The masked witches

TEN

As it thumped back down to the ground, the ice troll grabbed Jhesrhi s other arm, immobilizing it as well. She cried out in dread and revulsion. The creature opened its reeking mouth wide and lifted her toward its glistening, crooked fangs.

With a thought, she brought the fire that was a part of her leaping forth to cloak her body. The troll howled and flung her away.

Foes were still pressing close on either side. Keenly aware of the danger they represented, full of sheer loathing at their proximity, at the possibility that they too might touch her, she told the wind that still hovered close to her to whisk her back up into the air.

It tried. Her feet left the ground. But a mesh of thick gluey strands like a giant spider web appeared on top of her to stick her to the earth. The wind strained but couldn t break the adhesion.

Sneering, she called forth her flame once more, for as every apprentice knew, that was the counter to such a trap. But the mesh didn t burn.

But at least fire could protect her from the ring of foes that were about to strike at her from every side. Crying a word of power, and straining to shift her entangled staff sufficiently to write a rune on the air, she hurled flame in all directions.

The blast threw some of her assailants off their feet and sent others reeling backward, burning and screaming. But one remained: a scaly, reddish, long-eared thing that only looked a little singed. Leering, it reached to claw her through the mesh.

Suddenly the beast staggered and fell to one knee as Vandar drove his sword into its back. He hacked repeatedly at its neck, and with the third cut, the lump of a head with its wide fanged mouth and round yellow eyes fell off.

Vandar sawed at the mesh, and the red sword parted the sticky cables easily. Jhesrhi rattled off a counterspell and finished what the blade had begun. The net vanished.

Flinging drops of blood and pale ichor off his weapon, Vandar slashed it through the air to indicate the battlements. Kill! he snarled. Maybe, with his rage possessing him, that was as much speech as he could manage.

In any case, it was enough. She understood what he wanted to convey. Despite the attackers best efforts, there were too many undead up there. Masked, cloaked durthans were summoning translucent telthor wolves and bears. Nar demonbinders were drawing fiends from talismanic disks of iron, brass, and silver. There were even a couple of Raumvirans or what she suspected to be Raumvirans with magic leaping and sparking between their fingers. Insectlike mechanical creatures crouched on their shoulders and at their feet.

Vandar was right: Such creatures couldn t be allowed to work their magic without interference. Hoping that she was casting at the same magus who d dropped the mesh on top of her, Jhesrhi hurled flame at the battlements. Meanwhile, Vandar and two of his brothers surrounded her to shield her from enemies on the ground.

The vrock dived, then beat its charcoal-colored wings that glinted an odd magenta color when they caught Amaunator s light exactly right. Climbing once more, it wheeled toward Cera, Aoth, and Jet.

Beneath it, flame leaped forth seemingly from nowhere to shroud Jhesrhi s willowy body from head to toe. The ice troll that had been about to bite her roared and flung her away instead.

Cera was glad to see that, because she and her companions wouldn t be able to immediately help the elementalist. The vulture demon meant to intercept them, and they were going to have to deal with it first.

Cera asked the Keeper for strength and swung her weapon in an arc to point at the vrock. A flying, glowing mace appeared and bashed at the creature s head. Aoth pointed his spear and rattled off words of power, and a shrill whine covered the roar of battle for a heartbeat or so. Even though the noise was prodigiously loud, it somehow didn t hurt Cera s ears, but it slammed the vulture demon lower and made it flail like someone had stuck a sword in it.

Jet instantly furled his wings and dived. Astride his back, Cera couldn t see everything that happened next, but she felt the thump as the griffon s eagle talons stabbed into the demon, then felt the muscles in his hindquarters working as the leonine hind feet raked and raked and raked.

As the griffon clung to the tanar ri in his attack, they plummeted together. Though Cera trusted him, she gasped when it looked like they were going to crash down among the frenzied combatants below. But with a sudden heaving motion, Jet flung the vrock off his talons, extended his wings with a snap, and leveled off. Cera slumped and closed her eyes in relief just for an instant. When she opened them again, the air was gray with some sort of dust.

In another heartbeat, the wind Jhesrhi had conjured before the berserkers and stag warriors advanced on the fortress, a wind that was still howling and gusting, blew the stuff away. But even as it did so, Cera was jolted by terror. What was she doing there, high above the ground on the back of a fearsome beast? If Jet smashed to earth, she would be killed, and that had nearly happened just moments before. She let go of her mace, and only the leather thong that looped it to her wrist kept her from losing it not that she would have cared if she had. All that mattered was freeing up her hand to unbuckle the straps that kept her from jumping to safety.

Hurrying made her hands clumsy, and she fumbled with the harness. In front of her, Aoth thumped his chest and made his mail clink. Despite her panic, Cera realized he was invoking the magic of one of his tattoos.

Then he reached behind him and gripped Cera s thigh.

We re poisoned! he shouted. Purge yourself, and Jet, too!

His words didn t take away her fear, but they pushed it down enough so that she was able to think and to remember the dust. The vulture demon must have somehow released it into the air even as Jet was ripping it apart.

She calmed and centered herself as best she could, then drew down the light and warmth of the Yellow Sun. It filled her and quelled her fear, and then, with a touch, she passed the blessing on to Jet.

The griffon stopped veering madly back as forth as though trying to dodge a peril that only he could see. Instead, he screeched a challenge and lashed his wings as he tried to rise above the half a dozen entirely real imps that, Cera observed, had come flying at him and his riders while they were all distracted.

