A Girl and Her Monster (Rune Breaker) (4 page)

Ru paused in his ruminations on how exactly to ruin Taylin's former masters to gaze directly at her. The mounting blood-lust and cruelty in the link stopped and it stilled. Not blocked this time, but transformed into the dull buzz of consideration.

“Is that really what you wish, Ms. Taylin?” He asked. His tone had all the care of a hospitaller’s touch.

“Yes!” She said, anguished by the thought of what she'd been offered. “Anything is better than this. In fact, I wish you could do exactly that.”

He was no jinni, granting wishes wasn't his business, and she was not in the frame of mind to think through exactly what she was asking. But it was enough to count. It would be a massive drain, even on his considerable powers; but the return was in time. Time to plot and examine the link. To put his sorcerous genius to work, and to act as he pleased provided it was near enough to the cavern to avoid the retribution engine.

Just veiling his emotions in the link had taken him decades; and even then, he could only do it in short bursts. But with a thousand years... The former slave's reluctance toward the darker thoughts he'd come to expect of everyone who had ever taken up the link might not be so wasteful.

“As you wish, Miss Taylin.” He brought up his hands in a very specific gesture: first and middle fingers together, thumbs forward. He spoke only two words of invocation. With his vast power and skill it took nothing more than that to erect the appropriate spell array composed of the psychic energy,
psi
, and the void energy,
vox
. Maintaining it and keeping Taylin alive could come later. “Nightmare Syndrome.”

His robe grew a cloak as black as burnt wood and tattered like the mainsail of a ghost galleon. An invisible wind whipped it forward, causing it to stretch beyond it's apparent limits.

Taylin didn't notice until she was already surrounded by billowing folds of shadowy cloth.

“Ru? What are you doing? Ru?!” The cloth was everywhere, its noise canceling out all other sound and its fluttering bulk obscuring everything. It contracted close, too close. Something primal within her screamed and spurred her to action.

Flailing, she caught handful of cloth after handful of cloth. Tearing, ripping, casting aside. She lashed out with every ounce of her warrior's ferocity, and with every sheet of cloth she tore down, she stepped closer to its source.

It felt like eternity, but finally, she sensed a body near. And by now, she didn't care about the feelings or dignity of its owner. She lunged forth once more, shunting aside the cloak and finding Ru's face beyond it. Then she planted her fist into it.

Ru crumpled almost dutifully. But he didn't seem to fall that far. Had he been sitting down? Now that she looked, she was sitting too, with her back propped against the wall. There were no signs of cloth; not one torn edge. But she did see where one of the hounds had fallen. Its body was desiccated to a husk of brittle skin and hair, the dull, dirty white of bones and teeth exposed by drying and receding flesh.

It was then that her breath caught and she started choking. The air was close and stale, without a drop of humidity. Though her lungs filled, they burned at finding nothing of worth to extract from it.

Taylin had endured forty years of abuse and conditioning as well as more combat hours than she could remember. She had won her freedom with guile and a broken sword. She had faced the temptation of the greatest weapon in existence and resisted wielding it in anger. From her perspective, she had already cheated death twice that day and came out more healthy than she had ever been.

And now she was being killed by ancient, stale air.

“She loves flying.” said a voice that Taylin had never been able to put a face to. She was dreaming. Dreaming a dream she'd had many times before. It was always the same: a garden, blue skies, glass between the two, as clear as air.

The earthy smell of the place was so real, so familiar, as was the voice. It never spoke to her, but to someone else she couldn't see.

“And smart too. She can already read, write, and she's coming right along with sums.”

Fine brickwork made up the walkways between rows of carefully arranged plants. Some bore fruit; oranges and gathermelons that were wonderfully sticky-sweet. She picked one and tore into it, not minding the green juice that ran down her chin.

“She isn't just special in the way I intended. She's become my very clever girl.”

Then the voice was lost in a roar. The wind over an aerial troop ship at cruising speed. Chains bound her arms and there was stone pressing against her chest and stomach.

