This post is chapter fifty-two of my not-previously-published epic fantasy novel Broken Rule, which I'm serializing here on the Steem blockchain.
The story so far:
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
As Jonas and Arturo arrived at Castle Thornwood they could tell that something was seriously wrong. No soldiers manned the walls, and when they passed through the gates they saw that the keep had been cracked open like an egg. The courtyard was in disarray, as if there had been a battle, but no corpses were in evidence. Jonas's heart began to race. He had sent Rurik here to be safe. Where was he? What had happened? As they looked about in wonder they heard someone quietly crying behind one of the outbuildings. Jonas sprinted toward the sound. It was Rurik.
The boy knelt on a small patch of grass, between two corpses. When Jonas got closer he saw that they were the boy's mother and brother, clearly dead for several days. The boy had done his best to arrange the bodies with some dignity, but they were both bloody and broken. They had not died peacefully.
“Rurik,” said Jonas, his throat catching. He meant to say more, offer some words of comfort, but nothing would come. Rurik was startled at first, but then turned and ran to Jonas, hugging him with all the strength in his fragile little body. “What happened here, lad?” Jonas asked. He immediately regretted it. He should have taken more care to respect Rurik's mourning.
The boy rubbed his eyes and composed himself. From his expression, Jonas could see that he was past any shock he might have felt, but gripped by intense sadness. Every member of his family had now been slain. “Master, it was horrible," he said. "There were monsters. A giant, it must have been thirty feet tall. It just climbed up over the walls. All of the men from father's army, they just panicked and ran, and the giant stomped and smashed them. I told Cyril to hide in the cellar with me, but he said he was the duke now, and he had to be brave and lead the men. Mother must have stayed with him. I found them both together. There were other monsters, too. Goblins, I think. They searched everywhere. I know they came to the cellar. They would have got me, but I hid inside a chest and jammed the latch from inside, and they couldn't figure out how to open it. When I came out, everybody was gone. The giant and the goblins must have killed them all.”
“If the giant and the goblins killed them all,” said Arturo, “where are the bodies?”
“Dammit, man,” said Jonas. “He's just a boy, and he's lost his whole family. Give him some peace.” But Arturo was right. Cyril and the duchess seemed to be the only bodies here. Had the rest of the men fled? Surely at least a few of them must have fought. Where were they?
Jonas settled Rurik into one of the beds in the guard barracks and urged him to get some sleep. The two wizards explored the castle, surveying the destruction. They followed a trail of blood that seemed to end in a large pool. Jonas thought back to his first meeting with Arturo. “Someone must have been wounded, and then crawled over here to die. Can you use the blood to see what happened?”
“Yes, I should be able to. Fetch me some water from the well while I prepare the ritual.”
Arturo placed a bowl he had found in the kitchen on the ground and scraped up some of the dried blood to drop into it. He filled the bowl nearly to the brim with the water that Jonas brought from the well. Arturo grumbled about the amount of dirt in the water, but it would have to do. He began tapping the water, casting his spell to see the moment the dead man's spirit had left his body.
The vision began with the giant climbing over the castle wall, as the boy had said, although he hadn't described the monstrosity in detail. If anything, it was even more hideous that the goblins that had attacked them in the library. In some ways it seemed completely alien, especially when it used all three of its arms to climb, but occasionally a glint of intelligence could be seen in its malformed eyes. Somehow, that made it worse than if it was just some inhuman thing. Most of the defenders didn't even make an effort to fight the beast, but tried to flee at the very sight of it. The mass of humanity all trying to get through the doors of the gatehouse at once were easy pickings for the giant, who stomped and smashed them to bits. The giant picked up and threw a hay wagon, and that was what felled the man whose death they were observing. Jonas had guessed wrong about the details of his death, though. He had crawled and collapsed where the blood indicated, but he was still alive when the giant returned for him, with Orso the Fleshmender in tow.
Arturo became increasingly agitated as he saw Orso cast the spell that seemed to turn the man to a fleshy pink sludge that the giant absorbed into its skin. He was so startled that he almost broke the rhythm of the tapping required for the spell and nearly lost the vision, but he recovered in time. Orso and the giant didn't stop with one man. As the vision faded, they saw more and more of the soldiers that had been defending the castle absorbed into the giant, making it even larger.
“Most Holy,” said Arturo. “I don't believe it.”
“I do,” said Jonas. “After what I saw with the priest, and what I can do myself, I think I'd be ready to believe that magic was capable of anything now.”
“What can you do?”
“I can take down that monster, for one.”
With that, Jonas went to the walls of the castle and began expanding his will out through the stone. The walls, strengthened by his spells months ago when he was still in Gavril's service, resisted at first, but then began to soften and melt and combine into another Stone Woman. A giant replica of Suzana rose from the raw materials. Jonas had her reach her giant hand down. He motioned for Arturo to climb onto it.
“This is incredible,” gasped Arturo. “Where did you learn this? Is there another library?”
“No library. Just my own mind. Nicholas was wrong when he thought he could stamp out magic by destroying the books. The people that wrote those books had to think up their own spells. That's what I've been doing. It's more effective than I would have guessed.”
The Stone Woman lifted the two wizards high into the air, and they peeked out between her fingers, searching for signs of the giant that had destroyed Thornwood. Jonas knew little about tracking, but any fool would have been able to spot the tracks of the thing that started at the muddy shores of the moat. They left the remnants of the castle behind as the Stone Woman marched off along the giant's trail. It seemed to be heading for the river. Jonas hoped that Rurik would be all right when he woke up alone in the guard barracks.
