Rune Master (Dragon Speaker Series Book 3)

by Devin Hanson

  The crunch came again, and Travis turned, trying to isolate where the sound was coming from. There was something… organic about the noise; it was too multi-tonal to come from distressed metal. It reminded him of the sound a distant branch might make breaking off under a heavy snow load.

  Peering into the dark beyond the shelves, Travis squinted his eyes, trying to make out details in the shadows. Moving carefully so he didn’t bark his shins on some unseen iron casting, Travis made his way behind the shelving, moving quietly so if the crunch came again he could hear it plainly.

  The shelves seemed to be endless. There were enormous canvas-shrouded shapes placed on the shelves, interspersed with crates and barrels of every description. Dusty ironmongery, tools and lumber was packed in between haphazardly. If there was any rhyme or reason to the storage, it was lost on Travis.

  Movement caught his eye and he paused, letting his eyes adjust further to the darkness. There was a huddled shape on the floor between two shelves and strange jerking movements were coming from it. The crunching came again, and Travis saw a hand come up, gripping something curved.

  An organic squishing noise followed, liquid-sounding and underscored by a tearing sound. Fabric or something.

  “There you are,” Trent’s voice came, and Travis started, glancing around to see where Trent was, except there was nobody in sight but the huddled figure on the floor. “I’ve missed this,” Trent continued, and Travis realized the figure was Trent, and he was talking to himself or whatever it was he squatted over.

  There was another tearing sound, followed by rhythmic chewing and a sigh of pleasure from Trent. Darkness was spreading across the floor and Travis belatedly identified it as blood.

  Abrupt fear surged through Travis. He had been observing Trent in a sort of clinical inquisitiveness, but now his mind put the pieces of what he was seeing together. His spine ran cold as Trent lifted one hand, grasping a hunk of flesh. Ribbons of tissue hung from it, and blood pattered to the floor.

  With evident relish, Trent tore another bite from the fistful of flesh, chewing noisily. Travis took an involuntary step back and bumped into the shelf behind him. Iron clanked dully as a tool shifted and Trent spun.

  Travis cried out and turned to run, fear consuming his mind.

  “Ban!” Trent shouted, and Travis slammed into an invisible barrier, hard as stone.

  Stars pulsed in Travis’ vision as he fell sprawling. Warm blood ran down his face from a split lip. Fear drove him to his feet and he frantically felt along the invisible wall blocking his path. It was seamless, mostly frictionless, and had no give to it at all. Footsteps sounded on the stone floor behind Travis and he sagged against the alchemical barrier.

  “Travis Bellwether.” Trent’s voice was rough, as if he had laryngitis or had spent the last few hours screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Tiny gods, I swear, I didn’t see anything!” Travis moaned. Some part of him hated himself for the panic that gripped him and muddled his thoughts. He forced himself to stand up straight, but couldn’t bring himself to meet Trent’s eyes.

  “Do you know what I do here, Travis?” Trent rasped.

  “No! Please, I don’t want to know.”

  “Look at me!” Trent screamed.

  Travis dragged his gaze up, saw Trent’s face surrounded by greasy strands of hair. His mouth and jaw were covered in blood and it dripped off the point of his chin. His eyes were wide open, staring at Travis, and there seemed to be a faint luminescence about them, the whites standing out more clearly than they should have in the dimness. In his hand, a bloody human heart was gripped with crushing force.

  “You think me a monster,” Trent continued in his normal rasping voice. Bitterness and anger twisted his words. “I do this for my father. Always he must have more power! Being a lord isn’t enough! He wants to rule the kingdom, Travis. So, he needs airships!” Trent laughed, baring his red-stained teeth in Travis’ face.

  “Airships have a cost.” The laughter abruptly dropped away, the anger replaced by a surge of grief. Tears welled in Trent’s eyes. “I have to pay the price!” he sobbed, “His only son, a twisted, scarred freak. I’m making my father his burned airships, but I’m doing it on my terms! In my way!”

