The Masked Witches

by Richard Lee Byers

  Aoth glanced around, checking to see if anyone was approaching. No one was, as far as he could tell. “Who are you, and who were you spying for?” he asked.

  “My name is Zyl,” replied the rat. “The name of the prince I serve wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  “But he’s dark fey, isn’t he?” Vandar asked. “Which means a creature in his service is the last person we should trust.”

  “If you know anything about fey,” said Zyl, “dark or otherwise, you know we keep a bargain or a promise. And I swear by Lurue’s horn that if you free me and heal me, I’ll help you perform whatever foolhardy task you came to accomplish.”

  Cera looked to Aoth. “We shouldn’t leave any creature in such a plight,” she said.

  Vandar hefted his knife. “With respect, lady, I don’t intend to,” the beserker replied.

  Zyl kept his eyes fixed on Aoth. “I truly can help,” he said. “And you’ve fought alongside fouler things than me in your time.”

  Aoth smiled a crooked smile. “I don’t know how you know that, but it’s true,” he said. “Vandar, you’ve already got a knife out, so you can cut that wire around his feet. Cut him, too, if he tries to bite or run.”

  Scowling, the Rashemi got Zyl down and laid him on a table amid a scatter of bread crumbs and scraps of yellow fungus. Cera murmured a prayer that set her hand aglow and gently pressed her fingers to the rodent’s ghastly wound.

  Afterward, the raw, vacant space didn’t look any different. But Zyl did. He rose to his feet with renewed energy and said, “Thanks. Now it’s your turn, fire spirit. If you cool down the coals and the pot, I’ll thank you, too.”

  Jhesrhi aimed her staff and threw a flare of frost at the cauldron and the hearth. Steam puffed into being as cold met hot.

  Zyl jumped off the table, ran across the floor, sprang on the rim of the cauldron, and dropped inside. Over the course of the next few moments, pieces of rat viscera flew out of the vessel to land with a splat on the gleaming black floor. Aoth watched with slightly squeamish fascination as Zyl jumped back out after the organs, and, rearing onto his hind legs and using his forepaws like hands, stuffed them back inside his body cavity. When he had finished, he pulled his flaps of skin and muscle closed and sealed them with the stroke of a claw. His abdomen bulged and heaved as the organs inside presumably rearranged and reattached themselves.

  Zyl looked up and caught everyone staring. “I mostly heal pretty well all by myself,” he chattered. “I just needed a push to get me started. Now, what’s this errand you’re on?”

  Aoth told him.

  Still peering up from the floor, Zyl cocked his head. He seemed nonplussed, as if he hadn’t just been hanging helpless with his guts stewing on the other side of the kitchen. “That … might not be so easy,” he said.

  “Well,” said Aoth, “you’ve been spying. If you already know the information we’re after, you can simply share and save us all some trouble.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t,” replied the rat. “So … Let me think …”

  “We’ve stayed in this one spot too long already,” Vandar said.

  “Patience, berserker,” Zyl said, “I don’t tell you how to slice your own flesh and foam at the mouth.” Zyl looked back at Aoth. “Follow me,” he said as he dropped to all fours and headed for an exit.

  As they left the kitchen, Jhesrhi waved her hand in the direction of the hearth. Fire leaped up from the coals to set the cauldron boiling again and turn any leftover frost or water to vapor.

  “If you’re such an able spy,” Vandar asked, “how did they catch you?”

  “They didn’t,” said Zyl. “They caught a common rat. If they’d caught me, knowing it was me, I would have been hanging in a torture chamber, not the slaves’ larder.”

  “Still,” Cera said, shifting her grip on her gilded mace, “how did they get you?”

  “To you, healer, I’ll confess they found me passed out drunk,” Zyl said. “When their masters aren’t looking, the goblins distill a liquor from table scraps, toadstools, and such. It’s foul, but I’ve been in Lady Grontaix’s home a long time. I’d go mad if I didn’t take a little pleasure when I had the chance. Now, hush, everyone. We’re making too much noise.”