Being held aloft over the Stone Woman's head was a dizzying, exhilarating experience. Suzana's long, slender fingers were reproduced on a vast scale, and Jonas and Arturo clung to them like tree trunks. She maintained an even, steady gait on her march. Her long legs multiplied the speed of a normal human tenfold, and the air rushed past the wizards like a deafening gale. After what seemed like hours, Arturo tugged on Jonas's sleeve and pointed. On the horizon they could just make out the giant, hunched down on the banks of the Redwater, drinking thirstily from the river.
As they got closer, Jonas was able to see the creature in detail. It was indeed huge, and heavily muscled, but it also appeared drawn and gaunt. If Jonas was hungry during his travels, how must that thing feel? It would need an entire granary's worth of food to keep itself nourished. Still, it was dangerous. It was much larger than they had seen in the vision. It must have absorbed most of the men from Thornwood. The giant seemed to match the Stone Woman in height. How many men had been killed to make this beast? A thousand? More? Would that many men have been at Thornwood? Perhaps the remnants of Gavril's army had returned there after fleeing Kubara. Could even a monster like they had seen defeat that many men? Perhaps if the men had been as disordered and panicked as they had seemed in the vision. The giant would only grow larger and more powerful as Orso worked his magic on the defeated, which would allow him to frighten and defeat even more men.
Jonas stopped the Stone Woman a mile from the river, where the giant was still drinking. It may have had trouble finding food, but it was at least getting its fill of water. Arturo looked at the ground far below. “Jonas, is your Stone Woman going to hold on to us while it fights the giant? I can't say I savor the idea of being knocked loose in the melee.”
Jonas shuddered. He remembered falling with his Stone Woman all too well. “I would prefer not. Falling from a great height is not something I recommend. In the final battle in Kubara, I held her ankle.”
“The giant had goblins with it when it attacked Thornwood. Would you risk being down so low, close to them?”
That hadn't occurred to Jonas before. “I need to maintain physical contact for my stone spells to work.”
“Why don't you just think up a new spell? I thought that was supposed to be your forte.”
Why didn't he think up a new spell? Was there something fundamental about stone magic that required physical contact? He wished he could simply ignore this aspect of his magic, but he had no idea how. Metal magic could be done at a distance, why not stone as well? Could he apply the principles of metal magic to his stone spells? They seemed so different. Were they different branches of magic, irreconcilable? Or was his brain simply unable to bridge the gap? No matter how he sliced it, physical contact with the stone seemed necessary. His will needed to spread out through stone and earth to manipulate it.
Through the earth? Would that work? With a lithe grace that belied her size, the Stone Woman bent down and set the two wizards on the ground. Jonas stepped away from her, leaving her frozen in position, a lifeless statue. He went to his hands and knees and stretched his senses out through the soil beneath him. Yes, there she was. Through the soil, he stretched his spell of control into the Stone Woman through her feet. She straightened up, her face a determined mask, ready for battle.
The Stone Woman strode forward, and the giant stood up and met her advance. As powerful as Jonas's magic was, the speed at which she could move was limited. When they had been striding across the landscape, or even when he had tryied to crush a single man like a bug in Kubara, it hadn't been an issue, but now they were fighting a creature that was both enormously strong and seemed to have all of the grace of a skilled combatant. The Stone Woman threw wild haymaker punches, and the giant easily dodged.
The giant threw punches of its own, but immediately regretted it. As slow as the Stone Woman was, she was made of solid stone, no matter how fluid and flexible Jonas's spell made her when he wanted her to move. The giant's knuckles were broken and bloodied by the force of its own attacks, but it was undeterred.
Trying a different tack, Jonas tried to grab the giant in the Stone Woman's arms. The image of the delicate Suzana wrestling a huge brute was comical, but mere muscles weren't providing her strength. She could crush anything made of flesh and bone. But still she was too slow, and the giant easily slipped out of her grasp. Unfortunately, the new tactic had given the giant an idea.
Using his tremendous strength, the giant slipped an arm between the Stone Woman's legs and hefted her up over his back. She was so heavy that his knees immediately buckled and he dropped her, but the damage was done. With her feet lifted from the ground, she was cut off from Jonas's magic, and she became lifeless stone. Immense, but brittle. She fell off the giant's back in the same pose she had left the ground and when she struck the earth the shock of impact broke her limbs off. The giant was weakened by the strain of lifting her, but not taken out of the fight. He grabbed one of her broken arms and hurled it across the river. He grabbed her shoulders with two of his hands and pounded against her head with the heel of his third, stressing the cracks in her neck until her head separated from her body. He hefted that and slammed it into the depths of the river.
As Jonas watched, shaken, the giant continued to break apart his Stone Woman. He tried using magic to reform her from the broken bits, but that only softened the stone and made it easier for the giant to rip her apart. Jonas watched in dismay as his greatest spell was defeated by raw, brute strength.
The giant wandered off upriver after the fight, nursing its bruises. Jonas and Arturo could just make out the goblins running after it, along with the taller form that must be Orso the Fleshmender. That chilled Jonas. With Orso to heal him, the giant wouldn't even have the bruises for long. Despondent, he walked down to the site of the battle, Arturo following behind him in respectful silence.
Jonas climbed up onto one of the Stone Woman's arms that the giant had left on the riverbank. Her long, delicate fingers were dipped into water. It would seem playful, if not for the fact that the arm was cracked off at the shoulder and the rest of the body nowhere nearby. As he sat on the arm in quiet contemplation, a small rowboat appeared from upstream, and the boatman started rowing toward him.