  Travis shuddered, unable to tear his eyes away from Trent. The man was clearly insane. Emotions flitted over Trent’s face: wrenching anguish, blazing fury, twisted glee and crushing boredom, there and gone again.

  “What do I do with you?” Trent asked in a whisper. He giggled, tears running down his face and streaking the blood around his mouth. “My father values you for your brains, you know. But it isn’t the brain that holds the power. Oh no. The heart!” Trent’s voice rose to a triumphant bellow, his shattered voice cracking from the strain. “It’s the heart,” he whispered again, “and the intellect of the subject that provides the power. I could gain much power from you.”

  “I– I don’t know what you mean, my lord. I serve your father!”

  “That you do.” Trent abruptly turned away, hunching forward as he chewed another bite off the heart in his hand.

  Travis waited, frozen, but Trent seemed to have forgotten about him. Cautiously, Travis felt behind him and found the invisible barrier was gone. Moving as silently as he could, Travis inched away from Trent, his heart throbbing in his throat.

  Trent tore another bite from the heart, cackling as if he had just heard a funny joke.

  Travis couldn’t take it anymore. He sprinted away, leaving Trent in the shadowed halls of the shelves with his bloody feast. This time, no alchemy stopped him.

  “Relax,” Iria chided her companion. The constable had put together the surveillance team in a hurry, and instead of the veteran lawman she had expected, she had been paired up with Danny O’Malley, a redheaded teenager, still stringy with youth and twitchy with inexperience.

  They were holed up beneath a roof overhang with a clear view of the street below. The sky was cloudy and threatened rain. Danny spent most of his time staring fearfully at the sky, only glancing at the ground occasionally.

  “What are you looking for, anyway? Scared of lightning?”

  “Sorry, Mistress Mian.” He swallowed. “Aren’t you afeared of dragons?”

  Iria clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Where I come from, the dragons stay on the ground. But no dragon is going to spot us through that murk,” she pointed out reasonably. “And if a dragon was close enough to do so, you would not need to stare at the sky to see it.”

  Danny nodded reluctantly. “You’re right.”

  “Besides. The men we are looking out for are far more dangerous than a dragon.”

  “Cultists?”

  Iria sighed, irritated at the necessity of holding back information. The constable was an intelligent man and understood the necessity for secrecy, but Danny, for all his potential qualities, was just a kid. Stories of hunting Incantors through the streets of Ardhal in the companionship of a warden couldn’t help but escape his lips. Or worse, he’d panic and give away their position. The threat of murderous cultists was far more reasonable.

  “How many men do you know who have been killed by dragons?” she asked instead.

  “Uh, I dunno. Not many? Maybe two or three.”

  “Precisely. These cultists have killed over a hundred people in the last week, and those are only the ones we know of. Demonstrably, these cultists are far more dangerous than a dragon.”

  Danny didn’t have an answer to that, but he stopped looking up at the sky so often. Like most surveillance Iria had experienced, time seemed to move like cold molasses. The sky opened up and rain started coming down, first in fits and spurts, then settling in to a steady downpour that cut visibility to a bare hundred yards. Gusts of rain periodically shortened that distance even further, to where she could barely make out the street directly below them.

  They had come prepared for heavy weather with leather ponchos, but Iria quickly became miserably damp and cold. It wasn’t that she was un
familiar with rain. The monsoons in Nas Shahr poured down harder than this paltry sprinkle. But the monsoons were warm; this rain was frigid, despite it being nearly summer. Everything about the weather in Salia was unnatural. There was still snow on some of the mountain peaks!

  Drops made it past her poncho and ran down the back of her neck, making her shiver. Despite her discomfort, Iria found herself getting more alert. If she were on the run and trying to sneak past people on the watch for her, this is precisely the weather that she would do it in. Iria shifted her position slightly to get a better view of the servant’s entrance to the Old Hollow. There might not be a logical reason for it, but in her experience, people often went out a back entrance even when it was harder to make a run for it in a tight alley. There was something psychologically satisfying about sneaking out the rear.