Blue and green shimmers rippled along the head of Aoth s spear. He snarled a word of power, jabbed the weapon through the air, and darts of light leaped from it to pierce two of the imps. Screaming shrilly, they dropped.

Another imp flew at Cera, its fanged mouth open wide, and its prehensile tail cocked to stab with the sting at the tip. She would have had to strike across her body to bash it with her mace, so she swatted it with her buckler instead. The gilded steel clanked, and the little devil tumbled away.

Meanwhile, Jet snapped another in two with his beak.

The remaining imps vanished, and Cera instinctively winced to imagine them flitting at her like angry wasps when she couldn t see them to protect herself. But Aoth could see them, and since he could, Jet could, too. With his spear crackling with destructive power, the war mage thrust to the right, and the two pieces of a dead imp appeared in midfall. The griffon caught another in his clashing beak, gnashed it up, and spat it out.

As best as Cera could judge, that was the last of the vile little things. The skull lord! she gasped, for it seemed almost certain that he was the one who d summoned them.

Yes, Jet rasped, where is There!

Because he was wheeling to aim himself directly at the creature in question, Cera had no difficulty seeing where he meant. The three-headed skeleton with the war hammer and bulky gauntlet was standing on the roof of the donjon.

Aoth looked down into the courtyard, and Cera realized with a pang of guilt that he was making sure Jhesrhi was all right. She herself had forgotten all about their friend, even though they d all been intent on rescuing her mere moments before. The frenzy of what followed had wiped the thought from her mind.

All right, said Aoth. Let s do it!

Jet hurtled at the top of the keep like an arrow. The skull lord tossed his gauntleted hand. A bat-winged devil somewhat like the imps, but man-sized and covered in quills, appeared above him. The spinagon instantly lashed its wings and flew out over the courtyard. It whipped its arm and threw a volley of quills, which burst into flame as they shot through the air.

Jet raised one wing, dipped the other, and dodged the attack. Aoth growled a rhyme, pointed his spear at the spined devil, and a thunderbolt boomed from the point to blast it apart.

Jet jerked, and Cera realized that something had hurt him somehow. But his wings beat as smoothly and as strongly as ever, sweeping them all toward their foe as swiftly as before, so evidently it hadn t been bad.

Aoth recited the words to conjure more lightning. Cera drew down the Keeper s power and flung it from the head of her mace in a blaze of brilliant light. The two attacks struck the armored skeleton simultaneously and blasted him apart.

We got him! Cera cried.

Not yet, Aoth said through gritted teeth, and Jet kept on driving at the rooftop as fast as before. She realized they understood something she didn t. And an instant later, she saw what it was.

The skull lord s charred, splintered form flew back together, reassembling him, although for the most part, his broken bones didn t whisk their bent, smoking scraps of armor along with them. That wreckage still lay where it had fallen. But other than that, the undead Nar appeared restored except that he had only two skulls instead of three.

As the skeletal mage sprang to his feet, a crimson light glimmered in the eye sockets of the skull on the right. A great flare of dark red, foul-looking flame leaped forth, and, just a heartbeat short of the rooftop, Jet had to lash his wings and wrench himself off course to dodge it. By the time the griffon had corrected, the skull lord was scrambling through a door that likely opened onto stairs leading down into the keep.

Still, the creature was only a moment ahead of his pursuers. Jet thumped down on the rooftop, and, responding to Aoth s will, the saddle straps instantly unbuckled themselves. He and Cera leaped out of the saddle and ran toward the door.

With a deafening bang, an even larger blast of red fire blew the entrance apart, staggering everyone and jolting the whole roof. When Cera approached the wreckage, coughing and her eyes stinging from the haze of grit now fouling the air, it was plain the detonation had collapsed the stairwell and rendered it impassable. She spat a curse she d heard some of the coarser members of the Brotherhood use: a reference to Lady Firehair s anatomy as blasphemous as it was obscene.

Easy, said Aoth, we ll kill the thing. Just not right now.

Don t you have magic that will she began.

Aoth waved his spear to indicate the rest of the castle and the battle still raging there. For now, the fight is here, he said. Our allies need us to kill the creatures on the wall-walks. And now that we control the highest point in the fortress, we re in a good position to do it.

Bugles blared. Welvelod sensed surges of motion on every side.

The horns were sounding the retreat. Casting about, the undead Raumathari warrior saw that his allies were doing their frantic best to disengage from their foes and scurry toward the various doors that led into the interior of the fortress. Someone Uramar himself, most likely must have decided that their side was losing.

Welvelod whirled and bolted for one of the doors into the keep. A stag man jumped in his path and tried to spear him in the chest. He slipped the blow and stabbed at his attacker s flank as he sprinted on by.

Something thumped him between the shoulder blades, pitching him forward into a stumble but not quite making him fall. He didn t know what had hit him a missile or a handheld weapon and he didn t bother looking back to find out.

He tripped over the twitching body of an ice troll, and again had to fight to regain his balance. Reeling onward, he saw that the keep, and safety, were just ahead. A Nar demonbinder, his withered gray limbs covered in tattoos and a round brass amulet hanging around his neck, was holding the ironbound door as a pair of goblins scurried through.

The wizard looked straight at Welvelod, then gave him a grin and slammed the door with a bang like a thunderclap.

You filthy Nar bastard! Welvelod thought, just as something rammed into the back of his knee. He fell forward onto the ground. As he rolled over, a second spear thrust caught him in the face.