The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  It wasn’t until the sun had finally settled behind the horizon that I saw Lysone.

  I was surprised at first glance. I expected her to appear in a flash of lightning, or maybe step out of a pillar of flame, at the very least come strolling out of some fog. I hadn’t expected to see her, with the aura of power that surrounded her, trudging up the path with a backpack thrown over one shoulder, sweating and panting like the rest of us average Joes.

  Come to think of it, I’d expected to feel that wash of power long before I saw her. Instead, I didn’t feel a damn thing. Not so much as an inkling of the power I’d felt before.

  Curious.

  I watched her as she trudged up the hill, hopped the wall, and wandered out on the large, rocky outcropping. She took the bag off her shoulder and put it at her feet, sat down and took a bottle of water out of her bag. She took a few sips of the water and started pulling things out of her pack, laying them on the stone around her.

  Ritual magic, like what I was assuming she was about to do, took time and concentration. I figured my best course of action was to wait until she got into mid-mojo, unleash the swarm, and then hit her with everything I had in one hard, quick sucker punch. Hopefully, that’d be enough to put an end to all this nonsense.

  Lysone started the ritual as a massive moon the color of dried blood started to lift into the sky. She’d spent the better part of a half an hour prepping for it. From what I’d been able to see from where I sat, the stone sat at the center of it. There was a cross of some sort, or a compass, drawn on the rocks in red. She set bowls at each of the eight points, each of them containing what I assumed was some type of herb. From what I could piece together, or at least based on what I knew of magical theory, she’d light each in turn, using them to collect energy and direct it towards the center, towards the stone.

  She’d have to keep her focus throughout the course of the ritual, to be able to channel and control that much energy, regardless of how much power she had. If I hit her right around the time she lit the sixth or seventh bowl, that should go pretty far in ensuring that whatever chain reaction I set off was pretty spectacular. I’d probably want to ensure I wasn’t standing too close when such a thing went down, but one problem at a time.

  I watched her, hidden in the boughs of an oak tree a bit off the path, and opened up my senses, letting the spirit world come flooding in. Almost instantly, I was bombarded with the various strings of power she was pulling together, each one a bright green so unnatural in shade that it reminded me of toxic waste. I’d seen the way my magic worked and this was different, twisted. What I did was tap into the power of life, of growth. Lysone’s was a perversion of that, like she’d at one point had what I had, only it had been corrupted in a way that I couldn’t understand. That pretty much put to rest the idea that whatever it was she was working was good, compassionate, and kindly. This was the sort of color that went with sickness, madness, and disease.

  What surprised me, however, was her aura. The size of an aura was strictly based on how much of a connection a person had with the spirit world. Mine, for instance, probably radiated out from my body a few inches. Same thing for most humans with an innate connection to the spirit world or those capable of working magic. A werewolf, for instance, who was very closely tied to the spirit world, having two spirits and all, had auras radiated out a few feet. The Fae, their auras were damned near blinding.

  The way the aura moved and its colors were tied to a person’s mood, personality, and so on and so forth. Bottom line, you could tell a lot about a person from reading their aura.

  Lysone’s was near non-existent, barely more than an outline, which went completely counter to the power I had felt radiating off her earlier. There was no two ways around it. She was completely, utterly, and benignly human, which made absolutely not a bit of sense. On the plus side, the way her aura moved around her frame, twisting and whirling on itself, was a telltale sign of insanity, so at least I’d been right on that account.

  Lysone pulled the ropes of power together, twisting them into a single sphere of energy. As she did, she chanted in a language I didn’t know. From the few words and phrases I caught, it sounded Germanic. It had a music all its own, a lilting melody that helped her focus and pull the strands of energy in towards her. For someone with no real magical power of their own, she was doing a pretty good job of making it work.

  I waited until she lit the sixth bowl to step out from my hidey-hole. The concentration it took to maintain the spell was written on her face. I could’ve rode in on an elephant with a marching band accompaniment without her noticing I was there.

  I’d spent more than a few minutes thinking over how I’d break her concentration enough for the spell to go haywire and cause her as much physical pain as possible. Up until now, I didn’t think I could hurt her. The fact that she was every bit as much flesh and bone as I was, and just as vulnerable, caused a smile to spread out across my face that was so wide it almost hurt. At the same time, somewhere deep down, far away and distant, a touch of conscience drifted up, reminding me of how I’d felt after I’d killed Cash, how that was still hanging around me. I ignored it. I was going to give to her far worse than she gave to my friend. I was going to take that damned rock. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it once I got it, but that was the plan nonetheless.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the dandelion I’d picked. Dandelion, as it goes, only has a few real uses, and those are mostly associated with the root. Though, for what I had in mind, the roots weren’t going to do much for me. I needed the leaves. The leaves could be used for a few different things: summonings, divination, and the like. I needed them for their tie to the winds.

  I cut my hand with my pocketknife as I walked, letting the blood soak into the leaves and gathering up my intent. I waited until I’d hopped the wall, and tossed the leaves towards Lysone. In the spirit world, it looked like I’d tossed a handful of burning embers into the air. They drifted upwards and vanished a few feet away from me.