  Aoth thought the rat was right, and so, though he was full of questions, he allowed Zyl to lead them stalking onward in silence. At one point, a cyclops warrior appeared up ahead, but he evidently couldn’t see far enough in the gloom to spot the intruders. Aoth whispered, “Freeze,” his companions obeyed, and the hulking creature disappeared down a branching passage without ever realizing anything was amiss.

  By degrees, the tunnels and the chambers they connected became more and more rough and irregular, and showed fewer and fewer signs of use, until the intruders were essentially traversing natural cavern. Zyl stopped in front of an opening as broad as Aoth’s hand that ran up from the floor to as high as the human’s knee.

  “This,” said the rat, “is the tunnel I use to spy on the mistress of the house. Don’t worry, it’s big enough for humans on the other side of the hole.”

  “Maybe,” said Vandar. “But can we break through the wall without making enough noise to bring every cyclops in the place down on top of us?”

  “The fire spirit can,” Zyl replied.

  Frowning, Jhesrhi said, “That’s true. Just give me room to work.”

  Everyone else stood back while she positioned herself in front of the appropriate section of wall. She recited words of power in one of the tongues of the earth elementals, her high clear voice managing the hard consonants and rasping inhuman sounds without a fumble. For a moment, the folds of her patched, stained cloak and the strands of her golden hair stirred as though a jealous wind was tugging at them in a plea for her attention.

  The wall split from the small hole upward, grinding and crunching. Beyond it, an entirely natural tunnel twisted away. The floor humped up and down. In some places, the walls pinched inward, and in others, the ceiling dipped low enough so that a human would have to stoop to pass beneath it.

  “Does it get anymore cramped than this?” Aoth asked.

  “Some,” Zyl replied. “But I promise, you can all squirm through if you try.”

  It turned out he was right, although at one point, the way narrowed into such a tight bottleneck that Aoth wondered if anyone but Jhesrhi would be able to wriggle through without leaving armor behind. Then it occurred to him to conjure a coating of grease into being on the surface of the stone, to make it easier to worm one’s way through the tight spot, and when Aoth, with his wide shoulders and barrel chest, succeeded, he knew that his companions could, too.

  To his relief, the way widened out after that. Not long after, they reached a spot where a small fissure in the wall about four feet up made a natural peephole. A trace of light leaked through from the other side.

  Zyl leaped up onto a bulge in the stone just beneath the crack. He rose onto his hind legs, peered through, and then motioned for his companions to do the same. Crouching, Aoth obliged him.

  The vault on the other side was a sort of garden of stone, where sculpted trees and flowers, in many cases adorned with leaves, fruit, and blossoms of gold, silver, and some green metal or alloy, rose from the floor. Water splashed in fountains and ran through channels spanned by arching bridges. To human eyes, the bridges seemed anomalously broad and massive. But of course they needed to be to accommodate creatures as big as cyclopes, let alone the mistress to whom they owed their fealty.

  Lady Grontaix was lounging in a sort of gazebo, oversized like the bridges, in the center of the vault. Twice as large as any of the five male cyclopes attending her, she had a hairless hide the ugly mottled purple of a bruise, a hunchback, and one eye bigger than the other. The larger one was all amber except for a slit pupil, while the smaller one had a brown iris, a white sclera, and a round pupil.

  Aoth had never encountered such a creature before. Choschax had told him she was a fomorian, and as he looked at her, he ex
perienced a sort of division of perception. He considered her one of the most grotesque creatures he’d ever seen. But the Feywild invested even her deformity with its own kind of glamour.

  Still, if Grontaix herself didn’t seem entirely grotesque, Aoth couldn’t say the same for her current pastime. Though the cyclops males looked like children in comparison to their enormous lady, their attitude was that of the eager suitors Aoth had watched paying court to some celebrated beauty in places where extravagant gallantry was in vogue. One sat sketching the fomorian in charcoal, another was feeding her mushroom caps, and a third was declaiming what Aoth, though he didn’t know the language, assumed to be cyclops love poetry. The poet punctuated the particularly passionate phrases by striking notes from the dulcimer in his lap.

  Aoth motioned for his companions to take a look. When it was her turn, Cera whispered, “You must be joking.”

