Rune Master (Dragon Speaker Series Book 3)

by Devin Hanson

  Moving carefully, afraid of shifting some precarious support and collapsing the building even further, she made her way to the closest wall. There was a narrow gap between a tipped over armoire and a stretch of lathe and plaster all folded in on itself, where she could see the cobbles outside.

  She took a minute to breathe the fresh air coming through the gap and collect her wits. The thunder of the cannon seemed to have stopped, though her ears were ringing so loudly she had to press a hand against the ground to verify.

  There was a stabbing pain in her side when she tried to move, particularly when she twisted her shoulders to the left. She probed it gently and winced at the grating sensation and the wave of nauseating pain that followed. At least one rib was broken, but as long as she refrained from energetic movement, it didn’t hurt too badly.

  Movement outside caught her eye and she flinched as boots hammered past. She abandoned the idea of calling for help. With the defenders scattered by the aerial barrage, the Salians had already overrun the barricade. She needed to get out of the collapsed building first of all, and then figure out how to get back to the Academy. Maybe someone there could do something about her ribs so she could keep fighting.

  The ringing in her ears was starting to subside. As far as she could tell, the street outside was empty. She tried shifting the armoire, but even in the best of health she would have lacked the strength to move it. Her attempts now were feeble and made it feel like someone was stabbing her repeatedly in the side with a hot knife.

  Her scale! She touched her belt pouch and was comforted by the hard outlines within. She had to start thinking like an alchemist if she was going to get out of the building alive. She wished she had the Speaker’s ability to craft Sayings to fit her needs. Getting out of the building would be simple.

  She took a closer look at the armoire and the rubble above it. There was a lot of timber that seemed to be leaning on the armoire, timber that seemed inextricably entwined with the rest of the ruin. Moving the armoire, while it might be possible with alchemy, could bring the whole place crashing down on her head.

  The lath and plaster, though, now that she took the time to look at it, wasn’t holding any weight on its own. Couldn’t, in fact, since it was just a woven mesh of thin wooden strips and packed with plaster to fill in the space between the supporting timbers. After a lifetime of living in houses of similar construction, it took her a moment to adjust her thinking. The lath wasn’t a wall. It was the easiest way through a wall.

  Once she started looking at the lath as her way out, things suddenly became obvious. She focused for a moment then said, “Irdo’at’lani.”

  A blast of air ripped through the lath and blasted the whole section of crumpled wall clear across the street. She threw up a shield and held her breath, but beyond a fresh cloud of dust from the plaster, the building didn’t shift or collapse any further.

  Meria climbed through the hole where the lath had been, whimpering as the movement caused her broken rib to stab pain through her. She was free of the building at last. After moving a couple steps away in case it decided it wanted to collapse again, she turned in a slow circle, trying to figure out where she was.

  The mad dash away from the airship’s cannon had disoriented her, but now she found she was in a part of the city that she was quite familiar with. Michael Esterforth’s workshop was only a few buildings away. She had been on this street many times as she went between the workshop and the Academy.

  She felt a wave of sadness when she thought of Michael and his monoplane. With Andronath destroyed, she wondered if he would ever get around to creating his business building monoplanes for people.

  The monoplane!

  Meria glanced at the sky, hardly daring to believe her own audacity. If she could get the monoplane into the air, assuming it wasn’t damaged or destroyed, she could wreak havoc among the airships. It was full dark now, and Maeis had yet to rise. The airships would never be able to hit her, not at the speeds the monoplane flew at.

  She glanced back toward the Academy, but she knew her mind was already made up. Limping a little and careful of her ribs, she made her way downhill. Away from the Academy and safety and toward Michael’s workshop and the possibilities of the monoplane.

  Chapter 28

  To the Skies

  Michael Esterforth’s shop was a fairly common type of building in Andronath. It was a large rectangle building with a skillion and lean-to roof. It embodied a need for covered space at a minimum expense, with zero concern for aesthetics.

