Rune Song (Dragon Speaker Series Book 2)

by Devin Hanson

“Could something have happened to her?”

  “No, I would have felt that, I’m sure of it. She just got delayed or something. Dragons don’t have the best sense of time. She might have just found a sunny spot on a mountain and slept for a day or two.”

  “She always seems pretty focused when I’ve seen her. I can’t imagine her letting a few days just slip by.”

  “When I was helping her move her nest, I could have carved the kossarigan in a day but it took weeks because she was always flying off to hunt or sunbathe. Of course, I wasn’t in much of a hurry either, but she doesn’t have a human sense of time scale. Today is much like tomorrow unless something is there to focus on.”

  “I guess if I lived for thousands of years, things would seem a lot less urgent.”

  “She’ll show up eventually, I’m sure of it.”

  “It will not be long now,” Iria called, her voice muffled behind her sand mask, “If I remember right, there is a place up ahead we can use.”

  Romeda was rising, her blue light illuminating the dust cloud behind them like a beacon. Maeis was still high in the sky, giving them plenty of light to ride by. Two days into their desert ride and Andrew was starting to wish he had a mask of his own. The dust was ever-present and his spit was thick with it, his nose blocked by black conglomerations of mucus and dirt.

  The first day hadn’t been too bad, at least until he dismounted a few hours before noon and discovered his legs had locked into position, and bending them produced excruciating spikes of pain shooting up his spine. Today he had given up on being comfortable and simply hoped the aching tingle in his legs would finally turn into full-on numbness.

  Rajya had spotted the dust plume as they were getting ready for the night’s travels. Iria had spent a few minutes looking at the plume through a compact spyglass and announced they would continue their ride as planned. Andrew’s initial fear that the riders would catch up to them quickly proved to be unfounded. Their horses were fresh, cool, fed and well-watered. Their pursuers had been riding all night and all day to reach them. Even with two or three horses apiece, their mounts were exhausted.

  Iria kept their pace down to the same walk and canter, walk and canter from the day before despite the dust steadily coming closer. It took Andrew an inordinate amount of time before he realized Iria was only letting them canter where the sand under their horses’ hooves turned gravelly or compacted, giving their followers nothing to track them by.

  Andrew guessed it was roughly an hour after midnight when Iria pulled them off the ragged trail and into a narrow defile. The land had turned rocky as they traveled south, the sand slowly giving way to dark red sandstone cliffs, streaked with bands of ochre and yellow. The defile forked off the valley and led down into a basin crowded with spindly trees blanketed in thorns. A water hole, enlarged and defined by roughly-cut sandstone blocks, was shaded by an encircling growth of willows.

  Moving quickly now, Iria instructed them in tethering their horses where they could reach the water and then into a series of stretches that loosened the kinks from Andrew’s thighs and calves.

  “The riders will be on us soon,” the balai lieutenant said once Andrew could move without whimpering. “If you need to prepare, now is the time to do it.”

  “Any chance they’ll ride past us?” Jules asked, going into a set of her own stretches. Unlike the ones Iria had guided them through, these were clearly martial to Andrew’s eye. The motions were precise, and he knew just enough about sword fighting to recognize the widely spaced footings and twists of the core muscles as power moves, thrusts and parries that put the full strength of Jules’s body behind the blade in her hand. It hammered home how much he had to learn before he was really competent in a sword fight.

  Better to stick with what he was good at.

  He walked over to Iria. “I need a few minutes to set up and a good place where I can see everything that’s going on.” He looked around at the small forest of spiny trees. “Some place where I’ll be out of the way.”

  “Is this an alchemist thing?”

  “Sort of. I’ll do what I can to help in the fight, but to be completely honest, I have not used alchemy in battle much.”

  “You seemed to know what you were doing in the warehouse?” Iria’s voice was curious, her head tilted to one side slightly.

  “This is very different. This time I will have time to prepare.”

  “We face many men. I hope you will be able to fight well, or this night will end poorly for us.”