  “Ridiculous as it looks,” Aoth replied just as softly, “don’t let it distract you from the fact that those creatures are dangerous. Now, Lady Luck has favored us. Grontaix is right there. We don’t have to roam through her apartments hunting her. We’re going to make the most of our good fortune by hitting hard and fast.” He told his comrades what he wanted them to do.

  “What about me?” asked Zyl.

  Aoth had no idea what, if anything, the rat could do to help, and he didn’t feel like investing the time to find out. “Just make yourself useful however you can,” he said.

  They all took deep breaths and shifted their grips on their weapons. Cera murmured a prayer that made Aoth—and everyone else, presumably—feel refreshed and clearheaded. With a thought, Jhesrhi cloaked herself in fire, then she spoke to the wall. She wanted the stone to open fast, not quietly, and it split with a deafening crack.

  Startled, Grontaix and her consorts jerked around. Aoth scrambled through the breach, leveled his spear, snapped a word of command, and so cast one of the spells stored inside the weapon. A cloud of greenish vapor burst into existence to envelop the gazebo. Aoth could smell its putrid stench even at a distance, and inside the billowing mist, someone started retching.

  The poet cyclops reeled out of the cloud with his dulcimer still in hand. His gaze stabbed at Aoth, who felt a twinge of headache, but with Cera’s blessing fortifying him, he felt nothing worse. He hurled darts of azure light from the head of his spear, and they plunged into the cyclops’s torso.

  The brute staggered but didn’t go down. He hurled the oversized zither, and it flew at Aoth like a stone from a catapult.

  Caught by surprise, Aoth just barely managed to jump aside. The dulcimer slammed into the wall behind him with a crash of wood and a jangle of strings.

  The cyclops drew his blade and advanced. Aoth poised his spear to defend, but Vandar screeched like a griffon and raced past him to engage the giant. Aoth wondered if the berserker was actually following the plan or just charging headlong at the first foe to present himself. Either way, it freed Aoth up to look for Lady Grontaix.

  As he cast about, he glimpsed Cera chanting and swinging her mace over her head. A shaft of searing light blazed from the head of the weapon and struck the cyclops who’d fed his lady the mushroom caps squarely in the face. He cried out and clapped his hand over his eye.

  Meanwhile, Jhesrhi chanted at Aoth’s back. Other than the breach she’d just created, there were two ways into the vault, and her next task was to seal them before other cyclopes came rushing in. Masses of stone banged, crunched, and shifted as her power pulled them shut like curtains. Shaken loose, chunks of rock fell from the ceiling.

  Grontaix blundered out of Aoth’s conjured fog. She had mushroom-and-red-wine vomit spattered down the front of her silken gown.

  “You want me!” Aoth shouted, advancing a couple paces. “I made the mist!”

  She responded by closing her small eye and glaring with the large one. Though he’d never encountered a fomorian before, Aoth had heard that, like their cyclops vassals, they possessed the power of the evil eye. He twisted his head so as to not meet her gaze directly.

  It didn’t matter. Chathi died again, burning in an instant when the rod in her hand exploded. Mirror plunged his insubstantial sword into Szass Tam’s ravaged skeletal form, and they both blazed bright, but when the light faded, the ghost was gone, and the lich lord remained. Szass Tam turned, tore Bareris’s head from his shoulders and then advanced on Aoth.

  Nor was he the only one. His staff glimmering with magic, Malark glided in on the sellsword’s flank. Alasklerbanbastos and Tchazzar loomed above Aoth’s other foes, each dragon whipping his head forward and opening his jaws wide as he spewed his breath weapon.

  Aoth cried out and staggered, dropping his guard. Grontaix raced forward, her huge hands extended to seize him.

  Aoth waited until she was nearly on top of him. Then, pleased that his trick had worked, he dodged, charged his spear with power, and thrust at her knee as she pounded by.

  He could do it because, while it was by no means pleasant to watch people he’d cared about die all over again, or to see a selection of old enemies attacking him all at once, his truesight made the illusory nature of the phantasms immediately and absolutely apparent. Thus they couldn’t disorient or even hurt him as they might have another. But pretending they had was a good way to lure Grontaix in close.

