kick to his solar plexus. By then, he had time to put himself back to full strength, but it was still unexpected enough to send him back a few staggering steps.

It was all she required. One more time, she rolled over, arching her back to give her room to grab the King's sword as she did. By the time he recovered, she was on her knees, raising the sword in a solid block against his overhand swing. With his leverage and her strength, mitigated as it was by her injury, they were, for a moment matched.

Then Taylin grinned at him again. The same smile she offered Ru in the cavern just before she managed to find a way out without giving an order, except this time, there was no mirth or playful cleverness in it. There was, instead, a clear declaration that she knew exactly when and how he was going to die.

“Ignite.”

The twin tongues of flame once more raced along the length of Dóttir Logi, the Eastern Brand. But more importantly, it spat its cascade of sparks at the point of contact with other metal. The sparks didn't ignite the King's expensive leathers, but all they had to do was take him off his guard for a second.