  “Right. Me too. I just need some guidance in a good place to sit.”

  Iria stared at him for a moment, the blank regard of her sand mask disconcerting. “Very well.” She led Andrew to a tall rock formation off to one side of where the defile opened up into the basin.

  “I was going to have Rajya here. It is the best ground for a bowman.” She slid her sand mask up onto the top of her head, giving Andrew a glimpse into the tightly controlled fear that lurked behind her eyes. “I give this vantage point to you, Speaker, because Rajya with her bow would not sway the outcome of the fight in any meaningful way. The Lady Vierra has much skill, but knives and swords will not bring us to victory today.”

  “How many do we face, Iria?”

  “Many. I did not say so before, because it would not have assisted us. I tell you now so you can prepare.”

  “Can we do it? Will we survive?”

  “If you have any pull among your tiny gods, now would be a good time to pray.” Iria flipped the sand mask back down over her face and slipped away in the moonlight.

  So much for inspiring confidence.

  Andrew wasn’t a religious man, not in any real sense. He had respect for the myriad gods of the land widely worshipped in Salia, but had never offered more than a token prayer during festivals. Instead, he heard his father’s voice, comforting him after festival fireworks had sent him in tears to hide behind his mother’s skirts. The gods are to be respected, Andrew, but not feared and certainly not relied upon. Above all, the gods help those most who help themselves.

  He had much to do to in preparation. The gods weren’t going to get him out of this. He had only his companions and himself to rely upon.

  Climbing the rock formation was difficult at first as Andrew delicately forced a path through the trees around the base, but once he got to the rock itself, it was easy to clamber to the top. The view was excellent. With the height the rock offered, he could clearly see the opening of the defile and the ground in front of it.

  Jules and Iria made their way to the defile and Jules turned back for a moment, spotted Andrew and waved. She seemed cheerful enough, but Andrew knew her well enough to see the tightness in her stride and the nerves in the way her hands rested on the pommels of her weapons. She was fully kitted out, Andrew saw, her loose traveling clothes overlaid with a riveted leather cuirass. Moonlight glinted off the metal bracers on her forearms and the greaves on her legs. She carried with her the runed blade, balanced with her revolver on the other hip. The revolver was something of a noble’s toy, gunpowder being far too expensive for most people to afford as it had to be imported from across the ocean to the west. The few times Andrew had seen her use it, it had proven to be a devastating weapon.

  Andrew put his attention back on his own preparations. He had the scale on its chain about his neck, but that reservoir of vitae was small, for emergencies. At his feet, he spread out a scrap of leather and laid the real weapon of his arsenal upon it, a heavy scale from Ava’s back, the size of his spread hand, hot with the latent power of the vitae stored within. On the open market in Andronath, the scale could have bought him a noble title with enough left over to buy a castle or two. He smiled slightly thinking of how his priorities had changed since meeting Ava. He was about to burn through a king’s ransom to protect his friends and the only concern he felt was wondering if he had enough vitae to do it.

  He didn’t need to touch the scale to draw the vitae, and in truth, any prolonged contact with it wou
ld quickly become uncomfortably hot. Merely having the scale within reach was enough, though he found it helped to be able to see the scale.

  As he had done before when demonstrating his ability to Milkin and the gathered alchemists, Andrew closed his eyes and slowly cleared his mind. He gathered up the threads of unease, the tremors of fear and the physical discomfort of his sore muscles and channeled them off into nothingness. He picked up the fragments of worry over Ava, the swirling muddle of confused feelings about Jules and folded them away. He swept the corners of his mind clear of the anger at the Incantors, the rage at Trent and the lingering sickness from seeing the murdered Rangers.

  Slowly, calmness welled up in him and the bits and pieces of emotion tangling his thoughts were stripped away until he felt like he was floating bodiless and at peace with the world. He was getting good at the meditation trick. Then he started piecing together threads of the dragon tongue. He bound the air into shields and gusts, hammered fire into spears and blasts, sculpted stone to shards and shrapnel.