  Meria let herself in the side door and lit an oil lamp with a whispered bit of alchemy. The shop was quiet and untouched by the Salian soldiers. In the center of the floor, the monoplane rested on a set of sawhorses, surrounded by Michael’s runing and metal fabrication tools.

  She set the lamp down on a workbench and gave the monoplane a cursory examination. It looked much the same as it had when Meria had last seen it. The engine cowling was in place, and everything was prepared for its next flight.

  Now, how to get the monoplane airborne? Previously, she had helped take the monoplane down to the fields outside Andronath where they could give the vehicle a running start. Once airborne and gliding, the pilot would ease the engine thrust open.

  That wouldn’t work this time. She doubted the Salians would let her drag the monoplane through the streets uncontested and offer to give her a push to get the glide started. No, she had to do something that was completely untested. Michael had theorized that the engine at full burn would produce enough thrust to get the monoplane airborne on its own.

  It had remained a theory because of the danger involved. The engine was hot, easily putting out enough heat to melt stone and kicking out enough force to then spray that molten stone all over the place. There was a time for safety, and there was a time for action. Meria doubted anyone would care if she melted a hole in Michael’s floor if she managed to drive off the airships.

  Still, she felt slightly guilty as she took the monoplane off the rear sawhorse and set it so it was pointing up into the sky. She braced the wings so it wouldn’t roll, then climbed gingerly into the pilot’s seat. Looking forward over the monoplane’s nose, she verified the monoplane was pointing at the ceiling.

  The roof of Michael’s shop was thin sheets of hammered tin nailed over the rafters. It was drafty and the workshop was freezing during the winter, but it also had almost no substance to it. Wood was dear in Andronath, and an alchemical tinkerer building a workshop with as little money as possible didn’t worry about making sure his rafters were thick enough to never fall in.

  In the middle of the roof where the rafters were thickest, they were still barely larger around than Meria’s wrists, and just strong enough to hold up the weight of the tin roof. Without giving herself too much time to think and realize how terrible her plan was, she slammed the throttle lever full open and squeezed her eyes shut.

  Michael’s calculations for the thrust of the monoplane had been less than perfect. Without any way to perform full-throttle tests on the engine while grounded, he had only the observations of the monoplane in flight. From his observations, he could infer that there was a lot of thrust, and since the monoplane didn’t weigh much, it seemed evident that the engine could, in fact, lift the monoplane from a standstill.

  Fire washed through the room, boiling across the floor and raging up the walls. If the monoplane had stayed in place for any length of time, the flagstone floor would have been melted down by the heat of the engine. The walls would have burned soon after, and Meria would have died quickly. But it wasn’t to be. With the engine opened up at full throttle, the monoplane sprang from its makeshift cradle and blew through the thin rafters, scattering tin roofing far and wide.

  Meria barely even felt the jerk as the monoplane broke through the roof. She finished her flinch and found she was hurtling upward into the sky. The monoplane’s acceleration crushed her backwards into the seat, sending waves of pain radiating out from her broken
rib.

  It had worked! She wanted to scream and dance and pump her fists in the air. Instead she held onto the control yoke for dear life and eased the throttle back until the wind wasn’t stinging tears from her eyes.

  She tilted the monoplane around to a level flight and found she was far above Andronath, so high up that she couldn’t make out which building had been Michael’s workshop. The airships floated below her like fat beetles skimming the surface of a pond. Without the light of Maeis, the night was dark. Sporadic clouds covered a good portion of the sky, blocking out most of the starlight. The airships seen from above were vague shapes, visible only by the way they eclipsed the fires burning in Andronath.

  She was airborne, but only had the vaguest idea of what she was going to do to destroy the airships. The balloons were probably the most vulnerable part, but they were made of many layers of rubberized canvas and would take a great deal of force of puncture. She could target the crews with alchemy, but that was an even worse idea than trying to burst the balloons.

