A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (22 page)

Somewhere along the way, one of the halflings must have taught him that 'story spinner' was another derogatory term for a student of the College who wasn't a story spinner by profession. Kaiel neglected to point out that he 
was
 a story spinner even if his primary focus was chronicling, and thus wasn't insulted, if only to prevent him from going back to 'charlatan'.

He still shot the mage with a glare though, followed by a mean spirited smirk as he released his shield spell. “Just as much as it vexes you not being able to detect my casting.” The point hit its mark, as Ru's eyes narrowed. Kaiel laughed inwardly as he shifted position against the tree and drew his desk back across his knees. “I wonder how many hours of thought you've poured into that. Probably as many as I have trying to figure out the how and why of this link of yours. Thus, I propose a trade.”

“Information for information.” Ru guessed. His eyes were on the now largely reconstructed scythe blade. “You will explain how you conceal your power and I will shed light upon the nature of the link.” Much like their method of ending up in the current time period, Taylin didn't like talking about the link, or Ru's identity. But she never expressly or implicitly forbade him from divulging that information, so he had no qualms at doing so.

Kaiel gave him a level look. Something along those lines had come to mind for him. “Are you sure Taylin doesn't mind?”

“Why should I care? I don't intend to tell you anything further about her; and my history is my affair alone.” The link brushed his nerves with a certain sharpness that warned that his words were dangerously close to punishable insubordination.

“You're overly harsh with her.” Kaiel admonished. “Especially when she concerns herself so much with being pleasant to you.”

Ru hunched his shoulders. “I've warned her time and again about wasting her time in that way. It is none of my concern that the girl foolishly insists on treating me as something other than what I am.”

“This isn't the first time you've talked like that.” Kaiel noted. “As if basic demi-human compassion and dignity are below you... or possibly beyond you. It's not fitting for a self-important blowhard like you.”

“If you want to satisfy your curiosity, pay your end of the trade; tell me what in the seven interlocking hells is so different about your technique that literal centuries of training my senses cannot tell.”

Kaiel laughed. “I would actually be greatly impressed if you trained yourself to detect what was barely in use four hundred years ago, when you were last active. Oh, the Dragon Nations had the secret since the era of Draconic Control, but in your time, only the hailene were putting it to use; and only then, mostly in laboratory settings.”

“If you remain so cryptic, I reserve the right to be cryptic as well.” said Ru. “And if I choose to, I can twist words into instant madness.”

The chronicler got the message and moved to the heart of the matter. “It isn't the technique you're unable to see. Loreman tradition still relies on spell structures and patterns like any other. The thing that's confounding you is the source: the discarnate energy from the Well of Souls.”

Ru knew of the Well. It was the afterlife, or at least the current afterlife. It hadn't existed before the world was called Ere. Everyone that died passed down through its layers: the Afterworld, the White Ways and Court of Wandering Souls, the Seven Interlocking Hells, until finally joining with the Source of All Souls. It never occurred to him that magic there was any different than in the living world.

Kaiel read his expression. “You've never heard of discarnate energy? Understandable. It's use has grown since wide knowledge of it came in the Age of Tragedies, but it's still uncommon for anyone not born to it like a spirit docent, or inborn caster to have access to it. The College is one of only three schools that teach it. It's... hmm; are you aware of the five points of mortality?”

“Indeed: Mind, Body, Soul and the two sides of Anima: Generation and Decay.” Ru said, still studying the scythe blade, half wondering if it could be physically girded against the forces it had to contain.

“Exactly.” Kaiel nodded. “And each of those has energies attached to them. The Body is physical, made up of the six elements; 
ere-a
, 
vin
, 
flaer
, 
akua
, 
ferif
, and 
vox
; and thus under the purview of elemental energy within the physical plane. The Mind is, of course the seat and subject of 
psi
, the power generated by the Body harmonizing with the astral plane. And Anima is driven by the twin energies of 
vitae
 and 
nekras
, both of which come from living things altering the world around them.