  Andrew built the Sayings layer by layer, adding the twisting grammar and flowing nuances, the soaring commands and sibilant demands. Slowly, he unearthed patterns and synergies lurking within the Sayings, coaxed the patterns into rhyme and reason. He built the song by phrase and stanza, refrain and crescendo, until it hummed in his mind, filled his being.

  And at last, was ready to be brought forth.

  Iria crouched in the red shadow behind an upthrust spar of sandstone. Her breathing was deep and steady, her hands spread out on the ground in front of her, feeling the tremor of horses approach. There were many of them. She had not given Andrew an exact number, partly because she was not sure herself, but partly because she knew the exact number didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter how many there were because there were dozens of them, easily enough to overpower them all several times over.

  Or so they thought.

  Iria knew she was no easy mark, and Rajya, even wounded as she was, would bring many down with her. She glanced to the side, made out the slender shadow of the Lady Vierra behind her own rock, waiting as still as any balai, her strange weapons giving sharp corners to the softness of the shadow. Unknown to Iria were the abilities of her companions. She had glimpsed Jules fight in the warehouse and even from that brief moment knew Jules was a fighter equal to herself, even without the mysteries of her alchemy.

  And the Speaker was a complete unknown. She had feared she was making a grave mistake in her placement of Andrew on the rock overlook, but Jules had simply nodded a tight affirmation when Iria mentioned it to her. Jules knew what the Speaker was capable of, and Iria was comforted by her simple acceptance. The Lady was calm, the tightness in her posture a reflection only of the understood dangers in any fight, not the panicky fear of certain death. If the young Speaker was capable of relaxing Jules, maybe he had the power to turn this battle to a victory.

  Iria turned her head the other way and spotted Rajya. Iria had placed Rajya on a fold in the rock that would give her cover from other archers, but still left her close enough that she could join the fight after her arrows ran out, if they all survived that long.

  The tremors beneath her hands seemed to deepen as the riders found the defile and bunched up around it. They would be coming soon. The distant whicker of a horse floated up into the night and she heard their own horses shift in response.

  She almost missed the first of the attackers, she was so focused on the horses.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of motion, a shadow too deep to be natural that slid out of the defile and turned away from her, toward the place where Jules was hidden. She saw the gleam of moonlight on Jules’s eye as she tracked the man, waiting patiently until he was around the corner and out of sight of the defile before she struck.

  Iria heard the crunch of sand underfoot, the quiet hiss of a long blade clearing a scabbard, then the shadow that was Jules darted forward, the blue light of Romeda flashing down the length of her runed blade. There was a high silvery ping and the attacker’s sword blade spun to the sand, sheared in half midway down the blade. The man gave a choked gasp as Jules stepped free, graceful as a dancer, and he slumped to the ground. The Lady flicked her blade, clearing it of blood, and eased back into the shadows.

  Oh yes. The riders did not know what they were in for.

  A minute went by and the stamping and shuffling of the horses settled down. No further riders ventured into the basin and Iria assumed the single man had been a scout. If so, it would not take them long to realize he was not returning.

  After another minute, she heard footsteps and the clink of mail as a group walked down the defile with no attempt at stealth. These would be the forward party, a small skirmish force to test their defenses and push them back from their ambush positions. It wasn’t long before they came into view. Six men, one leading in chain mail, the rest in leathers. The two in the rear carried horse bows with arrows at half draw.

  Iria could only guess at the suffering the armored man’s mounts had gone through on the long gallop to catch them. The men looked weary, sore from the long gallop and tired from staying up for so many hours without rest. There weren’t many professions in Nas Shahr that called for frequent riding, and they had been riding hard for nearly twenty hours.

  A bowstring twanged behind Iria and one of the archers staggered backward, his throat decorated with fletchings. The other archer gasped, his eyes already tracking back to where Rajya was hidden in the rocks. They were a dozen paces from Iria, a long throw for a knife, too long for anything but a flesh wound.