  Movement! Iria reached out and squeezed Danny’s arm, making sure he was paying attention. The rear door eased open and a tall man in an oiled cloak slipped out. He paused, scanning the rooftops and alley for signs of anyone watching. Iria froze, despite the knowledge that the pouring rain made it impossible for the man to see her.

  After the space of a few deep breaths, the man beckoned inside the building and another five figures slipped out into the rain. Six, Iria thought frowning, far too many to attack. They might be able to kill one through surprise, two if they were really lucky, but attacking this many would be nothing short of suicide.

  Besides, they were supposed to watch only. Locating the Incantor’s bolt holes would go a long way toward killing all of them with minimal risk.

  The group huddled together in discussion briefly before setting off down the alley toward the street. They moved furtively, casting suspicious eyes up at the rooftops and all about. From her position in the shadowed eave, Iria watched them reach the mouth of the alley and split. Two went to the left, four to the right.

  The part of Ardhal where the Old Hollow was located was mostly new construction. Years ago, according to Danny, a fire had wiped out the surrounding blocks after an accident involving a crashing airship. The Old Hollow and the other buildings constructed over the ashes had a more regular layout rather than the twisting streets that followed the organic growth of a city.

  Because of this, Iria knew precisely where the groups were going, at least for the next block or two. Danny went to rise and she grabbed his arm, halting him before he could do more than get into a crouch.

  “Hold,” she hissed. “Use your head. Where will they be going next?”

  Danny paused then turned his head, looking across the roof down to the next street over. “There.”

  “Good lad. We will wait here where our cover is good. At night, movement is the easiest to see,” she explained. “The human eye is well-suited to picking out human forms, even in the rain. If we move to new cover now, it is likely our quarry will spot us.”

  The young lawman nodded in understanding and returned to the cover of the eave. From this angle, they didn’t have as good a view down into the street, but as Iria had pointed out, they didn’t have time to move. Within the minute, Iria heard the clatter of hobnails on cobbles, but their quarry was on the close side of the street and out of view.

  Gesturing for Danny to stay put, Iria crept up the slope of the roof in a crawl, keeping her head and shoulders below the peak until she could throw herself down and squirm up the last couple feet. The overlapping roof above cast a deep shadow that helped conceal her, but even so, she peeked slowly over the crest of the roof she was on. From this vantage, Iria could see most of the street, and a few of the figures they were following.

  One of them caught her eye: tall, burly, with an enormous bushy beard pushing out from under his hood. She recognized the figure from the description: Bircham Lameda. Iria heard Danny shift behind her, his boot grating on the roof tile, and she held up a hand, cautioning him to patience.

  Lameda was in discussion with the other robed and hooded figures, using his force of personality to sway the others to his decisions with a lot of looming and not-so-subtle threats. Eventually, an agreement was reached, or was forced upon the others. Lameda and a single other hooded figure continued down the street, while the other two doubled back and went in the opposite direction.

  Iria waited until the sound of their footfalls was obscured by the rain and eased back down the slope to Danny. “They split up. Quickly now, we must get down to the street to follow them.”

  She scrambled back up the roof and let herself slide down the rain-slick tiles, catching the lip of the roof with one hand as she went over and swung to the ground with barely a sound. Down the street thirty or forty yards, the group of four led by Lameda were still visible in the driving rain, if barely.

  A muffled curse came from above her and the distinct rattle of a tile broken free tumbling down the slope of the roof. Iria ducked under the overhang as Danny rolled off the roof, limbs flailing. He caught the over-hanging roof with a knee and yelped, then crashed to the cobbles.

  Iria darted forward and slapped a hand over his mouth before the stream of invectives could make it out. The lawman quieted under her hand, and she dragged him under the overhang, out of the rain.

  “What were you thinking?” she hissed, then shook her head. “No matter. Are you injured?”