  Aoth’s spear point tore flesh and scraped bone. The fomorian screamed and staggered, but didn’t fall. Instead, she stumbled around to face him again. He rattled off an incantation that put him at the hub of a spinning wheel of blades. Floating at chest level, the defense threatened any foe who ventured into striking distance. But in all likelihood, it would only slash the giant’s extremities, not her vital organs.

  Too late he saw that Grontaix didn’t mean to rush him again. Not yet, anyway. Instead, she invoked magic of her own. She thrust out her fist at him like she was miming a punch, and green and yellow light swirled from the cat’s-eye ring on her middle finger to make a kaleidoscopic pattern in the air.

  Aoth was no longer looking at illusions that he could recognize for what they were and ignore thereafter. The light was only light, but it was supremely beautiful; its power to fascinate augmented by both the atmosphere of the Feywild and his own preternaturally acute vision. He strained to look away, break free, but there was a treacherous part of him that didn’t really want to.

  Recognizing that she had him under her spell, Grontaix leered, gripped a little sculpted pear tree, and, with astonishing strength, twisted it and ripped it up from the floor. Aoth saw that the makeshift club would make it easier for her to strike at him without coming in contact with his spinning blades, that the hammering length of black stone would shatter his bones and pulp his flesh, and still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to move. With blood running from her wounded knee, his foe limped forward.

  Suddenly Zyl darted past Aoth and up the fomorian’s bloody leg. He paused for an instant to bite and scratch at the gash the spear had opened, then scurried onward. He vanished under the hem of her gown.

  Grontaix roared and pounded with her fist at the moving lump under the fabric. Somehow, she missed, and only managed to thump herself. Zyl scrambled from her front to her back, where she’d have trouble reaching, and where, Aoth assumed, he clung gnawing at her flesh.

  Still roaring, the fomorian heaved the stone tree over her head and thrust it repeatedly downward like a huge, unwieldy back scratcher. Shaken loose, silver pears fell clanking and rolled clattering across the floor.

  Meanwhile, a cyclops at the periphery of Aoth’s vision swung his sword at the flying mace of golden light that was assailing him in turn. By keeping the giant occupied, the conjured weapon freed up Cera to try to help Aoth. With her voice shrill—but still as controlled as spellcasting required—she rattled off a prayer.

  It set him free. Suddenly, though the floating, shifting pattern was still beautiful, its hold on him ended. For an instant, he felt a belated horror at having been so helpless, but he shook it off.r />
  By that time, the scraping stone branches had ripped Grontaix’s gown from her body. The garment hung from the tree like a tattered flag on a pole. She rammed her weapon downward yet again, and it finally brushed Zyl from his perch and dashed him to the floor. She lurched around, exposing the hump that, crisscrossed with welts, cuts, and bite marks, looked like someone had flogged her, and glared down at the rat. He thrashed like he was in the throes of a seizure. She swung the tree over her head.

  Aoth cast a fan-shaped flare of flame from his spear, and it splashed across her crooked, bloody back. She howled and staggered.

  “I’m still here, Ugly!” he bellowed. “Finish with me before you start killing rats!”

  She turned back around like he wanted her to. The force of her glare was like a hammer slamming into his face. He staggered and cried out, and, as fast as her wounded leg would allow, she rushed him.

  By the time Aoth had recovered his balance, the stone tree was whirling at him in a horizontal arc. He leaped back, and it missed his body but caught the end of his spear. The force of the blow tore the weapon from his grasp and stabbed pain up his arm. He suspected it was nearly broken or dislocated.

  Aoth snatched out the short, heavy sword he carried as a backup. He wasn’t as adept with it, nor had he painstakingly infused it with as many enchantments as he had the longer weapon, but it would have to do.

  He would have to get close to the fomorian and stay there, so the blade could reach her. She would have a more awkward time of it attacking him from the shorter distance. He scrambled toward her just as she followed up with a backhand swing.

  Aoth strained to spring forward even faster and just made it inside the giant’s reach. Her arms were above him, and the branches of the stone tree scraped, banged, and snapped, sweeping across the patch of floor at his back. The wheel of blades sliced a deep gash across Grontaix’s unwounded leg before the magic blinked out of existence. With a final stride, Aoth closed the distance, charged his sword with destructive force, and slashed a second cut above the other.