Children of the Rune: Winterer

Chapter 6

The Chase

“Did you lose him?”

The chaos around the manor was coming under control, though not in the way Yulken Jineman would have liked. The soldiers, having lost their leader, fell one after the other to the attackers. There were less than a hundred left standing now, and only half of them were really putting up a fight.

“I asked you if you found him!”

Vlado Jineman had summoned Jhongnal, the archmage, as soon as his brother had escaped from right under his nose. He had the mage send a signal to the scouts that had been positioned at the borders of the fields in advance.

Jhongnal was following Prince-Elector Khan’s orders to participate in this vendetta, but he didn’t like Vlado very much. He didn’t hate the man, either—put more accurately, he did not think that Vlado deserved to order him around. Jhongnal was in charge of all the mages of Prince-Elector Khan, but he could not disobey his master, who had commanded him to aid Vlado.

The scouts quickly moved to block all paths out of Jineman’s territory. A considerable time had passed after that, but there was no news of Yulken or Tulkh. The most they could have done was blink away, but they wouldn’t have gone far. The scouts had several pouches of Hinden’s Powder—a mixture that would detect anything imbued with magic after it was thrown into the air. Yulken and his mage could not have escaped notice, even if they were using magic to hide from sight.

Vlado was angry, but Jhongnal was also upset. Not only was he being forced to submit to a lesser man, but if this lesser man thought him useless, it would damage his pride even more. After hearing a report from the scouts, Vlado turned around with a frown on his face.

Jhongnal felt something boiling up within him and said on impulse, “Leave it to me. I will use Quirre’s Eighty Eyes for you.” His tone suggested that he was doing Vlado a massive favor by using a powerful spell the man did not request, and Vlado understood it.

Instead of being indignant, Vlado grinned back. “I would appreciate that.”

Simple spells had been around for a very long time and were named based on their functionality. More powerful, modified spells, however, were often named after their maker. Dagnes Quirre was a man who had dedicated his life to magic that would allow him to see far and peer into secret places. Eighty Eyes was the second-most powerful among the spells of his creation. It had a frightening level of accuracy and could spot a needle in a haystack within a radius of half a day’s travel.

While Vlado and the soldiers finished off the stragglers, Jhongnal prepared to cast the spell. A magic circle and runes were drawn with a moonlight-imbued slate pencil, the circle measuring about six paces across. Inside were crammed dozens of overlapping circles, runes, and spell-related words.

Jhongnal sat on the ground with his legs crossed in the center of the circle, where a triangle had been traced out, and slowly began making hand seals. The soldiers backed away so as not to hinder him, but it was rare to see an archmage cast such a complicated spell, and most of them looked on curiously.

One.

His finger drew out a horizontal circle in the air, then touched the ground.

Two.

He uttered three short words and touched his palms together.

Three.

He slowly raised his hands, then moved them away from each other.

Embers flew from the runes drawn in slate pencil every time a hand seal was completed. Soon all of them began to burn, and the space inside the circle lit up.

A yellow light fell on Jhongnal’s closed eyes. When he performed the final hand seal, with which he covered his eyes with both hands and opened them up again, a ring of light appeared around him, then expanded outward at an incredible speed. It moved beyond the circle, past where the soldiers were standing, and spread to the fields beyond before vanishing from view.

They thought they felt a brief wave of light passing over them. It was there and gone before they were sure what it was. Yevgnen and Boris couldn’t even guess. What happened next was less obscure. The air in front of them rippled like a watery surface, then ejected two human figures. It seemed as though they’d come out of a mirror.

Yevgnen shouted, “Father!” His tone changed slightly. “Wait... What happened?”

Yulken was conscious, but he couldn’t walk. Tulkh had used healing magic on him several times, to no effect. The black sword Haghrun, which Vlado had stabbed Yulken with, possessed a powerful poison that prevented healing. That was how, despite its relatively blunt blade, it was considered one of the great swords.

Tulkh was the mage of House Jineman—and the steward as well—but he had never spoken much with the young sons. He only discussed everything with his master, Yulken, which caused the boys to have a reticent and almost treacherous impression of him.

Tulkh bowed politely to Yevgnen, the eldest son of the family, and said in a low voice, “He is injured.”

“Did you heal him?”

It wasn’t surprising that Yevgnen could not understand what was happening. Tulkh did not possess any destructive spells, but he was second to none when it came to recovery spells. He shook his head unemotionally.

“It was no use.”

Boris approached his father. Yulken was leaning on Tulkh’s shoulder, gazing at both sons without saying a word. His face hardened.

Tulkh spoke in his stead. “Young Master Yevgnen, why have you not left yet?”

Yevgnen bit his lip but said nothing. He knew better than anyone that speaking to his father was no use.

Tulkh gazed at Yulken’s face again and seemed to read in it the question he wanted to ask. “Did something strange happen while you were here?”

“We were attacked by a monster, but Yevgnen killed it with Winterer.” It was Boris who had responded. Knowing that his brother was being rebuked, he quickly tried to explain how well he had done. “If it hadn’t been for him, I would be dead.”

Tulkh glanced behind the young masters at the corpse, which resembled a torn bag of leather, as well as the mucus around it. He didn’t seem all that interested. “Did anything else happen? Anything magical, for instance…?”

