Celtic Runes, Laddy

Seeing that she was in no immediate danger, Kallist dived into his pack. Leaving his broadsword momentarily untouched, lying half-covered by the hardened sewage, he pulled from the satchel one of the mechanized crossbows they’d taken from their rather ineffective captors.

Clutching the weapon in his left hand, Kallist slipped a bolt from the small quiver. Even as he placed it in the groove, his thumb traced a rune in the air above the projectile’s steel head. The shape took on a substance of its own, hovering in the air above the bolt for two full heartbeats before it faded away into the rain.

For long seconds Kallist aimed, literally holding his breath. If he missed, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to repeat the spell. Worse, should his bolt pass through the shambler and hit the angel …

The beast turned its back, and Kallist squeezed the trigger, exhaling slowly. The crossbow bucked with a twang, hummed as its enchanted gears ratcheted the cord back to receive another bolt. And the projectile itself flashed through the air to sink, without the slightest visible effect, into the living muck.

Again Kallist held his breath. A better mage could have targeted the spell directly, without the need for the bolt to carry it, but Kallist had barely managed the magic at all. Had he somehow bollixed it up? Had the bolt passed straight through, without striking anything solid? Would it even work on a creature without organs or muscles, bone or blood?

So determined was his stare, his reluctance even to blink that his vision blurred with strain and rainwater. Thus, when his enchantment did begin to take hold, he almost missed it. So gradually that it could easily have been his imagination or a trick of the rain-bent light, the shambler’s movements slowed. Each step grew more ponderous than the last, and the beast began to teeter on the verge of collapse as its feet struggled to keep up with its forward momentum.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 4