  She burst out of her cover and covered half the distance before anyone reacted. The archer spun, arrowhead tracking toward Iria. She dove to the side, planted a shoulder in the sand and rolled back to her feet, the whip of the arrow passing by gave her little satisfaction. She hadn’t closed enough distance and two of the men were already turning toward her, weapons shining in the moonlight.

  Iria drew her scimitar and feinted toward the closest man, pivoting around to keep the second one from closing with her. The parry came late, more of a reflex than a schooled counter and Iria’s hopes for surviving the night rose sharply. This man wasn’t a Ranger, he probably wasn’t even a local militia guard, just a street thug with access to a horse. The Incantors were scraping the bottom of the barrel for this unplanned assault.

  The archer had another arrow nocked, and Iria danced to the side, keeping at least one of the two men attacking her blocking a clean shot. The thug swung his sword at her, a heavy weapon rusted in spots, probably effective as a threat, but not a weapon designed for this dirty desert fighting. Iria didn’t even bother to parry, just let the swing go by with a twist of her shoulders then slammed the pommel guard on her scimitar into the man’s throat.

  Another arrow whistled past from Rajya, going wide this time as the archer jumped out of its path. The moment’s distraction was all Iria needed. She slapped the next sword swing from the second thug aside and took his arm off at the elbow, her follow-through chopping deep into the man’s thigh. Then she was past, with nothing between her and the archer ten feet away. The archer was already drawing his next arrow back when Iria threw her knife. It skipped through the air and sank three inches deep in the man’s chest, knocking him off balance and ruining the draw. The arrow flopped away, spinning off into the desert. The archer had time to tug the knife out of his chest and draw a breath to scream, and then Iria hacked him down with a heavy two-handed blow of her scimitar.

  Motion caught her eye and she turned. Jules had brought down the other thug and was facing off against the armored man. He had skill to go with his expensive armor, and his curved sword kept Jules from closing. Even so, he was bleeding from a rent in his armor, a blow from Jules that had been partially deflected by the chain links.

  Iria moved to support the other woman, but she needn’t have bothered. Seeing she wasn’t going to be able to end the fight quickly, Jules drew the revolver at her sid
e, fired, and holstered the weapon again in one practiced flip of her wrist. A burst of gore and splintered bone erupted from the man’s back and he staggered as the shot echoed around the basin. The horses neighed in protest at the noise as he flopped forward on his face, his armor giving one last jingle before he lay still in the sand.

  Iria had never heard a gunshot before, and she flinched at the ear-shattered crack, then stared wide-eyed at the ruin of the man’s back. Jules walked over to her and grabbed her shoulder.

  “Are you okay?” the Lady Vierra stepped back, scanned Iria over and saw nothing worse than sand sticking to the blood on her clothing.

  “I am fine,” Iria said, touched at the other woman’s concern, “just a little surprised. It is very loud.”

  “Sorry.” Jules drew the revolver again, spun the cylinder out and plucked the spent shell free. “It is a lot louder when you are on the other end of the gun. I should have warned you.” She loaded a new cartridge in and flipped the cylinder shut.

  “It is very effective,” Iria said, nodding her head at the gun. “I am surprised you do not use it more.”

  Jules shook her head. “It’s loud and expensive and rarely as useful as you might think.”

  “Still, it worked quite well on him.” Iria turned toward the defile and lifted her sand mask for a moment, letting the night breeze cool the sweat on her face. Her ears were still recovering from the loudness of the gunshot, but she could hear the commotion at the head of the defile. “There will be more coming soon. They will not have missed that noise.”

  “It is rather distinctive,” Jules said with a grin.

  Iria turned to look at the rock where Andrew was sitting and had a hard time picking him out among the shadows. He appeared to be sitting, his eyes closed. “Is the Speaker still preparing? The next attack will be in force.”

  Jules looked over and shook her head. “He hasn’t prepared for something like this before. I’d be lying if I said I understood what he is doing, or knew how long it will take. If we can buy him the time he needs, he could bring this whole conflict to a swift resolution.”