  Meria cut her speed back even more until she was coasting then dipped down until she was flying along parallel to one of the balloons and got a good look at it. The whole thing was covered in a fine metal mesh, not thick enough to stop a projectile of any sort, but would make slashing the balloon impossible.

  If she were a character in a swashbuckling novel, she’d lean out with a sword and hack open the balloons in passing. Or know just the right alchemy to pop the balloon. But up close, the balloons looked incredibly durable, strong enough to turn away a glancing hit from a cannonball.

  There was no harm in trying though. Meria picked a spot on the balloon, focused, and cried, “Igan’anir!”

  She had to take one hand off the yoke to direct the blast of fire, and she had some difficulty aiming the blast and keeping the monoplane steady. The Saying ended, and she examined her handiwork. The canvas was scorched and blackened through several layers, and flaming rubber flickered fitfully around the lip of the burn.

  Meria had no idea how many layers the balloon was made of. She had burned through three or four in her first blast, it was a little difficult to tell, but there couldn’t be that many more. The canvas inside the burn seemed to be bulging outward, the gasses inside the balloon were pushing outward against the weakest part of the balloon.

  Meria took one hand off the yoke again, preparing to repeat her blast against the balloon when it burst. A sudden rush of gas caught the monoplane and flipped it like a toy. Meria grabbed the yoke again, her heart in her throat and tried to fight the uncontrolled spin. She didn’t know what she was doing. Andronath was visible below her in brief flashes as she spun, and each time the ground was closer and closer.

  Putting the fear from her mind, she listened to her inner ear and twisted the yoke against the spin of the monoplane. The monoplane responded sluggishly. Were the control surfaces damaged? No. The monoplane was straightening out, if slowly. She finally got the spin under control, but the monoplane was falling like a stone and the roofs of Andronath were rushing toward her at frightening speeds.

  She hauled back on the yoke and the monoplane tilted upward slowly before the wings suddenly caught the air. She leveled out of her screaming dive with only yards to spare. With her heart hammering in her throat, Meria increased her throttle a little until the monoplane was once again responding the way it was supposed to.

  Sudden light blinded her from above and she raised one arm to block it out and try and identify the source. After a moment the answer came to her. An airship had found her with a spotlight! She had the realization at the same moment cannon boomed. She flinched as a cannonball howled by just above her.

  Sudden fear gripped her and she slammed the throttle all the way open. The blast of acceleration pressed her back in the seat and she rode the monoplane up into the sky on a column of fire.

  After a few seconds, the blinding light of the searchlight vanished and Meria could see again. Feeling sheepish, she cut off the throttle and dropped back once more into a glide. Spotlights shone from all the airships now and they swept the skies trying to pick out her monoplane. In the smoke rising from Andronath, the beams of light seemed tangible, like solid bars of luminescent metal reaching out to the heavens.

  The airship she had attacked first caught her attention. The balloon she had popped had sagged down and was now hanging from the gondola. The remaining balloon was enough to keep the airship in the sky, but the airship’s captain had turned away from the city, unwilling to risk his craft with only a single balloon.

  It was working! There were still many more airships in the sky above Andronath, but she had reduced their number by one. It was going to be dangerous. If the spotlights picked her out, the airships would do their best to shoot her out of the sky. Unlike the airships, she didn’t have a backup balloon. If the monoplane took any damage, she was going to fall out of the sky like a stone.

  Belatedly, she realized she had launched from Michael’s workshop without first putting on a parachute. In the urgency and excitement of the moment, it hadn’t even occurred to her. Even so, the thought of retreating never once crossed her mind. Andronath was her city, and she would defend it to her last breath if she had to.

  Andrew held the shield over Jules and himself and tried to think of a way to get out of the trap he had walked into. Two Incantors waited for him to drop his shield and scores of soldiers threatened him besides.