  “Only my pride,” Danny groaned, rubbing his knee. “I’ll be sore in the morning.”

  Iria peered into the rain and could barely make out the blurred shapes of the figures walking away. They hadn’t heard Danny’s tumble. She considered leaving Danny behind, forcefully if necessary. These lawmen were worse than the local hire-a-day guards back in Nas Shahr. With some effort, she pulled her anger under control. As clumsy and inexperienced as the lawman was, he knew the city and she did not. She was not so desperate yet that she would chase Incantors through unknown streets alone.

  “Good. We must hurry to catch up. Do not run, but walk quickly without swinging your arms overmuch.”

  “Alright.”

  “Follow me. Move as I do.”

  Iria got up and, following her own instructions, started walking as fast as she could down the street, keeping her arms tight to her sides. Someone looking at them from a distance would only see a person walking. Without the obvious swinging strides and pumping arms of a runner, it was difficult to gauge distance and speed in the rain.

  At first, Iria was afraid the delay had lost the Incantors, but after a minute of speed walking, she caught sight of them through the rain. There were still four of them, with the distinctive figure of Lameda in the lead. She slowed her pace, but made the effort to close the distance until the Incantors were barely without shouting distance.

  If one of the Incantors turned back now, they would see the two of them following along. They were on the other side of the street, but someone in a suspicious frame of mind would assume they were being trailed.

  She eased up on her speed and let the Incantors gain a bit of distance on her again until they were just vague shapes ahead, then told Danny to fall back twenty paces and follow. That would keep the lawman out of sight and Iria knew from experience that most people didn’t feel threatened by a single short woman following them from a distance.

  The Incantors walked straight down the street for two blocks to the edge of the new development before splitting up again, this time without apparent discussion. After a moment of hesitation, Iria decided to follow the pair that didn’t include Lameda. There was something about the hulking man that discomfited her.

  Certain that they had been seen when the group split, Iria fell back and instructed Danny to take the lead. In the curving, maze-like streets of the old city, Danny would be better able to judge if they were being led into an ambush. At least in theory. Iria rather doubted the young lawman’s critical analysis abilities, but maybe she was judging him harshly because of the roof thing.

  It didn’t take long for Iria to realize their method of following the Incantors had become inadequate. The curving streets lacked
the long straight lines of sight that the new construction offered, and Iria found she had to move closer to Danny in order to keep him in view. The lawman, too, had to move closer to their quarry.

  A relatively straight section of the street gave Iria a clear view to Danny and the Incantors for the first time in several minutes. The rain had let up a little bit, increasing the visibility even more. There was something wrong, and it took Iria a few paces to put her finger on what was bothering her.

  There was only one Incantor ahead of Danny.

  “Danny!” she cried, “look out!” Abandoning the pretense of having nothing to do with the Incantors, Iria threw herself forward in a sprint. The cobbles were slick beneath her soft leather boots, and she wasn’t as swift as she wanted.

  Danny spun on his heel, looking back at Iria, his eyes wide with panic. There was a flash of light from the side. For a moment, Iria could clearly see Danny’s face, then thunder boomed and Danny was flung from his feet.

  Chapter 9

  Guild Politics

  The wind in Meria’s face was chilly despite the sun beating down. Below her, the figures of Michael and Amir were tiny, nearly lost in the expanse of waving grasses. She grinned and tilted the monoplane out of its tight, banking turn.

  She eased the lever controlling the engine’s thrust shut and the roar of flames behind her died out. The silence that replaced it was a little shocking; the only sounds were the faint whistle of wind over the wings and the beating of her heart.

  This was her third flight in the monoplane. Despite her earlier apprehensions, she found the experience exhilarating. As Michael had promised, flying the glider was simplicity itself. Landing was tricky, but the plains to the south of Andronath offered endless cushioned opportunity for a novice flyer such as herself. The added security of the parachute on her back now felt like a formality, but it was a precaution she heartily approved of.