“We saw a flash of bright light traveling from the direction of the manor. It vanished immediately,” Yevgnen said. He was not aware of the import of his words, but he was taken aback when Tulkh, who seldom displayed emotion, rapidly went pale. “What was it? Was it something bad?”

Yevgnen found himself taking Boris’ hand and pulling him close. Tulkh turned his head and spoke to Yulken.

“My lord, I would guess that one of Quirre’s Eyes has been activated. Jhongnal should be capable of casting Quirre’s Eighty Eyes. They saw a bright light, which meant their location had already been compromised. We, however, were on the move, and it’s uncertain where they think we are.”

Even Boris understood this time.

Yevgnen bit his lip. “What must we do?”

Tulkh laid Yulken on the ground and used another healing spell instead of replying. He muttered two runes silently to himself, and no other complicated steps were necessary. Yulken’s breathing soon became a little less labored. By the time Tulkh spoke, Boris’ eyes were so wide that it was like he was trying to identify individual water molecules in the damp air.

“We must wish for the best.”

Yevgnen knew what this meant. There was no hope. His brother, too, was no fool.

The scowl on Vlado’s face shifted into a smile. He’d believed he knew his brother well, but he had to admit there was plenty he hadn’t foreseen. Surprisingly, Yulken had been powerful enough to protect the declining House of Jineman.

The decline had been an automatic result of the slow ruination of Prince-Elector Katsya, whom they had committed to serving, and not any fault of Yulken’s. A house that went down this path would never recover unless the superior house they served experienced a resurgence.

The fact that Yulken was strong meant that he hadn’t shifted allegiances despite the situation. It was easy to see from Vlado’s own experiences how lowly a thing it was to betray one’s master and change loyalty to a different house. Because he had betrayed the prince-elector he had served in the past, he had been forced to bear a seemingly endless number of insults and disgusting transactions before winning Prince-Elector Khan’s trust. It had been so painful that he wondered in hindsight whether it would have been a better choice to choose a slow collapse with the prince-elector his house served.

The impulse to try something new and experience a rebirth as the house slowly fell apart—that was an incredibly strong impulse, and something one could sell one’s soul for. But his brother had withstood it and refused to change. Yulken was not to be underestimated.

“Emera Lake…” he muttered quietly to himself as he raced along with hundreds of soldiers. It was a chilling name he’d put out of his mind, and the faint shiver that he felt in his lips soon vanished. It had long inspired fear in the people of the Longgord Fields, and it was a taboo location for the brothers. He could still remember clearly the pretty, cheerful Yenichka tearing her clothes apart like an animal, her eyes red and stark raving mad.

Vlado gave an involuntary shudder. That death really hadn’t been necessary. His sister had died in her beautiful years. Vlado was old now, and no longer the ugly, weak, and childish younger brother that would sneak up on her and cover her eyes.

Yenichka had been the one person that the brothers—who even from a young age had fought often over the smallest things—had both loved. She was the child with golden eyes who loved reed flowers and bird feathers; the mischievous girl who had hidden in a wardrobe to prank her brothers, only to fall asleep inside; and the sister who had grown up to be refreshing and lovely as spring.

That was why Vlado and Yulken could not forgive each other. She had searched Emera Lake for her fiancé, fooled into it by her younger brother, and died by her older brother’s hand. She was a flower that had died before bloom, and before she’d had a chance to start her own family—and how she’d loved babies!

That is your fault.

If she could come back to life, which one would she blame more?

“We’re almost there!”

Vlado raised his hand, stopping his men. They formed a semicircle facing forward, and the soldiers began searching the brush. Those armed with bows waited, their arrows nocked.

I will kill my brother, regardless of whom he did it for. His brother had been the reason Vlado had endured so much humiliation, and he would kill that man.

“Over here! I see footprints!”

The area around Emera Lake had degenerated into a swamp long ago, and mud was everywhere. Any ordinary person was bound to leave footprints, but if his brother was here, then so was Tulkh—and the mage would make sure no tracks remained. Vlado told himself that only his nephews were to be found here.

“Narrow the circle and continue searching!”

Yevgnen and Boris were his only nephews, and Vlado had no wife or children of his own. If at least one of the boys had been a girl, and if that girl had resembled Yenichka even a little bit, he thought he might have had second thoughts. But his nephews did not resemble her—they had none of her golden color, not in their eyes, not in their hair. He felt no pity for them. The tiny wrinkles around his yellow eyes twitched, apparently with emotion.

I’ll make you cover your eyes and run at their screams. I’ll kill them and make you race into my sight!

The southern part of the lake was a broad, muddy area, and the soldiers slowly closed in from the north, east, and west. Vlado soon caught sight of the lake. Dead trees were tangled, white and black, as if they were alive. Milky-white oil floated on the surface of the lake, a symbol of all that had died there. That was the lake that he remembered. In order to have a better look at it as he approached—a place he would never return to again—he requested light from the archmage.

A powerful ball of light emerged, seemingly from the lake itself, flooding their surroundings with something close to daylight. It was so bright that he could even see the winged insects buzzing around over the brush within forty paces in every direction. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were eager to find something that moved.

“The first to locate them and give a shout will be paid a thousand elsos!”

It didn’t take long for the first shout to come, but it wasn’t the sort Vlado was expecting. It wasn’t a single voice, either. Screams tore through the air once more.