“Do your duty, Captain.” said a new voice. A cruel voice. One that hated her as much as the first one loved her. “This one has lost the right to wings. I see it as a mercy, seeing how ugly they are.” Then there was white-hot pain. And always the wind.

***

Taylin awakened, wracked with a terrible coughing fit that tore at her throat and sent her body into spasms. Unable to stop it, she rolled onto her belly and coughed up the dust from the stale, reeking air she'd taken into her lungs earlier.

But the wind she'd heard was real. A powerful wind had appeared in the room; not just the movement of air, but the movement of the fresh air she sorely needed. With it came a mild yellow light; brighter than the magical torches, but far less harsh.

After minutes of hyperventilating and ridding herself of dead air, Taylin cautiously settled onto her side and looked to see where the light came from.

Fifty feet above her head, where the curve of the dome was well shrouded in darkness, there was a gap as large as her head in the air, bounded by arcs of white lightning. Through that gap, she saw not the stone ceiling, but an azure sky and white wisps of clouds.

“What...” She wheezed and coughed again.

“Short range teleportaton, Miss Taylin.” Ru's rough voice said from somewhere to her right. “Held at the very moment wherein that space is in two locations at once.”

Taylin had no idea what that actually meant, but the moment she sighted him, lying flat on his back, directly beneath the hole in the air, only one thing was important. She scrambled to her feet and dropped her hand to her sword. “You tried...” She had to pause for breath, “To kill me.”

A sour feeling came into the link, yet another of his emotions she couldn't identify; possibly indignation. “I did not.”

She gripped the hilt of her only weapon and slipped into a stance that would maximize the effect of drawing and striking in the same motion. “Then why did I wake up choking?”

“Why am I rectifying that issue?” Ru replied, but they both knew the answer to that: he had to.

After a moment of silence, he exhaled sharply. “I attempted to work your will. To allow you to sleep for one thousand years. But an outside force intervened.”

There was no need for Taylin to voice the myriad questions that provoked. He picked them up directly from her mind.

“It is possible.” He explained, spurred by the incredulity he no doubt sensed. “With my power, I could sustain you, at the cost of a substantial drain upon myself. I placed you into a dreamless slumber and created the necessary spell structures to sustain your life. But as I said, an outside agency, a power even beyond my own lashed out at the world. I was forced to split my focus to prevent this chamber from collapsing beneath the onslaught...” The sensation of his hurt pride came through the link, “I succeeded, but was knocked unconscious in the effort.”

Slowly, Taylin digested this information. A glance above revealed that some places in the ceiling were now worn and crushed to mirror-smoothness. Those patches glittered like jewels in the chaotic light of the portal Ru continued to maintain.

“That doesn't explain why the air was so dead when I woke up.” She finally said, still unwilling to let go of her mistrust.

“Because that is what happens to the atmosphere in a sealed room over centuries with no one to maintain it, Miss Taylin. To say nothing of the rotting corpses.”

His words struck like a bolt of lightning. Centuries? That had to be a lie. The link didn't prevent that. But what did he stand to gain by it? Did that really matter? There was no way she'd been asleep for a thousand years.

Again, he skimmed the thoughts directly from her mind. “You are correct, Ms. Taylin. Between the power I expended preventing the chamber's collapse, and being incapacitated to the point that I couldn't regenerate said power, I would not have survived sustaining you for ten centuries.”

Taylin would have relaxed a bit, if not for the fact that he was still talking.

“When I regained my senses, I ended the spell on you; at which point, you struck me.” There was no recrimination or hurt at that, just informing her what happened. She could tell he didn't give a damn one way or the other, but for some reason, that made her feel worse.

And in spite of it all, she sensed an unmistakable ring of truth from him. Whether it was from the link, or her own instincts, she didn't know. She released her sword and heaved a sigh. “I thought you were attacking me. From now on, please—and this is a request, not an order—make sure I know what you're doing before you do something like that.” No apologies. She felt guilty for the link and bad to punching him, but he should have known better in the second case.

“I will make the effort, Miss Taylin.” Ru said, sitting up in a smooth, swift manner that no normal man could match.

