Rune mage

Chapter 51: deathly blows

The captain and his men kept to themselves.

Well, as much as they could since one of mine was with anyone who wandered. My men told our visitors tales of men being devoured by the traps. The sergeant told them to exaggerate where needed but to keep to the truth about the terrible things my magic could do.

I asked the woman and three boys to stay out of sight. The twins had no trouble with this but the younger one still ended up in my cot at night. He was terrified of the captain and his men, but since the lad didn't talk about things that scared him, I didn't ask. It had taken long enough to get him to read and count with me. I didn't want him to return to silence.

To help him feel safer while the men were there, I gave him a special charm that would hide him if he was scared. All he had to do was touch the charm halves together. He practiced around me, then around the twins.

Of course the twins wanted one. That was asking for them to cause trouble. So I gave each of them one with orders to use them only in an emergency. They were likely to use it in the future for harmless trouble, but accepted the charms now with maturity beyond their age.

I gave the woman one as well.

It spoke volumes about how uneasy I felt with these men that I was giving charms to keep my civilians safe inside my fort.

They ate our food, grumbling about the small servings.

They made messes and grumbled about having to clean up after themselves.

And they ignored warnings about where they could travel.

Right up until the fort itself stopped them. I had laid down some runes that would allow me to make certain areas more secure...and then had forgotten about them. One of the things I did on the nights when I couldn't sleep and my men had been leaving or dying. I wasn't even sure when I had laid them down, or how I had laid my intent for the magic to follow, but when someone not wearing one of my charms approached the waste area, they found they could not move forward.

As though my ability to stick people to my webs had been repurposed.

So the men grumbled about invisible walls.

When I felt the enemy army touch my land, it was almost a relief. I could show these men that we could hold the pass and they would leave.

I took some food handed to me by the boy and alerted the fort, attack imminent. My men gathered to their designated stations.

The captain followed me, while his men went to the battlement to stand in the gaps between my men. There were ten of us, so no one stood close to each other.

Usually there would be illusions of others standing as well. But I had not returned those to power. It was beginning to itch, holding those runes from the power they were accustomed to.

"See? This is the an army and you have thirty men to hold the pass!" The captain said as we watched the army spill between spires of sharp almost white rocks.

There were indeed thousands. When they were almost all on my lands, I gave the runes a brush of power to send out the message, repeated through runes that cover the land: leave or die.

The mages that were in the army all reached for their power at once.

And all died before they could do more than gasp. I had their power now, and fed it neatly into the runes that were already weakening the army, draining their life away without their notice.

"That's it?" The captain scoffed. "You send them a spooky message and hope they flee?"

A few had fled. I didn't point it out.