“But have you ever wondered why there's no energy that pertains to the Soul?” Kaiel didn't wait for an answer, “It's because a mortal's soul needs only a small fraction of discarnate energy; the power that connects every living thing and draws them together. You can't tap your own Soul like you can your Body or Mind, so it's hard to even tell it's there—unless you know how to tap into the Well, where discarnate energy is as omnipresent as elemental power here.”

He took the flute from his vest pocket. “The secret is music. Vibration really. The Well has resonances that the College calls the Word and the Song. Connect a sound to that resonance in your mind and you can draw on that power. Even better, being trained in understanding discarnate energy allows us to manipulate the sliver of energy in the people around us; make our words sound like the truth, or--”

“Hear the truth in the words of another.” Ru finished for him. “So that is how you do it. I assumed that you were just claiming to be adept at reading body language.”

“Most do.” Kaiel admitted. “and the College encourages it, just like it encourages the dime novels. It makes people underestimate us. Besides, it might endanger many people's positions as advisers to the wealthy and influential if it got out that we could push and pull on people's minds without creating a single spell structure.”

That actually impressed Ru. All mystical methods against mind altering effects that even he knew about relied on disrupting the spell structures as they were laid over the target's mind. If there was no pattern to detect or disrupt, there was really no magical defense against them, only mundane training in detecting and evading mental attacks with one’s own mind.

“So now you know.” Kaiel finally said after a period of silence. “Care to honor your end of the bargain?”

Ru walked over to a different tree, not far away, and took a seat beneath it. “Where to begin? You call yourself a chronicler—stop me if you've heard the tale: There exists in this world a weapon; sought after by the most ambitious and wicked, because whosoever wields it gains the power to bring a nation to its knees and destroy any who stand in their path.”

“Sometimes I forget just what time you came from.” said Kaiel. “I suppose the Rune Breaker legends were quite widespread in your time. They're fairly obscure now, outside the College. Master Turenton teaches them as an example of the poison myth.”

“Poison myth?”

“Proof that not all legends and stories are positive; a lesson to make the story spinners stop and think about what they're putting on paper beyond just what will make them coin. The Rune Breaker legends seem to have done nothing but drive the half-mad and disaffected to throw away their lives looking for the cursed thing; many of whom did gruesome deeds in the pursuit.”

A sneer came to Ru's face. “Heh. What do you know of the weapon?”

Kaiel raised an eyebrow and let his eyes fall on the pieces of scythe in the other man's hands. “Why? Are you looking for it?”

“I can assure you that I have no need to search for the Rune Breaker.”

It was the truth. Kaiel could tell. “Fine...” He searched his memory. “No one can agree on much of anything about the thing's origins. The prevalent tale is of a small nation during Draconic Control where the dragons separated mortals into peasants and aristocrats in order to use class grudges to keep them from uniting against their lords.

“A woman of noble birth was taken from her lover, a knight of some renown, and married off to a cruel warlord to foster an alliance. On their wedding night, she slew him with his own sword and presented it, still wet with his blood, to her love. The warlord's spirit dwelt in the sword, and over time, twisted the knight's heart, causing him to become obsessed with conquest. His self-made widow, he 'protected' by sealing her in a tower alone but for when he delivered food and drink, until she went mad and died of loneliness.

“The sword passed from hand to hand, thereafter, granting its wielder its military genius at the price of losing everything of the self but the desire to conquer.”

Ru didn't bother concealing his bemused expression. It was amazing what a few centuries could do to facts. “But that is only one tale, yes?”

“Of about a dozen that we know of.” Kaiel confirmed. “There's another that says that it came to be in the peace after the beginning of the world, when a shepherd found an iron flask with a demon bound inside. The shepherd was a clever man and tricked the demon to change his shape into a goad and locked him into it, promising that he could be free of that shape if he served whoever held the goad with his powers for one thousand years.”

He gave Ru a speculative look. “But why are you asking this? If you don't want this weapon—if it even existed—then what does it have to do at all with my question?”