She nodded. “Good. And don't... assume I'm giving you orders. I don't want to and I'd rather you stop trying to make me do it.”

He stood, brushing himself off dramatically. He did everything with at least a dose of overwrought. “You could order me to stop.” He pointed out, smugness and dark humor emanating from him. Then he turned his attention to the door. It was nearly surrounded by the glassy stone that resulted from a battle of his raw power against the unknown force.

“However, the cave you followed to this place was collapsed and fused. Unless your training or abilities include burrowing through eight hundred feet of solid stone, you will require my abilities.”

A huff of unhappy air erupted from Taylin and she bared her teeth at him in a way that made it clear that she wasn't smiling. “Stop. Just stop. This spell, it connects us. I understand that. But it doesn't force me to treat you like a slave, so I refuse to. Does it prevent you from helping me out of charity and camaraderie without an order?”

Ru grimaced at her continued insistence at this argument. “Do you have a camaraderie with your sword? Does the sword bound out on its own volition to strike your foes because it cares about you and wants to help? No, it cleaves because you wield it.”

Taylin sent him a lance of her own annoyance and folded her arms and looked around the chamber, her eyes finally falling on the portal high above. “Ru?”

“Yes, Miss Taylin?”

“Where does the other side of that portal lead?”

“It opens at ground level directly above the chamber; the shortest distance to fresh air I could locate.” He replied, looking up at it as well.

“And what happens if a person touches those edges?”

“The distortion would sunder their flesh where it touched the boundaries, tearing it apart on a basic level, such that there would not even be blood remaining.”

She chewed her lip as she came to a difficult decision. “That would be rather harmful to them.” Before Ru could decipher that remark, she was off, dashing atop the nearest rubble left over from Ru's awakening. It only offered her a few feet of elevation, but every little bit helped, even with her phenomenal strength.

Two steps and a leap propelled her upward toward the scintillating gap in the air.

Panic exploded in the back of her head and suddenly, the gap enlarged enough for her to pass cleanly through it. Her gambit had been absolutely correct. Tingling raced across her skin as the windy cold of the chamber was replaced by calm and warmth.

A moment later, she landed face down on a slight, grassy slope, surrounded by trees. Salt air teased her nose and a warm breeze lapped at her face. It was something out of a dream, or a memory; simply lying out in the grass beneath the sun. There was no sun in the mines, and no grass on the ships, and yet... there was a fond memory of both together...

From behind her came a sharp buzzing; like a thousand angry hornets trapped in a metal pail. It became higher pitched and more cacophonous until finally terminating in a muffled thunderclap. The portal closing perhaps? Ru was a tiny cyclone of anger and embarrassment that the link unerringly informed her was eight hundred feet directly below her.

A short fit of laughter overtook her as she got up on her knees into a sitting position. It wasn't a noise she was used to making, but it felt good. Slowly, she became aware of the world around her.

The mental blip that was Ru suddenly jumped eight hundred feet to be behind her with no accompanying sound or other sensation. “Ordering me to help is immoral, and yet manipulating and exploiting the link in other ways are not.” The growl in his voice faltered in his agitation..

Taylin wasn't listening. She was looking down the slope, to where it became sand before it disappeared into the bay. The bay that hadn't been there when the hounds chased her into the cave.

Very vividly, she remembered how the airships had docked against the face of a line of steep, ocean-side cliffs to send hunting and foraging parties out into the local marshes. She'd seen her chance and instigated the round of discipline that ultimately freed her. The flight that ended at the cave had gone on for five miles.

Five miles that were no longer there.

“Ru...” She said tentatively.

She didn't need to say more. Ru nodded his agreement. “The force that struck me while you slept was more than powerful enough to be responsible for this. As I said, it was vastly more powerful than even myself. We were fortunate to be on the edge of the burst. Had it been more direct, even I may not have survived.”

For a time, Taylin marveled at the might it must have taken to carve the bay from those high cliffs. But then something tickled at her logic. “Why didn't it kill all the trees? And the grass? Everything's so alive here, as if nothing's happened at all.”