  A wind spirit, drawn by the magic I’d released and my intent, came swooping out of the sky, wings outstretched. It looked, at least to me, like a much smaller version of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of South American mythology. Granted, small was relative. This thing was at least ten feet long with a wingspan that was easily twice that.

  In the physical world, a gust of wind that was nearing hurricane force tore through the trees. Leaves, dirt, rocks, and just about anything that wasn’t nailed down were lifted into the air and thrown around with violent ferocity. This included the bowls that Lysone was using for her ritual. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if one of those little burning embers fell on a pile of dried leaves, then disregarded the thought every bit as quickly as it had come. Either way, imminent forest fire or not, the wind sufficed to break Lysone’s concentration and a shockwave of energy rippled out from the center of the circle, hitting me full on in the chest. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I figured it would be, more like getting hit in the center of the chest with a massive pillow. Though, when I looked down, I noticed that all the plants, moss, and trees within twenty yards had completely withered. Magic’s funny like that.

  The wind faded as quickly as it had come, leaving Lysone sitting on her knees in the middle of the outcropping. She didn’t so much as bother to turn around. She just sat there, hands palm down over her knees, head slightly lowered.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she asked, her voice quiet.

  “Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest. I figure, though, that it’s in my best interest to screw it all up.”

  Lysone stood up and turned towards me. In that instant, that wash of familiar, terrifying power came crashing into me. Her aura, which, until seconds ago, was nearly nonexistent suddenly grew exponentially and something in my head, something I hadn’t even realized until just now, clicked into place.

  Her power wasn’t hers. It was borrowed. Someone or something els
e was giving her mojo on loan. Not that it mattered, really. A borrowed gun can kill you just as dead.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, stalking towards me.

  “We’ve established that,” I said.

  “This is necessary,” she growled.

  I took a few steps backwards, the back of my knees hitting the small stone wall that separated the rocky outcropping from the rest of the trail.

  “If you’re referring to causing me bodily harm, it’s really not,” I said.

  “Oh, I will cause you harm,” she said, and her voice kicked down a notch, taking on an almost sultry purr. “I will cause you so much harm.”

  Chapter 36

  Lysone came at me, pure rage and malice in motion. This wasn’t the type of attack you’d associate with someone who, only a minute before, was working some serious magic despite having a complete lack of talent. This was unbridled fury given form.

  I tried to move, but I didn’t really have the coordination to get out of the way without tripping over my own two feet. All I really did was make a better target out of myself.

  Lysone hit me with a tackle that was on par with what I’d expect out of a pro-level linebacker, sending me tumbling over the small rock wall and to the concrete walking path behind it. I hit hard, scraping a good several inches of skin off my elbows and my back. She stepped over the wall after me, hair hanging in her face, and grabbed me by the throat, lifting me up without even the slightest bit of effort. Her hand was vise-like, shutting off the oxygen and blood to my brain. I started thrashing, my hands beating against her arm. If it hurt her in the slightest, she didn’t show it.

  “Did you really think you could take the key from me?” she growled.

  I replied with something that came out like “gurk.”

  Lysone slapped me with her free hand, and I felt a tooth shake loose.

  “That I would just let you take it from me, after all this time?”

  She slapped me again, on the opposite side of my face. My eye started swelling shut, a small cut over my eyebrow pouring blood down the side of my cheek. The stitched-together parts of my face had come undone, the thread snapping under the pure blunt force of each hit.

  “You poor, misguided, stupid little man,” she said, tossing me to the ground with a disappointed shake of her head. Tossed in this case meant being thrown for about thirty feet of skipping and bouncing across the walking trail that led up to the viewing area, just in case I had any skin left that she felt the need to relieve me of.

  I didn’t get up. The horizon was currently switching between horizontal and vertical at a dizzying pace. I could see her, with my still-open eye, stomping towards me, pure rage and bad intention drawn on the features of her face.

  For the second time in as many days, I was fighting for my life. Maybe the incident with Cash made it easier, but there wasn’t a whole lot of apprehension left in me when it came to causing someone bodily harm.

  Once I came to a stop, I jammed a hand into my bag, sucking in big gulping mouthfuls of air, and grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, and honestly, I didn’t care. I spit a mouthful of blood (and a molar) into my palm, focused a whole lot of bad intent towards whatever it was I was holding, and threw it directly into Lysone’s face when she got close. It took a moment, but when I realized what I’d hit her with, a small surge of hope ran over my nerves. I might have a dog in this fight after all.

  Oleander is a nasty, nasty plant. Sure, it’s pretty. Hell, the flowers even smell kind of nice. Like most things in nature, however, it has its unpleasantries, for lack of a better word. In this case, it was that every single part of the plant, from the roots to the pretty pink flowers, to the leaves and stems, were poisonous as all hell. Poisonous enough that there are urban legends about campers and boy scouts skewering their hot dogs with oleander sticks and keeling over dead. The symptoms included nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, seizures, comas, and well, death. Personally, I’d have been happy with just about any combination of those.