A sharp smile came to the mage's face, though he didn't look up from reattaching the blade to the scythe's haft with some elementary manipulation of the little used power of elemental metal, 
ferif
.

“What if I told you that both stories were, in a way, true? Neither are the origin of the weapon, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen.” Kaiel was silent, looking at him, confused. This pleased Ru greatly, so he continued, hoping to exacerbate that condition.

“The woman was called Arethlana, an elven highborn for whom the dubious privilege the dragons heaped upon her wasn't enough. She commanded a bandit gang in secret, preying on her friends and family for profit. It was her lieutenant and lover who found the Rune Breaker, but loyalty made him bring her to it to strike the bargain.

“She killed half her gang as a test of the weapon's power, then turned it on her highborn husband before sending a black knight forth to slaughter her fellows that she might accumulate their holdings. She died when the dragons found out that she had tipped their precious balance between the classes. The Rune Breaker aided her not against three members of the Gold Nation.”

Ru purposefully left out how Arethlana had frittered away so much of his power on humiliating her enemies, or his part in 'failing' to protect her when the dragons came. By then he had suffered quite enough of her faux royal attitude and strange appetites and the pain of the link's punishment was far outweighed by his annoyance at her. He laughed through the agony as her little empire burned along with her. The Nation of Gold brooked no interference with their works.

“How...” Kaiel began. If Ru got that story from a book, he wanted to read it. But Ru kept speaking.

“The shepherd was also real. He was called by Eske Metredes and found the weapon in a cave while looking for a strayed kid. He was the first in this era, but the Rune Breaker comes from a time before your gods arrived on this world.”

Except for the dogmatic to the point of insanity, it was understood that the primary gods of Ere, the so-called Vishnari Pantheon, had not always been part of the world. Their own dogma, by and large, admitted that goblins and ogres and many other mortal races dwelt on Ere before the Pantheon brought humans and hailene to what for them was a new homeland and transformed some of their number into other races; elves, halflings, minotaurs, hengeyokai and the like.

That assertion didn't pique Kaiel's interest; it was the implication of it. Precious few artifacts existed from the time before the arrival of the Pantheon—Saint's Landing. If Ru knew something the College didn't, that knowledge would be worth a great deal to anyone.

Ru either didn't notice or didn't care as he recounted how Metredes took over the little valley he called home and ruled by fear up until he was poisoned by his own son, and there was no reason for Kaiel to even consider that Ru had taught the jealous young man all he knew about poisoning. Metredes too had swiftly become worthy enough for death that the pain of the link's punishment was worth it. The poison took the tiny king of a tiny valley swiftly, but painfully as every muscle seized and spasmed.

“But,” He concluded, “That story contains some accuracies that I was surprised to hear. The Rune Breaker does indeed think for itself and change form.”

“None of this explains why we're talking about those terrible, destructive legends when I wanted to know about the link you share with Taylin.” said Kaiel hotly. As intrigued as he was with the possibility of pre-Saint's Landing knowledge, being denied the answers to that other mystery grated on him.

“Because I am a terrible, destructive man.” Ru said, swinging the repaired scythe up to rest over one shoulder. The motion drew Kaiel's eye.

“The Rune Breaker... the scythe. That's what you've been trying to do? Make one?”

Ru barked a harsh laugh. “Don't be foolish, story spinner. You cannot 
create
 one such as the Rune Breaker. The scythe was called Grace, and it served me well for centuries until that bloated fool that preceded Miss Taylin caused me to lose it.”

Kaiel groaned, which turned into a beleaguered sigh. “Then what was the point?”

“Not as smart as even I gave you credit for.” the mage made a tsking sound. “I have told you everything and yet, you cannot make the connections. Of how Arethlana struck a bargain to be master of the Rune Breaker. Of how the weapon thinks and changes its form. And we have both agreed that it is terrible and destructive. Are you so dense that I must add that Arethlana, thinking herself very clever, is the one who bestowed upon the weapon the name 'Rune Breaker'?”