  He had his shield up, so for the moment he was safe. He had a lot of vitae on him, two large scales and the small one around his neck, and Jules had the same amount with her. But even that huge amount of vitae wouldn’t last forever. If they kept him here until Trent showed up, the three Incantors could throw an almost unlimited amount of alchemy at his shield until it finally failed. Then he and Jules would die.

  “Andrew,” Jules said quietly, “what do we do?” Her voice was steady, but he could hear the effort behind it.

  Andrew frowned, concentrating. He was facing the same problem alchemists have always faced when fighting against each other. He needed the shield to protect himself, but he couldn’t attack his enemies while the shield was up.

  “How?” he asked the Incantor. Maybe if he could buy some time, he could figure something out, some way out of the trap.

  “It was easy,” Arlen laughed. “We heard your warden say she was going to fetch the Speaker, so we let her go and set our little surprise for you.”

  “The only surprise here is that you have the guts to fight us,” Jules replied bitingly. “Did Trent let you off your leash just for this?”

  “Lord Priah’s on the other side of the city,” the Incantor shrugged. “For some reason he thought the Speaker would be trying to flee. We sent a runner, but he won’t be here for a while. Don’t worry, though. You won’t survive that long.”

  Suddenly Andrew’s head was filled was the image of the same street he was on, but seen from above. With the image came an almost overwhelming wave of rage and the deepest, blackest, murderous hate. He looked upward just in time to see a rushing shape blot out the stars overhead.

  Wind gusted, carrying an overpowering reek of burnt cinnamon then a dragon crashed down into the street, crushing soldiers beneath its feet. Andrew focused on his shield, putting everything he had into it. The dragon was enormous. Durokosso had been the largest dragon he had seen, but this dragon was a third again as large. The street was wide enough for two oxcarts to pass abreast, but not nearly wide enough to fit the dragon. He had landed half on a building, half in the street. Under the dragon’s weight, the building crumpled like a child stomping on a sand castle.

  The dragon roared, a basso trumpet that thrummed deep within Andrew’s chest and deafened him. The dragon lashed his tail and obliterated a crockery shop, then lunged forward. The dragon’s head was the size of a wagon, and it smashed through the wall of the building over Andrew’s head.

  Over the ringing in his ears, Andrew heard a muffled scream suddenly cut off. The dragon pull
ed out of the building and spat Arlen onto the cobbles. The Incantor was stabbed through in a dozen places by the dragon’s teeth, but he was still alive. Andrew could make out the Incantor’s lips moving in the healing Saying.

  With casual power, the dragon stomped down on Arlen and the massively clawed foot crushed through the cobbles and several yards into the ground beneath.

  The soldiers rallied with heroic stupidity. Arrows glanced off the dragon’s scales harmlessly and swords rang on the dragon’s sides. The dragon belched a wash of flame and lashed its tail, killing a score of men. Andrew watched in perplexity as the soldiers attacked the dragon. Surely they knew it was futile, but they still fought.

  A man with a spear sprinted at the dragon and threw his full weight against the tip of the spear. Though the metal spearhead bent and the haft cracked under the impact, the dragon’s hide didn’t so much as dent under the blow. Quick as a snake, the dragon struck, snapping enormous jaws around the spearman before throwing its head back and bolting the man whole, armor and all.

  The soldiers attacked, but the dragon seemed preoccupied. It peered into buildings and down alleys, striking back at the soldiers in a sort of haphazard fashion.

  Abrupt fire raged across the street, great billowing surges of alchemical flames. The dragon spun, impossibly swift and agile for its size, and lunged. He blew through a building completely before spinning around again. Andrew saw the dragon’s mouth closed around the spherical shield of the second Incantor.

  For a few seconds, the dragon’s mouth was held open by the shield and Andrew could see the Incantor within it, his mouth opened in a scream of horror. Then the muscles in the dragon’s jaw bulged, the shield failed and the dragon’s jaw snapped shut. A shield could hold as long as the vitae powering it was available, but force on the shield translated back to the Incantor within and no human body could take thousands of pounds of pressure and remain intact.