  Fortunately for me, my blood mixed with the herb amped up its magical properties, along with its toxicity. Oleander was one of those plants that, magically, can be used for good or ill, depending on the intent of the person using it. Since my intention was leaning towards the latter, there was a whole lot of hurt to be had.

  Lysone doubled over almost instantly, clutched her stomach and broke into one of the most mind-shattering displays of projectile vomiting it has ever been my displeasure to witness. Which, given my history with the sauce, was saying something.

  I got to my feet, still dizzy, and shuffled towards the outcropping and the runestone.

  Whatever power that Lysone had gotten her hands into was fighting off the effects of the oleander. She stood up, shook her head, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. It seemed like a minor inconvenience that, in the end, had only pissed her off.

  I was maybe ten feet from Lysone when she managed to get it together enough to lock her eyes on me. She held up one hand, flicked her wrist, and my feet left the ground. This time, when I landed, it was with an explosion of pain that can’t be put into words. My breath caught in my chest, pure liquid fire filling my lungs. I could taste more blood in the back of my throat. I bounced once, and Lysone directed my flight with her hand, slamming me into the ground and then sending me skidding over the ground again, over gravel and roots, until my shoulder came into direct contact with the trunk of a pine tree. There was a loud cracking, which I assumed was my collarbone shattering, and pain lanced through my neck and shoulder, running all the way down to my fingertips. Another motion of her hand and I was pulled back towards her, right across the ground.

  Lysone held me there, hovering an inch off the ground with nothing but a stare, and then tossed me out onto the outcropping. She knelt down, picked up my bag, calmly walked towards me and tossed it at my feet. I was only three or four feet at most from the stone, with an entire magical arsenal at my feet. All I could do was lay there, coughing up blood, with a shoulder that, now that I’d bothered to look at it, was crushed into a shape that wasn’t even remotely natural.

  “Go on,” she said. “Take the stone, take up arms, stop me.”

  I fought up to my hands and knees, trying to hold the arm with the busted shoulder as close to me as possible. Given that I couldn’t really move said arm that in and of itself was a challenge.

  “That’s it. Go on,” she said, her voice full of malicious amusement and dripping with arrogance. “Crawl.”

  I started to crawl forward and managed to make it about six inches before she brought her foot down across the back of my leg, snapping both bones above my ankle with her heel.

  I screamed. My eyes filled with tears, a supernova of pain exploding up my leg. I rolled over onto my side, doubling up into a fetal position.

  “Aw, did that hurt?” she asked, giggling.

  I reached for my ankle, a simple reflexive action meant to shield my newest wound. She brought her heel down again, this time on my hand, crushing it between her heel and the rock beneath it.

  This time, it didn’t even hurt. There was just a distant, throbbing cold sensation.

  Lysone knelt down beside me, putting her lips right next to my ear.

  “I told you. I told you you’d fail,” she whispered. “And you’ll die. It’s inevitable, but not immediate. First the girl, then your friend, the fighter, then your father. I’ll make you watch every one of them go before you.”

  I wanted to tell her she could do something that involved self-copulation and a chainsaw. Instead, I just grinned, a wide, toothy, bloody grin.

  Lysone was so caught up in her taunts that she didn’t hear what I heard.

  It was magical, that sound, the buzzing drone of thousands of sets of insectoid wings in flight.

  The swarm of yellow jackets poured out of the tree line, a cloud of pure, all natural, six-legged winged, living embodiments of malice with nothing on th
eir little insect minds but causing some poor, miserable bastard a whole lot of hurt. The yellow jackets poured towards Lysone, engulfing her in a black cloud. Within seconds, her screams mixed with the near constant hum of the yellow jackets’ wings. Hornets continued to blow past me for a good few seconds, replacing those that had died after stinging her. Already, a small pile of them had begun to form around her feet.

  Lysone thrashed, fighting against the swarm. She stumbled backwards, her screams choked off, and fell against the stone. She twitched a few times and finally went still.

  As much as I wanted to just lay my head against the stone, close my eyes, and sleep, die, slip into coma, something, I still needed to get the stone. The best I could do was use my one good leg and my elbow to crawl towards it.

  “Shaman!” Kari shouted from behind me.

  I rolled over just time to see Lysone slowly getting to her feet. A horde of yellow jackets, all dead, sloughed off of her and pattered against the ground. She was covered from head to toe in swollen, red welts, a few of them bleeding, giving her entire form a twisted, misshapen appearance. Already the wounds were vanishing, though she looked more than a little unsteady on her feet, which, while being nowhere near enough, was at least a small victory on my part.

  Kari was several yards behind her, running towards us, a vague outline against the trees. The massive shape of Canute loped along beside her. She was yelling something after my name, but I couldn’t make it out.

  I made a maddened dive for the stone, pushing off with my one semi-good leg at the same time that Lysone launched herself towards me. I fell on top of the stone, rolling to the side out of instinct, a split second before Lysone’s stompy foot would have found the back of my skull. Instead, she grabbed my hair, and rammed the back of my head into the stone. With that one impact, the pain went away, became so distant that it was nothing more than a memory. I saw another shape behind her, one that I could make out.